come out most strongly when religious orthodoxy is politically enforced mono-
theism. In this context appear the entwining of epistemology and metaphysics
in proofs of metaphysical arguments, and the opening up of the basic questions
of substance and relation, causality and free will, being and contingency. This
is why there is such a gulf in the level of abstraction between Chinese thought
and that of the West (including both Islamic and Christian branches). In China,
where state-enforced supremacy of a monotheist church never took place, a
major pathway to metaphysical development is missing. In India, state-sup-
ported religious monopoly was usually absent, and the decentralizing struc-
tures which promoted meditative mysticism had the effect of turning philo-
sophical argument in different directions than in the monotheist West. As
Indian philosophy, from the medieval period onward, became increasingly
theist, epistemological and metaphysical parallels to the West increased as well.Proofs of God. Anthropomorphic monotheism produces high levels of tension
in intellectual argument and leads to theological proofs. This process raises the
level of philosophical abstraction and generates movement in the epistemol-
ogy-metaphysics sequence. As comparative evidence, we may note the virtual
absence of proofs of God in Chinese philosophy. The gods of the Taoist
pantheon, and the popular deities sponsored under the umbrella of the Con-
fucian state rites, have no qualities of infinite perfection nor world-creating
power, and call for no abstract argument as to their existence. The cosmos-
generating Supreme Ultimate of Neo-Confucianism is not the object of proof
either; and Chu Hsi rejects both immortality and existence of spirits. As in
other respects, early Chinese philosophy had an opportunity to take a different
path. The Heaven cult of the early Confucians had already transcended an-
thropomorphic qualities (even the conception of the Mandate of Heaven is an
impersonal cosmic rightness of political rulership); its fusion with the divina-
tion cosmologies in the Han dynasty reinforced its impersonal quality and its
identification with the cosmos rather than its transcendence. The Mohists, as
usual, could have made a difference. Against the impersonal cult of Heaven
and Destiny they exalted a personal God, rewarding the righteous and punish-
ing sinners, with ghosts as avengers of evil. The Mohists critiqued the Heaven-
Destiny conception for its fatalism, opening an early argument for free will. It
is possible that in the obscure middle period of the Mohists, the five generations
between Mo Ti and the formulation of the Mohist Canon, the basics of Mohist
logic arose from conflicts over religious faith and mutual accusations of heresy
among its schismatic factions. Mohist monotheism and formal logic went
together. Both were cut off by the destruction of the Mohist school in the Han,
a turning point in the history of Chinese philosophy.
The great development of proofs of God occur in three periods: Greek
832 •^ Meta-reflections