David Burrell on the distinction-and-relation between the world and God

David BurrellFootnote ² has made the task of spelling out the nature of the distinction-and-relation between the world and God central to his work.Footnote ³ It is a task which has been unhelpfully complicated, he thinks, by an over-emphasis (especially in post-Reformation Christian theology) on the doctrine of redemption rather than the doctrine of creation. By focusing disproportionately on redemption as the conceptual framework which explains how and why the world is related to God (in response to the ‘gulf’ brought about by sin), we risk losing sight of the original relation between creature and Creator involved in creation.Footnote ⁴ He thus calls for a ‘Keplerian revolution’ in Christian theology in order to redress this imbalance and to restore a vivid sense of a world always-already intimately connected to its Creator.Footnote ⁵ It is for this reason that Burrell has focused over the last thirty or so years on clarifying the theological ramifications of the Christian doctrine of creation as he finds it in the pages of St Thomas Aquinas; and in the particular approach he has taken, he is widely recognised as a leader in the field.Footnote ⁶ Specifically, Burrell focuses on how this ‘central though often hidden element’ in Aquinas’ philosophy (namely, the doctrine of creation) provides a context for understanding and speaking both of the relation and of the distinction between the world and God.Footnote ⁷

One of Burrell's most frequently acknowledged influences in this regard is Robert Sokolowski's The God of Faith and Reason.Footnote ⁸ When Burrell first came across this book in the early 1980s, he was struck by Sokolowski's central argument: that Christian theology depends for its coherence on being able to explain how God is both distinct from but also related to what God creates – the world.Footnote ⁹ Whereas doctrines like incarnation and redemption help to speak of this relation between the world and God, Burrell insists that these items of Christian belief should not ‘have to bear the burden of establishing a relationship, but rather of restoring one already embodied in an original order otherwise irremediably distorted by sin’.Footnote ¹⁰ In other words, if God simply is the founding raison d’être for all else, then there must be some sort of ontological relation between the world and God,Footnote ¹¹ just as truly as there must also be an ontological distinction between God and the world (since the world is not, after all, the raison d’être of God).Footnote ¹²

This is why Sokolowski can say that ‘in the Christian distinction, God is understood as “being” God entirely apart from any relation of otherness to the world or to the whole’.Footnote ¹³ On the other hand, however, the world could not be understood as ‘world’ apart from its relation to God, since without this relation established by and continually grounded in creation, it would not ‘be’ at all. In other words, given that there is a created world (even though there need not be), we must picture its constitutive relation to God not as an ‘extrinsic’ one – as if the two ‘things’ (world + God) exist separately and only later, as it were, become ‘connected’ (e.g. through a special act of grace like incarnation or redemption) – but as an originary relation which is inherent to the very meaning of what it is ‘to be’ created. Conceiving of the relation between the world and God as an ‘external’ relation between two separate entities ‘results directly from having to deny that we are creatures internally related to a creator’ and, according to Burrell, we should not, therefore, be surprised when this ‘creator alongside the universe’ is seen as otiose and dispensed with – ‘metaphysically, for the sake of parsimony, and ethically to obviate heteronomy’.Footnote ¹⁴ When Burrell talks of creatures being ‘internally related’ to the Creator, he is making fundamentally the same point as Sokolowski – i.e. we do not exist and ‘then’ (via a specific act of salvation) become related to the Creator; we are related by virtue of ‘being’ at all.

The precise nature of the distinction-and-relation between the world and God is unlike any distinction or relation within the world because God must not be thought of as an ‘item’ in a universal inventory or a cosmic catalogue; not being any kind of ‘thing’ at all, God cannot be compared and contrasted to other things with the same logic of difference and sameness that applies in every case within the world. On this, Burrell is in agreement with Sokolowski:

Aquinas was making this very point when he stated that ‘things not in the same genus are not comparable; as, sweetness is not properly greater or less than a line’.Footnote ¹⁶ The reason this sort of logic cannot apply in the case of God, however, is not just that ‘[t]hings not of the same genus are in no way comparable to each other’, and that ‘we say that God is not in the same genus with other good things’, but that, more fundamentally, God is not in any genus: ‘He is outside genus, and is the principle of every genus’.Footnote ¹⁷ In other words, there is no common background or genus within which we can situate God because God, as Creator, is the source and the ontological ground of all that exists, so there cannot possibly be any antecedent category to which God belongs as one particular instance.Footnote ¹⁸ As such, even talking of a ‘distinction’ or ‘relation’ between the world and God is, Burrell admits, something of a “philosophical conceit” because there is no domain of comparison between the world and God within which distinctions and relations can be situated.Footnote ¹⁹

It is for these reasons that Burrell insists on what Kathryn Tanner calls a ‘non-contrastive’ mode of discourse when it comes to speaking about God and, in particular, when it comes to how we conceive of the nature of the ‘distinction’ between creation and Creator.Footnote ²⁰ In God and Creation in Christian Theology Tanner is concerned with how to reconcile traditional accounts of God's omnipotence as Creator with creaturely freedom, but in the background of this problematic is the broader one of how to speak coherently about the distinction-and-relation between the world and God in the first place.Footnote ²¹ The body of rules she lays out is adopted by Burrell to make sense of how to speak of creature and Creator. Their governing principle for Christian discourse is that ‘[a] God who genuinely transcends the world must not be characterized … by a direct contrast with it’, because there is no logical common background against which such a contrast could be made.Footnote ²² The result of forgetting this key rule of theo-logic is that:

In other words, while Christian theology has historically been wary of diminishing the distinction between the world and God lest it end in pantheism or some sort of idolatry, a certain type of naïve emphasis on exalting this distinction can have almost the same consequence, albeit from the other end of the conceptual spectrum, of finitising God. Tanner's first rule for coherent Christian theology, therefore, is to ‘avoid both a simple univocal attribution of predicates to God and world and a simple contrast of divine and non-divine predicates’.Footnote ²⁴ In this way, Christian theologians can navigate, she argues, between collapsing divine transcendence into identity with the world, on the one hand, and opposing it contrastively with the non-divine, on the other.

Before we too quickly assume, however, that the reason it is difficult to spell out the precise nature of the distinction between the world and God is because the qualitative difference is too big, we must remind ourselves of the conceptual infelicities we are here trying to avoid. It is not that there is a big, or even infinite, difference between creatures and Creator but that there simply is no overarching background against which such a difference could be drawn:

In other words, if God's difference from creatures is categorically incomparable with any creaturely difference, ‘incomparable’ does not mean enumeratively or qualitatively greater, or peerless against a backdrop of logically possible peers, but radically incommensurable because there simply is no common scale.Footnote ²⁶ ‘[T]his difference [between God and creation]’, Denys Turner insists, in a clear echo of Tanner, ‘cannot be set in any form of contrast with sameness’.Footnote ²⁷

This insight into the sui generis nature of the distinction-and-relation between the world and God finds early and sophisticated expression in one of Thomas’ greatest intellectual influences: Dionysius, the pseudo-Areopagite (ca. fifth–sixth centuries). In the conclusion to his essay on Mystical Theology, as the culmination of a series of apophatic denials of what God is, Dionysius insists that the Supreme Cause must be ‘beyond assertion and denial’:

Later thinkers influenced by Dionysius, like John Scotus Eriugena (815–77) and Aquinas himself, develop this distinction ‘beyond sameness and otherness’ into full-blown theologies of creation, and some even creatively exploit the Dionysian hyper-logic of negating (ordinary) negation itself to insist that ‘the distinction’ between the world and God consists precisely in the indistinction which sets God ‘apart’ from all else. In other words, we are unable to talk meaningfully of difference and sameness at all when it comes to God – because of the absence of common conceptual background necessary to make such comparisons coherent – and this indistinction is what uniquely distinguishes God from creation, but not, of course, in such a way that the one is contrasted with the other. Language cannot cope with this hyper-logical ‘difference’ between God and creatures, other than to mutter the sort of paradoxical statements we find pre-eminently in Aquinas's near-contemporary, Meister Eckhart (1260–1327) and, later, Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64) – God is distinct because of God's unique indistinctness:

‘Distinction’, ‘relation’ and ‘creation’ in Aquinas and Burrell

‘Distinction’, ‘relation’ and ‘creation’ coalesce conceptually for Burrell: if we focus on the distinction between God and world without also attending to the relation, the risk is that we characterise them as two ‘entities’ (God + world) alongside each other; whereas if we emphasise relation and lose sight of the all-important distinction, we veer towards pantheism; therefore, it is the manner in which we explain creation that will crucially shape the distinction-and-relation that results. Uniquely in the case of God, God's ontological distinction from the world is God's logical relation with the world, and vice versa.

Burrell's contention is that the way we articulate the precise nature of the distinction/relation between creatures and Creator will establish the underlying grammar that governs and shapes the rest of our God-talk. Sokolowski also agrees that creation ‘is not merely one teaching among many in Christian belief’, but is foundational in opening up the logical and theological space for all other doctrines.Footnote ³⁰ Articulating the distinction-and-relation implicates us, for example, in the sorts of ‘grace’ versus ‘nature’ debates which structure so much intramural Christian disagreement.Footnote ³¹ Protestant voices typically accuse Roman Catholic thinkers of reducing the ‘gap’ (what I have been calling ‘the distinction’) by means of an overarching ontology that includes God and the world; while Roman Catholics tend to reverse the charge and accuse Protestants of emphasising divine sovereignty to the point of nullifying capacities inherent to human nature as a created gift.Footnote ³²

As we have seen, the challenge can be posed as follows: how to distinguish God from the world in such a way as to avoid a pantheistic identification of creature and Creator, on the one hand, and how to relate God to the world in order to avoid conceptualising them as two competing realities which exist in parallel, on the other. This challenge can also be parsed the other way around: i.e. of how to articulate the distinction in such a way that it doesn't become a separation, and how to articulate the relation in such a way that it doesn't collapse God into the world. This almost palindromic quality of the dilemma serves only to reinforce what I have been arguing throughout this essay – that ‘distinction’ and ‘relation’ are two sides of the same coin. Focusing on the distinction will tend towards emphasising the transcendence of God, while a focus on the relation will align with an emphasis on God's immanence in creation. The result is that Christian ‘[t]heologians of creation have all teetered on a thin line between monism [as a result of a one-sided emphasis on immanence/relation] and dualism [as a result of another one-sided emphasis on transcendence/distinction], each leaning towards one or the other of these poles’.Footnote ³³ At one end of the spectrum is the Scylla of deism, that is, of a monarchical God who is conceived as so utterly transcendent that the ‘distinction’ between creatures and Creator is turned into an ontological separation. This leads to ‘the blatantly dualist presentation of Christianity as a redemptive scheme’ and of a God as a deus ex machina ‘out there’.Footnote ³⁴ We are left with a ‘transcendentally transcendent’ God who is either entirely unrelated to the world, or who is so terrifyingly powerful that any creaturely freedom is completely swallowed up.Footnote ³⁵ Ironically, given the motivations behind such theologies to protect the otherness of God, the end result can be exactly the opposite: divine transcendence can become domesticated into a mundane sort of transcendence, where God is spatially contrasted with the universe in such a way that they become two separate objects. At the other end of the spectrum is the Charybdis of pantheism or, in other words, of a complete flattening out of divine transcendence, leading to an ‘immanently immanent’ God.Footnote ³⁶ In this case, distinction is dissolved into identity, and creation tends to be pictured as a sort of continuous God-world emanation.

Traditionally, Christian theology has seen both of these extreme positions as erroneous: that is, conceiving of God and world as two separate enumerable entities (God + world), on the one hand, and conceiving of them as one and the same reality (God = world) on the other. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that it is often when thinkers – not just in Christianity, but in all three Abrahamic traditions – have struggled to articulate the uniqueness of this distinction/relation between creatures and Creator (and, in particular, when they have ostensibly emphasised ‘relation’ over ‘distinction’) that they have tended to come under suspicion in their respective faith communities. Whether we think of an Eriugena or of an Eckhart, history testifies that ‘[v]ery frequently positions that are judged to be heretical are those that, by implication at least, blur the Christian distinction between God and the world’.Footnote ³⁷ This further suggests that Sokolowski and Burrell are correct in viewing the distinction/relation as a – perhaps, the – foundational issue in philosophical theology. It is not that disputed questions cannot be found in other areas of theology, but even these can invariably be traced back to an initially mistaken way of conceiving this distinction-and-relation. The way we understand this ‘creation relation’ between creature and Creator will structure everything else in our theology – from our understanding of incarnation and sacraments, to redemption and human freedom.Footnote ³⁸ Formulating this unique distinction in such a way as to respect the reality of both creature and Creator therefore becomes the quintessential theological task which is aptly summarised by Sokolowski:

‘Distinction’ as interfaith achievement: legacy and prospects

While we might not be surprised that a Roman Catholic priest and theologian like Burrell chooses to follow Thomist metaphysics in his discussions of creation, his consistent emphasis on the comparative theological dimensions of Aquinas’ project is more unusual. By exploring the ways in which Aquinas was drawing on Jewish and Muslim interlocutors like Moses Maimonides and Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Burrell aims to show how Thomas’ attempts to conceptualise the distinctive relation between the world and God are influenced by, at times differ from and also converge with, certain ways of thinking through this distinction-and-relation in the other Abrahamic traditions.Footnote ⁴⁰

Aquinas accepted Avicenna's key distinction between ‘existence’ and ‘essence’, as well as his argument that this distinction was the characteristic mark of a creature. He also took over Avicenna's manner of distinguishing God as the only One whose essence simply is ‘to-be’.Footnote ⁴¹ However, by reintroducing Aristotle's language of act (energeia) and potency (dunamis) to understand existence (esse) and essence (essentia), rather than Avicenna's necessary/possible hermeneutic, Aquinas was able to creatively combine and transform his Greek-Arabic sources in such a way that they could be used to explain the radical notion of creation ex nihilo found in the Jewish, Christian and Muslim scriptures.Footnote ⁴² Rather than substances ‘existing in themselves’, Aquinas argued that, on the contrary, substances are created, in the sense that they are composed of essence ‘in potency’ (which does not, pace Avicenna, mean the same as ‘possibly existing’ because there is no essence without existence) to an act(ivity) of existence (actus essendi) – and that pure act(ivity) of existence simply is the essence of what we call God (ipsum esse per se subsistens).Footnote ⁴³ By ‘participating’ in this divine pure act of existence, creatures are most intimately and profoundly related to esse (i.e. to God), since this is the creature's very ‘be-ing’, without which it simply would not be at all.

Crucially, then, we can see why Burrell identifies creation as the very foundation of the distinction and the relation between God and creatures. By the very fact of its existence, every creature shows a relation of ‘toward-ness’ to the Creator who, in turn, is really present ‘in’ each existing thing by virtue of its ontological constitution (as composed of essence/potency and existence/act) – existence is not something that ‘happens to’ or befalls a creature but is that to which essence must be related for there to ‘be’ a creature at all.Footnote ⁴⁴ In continuously giving each individual thing its sheer existence, God may be said always to be intimately present in the world. At the same time, God is distinct from creatures in virtue of God's simplicity (i.e. God's not being composed of essence and existence), which makes the relation an asymmetrical one: creatures are really related to God, because they would not ‘be’ otherwise, but God is not really related to creatures because God would be God even without them.Footnote ⁴⁵ Creating, therefore, belongs to God alone, because creation simply is the ‘emanation of all esse from universal being’, and God is esse itself.Footnote ⁴⁶ The radical contingency of the world, for Aquinas, does not lie in the fact that it could have been otherwise, but that it is there at all; for creation ex nihilo simply means that each thing receives its existence directly from the Creator. Thus, to the famous question later put by Leibniz, ‘Why is there some-thing rather than utter nothingness?’, Thomas’ response in a word would be: ‘Creation’.

Given the increasing recognition of the significance of global horizons for Christian theology, we will surely see more Thomist scholars joining Burrell in emphasising Aquinas’ openness to interreligious dialogue in the pursuit of ‘faith seeking understanding’.Footnote ⁴⁷ However, one of Burrell's more startling claims seems to have gone largely unnoticed. In speculating in the margins of his work on how these medieval Christian-Jewish-Islamic conversations in philosophical theology could benefit from an engagement with non-Abrahamic traditions, Burrell has suggested (somewhat to his own surprise) that his ‘struggles to understand the utter uniqueness of that relation [namely, between creature and Creator] could find expression in a conceptuality at the heart of Hindu thought’.Footnote ⁴⁸ The ‘conceptuality’ he is talking about is ‘non-dualism’ (advaita).

Burrell first encountered the tradition of Advaita (literally, ‘not-two’) via his colleague, Bradley Malkovsky,Footnote ⁴⁹ but only appreciated the possible significance of this worldview for Christian theology when he read Toward an Alternative Theology: Confessions of a Non-Dualist Christian, a largely autobiographical work written by a Roman Catholic sister of the Sacred Heart congregation, Sara Grant.Footnote ⁵⁰ Grant claims, somewhat controversially, that the metaphysical ‘non-dualism’ between the world and God which she came across in Advaita Vedānta also lies at the heart of Christianity, and she argues that the language of non-dualism provides a particularly useful way of balancing a number of oppositional tendencies in Christian thinking about creation and of avoiding conceptual errors in Christian talk about God. She thus offers a way of opening up an avenue of inter-theological engagement with a non-Abrahamic faith tradition which has the intriguing possibility of informing intra-Christian theological reflections as well. Paradoxically, but perhaps unsurprisingly, opening up these intra-Christian conversations to voices which do not necessarily share the same sets of presuppositions may enable us to see new ways of framing questions and disputes which seem intractable from within familiar sets of firmly established paradigms. As Tanner correctly points out: ‘A certain modern framework of discussion is disenchanted of its obviousness when an initially strange discourse is allowed to make a claim on it.’Footnote ⁵¹

This dialogical exchange brings challenges as well as opportunities, but Burrell's central argument is that:

In particular, he notes how the work of Sara Grant regarding the ‘non-dual’ Christianity she claims to find in Aquinas could help Christian theologians to ‘think Creator and creature together’.Footnote ⁵³ An ‘advaitic’ Thomas would be one way of moving beyond the conceptual impasse that often results from seeing the available options as either a dissolving of the difference between the world and God into some sort of pantheistic monism or the maintaining of such a clear enumerative distinction that the two ‘things’ appear to exist in splendid dualistic isolation from each other. Grant's presentation of non-dualism in an Indian context invites us to a way of thinking this relation which avoids both of the errors outlined above, precisely because it resists contrasting God and world as if they were two enumerable entities. Burrell says that it dawned on him when listening to Malkovsky's delineation of Vedāntic teaching on the relation of the world to its origin that ‘Nondualism is an attempt to state positively what Kathryn Tanner puts negatively.’Footnote ⁵⁴ More specifically, ‘pondering the manner in which Aquinas characterizes creation in things as a relation to their source, she [Grant] observes how malleable is this maverick Aristotelian category of relation’ and she is able to utilise the Vedāntic concept of advaita to stress the ontological dependence of creatures on their Creator, and thus the asymmetric nature of this relation.

Summing up

The connecting thread between figures as diverse in time as Pseudo-Dionysius, Thomas Aquinas and Sara Grant may be found in a certain concept of non-duality (advaita) that leads us to picture the distinction-and-relation between the world and God as a non-contrastive one: they are neither separate nor yet the same. The reasons for this statement boil down to there being no common genus within which we can situate God and creatures, such as to be able to spell out the ‘difference’ between them: God is ‘distinct’ precisely in virtue of indistinctness. In Aquinas, this (in)distinction comes to the fore in the doctrine of creation, understood as the free bestowal of existence to all beings which participate in the act of unqualified existence (esse) we call God. This in turn shows why we can only talk of a ‘distinction’ between God and what is not God if we also keep in mind the ‘relation’ between them – namely, that the very being of creatures is an esse-ad-creatorem.

Burrell emphasises not only the uniqueness of this relation but also its Abrahamic moorings as arising out of concerns common to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Lest he be accused, however, of evacuating theology in this regard of specifically Christian (i.e. christological) content, it should be noted that Burrell and Sokolowski agree that, with the theological inheritance of centuries of thinking through the ‘micro’ problem of the distinction-and-relation between the human and the divine natures of Christ, Christian theologians have an especially nuanced conceptual framework for addressing the ‘macro’ problem of the distinction-and-relation between the world and God.Footnote ⁵⁵ Indeed, Burrell also puts it the other way around – that Chalcedonian christology only makes sense in light of a non-contrastive (or non-dualistic) understanding of how creatures relate to God. As Turner reminds us:

We can, I think, borrow the ‘microcosmic’ language of Chalcedon to articulate its ‘macrocosmic’ iteration: God is (at least logically) related to the world ‘without confusion, without change, without division, and without separation’ analogously to the way in which divine and creaturely natures are uniquely related in the one divine person of Jesus Christ.Footnote ⁵⁷

While a certain concept of ‘non-duality’ is not, therefore, entirely unknown in the Christian tradition, I think that Burrell is right to encourage Christian theologians to explore more deeply Sara Grant's presentation of Advaita Vedānta in order to rethink old problems in new ways. Specifically, Burrell suggests three key motivations for doing so. First of all, there is the mandate handed down to us by Aquinas himself to work out Christian metaphysics in active conversations with thinkers from outside the tradition, to say nothing of the increasingly global horizons within which theology and philosophy must in any case be carried out. Secondly, by confronting the language of ‘non-duality’, which is uncommon for Christians, we are reminded of the uniqueness of the distinction between creature and Creator, and encouraged to articulate this in ways which avoid picturing God as ‘just another thing’ existing alongside the world. Finally and, perhaps, primarily, the startling possibility of describing creature and Creator as ‘not-two’ (a-dvaita) is one way of reasserting the true meaning of divine transcendence in Christian theology – not, as is too often the case, as a spatial metaphor opposed to metaphors of closeness and intimacy, but as precisely the unique sort of indistinctness that allows God to be, in the words of St Augustine, interior intimo meo.

Burrell's first allusion to Grant and the possibilities of a ‘non-dual’ understanding of the relation between the world and God goes back more than twenty years. Here, he suggested that ‘the affinities between Sokolowski's distinction and a recent presentation of nonduality by a Christian writer [i.e. Grant's 1989 Teape Lectures] are so startling as to merit at least extensive notice’.Footnote ⁵⁸ This was followed a year later by Burrell's most detailed treatment of Grant in his chapter on ‘The Creator and Creation’ in his shared volume with Elena Malits, Original Peace. Since then, he has consistently reissued this invitation to Christian theologians to look to Grant and Hindu non-dualism as a way of articulating the God-world relation-distinction in nearly all of his major published articles, chapters and monographs, right up to the present day. The ‘at least extensive notice’ of Grant's work which Burrell called for in 1996 is surely long overdue.Footnote ⁵⁹