Evils of Optimistic Panentheism

Abstract

Theologians have described Sergius Bulgakov as one of the greatest theologians of the 20th century. Bulgakov is an ‘optimistic panentheist,’ someone who embraces a combination of panentheist metaphysics and an optimistic attitude that God’s eschatological will (an essential desire of God) will necessarily be accomplished in the future, when all evil will be eliminated. This paper fleshes out a practical problem affecting ‘optimistic’ versions of panentheism like Bulgakov’s, using Bulgakov’s own views as an example. Not only is there no good way for panentheists to infer that God’s essentially good nature or desires (such as an essentially good will) will ultimately ‘win out’ over the bad consequences of His nature or desires, but their view implies that God only allows evil because its possibility is a metaphysically necessary consequence of God’s essence or desires. As God’s essence is eternally the same, it cannot then be that evil ceases to be so necessary at any point in God’s life. In sum, we will defend the conclusion that ‘pessimism’ is the only coherent position for panentheists to take, given their metaphysical commitments. Moreover, we will conclude by generalizing these insights to panentheism generally and Christian panentheism particularly.

Theologians have described Sergius Bulgakov as one of the greatest theologians of the 20th century. Bulgakov’s work on divinization, original sin, eschatology, and the problem of evil has been undergoing a rediscovery, and his views have influenced several prominent contemporary theologians, such as Rowan Williams and David Bentley Hart. Bulgakov’s theology is attractive to many because he aims to combine classical theistic metaphysics of divine simplicity, immutability, and God’s essential goodness with an apparently orthodox Christian panentheism. In particular, Bulgakov utilizes his panentheism to arrive at an optimistic conclusion that all evil will eventually be eliminated from the cosmos, as Bulgakov thinks creation’s essential connection to God’s ideas (and so to ‘Sophia’) makes it inevitable or necessary that the universe become fully divinized in the future. However, this paper will show that panentheism in general entails that moral evil is a necessary consequence of God’s nature. Bulgakov’s version of panentheism is susceptible to this same problem. We will therefore show that Bulgakov’s optimistic view—on which all evil will inevitably or necessarily be eliminated in the eschatological future—is incompatible with his panentheism.

This paper fleshes out a practical problem affecting ‘optimistic’ versions of panentheism like Bulgakov’s, using Bulgakov’s own views as an example. These versions of panentheism want to affirm both that moral evil is a necessary possibility, entailed by the essence of God, but also an optimistic perspective on which God’s essential goodness will eventually win out. However, there is no good way for panentheists to infer that God’s essentially good nature or desires (such as an essentially good will) will ultimately ‘win out’ over the bad consequences of His nature or desires. Instead, their view implies or entails that evil’s possibility is a metaphysically necessary consequence of God’s essence or desires. As God’s essence is eternally the same, it cannot then be that evil ceases to be a necessary possibility at any point in the universe/God’s life. In sum, we will defend the conclusion that ‘pessimism’ is the only coherent position for panentheists to take, given their metaphysical commitments. And we will illustrate this argument by showing that Bulgakov’s attempts to avoid this implication fail.

1. The ‘Practical’ Problem of Evil for Panentheists

Panentheism is usually vaguely stated as being the view that ‘all is in God,’ by contrast with pantheism holding that ‘all is God.’ Cashing out this inclusion relation is tricky and contentious. One plausible definition of panentheism is: the view that God is a part of everything or that everything is a part of God, although creation does not exhaustively compose the parts God has (See Crisp (2019)). But some self-identified panentheists do not conceive of the universe as having a parthood relation to the divine nature. For our purposes, we do not need to define panentheism. We instead take our bearings from Göcke’s suggestion that panentheism involves accepting that the world is a necessary consequence of the divine nature, and that acceptance of this thesis would be required for panentheism to be meaningfully differentiated from theism (Göcke 2013).

The versions of panentheism we intend to critique all hold that some relation to creation is essential to God, whether uniquely uniquely outcome-specific, where God’s essence entails God creating precisely one world (the best possible), or more generic, where God’s essence entails creating, e.g., one among a delimited set of worlds all of which include free persons. For these reasons, we will prescind from trying to define what is common to all panentheists in their account of the inclusion relation, and rather highlight only the way that this relation is held to be essential to God (in the broad sense, including being a necessary consequence of His essence). Such a claim that creation (uniquely or generically) is a necessary entailment of God’s essence would meaningfully distinguish panentheism from classical theism (the latter of which holds that God could have refrained from creating anything at all).

We propose that panentheism, thus construed, is committed to a certain view of moral evil. If moral evil exists in our world, and if the world is a necessary result of God’s nature, then, in virtue of the world being a necessary result of God’s nature, moral evil will thereby also be a necessary result of God’s nature. Now, panentheists do not need to hold that evil is essential to God in the sense that God’s essential nature or parts are evil. Even if the universe were something that follows necessarily upon God’s nature, it could still be true that God’s essence or essential parts are essentially good. Or perhaps God’s divine life could have been otherwise, such that some of God’s parts which are evil are contingent, such that whatever evil which is part of God was not a metaphysically necessary consequence of God’s nature. However, panentheists cannot admit that the world (with its nature as making evil possible) is contingently related to God’s essence. So, their views commit them to holding that the world and its character as including actual evil follows necessarily upon God’s essence.

What panentheists need to do is distinguish de dicto and de re necessity: necessarily, everything is a part or consequence of the divine nature, but not everything follows necessarily upon that nature. But this requires that they pick out the ‘point’ at which contingency becomes introduced into creation, and that point needs to be of sufficient character that it can generate moral evil in the world without making actual evil a necessary consequence of the divine nature itself. Panentheists typically hold that God’s divine life necessarily or essentially makes evil possible in virtue of chance or freedom being essential to God’s nature or a necessary consequence of it: “since chance and freedom, however, are fundamental parts of the essence of the divine Being itself, the panentheistic God cannot prevent the possibility that evil states of affairs obtain in this world and contribute to the history of the one divine life, even if the goodness of God does not want evil to be a determining factor of the one divine life.” (Göcke 2019, p. 84). Panentheism thus entails that evil is essentially a possibility of the divine life, unlike classical theism.

Panentheists as such could affirm that actual moral evil is essential to God Himself, or His essential parts, as in a situation where God would essentially have the freedom to be morally evil, or where moral evil would be metaphysically and instrumentally necessary for God to ‘perfect’ His own nature (i.e., His goodness is not essentially complete or perfect). But many Christian panentheists follow David Bentley Hart in rejecting such a possibility that God’s essential being would require evil either as an essential possibility of God’s own ‘inner’ life or as instrumentally necessary for God to be good in His own inner life. Hart writes:

…if God’s love were in any sense shaped by sin, suffering, and death, then sin, suffering, and death would always be in some sense features of who he is. This not only means that evil would be a distinct reality over against God, and God’s love something inherently deficient and reactive; it also means that evil would be somehow a part of God, and that goodness would require evil to be good. Such a God could not be love, even if in some sense he should prove to be “loving:‘ Nor would he be the good as such, nor being as such. He, like us, would be a synthesis of death and life.

(Hart 2005, p. 78)

We call panentheists who—like Hart—reject that evil is a fundamental constituent of our world or of God ‘optimistic’ panentheists. Yujin Nagasawa outlines different senses of ‘optimism,’ from the Leibnizian belief that this world represents the best possible world to more humble beliefs that the world is not an overall or an irredeemably bad world (Nagasawa 2024, pp. 133–53). He ends up settling on a very modest form of optimism, which holds that “overall and fundamentally, the environment in which we exist is not bad.” (Nagasawa 2024, p. 142). For our purposes, this is a helpful characterization of a typical optimism among Christian panentheists in particular. These panentheists reject that God could be essentially capable of evil and hold that God has definite good desires for our eschatological future, where God will eventually defeat all evil or save all. These panentheists hold something like the modest form of optimism outlined by Nagasawa, since optimistic panentheists hold that, given God’s essential desires for definite outcomes, it follows that the world, overall and fundamentally, is not only not bad but will also necessarily get better.

Panentheists who aim to maintain such an optimistic vision of God would require, therefore, holding both that God’s nature is essentially good, and that moral evil is introduced elsewhere, in virtue of something God did not necessitate. The natural way to do this is to hold that God’s essence is such that God necessarily creates free creatures, whose freedom is such that not even God can prevent from choosing moral evil. Moral evil is thus necessarily made possible by God’s essence, but actual moral evil itself is not necessary. Further, in order to be consistently optimistic that God did not need evil for the perfection of creation, and to affirm that the world is fundamentally good, optimistic panentheists typically combine their claims about metaphysical limits on God’s power (i.e., that the possibility of evil is necessitated by God’s desire for free creatures) with further claims that God has definite outcomes He essentially aims to achieve, such as the final elimination of evil or universal salvation, or something similar. By ‘definite desire’ we mean a desire such that there is a quantifier—e.g., “there is some definite time at which all evils are defeated.” Optimistic panentheists should not want it to be the case that God’s essential desires make any evil in particular instrumentally necessary for God’s desired outcomes. Otherwise, God would seemingly require actual sins for the achievement of His desires, and that seemingly makes God evil. Therefore, such views on which panentheism is true—such that God necessarily creates a world in which sin is possible—but where it is also true that God did not necessitate any sin, nor was it necessary for what God necessarily wills, as God also essentially has and will necessarily achieve definite desires which aim at eliminating evil, are what we mean by ‘optimistic panentheism.’

There is a problem for optimistic panentheism: it is inconsistent. Fundamentally, optimists need to hold that God essentially wants to achieve some definite outcomes, such as the perfection of His creatures, and that these definite outcomes made evil necessarily possible. If those desires are not appropriately related to God’s reasons for permitting sin, then, for instance, God would have no good reason for failing to achieve those definite desires at the earliest possible time. Yet, if moral evil is necessary for what God wants to achieve regarding any of these outcomes (e.g., as conditions for their achievement), it follows that moral evil is metaphysically necessary for their achievement. In other words, introducing definite outcomes for a future state of the world will entail that the possible evils God permits, at least in general, are also instrumentally necessary for achieving those outcomes.

We will illustrate the way that optimism is inconsistent with expectations derived from panentheistic metaphysics by appeal to Sergius Bulgakov’s Christian panentheism. Bulgakov is a panentheist, or very much like one, as he believes that the world is a necessary consequence of God’s nature. He also is an optimist, as he explains the occurrence of moral evil by way of arguing that free decisions are a contingent result of those free persons God necessarily creates and thinks the universe will necessarily end in the final elimination of all evil. But Bulgakov holds and he thinks that God necessarily wills not simply an eternally blessed humanity and instead wills a redeemed humanity. But a redeemed humanity presupposes sin (if not any particular sin, at least some sin or other). Bulgakov tries to avoid the problematic implication of his view by appealing to free will. But, if the eschatological end will of necessity be realized, then the means of achieving those ends by way of a human history without sin could have also been realized of necessity. Yet there is sin. So, optimistic panentheists like Bulgakov need to admit either that the sins are realized as necessarily as the definite outcomes, deny that God will necessarily ever achieve those outcomes He desires, or admit that God’s ends are achieved only contingently.1

By the same token, we will conclude by showing that this conclusion generalizes. On the specific combination of views needed for optimistic panentheism, there is no reasonable ground for optimism that things will ‘get better’ in the sense that moral evil will eventually be eliminated from the world, if God’s essential desires are counterfactually dependent upon the occurrence of evil. So, either the optimistic assumption or panentheism must be false. There is then a problem with optimistic panentheism like that alleged by Nagasawa to affect pantheism: there is a conflict between axiological expectations implied by panentheistic metaphysics and the ‘optimistic’ expectation or assumption held by optimistic panentheists (usually drawn from revelation by Christian panentheists) (Nagasawa 2024, pp. 64–66). Confident optimism that moral evil will be eliminated at some point in the future contradicts panentheistic commitments. The panentheistic world will not necessarily get better. No panentheist can be consistently optimistic. Panentheism is committed to a pessimistic outlook.

2. Bulgakovian Panentheism

Sergius Bulgakov uses classical ‘panentheistic’ ways of speaking, as when he claims that “Nothing can exist outside God, as alien or exterior to him. […] There is only the one God in his divine Wisdom, and outside him nothing whatever. What is not God is nothing.” (Bulgakov 1993, pp. 72, 148). And we are not the first to identify Bulgakov as a panentheist (e.g., Meixner (2020)). Yet, since Bulgakov’s overall metaphysics of the God-world relation is quite complex and expressed in florid German Idealist overtones, we will only focus on what is essential to give the outline of what Bulgakov refers to as ‘Sophia.’ In short, Bulgakov thinks that the manifestation of God’s life during world history is necessarily related to God’s own intra-divine life, and that this relation is also bi-directional. Bulgakov thinks that everything that happens in creation is, in some sense, a necessary result of God’s ‘sophianic’ essence. Let us now turn to how Bulgakov understands Sophia.

Bulgakov thinks Sophia is “the very being of the self-revealing God.” (Papanikolaou 2021, p. 17). ‘Divine Sophia’ is essential to God, as His ‘self-revealing’ nature. One aspect of God’s essentially sophianic nature is that it is essential to God that He has divine ideas, i.e., patterns or prototypes that are instantiated in creation; Divine Sophia “contains within itself all the fullness of the world of ideas.” (Bulgakov 1993, pp. 65, 70). Bulgakov thinks that God necessarily manifests an idea which is essential to Himself in all that He does in creation. Bulgakov calls the instantiation of those ideas the ‘creaturely Sophia.’ The other primary aspect of God’s essentially sophianic nature is that God is essentially loving. God is essentially such that He needs to reflect His love in creation by exhausting all possibilities contained within the divine ideas: “God-Love cannot fail to be the Creator…[for] the manifestation of love in creation necessarily belongs to the fulness of its self-revelation. Love cannot leave unactualized even a single possibility of love, and, in this sense, it needs creation, although it is ontologically independent of creation.” (Bulgakov 2002, p. 130).

Bulgakov thinks therefore that God necessarily and essentially instantiates all the divine ideas He has—“the fullness of the ideal forms contained in the Word is reflected in creation.” (Bulgakov 1993, p. 70). Specifically, Bulgakov holds that God’s essential love constrains God to instantiate all possible divine ideas, so that God could not have done otherwise than create precisely the world He did. If God could have done otherwise, then God would not be perfectly loving or wise in achieving His loving plan; ‘to admit [choice among alternative possibilities] ex parte Dei, in relation to the Creator, is impossible.” (Bulgakov 2002, p. 141). So, Bulgakov is clear that God’s choices could not have been otherwise but that all are necessary, given that God necessarily and essentially is good and will actualize all of His self-expressive ideas in the most loving way possible.2 God’s purposes in creating the universe are therefore essential to God’s divine ideas: “The purpose of creation [is] the full accord of the created type with its prototype, its entire accomplishment.” (Bulgakov 1993, p. 126). God’s love makes it that the perfection of everything within the universe, including specifically the moral perfection of every creature, is also an essential aim of God.

Bulgakov uses these claims as a gloss on the Christian concept of ‘divinization’ or ‘theosis.’ For Bulgakov, the perfection of the universe can lie only in union with God through ‘divinization,’ participating in God’s own nature. And this is why Bulgakov thinks that God must instantiate all the divine ideas ‘exhaustively’: as the divine ideas are essentially divine, for those ideas to be ‘exhaustively’ or ‘fully’ instantiated would be to make the material world essentially identical with God (Bulgakov 2008, p. 186). Bulgakov reifies this ‘creaturely Sophia’ because he thinks the divine ideas in creation are “ontologically identical with its prototype, the same Wisdom that exists in God,” (Bulgakov 1993, pp. 71–72; further, e.g., Bulgakov 2004, p. 372) and this seems to be the core commitment of what is ‘panentheistic’ about Bulgakov’s view. Thus, as he says, “Sophia unites God with the world as the one common principle, the divine ground of creaturely existence. Remaining one, Sophia exists in two modes, eternal and temporal, divine and creaturely.” (Bulgakov 1993, p. 74). It is for this reason that Bulgakov concludes that “nothing can exist outside God, as alien or exterior to him.” (Bulgakov 1993, p. 72). It is vague what Bulgakov means in saying that divine ideas themselves are ‘ontologically identical’ with whatever is instantiated in creation, but, at the end of the day, Bulgakov is making clear that the eschatological state of the universe is definite, will be achieved, and has already begun to be achieved from the moment of creation, because it was essential to creation that it had the definite goal it did—God could not have created a universe with any other design except the one He did.

Bulgakov thinks the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ represents an important moment in a cosmic process beginning at creation in which not only the believer comes to share in God’s own nature by way of grace, but the universe has been destined, necessarily and as a whole, to become a participant of the divine nature—and ‘literally’ so, as Bulgakov thinks creation will in the end then form a metaphysically anthropocentric single organism, with its own ‘world-soul,’ that will serve as an extension of Christ’s human body (Bulgakov 1993, p. 140). His view involves the material universe progressing to become (literally) the pan-cosmic body of Christ (See Bulgakov (1993, pp. 75, 146)). So, the universe will instantiate the divine ideas exhaustively and will be essentially divine in just the same way that Christ is. The material universe, and everything in it, would share one divine hypostasis, thereby bringing together divine nature and created nature, so that the eschatological state will involve “the complete penetration of the creature by Wisdom, the manifestation of the power of Divine-humanity in the whole world.” (Bulgakov 1993, p. 147). And this result follows directly from God’s essence—God could not fail to incarnate Himself in the universe this way.

Bulgakov’s panentheism is optimistic. Everything will necessarily become (hypostatically) identical with Christ, given facts about God’s essence. Taken straightforwardly, however, the claims Bulgakov makes above would entail that there is only one unique world and one unique course of world history. Clearly, if God necessarily ‘exhausts’ all the divine ideas He has in creation, and God’s ideas could not have been otherwise, and God’s choices in instantiating them could not have been otherwise, then there could only be one world which instantiates those ideas—the actual world—and only one possible timeline. And the actual timeline includes moral evil—and very atrocious instances of it. It would be very bad if all that evil was metaphysically necessary for achieving the eschatological state. It would be problematic if this evil were instrumentally necessary for what God wants to accomplish, as these facts would entail that God’s essence is counterfactually dependent upon the occurrence of evil—and that would undermine the optimistic assumption itself. In Bulgakovian terms, if the world needed the commission of evil to occur for that universe to become Christ, there is no good reason that the eschatological ‘life’ of the pan-cosmic Christ will not also involve evil. Indeed, panentheism would imply precisely that: the divine ideas themselves indirectly necessitated evil’s occurrence in time, and those same ideas are what become instantiated when Christ becomes the universe. So, if Bulgakov concedes that the divine ideas necessitated evils, then his panentheism would undermine his optimism. If God could not have created a world without sin, because God could not achieve the Incarnation without sin, then there is no reason that the eschatological Incarnation ever necessarily ‘arrives’ or even that we keep getting ‘closer’ to that ‘Omega point.’

Bulgakov recognizes this danger and rejects that God needed the world or the evils occurring in it “for the sake of his own development or fulfillment.” (Bulgakov 1993, p. 72). What Bulgakov seems to deny is that the world’s occurrence and history were instrumentally necessary for God to achieve His own perfection or goodness. Yet, strictly speaking, Bulgakov’s position implies that God’s essence, love, and goodness counterfactually vary with creation, since God would not be precisely the loving and good God He is without creation. If there were no creation, there would be no good and loving God. What Bulgakov can only be denying, considering his full metaphysical commitments, is that God undergoes temporal development in becoming better over time. That is, stated more precisely, Bulgakov can only be insisting that God is eternally what He is as good and loving. But notice that there is no contradiction in the possibility of God being eternally the same as He is and yet having an essence which is (eternally) counterfactually related to moral evil. If evil is necessitated by God’s essence, then the fact that God is essentially good and always loving, and does not increase in goodness over time, does not rule out that God’s essence always necessitates or entails evil. This vagueness is pervasive in Bulgakov’s account of evil.

3. Bulgakovian Evils

Bulgakov’s proposal to deal with evil, in brief, is as follows: freedom of creatures to commit evil is a necessary consequence of God’s plan to create the world; but the occurrence of evil is not necessary for that plan to be accomplished, since God’s plan included alternative possibilities for each person to choose other than evil acts. Bulgakov thinks that God necessarily desires to create free creatures and that those free creatures cannot achieve that perfection God (essentially) desires for them without those creatures necessarily passing through a temporal history in which moral evil is possible for them (See Bulgakov (2002, pp. 147–49)). “Essential to creatureliness is becoming, process, in which the fulness, plan, and idea of creation, sketched out in the Divine Sophia, are actualized…On this basis the creaturely spirit can be a more or less adequate or inadequate image of itself [in God’s ideas]” (Bulgakov 2002, pp. 136–38). Thus, in short, “creaturely freedom is…implanted in the world’s being, and, through this freedom, evil is also implanted in the world.” (Bulgakov 2002, p. 140).

And necessarily so, since if He wanted to create a world in which free creatures achieve divinization (as God essentially does), God could not have created a world where sin was not a possibility. Bulgakov insists that there was an undetermined choice between good and evil at the start of creation, with the possibility of choosing good (Bulgakov 2002, p. 138). He rejects that God determines us to choose and so that God’s action could ever be ‘irresistible’ or bring about choices with necessity; “the freedom of the person remains inviolable and impenetrable even for God.” (Bulgakov 2002, p. 205). While God’s ideas for time contain “all the content of time,” those ideas include “all the possibilities contained in it,” i.e., all the possibilities for creaturely free choice—consequently, Bulgakov thinks, God choosing to instantiate His ideas of the world would make it true that each person has possibilities for choosing otherwise than they do (Bulgakov 2002, pp. 206–7). So, it is likely that Bulgakov thinks God’s plan has multiple branches by which creatures could determine themselves to achieve the overall outcomes, and that the initial states of the plan did not necessitate taking one ‘path’ through the possible branches. That is, the outcomes are set by God’s plan, and could not be modified by creatures, but the paths taken are not; “… freedom is incapable of changing the general path of the world, although it affects its particularities.” (Bulgakov 2002, p. 222).

Now, there is a serious logical difficulty in Bulgakov’s outlook. Bulgakov’s proposal is consistent with there being one unique future necessitated by God’s plan. And such a specter is raised by Bulgakov himself, as he often uses compatibilist language to describe both divine and human freedom (e.g., “there is nothing that does not bear the stamp of freedom … that also is not determined… There is nothing that is not determined. Freedom and determinism are equally proper to man.” (Bulgakov 2002, p. 126)). The fact that God’s plan made it true that there are alternative possibilities for action does not show us that each person was in control of which alternatives were actualized. Bulgakov’s view might resemble that of David Lewis, for whom “one is able to act otherwise though past history and the laws of nature determine that one will not act otherwise” (Lewis 1981, p. 113). In Bulgakov’s case, each person seems to be unable to do otherwise than precisely one possibility, which is that possibility made true by God’s plan or desires, within the constraints of the necessary features of His creation.

Our question here is not whether Bulgakov is a compatibilist; the point is rather that Bulgakov’s insistence that God’s plan has many branches or alternative possibilities open to creatures would not avoid the difficulty. Everything Bulgakov says would be compatible with it being the case that God has chosen a definite outcome for His plan which would make evil necessary in terms of what was necessary to fulfill that plan.

For instance, John Duns Scotus points out that, if God brings about everything necessarily, and the activities of the universe depends upon God who causes necessarily what He does, then “every part of it is caused necessarily when it is caused,” and “the opposite could not be caused.” (Scotus 2024, p. 40). We do not have to think that God immediately causes me to choose something necessarily; rather, it could be the case that God instead moves or causes “something else necessarily to move our will necessarily and immediately—it moves because it is moved; ultimately some immediate cause will move the will necessarily, and so the will necessarily will will and its willing will be necessary.” (Scotus 2024, pp. 39–40). That is, at the end of the day, if God’s plan is necessary and cannot fail to be achieved, and there are certain definite choices which are necessary for God’s plan, then those choices could not have been otherwise.

The relevant question for our purposes is not even so much whether God’s plan necessitates one outcome, but whether the outcomes which God desired essentially could have been achieved without anyone passing through some branches that involved sin. The reason this question is relevant is because Bulgakov thinks the definite eschatological outcomes are identical with God’s ideas, and thus that God necessarily and essentially intends those outcomes. If those outcomes are such that the plan would not have been achieved without sin’s occurrence, then it would follow that God’s instantiating that world order (with the given possibilities) included at least one branch in world history where moral evil was necessary. In terms familiar from debates around Molinism, God’s purposes ‘constrain’ which ‘counterfactuals of freedom’ He can actualize. Clearly, if God’s purposes require instantiating a world in which sin occurred at least once, as in willing the good of a ‘redeemed’ world, then God’s purposes necessarily entail that sin will occur in that world at least once.

And it seems Bulgakov is committed to there being such a necessity, as Bulgakov’s panentheism requires him to affirm that God Himself necessarily or essentially willed just the definite outcomes He does at least in regards to the redemption or atonement of Christ. Thus, even if there are more than one ‘feasible’ set of counterfactuals that God can actualize to achieve those outcomes, it would be the case that the definite outcomes He (essentially) aimed to achieve would not have been achieved without sin. Consequently, if God’s essence made it necessary for God to actualize one of the possible options to achieve those outcomes, and if those outcomes necessarily entailed that sin occur at least once in world history, then God’s essence would have made it necessary that sin occur. So, in sum, Bulgakov’s insistence that there were alternative paths to achieve eschatological outcomes is not sufficient to rule out the problematic conclusion that God’s essence made it necessary that sin occur. All Bulgakov’s indeterminism rules out is that God requires some definite sin to occur; nevertheless, his views still entail (given Bulgakov’s other commitments) that God requires some sin or another for His desires to be achieved.

Bulgakov is explicit that the eschatological outcomes are ultimately identical with the instantiation of divine ideas, as Christ Himself is the eschatological outcome. But, if Christ alone is the outcome, Christ could have been incarnated immediately, without any creaturely freedom at all, since Christ is not a creature and would not have needed any ‘temporal development’ to be incarnate. So, Bulgakov must think that the ‘pan-cosmic’ Christ is not precisely speaking merely of the hypostasis that is Jesus, but that Jesus’ pan-cosmic being includes or contains all other created persons. For our purposes, we can simplify and think of those persons as parts of that pan-cosmic Christ, in keeping with Scriptural metaphors that the members of the Church are ‘parts’ of the Body of Christ. The question we need to answer can be rephrased in Bulgakovian terms as follows: did the fact that these persons came to compose Christ Jesus in the eschaton require that at least one of these persons sinned at some point prior to that eschatological point? If ‘yes,’ then Bulgakov is committed to sin being a necessary result of God’s essence. If ‘no,’ then Bulgakov’s answer implies that God’s eschatological outcomes did not necessitate sin, i.e., that sin was in no way instrumentally necessary for achieving the definite outcomes God desired. But that implies the possibility of sin would not be essential to achieving those same definite outcomes. It then becomes mysterious why God’s essential desires did not simply prevent all such possibilities from being instantiated, especially since Bulgakov seemingly endorses Leibnizian optimism at moments.3 Indeed, it leads to a contradiction, as Bulgakov’s panentheism requires that it is essential to bring about free creatures, and that creaturely freedom essentially makes sin possible, and this in turn implies that God could not have achieved those outcomes without the possibility of sin.

Nevertheless, Bulgakov is crucially ambiguous on precisely this question. He initially seems to reject that we can offer a motive for the Incarnation apart from that found in the actual world: “the best way to answer the question whether the Incarnation could have occurred without the Fall is to reject the question itself as a casus irrealis, or as an inappropriate anthropomorphism in relation to the works of God” and goes on to assert that it is true, in the actual world, that the Incarnation “was accomplished for the sake of fallen humanity.” (Bulgakov 2008, p. 131). However, Bulgakov skirts the central issue. He says, on one hand, that “the casus irrealis here consists in supposing that, if man had not sinned, God could have left Himself unincarnate.” (Bulgakov 2008, p. 131). That is, Bulgakov thinks we can assert that God essentially desires to become incarnate, and God’s desire is not counterfactually dependent upon whether man sinned. But then he qualifies that this is supposed to mean that, “The world did not use man’s fall to compel God to make Himself incarnate (For how could the world compel God to do anything?) Rather, God created the world for the Incarnation … precisely as redemption … and He thus included the Incarnation in His plan for the world before its creation.” (Bulgakov 2008, p. 131). Bulgakov’s response is not to the point. While it is true that the world could not causally act upon God to cause God to become incarnate, that is irrelevant to whether God’s plan to become incarnate (and to achieve certain definite eschatological outcomes) essentially or necessarily required the actual occurrence of sin.

There are basically two options for Bulgakov: either God’s essential desire is for a redeemed world or not. If Bulgakov admits that the Incarnation occurred in the actual world on account of sin, and God wanted a redeemed world, this fact in combination with the background belief that God could not have done anything else than will the Incarnation to occur in this way (i.e., specifically that definite Incarnation which is a response to sin), would entail that the Fall is necessary (given God’s essential aims). As Bulgakov thinks the Incarnation is not simply a reaction to sin but God’s supratemporal and essential purpose for creation, and God’s plan could not have been fulfilled as it was without sin, then God’s plan being achieved necessarily entails that sin occur. If God did not want a redeemed world but permitted sin as being metaphysically necessary for the outcomes, then this entails that sin is metaphysically necessary for what God wanted. But, while sin was necessary for God’s outcomes, the only way to avoid that sin is instrumentally necessary for those ends is to conclude that no amount or kind of sin (even in general) is sufficient for God’s desires to be achieved. But if no sin is sufficient for God’s definite desires to be achieved, but their continual occurrence is necessary for His desires, then God’s definite desires never end up achieved. God ends up in a ‘holding pattern’ and never achieves His eschatological desires as long as sin occurs. The latter route is to give up optimism.

4. Generalizing the Point

Bulgakov needs to drop one of his commitments: either he rejects that panentheism is true (and it is false that God necessarily creates the universe, becomes incarnate, and achieves the definite eschatological aims Bulgakov thinks that God does), or he rejects his optimistic assumptions about God and whether God necessitates evil. For Bulgakov to drop the latter assumption would be to accept either that God necessitates sin for His plans, that God has no definite eschatological goals for the universe, or that God will not actually ever achieve these goals at any definite point in time. Many ‘open theists’ might accept that there is no eschaton, but Bulgakov’s commitment to definite eschatological futures is not so compatible; similarly, Bulgakov is committed to God’s goodness. We therefore conclude that Bulgakov, whose whole theological system rests on optimism, should reject panentheism. But the same conclusion generalizes to all versions of panentheism. There is no obvious way that optimistic assumptions—even much more modest than those made by Bulgakov himself—would be compatible with panentheism.

We have illustrated that God permitting evil on account of those evils being instrumentally necessary for definite outcomes would imply that God could never definitively eliminate these evils; if the optimist wants to maintain that God’s desires necessitate no sin in particular (as Bulgakov does), the optimistic assumption entails that God’s desires will never be fulfilled by any occurrence of sin in particular and thus that the eschaton never comes. But we can imagine a more moderate optimist modifying the view to hold that God only has ‘indefinite’ outcomes in mind, such as a policy to defeat whatever evil arises, holding the other commitments fixed. But there is still an implicit conflict between this moderate optimism and metaphysical commitments of panentheism. Evil would not occur unless God’s desires made it necessarily possible that evil occurs. And it is obvious that there would otherwise be an illicit quantifier shift in concluding that, because God wants to eliminate whatever evil arises, or something like this, that therefore God will eliminate all evil at some point in the future. So, there is no objective reason provided by those desires to believe that the distributions of evils would be likely to decrease over time, merely given what is essential to God.

Then, given that God’s desires are counterfactually correlated with the current distribution of evils in the actual world are necessarily so (God would not have had the same desires if the distribution of evils had been different), there would be no good reason to think that God’s desires would improve the situation. The only improvement possible would result from the world, not from God. Someone might conceivably be so naively optimistic about the ability of humans to decrease the overall distribution of evils, given sufficient time, but panentheism gives us good reason to question that optimism: God is the ultimate cause of created persons. So, it seems intuitive that, if God wants the distribution of evils to be roughly what we presently find it to be, it would not be possible for anyone else to substantially decrease that distribution over time, let alone totally defeat evil. While this move would avoid the implication that evil is necessary for definite outcomes God essentially desires, it comes at the cost of optimism itself, since (again) there is no necessity that evil is defeated totally or definitively, as God does not essentially will a definite outcome, such as a world totally free of evil.

We have noted that characterizing the essence of ‘panentheism’ is difficult and contentious. Nevertheless, we think these conclusions generalize to at least all typical or exemplar instances of panentheism. By way of illustration, these implications of panentheistic metaphysics pertaining to moral evil have been recognized as following from the commitments of exemplar figures in the panentheist tradition, such as F.W.J. Schelling. It is beyond the scope of this paper to outline Schelling’s philosophy. Nevertheless, recent interpretations of Schelling’s theodicy are agreed that, for Schelling, moral evil is explained as a necessary consequence of God’s own interior life. This necessity is understood to flow from God’s nature, such that “evil is a necessary by-product of God’s perfection,” (Brown 2025, p. 8) and being indeed “necessary for the revelation of God.” (Schelling 2006, p. 41). Schelling is likewise explicit that evil should not be conceived of as a defect or lack of being, contrary to classical perspectives, but instead ought to be understood as positive being (Schelling 2006, pp. 36–38). Some interpreters, such as Rae, go so far as to conclude that, in Schelling, “God’s light cannot…exist without His dark abyssal ground and, by extension, the possibility of evil…” so that Schelling’s “God is not opposed to evil, but actually depends on the existence of evil.” (Rae 2018, p. 242). Rae’s interpretation rests on claims made by Schelling that, if evil were to be abolished, this “would abolish the ground of [God’s] existence.” (Schelling 2006, p. 66).

Other interpreters are not so stark in concluding that God’s existence depends upon evil, noting with Bernstein that “what is not intrinsically evil in God becomes the source of evil in human beings.” (Bernstein 2002, p. 89). They nevertheless agree that Schelling’s panentheism holds that God’s nature entails created evil necessarily. Pitkänen claims that “Schelling argues that God himself can become actualized only through a being whose freedom resembles God’s own,” where it is therefore the case that “evil necessarily appears in a living reality,” given the finite free creatures and their psychological constraints (which God necessarily brings about) (Pitkänen 2017, p. 368). So, for Schelling, it is roughly the case that God’s omnipotence and freedom necessitates that He create free finite creatures who embody a participation in God’s own freedom, and, given Schelling’s story of how freedom operates in finite creatures, this is supposed to entail that evil necessarily will occur in such creatures (See Brown (2025, pp. 6–12)). Evil is therefore necessary in any world God creates, given the way that the creatures He necessarily creates will commit evil.

Thus, while it is true that Schelling’s vision of panentheism does not hold that God’s nature and existence entail precisely one outcome in creation, his panentheism entails that the possibility of evil—and probably also its actuality—is a necessary consequence of God’s nature. That is, even if there is no unique world entailed by God’s nature, all the set of worlds entailed by God’s nature necessarily involve evil or its possibility. And the relevant facts about God’s essence which entail evils are not going to change at any point in the future. It is this combination of commitments which makes it inconsistent for panentheists to be optimists. For, if God’s nature entails evils necessarily, and God’s nature is relevantly the same for eternity, then God’s nature will always necessarily entail evils. It would not be consistent to hold at the same time that future evils will likely decrease consistently over time, let alone that evils will totally cease at some given point in the future. Instead, panentheist metaphysics would imply that the distribution of evils in the future should always be roughly the same as they are now. Optimistic panentheism involves an implicit contradiction.

There are few radical options that apparently remain open to panentheists which might seemingly allow optimists to retain the belief that God does not necessitate evil, although He requires sin generically speaking for the achievement of His definite eschatological goals. Justin Shaun Coyle presents Bulgakov’s views on evil as if Bulgakov held that moral evil did not really occur, but that the apparent occurrence of evil was an illusion created by temporality itself. As Coyle presents it, Bulgakov’s view of persons, which he derives from Schelling and Fichte, is that “individuals are not yet hypostases,” that is, individuals are not persons until their eschatological state (Coyle 2024, p. 144). Clearly, if sin consists merely in failing to instantiate a future ideal state, or failing to become “who it always supratemporally is,” (Coyle 2024, p. 144) then there is no such thing as moral evil per se. If we redefine moral evil in this way, culpability is no longer an essential mark of moral evil. People simply fail to do what they have not yet done—which is not obviously a culpable thing to do. Coyle therefore seems to paint the situation as one in which there is no ‘real’ moral evil, but where there is only a pervasive illusion that there is moral evil: “when humans reduce evil to act and so gift it ‘creative power,’ ‘an imaginary, ‘bad’ infinity of emptiness is thus created, where […] a multiplicity of illusory forms reign.’” (Coyle 2024, p. 148).

Regardless of whether this interpretation of Coyle’s position is correct, panentheists generally could embrace an error theory on which God’s essence only necessitates a widespread and pervasive illusion that moral error occurs. But (putting aside more obvious worries) this does not solve the fundamental issues facing optimistic panentheism. Embracing error theory would still leave panentheists pessimistic about getting rid of the error. Again, if God has no desires necessitating any illusions in particular, but only that illusions occur in general, those desires will never be satisfied by any amount of illusions occurring. The problem here just becomes shifted to discussing whether the problem is this ‘natural’ evil of a widespread non-culpable error or the ‘moral’ evil of culpable sin. Whatever illusions there are result from what is essential to God’s desires for the universe, at every time it exists, and the universe will exist as long as God does, i.e., forever, so it is not likely that the illusions will ever disappear.

Panentheists could think that, while God’s desires to achieve some eschatological plan could not have been different, there was a range of possible plans that God had for the universe. If this is not to be identical with the proposal that God desires sin only in some generic way, this should be a view that God could desire different definite goals, not different means to those goals. But, given that panentheism is committed to the view that the universe results from God’s essence and His essential desires, this response would seemingly admit that God could have been different in different possible worlds. Now, some theists have embraced that God would be different in virtue of making different free choices—but such proposals would seemingly envision that God would be different in regard to God’s contingent properties, since theists can reject that God’s free choice to create the universe or do anything ad extra at all would be essential to God (e.g., Kretzmann and Stump (1985, pp. 353–82)). The difficulty for panentheists lies in the fact that their commitments preclude that God’s desires regarding creating the universe can be anything other than essential to God. Thus, if the universe results necessarily from God’s essential desires, then the fact that the plan could have been different would entail that God’s essence could have been different. So, if God could have set up different definite eschatological goals for the universe than He did, God would have been essentially different in those different possible scenarios of creation (even though He would be eternally the same at every point in each possible world’s history).

This response might not seem so far-fetched to lovers of panentheism (or Bulgakov’s version in particular). In early writing, Bulgakov flirts with accepting that God’s essence could have been different: “the Absolute transcendent sets Itself as God, and consequently, accepts into Itself the distinction between God and the world, which includes the human being… The Absolute in the creation of the world or, to say it better, by the very act of this creation, generates God as well. God is generated with the world and in the world ….” (Bulgakov 2012, pp. 155–56, 217). Such claims are quite opaque, but the idea seems to be, as Bulgakov restates in later writing, that God choosing to be Creator is to limit or modify His being and introduce the possibility of creation. Now, Bulgakov insists that this view of God does not undermine divine simplicity or immutability because God creates in eternity and does so freely. God does not need the universe to become who He is essentially, but instead chooses freely to be a God who creates. “God as the Absolute is completely free of the world; he is ‘supermundane.’ To no extent is he conditioned by it and he has no need of it. The creation of the world or the origin of the relative is in no sense causal-compulsory or necessary for the Absolute, as a factor of its life.” (Bulgakov 2012, p. 209). Bulgakov distinguishes in later writing more clearly that while no factor outside of God constrains Him in any way, God freely determines Himself to act necessarily in the way He does—divine necessity of love concerns what others would refer to as ‘volitional necessities,’ which are the result of free choices.4 But all these qualifications are just as ambiguous as the earlier claims about sin’s relation to God’s desires in creation and Incarnation. While nothing outside of God constrains or causally affects Him, that is not at issue. What is at issue is whether God’s essence could have been counterfactually different in some other possible world where He made different choices than He did in our actual world. In short, Bulgakov’s position seems to imply that, yes, God would have been different essentially, had He made different choices.

Putting aside other obvious problems, these responses would do nothing to avoid the problem for optimistic panentheism. Since these responses admit that God could differ essentially, it is then an open possibility that God could have chosen (or did choose!) to be evil. These responses therefore undermine any grounds for optimistic panentheism at the source, since they undermine the distinction between God’s essential goodness or other essential desires for creation and the contingency of evil as resulting from something aside from God’s essence. Making God not essentially Good would undermine the possibility of being an optimistic panentheist, since there would be possible worlds where God ends up creating a very bad world, one that is not overall and fundamentally a good world, and these would be compatible with everything else we know about what God is essentially. Since we see no other less radical solution remaining for panentheists, we conclude that panentheism generally is incompatible with optimism, even of a relatively modest sort which would affirm that the world is overall a fundamentally good world. Panentheists should be pessimists in order to remain consistent.

5. Implications for Contemporary Christian Theology

Sergius Bulgakov attempted to carve out space for an optimistic panentheism. Bulgakov wanted his views not to be Hegelian, admitting that evil was a necessary result of God’s nature, but instead to affirm that God’s nature (despite making evil necessarily possible) did not require evil to exist. Bulgakov wanted to affirm that the set of people God created did not need to sin and that God would eventually eliminate all evil and ensure the salvation of all free persons. His Sophiological perspective holds that the created universe (creaturely Sophia) currently instantiates only partially what it will instantiate in the future, when it will be a perfect instance of the Divine Sophia that is God’s own nature. Bulgakov’s panentheism thus holds that everything is not currently but will become in the future what it is meant to be, as is necessarily the case given the sophianic character of God’s own essential nature. Yet Bulgakov’s panentheistic commitments undermined his attempt. Panentheistic metaphysics requires us to be pessimists, since it would entail that the evils we actually encounter are (in some way) necessary features of God’s world. Panentheists cannot consistently then endorse views on which all evil will inevitably be eliminated, given God’s essential character.

If our arguments here are correct, several Christian theologians who embrace Bulgakov’s mix of panentheism and optimism endorse an inconsistent set of commitments—and Christianity in general seems incompatible with panentheism, as long as Christianity is committed to God achieving a definite set of eschatological outcomes (as it plausibly is). If the world results necessarily from God’s essence, and God has definite plans regarding the eschatological future which are both essential to Him and that necessarily will be accomplished, then it will turn out that God’s essence entails evil or that there is some other more basic metaphysical incoherence affecting the view (such as the view that God’s essence is contingently dependent on God’s choices).5 For instance, David Bentley Hart follows Bulgakov in claiming that “there is no other world that God might have created, [because] nothing can hinder him from expressing his essential and infinite goodness perfectly…” (Hart 2006) and specifically that “whatever is not God exists as becoming divine, and as such is God in the mode of what is other than God.” (Hart 2022, p. 16). While Bulgakov’s response is somewhat ambiguous, Hart explicitly denies that moral evil is necessary or instrumental for God’s plans.

Hart admits that “the union of free spiritual creatures with the God of love is a thing so wonderful that the power of creation to enslave itself to death must be permitted by God …[as] rational freedom is worth the risk of a cosmic fall and terrible injustice of the consequences that follow from it,” (Hart 2022, p. 69). And Hart also holds that, “God has no need of a passage through sin and death to manifest his glory in his creatures, or to join them perfectly to himself” (Hart 2022, p. 74; see further Hart 2022, p. 61). On Hart’s account, “God does not “directly [govern] a cosmos that is exactly as he intended it,” so that free creatures’ action have wounded creation “in its uttermost depths and reduced cosmic time to a shadowy vestige of the world God truly intends, and enslaved creation to spiritual and terrestrial powers hostile to God.” (Hart 2005, p. 22). Yet Hart’s position collapses into the same position as that of Bulgakov, since Hart ends up affirming commitments that entail that sin occurs only because sin is metaphysically necessary for greater goods that God intends.

Hart elsewhere insists strongly that definite eschatological aims—namely, the universal salvation of every person—are essential to God and to God’s desires for the universe. David Bentley Hart’s ‘moral argument’ in Meditation Two of That All Shall Be Saved claims that the eschaton is “a moral claim about the nature of God in himself,” and that, “in the end of all things is their beginning, and only from the perspective of the end can one know what they are, why they have been made, and who the God is who has called them forth from nothingness.” (Hart 2019, p. 68). Hart then argues that God would be morally evil if He did not save all, despite being capable of doing so (Hart 2019, p. 90). Hart has therefore embraced a principle much like that embraced by Bulgakov, on which God’s love ‘leaves no possibility of love unactualized,’ and on which God has definite eschatological goals regarding our moral perfection that are essential to God (universal salvation). In addition to these commitments, Hart denies that God can ‘merely permit’ damnation, since “the consequent is already wholly virtually present in the antecedent.” (Hart 2019, p. 90). Hart seems to be arguing that, if God’s omnipotence makes it that God can ensure that all achieve union without any metaphysical impossibility, damnation can be possible only if “comprised within the positive intentions and dispositions of God.” (Hart 2019, p. 82). Hart seems to be arguing that, unless damnation were metaphysically necessary for what God aims to achieve, then damnation would be impossible. That claim implies that God can only permit some evil if that evil is instrumentally necessary for God’s aims.

If we put these three claims together, we would end up with the view that God’s desires for our salvation are essential to God, that God necessarily does all that He can to accomplish these desires, and that God can only permit evils which are instrumentally (and metaphysically) necessary for the accomplishment of His desires. But then, if moral evil occurs, it will need to be instrumentally (and metaphysically) necessary for our salvation. And the reason it would be so necessary arises from what is essential to God’s desires themselves: the essential nature of that salvation and that world that God desires necessarily entail moral evil. It would therefore be false that Hart can consistently maintain that “God has no need of a passage through sin and death to manifest his glory in his creatures, or to join them perfectly to himself.” (Hart 2022, p. 74).

While God may not ‘need’ us to sin in some ‘causal’ sense—the sense that Bulgakov distinguished when he denied that God saves us because our sins cause God to do so—it would follow straightforwardly from Hart’s commitments that God ‘needs’ us to sin in the sense that it is counterfactually implicated by facts about God’s essence. That is, it is a necessary consequence of God’s essence that we sin. Hart elsewhere asserts that God saving everyone from the first moment of their existence involves a logical contradiction, and therefore only seemingly accepts that the possibility of sin was necessary for salvation of all6. But the other commitments we have seen Hart to hold entail the stronger counterfactual conclusion: if we had not sinned, God’s plan would have been essentially different, and, since God’s plan and His desire to accomplish that plan was essential to God, God would have been essentially different if we had not sinned. Hart’s position is therefore as problematic as that of other optimistic panentheists.

6. Conclusions

The problem with optimistic panentheism lies in embracing a few positions simultaneously, which are an inconsistent set. Panentheists need to say that God’s decisions are necessary consequences of His essence, at least as pertain to the universe’s creation. Optimistic panentheists want to deny God’s essence necessitates evil, so they propose that God essentially desires to create free persons, whose actions are contingently evil. However, optimists then want to embrace (beyond panentheism generally) that there are essential desires God has for specific outcomes of creation—such as the elimination of evil or salvation of all persons in it. The problem is then that, since God is omnipotent, the only way that these outcomes would not be immediately achieved requires there to be metaphysical impossibilities (‘limitations’ on God’s omnipotence) such that the actual occurrence of evil is not ruled out. That is, actual evil would not have occurred if it were not properly related to God’s essential desires, since God would otherwise just never have let it occur (as God has no need to allow what is not essential to His desires). But this entails that the actual sins which occur are indeed metaphysically necessary for those definite outcomes God essentially desires.

The optimist thinks that affirming that free choices occur indeterministically (i.e., are not determined by God’s definite goals) is sufficient for avoiding the implication that any given sin, at any given time, is necessary. But this actually undermines their hopes. If they want God to achieve definite goals, then the only way they can exempt God from making particular evils instrumental to His end involves distinguishing that no particular sin was necessary for those definite outcomes God desires. It would still be true, if God has definite desires that are essentially related to the permission of moral evil, that some sin or other was necessary for those outcomes to be achieved. But then, given that it would be metaphysically necessary for God’s desires that the moral evils we see occur, and there is no definite fact regarding any particular evils being necessary for the outcomes to be achieved, then there is no amount of evil that would be sufficient for those outcomes to be achieved. This combination of views entails that the distribution of evils which we see at any given time would be compatible with God’s desires in the future. In the end, optimistic panentheists are faced ultimately with a choice: to embrace pessimism or to give up panentheism. They cannot have their cake and eat it too… as many nevertheless try to do.