IMMANENZA

IMMANENCE. — This term refers to that which, in its operation, does not go out of itself or beyond itself, but remains within itself.

OUTLINE:

I. Ontological immanence in classical philosophy

II. Theological immanence in Christian thought

III. Epistemological-pragmatic immanence in modern philosophy

IV. The method of immanence and Catholic doctrine.

In this absolute segregation of the divine void, the Greek and Arabic Aristotelian tradition, and in the Middle Ages Averroism, saw an implicit denial of any knowledge or providence on God’s part regarding individual sensible things, which were abandoned to the influence of secondary causes. Yet Aristotle retains the merit of having vindicated for the deity the perfect immanence of spirit. The pre-Socratics, on the other hand, conceived of a physical immanence of the divinity in the world: for Thales, the entire world was “animated and full of divinity” (ἐμφύριον καὶ δαιμόνων πλήρης). H. Diels–W. Kranz, *Fragmente der Vorsokratiker*, I, 5th ed., Berlin 1934, p. 68, 38; A. 1); Parmenides, gazing at the heavens, called it God, according to Aristotle’s testimony (Met., I, 5, 986 b, 20); H. Diels–W. Kranz, op. cit., I, p. 121, 18); the saying of Heraclitus, likewise reported by Aristotle (De part. anim., I, 5, 645 a, 17), in which he urged timorous guests to enter the room where a fire was burning, crying out that they should take courage, “for there too are gods” (ἐνίκησις), according to H. Diels–W. Kranz, op. cit., I, p. 146, 5; A. 9).

II. THEOLOGICAL IMMANENCE IN CHRISTIAN THOUGHT

Christianity took up this classical aspiration toward affinity of nature with God and the affirmation of God’s immanence in the world, but in a certain sense it reversed the metaphysical situation in order to safeguard both the dignity of God Himself and the consistency (in its own order) of the world and of man. God is the fundamental principle of all exigencies and the first cause of all movements and operations of creatures: through creation they have come forth from God, and through their own operations they return to Him. Thus creatures do not constitute (on account of eternal matter...) the absolutely “other” with respect to God, nor does God, in His necessity, have to unfold His activity in the world. Hence—if a formula may be permitted—it is no longer so much a question of God’s immanence in the world as rather of the world’s immanence in God, because it is God, as the first creating, conserving, and moving principle, who precedes, embraces, and contains the world and every created thing. This reversal of ontological immanence by Christianity was possible insofar as God enjoys His perfect life in Himself and by Himself (Trinity), prior to and apart from 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, of degree (one universal—in time and space—the other particular in a limited sector), but entails an absolute difference of quality (time-eternity, being by participation—being by essence).

St. Thomas devotes an entire question to “the presence of God in things” (*Summa Theologiae*, 1a, q. 8): the term “presence” rather than “immanence” expresses the advance of the Christian conception, which is founded upon God’s absolute transformation and freedom. 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 its effect in order to act (“Quamdiu igitur res habet esse, tamdiu oportet quod Deus adsit ei secundum modum quo esse habet”: ibid., a. 1), so He is present in an integral way according to the bold formula of the holy Doctor: “As the soul is whole in every part of the body, so God is whole in all and each of beings” (ibid., a. 2, ad 3). There are three ways in which the ontological immanence of God in creatures may be affirmed within the natural order: “... by power, insofar as all things are subject to His power; by presence, insofar as all things are naked and open to His eyes; by essence, insofar as He is present to all as the first cause of their being” (ibid., a. 3). It is well known how this doctrine nourished the mystical life of St. Teresa, who learned it from a very learned religious of the Order of St. Dominic (cf. *Vita*, ch. 18, 15; in *Opere*, Italian trans., I, Milan 1931, p. 186; also *Castello interiore*, 5th dwelling, ch. 1, 10; II, p. 384). By this natural immanence, God is present as the first creating, conserving, and moving principle of creation (*Summa Theologiae* 1a, 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 scope of natural immanence. A new and non-derivable immanence arises when the creature is admitted to share in the intimate life of God through grace: “And so only grace produces the singular mode of God’s being in things” (*Summa Theologiae*, 1a, q. 8, a. 3 ad 4; cf. *In Epistolam ad Colossenses*, ch. 2, lect. 2). In the mystical life, the presence of God is “experienced” by the soul through special illuminations of the mind and movements in the affective sphere; the perfect immanence of the soul belongs to its future life as a blessed one in glory.

III. EPISTEMOLOGICAL-PRAGMATIC IMMANENCE IN MODERN PHILOSOPHY

Immanence, in its dynamic aspect, is the property of living beings; every nature contains within itself the principles of its own operations (cf. the definition of φύσις: Aristotle, *Physics*, II, 1, 192 b 20–21). Yet

while in the inorganic world the term and effect of action remain extrinsic to the agent, in the realm of life both principle and effect remain intrinsic, so that the agent, in acting, perfects itself: “The operations of life are said to be those whose principles are in the agent” (*Summa Theologiae*, 1a, q. 17, a. 2, ad 2). Different, therefore, is the physical action “which remains in the agent, such as understanding, sensing, and willing. The difference between them is this: the first action is not a perfection of the agent that moves but of the thing moved; the second action, however, is a perfection of the agent” (ibid., a. 3, ad 1): the highest degree of immanence is represented by the life of intelligence and the higher functions. This is physical immanence.

Modern thought elaborated a new concept of immanence, claiming to synthesize and surpass both the classical and the Christian conceptions. The reef 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, as well as the metaphysical difficulty of attributing to finite reality a distinct consistency of its own apart from divinity. The principle of modern immanence affirms that being is only as the object of consciousness. The first explicit formulation of modern immanence is the *cogito, ergo sum* of Descartes. It asserts a) the priority of thought over being; b) the autonomy of thought with respect to being; c) the immanence of being to thought or to consciousness. In the development of modern thought, three conceptions of immanence may be distinguished: phenomenist, normative, and metaphysical or constitutive. In the modern concept of immanence, it is presented in the form of “self-consciousness”: “In this new period,” writes Hegel, “the universal principle that governs all things in the world is thought that moves itself” (*Geschichte der Philosophie*, Italian trans., II, 11, Florence 1944, p. 66), and Hegel regards this principle as the essence of Christianity, which has affirmed itself in its genuine meaning as the principle of absolute interiority (sola fides) in Protestantism and has reached its full development in his objective idealism.

a) Subjectivist idealism first developed within English empiricism: knowledge depends entirely on “experience,” which is essentially a “modification” of subjectivity by unknown causes, later variously reflected upon and elaborated. The empiricist idealist principle was appropriated by Locke in the reality of sensible qualities, by Berkeley in the metaphysical reality of substance, and by Hume in the final bastion of the causal relation, which is reduced to an “impression of reflection” understood as a conviction or habit (belief, custom) that consciousness draws from itself and expresses within itself (cf. D. Hume, *Treatise of Human Nature*, Appendix; ed. Selby-Bigge, Oxford 1928, p. 627). The idealism affirmed by Hume is, from a strictly theoretical standpoint, no less radical than that of absolute idealism and admits of no further development insofar as it not only affirms the subjectivity of knowledge as such but introduces “persuasion” regarding causality as an active principle constitutive of the reality of objects as such. The formula of phenomenist idealism is Berkeley’s: “esse est percipi,” which for Hume should be expressed: “percipere est sentire proprium sensum” (belief, feeling). Under the convergent influence of positivism and Kantianism, a numerous philosophical school known as Immanenzphilosophie developed toward the end of the 19th century, inspired purely by phenomenism and lapsing into probabilism and methodological skepticism according to Schuppe’s formula: “Human knowledge can only have the character of probability — or of a relative truth... The recognized impossibility that the human race attain possession of absolute truth cannot, however, diminish the value and indispensability of this concept” (W. Schuppe, *Grundriss der Erkenntnistheorie und Logik*, Berlin 1894, § 156, pp. 173–174).

b) Normative idealism 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 thus have meaning and value only within thought itself. Yet Kant presented the principal objects of metaphysics (the world, the soul, the existence of God, freedom, immortality, happiness) as “transcendental ideas” properly belonging to reason, which attains certainty in this domain as “practical reason” insofar as it must “postulate” the foundations of moral life. The metaphysical world, which seems closed to theoretical pure reason, thus opens to practical reason, and Kant termed this “constitutive moment” of metaphysical consciousness “rational faith” (*Vernunftglaube*) as the highest and most positive form of idealism (*Kritik der praktischen Vernunft*, I, 2, 2, v; ed. Cassirer, V, p. 137). Kant’s *Glaube* was developed in various directions by post-Kantians and neo-Kantians; it is regarded as “the organ of reality” or the positive and constructive moment of consciousness and has inspired, more or less directly, certain Catholic currents that have caused greater concern in the past half-century (modernism, fideism, philosophy of action), as will be discussed.

c) Yet the most complete form of idealism is the conception that has done away with the “thing-in-itself” and identified reality with thought: “It — declares Hegel — must be considered the highest thing not when it turns to other things but only when, occupied solely with itself, with the most noble object of all, it seeks and finds itself” (*Geschichte der Philosophie*, Italian trans., I, Florence 1930, p. 13). The new ideal standpoint, Hegel writes, consists in conceiving and expressing the true not as “substance” but as “subject,” not, however, as a subject related to something else but as a subject that moves itself, expresses itself, expands itself, and actualizes itself (cf. *Phänomenologie des Geistes*, ed. Jo. Hoffmeister, Leipzig 1937, pp. 19 ff.). In the metaphysical idealism of Hegelian idealism, the principle of self-consciousness is fulfilled, as is the reality and unity of subjectivity and objectivity in the “becoming” of Absolute Spirit. Thus irritation is resolved on the metaphysical plane, but no longer in the cosmological-naturalistic sense of classical thought and naturalism (including Bruno and Spinoza), but in the anthropological sense of the unfolding of human civilization. Even revealed religion, Jewish and Christian, represents merely a “moment” in this development, whose meaning can be deciphered only by philosophy. Contemporary thought has undertaken a radical revision of the principle of idealism by vindicating the reality of the concrete: with existentialism, the consistency of individual consciousness and freedom; with Marxism, the direct and constitutive (not merely apparent) relation that man has with nature. The outcome of this controversy remains suspended upon the presuppositions of these two orientations. In any case, the systematic exaggerations of the advocates of the principle of irritation do not respect the exigency of interiority that man has sought to affirm but must instead recall an adequate understanding of that structure of consciousness which does not present itself merely as the “receptivity” of the world and nature but above all as the capacity and principle of its own development in its double relation to the world and to transcendence.

IV. THE METHOD OF IDEALISM AND CATHOLIC DOCTRINE

Confronted with this challenge posed by modern thought, advocates of the method of idealism in Catholic apologetics and contemporary theology turned their research to this task. Their aim is to find and develop the truths of religion and even the mysteries of revealed faith starting from consciousness, its needs, aspirations, and presentiments that emerge in individual experience. This method becomes expressly 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 heuristic and approximate value of dogmatic formulas, the symbolic meaning of miracles, and even the perfect equivalence of various religions. Just as in the 13th century the entry of Aristotle into the West gave rise to forms of naturalistic and pantheistic idealism (Alexandrianism and Averroism), so the new principle of idealism in modern thought shook not a few who were not satisfied with the thought and formulas of the doctrinal tradition of the Church.

The most serious episode of this tendency is known as modernism (v.), which was described not as a heresy but as “the collection of all heresies” and condemned in 1907 by Pius X in the encyclical *Pascendi* (v.), which offers a broad and detailed analysis of the philosophical and theological aspects of the principle of idealism in the extreme form proposed by the modernists (*Acta Sanctae Sedis*, 40 [1907], pp. 593 ff.; Denz.-U., 2071–2109).

The method of immanence remains directly in the wake of KANT’s Glaube, FRIES, JACOBI, SCHLEIERMACHER, and claims to model itself on AUGUSTINE’s interiority, on PASCAL’s Christianity of paradox, and thus to form a bridge between Catholic doctrine and modern religious spiritualism, whether in the Protestant camp (A. SABATIER, W. JAMES, BALFOUR) or the Catholic (MAINE DE BIRAN, GRATTRY, L. OLLÈ-LA-PRUNE, BRUNETIÈRE). Protestant advocates of immanence fell into absolute subjectivity, which led to modernism: the existence of revealed truths and their meaning is solely a function of each person’s personal 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 ff.). SABATIER himself immediately acknowledges that the distinction between natural and supernatural revelation, between immediate and mediate revelation, and between the revelations of various religions thus disappears. As for miracles, SPINOZA’s critique (Tract. theol.-polit., part 6, De miraculis) is accepted as definitive: miracles can no longer be the object of objective verification 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 cœur pieux” (op. cit., p. 86). Similarly, religious inspiration is no different from poetic inspiration, and prophetic inspiration differs from that accessible to all only in degree of intensity, as 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 divine paternity toward himself: this is the attitude that every Christian, following the example of Jesus Christ, must have toward God, supplemented by the feeling of brotherhood toward men (op. cit., pp. 184 ff.). As for dogmas, one must distinguish between “form” and “substance,” between the assimilable religious experience they represent and the contingent and imperfect experience that ancient doctors may have given them: the religious soul assimilates their vital essence, abandoning the dry husk, namely the elements of a science that has fallen and been surpassed (p. 285). This is the only concept of religion to which the Protestant principle of the subjectivity of faith leads; and in this conclusion of extreme sincerity, even the Catholic theologian agrees, because the Protestant principle must ultimately undermine the foundations of Christianity as a revealed and transcendent religion. Along the lines of SABATIER, N. SÖDERBLOM, TYRRELL, and in the philosophical milieu W. JAMES with the essay The Variety of Religious Experience (London 1907) have expounded their theory of religion. In France, the organ of the movement 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 OLLÈ-LA-PRUNE, attempted his original interpretation of the principle of immanence under the formula of Philosophie de l’action. In its first formulation, it contained a severe condemnation of the traditional method, branded as rationalistic (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 in the subsequent reworking (L’action, 2 vols., Paris 1936–37) was considerably mitigated. In his later years, BLONDEL received the most authoritative assurance of the orthodoxy of the content of his doctrine in a letter from the Secretariat of State (2 Dec. 1944; cf. Documentatio catholica, 42 [1945], cols. 418–19), which, however, makes an exception for some expressions of B.’s that theological rigor would have wished more precise.

BLONDEL’s metaphysical thesis is that it is for action, not for the rationality of proofs and motives, to provide the demonstration of God’s transcendence (cf. L’action, p. 350 ff.): yet he intended to distance himself not only from intellectualism but also from pragmatism and thought to align the principle of immanence with St. THOMAS himself when he says: “Nihil potest ordinari ad finem” (De Veritate, 14, a. 2; Lettre sur l’apologétique, Paris 1896, p. 28). BLONDEL distinguishes between a sense of immanence as efference, idealistic and vitalistic, which annuls transcendence, and as afference, which instead founds transcendence inasmuch as it signifies the double openness to “the gratuitous inner promptings and to 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 meaning, therefore, of BLONDEL’s immanence has been to show that reason alone brings one only to the threshold of religious life and faith, and that the bulk is entrusted to the commitment of the subject’s freedom. This has found an echo in the Thomist theology of the act of faith, which distinguishes between the “judgment of credulity” (est credendum) within the competence of reason and the “judgment of faith” (credo) that proceeds from freedom moved by grace. Outside Catholic doctrine remain the developments given to the principle of immanence by L. LABERTHONNIÈRE and E. LE ROY, both condemned by the Holy Office.

Linked to the trend of the “method of immanence” is the so-called “theology of preaching” (Verkündigungs-theologie), sponsored especially by the contributors to the Zeitschrift für kath. Theologie in Austria, according to whom the inner sense of Christian truths is to be sought not so much in the formulas and conceptual expositions of scholastic theology as in the vivid symbols and living preaching of the writers and Fathers of the early centuries; an allied trend may be said to be that centered at the Jesuit Faculty of Theology at Lyon-Fourvière (H. DE LUBAC, J. DANIÉLOU, H. BOUILLARD). The encyclical Humani generis (AAS, 42 [1950], pp. 567–70) has pointed out the dangers that such trends may contain and has given norms to avoid them. The work of Cardinal NEWMAN has no direct filiation with the immanentism of modern philosophy; it arose rather from the study of the Fathers and the development of Catholic doctrine and appeals rather to an existential personalism of the type of KIERKEGAARD (cf. M. NÉDONCELLE, Oeuvres philo. de Newman, Introduction, Paris 1945, p. 149).

While the intention of the method of immanence to bring the problems of faith directly to the human conscience in its affective and dynamic concreteness may be praiseworthy, its advocates have not always seen the danger of underestimating the objective and rational criteria of credibility, which in Catholic doctrine must hold first place, because they are the foundation that can give meaning and guarantee of truth to the very subjective procedure of immanence. On this decisive matter for the orientation of human conscience toward revealed faith, the Vatican Council declared: “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). The main deficiency of the method of immanence is that it leaves in the shadows the criterion of the authority of the Church, which alone is the one in which the faithful can immediately and with certainty resolve their act of faith.

2. Non-Catholic authors: E. Vacherot, La religion, Paris 1869 (especially ch. 3, pp. 109 ff.; Méthode psychologique), O. Pfeifer, Geschichte der Religionsphilosophie von Spinoza bis auf die Gegenwart, Berlin 1893; H. Siebert, Religionsphilosophie, Berlin and Leipzig 1922, p. 104 ff.; C. Passim; H. Hoffing, Philosophie de la religion, Paris 1908 (especially ch. 3, p. 88 ff.; Le problème psychologique de la philosophie de la religion), J.-J. Gourd, Philosophie de la religion, vi 1911 (the religious as an act of love that separates it from the objective knowledge of the sciences and thus remains “unconditioned” by it); W. Koepp, Einführung in das Studium der Religionspsychologie, Tübingen 1920, pp. 13 ff.; 39, 95 ff.; R. Eucken, Der Kampf um einen geistigen Lebensinhalts, 4th ed., Berlin 1921, p. 89 ff.; A. Görland, Religionsphilosophie, Berlin and Leipzig 1922, p. 104 ff.; C. Passim; P. Hoffmann, Das religiöse Erlebnis (Philosophische Vorträge, 28), Charlottenburg 1925; N. Söderblom, Die vivant dans l'histoire, Paris 1937; E. Frank, Philosophie und Verstandung und religions trutth, Oxford 1945, p. 32 ff.; C. Passim; J. Balle, Our knowledge of God, Oxford and London 1946, p. 225 ff.; § 19; E. C. Brightman, Philosophy of religion, New York 1946, pp. 168 ff., 412 ff., and passim.

3. Catholic authors: F. Klimke, Der Monismus, Freiburg im Br. 1911 (see I. IV, ch. 2, pp. 410-82; exposition of the development of the principle still useful today); I. P. Steffes, Religionsphilosophie (Philos. Handbibl., 9), Kempten 1925, p. 32 ff.; H. Straubinger, Einführung in die Religionsphilosophie, Freiburg im Br. 1929; E. Przywara, Religionsphilosophie katholischer Theologie, Munich and Berlin 1920; B. Rosenmöller, Religionsphilosophie, 2nd ed., Münster in V. 1929, pp. 37 ff.; 92 ff., 134 ff.; J. Hessens, Religionsphilosophie, I. Essen 1948 (especially pp. 39 ff., 192 ff., 287 ff.; II. especially p. 91 ff.); H. Fries, Die katholische Religionsphilosophie der Gegenwart, Heidelberg 1949, p. 37 ff.; C. Passim. These two authors depend, in varying degrees, on the work of Max Scheler, whose essay on the religious must be recalled here: Probleme der Religion, in Vom Ewigen im Menschen, Leipzig 1923 (I, II, p. 1 ff.; see also the important preface to Part I, p. 9 ff.). On the position of Blondel: J. de Tonquédecq, Immanence, 4th ed., Paris 1933 (a resolutely negative critique, but always useful for the defense of principles). More conciliatory: Y. de Montcheuil, Pages religieuses de Maurice Blondel, Paris 1942 (the author maintains that Blondel remained faithful throughout to the position of L’Action of 1893); R. Aubert, Le problème de l'acte de foi, Louvain 1945 (ch. 2, Autour de la méthode d’immanence, pp. 265-302, with complete bibliography for French-language literature). On the psychological aspect of the immanence of the religious act, see G. Wunderle, Der religiöser Akt als seelisches Problem, Würzburg 1948. From the standpoint of mysticism, the controversial work of Fr. von Hügel should be noted (cf., for an overall exposition, the ontological collection: Religion als Ganzheit, ed. M. Schlüter Hermkes, Düsseldorf 1948); D. Feuling, Das Leben der Seele, Salzburg 1940 (cf. p. 479 ff.); A. Mager, Mystik als seelische Wirklichkeit, ivl 1945.

Cornelio Fabro IMMANUEL ROMANO (MANUELLO GUIDO). – Poet, b. in Rome c. 1268-72; d. after 1328. He belonged to the circle of Jewish doctors and poets in Rome. For reasons not well known, he left Rome and lived as a teacher in the households of wealthy families in Perugia, Fabriano, Fermo, Camerino, Ancona, and Verona.

A patron in Fermo encouraged him to compose his poetic work Mahlbäröth (maqāmāt). This work was printed in Brescia in 1491, in Constantinople in 1535, in Berlin in 1796, and in Lviv in 1870. A critical edition was undertaken by Hermann Brody. Individual parts of the work were translated into Latin and several European languages. As regards style, I. followed Solomon ibn Gabirol, Judah Levita (q.v.), and in particular Judah al-Harizi. The content of I. R.’s work is playful and sometimes frivolous, yet always witty and rich in wordplay; riddles, epigrams, and even lamentations and religious hymns recur.

He was the first to introduce the Italian sonnet into Hebrew literature. On one occasion he refers directly to Dante, and on another he imitates the “Sirventes” of the master of all the arts. The final maqāmah represents his passage through Hell and Paradise, in dependence on the Divina Commedia.