Pantheistic Evolution
Chapter IV: Pantheistic Evolution
Article I: Statement of Various Views
I. General Idea. According to this doctrine, the Principle of all things does not exist of itself, is not eternal, nor really distinct from the world, but is a “Becoming” — a constant evolution which, determining itself, constitutes the universe of things. God, on this view, is Creative Evolution.
This system of absolute evolution contains both a negative and a positive element.
The negative element comprises: (1) the denial of the existence of God the Creator, the first principle being conceived as an immanent tendency to development, with no need of a transcendent Creator; (2) the denial of the order of supernatural truth and life, since human reason is itself only a participation of the immanent principle, with no need of supernatural intervention; (3) the denial of the very possibility of miracles, the immanent principle being neither really nor essentially distinct from the universe, and therefore incapable of intervening in it.
The positive element holds that all religious phenomena are explicable by the development of the “religious sense,” and that religious truth changes as man himself changes.
II. Empirical Evolution, or Monism. On this view matter is the principle of all things, and from matter come life and rationality in turn. Haeckel, in his Die Weltraetsel, lays down both the general and the religious philosophy of Monism.
General Philosophy. There is nothing above or beyond phenomena. An indirect proof is drawn from the law of the Conservation of Energy: it is claimed that this physical and chemical principle would be rendered false if vegetative, sensitive, and rational life had any real influence upon the physico-chemical order; hence vegetative, sensitive, and rational life must be mere results or developments of material laws. A direct proof is drawn from the supposed resemblance between spiritual and material phenomena: the mutual affinity between hydrogen and oxygen, for example, is treated as a rudimentary inclination which, by development, leads to the affinities found in higher organisms.
Religious Philosophy. The negative part denies the supernatural order outright. The positive part holds that Science can satisfy the needs of speculative reason, and will one day be able to satisfy the needs of the human heart as well; until then, religion retains a certain usefulness. Positive religion, on this view, consists in the cultivation of the true, the beautiful, and the good; Christianity, resting as it does on the Supernatural, is not itself true, and Art as such does not properly belong to it. The good that Christianity does teach consists merely in observance of the precepts of the Natural Law, and is therefore entirely independent of Christianity. The true, the beautiful, and the good thus constitute, respectively, Science, Art, and Sociology, and education, on this scheme, should be entirely secular.
III. Idealistic Evolution. The supporters of this school were Spinoza, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel; Zeller and Fischer have written its history. In Germany, Baur, Ewald, Reuss, Knobel, and Wellhausen applied its principles to Hermeneutics; in France, Renan and Loisy wrote from a broadly Hegelian standpoint.
In this system the principle of development is no longer matter, but an idealistic principle called the Absolute, which becomes conscious of itself in human reason. Traced backward, the germ of the system is found in ancient Gnosticism.
1. Gnosticism. On this view God does not act directly upon the world, but through Aeons sprung from Him, emanating from the Divine Substance. A demiurge made spirit, but associated matter with it; hence a spirit — Christ — superior to the demiurge, came to reconcile the world to God.
2. The Pantheism of Spinoza. His views are found in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and in the Ethica.
Theory of Substance. The “universal” of the mind is here held to have an objective existence — an extreme realism which leads directly to Pantheism. There is only one Substance, and Substance is not merely being subsisting of itself, but “being subsisting from itself” (ens a se subsistens); Substance is therefore uncreated and eternal, that is, God.
Theory of Knowledge. The human mind is held to possess a natural intuition of the Divine essence, so that no supernatural order is needed. This Ontologism of Spinoza recurs also, in different degrees, in the works of Malebranche and, to some extent, of Rosmini.
Theory of Happiness. The love of the human mind for God is, on this system, simply a part of the infinite love with which God loves Himself; personal immortality is therefore impossible.
3. The Pantheism of Fichte (1762–1814). Fichte’s pantheism derives partly from Kant and partly from Spinoza. He found, with some justice, a difficulty in applying Kant’s subjective categories to objective phenomena: why, he asked, should reason apply to certain phenomena the category of causality rather than some other, such as substance? Must this not be determined by objective considerations perceived in the phenomena themselves — in which case how can the category of causality remain purely subjective? Fichte further observed that the Kantian system simply takes for granted the objective reality of the things perceived by sense (that is, their mere existence, though their extension, duration, and the like are held to be subjective). He therefore laid down the following principles: (1) we have knowledge only of our own conscious states; (2) we objectify the laws by which our activity is limited, and call that limitation “matter”; (3) so-called higher truths, such as the existence of God, are purely subjective ideas.
Fichte taught that the ego and the non-ego mutually determine one another, endeavouring to span the gulf between them by distinguishing, within the subject, a twofold ego — one finite and empirical, the other transcendent. This transcendent ego is something real and ideal, namely, “the practical reason of human society”; and he allowed that the non-ego might be a mere nonentity. But the critic may equally ask whether the ego itself is not also a nonentity — and Fichte’s earlier system does indeed end in nihilism. In his later teaching he affirmed the reality of both ego and non-ego, and their ultimate identity, an absolute subject-object; so that whatever we experience within ourselves, and whatever we perceive without, are alike manifestations of one and the same absolute mind, that is, of the Deity — not mere creations of His power, but actual modifications of His very essence.
As an instance of the difficulties that arise from applying human attributes to God univocally rather than analogously, Fichte writes in his Critica cujuslibet Revelationis (Opera, V): “The living God is Humanity itself. I shrink from a religious conception which regards God as a personal being… a personal God would be, as it were, a percipient subject limited by the object known, and thus God would not be infinite.” In Catholic philosophy, by contrast, the attribute of personality is applied to God only in an analogous sense, which involves no such limitation.
4. The Pantheism of Schelling (1775–1841). Schelling exposes the flaw in Fichte’s teaching by pointing out that the transcendent ego cannot itself produce the non-ego, or object; ego and non-ego are correlative, both presupposing the Absolute, and both being one and the same essence running parallel to each other. Hence the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of spirit alike have their root in the Absolute.
In Schelling’s system, the infinite mind, or Absolute, passes through various forms of objective and unconscious development, as seen in matter, motion, and organism, and attains a state of self-consciousness in sensation, reflection, and freedom, being carried by practical movement — through individuality, society, and history — to the highest point of self-realisation in Art. Here the unity of the ideal and the real is achieved; but it is clear that in this system all real difference between God and the universe is lost, there being one single enormous chain of necessity.
Schelling later attempted to modify his pantheistic views in what he called his “Positive Philosophy,” in which he claimed to find, within Christianity itself, the same threefold movement running through his whole system: a first movement, Catholicism, the religion of Peter, objective in its nature; a second movement, Protestantism, the religion of Paul, appealing to subjective consciousness; and a third movement, a “Perfect Religion,” the religion of John, the union of all in love.
Schelling’s system, in the end, rests: (1) upon an illusion, in that a mere process of mental generalisation is turned into a real and essential principle of things themselves; (2) upon a paralogism, confounding the order of knowledge with the order of existence; (3) upon an exaggeration, converting the harmony that truly exists between intelligence and reality into an outright identity of the two; and (4) upon a gratuitous hypothesis, placing all truth in reason itself, and thereby making reason equal to God.
The development of these systems may be summarised: with Spinoza, a pantheistic Ontologism, an intuition of God; with Kant, an agnostic subjectivism, a negation of that intuition; with Fichte, an identity of ego and non-ego; with Schelling, the Absolute becoming the universe.
5. The Pantheism of Hegel (1770–1831). Hegel’s Absolute is neither infinite substance, as with Spinoza, nor an infinite subject, as with Fichte, nor an infinite mind, as with Schelling: it is a perpetual process, an eternal thinking without beginning and without end. According to Hegel, this logical process passes through three movements: first, bare thought — logic itself, with its doctrines of being, of essence, and of notion; second, thought externalising itself — the philosophy of nature, comprising mechanics, physics, and organism; and third, thought returning to itself — the philosophy of mind, subjective (anthropology, psychology, will), objective (jurisprudence, morals, politics), and absolute (art, religion, philosophy).
Hegel’s teaching turns upon two fundamental points: the unity of contradictories, and the identity of being and thought.
Hegel’s Criticism of Schelling. Hegel judged, rightly enough, that Schelling’s Absolute explains nothing, since the transition from the unity of the Absolute to the multiplicity of phenomena is nowhere accounted for in Schelling’s scheme. Hegel proceeds to explain how the multiplicity of phenomena arises logically and necessarily out of primitive unity, summing up his explanation thus: “The Absolute is nothing else than the process of universal becoming, and especially the ideal process.”
Hegel’s Logic and Metaphysics. Spirit, he holds, is better known than matter, since we have an immediate cognition of spirit but not of matter; hence the exemplar and cause of all phenomena is to be found in the development of spirit and of thought, not of matter. Hegel accordingly identifies logic with metaphysics. How does the development of ideas proceed? The first idea is that of universal being; but universal being, being wholly indeterminate, is at the same time non-being. Hence “being is non-being,” and from this contradiction there arises, logically and necessarily, the “becoming” — the synthesis by which thesis and antithesis, being and non-being, are reconciled. Being becomes nature when it externalises itself, and becomes spirit when, by the help of consciousness, it makes itself the object of its own thought. Thus the principle of the identity of contradictories is, for Hegel, the law of higher reason and reality, while the classical principle of contradiction is merely the law of a lower reason, confined to abstract and static ideas.
Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature. The process of “becoming,” when not yet conscious of itself, is matter, in which attraction and repulsion stand opposed; from matter come, in turn, vegetative, sensitive, and finally rational life.
Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit and Religion. The subjective, or individual, spirit was the first appearance of spiritual life in primitive man; the objective, or social, spirit appeared later in history — Hegel notoriously finding in the ancient Hebrews “a people chosen by God” only in the sense of a stage in this social-spiritual development, before it passed, in turn, to the Greeks and then the Romans. The absolute spirit, finally, guides the whole development of both individual and social spirit, and is true spiritual life; it appears in three forms — Art, Religion, and Philosophy — corresponding to the degree in which the merely material element is eliminated, so that Art itself ascends through Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Music, and Poetry. Religion stands as the antithesis of Art, dealing with the spiritual as Art deals with the material. Hegel traces, in this manner, a whole sequence of antitheses and syntheses in the history of philosophy and religion — the antithesis of the Sophists and Socrates resolved in Platonism; of Plato and Aristotle, in the emanation-theory of Plotinus; of Greek philosophy and Christianity, synthesised by St. Augustine after the manner of Plato, and by St. Thomas after the manner of Aristotle; of the sensism of Hume and the spiritualism of Descartes, synthesised by Kant; and of Fichte and Schelling, synthesised by Hegel himself, whose Transcendentalism stands opposed to Empiricism, though, from the standpoint of Theism, it is in fact identical with Immanentism. Philosophy, as the highest, speculative synthesis, unites Art and Religion; and Christianity itself, for Hegel, is the synthesis of Oriental and Grecian religious inspiration, inasmuch as its object of worship is a God-man.
Hegelian Philosophy and Christianity. On Hegel’s own principles, the great dogmas of Christianity are systematically reduced to instances of his dialectical law. From the dogma of the Trinity, only the suggestion of a threefold relationship is retained — the subject knowing, the object known, and the knowledge itself, that is, the union of subject and object; Günther, a Semi-Rationalist, later attempted on this basis to “demonstrate” the Trinity, claiming that in God there must be Subject, Object (or Word), and the union of both, namely the Holy Spirit. From the dogma of Creation, only the truth that the infinite somehow “exists with” the finite is retained, Hegel identifying the infinite and the finite outright in the process of “becoming” — a contradiction, indeed, but only, on his principles, of the lower, not the higher, reason. From the dogma of the Incarnation, something is retained which suggests a most excellent form of spiritual life manifested in Christ; but the miracles attributed to Him are not, on this system, credible. And in the doctrine of the Redemption, God is said to have “emptied Himself” and become man, afterward drawing all things to Himself by His Passion and death — here again the fundamental law of Evolution is found in a contradiction of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.
In Hegelianism, then, the Deity is a process forever going on but never accomplished; nay, the Divine consciousness is held to be absolutely one with the advancing consciousness of mankind. The hope of immortality perishes, since death is but the return of the individual to the Infinite, and moral obligation itself perishes with it. In the hands of some of Hegel’s followers — Strauss, Bruno Bauer, Baur, Conradi, Feuerbach — this Pantheism reaches the point to which it ever tends, becoming fully synonymous with atheism; and the whole of the New Testament’s historical content is treated as a designed mythology.
Article II: Critique of Pantheistic Evolution
Pantheistic Evolution teaches that the principle of the universe develops from an imperfect to a more perfect state. In materialistic evolution, vegetative, sensitive, and intellectual life all come from matter; in idealistic evolution, from the idea of universal being come all subsequent higher forms; in both, the less perfect is made to give rise to the more perfect, and an innate tendency to being comes from no antecedent being at all. Measured against the first principles established in the previous chapter, this system involves a sixfold denial.
1. Denial of the Principle of Efficient Cause. Pantheistic Evolution has no reason of being (raison d’être) either in another or in itself — not in another, since the system admits no transcendent cause; not in itself, since evolution is, by its own account, a transition from indetermination to determination, from power to act, and this transition has no reason of being within itself. Indetermination is not determination, nor does it contain determination in any higher sense; power cannot of itself become act, but requires the agency of an extrinsic cause, itself already in act.
2. Denial of the Principle of Final Cause. The evolutionary process, in its materialistic form, is attributed to the material cause alone, in which the process is, at first, unconscious and blind; hence there is no place for a final cause. In its idealistic form, the process supposes an unconscious tendency whereby lower forms develop into higher ones; but such a tendency, unaccounted for, has no raison d’être of its own.
3. Negation of the Principle of Change. Pantheistic Evolution identifies the subject of change with the process of change itself, making it not merely the subject but the very principle of development of all things. But, as already shown, the principle of change requires a subject distinct from the change itself, otherwise the change would be, as it were, a flowing without any fluid, a flying without wings, a thought without a thinking subject. The true subject of physical change is matter, which does not exist of itself, but is contingent, and as such postulates, for its own creation, an Infinite First Mover. “Creative Evolution” thus proves to be evolution without a cause, without an end, and without a subject.
4. Denial of the Principle of Reason of Being. Since the principle of Reason of Being is closely allied to the principle of Efficient Causality, this denial follows directly upon the first conclusion above: on the hypothesis of Pantheistic Evolution, the perfection of things arises from no cause. On the contrary, that being, intelligence, and morality actually exist proves the existence of a Necessary Being who possesses, in a more eminent way, all the perfections visible in creation.
5. Denial of the Principle of Substance. Sensible phenomena presuppose an underlying reality — the substance in which they inhere. But the advocates of Pantheistic Evolution maintain that there is no substance at all, but only a universal “becoming” without any subject; material bodies, on this view, are mere bundles of accidents, or phenomena, bound together by some unknown law.
6. Denial of the Principles of Contradiction and Identity. These principles postulate that being is being, and not not-being; but the followers of Hegel teach that being and not-being are, in the process of “becoming,” one and the same, so that truth is only relatively true, and error only relatively erroneous. The definition of truth is, on this view, no longer the time-honoured “equation of intellect and object,” but rather an “equation of mind and life”; and since life is ever changing, truth itself must change with it.
Thus Pantheistic Evolution denies all the first principles of reason, together with the four causes correlative to them: it is a process without a subject, without an efficient cause, without an intentional end, and it jumbles together, as though identical, contraries and contradictories that can never be reconciled. The denial of first principles is defended, on this system, only on the ground that the law of Contradiction is a law merely of the lower reason, which makes use of abstract and static ideas, and not a law of the higher reason, which regards reality as always changing, and in which contradictories are somehow the same.
In opposition to this tissue of absurdities, Catholic philosophy shows that the first cause of all things is subsisting Being, absolutely simple, immutable, infinite, and essentially transcending the universe. God is seen, as it were in a mirror, by reflection from sensible things through the light of first principles; and Pantheistic Evolution itself, examined in that light, furnishes an irrefragable proof, by reductio ad absurdum, of the very existence of the transcendent God who is the source of the universe and of the Supernatural Order.
Two objections, drawn from certain twentieth-century writers, deserve brief consideration.
First Objection. Major: That which is greater cannot be produced from that which is less. Minor: But motion is greater than immobility. Conclusion: Therefore motion cannot be produced from immobility, but exists of itself, and is the principle of all things.
Answer. The difficulty here arises from ascribing to God, who is infinite, finite qualities without the necessary corrections — the so-called antinomies of Kant and of Spencer rest on the same error. Unchangeableness and immobility in God — the Unmoved Energeia of Aristotle — mean that God does not pass from power to act, from potentiality to achievement, since He is Pure Act. His immobility, therefore, is not the immobility of inertia, but the immobility of infinite perfection — an idea enshrined in the ancient liturgical hymn of Adam of St. Victor: “Amor Patris Filiique / Par amborum, et utrique / Compar et consimilis; / Cuncta reples, cuncta foves, / Astra regis, caelum moves, / Permanens immobilis” — “Love of the Father and the Son, equal to both and like to each, Thou fillest and sustainest all things, Thou rulest the stars and movest the heavens, remaining Thyself unmoved.” The answer to the syllogism is now clear: the major premise is true; but the minor requires a distinction — motion is indeed greater than the immobility of inertia, but not greater than the immobility of infinite perfection. The same distinction must be applied to the conclusion.
Second Objection. Major: If an effect is produced extrinsic to the First Cause, there is more of being than existed before. Minor: But by Creation, created things were produced extrinsic to the First Cause. Conclusion: Therefore, after Creation, there was more being than existed before — that is, more is produced from less.
Answer. Since God, who is the plenitude of being, contains in an infinitely higher way all the perfections of creatures, actual or possible, and since creatures derive their perfections from Him, God-and-creatures together are not more perfect than God alone. The Infinite is not made greater by the addition of the finite. After Creation there are more beings, but not more being. As St. Thomas writes: “Created goodness, compared to Infinite Goodness, is like a point compared to a line” — a point being position without magnitude, and its addition to a line does not increase the line’s quantity. Just as students who grasp the teaching of St. Thomas do not thereby make his teaching more perfect than it already was, so no addition of finite creatures adds to the perfection of the Infinite Being from whom they proceed.