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Updated: June 9, 2025
A one-sided insistence on the immanence of God, to the exclusion of His transcendence, leads to Pantheism, just as a one-sided insistence upon His transcendence, to the exclusion of His immanence, leads to Deism; it is the two taken together that result in, and are necessary to, Theism.
It is not the personal rapture of the spiritual marriage, but rather the "divine fecundity" of one who is a parent of spiritual children; which seems to them the goal of human transcendence, and evidence of a life truly lived on eternal levels, in real union with God. "In the fourth and last degree of love the soul brings forth its children," says Richard of St. Victor.
Between the call to transcendence, to a simple self-loss in the unfathomable and adorable life of God, and the call to a full, rich and various actualization of personal life, in the energetic strivings of a fellow worker with Him: between the soul's profound sense of transcendent love, and its felt possession of and duty towards immanent love a paradox which only some form of incarnational philosophy can solve.
A good deal of unnecessary difficulty arises in the first place from the habitual failure of many people to bear in mind that though God is immanent in the cosmos, He is not only immanent; as soon as His transcendence is realised, it is seen that there exists no a priori reason against the possibility of what from our point of view would look like Divine interpositions in the ordinary course of nature.
We are by no means so shut in by the walls of the material and the sensible as we have heretofore supposed. There is a transcendence of spirit over matter and materially imposed conditions which must give us pause.
Yet to that soul that is Catholic, who understands that the Eternal Throne is indeed above the stars and that the Transcendence of God is as fully a truth as His Immanence that God in Himself, apart from all that He has made, is all-fair and all-sufficient in His own Beauty to such a soul as this, if called to such a life, there is no need that the Church should declare explicitly that the Contemplative Life is the highest.
By the immanence of God is meant that He is everywhere and always present in the universe, nowhere absent from it, never separated from its life. By His transcendence is meant not as is sometimes represented that He is outside and views the universe from beyond and above, but that He is not shut up in it or limited by it, not required in His totality to maintain and order it.
Clarke, in his "Outline of Christian Theology," is like the spirit of a man in his body, which is greater than his body, able to direct his body, and capable of activities that far transcend the physical realm. God is a free spirit, personal, self-directing, unexhausted by His present activities. This statement affirms both the immanence and the transcendence of God.
By insisting specially on the immanence of God we get introspection, self-isolation, quietism, social indifference Tibet. By insisting specially on the transcendence of God we get wonder, curiosity, moral and political adventure, righteous indignation Christendom. Insisting that God is inside man, man is always inside himself. By insisting that God transcends man, man has transcended himself.
If we dwell upon Form alone, though it should be of surpassing beauty, the idea would not rise above that of man, for this is conceivable of man: but the moment the angelic nature is touched, we have the higher ideas of supernal intelligence and perfect holiness, to which all the charms and graces of mere form immediately become subordinate, and, though the beauty remain, its agency is comparatively negative under the overpowering transcendence of a celestial spirit.
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