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Ethical Monism is that method of thought which holds to a single substance, ground, or principle of being, namely, God, but which also holds to the ethical facts of God's transcendence as well as his immanence, and of God's personality as distinct from, and as guaranteeing, the personality of man.

Although we do not here assume the authority of the Bible, reserving our proof of this to the next following division on The Scriptures a Revelation from God, we may yet cite passages which show that our doctrine is not inconsistent with the teachings of holy Writ. The immanence of God is implied in all statements of his omnipresence, as for example: Ps. 139:7 sq.—“Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?” Jer. 23:23, 24—“Am I a God at hand, saith Jehovah, and not a God afar off? … Do not I fill heaven and earth?” Acts 17:27, 28—“he is not far from each one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being.” The transcendence of God is implied in such passages as: 1 Kings 8:27—“the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee”; Ps. 113:5—“that hath his seat on high”; Is. 57:15—“the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity.”

This is the faith of Augustine: “O God, thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is restless till it find rest in thee. … I could not be, O my God, could not be at all, wert thou not in me; rather, were not I in thee, of whom are all things, by whom are all things, in whom are all things.” And Anselm, in his Proslogion, says of the divine nature: “It is the essence of the being, the principle of the existence, of all things. … Without parts, without differences, without accidents, without changes, it might be said in a certain sense alone to exist, for in respect to it the other things which appear to be have no existence. The unchangeable Spirit is all that is, and it is this without limit, simply, interminably. It is the perfect and absolute Existence. The rest has come from non-entity, and thither returns if not supported by God. It does not exist by itself. In this sense the Creator alone exists; created things do not.”

1. While Ethical Monism embraces the one element of truth contained in Pantheism—the truth that God is in all things and that all things are in God—it regards this scientific unity as entirely consistent with the facts of ethics—man's freedom, responsibility, sin, and guilt; in other words, Metaphysical Monism, or the doctrine of one substance, ground, or principle of being, is qualified by Psychological Dualism, or the doctrine that the soul is personally distinct from matter on the one hand, and from God on the other.

Ethical Monism is a monism which holds to the ethical facts of the freedom of man and the transcendence and personality of God; it is the monism of free-will, in which personality, both human and divine, sin and righteousness, God and the world, remain—two in one, and one in two—in their moral antithesis as well as their natural unity. Ladd, Introd. to Philosophy: “Dualism is yielding, in history and in the judgment-halls of reason, to a monistic philosophy. … Some form of philosophical monism is indicated by the researches of psycho-physics, and by that philosophy of mind which builds upon the principles ascertained by these researches. Realities correlated as are the body and the mind must have, as it were, a common ground. … They have their reality in the ultimate one Reality; they have their interrelated lives as expressions of the one Life which is immanent in the two. … Only some form of monism that shall satisfy the facts and truths to which both realism and idealism appeal can occupy the place of the true and final philosophy. … Monism must so construct its tenets as to preserve, or at least as not to contradict and destroy, the truths implicated in the distinction between the me and the not-me, … between the morally good and the morally evil. No form of monism can persistently maintain itself which erects its system upon the ruins of fundamentally ethical principles and ideals.”… Philosophy of Mind, 411—“Dualism must be dissolved in some ultimate monistic solution. The Being of the world, of which all particular beings are but parts, must be so conceived of as that in it can be found the one ground of all interrelated existences and activities. … This one Principle is an Other and an Absolute Mind.”

Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person of Christ, II, 3:101, 231—“The unity of essence in God and man is the great discovery of the present age. … The characteristic feature of all recent Christologies is the endeavor to point out the essential unity of the divine and human. To the theology of the present day, the divine and human are not mutually exclusive, but are connected magnitudes. … Yet faith postulates a difference between the world and God, between whom religion seeks an union. Faith does not wish to be a relation merely to itself, or to its own representations and thoughts; that would be a monologue—faith desires a dialogue. Therefore it does not consort with a monism which recognizes only God, or only the world; it opposes such a monism as this. Duality is, in fact, a condition of true and vital unity. But duality is not dualism. It has no desire to oppose the rational demand for unity.” Professor Small of Chicago: “With rare exceptions on each side, all philosophy to-day is monistic in its ontological presumptions; it is dualistic in its methodological procedures.” A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 71—“Men and God are the same in substance, though not identical as individuals.” The theology of fifty years ago was merely individualistic, and ignored the complementary truth of solidarity. Similarly we think of the continents and islands of our globe as disjoined from one another. The dissociable sea is regarded as an absolute barrier between them. But if the ocean could be dried, we should see that all the while there had been submarine connections, and the hidden unity of all lands would appear. So the individuality of human beings, real as it is, is not the only reality. There is the profounder fact of a common life. Even the great mountain-peaks of personality are superficial distinctions, compared with the organic oneness in which they are rooted, into which they all dip down, and from which they all, like volcanoes, receive at times quick and overflowing impulses of insight, emotion and energy; see A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation and Ethical Monism, 189, 190.

2. In contrast then with the two errors of Pantheism—the denial of God's transcendence and the denial of God's personality—Ethical Monism holds that the universe, instead of being one with God and conterminous with God, is but a finite, partial and progressive manifestation of the divine Life: Matter being God's self-limitation under the law of Necessity; Humanity being God's self-limitation under the law of Freedom; Incarnation and Atonement being God's self-limitations under the law of Grace.

The universe is related to God as my thoughts are related to me, the thinker. I am greater than my thoughts, and my thoughts vary in moral value. Ethical Monism traces the universe back to a beginning, while Pantheism regards the universe as coëternal with God. Ethical Monism asserts God's transcendence, while Pantheism regards God as imprisoned in the universe. Ethical Monism asserts that the heaven of heavens cannot contain him, but that contrariwise the whole universe taken together, with its elements and forces, its suns and systems, is but a light breath from his mouth, or a drop of dew upon the fringe of his garment. Upton, Hibbert Lectures: “The Eternal is present in every finite thing, and is felt and known to be present in every rational soul; but still is not broken up into individualities, but ever remains one and the same eternal substance, one and the same unifying principle, immanently and indivisibly present in every one of that countless plurality of finite individuals into which man's analyzing understanding dissects the Cosmos.” James Martineau, in 19th Century, Apl. 1895:559—“What is Nature but the province of God's pledged and habitual causality? And what is Spirit, but the province of his free causality, responding to the needs and affections of his children? … God is not a retired architect, who may now and then be called in for repairs. Nature is not self-active, and God's agency is not intrusive.” Calvin: Pie hoc potest dici, Deum esse Naturam.

With this doctrine many poets show their sympathy. “Every fresh and new creation, A divine improvisation, From the heart of God proceeds.” Robert Browning asserts God's immanence; Hohenstiel-Schwangau: “This is the glory that, in all conceived Or felt, or known, I recognize a Mind—Not mine, but like mine—for the double joy, Making all things for me, and me for him”; Ring and Book, Pope: “O thou, as represented to me here In such conception as my soul allows—Under thy measureless, my atom-width! Man's mind, what is it but a convex glass, Wherein are gathered all the scattered points Picked out of the immensity of sky, To reunite there, be our heaven for earth, Our Known Unknown, our God revealed to man?” But Browning also asserts God's transcendence: in Death in the Desert, we read: “Man is not God, but hath God's end to serve, A Master to obey, a Cause to take, Somewhat to cast off, somewhat to become”; in Christmas Eve, the poet derides “The important stumble Of adding, he, the sage and humble, Was also one with the Creator”; he tells us that it was God's plan to make man in his image: “To create man, and then leave him Able, his own word saith, to grieve him; But able to glorify him too, As a mere machine could never do That prayed or praised, all unaware Of its fitness for aught but praise or prayer, Made perfect as a thing of course. … God, whose pleasure brought Man into being, stands away, As it were, a hand-breadth off, to give Room for the newly made to live And look at him from a place apart And use his gifts of brain and heart”; “Life's business being just the terrible choice.”

So Tennyson's Higher Pantheism: “The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills, and the plains, Are not these, O soul, the vision of Him who reigns? Dark is the world to thee; thou thyself art the reason why; For is not He all but thou, that hast power to feel ‘I am I’? Speak to him, thou, for he hears, and spirit with spirit can meet; Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet. And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see; But if we could see and hear, this vision—were it not He?” Also Tennyson's Ancient Sage: “But that one ripple on the boundless deep Feels that the deep is boundless, and itself Forever changing form, but evermore One with the boundless motion of the deep”; and In Memoriam: “One God, one law, one element, And one far-off divine event, Toward which the whole creation moves.” Emerson: “The day of days, the greatest day in the feast of life, is that in which the inward eye opens to the unity of things”; “In the mud and scum of things Something always, always sings.” Mrs. Browning: “Earth is crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees takes off his shoes.” So manhood is itself potentially a divine thing. All life, in all its vast variety, can have but one Source. It is either one God, above all, through all, and in all, or it is no God at all. E. M. Poteat, On Chesapeake Bay: “Night's radiant glory overhead, A softer glory there below, Deep answered unto deep, and said: A kindred fire in us doth glow. For life is one—of sea and stars, Of God and man, of earth and heaven—And by no theologic bars Shall my scant life from God's be riven.” See Professor Henry Jones, Robert Browning.

3. The immanence of God, as the one substance, ground and principle of being, does not destroy, but rather guarantees, the individuality and rights of each portion of the universe, so that there is variety of rank and endowment. In the case of moral beings, worth is determined by the degree of their voluntary recognition and appropriation of the divine. While God is all, he is also in all; so making the universe a graded and progressive manifestation of himself, both in his love for righteousness and his opposition to moral evil.

It has been charged that the doctrine of monism necessarily involves moral indifference; that the divine presence in all things breaks down all distinctions of rank and makes each thing equal to every other; that the evil as well as the good is legitimated and consecrated. Of pantheistic monism all this is true—it is not true of ethical monism; for ethical monism is the monism that recognizes the ethical fact of personal intelligence and will in both God and man, and with these God's purpose in making the universe a varied manifestation of himself. The worship of cats and bulls and crocodiles in ancient Egypt, and the deification of lust in the Brahmanic temples of India, were expressions of a non-ethical monism, which saw in God no moral attributes, and which identified God with his manifestations. As an illustration of the mistakes into which the critics of monism may fall for lack of discrimination between monism that is pantheistic and monism that is ethical, we quote from Emma Marie Caillard: “Integral parts of God are, on monistic premises, liars, sensualists, murderers, evil livers and evil thinkers of every description. Their crimes and their passions enter intrinsically into the divine experience. The infinite Individual in his wholeness may reject them indeed, but none the less are these evil finite individuals constituent parts of him, even as the twigs of a tree, though they are not the tree, and though the tree transcends any or all of them, are yet constituent parts of it. Can he whose universal consciousness includes and defines all finite consciousnesses be other than responsible for all finite actions and motives?”

To this indictment we may reply in the words of Bowne, The Divine Immanence, 130–133—“Some weak heads have been so heated by the new wine of immanence as to put all things on the same level, and make men and mice of equal value. But there is nothing in the dependence of all things on God to remove their distinctions of value. One confused talker of this type was led to say that he had no trouble with the notion of a divine man, as he believed in a divine oyster. Others have used the doctrine to cancel moral differences; for if God be in all things, and if all things represent his will, then whatever is is right. But this too is hasty. Of course even the evil will is not independent of God, but lives and moves and has its being in and through the divine. But through its mysterious power of selfhood and self-determination the evil will is able to assume an attitude of hostility to the divine law, which forthwith vindicates itself by appropriate reactions.

“These reactions are not divine in the highest or ideal sense. They represent nothing which God desires or in which he delights; but they are divine in the sense that they are things to be done under the circumstances. The divine reaction in the case of the good is distinct from the divine reaction against evil. Both are divine as representing God's action, but only the former is divine in the sense of representing God's approval and sympathy. All things serve, said Spinoza. The good serve, and are furthered by their service. The bad also serve and are used up in the serving. According to Jonathan Edwards, the wicked are useful ‘in being acted upon and disposed of.’ As ‘vessels of dishonor’ they may reveal the majesty of God. There is nothing therefore in the divine immanence, in its only tenable form, to cancel moral distinctions or to minify retribution. The divine reaction against iniquity is even more solemn in this doctrine. The besetting God is the eternal and unescapable environment; and only as we are in harmony with him can there be any peace. … What God thinks of sin, and what his will is concerning it can be plainly seen in the natural consequences which attend it. … In law itself we are face to face with God; and natural consequences have a supernatural meaning.”

4. Since Christ is the Logos of God, the immanent God, God revealed in Nature, in Humanity, in Redemption, Ethical Monism recognizes the universe as created, upheld, and governed by the same Being who in the course of history was manifest in human form and who made atonement for human sin by his death on Calvary. The secret of the universe and the key to its mysteries are to be found in the Cross.

John 1:1–4 (marg.), 14, 18—“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him; and without him was not any thing made. That which hath been made was life in him; and the life was the light of men. … And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. … No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.” Col. 1:16, 17—“for in him were all things created, in the heavens and upon the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things have been created through him and unto him; and he is before all things, and in him all things consist.” Heb. 1:2, 3—“his Son … through whom also he made the worlds … upholding all things by the word of his power”; Eph. 1:22, 23—“the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all” = fills all things with all that they contain of truth, beauty, and goodness; Col. 2:2, 3, 9—“the mystery of God, even Christ, in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden … for in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.”

This view of the relation of the universe to God lays the foundation for a Christian application of recent philosophical doctrine. Matter is no longer blind and dead, but is spiritual in its nature, not in the sense that it is spirit, but in the sense that it is the continual manifestation of spirit, just as my thoughts are a living and continual manifestation of myself. Yet matter does not consist simply in ideas, for ideas, deprived of an external object and of an internal subject, are left suspended in the air. Ideas are the product of Mind. But matter is known only as the operation of force, and force is the product of Will. Since this force works in rational ways, it can be the product only of Spirit. The system of forces which we call the universe is the immediate product of the mind and will of God; and, since Christ is the mind and will of God in exercise, Christ is the Creator and Upholder of the universe. Nature is the omnipresent Christ, manifesting God to creatures.

Christ is the principle of cohesion, attraction, interaction, not only in the physical universe, but in the intellectual and moral universe as well. In all our knowing, the knower and known are “connected by some Being who is their reality,” and this being is Christ, “the Light which lighteth every man” (John 1:9). We know in Christ, just as “in him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28). As the attraction of gravitation and the principle of evolution are only other names for Christ, so he is the basis of inductive reasoning and the ground of moral unity in the creation. I am bound to love my neighbor as myself because he has in him the same life that is in me, the life of God in Christ. The Christ in whom all humanity is created, and in whom all humanity consists, holds together the moral universe, drawing all men to himself and so drawing them to God. Through him God “reconciles all things unto himself … whether things upon the earth, or things in the heavens” (Col. 1:20).

As Pantheism = exclusive immanence = God imprisoned, so Deism = exclusive transcendence = God banished. Ethical Monism holds to the truth contained in each of these systems, while avoiding their respective errors. It furnishes the basis for a new interpretation of many theological as well as of many philosophical doctrines. It helps our understanding of the Trinity. If within the bounds of God's being there can exist multitudinous finite personalities, it becomes easier to comprehend how within those same bounds there can be three eternal and infinite personalities—indeed, the integration of plural consciousnesses in an all-embracing divine consciousness may find a valid analogy in the integration of subordinate consciousnesses in the unit-personality of man; see Baldwin, Handbook of Psychology, Feeling and Will, 53, 54.

Ethical Monism, since it is ethical, leaves room for human wills and for their freedom. While man could never break the natural bond which united him to God, he could break the spiritual bond and introduce into creation a principle of discord and evil. Tie a cord tightly about your finger; you partially isolate the finger, diminish its nutrition, bring about atrophy and disease. So there has been given to each intelligent and moral agent the power, spiritually to isolate himself from God while yet he is naturally joined to God. As humanity is created in Christ and lives only in Christ, man's self-isolation is his moral separation from Christ. Simon, Redemption of Man, 339—“Rejecting Christ is not so much refusal to become one with Christ as it is refusal to remain one with him, refusal to let him be our life.” All men are naturally one with Christ by physical birth, before they become morally one with him by spiritual birth. They may set themselves against him and may oppose him forever. This our Lord intimates, when he tells us that there are natural branches of Christ, which do not “abide in the vine” or “bear fruit,” and so are “cast forth,” “withered,” and “burned” (John 15:4–6).

Ethical Monism, however, since it is Monism, enables us to understand the principle of the Atonement. Though God's holiness binds him to punish sin, the Christ who has joined himself to the sinner must share the sinner's punishment. He who is the life of humanity must take upon his own heart the burden of shame and penalty that belongs to his members. Tie the cord about your finger; not only the finger suffers pain, but also the heart; the life of the whole system rouses itself to put away the evil, to untie the cord, to free the diseased and suffering member. Humanity is bound to Christ, as the finger to the body. Since human nature is one of the “all things” that “consist” or hold together in Christ (Col 1:17), and man's sin is a self-perversion of a part of Christ's own body, the whole must be injured by the self-inflicted injury of the part, and “it must needs be that Christ should suffer” (Acts 17:3). Simon, Redemption of Man, 321—“If the Logos is the Mediator of the divine immanence in creation, especially in man; if men are differentiations of the effluent divine energy; and if the Logos is the immanent controlling principle of all differentiation—i.e., the principle of all form—must not the self-perversion of these human differentiations react on him who is their constitutive principle?” A more full explanation of the relations of Ethical Monism to other doctrines must be reserved to our separate treatment of the Trinity, Creation, Sin, Atonement, Regeneration. Portions of the subject are treated by Upton, Hibbert Lectures; Le Conte, in Royce's Conception of God, 43–50; Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 297–301, 311–317, and Immanence of God, 5–32, 116–153; Ladd, Philos. of Knowledge, 574–590, and Theory of Reality, 525–529; Edward Caird, Evolution of Religion, 2:48; Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, 2:258–283; Göschel, quoted in Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person of Christ, 5:170. An attempt has been made to treat the whole subject by A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation and Ethical Monism, 1–86, 141–162, 166–180, 186–208.