By Charles Hartshorne1
Am I a theologian? The obvious and in a sense right answer is, no. But there is at least some ambiguity in the question. For there is an expression, “natural theology,” an expression whose validity, to be sure, has always been disputed, and in no age I suppose more widely challenged than in ours. Well, if there is such a thing as natural theology, it seems plain that I must be viewed as a (natural) theologian.
True enough, it is quite impossible to say what my views might have been had my parents not been more than nominally Christian, my Father professionally so (a preaching minister for over fifty years), and my Mother pious to such an extent as to approach saintliness. How far it is psychologically possible for a natural theologian to exist without influence from those who have accepted revealed theology as such is a question beyond my power to answer. What I do maintain is that there is no logical dependence of natural upon revealed theology. It may indeed be correct to say that a species of rational animal could scarcely be expected to arrive at clear theoretical conceptions prior to more intuitive and unanalyzed perspectives upon life and the universe. Art, poetry, ritual, precede science and metaphysics, this is presumably in some fashion a psychological law. But my contention is that once a culture attains the possibility of uninhibited theoretical activity, the idea of God is bound to be one of the products of this activity. It is inherent in all basic conceptions, and only some arbitrary inhibition can prevent its explicit formulation. For instance, the idea of fallible knowledge, by mere negation, turns into the notion of infallibility, and this is already deity. (Only failure to think out its implications can suppose otherwise.) Again, the notion of “fragmentary individual,” individuality owing its uniqueness to a localized stance within and perspective upon the whole, by mere negation turns into the notion of non-fragmentary individual, and this again, when all ambiguities and unclarities are attended to, is the idea of God. Or once more, the idea of individuals able to influence some but not all other individuals, or to receive influences from some but not all others, by negation turns into that of an individual universally influencing and universally influenced by others, and this too, in either case, can only be God. Even the idea of universal (divine) love is logically implicit in any idea of love. For its scope either is or is not universal, and either supposition suggests by contrast the other. What logical dependence can there be here upon revelation? (Unless, indeed, all capacity for abstract, uninhibited generalization presupposes revelation. as John Oman rather persuasively . . . 2
It may be objected that while the idea of God might arise by mere theoretical procedures, the existence of a corresponding reality is another matter, a question for observation of fact or sheer faith to settle, if it can be settled. But just this contention natural theology shows (to my satisfaction) to be theoretically invalid. My view thus is that theistic belief has its purely theoretical justification. To put it bluntly, I hold that theistic philosophy is, by an indefinitely wide margin, the most rational philosophy. This of course is a personal judgment only, in the present state of culture. And obviously I am obligated to explain why so many see the matter very differently, many both among believers and non-believers. My explanation is in terms of certain rather natural confusions and subtle ambiguities which have misled theologians and, derivatively, their skeptical critics, so that the expression “theistic philosophy,” which I used above, has in our culture no generally understood and self-consistent meaning. But this is a failure of analysis, of theoretical procedures as such. It originated in certain oversimplifications of Greek (and classical Oriental) philosophy, too trustingly adopted by medieval and most modern theologians, philosophers (including Kant), and rabbis, and by “the method of tenacity” still maintained in some quarters. If critics of theism have not known what theism, in its most self-consistent form, is, the fault lies, first with Plato and Aristotle, then with the long line of philosophers and theologians who appealed to the authority of revelation to support the first crude approximations of Greek philosophical theism. Contemporary theology, by its sharp distinction between philosophy and theology, should help to clear up this unholy alleged “synthesis” of Greek wisdom and revealed truth. I hold that it was neither. Plato’s supreme wisdom was in his tentativeness, his sense of the ambiguities of words, and the near impossibility of capturing our best insights in formal statements. Also, if there be revelation it can hardly be responsible for Aristotle’s metaphysics as it stands, or for Plato’s in that one-sided version which Philo, Plotinus, and Augustine succeeded in imprinting upon the European mind for more than a millennium.
The great mistake in contemporary philosophy is to think that making a fresh start, rethinking what we are doing while taking nothing for granted, except that the language we have to use has a certain validity, necessarily favors a skeptical outcome. For the secret weapon of skeptics for twenty-five centuries has been the failure of theists or natural theologians to think out [the] logical structure of the case they are trying to evaluate, the case for belief in God. With our new sophistication about the logic of basic terms and of language in general, theism at last has a chance to get rid of the confusion, the inconsistencies, which are in large part explanatory of disbelief. When this clarification has been presented effectively to educated people generally, we shall then see how much of the skeptics’ argument still has force. It is as plain to me as anything can be that at least much of the argument will no longer be relevant.
Notes
1. I have transcribed this brief statement from a three page document that is untitled which I acquired in 2001 from Emily Hartshorne Schwartz, the daughter of Charles Hartshorne. There is no indication in the document of a date. (Donald Wayne Viney)
2. The text trails off and is just as it is printed here with the period at the end of the sentence, a small case “a” in “as,” and no closing parenthesis. Presumably, Hartshorne intended to reference something argued by John Wood Oman (1860-1939). In his books, Hartshorne mentions John Oman only once, but it provides the clue to what Hartshorne found interesting about Oman on this subject. In Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1970), p. 156, Hartshorne writes: “I believe with John Oman—and in line with the suggestion of Brunner above referred to—that man’s awareness of God is no mere contingent extension of his awareness of himself, but is rather an indispensable element of that awareness. In this view, the divine-human contrast is the basic principle of all human thought, never wholly submerged, though it may often be driven rather deep into the dimly-lighted regions of experience.” Hartshorne owned a copy of Oman’s The Natural and the Supernatural (1931), but his underlining in the book is mostly in those sections (chapters 11 and 12) that deal with sensation and feeling. I thank Steve Hulbert at the Center for Process Studies for his extensive notes on Hartshorne’s copy of Oman’s book. (Donald Wayne Viney)
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