On the World of Space and Time

Discovery of the transcendence of ultimate reality—whether undesrtood as Tao, Brahman, Yahweh, Logos, or in another fashion—alters how the “world,” initially experienced as the cosmos, comes to be apprehended. In brief: it becomes a spatiotemporal universe. It becomes—slowly and inevitably, if often incompletely—“de-divinized.” The one cosmos “splits” into worldly being and transcendent being. The immediately manifest divine identities dissolve out of worldly things: out of the sun and moon and the patterns of stars, the sky and the land and the sea, rivers and trees and mountains, kingly personages.

This is the “differentiation”—the distinguishing of two related but conceptually separable realms of meaning—that eventually invites a disinterested analysis of what will come to be called in Western culture “nature.”  There are many meanings of the word nature, of course: we speak of the “nature of something,” that is, its essence; we use the term to refer to the biological or botanical realm; the word in fact has dozens of meanings. But nature in the sense of signifying the entirety of the physical, or spatiotemporal, universe is a term whose meaning arises from the fact that the world, after the “discovery” of transcendent reality, is now conceptually approachable as its own order of being, distinct from divine presences; that is, the world has become an autonomous realm of meaning.

As a consequence, nature (the finite universe) is now subject to being investigated “on its own terms”—that is, in terms of the intrinsic intelligibilities (the intrinsic meanings) of things: for example, in terms of the inherent properties and attributes of things; in terms of developmental laws or tendencies inherent in objects; in terms of recurrent causal or interdependent relationships between substances or their motions.

With regard to the sphere of human beings and human acitivities, there arises the issue now, too, of the “nature”— especially, of the proper character—of social organizations, or political orders, conceived independently of immediate divine presence in kings or other leaders, or divinity as manifest immediately in the rituals or rules guiding human affairs.

Just as “physics” is now conceivable, so is “politics.”

But let us ask: in such imagining and conceiving, is the world thereby thoroughly sundered from the transcendent ground of its being, from divine or sacred or ultimate reality? In in the language of Western religious traditions: is the world now severed from God?

Not at all! The cosmos is still one. It remains a unity. But the new intimacy between ultimate, transcendent reality and everything else—the relationship between God and all else; or, say, between the Tao and all else; or between Brahman and all else—is now a terribly complicated matter to think through.

How is the transcendent present in the “immanent,” the “natural”? In what manner does the natural thing, the worldly, depend for its being and its meaning on the transcendent? This is the problem set for everyone who comes to the cultural table after the elemental differentiation of “world” and “transcendent reality.” It is a problem whose burden remains.

In considering it, what should first be remembered is that the imaginative and conceptual autonomy granted to the dedivinized world of space and time, as a result of “distinguishing out” from it a transcendent ground of reality—whether transcendence is regarded as an impersonal principle, such as the Chinese Tao, or as a personal divinity, such as the Jewish and Christian Creator-God—is only a relative autonomy. Discovering the radical transcendence of ultimate reality does not dissolve the intimate relationship between the order of things in the world and the ordering transcendent ground sustaining them. The permanent danger for thought that inheres in the articulation of any notion of transcendent reality is that its “beyondness” will be imagined to be some kind of spatially separate thing: “world” here; God (or Tao) “out there.”

This is why it is helpful to refer to “transcendence,” in the manner of Bernard Lonergan, as a realm of meaning—a realm that, while distinguishable from other realms of meaning, must not be conceived as an “elsewhere,” or as any kind of entity apart from the world. We make a basic blunder if we forget that the reality revealed in our most elementary experiences is a communion of all being (a cosmos). Which means that, as Eric Voegelin puts it, “there are no things that are merely immanent.” Our primary experience of reality is that of its wholeness and oneness; and if the conceptual “splitting” of being into the two realms of transcendence and immanence (world) makes for stupefying complexities in appreciating the intelligible relationship between the two, and presents peculiar challenges for understanding what constitutes a proper existential comportment toward a reality comprised of “world + transcendence,” still any interpretatively sound (if always only partial) response to these complexities and challenges is rendered impossible if we misunderstand transcendent reality as yet another type of thing apart from “nature.”

Understanding this misunderstanding as a blunder is what gives rise, in the treatment of ultimate matters, to such locutions of paradox-in-language that we find in a text like the Buddhist Heart Sutra (likely composed in the first century AD), or in Zen teachings generally. If transcendent reality is “not a thing,” then it is “no-thing”; it is nothing. But it is not nothing in the sense of meaningless or irrelevant. It is the deeper reality of worldly things. So, analysis goes, if one penetrates any natural “form” truly enough, one experiences it as identical with transcendent “emptiness.” Thus, in the Heart Sutra (as translated by Red Pine) we read: “form is emptiness, emptiness is form; / emptiness is not separate from form, / form is not separate from emptiness; / whatever is form is emptiness, / whatever is emptiness is form.”

Language is always foundering here. We grasp that “nature” is constantly changing, and perishes; how are we to apprehend its relationship to the transcendent “nothing” or “emptiness” which is its origination and sustenance, which does not change or perish, and which somehow—but not simply—is identical with the world of things?

To make any sense of the Heart Sutra is to recognize how difficult it is not to wander off-track in thinking through the transcendence-immanence relationship.

And there are the related difficulties in Western religious teachings: how are we supposed to understand the relationship between things of the natural world and its transcendently “personal” Creator-God? Western mystics explore this question repeatedly. And here we find formulations such as: “God is everywhere and nowhere.” Precisely.

Distinct from the philosophers and mystics and wisdom teachers who use conceptual language, we find poets and literary artists of the last two millennia, both East and West, repeatedly evoking in their own manner the paradoxes involved in mentally grasping and linguistically encapsulating the immanence-transcendence relationship. The fifteenth-century Islamic mystic Kabir, who was influenced by Sufi poets and also Hindu teachings, writes (in Robert Bly’s translation): “Student, tell me what is God? He is the breath inside the breath.” This is not a conceptual explanation. It is an image, a symbol, of ultimate intimacy—and paradox. It may be dismissed as a meaningless image if one approaches it as some kind of account of ultimate things. But Kabi, like poets in all religious traditions, would insist that one can have experiences that make “He is the breath inside the breath” a meaningful, inspiring, existence-centering phrase.

It’s not a phrase about things. Rather, it signifies recognition of a relationship—a recognition that sees (among other things) that “there are no things that are merely immanent,” and that one’s own existence is continually “sourced” in transcendent reality.

Here comes one more intriguing fact. As historical developments came to prove, there was something unique about the way that the classical Greek philosophers—such as Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle—encountered and articulated divine transcendence. It was this: transcendent being was apprehendeed as Nous—a Greek term that can be translated as “Divine Intelligence.” Divine Nous is perceivable by human nous (intellect), they explained, and human nous exists at all, because human nous is a participation in transcendent divine Nous. It is Nous, they wrote, that orders reality and “steers all things through all things” (Heraclitus).

(To be noted: this God of Nous does not create “out of nothing,” ex nihilo, as does the Christian God; it “works on” a prior materia that limits its power of divine ordering.)

The consequences of this notion of transcendence for considering what the “world” is proved exceptional. For in light of this revelation, the “world” as formed by Nous is intelligible structure itself; and intelligible structure invites systematic investigation. Thus, the gateway to exploring the world scientifically—that is, as “nature” in the sense of “immanent structure in the world of experience”—had been found.

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