Transcendence and Immanence

9 T r a n s c en d en c e an d I mman en ce Johannes Zachhuber Introduction The binary use of the terms ‘transcendence’ and ‘immanence’ is one of the most powerful concepts to have emerged from nineteenth-century debates about religion. It is also one of their most enduring legacies; in fact, the juxtaposition of the two terms, the assumption that they refer to an ontological, epistemic or theological duality, is today usually taken for granted and conventionally applied to the analysis of religious and other worldviews throughout history and across cultures. The present chapter will set out by charting the historical emergence of this particular conceptual pair of opposites during the early part of the nineteenth century. Subsequently, I shall illustrate how it was used and applied in F. C. Baur, Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf Harnack. As will become clear, its widespread acceptance as descriptively valuable followed on from what was the product of rather speciic philosophical developments, notably the rise of Kantian criticism and its ambivalent reception in German Idealism. Yet the reason it resonated so strongly with the wider public cannot be reduced to those academic debates. Rather, the opposition of transcendent and immanent touched a nerve of Western societies uneasy about their understanding of religion as well as its abiding importance for modern culture. It is now widely recognised that the notion of the nineteenth century as the age of ‘the secularization of the European mind’ (Chadwick 1990) has been at best one-sided and more probably a misleading caricature. Yet if the nineteenth century was not a time of unmitigated religious decline, it most certainly was beset with concerns about such decline. Indifference or hostility to religion may have been less widespread than has often been assumed; very public controversies about the current state of religion certainly were one of the most characteristic features of the century. A major reason for the increasing popularity of references to transcendence and immanence was their usefulness in those debates. To many, acceptance or denial of ‘transcendence’ became tantamount to acceptance or denial of religious faith as such. Thus the duality of transcendence and immanence could be invoked both by advocates of traditional religion and by its critics: the proponents of modern science could insinuate that ‘transcendence’ was the hypothesis that was no longer needed under a methodical approach which ‘immanently’ offered a full explanation of the world, while their opponents bemoaned the loss of transcendence and regarded the totalitarian dominance of immanence as the supreme expression of modernity’s apostasy from religion. Some, admittedly, sought to reject this alternative, arguing instead that it was the very dualism of WHISTLER 9781474405867 PRINT.indd 164 05/07/2017 10:56 transce nde nce a n d i m m a n en c e 165 transcendence and immanence that caused a crisis of religious faith which, consequently, could only be overcome by moving beyond the sharp juxtaposition of the two concepts. A signiicant driver of nineteenth-century debates about transcendence and immanence, as we shall see, was the attempt to delegitimise this position, labelling it as pantheism and aligning it with the complete denial of transcendence. Ultimately, the emerging popularity of the dualism of transcendence and immanence provides a fascinating insight into the close link between philosophical, theological, historical and more broadly religious concerns in the nineteenth century. The Emergence of the Transcendent–Immanent Binary as Seen through Three Encyclopedias The rise of the binary opposition of transcendence and immanence can be traced from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth century by comparing the entries under the term ‘immanent’ in three major encyclopedias of the time (cf. Oeing-Hanhoff 1976): the famous Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, published in twenty-eight volumes between 1751 and 1772; the four-volume Allgemeines Handwörterbuch der philosophischen Wissenschaften nebst ihrer Literatur und Geschichte authored by the eminent Kantian philosopher, Wilhelm Traugott Krug, in 1827–8; and the monumental Allgemeine Enzyklop̈die der Wissenschaften und K̈nste, which was edited by Johann Samuel Ersch and Johann Gottfried Gruber in a rather astonishing 168 volumes between 1818 and 1889, but which remained incomplete nonetheless. The Encyclopédie included in its eighth volume a brief and unsigned entry ‘immanent’ (Diderot 1765: 8:570). The article deines the term as that ‘which remains within the person or which does not have an effect beyond it’. Two main contexts are given: philosophers, the author claims, distinguish between ‘immanent’ and ‘transeunt’ actions. The former are those whose end remains within the mind of the agent whereas the latter produce an effect outside the mind. Theologians, the author adds, have taken over the same distinction speciically for the actions of God. Accordingly, ‘God has generated the Son and the Holy Spirit through immanent actions’ whereas the creation of the world is counted as his transeunt action (ibid. 8:570). Immanent here is clearly a concept with limited use and of no particular importance. It is a technical term whose history dates back to medieval scholasticism but without any wider claim beyond the rather narrow conines of the philosophy of mind and Christian doctrine. While it is used as part of a binary pair of opposites, it is not contrasted with ‘transcendent’ but with ‘transeunt’. This is not because ‘transcendent’ is an unknown term to the editors of the Encyclopédie; in fact, ‘transcendent’ has its own entry, but the latter does not mention ‘immanent’ either. One of most fateful early references to ‘immanent’ perfectly conirms this impression. In proposition XVIII of Part 1 of his Ethics, Spinoza called God the ‘immanent, not the transeunt cause’ of all things (1925: 2:64). While contemporary readers may be inclined to ind here proof for Spinoza’s alleged ‘immanentist’ view of the godhead, his claim is much more speciic and fully in line with the usage described in the Encyclopédie, even though the thesis contradicts theological orthodoxy. In the act of creating the world, Spinoza urged, God does not cause an effect outside of himself but remains as much within himself as, according to Christian doctrine, in the inner-trinitarian processions. Krug’s General Encyclopedia of Philosophical Terms contains an article on ‘immanent’ in its second volume (1826: 447). Immanent is here deined as ‘remaining within’, but WHISTLER 9781474405867 PRINT.indd 165 05/07/2017 10:56 166 johannes za c h h u b er then distinguished according to three different meanings. In the irst one, it is opposed to ‘transcendent’ and refers to the principles of cognition. The immanent use of reason remains within that which can be properly known, whereas the transcendent use claims to surpass those limits. This is Kant’s own use, as we shall see in more detail later on. Second, Krug juxtaposes ‘immanent’ and ‘transeunt’ as the Encyclopédie did before, but deines immanent in this sense as ‘contained within the human mind’ or ‘theoretical’. A third and, according to the author, rather speciic meaning of the term is encountered in ‘the pantheistic system’ which, by seeing God as the world’s immanent cause, ultimately identiies the two insofar as all empirical things are mere accidents of one underlying substance. Of the three meanings only one moves decisively beyond the article in the Encyclopédie, and this is the very one juxtaposing transcendent and immanent. This is signiicant as it points to the emergence of an altogether novel interest in this duality. Yet the way Krug introduces this meaning does not suggest any broader or systematic concern for the distinction. He remains as technical and academic as the author of the earlier article in the Encyclopédie. A hint towards the wider signiicance of the matter can only be found in Krug’s reference to the ‘pantheistic’ use of immanent. Krug may have been unfamiliar with the earlier, theological background of Spinoza’s proposition XVIII, and clearly reads him in the context of more recent controversies about ‘pantheism’ initiated by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi in 1785 (Vallée 1988). Jacobi had caused public scandal by tying the half-forgotten Spinoza to the recently deceased Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, arguing that his philosophy ultimately amounted to the denial of freedom, ethical relativism and atheism. There is no evidence that the transcendent–immanent distinction was used by Jacobi himself or in the original pantheism controversy of the late eighteenth century. By the time Krug composed his Encyclopedia this had evidently changed. Things look very different indeed in the much longer article ‘immanent’ written by the little-known philosopher Karl Hermann Scheidler (1795–1866) for the General Encyclopedia of the Sciences and the Arts (1839). Scheidler, who identiied with conservative critics of Hegel’s philosophy, such as Immanuel Hermann Fichte, considered ‘the concept of the immanent together with its opposite, the transcendent, the very core or centre of [Kant’s] critical philosophy’ (ibid. 315). Not only is the pair important for Kantian thought, it is equally crucial for Hegel’s philosophy as well (ibid. 315). Whereas, however, Kant taught a sharp dichotomy of the two and, in a way, excluded the transcendent from the realm of human knowledge, Hegel’s ‘doctrine claims to have full knowledge of God etc. [sic] and thus to unite immanence and transcendence’ (ibid. 315). In Scheidler’s account, the opposition of transcendence and immanence inally appears as the key to recent philosophical developments. Remarkably, the earlier understanding of ‘immanent’, of which Krug was still aware just over ten years earlier, has entirely disappeared in Scheidler’s perception. He therefore begins his overview with an extensive sketch of Kantian philosophy followed by an equally extensive description of Hegel’s system. He links the latter in particular with the Spinozist heritage. Hegel himself, the article says, calls his system ‘absolute idealism’ but others rightly refer to it as ‘pantheistic idealism or idealistic pantheism’ (ibid. 316). While the article at the outset deines ‘immanent’ as a technical term of philosophy, the piece culminates in the observation that Hegel’s ‘immanent philosophy of this-worldliness fundamentally rejects . . . any faith in a higher Being, in the Beyond, or the personal immortality of the soul’ (ibid. 317). WHISTLER 9781474405867 PRINT.indd 166 05/07/2017 10:56 transce nde nce a n d i m m a n en c e 167 The author of this encyclopedia article goes beyond his predecessors in at least two ways: he claims the centrality of the opposition of transcendent and immanent for modern philosophy and at the same time inscribes it into contemporaneous debates about religion. The terms he uses for the latter purpose are quite telling. Those accused of insuficient recognition of transcendence deny the existence of a ‘higher Being’ (ein höheres Wesen) or ‘the Beyond’ (das Jenseits). What is at stake is not any particular doctrine of the Christian creed, but religion as such; and religion is essentially the postulation of an ontological order beyond the material realm. Faith, likewise, is conceived as the willingness to accept a worldview that involves those assumptions. In other words, the binary of transcendent and immanent corresponds to a binary of religion and non-religion, and it is the latter alternative that increasingly dominates religious debates in the nineteenth century. Just over ifty years separate the publication of the irst and the last of the three encyclopedia entries. These ifty years, admittedly, must be counted among the most eventful and transformative in the whole of Western history. Diderot and d’Alembert wrote while the ancien régime was still in power; Scheidler, by contrast, looks back to the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars and the Restoration. In fact, for him times are already heating up for the major revolutions spreading all over Europe in 1848. The intervening years were a period of radical transformation in practically all areas of culture and society. What we can conclude at this point is that the dichotomous pair of transcendent and immanent is a product of this particular intellectual transformation. Major philosophical developments played an important role in its emergence along with the evolution of a new kind of religious concern, for which the main decision was no longer one between particular doctrines or articles of faith, but more fundamentally between religion and its rejection. Transcendence and Immanence in Kant’s Philosophy It has already become clear that Kant’s critical philosophy marks a major turning point in the emergence of the transcendent–immanent binary. In fact, he is the irst to use the two terms as a pair. His contribution and its signiicance must now be described in some more detail. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant wrote: ‘We will call the principles whose application stays wholly and completely within the limits of possible experience immanent, but those that would ly beyond those boundaries, transcendent principles’ (1995–: A295–6/ B3521). Immanent and transcendent are here applied to the realm of human knowledge. Those principles of cognition that are ‘within the limits of possible experience’ are called immanent; those going beyond those limits are called transcendent. In order to gauge the signiicance of this deinition for Kant’s thought but also for the wider philosophical, theological and religious debate, it is useful to recall the ultimate purpose of his most ground-breaking book. As Kant explained in the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, he was ultimately motivated by the question of why metaphysics had made less steady progress in the development towards a science than had other ields, such as mathematics and the natural sciences. His own original contribution, as he saw it, was a radical change of perspective, the celebrated Copernican turn: Hence let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition, which would agree better with the requested possibility of an a priori cognition of them, which is to establish something about them before they are given to us. This would be like the irst WHISTLER 9781474405867 PRINT.indd 167 05/07/2017 10:56 168 johannes za c h h u b er thoughts of Copernicus, who, when he did not make good progress in the explanation of the celestial motions if he assumed that the entire celestial host revolves around the observer, tried to see if he might not have greater success if he made the observer revolve and left the stars at rest. (Ibid. Bxvi) Given, Kant suggests, that the quest for an understanding of being qua being has not led to unequivocal results, it may be time to query our capacity for knowledge instead. By investigating the principles of our cognition, we might hope to achieve those results that have so far escaped philosophers in search of a irm metaphysical foundation. In seeking this approach, Kant hoped to overcome the stark juxtaposition between the continental school of philosophical rationalism in the tradition of Descartes and Leibniz, in which he himself had been trained, and the British school of empiricism which had found its most brilliant representative in David Hume. Kant himself famously said that Hume’s scepticism had ‘irst interrupted my dogmatic slumber’ (ibid. 4:260). The resulting conundrum was the reason a ‘critique’ of pure reason was necessary. Kant’s solution lay in the insight that human cognition always depends on both sense perception and rationality. This permitted the philosopher from Königsberg to reject Hume’s epistemological scepticism. Hume, he asserted, had neglected the necessarily constructive role played by human reason in all cognition. Firm and reliable knowledge was therefore possible, Kant asserted, on the basis of the successful interaction between the material provided by our senses and the formal structure imposed on it by our intellect. As long as those two went together, human cognition stood on irm ground. The lip-side of this argument, however, was Kant’s equally strongly held view that no knowledge was possible where intellectual ideas were altogether cut off from an empirical basis. He therefore rejected the traditional proofs for the existence of God or, perhaps more precisely, he took away the epistemic foundation that had made them even conceivable. For Kant, human ideas about reality could ultimately be classiied in a binary way: those that fell within the boundaries of what the mind can know and those that aim to transgress those boundaries. Firm and ‘scientiic’ knowledge is possible of the former; no knowledge is possible of the latter. It is this precise theory that is encapsulated in Kant’s use of the pair ‘transcendent’ and ‘immanent’ as expressed concisely in the above quotation. All cognition is either immanent or transcendent. Insofar as it is the former, it is veriiable and therefore in principle justiied; insofar as it is the latter, the searching human mind has to guard itself against such ideas as they lead to confusion and insoluble contradictions. The terms ‘transcendent’ and ‘immanent’ are thus not merely given a novel use in Kant’s irst Critique; they are inserted into what is arguably the centrepiece of his argument. Their duality stands for the dichotomy the critical philosophy stipulates in the realm of human knowledge between legitimate and illegitimate use of reason. It is therefore further evident that Kant’s use of the distinction carries with it a normative judgement. He does not so much divide cognition into immanent and transcendent forms, but decrees that the latter of the two is deeply problematical: ‘[By transcendent principles] I mean principles that actually incite us to tear down all those boundary posts and to lay claim to a wholly new territory that recognises no demarcations anywhere’ (ibid. A296/B352). The binary of immanent and transcendent is of such a kind that only one of the two denotes a possible form of human knowledge. Transcendent principles of pure reason are no basis for knowledge whatsoever. They are presumptuous, making empty promises that lead to no real insight. The purpose of the Critique is to warn against them WHISTLER 9781474405867 PRINT.indd 168 05/07/2017 10:56 transce nde nce a n d i m m a n en c e 169 because of their potential to mire the human mind in contradictions and hinder rather than enable the growth of human knowledge. The negative connotations Kant associates with transcendent ideas become even clearer once we consider a German term he frequently uses as an equivalent for transcendent, the word ̈berschẅnglich (Zachhuber 2000). This term would now commonly be translated as ‘profuse’ or ‘effusive’ but is originally derived from the verb schwingen, ‘to swing’ which, combined with a preix meaning ‘over’, suggests a movement transcending or transgressing boundaries. Kant’s use of it as an equivalent for transcendent is therefore somewhat idiosyncratic but not implausible. The term has a long history in German mystical thought going back to the high Middle Ages and can be found in authors like Meister Eckhart where it signiied both the ecstatic union of the mystic with God and God’s superabundant being (Eckhart 1958: 55). It was later used by Lutheran pietists, such as Gottfried Arnold, who employed ̈berschẅnglich to translate the ontological superlative forms typical of the language of Psedo-Dionysius the Areopagite. According to Arnold and others, ̈berschẅnglich cognition is such that it permits an immediate, mystical approach to God (Arnold [1703] 1969: 83). Kant, who had a pietistic upbringing from which he later distanced himself, seems to have been aware of this speciic usage (Zachhuber 2000: 147–8). This explains regular references to ‘transcendent’ or ̈berschẅnglich cognition in strongly polemical contexts. His rejection goes way beyond the measured criticism to be found in the Critique of Pure Reason and indicates that he associates transcendent ideas with intellectually and religiously suspicious movements. Thus he accused opponents such as Johann Georg Schlosser (1995–: 8:398), Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (ibid. 8:134) or Emanuel Swedenborg (ibid. 7:46) of misguided expeditions into the transcendent realm, and this claim is supported by tying them to the ‘mystical-Platonic tradition’ which, according to Kant, goes back to Parmenides and in particular Plato, ‘the father of all enthusiasm in philosophy’ (ibid. 8:398). The reference to ‘enthusiasm’ (Schẅrmerei) here hints at the broader, religious background to Kant’s argument. In an evidently calculated move, Kant sides with mainstream Lutheranism which over the centuries had developed a fundamental suspicion towards radical and mystical spiritualism, so much so that the term ‘enthusiasts’, originally used by Luther against his more radical opponents within the Reformation camp, had practically become the designation of a heresy. At this point, it becomes possible to ascertain how Kant’s use of the opposition of transcendent and immanent is also indicative of his attitude towards religion and theology. From what has been said so far, it might easily appear that his intention was simply to disown any intellectual engagement with the transcendent. Yet Kant himself famously declared that his stipulation of the boundaries of pure reason was done, at least partly, ‘in order to make room for faith’ (ibid. Bxxx). This corresponds with the observation that Kant’s duality of immanent and transcendent principles of cognition apparently recognises that the latter exist, however much he may have warned against their inevitable abuse. Such an ambiguity, however, is not at all without precedent in theology which, on the contrary, has throughout its history grappled with the apparent tension between the afirmation that God is wholly other and any epistemic claims about the divine. Kant’s novel use of the transcendent–immanent distinction is therefore less obviously hostile towards religion than is often thought. It can perfectly well be read as a radical concession by philosophy that its potential for understanding the ultimate reality is extremely limited. In this sense, Kant’s critical philosophy was met sympathetically by WHISTLER 9781474405867 PRINT.indd 169 05/07/2017 10:56 170 johannes za c h h u b er rather conservative theologians from the outset. An interesting example is the so-called supranaturalist theology of Gottlob Christian Storr (1746–1805), who claimed that Kant’s critique of natural knowledge of God necessitated reliance on divine revelation (Storr 1794; Pannenberg 1997: 35–45). A similar use of Kant is evident in Karl Barth’s early dialectical theology, especially in the second edition of his hugely inluential interpretation of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans ([1922] 1968). His ‘theological epistemology in Romans II stands everywhere in the long shadow cast by Immanuel Kant’ (McCormack 1995: 245). The reason is simple: Kant’s radical distinction of immanent and transcendent principles of cognition could be read as an afirmation of a hyper-secular rejection of transcendence, but they could equally be seen to encourage a radical emphasis on divine transcendence. This is not to say that such appropriations would have found Kant’s own approval. In the realm of cognition, the division between immanent and transcendent for him was absolute. His own solution, which he presented in the Critique of Practical Reason and in many of his later essays, commended human practice as the realm in which the dualism of immanent and transcendent could be overcome: Ideas created by reason itself, whose objects (if they have any) lie wholly beyond our ield of vision; although they are transcendent for speculative cognition, they are not to be taken as empty, but with a practical intent they are made available to us by lawgiving reason itself, yet not in order to brood over their objects as to what they are in themselves and in their nature, but rather how we have to think of them in behalf of moral principles. (1995–: 8:332) As we shall see, in the early reception of Kant’s philosophy, this second leg of his philosophy – the afirmation of practical religion as an alternative to the impasse on the theoretical side – remained in the background. Later, however, this was to change, and a practical solution to the transcendent–immanent dichotomy became an attractive option for theologians in the latter half of the century. Pantheism as the ‘System of Immanence’ In his encyclopedia entry, Scheidler asserted that the distinction of transcendent and immanent was equally central for the philosophies of Kant and of Hegel. This assessment is, however, more accurate for the former than the latter. In fact, none of the idealists operated with this duality. This may well be due to their monistic tendency; Hegel as well as Fichte and Schelling sought to overcome what they saw as problematical dichotomies in Kant’s thought. Thus Schelling opined that ‘in light of the science that we teach and distinctly perceive, immanence and transcendence are completely and equally empty words because it [sc. the science] resolves this very duality’ (1856: 2:377). It is in keeping with this observation that Krug in 1826, as we have seen, gave no indication that the duality of immanent and transcendent, which he rightly associated with Kant’s critical philosophy, had subsequently been employed by his idealist heirs. He did, however, hint that ‘immanent’ was used in a speciic sense in ‘the pantheistic system’. The association of pantheism with the concept of immanence was indeed a product of the 1820s. This was an important step towards the eventual establishment of the transcendent–immanent binary, particularly important in light of the religious overtones that came to be associated with this distinction. WHISTLER 9781474405867 PRINT.indd 170 05/07/2017 10:56 transce nde nce a n d i m m a n en c e 171 Pantheism was not linked to Spinoza and his philosophy until the late eighteenth century. Jacobi’s writings and the ensuing ‘pantheism controversy’ played a major role in bringing this about. Subsequently, the term swiftly mutated into a widely used term of abuse on the philosophical–theological borderline. As a large number of thinkers with very different intellectual credentials were publicly accused of being pantheists, complaints grew that its meaning was increasingly vague and unspeciic. The Enlightenment thinker, Christian Jakob Kraus, compared Herder’s notion of pantheism to the sea-god Proteus who would change his shape in order to avoid answering questions directed at him (1812: 10). In 1826, the philosopher Gottlob Benjamin Jäsche (1762–1842), known to posterity largely as the editor of Kant’s lectures on logic (the so-called Jäsche Logic), sought to address this problem by composing a two-volume work entitled Der Pantheismus nach seinen verschiedenen Hauptformen, seinem Ursprung und Fortgange, seinem speculativen und praktischen Werth und Gehalt [Pantheism in its Various Main Forms, Its Origin and Development, Its Speculative and Practical Value and Content]. Jäsche’s work is based on the assumption that pantheism is a type of philosophy going back to Greek and even Indic antiquity (Friedrich Schlegel [1808: 140–53] had already hinted at that). While acknowledging diverse varieties of pantheism, Jäsche ultimately identiied its foundation as immanence: ‘The reason that a conceptual difference [of God and world] cannot be held together with the basic pantheistic concept of immanence, lies in the principle itself on which all pantheism is founded’ (1826: 1:33). Pantheism is thus the opposite of theism, and their main difference is identiied in their respective understanding of God and world. Pantheism, according to Jäsche, denies a Godhead that is ‘truly different from the world’ (ibid. 1:33) whereas its alternative afirms precisely such a God. Jäsche makes it clear in this work that for him, on the basis of this deinition, all more recent versions of idealist philosophy fall into the pantheistic category (ibid. 1:42–5). In describing the current philosophical predicament, he does not hide the religious dimension of his concern. In fact, he raises the question whether or not, in light of the triumph of idealism, the ‘sacred voice of conscience and religion’ would have to sound a principle warning against any and all philosophy (ibid. 1:45–6). Interestingly, the philosophical antidote he recommends is a kind of Kantianism, the recognition of the boundary that ‘once and for all has been set by the organism of human cognitive power for the human desire to know’ (ibid. 1:46). For it is this philosophy that accepts the need for faith as a necessary addition to speculative knowledge. Conversely, pantheism is ‘the only true and conceivable philosophy’ (ibid. 1:47) for all those who claim for philosophy the power of complete and absolute knowledge. Yet if Jäsche’s alternative to pantheism has Kantian overtones, he ultimately sides with Jacobi and Heinrich Fries in the afirmation of a philosophy that sees ‘purely reasonable faith’ (reinvern̈nftiger Glauben) as being above philosophy: ‘Such a philosophy, which displays itself as a theory of knowledge only in the lower regions of philosophical thought, but in its highest regions, as a doctrine of faith, must truly not be fearful of any kind of pantheism’ (ibid. 1:49). The conlict between criticism and pantheism is therefore ultimately a conlict between a philosophy of faith and a philosophy of knowledge, ‘which usurps rights it does not possess thereby threatening to damage religion’ (ibid. 1:51). Jäsche was not a theologian nor a fanatical polemicist. He was a professor of philosophy whose training was mainly with Immanuel Kant. In some ways, as we have seen, the opposition to his idealist contemporaries can be viewed as an outgrowth of his Kantian sympathies. Yet the overall angle he took in his work indicates a crucial shift away from WHISTLER 9781474405867 PRINT.indd 171 05/07/2017 10:56 172 johannes za c h h u b er Kant’s own concerns. Jäsche offers a philosophical and historical analysis, but his research is prompted by the broader sense that religion itself is under attack. One might say that the dualism we found in Kant – between immanent and transcendent principles of cognition – is now inverted, as the system of immanence is no longer, as in Kant, the one that secures reliable knowledge, but the one that transgresses its boundaries. Interestingly, Jäsche does not make use of the binary of immanent and transcendent to characterise the dualism with which he operates. It would, arguably, be easy to ascribe it to him in practice. After all, what is the opposite of a reduction of everything to a ‘system of immanence’ denying a God who is separate from the world? At the same time, the fact that he does not avail himself in this situation of the duality of transcendent and immanent, is surely itself telling, for it completely conirms the impression given by Krug’s nearly exactly contemporaneous Encyclopedia. Transcendent and immanent are established as technical terms within Kantian criticism, but there is as yet no evidence for a willingness to make more sweeping use of the pair in the interest of philosophical generalisations. This, however, was soon to change. The Establishment of the Transcendent–Immanent Binary Immanuel Hermann Fichte (1796–1879), son of the more famous Johann Gottlob, started where Jäsche and others had left off. A trained philosopher, he too explored the borderline territory of philosophy and theology; his irst monograph was characteristically entitled S̈tze zur Vorschule der Theologie [Theses on the Preschool of Theology] (1826). From the late 1820s, he emerged as a major critic of Hegel’s philosophy, but whereas the Young Hegelians sought to move the Hegelian heritage away from Christian theology, Fichte Jr censured the Berlin philosopher for the incompatibility of his thought with theism. In particular, he charged that Hegel’s philosophy failed to give an adequate account of the concept of personality. In spite of his claim to synthesise Spinoza’s metaphysics of substance and Kant’s metaphysics of the subject, Fichte argued, Hegel had in fact been unable to move beyond the former. He was ultimately a Spinozist whose one-sided focus on absolute substance prevented him from making allowance for divine or, indeed, human personality in the full sense. If Fichte’s critique of Hegel thus had similarities with Jäsche’s analysis of pantheism, it was also characteristically different. Jäsche had advocated a dualism of knowledge and faith based on the quasi-Kantian insight into the boundaries of reason. Fichte, by contrast, afirmed the idealists’ speculative approach and sought to perfect it. Hegel, he argued, had advanced philosophy to the point from where it could then be perfected to allow for the reality and personality of God as well as true human individuality. It is for this reason that his thought has often been described as speculative theism. In articulating his position, Fichte initially did not draw on the distinction of immanence and transcendence. This only occurred from the mid-1830s, but then in a decisive and highly inluential way. From 1833, he published a major, three-volume work, Grundz̈ge zum Systeme der Philosophie [Foundations for the System of Philosophy], which was not completed until 1846. The second volume, which appeared in 1836, contains a longer note under the header ‘the concept of God’s immanence in the world’. It is essentially a critical analysis of Hegel’s philosophy of religion which, according to Fichte, is largely characterised by this very doctrine. It is clear to Fichte that this position amounts to pantheism and is in many ways identical to that of Spinoza. In spite of this damning verdict, Fichte asserts that ‘in his system lies the seed from which must ultimately result the con- WHISTLER 9781474405867 PRINT.indd 172 05/07/2017 10:56 transce nde nce a n d i m m a n en c e 173 cept of transcendence, God’s free and independent existence [F̈rsichsein] above the world, which in itself contains, explains and corrects the concept of immanence’ (1833–46: 2:374). Hegel’s position, Fichte claims, ultimately rests on the proposition that God is not God without the world because he has his reality as Spirit only in the world (ibid. 2:376). Yet such a view, rightly thought through, must ultimately lead to the concept of a personal God who freely created the world and, in that sense, transcends it. Immanence and transcendence thus belong together, and only a philosophy that gives its due to the doctrine of divine transcendence can claim to have followed the speculative path to its end. It might appear that Fichte has merely added to Jäsche’s identiication of pantheism as the ‘system of immanence’ the alternative of a philosophy recognising the importance of transcendence. Yet that would be oversimplifying things. For Jäsche, immanence was an ontological principle in and of itself; Fichte by contrast speaks of ‘God’s immanence in the world’. While he probably started from the by now conventional identiication of pantheism with immanence, his focus on Hegel’s philosophy of religion led him to the more speciic and novel claim that pantheism was based on a view of God as ‘immanent’ in his creation. Only on the basis of this understanding of immanent did it then make sense for him to advance the further view that God must also, and primarily, be transcendent. Fichte’s argument provoked a furious response from Hegel’s students. Hermann Friedrich Wilhelm Hinrichs (1794–1861), whom Hegel had made famous by contributing a foreword to his 1822 Philosophy of Religion, focused his extensive review of Fichte’s book practically exclusively on this one aspect of the work (Hinrichs 1835). The charge against the master that he only taught God’s immanence, not also his transcendence, was, Hinrichs urged, wholly without foundation and entirely unfair (ibid. 786). On the contrary, in emphasising this distinction, Hegel’s opponents remained captive to the very dualism which his philosophy had successfully overcome. Rightly understood, Hegel’s philosophy afirmed both God’s immanence and his transcendence, but in a way that moves beyond their categorical juxtaposition (ibid. 787). By phrasing the counter-argument in this way, however, Hinrichs in practice accepted Fichte’s new terminological and conceptual frame, the duality of transcendence and immanence. While they disagreed on their interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy as well as the most appropriate way of conceptualising the immanence as well as the transcendence of God, Fichte and his critic concurred on the suitability of this terminological pair. A consensus on this usage was soon emerging. A good example is the writing Das Wesen der Religion [The Essence of Religion] by the liberal theologian Carl Schwarz (1812–85), published in 1847. Schwarz presents the duality of God’s transcendence and his immanence as an antinomy which it is the task of the philosophy of religion to solve: ‘The absolute must only be thought as transcending the world. The absolute must only be thought as immanent in the world’ (1847: 1:182). In Schwarz, inally, the distinction of transcendence and immanence is presupposed as a fundamental principle of the doctrine of God. God, he argues, can legitimately be understood as transcendent: The world essentially exists in space and time and is thus . . . a series of conditionally existing beings. The unconditional [das Unbedingte] must therefore be separated from them. If it were included in the totality of things that mutually condition each other, we could not call it the unconditional. (Ibid. 1:182) On the other hand, however, there are equally plausible reasons for referring to God as immanent in the world: ‘The absolute is not absolute if it has the world outside of itself. WHISTLER 9781474405867 PRINT.indd 173 05/07/2017 10:56 174 johannes za c h h u b er A world, which it is not, would be its boundary; being cordoned off from initude, the absolute itself becomes inite’ (ibid. 1:182). According to Schwarz, the solution is to be found in a teleological, personal and dynamic concept of God whose immanence always carries with it a radical distinction from the world. The duality of the two is therefore as far removed from dualism as it is different from a pantheistic identiication of God and world. Ultimately, Schwarz’s answer is less interesting than the evidence provided by his use of transcendent and immanent as such, which suggests that this duality had by his time become a conventional shorthand for the mapping out of possible positions in the philosophy of religion: radical dualism with a dichotomy of immanence and transcendence (Kant, Jacobi, Jäscher); pantheistic immanentism (Hegel, Schelling); speculative theism (Fichte, Scheidler, Schwarz). This corresponds to the state of affairs encountered in Scheidler’s encyclopedia article written in 1839, thereby conirming that the eventual establishment of the binary use of the two terms was the result of developments from the mid-1830s. * At this point, we can summarily describe the emergence of the binary use of transcendence and immanence, which happened between 1781 (the year the Critique of Pure Reason appeared) and the mid-1830s, as the product of three overlapping intellectual and religious developments of those decades. The irst is Kant’s critical philosophy with its sharp distinction of transcendent and immanent principles of cognition. The second is the debate about pantheism, which was initiated by Jacobi in 1785, but was turned into a controversy about a ‘system of immanence’ by Jäsche’s work in 1826. The third factor is the conlict over the philosophies of German idealism and in particular over Hegel which extended throughout much of the 1830s and 1840s. As we have seen, Jäsche’s real targets were Schelling and Hegel, and the philosophical basis of his construction of pantheism was a philosophical cross of Kant and Jacobi. Fichte’s introduction of the transcendent– immanent distinction, again, saw Kant and Hegel as equally problematical representatives of dualism and immanentism, respectively. The result, consequently, was not one univocal understanding of this pair. Rather, the emerging duality of immanence and transcendence could serve very different ends depending on the philosophical, theological or ideological standpoint of the author. Speculative thinkers, such as Fichte and Schwarz, could appeal to the complementarity of transcendence and immanence with the aim of perfecting idealism. More apologetic theologians, however, could use the same pair of terms to signify the fundamental as well as necessary boundary between human knowledge and the realm of the divine. In this vein, for example, Carl August von Eschenmayer (1768–1852), a follower of Schelling and Jacobi, employed the distinction of transcendence and immanence to argue for a limitation of the powers of self-consciousness: All error is based on a lack of philosophical distinction between the immanence and the transcendence of self-consciousness. The potency of the I is suficient . . . for all that is true, beautiful and good, insofar as it falls within the immanence of self-consciousness. But this standard is insuficient for that which transcends [self-consciousness], and this is where the holy, heavenly, and divine belong. (1840: 90) Yet others, however, could invert this logic and claim that modern science had removed the need for an appeal to the transcendent and embrace the very reduction of the world to the immanent that Eschenmayer condemns. Explaining the three stages of Auguste WHISTLER 9781474405867 PRINT.indd 174 05/07/2017 10:56 transce nde nce a n d i m m a n en c e 175 Comte’s philosophy of positivism, his student Émile Littré (1801–81) wrote in 1859: ‘The long conlict of immanence and transcendence comes to its end. Transcendence, this is theology or metaphysics explaining the world by causes outside of itself; immanence, this is science explaining the world by causes within itself’ (1859: 34). From all these discussions, religion was never far away. As we have seen, Kant himself intended his distinction between immanent and transcendent principles of cognition at least partly to delegitimise a certain brand of theological and religious thinking – one he associated with ‘enthusiasm’. For Jacobi and all who came after him, the critique of pantheism was at least as much the rejection of a religious and theological position as it was an objection to particular philosophical views. Finally, the conlict about Hegel’s philosophy was deeply informed by the disagreement between those who saw in him an apologist for Christianity and those who thought the opposite. Once again, the use of transcendent and immanent was directly related to this aspect of the controversy, as has been seen in Hinrich’s angry rebuttal of Fichte’s critique. All these conlicts bespeak the emergence of a new frontier that was to dominate much nineteenth-century debate on religion across Europe. Increasingly, theism itself moved to the centre of public controversy. More and more, what was under scrutiny was no longer the detail of doctrine but the plausibility of belief in God as such. Religious debate became a debate about religion, and questions about its essence, its history and the role of Christianity in it consequently became urgent. The career of the duality of transcendent and immanent closely mirrors this evolving conlict line as it was perfectly suited to express and symbolise the options individuals and groups were able to choose. What remains to be demonstrated is how this distinction, once established, was further inlected in the course of the nineteenth century. Two aspects deserve particular attention: the inscription of the transcendent–immanent distinction into historical theology in F. C. Baur’s Tübingen School and its use within a more practical yet historical frame by Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf Harnack. Transcendent and Immanent in Historical Theology: F. C. Baur It is common today to apply the duality of transcendent and immanent as a seemingly time-invariant concept to historical analysis. The roots of this practice also lie in the nineteenth century; in fact, its origin is directly tied to the developments that have so far been described. This is partly because the latter coincided with the evolution of historicism as an intellectual paradigm and the same factors contributed to the emergence of both. This is especially true for the intellectual trajectory leading from Kant and Lessing to the idealists of the early nineteenth century. Increasingly, it was accepted that the fullest possible account of any social or cultural phenomenon was its historical contextualisation. In this sense, the history of philosophy was seen as the ultimate key to philosophy, and the history of religion likewise promised to unveil the deepest insights into the divine and its relationship with humanity (Zachhuber 2013: 7–10). One of the most inluential early proponents of historicism within Christian theology was Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860). He is often presented as a theological Hegelian, but this is arguably a simpliication (ibid. 51–72). While Baur, whose knowledge and understanding of contemporary philosophy and theology rivalled his expertise as a biblical and historical scholar, made no secret of his admiration for Hegel’s philosophy and gave a prominent place to the presentation of his ideas in his major monographs on the history of doctrine in the 1830s and 1840s, his overarching aim was deined at a much WHISTLER 9781474405867 PRINT.indd 175 05/07/2017 10:56 176 johannes za c h h u b er earlier stage of his career and prior to his encounter with Hegel’s philosophy. This vision consisted in a fusion of historical and philosophical theology. The truth of Christianity, he believed, could be demonstrated by inscribing its emergence into a historical trajectory that ultimately led to its full realisation in the Christian faith as the absolute religion. To attain this goal, uncompromising historical criticism was as indispensable as the most rigorous philosophical and theological analysis. On the basis of this premise, Baur began work in the 1820s on a reconstruction of Christianity within the history of religions. His underlying conceptual framework is clearly post-Kantian, based on the duality of ‘nature’ and ‘spirit’. This initial, conceptual dualism of nature and spirit led Baur to a historical juxtaposition of nature religions and spirit religions, and the distinction between the two is drawn, not surprisingly perhaps, on the immanence or transcendence of their deities. The duality of immanence and transcendence is thus foundational for Baur’s understanding of the dynamic that moves the history of religions towards its goal. Like his idealist contemporaries, Baur sought to overcome this duality. In order for religion to come to its fulilment, he thought, there had to be reconciliation between nature and spirit, or immanence and transcendence. This was the historic role of Christianity as the religion of reconciliation with its central feature, the Incarnation. In the person of Jesus Christ, the God-man, the dualism of nature and spirit is both preserved and solved as, according to the Chalcedonian dogma, he is fully divine and fully human, and yet one single person. In this way, Baur thought, Christianity could claim to be the ‘absolute religion’, the ultimate and true manifestation of what all religion was aspiring to, without however being separated and detached from the historical continuity of the history of religions. This project inevitably led Baur to the study of the historical development of Trinitarian and Christological doctrine. For the duality of nature and spirit, immanence and transcendence is not resolved once and forever with the emergence of Christianity. Rather, it remains at the centre of theological attention throughout the history of this religion, and the development of Christianity’s central dogmas is the supreme expression of this fact. Baur wrote three major monographic works on the history of Christian doctrine, Die christliche Gnosis [The Christian Gnosis] (1835), Die christliche Lehre von der Versöhnung [The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation] (1838) and Die christliche Lehre von der Dreieinigkeit und der Menschwerdung Gottes [The Christian Doctrine of the Trinity and the Divine Incarnation] (1841–3). The last of these was published in three volumes in from 1841. In line with his overall understanding of the role of Christianity in the history of religions, Baur described the overall ‘theme’ of the two doctrines as the relationship between God and world: ‘the doctrine of God and the relationship of God to the world and to man as deined by the doctrine of the god-man’ (1841–3: 1:iii). The historical development he seeks to capture on nearly 2,500 pages is driven by various attempts to conceptualise this precise relationship, leading ultimately to Baur’s preferred solution in Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion. He discusses in detail Hegel’s critics who accuse him of perpetuating a system of immanence but, without failing to recognise crucial problems with Hegel’s account, Baur is on the whole still willing to side with his defenders and accept that Hegel, in his view of the Spirit as the bond that overcomes the duality of immanence and transcendence, has provided the most satisfactory solution so far. A good example of how Baur’s own acceptance of the transcendent–immanent distinction coloured his interpretation of earlier thinkers is his discussion of Augustine’s seminal De trinitate which ills the inal sixty pages of the irst volume of The Christian Doctrine of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Baur’s summary of Augustine’s teaching is this: WHISTLER 9781474405867 PRINT.indd 176 05/07/2017 10:56 transce nde nce a n d i m m a n en c e 177 Augustine was the irst to express the . . . deep thought that the absolute relationship of Father and Son could only be based in the thinking mind [Geist] itself; that, as far as [this relationship] can at all be understood, it must be understood as the relationship of the thinking mind to itself. (Ibid. 1:868) In a way that is dificult to render in English, Baur here draws on the broad meaning of the German Geist, which can mean both ‘mind’ and ‘spirit’. What he takes Augustine to say, then, is that the Spirit as the common bond between Father and Son relects the Bishop of Hippo’s speculative insight in the analogy between the Trinity and the human mind. These analogies, for which On the Trinity is famous, indicate to Baur Augustine’s awareness that the concept of mind contained the ultimate key to our understanding of the divine: As much as Augustine time and again feels the need to remind himself that God’s triune being, as it appeared to him from the doctrine of the Church, altogether transcended the mind’s imagination, he could not, on the other hand, avoid the assumption, deeply rooted in the constitution of the human mind, that, if there is a key to unlock the inscrutable mystery, such a key could only lie in the rational nature of mind (Geist) itself. For him the spirit (Geist) of subjective consciousness, which initially is inite but in its initude at the same time ininite, is the mirror of the eternal, absolute God who self-determines as the Trinity of Father, Son and Spirit. (Ibid. 1:869) It is evident how strongly Baur’s own interest in the reconciliation of immanence and transcendence informs his reading of his source. He is convinced that the Trinity has to be understood as the objective and absolute reality of mind if the dualism of nature and spirit is to be overcome. His entire approach to Augustine is determined by this premise which for him determines both Augustine’s achievement and his limits. For Baur was of course fully aware that Augustine had by no means taught the identity of the inite and the ininite spirit. Had he done so, he would hardly have achieved the status of a doctor of the church. Characteristically, Baur calls this Augustine’s ‘dogmatism’, his concession to orthodoxy and, as such, a limitation of his investigation. By accepting on authority the truth of the Trinitarian dogma, Augustine avoided the deeper question of why God had to be thought as Trinitarian in the irst place (ibid. 1:877–81). He therefore restricted his comparisons between the Trinity and the human mind to mere analogies pointing towards an understanding of the divine whose correctness was independently guaranteed by the church’s magisterial teaching (ibid. 1:882). Stripping Augustine’s insights of his orthodox cocoon, however, Baur suggests, reveals an even deeper truth; the parallel structure of divine spirit and human mind Augustine observed ultimately points beyond the dualism of God and world towards an understanding of God as spirit embracing and overcoming the dichotomy of immanence and transcendence. It is arguable that Baur’s criticism does not do justice to Augustine. Interestingly, the most speculative parts of the De trinitate, in which the Bishop of Hippo offered a probing analysis of self-consciousness, do not feature in Baur’s extensive presentation of Augustine’s teaching at all (Kany 2007: 314). More importantly, his reading of On the Trinity shows how the duality of immanence and transcendence became, soon after its establishment, a conceptual tool in historical theology and deeply inluenced the reading and understanding of past religious and theological thought. Baur has been much more inluential in this regard than in some of his rather questionable judgements. WHISTLER 9781474405867 PRINT.indd 177 05/07/2017 10:56 178 johannes za c h h u b er Transcendence and Immanence in Albrecht Ritschl and His School Albrecht Ritschl’s (1822–89) thought took shape in the 1840s and 1850s under the inluence of post-Hegelian debates about philosophy and religion. He became convinced that idealist philosophy led to pantheism and was ultimately incompatible with the theistic worldview of Christianity. At this time of his life, Hegel’s critics, such as Fichte Jr, exerted considerable inluence on Ritschl (Zachhuber 2013: 206–9), but in his mature thought he reached further back and Kantian insights gained considerable importance for him (Ritschl 1888: 208–11). Like Kant, Ritschl rejected epistemic claims about transcendent reality. In fact, he reserved some of his most scathing criticisms for theologians emphasising divine transcendence (ibid. 257–9). This, Ritschl thought, was incompatible with the revealed character of the Christian God. It might then appear that Ritschl’s theology was openly opposed to the very concept of transcendence. While Baur saw the role of Christianity in overcoming and reconciling the duality of immanence and transcendence, Ritschl, it could seem, rejected any reference to transcendence in the irst instance as something that would lead Christians into mystical enthusiasm. Yet such an analysis would miss the main point of Ritschl’s own theological position. The reason he objected to the tradition of negative theology, which he derisively called Areopagitism, is not that he rejected transcendence. Rather, he suspected that such a search for God as the other ultimately fails to recognise him as such. The God of negative theology, Ritschl claimed, is still ‘nature’ and as such ultimately not transcendent at all. By contrast, it is only when conceived as purposeful will that God becomes the true representative of transcendence which Ritschl, like Baur, calls spirit (Geist). In other words, it is once again the duality of nature and spirit that underlies the history of religions, but the dividing line between the two is now that between the realm of physical causality and that of teleological agency (Zachhuber 2013: 180–7). And whereas Baur saw the role of Christianity in a reconciliation of nature and spirit, for Ritschl its function was to lead spirit to victory over nature whose determinism robbed humankind of its freedom and dignity. Ritschl used Kant thus in a way characteristically different from those who appropriated him in the interest of carving out an ontological space which knowledge cannot reach but faith can. Instead, we see him draw on Kant’s moral and religious thought, taking seriously the philosopher’s suggestion to seek God in the context of practical reason rather than in metaphysical speculation. Yet Ritschl was not simply presenting Christianity as a religion of moral perfection. One key difference between immanent nature and transcendent spirit for him was that the former operates by means of a deterministic chain of cause and effect whereas the latter is structured by the teleology of inal causes. For human beings then the former signiies the bondage of determination, while the latter promises freedom and personal lourishing. In this promise lies the speciic dignity and the religious truth of Christianity which, however, has been obscured for much of its history by the fateful alliance between Christian theology and the metaphysical tradition. The rejection of metaphysics as ‘natural theology’ incompatible with the spiritual and ethical character of Christianity became one of the founding principles of Ritschl’s theological school. Among its members, arguably the most famous was the church historian Adolf Harnack (1851–1930). Harnack’s extensive scholarly interpretation of the development of doctrine, presented most comprehensively in his History of Dogma, was deeply informed by Ritschl’s speciic version of the duality of immanence and transcendence. WHISTLER 9781474405867 PRINT.indd 178 05/07/2017 10:56 transce nde nce a n d i m m a n en c e 179 Nowhere is this more apparent than in Harnack’s most controversial monograph devoted to the second-century heretic, Marcion. This book was only published in 1923 but is based on material going back to Harnack’s time as a student (Harnack [1923] 1990, [1870] 2003). For Harnack, Marcion was the only theologian of the early church who understood the gospel as taught especially in Paul’s letters in its radical novelty vis-à-vis the entire foregoing history of religions, pagan as well as Jewish. The utter novelty in Marcion’s message, however, is nothing other than God’s radical otherness and transcendence. Harnack’s subtitle expresses this by describing the theme of Marcion’s work as ‘the gospel of the alien God’; Marcion’s God is ‘alien’ insofar as he is not of this world and has, therefore, remained unrecognised by all prior religious history: [Marcion] proclaimed the Alien God with an entirely new ‘dispositio’. He had experienced this God in Christ and only in him, therefore he elevated the historical realism of the Christian experience to the level of the transcendent and caught sight, beyond the dark and gloomy sphere of the world and its creator, of a new reality, that is, of a new deity. ([1923] 1990: 141) This transcendence is not the higher sphere of metaphysical speculation. It is, as Harnack put it, the ‘elevation of the historical realism of the Christian experience’; it is, in other words, the radical afirmation of the Christian God as love: That new reality is love, and nothing but love; absolutely no other feature is intermingled with this. And it is incomprehensible love, for out of pure mercy it accepts an entity wholly foreign to itself and, by driving out fear, brings to it new, eternal life. Now there is something in this world that is not of this world and is superior to it! (Ibid. 141) This new, transcendent world is thus a future reality which, while announced and promised in Jesus Christ, will only be fully realised at the end of the current age. This alignment of the duality of immanence and transcendence with the temporal distinction of present and future was already present in Ritschl. Yet while the latter postulated a continuous and progressive historical development leading to the coming Kingdom of God, Harnack anticipates the radical eschatology of dialectical theology with a much more dualistic dichotomy of the old and the new: ‘This world, together with its righteousness, its civilization, and its God, will pass away, but the new kingdom of love will abide’ (ibid. 142). Conclusion Throughout the nineteenth century, the emergence and establishment of the duality of transcendence and immanence was largely a German story. As we have seen, it took its origin from the epistemological dualism of Kant’s critical philosophy which was subsequently merged with the controversy about pantheism and applied in the tempestuous discussions about the intellectual and religious heritage of German Idealism and, speciically, of Hegel’s philosophy. By the year 1840, it was conventional to inscribe current as well as historical positions in theology and the philosophy of religion into this conceptual duality. Realignments and further developments throughout the latter half of the century did little to slow its growth in popularity as a convenient shorthand for philosophical, theological and religious positions. WHISTLER 9781474405867 PRINT.indd 179 05/07/2017 10:56 180 johannes za c h h u b er At the end of the century, this development entered into a new phase as the binary of immanence and transcendence gained even more ground. Perhaps the most momentous of the new contexts into which it entered at that point was Catholic thought. Maurice Blondel made the duality of immanence and transcendence the cornerstone of his theistic philosophy arguing, with clear terminological echoes of earlier debates (McNeill 1966), that Spinoza’s ‘principle of immanence’ necessarily leads to an afirmation of transcendent truths however hostile modern rationalism seems to be to such an acknowledgement (Blondel [1894] 1997: 63). Blondel’s usage was subsequently taken up by some of the most inluential theologians of the twentieth century, such as Erich Przywara (1923) and Karl Rahner ([1966] 1967); the magisterial condemnation of ‘immanentism’ by Popes Pius X and XII furthermore indicates the signiicance this language gained within the Catholic Church more broadly (Denzinger et al. 2010: 3477–83, 3878). Today, the binary of transcendence and immanence has become one of the most widely used and most evocative markers of philosophical and religious belief systems. Religious believers and theologians criticise each other for their lack of a proper acknowledgement of transcendence; secularists cite their sole reliance on the immanence of natural laws as proof for the superiority of their worldview; scholars take for granted that these two terms can be historically applied to individual and communal belief systems of the past. The purpose of this chapter is not to reject such use of these two terms, but to draw attention to the fact that its plausibility is indebted to very speciic philosophical, theological and religious developments in the nineteenth century in whose long shadow we still stand. Note 1. As is customary, page references to the Critique of Pure Reason correspond to the original A and B editions; page references to other works by Kant cite the Akademie edition numbering. 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Transcendence and Immanence Johannes Zachhuber, University of Oxford 1. Introduction The binary use of the terms transcendence and immanence is one of the most powerful concepts to have emerged from nineteenth century debates about religion. It is also one of their most enduring legacies; in fact, the juxtaposition of the two terms, the assumption that they refer to an ontological, epistemic or theological duality, is today usually taken for granted and conventionally applied to the analysis of religious and other world views throughout history and across cultures. The present chapter will set out charting the historical emergence of this particular conceptual pair of opposites during the early part of the nineteenth century and, subsequently, illustrate some ways it has been used and applied later on. As I shall demonstrate, its wide-spread acceptance as descriptively valuable followed on from was the product of rather specific philosophical developments, notably the rise of Kantian criticism and its ambivalent reception in German idealism. Yet the reason it resonated so strongly with the wider public cannot be reduced to those academic debates. Rather, the opposition of transcendent and immanent touched a nerve of Western societies uneasy about their understanding of religion as well as its abiding importance for modern culture. It is now widely recognised that the notion of the nineteenth century as the age of ‘the secularization of the European mind’ (Chadwick 1990) has been at best one-sided and more probably a misleading caricature. Yet if the nineteenth century was not a time of unmitigated religious decline, it most certainly was beset with concerns about such decline. Indifference or hostility to religion may have been less wide-spread than has often been assumed; very public controversies about the current state of religion certainly were one of the most characteristic features of the century. A major reason for the increasing popularity of references to transcendence and immanence was their usefulness in those debates. To many, acceptance or denial of ‘transcendence’ became tantamount to acceptance or denial of religious faith as such. Thus the duality of transcendence and immanence could be invoked both by advocates of traditional religion and by its critics: the proponents of modern science could insinuate that ‘transcendence’ was the hypothesis that was no longer needed under a methodical approach which ‘immanently’ offered a full explanation of the world, while their opponents bemoaned the loss of transcendence and regarded the totalitarian dominance of immanence as the supreme expression of modernity’s apostasy from religion. Some, admittedly, sought to reject this alternative, arguing instead that it was the very dualism of transcendence and immanence that caused a crisis of religious faith which, consequently, could only be overcome by moving beyond the sharp juxtaposition of the two concepts. A significant driver of nineteenth-century debates about transcendence and immanence, as we shall see, was the attempt to delegitimise this position, labelling it as pantheism and aligning it with the complete denial of transcendence. Ultimately, the emerging popularity of the dualism of transcendence and immanence provides a fascinating insight into the close link between philosophical, theological, historical, and more broadly religious concerns in the nineteenth century. 2. The emergence of the transcendent-immanent binary as seen through three encyclopedias The rise of the binary opposition of transcendence and immanence can be traced from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth century by comparing the entries under the term ‘immanent’ in three major encyclopedias of the time (cf. Oeing-Hanhoff 1976): the famous Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, published in 28 volumes between 1751 and 1772; the four-volume Allgemeines Handwörterbuch der philosophischen Wissenschaften nebst ihrer Literatur und Geschichte authored by the eminent Kantian philosopher Wilhelm Traugott Krug in 1827–8; and the monumental Allgemeine Enzyklopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste, which was edited by Johann Samuel Ersch and Johann Gottfried Gruber in rather astonishing 168 volumes between 1818 and 1889, but remained incomplete nonetheless. The Encyclopédie included in its eighth volume a brief and unsigned entry ‘immanent’ (Diderot 1765: 570). The article defines the term as that ‘which remains within the person or which does not have an effect beyond it’. Two main contexts are given: philosophers, the author claims, distinguish between ‘immanent’ and ‘transeunt’ actions. The former are those whose end remains within the mind of the agent whereas the latter produce an effect outside the mind. Theologians, the author adds, have taken over the same distinction specifically for the actions of God. Accordingly, ‘God has generated the Son and the Holy Spirit through immanent actions’ whereas the creation of the world is counted as his transeunt action. Immanent here clearly is a concept with limited use and of no particular importance. It is a technical term whose history dates back to medieval scholasticism but without any wider claim beyond the rather narrow confines of the philosophy of mind and Christian doctrine. While it is used as part of a binary pair of opposites, it is not contrasted with ‘transcendent’ but with ‘transeunt’. This is not because ‘transcendent’ is an unknown term to the editors of the Encyclopédie; in fact, ‘transcendent’ has its own entry, but the latter does not mention ‘immanent’ either. One of most fateful early references to ‘immanent’ perfectly confirms this impression. In proposition XVIII of his Ethics, Spinoza called God the ‘immanent, not the transeunt cause’ of all things (Spinoza 1925: 2, 64). While contemporary readers may be inclined to find here proof for Spinoza’s alleged ‘immanentist’ view of the godhead, his claim is much more specific and fully in line with the usage described in the Encyclopédie even though the thesis contradicts theological orthodoxy. In the act of creating the world, Spinoza urged, God does not cause an effect outside of himself but remains as much within himself as, according to Christian doctrine, in the inner-trinitarian processions. Krug’s General Encyclopedia of Philosophical Terms contains an article on ‘immanent’ in its second volume (Krug 1826: 447). Immanent is here defined as ‘remaining within’ but then distinguished according to three different meanings. In the first one, it is opposed to ‘transcendent’ and refers to the principles of cognition. The immanent use of reason remains within that which can be properly known, whereas the transcendent use claims to surpass those limits. This is Kant’s own use, as we shall see in more detail later on. Secondly, Krug juxtaposes ‘immanent’ and ‘transeunt’ as the Encyclopédie did before, but defines immanent in this sense as ‘contained within the human mind’ or ‘theoretical’. A third and, according to the author, rather specific meaning of the term is encountered in ‘the pantheistic system’ which, by seeing God as the world’s immanent cause, ultimately identifies the two insofar as all empirical things are mere accidents of one underlying substance. Of the three meanings only one moves decisively beyond the article in the Encyclopédie, and this is the very one juxtaposing transcendent and immanent. This is significant as it points to the emergence of an altogether novel interest in this duality. Yet the way Krug introduces this meaning does not suggest any broader or systematic concern for this distinction. He remains as technical and academic as the author of the earlier article in the Encyclopédie. A hint towards the wider significance of the matter can only be found in Krug’s reference to the ‘pantheistic’ use of immanent. Krug may have been unfamiliar with the earlier, theological background of Spinoza’s proposition XVIII, and clearly reads him in the context of more recent controversies about ‘pantheism’ initiated by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi in 1785 (Jacobi 1988). Jacobi had caused public scandal by tying the half-forgotten Spinoza to the recently deceased Gotthold Ephraim Lessing arguing that his philosophy ultimately amounted to the denial of freedom, ethical relativism, and atheism. There is no evidence that the transcendent-immanent distinction was used by Jacobi himself or in the original pantheism controversy of the late eighteenth century. By the time Krug composed his Encyclopedia this had evidently changed. Things look very different indeed in the much longer article ‘immanent’ written by the little-known philosopher Karl Hermann Scheidler (1795–1866) for the General Encyclopedia of the Sciences and the Arts (Scheidler: 1839). Scheidler, who identified with conservative critics of Hegel’s philosophy, such as Immanuel Hermann Fichte, considered ‘the concept of the immanent together with its opposite, the transcendent, the very core or centre of [Kant’s] critical philosophy’ (Scheidler 1839: 315). Not only is the pair important for Kantian thought, it is equally crucial for Hegel’s philosophy as well (Scheidler 1839: 315). Whereas, however, Kant taught a sharp dichotomy of the two and, in a way, excluded the transcendent from the realm of human knowledge, Hegel’s ‘doctrine claims to have full knowledge of God etc. [sic] and thus to unite immanence and transcendence’ (Scheidler 1839: 315). In Scheidler’s account, the opposition of transcendence and immanence finally appears as the key to recent philosophical developments. Remarkably, the earlier understanding of ‘immanent’, of which Krug was still aware just over ten years earlier, has entirely disappeared in Scheidler’s perception. He therefore begins his overview with an extensive sketch of Kantian philosophy followed by an equally extensive description of Hegel’s system. He links the latter in particular with the Spinozist heritage. Hegel himself, the article says, calls his system ‘absolute idealism’ but others rightly refer to it as ‘pantheistic idealism or idealistic pantheism’ (Scheidler 1839: 316). While the article at the outset defines ‘immanent’ as a technical term of philosophy, the piece culminates in the observation that Hegel’s ‘immanent philosophy of this-worldliness fundamentally rejects […] any faith in a higher Being, in the Beyond, or the personal immortality of the soul’ (Scheidler 1839: 317). The author of this encyclopedia article goes beyond his predecessors in at least two ways: he claims the centrality of the opposition of transcendent and immanent for modern philosophy and at the same time inscribes it into contemporaneous debates about religion. The terms he uses for the latter purpose are quite telling. Those accused of insufficient recognition of transcendence deny the existence of a ‘higher Being’ (ein höheres Wesen) or ‘the Beyond’ (das Jenseits). What is at stake is not any particular doctrine of the Christian creed, but religion as such; and religion is essentially the postulation of an ontological order beyond the material realm. Faith, likewise, is conceived as the willingness to accept a worldview that involves those assumptions. In other words, the binary of transcendent and immanent corresponds to a binary of religion and non-religion, and it is the latter alternative that increasingly dominates religious debates in the nineteenth century. Just over 50 years separate the publication of the first and the last of the three encyclopedia entries. These 50 years, admittedly, must be counted among the most eventful and transformative in the whole of Western history. Diderot and d’Alembert wrote while the ancien régime was still in power; Scheidler, by contrast, looks back to the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the Restoration. In fact, for him times are already heating up for the major revolutions spreading all over Europe in 1848. The intervening years were a period of radical transformation in practically all areas of culture and society. What we can conclude at this point is that the dichotomous pair of transcendent and immanent is a product of this particular intellectual transformation. Major philosophical developments played an important role for its emergence along with the evolution of a new kind of religious concern, for which the main decision was no longer one between particular doctrines or articles of faith, but more fundamentally between religion and its rejection. 3. Transcendence and Immanence in Kant’s philosophy It has already become clear that Kant’s critical philosophy marks a major turning point in the emergence of the transcendent-immanent binary. In fact, he is the first to use the two terms as a pair. His contribution and its significance must now be described in some more detail. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant wrote: We will call the principles whose application stays wholly and completely within the limits of possible experience immanent, but those that would fly beyond those boundaries, transcendent principles (A 295-6/B 352). Immanent and transcendent are here applied to the realm of human knowledge. Those principles of cognition that are ‘within the limits of possible experience’ are called immanent; those going beyond those limits are called transcendent. I order to gauge the significance of this definition for Kant’s thought but also for the wider philosophical, theological and religious debate, it is useful to recall the ultimate purpose of his most ground-breaking book. As Kant explained in the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, he was ultimately motivated by the question of why metaphysics had made less steady progress in the development towards a science than had other fields, such as mathematics and the natural sciences. His own original contribution, as he saw it, was a radical change of perspective, the celebrated Copernican turn: Hence let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition, which would agree better with the requested possibility of an a priori cognition of them, which is to establish something about them before they are given to us. This would be like the first thoughts of Copernicus, who, when he did not make good progress in the explanation of the celestial motions if he assumed that the entire celestial host revolves around the observer, tried to see if he might not have greater success if he made the observer revolve and left the stars at rest (B xvi). Given, Kant suggests, that the quest for an understanding of being qua being has not led to unequivocal results, it may be time to query our capacity for knowledge instead. By investigating the principles of our cognition, we might hope to achieve those results that have so far eschewed philosophers in search of a firm metaphysical foundation. In seeking this approach, Kant hoped to overcome the stark juxtaposition between the continental school of philosophical rationalism in the tradition of Descartes and Leibniz, in which he himself had been trained, and the British school of empiricism which had found its most brilliant representative in David Hume. Kant himself famously said that Hume’s scepticism had ‘first interrupted my dogmatic slumber’ (4: 260). The resulting conundrum was the reason a ‘critique’ of pure reason was necessary. Kant’s solution lay in the insight that human cognition always depends on both sense perception and rationality. This permitted the philosopher from Königsberg to reject Hume’s epistemological scepticism. Hume, he asserted, had neglected the necessarily constructive role played by human reason in all cognition. Firm and reliable knowledge was therefore possible, Kant asserted, on the basis of the successful interaction between the material provided by our senses and the formal structure imposed on it by our intellect. As long as those two went together, human cognition stood on firm ground. The flip-side of this argument, however, was Kant’s equally strongly held view that no knowledge was possible where intellectual ideas were altogether cut off from an empirical basis. He therefore rejected the traditional proofs for the existence of God or, perhaps more precisely, he took away the epistemic foundation that had made them even conceivable. For Kant, human ideas about reality could ultimately be classified in a binary way: those that fell within the boundaries of what the mind can know and those that aim to transgress those boundaries. Firm and ‘scientific’ knowledge is possible of the former, no knowledge is possible of the latter. It is this precise theory that is encapsulated in Kant’s use of the pair ‘transcendent’ and ‘immanent’ as expressed concisely in the above quotation. All cognition is either immanent or transcendent. Insofar as it is the former, it is verifiable and therefore in principle justified; insofar as it is the latter, the searching human mind has to guard itself against such ideas as they lead to confusion and insoluble contradictions. The terms transcendent and immanent are thus not merely given a novel use in Kant’s first critique; they are inserted at what is arguably the centrepiece of his argument. Their duality stands for the dichotomy the critical philosophy stipulates in the realm of human knowledge marking the dividing line between legitimate and illegitimate use of reason. It is therefore further evident that Kant’s use of the distinction carries with it a normative judgment. He does not so much divide cognition into immanent and transcendent forms, but decrees that the latter of the two is deeply problematical: [By transcendent principles] I mean principles that actually incite us to tear down all those boundary posts and to lay claim to a wholly new territory that recognises no demarcations anywhere (A 296/B352). The binary of immanent and transcendent is of such a kind that only one of the two denotes a possible form of human knowledge. Transcendent principles of pure reason are no basis for knowledge whatsoever. They are presumptuous, making empty promises that lead to no real insight. The purpose of the Critique is to warn against them because of their potential to mire the human mind in contradictions and hinder rather than enable the growth of human knowledge. The negative connotations Kant associates with transcendent ideas become even clearer once we consider a German term he frequently uses as an equivalent for transcendent, the word überschwänglich (Zachhuber 2000). This term would now commonly be translated as ‘profuse’ or ‘effusive’ but is originally derived from the verb schwingen, ‘to swing’ which, combined with a prefix meaning ‘over’, suggests a movement transcending or transgressing boundaries. Kant’s use of it as an equivalent for transcendent is therefore somewhat idiosyncratic but not implausible. The term has a long history in German mystical thought going back to the high Middle Ages and can be found in authors like Meister Eckhart where it signified both the ecstatic union of the mystic with God and God’s superabundant being (Eckhart 1958: 55). It was later used by Lutheran pietists, such as Gottfried Arnold, who employed überschwänglich to translate the ontological superlative forms typical for the language of Ps.-Dionysius the Areopagite. According to Arnold and others, überschwänglich cognition is such that it permits an immediate, mystical approach to God (Arnold 1969: 83). Kant, who had a pietistic upbringing from which he later distanced himself, seems to have been aware of this specific usage (Zachhuber 2000: 147–8). This explains regular references to ‘transcendent’ or überschwänglich cognition in strongly polemical contexts. His rejection goes way beyond the measured criticism to be found in the Critique of Pure Reason and indicates that he associates transcendent ideas with intellectually and religiously suspicious movements. Thus he accused opponents such as Johann Georg Schlosser (8: 398), Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (8: 134)) or Emanuel Swedenborg (7: 46) of misguided expeditions into the transcendent realm, and this claim is supported by tying them to the ‘mystical-Platonic tradition’ which, according to Kant, goes back to Parmenides and in particular Plato, ‘the father of all enthusiasm in philosophy’ (8: 398). The reference to ‘enthusiasm’ (Schwärmerei) here hints at the broader, religious background to Kant’s argument. In an evidently calculated move, Kant sides with mainstream Lutheranism which over the centuries had developed a fundamental suspicion towards radical and mystical spiritualism so much so that the term ‘enthusiasts’, originally used by Luther against his more radical opponents within the Reformation camp, had practically become the designation of a heresy. At this point, it becomes possible to ascertain how Kant’s use of the opposition of transcendent and immanent is also indicative of his attitude towards religion and theology. From what has been said so far, it might easily appear that his intention was simply to disown any intellectual engagement with the transcendent. Yet Kant himself famously declared that his stipulation of the boundaries of pure reason was done, at least partly, ‘in order to make room for faith’ (B xxx). This corresponds with the observation that Kant’s duality of immanent and transcendent principles of cognition apparently recognises that the latter exist, however much he may have warned against their inevitable abuse. Such an ambiguity, however, is not at all without precedent in theology which, on the contrary, has throughout its history grappled with the apparent tension between the affirmation that God is wholly other and any epistemic claims about the divine. Kant’s novel use of the transcendent-immanent distinction is therefore less obviously hostile towards religion than is often thought. It can perfectly well be read as a radical concession by philosophy that its potential for understanding the ultimate reality is extremely limited. In this sense, Kant’s critical philosophy was met with sympathies by rather conservative theologians right from the outset. An interesting example is the so-called ‘supranaturalist’ theology of Gottlob Christian Storr (1746–1805), who claimed that Kant’s critique of natural knowledge of God necessitated reliance on divine revelation (Storr 1794; Pannenberg 1997: 35–45). A similar use of Kant is evident in Karl Barth’s early dialectical theology, especially in the second edition of his hugely influential interpretation of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (Barth 1968). His ‘theological epistemology in Romans II stands everywhere in the long shadow cast by Immanuel Kant’ (McCormack 1995: 245). The reason is simple: Kant’s radical distinction of immanent and transcendent principles of cognition could be read as an affirmation of a hyper-secular rejection of transcendence, but they could equally be seen to encourage a radical emphasis on the divine transcendence. This is not to say that such appropriations would have found Kant’s own approval. In the realm of cognition, the division between immanent and transcendent for him was absolute. His own solution, which he presented in the Critique of Practical Reason and in many of his later essays, commended human practice as the realm in which the dualism of immanent and transcendent could be overcome: Ideas created by reason itself, whose objects (if they have any) lie wholly beyond our field of vision; although they are transcendent for speculative cognition, they are not to be taken as empty, but with a practical intent they are made available to us by lawgiving reason itself, yet not in order to brood over their objects as to what they are in themselves and in their nature, but rather how we have to think of them in behalf of moral principles (8 : 332). As we shall see, in the early reception of Kant’s philosophy this second leg of his philosophy, the affirmation of practical religion as an alternative to the impasse on the theoretical side, remained in the background. Later, however, this was to change, and a practical solution to the transcendent-immanent dichotomy became an attractive option for theologians in the latter half of the century. 4. Pantheism as the ‘system of immanence’ Scheidler in his encyclopedia entry asserted that the distinction of transcendent and immanent was equally central for the philosophies of Kant and of Hegel. This assessment is, however, more accurate for the former than the latter. In fact, none of the idealists operated with this duality. This may well be due to their monistic tendency; Hegel as well as Fichte and Schelling sought to overcome what they saw as problematical dichotomies in Kant’s thought. Thus Schelling opined that ‘in light of the science that we teach and distinctly perceive, immanence and transcendence are completely and equally empty words because it [sc. the science] resolves this very duality’ (Schelling 1857: 377). It is in keeping with this observation that Krug in 1826, as we have seen, gave no indication that the duality of immanent and transcendent, which he rightly associated with Kant’s critical philosophy, had subsequently been employed by his idealist heirs. He did, however, hint that ‘immanent’ was used in a specific sense in ‘the pantheistic system’. The association of pantheism with the concept of immanence was indeed a product of the 1820s. This was an important step towards the eventual establishment of the transcendent-immanent binary, particularly important in light of the religious overtones that came to be associated with this distinction. Pantheism was not linked to Spinoza and his philosophy until the late eighteenth century. Jacobi’s writing and the ensuing ‘pantheism controversy’ played a major role in bringing this about (Jacobi 1988). Subsequently, the name swiftly mutated into a widely-used term of abuse on the philosophical-theological borderline. As a large number of thinkers with very different intellectual credentials were publicly accused of being pantheists, complaints grew that the meaning of the designation was increasingly vague and unspecific. The Enlightenment thinker Christian Jakob Kraus compared Herder’s notion of pantheism to the sea-god Proteus who would change his shape in order to avoid answering questions directed at him (Kraus 1812: 10). In 1826, the philosopher Gottlob Benjamin Jäsche (1762–1842), known to posterity largely as the editor of Kant’s lectures on logic (so-called Jäsche Logic), sought to address this problem by composing a two-volume work entitled Der Pantheismus nach seinen verschiedenen Hauptformen, seinem Ursprung und Fortgange, seinem speculativen und praktischen Werth und Gehalt (Pantheism in its Various Main Forms, its Origin and Development, its Speculative and Practical Value and Content). Jäsche’s work is based on the assumption that pantheism is a type of philosophy going back to Greek and even Indic antiquity (Friedrich Schlegel had already hinted at that: Schegel 1808: 140–153). While acknowledging diverse varieties, Jäsche ultimately identified the foundation of pantheism as immanence: The reason that a conceptual difference [of God and world] cannot be held together with the basic pantheistic concept of immanence, lies in the principle itself on which all pantheism is founded (Jäsche 1826: 1, 33). Pantheism is thus the opposite of theism, and their main difference is identified in their respective understanding of God and world. Pantheism, according to Jäsche, denies a Godhead that is ‘truly different from the world’ (Jäsche 1826: 1, 33) whereas its alternative affirms precisely such a God. Jäsche makes it clear in this work that for him, on the basis of this definition, all more recent versions of idealist philosophy fall into the pantheistic category (Jäsche 1826: 1, 42–45). In describing the current philosophical predicament, he does not hide the religious dimension of his concern. In fact, he raises the question whether or not, in light of the triumph of idealism, the ‘sacred voice of conscience and religion’ would have to sound a principal warning against any and all philosophy (Jäsche 1826: 1, 45–6). Interestingly, the philosophical antidote he recommends is a kind of Kantianism, the recognition of the boundary that ‘once and for all has been set by the organism of human cognitive power for the human desire to know’ (Jäsche 1826: 1, 46). For it is this philosophy that accepts the need for faith as a necessary addition to speculative knowledge. Conversely, pantheism is ‘the only true and conceivable philosophy’ (Jäsche 1826: 1, 47) for all those who claim for philosophy the power of complete and absolute knowledge. Yet if Jäsche’s alternative to pantheism has Kantian overtones, he ultimately sides with Jacobi and Heinrich Fries in the affirmation of a philosophy that sees ‘purely reasonable faith’ (reinvernünftiger Glauben) as being above philosophy: Such a philosophy, which displays itself as a theory of knowledge only in the lower regions of philosophical thought, but in its highest regions, as a doctrine of faith, must truly not be fearful of any kind of pantheism’ (Jäsche 1826: 1, 49). The conflict between criticism and pantheism is therefore ultimately a conflict between a philosophy of faith and a philosophy of knowledge, ‘which usurps rights it does not possess thereby threatening to damage religion’ (Jäsche 1826: 1, 51). Jäsche was not a theologian nor a fanatical polemicist. He was a professor of philosophy whose training was mainly with Immanuel Kant. In some ways, as we have seen, the opposition to his idealist contemporaries can be seen as an outgrowth of his Kantian sympathies. Yet the overall angle he took in his work, indicates a crucial shift away from Kant’s own concerns. Jäsche offers a philosophical and historical analysis, but his research is prompted by the broader sense that religion itself is under attack. One might say that the dualism we found in Kant – between immanent and transcendent principles of cognition – is now inverted, as the system of immanence is no longer, as in Kant, the one that secures reliable knowledge, but the one that transgresses its boundaries. Interestingly, Jäsche does not make use of the binary of immanent and transcendent to characterise the dualism with which he operates. It would, arguably, be easy to ascribe it to him in practice. After all, what is the opposite of a reduction of everything to a ‘system of immanence’ denying a God who is separate from the world? At the same time, the fact that he does not in this situation avail himself of the duality of transcendent and immanent, surely is in itself telling as it completely confirms the impression from Krug’s nearly exactly contemporaneous Encyclopedia. Transcendent and immanent are established as technical terms within Kantian criticism, but there is as yet no evidence for a willingness to make more sweeping use of the pair in the interest of philosophical generalisations. This, however, was soon to change. 5. The establishment of the transcendent-immanent binary Immanuel Hermann Fichte (1796–1879), son of the more famous Johann Gottlob, started where Jäsche and others had left off. A trained philosopher, he too explored the borderline territory of philosophy and theology; his first monograph was characteristically entitled Sätze zur Vorschule der Theologie (Theses on the Preschool of Theology: Fichte 1826). From the late 1820s he emerged as a major critic of Hegel’s philosophy, but whereas the Young Hegelians sought to move the Hegelian heritage away from Christian theology, Fichte Jr. censured the Berlin philosopher for the incompatibility of his thought with theism. In particular, he charged that Hegel’s philosophy failed to give adequate account of the concept of personality. In spite of his claim to synthesise Spinoza’s metaphysics of substance and Kant’s metaphysics of the subject, Fichte argued, Hegel had in fact been unable to move beyond the former. He ultimately was a Spinozist whose one-sided focus on absolute substance prevented him from making allowance for divine or indeed human personality in the full sense. If Fichte’s critique of Hegel thus had similarities with Jäsche’s analysis of pantheism, it was also characteristically different. Jäsche had advocated a dualism of knowledge and faith based on the quasi-Kantian insight into the boundaries of reason. Fichte, by contrast, affirmed the idealists’ speculative approach and sought to perfect it. Hegel, he argued, had advanced philosophy to the point from where it could be perfected to allow for the reality and personality of God as well as true human individuality. It is for this reason that his thought has often been described as speculative theism. In articulating his position, Fichte initially did not draw on the distinction of immanence and transcendence. This only changed from the mid-1830s, but then in a decisive and highly influential way. From 1833, he published a major, three-volume work, Grundzüge zum Systeme der Philosophie (Foundations for the System of Philosophy), which was not complete until 1846 (Fichte 1833–46). The second volume, which appeared in 1836, contains a longer note under the header ‘the concept of God’s immanence in the world’. It is essentially a critical analysis of Hegel’s philosophy of religion which, according to Fichte, is largely characterised by this very doctrine. It is clear to Fichte that this position amounts to pantheism and is in many ways identical to that of Spinoza. In spite of this damning verdict, Fichte asserts that […] in his system lies the seed from which must ultimately result the concept of transcendence, God’s free and independent existence (Fürsichsein) above the world, which in itself contains, explains and corrects the concept of immanence (Fichte 1833–46: 2, 374). Hegel’s position, Fichte claims, ultimately rests on the proposition that God is not God without the world because he has his reality as Spirit only in the world (Fichte 1833–46: 2, 376). Yet such a view, rightly thought through, must ultimately lead to the concept of a personal God who freely created the world and, in that sense, transcends it. Immanence and transcendence thus belong together, and only a philosophy that gives its due to the doctrine of divine transcendence, can claim to have followed the speculative path to its end. It might appear that Fichte has merely added to Jäsche’s identification of pantheism as the ‘system of immanence’ the alternative of a philosophy recognising the importance of transcendence. Yet that would be oversimplifying things. For Jäsche, immanence was an ontological principle in and of itself; Fichte by contrast speaks of ‘God’s immanence in the world’. While he probably started from the by now conventional identification of pantheism with immanence, his focus on Hegel’s philosophy of religion led him to the more specific and novel claim that pantheism was based on a view of God as ‘immanent’ in his creation. Only on the basis of this understanding of immanent did it then make sense for him to advance the further view that God must also, and primarily, be transcendent. Fichte’s argument provoked a furious response from Hegel’s students. Hermann Friedrich Wilhelm Hinrichs (1794–1861), whom Hegel had made famous by contributing a foreword to his 1822 Philosophy of Religion, focused his extensive review of Fichte’s book practically exclusively on this one aspect of the work (Hinrichs 1835). The charge against the master that he only taught God’s immanence, not also his transcendence, was, Hinrichs urged, wholly without foundation and entirely unfair (Hinrichs 1835: 786. On the contrary, in emphasising this distinction, Hegel’s opponents remained captive to the very dualism which his philosophy had successfully overcome. Rightly understood, Hegel’s philosophy affirmed both God’s immanence and his transcendence, but in a way that moves beyond their categorical juxtaposition (Hinrichs 1835: 787). By phrasing the counter-argument in this way, however, Hinrichs in practice accepted Fichte’s new terminological and conceptual frame, the duality of transcendence and immanence. While they disagreed on their interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy as well as the most appropriate way of conceptualising the immanence as well as the transcendence of God, Fichte and his critic concurred on the suitability of this terminological pair. A consensus on this usage was soon emerging. A good example is the writing Das Wesen der Religion (The Essence of Religion) by the liberal theologian Carl Schwarz (1812–85), published in 1847. Schwarz presents the duality of God’s transcendence and his immanence as an antinomy which it is the task of the philosophy of religion to solve: The absolute must only be thought as transcending the world. The absolute must only be thought as immanent in the world (Schwarz 1847: 1, 182). In Schwarz, finally, the distinction of transcendence and immanence is presupposed as a fundamental principle of the philosophical doctrine of God. God, he argues, can legitimately be understood as transcendent: The world essentially exists in space and time and is thus […] a series of conditionally existing beings. The unconditional (das Unbedingte) must therefore be separated from them. If it were included in the totality of things that mutually condition each other, we could not call it the unconditional (Schwarz 1847: 1, 182). On the other hand, however, there are equally plausible reasons for referring to God as immanent in the world: The absolute is not absolute if it has the world outside of itself. A world, which it is not, would be its boundary; being cordoned off from finitude, the absolute itself becomes finite (Schwarz 1847: 1, 182). According to Schwarz, the solution is to be found in a teleological, personal and dynamic concept of God whose immanence always carries with it a radical distinction from the world. The duality of the two is therefore as far removed from dualism as it is different from a pantheistic identification of God and world. Ultimately, Schwarz’ answer is less interesting than the evidence provided by his use of transcendent and immanent as such, which suggests that this duality had by his time become a conventional shorthand for the mapping out of possible positions in the philosophy of religion: radical dualism with a dichotomy of immanence and transcendence (Kant, Jacobi, Jäscher); pantheistic immanentism (Hegel, Schelling); speculative theism (Fichte, Scheidler, Schwarz). This corresponds to the state of affairs encountered in Scheidler’s encyclopedia article written in 1839 thus confirming that the eventual establishment of the binary use of the two terms was the result of developments from the mid-1830s. *** At this point, we can summarily describe the emergence of the binary use of transcendence and immanence, which happened between 1781 (the year the Critique of Pure Reason appeared) and the mid-1830s, as the product of three overlapping intellectual and religious developments of those decades. The first is Kant’s critical philosophy with its sharp distinction of transcendent and immanent principles of cognition. The second is the debate about pantheism, which was initiated by Jacobi in 1785, but was turned into a controversy about a ‘system of immanence’ by Jäsche’s work in 1826. The third factor is the conflict about the philosophies of German idealism and in particular about Hegel which extended throughout much of the 1830s and 40s. As we have seen, Jäsche’s real targets were Schelling and Hegel, and the philosophical basis of his construction of pantheism was a philosophical cross of Kant and Jacobi. Fichte’s introduction of the transcendent-immanent distinction, again, saw Kant and Hegel as equally problematical representatives of dualism and immanentism respectively. The result, consequently, was not one univocal understanding of this pair. Rather, the emerging duality of immanence and transcendence could serve very different ends depending on the philosophical, theological or ideological standpoint of the author. Speculative thinkers, such as Fichte and Schwarz, could appeal to the complementarity of transcendence and immanence with the aim of perfecting idealism. More apologetic theologians, however, could use the same pair of terms to signify the fundamental as well as necessary boundary between human knowledge and the realm of the divine. In this vein, for example, Carl August von Eschenmayer (1768–1852), a follower of Schelling and Jacobi, employed the distinction of transcendence and immanence to argue for a limitation of the powers of self-consciousness: All error is based on a lack of philosophical distinction between the immanence and the transcendence of self-consciousness. The potency of the I is sufficient […] for all that is true, beautiful and good, insofar as it falls within the immanence of self-consciousness. But this standard is insufficient for that which transcends [self-consciousness], and this is where the holy, heavenly, and divine belong (Eschenmayer 1840: 90). Yet others, however, could invert this logic and claim that modern science had removed the need for an appeal to the transcendent and embrace the very reduction of the world to the immanent that Eschenmayer condemns. Explaining the three stages of Auguste Comte’s philosophy of positivism, his student Émile Littré (1801–1881) wrote in 1859: The long conflict of immanence and transcendence comes to its end. Transcendence, this is theology or metaphysics explaining the world by causes outside of itself; immanence, this is science explaining the world by causes within itself (Littré 1859: 34). From all these discussions, religion was never far away. As we have seen, Kant himself intended his distinction between immanent and transcendent principles of cognition at least partly to delegitimise a certain brand of theological and religious thinkers – the ones he associated with ‘enthusiasm’. For Jacobi and all who came after him, the critique of pantheism was at least as much the rejection of a religious and theological position as it was an objection to particular philosophical views. Finally, the conflict about Hegel’s philosophy was deeply informed by the disagreement between those who saw in him an apologist for Christianity and those who thought the opposite. Once again, the use of transcendent and immanent was directly related to this aspect of the controversy, as has been seen in Hinrich’s angry rebuttal of Fichte’s critique. All these conflicts bespeak the emergence of a new frontier that was to dominate much nineteenth century debate on religion across Europe. Increasingly, theism itself moved to the centre of public controversy. More and more, what was under scrutiny was no longer the detail of doctrine but the plausibility of belief in God as such. Religious debate became a debate about religion, and questions about its essence, its history and the role of Christianity in it consequently became urgent. The career of the duality of transcendent and immanent closely mirrors this evolving conflict line as it was perfectly suited to express and symbolise the options individuals and groups were able to choose. What remains to be demonstrated is how this distinction, once established, was further inflected in the course of the nineteenth century. Two aspects deserve particular attention, the inscription of the transcendent-immanent distinction into historical theology in F.C. Baur’s Tübingen School and its use within a more practical yet historical frame by Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf Harnack. 6. Transcendent and immanent in historical theology: F.C. Baur It is common today to apply the duality of transcendent and immanent as a seemingly time-invariant concept to historical analysis. The roots of this practice too lie in the nineteenth century; in fact, its origin is directly tied to the developments that have so far been described. This is partly because the latter coincided with the evolution of historicism as an intellectual paradigm and the same factors contributed to the emergence of both. This is especially true for the intellectual trajectory leading from Kant and Lessing to the idealists of the early nineteenth century. Increasingly, it was accepted that the fullest possible account of any social or cultural phenomenon was its historical contextualisation. In this sense, the history of philosophy was seen as the ultimate key to philosophy, and the history of religion likewise promised to unveil the deepest insights into the divine and its relationship with humanity (Zachhuber 2013: 7–10). One of the most influential early proponents of historicism within Christian theology was Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860). He is often presented as a theological Hegelian, but this is arguably a simplification (Zachhuber 2013: 51–72). While Baur, whose knowledge and understanding of contemporary philosophy and theology rivalled his expertise as a biblical and historical scholar, made no secret of his admiration for Hegel’s philosophy and gave a prominent place to the presentation of his ideas in his major monographs on the history of doctrine in the 1830s and 40s, his overarching aim was defined at a much earlier stage of his career and prior to his encounter with Hegel’s philosophy. This vision consisted in a fusion of historical and philosophical theology. The truth of Christianity, he believed, could be demonstrated by inscribing its emergence into a historical trajectory that ultimately led to its full realisation in the Christian faith as the absolute religion. To attain this goal, uncompromising historical criticism was as indispensable as the most rigorous philosophical and theological analysis. On the basis of this premise, Baur worked since the 1820s on a reconstruction of Christianity within the history of religions. His underlying conceptual framework is clearly post-Kantian, based on the duality of ‘nature’ and ‘spirit’. This initial, conceptual dualism of nature and spirit led Baur to a historical juxtaposition of nature religions and spirit religions, and the distinction between the two is drawn, not surprisingly perhaps, on the immanence or transcendence of their deities. The duality of immanence and transcendence is thus foundational for Baur’s understanding of the dynamic that moves the history of religions towards its goal. Like his idealist contemporaries, Baur sought to overcome this duality. In order for religion to come to its fulfilment, he thought, there had to be reconciliation between nature and spirit, or immanence and transcendence. This was the historic role of Christianity as the religion of reconciliation with its central feature, the Incarnation. In the person of Jesus Christ, the god-man, the dualism of nature and spirit is both preserved and solved as, according to the Chalcedonian dogma, he is fully divine and fully human, and yet one single person. In this way, Baur thought, Christianity could claim to be the ‘absolute religion’, the ultimate and true manifestation of what all religion was aspiring to, without however being separated and detached from the historical continuity of the history of religions. This project inevitably led Baur to the study of the historical development of Trinitarian and Christological doctrine. For the duality of nature and spirit, immanence and transcendence is not resolved once and for ever with the emergence of Christianity. Rather, it remains at the centre of theological attention throughout the history of this religion, and the development of Christianity’s central dogmas is the supreme expression of this fact. Baur wrote three major monographic works on the history of Christian doctrine, Die christliche Gnosis (The Christian Gnosis) (Baur 1835), Die christliche Lehre von der Versöhnung (The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation) (Baur 1838), and Die christliche Lehre von der Dreieinigkeit und der Menschwerdung Gottes (The Christian Doctrine of the Trinity and the Divine Incarnation) (Baur 1841–3). The last of these was published in three volumes in from 1841. In line with his overall understanding of the role of Christianity in the history of religions, Baur described the overall ‘theme’ of the two doctrines as the relationship between God and world: … the doctrine of God and the relationship of God to the world and to man as defined by the doctrine of the god-man (Baur 1841–3, 1, iii). The historical development he seeks to capture on nearly 2,500 pages is driven by various attempts to conceptualise this precise relationship leading ultimately to Baur’s preferred solution in Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion. He discusses in detail Hegel’s critics who accuse him of perpetuating a system of immanence but, without failing to recognise crucial problems with Hegel’s account, Baur is on the whole still willing to side with his defenders and accept that Hegel, in his view of the Spirit as the bond that overcomes the duality of immanence and transcendence, has provided the most satisfactory solution so far. A good example of how Baur’s own acceptance of the transcendent-immanent distinction coloured his interpretation of earlier thinkers is his discussion of Augustine’s seminal On the Trinity which fills the final sixty pages of the first volume of The Christian Doctrine of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Baur’s summary of Augustine’s teaching is this: Augustine was the first to express the […] deep thought that the absolute relationship of Father and Son could only be based in the thinking mind (Geist) itself; that, as far as [this relationship] can at all be understood, it must be understood as the relationship of the thinking mind to itself (Baur 1841–3, 1, 868). In a way that is difficult to render in English, Baur here draws on the broad meaning of the German Geist which can mean both ‘mind’ and ‘spirit’. What he takes Augustine to say, then, is that the Spirit as the common bond between Father and Son reflects the Bishop of Hippo’s speculative insight in the analogy between the Trinity and the human mind. These analogies, for which On the Trinity is famous, indicate to Baur Augustine’s awareness that the concept of mind contained the ultimate key to our understanding of the divine. As much as Augustine time and again feels the need to remind himself that God’s triune being, as it appeared to him from the doctrine of the Church, altogether transcended the mind’s imagination, he could not, on the other hand, avoid the assumption, deeply rooted in the constitution of the human mind, that, if there is a key to unlock the inscrutable mystery, such a key could only lie in the rational nature of mind (Geist) itself. For him the spirit (Geist) of subjective consciousness, which initially is finite but in its finitude at the same time infinite, is the mirror of the eternal, absolute God who self-determines as the Trinity of Father, Son and Spirit (Baur 1841–3: 1, 869). It is evident how strongly Baur’s own interest in the reconciliation of immanence and transcendence informs his reading of his source. He is convinced that the Trinity has to be understood as the objective and absolute reality of mind if the dualism of nature and spirit is to be overcome. His entire approach to Augustine is determined by this premise which for him determines both Augustine’s achievement and his limits. For Baur was of course fully aware that Augustine had by no means taught the identity of the finite and the infinite spirit. Had he done so, he would hardly have achieved the status of a doctor of the Church. Characteristically, Baur calls this Augustine’s ‘dogmatism’, his concession to orthodoxy and, as such, a limitation of his investigation. By accepting on authority the truth of the Trinitarian dogma, Augustine avoided the deeper question of why God had to be thought as Trinitarian in the first place (Baur 1841–3: 1, 877–81). He therefore restricted his comparisons between the Trinity and the human mind to mere analogies pointing towards an understanding of the divine whose correctness was independently guaranteed by the Church’s magisterial teaching (Baur 1841–3: 1, 882). Stripping Augustine’s insights of his orthodox cocoon however, Baur suggests, reveals an even deeper truth; the parallel structure of divine spirit and human mind Augustine observed ultimately points beyond the dualism of God and world towards an understanding of God as spirit embracing and overcoming the dichotomy of immanence and transcendence. It is arguable that Baur’s criticism does not do justice to Augustine. Interestingly, the most speculative parts of the De trinitate, in which the Bishop of Hippo offered a probing analysis of self-consciousness, do not feature in Baur’s extensive presentation of Augustine’s teaching at all (Kany 2007 : 314). More importantly, his reading of On the Trinity shows how the duality of immanence and transcendence soon after its establishment became a conceptual tool in historical theology and deeply influenced the reading and understanding of past religious and theological thought. In this regard, Baur has been much more influential than in some of his rather questionable judgments. 7. Transcendence and immanence in Albrecht Ritschl and his school Albrecht Ritschl’s (1822–89) thought took shape in the 1840s and 50s under the influence of post-Hegelian debates about philosophy and religion. He became convinced that idealist philosophy led to pantheism and was ultimately incompatible with the theistic world view of Christianity. At this time of his life, Hegel’s critics such as Fichte Jr exerted considerable influence on Ritschl (Zachhuber 2013: 206–9), but in his mature thought he reached further back and Kantian insights gained considerable importance for him (Ritschl 1888: 208–11). Like Kant, Ritschl rejected epistemic claims about transcendent reality. In fact, he reserved some of his most scathing criticisms for theologians emphasising divine transcendence (Ritschl 1888: 257–9). This, Ritschl thought, was incompatible with the revealed character of the Christian God. It might then appear that Ritschl’s theology was openly opposed to the very concept of transcendence. While Baur saw the role of Christianity in overcoming and reconciling the duality of immanence and transcendence, Ritschl, it could seem, rejected any reference to transcendence in the first instance as something that would lead Christians into mystical enthusiasm. Yet such an analysis would miss the main point of Ritschl’s own theological position. The reason he objected to the tradition of negative theology, which he derisively called Areopagitism, is not that he rejects transcendence. Rather, he suspected that such a search for God as the other ultimately fails to recognise him as such. The God of negative theology, Ritschl claimed is still ‘nature’ and as such ultimately not transcendent at all. By contrast, it is only when conceived as purposeful will that God becomes the true representative of transcendence which Ritschl, like Baur, calls spirit (Geist). In other words, it is once again the duality of nature and spirit that underlies the history of religions, but the dividing line between the two is now that between the realm of physical causality and that of teleological agency (Zachhuber 2013: 180–7). And whereas Baur saw the role of Christianity in a reconciliation of nature and spirit, for Ritschl its function was to lead spirit to victory over nature whose determinism robbed humankind of its freedom and dignity. Ritschl used Kant thus in a way characteristically different from those who appropriated him in the interest of carving out an ontological space which knowledge cannot reach but faith can. Instead, we see him draw on Kant’s moral and religious thought, taking seriously the philosopher’s suggestion to seek God in the context of practical reason rather than in metaphysical speculation. Yet Ritschl was not simply presenting Christianity as a religion of moral perfection. One key difference between immanent nature and transcendent spirit for him was that the former operates by means of a deterministic chain of cause and effect whereas the latter is structured by the teleology of final causes. For human beings then the former signifies the bondage of determination, while the latter promises freedom and personal flourishing. In this promise lies the specific dignity and the religious truth of Christianity which, however, has been obscured for much of its history by the fateful alliance between Christian theology and the metaphysical tradition. The rejection of metaphysics as ‘natural theology’ incompatible with the spiritual and ethical character of Christianity became one of the founding principles of Ritschl’s theological school. Among its members arguably the most famous was the church historian Adolf Harnack (1851–1930). Harnack’s extensive scholarly interpretation of the development of doctrine, presented most comprehensively in his History of Dogma, was deeply informed by Ritschl’s specific version of the duality of immanence and transcendence. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Harnack’s most controversial monograph devoted to the second century heretic Marcion. This book was only published in 1923 but is based on material going back to Harnack’s time as a student (Harnack 2003; 2007). For Harnack, Marcion was the only theologian of the early church who understood the gospel as taught especially in Paul’s letters in its radical novelty vis-à-vis the entire foregoing history of religions, pagan as well as Jewish. This utter novelty in Marcion’s message, however, is nothing other than God’s radical otherness and transcendence. Harnack’s subtitle expresses this by describing the theme of Marcion’s work as ‘the gospel of the alien God’; Marcion’s God is ‘alien’ insofar as he is not of this world and has, therefore, remained unrecognised by all prior religious history: [Marcion] proclaimed the Alien God with an entirely new ‘dispositio’. He had experienced this God in Christ and only in him, therefore he elevated the historical realism of the Christian experience to the level of the transcendent and caught sight, beyond the dark and gloomy sphere of the world and its creator, of a new reality, that is, of a new deity (Harnack 2007: 141). This transcendence is not the higher sphere of metaphysical speculation. It is, as Harnack put it, the ‘elevation of the historical realism of the Christian experience’; it is, in other words, the radical affirmation of the Christian God as love: That new reality is love, and nothing but love; absolutely no other feature is intermingled with this. And it is incomprehensible love, for out of pure mercy it accepts an entity wholly foreign to itself and, by driving out fear, brings to it new, eternal life. Now there is something in this world that is not of this world and is superior to it (Harnack 2007: 141)! This new, transcendent world is thus a future reality which, while announced and promised in Jesus Christ, will only be fully realised at the end of the current age. This alignment of the duality of immanence and transcendence with the temporal distinction of present and future, was already present in Ritschl. Yet while the latter postulated a continuous and progressive historical development leading to the coming Kingdom of God, Harnack anticipates the radical eschatology of dialectical theology with a much more dualistic dichotomy of the old and the new: ‘This world, together with its righteousness, its civilization, and its God, will pass away, but the new kingdom of love will abide.’ (Harnack 2007: 142) 8. Conclusion Throughout the nineteenth century, the emergence and establishment of the duality of transcendence and immanence was largely a German story. As we have seen, it took its origin from the epistemological dualism of Kant’s critical philosophy which was subsequently merged with the controversy about pantheism and applied in the tempestuous discussions about the intellectual and religious heritage of German idealism and, specifically, of Hegel’s philosophy. By the year 1840, it was conventional to inscribe current as well as historical positions in theology and the philosophy of religion into this conceptual duality. Realignments and further developments throughout the latter half of the century did little to slow its growth in popularity as a convenient shorthand for philosophical, theological, and religious positions. At the end of the century, this development entered into a new phase as the binary of immanence and transcendence gained even more ground. Perhaps the most momentous of the new contexts into which it entered at that point was Catholic thought. Maurice Blondel made the duality of immanence and transcendence the cornerstone of his theistic philosophy arguing, with clear terminological echoes of earlier debates (McNeill 1966), that Spinoza’s ‘principle of immanence’ necessarily leads to an affirmation of transcendent truths however hostile modern rationalism seems to be to such an acknowledgement (Blondel 1997: 63). Blondel’s usage was subsequently taken up by some of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century, such as Erich Przywara (Przywara 1923) and Karl Rahner (Rahner 1967); the magisterial condemnation of ‘immanentism’ by Popes Pius X and XII furthermore indicates the significance this language gained within the Catholic Church more broadly (Denzinger: 2010, 3477–83; 3878). Today, the binary of transcendence and immanence has become one of the most widely used and most evocative markers of philosophical and religious belief systems. 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