David McIlroy on Iain McGilchrist's Worldview and Natural Theology
David McIlroy on Iain McGilchrist's Worldview and Natural Theology
A two-part scholarly essay in one place.
This page provides a single reference point to David McIlroy’s two-part scholarly essay on Iain McGilchrist’s philosophy and natural theology without substantive introductions from Perspectiva.
The first part: Understanding Iain McGilchrist’s Worldview was published by Perspectiva on January 25th, 2024.
The second part, originally called: The McGilchrist Worldview and its Relationship to Classical Theism and Christian Theology is published today, March 15 by Perspectiva as Cross with the Hemispheres? A Christian Challenge to Iain McGilchrist.
The author, David McIlroy is a Barrister and Head of Chambers at Forum Chambers, Global Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame (USA) in England, and a Visiting Professor in Banking Law at Queen Mary University of London.
Part One
Understanding the McGilchrist Worldview, by David McIlroy
Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher, and literary scholar. He is a polymath, best described as a natural philosopher.[1]
A former fellow of All Souls’ College, he has a glittering academic and professional career. His 2009 book The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (“TMHE”) is a masterpiece. In it, McGilchrist shows how there are two ways of attending to the world: one which seeks to take it apart and to manipulate it and the other which embraces it in its wholeness and connectedness. These two ways of attending to the world are typical of the left and right hemispheres respectively. He has expanded on this thesis in a monumental follow-up work, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (“TMWT”).
McGilchrist’s basic contention is that the two hemispheres of the brain have two different ways of perceiving the world (TMWT Introduction pp.17-32, ch.3 p.104). The right hemisphere looks at the world holistically, responding to its flow.[2] The left hemisphere looks at the world analytically, seeking to break it down into things that can be manipulated (TMWT Introduction p.21). The optimum way to use our brain’s potential to connect with reality is for the right hemisphere (the Master) to attend some part of the world, for the left hemisphere (the Emissary) to seek to apprehend that part, and for the results of the left hemisphere’s analysis to be re-integrated into the right hemisphere’s vision. After the parts have been examined, “There is … a need for effortful recomposition to make the whole comprehensible”. (TMWT ch.9 p.331).
In McGilchrist’s own words,
“all that is to be known must initially ‘presence’ to the right hemisphere (we have no other access); then be transferred to the left hemisphere so as to gain expression through re-presentation; and that re-presentation returned to the right hemisphere where it is either recognised for its consonance with the initial presencing and subsumed into a new Gestalt, or rejected.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1229).
McGilchrist’s argument is that healthy individuals, groups, and societies approach the world first via the right hemisphere, reacting to what is found there to form an impression of how everything links together; then the left hemisphere looks in detail at elements that can become objects of human action in isolation, and then the results of the left hemisphere’s inspection are returned to the right hemisphere where the individual elements are reintegrated into a more profound understanding of the whole. In unhealthy individuals, groups, and societies, the move to isolate and manipulate is the primary move, and the left hemisphere creates a feedback loop that fails to acknowledge the reality of that which can be embraced but cannot be grasped, that which must be accepted but cannot be captured in words.[3]
Already in The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist was arguing that in modernism, the left hemisphere had triumphed resulting in “an excess of consciousness and an over-explicitness in relation to what needs to remain implicit; depersonalisation and alienation from the body and empathic feeling; disruption of context; fragmentation of experience; and the loss of ‘betweenness’.” (TMHE ch.10 p.397). “Ultimately there is nothing less than an emptying out of meaning.” (TMHE ch.10 p.398).
McGilchrist’s 1,578 page follow-up, The Matter with Things, is the most devastating demolition of reductive materialism since Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.[4] At TMWT ch.26 p.1165, McGilchrist states: “It seems to me that the reductionist account is contrary to scientific findings, unreasonable, counterintuitive, and shows a complete refusal to exercise intelligent imagination”.
McGilchrist’s claim is that in modernity the West has “systematically misunderstood the nature of reality” (TMWT Introduction p.3) as a result of succumbing to “the reductionist view that we are – nature is – the earth is – ‘nothing but’ a bundle of senseless particles, pointlessly, helplessly, mindlessly, colliding in a predictable fashion, whose existence is purely material, and whose only value is utility.” (TMWT Introduction p.5). McGilchrist nicknames this reductionism “nothing buttery”.
Things have gone wrong because the left hemisphere believes that its comprehension of the part is total. “The awareness coming from the right hemisphere can embrace that of the left, but not the other way round.” (TMWT Coda to Part III p.1314). The left hemisphere makes at least two fatal mistakes: it regards its representation or analysis of the part as definitive in place of attending to the part itself and it treats the part in isolation from its relationship with other parts of the flow of reality. Instead of humbly submitting the results of its analysis to the right hemisphere, the left hemisphere becomes stuck in a feedback loop. The world as created by the left hemisphere becomes a totalising narrative, a metaverse, from which broader reality (especially those aspects which cannot be reduced to language, measured or manipulated are excluded (TMWT Introduction p.26, Introduction pp.43-45)).[5] “The left hemisphere adopts a theory, and then actually denies what doesn’t fit the theory.” (TMWT ch.4 p.172).[6]
In late modernity, we have mistaken the map, the theoretical schema created by the left hemisphere, for the reality of the lived world that our right hemisphere connects us with (TMWT ch.9 p.317, ch.15 p.573). The “consequences … are far-reaching – indeed devastating.” (TMWT ch.9 p.305). Our lives are “lived” under the shadow of the “dead hand of mechanism, scientism,[7] and bureaucracy” (TMWT ch.9 p.329).[8] Analytical philosophy and the dominance of the machine metaphor in science[9] have created “a tradition in which most academics now are so thoroughly schooled that they can’t see that there is a problem, let alone how to escape it.” (TMWT ch.9 p.347).
At one level, TMWT is the “unfolding and differentiation” of McGilchrist’s key claim that our left hemisphere-dominated worldview is having a multitude of nefarious ramifications. But it is also McGilchrist’s attempt to integrate a lifetime of insights into a coherent overall framework. The result is a work of such depth and subtlety that any attempt to summarise it risks descending into caricature or parody. An important claim McGilchrist makes is that “We cannot know anything without attending to it, and the nature of that attention alters what we find” (TMWT ch.26 p.1129). This, of course, means that my reading of McGilchrist is partly determined by the questions I brought to his text and the context of my life in which I am reading his work.
With that warning in place, eleven key features of McGilchrist’s worldview can be drawn out of the summary he offers on TMWT Epilogue p.1329:
1. Relationships are ontologically primary, foundational; and ‘things’ a secondary, emergent property of relationships.
2. Matter is an aspect of consciousness, not consciousness an emanation from matter.
3. Individuation is a natural process, whose aim is to enrich rather than to disrupt wholeness.
4. Apparent opposites are not as far as possible removed from one another but tend to coincide.
5. Change and motion are the universal norm, but do not disrupt stability and duration.
6. Nothing is wholly determined, though there are constraints, and nothing is wholly random, though chance plays an important creative role.
7. The whole cosmos is creative; it drives towards the realisation of an infinite potential.
8. Nature is our specific home in the cosmos from which we come and to which in time we return.
9. The world absolutely cannot be properly understood or appreciated without imagination and intuition, as well as reason and science: each plays a vitally important role.
10. The world is neither purposeless nor unintelligent, but simply beyond our full comprehension. The world is more a dance than an equation.
11. At the core of the world is something we call the divine, which is itself forever coming into being along with the world that it forms, and by which, in turn, it too is formed.
The remainder of this article will reflect on these eleven aspects, taking them roughly in turn (but postponing consideration of the second aspect almost to the end).
McGilchrist’s First Feature of Reality: The primacy of relationships
A left hemisphere view of things regards each thing in isolation and as “nothing but” itself. McGilchrist dismisses this reductionist ‘nothing buttery’ as inadequate to our experience of the world and inconsistent with the findings of quantum physics (TMWT Introduction p.5).
McGilchrist, like Wordsworth, sees wonder, connectedness, and significance in nature. Speaking of his experience of the natural world, he writes: “nothing ‘super’ needed to be added to the ‘natural’ for it to invoke wonder.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1215). “In short, creation and the mystery of what lies behind it become sacred; and the disposition that sees it thus is what is meant by a religious disposition. It is a disposition that perceives depth.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1217).
McGilchrist’s view of nature has similarities to that of Henri de Lubac, who famously argued that there is no natura pura, that nature is always already everywhere laden with God’s grace.[10]
Nothing in nature exists in isolation, “everything exists only in relation” (TMWT ch.21 p.846). Although at points McGilchrist entertains the possibility that things and their relations are equally fundamental,[11] his preferred view is that “relationships must be primary, since entities become what they are only through their situation in the context of multiple relations.” (TMWT ch.24 p.1006) and “things are secondary properties of phenomena that emerge out of the web of experience, as ‘objects’ that attract our focussed (left hemisphere) attention. … an object is … what presents itself as useful to grasp.” (TMWT ch.22 p.885). “Relationships are prior to relata” (TMWT ch.12 p.459, ch.24 p.1006).[12]
The primacy of relationships leads to McGilchrist’s eighth feature of reality: human beings are part of nature. Instead of thinking of human beings in opposition to their environment, we urgently need to rediscover that we are part of the world, and to re-form our attention to the world in ways that nourish and sustain it in its relationships with us and us in our relationships with it.
Religion is, for McGilchrist, a key way of emphasising the importance of relationships. “A religious cast of mind sets the human being and human life in the widest context, reminding us of our duties to one another, and to the natural world that is our home; duties, however, that are founded in love, and link us to the whole of existence. The world becomes ensouled. And we have a place in it once more.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1283).
McGilchrist’s Third Feature of Reality: the Particular and the General (*The second feature is considered later!)
Our world is one in which there is a high degree of regularity but also an amazing amount of individuation. Every fingerprint and every snowflake is unique. Individuation and connectedness produce a creative tension. Things are recognised for what they are not because they are identical with other things, but because of their resemblance to a pattern. “Everything is part of one whole, connected to every other part by a matter of degree. But everything is also absolutely unique” (TMWT ch.21 p. 843). “If there were no general patterns at all, there would not be uniqueness, but mere chaos.” (TMWT ch.21 p.844).
Thus, McGilchrist concludes: “The claim that All is One is well-intentioned, but, it seems to me disastrous, because it is just half a truth. … the other equal truth is All is Many.” (TMWT ch.21 p.875). “Whatever exists in time and space is ipso facto unique; though in it and through it one sees the general and the timeless, not as separate but as another facet of the same entity.” (TMWT ch.21 p.879).
McGilchrist’s Fourth Feature of Reality: the Reconciliation of Apparent Contradictions
The dialectic between the One and the Many is an illustration of McGilchrist’s fourth feature of reality, that two superficially contradictory perspectives can be held in tension with one another, but ultimately reconciled by integrating one into the other. Thus, McGilchrist sees reality as exhibiting a kind of exitus – reditus movement (separation leading to deeper union), with “the ultimate priority of the principle of union over that of division, despite the necessary part played by division at one stage of the process.” (TMWT ch.21 p.847).[13]
At times McGilchrist appears to verge towards Manicheism (the belief that good and evil are equally primary and equally balanced). “For everything there is an optimal amount, and it is rarely if ever zero or infinity. Even what appears evil may cause some good, and what seems good cause some harm. If it is true that every devil has his angel, it is also true that every angel has his devil.” (TMWT ch.15 p.598). The title of chapter 20 of TMWT, “The coincidentia oppositorum” continues this impression.
However, just as the left and right hemispheres of the brain are asymmetric (TMWT ch.20 p.836), so too McGilchrist sees an asymmetry in the coincidentia oppositorum (TMWT ch.20 p.833) and in the foundations of physical reality (TMWT ch.24 pp.1028-35). McGilchrist advocates for balance, harmony, and complementarity, but not for symmetry. “Small imbalances, differences among sameness, at all levels in nature make it work, starting with the initial inequality of matter and antimatter.” (TMWT ch.20 p.833). In a similar way, “I experience both good and evil as real, and see them as necessary opposites; but while evil can, goodness knows, locally overwhelm good, it cannot subsume good into itself. The goodness of loved can embrace its opposite; the evil of hate cannot.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1300). The tension between asymmetric opposites is creative, perfect symmetry is inert.
McGilchrist’s Fifth Feature of Reality: Change and Motion are what Give Things their Identity
The left hemisphere worldview gets stuck in superficial paradoxes: for it, something either has to remain static or it becomes a different thing. McGilchrist argues that: “in the deep … structure of reality opposite truths do actually coincide, and we must therefore accept both.” (TMWT ch.16 p.641). In part, this is because, he thinks “many, if not all, logical paradoxes can be seen as arising from the left hemisphere’s attempt to analyse something that is better grasped as a whole by the right hemisphere.” (TMWT ch.16 p.642). “[W]e need to resist choosing one truth only and ignoring the other; rather, we must see how the greater truth may hold both together.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1231).
The right hemisphere worldview can embrace paradox, seeing how different perspectives can be integrated into a deeper vision. Our own experience of growing up and growing old is that we are the same person even as our life extends through time and the cells in our body are replaced. McGilchrist’s view, following Balbir Singh, is that “What we ordinarily call a thing is itself a process, a ceaseless coming to be and passing away.”[14] This means that being is not a static quality but a continuous presencing. “If one espouses a view of the world as a flow, not as a collection of things; then all that exists is not just, inertly, being, but always ‘be-coming’; and time and movement is bound up in that very concept.” (TMWT ch.22 p.934).
Heraclitus is the Greek philosopher most associated with emphasising change over statis. For McGilchrist, “Heraclitus points not to change only, but as much to permanence: flow which ever changes but ever remains. There is no succession of things involved in this change, because they always flow, interpenetrating one another.” (TMWT ch.23 p.953). “Flow, then, is not primarily about change, since it is equally about persistence” (TMWT ch.23 p.954). “[C]hange is accentuated when one sees ‘things that flow’; persistence when one sees the flow itself.” (TMWT ch.23 p.954).
Nicholas Wolterstorff once said that there has never been a satisfactory philosophy of time. McGilchrist sees time as “a way of precipitating out into infinitely various actuality the undifferentiated oneness from which the universe began” (TMWT ch.22 p.888). “Time, for the right hemisphere, is not something distinct from being, from reality flowing: it is always thus a becoming, never a something become.” (TMWT ch.22 p.902). “Time is the coherence-giving context in which we live.” (TMWT ch.22 p.906).
McGilchrist’s Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Features of Reality: This is a Participatory Universe
McGilchrist strongly affirms Wheeler’s famous pronouncement: “This is a participatory universe.”[15] (quoted in TMWT ch.25 p.1057). The world for us is the world as we experience it. This world cannot be manipulated howsoever we wish (as the left hemisphere is apt to think) but neither it is unresponsive to our attention.
McGilchrist consistently defends the position that “there is something other than the contents of our own minds to which each of us aims to be true – and the right hemisphere is, on any account we can advance, a better witness to that reality than the left.” (TMWT ch.22 p.882). “[W]e do actually deal with reality and know it, just with an aspect of it that we partly call forth ourselves by our approach.” (TMWT ch.25 p.1052).
Through our consciousness, our focus of attention, our response to the real world:
“… this is how we bring all our world into being: all human reality is an act of co-creation. It’s not that we make the world up; we respond more or less adequately to something greater than we are. The world emerges from this dipole. We half perceive, half create.” (TMWT ch.19 p.765). “… we are social beings who co-create one another and the world.” (TMWT ch.21 p.874).
“The nature of the attention that we bring to bear on the world, and the values which we bring to the encounter, change what we find; and in some absolutely non-trivial sense, change what it is. At the same time, the encounter … changes who we are.” (TMWT Epilogue p.1330-31). This is something we share with all other creatures. “In organisms there is never just action without both interaction and mutual construction.” (TMWT ch.12 p.451).
The openness of the universe to our participation is the concomitant of McGilchrist’s sixth feature of reality. The insights of quantum physics reveal that in nature, nothing is wholly determined, though there are constraints, and nothing is wholly random, though chance plays an important creative role.
For McGilchrist, the world has the contours of structure which make free action possible. We can plan, choose, and act because the laws of nature exhibit sufficient regularity to make our agency effective. This involves God, who could wholly determine everything, drawing back in order to create something other than, and in relationship with, God. Thus, “for the cosmos to be at all, both the principle of love (chesed), and the power of restraint (gevurah), are required.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1260). God has to allow the other to be in order for the other to respond in genuine love. “What does love mean, to the lover or the one that is loved, if it is compelled?” (TMWT ch.28 p.1262). “The existence of human free will is the ultimate expression of tzimtzum, the ‘standing back’ of God.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1257).
McGilchrist’s participatory view of the universe reinforces his claim that relationships are primary. “The idea that God is love, or even the ‘word’ (logos), suggests that ultimately what is primary is relationship: a word exists only in the betweenness of utterance and audition, which has the same structure as love. Love is an experience always in process, never a thing or anything like a thing.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1237).
Love is fundamental to the shape of the universe.
“One way of thinking of this (it is hardly original) is that a divine principle of love needs something Other to love, since love is essentially directed outwards; that that Other must be free to respond, since a love that is compelled is not love; and that this necessarily means that the Other must be free to reject the love that is proffered. This seems to me necessarily true, if such a divine principle of love exists.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1301).
So love is key to our lives. “We are temporarily material entities, capable … of playing a part in creation itself … We are embedded in the cosmos that gives rise to us … What is wonderful about us is not our pitiful lust for power, … but precisely our capacity to be vulnerable, to wonder, and to love: which alone makes what we most value possible.” (TMWT Epilogue p.1330).
An ‘engineering God or a detailed plan’ are ideas that McGilchrist explicitly rejects (TMWT ch.27 p.1179). “The grounding consciousness is not deterministic. It has none of the characteristics of an omnipotent and omniscient engineering God constructing and winding up a mechanism. It is in the process of discovering itself through its creative potential …” (TMWT ch.25 p.1099). McGilchrist is emphatic that “the beautiful colours of the flowers and birds, and all the other beauties of nature, were [not] created by an engineering God for human delight”. (TMWT ch.26 p.1148). Instead, “we, as they, are the manifestations of an intrinsically beautiful cosmos” (TMWT ch.26 p.1164).
McGilchrist’s rejection of an engineering God means the embracing of Aristotelian / Thomist / Leibnizian teleology, of final causes, of what McGilchrist calls “intrinsic purpose”.
“If you understand purpose to mean extrinsic purpose, you invent an engineering God who made the universe as an infinitely complex mechanism to serve some unknown end of his own. Such a God is just a projection of the left hemisphere’s fantasy of endless power to manipulate – a divine left hemisphere, detached from the cosmos and running the show according to a foreordained plan. … If, like me, you can’t … believe in such a God, you might jump to the conclusion that this infinitely complex ‘mechanism’ has simply no purpose. But that is just to make the same error, that of conceiving purpose only in extrinsic terms: as if the only alternatives were the purposes of an engineering God, or a cosmos without purpose.” (TMWT ch.27 p.1169).
Instead, McGilchrist argues: “things are better thought of as being attracted towards certain goals, rather than pushed blindly forwards by a mechanism from behind.” (TMWT ch.27 p.1190). “Nature’s purposiveness includes and is predicated on the freedom of her creatures” (TMWT ch.27 p.1186). Once we have accepted that human beings are not the only things with intrinsic purpose, then we realise that we are part of nature, that we belong in and with nature (McGilchrist’s Eighth Feature of Reality).
McGilchrist’s Ninth Feature of Reality: Understanding the World requires more than the use of Science and Reason
Because of the left hemisphere’s blindspots, “the right hemisphere is a more reliable guide to reality than the left hemisphere. … it has a greater range of attention; greater acuity of perception; makes more reliable judgments; and contributes more to both emotional and cognitive intelligence than the left.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1285).[16]
McGilchrist is critical of narrow, unfeeling, ratiocination. Reason is important, but is limited and never entirely separable from emotion (TMWT ch.4 p.167, ch.14 p.549, ch.15 p.579).[17] Explicit reasoning needs to be counterbalanced by intuition (the synthesis of experience with unconscious reasoning) (TMWT ch.8 p.256, ch14 p.554) and imagination (TMWT ch.14 p.549).[18] “[R]eality is neither undiscoverable, nor discoverable by the intellect alone, but by the whole embodied being, senses, feeling, intellect and imagination.” (TMWT ch.15 p.576). “Human cognition is never just abstract and mechanical, but must be personal as well. As such, it involves not just calculating and categorising, but feeling and judging, and that this is essential to our humanity." (TMWT ch.21 p.873).
“Some things can only be experienced or understood when they are not put to analysis. This is not because analysis defeats them, but because they defeat analysis.” (TMWT ch.14 p.565). Therefore, the left hemisphere fails to take proper account of them: “by focussing too much on reason we miss all the things that can’t be reasoned about, or precisely expressed – only alluded to.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1265).
Reliance on ratiocination rather than experience therefore opens the way to radical scepticism because, as Bryan Magee claims (with some degree of hyberbole): “direct experience which is never adequately communicable in words is the only knowledge we ever fully have”[19] (quoted in TMWT ch.28 p.1196). In denigrating this, the left hemisphere approach fails to recognise that “there is a distinction between something beyond our means of grasp and something beyond our means of knowing.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1205).
Because of the interconnectedness, the richness, and the multi-layered nature of the world and our experience of the world, “metaphor … is fundamental to how we understand the world.” (TMWT ch.19 p.757). McGilchrist approves of Aristotle’s observation in De arte poetica that “a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars”.[20] “All understanding whatsoever is, at bottom, metaphorical.” (TMWT ch.15 p.632). Elsewhere he says: “It’s metaphors all the way down”.
Our dependence on metaphors reveals our need for myths and for metaphysics. “Just as there is no option to think without metaphor, there is no such thing as not having a myth” (TMWT Epilogue p.1330). “[U]ltimate meaning will always lie beyond what reason can conceive or everyday language express.” (TMWT, ch.14 p.569). “The beauty and power of art and of myth is that they enable us … to contact aspects of reality that we recognise well, but cannot capture in words.” (TMWT ch.15 p.631). Thus, “the most fundamental truths, of both a physical and psychical nature, can ultimately be expressed only in terms of poetry.” (TMWT ch.10 p.387).
McGilchrist’s Tenth Feature of Reality: Reality is Bigger Than We Can Grasp
Therefore, in order to find our home in the world, we need to approach the world as something to be embraced rather than manipulated. We need to assume the connexion with the world that we are going to find. McGilchrist insists that “belief is dispositional, not propositional” (TMWT ch.28 p.1262) and that “a true understanding requires a certain disposition of the mind towards its object. … True understanding … already presupposes a connexion, rather than being the prerequisite of such a connexion.” (TMWT ch.26 p.1127).
The view from nowhere, and the God’s-eye perspective, are not open to us (TMWT ch.15 p.612). Our knowledge of the world is always situated, contextual and partial. The reason that we cannot pin down the “meaning” of the world, is not because it has no meaning, but because there is “a plenitude of meaning, beyond simple articulation” (TMWT ch.10 p.390). There are things, (like love, sunsets, and even the joy of being in a good bookshop) which we cannot reduce to writing not because they have no meaning but because they are overflowing with meaning.
McGilchrist writes:
“if we lose the sense of just how much we do not know, we lose understanding of even the little that we do know.” (TMWT ch.19 p.775). “mystery [does not] betoken a lack of meaning – rather a superabundance of meaning in relation to our normal finite vision.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1258).
Nicholas Cusanus made the point in the fifteenth century that infinity “is intrinsically unknowable because there is no comparison” (TMWT ch.28 p.1259). Whilst some kinds of mathematic infinities can be conceptualised, we do not know and cannot imagine what it would be to be outside the constraints of space-time. “Uniqueness brings everyday language to a standstill. Anything truly unique cannot be expressed in such language, which is why whatever is profound, personal, or sacred, if it is to be expressed in words, can be so expressed only in poetry, the language of the right hemisphere. In poetry, language subverts its normal tendency to precision and becomes rich with ambiguity, with potential meaning again; and through the rifts created in the enclosing veil of language the light once more streams in.” (TMWT ch.21 p.867).
McGilchrist’s speculations about God are therefore apophatic. God is the surplus in creation that cannot be encapsulated, that resists formulation, and that refuses all attempts at reduction. “There can be no certain truth in speaking of the divine. But there is resonance, and the test is whether it answers to experience.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1250).
McGilchrist endorses the via negativa and the mystical theology of, in particular, Meister Eckhart (TMWT ch.28 p.1212). McGilchrist calls Eckhart, “The greatest of the mediaeval mystics … associated with what has been called a ‘metaphysics of flow’.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1236). He quotes McGinn,[21] who writes that Eckhart saw “God as negatio negationis is simultaneously total emptiness and supreme fullness.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1255).
Our fundamental calling is to experience, to enjoy, rather than to analyse, to rejoice in rather than to exhaust. The metaphor McGilchrist repeatedly reaches for here is that of a dance. “[Thomas] Fuchs sees that our lives as social beings must belong to something that is best expressed as a dance or a piece of music, if we are to enmesh, engage, connect” (TMWT ch.23 p.969).[22] “Life, in its essence, is a making new: a wholly superfluous, super-abundant, self-overflowing – an exuberant, self-delighting process of differentiation into ever more astonishing forms, an unending dance, in which we are lucky enough to find ourselves caught up” (TMWT ch.21 p.853). We are to go with the flow, to connect with our partners, to follow the harmonies.
McGilchrist’s Second Feature of Reality: Consciousness is Prior to Matter
McGilchrist’s emphasis on experience leads to his affirmation that consciousness is prior to matter. The left hemisphere worldview thinks that material things are simple and can be understood in their totality, but that consciousness is a mystery which must be explained away as either an illusion, an epiphenomenon or as somehow magically emerging from matter. A major theme in TMWT is that no things can be fully understood apart from their relationships to everything else in the universe, with the consequence that our understanding of matter is necessarily partial and incomplete. Matter is therefore far more complex than is commonly assumed, and that the best explanation is that “matter appears to be an element within consciousness that provides the necessary resistance for creation; and with that, inevitably, for individuality to arise.” (TMWT ch.25 p.1049).[23] McGilchrist’s claim that matter is the creation of consciousness, rather than vice versa, has similarities with the idealist philosophy of George Berkeley (TMWT ch.2 p.77).
Given the total failure of the materialistic worldview to explain consciousness and, McGilchrist would argue, its fundamentally mistaken account of matter, McGilchrist argues that it is more consistent with experience, more powerful as an explanation of the nature of the world, and therefore more reasonable, to regard consciousness as equally fundamental as, or even as prior to, matter (TWMT ch.10 p.394).
McGilchrist insists that the metaphysical questions are the most important questions of all, and that they cannot be answered from within a left hemisphere framework (hence the inability of scientism to make sense of the questions).
“For me, and for many philosophers historically, the deepest question in all philosophy … is why there should be something rather than nothing. And close on its heels comes the question why that ‘something’ turns out to be complex and orderly, beautiful and creative, capable of life, feeling and consciousness, rather than merely chaotic, sterile, and dead.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1193).
McGilchrist’s answer to the second question is that the best explanation for the qualities of the matter of the universe is that it is the product of a cosmic scale mind.
“But if the material cosmos is an emanation or projection of a grounding consciousness it will as a matter of course have the necessary, apparently fine-tuned, conditions to come into existence; it will naturally have the qualities of order, beauty and complexity because it issues from a consciousness that, like us, is attuned to and gives rise to such elements; it will naturally produce conscious beings, and the conscious beings will naturally be able to speak its language, since they are generated by it. Of course this does not answer the unanswerable question, why there is something rather than nothing.” (TMWT ch.25 p.1098).
Speaking of the relationship between the mind and the body, McGilchrist writes: “During life it is possible that the spiritual and physical are entangled, neither causing the other, neither depending on the other for its existence, but their entanglement certainly depending on the co-existence of each” (TMWT ch.22 p.916). Thus,
“we find the soul not by turning away from the body, but by embracing it in a way that spiritualises the body; and we find the sacred not by turning away from the world, but by embracing it, in a move that sanctifies matter. The soul is both in and transcends the body, as a poem is in and yet transcends mere language …” (TMWT ch.24 p.1014).
McGilchrist’s Eleventh Feature of Reality: God is becoming with Nature
If consciousness is prior to matter, then the universe is a product of Mind. McGilchrist does not endorse pantheism, the idea that, as Roger Scruton puts it when commenting on Spinoza, ‘the distinction between the creator and the created is not a distinction between two entities, but a distinction between two ways of conceiving a single reality’ (TMWT ch.28 p.1248).[24] Instead, he prefers panentheism (the view that “all things are in God, and God in all things” (TMWT ch.28 p.1231)), because it “permits something further: the possibility that God has a relationship not just with the divine self, but with something Other; and this, it seems to me, is the drive behind there being a creation at all.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1248).
McGilchrist is clear that God is both wholly transcendent and wholly immanent (TMWT ch.28 p.1231, 1248). As for God’s transcendence: “God is above all not a thing alongside other things – even one equipped with ultra-special powers. God simply is – in a use of the verb that requires that we understand God both to have Being and to be the ground of Being at one and the same time.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1201).
Beings participate in Being. As McGilchrist puts it, in express agreement with Thomas Aquinas and classical theism on this point:
“To exist, … is to have a share in being … given by God, … it is a revelation of God. … God gives himself in a certain respect in creation; in giving the world being, he is giving what he is, even if he is giving it so perfectly generously as to give it away, to make something truly other than himself.”[25]
Moreover, “to say that God gives himself definitively, and even in a certain sense perfectly, in creation does not at all mean that the created world, even taken as a whole and in all of its mysterious depth, exhausts the meaning of God. God infinitely transcends the world, and so the world in its natural reality falls radically short as a revelation of God.”[26]
Therefore, “God is certainly greater than but includes the universe” (McGilchrist, quoting Keith Ward,[27] TMWT ch.28 p.1232). “God … can say ‘yes’. And to say ‘yes’ to everything includes saying ‘yes’ to ‘no’ – limitation – which may explain the existence of sin.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1254).
For McGilchrist, following Alfred North Whitehead, God’s ability to inhabit the universe (even to the point of becoming a human being if the Christian mythos is to be believed) is expressed in the idea that God is Becoming.
“God, truth, and infinity are all processes, not things; comings into being, not entities that are already fixed. … Ultimately Being and Becoming are aspects of the same thing. …However, as usual, there is an asymmetry: they are not equal. In the philosophy of Whitehead, the divine is Becoming, and Becoming is even more fundamental than Being.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1241).
McGilchrist’s panentheism draws on a number of thinkers, including the Christian theologian Jürgen Moltmann: “In the panentheistic view, God, having created the world, also dwells in it, and conversely, the world which he has created exists in him” (TMWT ch.28 p.1267).[28] McGilchrist’s panentheism rejects any notion of creation as a machine or God as a clockmaker who simply winds up the clock and then lets it tick away by itself.
McGilchrist is a theist rather than a deist. His God is continuously co-creating in the unfolding universe rather than having departed the scene. In a way similar to Moltmann’s account of the Holy Spirit as the holistic Spirit, McGilchrist suggests “that whatever creative energy underwrites the unfolding of the phenomenal universe is continually active and involved in that universe; that the future is tended towards, but not closely determined; rather it is open, evolving, self-fulfilling.” (TMWT ch.27 p.1172).
McGilchrist poses his own wager, with an express nod to Pascal:
“if God is an eternal Becoming, fulfilled as God through the response of his creation, and we, for our part, constantly more fulfilled through our response to God; then we are literally partners in the creation of the universe, perhaps even in the becoming of God (who is himself Becoming as much as Being): in which case it is imperative that we try to reach and know and love that God. Not just for our own sakes, because we bear some responsibility, however small, for the part we play in creation …” (TMWT ch.28 p.1263).
Panentheism is what McGilchrist thinks is part of the best explanation for the world as it presents, or better, presences itself to us. “While invoking God does not … answer our questions, it is part of a picture – a Gestalt – that makes more sense to me as a whole than a Gestalt that avoids the divine.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1259). McGilchrist’s openness to God is part and parcel with his rejection of materialism, determinism and the metaphor for the universe as a machine or a clock. “… [I]f the nature of reality is not already fixed, but rather, evolving, participatory, reverbative, it is both rational and important to open your mind and heart to God, in order to bring whatever it is evermore into existence.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1263).
As the extracts above show, McGilchrist’s natural philosophy shades into a natural theology in which qualified affirmations about the divine can be offered. McGilchrist’s God is “that which underwrites, timelessly and eternally, whatever is: in other words, the ground of Being.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1194).
God is “a co-ordinating principle in the universe which is evidenced in order, harmony and fittingness; a principle that is not only true, but the ultimate source of truth.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1206). But McGilchrist acknowledges: “I have … no final answers to any of the big questions. … I believe the concept of God to be fraught with difficulties. … I am merely indicating that … there is almost certainly more here than we have words for, or can expect ever to understand using reason alone.” (TMWT ch.25 p.1195). Thus, “What the term ‘God’ requires of us is not a set of propositions about what cannot be known but a disposition towards what must be recognised as beyond human comprehension.” (TMWT ch.25 p.1207).
Consistent with his apophaticism, McGilchrist does not want to be dogmatic in his assertion of panentheism. “We should resist the temptation to take it as gospel – which is why I talked about a ‘speculative’ theology of panentheism. There are no certainties here.” (TMWT ch.25 p.1248).
Conclusion
McGilchrist offers a philosophical vision with many strengths. It is relational, it is anti-reductionist, and it integrates perspectives from a variety of disciplines into a more than plausible whole. Any society in which such a vision has arisen will be greatly enriched if only we will take the time to attend to it.
McGilchrist has also dared to think about what a wholehearted and fully engaged attention to reality suggests about “God”. This has implications for other ways of thinking about God, and in my next article, I will consider McGilchrist’s ideas in the light of classical theism and Christian theology.
Endnotes:
[1] I am enormously grateful to Dr. McGilchrist for his generosity in giving me time to ask questions to clarify my understanding of his work.
[2] “Flow is an irreducible, not an emergent, element in the universe.” (TMWT ch.16 p.648).
[3] “The left hemisphere simply ignores, dismisses, and ultimately denies the existence of, anything it can’t pin down and measure.” (TMWT ch.8 p.295). “Since the left hemisphere uses language to label, this often involves a belief that changing the label will change the reality. The left hemisphere takes truth to be what is says on the piece of paper.” (TMWT ch.21 p.863).
[4] Oxford, OUP: 2012.
[5] “The left hemisphere is both unreasonably willing to jump to conclusions (and stick to them), and inclined unreasonably to put in doubt the basics of existence.” (TMWT Coda to Part I p.375).
[6] At TMWT ch.10 p.398-9, McGilchrist reports the experience of an American woman whose brother had been taken to the morgue. When she kissed him, she felt that he was still warm and that he had a pulse. When she drew a nurse’s attention to these vital signs, the nurse replied: “That’s odd, but you needn’t worry about it, dear, because it says here on this chart quite clearly that he’s dead.”
[7] “… science cannot possibly fulfil the burdensome role of sole purveyor of truth. This is not a failing of science. Good science is aware of its limitations. Scientism, the belief that science will one day answer all our questions, is not.” (TMWT ch.11 p.407).
[8] One manifestation of this is “the triumph of procedure over meaning in every walk of life.” (TMWT ch.9 p.351). The left hemisphere is “a little like a high-ranking bureaucrat, protected from the world which he or she must administrate: adept at knowing and observing the rules, but knowing little if anything about life as it is lived there. All that it leaves to the right hemisphere.” (TMWT Coda to Part I p.371). McGilchrist expands on his critique of bureaucracy at TMWT ch.28 p.1286.
[9] “The brain is often compared to a computer. This metaphor is one of the scourges of our time.” (TMWT Coda to Part I p.372). See also TMWT ch.11 p. 410 “… the machine model remains only a model, a form of metaphor. … even at the relatively lowly level of explanation it has exhausted its potential, something that was obvious in physics some time ago, and is becoming increasingly obvious in the life sciences.” At TMWT ch.12 p.474, McGilchrist ventures the supposition that: “one element in the model’s popularity is that it encourages the sense that we can easily understand what life is and learn to control it – Faustian fantasies, in other words, of omniscience and omnipotence that reductionists quite rightly dislike when they see them attributed to a God (I share their qualms).”
[10] Henri de Lubac, Surnaturel: Etudes historiques (Paris: Aubier, 1946) 2nd edn (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1991).
[11] At TMWT Coda to Part III p.1307, McGilchrist says: “Relations are not secondary to relata, and it may be argued that relata may be secondary to relations, as the nodes in a web are secondary to the intersection of the threads …”
[12] The primacy of relationships does not come at the expense of individuality. For McGilchrist, “A good relationship is one in which each party is maximally fulfilled as a differentiated individual, without this in any way detracting from the relationship” (TMWT ch.10 p.393-4).
[13] “This primacy of union over division, however necessary division might be, is reflected in the fact that one can move from an extended whole in space or time to parts (though losing almost everything on the way), but not from the parts to the whole.” (TMWT ch.23 p.978).
[14] Balbir Singh, Indian Metaphysics (Humanities Press, 1987) 10, quoted in TMWT ch.23 p.993.
[15] J.A. Wheeler, “Information, physics, quantum: The search for links”, in. Wojciech Hubert Zurek (ed.), Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information (Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1990).
[16] In TMWT ch.21 p.857-8, McGilchrist criticises the left hemisphere for first artificially separating things, and then artificially aggregating things, imposing and organising them into categories by an act of cognition, rather than adopting the right hemisphere approach of seeing existing individual entities both as wholes and in context.
[17] “Reason is not opposed to feeling, but dependent on it.” (TMWT ch.18 p.740).
[18] “I take imagination to be our only means of approaching reality of any kind, a fortiori that of God. It is certainly not a guarantor of truth – there isn’t any; but its absence is a guarantor of failure – failure to properly understand truths of any kind, including those of science.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1270).
[19] Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher: A Journey through Western Philosophy (Phoenix: 1998) p.98.
[20] Aristotle, De arte poetica XXII.10, §1459a6-8.
[21] B. McGinn, The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart, (Herder & Herder, 2001), 84, 93-94.
[22] T. Fuchs, ‘Temporality and psychopathology’, (2013) 12 Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 75-104.
[23] Aquinas would disagree that matter is necessary for consciousness to arise, seeing angels as immaterial individuated beings: Summa Theologiae I.50.1.
[24] R. Scruton, Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1986), 78.
[25] D.C. Schindler, Love and the Postmodern Predicament: Rediscovering the Real in Beauty, Goodness, and Truth (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2018), 158.
[26] D.C. Schindler, Love and the Postmodern Predicament, 162.
[27] Keith Ward, ‘The anthropic universe’ 2006: www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/the-anthropic-universe/3302686.
[28] Moltmann, God in Creation (Fortress Press, 1993), 98.
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PART TWO
The McGilchrist Worldview and its relationship to Classical Theism and Christian Theology[1]
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.
[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 2nd 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, 2nd 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).
An epic delineation and dissection of Iain's work. Thanks, David.
Thank you for the gift of these two beautifully crafted essays, David McIlroy and Perspectiva. I sense that they are timely, not only for me but for others, and I appreciate the depth and thoughtfulness of scholarship.