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 fol-
lowed on from what was the product of rather speciic philosophical developments, nota-
bly 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 imma-
nence was their usefulness in those debates. To many, acceptance or denial of ‘tran-
scendence’ 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 methodi-
cal 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

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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, his-
torical 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 phi-
losophischen 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: phi-
losophers, 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

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 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 dis-
tinction. 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 refer-
ence to the ‘pantheistic’ use of immanent. Krug may have been unfamiliar with the ear-
lier, 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 conserva-
tive critics of Hegel’s philosophy, such as Immanuel Hermann Fichte, considered ‘the con-
cept 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 under-
standing 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).

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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 ency-
clopedia 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 appli-
cation 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 metaphys-
ics 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 estab-
lish something about them before they are given to us. This would be like the irst

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 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 con-
structive 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 conceiv-
able. 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 imma-
nent 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 ‘transcend-
ent’ 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 norma-
tive 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

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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 idi-
osyncratic 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 superabun-
dant being (Eckhart 1958: 55). It was later used by Lutheran pietists, such as Gottfried
Arnold, who employed ̈berschẅnglich to translate the ontological superlative forms typ-
ical 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 reli-
giously 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 expe-
ditions 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 theol-
ogy. 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 recog-
nises 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

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 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 inter-
pretation 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 transcend-
ent 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 law-
giving 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 indi-
cation 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 transcend-
ent–immanent binary, particularly important in light of the religious overtones that came
to be associated with this distinction.

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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, com-
plaints 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 prak-
tischen 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 pan-
theism 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 dimen-
sion 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 pan-
theism’ (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 philoso-
phy 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

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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 imma-
nence and transcendence. This only occurred from the mid-1830s, but then in a deci-
sive 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 pan-
theism 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-

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 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 tran-
scendence 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 fore-
word to his 1822 Philosophy of Religion, focused his extensive review of Fichte’s book prac-
tically 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 imma-
nence 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.

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 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 philoso-
phy 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 transcend-
ence 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 lim-
itation 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

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 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 transcend-
ent 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 atten-
tion: 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 histor-
icism 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 theol-
ogy 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

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 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 tran-
scendence 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 over-
come 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 transcend-
ence 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 devel-
opment 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 doc-
trine of God and the relationship of God to the world and to man as deined by the doc-
trine 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 dis-
cusses 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 distinc-
tion 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:

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 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 iden-
tity 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 ‘dog-
matism’, 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.

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 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 inlu-
ence 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 emphasis-
ing 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 rep-
resentative 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 the-
ological school. Among its members, arguably the most famous was the church historian
Adolf Harnack (1851–1930). Harnack’s extensive scholarly interpretation of the devel-
opment 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.

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 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 forego-
ing 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 experi-
enced 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 intermin-
gled 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 prom-
ised 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 civili-
zation, 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 subse-
quently merged with the controversy about pantheism and applied in the tempestuous dis-
cussions 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.

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 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 transcend-
ent 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.

References
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Baur, Ferdinand Christian (1835), Die christliche Gnosis oder die christliche Religions-Philosophie in ihrer
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