Charles Hartshorne
Since theology is now passing through its profoundest revolution since the early centuries of the Christian Era, it is impossible that brief reference to it should be free from the danger, if not the certainty, of serious misunderstanding. Nevertheless, the bearings of the concept of affective continuity upon the theistic hypothesis are so unmistakable that some discussion of them may be appropriate. It must, however, be definitely understood that I do not believe that the revolution referred to can ever be undone, and that I have no interest in giving any encouragement to the groups who are trying to lead us back to the methods and results of medieval theology.
These methods are non-relative, non-quantitative, non-dimensional, and hence opposed to the notion of method which has been stressed in this book; and in their results the popular quantitative notions of all-knowing, all-controlling, at-all-times-existing, etc., are subordinated to technical conceptions such as absolute, immutable, timeless, ens a se, totum simul, which are held to be more exact, but which, in my judgment, should not be so estimated by anyone with much understanding of modern logic. I also entirely fail to find in them a plausible referent of religious experiences.
Some years ago there appeared in a prominent magazine an excellent account of the inseparability, in the writer’s personal experience, of the nominally quite distinct experiences of light and spiritual exaltation.1 The inseparability appeared as a kind of identity, which the subject found mysterious enough from the standpoint of her scientific gleanings, but stubbornly inescapable as an experiential fact. Subsequently she learned that it was a commonplace of religious and mystical literature, a universal truism indeed, that the Divine appears literally as an inward light. Moreover, one should not forget the constant use of every variety of sense metaphor to characterize the Divine Presence. If even the ordinary worshiper were deprived of the “radiance,” the “warmth”—nay, with minds not enslaved to silly aesthetic snobberies, even the “sweetness” and the “fragrance”—of the vision beatific, he would find his capacity for expression seriously impoverished.
Theological theory has not altogether failed to take account of these facts of experience, and certainly the logic of the theological tenet implies that sensory qualities must be regarded as possessing spiritual content. Both in Occident and in Orient this view may be found; and the grounds for it on the logical side are so obvious that I can only regard it as an instance of the illogicality of mankind that it has not been far more commonly accepted by religious thinkers than history shows it to have been. For if one is a thoroughgoing believer in an ultimate Divinity, a spiritual Creator, or omnipresent Life, one is obliged to hold that this Divinity is somehow manifested everywhere, that the Creator is expressed in some degree in his creation, in all that is. Strictly regarded, the statement that man is made in his maker’s image cannot be taken to ascribe more than a relative distinction to man among the creatures, for in some degree the statement must be true of all created things as such.
In the Middle Ages it was indeed a commonplace that all things partake of being just in so far as they bear some resemblance to the Divine Being who in some sense is Being itself.2 To be wholly unlike God is to be wholly unlike being, to be pure non-being or nothing. Now God is not a composite of parts, such that a man could resemble him in respect to one of these parts and not to others. Resemblance must be to his nature as a whole. Hence if we say God is perfect spirit, then whatever spirit may mean, all things must partake, in some degree, of spirituality. And if God is infinite love, then all things must possess and embody love, in however slight or embryonic a form.
It requires no exceptional mental power to deduce the affective continuum as a, corollary. The inductive verification of affective continuity may not establish the truth of theology, but (unless there is a flaw in the foregoing reasoning) its inductive refutation would establish the falsity of the only theology that is religiously significant and logically definite.3
Notes
1. See Jane Steger, “Some Notes on Light,” Atlantic Monthly, CXXXVIII (1926), 315-25.
2. Aquinas said: “The essence of God is the perfect resemblance of all things, for it is their universal principle.”
3. This theology is the subject of a projected book, The New Vision of God, and of an article to appear in The New Humanist (1934), “Philosophy’s New Alternative to Scholasticism.”
Source:
Charles Hartshorne, The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation, pp. 271-272.