Three cheers for pantheism

(Well, not quite. But the title got your attention, didn’t it?)

At the hands of one James Poulos, pantheism has gotten some bad press of late, and understandably so. It’s false, for one thing, and damnable heresy, for another. I’m not God; you’re not God; so let’s cut the crap and figure out Who, if anyone, is.

But.

BUT.

It seems to me that anyone who takes Christian orthodoxy seriously has got to allow that a certain sort of pantheism – not the kind where God, or rather the “sense” thereof, has been invented, but the one where

As God is a being absolutely infinite, of whom no attribute that expresses the essence of substance can be denied (by Def. vi.), and he necessarily exists (by Prop. xi.); if any substance besides God were granted it would have to be explained by some attribute of God, and thus two substances with the same attribute would exist, which (by Prop. v.) is absurd; therefore, besides God no substance can be granted, or consequently, be conceived. If it could be conceived, it would necessarily have to be conceived as existent; but this (by the first part of this proof) is absurd. Therefore, besides God no substance can be granted or conceived. Q.E.D.

- is at the very least no less orthodox, which is to say no more damnably heretical, than the alternative, deist-or-theist-I’m-not-sure-but-there-had-to-be-a-watchmaker conception that predominates among another vocal segment of religious imaginaries (e.g.). Whatever exactly a substance is (Have I told the story where that – “Substance”, I mean – was the promised title of an upcoming sermon at a Unitarian church in San Francisco? Sadly I was on a bus and could not get my camera out in time …), God is surely not the only one. Nor, however, and this is a point that needs to be driven home again and again, is He merely one substance among many, one being to be counted among a horde of others, one cause competing with the rest for some elbow room in the nexus. And allowing ourselves occasionally to succumb to the temptations of the former mistake can, I think, help stem the tendency to slip-slide away into the latter. Put only very slightly differently, taking seriously the idea of a a problematic immanence can keep us from giving up altogether on the notion of real transcendence.

Prof. Dupré’s Religion and the Rise of Modern Culture is, once again, instructive. He writes, for instance, of Schelling’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Mythology:

Formerly some scholars considered the most ancient forms of religion, which possess no polytheistic pantheon, to be “monotheistic,” assuming that a pristine revelation had preceded polytheism. The mythological process thereby came to be seen as a corruption of primeval monotheism. For Schelling, however, polytheism, rather than implying a decline of the religious consciousness, constitutes a necessary phase in the mind’s ascent to a spiritual idea of God. The alleged primitive monotheism merely results from a primitive inability to distinguish the sacred from the nonsacred. At the ground of this modern “monotheist” interpretation of this archaic religion lies a theological misconception of God as a being among others. That dualism still survives in modern dogmatic theories, according to which the link between God and the finite consists in a relation of efficient causality between two beings. Such a conception conflicts with the idea, admitted by the same theologies, that God is Being (esse ipsum) and, as such, must in some way include all that is. The idea of God as Spirit, so strongly asserted in the Fourth Gospel, includes, according to Schelling, that God is present in the inmost nature of all beings. Polytheistic mythologies thereby serve the purpose of reintegrating the multiplicity of creation within the divine unity.

And again, this time discussing Schleiermacher’s Discourses on Religion:

It seems unlikely that he [i.e., FS] ever conceived of God as independent of the world. As late as the third edition he writes: “The usual conception of God as one simple being outside the world and behind the world is not the beginning and the end of religion. It is only one manner of expressing God, seldom entirely pure and always inadequate” … He appears to be favoring a Christian Platonic panentheism, according to which God included the world, while at the same time transcending it. If my interpretation is correct, “the Universe” might not be a substitute for God, but God’s worldly manifestation.

Lest it should seem that what we have is only a record of a pair of heresies, the background story is essential. On Dupré’s telling, which is by no means idiosyncratic, the rise of this sort of pan(en)theism among the German Romantics was the product of a pair of related ways of thinking, long present in the Christian West, which came to a head during the Enlightenment. The first, which I discussed earlier, was the rejection of what Dupré calls the “form principle” – roughly the idea, epitomized in Plato’s idealism, that “it belongs to the nature of the real to appear and to do so in an orderly, intelligible way”. The story of how this doctrine came to be rejected will be known by anyone familiar with the history of medieval philosophy: Scotus insisted on the necessity of placing individuality itself among – indeed, as the ultimate member of – the Platonic hierarchy of forms, and Ockham concluded this development by denying that universal forms have any existence at all outside the human mind. It then fell to Galileo, Descartes, and the rest of the Enlightenment thinkers to drive in the final few nails, settling ultimately on the conviction that “[i]nstead of participating in nature’s immanent truth, the mind has to perform a reconstruction of it”. Form was no longer something “inherent in a given nature”, but rather “an ideal to be pursued by human endeavor”.*

The second transition Dupré describes, which is arguably more directly relevant to the questions at issue here, was the rise of a stark separation between the realms of nature and grace:

Nominalist theologies destroyed the intelligibility of the relation between Creator and creature. If creation depends on the inscrutable decision of a God who totally surpasses the laws of human reason, nature loses its intrinsic intelligibility. Grace also becomes a blind result of divine decree, randomly dispensed to an unprepared human nature. The emphasis upon a divine omnipotence unrestricted by rationality results in a “supernatural order” separated from nature’s immanent rationality.

Again, the story here is a familiar one, and the tendency being described manifested itself most clearly in Protestant approaches to redemption, theologies which gave pride of place to “a concept of fallen nature, which grace would not be able to transform intrinsically. God’s ‘imputed’ righteousness, though expressing a change in the divine attitude, left nature right where it found it”. And this, Dupré argues, led directly to the motivation to set up “a natural religion next to one so tenuously linked to nature”.

But – and this is the crucial point for my argument – this latter development, if that is indeed what it can be called, was presaged by the earlier struggle between Aristotelianism and the Christian Platonism (or Neoplatonism) that had dominated the thought of the Church Fathers. Dupré points to the thought of Thomas Aquinas, in particular his understanding of the relation between God and creation, as the place where these tensions came to a head:

In his early works, in which the Neoplatonic influence was still very strong, Thomas had conceived of this relation as consisting primarily in a participation in the divine Being. In the later Summa Theologiae, however, he adopted the causal explanation stating that the act of existing is the effect of a transcendent Cause, whereby creating means “to produce the existence of things” (ST I, q.45, a.6). But if God, defined as pure Being, in the creative act “produces” finite being, God is separated from creation, as an efficient cause is from its effect.

It is this that is the essential issue. Dupré continues:

The concept of causality in Thomas had not yet been reduced to mere efficient causality, as it was to be in most modern philosophy. It even appears to have included some idea of participation. At the beginning of the Summa he writes: “Being is innermost in each thing and most fundamentally present within all things, since it is formal in respect of everything found in a thing. … Hence it must be that God is in all things, and innermostly” (ST I, q.8, a.1). Yet in the reply to the first objection against this position he stipulates how God is present and writes: “He is in all things as cause of the being of all things.” This was a perfectly reasonable answer, but in the context of the later understanding of causality as efficient causality, it could easily be misunderstood to mean: God produces all things as a cause produces an effect.

And misunderstood it was. The challenge for us, in other words, for whom the notion of a non-efficient form of causality is notoriously difficult to get a handle on, is to work to turn that last formulation on its head: God is the cause of the being of all things as the Being that is in all things, and indeed innermostly. Only so can the temptation to regard God as primarily** a pusher of molecules, and so as a mere manipulator of being rather than Being itself, be avoided.

Hence pantheism does have a crucial role to play: not as a resting-place, mind you, but as an element in what is bound to be an inescapable dialectic. “God and gravity” is no better a theological refrain than “God and guns” is a political one: each ranks as one among many what is really the One in Whom the many are found. The temptation to give up altogether on the distinction between creation and Creator, though clearly worthy of resistance in its own right, can aid in resisting potential confusions of a no less problematic – and, for many of us, markedly more tempting – variety. A full trio of cheers would be more than a bit overboard, but the boos and hisses ought really to stop. We’ve got something to learn from the pantheists, too.

***

* But nota bene: “My intention in writing this is not to deny the benefits the nominalist way of thinking brought to the development of science. All too readily, medieval [and Cartesian! - JLS] philosophy had predicted a priori the course of nature on the basis of assumed divine attributes. … Henceforth philosophers could no longer rely on what had to be the nature of a physical process, according to their idea of God’s eternal reason. They were forced to find out how things actually were by empirical investigation. By the same token, however, the delicate medieval balance between philosophy and theology was permanently disturbed.”

** I do not wish to imply that Ms. McGrew regards God primarily in such a way. He may be in the molecule-pushing business too, for all I know, but the point at present is simply that His relation – as it were – to creation is fundamentally of a quite different character than this.

Filed under: philosophy, religion