Immanence/Transcendence

Abstract

A longstanding assumption in the study of religion is that those beliefs, practices, and institutions considered to be religious orbit around or somehow involve two opposed or oscillating but always intertwined states of being or, as we should probably designate them, experiences: that which is internal and that which is external. By the latter we do not just mean public, and thus empirically available for study. Rather, they are believed to be experiences and modes of existence that are overarching and all-consuming, those in which the participant can either lose or, ironically perhaps, find themselves—much as with those experiences reported to involve some sort of inward identification. Romain Rolland (1866–1944), the French author and art historian, comes to mind, who once discussed the “oceanic feeling” (in, for example, a December 5, 1927, letter to the psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud [1856–1939]). Rolland, as with so many throughout the history of the field, argued that “true religion arose from the mystical experience of oneness with the world ( la sensation océanique ),” something he thought to be a cross-cultural constant among so-called mystics (quoting the psychologist of religion, William Parsons, in his The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism [1999], 4). The terms that have traditionally been used by scholars to name the two poles of this all-consuming quality or feeling are the nouns “immanence” and “transcendence.” The former begins as an adjective, “immanent,” around the mid-sixteenth century, derived from the post-classical Latin term immanens , for dwelling or staying within. The latter term enters English in the mid-fourteenth century as a verb, “to transcend,” from the Latin verb, transcendĕre , meaning to climb or pass over, and thus to surpass something. Immanence comes to refer to the internal realization and identification of meaning, significance, or being, while transcendence designates states or experiences claimed to exceed all measure, categorization, and thus 115 rational understanding. As the American philosopher, Louis Dupre, once phrased it in the opening line to a 1976 essay in the Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America (31), titled “Transcendence and Immanence as Theological Categories”: Transcendence is the religious category par excellence. It refers to that particular quality by which the source and terminus of the religious relation surpasses absolutely the mind’s and all other reality …. It provides the dynamic tension without which the religious act would grow slack and eventually collapse in its own immanence. (1)