On Christian Monism / Non-Dualism / Pantheism

Some Preliminaries

As those following for awhile know, I've recently had published two papers at *Religious Studies* defending what I called "Orthodox Panentheism." It's a panentheism, insofar as it tries to account for a sense in which God is "in" the world, and the world "in" God, while maintaining God's transcendence of the world. It's Orthodox in the sense of being based in the patristic tradition and, in particular, on St. Gregory Palamas's distinction between the essence and the energies of God.

St. Gregory Palamas and Adi Shankaracharya

In the beginning of the initial paper, I distinguish panENtheism from pantheism by identifying the latter with the view in which God and the world are identical, thus denying God's transcendence. In drawing this distinction, I was following standard practice in recent philosophical discussions. However, I do think this way of drawing the distinction is problematic. And the main reason it is problematic is just that "pantheism" in this sense doesn't really pick out a philosophical doctrine that has ever been held by any major intellectual tradition.

When one thinks of a "pantheist" philosophical tradition, perhaps one thinks most readily of Hinduism, and in particular of the Advaita tradition. But it is just false to say that even in this strictest non-dual tradition, God and the (empirical) world are simply *identical*. For one thing, this leaves out the role of *maya*/illusion in Hindu thought. The primary idea is not that the empirical world is either completely unreal or completely identical with God, but that we tend to be subject to the illusion that the world is an independently existing thing with a fundamental reality of its own.

Discussing this point in *The Advaita Worldview*, Anantanand Rambachan insists that "What Sankara emphatically denies is that the world has a reality and existence independent of *brahman*. The world derives its reality from *brahman*, whereas the reality of *brahman* is independent and original. The world does not have an existence of its own, whereas *brahman's* existence is its own" (77). Swami Prabhavananda is even more explicit: "‘Though he has become all this, in reality he is not all this.’ The words are characteristic of all Indian thought, and will be echoed and re-echoed in later pages of this book. There is, properly speaking, whatever appearances may sometimes suggest to the contrary, no pantheism in India. The Hindu sees God as the ultimate energy in and behind all creation, but never, either in ancient or in modern times, as identical with it" (*The Spiritual Heritage of India*, 33).

In the light of this confusion, it may be best to leave behind the word 'pantheism' and stick to 'monism' or 'non-dualism,' which I think has been the general tendency in philosophical discussions. I'm a bit hesitant to do so, for the simple reason that there is Biblical and Patristic precedent for the statement "God is all", which is the basic meaning of 'pantheism.' Still, it is probably a lost cause at this point.

At any rate, the main point here is to discuss the prospects for a Christian monism/non-dualism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I think the prospects are good; I think some version of monism is probably the best of conceiving the God/world relationship. This is just a very brief dump of some ideas for future development.

First of all, there are certainly some statements from Scripture and Tradition that seem to point in that direction. In Scripture, probably the most famous bit of data is the statement of St. Paul in Acts 17:28 that "in [God] we live, and move, and have our being." He seems to be quoting a Greek poet here, but elsewhere he says in his own voice, "For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, *and in Him all things consist*" (Colossians 1, emphasis added).

Perhaps the most telling statement, though, is one of the least known. In the book of Sirach, after the author spends nearly 50 verses discussing the wonders of creation and God's activity within it, he ends with this stark statement at 43:27: "Though we speak much we cannot reach the end, and the sum of our words is: 'He is the All.'" In the Greek of the Septuagint, that is, God (*o theos*) is said to be 'the all' (*to pan*). It doesn't get much more clear than that.

In the theological tradition, the statements are more striking and numerous. I've collected more than I can put here, but here are some of my favorites. I think when you put then all together, they make at the very least a very compelling case for consideration:

"For He is the Maker of all these things, filling all with His essence, containing all things, filling the world in His essence, yet incapable of being comprehended in His power by the world; good, upright, princely, by nature not by adoption; sanctifying, not sanctified; measuring, but not measured; shared, not sharing; filling, not filled; containing, not contained…." - St Gregory the Theologian (Fifth Theological Oration)

“God always *is*…And he gave himself this name when he consulted with Moses on the mountain. For he contains and possesses the whole of existence in himself, without beginning or end, like an endless, boundless Ocean of Being, extending beyond every notion of time and nature.” - St Gregory the Theologian (Oration 38.7)

"Who, looking at the universe, would be so feeble-minded as not to believe that God is all in all; that he clothes himself with the universe, and at the same time contains it and dwells in it? What exists depends on Him who exists, and nothing can exist except in the bosom of Him who Is." - St Gregory of Nyssa (Catechetical Orations)

"He binds the whole universe totally to himself. He generates everything from out of himself as from some omnipotent root and he returns all things back to himself as though to some omnipotent storehouse...He keeps them thus in a transcendent bond and he does not permit them either to fall away from him or to be destroyed by being moved from their perfect home." - St. Dionysius

"This Godhead is given to all beings, and, overflowing with the participations of all goods, is distinguished unitedly, and is multiplied uniquely, and becomes multiform without going out of the One; as, since God... gives being to beings and produces the whole that exists, that One is said to become multiform by the production of many beings from him, while That remains no less, and one in the multiplication...by the undiminished flow of his unlessened impartations." St. Dionysius the Areopagite (DN 2.11)

”Where can we learn anything certain and true about God, about the world as a whole, and about ourselves? Is it not from the teaching of the Holy Spirit? For this teaching has taught us that God is the only Being that truly is.

...

"God both is an is said to be the nature of all things, in so far as all things partake of him and subsist by means of this participation...In this sense he is the Being of all beings, the Form that is in all forms as the Author of form, the Wisdom of the wise and, simply, the All of all things. Yet he is not nature, because he transcends every nature; he is not a being because he transcends every being; and he is not nor does he possess a form, because he transcends every form...He is everywhere and nowhere; he has many names and he cannot be named; he is ever-moving and he is unmoved and, in short, he is everything and no-thing." - St Gregory Palamas (150 Chapters)

Putting all of these together, what emerges is a view according to which God is in some sense within everything, and everything is in some sense within God. God is the only being that truly exists, and everything else that exists has its being only derivatively, by sharing in God's being. Being itself is, for St. Gregory, one of God's energies - i.e., something God *does*. Our existing, then, *just is* God's acting in a certain way. This is more or less the view I try to spell out in more detail in my panentheism papers.

Is this a type of monism or non-dualism? It depends, of course, on what you mean by that. But it seems more or less to match up with basic view of Shankara's advaita as exposited by Rambachan: strictly speaking only God truly exists, non-divine reality is not illusory, but it's reality is derivative and dependent, and it is to fall into a type of illusion not to see this. As St. Maximus puts it "No being can permanently isolate itself through its own particularity or through the drive of its nature toward some other end; rather, everything remains, in its very being, bound without confusion to everything else, through the single, enduring relationship of all to their one and only source.”

More research needs to be done. In particular, I am very fascinated by the similarities between Shankara's distinction between higher Brahman (Brahman as absolute, transcendent, formless) and lower Brahman (Brahman as manifest, creator, etc.) and St. Gregory Palamas's essence/energy distinction. They seem to track similar things for similar reasons, but I haven't been able to find a single paper that discusses them together in any length. (And, fwiw, Rambachan seems to think the distinction in Shankara may be a mistake.)

More also needs to be done on the compatibility between the Christian understanding of creation and Advaita Vedanta. Rambachan summarizes the vedantic Brahman-World relationship in four key points:

• Non-dual brahman alone exists

• Brahman is the sole cause of the world

• Brahman does not undergo a change of nature to produce the world

• World is non-different in essential nature from brahman (*ibid*, p. 72).

The discussion above I think shows that the Christian conception can be consistent with the first three points. But the fourth certainly looks like a non-starter. Christianity tends to stress an absolute distinction between the essence of God and everything else. The whole point of St. Gregory's distinction is to insist that God is utterly unique and non-participable in his essence, whereas he is known and participated in by his energies. But, of course, much more would need to be said about what that fourth claim means, exactly. Is there a way of understanding it that is consistent with the Christian picture? If not, then does that mean the Christian picture is not really non-dual after all?

These are questions I hope to take up in future work.