The religious appeals of transworth and transtrying

Abstract

The so-called world religions arose in socially heterogeneous, intellectually competitive civilizations and have always been propagated by appeals that work powerfully on individuals in a relatively open communicative marketplace. 1 One kind of appeal they all make is to hold before the individual an ideal of life better than any life that can be taken for granted in ordinary unenlightened human reckoning. This religious life ideal is discontinuous with ordinary worldly life insofar as it offers a decisively superior alternative to it; at the same time, however, no one could recognize how the ideal saves or exalts a human life if the ideal did not somehow encompass ordinary reference points of practical evaluation. It might, for example, promise a glorious victory like that of a runner in a race, or a blissful union like that of lovers. The sense of the religious ideal depends, therefore, on an ordinary practical understanding of self, world, success, and happiness that it both departs from and trades on. My purpose in this essay is to sound out the relationship between an everyday understanding of “worthy” action associated with an orientation toward exerting oneself to achieve the best results, on the one hand, and the religious appeal of a categorically superior, hence “transworthy” life associated with a religiously definitive orientation toward what I will call “transtrying,” on the other. I make no claim of a priori necessity or universality for my conceptions of worth and transworth; I contend only that the two kinds of ideal do play important and related roles in much of the moral and religious thinking that we take most seriously, and especially in classic appeals of the world religions. I begin with an account of the place of trying and worth attribution in everyday practical evaluation. Then, under the practically appealing rubric of transworth, I describe and question two ideals for surpassing trying and worth, serenity and passion. As a final illustration of the relevance of this way of interpreting religious appeals, I show how it elucidates some key Pauline Christian ideas.