The Long Death of Transcendence

On November 1, 1755, the morning of All Saints’ Day, a massive earthquake struck Lisbon, Portugal. Churches were filled with worshippers attending Mass. The quake, followed by fires and a tsunami, destroyed much of the city and killed tens of thousands of people. Nearly eighty churches were damaged or destroyed.

The catastrophe deeply shook Enlightenment Europe. Voltaire responded with his famous Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne (Poem on the Disaster of Lisbon), in which he attacked the optimistic belief that this is “the best of all possible worlds.” He used the disaster to question how a good and providential God could allow such destruction to occur during a holy feast day, inside churches, while worshippers were praying.

Voltaire was raised in a conventional Catholic environment in France and educated by the Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, one of the most respected Catholic institutions of the time. As a young man, he accepted the broad framework of Christian belief that shaped French society, God as a personal being, divine providence, revelation, and the authority of the Church.

By the time the earthquake struck Lisbon in 1755, Voltaire had already abandoned orthodox Christianity and embraced deism. He no longer believed in miracles, divine intervention, or the authority of the Church. He rejected revelation as binding truth and dismissed biblical literalism as superstition. His God was no longer the personal, intervening deity of Catholic theology. He believed in a distant intelligence who set nature in motion and allowed it to operate according to fixed principles.

But Voltaire was not alone in this transition. As science advanced and the universe came to be understood as a system governed by stable, discoverable laws, Europe was drifting away from God. If nature operated through necessity, if physical events followed fixed patterns without interruption, then divine intervention became increasingly implausible. Even those who continued to affirm a Creator were describing Him less as a living, acting presence and more as a distant architect who set the system in motion and allowed it to run.

In his earlier years, Voltaire sharply criticized Spinoza; he mocked the system that identified God with Nature. Yet as Enlightenment thought matured and Europe increasingly embraced reason and natural law as the primary explanations of reality, Voltaire himself admitted that “Everybody ends up, despite themselves, sharing the views of this ‘bad Jew’”, ce malheureux Juif.

The Death of Transcendence

Even though denying transcendence is as old as philosophy itself, one could trace naturalistic tendencies back to Thales of Miletus, what happened in early modern Europe was different. Ancient thinkers questioned myth. Some reduced reality to matter or to principles within nature. But the civilizational structure of Europe remained grounded in transcendence for nearly two millennia. Reality was not self-contained. It had an origin outside itself. Meaning did not emerge from within the system; it descended into it.

Transcendence refers to that “outside.” It means that ultimate reality is not identical with the physical cosmos. It means there exists something ontologically distinct from nature, beyond experience, beyond material causality, beyond the closed chain of events. Plato’s Forms exist in a higher, intelligible realm. The Judeo-Christian God stands apart from creation and brings it into existence ex nihilo, out of nothing, by free will. In both cases, reality is not self-sufficient. It depends on something beyond itself.

To deny transcendence is to embrace pure immanence. Immanence means everything that exists is contained within one unified, self-sufficient system. There is no external source. No metaphysical “outside.” No supernatural rupture. No ontological gap between Creator and creation. Reality becomes self-contained.

Medieval thinkers never abandoned transcendence. Even when theologians like Duns Scotus or William of Ockham refined discussions about God’s presence or activity within creation, they never denied that God was ontologically distinct from the world. God remained Creator, not identical with nature. The language of immanence appeared in theological discussions, but it did not eliminate transcendence.

The modern binary between immanence and transcendence, treating them as mutually exclusive, solidifies only after Kant. But the decisive rupture occurs earlier. Baruch Spinoza is the first major modern philosopher to systematically eliminate transcendence.

In his Ethics, Spinoza argues that there is only one substance. He calls it “God or Nature” (Deus sive Natura). There are not two orders, Creator and creation. There is no ontological divide. Everything that exists is a mode, an expression, of this one infinite substance. God does not stand outside the world; God is the world understood under the aspect of eternity.

In classical theism, God freely creates the world from nothing. Creation is contingent. God could have created differently. God could intervene. God judges, commands, and sustains reality.

In Spinoza’s system, nothing is contingent. Everything follows necessarily from the essence of substance. God does not create by choice. God does not decide. God does not intervene. The world is not brought into existence by a transcendent act; it unfolds immanently from the nature of reality itself. There is no “outside.” There is no supernatural breach. There is no personal, providential deity standing over history.

This is why Spinoza was excommunicated and accused of atheism. In the 17th century, to deny transcendence was to deny God in any meaningful sense. Even though Spinoza used the word “God,” his God did not resemble the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It was not a being who speaks, commands, loves, or judges. It was the infinite totality of being itself.

Spinoza’s influence on European philosophy was enormous, arguably one of the most pervasive and transformative in modern thought, precisely because it reshaped the entire intellectual landscape, even (and especially) among those who rejected or critiqued him. His monism, denial of transcendence, strict determinism, and identification of God with Nature forced later thinkers to confront and respond to his framework, often absorbing key elements while modifying or opposing others. This created a dialectical momentum: Spinoza set the terms of debate, and the major currents of Continental philosophy from the late 17th century onward developed in dialogue with (or against) him.