Charles Hartshorne
Maximizing relativity as well as absoluteness in God enables us to conceive him as a supreme person. The absolute is neutral between any and all relational alternatives; surely a person cannot be thus neutral. If God be in all aspects absolute, then literally it is “all the same” to him, a matter of utter indifference, whether we do this or do that, whether we live or die, whether we joy or suffer. This is precisely not to be personal in any sense relevant to religion or ethics. But as we have seen, God is not neutral to relationships, except qua absolute, and this means, taken merely with respect to the generic and universal form of his relationships abstracting from their specific or individual content.
It is often said that God as personal can only be an appearance or expression of the Absolute. And usually the implication is conveyed that the Absolute is more than God, or that God is a self-limitation or even a “descent” of the Absolute into a lower region. These are somewhat confused notions at best. The Absolute is the formal abstract fixed relational type which any concrete state of God exemplifies, and so, if you like, manifests or expresses. Such a concrete state is God as person caring for the creatures he has created. But the abstract relational form is only the form of adequate or supreme personality as such. Personality is not itself a person, even when it is the divine personality. The form of adequate personality is nonpersonal or absolute; even though no other person exemplifies it and thus it is personal, i.e., individual, to God. It is nevertheless nonpersonal in the sense that it does not think or feel or will.
The character of a man does not think or will, the man thinks or wills. The abstract does not act, only the concrete acts or is a person. But it is the divine Person that contains the Absolute, not vice versa. The man contains his character, not the character the man. Moreover, a supreme person must be inclusive of all reality. We find that persons contain relations of knowledge and love to other persons and things, and since relations contain their terms, persons must contain other persons and things. If it seems otherwise, this is because of the inadequacy of human personal relations, which is such that the terms are not conspicuously and clearly contained in their subjects. To transfer to the adequately related subject this apparent externality of terms is the opposite of judicious, however often it has been done in the past and is done now. In God, terms of his knowledge would be absolutely manifest and clear and not at all “outside” the knowledge or the knower.
Another reason given for supposing that God is less than the Absolute is that a person is limited by his acts and choices to this rather than that, whereas the absolute is unlimited or infinite. But again we have equivocation. The infinity of the absolute is the infinity of possibility. The absolute form is neutral to alternatives, therefore limited to none of them, but not because it has something lacking to any one of the alternatives. For since the abstract is in the concrete, any concrete case contains the entire unlimited form. The form is unlimited, not because it has all possible cases in actualized form, but because it has no actual case within it, being the common form of all actuality, and no actuality whatever.
Possibility is unlimited because it is not actualized at all. It is everything in the form of possibility, nothing whatever in the form of actuality. God merely as absolute is nonactual; God as personal is at least actual. But not God as absolute nor God as personal nor anything whatever can be actual in all possible ways; for that would be absolute chaos and the same as no actuality. There are the two aspects of existence, possibility and actuality; and the existing power which has both aspects is, in its aspect of unactualized power or possibility, infinite and unlimited, but also completely unactualized, and is in its actuality necessarily limited.
A related argument for supposing God less than the Absolute is that God is good and wise and therefore excludes the predicates bad and foolish, leaving them outside himself. By the same reasoning a house which is large and heavy excludes small and light, which must be outside the house. On the contrary the smallness and lightness of the parts of the house are in the house, and yet the house is not small or light. It is not according to logic to suppose that predicates not applicable directly to a thing as a whole must be outside it. They may be inside it as properties of its constituents.
Of course as absolute God is “simple,” has no constituents. But this only shows once more that it is God as relative that is the inclusive conception. As relative, God contains an absolute form of which there are no constituents, and he is, rather than merely contains, a relative actuality of which there are constituents. In this way, God is really all-inclusive, and yet is not wicked or foolish; for these properties are restricted to his included beings, and hence do not apply to him as the including being.
If A includes B, but not vice versa, then manifestly A does not have the property of being noninclusive which its constituent B has. Yet both inclusiveness and noninclusiveness are of course included in A, the one as its own property, the other as property of its included relatum B. It is truly amazing how theological discussion has proceeded in discussing such matters, how crude or arbitrary its assumptions have often been.
The not uncommon notion of the “absolute limiting itself” is open to objection. The absolute is by definition indifferent to limits. This neutrality is overcome only in and by a concrete particular act, and such an act is already limited and not absolute. The limited is self-limited, the relative is self-relativized, but the absolute is not limited or relativized, even by itself; for this would be contradiction. The absolute remains unlimited, though inactual or nonconcrete. We may say that God limits himself, but it is God, not the mere absolute form in God, that does so. Furthermore it is misleading to say that even the concrete God “limits himself,” if by that is meant that limitation in God is in no way due to anything other than God.
Terms qualify and limit their relations. Terms that are self-determining subjects, such as man, with a spark of freedom and creativity in them, are also in part self-limiting, and in choosing their own limits they also choose what the limits of God as knowing them shall be. In deciding to do this, not that, I decide that God shall know me as actually doing this, and not know me as actually doing that. I decide the content of the divine knowledge. To decide less than this is to decide nothing whatever, and is not to decide. For omniscience is the measure of reality, and if it is not affected by our decision, nothing is affected.
From all this nothing perhaps follows as to the extent to which man is capable of good “without grace.” There is always a divine element in human decisions, and (while man exists) a human element in the divine decisions, but manifestly the human element is radically inferior and radically dependent. How much good we can do except in loving union with God is not in the least settled by what I have said. Certainly it is meaningless to ask what we could do if God did not help us. He always does help us. The question means, I presume, does God help some more than others, or help more sometimes than at other times, or in this way rather than in that way?
An argument which might be used against our view is this: if the absolute as such is abstract and inactual, is this not a limitation? Yet the absolute, I have said, is unlimited. I reply that limitation is used ambiguously in this argument. To be this rather than that, red (in a certain part) rather than blue, or with knowledge that P is true instead of with knowledge that P is false, is to be “limited” in the first sense. Here it is a question of positive alternatives exclusive of each other. But being inactual is no such positive alternative to being actual. It is rather an element in every actuality, the element of generic form (which as such cannot be actual) common to all the alternatives and neutral to the choice among them.
To call such a form limited because as the common form it is not also actual as specific form (the only way anything can be actual) is to use the term in at best a vaguely analogous if not simply equivocal sense. There is no question of choice between the common form and the specific forms. The common form cannot not be, whatever specific forms there may or may not be. Contingency, and all that is subject to success or failure, lies outside the common form. “Limitation” is the measure of such success or failure. In that sense the common form is unlimited. It is no success and no failure because, being an element in any possible achievement, itself is no achievement. If it were alone, it would be a common form common to nothing, a possibility with no actualization, an outline outlining nothing, a relational type where there were no relations and no terms, a class without members, which was yet the only class—in short, nonentity.
Source:
Charles Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God, pp. 142-147.
HyC