Charles Hartshorne
So old and widely used a term as “God,” it is frequently said, should not be given a radically new meaning. Perhaps this is just; but it should be remembered that there are several ancient meanings for “God” rather than but one. Admitting that the God of some present-day philosophers is not the God of the Scholastics or of Calvin, it does not automatically follow that the new view is in hopeless disagreement with that of Jesus and the prophets. For who (unless the Pope) guarantees that the older theologians were in agreement with the founder of the religion they sought to interpret? “Jesus above the heads of his disciples” may be applied to theological disciples as well as to less intellectual ones. The Scholastics and Calvin derive from many sources besides the biblical—for example, Greek philosophy and Roman law. Perhaps the new view of God is really, in some respects at least, a return to the Gospel conception.
Among those accused of misusing the divine name, Whitehead is prominent. The accusation has just been made again, this time with more careful documentation than usual.1 Now, admittedly, Whitehead has set his statements about God in a highly complex intellectual context. Nor is his exposition always all that could be desired. For these reasons his idea of God cannot without difficulty be taken over by religious persons. Much more than this has not, I think, been established against its religious availability. Men can, indeed, as Professor Ely remarks, have God on much simpler terms from religious resources. On the other hand, religious persons need not be obscurantists, they need not be without interest in the rational unity of culture, including religion, science, and art, and Whitehead’s effort in this direction is, in the opinion of many, one of the most momentous ever undertaken. Further, it could, I think, be shown that certain religious values enshrined in Whitehead’s doctrine have often been neglected in religious practice partly because the climate of philosophical and theological opinion was hostile to them. Never before, I believe, has a really first-rate philosophical system so completely and directly as Whitehead’s supported the idea that there is a supreme love which is also the Supreme Being. Such a philosophy may help to bring practice more into accord than in the past with the ethical principle that the general good, the good we all seek in proportion as we love all creatures, is the only aim that can stand rational criticism.
The evaluation of Whitehead’s contribution to religious thought has been impeded by the widespread use of equivocal terms in our theological tradition. Through this equivocation doctrines acquire credit which is not really due them. Whitehead is tying to be intellectually honest and clear. This forces him to break with traditional terminology at some points, and those who have not been accustomed to judge that terminology by rigorous standards may infer that Whitehead is sacrificing the religious values supposed to be enshrined in the terminology. For instance, he is sometimes accused of offering an “impersonal principle” in place of a “personal God,” all the more so because in his earliest discussions of this topic he did speak of deity as a “principle of concretion,” and indeed it seems doubtful if prior to the time of Process and Reality the philosopher had thought out in his own mind the great conception of divinity embodied in that book. But actually, what White-head is saying there comes closer to the religious feeling of the divine as personal than does Augustinianism or Thomism, if these are held to the logical implications of their axioms.
What is an individual, a person? A person involves a character, a complex of personality traits (including bodily traits) which are embodied in successive acts or experiences. These acts “express” the character, but are not identical with or included in it. If they were thus identical or included, a wise man would have a different wisdom, or become foolish, every time his experience changed, that is, every time the temperature altered, or with every new sentence as he reads a book. The function of terms like “character” is to point to a contrast between the at least relatively permanent and the variable in the man. True, a man may act “out of character,” and in this sense character, in such as we are, is not wholly fixed or definite. But still, not every change is change in character. John Jones remains “himself,” when he looks out of the window whether he sees rain, snow, or neither. If it were otherwise, “John Jones” would never refer to anybody until the man was dead. For only with death do changes in a man’s experiences and acts come to an end. But the function of proper names surely is not limited to their use in writing the biography of the deceased! If we know who John Jones is while he lives, although obviously we know none of the precise changes he may suffer in future experience, it follows that personal identity is something to which numerous particular changes of experience and action are neutral. This is the very freedom of a man, that he is not committed, by the personal identity which emerged as his embryo became a human self, nor by any later phase of his growth, to any determinate future acts. Each such act will be self-decided, to a certain extent, when it takes place; limited in possibilities, of course, by the character already laid down, but not for all that narrowed down to a single possibility for the given moment and circumstances.
In orthodox theology there occurred the colossal equivocation of maintaining:
1) God’s action of willing simply is his character (“essence”)
2) This action is free (he creates this world, but might have created a different one, or none)
Since the essence, or self-identity, of a being is the only one that being could have, it follows that if the essence is the willing, no different willing was possible for that being. If then, on the assumptions, God willed to create this world, he could not but have so willed. I am persuaded, after considerable discussion of the matter with proponents of orthodox theory, that there is here sheer contradiction, or words with no meaning at all.
What does Whitehead do? He removes the contradiction, or equivocation, by denying (1), thus admitting a real distinction between the acts of volition and the character or essence of deity. The character is the “primordial nature,” what God is eternally, simply in being himself. But the acts constitute part of the “consequent nature,” the de facto experience, or concrete state of God, which expresses the eternal character, but does not constitute it. (That there is some such concrete consequent state belongs to the essence, but not which among possible such states.)
Again, take the following doctrine of orthodoxy:
1) God knows infallibly that a world containing men, etc., exists
2) Some other world might have existed (or no world) instead of this one (the world’s existence is contingent)
3) God’s knowing is his essence
From (3) it follows that the knowing could not but have been just what in fact it actually is. But according to (2) the world which God knows to exist might not have existed, in which case the knowledge that it exists (which according to (1) and (3) could not have failed to obtain) would have been false knowledge. Now what follows from a possibility is also possible. Yet (1) declares that the falsity of God’s knowledge is impossible (the meaning of “infallibility”). So we have a flat contradiction. To say that God’s knowledge would have been the same entity, had the world not existed, only it would have been knowledge that the world did not exist, rather than knowledge that it exists, is merely to repeat the contradiction in another form. For “God knows that the world exists is incompatible with “the world does not exist,” while “God knows that the world does not exist” is compatible with and implies “the world does not exist.” But two propositions, the one compatible, the other incompatible, with the same third proposition, cannot affirm the same entity! The entity which would be the same in God whether the world is or is not can only be described as “God knows,” but not as “he knows that the world exists,” nor as “he knows that the world does not exist.” So either such definite knowledge as to the status of the world is not in God, or something which could have been otherwise is in God. Indeterminate knowledge that “one of the two is true, the world exists, or the world does not exist,’ is scarcely what anyone means by omniscience; but it is all that can, without sheer contradiction, be affirmed of God if his actuality is the same as his necessary essence.
Whitehead once more eliminates contradiction by denying that the essence of God is his total reality. Another world was indeed possible; but it would have meant another divine knowledge, which therefore must also have been possible. Another divine knowledge does not, however, mean another divine essence or character; for character determines only a certain generic quality or manner of knowing, not any actual knowing in its concreteness. This generic quality involves a unique excellence of knowing which we may call infallibility (Whitehead does not use the term, but he does say that the divine knowledge is perfect, and that it coincides with the truth). Whether God knows that there are men, or that there are not men (in case none exist), either way, he knows with certainty and exactitude, so that the world which he knows, is just what he knows it to be. Infallibility, as a quality of all possible states of divine knowing, belongs to the primordial nature of deity, but any actual knowing to the consequent nature. Only the former is eternal and immutable; the latter is everlasting, imperishable and incorruptible in what it has already become, but perpetually “in flux,” in the sense that new phases of the world process mean new states of divine knowing added to those previously achieved.
But, you ask, would not a perfect knowledge survey all phases of the world process at once, whether these phases be for us past, present, or future? The Whiteheadian answer is that terms like “universe,” or “the whole of time,” are “demonstrative pronouns” which get their meaning from their context, and a partly new meaning each moment. There is no “all” of events, eternally fixed and the same, but an ever-growing totality. Time, says Bergson—and Whitehead agrees—is creation or nothing. This means, the function of time is to settle one by one issues that eternity, or the uncreated, does not settle. The Thomistic doctrine that divine knowledge of our future acts is not of acts future to God’s knowing, but, as it were, simultaneous with his eternity (since his knowing is not “before” or “after” but above time altogether) simply assumes that time has a settled character from the standpoint of eternity—which is the basic question at issue. The doctrine really deprives time or process of intelligible meaning. An event cannot be fully known beforehand; for it does not exist to be known until it happens. Much less can it be known eternally; for much less does it exist eternally. The famous Thomistic solution, thus, so far from alleviating the paradox of “foreknowledge,” infinitely aggravates it. If I have not freedom to settle today what was unsettled eternally, or for an eternal knowledge, how could I have freedom to settle today what was unsettled yesterday? For what is settled eternally cannot have been unsettled yesterday or ever. So, as Bergson says, we are (on the assumption in question) merely “reediting eternity,” and time is superfluous or empty of meaning. But if our freedom is thus illusory, then whence our very idea of freedom, even as applied to deity? To remove the paradox, we must say that eternity is merely the neutral noncommittal background common to all times, leaving all details unsettled so that they may be settled (and the settlement known) when and as process actualizes such details. “What will be will be”— yes, but there is nothing in particular that will be; there are only certain more or less general limitations imposed upon the future from the standpoint, not of eternity, but of each present, with its partly novel “determining tendencies” for what may come after it. What will-be will be—and also, what may-or-may-not-be may or may not be—but the more we approach the “standpoint of eternity,” the more do the definite will-be’s give place to mere may-be’s.
Many philosophers besides Bergson and Whitehead have taken the foregoing position, and not a few (e.g., Socinus and Fechner) have applied it to theology. Whitehead is merely the most elaborate and incisive and thorough of these; the most thorough in that he has more completely thought out the implications of the idea of time as not simply something created, but as the order of the creating itself, the way in which the uncreated or indeterminate is related to the created or determined. The result is that Whitehead has, not a less but a more, “personal” deity than Augustine or Thomas, if personal means being an individual with a character expressible freely in acts of knowledge, choice, and love. God “shares with each creature its actual world”; he takes into his actuality, as consequent upon process, the life of the world, somewhat as we (in infinitely less adequate fashion) take into ourselves experiences of our friends. He does not plot it all out in eternity, and with a single moveless stare register the result. He lives, genuinely lives, in unison with our living, and the only moveless feature is the basic character of infallibility of knowing, perfection of love or cherishing, adequacy of eternal ideal or underlying purpose. Character in God, it is true, does not have to emerge, cannot improve or degenerate, and cannot in his acts be violated, but is fixed and binding so that never will or could he act out of character. But since being “in character” is the mere common denominator of all the acts, it cannot involve what is peculiar to any of them.
Not only does Whitehead accept the distinction between personality or essence, and experiences or acts, without which none of these ideas retains any meaning; he gives an intelligible analysis of the relation between the two sides of deity. Men have often distinguished verbally between God as he is “absolutely,” or “in himself,” and as he is relatively, or for us, or as “manifested” in the creation. But they have generally failed to endow the distinction with anything like a clear and consistent meaning. Worse, they have tended to suggest that God qua absolute, or as independent of the world, is superior to God as related to the world. But in that case, the existence of the world is sheer mistake. We face a trilemma: God alone or simply in himself is inferior, superior, or merely equal, to God-with-the-world. If inferior, then deity acquires value from the world process, he has a consequent nature which is in process of never-ending actualization, as Whitehead maintains. This is a forthright position. But if, on the contrary, God-alone is superior to God-with-the-world, God must degrade himself in creating. We are then by our very existence blots on the divine perfection. To maintain this is self-stultifying. If, finally, God-alone is merely equal to God-with-the-world, then the act of creation was futile as measured in terms of the divine being. (And what other measure can there be? Is not omniscience the measure of all truth and value? If the significance of the creation cannot be expressed in terms of the divine, there can be no such significance.) This position too is self-stultifying. A man cannot significantly deny all significance to his very existence.
How then is God-with-the-world superior to God-alone? Quite simply—as the concrete is superior ‘to the abstract. In abstraction from all stages of the world-process (and the idea of deity alone, or as not related to the world, is just this abstraction) God—not simply for us, but for himself—is “abstract,” “deficient in actuality.” The merely eternal purpose in God is the source of value, but not the value itself. Actual value is not mere intent or cause of achievement, but achievement itself. All such achievement is an emergent, a creation, even if it be divine achievement. Not that deity existed first or eternally without any achievement; but that always, primordially and everlastingly, God has created and creates. The world process had no beginning (Whitehead does not explicitly discuss the point, but .this seems the reasonable construction), so that always God was concrete, actual. However, actualization of personality, at least on this highest level, is an inexhaustible affair, since here potentiality is absolutely infinite. More is always possible, even for God; or especially for God, since our own capacity for growth, within the limits of a human personality, seems not unlimited.
“Why does not God once for all, eternally, actualize all possible values?” Answer: because there are incompatible goods; actualization is an art, and every beauty excludes others. The “beauty of all possible beauties” is not any actual beauty at all, but mere chaos. Tragedy lies not in conflict of good with mere evil (only fanatics imagine this) but of good with good. On this profound point, as on many, Whitehead and Berdyaev, quite independently, reach the same conclusion.
Creation is thus not a mere superfluous “condescension” of deity, but his very life. We are co-workers with God, in that we add nuances of feeling to the “ocean of feeling” which is the richness of his ever-growing experience. This will be parodied, but only parodied, by the charge that thus we men lose all religious humility and view ourselves as necessary to God, or as capable of effecting “improvement” or possible “corruption” of his character. All this is excluded by the doctrine of a primordial fixed character of deity. God will be himself whatever we do, and would have been had none of us ever existed. True, he would not have had the same experiences or the same concrete value. But the abstract character traits, such as infallibility, or lovingness (“tenderness,” is one word used by Whitehead here), owe nothing, simply nothing, to us. This is the untouchable holiness of deity. The alternatives of divine action are never between fallible and infallible, or right and not right. They are alternatives as to particular content, but the generic form of infallibility and appropriateness of response to the content is everlastingly fixed.
The foregoing paragraph can be summed up in another way, by saying that for Whitehead God is still the “necessary” being, if that means that his existence is necessary, or that his essence, the perfection which distinguishes him as individual from all others, is inseparable from its existence, and is identical with that existence. But at the same time, Whitehead can agree with modern logic, and also with Existentialist philosophies, that the most concrete and complete form of reality, which he calls actuality, is never necessary, is always transcendent of essence or fixed nature. God’s existence is his essence, but his actuality is infinitely more than his essence. This is not, I shall now show, a mere quibble.
The contrast, essence-existence, is derivative from a more basic duality, that of possibility-actuality. This is not the same pair of concepts. A dog who fears the brandished whip is concerned about a possible feeling of pain. The possibility may become actual. But suppose it does, will the sum of existents be thereby increased? The dog exists already. Shall we say, the pain does not but might exist? This is linguistically possible, but such usage slurs over a distinction that for some purposes is fundamental. The sense in which the dog exists, and the sense in which its pain exists are different in principle. The occurrence of the pain is an event; now it is somewhat unnatural, and as we shall see it is philosophically misleading, to say that events exist. On the one hand, we need the word “exist” for things or persons, for men, mountains, God. On the other hand, such existence of things or persons is not the strict alternative to essence or to possibility, and we also need a word for this alternative. Granted that the dog exists and will continue to exist for the next hour, let us say, this does not decide among various possibilities. It is possible he will be whipped, possible he will not be: His existence is common to these possibilities. The strict alternative to “possible” is “actual,” in the sense of Whitehead’s “actual entity,” that is, a unit event or “occasion of experience.” Such a unit event or unit experience is what it is, there is nothing else that “it” might be or have been (although some other event might have occurred in its stead). Thus, it is states, events, occurrences, or occasions that definitely decide among possibilities. Since we need to be able to say that dogs and men exist, and these entities are not strictly contrasted to possibilities, whereas events are thus contrasted, we had better not say that events exist, but rather that they occur, or are actual.
What exists is an individual thing or person; wherein then does the existence of such an individual consist? It consists, according to some contemporary logicians, including Whitehead, simply in this, that there are successive actual instances of a certain kind of event—for example, human experiences embodying the personality traits of John Jones, Jonesian experiences, as it were. But the mere existence of a specified individual leaves it undetermined just which instances of the kind of event in question are actual; thus, for example, “I” may exist tomorrow, either in a state of health or of sickness, that is, either through a series of actual experiences and acts expressive of health, or a series expressive of ill health, and either lying (or sitting) in bed, or “up and about”; that is, thanks to events with one or the other set of characters—in any case, however, I shall exist, provided there be some actual events embodying the personality traits characteristic of the events through which “I” have hitherto existed. (Included among “personality traits” is a tendency to remember some of the earlier portions of the series of experiences called “mine,” and other types of relationship binding the various experiences into a single sequence. Now the ordinary individual is highly selective with respect to the events which can actualize it, and therefore its existence is uncertain; it makes peculiar demands upon the course of events, and these demands may not be fulfilled. Thus, existence in such cases is ‘contingent,” like the actualities which may or may not occur to embody it. But suppose an individual whose personality traits would be expressed in any possible events—and it is arguable that the divine individual, God, may be defined in this manner—then this individual “exists” necessarily or by its very essence, not because there is here an exception to the law that an “actuality” or happening is always contingent and indemonstrable, but because the only possible alternative to an actuality embodying deity is—another actuality also embodying deity, so far as its personality traits or essential characters are concerned, though as different as you please in inessential qualities of the events.
All this is less difficult than may appear at first sight. Events, experiences, constituting a human personal history vary with changes in one small region of the world on the earth’s surface—for example, with temperature changes. If the changes are too great, the personal history comes to an end. Instead of “my” experience of cold, if the temperature drops too low, there will be no human experience at all, just as there will be none of heat if the temperature rises too high. But it inheres in the idea of “God” that his existence cannot be contingent in this way. Whatever happens in the world, “omniscience,” infallible or divine knowledge, is equally possible with respect to that world. No doubt, actually to know infallibly, that is divinely, that a certain world, W1, exists is a different state of cognitive actuality from knowing infallibly that some other kind of world, W2, exists instead. Omniscience, thus, is not a determinate actuality, but a property or essence which may be embodied in this or that possible actuality, and with respect to any world you please. Any actual omniscient awareness of a given world will be contingent. But it does not follow that the existence of the omniscient being or individual is contingent. For that existence is actualized provided, whatever world there is, or is not, the being of this world, or its non-being, is completely known in some actual infallible awareness, expressive of the essence of the “all-knowing” or “infallible” individual.
So we see that Whitehead’s philosophy enables us to synthesize the ancient insight that the existence of deity is of a higher type than all ordinary existence, and is the great anchor which cannot drag, the one unconditional necessity, with the other great insight that reality in the full sense of actuality, even divine actuality, is a surd to all essence, or necessity. So long as philosophers fail to see the difference between a merely existent and an actual entity, it is quite hopeless, I think, to try to clarify such topics as the ontological argument, or the status of Existential judgments with reference to metaphysical issues. We need, in effect, to distinguish “Existentialism” and “actualism.” Whitehead is neither an Existentialist nor an essentialist, but an actualist.
If Whitehead preserves a necessity, or absolute security, of existence for God, he also gives a striking interpretation for certain other traditional divine attributes. When, for example, he says that love, which is imperfect in us, is perfect in God, what does he mean? I should say, he means about what he says. Every divine experience expresses a cherishing without stint or reserve of the qualities of all actual lives; for any such reserve would mean fallibility, would mean shutting out from divine attention some real experience somewhere. With us men, sympathy always has reservations. I feel (sometimes, and more or less) how my friends feel, but how those I dislike or find tedious may feel I care little to know, and may be at pains not to know. God dislikes none in this sense and finds none tedious. Is this not the very best of what we call love?
There are, however, those who seem to mean by love an unlimited willingness to accord to the loved one whatever importance in the scheme of things this loved one desires or imagines is appropriate. Thus, if some of us (not all!) imagine it would be appropriate or desirable that our individual life-histories should be endlessly prolonged beyond the grave, then either God loves us not, or he will secure the prolongation. It seems clear that this is a non sequitur. I for one incline to view such prolongation as undesirable and inappropriate. But apart from that, do we admit we are unloving every time we veto the desires of our children or our friends? The more friends we have the more certain it is that they will have mutually conflicting desires that cannot all be satisfied, so that choice is unavoidable. Love, in any admirable sense, does not mean endorsing every purpose of another, but rather, taking seriously every feeling and experience of another, in the sense of entering into it, learning its flavor, rather than turning away from it as merely irrelevant or impertinent. As a result of such sympathetic participation, we shall, of course, endorse (with whatever qualifications) many of the purposes of the other, but if we simply endorsed all, we should not be a different person from the other, and certainly not a superior one. Defects of human loving are not in the refusal to accept others’ valuations as valid, but in the willful suppression of (or innocent incompetence for appreciating) some part of the evidence to which they appeal. We often refuse to allow our blind spots as to values to be cured by others, or we are unable to have them cured. It is quite another matter to ask us to adopt the blind spots of others as our own!
It may also be asked, is Whitehead’s God “righteous”? Does this mean, is God, a dispenser of rewards and punishments that exactly fit the crime, or the good deed, in each case? It is perhaps sufficient to reply that no one knows what this fitness means, and that every theologian (I suppose) has so diluted such “justice” with “mercy” that one cannot tell what in the end it all comes to. But also, it may be said that the whole legal machinery of punishment and compensation is political, not ethical, a defense of minimal social order, and nothing more. The doctrine of heaven and hell is transcendentalized politics, not transcendentalized ethics. There is no truly ethical need for proportional compensation. He who wills good to others for their own sake cannot at the same time find the justification of his acts in the prospect of future reward to himself. To really love others is to find reward now in promoting their good. The ethical crudities that have gone under the name of divine righteousness are indeed something to marvel upon.
Here Whitehead’s concept of the self is valuable. A man is a new “actual entity” in every moment or “specious present.” True, there is something fixed about his character, but in men—in contrast to God—fixity of character is never absolute, since we can always act “out of character,” and in this way develop new characteristics, and since it is arbitrary when, after the fertilized-egg stage, we are said to have first acquired a definite character. But in any case, it is not the fixed character of a man which performs his deeds, nor is it this character that reaps a subsequent reward. It is a momentary self (or sequence of selves) which enacts any given deed, and another later self which experiences the reward. Character, or the man as self-identical, is an abstraction from the sequence of concrete experiences each with its own intrinsic “subject” or “agent.” Each such momentary agent reaps the reward of its activity in and with that activity itself, and that is the only reward this agent ever can reap! (If it were otherwise, if the very self that has the action should also have its future compensation, then that compensation would not be future but present.) Included in the present satisfaction is whatever sympathy for future members of the personal sequence the present self may feel, and this is “self-interest,” but included also is whatever sympathy that self may feel for members of other sequences, human, sub-human, or superhuman. This sympathy for other sequences is “altruism.” The essential terms of the motivation equation are the momentary concrete acting-and-enjoying self, on the one hand, and whatever future life with which it sympathizes or feels a concern about, on the other. Since all life is embraced in the divine life, the final terms are: present self and God. “Self-interest,” ,, as the aim at future advantage for the same sequence of experiences, is merely one important strand in this sympathy of the present self for the future of life and God. To return then to the politico-legal conception of justice, we see that the judge, strictly speaking, punishes one self for acts committed by another. In Whiteheadian terms, the rationale of this can be conceived in at least two ways. For the moment I shall consider only one. Assuming the theory of punishment as deterrence from crime, since there is in normal human experience a dominant strand of sympathy with prospective experiences belonging to the same “personally-ordered” sequence or “linear society,” the threatened punishment of later members of such a sequence can very well act as a deterrent upon earlier members, under favorable circumstances—and that is the best that is ever claimed for punishment from the standpoint of its deterrent effect. However, this use of punishment is a means to the end of good behavior which, where possible, is better secured by arousing sympathy not so much for one’s own future as for that of others, best of all, for God whose future contains all futures.
It may be thought that the above doctrine destroys the root of responsibility. Can a man repent of misdeeds, if he can always say, “another concrete man it was who performed them, not this concrete actuality which I now am?” But on the contrary, the man is obligated to repentance just to the extent that he has not become a new man in respect to the very tendency to commit the kind of bad act in question. He is a partly new man, true enough; but is the newness relevant to the misdeed? Repentance, with “forgiveness of sins,” means, I suggest, ,being “born anew” in the sense that, in the relevant aspect one is a different man. (This means, of course, a new relation to God, and of God to us.) Past misdeeds are evidence of the need for a partly new character, and until this emerges, and in order that it shall emerge, we should repent. But if repentance has effected its proper result, punishment is out of order, ethically and in so far as the man himself is concerned, though it may have legal and political justification. Thou who hold the other theory of punishment argue that legal “retribution” is at worst better than private revenge, and that human nature demands one or the other. Whether the “guilty man” has been born anew or not, his victims and their friends may have hardened into hatred and rage, and this’ is a force with which society does have to reckon somehow.
In any case, God’s concern, and that of a wise judge, too (or at least, the value of his function), refers to the future, not the past. Even God cannot undo or mitigate the past evil by punishing it; his goal is to work for the optimal future. And moreover, since freedom is inherent in the idea of personality, or even of individuality on any level, God could not manipulate the exact course of events to fit it to a precise scheme of reward and punishment, or to any precise scheme whatsoever. He could not because the idea is an absurdity. The world process is not and could not be a sheer contrivance; it is and could only be a multi-life in an embracing life. Thus, the problem of Job is in a sense a false problem.
The ancient riddle of death and immortality receives in Whitehead’s philosophy a new illumination as simple as it is profound. Death is merely a final incident in the fundamental transience of life, as it appears to us when we forget about God. On any day of his life a man has already died, so far as all but a tiny fraction of his past actuality is concerned. A million or so of his experiences have already “perished” into the past. The basic question of permanence concerns not so much the perished men as the perished states or experiences of men, even though still living. For actuality is in experience, and if every experience is impermanent, then all actuality is so. Are the perished experiences reduced to the virtual nothing that we remember of most of them? For the faint memories we have of the past are mere background of the remembering experience, which as an experience is no richer appreciably than most of its predecessors, frequently less so. Is this the entire reality of achieved actuality? No, says Whitehead, for perishing by way of human forgetting may be balanced by a uniquely adequate “objective immortality” in the unforgetting awareness of God. Given this complete preservation, resurrection in any conventional sense seems at best a secondary matter, a problematic luxury, possibly undesirable. (The case for it seems to me to be best presented in the writings of Fechner, A. C. Garnett, and Gustav Strömberg.) Without the immortality of experiences, any heaven would present the same problem of the transience of experiences, which alone are actual values.
It is all very well to say we can live for posterity, for “social immortality.” What will posterity ever do with the actual experiences of those dying at Hiroshima, or those going down on a ship? Indeed, how much will posterity know of your experiences, or of mine? Everything, indeed, if posterity includes the divine survivor! He alone is the adequate heir of the true goods of men, their conscious states. To no one other than God can these goods be willed. To him, however, they can be wholly intrusted, with confidence that their true worth will count to the last item.
Concerning the “religious availability of Whitehead’s God,” (a phrase used by the late Stephen Ely), we may say that if “religion” means the highest form of love between God and man whereby our passing lives achieve everlasting value, then Whitehead’s doctrine gives us this far beyond most others. I have one reservation. In a few passages our author does speak as though not all aspects of our experiences could be “saved” for immortality, and A. H. Johnson reports that he unmistakably affirmed this in conversation. However, this seems only to show that Whitehead wavered on the point. For he tells us that the truth is only the way all things are together in the consequent nature, from which it follows that it could not be “true” that something was omitted from the consequent nature. In any case we are free to make this our position, and I know of nothing in Whitehead, save those few passages, which even appears to conflict with it.
We survivors remember bits and echoes of Whitehead’s inner life that reached us from time to time. The grace and grandeur of this life many have felt. But let us not imagine that it was but these echoes in us that he was “worth to God.” Each man is an addition to the universe, an addition essentially secret. The old mystics saw better than the rationalistic theologians here. “Everlasting life” is what we have at this moment in the heart of deity.
Note
1. S. L. Ely, The Religious Availability of Whitehead’s God. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. 1942. Ely’s tragically premature death occurred some time after this paragraph was first published.
Source:
Charles Hartshorne, Reality As Social Process: Studies in Metaphysics and Religion, pp. 196-212.
HyC