IMMANENZA. — Said of that which, in its operation, does not go outside itself or beyond itself, but remains within itself.
SUMMARY: I. Ontological
i. in classical philosophy
II. Theologicali. in Christian thought
III. Epistemological-pragmatici. in modern philosophy
IV. The method of i. and Catholic doctrine.I. ONTOLOGICAL IMMANENCE IN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY. — In its absolute metaphysical meaning, immanence is the very property of divinity insofar as God is the esse subsistens by essence and therefore the fullness of his life, perfect act and first principle, as Aristotle already glimpsed (Met., XII, 6, 1072 a 4: ὅτι δ'ἐνέργεια πρότερον). Aristotle conceived the first Principle as pure thought (ἀρχὴ γὰρ ἡ νόησις: loc. cit., 7, 1072 a 30), an unmoved mover and “separate” from the world, who lives the fullness of his wondrous life, an activity of pure intelligence that possesses its supreme perfection in knowing and, in knowing, expresses the eternal life of God: φαμὴν δὴ τὸν θεὸν εἶναι ζῷον ἄλθον ἄριστον, ὥστε ζωὴ καὶ αἰὼν συνεχὴς καὶ ἄλθος ὑπάρχει τῷ θεῷ τοῦτο γὰρ ὁ θεός (loc. cit., 1072 b 28-30).
In this absolute segregation of the divine νοῦς, the Greek and Arab Aristotelian tradition and, in the Middle Ages, Averroism saw an implicit denial of every knowledge and providence on God’s part concerning individual sensible things, abandoned to the influence of secondary causes. Yet Aristotle retains the merit of having claimed for divinity the perfect immanence of spirit. The pre-Socratics, on the other hand, conceived a physical immanence of divinity in the world: for Thales the whole world was “animated and full of divinities” (ἐμφύχων καὶ δαιμόνων πλήρς; H. Diels-W. Kranz, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, I, 5th ed., Berlin 1934, p. 68, 28; A, 1); Parmenides, looking at the heavens, called them God, according to Aristotle’s testimony (Met., I, 5, 986 b, 29; H. Diels-W. Kranz, op. cit., I, p. 121, 18); Heraclitus is famous for the saying, again reported by Aristotle (De part. anim., I, 5, 645 a, 17), with which he welcomed guests fearful of entering the room where he was warming himself by the fire, “shouting that they should take courage and enter,” because there too there were gods (εἶναι γὰρ ἐνταῦθα θεούς; H. Diels-W. Kranz, op. cit., I, p. 146, 5; A, 9).
Similar ideas circulate among all the pre-Socratics and return among the Stoics; God is the logos-fire-spirit, united ob aeterno with matter; he is the craftsman who forms and distributes the seminal reasons according to the various natures in which he remains immanent and everywhere diffused: “Deus per materiam tamquam mel per favos transit,” according to Zeno; and for Seneca God is “divinus spiritus per omnia maxima ac minima aequali intentione diffusus” (Adv. Helv., 8, 3). “This was a major source of offense for Christians,” M. Pohlenz rightly observes, collecting these texts in: Die Stoa, Geschichte einer geistigen Bewegung (II, Göttling 1948, p. 54; cf. I, p. 95). The Stoic conception reached its summit in Posidonius, according to whom everything in the physical world and in the stars of heaven is penetrated by divinity down to its minutest particulars, as is also the soul of mortals: everything that lives participates in the life of this immeasurable organism, whose soul is God, and therefore everything lives and exists in him (cf. M. Pohlenz, op. cit., I, p. 233; II, p. 118 ff. On p. 119 are cited texts attributing knowledge of God even to animals, and of primitive men it is said that they “should not be sought far away or outside the divinity, but were born in its midst, or rather naturally united to it”: ὅτε γὰρ οὐ μακρὰν οὐδ' ἔξω τοῦ θεῶν διψιδόμενοι κατὰ τοὺς ἀλλ' ἐν αὐτῷ μέσῳ περικότες, μᾶλλον δὲ συμπεφκότες ἐκείνῳ. The text immediately suggests comparison with the quotation from the poet Aratus made by St Paul in his speech to the assembly of the Areopagus (Act. 17, 22 ff.), composed of Epicureans and Stoics: here too God “is not far from each one of us” (οὐ μακρὰν ἀπὸ ἑνὸς ἐκάστου ἡμῶν ὑπάρχοντα). For in him we live, move and exist, as some of our poets also said: “For we are indeed his offspring” (τοῦ γὰρ καὶ γένος ἐσμέν). Neoplatonic intellectualism diluted the robust Stoic metaphysics with the theory of intermediaries, which were to subdivide this immanence of the divine in the cosmos according to the diversity of formalities and their degree of actualization; but it remains essential to the Greek conception of divinity that it exists for the world, insofar as it is the act, the moving and final principle of the world, which in its movements and phenomena unfolds the reality of God: “Qua Dorylaeus scripsit esse mundum organum dei” (Censorinus, De die natali, ed. O. Jahn, Berlin 1845, chap. 13, p. 32, 20).
II. THEOLOGICAL IMMANENCE IN CHRISTIAN THOUGHT
Christianity took up this aspiration of classical civilization toward an affinity of nature with God, as well as the affirmation of God’s immanence in the world, but in a certain sense reversed the metaphysical situation in order to safeguard both God’s own dignity and the consistency (within its own order) of the world and of man. God is the fundamental principle of all essences and the first cause of all the movements and operations of creatures: through creation they have gone forth from God, and through their own operations they return to him. It is not, therefore, that creatures constitute (by virtue of eternal matter...) the absolutely “other” than God, nor that God must of necessity express his activity in the world: hence—if such a formula may be permitted—the question is no longer so much God’s immanence in the world as rather the world’s immanence in God, because it is God who, as the first creative, conserving, and moving principle, precedes, embraces, and contains the world and every created thing. This reversal of ontological immanence on the part of Christianity was possible because God enjoys his perfect life in himself and for himself (the Trinity), prior to and without the creature (free creation in time), so that the distinction between the two lives, the divine and the human, between infinite and finite perfection, is not quantitative, a matter of degree (the one universal—in time and space—the other particular, within a limited sector), but entails an absolute difference in quality (time–eternity, being by participation—being by essence).S. Tommaso devotes an entire question to the «praesentia Dei in rebus» (Sum. Theol., 1°, q. 8): the term “presence,” instead of that of immanence, expresses the development of the Christian conception, which is founded upon the absolute transcendence and freedom of God. God’s omnipresence is a consequence of his universal causality; God is the cause of being as such, and just as an agent must be present to the effect in order to act («Quamdiu igitur res habet esse, tamdiu oportet quod Deus adit ei secundum modum quo esse habet»: ibid., a. 1), so there is an integral presence according to the bold formula of the holy Doctor: «Sicut anima est tota in qualibet parte corporis, ita Deus totus est in omnibus et singulis entibus» (ibid., a. 2, ad 3). There are three modes according to which God’s ontological immanence in creatures may be affirmed within the natural order... per potentiam in quantum eius potestati subduntur, per praesentiam in quantum omnia sunt nuda et aperta oculis eius, per essentiam in quantum adest omnibus ut prima causa essendi» (ibid., a. 3). It is well known how this doctrine nourished the mystical life of s. Teresa, who learned it from «un dottissimo religioso dell'Ordine di S. Domenico» (cf. Vita, cap. 18, 15; in Opere, trad. it., I, Milano 1931, p. 186. Also Castello interiore, 5° mansione, cap. 1, 10; II, p. 384). Through this natural immanence God is present as the first creative, conserving, and moving Principle of the created world (Sum. Theol. 1°, qq. 44, 104, 105); in rational creatures there may be an intentional presence of God, insofar as they can know and love him in the mirror of creation, but this always remains within the sphere of natural immanence; a new immanence, deriving from no natural principle, occurs when the creature is admitted to participate in the intimate life of God through Grace: «Et ideo sola Gratia facit singularem modum essendi Dei in rebus» (Sum. Theol., 1°, q. 8, a. 3 ad 4; cf. In Ep. ad Coloss., cap. 2, lect. 2). In the mystical life God’s presence is “experienced” by the soul through particular enlightenments of the mind and movements in the affective sphere: the perfect immanence of the soul in God belongs to the future life of the blessed in glory.
III. GNOSIOLOGICAL-PRAGMATIC IMMANENCE IN MODERN PHILOSOPHY
Immanence, in its dynamic aspect, is the property of living beings; every nature possesses within itself the principles of its own operations (cf. the definition of φύσις: Aristotle, Phys., II, 1, 192 b 20–21). Butwhereas in the inorganic world both the term and the effect of action remain extrinsic to the agent, in the realm of life both the principle and the effect remain intrinsic, so that the agent, by acting, perfects itself: «Opera vitae dicuntur, quorum principia sunt in operante» (Sum. Theol., 1°, q. 17, a. 2, ad 2). Physical action is therefore of another kind, «quae manet in agente, ut intelligere, sentire et velle. Quorum haec est differentia: quia prima actio non est perfectio agentis quod movet sed ipsius moti; secunda autem actio est perfectio agentis» (ibid., a. 3, ad 1): the highest degree of immanence is represented by the life of the intellect and of the higher faculties. This is physical immanence.
Modern thought elaborated a new concept of immanence, claiming to synthesize and surpass the classical and Christian conceptions: the obstacle that caused the irreparable break with tradition was the epistemological difficulty of explaining the action of the external world upon consciousness and the inability of the senses to guarantee a criterion of truth, together with the metaphysical difficulty of attributing to finite reality a consistency of its own, distinct from divinity. The principle of modern immanence asserts that being exists only as an object of consciousness. The first explicit formula of modern immanence is Descartes’ cogito, ergo sum. It asserts, in fact: a) the priority of thought over being; b) the autonomy of thought with respect to being; c) the immanence of being in thought or consciousness. In the development of modern thought, three conceptions of immanence may be distinguished: phenomenalist, normative, and metaphysical or constitutive. In the modern concept of immanence, it is presented in the form of “self-consciousness”: “In this new period,” Hegel writes, “the universal principle that governs everything in the world is thought moving itself” (Geschichte der Philosophie, Italian trans., II, 11, Florence 1944, p. 66); and Hegel regards this principle as the essence of Christianity, which asserted itself in its genuine meaning as the principle of absolute interiority (sola fide) in Protestantism and reached its full development in his objective idealism.
a) Subjectivist immanence first developed within English empiricism: knowing depends entirely upon “experience,” which is essentially a “modification” of subjectivity by unknown causes, subsequently reflected and elaborated in various ways. The principle of empiricist immanence appropriates, with Locke, the reality of sensible qualities; with Berkeley, it penetrates into the metaphysical reality of substance; and with Hume, it encompasses the last stronghold, the relation of causality. This is reduced to an “impression of reflection,” understood as a conviction or habit (belief, custom) that consciousness derives from itself and experiences within itself (cf. D. Hume, Treatise of human nature, appendix: ed. Selby-Bigge, Oxford 1928, p. 627). The immanence affirmed by Hume is, from a strictly theoretical point of view, no less radical than that of absolute idealism and in itself admits no possibility of development, since it affirms not only the subjectivity of knowing as such, but also introduces the “persuasion” of causality as an active principle, which becomes constitutive of the reality of objects as such. The formula of phenomenalist immanence is Berkeley’s: «esse est percipi»; for Hume it should be expressed: «percipere est sentire proprium sensum» (belief, feeling). Under the converging influence of positivism and Kantianism, a numerous philosophical school developed at the end of the nineteenth century, known as Immanenzphilosophie, of genuinely phenomenalist inspiration; it falls back upon probabilism and methodical scepticism according to Schuppe’s formula: “Human knowledge can possess only the character of probability—or of a relative truth... The acknowledged impossibility of the human race attaining possession of absolute truth cannot, however, deprive this concept of its value and indispensability” (W. Schuppe, Grundriss der Erkenntnistheorie und Logik, Berlin 1894, § 156, p. 173 ff.).
b) Normative immanence is characteristic of Kantian idealism. The original spontaneity that Hume had attributed to causality was generalized by Kant to all the categories of thought, which consequently have meaning and validity only within thought. Kant nevertheless presented the principal objects of metaphysics—the world, the soul, the existence of God, freedom, immortality, and happiness—as “ideas” of the transcendental kind, with which reason properly concerns itself; in this sphere reason attains certainty as “practical reason,” that is, insofar as it must “postulate” the foundations of moral life. The metaphysical world, which had seemed closed to pure theoretical reason, thus opens itself to practical reason, and Kant called this “constitutive moment” of metaphysical consciousness “rational faith” (Verwulgläbe), as the highest and positive form of immanence (Kritik der praktischen Verwulf, I, 2, 2, v, ed. Cassirer, V, p. 137). Kantian Glaube was developed in various directions by the post-Kantians and neo-Kantians; it was regarded as “the organ of reality,” or as the positive and constructive moment of consciousness, and it was the principle that, more or less directly, also inspired certain Catholic currents that aroused increasing concern during the last half-century (modernism, fideism, the philosophy of action), as will be explained.
c) But the most complete form of immanence is the idealist conception, insofar as it has done away with the “thing in itself” and identified reality with thought: “It,” Hegel declares, “must be regarded as the highest thing, not when it turns toward other things, but only when, occupied solely with itself, with the noblest of all objects, it seeks and finds itself” (Geschichte der Philosophie, Italian trans., I, Florence 1930, p. 13). The new standpoint of idealist immanence, Hegel further writes, consists in conceiving and expressing the true not as “substance” but as “subject”—not, however, as a subject that relates to something else, but as a subject that, resting in itself, moves itself, expresses itself, unfolds itself, and actualizes itself (cf. Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Jo. Hoffmeister, Leipzig 1937, pp. 19 ff.). In the metaphysical immanence of Hegelian idealism, the principle of self-consciousness is fulfilled, and reality is the unity of subjectivity and objectivity in the “becoming” of the absolute Spirit. Thus immanence returns to the metaphysical plane, but no longer in the cosmological-naturalistic sense of classical pantheism and naturalism (including Bruno and Spinoza), but in the anthropological sense of the unfolding of human civilization. Revealed religion itself, Jewish and Christian, represents merely a “moment” of this development, whose meaning can be deciphered only by philosophy. Contemporary thought has undertaken a radical revision of the principle of immanence by vindicating the reality of the concrete: existentialism asserts the consistency of individual consciousnesses and freedom; Marxism, the direct and constitutive—not merely apparent—relationship that human beings have with nature. The outcome of this controversy, however, remains dependent upon the presuppositions of these two orientations. In any case, the systematic exaggerations of the advocates of the principle of immanence must not lead us to reject the demand for interiority that it sought to affirm; rather, they should call us to an adequate understanding of that structure of consciousness which presents itself not merely as the simple “receptivity” of the world and of nature, but above all as the capacity and principle of its own development in its twofold relationship to the world and to transcendence.
IV. THE METHOD OF
I. AND CATHOLIC DOCTRINE
To this task, prompted by modern thought, the proponents of the method of i. in contemporary Catholic apologetics and theology turned their investigations. It aims to discover and develop the truths of religion and the very mysteries of revealed faith, starting from consciousness, from its needs, aspirations, and presentiments, which emerge in individual experience. This method becomes explicitly heterodox when it subordinates the meaning of religious and revealed truths to the interpretation and formulation of individual subjects, implicitly affirming the relativity of dogmas, the merely therapeutic and approximate value of dogmatic formulas, the symbolic meaning of miracles, and even the equivalenceof the various religions. Just as in the thirteenth century the entry of Aristotle into the West gave rise to forms of naturalistic and pantheistic i. (Alexandrianism and Averroism), so the new principle of i. in modern thought shook not a few who were dissatisfied with the thought and formulas of the Church’s doctrinal tradition.
The most serious episode of this tendency goes by the name of modernism (v.), which was called not a heresy but the “collection of all heresies” and was condemned in 1907 by Pius X with the encyclical Pascendi (v.), which offers a broad and careful analysis of both the philosophical and theological aspect of the principle of i. (Acta Sanctae Sedis, 40 [1907], pp. 593 ff.; Denz-U, 2071-2109) in the extreme sense proposed by the modernists.
The method of i. remains directly in the wake of the Glaube of Kant, Fries, Jacobi, and Schleiermacher and claims to be connected with Augustinian interiority, Pascal’s Christianity of paradox, and thus to form a bridge between Catholic doctrine and modern religious spiritualism, both in the Protestant sphere (A. Sabatier, W. James, Balfour) and in the Catholic sphere (Maine de Biran, Gratry, L. Ollé-Laprunne, Brunetière). The Protestant proponents of i. fell into absolute subjectivity, which led to modernism: the existence of revealed truths and their meaning are solely functions of each person’s individual experience: “Un seul critère (de la Révélation authentique de Dieu) est infaillible et suffisant: toute révélation divine, toute expérience religieuse vraiment bonne pour nourrir et sustenter votre âme, doit pouvoir se répéter et se continuer comme révélation actuelle et expérience individuelle dans votre propre conscience... La révélation divine qui ne se réalise pas en nous et n'y devient pas immédiate n'existe point pour nous” (A. Sabatier, Esquisse d'une philosophie de la religion, 3rd ed., Paris n.d., pp. 58 f.). Thus Sabatier immediately acknowledges, the distinction disappears between natural and supernatural revelation, between immediate and mediated revelation, and between the revelations of the various religions. As regards the miracle, Spinoza’s criticism (Tract. theol. politicus, part 6, De miraculis) is accepted as definitive: the miracle can no longer be an object of objective ascertainment but only of the heart: “Percevoir Dieu et l'action de Dieu dans l'âme humaine et dans le cours des choses, c'est l'affaire du coeur pieux” (op. cit., p. 86). Similarly, religious inspiration is no different from poetic inspiration, and prophetic inspiration differs from that accessible to everyone only in degree of intensity, insofar as it is an inspiration “to the second power” (ibid., p. 100). The essence of Christianity lies in the feeling of a “filial relationship” that man feels toward God and of God’s fatherhood toward him: this is the attitude that every Christian, following the example of Jesus Christ, must have toward God, supplemented by a feeling of fraternity toward men (op. cit., pp. 184 f.). As for dogmas, one must distinguish between the “form” and the “substance,” between the assimilable religious experience that it represents and the contingent and imperfect experience that the ancient doctors may have given it: the religious soul assimilates its vital essence, abandoning the arid shell—that is, the elements of a science that has fallen into disuse and been superseded (p. 283). This is the only concept of religion to which the Protestant principle of the subjectivity of faith leads; and in this conclusion of Sabatier’s extreme sincerity, the Catholic theologian too agrees, because the Protestant principle must ultimately undermine the foundations of Christianity as a revealed and transcendent religion. Along Sabatier’s lines, N. Söderblom and Tyrrell expounded their theory of religion, as did W. James in the philosophical sphere with his essay The variety of religious experience (London 1907). In France, the movement’s organ was the Annales de philosophie chrétienne, which ceased publication with the condemnation of modernism: it was in this journal that M. Blondel, a disciple of Ollé-Laprunne, attempted his original interpretation of the principle of i. under the formula Philosophie de l'action. In its first formulation it contained a severe condemnation of the traditional method, stigmatized as abstract rationalism (cf. L'action, Essai d'une critique de la vie et d'une science de la pratique, Paris 1893, pp. XXI ff.; 97 ff., 476 and passim), which was considerably mitigated in the subsequent reworking (L'action, 2 vols., Paris 1936-37): in his final years Blondel received the most authoritative assurance of the orthodoxy of his doctrine’s content in a letter from the Secretariat of State (2 Dec. 1944; cf. Documentation catholique, 42 [1945], cols. 418-19), which nevertheless made an exception for certain expressions of B. that theological rigor would have required to be more precise.
Blondel’s metaphysical thesis is that it is action, and not the rationality of proofs and motives, that provides the demonstration of God’s transcendence (cf. L'action, p. 350 f.); he nevertheless intended to distance himself not only from intellectualism but also from pragmatism, and thought to bring the principle of i. close to St. Thomas himself when he says: “Nihil potest ordinari ad finem aliquem, nisi praesxistat in ipso quaedam proportio ad finem” (De Veritate, q. 14, a. 2; Lettre sur l'apologétique, Paris 1896, p. 28). Blondel distinguishes between a sense of i. as efference, idealistic and vitalistic, which nullifies transcendence, and as afference, which instead grounds transcendence insofar as it signifies the twofold openness to the “intimate gratuitous promptings and the teachings authorized by the supreme effort of our reason and our sincerity” (in Lalande, Vocab. de la philosophie, 4th ed., I, Paris 1938, p. 345 n.). The positive significance, therefore, of Blondelian i. was to show that reason alone leads only to the vestibule of religious life and faith, and that entry is entrusted to the commitment of the subject’s freedom. This finds a parallel in Thomistic theology of the act of faith, which distinguishes between the “judgment of credibility” (est credendum), within the competence of reason, and the “judgment of credibility” (credo), which proceeds from freedom moved by Grace. Outside Catholic doctrine remain the developments that L. Labertonnière and E. Le Roy gave to the principle of i.; both were condemned by the Holy Office.
Può essere ricondotta all'indirizzo del «metodo della i.» la cosiddetta «teologia della predicazione» (Verhündigungstheologie), patrocinata specialmente dai collaboratori della Zeitschrift für hath. Theologie in Austria, secondo i quali il senso intimo delle verità del cristianesimo non va cercato tanto nelle formole e esposizioni concettuali della teologia scolastica, quanto nei pittoreschi simboli e nella predicazione viva degli scrittori e Padri dei primi secoli; un indirizzo affine può essere detto quello che fa capo alla Facoltà di teologia S. J. di Lyon-Fourvière (H. De Lubac, J. Daniélou, H. Bouillard). L'encicl. Humani generis (AAS, 42 [1950], pp. 563-70) ha segnalato i pericoli che simili indirizzi possono contenere e ha dato le norme per evitarli. La posizione dell'opera del card. Newman non ha alcuna filiazione diretta coll'immanentismo della filosofia moderna, ma è nata piuttosto dallo studio dei Padri e dello sviluppo della dottrina cattolica e si richiama piuttosto ad un personalismo di tipo esistenziale come quello di Kierkegaard (cf.: M. Nédoncelle, Oeuvres philos. de Newman, Introduction, Parigi 1945, p. 149).
Se può essere lodevole l'intento del metodo della i. di accostare direttamente i problemi della fede alla coscienza umana nella sua concretezza affettiva e dinamica, i suoi fautori non hanno però sempre visto il pericolo del sottovalutare i criteri oggettivi e razionali della credibilità che nella dottrina cattolica devono avere il primo luogo, perché sono il fondamento che può dare significato e garanzia di verità allo stesso procedimento soggettivo della i. In questa materia decisiva per l'orientamento della coscienza umana verso la fede rivelata, il Concilio Vaticano ha dichiarato: «Si quis dixerit Revelationem divinam externis signis credibilem fieri non posse, ideoque sola interna cuiusque experientia aut inspiratione privata homines ad fidem moveri debere: anathema sit» (Denz-U, n. 1812). La lacuna principale del metodo della i. è di lasciare nell'ombra il criterio dell'autorità
della Chiesa, che invece è l'unico nel quale il fedele possa fare immediatamente e con sicurezza la risoluzione del suo atto di fede.
2. Autori scattolici: E. Vacherot, La religion, Parigi 1869 (specialmente cap. 3, pp. 109 sgg.; Méthode psychologique); O. Pfeiderer, Geschichte der Religionsphilosophie von Spinoza bis auf die Gegenwart, Berlino 1893; H. Siebert, Religionsphilosophie, Berlino e Lipsia 1922, p. 104 sgg. e passim; H. Melfing, Philosophie de la religion, Parigi 1908 (specialmente cap. 3, p. 88 sgg.; Le problème psychologique de la philosophie de la religion); J.-J. Gourd, Philosophie de la religion, ivi 1911 (l'i. religiosa come atto di amore che la distacca dalla conoscenza oggettiva delle scienze e resta perciò «incoordinabile» con essa); W. Koep, Einführung in das Studium der Religionspsychologie, Tubings 1920, pp. 13 sgg., 30, 93 sgg.; R. Eucken, Der Kampf um einen geistigen Lebensinhalt, 4ª ed., Berlino 1921, p. 89 sgg.; A. Görland, Religionsphilosophie, Berlino e Lipsia 1922, p. 104 sgg. e passim; P. Hoffmann, Das religiöse Erlebnis (Philosophische Vorträge, 28), Charlottenburg 1925; N. Söderblom, Dieu vivant dans l'histoire, Parigi 1937; E. Frank, Philosophical understanding and religious truth, Oxford 1945, p. 32 sgg. e passim; J. Baillie, Our knowledge of God, Oxford e Londra 1946, p. 228 sgg., § 19; E. C. Brightman, Philosophy of religion, Nuova York 1946, pp. 168 sgg., 412 sgg. e passim.
3. Autori cattolici: F. Klimke, Der Maximum, Friburgo in Br. 1911 (vedi IV, cap. 2, pp. 410-82; esposizione dello sviluppo del principio d'i. ancor oggi utile); I. P. Steffes, Religionsphilosophie (Philos. Handbibl., 9), Kempten 1925, p. 32 sgg.; H. Straubinger, Einführung in die Religionsphilosophie, Friburgo in Br. 1929; E. Przywara, Religionsphilosophie katholischer Theologie, Monaco e Berlino 1929; B. Rosenmöller, Religionsphilosophie, 2ª ed., Münster in V. 1930, pp. 37 sgg., 92 sgg., 134 sgg.; Jo. Hessen, Religionsphilosophie, I, Essen 1948 (specialmente pp. 39 sgg., 192 sgg., 287 sgg.; II, specialmente p. 91 sgg.); H. Fries, Die katholische Religionsphilosophie der Gegenwart, Heidelberg 1949, p. 37 sgg. e passim. Questi due autori dipendono, in diversa proporzione, dall'opera di Max Scheler di cui va ricordato, a proposito della i. religiosa, il saggio: Probleme der Religion, in Vom Emigen im Menschen, Lipsia 1923 (I, II, p. 1 sgg.; V. anche l'importante prefazione alla parte 1ª, p. V. sgg.). Sulla posizione del Blondel: J. de Tonquédecq, Immanenz, 4ª ed., Parigi 1933 (critica risolutamente negativa, ma sempre utile per la difesa dei principi). Più concilianti: V. de Montcheuil, Pages religieuses de Maurière Blondel, Parigi 1942 (l'autore sostiene che il Blondel è rimasto sempre fedele alla posizione della Action del 1893); R. Aubert, Le problème de l'acte de foi, Lovanio 1945 (cap. 2, Autour de la méthode d'i., pp. 265-292, con bibl. completa per la letteratura di lingua francese). Sull'aspetto psicologico della i. dell'atto religioso, v.: G. Wunderle, Der religiöser Abt als seelisches Problem, Würzburg 1948. Dal punto di vista della mistica va ricordata l'opera discussa di Fr. von Hügel (cf. per un'esposizione d'insieme, la raccolta ontologica: Religion als Ganzheit, a cura di M. Schlüter Herinkes, Düsseldorf 1948); D. Feuling, Das Leben der Seele, Salisburgo 1940 (cf. p. 479 sgg.); A. Mager, Mynth als seelische Wirklichkeit, ivi 1945. Cornelio Fabro