In an earlier essay I have given short expositions of the pan(en)theistic philosophies of John Leslie and Timothy Sprigge. In this essay I briefly consider whether, and to what extent, Leslie’s account is consonant with, or can be reconciled with, classical theism. I hope to do likewise with Sprigge’s in a future essay.
Although Leslie describes his account as Neoplatonist, he does not seem to intend it as a form of classical theism and indeed has even described classical theism as “puzzling”. As we shall see, however, his account is appropriately characterized as a form of classical theism (although one probably not compatible with Christian Trinitarianism).
It will be as well to begin with a short summary of classical theism. I am using the term broadly here, to include not only the theism of St. Thomas Aquinas and other pre-modern Christian theologians, but any theism in the general line of succession of Plato and Aristotle: that of non-Christian Neoplatonists like Plotinus, Porphyry, and Proclus as well as of Christians (Neoplatonist and otherwise) like Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas. (Various Muslim and Jewish philosophers belong on the list as well, for example Avicenna and Maimonides.)
I take the philosophical essentials of classical theism to be these. The relative, contingent, changing, temporal, material world that we know through our sensory experience has its ultimate source and explanation in an absolute, necessary, immutable, eternal, incorporeal being, whom we call God. This being is unitary in a strong and special sense (not only “one” but also a “one without a second”), simple (not in any way composed of parts, for such composition would require explanation in turn), and self-explanatory (though not “self-caused,” which would be incoherent).This being is the uncaused cause of everything else that exists. Though in a sense personal (and indeed more than personal), this being is not a “person” if that means simply a human being writ large and with our usual limitations removed; the deity of classical theism is not at all anthropomorphic (and in fact early Christians were regarded by Romans as atheists precisely because they rejected anthropomorphic gods). This being is (under suitable interpretations of these terms) omnipotent, omniscient, and perfect. Indeed, this “being” is not just one being among others but Being itself.
Significantly, all of these points, according to classical theism, can be established by the exercise of natural reason and strictly require no special revelation even if it is through such revelation (or other authoritative teaching) that we most often come to learn them. (I agree, but it is not my purpose to argue for classical theism here.) They are therefore of course not specific to Christianity and the arguments for them—common misconceptions to the contrary notwithstanding—do not purport to prove the existence specifically of the Christian God.
Still, even in purely natural theology (i.e., theology carried out with natural reason apart from revelation), the specifically Christian strand of classical theism has its own emphases, and in particular is at greater pains than the Neoplatonic to maintain a clear distinction between God and His creation. (It is frequently stressed in the Scholastic literature, for example, that God does not “need” to create and that creation adds nothing to Him or His perfection. Christian classical theism also insists that God creates the world ex nihilo rather than out of any pre-existing material, and in particular He does not create it out of Himself: the world isn’t made out of “God-stuff.”) For precisely this reason, in fact, Christian classical theists are particularly keen to distinguish their views from pantheism and panentheism. Whether that poses a problem for Leslie we shall soon try to see.
Much modern theism departs from classical theism in crucial respects. Most importantly, many modern theists (including William Lane Craig and Alvin Plantinga) reject the doctrine of divine simplicity, thereby rendering dubious God’s role as the ultimate explanans. They also tend to regard God as not just “personal” but a person (as do e.g. Plantinga and Richard Swinburne)—this despite the fact that some of them are committed Christians who accept the doctrine of the Trinity and therefore regard God as comprising three “persons.” In effect if not by design, such theism treats God not as “Being itself” but as merely one being among others. This modern sort of theism has been called “theistic personalism” (by Brian Davies) and “neo-theism” (by Norman Geisler); all we need note here is that it is a departure from classical theism and that it is not the sort of theism that concerns us in this essay.
Let us first see how well Leslie’s views accord with classical theism in its broader sense. We recall that for Leslie, “God” is the creatively effective ethical requirement that there be a mind that knows everything worth knowing, and the universe in which we live is the object of the knowledge of such a mind. On Leslie’s view, there may be many (indeed infinitely many) such minds, each worthy of being called “divine” and each with its own universe. We noted in the previous essay that each such mind corresponds at least roughly to the “Divine Intellect” in Plotinus’s scheme and that the creative ethical requirement from which it arises corresponds both to Plotinus’s “One” and to Plato’s “Form of the Good.”
Since Leslie does, after all, characterize his account as Neoplatonist and we have defined classical theism broadly enough to include Neoplatonism, it should come as no surprise that his account comports well, and fairly obviously, with classical theism. But our purpose here is to spell out just how it does so, a matter that is of particular interest because Leslie himself does not seem to have had any such outcome explicitly in mind:
(1) Leslie’s God is without doubt the absolute source and explanation of everything else that exists, and is in an important way self-explanatory in that it is His own goodness or ethical requiredness that explains His existence. He is an essentially complete answer to the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”
(2) He is simple: a “creative ethical requiredness” just isn’t the sort of thing that could have parts. As Leslie himself says in spite of his misgivings about the doctrine of divine simplicity: “[A creatively effective need] would be a reality having the kind of simplicity that Aquinas attributes to God.” (The divine mind(s) or person(s) to which this need gives rise might be complex, but for Leslie those minds/persons are not the ultimate reality.)
(3) He is omnipotent: He must be, if efficacious in creating a divine mind for whom knowing anything at all is sufficient to bring it into being.
(4) He (or, more precisely, Leslie’s functional equivalent of the Divine Intellect) is at least the next best thing to omniscient: each of Leslie’s divine minds by definition knows everything worth knowing, and presumably could have known everything else if it had been worth bothering about.
(5) He (or, again, the Divine Intellect) is perfect: indeed it is His very goodness/perfection that explains His existence in the first place.
(6) Finally, although Leslie does not hold that the existence of his God can be established with absolute certainty by reason alone, it is nonetheless by reasoned argumentation rather than by any claims to special revelation that he makes his case.
What about specifically Christian classical theism? Here, most notably, it might appear difficult to reconcile Leslie’s pantheism with Christianity’s firm distinction between Creator and creation.
But I think this difficulty is more apparent than real. It is true that for Leslie, the world can be said in some sense to be “in” God as the object of the thought/knowledge of the divine mind, but this is also true in Christian classical theism even if articulated in different language. The claim of Christian classical theism is that God creates the world by something analogous to knowledge, thought, or speech, and that the world exists because God “knows” it into existence. On this view, since God is simple, His intellect and His creative power are not really distinct; His intellect just is His creative power, and the world exists precisely because God thinks it does. The relation between God and the world is something very like the relation between a thinking subject and the object of its thought, much as it is for Leslie. (And if such creation by the Christian God can be ex nihilo, so can Leslie’s.)
I do not see, then, that Leslie’s pantheism has any harder a time than Christian classical theism does in keeping God and creation distinct, though of course the precise relation between them requires a good deal more elaboration than we can give it here (and such elaboration might cause us to suspect that Leslie’s “pantheism” is misnamed!). The reader interested in Christian (specifically Thomist) objections to pantheism is referred to Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange for a helpful summary.
Another possible conflict arises when we ask whether Leslie’s God had to create the world. Here I think the conflict is real: it does appear that Leslie’s God, Who by definition is the ethical requirement that there be a mind (or infinitely many minds) knowing everything worth knowing, creates “necessarily” rather than “freely.” For Leslie, that is, the ethical requiredness of God logically carries over into the world: if there must be a divine mind that knows everything worth knowing, and if such a divine mind’s knowing something just is that thing’s existence, then not only the divine mind but the objects of its knowledge must exist. Leslie’s God would not be God if He did not create.
But the conflict, though real, may not be deep. What the Christian classical theist means in saying that God was not compelled to create may be just that He was under no external compulsion to do so, and that much, at least, is true of Leslie’s God as well. And if more than this is intended, it is not obvious that Leslie’s account is the one that needs changing.
Yet another possible conflict arises when we ask whether Leslie’s God is consonant, not just with Christian natural theology, but with Christian claims to special revelation, i.e., to knowledge of God that is unattainable by natural reason. Here the most obvious question to ask is surely whether Leslie’s God might conceivably be matched up to the Christian Trinity.
It is hard to see how He could be. We have previously called attention to the rough parallel between Leslie’s views and those of Plotinus, whose doctrine of the One, the Intellect, and the Soul is sometimes taken to resemble the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. However, as Edward Feser explains, this resemblance is only superficial. And as for Plotinus, even more so for Leslie: if we try to identify Leslie’s “creative ethical requirement” (corresponding to Plotinus’s “One”) with the Father and his “divine mind(s)” (corresponding to Plotinus’s “Intellect”) with the Son, we end up with infinitely many Sons and, so far as I can see, no Holy Spirit.
So at this point we have a genuine and deep theological conflict—again perhaps unsurprisingly, as Leslie’s account is broadly Neoplatonic and Neoplatonism was for many centuries a rival of Christianity.
There is of course much more to say here, and many points on which more detailed exposition and comparison would be profitable. But we have said enough to justify our conclusion: Leslie’s pantheism, whatever his express intentions, is properly regarded as a form of classical theism, although it does not seem to be one that could be accepted without modification by a Trinitarian Christian.
Scott Ryan
