Transcendence and immanence are two of the most useful terms for talking about God, and you might come across them pretty frequently if you start researching religion. They refer to two different models for the relationship between God and finite realities. Transcendence refers to something that surpasses those finite realities—we can think of it as an extreme form of limitlessness or boundlessness. Conversely, immanence refers to something that is contained within the same world as material reality.
Generally, we associate transcendence with religious feeling, and immanence with secularism. The usual Christian version of God is entirely transcendent. He is an immortal, omniscient, and omnipresent individual, someone who extends beyond all the boundaries of the finite world of things. Conversely, a secular understanding of the world is inherently immanent: a strictly scientific understanding of the universe asserts that the rules which govern life on earth are universal. Everything is contained by the same fundamental limitations, such as the conservation of matter.
Some religious thinkers, however, have challenged this dichotomy, arguing that transcendence and immanence are not mutually exclusive. In her book John Clare’s Religion, Sarah Houghton-Walker argues that Clare embodies this less-binary understanding of the terms, by portraying God as “both immanent in nature and transcendent.” In other words, for Clare God is contained by the natural world, something we can see and touch when we encounter beauty. Yet he also sees God in more abstract terms, as that which defies the limitations of the world of things, especially its mortality.
“Love Lives Beyond the Tomb” is a particularly explicit example of religious thinking that combines transcendence and immanence. Though the poem is about love, Christian thought conventionally figures God and love as interchangeable. The abstract and generalized love Clare describes in this poem is particularly akin to the divine. We can read the first two and final stanzas as voicing a transcendent model of God as love. In them, love extends “beyond” the mortal earth, exceeding the limitations of the finite world.
Conversely, the third, fourth, and fifth stanzas figure God as immanent. In these sections of the poem, Clare describes love as something he can observe in the things of this world: the dew, the green world, the blue sky. The symbol of dew embodies the poem’s embrace of the two opposites. In the first and second stanzas, it appears as a symbol of mortality and grief. However, in the third stanza, Clare instead emphasizes its beauty, a beauty that stems partially from its ephemerality. While dew’s mortality distinguishes it from love, its ephemeral beauty simultaneously makes it a place where love becomes visible in the world.
