“Immanence” and “transcendence” are terms that refer to two different aspects of the relationship between the divine and the world. Divine immanence is the presence of the divine within the world, and divine transcendence is the presence of the divine beyond the world.
All religions teach that the divine is both immanent and transcendent – that everything in the world is filled with divine presence, but that the divine’s infinite nature could never be confined to just this finite world. As Mircea Eliade, who’s the closest thing to a rock star that a historian of religion can be, puts it, “Whatever the historical context in which he is placed, [religious man] always believes that there is an absolute reality, the sacred, which transcends this world but manifests itself in this world, thereby sanctifying it and making it real.”[1]
Let’s first demonstrate and illustrate this point with examples from numerous religions from all over the world. Then, let’s consider why believing in both divine immanence and transcendence, rather than just one or the other, is of the utmost importance for spirituality.
Hinduism
Hinduism teaches that the many gods and goddesses that Hindus worship are different faces of the same underlying divinity. The Upanishads, a set of poems that are some of the most important sacred texts in Hinduism, call this underlying divinity the “Self” with a capital “S.”
This terminology already indicates both immanence and transcendence. The Self is immanent because it’s the innermost nature and true identity of all that exists. But it’s also transcendent, because it’s vastly greater than any of the mundane, ordinary “selves” (with a lowercase “s”) that exist within it, or even all of them together.
These passages from the Isha Upanishad illustrate this belief particularly well:
Bright is the Self,
Indivisible, untouched by sin, wise,
Immanent and transcendent. He it is
Who holds the cosmos together.[2]
In dark night live those for whom the Lord
Is transcendent only; in night darker still,
For whom he is immanent only.
But those for whom he is transcendent
And immanent cross the sea of death
With the immanent and enter into
Immortality with the transcendent.[3]
The Shvetashvatara Upanishad also makes this point especially directly and beautifully:
He fills the cosmos, yet he transcends it.
Those who know him leave all separateness,
Sorrow, and death behind. Those who know him not
Live but to suffer.[4]
Know him to be the supreme pervader,
In whom the whole universe is smaller
Than the smallest atom.[5]
The Bhagavad Gita, another poem that Hindus find to be exceptionally important out of all of their many sacred texts, concurs with the perspective of the Upanishads. It has the god Krishna say to the human protagonist, Arjuna, “All creatures find their existence in me, but I am not limited by them,”[6] and “I support the entire cosmos with only a fragment of my being.”[7]
Buddhism
The earliest Buddhist literature tends to describe the divine as a state of being that wildly transcends the everyday world and our everyday selves. It’s often said to be the “far shore” on the other side of some unimaginably wide ocean, or otherwise described in ways that heavily emphasize the transcendent aspect of the divine. The following verses from the Dhammapada provide a case in point:
Whoever has gone beyond his quagmire of rebirths,
Passed over this hard road of passion and delusion
And reached the other shore,
Who is meditative, secure, free from doubt,
And completely emancipated –
Him do I call a Noble One….Whoever is free from all bonds,
Having cast off earthly ties,
Having transcended heavenly ties –
Him do I call a Noble One.[8]
Similarly, the Udana characterizes the divine as a place that lacks any and all of the qualities of any and all earthly places:
Where neither water nor yet earth
Nor fire nor air gain a foothold,
There gleam no stars, no sun sheds light,
There shines no moon, yet there no darkness reigns.
When a sage, a brahmin, has come to know this
For himself through his own wisdom,
Then he is freed from form and formless.
Freed from pleasure and from pain.[9]
However, somewhat later (but still ancient) Buddhist literature often emphasizes the other side of the coin: divine immanence. This is particularly true of texts from Mahayana Buddhism, one of the three major Buddhist schools or sects. One of the central concepts of such texts is “Buddha-nature” (Sanskrit Tathagatagarbha, Dharmakaya, or Buddhadhatu), which is more or less identical to what Hinduism calls the “Self.”[10] The following passage from the Mahaparinirvana Mahasutra is one example:
What is called ‘the self’ means the tathagatagarbha.
The nature of the Buddha exists in every sentient being,
but because it is obscured by all manner of afflictions,
sentient beings cannot see, within themselves, its presence.[11]
Mahayana Buddhists often use the words “Mind” (citta) or “Suchness” (tathata) as synonyms for Buddha-nature.[12] Ashvaghosha, one of the most influential writers within the Mahayana tradition, writes in his magnum opus The Awakening of Faith that Mind or Suchness is immanent: “all phenomena (dharma) are identical with Suchness and are neither increasing nor decreasing.”[13] Yet he’s clear that it’s transcendent as well: “This Mind includes in itself all states of being of the phenomenal world and the transcendental world.”[14]
Islam
The monotheistic God of the three major Abrahamic religions – Islam, Judaism, and Christianity – is sometimes said to be transcendent rather than immanent. You can hear this claim advanced not only by the critics of these religions, but even by certain followers of these religions themselves. But the scriptures and other classic spiritual texts of these religions tell a different story, and show that such claims are based on a too-limited understanding of what these religions actually teach. Let’s first consider the Qur’an, the sacred book of Islam.
The Qur’an doesn’t exactly mince words when it comes to the transcendence of God (Allah in Arabic, the language in which the Qur’an was written or revealed). Here’s one particularly majestic passage that makes that point:
Neither slumber nor sleep overtakes Him. All that is in the heavens and in the earth belongs to Him. Who is there that can intercede with Him except by His leave? He knows what is before them and what is behind them, but they do not comprehend any of His knowledge except what He wills. His throne extends over the heavens and the earth; it does not weary Him to preserve them both. He is the Most High, the Tremendous.[15]
Elsewhere, the Qur’an admonishes Muslims to remember that God transcends any and all of the things he’s created. His creations speak of him, but none represent him in his totality or essence:
The night, the day, the sun, the moon, are only a few of His signs. Do not bow down in worship to the sun or the moon, but bow down to God who created them, if it is truly Him that you worship.[16]
But at the same time, the Qur’an often talks about the immanence of God within his creation. After all, how else could his creation consist of “His signs” if it didn’t contain traces of his presence? Who else’s voice but God’s could speak through these “signs,” just as God’s voice speaks through the verses of the Qur’an, which are also called “signs” (Arabic ayat)?[17]
Thus, the Qur’an also says, “The East and the West belong to God: wherever you turn, there is His Face. God is all pervading and all knowing.”[18]
And in an especially intimate depiction of divine immanence, God says with regard to humanity, “We are closer to him than his jugular vein.”[19]
These verses leave little to no doubt that “God” or “Allah” is the Islamic way of talking about the same transcendent and immanent Something that Hinduism calls the “Self” and that Buddhism calls “Buddha-nature,” “Suchness,” or “Mind.”
Judaism
Readers of the Hebrew Bible (or “Old Testament” in Christian terms) are sooner or later struck by just how conspicuously divine transcendence is emphasized in the book’s portrayals of Yahweh, the monotheistic God of Judaism.
For example, in the forty-fourth chapter of the book of Isaiah (among many other places), Jews are forbidden from representing God in images or statues, because to do so would compromise their awareness of how radically he transcends anything and everything in the world he created.[20] In the same spirit, Genesis 18 has the patriarch Abraham confess that compared to God, he (and by extension the rest of the world) is “but dust and ashes.”[21] Likewise, Psalm 89 wonders rhetorically,
For who in the skies can be compared to the Lord?
Who among the heavenly beings is like the Lord,
a God feared in the council of the holy ones,
great and awesome above all that are around him?[22]
And yet, other passages in the Hebrew Bible show that Yahweh is also immanent in everything. Psalm 139, for example, exclaims,
Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol [the underworld], you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night,”
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day,
for darkness is as light to you.[23]
Or, as the sixth chapter of the book of Isaiah states pithily, “the whole earth is full of his glory.”[24]
How can the world simultaneously be “but dust and ashes” yet “full of his glory?” One of the quotes from Hinduism’s Shvetashvatara Upanishad that we considered earlier can help us to bridge this apparent gap, even though it comes from a very different religion:
Know him to be the supreme pervader,
In whom the whole universe is smaller
Than the smallest atom.[25]
Since God is immanent in the world, the world partakes of his glory. But since the entire cosmos is the merest drop in the infinite ocean of God, it can only be “dust and ashes” compared to the transcendent totality of God.
Christianity
Since Christianity grew out of Judaism, it inherited the Jewish conception of God. Inasmuch as Christianity altered that view, it did so in ways that place more emphasis on divine immanence than the Jewish view does, such as by replacing Judaism’s ban on visual representations of God with an enthusiastic celebration of icons. Even more to the point, Christianity’s central symbol of the divine – Jesus Christ – is God incarnated in matter, a reminder of divine immanence if ever there was one.
The early Christians included the Hebrew Bible in their own Bible, but added twenty-seven more texts to it to form the “New Testament,” a set of scriptures unique to Christianity. While the New Testament differs from the Hebrew Bible or “Old Testament” in many ways, it agrees with the Hebrew Bible’s view that God is both transcendent and immanent within all of his creation.
In the Gospel According to Saint John, Christ repeatedly affirms his transcendent nature. While on trial before the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, he declares, “My kingdom is not from this world.”[26] And he tells the Pharisees, a group of Jewish scholars and jurists who oppose his mission on earth, “You are from below, I am from above; you are of this world, I am not of this world.”[27]
Elsewhere in the New Testament, Saint Paul, one of Jesus’s most devout early followers, utters the following prayer in awe of God’s transcendence:
O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!
“For who has known the mind of the Lord?
Or who has been his counselor?”
“Or who has given a gift to him,
to receive a gift in return?”[28]
Yet the very next line in Paul’s letter (to the early church in Rome) is one of the quintessential affirmations of divine immanence in the New Testament: “For from him and through him and to him are all things.”[29] The book of Acts concurs: “In him we live and move and have our being.”[30] And in Saint Luke’s gospel, Christ locates his kingdom not only in another world, but in the depths of this one, too: “The kingdom of God is within you.”[31]
Conclusion: Why Does All This Matter?
While it’s of course not realistically possible to cite examples of divine transcendence and immanence from every religion that’s ever existed, especially in an article like this that has to be kept to a readable length, the relatively few examples that we’ve considered here should hopefully at least indicate the near-universality of the belief that the divine is both immanent and transcendent.
Let’s now consider one final question, perhaps the most important of all: why is it so crucial for a religion to teach that the divine is both transcendent and immanent? What’s wrong with believing in just one or the other?
The crux of the matter is that only a worldview that acknowledges both divine immanence and transcendence is conducive to spiritual enlightenment, the pursuit of which is what religions agree is the meaning of life.
Ultimately, the experience of spiritual enlightenment can’t be adequately put into words. But one of the least inapt characterizations of it would probably be something along the lines of: it’s the experience of the oneness of all things, times, and places in the all-embracing unity and perfection of the divine. That includes an immanent aspect, in that it encompasses everything that’s ever existed and ever will exist. But it also includes a transcendent aspect, in that the unfathomable, ineffable Something that unifies all things is profoundly, shockingly alien to our everyday mode of consciousness and all the things we perceive through that mode of consciousness. Indeed, only that Something is truly real, and the rest of us are only real to the degree that we consciously or unconsciously partake of Its reality through Its manifesting Itself in us.
The view that the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment is the true purpose of life sanctifies life and everything in it, and turns it toward the end that does indeed produce the most meaningful life in practice. Without a worldview oriented toward spiritual enlightenment, we’re left adrift in a never-ending storm of frightful suffering and petty craving.
The belief that the divine is only transcendent or only immanent points away from spiritual enlightenment rather than toward it. Not only that, but either of these insufficient beliefs leads to outright atheism in the long run. That’s because as soon as you carve out a realm where the divine is not, whether within the world or beyond it, that realm has a way of expanding until it consumes even the things that you used to think were full of divine presence. In other words, a limited God is no God at all, and if you insist on limiting God in any way, the “no God at all” part eventually comes to the fore. As scholars of Islam Sachiko Murata and William C. Chittick explain in their magisterial book The Vision of Islam,
If people think only about God’s transcendence, difference, and otherness, they will end up considering the universe as distant from oneness and unity, since oneness and unity are God’s attributes. If they keep on stressing the idea of God’s remoteness, they will be left with a universe that has no relationship with God whatsoever. This can only mean that they will lose even the concept of God, and they will then find it logical to be atheists or agnostics.[32]
Let’s pause here for a moment to note that the history of the modern world provides some striking corroboration for the part of Murata’s and Chittick’s thesis that we’ve seen so far. (But just to be clear, the following characterization is my own, not Murata’s and Chittick’s.) The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century stressed the Christian God’s transcendence to the effective exclusion of his immanence. It all but forbade people from pursuing spiritual enlightenment (in Christian terms, “union with God,” something the Reformers deemed to be a blasphemous, categorical impossibility) and turned their attention instead toward commercial pursuits with what sociologist Max Weber famously called the “Protestant (work) ethic.” Is it any coincidence that after this cataclysmic upheaval in sixteenth-century Christianity, the Christian world brought about the seventeenth century’s “Scientific Revolution,” the eighteenth century’s “Enlightenment,” the nineteenth century’s Industrial Revolution, and so on? All of these developments were in large part the result of taking Protestantism’s denial of divine immanence, and its consequent desanctification and despiritualization of man and nature, to its logical conclusion – which, in one of history’s most ironic acts of fratricide, has ended up largely eclipsing Protestantism, too, in favor of a more thoroughly secular and materialistic worldview and way of life.[33]
(I’d like to add here, as a side note, that Protestantism should be praised for the many things that it does preserve from traditional Christianity. It would be unfair to leave an impression to the contrary. However, the same standard of fairness also necessitates being honest about the considerable amount of responsibility Protestantism bears for the anti-spiritual character of the modern world.)
But just as a denial of divine immanence leads to spiritual impoverishment, so, too, does a denial of divine transcendence. To bring Murata and Chittick back into the discussion, when people neglect divine transcendence,
they will forget that the Real is different from the world and consider the world in itself as real, good, valuable, and worthy of ultimate concern…. The constant insistence that God is near may also lead toward a type of gushy sentimentalism that is familiar nowadays. Proponents of this view tell us that all is one, so we should love everyone and everything equally. In other words, we must ignore our God-given ability to judge the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, paradise and hell…. In short, excessive stress upon [divine immanence] leads people to serve… their own egos in place of God.[34]
This belief that the divine is only immanent and not also transcendent, that “God” is just a name for the sum total of all things (“the universe,” in common New Age parlance), is called “pantheism.”[35] By denying that the divine transcends the world, pantheism, when taken to its own logical conclusion, has the same ultimate effect as denying divine immanence: diverting our focus away from the divine and toward more, well, worldly concerns. A world that can’t be transcended, just like a world in which the transcendent is almost hopelessly remote, is a world in which materialism and egoism make a great deal of sense and all too easily call us over to their side. Pantheism takes the opposite road to reach that same point, but it does reach that same point in the end. The spiritual superficiality of the largely pantheistic New Age movement compared to traditional religions offers a case in point.
And that, in a nutshell, is why the world’s religions are wise to stress both the immanence and the transcendence of the divine. And it’s things like this that remind us of how much we need their wisdom to live a life worth living.
References:
[1] Eliade, Mircea. 1987. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Transl. Willard R. Trask. Harcourt Books. p. 202.
[2] Easwaran, Eknath (transl.). 2007. “Isha Upanishad.” In The Upanishads. Nilgiri Press. p. 58.
[3] Ibid. p. 58-59.
[4] Easwaran, Eknath (transl.). 2007. “Shvetashvatara Upanishad.” In The Upanishads. Nilgiri Press. p. 167.
[5] Ibid. p. 169-171.
[6] Easwaran, Eknath (transl.). The Bhagavad Gita. Nilgiri Press. p. 173.
[7] Ibid. p. 189.
[8] Maitreya, Balangoda Ananda (transl.). 1995. The Dhammapada: The Path of Truth. Parallax Press. p. 109.
[9] Ireland, John (transl.). 2017. The Udana and the Itivuttaka. Buddhist Publication Society. p. 21.
[10] Jones, C.V. 2021. The Buddhist Self: On Tathagatagarbha and Atman. University of Hawai’i Press.
[11] Ibid. p. 1.
[12] Ashvaghosha. 2006. The Awakening of Faith. Transl. Yoshito S. Hakeda. Columbia University Press. p. 36-38.
[13] Ibid. p. 36.
[14] Ibid. p. 35.
[15] Haleem, Abdel (transl.) 2005. The Qur’an. Oxford University Press. p. 29.
[16] Ibid. p. 309.
[17] Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. 2007. The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition. HarperOne. p. 46-47.
[18] Haleem, Abdel (transl.) 2005. The Qur’an. Oxford University Press. p. 14.
[19] Ibid. p. 340.
[20] Coogan, Michael D., et al (eds.). 2018. The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press. p. 1039-1040.
[21] Ibid. p. 36.
[22] Ibid. p. 856.
[23] Ibid. p. 895.
[24] Ibid. p. 988.
[25] Easwaran, Eknath (transl.). 2007. “Shvetashvatara Upanishad.” In The Upanishads. Nilgiri Press. p. 169-171.
[26] Coogan, Michael D., et al (eds.). 2018. The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press. p. 1551.
[27] Ibid. p. 1536.
[28] Ibid. p. 1631.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Ibid. p. 1591.
[31] Ware, Timothy. 1964. The Orthodox Church. Penguin Books. p. 226.
[32] Murata, Sachiko, and William C. Chittick. 1994. The Vision of Islam. Paragon House. p. 252.
[33] The framing and conclusions of this paragraph are largely my own, but have been particularly heavily informed by the following three books:
Eire, Carlos M.N. 2016. Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650. Yale University Press.
Thomas, Keith. 1991. Religion and the Decline of Magic. Penguin Books.
Easlea, Brian. 1980. Witch-Hunting, Magic, and the New Philosophy: An Introduction to Debates of the Scientific Revolution, 1450-1750. Harvester Press.
[34] Murata, Sachiko, and William C. Chittick. 1994. The Vision of Islam. Paragon House. p. 256.
[35] Schuon, Frithjof. 1998. Understanding Islam. World Wisdom. p. 178.