Classical Theism and Buddhism: Connecting Metaphysical and Ethical Systems by Tyler Dalton McNabb and Erik Baldwin (review)

When the Jesuit missionary Ippolito Desideri (1684–1733) reached Tibet in 1716, his philosophical and theological training at the Collegio Romano was still a relatively recent memory. After the customary formation in the liberal arts, all novices read extensively the philosophical works of Aristotle before plunging into the vast ocean of Thomas Aquinas's theological writings. The Scholastic vision brought together revelation and reason to foreground a reading of the natural order grounded in a first cause—a metaphysical tether identified with Aristotle's first mover, no less than the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The claim that God's existence could be proved by reason alone, albeit with some difficulties that revelation alone could clear, was one of the fundamental convictions that Counterreformation missionaries retained from their theological formation, arming them with conceptual tools to defeat the supposedly flawed beliefs of the Asian and Latin American masses.

As soon as he had sufficiently mastered the Tibetan language and had started to attend the public debates at the monastic university of Serah—a few miles from the center of Lhasa and an active Gelug monastery to this day—Desideri discovered that novices embracing the religious life were called to use the tools of philosophy—in particular, those of the Madhyamaka school—to debunk all belief in a creator God. Indeed, in line with the teachings of Nāgārjuna (ca. 150–250 CE) and the broader Mahāyāna tradition, Tibetan Buddhists strongly rejected the existence of a creator God or a first cause of the universe altogether. This attitude was in startling contrast to the classical Thomist belief that God's existence could be proved by reason alone—a claim that would be formally embraced as normative by the Catholic Church at the First Vatican Council in 1870. The tradition of the dharma, instead, was in no need of a divine prop—rather, it rested in the conscious embrace of codependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda) while letting go of all sorts of questions about the cause and the purpose of the natural order that could not possibly contribute to our achievement of nirvāna. Desideri's apologetic writings in Classical Tibetan would take issue with Madhyamaka's critique of theism and posit the Aristotelian notion of prime mover as a necessary conceptual supplementation to pratītyasamutpāda, thereby hoping to convince Tibetan practitioners that their belief system, while not entirely mistaken, could only find fulfillment in the acceptance of Christian revelation.

This short monograph by Tyler Dalton McNabb and Erik Baldwin takes issue with the traditional position that views classical theism and Buddhism as ultimately incompatible and seeks to propose a middle ground that weaves together metaphysical claims as well as their ethical implications—in other words, offering a glimpse of a synthesis that is not just intellectually but also soteriologically enticing. The first part of the book challenges what, for the authors, is a simplistic tendency to oppose the two traditions on the grounds that their claims posit metaphysical explanations of the natural order that are mutually exclusive. In the words of David Burton, cited in the Introduction, "Christians believe in a creator God whereas Buddhists do not. Most Christians regard Jesus as uniquely salvific, whereas Buddhists do not share this conviction. The Buddhist soteriological aim is nirvana, which seems very different from the Christian conception of heaven" (2). The authors go on to contend instead that while there is a long-standing tradition of theism within the Buddhist tradition, there is no contradiction between "core Buddhist doctrines" and what they regard as "Classical Theism." The first part of the book goes on to review some of the Buddhist arguments against the existence of a personal creator, God, reinterpreting them in such a way that the core claims of Classical Theism remain untouched. The second part of the book focuses instead on ethical and soteriological questions and argues that...