Immanence

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The doctrine or theory of immanence holds that the divine encompasses or is manifested in the material world. It is held by some philosophical and metaphysical theories of divine presence. Immanence is usually applied in monotheistic, pantheistic, pandeistic, or panentheistic faiths to suggest that the spiritual world permeates the mundane. It is often contrasted with theories of transcendence, in which the divine is seen to be outside the material world.

Major faiths commonly devote significant philosophical efforts to explaining the relationship between immanence and transcendence but do so in different ways, such as:

• casting immanence as a characteristic of a transcendent God (common in Abrahamic religions),
• subsuming immanent personal gods in a greater transcendent being (such as with Brahman in Hinduism), or
• approaching the question of transcendence as something which can only be answered through an appraisal of immanence.