Environmental Ethics and the Cambridge Platonist Henry More

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

An interesting attempt at application of a long dismissed theory. While the overall argument is well crafted I have a few suggestions for improvement. 

Footnotes are mixed up (what does note 0 refer to? where in the volume in note 1 do you mean to call our attention?). 

You do little more than reference, and then dismiss, the prevailing theory of omnipresence inherited by More, what he calls holenmerism. Some discussion of this traditional way of understanding the unity of matter and form would make the paper stronger and demonstrate that More had principled reasons for rejecting it. Expanding on your note 46 within the text itself would go a long way toward explaining why Morean space is worth the risks. 

Divine simplicity is not unique to the so-called "Judeo-Christian" tradition (line 364). In fact, Islam has arguably been home to the most serious arguments for divine simplicity of all. Leaving Islam out seems arbitrary.  

Finally, it is unclear how divine space makes any practical difference ecologically from pantheism. How is Morean divine space practically different than a holenmerist account of omnipresence? How is a holenmerist account any less one of a God in whom we live and move and have our being? Why not think of divine presence as instantiated by divine power rather than space? 

Your overall point seems more focused on the more philosophically adequate nature of More's theory of omnipresence with the ecological concerns a throwaway after thought. What's the actual point of this paper? Is it about God? Environmentalism? Or both? 

Author Response

Thank you for your notes and insightful feedback. In response to it I have:

1. Added a sentence to the initial footnote to specify it further.
2. Expanded note 46 to clarify why I did not elaborate further upon this issue. 
3. Reworded 'Judeo-Christian' to avoid this error.
4. Added more content upfront to specify why the traditional account is inadequate for an immanent and environmentally present God, and thereby more urgently point to the need for a Morean alternative.

Thank you again for your feedback! Best

Reviewer 2 Report

This submission is overall well written with the author's original argument based on his or her understanding of Henry More's theological outlook of "a God who is spatially present to nature without being pantheistically reducible to it" (16-17) and of a God who is "near to us" but not "identical with us" (89-90). In this argument, the Christianity divinity concurrently is apparently present in this world but is distinct from its this-worldliness. 

The reviewer recommends a minor revision in these two areas:

(1) More's initial theological work was not intended to address environmental issues but to discern how the essence/substance of the divinity moves the inert matter of this world. This submission can offer more visible connections between the Morean sense of divine space and the ecologically-discernible environments of the earth;

(2) This submission is recommended to give a more informed representation of pantheism and/or to open a conversation with how pantheism is applied in the modern/contemporary field of Christian environmental ethics and ecological theology, which are directly concerned with the geological and ecological creative forces of the earth as a sacred creation. For instance, the works of Pierre Teilard De Chardin (1961, 1974), Liberty Hyde Bailey (1916), Thomas Berry (2009), Catherine Keller and Mary Jane Rubenstein (2017), and Laurel Kearns and Catherine Keller (2007) can be invited into this submission to strengthen its current weakness of discussing environmental ethics without offering an ecologically-understood, environmental interpretation of Henry More's works and with a literal, twisted understanding of pantheism (e.g. "The pantheistic God would not just be the sun and the flowers, but the atoms of the bullet, the hand of the abuser...").

Thanks in advance for the author's willingness to consider the recommended minor revision. Godspeed!

Author Response

Thank you for your helpful feedback and insights. In response I have:

1. Added a note emphasizing the anachronistic nature of the project as an attempt to resource a thinker and appropriate their ideas for a contemporary project that would have been foreign to them, and clarified exactly what More was trying to do in his original context.
2. I have added multiple sentences elaborating upon Christian environmentalism and pantheism, mentioning the authors you listed and locating their relation to my project. I also note that this is not meant to primarily be an inescapable critique of all conceivable forms of pantheism, but of a popular problem that seems to often reoccur with pantheism.

Thanks for your thoughts! Best