Immanentism and dualism

In the same article, Milbank argues that “dualism and hierarchy are . . . the secret heart of all immanentisms.”

The argument is: In 18th and 19th century design arguments, God is “half-immanent” and interacts “on the same plane with what he influences.” This is a dualism between “the creative and designing on the one hand and the inert and the designed on the other.” This is not the result of transcendence, but rather “the result of dividing up the finite world into spheres of influence between a quasi-transcendent principle on the one hand and sheerly finite causal process, on the other.”

Vitalism tries to eliminate dualism by eliminating transcendence. It doesn’t, but makes the dualism “aporetically virulent.” For the vitalist, what seems fixed is only the “phenomenal guise for the dynamic and virtual” but this dynamic and virtual only “‘is’ at all through its phenomenal self-occlusion.” Invoking Carlyle’s description of German Idealism, Milbank says that for vitalism the cosmic clothing - the world we inhabit and know - conceals a “null energy which is merely the power to clothe and so disguise itself.” Immanentisms of all kinds tends to “succumb to this model of double disguise, of the real by appearance, but more fundamentally of appearance by the supposedly real.” In any immanentism, there is always “the whole” that is truly real, which functions as a kind of immanent absolute, against which the particulars are set in dualistic fashion.

Only transcendence rescues from dualism.