Transcendence and immanence

Transcendence and immanence name a polarity rather than two rival doctrines. Transcendence is God's exceeding the world, unbounded by it, not measurable by anything within it; immanence is God's presence within it, active, near, accessible. Almost every developed theology asserts both, and its character is largely determined by how it holds them together.

The Abrahamic traditions state both, often in a single breath. Isaiah's God is "the high and lofty One that inhabits eternity" who dwells also "with him that is of a contrite and humble spirit" (57:15). The Qur'an declares that "there is nothing like unto Him" (42:11) and, elsewhere, that God is nearer to a person than the jugular vein (50:16). Islamic theology made the pair technical: tanzih, declaring God incomparable, and tashbih, affirming likeness or nearness. Each alone was treated as an error, pure incomparability empties religious language, pure likeness makes God an item in the world, and Ibn Arabi made their combination a governing principle of his metaphysics.

Hindu thought supplies the most explicit vocabulary for the polarity: Brahman as nirguna, without qualities, and saguna, with qualities. Advaita Vedanta emphasises the unqualified absolute and the identity of the self with it; the Vaishnava and Shaiva theistic schools insist on a personal God genuinely related to devotees, and much of the classical debate between the Vedanta schools is an argument about how far the first can be affirmed without losing the second. Christian theology places the polarity at the centre of its claim about the incarnation, and Eastern Orthodoxy formalises it as the distinction between the unknowable divine essence and the uncreated energies in which God is participated.

Where the balance tips, recognisable positions result. Deism retains transcendence and drops effective immanence, leaving a God who does not act. Pantheism retains immanence and drops transcendence, leaving a God who is not more than the world. Panentheism attempts to keep both by holding the world within God. Within a single tradition, prophetic and mystical emphases often divide along this axis, and a surprising number of internal disputes, over images and icons, over intermediaries and saints, over whether God can be said to change or to suffer, turn out on inspection to be arguments about how transcendence and immanence are to be held together.

Article one notes in passing that process thought presses immanence. Process theology's specific technical account of how transcendence and immanence are held together, rather than merely which one is emphasised, is detailed enough to deserve its own treatment.

Alfred North Whitehead's metaphysics, developed from the 1920s, gives God two natures rather than one undivided simplicity. The primordial nature is God's fixed, eternal grasp of every possibility, unchanging and, in that sense, transcendent of any particular state of the world. The consequent nature is God's ongoing, changing experience of the actual world as it unfolds, affected and enriched by every event within it, immanence taken about as far as a coherent theology can take it: not merely God acting within the world but God being changed by it.

Charles Hartshorne developed the position into an explicit panentheism, arguing that the world exists within God as a later development of God's own being rather than as something merely accompanied by God, while insisting God still exceeds the world and is not exhausted by it, precisely the distinction article one draws between panentheism and simple pantheism. The classical theism article one describes rejects this framework at its root, since divine simplicity and immutability deny that God has two natures, or any parts, or that God's being could be really altered by anything external; process theologians reply that an unchanging God moved by nothing external is not obviously more biblical, and may be less so, than one transcendent in one respect and immanent enough to be changed in another.