009. MONISM OF SPINOZA AND HEGEL

MONISM OF SPINOZA AND HEGEL

Professor Wundt, of Leipzig, and more recently Professor Baldwin, of Princeton,¹ have intimated that the integration of finite consciousnesses in an all-embracing divine consciousness may find a valid analogy in the integration of subordinate consciousnesses in the unit-personality of man. In the hypnotic state, multiple consciousnesses may be induced in the same nervous organism. In insanity there is a secondary consciousness at war with that which normally dominates. If consciousness is present in the elements of the nervous tissue apart from the unit consciousness of the organism as a whole, it need not seem so strange that in the one all-including divine consciousness there should be finite consciousnesses quite unaware of their relation to the whole, and even antagonistic to it. If matter, moreover, be merely the expression of spirit, then the body, as an object of consciousness, may well be only the reverse side of what we call the consciousness of the object. Since the all-including consciousness is that of Christ, our very bodies may be manifestations of the thought and purpose of Christ.

Hegel was very far wrong when he identified being with thought, and held that thought thinks. Spinoza was nearer right when he called both thought and extension opposite manifestations of being or substance. But Spinoza was wrong in putting extension on the same level with thought, and regarding it as equally primary and necessary. "Both Hegel and Spinoza ignored the element of will, and denied freedom.^ Hegel recognized development, while Spinoza had no place for it in his system. The truth may be better stated as follows: Being has, not is, thought and volition; and will may, not must, initiate a finite universe of which extension is an attribute. The universe is not necessary, but free; it is the manifestation of an infinite mind and will; it may be traced back to a beginning; creation is a conception not only scientific, but indispensable; development, or evolution, is the product of free intelligence. Instead of being agnostics, we are bound to see God in everything; instead of finding no design in the universe, it is more true to say that there is nothing but design. We think truly, only as we enter into the thought of God; even as we will truly, only by entering into the will of God.

I have identified this thought and will of God with Christ, and have said that since his is the all-including consciousness, our very bodies are manifestations of his thought and purpose. Christ dwells naturally in every man’s physical frame, and in sinning against our own bodies we are actually crucifying Christ and putting him to an open shame. Our souls are habitations of Christ also. He is the source and upholder of all intelligence and of all morality—"the light that lighteth every man.’Y_AU literature*, all history, all civilization, all religion, so far as they are true, salutary, progressive, are movements of his wisdom and_j>o\ver; for in him alone is Hfe, and that life is the only light of men. To put the central thought in the words of Goschel:¹ "Christ is humanity; we have it; he is it entirely; we participate therein. His personality precedes and lies at the basis of the personality of the race and its individuals. As idea, he is implanted in the whole of humanity; he lies at the basis of every human consciousness, without, however, attaining realization in any individual [except the incarnate Redeemer], for this is only possible in the entire race at the end of the times."

I am well aware that the test of this doctrine must be its ability to explain the fact of sin. How can that which is of the substance of God ever become morally evil? Our only answer is: It was not morally evil at the first. God has limited and circumscribed himself in giving life to finite personalities within the bounds of his own being, and it is not the fact of sin that constitutes the primary difficulty, but the fact of finite personality. When God breathed into man’s nostrils the breath of his own life, he communicated freedom, and made possible the creature’s self-chosen alienation from himself, the giver of that life. While man could never break the natural bond which united him to God, he could break the spiritual bond, and could introduce even into the life of God a principle of discord and evil. Tie a cord tightly about your finger; you partially isolate the finger, diminish its nutrition, bring about atrophy and disease. Yet the life of the whole system rouses itself to put away the evil, to untie the cord, to free the diseased and suffering member. The illustration is far from adequate, but it helps at a single point. There has been given to each intelligent and moral agent the power, spiritually, to isolate himself from God while yet he is naturally joined to God, and is wholly dependent upon God for the removal of the sin which has so separated him from his Maker. Sin is the act of the creature, but salvation is the act of the Creator. To permit finite creatures to sin is God’s ineffable act of self-limitation.

It is an amazing thing that God could so humble himself as to create finite spirits capable of thwarting the purpose of their being and at the same time of outraging his holiness. But here too, we find the explanation in Christ. He was "the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world." The decree of redemption is as old as the decree of the apostasy. The provision of salvation in Christ shows at how great a cost to God the fall of the race was permitted. He who ordained sin ordained also an atonement for sin and a way of escape from it. With Doctor Shedd we may say: "The permission of sin has cost God more than it has cost man. No sacrifice and suffering on account of sin has been undergone by any man, equal to that which has been endured by an incarnate God. This shows that God has not acted selfishly in permitting it." But now I wish to add what has not been clearly perceived in theology hitherto, that Christ’s atonement is not made merely when he becomes incarnate and dies upon the cross. That outward and visible union with humanity which brings him to his sacrificial death is only the culmination and manifestation of a previous union with humanity which was constituted by creation, and which, from the moment of man’s first sin, brought suffering to the Son of God. Can the finger be even temporarily and relatively isolated from the human body and yet the body be free from pain? Must not the whole organism suffer when the finger stops the free flowing into it of the currents of life? Humanity is bound to Christ, as the finger to the body. Christ has been in natural union with humanity from the very beginning of man’s existence. Since human nature is one of the "all things" that "consist," or hold together, in Christ, man’s sin is the self-perversion of a part of Christ’s own body, and the whole must suffer in the self-inflicted injury of the part.

If God is holy and sin is ill-deserving, then sin on the part of finite creatures must be visited with penalty. The view of Horace Bushnell that Christ suffers in and with his creatures out of merely sympathetic love, ignores the real reason and ground of suffering in God’s moral antagonism to unrighteousness. But if God’s nature binds him to punish sin, then he who joins himself to the sinner must share the sinner’s punishment. Much more must he who is the very life of humanity take upon his own heart the burden of shame and penalty that belongs to his members. In the work of Prof. D. W. Simon, of Bradford,¹ I find so excellent a statement of this point that I quote it here:

If the Logos is generally the Mediator of the divine immanence in creation, especially in man; if men are differentiations of the effluent divine energy; and if the Logos is the immanent controlling principle of all differentiation,—I. e., the principle of all form,—must not the self-perversion of these human differentiations react on him who is their constitutive principle? This is also the view of Dr. R. W. Dale, in his wellknown work on "The Atonement." He too holds that Christ is responsible for human sin, because, as the upholder and life of all, he is naturally one with all men. As God’s righteousness compels him to inflict punishment, so Christ’s union with all men by creation compels him to bear it. "It must needs be that Christ should suffer," for only thus could "God himself be just and the justifier of him that hath faith in Jesus."

Ethical Monism throws light upon the method of Christ’s atonement. To make plain my meaning, I am tempted to quote what I have said in another connection¹ with regard to Christ, as both divine and human, both eternal and manifested in time:

(Thrist is the Word of God, the divine Reason in expression. AH outgoing, communication, manifestation of the Godhead, is the work of Christ. God never thought anything, said anything, did anything, except through Christ. Christ is the creator of all and the sustainer of all He "upholds all things by the word of his power." In him all things "consist," or hold together. Nature, with its powers and laws, exists and moves only because Christ’s ene,EtX-th.robs through it all . . As this Logos, or Word of God, is the originating and animating principle of nature, so man lives and moves and has his being in him. Humanity, physically and mentally, is created in Christ before it is re-created in him. It is intellectually united to him before it is spiritually united to him. It is Christ who conducts the march of human history. . . He is the author, the subject, the end of the Old Testament revelation, and the New Testament is simply his emerging from behind the scenes, where he has been invisibly managing the drama of history, to take visible part in the play, to become the leading actor in it, and to bring it to its denouement. The curtain has not fallen, and it will not fall until the end of the world. But that appearance of the incarnate, crucified, risen, ascending God has given us the key to human history.

It is the manifestation to sense of what Christ, the— pre-incarnate LogoSj_.has been doing ever sinrp man’s first sin. But it is also the summing up and expressionof his very being. The incarnation and the atonement are object-lessons only because they are realities. God’s holiness and love are focused in the cross, so that it reveals to us the heart of the Eternal, and teaches us more of him than we can learn from all space and time besides.