We are accustomed to looking upon the universities as the loci of scholarly investigation and consideration, but in the centuries before these institutions were born in the West scholarship found its hibernaculum in the great monasteries. The reflections of the ninth century Irish monk, John Scotus Erigena, evidence the vitality extant in these great houses of study and prayer. Erigena is beholden to Pseudo-Dionysius and thus to Plato and Plotinus, but also to a number of the Greek Fathers, the founding theologians of Eastern orthodoxy.
Erigena posits Nature as the supreme reality, indeed, it is all reality. It exists in four forms or species: Nature as that which creates and is not created (God), Nature as that which is created and creates (akin to Plotinus’ Nous), Nature as that which is created and does not create (the cosmos), and Nature which neither creates nor is created (God as the final cause, and resolution).
His work is condemned on the grounds of pantheism. His vindication might have been secured in consideration of his funambulist gyrations wherein he clearly presents his position, and then produces examples and caveats that may well be taken as the contrary. He appeals to reason, then reverts to the authority of scripture and the Fathers. He expostulates God freely creates ex nihilo, then effectively renders God the Neo-Platonic inexhaustible principle of creativity, then invokes Pseudo-Dionysius’ position on indefinability of the divine. The second species of Nature, that which is created and creates, echoes the Neo-Platonic Nous, but is incompatible with the scriptural vision of an uncreated Logos or Word of God. He sets on metaphysical grounds that which Origen had marked on spiritual grounds: damnation cannot endure eternally for the consummation of the universe is a return to the unicity of the divine. Nevertheless, damnation is realized through a spiritualization which exscinds from reality that which is rightly damnable, in which case it might be argued not all is resolved into the primal unity. Further, true to his equilibristic modus operandi, in that final infolding individualities will be by some inexplicable means maintained.
Erigena fosters his ecclesiastical fustigation by attempting to express simultaneously in both philosophical and scriptural ideas a mystical vision of the intimacy extant between God and cosmos. He envisions Nature as a theophany, an unfolding manifestation of the fullness of divine being as loving creativity, as a vitality exhibiting the plenum radiant within the singularity, but in this fulgurant brilliance he dissolves the boundaries twixt creator and creation. His presentation does appear a type of evolutionary pantheism wherein Nature is merely God unfolding in his otherness–the four species of Nature constituting a cyclical movement, from God, returning to God, and in between forming with God the cosmos.
A theory of a “monad” or singular unit expressing itself in multifarious manners will continue to be revisited in varied forms in occidental philosophy. As an endeavour to find that boundary between the vital principle of being and its manifestation, in the exercise to balance the indivisible transcendent, immanent, and dynamic of the divine in and by decocting the eternal to the temporal, levelling the distinctions twixt time and duration, essence and existence, quantum and quality, pantheism in any of its many guises will always fall short in some aspect, not least in terms of traditional Christian iconography. The divine may be all, and all may be in the divine, which is a patently expressed scriptural hope, but as I have marked in sundry places, the blunt “all=god” is an equation, and equations function for things, for mathematical points, not for vitalities. Pantheistic systems are fundamentally wondrous visions of the unicity of the divine and its work, the intimacy of all being, but such artful and rapturous conceptions are not well rendered, or I venture well served, by reduction to theory.
There is, thus, a certain hebetudinous, an insipidity to pantheistic systems. If the ideas of Nature, or Being, or the Real, or God are meant to denote the fullness of all that is, the before of all that is, as well as the beyond of all that is, the primal, the efficient as well as the final or exemplary cause of all that is, we, at least to my sensitivities, are at a loss for the dynamic that conjoins the ever transcendent and always immanent aspects, for the ground, the platform of reality, nature, being. The principle, the cause, the animating power, the “soul” of be-ing is lost in presenting it simply as part, as function, within the sum of reality. The grand equation may reside, be defined, in a tensor, but it needs to be writ out upon something, some platform, be it a mind or a chalk-board. The vermouth in my martini may inform and permeate the gin, but I know they are two distinct items, and I can at once and distinctly appreciate them as such. In the pantheistic position, the leisure to know and appreciate the distinctiveness of platform and presentation, Being and be-ing is befuddled. Theology, both natural and dogmatic, exists primarily for leisure (the receptivity for the cultic, the threshold of the transcending) and for appreciation (the openness to the vitalizing encounter), hence, its place at the heart of “the Sabbath”.
Christianity, with its depiction of God emptying self into creation and rising into its fullness, does stand open to being interpreted in pantheistic terms. Spinoza (admittedly not a Christian) will revisit the conjoining of God and Nature, and with intriguing discipline and calculation detail the how and why of his position. Hegel (in ardent defence of Christianity) will also make the equation, and in exhaustive detail upon detail regarding every detail on the planet trace the unfolding of the divine toward its fullness. Kierkegaard went off to sit before Hegel, and became so revolted by the plodding, diagnostic mathematics of the ceaseless infolding, blending and turning of being that he went off alone, and there deciphered be-ing means to stand out, to “ex-ist”, and so fathered modern existentialism. Whitehead gave the idea of God as the beginning, unfolding, growing together, and drawing forth of reality some twentieth century nuances, and inspired a new generation of theologians trying to find a pathway beyond scriptural literalism or idiom, and the harness of Greek thought that has so long saddled Christian vision.
In the last century, Jesuit priest and palaeontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, with modern insights and sensibilities, stood in a place of wonderment akin to Erigena’s, and also shared in censure. It has been debated whether Teilhard ought to be considered a philosopher or merely philosophical. It cannot be debated that he was a scholar, scientist, and priest, a man of learning and faith, who shied not from expressing the height, the depth, and the breadth of vision and hope his diligently honed gifts gave to his heart and mind. His position, unlike Erigena’s, is clearly not pantheistic. God is the first cause of the universe, a universe in constant evolution, a universe imbued by the Creator with creativity, by its Prime Cause with causality. Energy is our foremost conception of such openness to constant becoming, action, adventure, experimenting, organizing, re-organizing. While its external or tangential aspect may lead to entropy, its internal or radial aspect leads to ever greater complexity, and so to consciousness with its fruits of knowledge, lucidity and freedom. The foundational causality within being is at first uncertain of itself, branching out in sundry directions until it finds the point of its intensification in the human mind. Here it begins a convergence, a psychic thrust toward the co-operation of the species, a vitalizing unification evidenced in the socially concrescent use of resources and knowledge, of world and mind. The evolution of the planet which produced the biosphere, the radiance of life forms enwrapping the planet, now gives way to its hominization, to the rise of a “noosphere”, a mind-sphere, which expands the bounds of being human until that movement transcends into the Christo-sphere wherein the heart and mind of the Holy will inform and bring man to the Omega point, the prime cause become not only the final and exemplary cause, but reality.
On logical grounds in may be argued that Teilhard’s idea of the world becoming ever more interiorized is a presumption, one possible direction on one planet within a cosmos in evolution. On logical grounds it must be admitted every toss at a theory in philosophy as well as in science is a presumption, an assumption founded in acceptable, useable, parcels of understanding–until some other appear and demand our attention and adherence.
Teilhard faced ecclesiastical censure because Rome clearly saw the relativism inherent in his understanding. Evil, as with Erigena and Origin, has an end point, the Omega. Salvation may not reside in evolution, but in having a Christ-mind, but this Christ-mind, a type of Pauline mystical body, acting on grace, the presence of God in the freedom and lucidity of the mind of man, utilizes evolution and progress, and seeks out the divine in and through history. Our understandings of God, his Christ, and morality are all items evolving within the evolution of man. Organizations, born to maintain order, are not inclined to admit the relativity of the items given to their control, their bureaucracy, their raison d’etre.
In Part one of this series it was noted that Rome in the nineteenth century, faced with the modern mind’s enfilade of philosophical ideas that were realigning the boundaries of theological statements, decided to control the terminology and vision of its theology by declaring the ideas and terms of thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas as its official paradigm. Thomas effectively had had the final word. I recall attending a lecture while in seminary during which a fellow student interrupted the reverend doctor to ask how the item being presented related to Teilhard’s vision. A series of sentences were exchanged until the esteemed scholar behind the lectern insistently pounded his fists upon the Thomist text as he reiterated it over and over finally bursting into tears as he plangently pleaded before God how a mind so quizzed by a theory condemned could ever presume to present itself to Holy Order. Perhaps there is hope, the student-inquisitor did presume; when last I heard he was being addressed as the Most Reverend.
Perhaps there is not hope. Joseph Ratzinger, before he became cardinal and team Vatican’s enforcer for doctrinal orthodoxy, wrote some works on dogmatic theology. I know them only in English translation (and translations are not always stylistically true), however, Ratzinger’s presentations are crystalline in their clarity and occasionally glorious and delightfully brilliant in their enunciation. Nevertheless, they tell us nothing more than Thomas did seven hundred years prior. Evolution? The transcendence of the divine may be eternally impassible and unchanging, but the immanence of the divine is equally passible and changing, and its dynamic endlessly open—and this is orthodoxy. To paraphrase Erigena in modern parlance: is the divine open to evolution? Why else would the Cause of Causes imbue creation with causality if it were not open to change, to evolution, to growing freedom and lucidity? The crux is to decipher for today—in a world of plural societies and visions visibly moving, converging–how to celebrate that.
Allow me to return to the issue of divining the bounds of being, and the notions of pantheism it is prone to produce. Among the visions proffered by Hinduism is one of a God who sleeps, and in his sleep dreams. The content of that divine dream is all that which we name reality. Aeons pass. The God awakens. The dream vanishes, with and in it our worlds, our gods, our selves. Thus, some claim all our world, ourselves included, is an illusion, as if in the aftermath of Freud and Jung the creative profundity of a dream may be dismissed as mere illusion. Time passes. The God again sleeps. A new dream arises. A new cosmos is born.
I was once dismissingly told the above was the most absurd idea of creation and reality ever concocted. Yet I doubt there has ever thrived a human who has not day-dreamed and conjectured what the world or oneself might be like had a different path been once taken somewhere, by someone. Take that mind-set and multiply it upon a cosmic scale. Do we not find ourselves in a divine dream living out every possibility, every path? Do we not have within this cosmic mind all possible universes realized? Do we not have in the mind of this God that which Hawking’s mind could not long even theoretically contain? Have we not in this Hindu divine of all possible worlds the mind for which Eliot pined when he wrote “Footfalls echo in the memory down the passage which we did not take towards the door we never opened…” The vision of a dreamer-God is a profound portrayal of purist creativity, a God living out every possible experience. Pantheism, in its every possible form, seeks to rehearse the same idea within cosmic theory, but the Hindu sacred narrative tells the vision with a deeper sense of truth, with a more rich and wondrous insight into the dialectics of our being, into the groundwork of our being, into the bounds of Being than any theory shall ever be equipped to convey.