Monism

Evgueny Lampert

Lampert, Evgueny. The Divine Realm: Towards a Theology of the Sacraments. London: Faber and Faber, 1944, pp 11-12.

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The relation between God and the world has been conceived from two opposite points of view: pantheistic and atheistic monism, and the dualistic interpretation of the universe.

According to the former the world is self-sufficient: it can be understood from within its own nature and possesses the hidden roots of its own being. The substance of the world is its only and ultimate foundation. However we interpret it, whether materialistically, as a cosmic substance-matter or energy, or spiritualistically, as a spiritual monad or system of monads, the common feature of all forms of monism remains the idea that the world is self-sufficient in its own being, and is therefore ultimately itself the absolute.

Monism either conceives the world as God; or else it is simply a form of atheism, by which divine being beyond, above and even in the world is denied. In neither case does the problem of the origin of the world arise, for it is as such irrelevant to absolute being: absolute being is eternal and has no beginning or end. Pantheistic monism is in fact not even primarily a heresy against God, but first and foremost a heresy against the world, against man, who is absorbed and annihilated in the sea of an all-embracing “pleroma.”

Pantheism may well admit the distinction between noumenal and phenomenal being, between substance and energy; in general, there is room for every sort of distinction within the self-sufficient world-unity. Various shades of this world-outlook are conceivable — from a mystical-poetical conception of the universe, to a prosaic, empiricist, mechanistic and materialistic one. There is possible here the development of mysticism, which can assume even subjective religious forms. Yet, fundamentally, the monistic world-outlook is atheistic, in as much as it is incapable of really transcending the world or of conceiving an issue beyond its limits; it includes the world as a self-sufficient whole immanent in its own parts, and thus loses the vision of the true and real idea of the world.

Moreover, pantheistic monism may have two opposite tendencies — either to a divinization of the cosmos, or to its negation, either to a divinization of man, or to his negation. And these opposite tendencies may even meet.

The idea of the world exists only in relation to the beyond, to the “other-one,” to God. The world is possible because as such its foundation lies beyond its own being. No man can stand fast in the world with unquestioning satisfaction, or contemplate himself and it, without becoming aware of a call to the highest. He lives in the tension of a cogency, in revolt against mere worldly evidence, and yearns perpetually for the ultimate meaning of things. The very possibility, inherent in the creature, of questioning about its own meaning and existence, points to the transcendent, to the “other-one,” and in so questioning the creature reads the transcendent cipher of being. Monism is always the denial of this transcendent-immanent mystery and dialectic of being, its dialogical character as two-in-one, i.e. what in Christian language is called God-manhood.

Thanks to the fact that various layers and depths within the immanent whole are distinguished, pantheism may be unaware of its own atheistic nature. History knows religious-philosophical systems which were considered both by their adepts and their followers as deeply religious: such in ancient philosophy were Stoicism, and especially Neo-Platonism; such are Brahminism and Buddhism; such are certain recent forms of naturalism. Their common and characteristic feature is that the idea of the creation of the world by God is alien to them all. Sometimes, indeed, even a creation of the world is admitted, yet only in the sense of its self-realization through its own higher energies or “hierarchies” in their relation to the lower ones. In the heart of the one cosmic whole there arises a succession of worlds — a cosmic evolution of unknown origin and moving towards infinity. This auto-evolution of the world, however, does not alter the essential monism of this outlook. There is here above all a fundamental difference from the Christian revelation, in that it is deprived of the idea of creaturehood. The relation between Creator and creation, and all the opportunities of really facing the problem of the world’s existence implied in this relation are entirely absent in pantheism, for which the world remains self-evident and self-sufficient.