Cross with the hemispheres?

A Christian Challenge to Iain McGilchrist

Perspectiva is delighted to share the second of two scholarly essays on Iain McGilchrist’s work by Professor David McIlroy, called The McGilchrist Worldview and its relationship to Classical Theism and Christian Theology.

We share that essay below, after - forgive me - twenty paragraphs of introduction, but to let the work speak for itself, and for ease of reference, we have created a direct link here to both essays together without any Perspectiva introductions.

We are always happy to receive critical engagement with The Matter with Things which is a book of first principles philosophy we published in 2021. That book has received extraordinary critical feedback because while it is not quite a theory of everything, it provides invaluable guidance to anyone attempting to rethink or reimagine the world.

The essay below is a relatively rare high quality challenge to Iain’s ideas, and it comes from a Christian perspective. We are aware that this work of Professor McIlroy (‘David’ from here on, if only because we are used to referring to ‘Iain’) deserves a more salubrious home than our Substack and we hope to offer that in due course. If the subject matter has immediate appeal, please jump straight to the main essay after the photograph of David below, but if you are interested in why an essay offering a Christian critique of Iain McGilchrist’s work is of particular interest to Perspectiva at the moment, please read on.

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We published the first part of David’s reflections on Iain’s work in Understanding Iain McGilchrist’s Worldview in January. That distillation of Iain’s main ideas is the best I have read. As a long-time interpreter and promoter of Iain’s work, I grow weary of half-baked aspirations for the right hemisphere to save the world from the evils of the left hemisphere, based on a partial understanding of Iain’s work gleaned from internet clips or anecdotes. The primary source is always the best place to go, but David’s secondary text is thorough and it is also trustworthy because it is diligently tethered to Iain’s main text(s). The exposition is also discerning enough to include Iain’s most important ideas, without being so exhaustive as to defeat the purpose of a distillation. In my view it’s neither too little nor too much. It’s lagom, as they say in Sweden.

This second part follows from the distillation but can be read as a stand-alone piece. David is a Barrister and legal scholar and holds a doctorate in Theology (of Law). In the essay below he explores Iain’s writings on the sacred and his panentheism (roughly the view that God is not everything as such, but is in everything) and he asks - in effect - why Iain’s analysis doesn’t lead him to Christianity.

I share David’s Theological disquisition here with a degree of trepidation because it is so resolutely Christian. As CEO of Perspectiva, I feel the need to say that the views expressed in the extended essay below are those of the author - David McIlroy - and not Perspectiva. Since that disclaimer begs the question, however, this seems as good a moment as any to say that Perspectiva is not a Christian organisation, but nor is it an a-Christian or anti-Christian organisation either.

Much of what passes for spirituality arises in what Rowan Williams calls a post-Christian context. In the UK at least, our moral norms, aesthetic sensibilities, legal code, institutional settlement and cultural memory are imbued with a Christian ethos; that’s clear in the work of, for instance historian Tom Holland or my old politics tutor Larry Seidentop. And yet the general level of theological understanding today is shallow. In other words, many people who are culturally Christian feel allergic to what they think of as religious Christianity, with little sense of its contested history or philosophical richness and what it could mean for them, including its wide range of beliefs and practices all over the world.

Like all religions, Christianity has a shadow, with a history of coercion and abuses of power, so it is not hard to understand why people are wary of it. I am wary of it too. But part of what motivates me in remaining ‘Christian curious’ is the need to get beyond reflex allergies that are at best uninformed, and at worst a kind of laziness or cowardice. Lots of people today are saying something like: “I wish I could be Christian, but…” and I want to explore both the wish and the refrain.

My personal case is complicated because I am partly Hindu through marriage to my wife Siva, I have been given the spiritual name of Vivekananda, a lot of my intellectual formation was Buddhist, and I wonder if I am just too much of a liberal cosmopolitan to have the patience to sit on the pews or the guts to get down on my knees and pray (though I have done that too). I shared my struggle with Christianity in a recent Ash Wednesday post.

Perspectiva’s co-founder and Trustee Tomas Bjorkman calls himself an atheist, though I have seen what’s on his bookshelves in Stockholm, and I doubt it. Another Trustee, Ian Christie, is Christian, and he helped me see secular liberal western humanism as a stealth ideology that operates without adequate awareness of its Christian provenance while still being religious in nature. Our colleagues, associates and authors come from a range of backgrounds though, including Zen, Taoism, Islam, Judaism, Atheism, Spiritual generalism, Pureland Buddhism, Shamanism, Quakerism, and The Diamond Approach. Our origin story includes a much more general inquiry into the place of spirituality in public life and public policy leading to the book Spiritualise. We are also interested in metaphysical imagination, imaginal causality, and we are working to develop innovations in spiritual practice. So while Perspectiva is not Christian, we are not ‘not Christian’ either. And if that apparent contradiction bothers you, I would encourage you to read chapter sixteen on Logical Paradox in volume one of The Matter with Things.

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Perspectiva is interested in the relationship between systems, souls and society in theory and practice and sometimes that means we talk about the metacrisis, sometimes about political economy or technology and sometimes about education. However, while fielding questions as chair of Iain McGilchrist’s talk at The Realisation Festival last summer, I noticed the conversation was all about God. I asked how the audience felt about that, and to raise their hands if they felt uncomfortable. Quite a few arms went up, and some of those people thanked me later for acknowledging their discomfort. Yet the conversation felt lively, and most hands stayed down. While this was a small sample of people, and just one conversation, it still felt like a kind of data. Something had changed.

I say that partly because about a decade earlier, while chairing an event called Beyond Belief at the RSA, Elizabeth Oldfield, then Director of Theos, joked with the audience about threatening to use ‘The G-bomb’ as a weapon in the conversation, by which she meant God. Back then it was funny, and I remember the room laughing, because the idea of daring to bring God into a secular context felt subversive in 2013, almost ridiculous, in a way I am less sure that it does today.

The social scientist in me is curious as to how one would assess this claim, but anecdotally there seems to be a newfound intellectual openness to the possibility of God, a newfound social acceptability of exploring that possibility, a recognition that we are beyond lame straw-man sky-God arguments, an awareness that we are all more or less perplexed, and a hunger for a shared exploration into our relationship to reality as such. All those subtle shifts of emphasis make it easier to recognise that this is an open question we’ve been asking for centuries, and since religious intuitions have endured and are still shared by a large majority of humans, perhaps they are worth a look, or even a try. There is also a growing awareness that much was lost (as well as gained) through religion receding from the public realm, and many are also discovering that the more nebulous notion of spirituality can only get us so far before we encounter existential challenges relating to pain, grief, and mortality. When that wave of reality hits us, we may wish there were established practices and supportive communities to get you through, as well as sources of authority and myths that might be true - precisely the kinds of things religions offer, and not always on the condition of intellectual surrender.

Whatever we think of God and religion in general, my friend Jules Evans (who helped to develop the RSA spirituality project mentioned above) does a good job of summarising some of the possible reasons for the surprising return of Christianity in particular in the first part of his recent post - and I recommend taking a look there. But curiously, he also says the following in passing:

I think a large part of this shift can also be credited to the enormous popularity of Jordan Peterson, who even if he hasn’t become Christian himself, certainly made Christianity far more appealing to spiritual seeker types by explaining it in terms of Jungian psychology and also promoting a Christian-style trad morality.

You also have to credit the influence of neuro-philosopher Iain McGilchrist. I personally think McGilchrist’s ideas are pseudo-science - as in, they’re a grand theory of neuro-history which is unfalsifiable and very little actual use in terms of explanations or suggested actions - but they’re very appealing to some people looking for an intellectually respectable escape from rigid materialism.

Leaving Peterson to one side (my thoughts on him are here) it is actually weirdly refreshing to see a challenge to Iain’s work because there is too little of that around in my experience. And yet the charge of pseudo-science feels comically misplaced, and it’s hard for me to believe anyone could make that claim after reading Iain’s books. Iain could only be accused of not explaining anything useful in the sense that a carefully argued grand theory does not primarily seek to explain any thing, but to provide a sounder basis for explaining everything. What Iain offers is an erudite and foundational explanation of cultural processes grounded in scientific evidence and philosophical argument, giving rise to a case for particular epistemic dispositions and grounded metaphysical judgment. To call that kind of world-historical scholarly ambition unfalsifiable pseudoscience is on the wayward side of provocative, to put it diplomatically.

Where Jules is right however is that Iain’s work does not - and I think Iain would agree -lend itself directly to action plans. While his grand theory has, inter-alia, plausible implications for education, for the value of meditation, and for our relationship to nature, what his work points towards mostly is a kind of metanoia which is typically translated as ‘repent’ but means something more like spiritual transformation, and is the first word Jesus utters in The New Testament.

To put it analytically, Iain’s work is about necessary rather than sufficient conditions for world renewal. The ‘point’ of the hemispheric hypothesis (and The McGilchist Manoeuvre) is to disclose the intellectual basis for a necessary (and now urgent) shift in perception through science, reason, intution and imagination. That shift arises from realising - making real in our lives - the profound difference between the world as it presences itself through a kind of unconcealing (Alethia) of truth, beauty and goodness, and the world as it is relentlessly, automatically and increasingly wilfully re-presented for instrumental reasons. The task demand embedded in that realisation is not so much to know but to acknowledge the nature, meaning and purpose of life through direct perception, to consolidate that insight in how we live, and from there, to attempt together to organise society for the greater good. That’s ‘the work’ as I see Iain disclose it, but it’s clearly a version of a case others have made too, and it’s a task not for Iain, but for all of us.

It is in that context that a friendly and informed Christian critique of Iain’s work is timely. Why not go native with the metanoia? In essence, if Iain’s work serves not only as “A respectable escape from rigid materialism” as Jules Evans puts it, but as intellectual underlabour that discloses a Christian theology and ethics, then the ‘So what?’ and ‘What follows’ questions have a different kind of answer.

The Christian challenge to Iain outlined below is, in effect, that he pulls his punches on the matter of the sacred and does not follow through with where his argument leads. David structures his case initialy by considering the God of classical theology alongside Iain’s process theology, but there appears to be scope for mutual flexibility there. The more exacting claim is that “Jesus challenges McGilchrist’s understanding of Incarnation, Revelation, Atonement, and Fulfilment.” In all these cases, the underlying point, as I understand it, is that there is an answer to the questions raised by Iain’s inquiry in the historical figure of Jesus. Iain juxtaposes the right hemisphere’s disposition to understand uniqueness with the left hemisphere’s tendency to utilise instances of a kind. And yet in the case of Jesus, argues David, there is a form of particularity and uniqueness that requires precisely that kind of discernment, and yet Iain appears reluctant to take that step.

Iain would not characterise it as reluctance of course, and the idea that it all rests on the historical figure of Jesus has even been called ‘the scandal of particularity’ - a widely used expression apparently first used by Theologian Gerhard Kittel in the early 20th century, and generally invoked to critique expansive reasoning from one contested historical premise. And while I lack the Theological training to challenge David’s account of the historical veracity of particular claims about Jesus, I know there are many who have been doing precisely that for centuries. In any case, I admire the passion and painstaking effort David shows here to make his argument.

Iain seems quite at ease with his Taoist sensibility alongside his love of Christian mythos, without feeling the need to be a card-carrying or practising Christian. That position seems sound to me. However, given the number of public figures converting to Christianity in recent years, and Iain’s considerable and growing intellectual influence, I can see why Christians would want to nudge him a little closer towards them. That can and perhaps should be resisted, but doing that well means contending with the case outlined below.

Dr. Jonathan Rowson, Co-founder and CEO of Perspectiva.

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The McGilchrist Worldview and its relationship to Classical Theism and Christian Theology[1] by David McIlroy

In ‘Understanding McGilchrist’, I set out my summary of the worldview McGilchrist offers us. I have done so as a fellow “expert generalist”. I am a practising lawyer, a professor of banking law, I hold a doctorate in Christian theology, and I have published in the fields of law and economics, theology, and legal philosophy.[2]

McGilchrist writes as a psychiatrist and a philosopher open to religion. He is a natural philosopher, a sincere, erudite, and profound seeker after truth, whose philosophy shades into natural theology (theology based on reason rather than on revelation).[3] I find McGilchrist’s work enormously insightful, stimulating and challenging.

McGilchrist offers a powerful vision which has many elements that Christians can embrace. In his insistence that the left hemisphere is wrong when it reduces something to “nothing but” the product of its analysis, he is echoing the Dutch Christian philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd’s insistence that every thing, event, or experience is a whole which cannot be understood in its totality using any single approach or mode of analysis.[4]

In this article, I want to interrogate McGilchrist’s thinking in the light of two perspectives with which he interacts: classical theism and Christian teaching regarding the person of Jesus Christ.

Classical Theism

Many of Christianity’s greatest philosopher-theologians, figures such as Clement of Alexandria, Augustine of Hippo, Boethius, John of Damascus, Pseudo-Dionysius, Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, and Gottfried Leibniz were committed to a metaphysical understanding of God known as classical theism. Classical theism is also the philosophical view of God held by the Greek and Hellenistic philosophers Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and Proclus, by the Jewish philosophers Philo of Alexandria and Maimonides, and by the Islamic philosophers Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd). In his review of the field, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness and Bliss, David Bentley Hart identifies a philosophical approach to “God” which “can be found in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Vedantic and Bhaktic Hinduism, Sikhism, various late antique paganism, and … even applies to … various Mahyana formulations of, say the Buddha Consciousness or the Buddha Nature, … or to certain aspects of the Tao, …”[5]

Classical theism describes “a God who is the infinite fullness of being, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient, from whom all things come and upon whom all things depend for every moment of their existence, without whom nothing at all could exist.”[6]

As is to be expected with such a long-lasting and widespread philosophical tradition, classical theists differ from one another in their construal of God’s attributes. Bentley Hart’s description is a helpful summary of classical theism’s core features, and of particular utility when interrogating McGilchrist’s work because McGilchrist has read The Experience of God and cites it repeatedly in chapters 26 to 28 of TWMT.[7]

Christianity and Classical Theism

McGilchrist says of Christianity,

“The Christian religion is unusual for its metaphysically complex creed, which unfortunately leads straight into the territory of the left hemisphere. … Although as a teenager I therefore tended to dismiss its tenets as incomprehensible and possibly nonsensical, with living I have come to see them as intuitive insights, misrepresented to me as if they were something to evaluate like a chemistry experiment.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1268).

The metaphysical complexity of Christian classical theism is that it attempts to square the circle (or rather, to circle the triangle) of divine simplicity (“the denial that God is in any way composed of separable parts, aspects, properties or functions”)[8] with the idea that God has revealed God-self to be Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Christianity’s need to do so arises from what McGilchrist sees as one of its most fruitful claims, the idea that God could become a human being. McGilchrist sees Christianity as offering an account of how mind can come to inhabit and to express itself in matter. He writes: “The extraordinary power of the Christian mythos lies in its central idea of incarnation – the intimate relationship between consciousness and matter” (TMWT ch.28 p.1267).

Christianity’s claims about Jesus Christ are authoritatively set out in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381 AD (usually referred to as “the Nicene Creed”). It is held in common by the Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant churches. The Nicene Creed affirms the oneness of God, but also that Jesus Christ is “the only-begotten Son of God, … very God of very God, begotten, not made, [and] consubstantial with the Father”. He goes on to place Jesus Christ at the centre of God’s acts of creation, salvation and judgment.[9] The Nicene Creed draws on a number of passages in the Bible in the claims it makes. Later in this article, I want to look at just one of those passages from the Book of Hebrews.

The claim of the Christian classical theists is that the revelation that the man Jesus of Nazareth is also the Son of God, existent as a constituent of God from all eternity, requires us to adjust but not to reject the account of God given by classical theists who were unaware of or who reject the claims of Jesus Christ. For McGilchrist, the possibility of God becoming incarnate as a human being entails panentheism (TMWT ch.28 p.1267), and therefore the rejection of aspects of classical theism.

As stated above, many of Christianity’s greatest philosopher-theologians were and are committed to classical theism. Classical theism has, however, been questioned by Christian theologians, particularly those who are concerned about its compatibility with freewill (for example, open theists such as Clark Pinnock), the God who is revealed in Jesus Christ, and with God’s love for creation (for example, Jürgen Moltmann).[10]

The relationship between Christian theology and classical theism is that of a Venn diagram: there are classical theists who are not Christians, there are classical theists who are Christians, and there are Christian theologians who are not classical theists.

The discussion in this article will therefore seek to evaluate McGilchrist’s work first with respect to classical theism and then in relation to Christianity’s distinctive theological claims about its founder.

The McGilchrist worldview and Classical Theism

McGilchrist’s engagement with classical theism is nuanced. He emphasises that God is all-good and, as a result, challenges classical theists to re-think what they mean when they claim that God is all-powerful and all-knowing. Whilst regarding classical theism as strongly preferable to deism (the idea that God is just a watchmaker), he argues against classical theism that God’s relationship to creation is more than God being present in creation and creation being dependent on God. In McGilchrist’s panentheism the relationship between God and creation is more dynamic. God can be affected by creation, in particular its suffering. This leads McGilchrist to endorse Whitehead’s process theology, in which God is as much Becoming as Being. I will explore each of these facets of McGilchrist’s thinking in more detail in the sections which follow.

Is God omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent?

McGilchrist sees God as a force of good to which we are attracted, rather than a despot whose arbitrary rules we disobey at our peril.[11] He therefore lines up with Aquinas against the voluntarism of Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. McGilchrist endorses Aquinas’s view of

“God as an infinite potential, attracting things to their fulfilment. Yet in doing so God is not seen as determining, engineering or controlling, though neither is God merely passive. From this perspective, God is seen as the ultimate good who attracts all things to their flourishing, the possibility that is most fulfilling for them, but does not compel them to take that path: they have the freedom to respond for better or for worse. This is like a lover, who by virtue of love draws whatever emerges in the loving relationship towards a greater fulfilment in love, but cannot in any way enforce such an outcome.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1242).

McGilchrist regards the affirmation of God’s goodness to be inconsistent with the ways in many classical theists have understood what it means for God to be omnipotent. McGilchrist’s rejection of determinism and his insistence on the participatory nature of the universe might seem to make him an open theist (open theism is the contemporary position that although God knows everything which can be known, this does not include knowledge of what free creatures will freely do in the future). McGilchrist’s view seems, however, to be closer to Molinism (Molinism is the view that God’s knowledge includes knowledge of counter-factuals, and therefore God’s knowledge of the future includes the knowledge of all possibilities).[12]

With regard to the trilemma created by the triad of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence, McGilchrist writes: “For what it is worth, I do not believe in a God of love who is also omnipotent and omniscient.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1251).

“… but I also think that God is not ‘not omniscient’, and not ‘not omnipotent’. It’s that the terms just don’t apply. … if there is to be veritable creation, creation must be not wholly under the creator’s control. We are thinking in the wrong way if we think like this about God. For neither power nor knowledge is only of this kind.

God is not in a left hemisphere sense, but in a right hemisphere sense, all-knowing and all-powerful. Knowledge, as understood by the right hemisphere, is a process of openness and receptivity in which two entities progress ever closer to one another through experience. Kennen, not Wissen. In this sense, God alone has knowledge of everything, whereas we have knowledge of only that limited part of reality that we can encounter. If God were to know everything, in the sense of ‘knowing the facts’, God would be importantly limited, because then Creation could no longer be truly free and with that the possibility for love – which depends on the free will of a true Other – would be lost. …

And power? Power as understood by the right hemisphere is permissive: creative power, the power to allow things to come into being, precisely by underwriting the existence of a creative field, but not interfering and manipulating within it. Not making things happen according to fiat, but allowing things to grow.” (TMWT ch. 28 p.1252).

For McGilchrist, whatever else we postulate about God must be consistent with God having a relationship of love with God’s creation, in which the love of God’s creatures for God is theirs in a meaningful sense. Christian theologians commonly affirm that this means that God uses the power God has in the service of God’s love. McGilchrist raises the intriguing question: what does prioritising God’s love mean for the knowledge that God has, or that God uses, in service of that love?

A process theology

In my previous article, I looked at McGilchrist’s panentheist account of God’s relationship to creation. McGilchrist gives a very broad definition of panentheism, wide enough to encompass many Christian theologies as well as those from other religions. What distinguishes McGilchrist’s own panentheism from classical theism is his claim that “the divine … is itself forever coming into being along with the world that it forms, and by which, in turn, it too is formed” (TMWT Epilogue p.1329). Classical theism can accommodate the panentheist claim that God is both transcendent and immanent, but denies that God’s continual involvement in the world is constitutive of God’s essence.

McGilchrist proudly describes himself as a process philosopher, and prepared to endorse my suggestion that he is a follower of Alfred North Whitehead. In McGilchrist’s view, “Process theology is a natural counterpart or companion to panentheism, since it, too implies that God is in everything without being reducible to the sum of everything: the spring and that which comes forth from the spring.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1234). He defines process theology as:

“…put very simply, the belief that the divine is misconceived as purely a static entity outside time (though that is an accepted aspect of divinity), and is, at least in some important aspects, better seen as a process within time, an eternal Becoming rather than merely an eternal Being – though it is that, too.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1234).

In the Coda to Part III, McGilchrist says: “I have … suggested that whatever creative energy underwrites the unfolding of the phenomenal universe is continually active and involved in that universe. This … is true to a Whiteheadian vision: that of the world and a creative dynamism forever bringing one another into being.” (TMWT Coda to pt. III p.1308).

McGilchrist cites frequently from a wide selection of works in Whitehead’s corpus, most notably: An Enquiry Concerning The Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919), The Function of Reason (1929), Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929), and Modes of Thought (1938). McGilchrist is persuaded by “Whitehead[‘s] view [that] God’s interaction with the cosmos is dialectical, in that God and the world fulfil each other and bring each other into being.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1240).[13] He endorses Whitehead’s view that

“God is the great companion – the fellow-sufferer who understands. Christianity is, above all, the religion that speaks of vulnerability and love, in the image of a God that cared for creation in such a way as to be unable not to suffer in and alongside it. Whitehead … thought Christianity had erred by presenting God as a divine ruler, whose outstanding characteristic is power: he preferred what he called ‘the brief Galilean vision of humility’, characterised by love. There are hemispheric implications here, too, that are too obvious to need pointing out.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1243).[14]

God’s relationship to suffering is a key point on which classical theism and process theology disagree. Classical theism was formulated in opposition to the Greek, Roman and other ancient myths about the gods. These gods were like super-humans, with their super-powers being accompanied by super-emotions. Like humans, they could become overwhelmed by their emotions, over-reacting in jealousy, anger and even greed and lust. Classical theism insists that God is not a prisoner of God’s own emotions, and therefore God can be fully trusted by human beings because God will not deny God-self and be blown off course by events. God is impassible.

Christian classical theism unhesitatingly affirms that God is present everywhere, but in order to preserve God’s freedom and God’s constancy, insists that God is not dependent upon the world. Process theology seems to put God’s freedom and constancy at risk, and the theological problems it raises may outweigh those it solves.[15]

Critics of classical theism, including many Christian biblical scholars and theologians, think that classical theism pays too high a price for its wish to ensure God’s constancy: it results in a God who does not really care, or who has no intrinsic reason to really care, about what happens to human beings and to the rest of creation. Christian classical theists respond that the human suffering of Jesus Christ is sufficient to show that God does care and does know what human suffering feels like.[16] Jürgen Moltmann, in The Crucified God[17] rejects this response as inadequate: God suffered the crucifixion not just as a human being but also in God-self.

The risk with Moltmann’s approach (whom McGilchrist cites approvingly at TWMT p.1266-7) and with McGilchrist’s on this point is that it seems to make God co-dependent on the world. In conversation with me McGilchrist affirmed that God’s suffering does not overwhelm God as it might overwhelm a human sufferer, and that God’s suffering with creation is voluntary. Both classical theists and process theologians might be wise to reflect on whether attempts to plumb the depths on this issue are not left hemisphere approaches inadequate to addressing what must be held together and taken on trust.

An over-reliance on a single analogy?

McGilchrist’s intuition that God is a fellow sufferer with the universe may be the predominant reason why he prefers panentheism to classical theism, but I wonder whether he has also been unduly influenced by his own insight about the relationship between the two hemispheres of the brain. It seems to me that McGilchrist treats the inseparable but asymmetric relationship between the left and right hemisphere as a microcosm reflecting the macrocosmic relationship between the universe and God.  For McGilchrist, just as the two hemispheres of the brain exist in asymmetric co-dependence so do God and the creation. Although creation is less than God, in some sense God needs the world and is created by the world whilst at the same time creation is dependent on God’s origination and on God’s creative power constantly at work within it. Whilst this is very close to the account given by Jürgen Moltmann, and may be claimed to have salutary effects in the fight against global warming, it is anathema to classical theism. Despite his affirmations of divine transcendence, McGilchrist’s conception of the relationship between creation and God appears to place God in peril.

If I am right about this, McGilchrist has not heeded his own warnings. He is right to stress that there are two problems with using anything in the world as an analogy for the relationship between the world and the divine: “a single, simple analogy can never be right. (There are, separately, problems in finding analogies of any kind whatsoever to something that is utterly sui generis).” (TMWT ch.28 p.1225). McGilchrist at this point adds a footnote to Nicholas Cusanus, De docta ignorantia, I, 1 §4 “the infinite, qua infinite, is unknown; for it escapes all comparative relation.” God, because God is infinite, because God is not a thing, because God is unique, cannot be captured or controlled by any analogy. God can only be approached on God’s own terms.

McGilchrist and the Trinity

As noted above, Christian classical theism seeks to combine classical theism with the Christian claims that God is simultaneously and fundamentally both One divine nature and Three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. McGilchrist’s insistence on the interrelatedness of all things and the primacy of relations (TMWT Introduction p.6) is strongly redolent of the revival in trinitarianism in the twentieth century (across figures as distinct from one another as Colin Gunton, Paul Fiddes, and Jürgen Moltmann).[18] McGilchrist is excellent in explaining how differentiation can occur without division, so that the Son is not the Father but the Son and the Father are nonetheless united as the Godhead.

What McGilchrist offers is a natural philosophy-theology that is open to the possibility of the Trinity.[19] Nonetheless, like all natural theologies, although McGilchrist can posit the existence of God and rule out certain possibilities of what God is like, there is a hole at its centre. The Nicene Creed highlights that the hole left by natural theologies is a Jesus-shaped hole.

Overall comparison of the McGilchrist worldview and Christian classical theism

As a Christian theologian, I am delighted that McGilchrist places God’s love at the centre of his understanding of what God must be like. I strongly endorse his commitment to prioritise God as the ultimate good and to reject images of God as brute power. His invitation to re-think what classical theists mean when they say that God is omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent is one which deserves to be taken seriously. Similarly, although his process theology approach which risks making God dependent on creation is a step too far for classical theism, his overall thought should challenge classical theists to consider whether their approach is too left-brained and reductive. I think in Part III of TWMT, McGilchrist is at his best when he is raising questions, inviting everyone interested in ultimate issues, to look again with fresh eyes.

A Jesus-shaped Hole

McGilchrist’s thought is remarkably open to the possibility of the Trinity, and his exploration of how differentiation does not require division is important for Christian theologians who seek to hold together Christianity’s claims about Jesus Christ and classical theism’s claims about what God must be like. From my perspective as a Christian theologian, the greatest lacuna in McGilchrist’s natural philosophy-theology relates to questions of Christology, in other words to questions about who Jesus of Nazareth is?, and what has Jesus of Nazareth done?

In order to give some structure to the enquiry, I want to consider McGilchrist’s ideas in the light of eight affirmations about the uniqueness and indispensability of Jesus made in the Book of Hebrews. As its name suggests, the purpose of this book was to set out the ways in which Jesus was more than just another messenger bringing God’s word to God’s people. The opening verses of the book (Hebrews 1:1-4) make eight claims about Jesus. Numbering those affirmations in the order in which they appear in the text - Jesus is:

(i) the Son of God,

(ii) Jesus is the heir of all things,

(iii) through whom God the Father made the universe,

(iv) and through whom the universe is sustained,

(v) who is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of God’s being,

(vi) the one who has provided purification for sins,

(vii) and the one who, having completed his work of redemption sits at the Father’s right hand in heaven.[20]

As a consequence, (viii) Jesus is far, far more than a messenger (angel or prophet) from God.

Of those eight affirmations, McGilchrist’s philosophy can accommodate (iii) and (iv). The historicity of Jesus, and the capacity of God to become incarnate as a human, so that God has a history of the sort affirmed by (vii) is also something McGilchrist could accept. The challenges Jesus presents to McGilchrist’s philosophy are fourfold. First, Jesus’ unique status as (i) the Son of God and (viii) as far more than a messenger. Second, (v) the idea that Jesus is the exact representation of God’s being; so that to see Jesus is to see the Father and to understand our relationship to Jesus is to understand our relationship to God. Third, (vi) the need for our sin to be purified, for God to enter into the world God had created in order to deal once and for all with the evil which was opposed to God and which was preventing the world from being in right relationship to God and from being all that it was meant to be. Fourth, (ii) the idea of Jesus as the heir of all things, the one for whom all things were made and in whom all things are fulfilled. In short, Jesus challenges McGilchrist’s understanding of Incarnation, Revelation, Atonement, and Fulfilment. The ancient theologian Athanasius and the modern theologian Oliver O’Donovan are convenient foils to show how McGilchrist’s natural philosophy-theology is incomplete.

Incarnation

McGilchrist understands creation as an act of self-limiting by God. Christianity goes further, insisting that God’s ability to self-limit extended to the Son of God being born into a working class family in Palestine under Roman occupation. God appeared on earth, not just as a temporary visitor, but as a real human being with a life-story and a full experience of what it is to be human. McGilchrist is open to that possibility, but baulks at the claim that the birth of Jesus of Nazareth was a unique event. McGilchrist favours Schelling’s idea that God has not incarnated just once, but “is always incarnating itself in the evolving cosmos.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1240).

The Incarnation as a unique event is God coming to earth on God’s own terms. Colossians 1 contains the strong affirmation that the creation of the universe was mediated by the Son of God (Col. 1:15-16), but that this Son of God is none other than Jesus of Nazareth who died on the cross (Col. 1:20) and rose again from the dead (Col. 1:18) The definitive revelation of God in Christ secures the unity and the ordering of creation, provides the focal point of history, and illuminates both the character of God and the meaning of creation in ways that go beyond what is otherwise present to human minds.

Yet, even more than this, the one through whom the universe was made, embraces matter, comes to earth, is made flesh, in order to conquer death and to redeem matter from corruption. It is this, Athanasius insists in his definitive work De Incarnatione Verbi Dei,[21] was the reason for the incarnation: “The supreme object of His coming was to bring about the resurrection of the body.”[22] “Naturally, therefore, the Saviour assumed a body for Himself, in order that the body, being interwoven as it were with life, should no longer remain a mortal thing, in thrall to death, but as endued with immortality and risen from death, should thenceforth remain immortal.”[23]

Revelation

Like McGilchrist, O’Donovan would strongly affirm that there is a natural ordering in the world, that things are meant to fit together in a certain way, that the interrelatedness of all things means that both their correct ordering and their disordering are of cosmic significance. Like McGilchrist, O’Donovan affirms that “humankind finds its dwelling within a broader universe of fellow creatures, from which the concept of humanity is ‘actually inseparable’.”[24]

But O’Donovan, like most Protestant and many Catholic proponents of natural law, finds that ordering to be obscure. The wisdom traditions across the world, to which McGilchrist refers frequently, provide some degree of illumination of their ordering, but remain discordant and fragmentary.

The incarnation of Jesus, however, provides a definitive revelation of God, a revelation which goes beyond the uncertainties of apophaticism and the pseudo-certainties that misuse of the via negativa offers. Jesus was not a messenger pointing to the revelation of God in nature; nature is a signpost pointing to God who revealed the divine nature uniquely in Jesus Christ. Jesus insisted: “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). The anxieties and (mis-) apprehensions of apophaticism are replaced by the assurance that there is no God behind God, that the revelation of God in Christ is reliable though not exhaustive, that what can be known about God is not complete but it is enough.

Jesus claimed that he was “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:9). Jesus is “the Way”. He is the guide on our search for reality. Jesus is “the Truth”. He is the goal of our search and the one in whom creation in its diversity, conflicts, contradictions and loose ends finds its centre, its redemption and its resolution. Jesus is “the Life”. He is the mediator of creation, the one by whose Spirit everything flows, and the one who opens up his relationship to God the Father in order that we may participate in it.

Such revelation is relational (Jesus shows us that, in McGilchrist’s words, “truth is a relationship.” (TMWT ch.10 p.384)), dispositional (“Follow me”) and in Jesus’ teaching, metaphorical more often than propositional. Jesus’ parables are extended metaphors, many beginning “The Kingdom of heaven is like …” As revelation, the movement is from the infinite to the finite, from the ineffable to that which can be signified in imagery, in words, and in actions.

Jesus, the Word of God, by being born as a human baby, takes on material form in order to reveal God to human beings. The revelation comes not in the form of a philosophy in which all the loose ends about existence and causality are tied up but in the shape of a man, a person who calls us to enter into relationship with himself. Jesus shows us God the Father by showing us himself, he talks about the God not by making technical or scientific statements but through metaphors and parables which feel like poetry. Jesus gives us not savoir but helps to connaître God by reminding us, through his actions, what God does.

Atonement

The Christian creeds do not offer a definitive theory of the atonement (the meaning of Christ’s death and resurrection). McGilchrist does not believe in divine retribution (TMWT ch.28 p.1296) and has trouble with the idea that we need to be “bought back” from God.[25] He shares with Whitehead the sense that the emphasis on God as an omnipotent judge is a mistake.

McGilchrist prefers the idea of “at-one-ment”, of God ultimately turning sin and evil into good. Jesus’ life, death and resurrection are therefore symbols of redemption, exemplars and myths, rather than unique, decisive and paradigmatic. Whether they are historical events is, for him, unclear, and less important than whether the story of Jesus carries metaphorical truth.[26] At most, he appears open to the idea of participation in atonement. “[R]epair, is brought about by human acts of compassion in the world, much as the redemption which Christ symbolises is realised and renewed in the acts of kindness and mercy of each one of his followers.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1284).

O’Donovan would see judgment as an essential moment of truth in atonement: a judgment which takes place in two acts – the false judgments of human judges on Jesus which lead to the cross and the true judgment of God declaring Jesus to be the Son of God by raising him from the dead. The atonement is both the acceptance and the refusal of human rejection of a right relationship with creation and with God. On the cross, God accepts the human refusal into the person of the Son of God.[27] The vindication of Jesus in his resurrection is “God’s refusal of our refusal of the goodness of creation.”[28] The death of Christ is the means by which evil is absorbed and overcome by God, enabling not only restoration but a transformation exceeding the possibilities of the natural order.

McGilchrist is not averse to this, but does not know what to make of it. He writes movingly:

“I understand the Christian belief in the redemption of death through God’s own suffering to mean that death is not an end, but plays a part – like the intermediate phase of destruction, of fragmentation, of the shattering of the vessels – in the greater story of repair and restoration; a story that is both mine and not mine, taking place in the immensity of a living cosmos where the part and the whole are as one, yet without of the loss of the meaning of the part that is each one of us.” (TWMT ch.28 p.1297-8).

The Apostle Paul in Acts 17 sought to address uncertainties even greater than the ones McGilchrist expresses. Speaking in Athens where, at the popular level, the gods were beings within the universe. Paul decisively asserted that the God he proclaimed was the creator of the world and all things in it (Acts 17:24). However, for Paul, God’s supreme act of self-revelation was not through the sublime aspects of creation but in the person of Jesus. Paul presented the Athenians with a call to face up to a coming judgment, to be delivered by Jesus, whose credentials for this task had been established by his resurrection from the dead (Acts 17:30-31). Paul’s affirmation that in God “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28) was an assertion of God’s immanence balanced against God’s transcendence in the context of an overall argument centred around the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The Nicene Creed resolutely affirms the materiality of the resurrection. Jesus’s resurrection was not his spiritualised re-absorption into the cosmic consciousness, it was the declaration of the triumph of life over death, and the transformation of already good matter into something even greater.

Fulfilment

The uniqueness of the Incarnation, the revelation of God the Father in the person of Jesus Christ, and the once and for all Atonement in the cross and resurrection, open the way to a fulfilment which exceeds the inherent possibilities of the natural order. Jesus Christ, the author of Hebrews proclaims, is the one in whom the meaning of the world is to be found. His ascension reveals that “man is summoned to a destiny that is not given immediately in his creation, a ‘higher grace’, as Athanasius puts it, ‘to reign eternally with Christ in his heaven’.”[29]

1 Corinthians 15:28 looks forward to a moment when “God will be all in all”. The focus of the chapter in which this phrase appears is the reality of resurrection. Paul stakes everything on the claims that “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day” (1 Cor. 15:3-4). If these historical events, the truth of which Paul had verified for himself, including by talking to the other witnesses to them (1 Cor. 15:4-8), had not happened, then Paul and the other witnesses were false witnesses (1 Cor. 15:15), the message they were preaching was a lie, those who had believed their message were deceived, and death and sin remained the unconquered realities of human existence (1 Cor. 15:15-18).

Having summarised the evidence which caused him to change his mind about Jesus, Paul reminds his readers that he has been prepared to risk death many times (1 Cor. 15:30-32), in the hope of resurrection and for the truth which he has witnessed. It is between those passages, the first of which sets out the evidence for the resurrection of the Son of God and the second of which expresses the depth of Paul’s conviction that this decisive event had occurred, that Paul gives an account of how the Son of God will overcome all of humanity’s enemies, including death (1 Cor. 15:26) before returning all things to God (1 Cor. 15:28). Paul’s extraordinary claim is that the sublimation of evil and the resolution of all things is not some entirely uncertain or unknowable enigma but takes a shape defined by events which took place around AD30, when one homeless Judean rabbi was executed as a blasphemer and traitor, only to have his authority over creation, evil, and death confirmed by being brought back from the dead by the God who is behind, above, and beyond creation.

The overabundance of meaning in the world cannot be contained within the world because the destiny of this world does not lie within itself, but is to be found in Jesus Christ’s restoration, renewal, and transformation of both matter and consciousness. Our material bodies will be transformed; our consciousness, our Kennen, will be opened up to a beatific vision of God.

Conclusion

McGilchrist’s work is a magnificent affirmation that natural philosophy-theology is still alive, generative and fruitful. Though not wholly consistent with classical theism, it is an important addition to philosophical reflection on why there is probably a God, and what such a God may be like. McGilchrist advances his positions with an appropriate confidence borne out of the breadth and depth of his reading across different fields, cultures and time. But strikingly, he readily acknowledges that revision and openness to dialogue and to learning, are imperatives.[30] McGilchrist thereby avoids the trap of an over-confident left hemisphere which becomes too rigid in its certainties about what we cannot know about God.

McGilchrist has journeyed very far into the heart of reality in his philosophical vision, but there are yet greater things to be discovered. Christian theologians will differ in their assessments of McGilchrist’s panentheism, his process theology, and his views on the nature of God’s knowledge and power. I think there is warrant to strengthen and revise McGilchrist’s apophatic speculations in the light of the Incarnation, the Revelation of God in Christ, the Atonement, and the Fulfilment of Creation.

Christian classical theism claims that however much it is true that God is present in creation, God is wholly other than creation. Yet, precisely because God is wholly other than creation, God is able not only to pervade creation by God’s Spirit but also to step into creation in the person of a human being, Jesus Christ. By showing us God with a human face, God has been able to give a true revelation of God’s nature in and through the person of Jesus Christ.

Many theologians, both Christian and from other faiths, would agree with McGilchrist’s diagnosis that “Having abandoned God, our idol is – ourselves, as ‘God’: the gaining of human power over every manifestation of Nature” (TMWT Epilogue p.1333). McGilchrist writes with urgency, seeing our left hemisphere-dominated societies as having fallen into an echo chamber in which artifice and manipulation have replaced encounter and acceptance, rationalism has ousted reason, and reductionism has evacuated meaning.

McGilchrist offers a reminder to those of us who claim to be theologians that in our attempts to understand, we may lose contact with ineffable reality and replace it with rigid left hemisphere systems which imprison and impoverish our thinking. McGilchrist offers a call to remember the wisdom offered seven hundred years ago by an unknown English priest wrote a book called The Cloud of Unknowing.[31] In this masterpiece the writer rejected the attempt to grasp God through as an intellectual exercise because the only way to get to know God is to embrace God as an act of love, that to desire a relationship with God is beginning of discovering one.

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[1] I am enormously grateful to Dr McGilchrist for his generosity in giving me time to discuss his work. I remain, nonetheless, entirely responsible for any errors.

[2] For details of my publications see www.theologyoflaw.org.

[3] This phrasing is common, but inaccurate. All knowledge is revealed by God. Some knowledge is revealed through reason (what theologians call general revelation); other knowledge is revealed through authority (e.g. a messenger from God or Holy Scripture – theologians call this special revelation).

[4] He illustrates this with the example of buying a box of cigars: H. Dooyeweerd, tr. R.D. Knudsen, ed. A.M. Cameron, Encyclopedia of the Science of Law: Volume 1 (Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2003), 13-21, 24.

[5] David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (London: Yale University Press, 2013), 4.

[6] Hart, The Experience of God, 7.

[7] At pages 1158, 1168-9, 1199, 1276, 1282, and 1369-70.

[8] Hart, The Experience of God, 134.

[9] The Quincunque Vult, a creed dating from at least the early sixth century AD, affirms that each of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is uncreated, unlimited, eternal, Almighty, and that they are together one God not three Gods.

[10] For a recent defence, see Steven J. Duby, Jesus and the God of Classical Theism: Biblical Christology in the Light of the Doctrine of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2022).

[11] “Kant believed not in moral values because there was a God, but in God because there were moral values: not in a rule-engendering Nobodaddy in the sky, that we had better obey, but in an ultimate moral force in the universe to which we are intrinsically attracted.” (TMWT ch.26 p.1124). Whether McGilchrist is right in his exegesis of Kant is another question.

[12] Molinism is defended by William Lane Craig in ‘The Middle-Knowledge View’ in James K. Beilby and Paul R. Eddy eds., Divine Foreknowledge: Four Views (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2001), 119-43..

[13] A.N. Whitehead, ed. D.R. Griffin and D.W. Sherburne, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology,  (Macmillan, 1929), 208.

[14] A.N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 351.

[15] For a recent discussion of those problems in the broader context of debates about anthropology and the status of law, see D.W. Opderbeck, The End of Law? Law, Theology, and Neuroscience (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2021).

[16] Classical Christian theism is defended on this point by Thomas G. Weinandy in Does God Suffer? (University of Notre Dame Press, 2000).

[17] J. Moltmann, The Crucified God 2^nd edn. (Munich: Christian Kaiser Verlag, 1973) tr. R.A Wilson and John Bowden (London: SCM, 1974, 2001)

[18] Colin Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991); P.S. Fiddes, Participating in God: A Pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity (London: Darton Longman & Todd, 2000); J. Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom of God: The Doctrine of God (Munich: Christian Kaiser Verlag, 1980) tr. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM, 1981).

[19] The metaphor for the Trinity which McGilchrist says he finds himself attracted to, and which was shared with him by a Franciscan, is that of a book: “What is the book? Is it what was present in the mind of its writer? Or the tangible volume on the table in front of me? Or what goes on in the mind of the receptive reader? Clearly it is each and all.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1266 footnote 251).

[20] The Roman numerals refer to the order in which these points are made in verses 1 to 4.

[21] Athanasius, St. Athanasius on the Incarnation, tr. and ed. A Religious of C.S.M.V. (London: A.R. Mowbray & Co Ltd, 1953), chapter 1 §8-§9, chapter 4 §20-§21.

[22] Athanasius, St Athanasius on the Incarnation, chapter 4 §22.

[23] Athanasius, St Athanasius on the Incarnation, chapter 7 §44.

[24] Samuel Tranter, Oliver O’Donovan’s Moral Theology: Tensions and Triumphs (London, T&T Clark, 2022),  51.

[25] Private conversation.

[26] In conversation he shared that he does not know enough about Jesus, because the gospels were written some time after the events in question. Whilst I agree with him that memories fade and recollections alter, the fact there are four gospel writers, who are clearly writing down stories they have retold for years since Jesus’s death persuades me of their basic reliability: see Peter J. Williams, Can We Trust the Gospels? (Wheaton, IL: Crossway: 2018) and F. Morison, Who Moved the Stone? (Faber and Faber, 1930).

[27] There are different construals of whether this affects Jesus of Nazareth only in his humanity or also in his divinity.

[28] Tranter, Oliver O’Donovan’s Moral Theology, 48.

[29] O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, 2^nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 56.

[30] “Faith, like science, is not static and certain, but a process of exploration that always has in sight enough of what it seeks to keep the seeker journeying onward.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1275).

[31] The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works tr. C. Wolters (London: Penguin, 1961, repr. 1987).