Recently I have had reason to look again at Peter Berger’s A Rumour of Angels. The chain of ideas that led me back to a book I have not read for many years is not relevant in the present context. At one time, however, I did find it a very influential voice in the development of my own thought. In case you don’t know Berger’s work, he is an American social scientist who was one of the major figures in the development of the study of religion, back in the 1960s, starting with with his book The Sacred Canopy.
The idea that prompted my decision to go back to Berger was his concept of “signals of transcendence”. These are features of ordinary, everyday life that he regards as the springs of the human propensity to believe in the possibility of transcendence, that lies at the heart of all religion. These are “prototypical human gestures …. that are to be found within the domain of our ‘natural’ reality but that appear to point beyond that reality.” These “prototypical gestures” he identifies as “the propensity to order”, the human capacity for laughter, our tendency to play, our commitment to hope, and the roots of morality that he describes graphically in terms of “the argument from damnation”. (In other words, some actions we condemn spontaneously and unequivocally as evil.)*
In all of these elements of the universal make-up of human beings we take for granted the belief that the world does not simply have to be the way it appears to be in banal, routine, everyday existence. It is possible to take a leap out of and beyond the everyday, and affirm that the world might be different, and often better. We can by means of these “signals” rise above, or go beyond what passes for ordinary reality.
Without reviewing in detail Berger’s book here, the reason for my mentioning it is that it struck me in reading it that he might have missed another possibility. Does our capacity to create art not also merit inclusion in his list? Unless art is reduced to a mere copying of that which the artist observes, surely it must possess something of the qualities Berger finds in his “signals of transcendence”. I have only just lit upon this idea, but I’m sure it is worth pursuing further.
*The importance of “the comic” he discusses much greater length in his later book Redeeming Laughter.