Percy on "estrangement" and transcendence

"The Coming Crisis in Psychiatry" (1957):

What has gone wrong?  A clue is perhaps to be found in Fromm's ambiguous treatment of transcendence.  If there is any one feature which all existentialists agree upon as an inveterate trait of human existence, it is transcendence.  . . .  In Friedrich Nietzsche's words, man is he who must transcend himself. . . . [E]ven the atheistic existentialists would be candid enough to admit man's incurable God-directedness[.]

God is absent, said Johann Christian Holderlin; God is dead, said Nietzsche.  This means one of two things.  Either we have outgrown monotheism, and good riddance; or modern man is estranged from being, from his own being, from the being of other creatures in the world, from transcendent being.  he has lost something--what, he does not know; he knows only that he is sick unto death with the loss of it.