Transcendence, Immanence and Materiality
Transcendence, Immanence and Materiality
Understanding how a Culture of Immanent Non-Materiality Came To Be
I am a human being. Therefore, I am a sense-creating being. I want to understand. I will not stop until I do.
In a response to a Substack post by Dr. Toby Rogers, Even when one realizes that SARS-CoV-2 is a bioweapon, the rest of the story still does not make sense
I made the following comment.
Logic fails to explain any of this. Because logic operates in a world of consequence and accountability. This is the material world of the natural order.
However, at some point in the recent past, corporate and government leaders abandoned the material world as the context of their rationality. They began to believe that they transcend that world, and live in one where they can abuse logic and nature. This non-material world has only two values: money and power. They have structured a global system where they are the only winners.
In 1983, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn was awarded The Templeton Prize. His acceptance speech is remembered for one sentence, “Men have forgotten God.” Nietzsche saw this. There are countless examples of people during the past century who not only forgot God but believed that they were God as they also forgot that the material world, the context for science discovery, operates as a natural order.
We live under the tyranny of devils who will destroy the world. Only the natural world with its material resources has the capacity to recover. I thank God every day for the incompetence of small-minded egotists. They will fail. And those of us who humbly respect the real, material world are ready and are already at work repairing and restoring the world that transcends their madness. For me this is where logic leads.
I’ve been thinking about this for some time, as I try to make sense of things, I see this as a progression in three historic transitions.
Divine Transcendence to Scientific Immanence
Before the dawn of the age of science and industry, the world was a mysterious one. Enter any of the ancient cathedrals in Europe and you are enveloped in the sensory experience of space. Vertical space. This was an age before literacy. So the windows told stories from the Bible. People believed in a big world with God as their creator.
In the 15th century, books began to be printed. People learned to read. And human independence began to emerge. The first great transition from the old world to a new one was the Protestant Reformation in Europe. As people claimed a faith of their own, they also began to think for themselves. Out of this the age of Enlightenment, followed by the age of science and industry emerged.
The former world believed in a divine being, a creator God, transcendent over the natural order. This intimate relationship between God and the world sparked the desire in people to know the world as God’s creation. A new age emerged that ultimately drove a wedge between this transcendent world and the immanent one of science. We see now, this transition from a Transcendent Material world to an Immanent Material world.
This is the first transition that we need to recognize. The second has to do with us as individuals.
Transcendent Community of the Faith Spirituality to Personalist Spirituality
Prior to the Protestant Reformation, the idea that human persons were distinct in themselves was a foreign one. People were identified by family, faith, national origin, ethnic origin, and by their job.
When a person could read their Bible, come to faith, and declare that they were a Christian without the approval of a church, the beginnings of the individualism that characterizes our present world came to be.
As a pastor during the early years of my career, I saw these various versions of spirituality presented to me. There were those whose spirituality was medieval. They believed because of the institution of religion that they had known all their lives. The rituals of faith and practice defined their lives. While they could quote chapter and verse from Scripture, their spirituality was not personal. It was cultural.
During the last century, a more personalist spirituality arose. There are those to whom God speaks directly. And there are those whose spirituality has no place for God. It is a self-contained personal spirituality.
The transition that I see here in the spiritual realm is similar to the first. A Transcendent Material Spirituality which is of the community of the faith has transitioned to a Transcendent Personal Spirituality with its secular counterpart of an Immanent Personal Spirituality. The difficulty in characterizing the Personalist type is in deciding whether it accepts a material context or not. It follows the old church saying, “He’s so heavenly focused that he is no earthly good.”
In other words, we have three concepts here to bring together to make sense of the world we are in. They are:
Transcendence and Immanence
Spirituality of the Community and of the Person
The Material versus the Non-Material.
This third concept represents the third transition that I see.
A Material World versus a Non-Material One
This transition can be most easily seen in my comment above at Toby Rogers's site. The culture of science operates in the material world. However, as I have written in ten posts over the past few months, the culture of simulation is really an artificial culture. The Matrix’s Blue Pill world is a non-material world. It is the world of politics and finance. A world of exploitation without consequence. It is the world of the centralized institutions of governance and finance of my Two Global Forces framework.
This transition represents not a move from one room to another, but rather a conflict where the material world of science is replaced by the non-material world of politics and finance.
When a US Senator asks a nominee for the US Supreme Court if she is a woman, and she responds that she cannot answer because she is not a biologist, we see the collision of a materialist ideology with a non-materialist one.
The non-materialist movement is also personalist and immanent. It is a product of a philosophic shift that began during the 1970s and 1980s. This quote, from Francois Cusset’s book, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed The Intellectual Life of the United States, describes this transition.
“Whether one is speaking the Derridean patois or the Foucauldian dialect, one thing is clear, perhaps clearer than it has ever been in France: as of now, there is no longer a discourse of truth; there are only apparatuses (dispositifs) of truth – transient, tactical, and political. … In other words, if Derrida or Foucault deconstructed the concept of objectivity, the Americans would draw on those theories not for reflection … but for a more concrete political conclusion: objectivity is synonymous with “subjectivity of the white male.” … the notorious referent, evacuated by these formulistic versions of French theory, made a sudden comeback under the name of identity politics. …
Indeed, the sense of identity-based membership, the perception of oneself first and foremost as a member of a minority, is far from being a purely verbal invention of idle academics. These sentiments had spread throughout all levels of American society …”
This clash of philosophies presents itself to us in every situation we encounter. I saw this at the reunion of my American Studies university academic program where the faculty and Ph.D. students presented their current research work. During my years in the program, we stressed the big picture. I still refer to Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind as my introduction to systems theory. Now, the focus is on the personal and the discrete. Maybe there is an application for what they learn, but it was not readily obvious to me.
This transition from a material to a non-material context affects the culture of every country.
Living in an Immanent Non-Material World
The world of the divine transcendent spiritual materiality was replaced by the immanent materiality of science and industry, and the personalist spirituality of individualism. Secular materiality does not have the resources to withstand the political challenge of immanent non-materiality.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a showpiece for how our connection to the material world gets lost in the name of a social and political narrative that has no grounding in reality. Every crisis is now conducted within the context of non-material reality. This is the culture of simulation, an artificial culture intended to be so anarchic toward reality that it can cause mass psychosis.
If you grew up in a world of natural order like I did, and are confronted with an immanent non-material spiritual ideology, it seems like madness. It may be, but more importantly, we must recognize what it is and why it is. I draw upon two quotes by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn to frame how we are to see ourselves within this cultural context
A writer in the late 1960s/early 1970s Communist Russia, Solzhenitsyn faced a similar crisis. His memoir The Oak and The Calf describes the conflicts that ultimately led to his expulsion from the Soviet Union. On that day, his article Live Not By Lies was published.
“ We have internalized well the lessons drummed into us by the state; we are forever content and comfortable with its premise: we cannot escape the environment, the social conditions; they shape us, “being determines consciousness.” What have we to do with this? We can do nothing. …
So has the circle closed? So is there indeed no way out? So the only thing left to do is wait inertly: What if something just happens by itself?
But it will never come unstuck by itself, if we all, every day, continue to acknowledge, glorify, and strengthen it, if we do not, at the least, recoil from its most vulnerable point.
From lies.
When violence bursts onto the peaceful human condition, its face is flush with self-assurance, it displays on its banner and proclaims: “I am Violence! Make way, step aside, I will crush you!” But violence ages swiftly, a few years pass—and it is no longer sure of itself. To prop itself up, to appear decent, it will without fail call forth its ally—Lies. For violence has nothing to cover itself with but lies, and lies can only persist through violence. And it is not every day and not on every shoulder that violence brings down its heavy hand: It demands of us only a submission to lies, a daily participation in deceit—and this suffices as our fealty.
And therein we find, neglected by us, the simplest, the most accessible key to our liberation: a personal nonparticipation in lies! Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold not through me!”
So, I see that we face similar challenges, albeit, in a much more sophisticated form, There are two steps that we need to take.
The first is for us to require people to live by their lies, to live by their beliefs.
I am not saying change their minds. I am saying respect their position by requiring them to live accordingly. For I am convinced that much of the political strategy of immanent non-materiality is a diversion, a simulacrum, a spectacle that is intended to neutralize our efforts to live not by lies.
This means that we must resist being compromised.
Be always ready to state what you believe and do so with respect and dignity.
The second step is a restoration of the material world.
Solzhenitsyn describes this in his Templeton Prize speech, Men Have Forgotten God.
“… if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: ‘Men have forgotten God.’ The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century. The first of these was World War I, and much of our present predicament can be traced back to it. It was a war (the memory of which seems to be fading) when Europe, bursting with health and abundance, fell into a rage of self-mutilation which could not but sap its strength for a century or more, and perhaps forever. The only possible explanation for this war is a mental eclipse among the leaders of Europe due to their lost awareness of a Supreme Power above them. Only a godless embitterment could have moved ostensibly Christian states to employ poison gas, a weapon so obviously beyond the limits of humanity.
The same kind of defect, the flaw of a consciousness lacking all divine dimension, was manifested after World War II when the West yielded to the satanic temptation of the ‘nuclear umbrella.’ It was equivalent to saying: Let’s cast off worries, let’s free the younger generation from their duties and obligations, let’s make no effort to defend ourselves, to say nothing of defending others — let’s stop our ears to the groans emanating from the East, and let us live instead in the pursuit of happiness. If danger should threaten us, we shall be protected by the nuclear bomb; if not, then let the world go to hell! The pitifully helpless state to which the contemporary West has sunk is in large measure due to this fatal error: the belief that the only issue is that of nuclear weapons, whereas in reality the defense of peace reposes chiefly on stout hearts and steadfast men.
Only the loss of that higher intuition which comes from God could have allowed the West to accept calmly, after World War I, the protected agony of Russia as she was being torn apart by a band of cannibals, or to accept, after World War II, the similar dismemberment of Eastern Europe. The West did not perceive that this was in fact the beginning of a lengthy process that spells disaster for the whole world …”
I’m not suggesting that any person become religious. Rather, it is to believe that the material world is an idea and a reality that requires a belief beyond a mechanistic perception. I am not talking about a fear of losing the material world, but rather an affirmation and an affection for it as filled with meaning and purpose. As Solzhenitsyn stresses, without a belief in the divine character of the material world, we simply become exploiters of it.