Only the traditions, albeit in fragmentary form, contain the true resonance of transcendent revelation. There is no other knowledge outside of them. By taking up the invitation they gently extend to us we begin to discover the only route toward transcendent illumina­tion that is possible for human beings. We accept the status we have been assigned in the order of the whole. Not being gods, we can acknowledge God and receive from him the gift of participa­tion in the divine life. Once freed from the impossible burden of providing our own meaning to ourselves, we can accept the sur­passing divine outpouring of reality. By accepting the gift of transcendent life as our goal we have at the same time received the gift of meaning within this life.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE

As is evident, this book is more in the mode of a meditation than in that of a scholarly treatise. Its principal intent is to fol­low out the lines of reflection that discernably emerge from the chaos of our world. Scholarship is undoubtedly one of the tools that serve that purpose, but it is not the primary mode by which the transparence of existence can be apprehended and commu­nicated. Indeed, one of the implications of the preceding essay is that scholarship itself rests on a set of presuppositions that are far from self-subsistent. We tend to overlook the contextual dependence of the world of learning precisely because it is a world constituted by a common set of assumptions. This is of course why the different fields of knowledge often find one an­other incomprehensible: they may not share the same starting points. There is a need therefore for scholars to periodically step back from their disciplines, in order to attempt a freestanding formulation of their insights for the edification of that most elusive of all prey, the well-disposed general reader. Such has been my goal.

Having now completed the effort, fairness also obliges me and the interest of readers compels me to include something by way of recognition of the scholarly debts that underlie it. A medita­tion may stand or fall on its own merits, but no one arrives at its elaboration without the illumination extended by a great many others. Curious readers too will naturally want to know what an author has read, both from a general interest in understanding the arguments better and a more specific interest in pursuing it further on their own. Accordingly, I am happy to append this bib­liographic note by which the sympathetic might be further guided and the suspicious more fully confirmed. I make no claim to the originality of the reflections I have pursued, not only be­cause of the manifest limits of my own abilities, but more essen­tially because originality is not a particularly prized value in the search for truth.