Monothelitism

“ I am using a license here in that I do not take pantheism in the ordinary sense, but understand it as the idea that everything can be an agent of divinity, can be a mediator, by my elevation of it: just as monotheism, on the contrary, indicates a belief that there is only one such agent bestowed for us in the world, one alone that is appropriate to the idea of ​​a mediator, and through which God alone lets himself be heard, which I am compelled to choose for myself: for without which monotheism would not be true religion. ”

“ But are there not superhuman forces also, such as religious men of the pluralistic type we have been considering have always believed in? Their words may have sounded monistic when they said "there is no God but God"; but the original polytheism of mankind has only imperfectly and vaguely sublimated itself into monotheism, and monotheism itself, so far as it was religious and not a scheme of class-room instruction for the metaphysicians, has always viewed God as but one helper, primus inter pares, in the midst of all the shapers of the great world's fate. ”

“ So long as the mathematical conception of number, whether one or many, is applied to deity by a theological system, it has not yet “arrived at the highest perfection of which it is capable.”
For let us inquire what a monotheism is? It [188] is a belief in one god as distinct from the belief in several gods. In other words, it applies to God the mathematical concept of unity, a concept which can only come into cognition by virtue of contrasts and determinations, and which forces therefore the believer either to Pantheism or anthropomorphism to reconcile his belief with his reason. ”

“ For the purpose of this argument I take Monotheism to be the doctrine ‘that the universe owes its existence and continuance in existence to the wisdom and will of a supreme, self-existent, eternal, infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, righteous, and benevolent personal being, who is distinct from and independent of what he has created.’ By wisdom and will I mean that which I should mean using the same words of any animal able to perceive, remember, reflect, judge, and determine, and active in that ability or those abilities. ”

“ Since the monads do not metaphysically act upon one another, what rational purpose is subserved by the real existence of so many? The mere dream of them by one would do as well. Why should each monad have the three peculiar characters of intelligence, passion, and will, or why should any phenomena be as they are? In short, the absolutely inexplicable pervades the whole system, while one supremely antirational nominalism is supreme over the whole. Continuity is nothing but that modification of generality which is proper to the logic of relatives; and generality is of the essence of rationality. ”

“ Monotheism, on the contrary, the rigid consequence of the doctrine of one normal human being—consequently the belief in a normal God, beside whom there are only false, spurious Gods—has perhaps been the greatest danger of mankind in the past: man was then threatened by that premature state of inertia, which, so far as we can see, most of the 180other species of animals reached long ago, as creatures who all believe in one normal animal and ideal in their species, and definitely translated their morality of custom into flesh and blood. ”

“ Finally, reason in striving to understand and explain the world tends towards mono theism. The mind cannot be expected to recognize the unity of God until it recognizes the unity of nature; when it sees nature to be a whole, a universe or cosmos, it cannot but form a conception of it which will be panthe istic, if the unity of substance, law, and evolution be alone acknowledged, and monotheistic if a unity of causality, rational plan, and ethical purpose be also apprehended. ”

“ It may be seen from the reality and truth of this theory how much mistaken those men are who hold, owing to their religious prejudices or to their systems of logic and history, that monotheism was the first intuition of man, or at any rate of the privileged races. [Pg 105] This is altogether impossible, since such an opinion is opposed to the genuine development of the intelligence, to its primitive constitution and progress, and to the essential solidarity of human and animal nature. ”

“ Monotheism and Monodiabolism, both originating simultaneously in the monistic tendencies of man's mental evolution, together constitute a Dualism which to many is still the most acceptable world-conception. Nevertheless, it is not the final goal of human philosophy. As soon as the thinkers of mankind become aware of the Dualism implied in this interpretation of the world, the tendency is again manifested towards a higher conception, which is a purely monistic view. ”

“ The advance of modern science carries us irresistibly to what some German philosophers call monism, but I prefer to call it monotheism. In getting rid of the Devil and regarding the universe as the multiform manifestation of a single all-pervading Deity, we become for the first time pure and uncompromising monotheists,—believers in the ever-living, unchange [Pg 23] able, and all-wise Heavenly Father, in whom we may declare our trust without the faintest trace of mental reservation. ”

“ With the rise of monotheism our moral sanction came to us as the command of a supreme ruler of the universe; in the age of abstract philosophy as metaphysical principles, and in the age of science these should be recognized as lessons of experience. ”

“ Is the Christian view of the world inseparably bound up with this ancient outlook, or can it be purged of it? Is the moral fervor and idealism of Christianity its essential and permanent contribution, a contribution to a rational appreciation of human life? Probing still deeper, let us not be afraid to ask ourselves whether the surgery which this thesis implies does not involve the daring of a break with theism as only a developed form of primitive animism? In ethical monotheism, may not the monotheism be the protecting envelope from which the butterfly has already flown? ”

“ In the long run we know that the mob triumphed, and that every religion of the West was orientalised, every superstition and neurotic tendency developed, and philosophy was brought to its knees utterly debased, until its function was merely to be the apologist of all that superstition taught or did. For the present, rational thinking men were alive. When they died, exclusive monotheism came, carrying before it, like a flood, the greatness of the former world. ”

“ But Monotheism here stands in a very different relation to science.’ ‘If a uniform mode of work on a large scale is attributed to the one God, the mutual connexion of things in their origin and action becomes not only a possible, but even a necessary consequence of the assumption. ”

“ All these sad but insuperable facts—truly the dark side of nature—are made intelligible to religious faith by amphitheism; they are the "works of the devil," who opposes and disturbs the perfect moral order in the world of the "good God." For pure monotheism which knows only one God, one perfect highest being, they remain unintelligible. If, with a monotheistic creed, any one still continues to talk of the moral order of the world, he in so doing shuts his eyes to the undeniable facts of history, both natural and civil. ”

“ As to the issue between monotheism and trinitarianism, it has long since become obsolescent, if not obsolete. The forward-looking men and women of our time are absorbed in far other issues—Is the mechanical theory propounded by science the ultimate account of things? Is the world in which we live a blind machine? Is man a chance product of nature, like the beasts that perish? Not is God one in unity or is He a Triune God, but, is there a God at all? ”

“ The monophysite psychology plunges men into the opposite error. An undiscriminating craving for unity among the phenomena of psychic life prevents any recognition of the dual character of experience. Monophysitism is blind to the difference between person and nature because it places all psychic experiences on the one level. Determined to find unity in its ideal, it seeks an inappropriate unity, the mathematical unity, the unity that excludes plurality. ”

“ But the Metaphysical spirit, strictly so called, did contribute largely to the advent of Monotheism. The conception of impersonal entities, interposed between the governing deity and the phaenomena, and forming the machinery through which these are immediately produced, is not repugnant, as the theory of direct supernatural volitions is, to the belief in invariable laws. ”

“ The monist asserts that the world exists only in the mind of the thinker. It is an illusion of the senses. The duty of the philosopher is to overcome the illusion by turning away from the world of sense and fixing his mind on true being; by ascesis and contemplation he endeavours to attain the ecstatic state, in which the illusion of the world's reality disappears, and the potential identity of man with the universal spirit becomes actualised in experience. Similarly, for the monophysite, the humanity of Christ was a creation of the senses. ”

“ Procedure, that is proper in the sphere of logic, is out of place in psychology and theology. Concepts such as person and nature must be kept fluid, if they are not to mislead. If they are made into hard and fast ideas, into sharply defined abstractions, they will be taken to represent discrete psychic entities, external to one another as numbers are. The elusive, Protean character of the inter-penetrating realities behind them will be lost to view. The most signal defect of monophysite method is its unquestioning submission to the Aristotelian law of contradiction. ”

“ In the measure in which reason advances either on the path of scientific investigation or of philosophical specu lation, polytheism must retreat and disappear; in the measure in which it discerns unity, order, system, moral government, indications of spiritual character and design in the world, monotheism must rise and spread. ”

“ The theory has been held in the past, and is still held, that monotheism was the primitive form of religion and that the worship of many spirits or many gods is a corruption of primitive thought due to man's intellectual feebleness or to his moral depravity. It is urged that such a monotheistic system was the natural one for unsophisticated man. ”

“ If Man is the same in all ages, differing only in degree of development, and this element is natural to him, then we must expect to find such expressions of it in the poets and philosophers; in the religion of India, Greece, and Rome. Men of the same spiritual elevation see everywhere the same spiritual truth. If this doctrine of Monotheism proceed from tradition alone, then it must be more clear and distinct as we approach the source of the tradition. ”

“ In fact, pure monotheism is a conquest of the metaphysical spirit, which traces back the series of secondary causes to discover the first cause, rather than an intuition of popular consciousness.
This survey of ascending generalisation is somewhat schematic, and has been presented as an ideal restoration, though all its elements have been taken from reality. Some nations have attained the first stages only; others have, with much difficulty, passed beyond them; others have passed through several at a bound. Perhaps the evolution of religious ideas has not been in any two cases identical. ”

“ Now, it is essential to Monadism that the monads, because ultimately independent, shall only seem to interact. They appear to form a single world with a history in which each distinct state of each monad is a stage. But really, while the successive states of the individual monad are, what they seem to be, a connected process of development, the various processes do not make up a single-world history at all. They only seem to do so by an inevitable illusion. Hence the unity of the whole system must after all be not only ideal, but, strictly speaking, imaginary. ”

“ Ordinary monistic idealism leaves everything intermediary out. It recognizes only the extremes, as if, after the first rude face of the phenomenal world in all its particularity, nothing but the supreme in all its perfection could be found. First, you and I, just as we are in this room; and the moment we get below that surface, the unutterable absolute itself! ”

“ Monism allows for no such things as 'other occasions' in reality—in real or absolute reality, that is.
The difference I try to describe amounts, you see, to nothing more than the difference between what I formerly called the each-form and the all-form of reality. Pluralism lets things really exist in the each-form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational. ”

“ But this is one of the characteristic tenets common to all systems of idealism; in the historic nomenclature of philosophy it has never borne the name of monism. The contrast between monism and pluralism is concerned with the theory of ultimate (or primary) reality. A pluralist does not in the least believe (as the reviewer apparently does) that “the ultimate interest of philosophy is to find the One Reality that lies behind the innumerable diverse phenomena of the world.” ”

“ Though every form of religion holds something of undying truth, the evolutionist must classify religions. He must regard a monotheistic faith as representing, in the progress of human thought, a very considerable advance upon any polytheistic creed; monotheism signifying the fusion and expansion of countless ghostly beliefs into one vast concept of unseen omnipotent power. And, from the standpoint of psychological evolution, he must of course consider pantheism as an advance upon monotheism, and must further regard agnosticism as an advance upon both. ”