In this impressive and very welcome book, Daniel Soars offers us a very sophisticated study of the encounter between Aquinas’ account of God and creation and the Hindu Advaita (non-dual) Vedānta account of the relationship between the ultimate reality, Brahman, and the world. The intellectual conversation Soars articulates between these two traditions is exemplary for clear and exacting scholarship, as well as fascinating for anyone interested in the history of Thomist engagement with Hindu thought and its contemporary relevance. With great care, it balances the identification of points of convergence with the recognition of those areas where the traditions diverge significantly.

The fundamental motivation for such a study is the importance of finding theologically helpful ways of expressing the sui generis nature of the creational relation itself. Since the world is dependent on God at all times for its existence, God and the world cannot be described as two separate things, but, equally, since God and the world are ontologically distinct, they cannot be described as one thing. Thus, neither dualism nor monism can serve to express the creational relationship. Hence the title of this monograph and hence, in the first place with regard to the problems with dualist language, the attraction for Soars of engaging with the Advaita (non-dual) Vedānta cosmology which emphatically rejects dualism in any description of the relationship between ultimate reality, Brahman, and the world. As Soars states at the very beginning of the book:

Such a choice of Advaita Vedānta as a helpful conversation partner might, however, seem quite implausible, since Advaita has very often been characterized as either a monist account, identifying the world and Brahman, or as an illusionist, depicting the world as an illusion, a cognitive error, with only Brahman itself real. The ‘not two’ or non-dualism of Advaita would seem to amount to the assertion either that Brahman and the world are in fact one or that Brahman alone exists and that the world is false. As a result, earlier Christian views of Advaita Vedānta tended to be very negative.

This is where the encounter and engagement that took place between Thomist theologians and Advaita in the modern period becomes very interesting and relevant. And in the first three chapters of the book, Soars draws us into this conversation, one that fundamentally challenged such depictions of what Advaita is saying, and in which it was argued that there is a fundamental convergence between the thought of Aquinas and that of the greatest of all Advaita teachers, Śaṃkara (traditional dates 788–820 AD).

Soars takes us in the first chapter to the work of the modern Thomist David Burrell CSC (1933–), whose extensive scholarship has focused on the Thomist doctrine of creation, in particular on Aquinas’s use of Arabic texts and thought. For Burrell, the fundamental challenge is, following Sokolowski, to find the right ‘grammar’ of creation. For his part Aquinas refined Arabic thought as influenced heavily by Neoplatonism, adopting the language of emanation but ridding it of any sense of necessity, while also rejecting any implication of the pre-existence of the essences of created things. Yet, Burrell also encountered Advaita thought in the work of Sara Grant RSCJ (1922–2002), who argued for a convergence between Śamkara’s account of the relation between Brahman and the world and the doctrine of creation in Aquinas and for the usefulness of adopting Advaita, non-dual, language for expressing the creational relation. Impressed by her work, Burrell has argued that Advaita thought helps us in ‘thinking creator and creature together’, and he has called on other Thomists to engage in further study of the Advaita tradition as a way to develop a richer ‘grammar’ of the creational relation, complementing rather than correcting what we already have.

Soars depicts his book as a response to Burrell’s call. He charts out (chapters 2 and 3) the history of Thomist encounters with Advaita Vedānta in India in the modern period, above all in the work of the ‘Calcutta School’, a group of Thomist theologians centred in Calcutta, especially Richard de Smet SJ (1916–97), who taught Sara Grant and inspired her own study. De Smet and Grant argued that if we take the undisputedly authentic works of Śaṃkara and read them alongside Aquinas, we can see a fundamental convergence. Far from teaching either monism or illusionism, Śaṃkara’s non-dualism is compatible with Aquinas’s account of non-reciprocal relations between creator and real created things. As Soars shows, de Smet and Grant were, in fact, able to read Śaṃkara in this way because of the historical re-emergence of an emphasis on the Platonic aspects of Aquinas during the twentieth century, such as the language of emanation and participation, which provided a grid both for re-reading Śaṃkara’s account itself and for identifying its convergence with that of Aquinas.

Grant’s own detailed analysis of key texts and terms in Śaṃkara set against those in Aquinas offered the most systematic justification for this line of argument, and she went on to promote the value of Śaṃkara’s non-dualist language for contemporary Christian theology, above all as a counter against tendencies in more popular Christian language and imagery to separate God and world both ontologically and spatially. So, reading Śaṃkara in the light of Aquinas for Grant allows us to retrieve a fundamentally different way of reading Śaṃkara and shows how Christian theologians might usefully adopt Advaita language:

In the final two chapters of his book, Soars moves on to make his own contribution to this conversation, furthering and refining the lines of communication established by de Smet and then Grant.

First, (chapter 4) Soars takes the Śaṃkara’s doctrine of satkāryavāda (the pre-existence of the effect in the cause). Initially, this would seem to imply a monistic unity of substance between cause and effect and quite incompatible with Aquinas’s doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. However, when satkāryavāda is qualified by the wider account of Śaṃkara’s thought as articulated by de Smet and Grant, such a monist reading is removed. Moreover, as Soars shows, what both accounts have in common is that they both deny that the world is created from mere nothingness but is rather brought into existence from its cause and deny that the world was fashioned from some kind of uncreated matter. Here Soars himself also argues that the Platonic dimensions of Aquinas’s doctrine of creation, especially his use of the language of emanation, enable us to see how the parallel language of satkāryavāda can be understood without having to end in the affirmation of monism.

On the other hand, in the final chapter (chapter 5), Soars argues that we should recognize a significant area of divergence between the accounts of Śaṃkara and Aquinas, when it comes to the way Śaṃkara characterizes the world as unreal in comparison to the real of Brahman. Śaṃkara equates real with the absolute being of ultimate reality, Brahman, as unchanging, simple, and infinite, and so the changing, composite, and finite being of the world is equated with being unreal. This does not mean that the world is deemed to be a mere illusion, but nonetheless, the resultant tendency in Śaṃkara is inevitably to downplay the concrete reality and hence the value of the world. When it comes to Aquinas, however, Soars notes that, despite the presence of Christian language of the nothingness of the world in comparison to God, the Christian theologian would be uncomfortable with any such assertion of the unreality of the created world. For Aquinas, the world is willed by God to be what it is and participates in the being of God, rather than simply falls short of it.

Soars argues that this is where the Aristotelian aspect of Aquinas’s theology emerges strongly, informing and qualifying the more Platonic language, as Aquinas asserts that the primary reality of created things is as the concrete existents they are. The fact that they are dependent, changing, and finite entities is what makes them real as the things they are, rather than what undermines their reality.

So, it turns out that if the Thomist Christian account can and should be characterized as non-dual, this is a form of non-duality that affirms much more emphatically the value of created things than Śaṃkara’s Advaita. This is where Soars parts company with de Smet and Grant, who were so focused on arguing for convergence between Śaṃkara and Aquinas that they failed to give sufficient weight to how significantly the two accounts differed. This does not deny the usefulness of adopting Advaita, non-dual, language, but it should make us clear about the distinctive nature of Christian non-dualism when it comes to creation.

Soars study is, then, a sophisticated response to Burrell’s call to engage with Advaita non-dualism as articulated by de Smet and Grant and a helpful contribution to contemporary Christian reflection on the theology of creation. It is a model for Catholic comparative study, as something that meets the highest standards of scholarship, while also remaining ecclesially responsible in its approach.