Asymmetrical participation. Your getting at and offering an articulation of what I’ve been trying dearly to find the language for. In a sense as much as analogy can be productive as skaladom said it leads to us comprehending god (in the old sense of the word) rather than God comprehending is. Analogical language with hart sometimes starts to sound univocal. But in some ways don’t we have to say in a sense there it is also equivocal? Does that make sense? But you nailed it on the head. It’s the I am God in potency but not God but a contingent created being. I guess this is where I think only a qualitative monism can hold. Anyway thank you for your clear explanation of extremely hard to express ideas!
I guess I mean by qualified dualism most simply we are and are not God in the manner you expressed it. Walking the tightrope between Barth and pantheism.
I don’t know ramanuja well but from what I’ve gathered he’s willing to say something similar to what you did. It allows for us to “be God” and yet distinct and thus atman and the world are granted some degree of dignity. But as you said, it’s walking a razors edge and I feel like Harts trying to be responsible but many of his followers grossly oversimplify the idea to the point where we can just think we are God and the epistemic switch will be hit and we’ll essentially in my mind it becomes prelest. They ignore the entire praxis assumed as necessary for divinization.
I do think that getting the "monism" right will be crucial to Hart's project. It's worth noting that he doesn't give many ontological or metaphysical details in the Light of Tabor series—I was eager for those details, but I think his hesitance to commit also makes sense. He has to thread a very narrow needle.
To that end: can you tell me more about your preferred qualified monism? Would this mean something more in the Ramanuja vein, as opposed to Shankara's more absolute approach? I also think Russelian "neutral" monism is worth further exploration, especially is it would allow more distance between consciousness and being than monisms generally do...
One thing that strikes me as odd about this approach, though, is that the thinkers involved seem to have a very full and fleshed-out concept of God, before they get around to finding how difficult it is to talk about that God. They sound pretty sure they know their object, before finding themselves unsure what can be literally said about it. That strikes me as methodologically backwards; wouldn't it make more sense to start from a rather minimal concept first, and only flesh it out to the extent you find things that you can actually say about it?
I guess the answer is that they are not operating in a vacuum, these are Christian theologians who first accepted their religion, with its scriptures amd tenets, and then proceeded to philosophize about it. Which is fair enough as things go, but then what they're producing is inseparably tied to that tradition. I don't think it makes sense to try to make it more abstract and general after the fact, when a specific religion has been allowed to shape not only the answers but even the questions.
Given the excellent name of this blog, I'd dream of an approach where the starting point is something relatively minimal, like the intuition of some kind of transcendence/immanence, which occurs East, West, North and South... and instead of jumping to put everything into a singular external entity called God, it could be examined through a phenomenological lens, prior to objectification.
With that kind of enquiry, one might find that the questions of transcendence/immanence and of the origin of the universe are "prima facie" quite unrelated, given that one occurs in the present moment, and the other at a definite point of time in the distant past!
Could you say more about the extent to which this discussion about theological language has relied on an already-determined concept of God? I'm not sure I'd agree. I will also say that the only quote I drew on in the piece above was a summary of the views of Plotinus—who was not a Christian. I also did not address Scripture, Jesus, sin, salvation, etc. I actually intentionally made this series as doctrinally neutral as I could! But perhaps I unconsciously smuggled in something you found questionable.
Now, if you are referring to the idea of God as creator as the main aspect of the fleshed-out concept of God that I assume but do not prove, then you would be right to point out that I simply assumed that idea for this series—and I made no effort here to metaphysically or phenomenologically argue the point. I *do* actually have a piece already written (but not yet published) making the metaphysical case for seeing God as the creator—perhaps I will publish that soon, and if so I will try to remember to link it in this thread.
One thing I did want to point out, though (and, again, I did not clarify this in any of the posts in this series, so that's on me) is that the doctrine of God as creator is not a claim about some pat event—though, unfortunately, all too many Christians, especially Evangelicals, do seem to take this view ("creationism" and "intelligent design" arguments—which I disagree with wholeheartedly—certainly seem based on this understanding of the metaphysics of creation). But a genuinely orthodox Christian (not to mention Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Neoplatonist, etc.) view of creation states that God is always and continuously creating the cosmos. Creation is not an event in the past; it is an eternal metaphysical relation between what is created (contingent) and what creates (absolute). But as I mentioned above, I will have more to say about this in a future post.
In any event, please let me know if this addresses your critique—and if not, I'd love to hear more details on your concerns!
On second thought, I'm not sure I buy your argument of continuous creation, just on semantic grounds. Even if things happen just as you described, with God remaining involved at every moment to keep the Universe up and going, there is a large structural package of information in the Universe that only needs to be decided once. In modern physical terms, that would be the mathematical shape of the laws of physics, the constants, and the initial conditions. That makes the initial act of creation significantly different from what comes after. It seems to me that this justifies calling these two moments by two different words, in which case "creation" would more naturally apply to the initial act, and its ongoing continuation could be called something different like "sustaining".
I am not claiming, however, that God "remains involved" in every moment, but rather that every moment metaphysically depends on God utterly. (from my perspective, though these two clauses are semantically similar, they are ultimately profoundly different kinds of claims.) On the view I am presenting, the cosmos, in every moment and place, is completely contingent, and "always" depends on God as the absolute ground and base of existence.
So: the laws of physics, for example, are not some kind of entity which God created "back then" in the past, and which now exist by their own substantial being, but are rather something that God continues to will into being.
While we certainly can try to distinguish the initial "moment" of creation from God's sustaining work, the point is that (within my own interpretation of Abrahamic theology, which is shared by many though not all of my coreligionists) the two "acts" are *one and the same*. Metaphysically, there is no distinction between creation and sustaining on the part of God.
This can perhaps be seen more clearly when we remember that when we say God is infinite and eternal, we are *not* saying that God has never-ending spatial or temporal extension, but rather that God utterly transcends space and time, even while they are contained "within" God (in the sense of being metaphysically contingent upon God as the absolute). This means that every place and every moment is equally and always "present" to God. For God, the past and the future are always fully present. God's relationship with the world is in no way changed by time, precisely because time is one of the things about the world that God creates; time is itself contingent upon God's absoluteness.
Again, obviously, plenty of people can disagree with this understanding. My own opinion is that this position is the best (and probably the only consistent) understanding of Abrahamic thought. My suspicion is that it also does a fair, if imprecise, job of accounting for views in many other traditions, such as Vedanta within Hinduism, possibly certain versions of Mahayana thought (especially certain modes of Tibetan thought), certain interpretations of Daoism, etc.
But of course, I can only vouch for this view from my own perspective! Anyway, I hope this clarifies my views. I didn't get into any of this in the posts themselves, because I tend to write too long and so I made an effort to limit myself to the discussion of language about God, rather than metaphysics per se. But I do hope to write more on this going forward.
Re-reading your posts, I do see significant efforts to be neutral. But I still find it striking that the point of departure is "what can be said about God", implying on one side an epistemological difficulty, but on the other side quite a certainty that there is something best referred to by the capitalized singular noun "God". The word itself seems to imply a definite entity, unique in its class; more on the side of a person-like entity than an abstract principle, and at first blush belonging to the object side of the subject-object divide. On top of that, goodness and creation are immediately predicated on it.
To be clear, I don't object to any of these per se, I think it's a perfectly valid and very common way to conceive of the spiritual realm. And you can find elements of this in many traditions. But you can also imagine the polar opposite, such as an experientially oriented approach that would tend to go "hey, there seems to be something subtle and profound when we pay attention 'that' way, I wonder what it's like at the end of the road, if there is one". The old Indian sramana tradition, before they solidified into Buddhism, Jainism and a few other now-extinct sects, might have been a good example of this.
This all sounds incredibly nitpicky, and really, I appreciate your summaries of Western lines of theological thought. I wouldn't be nitting those picks if the blog's excellent name wasn't "phenomenology East and West".
I guess if I stand for something here, it will be for intellectual pluralism; I tend to think of the space of possible conceptions as exceedingly vast, way beyond what any human culture has probably been able to dream up, and within those conceptions that we have dreamed up, I see them more as complementary to each other. What is so central in one way of seething things can be rather peripheral, or altogether absent, in another.
You're certainly right to point out that my approach here was not phenomenological (something I admit sheepishly in footnotes in parts 1 & 2). Though I did use Phenomenology in the title of the substack, I have to admit that I will sometimes venture outside of it.
These posts are certainly an example of that: I wanted to explore how we use language about God (in English) and how simply paying attention to that use of language leads us into quite a lot of difficulty and some (seeming) paradoxes.
I certainly agree with your appreciation of pluralism—and I definitely do plan to approach topics from a diversity of viewpoints on this substack. That said, I can only speak from my own perspective, and my perspective is definitely shaped by my spiritual, theological, and philosophical upbringing and interests.
Finally, I found your summary of the word "God" above interesting, precisely because I actually do *not* hold the majority of the views you seem to think I assume: in my view, God is *not* an entity, belongs to no class, and is most certainly not an object. Furthermore, even though I think its fair to say that I would see God as more of person than an abstraction, note that for me, even "person" here can only be used analogically, and indeed God does include all the reality of an "abstract principle" as well.
If I may be so bold, I think you may be trying to read my position through the lens of English-language analytic philosophy (though I certainly might be in error!). *If* this is the case, I must insist that such a lens would fatally distort the picture I am trying to present.
All fair enough! I wasn't so much reading your views into you, as into the tradition(s) you were quoting from, and even that was probably a bit of an overreach. I try to read between the lines, because I find that lexical and grammatical choices tell a lot about the implied mindset, and I often find questions of emphasis and centrality more telling than questions of assertion. But it's easy to add one's own projections that way.
My lens is quite eclectic; the spiritual traditions I know best are the Indian ones, but I don't formally belong to one at this point. As a westerner I also have a background in science, which is quite analytic, but I haven't studied analytic philosophy systematically. And a bit of a postmodern mistrust of "narratives" probably crept in too.
In any case, happy to stay around as a local non-Abrahamic gadfly :)
In reading Julius Lipner's The Face of Truth, which seeks to give a robust summary of Ramanuja's theology, I came across this paragraph, which I thought might be of interest to you. I think it tries to say something like what I outlined above, but through a Vedantin lens:
"The idea looms large in the Vedanta that nothing can come into being or continue to exist independently of Brahman. Ramanuja, like most of the classical Vedantins, was deeply impressed by this idea. There could be no ontological 'creational' gap between Brahman and the finite order. The world in its origin and in its continuing being has Brahman alone for its existential support; it participates ontologically in Brahman, it is 'of Brahman'. Ramanuja believed that this religious insight could be done justice to from the viewpoint of divine causality, as it were, by speaking of the world itself as the 'effected' Brahman, the result of Brahman himself in his causal state. In this way the ontological continuum between Brahman and the world (or its individual components) could be preserved."
Julius Lipner, The Face of Truth, 38. (Hat tip to Darran for recommending this book!)
I'm very happy to have your presence in the comments! Though I think we will often disagree, you continue to raise important questions and clarifications (and it is dialogue, after all, that yuelds true learning). Thanks for taking the time, and I hope to see your name in the comments section again soon! I think your voice wil be especially important once I engage in more writing on Vedanta thought...
Asymmetrical participation. Your getting at and offering an articulation of what I’ve been trying dearly to find the language for. In a sense as much as analogy can be productive as skaladom said it leads to us comprehending god (in the old sense of the word) rather than God comprehending is. Analogical language with hart sometimes starts to sound univocal. But in some ways don’t we have to say in a sense there it is also equivocal? Does that make sense? But you nailed it on the head. It’s the I am God in potency but not God but a contingent created being. I guess this is where I think only a qualitative monism can hold. Anyway thank you for your clear explanation of extremely hard to express ideas!
I guess I mean by qualified dualism most simply we are and are not God in the manner you expressed it. Walking the tightrope between Barth and pantheism.
I don’t know ramanuja well but from what I’ve gathered he’s willing to say something similar to what you did. It allows for us to “be God” and yet distinct and thus atman and the world are granted some degree of dignity. But as you said, it’s walking a razors edge and I feel like Harts trying to be responsible but many of his followers grossly oversimplify the idea to the point where we can just think we are God and the epistemic switch will be hit and we’ll essentially in my mind it becomes prelest. They ignore the entire praxis assumed as necessary for divinization.
I do think that getting the "monism" right will be crucial to Hart's project. It's worth noting that he doesn't give many ontological or metaphysical details in the Light of Tabor series—I was eager for those details, but I think his hesitance to commit also makes sense. He has to thread a very narrow needle.
To that end: can you tell me more about your preferred qualified monism? Would this mean something more in the Ramanuja vein, as opposed to Shankara's more absolute approach? I also think Russelian "neutral" monism is worth further exploration, especially is it would allow more distance between consciousness and being than monisms generally do...
Well explained, thanks!
One thing that strikes me as odd about this approach, though, is that the thinkers involved seem to have a very full and fleshed-out concept of God, before they get around to finding how difficult it is to talk about that God. They sound pretty sure they know their object, before finding themselves unsure what can be literally said about it. That strikes me as methodologically backwards; wouldn't it make more sense to start from a rather minimal concept first, and only flesh it out to the extent you find things that you can actually say about it?
I guess the answer is that they are not operating in a vacuum, these are Christian theologians who first accepted their religion, with its scriptures amd tenets, and then proceeded to philosophize about it. Which is fair enough as things go, but then what they're producing is inseparably tied to that tradition. I don't think it makes sense to try to make it more abstract and general after the fact, when a specific religion has been allowed to shape not only the answers but even the questions.
Given the excellent name of this blog, I'd dream of an approach where the starting point is something relatively minimal, like the intuition of some kind of transcendence/immanence, which occurs East, West, North and South... and instead of jumping to put everything into a singular external entity called God, it could be examined through a phenomenological lens, prior to objectification.
With that kind of enquiry, one might find that the questions of transcendence/immanence and of the origin of the universe are "prima facie" quite unrelated, given that one occurs in the present moment, and the other at a definite point of time in the distant past!
Skaladon,
Thanks for reading and the comment!
Could you say more about the extent to which this discussion about theological language has relied on an already-determined concept of God? I'm not sure I'd agree. I will also say that the only quote I drew on in the piece above was a summary of the views of Plotinus—who was not a Christian. I also did not address Scripture, Jesus, sin, salvation, etc. I actually intentionally made this series as doctrinally neutral as I could! But perhaps I unconsciously smuggled in something you found questionable.
Now, if you are referring to the idea of God as creator as the main aspect of the fleshed-out concept of God that I assume but do not prove, then you would be right to point out that I simply assumed that idea for this series—and I made no effort here to metaphysically or phenomenologically argue the point. I *do* actually have a piece already written (but not yet published) making the metaphysical case for seeing God as the creator—perhaps I will publish that soon, and if so I will try to remember to link it in this thread.
One thing I did want to point out, though (and, again, I did not clarify this in any of the posts in this series, so that's on me) is that the doctrine of God as creator is not a claim about some pat event—though, unfortunately, all too many Christians, especially Evangelicals, do seem to take this view ("creationism" and "intelligent design" arguments—which I disagree with wholeheartedly—certainly seem based on this understanding of the metaphysics of creation). But a genuinely orthodox Christian (not to mention Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Neoplatonist, etc.) view of creation states that God is always and continuously creating the cosmos. Creation is not an event in the past; it is an eternal metaphysical relation between what is created (contingent) and what creates (absolute). But as I mentioned above, I will have more to say about this in a future post.
In any event, please let me know if this addresses your critique—and if not, I'd love to hear more details on your concerns!
On second thought, I'm not sure I buy your argument of continuous creation, just on semantic grounds. Even if things happen just as you described, with God remaining involved at every moment to keep the Universe up and going, there is a large structural package of information in the Universe that only needs to be decided once. In modern physical terms, that would be the mathematical shape of the laws of physics, the constants, and the initial conditions. That makes the initial act of creation significantly different from what comes after. It seems to me that this justifies calling these two moments by two different words, in which case "creation" would more naturally apply to the initial act, and its ongoing continuation could be called something different like "sustaining".
I am not claiming, however, that God "remains involved" in every moment, but rather that every moment metaphysically depends on God utterly. (from my perspective, though these two clauses are semantically similar, they are ultimately profoundly different kinds of claims.) On the view I am presenting, the cosmos, in every moment and place, is completely contingent, and "always" depends on God as the absolute ground and base of existence.
So: the laws of physics, for example, are not some kind of entity which God created "back then" in the past, and which now exist by their own substantial being, but are rather something that God continues to will into being.
While we certainly can try to distinguish the initial "moment" of creation from God's sustaining work, the point is that (within my own interpretation of Abrahamic theology, which is shared by many though not all of my coreligionists) the two "acts" are *one and the same*. Metaphysically, there is no distinction between creation and sustaining on the part of God.
This can perhaps be seen more clearly when we remember that when we say God is infinite and eternal, we are *not* saying that God has never-ending spatial or temporal extension, but rather that God utterly transcends space and time, even while they are contained "within" God (in the sense of being metaphysically contingent upon God as the absolute). This means that every place and every moment is equally and always "present" to God. For God, the past and the future are always fully present. God's relationship with the world is in no way changed by time, precisely because time is one of the things about the world that God creates; time is itself contingent upon God's absoluteness.
Again, obviously, plenty of people can disagree with this understanding. My own opinion is that this position is the best (and probably the only consistent) understanding of Abrahamic thought. My suspicion is that it also does a fair, if imprecise, job of accounting for views in many other traditions, such as Vedanta within Hinduism, possibly certain versions of Mahayana thought (especially certain modes of Tibetan thought), certain interpretations of Daoism, etc.
But of course, I can only vouch for this view from my own perspective! Anyway, I hope this clarifies my views. I didn't get into any of this in the posts themselves, because I tend to write too long and so I made an effort to limit myself to the discussion of language about God, rather than metaphysics per se. But I do hope to write more on this going forward.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply :)
Re-reading your posts, I do see significant efforts to be neutral. But I still find it striking that the point of departure is "what can be said about God", implying on one side an epistemological difficulty, but on the other side quite a certainty that there is something best referred to by the capitalized singular noun "God". The word itself seems to imply a definite entity, unique in its class; more on the side of a person-like entity than an abstract principle, and at first blush belonging to the object side of the subject-object divide. On top of that, goodness and creation are immediately predicated on it.
To be clear, I don't object to any of these per se, I think it's a perfectly valid and very common way to conceive of the spiritual realm. And you can find elements of this in many traditions. But you can also imagine the polar opposite, such as an experientially oriented approach that would tend to go "hey, there seems to be something subtle and profound when we pay attention 'that' way, I wonder what it's like at the end of the road, if there is one". The old Indian sramana tradition, before they solidified into Buddhism, Jainism and a few other now-extinct sects, might have been a good example of this.
This all sounds incredibly nitpicky, and really, I appreciate your summaries of Western lines of theological thought. I wouldn't be nitting those picks if the blog's excellent name wasn't "phenomenology East and West".
I guess if I stand for something here, it will be for intellectual pluralism; I tend to think of the space of possible conceptions as exceedingly vast, way beyond what any human culture has probably been able to dream up, and within those conceptions that we have dreamed up, I see them more as complementary to each other. What is so central in one way of seething things can be rather peripheral, or altogether absent, in another.
You're certainly right to point out that my approach here was not phenomenological (something I admit sheepishly in footnotes in parts 1 & 2). Though I did use Phenomenology in the title of the substack, I have to admit that I will sometimes venture outside of it.
These posts are certainly an example of that: I wanted to explore how we use language about God (in English) and how simply paying attention to that use of language leads us into quite a lot of difficulty and some (seeming) paradoxes.
I certainly agree with your appreciation of pluralism—and I definitely do plan to approach topics from a diversity of viewpoints on this substack. That said, I can only speak from my own perspective, and my perspective is definitely shaped by my spiritual, theological, and philosophical upbringing and interests.
Finally, I found your summary of the word "God" above interesting, precisely because I actually do *not* hold the majority of the views you seem to think I assume: in my view, God is *not* an entity, belongs to no class, and is most certainly not an object. Furthermore, even though I think its fair to say that I would see God as more of person than an abstraction, note that for me, even "person" here can only be used analogically, and indeed God does include all the reality of an "abstract principle" as well.
If I may be so bold, I think you may be trying to read my position through the lens of English-language analytic philosophy (though I certainly might be in error!). *If* this is the case, I must insist that such a lens would fatally distort the picture I am trying to present.
All fair enough! I wasn't so much reading your views into you, as into the tradition(s) you were quoting from, and even that was probably a bit of an overreach. I try to read between the lines, because I find that lexical and grammatical choices tell a lot about the implied mindset, and I often find questions of emphasis and centrality more telling than questions of assertion. But it's easy to add one's own projections that way.
My lens is quite eclectic; the spiritual traditions I know best are the Indian ones, but I don't formally belong to one at this point. As a westerner I also have a background in science, which is quite analytic, but I haven't studied analytic philosophy systematically. And a bit of a postmodern mistrust of "narratives" probably crept in too.
In any case, happy to stay around as a local non-Abrahamic gadfly :)
In reading Julius Lipner's The Face of Truth, which seeks to give a robust summary of Ramanuja's theology, I came across this paragraph, which I thought might be of interest to you. I think it tries to say something like what I outlined above, but through a Vedantin lens:
"The idea looms large in the Vedanta that nothing can come into being or continue to exist independently of Brahman. Ramanuja, like most of the classical Vedantins, was deeply impressed by this idea. There could be no ontological 'creational' gap between Brahman and the finite order. The world in its origin and in its continuing being has Brahman alone for its existential support; it participates ontologically in Brahman, it is 'of Brahman'. Ramanuja believed that this religious insight could be done justice to from the viewpoint of divine causality, as it were, by speaking of the world itself as the 'effected' Brahman, the result of Brahman himself in his causal state. In this way the ontological continuum between Brahman and the world (or its individual components) could be preserved."
Julius Lipner, The Face of Truth, 38. (Hat tip to Darran for recommending this book!)
I'm very happy to have your presence in the comments! Though I think we will often disagree, you continue to raise important questions and clarifications (and it is dialogue, after all, that yuelds true learning). Thanks for taking the time, and I hope to see your name in the comments section again soon! I think your voice wil be especially important once I engage in more writing on Vedanta thought...
My father is still working and so am I? Isn’t that something Jesus said.