Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 10.djvu/537

 MONISM

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MONISM

out on their journey, stopping at Civiti Vecchia and at Ostia. Here death overtook Monica and the finest pages in his "Confessions" were penned as the result of the emotion Augustine then experienced.

St. Monica was buried at Ostia, and at first seems to have been almost forgotten, though her body was removed during the sixth century to a hidden crypt in the church of St. Aureus. About the thirteenth century, however, the cult of St. Monica began to spread and a feast in her honour was kept on 4 May. In 14.30 Martin V ordered the relics to be brought to Rome. Many miracles occurred on the way, and the cultus of St. Monica was definitely established. Later, the Archbishop of Rouen, Cardinal d'Estouteville, built a church at Rome in honour of St. Augustine and deposited the relics of St. Monica in a chapel to the left of the high altar. The Office of St. Monica how- ever does not seem to have found a place in the Ro- man Breviary before the sixteenth century. In 1850 there was established at Notre Dame de Sion at Paris an Association of Christian mothers under the patron- age of St. Monica; its object was mutual prayer for sons and husbands who had gone astray. This Asso- ciation was in 1856 raised to the rank of an archcon- fraternity and spread rapidly over all the Catholic world, branches being established in Dublin, London, Liverpool, Sidney, and Buenos Ayres. Eugenius IV had estabUshed a similar Confraternity long before.

St. Augustine, Confessions, IX, reprinted in SuRIus. GuAL- TER08, Canon Regular of Ostia, who was especiall.v charged with the work of removing the relics from Ostia by Martin V, wrote a life of the saint with an account of the translation. He appended to the life M lettfr which used to be attributed to St. Augustine but whirl, i.1 niiilitiil.ti-illy spurious; it purports to be written to his sist-.T PiTpri ii;i uml tlfsiTibes theit mother's death. The Boll,\n- DisTs d._-ciii-. twr ihf ( 'nitemporary character of the letter whilst denying it to St. -Vugustine. B.4RONIU9, Ann. EccL, ad an. 389; Boua.vCD, Histoire dt S. Monique.

Hugh T, Pope.

Monism (from the Greek libvoi. "one", "alone", "unique") is a philosophical term which, in its various meanings, is opposed to Dualism or Pluralism. Wherever pluralistic philosophy distinguishes a multi- plicity of things, Monism denies that the manifold- ness is real, and holds that the apparently many are phases, or phenomena, of a one. Wherever dual- istic philosophy distinguishes between body and soul, matter and spirit, object and subject, matter and force, the system which denies such a distinction, reduces one term of the antithesis to the other, or merges both in a higher unity, is called Monism.

I. In Met.4PHYSICs. — The ancient Hindu philos- ophers stated as a fundamental truth that the world of our sense-experience is all illusion (maya), that change, plurality, and causation are not real, that there is but one reality, God. This is metaphysical Monism of the idealistic-spiritual type, tending to- wards mysticism. Among the early Greek philos- ophers, the Eleatics, starting, like the Hindus, with the conviction that sense-knowledge is untrustworthy, and rea.son alone reliable, reached the conclusion that change, plurality, and origination do not really exist, that Being is one, immutable, and eternal. They did not explicitly i<lentify the one reality with God, and were not, so far as we know, inclined to mysticism. Their Monism, therefore, may be said to be of the purely idealistic type. These two forms of metaphysical Monism recur frequently in the hi.story of philo.sophy ; for instance, the idealistic-spiritual type in neo-Plato- ni.sm and in Spinoza's metajihysics, and the purely idealistic tj-pe in the rational absolutism of Hegel, Besides idealistic Monism there is .Monism of the ma- terialistic type, which proclaims that there is but one reality, namely, mat ( er, whether mat ter be an agglom- erate of atoms, a [)rimitive, world-forming substance (see Ionian .School of Philosophy), or the so-called cosmic nebula out of which the world evolved. There is another form of metaphysical Monism, represented in these days by Haeckei and his followers, which,

though materialistic in its scope and tendency, pro- fesses to transcend the point of view of materialistic Monism and unite both matter and mind in a higher something. The weak point of all metaphysical Monism is its inability to explain how, if there is but one reality, and everything else is only apparent, there can be any real changes in the world, or real relations among things. This difficulty is met in dualistic systems of philosophy by the doctrine of matter and form, or potency and actu.ality, which are the ultimate realities in the metaphysical order. Pluralism rejects the solution offered by scholastic dualism and strives, with but little success, to oppose to Monism its own theory of synechism or panp.sy- chism (see Pragmatlsm). The chief objection to materialistic Monism is that it stops short of the point where the real problem of metaphj-sics begins.

II. In Theology. — The term Monism is not much used in theology because of the confusion to which its use would lead. Polytheism, the doctrine that there are many Gods, has for its opposite Monotheism, the doctrine that there is but one God. If the term Monism is employed in place of Mono- theism, it may, of course, mean Theism, which is a monotheistic doctrine, or it may mean Pantheism, which is opposed to thei.sm. In this sense of the term, as a synonym for Pantheism, Monism main- tains that there is no real distinction between God and the universe. Either God is indwelling in the universe as a part of it, not distinct from it (pantheis- tic Immanentism), or the universe does not exist at all as a reality (Acosmism), but only as a manifesta- tion or phenomenon of God. These views are vigor- ously combated by Theism, not only on considerations of logic and philosophy, but also on considerations of human life and conduct. For the ethical implica- tions of pantheism are as detrimental to it as its shortcomings from the point of view of consistency and reasonableness. Theism does not deny that God is indwelling in the universe; but it does deny that He is comprised in the universe. Theism does not. (lf>ny that the universe is a manifestation of God ; but it does deny that the universe has no reality of its own. Tin 'ism is, therefore, dualistic: it holds that God is a reality distinct from the universe and independent of it, and that the universe is a reality distinct from God, though not independent of Him. From another point of view, theism is monistic; it maintains that there is but One Supreme Reality and that all other reality is derived from Him. Monism is not then an ade- quate equivalent of the term Theism.

III. In Psychology. — The central problem of rational psychology is the question of the relation between soul and body. Scholastic dualism, following Aristotle, maintains that man is one substance, com- posed of body and soul, which are respectively matter and form. The soul is the principle of life, energy, and perfection; the body is (he principle of decay, potentiality, and imperfection. These two are not complete substances: their union is not accidental, as Plato thought, but substantial. They are, of course, really distinct, and even separable; yet they act on each other and react. The soul, even in its highest functions, needs the co-operation, at least extrinsic, of the body, and the body in all its vital functions is energized by the soul as the radical principle of those functions. They are not so much two in one as two forming one compound. In popular imagin,'ition this dualism may be exaggerated ; in the mind of the extreme ascetic it sometimes is exagger- ated to the point of placing a too sharp contrast be- tween "the flesh" and "the spirit", "the besist" and " the angel ", in ua.

Psychological Monism tends to obliterate all distinc- tion between body and soul. This it does in one of three ways. (.\) Monism of the materiidisli<- type rcilucea the soul to matter or material eoiulitioiis, and thus, in