The Dangers of Dualism

DAVID ARMSTRONG

In 2020, Metropolitan Kallistos Ware spoke with Michael James, a practitioner of classical Hinduism, in an interview recorded for YouTube. They discussed the relationship between the Orthodox concept of theosis and the Hindu notion of jnana, which James describes as a liberating form of knowledge. In James’s subset of the Hindu tradition (Advaita Vedanta—one of the six orthodox darshanas, or philosophical schools, in classical Hinduism), the knowledge that liberates humanity is the realization that reality is “not-two”: that there is a total unity between God, world, and self. For James, the world as we know it is nothing other than the infinite God manifesting in all of these finite forms, as a kind of “play” (lila in Sanskrit).

It is clear throughout the interview that Met. Kallistos appreciates the wisdom and sanctity of the Hindu tradition; but he cannot embrace this radical idea of unity. In his understanding of Christian theology, the barrier between self, world, and God never fully disappears. It’s easy to see where he’s coming from. The Byzantine Liturgy describes God as the “lover of the human being,” and this seems to imply a distinction between God and humanity. But I would suggest—with fear, trembling, and filial love for the Metropolitan—that Ware misrepresents the proper Christian view of the self. He seeks to defend the notion of a stable self, a distinct principle that can relate to God and the world as a self among other selves, both now and in the future. Yet Christian Tradition offers something better: a fluid, empty self, which can serve as an icon of the divine, precisely because it is mutable.

To start with, it will be useful to chart some of the conversations around the self in the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition, which Early Jews and Christians relied on. The two main schools of thought come from the Greek philosophers Heraclitus and Parmenides. Heraclitus was remembered to have said that a man could not step in the same river twice, since it would not be the same river, and it would not be the same man. “Everything goes, and nothing remains.” Parmenides, by contrast, reportedly said that change was impossible, since true being was not subject to growth or decay. For Parmenides, the true self of both river and man—what we more often think of as the “soul”—could not really change, and all appearances to the contrary were either illusory or dealt with something less than true existence. 

At least superficially, the distance between these positions is obvious, and to the ancients it posed a logical problem. Plato and Aristotle resolved it by saying that where Heraclitus spoke of the sensible world of phenomena, Parmenides spoke of the intelligible world of the forms. The Epicureans solved the problem by denying the immortality of the soul and the guidance of divine providence. The Stoics solved it by dividing the world into two bodies: a corporeal “spirit” (Greek: pneuma), which is divine, fiery, intelligent, and ubiquitous throughout the universe; and matter, which is passive, heavy, and mortal. For the Stoics, the individual consciousness was simply the particular dosage of “spirit” as present in the individual body.

Several centuries later, the philosopher Plotinus coined the teachings that came to be known as Neoplatonism by combining all of these answers except the Epicurean. In his view, reality had three fundamental principles: the One (the metaphysically supreme God); Intellect (nous), which contemplates the One and produces the intelligible world of the forms; and the World Soul, which animates matter with copies of what it perceives in the Intellect. For Plotinus, the individual soul is just part of the World Soul, just as the individual intellect is simply the Intellect. The philosophical quest, he said, is part of the soul’s ascent back to its true origin, and its realization of absolute unity with the One.

Jewish scribes also wrestled with similar questions. For the author of Ecclesiastes, the vaporous “futility” or “vanity” of the world renders belief in a meaningful personal self—especially one that endures death—unrealistic. The author even doubts whether generational immortality through offspring provides any relief (Eccl 2:16). “All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again,” the author wrote. “Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down to the earth?” (3:19-21). The scribe Ben Sirach, writing in the second century BCE, agreed; he argued that the human being is a composite of elements that are separated at death, and that there is no remaining personal “self” to enjoy an immortal afterlife (Sir 40:11).

In the waning centuries before Christ and the first centuries of the common era, Jewish attitudes about this matter were influenced by the popular teachings from Greek philosophy. Jewish translations of Scripture into Greek made use of the Greek concept of spirit by using pneuma as a translation for the Hebrew ruach, the “breath” or “wind” of God. Ambiguity in Jewish Scripture about the relationship between God’s spirit and the human spirit allowed for new understandings of the self that were more aligned the prevailing intellectual trends. Belief in the soul as an entity distinct from the body, which could survive in a personal form beyond death, first appears in the texts from this period, like the apocalyptic Book of Watchers (1 Enoch 1-36, esp. 22). So also does belief in a future, eschatological reunion of soul and body, where the whole human being will be reconstituted. These attitudes were not universally affirmed by all Early Jews, but they became increasingly popular as ways of resolving both the problem of evil and the relationship of self, world, and God.

It is in this Greek-influenced setting that the teachings of Jesus, his apostles, and the authors of the New Testament should be understood. For instance, when Jesus debates with the Sadduccess about whether there is a future resurrection, their discussion actually revolves around the character of the self that will be resurrected in the future. Both agree that the self as presently constituted will be irrecoverable in the eschaton. For the Sadducees, this means the resurrection itself is impossible, but for Jesus, it simply means that what will be resurrected will be of a different quality than the present self (Matt 22:23-46; Mk 12:18-27; Lk 20:27-40).

Paul’s understanding of the self is also changeable. Paul measures human beings by their concentration of spirit (pneuma): some people are “spiritual,” while others are “psychics” and “sarkics” (1 Cor 2:10-13); the future body of the resurrection will not be “flesh and blood” but “spiritual,” in the sense that it will be composed of spirit (as opposed to the present body which is psychic—15:44-51). But Paul—who uses a wide number of terms to characterize the human condition, including “spirit,” “psyche,” “flesh,” “blood,” “inner” and “outer” human, etc.—never identifies a single one with the “self,” something perennial which is identifiable with the person. For Paul, the resurrected human exists in a world where God, through Christ and the Spirit, has become “all in all” (15:28), completely filling all things with himself as their final content.

Early Church Fathers, from Sts. Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria (in the second century) up to Gregory Nazianzen, Basil the Great, and Gregory Nyssen (in the fourth), would all depend on the synthetic philosophy of later Platonists as the lens through which they read these New Testament texts—and therefore as the source of their own doctrine of the self. Early Christian interpreters of the New Testament clearly articulate an unstable, dynamic, fluid self. As St. Athanasios puts it in On the Incarnation of the Word, the self and the world do not exist independently. This is why creation lapses back into nonbeing when communion with God is broken. As St. Augustine of Hippo puts it in Enchiridion XI, evil is “the absence of the good,” because God, who is the Good, is also Being itself; therefore, that which is not God does not have real existence.

To put this in a positive way, to have communion with God is a means of coming to really exist. Likewise, in the Desert Fathers, key to the processes of purification and illumination is stripping away false conceptions of the self and coming to a true account of the soul. According to them, as one comes to know the full truth about the poverty of oneself as a creature, what one discovers is what Thomas Merton would later call the “still point of nothingness” at our core: where God himself indwells us. For Nyssen, the changeable nature of the self, empty of private content apart from what is given to fill it, is the logical ground of epektasis, the “striving,” or ceaseless ascent, into the infinite God “from glory to glory.” Later Christian writers in East and West—John Scotus Eriugena, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, and the Russian sophiologists Vladimir Solovyov, Pavel Florensky, and Sergius Bulgakov—would all come to different forms of the same conclusion: namely, that God includes, though he transcends, both world and self. 

Christians are therefore not very far from the Advaitin doctrine that the self is infinite, and therefore identical with both world and God, or with the Buddhist doctrine of “no-self”—that is, the denial of a perennially stable self which underlies the succession of our mental and physical experiences. True, Christians remain beholden to a future personal immortality for the individual being in the glorified body of the resurrection, while Advaita does not clearly teach a single postmortem future for the liberated. Buddhism’s concept of liberation as “extinction” (nirvana) of the causes of suffering, while it is not annihilation, does however represent the end of what most of us would recognize as “personal” existence. But despite these differences in emphasis, Christian Tradition agrees with Advaita that God is the source of existence and awareness for all beings, and therefore that the idea of an absolute separation between God, world, and self is nothing other than an illusion arising from ignorance of the truth. And with Buddhism, Christian Tradition concurs that much of what we conventionally call the “self” is really a misidentification, that all such misidentifications are impermanent, not constitutive of either the soul’s endurance beyond death or of the future resurrection. The self’s fluidity and emptiness is exactly the possibility, in Christian hope, of theosis: the possibility of deification through our ever-greater unification with God—which God, from his own vantage, has always eternally known and willed.

If we understand this, it can free us from the suffering that is intrinsic to the transient world, which, as South Asian religions are so good at observing, seems to be filled with cycle of gain, loss, and sorrow. It also gives Christians—particularly Christians whose theological heritage is closer in culture and thought to Central, South, and East Asia—a seat at the table with Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains in talking about the primary spiritual goal of moksa, or “liberation.” Christians can acknowledge just as readily as Advaitins or Buddhists that prosperity and pleasure do not satisfy our deepest spiritual longings for transcendence. But it must be admitted that modern Christians, especially in the West, are generally reluctant to embrace this kind of nondualism. It seems too dangerous, foreign, and exotic, and destabilizes our larger religious, cultural, and political assumptions of individuality and separation. Ware’s hesitance, then, to affirm a simple nondualism makes sense, but the conversation should not end there. 

In our context, where traditional forms of religion are breaking down all over, in part because they seem intellectually untenable to many postmodern people, a compelling vision of God will have to be one that speaks to the deepest felt anxiety that our modern concept of the changeless self engenders: that however substantial we are, we are no less alone. Ware perhaps underestimates the damage that dualistic thinking can do to us, of the gulf that it can open up between us and ourselves and other people, between us and the world, and finally between us and God, fixed and so great that none may pass it (Lk 16:26).

David Armstrong writes the Substack newsletter A Perennial Digression and runs the YouTube channel of the same name.