Abstract

'Transcendence' may be thought of not so much as an attribute of God, as a motif that sets standards for theological and philosophical discourse. The standards it sets stand over against its partner term, 'immanence,' which it both relies upon and negates. The relationship between these two partner terms constitute the bare bones of the philosophy of religion and theological discourse. The philosophy of religion refers to at least two types of divine transcendence: cosmological and epistemological. The former describes God's relationship with the world, while the latter refers to the silent quality of God's hiddenness or mystery. I argue that the two types of transcendence mirror gender stereotypes ambiguously. ;I begin by demonstrating and problematizing how various types of theology retain a 'transcendence' that separates God from Life. In the next chapter, I explore the way that transcendence and immanence have been posed against each other as masculine to feminine and then problematize the various ways that feminists have tried to correct this problem. I, then, turn to Hegel both constructively and critically. First, I show how he provides a possible landscape for exploring the question of divine transcendence, through his master/slave dialectic and his notion of the Unhappy Consciousness. Then, I demonstrate the way in which Hegel's view of women reinscribes a problematic dichotomy based on gender that renders Spirit internally divided. ;Chapter 4 examines this divided Spirit by explicating the standpoints of the Hegelian 'man' and 'woman' in terms of his master/slave dialectic. Here I demonstrate that, although cosmological transcendence can be read as masculine, epistemological transcendence seems more parallel to the standpoint of women and make suggestions for correcting this situation. Then in the final chapter, I look at possible ways to think about the two types of divine transcendence when these are no longer attached to gender stereotypes. Since the defence of 'divine transcendence' has been standard procedure in the philosophy of religion when it is focused on the possibility of God's existence, I see my work as yielding a preface for a critical philosophy of religion that sees the question of God as a matter of perspective