What is monism?

The second major worldview category comes from the East. It is called pantheistic monism, which says, "All is one, one is all, and all is God." Hinduism and Buddhism share important elements of this worldview. The New Age movement is, in great part, a Western adaptation of Hindu and Buddhist religious and worldview thinking.

Pantheism is the belief that is current in the heathen world today. It asserts the eternity of matter. It declares that mind and matter are one. It declares that there is no God apart from nature or the universe. The pantheist believes that he himself, the flowers that grow in the field, the fruits on the trees, the water that flows to the ocean, the ocean itself, the elephant, the cow—in short, organic and inorganic matter are all God, immanent and inherent as part of the Supreme Being.

Clearly if phenomena disguise, instead of revealing, knowledge is impossible even to man endowed with mental powers beyond other creatures on earth; phenomena would be worse than useless. It is the Maya that suits an Oriental Pantheist, as Mr. A. argues, not an observer unprepared for its moral and social corollaries. Brahm in that scheme is alone the true existence, and man peculiarly under illusion who thinks of himself as separate from Brahm, the ever-acting power, who wishes, designs, discriminates and causes (Bhagavat Gita, § x.; Upanishads), though inconsistently man bears the penalty of demerit, and has pain and pleasure, while God does all. This is not universal identity. Such "inconsistency is far from being the effect of a transient lapse of attention. It has a far deeper cause. The reality of which phenomena are the appearances are not to the Agnostic, as to us, a substance proper to each thing taken individually and specially indicated by appropriate appearances. On the contrary, the Reality is one universal substance, sole and continuous in time, sole and continuous in space, which appears within us, which appears without, which is in itself the All-Being. Hence appearances are not truly appearances, but disguises — the antitheses of appearances, which are the manifestations of one person to another, or of a thing to a person; whereas disguises are expedients for preventing an appearance from conveying the truth; and in the case supposed for deceiving parts of the same being by giving them an impression that they are distinct from the whole, and hold intercourse with it. If there is in existence but one substance, and no other being to which it can be manifested, and if all appearances are no more than tremors in that one substance, then manifestly each appearance indicative of a separate individual, is a sheer delusion, and phenomena in the total are properly called all-nothingness. They may seem to be heavens and earth, forces and motion, form and thought, war and repose, but they are only curls of foam on the same stream; not even that — all only oscillations on the same cord; not even that — they are All-nothingness.

It was a strange compound — oriental philosophy and divine truth. It would seem as if the philosopher of that day sought to enlarge the range of his view by borrowing from truth, but perverting what he found, to make it fit into his own system. But he was no nearer the truth; he was a worse man; for he had heard the truth, and loved not but made merchandise of it. How much greater the guilt, and the evil consequences, of teaching as truth of God the vain speculations of men! This was done in the first ages of the church; and they who did it pretended to be the only ones who had knowledge and true understanding of the word. Hence their name — Gnostics. Under this, as a general term, very many different parties arose; but they all united in this, they denied the Son. Infidelity was the true name of their philosophy. The leading idea, that is the starting point (which is very like that of Brahminism), is "absolute unity," a something which was both spirit and matter: from this unity was evolved the whole universe of manifold beings. Matter became separate from spirit, and so in consequence the principle of evil. The spiritual beings emanating from the original monad became imperfect through contact with matter, and were held in thrall by it. Does it not occur to us that the inventor of this fable had seen the Mosaic account of Creation and of the Fall, but had so distorted the facts that the truth was lost?

Dravidian polytheistic fertility religion and the early Aryan Vedic polytheistic religion laid the foundations of what later became Hinduism. While the earliest Vedas were blatantly polytheistic and devoted to rituals and sacrifice, the later Vedas showed a movement toward pantheism (from the word "pan," meaning "everything," and "theos," meaning "God"). According to pantheism, God did not create the world; God is the world, along with everything in it.

Although the earlier Hindu scriptures had mentioned many gods, the highest goal, according to the later Vedic literature, was union with Brahma, the impersonal absolute. The priests of Brahma became known as the Brahmins, who performed the ritual duties for the community, which were demanded in the early Vedic writings to appease the many gods. The Brahmins also maintained a monopoly on the higher truths of pantheistic Brahmanism. Brahmins grew more and more powerful until they became the highest social class.

The writer has lately been in India and heard it argued for the eternity of matter, that matter is simply an extension of God, that God is in each flaming bush, in mankind, in animals, in trees, in streams, in fact in everything. Pantheism is the doctrine that God and the universe are identical.

The chapter opens with GOD. The word used in the Hebrew is Elohim, a word, remarkably enough, of plural form. This is the more striking when we remember that the Hebrew has, besides a singular, a dual form for its nouns. Dual signifies two, plural therefore signifying three or more. Yet the verb "created" is in the singular! Why this apparent breach of grammar? Evidently in order that in the very introduction to our knowledge of God we may receive a hint of the truth afterwards plainly revealed that He is a Trinity in Unity — three Persons yet one God. We have only to read verse 2 to discover mention of the Spirit of God, and later in the New Testament we find the active work of creation consistently attributed to the Lord Jesus, the Son. "His Son … by whom also He made the worlds" (Heb. 1:2). The first verse of the Bible, therefore, contains a denial of Unitarianism.

It also contains a denial of Pantheism — an idea of the ancients and of the heathen world, but more recently revived in Christendom as one of the buttresses of "New Theology." The god of the Pantheist is simply the spirit or essence of Nature. He expresses himself in Nature, but is not to be known or even conceived of as outside of or apart from Nature. The Pantheist professes a god who is immanent in Nature but not transcendent above it. The God of verse 1 is clearly One outside of Nature and infinitely above it, seeing He made it, and therefore existed before it. From Him all that which we call Nature proceeds.

There is no necessary relation in causing: indeed the idea of causing denies it (though I am aware there are those who hold a law of order and no being, but this is not properly a cause). When there is an I a Being - who causes, there is no necessary relationship but the contrary; in the caused being there is. If it can be said, I am, I create, I destroy, there is absoluteness and no necessary relation. Aristotles, and Origens, and Fichtes may deny it, because they introduce time (that is, my mode of being, into God's) to get an idea of how. But if this confusion be avoided, and it is only confusion, creation and absoluteness are not contradictory. The idea of eternal matter is not really possible to us if we reflect; because we, being caused, are so constituted as to feel the need of a cause for existence, forcing us to infer that there must be a self-existent Being, but making it impossible to conceive that mode of existence. Pantheism reduces existence to matter, and so denies absoluteness and unchangeableness.

34 I admit creation is an object of faith, not of knowledge; I can only know it when created. But it is no coming out of God as emanation, and going back. What I am in relation to, God has formed according to the apprehensions of it He has created in me. There is no existence independent of Him, nor place where He is not sustainingly; but He does not exist in it. All these difficulties the simple words of scripture make as plain as possible: "God created"; but "by him all things consist." Their difficulties arose from making pure intellect God. Then you must have the intelligent and the intelligible (that is, ideal objects in the mind at least).

We need not dwell on Mr. Spencer's view of the origin of the Universe, which Mr. A. discusses in his chapter 7. Creation out of nothing does not mean by nothing, which is truly unthinkable, but by God, the Everlasting Being; and this alone satisfies. Even Mr. S. confesses "It is impossible to avoid making the assumption of self-existence somewhere." Just so; reason she-es there must be God; revelation, Who and what He is, as well as that He is. And who could reveal God but Himself, directly or indirectly? It is ridiculously false to say that this is impossible in thought or fact. To treat matter and mind as practically identical is irrational to the last degree, which is eluded, not faced, by calling these "proximate activity," though the phenomena are essentially diverse. Alike from God, they are totally different in themselves. It is here that Mr. Spencer's "illusion" enters, which, if true, would make all science impossible. Mr. A.'s conclusion is: — "The supposition of an Eternal Nothing which produced both mind and matter is unbelievable and inconceivable. The supposition of Eternal matter which produced mind is unbelievable. The supposition of Eternal Mind which produced both matter and finite mind is conceivable and believable, according to reason by infinite weight and probability." It may be well to add that reasoning can only give us a conclusion. Observation gives facts, as in this case divine testimony alone presents the truth to faith. "By faith we understand that the world was framed by the word of God, so that what is seen hath not been made out of things which do appear."

Chap. viii. Mr. A. entitles "Mr. Spencer's replacement of God." Of this unascertained Something (says Mr. A. p. 479), Mr. Harrison says it is impersonal, unconscious, unthinking and unthinkable; while Sir James Stephen calls it a barren abstraction. Whatever else it is, it is neither God nor man. When Mr. Spencer is on his defence, his struggles to escape from the effect of these negations have no other result than that of working him into positions impossible to be held except on the ground of faith in a living God. A self-evolved universe is the theory of Mr. Spencer. His illustration of mist forming in a clear sky in no true way helps self-evolution, as Mr. A. shows; for it takes for granted water, air, heat, etc. It pre-supposes the concurrent action of heaven and earth. It is the result of a change effected by sundry agents external to itself. What is self-evolved must find within itself the impulses, the agents, and the materials of its evolutions. A self-evolved universe is simply another form of the self-existence of matter. Now we come to the old point in the circle — Given matter, force, and motion, then we begin. Now, who gives the three finites? Finites cannot be self-originated.

"Hegel and his disciples, of which Strauss is one, say: God Almighty, the Creator, must reveal Himself, go out of life, — being the subject, become His object. They say, this world is the personification of God, His second Person, and there is no other revelation. The creation of the world out of nothing we believe, they say; but it must be rightly understood. Nothing is not nothing; nothing means that which was nothing, namely, God, before His manifestation or effusion in the world. What do the Hindus reason in regard to the same subject? They speculate on the nature of God: whether He is nothing, or everything; whether He is gunman or nirgun; with qualities or attributes, or without; whether He can reveal Himself, or not. The Brahmins and Hindus know no other God but the world. A transcendental, pure, and holy God they can form no notion of.