Immanence

In 1600, a man climbs the stake in Rome. His name: Giordano Bruno.
This Italian philosopher, a defrocked Dominican monk, dared to say that the universe is infinite, filled with an infinity of worlds, and above all, that God is present in all things. For this idea, deemed heretical by the Church, he was sentenced to death.
And yet, this belief he held, radical for his time, did not begin with him. It is an ancient intuition, already found in the Stoics: the idea that the divine is not separate from the world, but dwells within it.
This is what we call immanence.

This philosopher also developed the theory of heliocentrism, asserting that the Earth is not the center of the universe. In doing so, he opposed the geocentric model, which held that the Earth is motionless and at the center of the cosmos, a view inherited from antiquity, first formulated in the 4th century BCE by Aristotle, later systematized, and which remained dominant in the West for over a thousand years.

Immanence is not, at its origin, a religious concept, but a philosophical one: it does not refer to a dogma or a form of worship, but to a way of thinking about the relationship between the world and what flows through it, between nature and what some call the divine. And long before philosophy gave shape to ideas, certain truths were already being intuited.

In the earliest human cultures, the world had not yet been divided between heaven and earth, between the visible and the invisible, between God and reality. There was only nature, vast, alive, mysterious—and within it, everything bore the signs of a presence. Mountains seemed full of soul, rivers sang something, animals embodied forces, spirits, myths. It was not yet a religion in the institutional sense, but rather a way of dwelling in the world, of feeling it as full, inhabited, traversed by something greater than oneself. From this way of living was born an intuition that has never truly left human history: the sense that the divine is not elsewhere, not floating in some distant beyond, indifferent or capricious, but rather right here, at the heart of things. Not separate from humankind, but present with them, in all places and at all times. This is immanence: the belief that the divine principle, whatever its nature, does not stand outside the world, but acts within it, through it, in all things.

Later, the Stoics would take up this idea with the rigor of philosophers. For them, the entire universe is animated by a rational force, an active intelligence they call the Logos. This Logos is not a god in the form of a person, but a living principle, a subtle, organizing fire present in all things. It is the inner law of reality, the reason why everything follows an order—why the cosmos is not chaos, but coherence.

And since the Logos is nature itself, nature becomes, for the Stoics, divine.

The divine is not above,
it is beneath, within, everywhere.
In the growth of a plant, in the regularity of the seasons, in the mechanics of the stars, in the movement of the human heart, in the thought that seeks to understand. Human beings, as rational creatures, carry within them a spark of the Logos, a fragment of this cosmic reason. This is why they can, if they choose, live in harmony with nature, by aligning themselves with the rhythm of the world, with the intelligence that animates it.

To think in terms of immanence ¹ is to radically shift our understanding of the sacred. It is no longer a distant realm to be reached, a beyond to be earned, but a presence to be recognized, here and now. Immanence is the power of the present moment. It means not waiting for judgment day, but living right now, in resonance with all the vital forces around you, and with those you form a coherent, unified whole. What the Stoic honors, then, is not a celestial throne reserved for a transcendent, all-knowing, judging God, but the order of reality itself. They do not worship a distant deity, but seek instead to attune themselves to what they feel is true, constant, and alive.

And this vision, while it does not yet declare that the world is God, already lays all the groundwork for it. It offers a radically different spiritual outlook from that of the transcendent monotheistic religions:
the idea that the sacred is present in the totality of what exists, that nature bears the divine, and that human beings can find their place within it through intelligence and virtue. This is where the next stage begins—the one we’ll explore in the upcoming entry: pantheism.