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Trinity and Process: A Critical Evaluation and Reconstruction of Hartshorne’s Di-Polar Theism

Towards a Trinitarian Metaphysics (Peter Lang: 1992)

What follows is a highly abridged summary of Greg Boyd’s PhD dissertation (Princeton). The purpose of this summary is to make its conclusions more easily accessible. I’ve taken several steps to downsize the work: (1) Footnotes have all been removed, (2) minimal sectional headings have been retained, (3) material I thought one could do without to get the essential points was removed, (4) original pagination is gone, (5) the opening Introduction and Bibliography are not included, and (6) original wording hasn’t been tampered with except to correct misspellings and minor grammatical mistakes. It may read as if the paragraphs should have been bulleted. That’s due to having removed material and collapsed what was left. Please be mindful in quoting (better refer to the original) because due to editing some paragraphs appear run-on here which in the original are separated by material. T&P critically appropriates philosopher/theologian Charles Hartshorne’s Process metaphysics to articulate an understanding of God that retains both the best of Hartshorne’s (Process) contributions and essential orthodox Christian beliefs regarding God. It’s a purely analytic work that seeks to explore what can be known about God and the world based on philosophical reasoning. In the process different aspects of CH’s metaphysics and classical Christian belief are both surrendered and retained. My interest in doing this summary stems from ongoing conversations I have with people about Greg’s conclusions but who are unfamiliar with this earlier work of his. I hope this will be enough of a summary to give interested readers a clear picture of his essential thesis. For more specifics you’ll have to read the book. Tom Belt Minneapolis, October 2014

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PART I SIX FOUNDATIONAL A PRIORI TRUTHS OF HARTSHORNE’S SYSTEM

CHAPTER I The First Four A Priori Truths

There are two aspects to the truths with which metaphysics is concerned: metaphysical truths are both “necessary” and “categorical.” We shall shortly discuss the six candidates for the status of a priori truth which constitute the foundation of Hartshorne’s metaphysical system. The first four shall be discussed in the remainder of this chapter, the fifth and sixth in chapter II. The Three Conditions of an A Priori Truth Condition 1: Idea Implies Reality The first condition for an existential a priori truth which Hartshorne shall be employing in this metaphysical system is that an axiom can be considered to be a synthetic a priori truth only if its mere idea entails its actual existence. If an existential statement is genuinely a priori, its truth must include necessary existence. Condition 2: Non-restrictive and Existential The second condition which must be met by any statement before it can be considered a priori is that it must be a “non-restrictive existential statement.” An a priori truth, since it must be universally exemplified, must be “wholly positive.” Its instantiation must exclude no conceivable state of affairs. Condition 3: Verifiable but not Falsifiable The final criterion by which Hartshorne shall evaluate candidates for a priori truth is that it must be in principle verifiable but not falsifiable. Indeed, if metaphysical statements are to be necessary and categorical, then they must not only be verifiable, but they must be verified in every experience. The First A Priori: “Something Exists” The first and most fundamental candidate for an a priori non-restrictive existential truth is, according to Hartshorne, the statement “something exists.” This a priori functions as the fundamental axiom in Hartshorne’s system. Indeed, this a priori truth is in a sense the only a priori in Hartshorne’s system, for everything else in the system is simply an aspect of what it means to say “something exists.” The Second A Priori: “The Concrete/Abstract Distinction” The first step to be taken by way of flushing out the full meaning of the statement “something exists” is, according to Hartshorne, to identify existence with “definiteness,” or as Hartshorne tends to prefer, “concreteness.” To say “something exists” is, for Hartshorne, to say “something is concrete.” And to be concerned about “existence as such” is nothing other than to be concerned about “concreteness as such.” “[T]he basic form of reality,” then is, for Hartshorne, by definition “concrete reality.” “Concrete actualities are the whole of what is.” The Principle of Contrast According to Hartshorne, the meaning of any proposition is contingent upon the meaningfulness of its contrast. Hartshorne calls this principle the “principle of contrast.” “[C]oncreteness as such,” then, implies a contrary with “abstraction as such.” To have an idea of what “concreteness” means, we must have some idea of what “abstraction” means in contrast to it. Metaphysics as the “purely general theory

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of concreteness,” then, must “include a theory of abstractions.” The a priori truth that “something exists” implies the a priori truth that “something is concrete,” which in turn leads to the a priori truth that “something is concrete with abstract features.” The Asymmetry of the Abstract/Concrete Distinction Of fundamental importance for an adequate understanding of Hartshorne’s system is the recognition that the relationship between the concrete and the abstract is not symmetrical. While the contrast between concreteness and abstractness is an a priori truth—and in this sense both can be said to be “fundamental truths”—it does not follow, according to Hartshorne, that concreteness and abstractness are symmetrically relation a priori in the same way. Rather, as we have already seen, concreteness is “the basic form of reality.” “Definiteness is the positive, hence basic idea.” It is the concrete which expresses “the fullness of reality,” while the abstract only expresses “features, aspects, or relations of it.” The Third A Priori: “Experience Occurs” We now turn to the third fundamental candidate for a priori truth within Hartshorne’s system: the statement “experience occurs.” Like the second a priori truth, and like all the candidates for a priori truth which follow, the contention that “experience occurs” is not, for Hartshorne, separable from the first fundamental a priori: the necessary truth that “something exists.” It rather is implied in this first a priori as an integral part of its meaning. Hartshorne’s contention is that to say “something exists” is ultimately to say “experience occurs.” The Infinite Flexibility of A Priori Concepts It is, according to Hartshorne, tautologous to say that non-restrictive existential concepts must linguistically possess “infinite flexibility.” An a priori existential concept must be capable of being meaningfully generalized to an absolutely universal level. “Existence” and “concreteness” are such concepts because they are inclusive of any conceivable reality whatsoever. Though people and rocks and molecules, etc., all exist, and are concrete in radically different ways, the terms can yet be meaningfully applied to them all. They are flexible enough not only to be applied to all known reality, but to all conceivable reality. This “infinite flexibility” is an inherent feature of all truly non-restrictive concepts. According to Hartshorne, the concept of “experience” is flexible in just the same manner and degree as are the concepts of “existence” and “concreteness.” It might be argued that we only know experience in human terms, and thus do not know what it would be like to generalize this concept to a universal level. This is, as we shall shortly see, the most common objection to Hartshorne’s “psychicalism.” It must be acknowledged that we commonly generalize the concept of experience a great deal. We conceive of animals as having experiences, of insects has having some sort of experience, and perhaps even of very simple organisms as having something like experiences. Hartshorne’s question is the question of why we should arbitrarily stop this generalization at some point. And his argument, which we shall shortly examine, is that logic forbids us to draw a stopping point to this generalization. Psychicalism: The “Principle of Continuity” But can we not imagine a state of affairs which exemplifies a zero instance of experience? Indeed, is not our ordinary conception of “matter” just such a concept? Is the concept of “mere matter” really a logical contradiction—as it must be if “experience” is in fact a necessary truth? In other words, is the concept of

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an “experienceless something” a complete negation, saying nothing positive and hence nothing meaningless? According to Hartshorne, the concept of “mere matter” is indeed just this, and his argument for this contention constitutes what has been called his “panpsychistic” doctrine, or as he prefers, his doctrine of “psychicalism.” What, Hartshorne asks, is the concept of “mere matter,” wholly devoid of mind-like qualities, but the complete negation of human experience and all that could be analogous to it? We know what our own human experience is in all its variety, and we can meaningfully “stretch” by analogy our experience to understand in some measure other human, super-human, sub-human, and even sub-animal experiences. But how can we know, recognize, understand, and meaningfully speak about its complete negation? Negation, as we have already pointed out, is parasitic upon affirmation, or it is meaningless. But the concept of a wholly non-experiential “something” is, it seems, just such a complete negation, and hence it is meaningless. Thus Hartshorne argues, “I do not know how matter can be interpreted save by analogy with experience as such.” What appears to be “dead matter” must, then, in reality be merely “habit bound mind,” or at least something analogous to it. The correct view, as Hartshorne sees it, is that while all concrete actuality has, and must have, abstract lifeless features to it, the concrete itself is alive and is constituted by some mind-like experiences. The Fourth A Priori: “The Asymmetrical Sociality of Experience” We now turn to Hartshorne’s fourth candidate for an a priori truth which is also simply a working out of the logical implications of the preceding candidates: it is the statement “asymmetrical relations occur.” Experience As Necessarily Relational If the concept of experience is indeed non-restrictive and hence “infinitely flexible,” it is necessary to inquire into what its general features are which remains constant through the infinite flexibility of its application. What is it which all experiences—from God’s experience down to the experience of an electron—must have in common? In asking this, we are once again seeking to distinguish the ontologically necessary from the contingent features of our experience of reality. Experience must be relational. It “cannot generate its own content.” If to be is to be an experience as has been argued, then it is also true that “[t]o be is to be in relation.” Non-relational being is simply non-being. This, in a nutshell, is Hartshorne’s a priori argument for the necessary sociality of being, and its importance within Hartshorne’s cannot be overstated. To exist, then, is to be concrete, which is to experience, which in turn, we now see, is to be related. Only the abstract features of this social concreteness can be considered as non-social. The whole of Hartshorne’s metaphysics from this point on consists in working out of the implications of this sociality. The Asymmetrical Structure of the Sociality of Experience: “Feeling of Feeling” Having determined that any conceivable experience must be relational, what, we must further ask, is the essential nature of this necessary relationality? What are the necessary a priori features of the sociality of experience as such? The first thing to be discovered about the sociality of experience is that since to exist at all is to be an experience, what is experienced must itself be an experience. Insofar as “feeling” is a constituent of any experience which can be understood analogously with human experience, Hartshorne can (following

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Whitehead) say that to experience is to “feel a feeling.” The structure of concrete givenness is thus “participatory”: a present experience of “feeling” is constituted by its participation in another “feeling”—and nothing more. Refutation of Absolute Pluralism and Absolute Monism The crucial issue which must now be raised is how this “feeling of feeling” is to be understood. What is the nature of this sociality which necessarily characterizes all experience, and hence existence itself? How one answers this question concerning the nature of relations directly determines the whole of one’s metaphysical understanding of reality. The first possibility is to suppose that all relations are external to the entities being related. That is to say, we might suppose that all relations between things are “accidental” in that they do not essentially constitute what those things are. Entities would be essentially as they are even if the particular relations they are involved in did not exist. This is, in very brief outline, the position of absolute pluralism. Among its most famous exponents are Hume and Russell. This position is plagued by a number of serious difficulties, however, as Hartshorne tirelessly points out. First, the principle of contrast is violated. If all relations are external, then where do we get the notion of “internal relations” from? And if the latter is not real, what meaning has the former? Secondly, as is especially clear in Hume, it is impossible to arrive at anything more than phenomenological definition of causation if in fact all relations are external. A second possibility is to maintain that all relations are internal to the entities which are being related. That is to say, the relations which a thing is engaged in are essentially constitutive for that thing. The relations are “essential” in that entities have no “essence” beyond the relations which constitute them. Among this position’s most famous proponents are Spinoza, Royce, and most recently Blanchard. While the doctrine of purely external relations renders all relations “idle,” as Bradley noted, the doctrine of purely internal relations renders them, as Bradley again noted, “vicious.” That is, if all relations are internal to the entities related, the notion of a distinct autonomous entity to be related seems to vanish. For anything “outside” the relation must be external to the relation, and hence it would be false that all relations are internal. What is more, the doctrine of purely internal relations destroys the linguistically necessary contrast with external relations. It also, like the afore mentioned doctrine, renders all knowing, loving, hating, etc., unintelligible, for these relations presuppose a distinct entity to be related. And it destroys any ontologically real distinction between the past, present and future (for the last event would necessarily be an internal constituent of the definition of the first event). As a final note, the doctrine of purely internal relations makes any understanding of God as ontologically distinct from the world utterly impossible. God and the world must be eternally mutually constitutive if all relations are, in fact, internal. The Asymmetrical Alternative Exponents of exclusively external as well as exclusively internal relationality have convincingly used such arguments as have been outlined here against each other. As far as Hartshorne is concerned, both of

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their critiques against the other are, by and large, sound. The two extreme positions thereby cancel each other out. According to Hartshorne, then, the stalemate between the pluralist and the monists is the result of two equally indefensible positions showing each other’s weakness. And the insistence that one must locate oneself either in one extreme position or the other is part of the weakness of both. It is, he is fond of arguing, like two carpenters arguing about how to hang a door. One argues that there should be no hinges, the other that the door should have hinges on both sides. Each carpenter is brilliant in showing how the other’s idea will not allow the door to open. But because of the extreme polarization of their thinking, each overlooks the equally extreme faults of his or her own position. The solution, Hartshorne argues, is to hang the hinges on one side of the door but not on the other. In other words, the solution to the problem of relations is to be found by maintaining that relations are internal for one of the terms while being external to the other. Applying this to our present issue of the nature of “feeling of feeling,” Hartshorne argues that the relation which pertains between the two feelings (experiences) is internal from the perspective of the present experience, but external from the perspective of the feeling now being felt. The past feeling minus the present experience of it would be just what it is. But the present feeling minus the past feeling which it feels would be a different experience altogether. The Confirmation of Asymmetrical Relationality Hartshorne believes that the primacy of Asymmetricality can be demonstrated both by sheer logic and by an analysis of the concept of experience. Concerning logic, Hartshorne argues that while symmetrical relations can be derived from the simple notion of asymmetrical ones, the converse does not hold. The primacy of asymmetrical relationality can also be demonstrated by an analysis of the concept of experience, according to Hartshorne. We have seen that, in Hartshorne’s view, experience is part of what it means to be concrete. Since, as we have also seen, no experience can have itself as its own datum, it therefore follows that the determinateness of any conceivable experience must essentially be derived from the determinateness of the external datum which forms the content of the experience. But this means that the datum experienced cannot itself be indeterminate relative to the experience of it. It cannot itself be determined by the experience of it. For in this case there would be nothing determinate to experience, and thus the experience could not be concrete. The concept of two experiences symmetrically determining each other is, in Hartshorne’s mind, logically no more conceivable than an experience having itself as its own datum. The only way to render experience conceivable, then, is to suppose that the determinate object experienced is internally related to the experience of it as its determinate content, while the experience of it is external and thus non-constitutive of the object experienced.

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CHAPTER II The Fifth and Sixth A Priori Truths:

Creative Synthesis and Aesthetic Value The Fifth A Priori: Creative Synthesis The Temporal Structure of Asymmetrical Sociality of Experience Perception and Memory We have seen that it is for Hartshorne an a priori truth that experience must be asymmetrically structured at the most concrete level. Being a priori, this must be a non-restrictive feature of the world, necessarily exemplified in every experience of reality and in every conceivable experience of reality, as has already been argued. Like all non-restrictive concepts, this concept will be immediately exemplified in human experience, and will then analogically extend to all of reality. Like Whitehead before him, Hartshorne finds the key to disclosing this a priori asymmetricality within human experience to be human perception and memory. The phenomenon of perception is thus an illustration of the basic asymmetry necessarily exemplified in experience. But the reason for this asymmetry, Hartshorne argues, lies in the nature of temporality. We do not, Hartshorne contends, every really perceive a contemporary object. All perception is perception into the past. This temporal asymmetrical structure of experience is even more clearly exemplified in the case of memory, according to Hartshorne. In memory, unlike in perception, there is no temptation to succumb to any apparent but illusory simultaneity. Memory, then, is the chief clue to the relativity of events to their conditions in previous events. To be more specific, there are in Hartshorne’s view two essential features of memory which together allow it to function as the key to the asymmetrical sociality of experience. First, and most importantly, in memory we have most clearly an instance of the present being in part constituted by the past. “Memory is something in the present conditioned by something in the past.” Memory is a present experience, a present instance of concreteness, which has as its object(s) something in the wholly determinate past. It thus clearly exemplifies the a priori asymmetrical structure of experience, according to Hartshorne. The present experience is conditioned by the object experienced, while the object experienced is unaffected by the experience of it. Secondly, and closely related to this, in memory we have our first, and really our only, clue to the nature of causation. If, in fact, as we have seen Hartshorne argue, all of reality must be interpreted by analogy with the experience of the human self, then it is our experience of the past influencing the present which must, in a universally generalized form, provide us with our conception of how the past affects the present in sub-human (or, as we shall see, in super-human) realms. Cause/effect relationships, then, must be conceived as being “something like” our experience of remembering (and, much more ambiguously, perception). In memory as well as perception, then, we find illustrated the a priori asymmetricality of experience, according to Hartshorne. This clarifies for us the fact that the asymmetrical sociality which is implicit within experience is identical to the temporality which is implicit within all experience. “[T]he structure of time,” then, “in inherent in concreteness as such, and hence a priori.”

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Prehension The term used by Hartshorne, taken from Whitehead, to articulate this inclusion of the past into the experiential present is the term “prehension.” This concept attempts to articulate the universal fact that the present is constituted as a distinct “feeling” by “feeling the feeling of past feelings.” Present “drops of experience” are said to “prehend” a past “objectified datum,” and the particular way they prehend these past events—the particular way they feel the acquired feelings of these past experiences—constitutes what the present drop of experience is. Though he modifies the concept in several ways, Hartshorne regards Whitehead’s doctrine of prehension to be “one of the supreme intellectual discoveries” of all time. “In one conception,” he argues, it renders intelligible the nature of the relationality, connectedness and freedom of reality.” According to him, this concept renders the relationality of reality intelligible by explicating the asymmetricality of the temporal process; it renders the connectedness of reality intelligible by elucidating the way by which the past conditions and is contained in the present; and, as we shall shortly see in detail, it renders the experienced freedom of reality intelligible by articulating how present “drops of experience” are creative in the particular unique way they “feel” the accomplished feeling of the past. Experience as a Free, Creative Synthesis The doctrine of prehension, in Hartshorne’s estimation, “furnishes perhaps the neatest, strongest argument for freedom ever proposed.” The act of prehending past data, we see, is in Hartshorne’s scheme an act which must, to some degree, concretely transcend that data. To experience, then, is to creatively synthesize a previous many into a novel unity. We perceive many things, but any given concrete perception is one experience, a unity which was not present, explicitly or implicitly, in the many. Precisely this constitutes the necessary asymmetrical sociality of experience. The present experience creatively transcends previous experiences. And it is, according to Hartshorne, logically inconceivable to suppose that this unity is itself determinately prescribed by the many which it unites. The unity must, then, be a free creative synthesis. The Ultimacy of Creativity Since, as we have just determined, to exist is to create, the fundamental all-inclusive category by which reality can be accurate described is, for Hartshorne, the category of “creative becoming.” Process philosophy takes creative becoming rather than mere being as the inclusive mode of reality. Since the concrete implies and includes the abstract, while the converse is not true, and since to be concrete is to create, “creative becoming” must be seen, according to Hartshorne, as being inclusive of, and hence fundamental to, “being.” “Becoming is the richer, more concrete conception and includes within itself all the needed contrasts with mere being.” “Becoming,” then, “is the absolute principle.” “Being” is secondary, abstract, and derivative. The present concrete experience, therefore, “contains” the abstract; the present concrete asymmetrical sociality of an experience “contains” its abstract symmetrical relations; and the present concrete instance of becoming “contains” the being of the being of the past. Creativity, then, is in Hartshorne’s system, as it was in Whitehead’s, the “universal of universals,” the “ultimate of ultimates,” the final all-inclusive category of metaphysical explanation.

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Atomistic Creativity Creativity and Substance The exaltation of creativity to the category of the ultimate, of course, stands traditional Western substance metaphysics on its head. Whereas in traditional Western metaphysics an entity is first (logically) a “substance” and secondly an event, in Process thought an entity is first (logically) an event and only secondly a “substance.” It is, for Hartshorne, the creative act which is constitutive of the substance—if that word is to be retained at all—not the substance which is constitutive of the creative act. That is to say, “substance” refers to the abstract regularity of a given series of creative experiences which, by way of this regularity, form a distinct phenomenologically defined entity relative to our ordinary sense perspective. It constitutes the abstract “defining characteristics” of a particular “event sequence.” An event, then, is not, via some “enduring substance,” the cause of its relatively stable self-defining characteristics. This notion of “substance” can, according to Hartshorne, be given no intelligible meaning on a metaphysical level. Rather, the “substance,” or “defining characteristic,” which constitutes the phenomenological entity is the result of an incredible myriad of constitutive creative “units of experience” carrying over some regularity from the past, but reconstructing it each moment in a novel synthesis. Creativity and Self-Identity Self-identity, therefore, whether at a human or sub-atomic level, is abstract, partial and relative. It is, in contrast, the present moment of becoming which is concrete, complete, and absolute, as we have seen. There can, for Hartshorne, therefore be no concrete self-identity which preserves over time. The only concrete reality is in the “specious present,” the present momentary experience of becoming. For human beings, for example, the concrete self becomes anew “every tenth of a second or so.” This alone constitutes truly concrete reality. Everything else concerning human self-identity is an abstract feature of this. Creativity and Actual Occasions But if there is no enduring self behind or within the “personal ordered series,” what, one must ask, constitutes the “units” of actuality which collectively constitute this series? Put another way, if the enduring self is but an abstract feature of the concrete reality, what constitutes the reality form which self-identity is an abstraction? Hartshorne’s answer to this way, he believes, contained in the third and fourth a priori deductions of his system. In a word, the ultimate constituents of reality must be irreducible experiential occasions, and nothing more. Process thought takes a momentary experience as the model or paradigm for understanding concrete reality. These momentary units of experience are called by Hartshorne, following Whitehead, “actual occasions” or “actual entities.” Whitehead himself most succinctly articulates this central concept of Process metaphysics when he writes, “Actual entities…are the final real things of which the world is made. There is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real. They differ among themselves: God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence in far-off space. But, though there are gradations of importance, and diversities of function, yet in the principles which actuality exemplifies all are on the same level. The final facts are, all alike, actual entities; and these actual entities are drops of experience, complex, and interdependent.”

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Given the fifth a priori of Hartshorne’s system, another way of expressing this understanding of actual occasions is to say that the “final real things” of which the world is made are irreducible momentary units of “creative synthesis.” Each actual occasion is a fleeting instance of creativity which forms “a single reality not reducible to inter-related parts.” Concrete experiences, then, must be discrete and ontologically discontinuous events: all continuity, conversely, must be abstract. The experience of “atomistic” creative synthesis, then, itself constitutes the sole concrete content of the ultimately indivisible temporal-spatial units of reality. There is nothing else ontologically more fundamental which “has” the experience or which “does” the synthesizing. According to Hartshorne, such a conception of a “subject” is an abstraction from the concrete, as we have seen. Rather, “there is no feeler over and above the togetherness of the feeling.” It is the absolutely present concrete “drop of experience” which “has” everything else. The Mystery of Creativity Though Hartshorne as a rationalist is not fond of paradoxes—most of them, he suspects, are really straight forward contradictions—he nevertheless admits that paradoxes are inevitable in every system of thought. In his own system, it is the ultimate principle of creativity which is most paradoxical. This does not detract from the rational viability of his system, he feels, if sufficient reason can be given for why this principle is paradoxical, and why this paradox should not be regarded as “fatal.” It will be beneficial for our study to briefly examine his thinking on this issue, as this “paradox” shall subsequently be a point on which we shall criticize Hartshorne. There are two senses in which creativity poses a mystery to human thought. The first relates to the nature of concreteness and of rationality as such. The first relates to the nature of concreteness and of rationality as such. Rationality, according to Hartshorne, necessarily operates on the level of abstractions. It is concerned not with the concrete as such, but with the logical laws which abstractly characterize the concrete as such. Concrete creative experiences, then, cannot be rationally defined by us, but “must be pointed out, e.g., the first experience I had after walking this morning.” According to Hartshorne, the richness of the concrete can never be an object of thought, but must be experienced. One cannot “think” a sense quality. Reason is concerned only with the universal features which experience exemplifies. But this means that creative concreteness as such must always be seen as a mystery by rationality. The second and in some ways more fundamental sense in which creativity is a mystery concerns the question of how actual occasions arise as units of creative synthesis. How do experiences as moments of creative unifications of past data come to be? They are not, as we have seen, fully determined by anything antecedent to themselves, for that would be to deny the very creativity which is essential to all experience. But if nothing outside (viz., before) the experience brings the experience into being, then what does? The only possibility remaining is that the experience creatively brings itself into being. Insofar as the experience is creative, it must, then, be causa sui. The innumerable atomic experiences which constitute actual reality every instant, then, are by definition “self-created.” Insofar as they are free, insofar as they transcend antecedent causal conditions, they are not “created,” but “creators”—creators of their own novel synthesis. The precise definiteness of any

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given actual occasion, therefore, comes from nowhere but the concrete experience itself. And, according to Hartshorne, it is just this unifying creativity which reason can never grasp. The concrescence of an actual occasion, therefore, is strictly unknowable, for it is non-rational until it is complete; that is, until its creative “fiat” has been accomplished. Neither any contingent creature, not even God, can know a contemporary occasion in its moment of self-determination. In this sense, creativity is a mystery. Indeed, since the precise unity of feeling which constitutes an actual occasion is always of past data, it makes no sense to say, according to Hartshorne, that the becoming occasion can even know its own contemporary self. Creativity is, therefore, a mystery not only because reason operates on the levels of universals, but because of the nature of creativity itself. It comes from nowhere, and is unpredictable in its coming. This is true for God—even in relation to the creativity of Godself—as well as for all contingent creatures. The Sixth A Priori: Aesthetic Value Identity of Fact and Value | Experienced Facts as Acquired Value We have seen that the a priori statement “something exists” logically generates the a priori statements that “something is concrete with abstract features,” “experience occurs,” “asymmetrical relations occur,” and “creative synthesis occurs.” Each of these was arrived at by deducing what was necessarily implied in the preceding a priori truth. So it is here: we now ask, what is necessarily implied in the concept of creative synthesis? According to Hartshorne, experience, understood as a creative synthesis of past objectified feelings, as a “feeling of feeling,” necessarily implies that some value is achieved. On Hartshorne’s view, therefore, there is no meaningful ultimate distinction between a fact and value. Sensed facts do not arouse emotion valuations: sensed facts are already emotion valuation. Yellow, for example, does not “arouse” a “lively, cheerful, light-hearted feeling” which is simply “association with it”: to experience the colors yellow, according to Hartshorne, is to experience just this feeling. Or again, blue violet doesn’t “arouse” a “quiet, wistful, earnest” feeling: to sense blue violet is to sense this feeling. Interestingly enough, it seems that an increasing number of psychologists are coming to hold this view. Creative Synthesis and Emotive Valuation The identification of sensation and valuation is, for Hartshorne, simply the result of carrying through the logic involved in the concept of creative synthesis. Experience, we have seen, is always asymmetrically related to previous experiences. To prehend a past datum is to “feel its feeling.” The past datum prehended is nothing more than the “felt unity” of a synthesis of still further past experiences not “made public.” Prehension, then, is simply the enjoyment of the publicity of previous feelings. Hartshorne is simply articulating this point a bit further when he translates “feeling of feeling” as “valuing of value.” The past-enjoyed-feeling of an occasion is now publicly enjoyed by present occasions, but in a new context. How could this be understood unless the present occasion found some value in the previous occasion? How can one “enjoy” the feeling of another without finding some value in it? How could one occasion participate in the feelings of another without participating in the value that occasion valued? In short, Hartshorne believes that the identification of sensation and valuation follows linguistically once one admits the identification of sensation and feeling. Valuation is necessarily implied in prehension or creative synthesis.

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It is, according to Hartshorne, largely our dominating pragmatic orientation which causes us to overlook the value inherent in every experience. We are preoccupied with our environment’s utilitarian value for us that we fail to see that it is, in a real sense, an end in itself. “Sensation is used rather than enjoyed.” We key in on useful abstractions of experience, and hence miss the richness, including emotive richness, of the concrete. It is, according to Hartshorne, to a large degree only children, artists, and primitive people who naturally enter into the experienced world as it really is—as a vast ocean of feeling “in whose aesthetic richness each experience participates.” If the adult modern person is to recapture this truth, he or she must “become as a little child.” The Primacy of Aesthetic Value We have thus far seen that Hartshorne argues that fact and value are two facets of every experience, not two different experiences. But there are, obviously, different kinds of valuation. One can value the truth over falsity, the right over wrong, or the beautiful over the ugly or mundane. What, we must then ask, is the mode of valuation which Hartshorne believes to be an a priori aspect of experience, or creative synthesis, as such? In Hartshorne’s estimation, we see, it is the experience of beauty, and hence aesthetic valuation, which is fundamental to both acting and thinking, and hence ethical or logical valuation. Hartshorne supports this position with basically three lines of argumentation, to which we now turn. Three Arguments for the Primacy of Aesthetic Value Aesthetic Value and the Three Conditions for A Priori Existential Truth The first and most fundamental way in which aesthetic value can, according to Hartshorne, be shown to be fundamental to all other modes of valuation is to show that it is a priori, while other modes of valuation are not. Whereas some experiences are conceivably without ethical or logical valuations, according to Hartshorne, no experience is conceivable without some degree of aesthetic valuation. “Infants and animals experience and enjoy value,” for example, but neither are ethical or logical beings. Only aesthetic valuation, then, can meet the three conditions for a priori existential truths. Ethical and logical valuations are restrictive insofar as they can and do fail to be exemplified. Whether they are exemplified or not, then, is a contingent matter, contingent, for example, on whether or not one is an adult or an infant. They cannot, then, be necessary. But if value is indeed intrinsic to the concept of experience, then, it seems, then only remaining candidate is aesthetic value. Hence Hartshorne argues that no experience, including an experience of ethical or logical value, can be consistently conceived completely void of aesthetic value. If this is correct, it follows, then, that insofar as the idea of experience implies existence, the idea of aesthetic value implies aesthetic value (the experience of the idea itself must have some intrinsic aesthetic value). Aesthetic Value and the Concrete A second argument used by Hartshorne to prove the metaphysical priority of aesthetic valuations over ethical or cognitive valuations is that it is only in aesthetic experiences that we are necessarily attentive to the concrete as such. Both ethics and cognition are necessarily abstract (which is also why lower animals do not share these activities with us).

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This is, in reality, a corollary to the above mentioned fact that aesthetic values are, in contrast to ethical or logical values, non-restrictive. It is because of this fact that only in the enjoyment of aesthetic value are we attentive to the whole of the concrete as given. Every concrete aspect of an entity or an event (and not just an intentionally artistic one) is an aspect of our aesthetic appreciation. Ethics and logic, in contrast, necessitate abstraction from the concrete. Aesthetic Value and Creative Synthesis A final argument which strengthens Hartshorne’s case for the a priori status of aesthetic value, and one which we have already touched upon, is that only aesthetic value is necessarily contained within the definition of experience as a creative synthesis of a multiplicity of past data. For the definition of beauty has the same structure as the definition of creative synthesis. This definition of beauty as an organic unity contains within it the definition of experience as a creative synthesis. Each experience, we have seen, brings together into a novel unity a multiplicity of antecedent facts. It “feels the feeling” of past occasions and does so in such a way that it constitutes itself as a new unique feeling, now available for subsequent prehensions. The togetherness of this multiplicity must, Hartshorne argues, exemplify some degree of “likeness and difference,” some “similarity and contrast.” The organic unity of a creative synthesis must, in other words, be to some degree an “aesthetic unity.” Were the antecedent facts within the prehension completely unlike each other, there would be no togetherness. Were they completely alike, there would be no genuine multiplicity. For Hartshorne, therefore, to say “creative synthesis” is to say “aesthetic value,” and to say “aesthetic value,” to so say “creative synthesis.” What is more, the fact that each occasion must, as we have seen, transcend its antecedent conditions, guarantees that every occasion will have some new aesthetic value to be subsequently enjoyed. This is to say that the a priori requirement of diversity in unity within experience is one with the a priori requirement that experience be a creative synthesis, and one with the a priori requirement that aesthetic value be non-restrictive. We see, then, that to experience is to experience some minimal aesthetic value. “Absolute aesthetic failure simply means no experience at all.” Each atomistic experience which constitutes concrete reality must, by definition, enjoy some intensity of “aesthetic satisfaction.” Indeed, for both Hartshorne and Whitehead, its most fundamental reason for being, is precisely the acquisition of this aesthetic enjoyment. This is what it aims at. This is what it exists for. The intensity of aesthetic satisfaction will vary with the breadth of contrast in the unity instantiated as a particular actual occasion. The intensity of God’s enjoyment will be greatest because God synthesizes the entire world just past. The intensity of (say) an electron will be miniscule in comparison. The intensity of a human experience will fall in between. But in principle, Hartshorne argues (following Whitehead), the nature of the satisfaction is the same in every instance. It is always aesthetic. The becoming of any actual occasion is thus driven by an “appetition” for aesthetic satisfaction, and the precise nature of the actuality of any given occasion is determined by the free manner it has satisfied that aesthetic aim.

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To conclude, by answering the question with which we opened this inquiry into the sixth foundational a priori of Hartshorne’s system, it is this production of aesthetic satisfaction which is the ultimate telos of creativity. “[T]he teleology of the Universe is directed towards the production of Beauty.” Hartshorne acknowledge his agreement with Jonathan Edwards when he says that “the beauty of the world is its final justification.” Experience creates and enjoys this beauty. Metaphysics reflects upon the necessary aspects of this beauty. And science studies the contingent features of this beauty. And they all do so because, if Hartshorne is correct concerning this sixth a priori truth about existence, it simply cannot be gotten away from: the aesthetic dimension of reality pervades and defines the whole of what is. To study anything, then, is to study some aspect of aesthetics. Conclusion: The Six Foundational A Priori Truths of Hartshorne’s System with Reference to the Six Theistic Arguments We have seen how Hartshorne defines metaphysics and understands the methodology appropriate to this enterprise. We have seen how this methodology first tentatively postulates the statement “something exists” as the basic a priori about existence. And we have seen how this methodology deductively generates from this first a priori statement the statements “something is concrete with abstract features,” “experience occurs,” “asymmetrical sociality occurs,” “creative synthesis occurs,” and finally, “aesthetic value is enjoyed.” Together these constitute the six foundational a priori truths of Hartshorne’s metaphysical system. And together they constitute Hartshorne’s view of the sociality of being as such. Being, for Hartshorne, is necessarily experiential, relational, creative, and beautiful. To suppose otherwise is for him to ultimately suppose a contradiction. We shall in Part II see how these foundational a priori statements generate five of the six a priori arguments for the existence and nature of God construed by Hartshorne. The ontological argument, we shall see, is derived from the first criteria for a priori statements about existence itself. The other five theistic arguments follow this one, each building upon one or more of the foundational a priori truths. In the end, we shall see that each of the five theistic arguments which follow the ontological argument are really variations on this first theistic argument, since each attempts to arrive at the existence of God from the mere idea of God, but considered from a distinct angle. This exactly parallels the manner in which the five candidates for a priori truth which follow the first are all ultimately variations on the first, but considered from a distinct angle. To be sure, all of the theistic arguments are themselves ultimately variations on Hartshorne’s first a priori statement “something exists.” As the six foundational a priori statements of Hartshorne’s system have attempted to demonstrate the necessary sociality of being as such, each of the six theistic arguments in its own way attempts to establish an aspect of the necessary sociality of a necessary being in relation to all contingent being. The six foundational a priori statements, and the six theistic arguments which build upon them, therefore constitute Hartshorne’s a priori construction of the doctrine of God, which includes, of course, his view of God’s relationship with the world. Given this structure, it follows that if one is to reject or revise any of the attributes of Hartshorne’s view of Deity—as we shall argue Christian theology must if it is to retain the classical doctrine of the Trinity and the Christian view of grace—one must either reject the reasoning from the foundational a priori to the theistic argument, or reject the foundational a priori itself.

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CHAPTER III A Critical Evaluation of The Six Foundational

A Priori Truths of Hartshorne’s System1 We shall, in this chapter, critically discuss the merits and weaknesses of Hartshorne’s metaphysical system as we have explicated it thus far. Where appropriate we shall offer a reconstruction and/or supplementation of his system. Our critique shall proceed in the same point by point order in which we elucidated the points in the preceding two chapters. This critical evaluation shall lay the groundwork for our evaluation of the view of God arrived at via Hartshorne’s theistic arguments. First A Priori: “Something exists” We have already considered in some detail objections against Hartshorne’s most fundamental candidate for the status of a priori truth: the statement “something exists.” We have argued that Hartshorne is correct in holding that existence as such is necessary. This does not necessarily mean that our cosmos, or any cosmos, or anything in any cosmos, is necessary. It simply means that something is necessary. We shall in fact subsequently argue that it is only the one necessary being, God, who is necessary. Beyond this, I have no further defense to make on behalf of this candidate for the status of a priori truth. Second A Priori: “The Concrete/Abstract Distinction” Is the Abstract “Contained in” the Concrete? The first difficulty which must be raised in regard to Hartshorne’s understanding of the concrete/abstract distinction and the relation between them is that it seems to assume the structure of reality rather than render it intelligible. If all “transcendentals” are simply abstractions from concrete realities, if universals have no reality over and above the concrete realities which “contain” them, then these “transcendentals” cannot explain the ontological structure of the concrete realities. They are descriptive only, not prescriptive. Hartshorne might respond, as we have seen him do against Neville, that because order is a priori it needs no further explanation. Order is simply a necessary abstract feature of things, and that is all the justification it needs. I have conceded that order is a priori, and that a priori truths are, in principle, self-explanatory, but for this very reason I maintain that order as such could not be a mere abstraction. A priori truths prescribe what structure reality must have, and thus cannot be reduced to descriptive generalizations (viz., abstractions from the concrete). A de facto reality governs nothing. The normativity of these transcendentals, I thus maintain, requires that they are in some sense ontologically independent from the concrete realities they explain. Only as such can they be rendered intelligible. Perspectivalism A second difficulty concerning the categories of concreteness and abstraction in Hartshorne is that they are spoken of as being absolute distinctions. Hartshorne, throughout his writings, holds that there is an absolute level of concreteness, from which everything else is an abstraction. Thus his whole metaphysical enterprise is an attempt to locate and describe the “ultimate level of concreteness.”

1 The section on ‘dispositions’ in Ch. 3 is the heart and soul of Greg’s thesis. I’ve kept pretty much all of it in the summary because of its importance.

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The question which must be raised, however, is whether this concept of “ultimate concreteness” or “unqualified determinateness” adequately renders our experience of reality intelligible. We shall consider this in more details when we evaluate Hartshorne’s concept of atomistic creativity , but a more general word is in order here. As Justus Buchler and Stephen Ross have effectively argued, it seems that determinateness and indeterminateness are relative or perspectivally contingent concepts. It seems that whether a reality is concrete or abstract, determinate or relatively indeterminate, is contingent upon the perspective from which it is being interacted with. And, Buchler and Ross argue, there is no “ultimate” perspective which can define any reality as “absolutely” determinate or indeterminate. The meaning of determinacy and indeterminacy, of concreteness and abstractness, then, is therefore perspectivally contingent. In this light, we must ask for some justification of Hartshorne’s contention that there is an ultimate level of concreteness, of determinate reality. Why suppose that there is one unequivocal, non-relative and unqualified level of concreteness which characterizes actuality “as such”? Our phenomenological experiences, for example, are, in every meaningful sense of the term, concrete. We experience the corporeal world as determinate. The world, in other words, is definite relative to our faculties of experience. But, of course, physics tells us that our phenomenological experiences are, from the perspective of atomic and sub-atomic events which constitute the reality we experience, abstract generalities. Our sensed world is thus, in a sense, indefinite relative to the world’s atomistic activity (or better, relative to an interest in the world’s atomistic activity). Indeed, as we shall later argue in more detail, the conception of a phenomenological entity as being “really” a highly complex conglomeration of atomistic occasions is, from our ordinary perspective, what is the abstraction. An entity is indeed such a complex conglomeration, but it is also a real whole, and this latter is more immediately real to us than the former. Or, to state it differently, “definite” and “indefinite” derive their unequivocal meaning from the definite and indefinite aspects of our phenomenological experience. We apply these categories to realms outside of common human experience only analogically, and only by abstracting elements from our ordinary experience. Thus, while agreeing that the statement “something exists” implies the statement “something is concrete with abstract features,” we nevertheless add that what is abstract is not necessarily derived from the concrete, and what is abstract or concrete is perspectivally defined (except, we shall argue, in the necessary features of the self-experience of God whose essence is this One’s existence and whose perspective on non-divine reality indexically encompasses all finite contingent perspectives). The Category of Disposition The final, major, difficulty we have with Hartshorne’s second a priori arises from its supposed exclusivity. His supposition is that the necessary structure of experience can be exhaustively accounted for by the categories of the abstract and the concrete. Reality is, according to Hartshorne, rendered intelligible if its necessary features are located in concreteness and abstraction. But this supposition, we now wish to argue, raises some difficult problems for Hartshorne, specifically with regard to the task of rendering becoming intelligible.

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The Problem of Causation Hartshorne agrees with those philosophers who argue that the Humean conception of causality is inadequate. As Ushenko, Weissman, Harre and Madden, as well as numerous others have argued, the Humean conception of causality as simply expressing the de facto sequential uniformity of our experience undermines the rationality of science, the common sense view of the world, and with it, the ordinary language which is used to refer to the causative features of the world (to name just three of its numerous problematic points). The concept of “power to cause” cannot, therefore, be reduced to a mere “promissory note” or phenomenological “if-then” statement without severe undesirable philosophical repercussions. While Hartshorne agrees with this critique, it is not clear to me how his own theory of causation constitutes any significant improvement over Hume’s account. Indeed, it seems his theory of causation is burdened with difficulties similar to, and at least as difficult as, those facing the Humeans. As we have seen, Hartshorne believes that his asymmetrical view of concrete relationality, his view that present experience is constituted by a prehension of a past multiplicity, is sufficient to overcome Hume’s deficiencies. He holds that “causality is crystalized freedom, and freedom is causality in the making.” It is, in other words, the objectified (“crystalized”) nature of previously accomplished actualities itself which, by “offering itself” as data for subsequent prehensions, is causation. When the free creativity of an occasion has been exercised, when its aesthetic aim has been satisfied, its very objectivity, its “publicity,” its availability as material for subsequent experiences of creative synthesis, constitutes its “causation influence” on subsequent occasions according to Hartshorne (and Whitehead). But, we must now ask, does this view of causation really explain anything? Does it render causation any more intelligible than it was on Hume’s account? It does not. Once the entity has been actualized, it is lifeless (“crystalized, “objectified,” “perished”): before the actual entity is actualized, however, it is nothing but an abstract possibility, according to Hartshorne. But abstract possibilities are wholly dependent upon the concrete realities, and thus have no independent reality of their own. They cannot, then, “decide” on (viz., “cause”) what is and is not to be actualized from among the possible alternatives. The obvious question is, how does the crystalized (viz., “perished”) feeling of the past creative occasion influentially pass over to the as yet non-existent feeler of the past? How does the as yet non-actual feeler feel (viz., “prehend”) the now lifeless feeling? And how does this lifeless feeling “cause” the possibility of a given occasion to actualize as that occasion? In short, how does one account for the process of becoming in which reality moves from possibility to actuality? This is precisely the problem of causation. Hartshorne gives what seems to be an explanation:

To explain how something influences an experience, we have only to explain how this something comes to be an object of content of the experience. The answer is simple: the objects come to be experienced just by being there, by being actual and by having a character suitable for objects of a given suitability of actuality, and that is all there is to it. No mechanism is required for experience to be enabled to lay hold of its appropriate objects…It simply is the experience of those objects, by virtue of their natures and its nature, and nothing else whatsoever.

Now there are, I think, a great many paradoxes involved in this passage—such as where are the actual “perished” entities before they are experienced, and where is the experience, or what does it consist of,

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which enables an actual occasion, before it is actual, to “take advantage” of the past actualities. How, in other words, does it “lie in the nature” of a perished past object and non-existent present subject to have the former influence the latter? But the central point to be presently noted in this passage is that this “explanation” is not really an explanation at all. According to Hartshorne, it simply “lies in the nature of things” that past “perished” experiences can influence future (but presently only “possible”) arising experiences. Thus, “no mechanism is required.” But surely this is to beg the whole issue. Hartshorne’s appeal to “the nature” of experience as an “explanation” of the causal efficacy of the experienced past on the experiencing present seems to be little more than this: a repetition of the problem which needs explaining. The Need For The Ontological Category of Disposition Hartshorne’s inability to render causation intelligible is the result of his restriction of the metaphysical categories of reality to concreteness and abstraction. Given this supposition, there is no way to account for how concrete reality intelligibly flows from abstract possibility. First, there is possibility: Then there is actuality. And “no further mechanism is needed.” With such contemporary philosophers as Harre, Madden, Weissman, and Ushenko, it is our argument that without a concept which explications how actuality is “disposed” to arise from here possibility, no intelligible rendition of causation is possible. What Hartshorne (and Hume) lacked, in other words, was an ontological concept of “disposition” or “power.” What is common to this dynamic tradition is precisely what Hume and Hartshorne lack: namely, the above mentioned insight that possibility and actuality are not in themselves sufficient to exhaustively account for reality. What is common to this tradition is the insight that we must postulate the ontological reality of “abiding power” which are neither merely abstract possibilities, nor yet concrete actualities, but which ground both, if becoming reality is to be rendered metaphysically intelligible. As Harre and Madden have argued, to account for the becomingness of reality we must postulate “an ontological tie that binds sequential events together” but which “is not [itself] event-like.” We must, with Process thought, postulate creativity, but we must do so not as a mere abstraction, nor as concrete, nor yet as a wholly indeterminate Creator (Neville). It must, rather, be postulated as a mediating force which is particular and determinate-tending (“disposed to,” “inclined to”) without being actual, yet deficiently determinate (non-actual) without thereby being merely abstract potential. As such, it is what creatively moves being from possibility to actuality, from abstractness to concreteness. It is the “ontological tie that binds.” Dispositions and the Principle of Sufficient Reason The first thing to be said about the reality of dispositions is that they are, most essentially, the necessary and sufficient ground for all causation. Whether or not they must be conceived of deterministically—as necessitating all they explain—shall be dealt with shortly. But presently it will suffice to simply note that they are postulated as distinct and abiding realities to account for the “power” an entity has to interact with other entities in predictable manners. They are the sufficient reason for every movement from possibility to actuality.

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Hartshorne, of course, rejects the supposition that any given instance of concreteness has an exhaustive sufficient reason, which is why his view of causation is so problematic. What is new in each occasion, its exemplification of creativity, is literally there ex nihilo. Incorporeality of Dispositions Dispositions are dynamic realities which are known only in terms of their actual effects. Not being concrete (viz., actual), dispositions “cannot be seen, tasted, touched or smelled. They are quite as intangible a kind of entity as are, say, social relations.” Our inability to “picture” the reality of dispositions has been one of the chief grounds upon which individuals have rejected them. Our inability to “picture” the reality of dispositions has been one of the chief grounds upon which individuals have rejected them. Hume was quite correct in arguing that no one literally “sees” something called “causation” or “a power to cause.” And if one limits their ontology to what is directly and distinctly observable, then, indeed, the reality of dispositions must be denied. But there is no metaphysically or scientifically justifiable grounds for supposing that solid material objects must be the determiner of all our concepts about reality. Indeed, the entire enterprise of quantum mechanics today tells against such a supposition. “Below” (and “above”) the phenomenological level, reality becomes increasingly “unpicturable.” Dispositions, then, are not given in direct sensory perception, but are rather postulated to account for the intelligible structure of all sensory perception. In this sense, they are “transcendental.” The Multifarious Levels of Dispositions As Madden and Harre argue, we must conceive of different levels of dispositions or fields of potentiality. We must first conceive of different levels of dispositions or fields of potentiality. We must first distinguish between “definitional dispositions” and “constitutive dispositions.” A “definitional disposition” may be thought of as that power, or cluster of powers, which defines an entity’s “essence”—that without which an entity would not be the entity that it is. This concept specifies what an entity has to do in relation to other entities to be what it is. These must be invariant throughout the career of the entity. A “constitutive disposition,” in contrast, is a power which an entity may or may not possess and yet be the essential entity that it is. A person may lose their power to speak, but they would nevertheless continue to be a human being. But if they were to somehow have their genetic structure altered, and thereby lose not only their speech, but all power to interact socially, they would not, or most accounts, yet be considered human. Dispositions, though they lack the determinateness of actuality, are, as we have said, nevertheless specific or particular. This alone is what renders them relatively predictable and renders causation intelligible. It is precisely the abstractness and indeterminateness of creativity within the Process framework which hinders it from being metaphysically useful in this area. Rather, creativity must be ontological real, and must be disposed toward being actualized in certain relatively determinate ways. The Abiding Reality of Dispositions The fourth characteristic of dispositions which shall be important to us in what follows is that dispositions “can be exercised over and over again, or not exercised at all.” Definitional dispositions must invariantly constitute and characterize an entity throughout its career, while constitutive

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dispositions may come and go. The reality which abides throughout the career of an entity is dynamic, not static. It is, ultimately, simply the particular way creativity is disposed toward actuality in such and such circumstances. This is a thing’s “essence.” The Creative Spontaneity of Dispositions A final and perhaps most controversial characteristic of the concept of disposition which I shall be arguing for, against Hartshorne, is that they are spontaneously creative. In my view, we may understand them as supplying the sufficient reason for any given event occurring without thereby necessitating, in exact detail, just that event. Leibniz and Edwards, as well as most of the scientific field, have denied this about dispositions or fields of potentiality. For Liebniz, the non-material, non-spatial monad had the entire career of its actualization preprogrammed into it. The entire course of history, then, was simply the working out of the “preestablished harmony” of the countless number of monads which constituted it. So with Edwards, the dynamic disposition which relationally defined a being was created and exhaustively predetermined by God. Hartshorne, in contrast, argues that autonomy implies some degree of spontaneity of “self-creativity, and with this we are inclined to agree. Hartshorne, however, assumes that a reality which would supply the sufficient reason for the becoming of an entity would, at the same time, destroy the entity’s spontaneity, and hence its autonomy. The “character” or “disposition” of an entity cannot, then, be the sufficient reason for the actual entity’s freely becoming the entity it in fact becomes. Rather, it is the becoming of the entity which is the sufficient reason for the abstract character which the “personal ordered series” the entity is a constituent of exemplifies. “Character” is nothing more than “the balance of past acts.” It is “merely a quality of a person’s past actions.” What is more, because each momentary occasion must be free, there can be no abiding ontological reality which endures throughout the career of a personal ordered series and which supplies the sufficient reason for its being what it is. As we have seen, all continuity, all “personal identity,” is abstract. I believe this to be fundamentally misconstrued. This misunderstanding of the self not only undermines our experienced sense of continuity through time; the rejection of the principle of sufficient reason to save freedom renders freedom, by definition, arbitrary and unintelligible. If an act is free only to the extent that no reason or cause can be given for it, then it seems that an act is free only to the extent that it is capricious, unintelligible, and morally irrelevant. Dispositions as Aesthetic Subjective Aims Is there an alternative way of rendering indeterministic freedom, a way which avoids these difficulties, and is not incompatible with a theistic perspective? I believe the concept of disposition furnishes us with such an alternative. As Madden and Harre have argued, dispositions need not be absolutely determinative to function as the sufficient reason for the actions they generate. How is this to be understood? A beginning point is the recognition that the mechanistic (and hence deterministic) models of dispositions which tend to be most useful in science need not be considered ultimate. Their utility, and thus relative validity, can be affirmed, but the very recognition that we are talking metaphorically about an unpicturable reality suggests that no one model need be taken as exhaustively definitive for disclosing the nature of this reality. The legitimacy of models must be contextually determined.

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Thus, if we can locate other areas of life in which the mechanistic model is not the most helpful in disclosing the nature of dispositions as manifested in this area of life, we may, and indeed must, compliment the mechanistic model with another. It is the insight of Whitehead and Hartshorne that there is an aesthetic dimension to all experience which, I believe, can furnish us with another very fruitful model of dispositions. If beauty is indeed a priori, and if becoming is, therefore, essentially a becoming towards “aesthetic satisfaction,” then it is reasonable to construct a model of dispositions which reflects this dimension of reality. I believe that the Process concept of a “subjective aim towards aesthetic satisfaction” furnishes us with just such a model. How can the spontaneity of dispositions be rendered intelligible via the model of an aesthetic subjective aim? Turning our attention to the nature of aesthetic work itself will furnish us with the answer. This should not be surprising either, for, if Whitehead and Hartshorne are correct, in artistic work we find most explicitly what is universally present everywhere: namely, activity driven by an aesthetic “appetition.” Consider, then, the “aesthetic drive,” the “subjective aim,” which motivates a painter to paint a painting. There is an aesthetic experience—an “aesthetic satisfaction”—which the artist is question for, and it is, in an ideal instance, primarily this which motivates her to embark upon her work. This relatively determinate aim, this “directed” or “disposed” creativity, is what supplies the sufficient reason for her particular work. When the work is completed, every aspect of the work can be hypothetically rendered intelligible by reference to this aim which inspired it. But if one now were to ask her whether or not some details of the painting could have been slightly altered in certain ways and yet still have expressed the aesthetic aim she was seeking to fulfill, and if one were to inquire whether or not a slightly different painting might have arrived at the same intensity of aesthetic satisfaction, the answer, it seems, would be yes. There was, within parameters set by the “subjective aim,” more than one way the aim could have been satisfied, which is to say that alternative paintings could have had this same aim as their sufficient reason. The disposition of creativity which constituted her subjective aim was relatively determinate, but not deterministic. In other words, even if we could have known exactly what the subjective aim was prior to its actualization, we still would not have been able to predict in exact detail what the work which satisfies this aim would have been like. But it would have been known that any of the possible variables allowed for by the aesthetic aim (viz., which fall within the parameters defined by the aim) would have had their sufficient reason in this initial subjective aim. Thus, there is spontaneity, but there is no de facto unintelligibility. We can now summarize our argument. With Hartshorne, we agree that the achievement of an aesthetic aim requires spontaneity. The metaphysical conditions for aesthetic creativity and for autonomous individuality—namely, that there is spontaneity—are two sides of the same coin. And, for there to be genuine creative spontaneity, genuine freedom (not just apparent freedom resulting from an ignorance of causes), what is spontaneously produced must be futuristically unpredictable in terms of its exact details. The antecedent conditions which converge upon the subject and collectively constitute this drive toward aesthetic satisfaction cannot determine in exact detail the outcome of the drive.

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But, on the other hand, if this unpredictable spontaneity is to be intelligible, if the principle of sufficient reason is not to be rejected, and if this spontaneity is to be non-capricious, this same spontaneity must be retroactively intelligible. The aesthetic model of disposition we are here arguing for seems to accomplish just this. It renders creative acts futuristically unpredictable but retroactively intelligible. It thereby fulfills Ross’ requirement for intelligible spontaneity by “circumscribing without determining” the act it explains, and it does this without necessitating either the postulation of an indeterminate world totality (Ross), an indeterminate Creator (Neville), or an unintelligible self-creation ex nihilo (Hartshorne). This ontologically grounded dispositional understanding of aesthetic subjective aims sets the parameters of intelligibility for a future act or event without necessitating the totality of this act or event. It preserves the openness of the future while articulating the aesthetic dimension of reality just as the Process concept of an aesthetic subjective aim does. But this reconstructed understanding of “disposed creativity” does this while avoiding the many difficulties with causation which plagues the Process metaphysical schema. Third A Priori: “Experience Occurs” (Psychicalism) Having critically discussed Hartshorne’s second candidate, we may now turn to this third: namely, the statement “experiences occur.” We shall do this by discussing two objections to Hartshorne’s psychicalism, considering Hartshorne’s response to these objections, and then refuting his responses. And we shall end by again supplementing Hartshorne’s view of experience with an a priori element which we deem lacking in his account. The Superfluity of Universal Subjectivity The Objection It seems, one might argue, that experience is not a priori, for we can understand the nature of sub-human occasions without supposing that they have any sort of subjectivity. Indeed, it seems we can understand many human occurrences without the use of this category. What is more, no one (including Hartshorne) holds that such things as plants, rocks, and mountains have a subjective center. Phenomenological wholes, according to Hartshorne, are “mindless”—they have no distinct subjective center—but each ultimate constituent of the whole, he argues, is nevertheless “mind-like.” We have already called into question the notion of an “ultimate constituent” or “ultimate level of concreteness.” Only on the arbitrary supposition that the smallest constituents of a phenomenological whole are “more real” (viz.., alone actual) can psychicalism be maintained. But even beyond this, we need to ask why we cannot understand the constituents of (say) a rock as being rock-like. We seem to be unable to understand what it is to be a rock without an appeal to any subjectivity. Why cannot we understand the rock’s constituents in the same fashion? It seems, therefore, that one may accept the “principle of continuity” and yet reject psychicalism. According to this objection, the understanding of matter is to be seen as being analogous to our unconscious moments, not our conscious experience. The intelligibility of the material world within this view is seen largely as the intelligibility of an unconscious, subjective structure. Its movement is largely the movement of unconscious “twitches.” “Matter,” in short, is experienced by another, but it is not itself an experience.

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A Dispositional-Ordinal Interpretation of Autonomy One final element of our rebuttal of Hartshorne’s response to the objection that the supposition of universal subjectivity is superfluous consists in the fact that an account of the relative autonomy, and hence of the creativity, of individuality can be provided without appealing to universal subjectivity. There is, it seems, no problem inherent in the notion of a disposition which creatively generates spontaneous features, but which does not produce an experiential subject. Could such a disposition be described as an aesthetic subjective aim? Would this view accord with the insight that reality has a fundamental aesthetic dimension? The answer, I believe, is yes, provided we keep in mind that we are speaking metaphorically, not literally. An unconscious entity could be conceived of as constituted by an internal drive to a particular actuality (leaving room for spontaneous details) which, like all actualities, is what it is by virtue of its relationship with other actualities. Its defining feature, however, would not be a subjective experience of aesthetic satisfaction, but a contribution to the aesthetic satisfaction of others. It has an aesthetic role to play within the ordered matrix of being, but its role is not that of experiencing aesthetic satisfaction: its role is rather to contribute to the satisfaction of others (viz., conscious being). As with our sleeping twitches, such a reality is understood by being known, not by the fact that it, like us, knows. Thus, we may say that what all beings, experiential or non-experiential, have in common is not that they are experiential centers, but that they are essentially dispositions towards an actualization which is defined by a generally determinate aesthetic role to play in relation to other actualizations. This role may, from the perspective of aesthetic experience, be strictly contributive (“matter”), or both contributive and receptive (experiencing subjects). In saying this we are, I believe, essentially agreeing with Ross that what is most fundamental to all being is not subjectivity, but perspectivity. While we can, I have argued, have some intelligible idea of a reality which does not exemplify experience (viz., the past, phenomenological wholes, twitches in our sleep), it is most difficult to see how we could arrive at a coherent idea of what a perspectiveless entity would be. Whatever is, is related, and, hence, it necessarily is constituted as a perspective on a relation. Thus, to be is, according to Ross (following Buchler), to be an ordered related convergence of constitutive related convergences which collectively constitute a unique “perspectival center” on being, a unique “vantage point,” an “ordered loci of relations” or centered “unitariness in a given location.” In this way the relative autonomy of individuals can be articulated without encumbering oneself in the problematic notion of causation and the arbitrary, non-perspectival view of concreteness in Process thought. We shall see that this alternation in Hartshorne’s psychicalism in the direction of a disposition ordinal theory shall have significant repercussions in our reconstruction of Hartshorne’s view of God in Part II. Experience Entails and Experiencer We have thus far argued that experience is a restrictive concept, and thus its exemplification or non-exemplification is contingent creatures is a contingent matter. But a further important criticism must be raised against Hartshorne’s view of the nature of experience. Hartshorne, we have seen, argues that experience is all that is concretely real. There is, therefore, no subject which “has” an experience. Rather, concrete experiences “have” an abstract subject. “The abiding ever-identical agent is an

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abstraction.” But this seems, at best, counter-intuitive. Indeed, it is at least questionable whether we can have any coherent conception of an experience without an experiencer. The very idea of an experience seems to entail the notion of a relational interplay between an experiential subject and another. In Hartshorne’s scheme, however, there is no “interplay” between an experiencer and what is experienced, thus producing a distinct experience. Rather, the experience of an object constitutes, without remainder, the concrete subject experiencing. Nothing or no one “feels” the feeling of the past. The novel feeling of the past is all there is. All of our phenomenological experiences of the world seem to negate this view. It is, we would argue, only a predefined reductionistic understanding of what is “truly real” and what is “abstract” super-imposed upon our phenomenal experience which could call our ordinary intuition into question. Hartshorne attempts to explain our experience of reality by abstracting himself out of the datum which needs explaining. It is, on this score, he, not his opponents, who has committed the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” And one of the results of this error, we now see, is that his understanding of experience as subjectless is misconceived. Fourth A Priori: “The Asymmetricality of Relationality” (Asymmetrical Relations Occur) We may now turn to a critical examination of the fourth foundational statement of Hartshorne’s system: the statement “asymmetrical relations occur.” As we have seen, this statement expresses Hartshorne’s conviction that concreteness is characterized only by asymmetrical relations, all symmetrical relations being understood to be abstract. We raise three objections against this position; the first calls into question Hartshorne’s logical argument for this position, the second is raised against his view of concreteness, arguing against Hartshorne that actuality can be symmetrical related, and the third raises questions about his view of the temporality of concreteness, specifically addressing problems implicit in his understanding of the way the present “contains” the past. Symmetrical Relationality and the Phenomenologically Concrete Even more important for our purposes than the logical issue just reviewed is the issue of whether or not Hartshorne is correct in maintaining that an accurate analysis of “concreteness as such” requires that only asymmetrical relationality be seen as concrete. As we shall subsequently see, Hartshorne’s answer to this question ultimately turns out to be crucial throughout his own construction of the doctrine of God. We shall see that if Hartshorne is correct in his view of concreteness as necessarily asymmetrically related, then by metaphysical necessity God cannot be antecedently actual and internally relational. We shall, however, presently argue that Hartshorne is mistaken is mistaken in this contention. Symmetrically Related Concreteness The view that concreteness is necessarily asymmetrically relational is, I believe, inextricably tied up with the reductionistic view that what is alone concrete is what all entities can ultimately be reduced to. The view that all things, including God, are “ultimately” indivisible experiential moments of temporal processes asymmetrically related to antecedent data is the result of methodologically assuming that what is “really” real is to be discovered by reducing all phenomenological entities to their smallest constituents. This is evident, I believe, by virtue of the fact that at a phenomenological level we clearly do experience symmetrical relationality. We experience the world and the self as simultaneously given and mutually defining.

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In Hartshorne’s view the mutually defining encounter with “the other” at a phenomenological level is abstract. As we have seen, there are no concrete symmetrical relations between contemporaries. All concrete relations are internal (viz., constituent of) the present experiencer, but external to the past being experienced. Thus, what “really” goes on in an “I-Thou” encounter is that one society of actual occasions synthesizes the other just-past society, and this other society of actual occasions then synthesizes the now-past society of occasions which had just experienced it. According to Hartshorne, our conscious awareness is too dull to pick up this moment by moment asymmetrical exchange, and thus the relation seems to be symmetrical. But “in fact” this symmetricality represents only the abstract features of the truly concrete asymmetrical relation. We have already had occasion to criticize this reductionistic program. Buber essentially agrees with our former analysis when he argues (pace Hartshorne) that it is the attempt to reduce all symmetrical relations to asymmetrical relations which, in truth, constitutes the abstraction. Concrete reality, he argues, is to be found in the present reciprocal relation. Buber, like Merleau-Ponty, has done us the service of showing the necessity of preserving the ontological integrity of phenomenological wholes. They cannot be explained away as abstractions except by a misconstrued process of philosophy which itself wrongly abstracts from them, and defines what is “ultimately real” in the light of this abstraction. It is, we again see, Hartshorne, and not the phenomenologists, who commits the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” We cannot, however, go all the way with Buber either. His view is essentially as non-perspectival as is Hartshorne’s. Because he holds that only the symmetrical I-Thou relation is truly concrete, he seems to view all asymmetrical relationality as being abstract. The awareness of an “I” which is over against the world as an “It” is, he argues, a relative abstraction. Thus, the asymmetrical relation of the present to the past or the notion of causality which results from this I-It relation also is an abstraction. In a sense, Buber, in his own way, falls into the same reductionistic trap as Hartshorne, but in an opposite direction in that he is searching for what is “deepest in our experience.” My contention is that while Hartshorne is correct in holding that relationality or order as such is a priori, both he and Buber are wrong in supposing that either asymmetrical or symmetrical relationality fundamentally constitutes this order. The order of our experience includes asymmetrical and symmetrical aspects. The perspective which constitutes this experience also constitutes what will be taken as concrete or abstract and what will be taken as symmetrical or asymmetrical. Can the Present Contain the Past? A third and final criticism which must be raised concerning Hartshorne’s view of the relationality of experience has to do with his notion that the present exhaustively contains the past. As we have seen, the concrete present is asymmetrically related to the past, for present experiences contain the experiences of the past, but past experiences are in no way conditioned by this subsequent inclusion in the present. Past “feelings” are repeated in the present, but in a creatively new context. But, for Hartshorne, the past is real in the present, and this is what accounts for the relative stability of the temporal process. “What persists from the past into the present is the past itself.” For Hartshorne nothing is lost in the process of temporality. Temporality is purely “enrichment, addition—not loss or destruction.” This is not, of course, to suggest that the past is in every present

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instance perfectly contained in the present. It is, as we shall see in the following chapters, ultimately only God who prehends and thus contains the past perfectly. All “lower” entities only approximate the divine inclusivity with their constitutive prehensions. But it is nevertheless true that nothing is lost in the transition from the past to the present according to Hartshorne. The feelings which integrally constitute the becoming of any present occasions live on forevermore, at least in the infinite memory of God. One rather obvious difficulty which can be raised against this view, however, is that it would seem to blur the distinction between the past and present. If the “feeling” constitutive of the past occasion is carried over without loss to the “feeling” constitutive of the present occasion, it becomes unclear as to where the past ends and the present beings. Indeed, the position seems to imply that the process of reality is ultimately one single ever-evolving feeling. If no feeling ever perishes, but is simply included into a more comprehensive feeling, then is not this conclusion unavoidable? A corollary difficulty is that it seems that the distinction between knower and known breaks down if the known is incorporated, without remainder, into the known. Hartshorne addresses this difficulty by recalling Whitehead’s distinction between the “subjective” and “objective” forms of feeling. “A past occurrence is in itself a subject, but as known it is object.” A present occasion therefore “feels how the other [past occasion] felt,” but not “as the other [occasion] felt.” Thus, to cite one of Hartshorne’s examples, if we have placed trust in a fallacious hypothesis, God shall contain this truth by knowing that we have trusted the hypothesis: but God does not in Godself trust the hypothesis. God does not feel our trust as we feel it. There are, I believe, at least three problems with this position: two of them are philosophical, one theological. First, neither Hartshorne nor Whitehead explain how the transition from the subjective form to the objective form of a feeling is made. How can a feeling endure when its subjective experiential center is gone (viz., “perished”)? What accounts for the “superjective” nature of past experiences or the “vectoral” nature of present experiences? How can the dead past be appropriated by the living present? A second difficulty with Hartshorne’s distinction between the objective and subjective forms of feeling is that it does not yet account for his view of temporality as being sheer addition. As both Whitehead and Hartshorne (at times) admit, the “living immediacy” of a past occasion is irretrievably lost. But if this must be granted, how can the present occasion experience in a new mode the same feeling which constituted a past experience? Even setting aside for the present the first criticism raised above concerning the mechanism for this prehension, one must indeed wonder how one can subtract subjectivity from a feeling and yet have the same feeling. I must agree with Peters, Neville, and others that either Hartshorne must admit that a good deal is lost in the temporal process, or he must revise his epistemology. The final criticism which must be raised against Hartshorne’s view of the present’s apprehension of the past is theological in nature. In Hartshorne’s scheme, God, like all other occasions, knows and experiences only the past. Because all concrete relationality is, in his view, asymmetrical, God cannot experience us as we experience. Nor can God know us in the process of our immediate becoming. All of God’s experience is of the past; all of God’s actual knowledge is hindsight. And as we have just seen, this entails ultimately that God cannot know and experience everything. God cannot, at least, know and experience our subjective experiences in their subjectivity. Indeed, as to the subjective immediacy of our experiences, we are wholly external to and shut off from God.

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This conception of God runs directly counter to the religious intuition, and indeed the revelational truth, that “God is present to the subjective reality of things, closer to them than they are themselves as their creative ground.” The sense of God as immanent in the very subjective immediacy of every subject and the revealed truth of God as the ever present Creator who constitutes the essence of all things by God’s ever creative Word is a datum not to be easily dismissed by any philosophical system—certainly not one which understands itself as standing within the Christian tradition. Fifth A Priori: “Creative Synthesis” We shall in Part II see the full significance of the criticisms and revisions we have made thus far in Hartshorne’s system, as all of these foundational statements play a significant role in Hartshorne’s a priori construction of God. But while each candidate for the status of a priori truth contributes in its own way to Hartshorne’s a priori theistic view, none serves a more explicitly central role than does Hartshorne’s fifth foundational statement: the statement “creative synthesis occurs.” Our criticism and revisions of this statement, then, shall be of great importance when we turn to critique and revise Hartshorne’s di-polar theism. The Problem of an Antecedent Multiplicity The first difficulty which must be raised in relation to the fifth foundational statement of Hartshorne’s system concerns the fact that it requires an antecedent multiplicity of objectified data for its conceivability. Clearly no present “creative synthesis” could occur unless there existed an antecedent multiplicity of objectified data to be synthesized. There are, however, two related difficulties with this postulate. First, while Hartshorne makes a good case for the a priori nature of multiplicity as such (a pure unity being equivalent to nothingness), he nowhere proves that this multiplicity must be antecedent to a present experience. The closest he comes to making an argument for this position is found in his article “Whitehead’s Theory of Prehension,” when he writes: “The subject prehends not one but many prior actualities. (Otherwise the world would have temporal but not spatial structure.)” This argument does not succeed in the context of Hartshorne’s own system, however, for Hartshorne, unlike Leibniz, holds that each experiential occasion is itself extended. Mental states themselves do have a spatial structure. And this admittance, it seems, undermines the force of this argument for the necessity of an antecedent multiplicity. Secondly, once we have rejected the ontological preference for smallness and hence the notion that only asymmetrical relationality is concrete, and once we have recognized the truth that the conceivability of an experience requires the suppositions of an antecedent experiencer as we have done, we no longer have any reason to maintain the metaphysical necessity that each experience must temporally follow the object of its experience. If our previous revisions of Hartshorne’s third and fourth foundational statements be correct, there are no grounds for insisting that every “real” experience, or every “concrete” relation, must be a synthesis of an antecedent multiplicity of objectified experiences. There are, of course, perspectives on reality for which this view is true. This may, for example, be an accurate empirical observation from (say) a neurological perspective about the way creatures neurologically and physiologically interact with the world. But it is not an a priori metaphysical necessity,

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for there is no reason to maintain that what is true neurologically is “truer” than what is true phenomenologically, and phenomenologically, relations can be symmetrical. What is an a priori metaphysical necessity is that there is an ordered multiplicity. But whether and/or how this multiplicity exemplifies symmetrical and/or asymmetrical relationality is we contend, a contingent matter, and thus can only be determined empirically, and from some contingent, limited, perspective. Already one significant feature of Hartshorne’s fifth foundational statement for his a priori construction of a view of God should be clear. If experience is a metaphysical necessity, and all experience is a creative synthesis of an antecedent multiplicity of objectified data, then, clearly, God and the world must be coeternal partners, necessarily existent and necessarily asymmetrically related throughout all time. The world cannot have a beginning, and cannot be wholly contingent upon a Creator. Because of the way experienced is defined, the God-world relation lies “beyond the accident of God’s will.” While the precise way non-divine reality exists is influenced by the divine will and is contingent, the fact that there is a contingent non-divine reality is in no way the result of God’s will. It is a metaphysical, and thus eternal, necessity. The Christian doctrine of “creation ex nihilo” is thus impossible. So also, then, is the Christian doctrine of God as self-sufficient unto Godself completely impossible. The supposed a priori structure of rationality, and hence being, requires this. The Problem of Atomistic Creativity Arbitrary Reductionism We have already had occasion to refer critically to Hartshorne’s reductionistic definition of concreteness. This criticism may now be expanded in full. We might succinctly phrase our present objection in Whiteheadian terms by asking why actual entities are “more real” than the nexus they are constituents of. The concrete/abstract distinction must be understood perspectivally. There is no one “ultimate” level of concreteness over against which everything else is an abstraction. “Concrete” and “abstract” can never be understood without perspectival qualification in all their contingent applications. The relative continuity and wholeness of (say) enduring human experiences, then, is (pace Hartshorne) as concrete as anything we can give meaning to. Phenomenological wholes cannot be reduced to their constituent parts. The Ontological Parity of Being and Becoming Once we have recognized the arbitrariness of reducing actuality to atomistic occasions, we are in a position to recognize the arbitrariness of regarding becoming as being “more fundamental” than being, for this later supposition is a consequence of the first. Once we have admitted the ontological parity of individual occasions and nexus, we have no good a priori or a posteriori reason for regarding either being or becoming as being metaphysically fundamental to the other. Both must be prespectivally defined. Correlatively, there no longer remains any ground for regarding all becoming as concrete and all being as abstract. Both being and becoming are capable of being exemplified concretely and abstractly. And, in

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fact, they are capable of being so at the same time in regard to the same subject or event, but from different perspectives. As we shall see more fully in our exposition below, an adequate metaphysical account of the structure of experienced reality requires the acceptance of the ontological parity of being and becoming. The point made here is that neither becoming nor being is conceivable alone. As we argued earlier in connection with Hartshorne’s view of experience, the notion of a subjectless experience, or a subjectless becoming (“pure becoming”), is unintelligible. Something must have the experience, and something must become, and neither is intelligible without the other. The relatively stable phenomenological wholes are thus not “really” abstract features of “more real” atomistic occasions—unless perhaps one is speaking from the perspective of, and playing the language game of, a physicist in which case there are different definitions of what “stable,” “concrete,” and “abstract” etc. mean. From the perspective of ordinary experience, however, they are “really” (viz., “concretely”) stable wholes. The language of event pluralism, then, is not “the ultimate language.” There is no “ultimate language”: there are only perspectivally relevant languages. The acceptance of the ontological parity of becoming and being frees us from a number of entanglements of which Process philosophy has not been able to rid itself. One of these has been the problem of accounting for the experience of the self’s continuity through time. It is, then, to this problem that we now turn. The Problem of the Enduring Self Hartshorne’s view of all concreteness and creativity as atomistic creates for him a problem of accounting for the phenomenologically conscious continuity of the human self (and by analogy, sub and super-human selves) through time. The problem, in a nutshell, is this: if the enduring “I” of human experience is simply an abstraction from what twenty or more different selves each second have in common, how can “I” experience change? If all “I” am is an abstraction—and, as Hartshorne admits, abstractions are in themselves unconscious—how can “I” experience time? How can “I” distinguish the present from the past and future if there is no real enduring self which pulls together the past, present, and future—a self which in some measure actually transcends the perpetual flux of its own momentary experiences? Indeed, if the extent of my actuality does not go beyond the momentary “drops of experience” which arise and perish every fraction of a second, how can I even meaningfully ask the question of time? Once again we see that it is the Process thinkers, not their opponents, who seem to have committed the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Hartshorne abstracts from the ordinary flow of human experience the many minute alterations which comprise this experience. And these, by an arbitrary move, he labels “actual,” while the connectedness of our ordinary experience he labels “abstract.” But from the perspective of our ordinary experience and our ordinary ways of speaking, surely it is the atomistic reduction of our continuous experience to discrete quantum jumps which constitutes the abstraction. Our actual experience is not that of a choppy fluctuation of a myriad of independent quantum jumps. It is rather, the experience of a relatively enduring self in interaction with a relatively enduring world. But does our rejection of the Process view of the enduring self as abstract necessitate that we fall back into a form of dualism, separating the self in a Platonic fashion between that which is permanent and that which is impermanent? Is there an alternative? Is there a view of the “soul,” of the enduring experiential self, which is neither concrete nor merely abstract? The question is, I believe, closely related to our earlier raised questions concerning the possibility of conceiving of the essence of determinate

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entities in such a way that real becoming is neither denied nor placed “over” real being; of conceiving of the essence of determinate entities in such a way that the continuity of the past and present is retained without making the present part of the same “feeling” as the past; and of conceiving of the essence of determinate entities in such a way that God can be said to constitute the essence of the entity, without destroying the entity’s relative autonomy. And our answer shall, in each case, be the same: we shall argue that our dispositional-perspectival ontology provides the categories needed to accomplish this task. If we accept the ontological parity of being and becoming, then, we shall argue, we can, with metaphysical justification, view God as God has traditionally been viewed within the Christian Church, as being the fullness of being and becoming within God’s own social triunity ad intra. As shall be argued in detail throughout Part II, the way is now open for a view of God in which God’s being consists in God’s becoming: and this in such a way that God does not need the world. Its existence, and its salvation, are matters of grace, not necessity. Creativity as Causa Sui The Paradox of Subjectless Becoming A third criticism which must be raised against Hartshorne’s understanding of creativity concerns his notion that every actual occasion is causa sui. The problem involved in this concept can be succinctly state as follows: what or who prehends the past data as a creative synthesis? It cannot be the past actualities, for they are the data which are prehended, and, as we have seen, “no experience can have itself as its own datum.” What is more, they are not objectified, meaning that they are no longer experiences, and thus cannot, by definition, be subjects now prehending. But neither can any present actuality perform the prehension, for actuality, on Hartshorne’s and Whitehead’s scheme, is precisely what results from the prehension. There is, then, no real subject antecedent to the prehensive occasion which may “create itself” via its prehension. So, the obvious question is who or what does the prehending? If Hartshorne’s “present self” was not yet “real,” who or what was the “I” which “acted” to bring the present self about? If the “present self” was “not the cause of the act,” who acted? The past self? No. It is merely the objectified data which is creatively synthesized to form the present self. But then who or what does the synthesizing? The possible future self? No. Possibilities cannot themselves decide (“select”) their own actualization. But there seems to be no alternative within the categories of Hartshorne’s system. Free Creativity We have thus far seen that Hartshorne’s asymmetrical, reductionistic, and self-begetting understanding of creativity has raised insurmountable problems for his system in regard to the possibility of rendering the dynamic and stable nature of experienced reality intelligible. We shall now see that it raised difficulties in rendering human freedom intelligible as well. Freedom and Capriciousness Because the creative synthesis which constitutes every actual occasion must be “free,” which for Hartshorne means that it must transcend the antecedent causal conditions from which it arises, the concrescing occasion must be, to some extent, uncaused. Causation and freedom are strictly antithetical terms for Hartshorne. But rational explanation, according to Hartshorne, always operates by tracing causes. Thus, to the extent that an occasion has “created itself” freely, it has, by logical necessity,

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created itself capriciously. “Freedom” and “capriciousness,” in other words, are pretty much synonymous in Hartshorne’s metaphysical system. This point is not simply an inferred feature of Hartshorne’s system; he explicitly states that freedom is synonymous with capricious spontaneity. A present occasion is on his view, “free” only because “[n]o reason can be given from which…[it] can be deduced.” There are, I believe, at least three fundamental problems with this view, each which greatly affects our understanding of God’s sociality. The first is that this view entails the rejection of the principle of sufficient reason as a universal principle. The second is that it runs counter to our ordinary experience of freedom, and thus our ordinary use of the word “freedom.” And the third is that this view cannot account for moral responsibility. We shall address these problems in their respective order. A Dispositional Account of Moral Freedom We have thus far criticized Hartshorne’s atomistic, self-determining, and capricious view of creativity, arguing rather that his understanding entails a rejection of the principle of sufficient reason, that is does not square with our ordinary sense of freedom, and that it cannot account for the experience of a moral dimension of our experience. However, it is not self-evident that our own dispositional view of the self, and thus of freedom, constitutes any improvement in accounting for this last aspect of our experienced freedom. While we have, we think, rendered an open future intelligible with our concept of intelligible spontaneity, it is not yet clear how this openness itself explains the moral dimension of our experience of freedom. We must, therefore, presently inquire into the question of whether or not our dispositional view of the self can render moral responsibility intelligible. This crucial problem is admittedly exceedingly difficult, whatever position one espouses. But I believe that an aesthetic ontologically abiding dispositional view of the self accomplishes the most in the directly of rendering the moral dimension of freedom intelligible with the least severe difficulties. We shall argue that it, at the very least, is an improvement over Hartshorne’s view. Pannenberg On Moral Responsibility Because of the relative similarities of our dispositional view of the self and Pannenberg’s eschatological view of the self’s essence, it shall prove fruitful to work towards a solution to this problem with the aid of his reflections on this subject. Pannenberg argues that the dilemma of locating a moral dimension in the self’s ability to choose between alternatives is utterly unsolvable. We disagree with his contention that the notion of a liberum arbitrium is merely an erroneously construed abstraction from the concrete human situation, since we hold, with Hartshorne, that individual realities are characterized by some degree of genuine spontaneity: dispositions are only generally determinative. Nevertheless, we agree with Pannenberg that this spontaneity, this intelligible contingency, does not in and of itself constitute what we normally call “freedom.” Nor can it alone account for free moral responsibility. What is more, as Pannenberg points out, this spontaneity is not at all what the New Testament calls “freedom.” The key to understanding the nature of moral responsibility, according to Pannenberg, is to realize that responsibility is not based on being “the author or originator” of an act. The common suppositions that an agent is responsible for an act only because he or she “caused” the act is, he believes, a mistaken

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notion. That an individual produced a certain act is, in his view, actually morally irrelevant: it can, for example, be used to excuse the actor as well as to blame her or him. Rather, Pannenberg argues that responsibility has to do with the essential identity of an agent. Moral responsibility does not arise because of a heteronomous imperative which is imposed on an agent from without—an authority which the individual either acts in accord with or violates, thus determining the rightness or wrongness of a particular act. Rather, responsibility has to do with “the moral demand” which is constitutive of an individual’s essential identity, an immanent imperative which requires that “they acknowledge their behavior as their own.” It is the eschatologically defined essence of individuals which provides the “ought” of their existence. It is this which grounds the moral dimension of our experience. It is at the point of this teleologically defined reality that the classical Humean gap between “is” and “ought” is overcome. In this light it may be said that “freedom” is the ability of a person to accept this eschatological destiny. This position is precisely what is required by a dispositional view of the human self. With Pannenberg, we define the “soul” of humans in their disposition towards a future actualization—as their essential creative telos, their “subjective aim.” We differ from Pannenberg, however, in that we locate the ontological ground of this drive in an antecedent ontological reality, whereas Pannenberg locates it in the future. One might say that in our view an antecedent reality “pushes” whereas in Pannenberg’s thought the future “pulls.” It is principally our understanding of the antecedent fullness of God’s being, to be discussed in Part II, as well as the paradoxes involved in Pannenberg’s own eschatological ontology, which dictates our difference from him. But in any case, the views come to essentially the same thing with regard to the issue of rendering the moral dimension of human experience intelligible. The “ought” arises from the “is” of human futurity as experience in the present. The Dispositional Essence of Humanity and Sin The equation of freedom with capriciousness in Hartshorne’s philosophy not only prevents him from rendering our normal experience of freedom and our experience of moral responsibility intelligible: it also entails that his view of sin is radically counter intuitive as well as counter-Christian. The root of evil, according to Hartshorne, is identical to the root of all good; namely, creative freedom. The spontaneity which allows for each occasion to be “self-creative” also necessitates that there is always the possibility (indeed, the inevitability) that the “aims” of diverse occasions will collide with each other. Thus, “[r]isk and opportunity go together.” That a possibility of collision was in fact actualized, however, is the result of no single person’s (or occasion’s) mal intent. They are “not intended by anyone.” Rather evil and suffering are the result of misfortune, bad luck. Given the inherent freedom of all occasions, there will always be some chance “escape from order”: from such misfortune is the evil in the world produced. Pannenberg discusses the nature of sin in a manner which does justice to the human experience of moral evil as well as the Christian view of sin. He locates the nature of sin in the human proclivity to turn away from our above described divinely ordained eschatological essence. The eschatological constitution of humanity’s essence means that humans are constituted as a drive towards “self-transcendence.” Indeed, this is principally what constitutes our being made in “the image of God,” according to Pannenberg. The “lure” of the future which defines our essential self constitutes us as self-conscious, self-transcendent, and hence “exocentric” beings who can and must objectify themselves. We

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have the possibility, and the essential calling, to step “outside of ourselves” and orientate ourselves to what is fundamentally other than ourselves. But humans also share with all other humans the need to be “centered,” to preserve their lives over against all threats to their distinct existences: in short, to be egocentric. This means, then, that humans are constituted as a tension between their necessary egocentric concerns and their self-transcendent eschatological essence. And it is in this tension that the possibility of sin arises. Sin, then, is “a conflict of human beings with themselves and their own destiny.” It is, as Kierkegaard says, the despairing attempt of the self to ground itself in itself rather than in the divine power which constitutes it. Or as Augustine says, the sinful person is, most fundamentally, “homo incurvatus in se.” It is Pannenberg’s category of “eschatological essence” which allows him to account for sin in a way that is not equivalent to misfortune. It is because of this abiding essence, this self-transcendent aspect of human beings, that sin can be intelligibly portrayed as a fundamental “failure to exist” as authentically human. In contrast to Hartshorne’s thought, there is a “soul” to human persons which abides amidst their ever-changing lives, and it is this “soul” which constitutes the ought of their existence. Though our concept of disposition differs from Pannenberg’s concept of eschatological essence in ways specified earlier, it nevertheless accomplishes the same end as applied to this issue. It renders intelligible a sufficient reason for the moral dimension of human experience: something a system which restricts itself to the categories of concreteness and abstraction cannot do. There is, in our view, a reality which “is,” and which is the “ought” of human existence. This reality is neither identical with the strict actuality of the human subject—for this changes continually as Hartshorne rightly notes: nor is it identical with mere possibilities—for these are contingent upon the actuality of the subject, and as such, cannot be normative over the subject. It is, rather, the dispositional essence of the human subject, the ontologically real and abiding aesthetic subjective aim which most essentially defines their existence. In light [of Pannenberg’s view], “the fall” is viewed as a mythological expression of this proclivity to violate our own true self-identity. The “ideal humanity” was never present in the past: it rather is yet in the future as our true identity. We are, in this sense, “fallen” from the future. There is much to commend in this view. It is, in our estimation, certainly superior to what the categories of Process thought allow. It does not attempt to exhaustively “explain” the mystery of our fallen condition, but at the very least, it puts this condition in a perspective which accords with our own experience and with the Christian proclamation (which a “chance” view cannot do). We are, however, not convinced that this is the only, or even the best, possible avenue available for making the mystery of the fall reasonably coherent. While our own dispositional view of the essence of humanity can utilize much of what Pannenberg has here offered, we shall subsequently argue that a view of dispositions which postulates their antecedent reality can understand the fall in realist-historical terms, and do so with as much, or more, explanatory force as Pannenberg’s thesis has. Our understanding of the multifarious levels of dispositions shall allow us to contrast to Hartshorne’s system, to make sense of the ontological solidarity of humanity “in Adam” and “in Christ,” a dispositional solidarity which conditions every individual human, and a solidarity which, we feel, is presupposed in the Bible (V.iv.5.4, VI.vii.5.4). And our understanding of dispositions as relatively open, as embodying

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genuine spontaneity, shall subsequently allow us to make sense of the counterfactual element implicit in the concept of a fall, something Pannenberg (and Royce) have difficulty doing. Sixth A Priori: “Aesthetic Value” Divergent Multiplicity and Subjective Intensity We have seen that both Whitehead and Hartshorne held that the intensity of an aesthetic experience is contingent upon the variety and divergency of the multiplicity being synthesized in that experience. The intensity of an aesthetic experience (viz., any experience whatsoever) “depends upon contrast, the amount of diversity integrated into an experience.” God, we shall see, is, in Process thought, essentially defined each moment as an unsurpassably intense aesthetic experience, for the experience of the “supreme actual occasion” synthesizes the whole of the diversified just-past world. If this equation of intensity and multiplicity is correct, then there is no possibility of defending a view of God as self-sufficient within Godself. This equation logically necessitates the view that God plus the world is greater than God without the world. Indeed, it requires the view that God without the world is meaningless. God needs the world for a multiplicity of data to synthesize to constitute God’s supreme aesthetic experience. And since being is essentially aesthetic in nature, God’s aesthetic dependency on the non-divine world entails God’s ontological dependency on the world. God’s divine experience is, in this view, “unsurpassable” by any present competing occasion, but it shall be forever surpassed by Godself in each new moment as God synthesizes the world anew. For this new world encompassing creative synthesis will now be synthesized with the accumulated value of all past syntheses, so the total diversity will be greater, and thus the total synthesis with its resultant aesthetic intensity will be greater. The intensity of God’s experience there grows eternally. There is, by definition, no coherent “maximal instance” of aesthetic experience in Hartshorne’s (or Whitehead’s) system. But is it true that aesthetic intensity is necessarily contingent upon a diverse multiplicity? It is perhaps true as a general rule that a more comprehensive and complex multiplicity in unity evokes a more intense aesthetic feeling than does a simple and nearly self-identical multiplicity. But does it follow from this that this is the principal and necessary ingredient in any aesthetic experience? Our aim here, rather, is to simply call into question the Process claim that aesthetic intensity is necessarily and directly connected with the scope and complexity of relations, and the claim that this is an a priori truth, the denial of which results in nonsense. Our claim, in contrast, is that this definition is at best a generally accurate empirical descriptive generalization of how humans experience beauty (and even this is debatable). But it certainly is not a priori. A second question needs to be raised. Even if it be granted that the intensity of an experience is generally connected with the scope and diversity of an experience, does it follow from this that the possibility for increasing the intensity of an experience is endless? Because the possibilities for finite combinations is infinite, does it follow that “[a]n absolute maximum of beauty is a meaningless idea,” meaning by “beauty” here “the experience of beauty”? It seems to me that it does not. While there is, admittedly, no conceivable upper limit to the possible variety of being (for all possible finite complexities are “incompossible”), there is, it seems, a conceivable upper limit to the intensity with which any degree of aesthetic complexity can be enjoyed. There is, I contend, a conceivable acme

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of aesthetic experience. Indeed, the denial of this is what seems inconceivable. We are, in other words, arguing that the mathematical infinitude of finite possibilities does not necessarily correspond to an endless possibility of increasing aesthetic intensity. We never experience an “absolute infinity” of finite complexity, but we can, it seems, at times experience an acme of aesthetic enjoyment. In right moments one can have what might be called a “peak experience,” a delectatious momentary experience in which one’s enjoyment and appreciation of an aesthetic expression or object of nature reaches a zenith. One enjoys (say) a symphony as it progresses each moment, but it may happen that after a certain point it cannot be said that one’s enjoyment increases with each progressing moment. A pinnacle is reached and (perhaps) retained and re-expressed with each progressing moment. Indeed, in the midst of such absorbing experiences, increasing the intensity of the experience may, if the experience is sufficiently intense, be inconceivable to the individual. However much the richness and harmonic complexity of the symphony may increase after one’s acme of “aesthetic satisfaction” has been attained, the enjoyment of the symphony does not, and cannot, increase. One might go farther and argue that if the concept of a supreme (unsurpassable) enjoyment of beauty, like the concepts of supreme goodness, wisdom, love, etc., is intelligible by analogy with our own limited (“non-supreme”) exemplification of these attributes, then the concept of an eternally increasing intensity must be unintelligible. As Hartshorne admits, we have no way of rendering intelligible a concept of supreme goodness, wisdom or love which is at once supreme and yet forever increasing. His theistic arguments shall attempt to show that if these supreme attributes are conceivable, they must be instantiated in a necessary being, God. But once the logical necessity of correlating aesthetic intensity with scope and complexity is denied, it seems that the same must be said about supreme aesthetic enjoyment. Subjective Intensity and Objective Aesthetic Expression We will do well to immediately forestall an obvious objection from a theistic perspective to our argument, an argument which is frequently employed by Process theologians in support of their position. This will not only remove one obstacle from our subsequent reconstruction of Hartshorne’s doctrine of God, but will further lay the groundwork for this reconstruction by articulating the relationship which we perceive to exist between this supposed unsurpassable divine instance of aesthetic enjoyment and the infinite compossibilities of finite relations. The objection is this: it seems that if God is eternally characterized within Godself as an unsurpassable instance of aesthetic enjoyment, then the infinite compossibility of finite relations can mean nothing to God. It seems that if “God can be neither increased nor diminished by what we do,” then “our action, like our suffering, must be in the strictest sense wholly indifferent to him.” It seems that if we do not increase God’s enjoyment, then all talk about “serving God” is meaningless and “our existence is idle.” In short, it may seem that either our existences increase the value of God’s experience, or our existences are of no value to God. In response, I believe a distinction can be made between the “subjective intensity” of an aesthetic experience and its “objective expression.” To attempt to make this distinction clear, we might return to our earlier example of listening to a symphony. Though the intensity of one’s enjoyment of a symphony does not increase once the acme of his or her possible aesthetic satisfaction has been attained, this does

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not render the remainder of the symphony unimportant. Rather, each changing harmonic progression continues to be enjoyed because of the continuance of novel variations it expresses. The aesthetic satisfaction of the listener under ideal conditions is constant (assuming that the acme has been attained and is sustained), but the occasion for its expression and enjoyment is changing—and indeed can, hypothetically, have an infinite variety of forms. Perhaps an analogy which is more helpful in picturing the relationship between aesthetic satisfaction and aesthetic expression in God is that of an ideal artist. We may conceive of a factitious “ideal” artist who always accomplishes works of art so perfect that her aesthetic satisfaction in response to them is always unsurpassably intense. But this perfection, it seems, would in no way imply that all of her works after her first in which her zenith of aesthetic satisfaction was first attained had to be unimportant to her. They would be important, though not as objects to improve her ideal aesthetic satisfaction. Rather, they are valuable to her as novel expressions of this ideal enjoyment. Why, one might ask, would such an artist want to arrive at a new expression of her aesthetic enjoyment if it was already ideal (assuming that this ideal artist would naturally sustain this ideal intensity without further works to produce it)? Would not her first ideal work suffice? Does not the production of new works signify that she is aiming at more intense satisfaction? And by analogy, does not the creation of the non-divine world signify that the divine artist is aiming at a more intense satisfaction? Why would God create the world if God had already (eternally) attained an unsurpassable aesthetic satisfaction within Godself? This answer is, I believe, implicit in Hartshorne and Whitehead’s own views of beauty: the spontaneous expression of an aesthetic intensity is an end in itself. It needs no further justification. Fundamental to Process thought—and many other aesthetic theories as well—is the conviction that beauty is the one aim which by its nature is self-justifying. Indeed, as Kant, von Schiller, Valery and many others have recognized, aesthetic satisfaction is distinctly aesthetic precisely because it is wholly non-utilitarian: it is “purposiveness without purpose,” spieltrieb, a “drive-to-play.” If this is so, then it would seem that the on-going expression of an ideal aesthetic intensity would need no further purpose to explain it or justify it. Our ideal artist would, therefore, enjoy a variety of ways of re-expressing her aesthetic delight, even though these novel re-expressions could only re-express, and not increase, this delight. We may state the matter in a different way, this time in the light of our previously articulated dispositional ontology. Our ideal artist is essentially constituted by the disposition to produce and enjoy with an unsurpassable intensity artistic works. But dispositions, we have argued with Hare and Madden, are not exhausted by their exercise. They are abiding orders of creativity, particularized laws of actualization, structured proclivities of being in its movement from possibility to actuality, and they remain (or at least may remain) even after any given instance of their exercising. What is more, dispositions, aesthetically understood, do not necessitate only one possible outcome. Spontaneity, we have argued for a number of reasons, is an inherent aspect of things. This being the case, we can I believe, now understand why our ideal artist would be motivated to re-express her aesthetic aim and enjoy her aesthetic satisfaction in novel ways, though none of these ways increases the intensity of her (already unsurpassable) satisfaction. Her essential self is defined (at least in part) as a creative becoming towards an aesthetic satisfaction, and the reality of this self-defining law of concrescence abides so long as she exists. Her enduring self-identity, her “essence,” is thus defined by

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a futurity of creativity, and her actuality is defined at any given moment (at least in part) by an unsurpassable intensity of satisfaction resulting from this creativity. Thus, this hypothetical artist cannot but create, and she cannot but enjoy with maximal intensity her creativity, though the precise way she creates and enjoys it is in part spontaneously generated. Her definitional disposition is an end in itself. Correlatively, the creative variety this disposition generates is an end in itself. And, again correlatively, her unsurpassable enjoyment of what her dispositional essence creatively produces is an end in itself. It is all beautiful, and is, as such, its own reason for being. And if Whitehead and Hartshorne are correct about this, we are all something like this ideal artist in every action we perform—and so is God. Summary of Part I We have completed the first Part of our critical evaluation and reconstruction of Hartshorne’s a priori construction of the doctrine of God. In Hartshorne’s view, the assertion of God’s existence, and the assertion of the di-polar conception of God, is also a priori and is, therefore, already implicit in the six foundational statements we have just examined. To modify these foundational statements, then, is already to modify our view of God. We have accepted Hartshorne’s first candidate for an a priori truth; the statement that “something exists.” We have also accepted Hartshorne’s contention that it is necessary that “something is concrete with abstract features” though we have supplemented this view with the contention that a) what is abstract cannot be “contained in” the concrete, but must be normative over it; b) what is concrete and abstract must be perspectivally defined in every contingent instance; and c) the categories of abstractness and concreteness are not themselves sufficient to account for this stability and dynamism of reality: the category of disposition is needed as well. We have rejected Hartshorne’s third candidate for a non-restrictive a priori truth: the statement that “experience occurs.” This, we have argued, is superfluous since an ordinal-dispositional concept of perspectivity can account for the principle of continuity while rendering the autonomy of entities intelligible. We have also argued that psychicalism is ultimately meaningless. And we have argued that where experience does occur, it presupposes the conception of an experiencer. We have argued that while order and relationality are a priori, this need not be characterized at a fundamental level by either exclusively asymmetrical (Hartshorne) or symmetrical (Buber, Oliver) relations. In every contingent instantiation of relationality, what is asymmetrical and symmetrical is contingent and is perspectivally defined. And we have argued that Hartshorne’s fifth candidate for an a priori truth, “creative synthesis occurs,” is erroneously constructed. There is no necessary ground for there being an eternal antecedent multiplicity to an experience; the reductionistic view of concreteness it presupposed is arbitrary and creates a number of problems; the conception of creativity as causa sui is impossible, and creates a number of other insurmountable difficulties; and the view of freedom as capricious is unintelligible. And finally, while we have defended Hartshorne’s view that aesthetic value is a priori, we have argued that his correlation of aesthetic intensity with synthesized multiplicity is not necessary. One can, rather, distinguish between the subjective intensity of an experience, and the expression of that experience: the former admits of an acme point, the latter does not.

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PART II SIX THEISTIC ARGUMENTS OF HARTSHORNE’S SYSTEM

CHAPTER IV The Ontological and Cosmological Arguments:

The Logic of Perfection and Di-Polar Theism Our goal in Part II shall be to evaluate and reconstruct the conception of God which Hartshorne develops on an a priori basis via his six theistic arguments. In each of these last chapters we shall do this with regard to two of Hartshorne’s six arguments. We will then draw out the most relevant theological implications of each argument in relation to the foundational statements previously examined, and we shall compare these implications to the same attributes found in the “classical” conception of God. The Ontological Argument The a priori Nature of the Theistic Question The question of God is not one among many metaphysical questions, according to Hartshorne. It is, rather, the “sole question.” The existence of God is either true or false a priori according to Hartshorne. It is either a necessary metaphysical truth, or an utter contradiction. Either the very idea of God implies the existence of God, or the very idea of God implies the non-existence of God. The Tetralemma of the Ontological Argument He postulates the tetralemma as follows: A1: Deity cannot be consistently conceived.

A2: Deity can be consistently conceived, equally whether as existing or as not existing. A3: Deity can be consistently conceived, but only as non-existent, as an unactualized or regulative ideal or limiting concept.

T: Deity can be consistently conceived, but only as existent.2 The Cosmological Argument Whereas the ontological argument proceeds from the concept of an a priori truth as such, the cosmological argument proceeds from Hartshorne’s first and second exemplification of the category of a priori truths. It operates with “…the modal structure of the concept of existence,” which includes the truth that something is concrete with abstract features. Its goal is to arrive at the a priori truth that “what exists is partly contingent and partly necessary, and something is divine.” The Formal Argument A1: Nothing exists. A2: What exists either (a) has no modal character or (b) is wholly contingent. A3: What exists is wholly necessary. A4: What exists is partly contingent and partly necessary, but nothing is divine.3

T: What exists is partly contingent and partly necessary, and something is divine.

2 I’m not including Greg’s treatment of A1-A3. They’re well-known. He concludes ‘T’. 3 I’m not including Greg’s treatment of A1-A4. He concludes ‘T’.

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Theological Implications: God’s Di-polarity We have thus far seen Hartshorne’s argument that the very idea of God and the very concept of existence entail the existence of a necessary being. What now needs to be explicated is the more precise view of the One’s existence which these arguments necessitate. We shall see that they necessitate a particular understanding of divine perfection which is antithetical to (and in many respects superior to) the traditional understanding of divine perfection. But we shall go on to see that this Process understanding contains several significant difficulties of its own. The Classical Understanding of “Perfection” Hartshorne distinguishes his own view of God from what he calls the “classical” or “traditional” theism. The classical position, according to Hartshorne, is most fundamentally characterized by its assumption that the concept of supreme perfection requires the absolute negation of potentiality. What has “potency” is some respect, according to Aquinas for example, is deficient in that respect. Hence, perfection which cannot be surpassed must be equivalent to the actualization of all possibility. God is, therefore, “actus purus.” As we have already mentioned, there are a number of significant points which logically follow from this understanding of “perfection.” Since change, for example, seems to be the result of some deficiency in the altered actuality (as Aristotle argued), God must be viewed as absolutely unchanging. Since time is the measurement of change, God must also be non-temporal. And since God must be purely actual, there can be no distinction between God’s essence and God’s existence: God must be perfectly “simple” and hence must have all attributes as identical with one another. As Plantinga points out, God’s “simplicity” must then be equivalent to a single predicate. Difficulties With the Classical Understanding There are a significant number of problems with this classical understanding as Hartshorne has, throughout his career, tirelessly pointed out. An exhaustive discussion of this matter would take us too far astray, but it will be beneficial to presently outline at least five central problems which Hartshorne and others find in this classical understanding of perfection and which are relevant to our concern. Incompossibilities First, the very concept of a perfect actuality which cannot in any state of affairs be altered or in any sense improved is, in Hartshorne’s mind, an unintelligible concept. There can, in his view, be no ultimate “sum of all perfections” that is actual. Why? Because, as Leibniz realized, values are “incompossible.” “Red-here-now” excludes “green-here-now.” Actuality, according to Hartshorne, is always a “selection” for definiteness from among an infinitude of indefinite possibilities, as we have already seen. Thus, the actualization-here-now of one possibility excludes—viz., is “incompatible with”—the actualization of all other possibilities-here-now. Actuality and finitude, in other words, are necessary corollaries (for precisely the same reason that finitude and contingency are corollaries). And thus, according to Hartshorne, the notion of an “infinite actuality” is incoherent, as is, by necessity, the notion of an actual infinite sum of all possible perfections. The concept of an ultimate perfection, then, when rendered consistent, “requires that there be potentiality as well as actuality.”

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The Reality of Becoming A second fundamental problem which results from the classical view of perfection of a being whose actuality cannot be in any sense “increased” is that it necessarily destroys the contrast between actuality and possibility, and hence undermines the reality of becoming. If God’s reality includes all possible actuality, then there is nothing genuinely possible (viz., open, underdetermined) for the future, according to Hartshorne. Actuality and possibility here become “co-extensive.” The Personhood of God A third difficulty which arises from the supposition that God is actus purus concerns the personhood of God. As we have already noted, the view of God as actus purus entails that God is absolutely simple. God’s essence is, in every respect, identical with God’s existence, and hence there is no objective distinction between any of the properties of God. In God, God’s knowledge is identical with God’s will, God’s will is identical with God’s love, God’s love is identical with God’s justice, etc. The appearance of a multiplicity of attributes in God arises only from our inability to comprehend a perfectly simple essence. The doctrine that God is actus purus, with all that this implies, seems to portray more of Aristotle’s “unmoved mover” than it does the dynamic God witnessed to in Scripture and the living God experienced by believers. It is a portrait of a being—a property—frozen solid in an eternally unchanging “now”: an entity for whom time, change, novelty, adventure, etc., can mean nothing. This entity could never experience these. What is more, because God, in this view, lacks all potentiality, God must also lack such fundamental personal traits as deciding, acting remembering, intending, etc., for these are all temporally contingent. But it is certainly questionable, as Robert Coburn notes, “whether anything which necessarily lacked [these]…capacities would, under any conceivable circumstances, count as a person.” Virtuous Mutibility Fourthy, the classical view of “absolute perfection” entailed that the absolutely perfect One could not genuinely be related to the created order. Since God does not change, even in God’s knowledge or feeling (God is “immutable” and “impassible”), God’s relationship to the contingent changing order cannot itself be contingent and changing. God, therefore, eternally knows and experiences contingent reality by knowing and experiencing God’s own eternally unchanging self (without thereby destroying the “contingency” of what is necessarily known). Hence, as Aquinas says, “…a relation of God to creatures is not a reality in God but in the creatures.” God is, in other words, completely independent of the world, even in regard to this One’s experiences “of the world.” But, Hartshorne asks, is this sort of independence and immutability really admirable (let alone intelligible)? Is this really part of what we conceive to be (say) moral perfection? Hartshorne goes on, then, to give an example of a parent who is “independent” of his or her daughter’s happiness or sadness. This parent is “above” the contingencies of the child, and indeed, the parent’s sate of being—his or her happiness, thoughts, feelings, etc.—are precisely as they would have been had the child never been born, or had the child gone through radically different experiences. Is there anyone, Hartshorne asks, who could regard such a parent as “ideal”? Far from being a moral ideal, is this “independence” and “immutability” not the ideal of a despotic tyrant?

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Moreover, is not Hartshorne correct in showing that our ordinary presuppositions, and therefore our ordinary word meanings, are directly counter to calling the notion of absolute independence and unchangeableness “good”? While it is true that certain characteristics, such as virtuous ethical commitment, are more admirable the more “immutable” they are, is it not a detestable characteristic to be affectively immutable? It seems that unless God is in part conceived of as possessing potentiality, our conception of God will be less than “ideal,” and indeed our speech about God’s “perfection” will lack an analogical base. Logical-Type Objection to the Ontological Argument The fifth and final difficulty with the concept of absolute perfection which is relevant for our discussion is that the ontological argument cannot work when this conception is employed in it. It falls under what Hartshorne regards to be “the strongest of the classical objections” to the ontological argument: the logical-type objection. The argument runs as follows,

Existence is on a different logical level, or of a different logical type, from a predicate, being more concrete, and hence an addition to the mere predicate, not contained in it…[a] mere universal or definable abstraction such as “perfection” cannot entail an actual individual exemplifying the universal.

Existence, and the properties which characterize it, are on two different logical levels according to this argument. An abstract property cannot itself imply the individual instantiation of that property. Defining what a property is does not itself prove that there is an entity which possesses that property. The problem, put another way, is that if the property/instance distinction cannot here apply, then the only “real existence” the property of supreme perfection necessitates is the existence of the abstract property itself. But in this case the ontological argument turns into a mere tautology. It simply states that what is necessary is necessary. But that there is an actual individual instance of the perfection of necessary existence has no yet been proven. If the ontological argument is going to work, then, we need a conception of perfection which allows for the property of perfection to be abstract, but the instantiation of perfection to be concrete and contingent while being, at the same time but in another sense, necessitated by the concept. The classical idea of perfection as actus purus clearly does not allow for this. Once one admits potentiality into God, however, the difficulty disappears as we shall see. According to Hartshorne, that God is perfect is abstract, necessary and unchanging. But how this perfection is actualized each moment is concrete, contingent and forever changing. The Neo-Classical Conception of Perfection Perfect as Moral Coincidence The solution to the five difficulties posed by the classical understanding of perfection can be solved, Hartshorne says, by simply rejecting the unwarranted notion that God’s perfection must exclude potentiality. In this view, then, God is not “infinitely actual.” Rather, God’s “perfection” is that God is “infinitely capable of actuality.” God’s perfection is not that “He exhaustively actualizes all possible value

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(this is impossible), but that there is no consistent set of possible values He could not enjoy.” God’s actuality encompasses all actuality: and God’s potentiality encompasses all potentiality. God’s perfection, in other words, consists in the modal coincidence of all actuality and possibility in God’s own being. The Concrete/Abstract Distinction If God’s possibility are co-extensive with possibility as such, and if, as we have already argued, the simultaneous actualization of all finite possibilities is logically incoherent, then it seems to follow that God’s present state of being, what God is now actually, is not the “greatest possible” state of being. There is, strictly speaking, no such thing. According to Hartshorne, actual states of being—including God’s—are always finite, and hence capable of increase or enrichment. But then, one must ask, in what sense is God “unsurpassably” perfect? It is at this point that the first and second a priori truths of Hartshorne’s metaphysical system, and the cosmological argument which arises from them, become most relevant. According to Hartshorne, as we have seen, it is an a priori truth that “something is concrete with abstract features.” Absolute non-being is incoherent, and existence is incoherent except as exhibiting concreteness and abstractness. Being a priori, this abstract/concrete distinction must find exemplification in God as well. The necessarily existing Deity which the ontological argument arrives at must be, in some respects, concrete, and in other respects abstract, which means God must, in some respects, be necessary, and in other respects contingent. This, in a nutshell, is the neo-classical understanding of God’s di-polarity. What is abstract is what must necessarily characterize God’s actuality whatever actual divine state is being exemplified. What is concrete is the particular way this abstract character is being contingently exemplified at a given moment. Or again, what is necessary is that God is: what is concrete is how God is. In light of this, we can understand the sense in which God is and is not “unsurpassable,” according to Hartshorne. What the ontological and cosmological arguments attempt to prove is that it is a necessary ingredient in God’s abstract character that (a) it is always instantiated, and (b) whatever state God is in, it is unsurpassable by another being or by Godself at that time. The necessity of God’s being, then, pertains to the abstract fact that God exists, and that God exists without competition. But this is not to say that God is unsurpassable by Godself in a subsequent state. What God concretely is at any given moment is a matter of contingency. And because of the incompossibility of all possibilities, this can, and indeed must be, always surpassed by God in a subsequent state. Recalling from chapter one that “[t]he concrete is the inclusive form of reality, from which the abstract is an abstracted aspect or constituent,” it may be said that God’s abstract pole is God’s necessary and hence unchanging identity, “required by the concrete.” God’s abstract pole is the necessary abstract enduring self-identical identity “required by” the ever fluctuating divine process. It constitutes the unchanging self-defining law of God’s eternal infinitude of possibilities “required by” the concrete finitude of God. The divine perfection is thus understood as a modal coincidence in that God’s abstract and concrete characteristics are at any given time unsurpassed, and, in the case of the abstract characteristics, unsurpassable. God’s actuality is inclusive of all actuality, and God’s possibilities are inclusive of all possibilities.

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The Advantages of the Neo-Classical Concept of Perfection We have, in outline form, explicated Hartshorne’s understanding of divine perfection as arrived at by his ontological and cosmological arguments which build from the idea of God itself and from the first two of his six foundational statements. But, we must ask, does this di-polar understanding of perfection avoid the pitfalls of the classical conception? It seems that on most accounts it does. First, the neo-classical conception specifies in what respects the perfect be unchangingly perfect, and it does so in such a way that it avoids the paradoxical attribution of “all possible value” to one actual being which plagues the classical conception. Secondly, because it defines perfection as the coincidence of modality as such, it can specify the way in which the perfect can be abstractly and eternally perfect and admit the concrete flux of time. Whereas the classical understanding could not genuinely relate God to time, the neo-classical understanding makes God the “perfection of temporality,” the supremely temporal being. Thirdly, because the neo-classical conception of the necessity of the perfect Individual embodies contingency—indeed, the contingency of this One is inclusive of all contingency—this Individual is more readily understood in personal terms than the conception of God as actus purus. The personal attributes of intentionality, decision, recollection, action, anticipation, etc., are also exemplified, in a superlative manner, in the concrete existence of this One. Fourthly, the neo-classical understanding of perfection can adequately specify the manner in which the perfect One is virtuously immutable, and virtuously mutable. God’s self-defining characteristics (what God is in all possible circumstances) are necessary, and hence eternal, non-threatened, and unchanging. Thus God’s love, goodness, adequacy of knowledge and power, etc., are unsurpassable and invariant. But what God concretely experiences every moment is contingent and thus eternally changing. Thus, the way God is loving, good, omni-influential, and all knowing, is unsurpassably sensitive to, and thus affected by, each and every non-divine actuality each moment. Here we have a model of divine perfection in which “goodness” and “love” mean something of what they do in their normal applications. A Critical Evaluation And Trinitarian Reconstruction Of Di-Polar Theism The neo-classical conception of divine perfection has a great deal to comment itself over the classical tradition. But the philosophical and theological advantages gained by this definition of perfection are not without a price, however. Neither is the conception of perfection wholly free from difficulties of its own. In the remainder of this chapter we shall examine what this price tag is, what these difficulties are, and inquire into the possibility of achieving the advantages of the neo-classical view, but without paying the high price it exacts as well as avoiding the difficulties it embodies. Is the World Necessary to God? What is the price tag to be paid for the advantages of the neo-classical definition of God? As we have already intimated, it is most fundamentally this: the neo-classical definition of perfection necessitates that the contingent world be seen as being a necessary co-existent alongside God. The God-world relationship lies “beyond the accident of God’s will.” God and the world are equally necessary: one logically (and thus ontologically) requires the other to be what it is, and both are required by the

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supposed a priori structure of rationality as such. The traditional concepts of God as unsurpassably self-sufficient within Godself apart from the world and thus the traditional concepts of the creation and salvation of the world as acts of grace, not necessity, must here be jettisoned. First, as we have seen, both the ontological and the cosmological arguments require that God have an abstract and concrete pole. God must conform to the second a priori, and only in this way does the ontological argument avoid the logical-type objection. But God must also conform to the third a priori—God is concretely an “experience”—which further means, in light of the fourth and fifth foundational statements, that God must be asymmetrically related to an antecedent multiplicity and must be concretely constituted as the creative synthesis of this past data. A second closely related argument for the eternality of the non-divine world is again implicit in the cosmological argument. This theistic argument, we recall, concluded that “what exists is partially contingent and partially necessary, and something is divine.” It did not and could not say “and everything is divine.” It is for Hartshorne an a priori truth that the divine and non-divine form a necessary contrast with one another. Yet a third reason as to why the neo-classical concept of divine perfection arrived at by the ontological and cosmological arguments requires the necessity of the non-divine world can be seen in the light of the sixth foundational statement of Hartshorne’s system: the a priori truth that aesthetic value is experienced. If the intensity of aesthetic experience is dependent upon the “massiveness” of a creative synthesis, and this creative synthesis is necessary, then God would be forsaking the ground of beauty itself by neglecting to create a world with a multiplicity of non-divine agents to be appreciated. The concept of perfection which the ontological and cosmological arguments arrive at, then, entails that God is not free to refrain from creation. This would be for God to violate God’s own necessary character, and would violate all of the other a priori truths (as Hartshorne sees them) as well. There must, then, be a necessary being, and there must be contingency: these truths the first two theistic arguments of Hartshorne have proven. But as they are set forth in Hartshorne’s system, it is also necessary that these truths are not and cannot be satisfied in God alone. There must also be a non-divine reality. Our task shall be to attempt to maintain the truth which these two arguments seek to establish but to do so without paying the price Hartshorne pays to maintain them; without, in other words, maintaining the apparently correlative supposition that the non-divine world is also necessary, and hence that its existence is not a matter of grace. The first step in this direction shall be to consider a philosophic difficulty internal to the neo-classical conception of perfection. This shall provide the basis for our proposed reconstruction of the view of God arrived at by Hartshorne via these two arguments. The Problem of Abstraction in God We earlier criticized Hartshorne’s theology of abstraction on the grounds that it cannot account for the normativity of transcendentals over concrete reality. If, as Hartshorne contends, abstractions are “contained in” the concrete, if they have no abiding reality in any sense independent of the concrete,

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then, it was argued, they can be descriptive only. They have no prescriptive (and thus explanatory) value whatsoever. They are simply the abstract feature which contingent reality happens to exemplify. But a priori truths, which constitute the highest level of abstraction, cannot be rendered intelligible in this fashion. They prescribe what reality must be, and thus cannot be contingent upon what contingent reality happens to be. Hartshorne, we argue, wrongly rejected Whitehead’s (inconsistently held) realist interpretation of “the eternal forms.” This problem becomes the most acute when we consider Hartshorne’s understanding of God’s abstract character. The problem, in a nutshell, is that there seems to be no way within Hartshorne’s system for rendering intelligible the necessity of God’s character. Character, we have already seen, is for Hartshorne merely the de facto abstract characteristics of the past spontaneity of a nexus of actual occasions. It is nothing in and of itself. But then how are we to understand the necessary normativity of God’s abstract character? If “[t]he absolute pole is an abstraction from the contingent, changing, and temporal God,” how is it “absolute”? Hartshorne attempts to answer this by arguing that God’s character is utterly unique: unlike all contingent abstract characters, what defines God as God is definable a priori. This is God’s “unique metaphysical status.” Thus, whereas contingent beings have “a quasi-primordial feature” which generally (but not normatively) characterizes them throughout their life span, “only God has an absolutely fixed and ungenerated general style of self-identical character, an abstract element of strict invariance individual to him.” The problem with this answer however, is that it does not seem that Hartshorne has construed his general theory of abstraction in such a way that it can intelligibly account for this metaphysical uniqueness in God. The abstract character of contingent “societies of occasions” is intelligible within the context of his system, but only because this abstract character is “contained in” the past decisions which the present society now prehends. The society continues to roughly exemplify the same abstract character because (viz., contingent upon) its free creative synthesis has this particular past, with such and such particular features, as its primary antecedent material to now add to. The actual contingent decisions of the past now place restrictions on the freedom of the present society which in turn guarantees the continuance of roughly the same abstract characteristics for that “personal ordered series.” What is more, the whole process receives at every new moment a new “subjective aim” from God which further specifies how the abstract identity of a series will be exemplified at that moment. Consistent with Hartshorne’s theory, the abstract character in these instances is nothing in itself: it only describes the general characteristics of what is real; namely, the past society of free actual occasions. It is the actual just-past society which “grounds” the abstract characteristics. And, in these contingent instances, the abstract characteristics are relatively normative over the present society because—but only because—the actual objectified data and the real divine subjective aim must be prehended by the present becoming society of actual occasions. But what allows us in the case of the divine society to conceive of abstractions as yet “contained in” the concrete, but not in any sense “derivative from” or “grounded in” it? How can the normative character of God neither be derived from the concrete, nor yet be in any sense autonomous in relation to the concrete? Hartshorne, it seems, wants to have it both ways.

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Moreover, what “grounds” these abstract features if it is nothing actual? How can these abstractions be “invariantly normative” when they have no reality over and above the contingent occasions they are supposed to govern? Or to phrase this question in Process categories, who or what “lures” the concrete pole of God from moment to moment, and does so with “invariant” force? Where does the concrete pole of God get its determinative subjective aim? Nothing Hartshorne has said about the general nature of the abstract/concrete relationship, nor about the universal/instance relationship, allows us to conceive of an abstraction “ruling over” contingent experiences with invariable authority. How this is so in God is left unanswered. Hartshorne simply asserts that such must be the case. The crucial question, however, is again how this “law” can be a law if it is simply an abstract description of how a particular set of spontaneous actual occasions in fact prehend each other. The abstract “law” is what is illustrated: how can it also then be the cause of the illustration? To be more specific, how can God’s unsurpassable goodness be invariably and eternally normative over God’s concrete actuality if in fact this abstract goodness is nothing real in itself over and above the (otherwise) contingent divine concrete states? Our argument shall be that without the postulation of a necessary divine actuality, without the supposition that God’s essential actuality is identical with God’s “abstract” character, the a priori necessities which define God’s eternal character are unintelligible. To this argument we now turn. The Necessary Actuality of God Whitehead, we believe, saw something which Hartshorne overlooked; he understood that the intelligibility of God’s stable character amidst God’s contingent interaction with the contingent world requires the view that God be, in some degree (at least), antecedently actual. What Hartshorne has understood as God’s “abstract” character, Whitehead took to be “God’s primordial pole.” And in Whitehead’s system, this “pole” is no mere abstraction. God’s subjective aim to be Godself concretely in response to the world is, pace Hartshorne, grounded in something: it is “wholly derivative from [God’s] all-inclusive primordial valuation.” The “perfection of this subjective aim” is not abstracted from the consequent nature of God, but rather issues from “the completeness of [God’s]…primordial nature.” Unfortunately, however, Whitehead largely takes back with one hand what he gave with the other when he describes this primordial nature as being “actually deficient” and “unconscious.” For now the nature of God’s primordial “feeling,” “valuation,” and “action”—the very things which render intelligible God’s contingent feeling, valuation and action—are rendered problematic. The very “completeness” of the primordial pole which would have rendered the consequent nature of God intelligible itself becomes unintelligible when it is now described in terms which render it “less conscious” and “less actual” than the consequent nature it explains. Hence, all of the personal attributes and activities which Whitehead otherwise gives to this primordial pole, attributes and activities which would render his conception advantageous to rendering God’s contingent activity intelligible, are hereby qualified to an extent that they are rendered philosophically useless. It becomes, for example, extremely difficult to understand how God can make the decisions and valuations which God must make in this One’s primordial pole when God is, in this pole, unconscious.

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Whitehead thus correctly saw that the intelligibility of God’s relationship to the world (and hence the intelligibility of the world process itself) requires that the necessary self-defining features of God be identified with a “reality,” a reality which is more than an abstraction and which, in fact, is “complete” and “unconditioned” in relation to the contingent temporal process. The categories of his system, however, did not allow him to carry this insight through to its end. Likewise Hartshorne, therefore, the full actuality of God must here be viewed as being constituted as a prehension of antecedent (non-divine) data. Once the Process requirement that each occasion must creatively synthesize antecedent data is rejected, however, and once the Process view that an entity is nothing over and above an experience is rejected, we are, I believe, free to go all the way with Whitehead’s insight. The perfection of God, that which defines God’s self apart from all interaction with a non-divine reality (viz., is “unconditioned”) must be identical with a necessary and actually abiding reality. As to God’s necessary existence, God does not have the abstract features of goodness, love, awareness, etc. God is—actually—goodness, love, awareness, etc. To use traditional terminology, God’s “abstract” essence is God’s necessary concrete existence. The a priori features which “abstractly” identify God as God constitute God’s essential actuality. God’s actuality is not, therefore, simply a contingent exemplification of divine attributes. The “abstract” attributes of God are, on this account, given an intelligible normative status over all of God’s contingent activity. The “absolutely fixed” and “ungenerated style” of God, the “law” of God’s concrete contingent activity, is simply the aseity of God’s eternal actuality. God’s necessary character is not paradoxically “contained in” God’s contingent actuality: it is, rather, identical with God’s eternal actuality. The Relativity of Perspectivity We have previously qualified Hartshorne’s concrete/abstract distinction by espousing the insight of Buchler and Ross that concreteness and abstractness (as well as all derivative concepts of “actuality,” “potentiality,” “being,” and “becoming”) are perspectivally contingent concepts. Yet if left unqualified, this view becomes inherently atheistic, as it is in Buchler and Ross. Why? Because, as Ross himself notes, “God’s all-inclusiveness…is incompatible with the principle of perspective.” Thus, there is, for him, “no encompassing order, no total explanation” of things, and hence no being whose perspective (viz., awareness, scope of interaction, etc.) is all-inclusive. If a belief in God is to be retained, then, the perspectivity of which Buchler and Ross speak must be qualified. And, in fact, our previous description of a being whose essence is this One’s essential existence already presupposes such a qualification. If God’s “abstract” characteristics are identical with God’s eternal actuality (“concreteness”), then clearly the distinction between abstractness and concreteness breaks down at this point. Correlatively, the doctrine of ordinal metaphysics that “to be is to be in perspective” here breaks down, for concerning the necessary existence of this One’s reality, there is no perspective in which the abstract essence is distinct from the concrete existence. What makes God God throughout eternity is this One’s necessary definiteness. From the standpoint of contingent divine activity, and from the perspective of

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finite creatures, this necessary actuality is abstract. But this perspectival conditionality arises only with the creation of, and interaction with, non-divine, hence finite creatures. All of this is, in so many words, to say that we are conceiving of a being who can exist utterly alone, self-sufficiently. If such a reality is possible, then the concrete/abstract distinction and the doctrine of perspectivity are not a priori in the sense that they must always be instantiated. If such a reality is possible, moreover, then the doctrine that there is no “encompassing world order” must also be seen as unnecessary. If such a reality is possible, then there can be no contradiction in the supposition that there exists a being, whose essence is identical with this One’s necessary existence, and whose perspective on reality encompasses all actual and possible perspectives. Yet it remains true that if finite creatures exist, then their interaction with the world must be perspectivally qualified. To say “finite” is to say “finite perspective.” We must then define reality in terms of perspectivity. It is concerning contingent realities that it must be said that “something is concrete and something is abstract” (for, as Aquinas held, the separation between essence and existence is one of the marks of contingent beings). And we must admit that to be concrete or to be abstract is to be concrete or abstract relative to some perspective. It is thus necessarily true that if finite contingent beings exist, “there must be something concrete with abstract features from some perspective.” And, of course, this “if,” this possibility, is as a possibility eternal and necessary. In this conditional sense, the abstract/concrete distinction and the perspectival definition of reality is a priori. Conscious finite beings could not think and speak without them. It is thus yet appropriate for us to distinguish between the “abstract” and “concrete” poles of God, for there are perspectives within which these categories have meaning. The eternal actuality of God is, from the perspective of God’s contingent activity, abstract, for it abstractly characterizes all of this contingent divine activity. But, pace Hartshorne, we cannot regard this distinction to be absolute, any more than we can take any concrete/abstract distinction to be absolute. It is, rather, perspectivally contingent. From the perspective of the necessary eternal actuality itself, from the perspective of One who is not contingent and limited to a finite perspective, the eternal actuality is itself concrete. Since none of our concepts can be freed from their perspectival conditionality, however, this divine perspective can only be spoken of by analogy. Necessity and Contingency in God It no doubt appears at this point that we have simply worked our way back to classical theism with all of its concomitant paradoxes. If, in fact, God’s essence and necessary existence are identical in our view, then, it seems, that we must, with the classical view, maintain that how God is (God’s existence) is as eternal, as necessary, and as unchanging as is the fact that God is (God’s essence). And if this be the case, we are it seems again faced with the earlier discussed paradoxes of defining perfection as actus purus, of accounting for incompatibilities, of accounting for real becoming, of accounting for a genuine personal sociality between God and God’s contingent creatures, of rendering determinism intelligible (since contingency has been now ruled out), etc. I am not convinced, however, that the classical and neo-classical conceptions of God exhaust the viable alternatives, and I do not believe that our own view necessitates the classical view. We must, first of all, question whether it is really the case that the possibility of God having no eternal necessary actuality

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(Process thought) and the possibility of God being completely eternally actual (classical theism) are logically exhaustive of all theistic possibilities. In other words, is it the case that between the [neo-orthodox] position that God’s essence is abstract and God’s existence is concrete, and the [classical] position that God’s essence and God’s existence are exhaustively defined by one another, there lies no alternative? Indeed, do not the severe difficulties which, we have seen, are involved in both positions suggest that neither of them is entirely correct, and thus that the truth must lie somewhere between these two extremes? We do well, then, to at least investigate the possibility of a mediating position. The essential question we are concerned with is this: can God be at once eternally actual, and unsurpassable in this actuality, and yet genuinely partake in contingent states? Is there a sense in which God can be eternally and necessarily concrete and contingently concrete? Can God’s essence be God’s essential self-defining existence but not necessarily the totality of God’s existence? Could we not define the possibility of contingency into the very essence of God so that God, though this One exists concretely in this necessary mode, yet can exist in a contingent mode as well—without violating God’s essence? Can God be necessary and contingent in different respects, but not in such a way that God’s necessary features are merely abstract? Attempting to render an affirmative, intelligible and defensible answer to these questions will be the primary task of the remainder of this work. For the remainder of this chapter, however, we simply wish to argue for the bare possibility of such a position. Presently, the only force of persuasion it has is the manner in which it avoids the difficulties of both the classical and the neo-classical views as well as its internal cogency and its compatibility with the essence of the Church’s traditional view of God as triune (for whom this consideration is compelling). Our critique of the view of God arrived at in the next four theistic arguments shall serve as the basis upon which this proposed reconstructed view is filled out and substantiated. Let us therefore ask once again: is there any logical contradiction involved in the notion that God’s actuality could be eternal in one sense, and contingent in another? That one being could be at once necessary and contingent is, it seems, in itself unproblematic, least of all from a Process perspective. One of the contributions neo-classical theism has made has been to show the general intelligibility of just this proposition. What is problematic, however, is the contention that both of these “senses,” concern God’s actuality. According to Hartshorne, necessity and contingency can be consistently applied to one God only if they apply to different aspects of God. And this, for Hartshorne, means that they cannot both refer to either God’s actuality or to God’s abstract character. One attribute must refer to one pole: the other attribute to the other pole. It is the validity of this argument which must now be challenged. The Analogy of Co-Existing Occasions of Varying Durations Beyond the already discussed difficulties with this understanding of the di-polarity of God, one must wonder what is intrinsically contradictory about saying that a being can be actual [and contingent] in different respects? Why cannot one aspect of the divine actuality be necessary and eternal, and another aspect of God’s actuality be contingent? It seems that, in at least one sense, even Process thought must admit that this is possible in terms of its own categories.

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According to Process thought, any given “society of actual occasions” can be made up of entities whose “living immediacy” and “specious present” varies from one another considerably. A “specious present,” according to Hartshorne, can vary about as far as the imagination can stretch: from less than one millionth of a second to more than a century. Now it seems that there is no a priori reason why a “specious moment” may not be eternal, though the society which it “dominates over” includes occasions whose “specious present” is finite. Just as the mind, the dominate occasion of the human person, consists of “specious presents” whose duration vary from those occasions which it rules over, so too we might conceive of God’s essential self as an eternal specious present which encompasses other “specious presents” of finite durations within itself. So far as I can see, then, there are no grounds for supposing a priori that the “specious present” of an experiencing actuality could not be both definite and actual, while being at the same time endless in its duration. Hartshorne and God’s Actual Infinity Our case for the possibility of an actually infinite aspect of God within the structure of Process thought is rendered firmer when we realize that Hartshorne himself admits, however reluctantly, that his own system of thought logically requires that there be a sense in which God is actually infinite. Though he has, as we have seen, repeatedly insisted that actuality is always finite, he has conceded that in at least one respect God must be actually infinite. Hartshorne concludes:

…there must be for him [God] an infinite aspect even of the consequent [viz., actual, contingent] nature, since this involves a perfect memory of all the past and hence contains a numerically infinity of remembered events.

Hence, even in Process thought itself one must admit the conceivability, and indeed the metaphysical necessity, of an actual infinity. The divine mind which perfectly remembers the infinite past must be actually infinite. This is not an “absolute infinity,” an infinity of all possible value, but it is an infinite actuality nonetheless. And if this much be granted, there are clearly no grounds on which to argue that either a subject, or an experience of a subject, could not hypothetically be infinite in time or space. The only remaining question, then, is whether or not one subject could be both infinitely and finitely, both necessarily and contingently, actual at the same time. Here again I see no reason to deny this. One subject can, in Process terms, be constituted by numerous occasions of varying durations of subjective immediacy, as we have said. But then what in principle is there that disallows the possibility of a subject who is necessarily constituted by an everlasting subject and/or experience, on the one hand, and yet who has finite contingent experiences on the other? I can see none. My “specious present” is in one respect very long—hence my “ordinary” sense of time is distorted in such experiences. Yet the fact that I am at least tacitly conscious of the bustle around me shows that I also have, at the same time, occasions whose “specious present” is much shorter. Every sensed alteration in my environment is, in Hartshorne’s view, a new “specious present” for some actual occasion(s).

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Thus experience, including the experience of consciousness, can be multifarious and multidimensional. Indeed, at a human level it always is. Hartshorne, of course, argues that it is only the “lowest” dimension of consciousness the minute alterations in our experience which are “truly concrete.” Our experience of wholes, whether they be in art, music, or the world around us, is “abstract.” But this supposition we have already shown to be the result of an arbitrary reductionistic presupposition. Once the definition of “concrete” and “abstract” are recognized as being perspectivally contingent, the actuality (concreteness) of our phenomenological experiences, as well as (from a different perspective) the actuality of the minute alterations which, in one sense, comprise these experiences, can be admitted. To say that our normal sense of consciousness is multifarious is thus to say that our dominant perspective always encompasses relatively tacit perspectives. Prima facie, then, no obvious absurdity is committed in maintaining that God can be, in one sense, necessarily actually infinite while further maintaining that God can also be, at the same time but in another sense, contingently actually infinite. This is, from another angle, simply to say that God can have a necessary eternal perspective on Godself which may (it is a contingent matter) include a perspective which encompasses non-divine perspectives. God is eternally and necessarily defined by this one’s eternal experience of Godself, and this experience may encompass, and find expression in, the interaction of non-divine creatures. Our purpose, it must be noted, has not been to argue that in fact God’s necessary actuality is composed of an eternal “specious moment.” This would, it seems, entail that God is timeless ad intra which, we shall argue, is an exceedingly difficult doctrine to uphold. But we shall subsequently argue that there are alternative ways of rendering the antecedent actuality of God intelligible. Our purpose here has simply been to render intelligible, even within a Process framework, the possibility that God is actually infinite, and to render intelligible by analogy the contention that this necessary infinite actuality does not entail that God cannot also be contingently actual in God’s relationship to non-divine reality. But how are we to understand the relationship between the eternal actuality which defines God’s eternal being and the contingent actuality which constitutes God’s concrete involvement in the continent world? In what sense is the classical position correct in maintaining that “God’s essence is God’s existence,” and in what sense is it wrong? Necessary Self-Defining and Contingent Self-Expressive Characteristics It must first be said that the necessary and eternal self-defining characteristics of God, that which constitutes God’s antecedent actuality, cannot necessarily include any given actualized contingent aspects of God (viz., the creation of the non-divine world). This would, I believe, involve us in a contradiction. The necessary being qua necessity cannot include given non-necessities as integral features of this One’s self-definition. And, moreover, no particular contingency can by definition be necessary. Hartshorne, for his part, rightly perceived and articulated the exclusion of the contingent from the necessary in God. But he wrongly inferred from this that God’s essential self-definition must therefore be merely abstract (since actuality, for him, is always in principle finite and contingent). We have rather suggested (what shall later be substantiated more fully) that an actuality can be infinite and necessary while also being in different respects finite and contingent.

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When we say that God might be actually eternal and actually contingent, therefore, we do not mean to suggest that God is essentially defined by both an eternal and contingent actuality. God is essentially defined only by this One’s necessary actuality. Thus we have not in the preceding said simply that “God’s essence is God’s existence,” but rather, “God’s essence is God’s essential existence.” For if there can be contingency in God, then God’s existence can encompass more than what this One essentially and necessarily is. God can be “more than necessary.” Thus, God is necessarily constituted by a necessary actuality, and precisely this divine necessity is open to the spontaneous creativity which brings forth a non-divine reality and a contingent mode of experience—both for God and the created creature—with it. The second point which needs to be said is this: however we understand this “openness” of God’s necessary actuality to contingency, it is clear that this openness, when actualized, cannot be foreign to God’s necessary actuality any more than it can be necessitated by this necessary actuality. Were it foreign, it would violate the necessary actuality of God which constitutes the a priori conditions of being: and were it necessitated, it would not be contingent. Rather, we propose that the contingent openness of God, when actualized, be understood as expressing God’s antecedent actuality. It is neither necessitated by nor foreign to the antecedent actuality of God. It rather constitutes the creativity of God by which God expresses Godself—God’s eternal, self-sufficient fullness—in creatively novel and contingent ways. We can, in short, conceive of the necessity and infinite antecedent actuality of God as being open to the infinitely possible forms of finite expression. The creation of non-divine perspectives is one mode of such expression. Our rejection of the Process correlation of “aesthetic intensity” and “scope of creative synthesis” has laid the groundwork for this proposal—a proposal to be carried out in its aesthetic dimension when we consider Hartshorne’s aesthetic argument. For if being is, as we have conceded, fundamentally aesthetic in its valuational dimension, then the unsurpassable being of God, God’s infinite and complete antecedent actuality, can be understood most fundamentally as the unsurpassable intensity of an aesthetic satisfaction. And since the intensity of an aesthetic satisfaction is not, pace Hartshorne, contingent upon an antecedent multiplicity, we can conceive of this One’s antecedently actual existence—viz., God’s self-defining aesthetic delight—as being unsurpassable, self-sufficient, and as being “unconditioned” and independent of the world (so long as it is conceived of as inherently relational, as shall be explicated below). Finally, if in fact the expression of an aesthetic satisfaction is an end in itself, as we have argued with Process thought, then we can begin to conceive of the inherent intelligibility of God’s contingent aesthetic expression of Godself in creating a non-divine reality. We can now being to conceive of how the contingent actuality of God in relation to the non-divine world can be seen as being valuable and enjoyed both by God and the non-divine created beings who share in this aesthetic adventure without this relationship being seen as being necessary to God’s essential existence as it is in Process thought. The Possibility of a Triune Conception of God It is appropriate in this chapter in which we are, following Hartshorne’s logic, outlining a theistic position to be filled in by the content of the following four theistic positions, to outline one final and extremely important factor which is already implicit in our reworking of the view of God at which the ontological and cosmological arguments arrive.

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If in fact it is necessary to postulate the antecedent actuality of God to intelligibly satisfy the requirements of God’s necessity as the ontological and cosmological arguments purport to demonstrate: and if in fact it is correct that being is necessarily relational as Hartshorne has argued, then our theistic reflections already point strongly in the direction of a view of God’s essential being which includes within itself relationality. For if the necessary being is necessarily actual—and all other non-divine beings only contingently so—then the actuality of God must be self-sufficient. And if this self-sufficiency is to be intelligible, then it must in and of itself satisfy all of the a priori conditions of rationality and meaning. All of this implies, we believe, that God, in God’s essential self-actuality, must contain within Godself relationality. Indeed, in the light of Hartshorne’s sixth a priori which we have, with qualification, accepted, this divine rationality must be understood as being fundamentally aesthetic in nature. To be sure, because the divine antecedent actuality must be self-sufficient—in need of no other reality for its essential constitution—this divine relationality must be characterized by an unsurpassably intense aesthetic experience. This means, if we are correct, that to consistently conceive of the necessary being which the ontological and cosmological arguments seek to demonstrate is to already conceive of a being who is necessarily actual, b) is self-sufficient in this actuality, c) is open to express Godself in contingent modes, d) is internally relational, and e) enjoys within Godself an unsurpassable intensity of aesthetic satisfaction. We shall subsequently attempt to show that the doctrine of the Trinity, when reworked in the light of an aesthetic dispositional ontology (largely following the model of Jonathan Edwards), expresses just these necessary features of God. Summary of Chapter IV We have in this chapter attempted to establish the following: a) that Hartshorne’s conception of the ontological and cosmological arguments leads to his di-polar conception of God by virtue of his conception of what is and is not a priori; b) that, while there are certain philosophical and theological advantages to the Process conception of perfection, implied in these two arguments, over the classical conception, there are a number of significant problems with both views as well; c) that our modification of the fundamental a priori elements of Hartshorne’s thought frees us to conceive of God in a way which retains the eternal self-sufficient actuality of God as in the classical conception, but without entailing that God is actus purus; d) that this revision allows us to preserve what is advantageous in both the Process and classical views while avoiding the difficulties of both; and e) that this conception of God already points in the direction of a view of the divine actuality which is internally relational and fundamentally constituted by an unsurpassably intense aesthetic satisfaction.

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PART II SIX THEISTIC ARGUMENTS OF HARTSHORNE’S SYSTEM

CHAPTER V The Design and Epistemic Arguments:

The Omnipotence and Omniscience of God Whereas the ontological and cosmological arguments, as Hartshorne develops them, work through the nature of an a priori truth itself and through the a priori truth that something is concrete and something is abstract, the design and epistemic arguments which we shall be concerned with in this chapter develop the a priori theistic content of the third, fourth and fifth foundational statements of Hartshorne’s system. Whereas the ontological and cosmological arguments seek to establish on an a priori basis that God necessarily exists and that God is in different respects both necessary and contingent, the design and epistemic arguments attempt to develop an a priori view of what this necessary being who is concretely and contingently instantiated must be like. What is more, whereas the ontological and cosmological arguments seek to establish an a priori outline of God’s perfection and di-polar nature, the design and epistemic arguments seek to establish, more specifically, the perfect nature of God’s influence (omnipotence) and God’s knowledge (omniscience). They attempt to show, in short, that the concepts of experience, asymmetrical relationality, and creative synthesis imply, a priori, a necessary divine experience which is prehended by all and which thus influences all (design argument), and a necessary divine creative synthesis which synthesizes all (epistemic argument). The Design Argument The design argument is perhaps the oldest recorded theistic argument, extending all the way back to Plato. It has been extensively employed throughout the history of philosophy both by Christian and non-Christian theists. Yet, until its revision in Hartshorne, no one ever thought of this argument as being anything other than an a posteriori argument. Herein consists Hartshorne’s most unique contribution to the design argument. The Tetralemma of the Design Argument A1: There is no cosmic order. A2: There is cosmic order but no cosmic ordering power. A3: There is cosmic order and ordering power, but the power is not divine. T: There is cosmic order and divine power.4 We shall again treat Hartshorne’s response to each of these alternatives in their respective order. The Epistemic Argument The epistemic argument is relatively young in the history of philosophy. The argument is, according to Hartshorne, implied in Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena: an entity can intelligibly be said to be a thing-in-itself (ding an sich) over and beyond all of its appearances only if it be supposed

4 The review and responses to A1-3 are excellent. I’ve not included them here. See TP for the details.

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that there is a transcendental non-sensory intuition of this thing (for if it were sensory the object would again be an appearance). The epistemic argument received its most refined articulation and cogent defense up to that point in time in the philosophy of Josiah Royce. Royce argued that we cannot even err about that which is in principle unknowable. The true, or what is true about reality, must be defined, then, in terms of what can be adequately known by some knower. In other words, the possibility (and certain reality) of human error in knowledge presupposes a standard of knowledge which transcends all finite possibilities. For Royce, this ultimately works out to imply that our concept of finite knowledge entails for its intelligibility an infinite knower whose knowledge of reality is coextensive with reality itself. In arguing thus, he was closely anticipating Hartshorne’s own argument. The Tetralemma of the Epistemic Argument

A1: Reality (or truth) is in no way dependent upon knowledge. A2: Reality is actual or potential content of non-divine knowledge. A3: Reality is potential content of divine knowledge (what God would know if he existed). T: Reality is actual content of divine knowledge

We shall, again, treat each of these in their respective order. A1: Can Reality Be Defined Independent of Knowledge? This is, in Royce’s terms, the “first conception of being,” the “realistic conception of being.” It holds that the knowledge of a given reality “makes no difference” to the given reality which is known, and hence that the given reality – or any given reality – can be adequately defined apart from the knowledge of it. All of our ideas, and indeed the meaning of our language, arise from, and have meaning only in reference to concrete experience (of which knowledge is a high level example). It is, therefore, not simply the case that there could be no reason to believe that x is real if there is, and can be, no experiential evidence for it. Even more fundamentally, the contention is that apart from some conceivable experience, a supposed idea or phrase is really a “pseudo-idea” and a “pseudo-phrase.” This observation, however, produces an apparent paradox, for reality always transcends its humanly experienced, perceived, and known content. The point here is that we always assume, and must assume, the meaningfulness of speech about the transcendent aspect of experienced reality. How else, Royce asks, could we conceive of our experience and ideas about reality as being in error, or only partially true? How can reality be a standard against our knowledge unless it transcends our knowledge? Yet we also assume, and must assume, that our concept of reality is meaningful only insofar as it is immanent in experience. Indeed, the possibility of error, Royce again points out, not only requires a transcend aspect to reality, but also that this transcendent aspect is not “foreign” to the known. How could reality be a standard of our knowledge if it were completely foreign to our knowledge? The obvious question which these facts necessitate is this: how can the transcendent be transcendent while yet being in some sense immanent (viz. not foreign)? It is Hartshorne’s (and Royce’s) contention that this question, when thoroughly thought through, leads to the necessary postulation of an

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omniscient necessary being. In any case, the possibility of defining knowledge and reality independently seems impossible. A2: Could the Ideal Knowledge Be Hypothetical? A2 grants the argument in A1: reality must transcend what is humanly experienced (known) and yet this very transcendence cannot be defined apart from some ideal possible form of knowledge. But, the A2 proponent asks, why suppose that this ideal knowledge is anywhere actual? Might not the hypothetical content of this “ideal knowledge” simply specify what we, or any finite knower, would know under ideal conditions? Does it not merely specify our tentative and heuristic definition of reality that to which we aspire in our cognitive endeavors? In short, is not the content of the “ideal knowledge” which defines reality identical with the concept of “potential knowledge”—that which a knower such as ourselves has the potential to know under (unfortunately non-existent) ideal conditions? Hartshorne’s response is that there are elements of reality which not only transcend human knowledge, but which do so necessarily. There are, in other words, features of reality which are not even the potential content of human knowledge, or any knowledge from a finite perspective. Various aspects of the past and various events in galactic space are two examples of such unknowable realities, according to Hartshorne. An Objection A defender of A2 might conceivably attempt to refute this objection to her thesis by making the following distinction: there is perhaps a meaningful difference between what is the potential content of human knowledge in fact and what is the potential content of human knowledge in any possible world. In other words, it may in fact be perfectly true that much of the past is irrevocably lost to human knowledge, and indeed that most of what occurs in deep space is eternally hidden from human knowledge (and perhaps all other finite cosmic knowers, in case they exist). But it doesn’t follow from this that such information is necessarily hidden from human knowledge. And just this, the argument goes, is why we commit no logical contradiction in accepting the contention that reality and knowledge must define each other, while yet denying that an omniscient being necessarily exists. Rebuttal While we admit the meaningfulness of the above distinction, it is, I think, difficult to defend as conceivable the supposition that humans, or any finite creatures, could even hypothetically (viz. in any possible world) arrive at a state of affairs such that their knowledge was coextensive with reality. The partiality of finite knowing does not seem a posteriori, but a priori. It seems, in other words, that limitation and partiality of knowledge is built into the very concept of a finite knower, just as we earlier saw that imperfection in other respects is built into the conception of contingency. Beyond what has already been said relative to this issue, there are, briefly, three other arguments to be made in support of Hartshorne’s position. First there is the problem of the knowledge of the pre-historic past. We assume that this remote past was real, but it seems that no finite knower or group of finite knowers could even hypothetically know it exhaustively. But might it not have been possible in some world for knowers such as ourselves to have always existed? Might not the absence of humans (or similar knowers) for billions of years be due to one of the “non-

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ideal” circumstances which in fact limit our knowledge, but which don’t preclude the counter-factual possibility that we might have existed? I suspect this possibility to be a pseudo-possibility. As we have seen, the concept of an eternal contingency is equivalent to an eternal accident, a wholly irrational and irrevocable surd. The temporality of a contingent race seems as necessary as the temporality of a contingent star – and as we have seen, no star can meaningfully be affirmed as non-contingent. Moreover, since this hypothetical eternal race would not have their essence as being identical with their existence (thus they are not necessary) they could not, in and of themselves, satisfy within themselves the a priori categories. Hence the sufficient reason for their existence must lie outside themselves. They are, in a word, contingent. So what, we must therefore ask, accounts for their existence and for their existence being just the way it is? Secondly, it does not seem that finite creatures, in any possible world, can know anything in particular exhaustively. It does not seem to be a merely contingent fact that “all our knowledge is approximate at best.” We are, as has been said, perspectivally conditioned creatures. We always see, and must necessarily see, from some limited perspective. Given finite creatures, this is a priori. But to know anything exhaustively is to know it from all perspectives. This we cannot do. Finite knowledge is thus limited not only quantitatively, but qualitatively, and hence cannot function as an even hypothetical ideal knowledge. To be contingent is, as Hartshorne describes it, to be “fragmentary.” But this means that the “ideal knowledge” which is presupposed in our conception of reality which transcends our knowledge cannot be accounted for by appealing to possible worlds where conditions for finite knowers might be different. A3: Could Ideal Knowledge Be the Potential Content of Divine Knowledge? Even if one grants that reality cannot be defined as the potential content of human knowing, even if one grants that reality must be defined in terms of a knowledge which is not “fragmentary” – viz. which is omniscient – does it follow that such a knowledge must be actual? Could not one conceivably argue that such knowledge is ideal, not actual? Might we not, in other words, define reality in terms of what God would know if God existed? This alternative can, I think, be quickly refuted on the basis of what we have already explicated in Hartshorne’s system. The ontological argument has already shown us that if God is possible, God is necessary. The “if” of A3 can, therefore only be equivalent to, “if God is not logically impossible.” But this it cannot mean, for A3 already has conceded that reality must be defined in terms of what God would know – in terms of “ideal knowledge.” And what sense can be made of the defining reality in terms of a logical contradiction? T: Reality is the Actual Content of Divine Knowledge The notion of “potential divine knowledge,” then, is internally inconsistent. With what, then, are we left? According to Hartshorne, “T” alone remains. “Reality is the actual content of divine knowledge.” Our knowledge, according to Hartshorne, is “fragmentary” because of “internal defects” (“confusion,” “doubt,” “a lack of concepts adequate to interpret our precepts and of precepts adequate to distinguish between false and true concepts”). As such it cannot, even hypothetically, itself account for the ultimate definition of reality. This, to some degree, would be present with any contingent, perspectivally limited creature. Only a form of knowledge which is free from such defects can define reality.

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Having now articulated the essential elements of the design and epistemic arguments we are in a position to critically examine the view of God arrived at by means of them. Theological Implications of the Design Argument: God’s Power The Logic of Omnipotence The design and epistemic arguments, we have seen, arise out of the concept of reality as necessarily ordered and necessarily knowable. They build upon the third, fourth, and fifth foundational statements of Hartshorne’s system. Together they attempt to demonstrate that a necessary cosmic Orderer and necessary cosmic Knower exist. What must now be explicated is the type of power and knowledge which these arguments necessitate. The Classical View of God’s Power The classical view of omnipotence, according to Hartshorne, says simply that “whatever happens is divinely made to happen.” While this is an enormous generalization, it must be conceded that this is not far from what the dominant theological voices in the church have traditionally tended to say, or at least imply. Thankfully, this divine omnicausaul position was usually not worked out with perfect consistency. But the point nevertheless stands. Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas (to name a few) can hardly be said to consistently depart from this view. The power of God was, therefore, generally defined as “absolute” and “perfect,” and by this was meant “unlimited” and “exhaustive.” Difficulties With the Classical Understanding As with the classical understanding of divine perfection, there are five fundamental difficulties which Hartshorne finds with this classical understanding of omnipotence. Individuality Means Self-Determination The first criticism of the classical view of omnipotence has already been raised in our previous discussion of Hartshorne’s refutation of determinism. We here saw that, according to Hartshorne, individuality and relative self-determination are mutually implicative. “Individuals…must be in some measure self-managed, agents acting to some extent on their own, or they are not individuals.” If, then, creaturely existence is nothing over and above the expression of God’s power, of God’s will, then it is, ultimately, simply God over again. From this it follows that if God is to create a world which is, in any measure distinct from Godself (viz. for God to create any world), God must surrender, to some degree, God’s sole possession of power. Absolute Omnipotence is Pragmatically Meaningless A second argument against the classical view of omnipotence also has been previously alluded to in the earlier context of Hartshorne’s refutation of determinism and thus need only be reviewed here. We have already seen that the concept of absolute determinism fails to meet the pragmatic criterion of meaning. It could not be “acted upon or in some sense lived by….” By the same means, the view that God has power to determine every detail of the contingent world fails to meet the pragmatic criterion of meaning. How could we possibly act on a belief that “we have no power to autonomously act”? How could I determine my actions in such a way that I significantly reflect the fact that the determination is “really” made by another agent? How could my actions reflect the authentic belief that my actions are “permissively” (but certainly!) ordained by my Creator? Hartshorne

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seems correct when he argues that the only way humans (and indeed all agents) can act is in accordance with the belief that the future is at least partly determinable by us. Freedom of God Destroyed A third difficulty with the classical view of omnipotence, which has also been alluded to previously, is that once one claims that creatures have no autonomous power, and hence no autonomous “self-determination,” one loses all hope of speaking analogically about God’s self-determination. “How,” Hartshorne asks, “starting from zero, is there a path to the concept of the supreme case?” Only if humans constitute at least a minimal instance of what God is in the maximal instance can we speak meaningfully of God. If God is said to be genuinely self-determining (viz. not simply free in a phenomenological, compatibilistic sense), then humans must be, in some small measure, self-determining as well, and in a non-compatibilist sense. Their actions must be, to some extent, non-determined by agents and factors other than themselves. The Problem of Evil A fourth problem which the classical view of God raises in an acute way is the problem of evil. The problem, as traditionally understood, is this: if God is all good, and all powerful, then why is there evil in the world? For if God is all good, God would want to prevent or eliminate it. And if God were all powerful, God would be able to prevent or eliminate it. Yet evil continues to exist. Hence, God must either be less than all good, or less than all powerful, or both. There have, of course, been a number of solutions proposed for this problem from the classical perspective, and the contemporary discussion of the matter has taken up a vast body of literature. Given the restricted interest of this work, we cannot even begin to enter into a full discussion of the issues involved. We presently wish only to locate the central dilemma the problem of evil poses for the conception of God as actus purus. The classical understanding led to the view that God’s power was simply the supreme power to act, not the power to be supremely acted upon: it meant that God’s power was simply the power to be the supreme cause of events after God’s own plan, not the power to be in any sense supremely caused, to be the supreme effect of non-divine willing. Religiously Inadequate The final difficulty with the classical understanding of the supreme power is that it is not religiously adequate—it is not genuinely “worshipful.” It is not, in effect, the sort of power we ordinarily deem laudable, but is, rather, a “despotic” conception of power, according to Hartshorne. If God in fact ordains (whether “effectually” or “permissively”—whatever that distinction amounts to) the whole of the created order, then the best analogy for God is that of an absolute tyrant who rules over every feature of the lives of those in this One’s kingdom. But this, surely, is not the highest, most praiseworthy, conception of power. As with the doctrine of God’s immutability, the central problem with this traditional conception of God’s power, according to Hartshorne, is that it exemplifies only one side of possible metaphysical contrasts of God. The Neo-classical View of God’s Power The Definition of Power in the Light of Hartshorne’s Foundational Statements

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In contrast to the traditional understanding of power as the ability to control others, Hartshorne’s Process metaphysics generally defines power as self-creativity responding to others’ self-creativity. The concept of “power” is really but a sub-category of the concept of “prehension.” The “power” of a given actual occasion is its ability to create itself by prehending past objectified data in such a way that it is available to—and hence influential over—subsequent actual occasions. The more attractive a new objectified occasion is to a subsequent occasion, the more “power” it can be said to have. The supreme “society of actual occasions” thus exemplifies the supreme instance of what it is to be significantly prehended by other actual occasions. The availability for prehension of all other (non-divine) occasions is minute in comparison, and their influence too is comparatively small. God’s power, in contrast, in infinitely superior to the intensity and scope of these non-divine instances of power, but this difference is a difference of degree, not kind. A Critical Evaluation of the Neo-Classical View of God’s Power There is, we have thus far seen, much to commend the Process view of God’s power as an alternative to the classical view. What must now be examined, however, are the problematic features of this Process view itself. We shall see that this view itself runs aground on metaphysical difficulties as well as difficulties which arise from the distinctly Christian perspective we are assuming throughout this work. Thus, while there are, I believe, many advantageous elements in this view of divine power which ought to be appropriated, it shall nevertheless be argued that this view is fundamentally at odds with central elements of the Christian proclamation, and that there are no good metaphysical grounds for undertaking the radical re-evaluation of the content of the Christian proclamation which would (we shall show) be necessary to accommodate the Process view. Rather, the view which the Christian-trinitarian proclamation presupposes, we shall argue, is precisely the sort of view which metaphysics requires when it is properly understood. The Unintelligibility of Freedom As we have already noted, one of the major positive features of Hartshorne’s design argument is that it preserves creaturely freedom and renders possible our intelligible talk about God’s freedom. But the manner in which freedom is employed in the design argument also constitutes one of its major weaknesses, for, as we have seen, freedom has not been rendered intelligible in Hartshorne’s system. Freedom and capriciousness are not, as Hartshorne implies, strictly identical. Contingency or spontaneity is necessary, but not sufficient, to account for what we normally call “freedom.” All of reality embodies spontaneous features, but only humans (and perhaps, to a far lesser extent, higher mammals) exemplify the sort of openness to the future combined with rational deliberation which constitutes what we normally call “free decisions.” Correlatively, the evil of the world and “bad luck” are not necessarily identical. The Hitlers and Stalins of the world are not simply the result of a myriad of actual occasions making, with the best of intentions, “unfortunate” decisions. They are, rather, whole beings who have evil intentions and make evil decisions based on these intentions. It is the Process reduction of phenomenal wholes to atomistic occasions which transforms genuine moral evil into “bad luck.” Hartshorne’s view of ontological becoming as a subjectless, instantaneous “popping into existence” is, we have argued, unintelligible. Becoming presupposes some form of an antecedent subject which

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endures throughout the process of becoming. Becoming is essentially creative self-determination, but this presupposes that there is a self which is creative. Hartshorne has rightly argued that the individuality and creative self-determination are mutually implicative, but this means that his inability to render creative self-determination intelligible also renders his view of individuality unintelligible. Concretely, there is for Hartshorne no enduring individual, and this, as we have seen, creates numerous problems for his metaphysical system. The Metaphysical Bondage of God A second criticism which has been raised against Hartshorne’s view of God’s power—God’s omni-influential relationship to the non-divine world—is that God is not on this view significantly free. This may seem paradoxical since this view is, if it is anything, a view which exalts universal freedom. Yet a closer look at the position reveals, as several have pointed out, that the God of Hartshorne’s system is, at least to some extent, a necessitarian God. For one thing, in this system God must by logical necessity have a world, some divine world or other, as we have seen. For God must concretely constitute Godself as a creative synthesis of the objectified data from this world. What is more, God must prehend the whole of the divine order with equal sensitivity. God must of necessity, then, make an ideal response to this data, and must, in turn, be available to be prehended to all creatures. Moreover, God must then eternally remember the good as well as the evil; God must be perfectly just as well as perfectly loving; God must suffer the evil suffered in the world and enjoy the good enjoyed in the world. In short, to appeal to Hartshorne’s favorite analogy, God is bound to have “a body” which God cannot have complete control over, and God must passively experience and responsively influence this “body” in strictly and eternally necessary ways. Response Hartshorne has a response to this objection which, I believe, adequately answers the majority of these criticisms. A central mistake which, Hartshorne claims, such criticisms as these make, is that they assume that God’s absolute ideal character necessitates that the possibilities for God are reduced to “the best possible”—which is to say, “to one alternative.” This is very clear, for example, in an article by David Mason in which he writes that “…to insist that God, of necessity, selects the best possible implies that God is not, finally, free to choose from among genuine alternatives…” Hartshorne’s response is to note that the concept of “the best possible” is systematically misleading. In any given situation calling for a free decision, there will be at the time of decision no singular “best possible response”: there will only be alternatives which at that time are as likely to be “as good” as any of the others. What is more, as we have seen, possibilities are never as definite as actualities. The phrase “best possible,” however, assumes the opposite: possibilities are here as definite as actuality. Only on this supposition could one say that there was a possibility which was the “best possible.” But this, we have already argued with Hartshorne, destroys the contrast between actuality and possibility. To say, then, that God always and of necessity acts in “an ideal manner” is not to say that God’s alternatives are narrowed to one. Such a view would indeed violate the fifth a priori of Hartshorne’s system. There could be no creative synthesis were there no “openness” to God’s response to the world. But God, in Hartshorne’s view, has numerous alternatives to decide between, though God’s decision will

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always be “ideal.” Since an object always influences but cannot dictate the awareness of itself, we influence God by our experiences but do not thereby deprive him of freedom in response to us. The Necessity of the Non-Divine World As I see it, the central difficulty with Hartshorne’s view (and Process theology’s view in general) lies in the misconceived fifth candidate for a priori truth of Hartshorne’s system. Because creative synthesis must occur, according to Hartshorne, God must have a world, prehend the world, reconstitute Godself every moment in response to the world. All of the necessitarian features of the di-polar view of God follow from this statement, not from the fact that God must be perfectly good and respond to the world in an ideal way. To say that God, according to Hartshorne, is necessarily bound to the world and a particular way of responding to the world because God lacks an individual self-sufficient actual reality of God’s own is to make this same point from a different angle. But if, in fact, as we have argued, Hartshorne’s fifth foundational statement is not a genuine a priori truth, and if in fact this is not necessarily universal, but is rather contingent, then the way is open for viewing God’s “bond” to the world as a matter of God’s gracious will rather than as a metaphysical necessity. To say that God’s internal actuality is eternally constituted as an unsurpassably intense aesthetic satisfaction, that God therefore does not need the multiplicity of the non-divine world to be “satisfied,” and that God’s “bond” to the world is therefore one of expressing, not constituting, who this One actually is, is again to make this same point from a different angle. We may argue this from yet another direction. Hartshorne has rightly seen that to always act in an “ideal” manner does not abrogate the possibility of deciding how concretely to act. There can at any given moment be for God a number of alternatives which are equally good. Given this much, we may say that if Hartshorne’s fifth foundational statement is rejected, then the way is opened for supposing that for God to create or to not create is, in some significant sense, “equally good.” Once the statement “creative synthesis occurs” is seen as contingent and empirical rather than as metaphysically necessary, the way is open for conceiving of a God who is “as great” in this One’s essential constitution without the world as with the world. As Father Sokolowski points out, it is just the supposition that God is “as great” without the world as God is with the world which distinguishes Christianity from paganism and lies behind all of the distinctively Christian concepts of creation and salvation as matters of grace, not necessity. According to Sokolowski, because creation’s being an act of grace is so fundamental to Christian theism that, when it is not affirmed, everything distinctively Christian within Christianity begins to disintegrate. The fundamental God-human relation which is revealed as contingent and gracious otherwise becomes a relation of necessity, and the central concept of grace is thereby necessarily ruled out. The Activity of God A third criticism which has been raised against Hartshorne’s view of God’s power is that God cannot, in this view, genuinely act, or initiate events, in the world. The activity of God is problematic in Hartshorne, I argue, not because his view of God contains a high view of God’s “passivity,” but because Hartshorne has not yet resolved on a general level the paradox of how an experience can prehend—before the experiencing agent exists—past data which have now “perished.”

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As we have seen, Hartshorne simply defines experience as that which creatively carries the old dead into the new living. But this definition, we have argued, renders nothing intelligible and thus is, as such, but a label for the problem in need of explanation. Until causation as such is rendered intelligible in Hartshorne’s system, God’s causative influence on the world must remain unintelligible. And even if we grant that God can intelligibly act within the framework of Hartshorne’s system, it nevertheless remains true that God is necessarily bound to act only as God is acted upon. The third, fourth, and fifth foundational statements of his system necessitate this. As to the concrete pole of God, God is necessarily an experience which is asymmetrically related to antecedent data which provides the content of this experience, and God is concrete only as this One synthesizes this antecedent data. After this synthesis, and only as a result of this synthesis, can God “act” by influencing the non-divine occasions which shall again subsequently become data for this One’s own self-constituting prehension. And this “act” is not even on or towards the other selves, but only on Godself. God changes the world only by changing this One’s self which the world must prehend. Still yet, Hartshorne’s understanding of divine power as it relates to God’s activity is problematic in that he contends that “power” must mean “influence.” This is, we have seen, for Hartshorne an a priori truth, the denial of which results in meaninglessness. But, it seems, that it is meaningful to speak of coercive power in certain respects. We have conceded to Hartshorne that the conception of total control destroys any coherent notion of autonomy, but this does not entail that power must always be equivalent to persuasion. It does not, in short, mean that the concept of coercion is meaningless. Hence, when a mother grabbed onto the arm of her child as he was about to run into the street in front of a car, we would naturally say that the parent exercised unilateral control over—she “coerced”—the child. She didn’t simply “persuade” the child to stop running. This doesn’t, of course, mean that the parent at that moment controlled every thought, every feeling, every cellular movement in the child’s body: the child remains an autonomous individual. But with respect to the activity of running into the street, the child was unambiguously coerced. The analogy demonstrates two things. First, it shows, pace Hartshorne, that talk about a person coercing another person is meaningful, for it is possible to exercise unilateral control over another individual without thereby destroying their individuality. The only kind of coercion Hartshorne’s system rules out is exhaustive coercion over every aspect of another’s being—in which case, we concede, the “other” is not truly “other” at all. But this is not what we normally mean when we talk about coercive power. Hence, it must be concluded that Hartshorne has not demonstrated that divine coercion is impossible. As David Basinger has insightfully argued, no Process theologian or philosopher has yet successfully explained why it is that God should be limited, by metaphysical necessity, to utilizing merely persuasive power. The second point the above analogy makes is this: coercive power is not always an unethical thing to exercise. This runs directly counter to the frequently expressed Process claim that persuasive power is always more admirable than coercive power. Even if God could exercise coercive power, as the classical view portrays it, it would, it is claimed, be wrong for God to do so. But this they have not proven. The Problem of Special Revelation God can only operate along the lines specified by the metaphysical categories of Process thought, and this, we see, means that God can only act universally and responsively. God can only create Godself as a

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new synthesis of the past and offer Godself as the dominant data to be prehended by the multiplicity of actual occasions which shall constitute the concrete world in the next instant. In Hartshorne’s system, at least, there is no other conceivable form of action. Any other conception violates supposed a priori truth. God can thus move history only by moving Godself. Indeed, since it is always Godself alone which God directly changes, Ogden is quite correct in stating that in a literal sense, “…[God’s] creative action…is not an action in history, but an action that transcends it…” God is, as Whitehead says, the transcendental “principle of concretion,” nothing more—by metaphysical necessity, nothing more. One primary consequence of this is that all claims to “special revelatory acts” of God must be judged as being “mythological”. But this position, in our estimation, is disastrous for Christianity. Who is the God revealed in Jesus Christ and proclaimed throughout the Old and New Testaments if not One who reveals Godself through initiating particular, radically new, events in history? As Barth notes, the biblical concept of “revelation” is precisely the opposite of “myth.” It does not tell us about “a relation between God and man that exists generally in every time and place and that is always process.” Rather, the revelation of this God is always specific and particular. God’s Activity and Key Christian Doctrines To render our objection to Hartshorne’s conception of divine power, and thus of divine activity, more explicit, we shall briefly elucidate some of its implications for key Christian doctrines. Christology What becomes of our view of Christ when the initiating, specific, and unique nature of divine activity is ruled out? It is not difficult to discern. The distinctiveness of Christ can, in this case, only refer to the special way in which he “represents” what is true of all people. Ogden makes this quite explicit when he writes,

The claim “only in Jesus” must be interpreted to mean, not that God acts to redeem only in the in the history of Jesus and in no other history, but that the only God who redeems any history—although he in fact redeems every history—is the God whose redemptive action is decisively re-presented in the word that Jesus speaks and is.

Several crucial features of the implications of Process thought for Christology must be noted here. First, it is not God’s initiative which can account for the decisiveness of Jesus. God simply did what God always must do: God responds to creatures in an ideal way. Thus, the credit for the distinctiveness of Jesus goes to the man Jesus. This must, at best, constitute a radically adoptionistic Christology. Second, whatever “redemption” means in this passage, it again is not a free act of God’s grace. That God does “redeem” at all, let alone in and through all of history, is the result of God’s being metaphysically bound to God’s own “body.” Redemption can be nothing God initiated: if redemption occurs, whatever it means, it must, on the terms of the Process system, be the result of creaturely initiative, followed by God’s response. And third, it is not clear how Jesus could “decisively” be anything in any significant sense of the term. If this re-presentation happened once, one would think that it could, and indeed should, happen again. Nothing in terms of the world environment has changed. If it has not, that is, it seems, mere “misfortune.” The eph hapax of Hebrews (10:10) is hence reduced to nonsense.

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The center of the Christian faith, the proclamation that “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself” (II Cor. 5:19), is clearly reinterpreted, if not overhauled, in a damaging fashion in this scheme. A metaphysical scheme which does not allow for such a fundamental feature of Christian revelation must, from our perspective, be judged as being misguided. In the case of Hartshorne, the central point of error is his fourth and fifth foundational statement. It is because God, like all actualities, must be asymmetrically related to antecedent data, and because God, like all actualities, must be constituted as a creative synthesis of these antecedent occasions, that his system flies in the face of traditional Christianity at this point. We shall argue in the final section of this chapter that our modifications of the foundations of Hartshorne’s system allow us to articulate the dynamic nature of God which Process thought has sought to articulate, but to do so without necessitating the low Christology which it necessitates.

God’s “More Than Necessary” Love Hartshorne defines love most fundamentally as “social awareness.” The act of being sensitive and responding appropriately to others is love. One notes immediately that, under this definition, God’s love and God’s power are co-extensive. They both refer to the same reality, though in slightly different ways. In the end, they both are different ways of saying “creative synthesis.” Love refers to the scope and qualitative perfection of the prehensive act, and power refers to the relevance for subsequent data of the prehensive act, its “superjective” character (which is, of course, contingent upon the prior scope and perfection of the act). The difficulty this raises for Christianity is precisely the difficulty raised concerning God’s freedom earlier. It can be expressed succinctly in the following question: can the biblical notion of God’s love be at all intelligible unless God is free not to love, or at least free not to love in the surprising manner that God in fact loves? Is the biblical concept of God’s love for humans exhaustively intelligible as an abstract metaphysical necessity? As with Gunton’s and Neville’s critique of God’s freedom discussed above, we disagree that the perfect and necessary love of God in any sense limits God as these two seem to suggest. This is rather a freedom of God’s perfect character. But we nevertheless sympathize with Gunton in feeling that the metaphysical account of God’s love does not do full justice to the biblical account of God’s love. The love of God revealed in Christ has, as Aulen notes, a spontaneous, an unpredictable, a radically unexpected quality to it—which is not simply the result of our metaphysical ignorance. The God who is defined as love is not only necessary: this One is, as Jüngel has argued, “more than necessary.” Jüngel argues that God is the One who is love, but in a way “which can neither be surreptitiously gained nor coerced, which is entirely unnecessary and thus is more than necessary.” We cannot concur with Jüngel that God’s love is “entirely unnecessary”—if he means this literally—for this would make God’s love contingent. If we are understanding him correctly, the result would be that the difference between the statement “God is Love” and the statement “God is Hate” would, presumably, be a matter of God’s contingent will. We would have a Scotian voluntarianism of the worst sort. We rather argue, with Hartshorne, that the statement “God is love” is a metaphysical necessity, being an aspect of God’s eternal character.

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But the second part of Jüngel’s statement is, in our estimation correct and crucial to the issue at hand. God’s love is not only necessary. It cannot be circumscribed by the logical necessities of human thought. If we are to remain true to the revelation of God in Christ, our account of the metaphysical necessity of God’s love must leave room for an aspect of God’s love which is “more than necessary.” This Hartshorne does not do, and the reason is that his fourth and fifth foundational statements claim to exhaustively define the being of all things, including God. Salvation by Grace Hartshorne’s denial of an eternal, necessary, actual aspect of God leads him to deny that God can act in any other way than as a “cosmic responder.” This view further necessitates that he deny that there could exist any “trans-necessary” dimension of God’s love. And all of this, we here contend, has implications for the traditional Christian understanding of salvation which are nothing short of catastrophic. Because God can initiate no radically new and particular action in the world, it cannot be the cases, on this view, that God graciously, and therefore unexpectedly, justifies and transforms humanity through the salvific work of Christ. Because God acts only as responding to our act, any attempted view of salvation in this framework must, of necessity, be ultra-Pelagian. God appreciates us only as we are worthy of appreciation; God enjoys us only as we are, in fact, enjoyable. God could not do otherwise. What is more, it is not clear to me that the concepts of “salvation,” “justification” or “grace” can even have any recognizably Christian meaning in Hartshorne’s scheme as it stands. What would we be “saved” from? A state of sin? But since there is no abiding essence to individuals (let alone to humanity as a whole, see below), since we are, quite literally, a new self every moment, there can, it seems, be no “slavery to sin” to be rescued from. There may be individual “sins” (though it is hard to see how these would be more than “misfortunes”), but the traditional Pauline concept of “sin” as a noun (not a verb), as a transcendental binding condition, can have no meaning here. The Solidarity of Fallen and Redeemed Humanity An integral aspect of the biblical conception of sin and salvation, an aspect frequently overlooked by contemporary Christians, is the concept of the solidarity of humanity in its fallen and redeemed states. We are, in our fallen state, “in Adam,” and we are, in our redeemed state which we presently fragmentarily participate in and are destined to become, “in Christ.” Contrary to much popular Christian thinking and acting, sin and salvation are not merely, nor even primarily, individualistic affairs. “In Adam” and “in Christ” are not just abstract summations of what “happens” to take place on an individual level. The scriptural assumption is that they are abiding transcendental realities which describe what we are precisely because they are, to a significant extent, normative over what we are. They not only reflect us: they are us. It is, however, quite clear that no sense can be made of such transcendental realities in Hartshorne’s system. The exclusivity of the categories of abstraction and concreteness, his particular non-perspectival understanding of abstraction and (correlatively) his reductionistic conception of concreteness, all prevent him from having any room in his system for a realist understanding of transcendentals.

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If the character of an individual is merely the abstract characteristics of a myriad of actual occasions over time, having no normativity over what those actual occasions become, how much more abstract is the character of “humanity” as a whole? And if an individual as a phenomenological whole is “really” but an abstraction from a series of actual occasions (and is thus so viewed by God), what ontological status could characterize the conception of “the reality of humanity as a whole”? It can only be more abstract. We cannot, then, in any real sense be “in Adam” or “in Christ.” We fall and rise strictly on our own. Prayer Central to the traditional concept of being a disciple of Christ, of growing in the Christian life, is the concept of prayer. There are, of course, a number of different kinds of prayer, but for our present purpose we are interested only in petitionary prayer. Other forms of prayer are less problematic within the context of Hartshorne’s thought. Because God can take no special, particular, and radically new action in his view, it is not surprising to hear Hartshorne admit that petitionary prayer is “problematic at best” within the context of his system. God will respond to us as God must respond to us (with, of course, creative variables), and thus the notion of God “hearing” and “answering” the prayers of this One’s children simply makes no sense. God is available for our prehension, and prayer or no prayer, that is all the help we are going to get! Only if God can and does have power to unilaterally “intervene” in the life of this One’s children can this practice mean anything more than “reminding [ourselves] that we are in the divine presence.” Eschatology One final implication of Hartshorne’s concept of divine power and activity needs to be brought out before we turn to the theological implication of the epistemic argument. Since God is, in Hartshorne’s view, necessarily tied to the world as the data for this One’s self-constitution, it follows that a) the sum value of the world must increase; and b) that this increase can never end. The value forever increases because each new divine synthesis is combined with God’s memory of the infinite past and hence becomes richer, and this progress can never end because it is an essential ingredient to God’s self-constitution (and greater “intensities” of satisfaction are always possible). This conception, however, embodies several difficulties which must presently be examined. The Ontological Ground of Creativity We do not, in contrast to some, find the concept of an eternity of progress itself problematic. The mistake here is in assuming that Hartshorne is ever talking about “a finite universe comprised of finite and limited components.” True, the universe at any given moment is, according to Hartshorne, finite. But the universe, taken as the non-divine reality as such, in infinite. How can this be? Because the logically possible number of finite combinations is infinite. Finite multiplicities as such are infinitely compossible. And, mathematically speaking at least, there are no grounds for contending that in an infinite amount of time all possibilities must be realized. Our own difficulty with Hartshorne’s concept of eternal progress is thus not its supposed logical impossibility, but its lack of an ontological foundation in the context of Hartshorne’s thought. Possibility is, Hartshorne realizes, contingent upon actuality. The “principle of transcendence” lies in the “element of futurity” implicit in every existing occasion. But it is at this point that the problem arises.

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For all particular contingent actualities might not have been. Hence all future possibilities might never have been. Yet the possibility of no possibilities (because of the possibility of no actualities) is, we have with Hartshorne argued, false a priori. The “principle of transcendence” or (as Hartshorne usually prefers), “the principle of creativity” as such, then, cannot lie in contingent actualities. A necessity cannot be grounded in a contingency. But, as Whitehead insightfully remarked, the “general possibility of the universe must be somewhere.” But where if not in contingent actualities? God cannot here be appealed to, for, as we have seen, the actuality of God in Hartshorne’s thought is itself the result of contingent possibilities. Concretely, God is contingent. And the abstract pole of God is simply a general description of what the contingent actualization of divine possibilities exemplifies. So how is one to account for the necessity of creativity, when it is admitted that possibility is contingent upon actuality, but it is not admitted that actuality can be necessary? My criticism of Hartshorne’s doctrine of the eternal progress of the world, then, is that it has no ontological foundation. As Walter Kasper has argued, “[t]he miracle of becoming something more and something new can only be explained through participating in a creative fullness of being.” It is just this “fullness of being” which is lacking in Hartshorne’s account. Only a necessary actual being who is antecedently complete and inexhaustibly full (“more than necessary”) within this One’s self can ground an eternity of creative becoming. The Eternality of Evil A second criticism which arises from a more theological interest concerns the status of evil in Hartshorne’s view. We have agreed with Hartshorne that evil is the result of misused or unfortunately used creaturely freedom. And we have recognized that Hartshorne’s design argument, for all the ambiguity of his own conception of freedom, nevertheless renders this fact concerning the origin of evil less ambiguous than traditional theodicies. There is here the ontological “openness” of the future which is necessary for a genuine free-will defense. The difficulty we find in this system, however, is that because God and the world are both eternal, and necessarily so, and because freedom (e.g. “capriciousness” in Hartshorne) is inherent in being, there can be no hope of God ever ridding the created order of its evil. Hartshorne is himself very explicit on this point. If creaturely freedom is defined as capriciousness, and if, therefore, the possibility of good entails the possibility of evil, and if, finally, all of this is a priori, then it follows that evil is a permanent feature of the non-divine world. Any hope of ever conquering it, of ever ridding the world of pain and suffering, is thus strictly illusory. The eternal and necessary world is, for Hartshorne, eternally and necessarily free, and God is not free to have it any other way. We cannot be coerced, so “all that God can directly give us is the beauty of his ideal for us …to which our response has to be partly self-determined….” But if this is all God can do, how can God head off universal chaos by unilaterally limiting freedom in any particular instance? If order is a priori—and I agree that it is—then it is logically impossible for all occasions to simultaneously veer from the divine subjective aim in such a way that universal chaos would ensue. But if freedom is a priori—and I agree that it is—then it seems that there can be no logical grounds for preventing this simultaneity. Indeed, if cosmic progress is a priori as Hartshorne claims—I would argue

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that it is not!—then not only is universal chaos necessarily excluded, but even a general worsening of the cosmic situation is excluded. But this exclusion, it seems, is something which Hartshorne’s system cannot consistently promise. This difficulty arises, I believe, because the a priori of relationality, creative synthesis, and aesthetic enjoyment is understood to be world-contingent by Hartshorne. Only if the a priori of order, freedom, and aesthetic satisfaction is satisfied in the infinite actuality of God—making all other orders, freedoms and aesthetic experiences contingent—can this paradox of Hartshorne’s system be resolved. The time of the creation’s “groaning in travail” (Rom. 8:20-22) shall here be finished, for the entire cosmic order shall be “set free from the bondage of decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God.” Indeed, so wonderful shall be the eschatological deliverance of the creation that Paul can say that our present sufferings are “not worthy to be compared to the glory that is to be revealed in us.” If Hartshorne is correct, such a hope is impossible. The Theological Implications of the Epistemic Argument: God’s Knowledge We have in this chapter thus far outlined Hartshorne’s design and epistemic arguments. We have further examined the positive features of the theological implications of the design argument over the classical position, and have then gone on to critically evaluate these implications in the light of their internal difficulties and adverse repercussions for Christian theology. We must now do the same with regard to the second argument we are concerned with in this chapter: the epistemic argument. The Classical View of God’s Omniscience Until the time of the Socinians, the belief that God’s omniscience included all future events was not generally questioned. The classical understanding of God’s knowledge was in general that God knew all things, including the future, “perfectly,” without change, and hence in a timeless fashion. Because God was seen as actus purus, and, hence, perfectly simple and immutable, God’s knowledge was generally seen to be identical with God’s power, will, love, etc. Difficulties with the Classical View Internal Consistency First, we must recall the difficulties which we discussed concerning the timeless perfection of God itself. The very concept of “timeless perfection,” we saw, runs into the problem of “incompossibilities”; it seems to subjectivise and render illusory the reality of becoming; it undermines the contrast between possibility and actuality, and hence it undermines any ontological distinction between the past, present, and the future; it renders unintelligible the personhood of God; and it bypasses all of those aspects of perfections which attach to “virtuous mutability.” Since the classical understanding of God’s perfect knowledge is an aspect of its understanding of God’s perfection as such, all of these criticisms now attach to omniscience as it is classically defined. Other criticisms, however, arise specifically in relation to this classical understanding of omniscience. Perhaps foremost among them is the suspicion that a God who knew reality in a timeless mode would not know “what time it was.” A timeless God, in other words could not truly be omniscient. God would indexically know what events follow what events, but this One could not know what it is to be in the

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now, with just this past, with just this future, and with just this experience of the temporal passage of becoming from one to the other. For all moments are, per hypothesis, simultaneous with this One. The Neo-Classical View of God’s Omniscience Summary of Hartshorne’s View To state it most succinctly, the view of omniscience arrived at through the epistemic argument is that the perfection of God’s knowledge consists in God knowing as actual all that is actual, and as possible all that is possible. God’s knowledge includes an exhaustive memory of the infinite past as actual, and a comprehensive scope on possibilities for the future. Only in this way, we saw, can the value and reality of the past not be lost; and only in this way can God, with infinite wisdom, offer each new occasion with a relevant subjective aim which maximizes the possibilities of good, and minimizes the possibility of evil. But this means that God does not, and cannot, have an actual (viz. determinate) and exhaustive knowledge of the future. The Advantages of The Neo-Classical View of Omniscience First and foremost, this view clearly avoids any form of determinism. Secondly, Hartshorne’s view also clearly preserves the intelligibility of the distinction between possibility and actuality as well as the future and the past which the classical view obscured. Thirdly, because Hartshorne views God as temporal, there is no problem with squaring omniscience with the flow of time. And finally, Hartshorne’s view, at least insofar as it affirms the temporality of God, is biblically more sound than the classical view. God genuinely “moves with” the created order in time as the Bible portrays God. A Critical Evaluation of the Neo-classical View of God’s Knowledge Hartshorne’s view of God’s knowledge, we have seen, has some significant advantages over the classical understanding of this attribute of God. There are, however, some serious difficulties with this view which must now be attended to. Can God Know Our Subjectivity? We have seen in our treatment of the epistemic argument that God knows the cosmic order by prehending the creative synthesis of each just-past actual occasion. This means, as Hartshorne explicitly states, that there can be, strictly speaking, no interaction among contemporaries. God, like all other actual occasions, prehends how a previous occasion felt, but not as the occasion felt. “A past occurrence is in itself subject, but as known it is object.” God, therefore, can only know us when our subjectivity has “perished,” when we have become “objectified.” We have already alluded to the significant conflict this view creates with one of the most fundamental human religious institutions: namely, the conviction that “God is closer to me than I am to myself.” God may know about my experience after it occurred, but God, in Hartshorne’s scheme, cannot know my experience “from the inside,” and God cannot know me as I am having the experience. In my concrete experience, I am locked into my solitary subjectivity.

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Once we have rejected the asymmetricality of all concrete relatedness as an a priori truth, there is no longer any metaphysical necessity to hold this position. We shall argue that our dispositional view of the self opens up for us a way of maintaining creaturely autonomy while asserting the presence of the Creator in the contemporary essence of the creature. Is the Contemporary World Real? Beyond the religious applicability of Hartshorne’s doctrine of God’s actual knowledge as being exclusively knowledge of the past, there is a further, closely related philosophical problem. We have seen Hartshorne argue in the epistemic argument that reality and God’s knowledge must be coextensive. Reality or truth cannot be defined apart from divine knowledge. But if God has no knowledge of the contemporary world, does this not entail that the contemporary world is not real? How can Hartshorne assert the existence of something which God cannot know? Is our subjective becoming real? Hartshorne never denies it. Yet it is not known, and cannot be known, by God. As we have already noted, the central difficulty here is that Hartshorne holds that all concrete relations must be asymmetrical (past in the present) because of his reductionism, and Hartshorne has restricted his ontology to the abstract and the concrete. And as we have seen, this means that he cannot render becoming intelligible, for the move from the abstract to the concrete here must be capricious, atomistic and subjectless. What is now clear is that this also ultimately entails that this moment of becoming cannot fit Hartshorne’s own definition of reality—that which is known by God. Is The Future in God’s Hands? A third difficulty also concerns the unhappy relationship between Hartshorne’s understanding and the biblical presentation of God’s knowledge. We have applauded the neo-classical view for allowing, in contrast to the classical view, the future to be intelligently open, and hence for humans to be genuinely free. To the extent that it does this it is, we believe, not only philosophically more sound, but biblically more sound as well. We must, however, now qualify this by arguing that while it is true that Scripture presents humans as free and morally responsible, it also portrays God as being sovereign over this creaturely freedom, viz. as knowing and predetermining whatever is necessary to guarantee this One’s over-all design for human history. Hence in Scripture God can, when appropriate, decree that certain events are going to come to pass as a manifestation of this One’s Deity (e.g. Isa. 41:26, 42:9, 44:7-8, 45:21). For example, God at some point predestinated, and hence foreknew with some definiteness, the crucifixion of Christ (Rev. 13:8, Acts 2:23, 4:48). Indeed, it was predestined from the foundation of the world that there would be an elect body in Christ (Eph. 1:3-11). In contrast, Hartshorne’s account of God’s knowledge of the future can do nothing with the biblical account of God’s predestinating and foreknowing activity. On his account, God, by metaphysical law, cannot determine what God might wish to determine, and hence foreknow, concerning future events. Only the most general abstract outlines of the future can be known, for nothing definite can be predetermined. This God cannot take any initiative. This God can act only as acted upon. And it is for this reason that the God witnessed to in Christ and Scripture has so much more control over this One’s creation than does the God of neo-classicalism. The Eternal Object of God’s Knowledge

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We have reviewed a number of arguments which lead Hartshorne to suppose that the world is necessary and eternal alongside of God. One of these arguments was that without a world there would be no multiplicity for God to prehend, and hence no material from which God could re-constitute Godself concretely for an aesthetic satisfaction. To say, as Hartshorne says, that God’s knowledge must always have a non-divine content, is in effect, to state this same argument another way. The world, by availing itself to God’s knowledge (prehension) every moment provides the material by which God concretely becomes God anew every moment. Hartshorne makes this point from a different angle when he writes, “… is not the notion of a knower knowing himself absurd? Could even God observe a mere privations? I hold that we have no right to suppose this, since we have no idea what he would be observing as the objective situation.” The assumption here is that “merely” knowing oneself is “a mere privation,” even in the case of God. Why? Because there is no experiencer over and above the experience which constitutes a “subject-now.” Moreover, experience needs some content, and hence must be related to some other object. Hence, the experience which constitutes “God-now” cannot have “God” as its content. It must have what is not God: namely, the non-divine world. A corollary to this argument is that we have no concept of a self except as distinguished from other selves. Unless the “I” is distinguished from others, there can be no coherent meaning to “I.” Thus, unless God is eternally distinguished from non-divine selves, we cannot, in Hartshorne’s view, conceive of God as knowing Godself as a self. But, of course, if it is supposed that God is antecedently social within Godself, if God is already eternally self-differentiated and self-sufficient, complete and full within this sociality, then there is no need to posit an eternal world to give God an object of knowledge (and love, and fellowship, etc.). The Trinity, as C.S. Lewis noted, allows God to be seen as a genuine “self,” without positing an eternal contrast between this “self” and non-divine selves. We shall expand this in our reconstruction in the following section. The Problem of the One and Many There is, we have heard Hartshorne say, “no interaction” between contemporaries. Every occasion is, in the present, locked in its own subjectivity. By the time it is known by another, the occasion has died, “perished”—become “objectified data.” Even God “waits” (by metaphysical constraint) for the occasion to attain its “satisfaction,” to achieve its subjective aim, before God can participate in its feeling. The philosophic problem this raises, in an acute way, is the problem of the one and many. The difficulty with Process thought is that if, at moment x, every actual occasion is isolated in its subjectivity from every other occasion, it seems that we have a momentary instance of complete non-relationality? True, every occasion is related to past occasions, and true every occasion shall momentarily be related to future occasions: but we nevertheless seem to have complete non-relationality, complete pluralism, in the contemporary universe. What, we must ask, unifies the many and makes them intelligible at moment x? What do they all have in common? It is of no avail to attempt to answer this question by appealing to “the category of the ultimate,” creativity. For creativity is not a reality which unifies many, it is not “an actual entity…which does anything.” It is, rather, simply “the generic name for all doings.” It has no character apart from the

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specific occasions it describes. And hence, as Neville argues, it is, in fact, “a statement of the ontological problem, not the answer to it.” As we have already seen, ontological normativity requires antecedent actuality. Hence, universal creativity cannot be divorced from the actuality of the Creator, as Neville has argued. And, as Neville also argues, the unity of the cosmos must be located in this same antecedent actuality. Nor is it possible to argue that the unity of the cosmos is sufficiently accounted for by the unity of each actual occasion as it unifies the cosmos into its own self-constituting synthesis. This “pluralistic solution” does not “account for the unity of the others [viz. other actual occasions] of the ontological many, for each of those others unifies the many in its own way.” Alternatively, it might perhaps seems that God, considered as an actual occasion, is the exception to this which saves the theory, for God’s unique synthesis is all encompassing. Yet this too fails, for this unification comes “too late.” In any strictly contemporary moment, we have only a many. What God synthesizes is the just-past in the immediate present. But, as to the immediate present itself, the divine synthesis is one of “the unrelated many” which needs unification. Hartshorne’s metaphysics, then, runs aground on the problem of the one and the many. It does so, I believe, for the exact same reasons it cannot account for the reality of the contemporary world. Indeed, these are really identical problems. The unintelligible plurality of the contemporary world is simply an aspect of the unknowability of the becoming of the contemporary world. The problem of an unrelated many is, from a different angle, the problem of the unknowability of the many all over again. The Problem of the Theory of Relativity A final frequently voiced criticism of Hartshorne’s view of God’s knowledge of the world is that it conflicts with Einstein’s theory of relativity. If, as relativity theory implies, we cannot meaningfully speak about “cosmic simultaneity,” then, it seems, the notion that Gods prehends the whole cosmos “every moment” and offers it a new subjective aim “every moment” is meaningless. Hartshorne’s view, in other words, seems to presuppose an “absolute time” which both God and the cosmos move within. Hartshorne has, for the most part, been content to leave this problem unsolved, though as we have seen, he repeatedly stresses how paradoxical, if not unintelligible, the alternative to his position is (viz. the timeless view of God). As difficult as it is to conceive of “divine time” in the light of relativity theory, surely it is less difficult than conceiving of divine timelessness which nevertheless causes and is related to temporal events, some of which are self-determining. Hartshorne is attempting to avoid the notion of “cosmic simultaneity” by denying that God’s prehension of the cosmos is a single prehension, that is, a single “divine state.” Rather, he suggests that God’s concrete prehension of the cosmos is multifarious. God’s prehension of a multiplicity of actual occasions in one temporal-spatial location is a different prehension than God’s prehension of a multiplicity of occasions at another temporal-spatial location. Hartshorne himself admits that he has “mixed feelings” about this solution. One particular worry is that it seems that “the idea of God as an individual though cosmic being is…compromised.” This I take to be something of an understatement. If Hartshorne’s suggestion were adopted, then, it seems he could no longer speak about a “consequent nature” of God. He rather would have to speak about “consequent natures” of God, for each divine prehension, recall, constitutes God’s concrete self. If there are a multitude of prehensions, then there must be a multitude of divine concrete selves.

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Hartshorne’s proposal must, I believe, be considered unsuccessful. The problem remains. What has not been sufficiently recognized, however, is that the problem of relativity physics is not endemic to Process thought alone. The criticism is frequently thrown at Process thinkers (and they frequently throw it at themselves) when in fact it is a problem which any theistic system must face. It is precisely the equivalent to the problem which the “principle of perspectivity” poses for theism which was discussed earlier. Even the “timeless view of God” must wrestle with it, for the supposition of an eternal simultaneity of time is prima facia no more inherently compatible with relativity theory than a temporal point of simultaneity. If, in fact, there is no absolute frame of reference in which universal contemporeity makes sense, calling it “eternal” will not create such a reference point. If every perspective is limited—bound to a time-space reference point—then a single all-encompassing perspective, whether temporal or nontemporal, is impossible. A Trinitarian Reconstruction Of The Neo-classical View of God’s Power and Knowledge As the design and epistemic argument spell out the content of the perfection which the ontological and cosmological arguments outline as necessary, so our present reconstruction of the view of God arrived at by the design and epistemic arguments shall begin to fill in the content of our Trinitarian reconstruction of the neo-classical view of God. The Necessary Relationality of God We have repeatedly seen that one centrally significant implication of Hartshorne’s metaphysical system is that the non-divine world must be seen as a metaphysical necessity alongside the necessary divine reality. This, we have seen, is the result of a) Hartshorne’s contention that being is necessarily relational; b) his view of actuality as exclusively atomistic; c) his view of experience as necessarily asymmetrically related to its objective content; and d) his view of experience as necessarily consisting of a creative synthesis of an antecedent multiplicity. We have, however, argued that b, c and d are erroneously constructed as a priori. Relationality is indeed a priori—absolute unity being conceptually equivalent to nothingness—but, we have argued, concrete reality need not be conceived of as exclusively atomistic, concrete relationality need not be strictly asymmetrical, and experience need not consist in creative synthesis. These are partial and contingent aspects of reality; they are not non-restrictive and a priori. The first and foremost consequence of this is that the a priori truth of relationality can now be satisfied without the postulation of a contingent non-divine multiplicity to be prehended by God. The necessity of relationality can be satisfied in the necessity of the divine being itself. God is necessarily relational to Godself. All intelligibility, we argue, is satisfied by this. There is no further metaphysical necessity of a non-divine world. This point is really simply restated in a different form as we recall the metaphysical difficulty embodied in Hartshorne’s theory of abstraction as applied to God. The necessity of God’s character, we have argued, is unintelligible unless grounded in, and indeed identical with, a necessary infinite actuality. God must have an eternal, infinite actuality which is at once God’s essence and God’s essential existence. Without this antecedent and primordial actuality, the view of God’s necessary and actual relationality

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apart from the world would be unintelligible, as it is within Hartshorne’s system. If God’s eternal character is merely an abstraction from contingent divine actual occasions, then clearly an actual self-sufficient (because necessary) relationality could never characterize God’s eternal character. But once we postulate a necessary actuality to render intelligible the a priori “abstract” character of God as required by the theistic arguments, we are not only free to now postulate an actual relationality within God: we must do so. For again, pure, independent, solitary simplicity is unintelligible. But just this is what we would have to conceive in order to conceive of God’s necessary, primordial, independent actuality—were it not internally relational. The Necessary Object of God’s Knowledge The view of the one necessary being as being necessarily constituted by internal relationality provides for us the answer to Hartshorne’s argument for the necessity of the world based on the necessity of God’s knowledge and God’s love having a proper object. For having refuted the unnecessary features of the foundational statements of Hartshorne’s system which his theistic arguments arise from, we may now say, and indeed must say, that the only thing which the one necessary reality necessarily knows and loves is Godself. Again, if God is conceived of as alone necessarily actual, and thus as consisting of an eternal self-differentiated relationality, and if it is granted that the concept of experience requires the conception of an experiencing subject, as we have argued, then it can no longer be argued that “the notion of a knower knowing himself [alone] is absurd.” Nor could it any longer be argued, as Hartshorne argues, that God would be “foolish” or “do the worst possible thing” if God chose not to create the world. For the necessity of the divine self-differentiated actuality cannot be essentially altered, for better or for worse, by contingent considerations. It is “as great,” at least as to its necessary features, with contingent non-divine expressions as without them. If we may now utilize the language of Scripture, we may, in the light of our reconstruction, view God’s essential being as eternally consisting in the event of the perfect knowing and loving of the Father and Son in the power of the Spirit. The very conception of the biblical God as the one who not only loves, but is love, implies this. If in fact a non-divine world is not a metaphysical necessity, and if in fact God is a metaphysical necessity—and with God, God’s knowledge and God’s love—then it is necessary that God be conceived of as being self-differentiated and that this self-differentiation consist in God’s social knowledge and love. As necessary, the God-defining social action within Godself must be in need of (contingent upon) no other, but must be sufficient unto itself. God must then be metaphysically defined as just the event of this eternal, divine, self-sufficient knowledge and love. The One whose power is this One’s love, and whose love is this One’s knowledge, is the necessary and eternal divine event which structures and internally satisfies, in and of itself, all rationality and which further grounds all contingent being. The contingent relationality, rationality, love and knowledge of non-divine being has its source in the necessary relationality, rationality, love and knowledge of this social and eventful One. The fundamental purpose for the being of contingent reality, as shall be argued in chapter VI, is to express (not constitute) the fullness of the One who has freely, and therefore graciously, called it into being.

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The Trinity and Divine Activity Earlier in this chapter we saw that Hartshorne’s understanding of God’s actuality produces a view of God’s activity which is problematic for philosophical, and certainly doctrinal, reasons. We saw that the problem of causation was left unsolved and that this view ruled out the possibility of God taking any unique and radical action in the world. This in turn affected all of the central tenets of the Christian faith. In the light of our revision of Hartshorne’s foundational concepts, it should be clear that the problem of God only acting as acted upon does not apply to our reconstructed view of God based on Hartshorne’s theistic arguments. God can only act as acted upon in Hartshorne’s system because God is only actual as made actual (at least in part) by non-divine creatures. God’s actuality is nothing over and above the contingent creative synthesis of the just-past multiplicity of the world. So, of course there is, as it were, no “surplus” actuality to make any radical initiative in the world. God’s responsive (“passive”) self-creativity is all the activity God can enact. But if, as we have argued, it is not a priori that actuality necessarily consists of a creative synthesis of antecedent occasions, then obviously, it cannot be an a priori truth that God’s actuality must consist in such a creative synthesis. Thus, God does not have to derive the material for God’s actual self-constitution from non-divine objectified entities. But this in essence entails that the difficulties raised against Hartshorne’s view of God’s activity do not apply here. For if God is relationally actual within Godself, apart from the world, then God’s activity need not simply be a response to what the world has just done. God can, as God chooses, take the initiative in the world. Once we admit a primordial, non-contingent and socially self-sufficient actuality to God, then—but only then—God can be conceived of as a truly free Creator. God is free to create, or not create; to determine or leave undetermined; to allow the creation to freely run its course, or to intervene and alter its course. God has, as it were, the “surplus” of actuality sufficient to act in this fashion. The Trinity and Key Christian Doctrines The Trinity and Christology The Trinitarian and Christological controversies of the early Church took place at different times and were historically only remotely related to each other. This fact, however, must not cloud the fact that these two orthodox confessions are really mutually implicatory. Each necessitates the other. Our critique of Hartshorne’s system on this point is sufficient to already demonstrate that the Church’s Christology—the view that in Christ God united Godself to humanity in a distinct and decisive way—cannot stand without the Church’s traditional understanding of God as triune. Only if God is antecedently actual, relational, and self-sufficient in relation to the world can God be free enough to do what Scripture proclaims that God did in fact do in Christ Jesus. Only a God who is eternally social within Godself can perform the “more than necessary” feat of “opening up” this sociality to what is fundamentally other than Godself. Only a God who is socially and self-sufficiently triune as lover, beloved and loving can take the radical and completely unprovoked initiative to take upon and within this One’s self the full nature of a non-divine self in order to effect wholeness in the whole of the non-divine creation. Only a God whose self-defining disposition toward aesthetic and social delight is

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perfectly satisfied within Godself could be free enough to redefine Godself in perfect conjunction with the self-defining disposition of a human individual. And only a God who is self-differentiated within Godself could do this without thereby ceasing to be God. In short, only a God who does not “need” the world can genuinely become incarnate within the world and graciously save the world. Neither a static solipsistic God, nor a dynamic but dependent God, can render intelligible the revelatory fact that “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself” (2Cor. 5:19). Only the internally relational One, whose actuality is “in surplus,” is “more than self-sufficient” or “more than necessary”—only this One renders intelligible this revelatory fact, and with it, all the metaphysical categories. The Trinity and Grace It is in no way coincidental that the view which renders the orthodox conception of Christ intelligible at the same time renders the Christian theme of grace intelligible, for the grounds of intelligibility are in both cases the same: namely, the conception of a God who is internally social and self-sufficient—more than self-sufficient—within Godself. We have seen that Hartshorne’s view of God cannot allow for grace, for what this God does God does only as a response, and this out of metaphysical necessity and metaphysical need. God can only offer an initial subjective aim to the creature—which is to say that God can only re-create Godself in a way which is relevant to a subsequent creature’s prehension—and even this offer is made not of abundance, but out of God’s own metaphysical need for a subsequent aesthetic satisfaction. Once the foundational elements which give rise to this neo-classical conception of God are refuted, however, this difficulty is avoided. A God who is in need of none other is supremely free for the other, and when this freedom is actualized, it is done so not out of need, but out of abundance, out of grace. As God creates the world before the world could offer anything to God, and thus out of grace, so God re-creates the fallen world order before this world order could benefit God, and thus out of grace. Only the God who is free to be alone—for this One is never alone—can out of the abundance of this One’s eternal self-sufficient actuality take the gracious initiative to save lost humanity. As Scripture portrays the matter, this initiative is performed through the fact that God graciously renders God’s eternal sociality supremely inclusive to encompass the other. In the language of the New Testament, the Father comes to us in the person of the Son through the power of the Spirit, in order that we and the whole created order might have access to the Father through the Son in the power of the Spirit (Eph. 2:18). The Trinity and Prayer The same internally social conception of God which renders the Church’s understanding of Christ and salvation intelligible renders—for the same reasons—the Church’s understanding of petitionary prayer intelligible. Whereas God can, in Hartshorne’s scheme, “do no favors” as we have seen, a self-sufficient God whose essential actuality is not contingent is free to actively inspire, hear and respond to particular cries in particular ways as this One sees fit. This God is not bound to operate at all times in all places in the same metaphysically necessitated way. Only such a view of God as this could have the resources to share, unnecessarily, the governing of the world with this One’s children through prayer. Only this One can conceivably have the abundance of life

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and confidence to share with radical inferiors the risk and adventure of working towards the largely undetermined future through faith, action and prayer. If God’s actuality were exhaustively determined by the previous acts of contingent creatures, and if God were bound to the created order as an ingredient in a single organism, then this could not be the case. Only the “more than self-sufficient” God is free to act in a more than universal, metaphysically determined, exclusively responsive, way. The Trinity and the Eschaton It is this same internally social conception of God which alone grounds the creativity and progress of the world order. So long as creativity is viewed as an abstraction from atomistically conceived concrete entities, it cannot be rendered intelligible, as we have seen. A descriptive abstraction, we have argued, cannot be given a metaphysically prescriptive role. As Rahner, Kaspers and others have argued, only if there is an encompassing wealth of potentiality resident within an actuality which logically precedes the world at every moment can the self-transcendence of the contingent world be explained. The Trinity and the Triumph of the Kingdom Along these same lines, we have seen that the God of the neo-classical theism cannot promise—cannot even hope—to eventually overcome evil in the world. To be sure, Ford is correct in admitting that this One cannot even promise that this world, as it concerns human beings, will not end up catastrophically. The “sharing of power” which constitutes the multiplicity of all beings is in no way voluntary on God’s part, and thus it would violate the freedom inherent in the necessary non-divine order for God to make such a promise—let alone promise that evil shall be overcome altogether. This, we argued, goes directly counter to the eschatological vision given us in the resurrection of Christ. Again, not coincidentally, it is only a Trinitarian conception of God which provides the metaphysical framework within which such a promise could be intelligibly made by God and intelligibly understood by the recipients of this promise. Only if God is independent of the world as to this one’s essential existence can God hold the final outcome of the world process in this One’s own hands. There is, we have agreed, a sharing of power. God’s decision to create non-divine individuals entailed a limitation on God’s self in that the autonomy of the creature means some degree of autonomous power. And we have agreed that this sharing of power also entails that the future is not completely predetermined: that even for God some significant aspects of the future must remain concretely unknown. But if the sharing of life, and therefore of power, is voluntary on God’s part, this One can with divine wisdom control the degree and extent of its use. In sum, then, only a God who is complete within Godself, and only a God whose completeness is “more than necessary,” open to contingent expression, can do what Scripture portrays this One as doing. Only if God is neither only abstractly necessary nor only actually necessary, only if God is both necessarily (in essence) and contingently (in expression) actual, can this necessary and exalted balance between order and freedom be maintained in a way which is internally coherent and which expresses the view which the biblical view of God presupposes. Only here can the triumph of the Kingdom be promised while freedom and needed cooperation of the subjects are at the same time maintained. The Trinity and the Problem of the One and Many

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We have seen that the central reason why Process thought illustrates the problem of the one and the many so acutely is because it cannot concretely unify the multiplicity of the world at any given moment. The unity of the world is always de facto unity, a synthesis of a previous multiplicity. But this new unity itself instantly becomes a member of a new multiplicity. This problem is itself the result of the view that asymmetrical relationality alone is concrete, and that experience must be constituted by a creative synthesis. Once these concepts are rejected as a priori, the way is open to begin to render the problem of the one and many a bit less problematic. The Necessary Determinate Trinity and the Unity of Being If in fact it is the case that the a priori categories are satisfied in the one necessary being, as they must be since all else is contingent, and if relationality is indeed a priori, then God must be one and many within Godself. The unity of God is precisely the social relationality which constitutes this One’s being. And the multiplicity of God is precisely the divine “Persons” who are knowingly and lovingly encompassed and mutually defined by this unity. The “Persons,” in this view, are not first distinct and only secondly related, for in this case the relationality would be contingent. Rather, the “Persons” and the relation are both necessary, and hence the “Persons” are inconceivable apart from the relationality. The “I” and the “Thou” which defines the reciprocal eternal loving event of the Trinity are inseparable from the relationality which unites and defines them. Summary of Chapter V We have in this chapter expounded and evaluated Hartshorne’s design and epistemic argument as well and the theological implications of these two arguments. Like the theological implications of the ontological and cosmological arguments, we have found that Hartshorne’s view of God avoids many of the difficulties of classical theism, but produces a number of severe philosophical and theological difficulties of its own. Through our revisions of the foundational structure of Hartshorne’s thought, we have attempted to show that one can construct a view of God from these theistic arguments which still retains the advantages over classical theism, but does so without entailing the difficulties of neo-classical theism. And the fundamental ingredient in our reconstruction, we saw, was the recognition of the primordial necessary actuality of God, and hence of the primordial necessary sociality of God. When properly understood, then, the a priori arguments thus far examined point not in the direction of a necessary God-world relation, but in the direction of a necessary God-God direction: they point, in other words, to what can be considered to be the abstract skeletal outline of the doctrine of the Trinity. A number of crucial questions yet remain. Chief among these is the question of how we are to conceive of the relationship between the necessary and contingent actuality of God. Also yet unanswered is the question of how this contingency in God relates to the contingency of the world. How is the triune God immanent within the world process? How does God constitute the innermost being of created things, as Neville argues, while yet allowing for the relative autonomy of these creations? And how is creaturely freedom and divine freedom related? In short, left largely unanswered thus far is how a Trinitarian view of God works out into a Trinitarian metaphysics. We shall attempt to address these in our final chapter in which we consider the goodness and the beauty of God as arrived at via Hartshorne’s moral and aesthetic arguments. We shall attempt to show that the view of God these arguments necessitate, when considered in the light of our revised foundational statements, is something akin to the traditional view of God as triune.

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PART II SIX THEISTIC ARGUMENTS OF HARTSHORNE’S SYSTEM

CHAPTER VI The Moral And Aesthetic Arguments:

The Goodness and Beauty of God We have thus far seen that the necessary sociality of being as such entails the necessary sociality and self-sufficiency of God once certain mistaken features of Hartshorne’s system are rejected. Once the supposed asymmetrical view of concrete relationality, the view of experience as creative synthesis, and the atomistic conception of actuality are rejected as a priori, the remaining features of Hartshorne’s system argue, on an a priori basis, for a view of God as the only necessary reality. This necessary divine reality, we have further argued, must be omni-influential over a free creation, and must be omniscient—though this One need not have a creation to be influential over, nor need this One have a creation as the object of knowledge. Nothing is necessary save God. We shall, in this final chapter, see this conclusion reaffirmed and further filled out by our examination of Hartshorne’s moral and aesthetic arguments. Our argument shall be that, when corrected, Hartshorne’s moral and aesthetic arguments require something like the traditional trinitarian view of God, a God who is internally relational and self-sufficient. Moreover, we shall argue that only such a view of God as this can render coherent the necessary goodness and beauty of the one necessary reality. The Moral Argument Introduction Consistent with the format we have been following, we shall follow the tetralemmic form Hartshorne’s moral argument takes with his “global argument” as found in Creative Synthesis and Philosophical Method. The Tetralemma of the Moral Argument

A1: There is no supreme aim or summum bonum whose realization a creature’s action can promote.

A2: There is a supreme aim, which is to promote the good life among some (or all) creatures during their natural life spans.

A3: There is a supreme aim, which is to promote the good life among creatures after death or in heaven.

T: There is a supreme aim, which is to enrich the divine life (by promoting the good life among creatures).5

God as the All-Inclusive Summum Bonum If A1-3 are considered to be refuted, then the only remaining alternative is to conceive of a necessary reality which consciously encompasses and eternally remembers and appreciates the good achieved in human life and which also constitutes the in a word, is to admit the existence of a morally perfect God. Hence Hartshorne’s moral argument arrives at the conclusion that there is a summum bonum, and it is

5 Greg’s development of Harthorne’s points in TP are excellent but I’ve chosen not to include them in the interests of keeping this summary as short as possible. CH concludes ‘T’.

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“to enrich the divine life (by promoting the good life among creatures).” The theistic implications of this argument shall be treated shortly. But first we must consider the last of Hartshorne’s theistic arguments: the aesthetic argument. The Aesthetic Argument We have, with the preceding arguments, noted the novelty of Hartshorne’s a priori approach in relation to arguments which preceded it in the history of western philosophy. With the aesthetic argument, however, it is not simply the case that Hartshorne’s a priori approach is new. The very concept of a formal aesthetic theistic argument—distinct from the design argument—is unique to Hartshorne. The Tetralemma of the Aesthetic Argument

A1: There is no beauty of the world as a (de facto) whole. A2: There is beauty of the world as a whole, but no one enjoys it. A3: There is a beauty of the world as a whole, but only non-divine beings enjoy it. T: There is a beauty of the world as a whole and God alone adequately enjoys it.

A1: Could the World Be Devoid of Beauty? Hartshorne argues that A1 could be true only if a) the world were wholly monotonous, or b) the world as a whole was wholly chaotic. The first alternative, however, cannot be correct according to Hartshorne because “reality is essentially active and free and all radical monotony is secondary and artificial.” If all concrete existence is a free creative synthesis, all stability being abstract, then the world taken as a concrete whole cannot be radically monotonous. But neither does the second alternative succeed for reasons given against A1 of the design argument. Absolute chaos, like absolute unity, is unintelligible. It is equivalent to nothingness, and hence violates the first of Hartshorne’s a priori truths. Hartshorne’s refutation of “b” is successful, but our revisions of his atomistic conception of concreteness might be thought to render this refutation of “a” unavailable to us. If concrete reality is perspectivally defined, as we have argued, then we cannot say that all mundaneness at a phenomenological level is abstract or “secondary.” Might the world, then, be more like a rock when taken as a whole than an “ocean of feeling” as Hartshorne envisions? My response is that even something as mundane as a rock is not without its aesthetic value. If beauty is, as Hartshorne has argued, a complex unity among a relational multiplicity, then even a rock possesses or constitutes some degree of beauty. The value may be meager from our perspective: the rock’s internal relationality, for example, is no doubt more exciting when considered at a sub-atomic level, and its external relationality is, perhaps more exciting when considered as a relation amidst a scope of relations far more vast than humans can ordinarily enjoy. But from every perspective there is a related multiplicity, and hence some aesthetic enjoyment. Radical mundaneness, therefore, is not only secondary, as Hartshorne says, it is non-existent. A2: Could the Aesthetic Value of the World be Unknown? Hartshorne’s response to the supposition that the beauty of the world, taken as a whole, could be unknown follows the same pattern of thought laid out in the epistemic argument against the supposition that there could be elements of reality which are unknown.

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First, in the very thought of “the beauty of the world” we are, to some degree, enjoying the beauty of the world. To thus maintain that no one ever experiences this reality is self-refuting. Closely related to this, the supposition that there is an unknowable reality—or an unappreciable beauty—is internally incoherent as the epistemic argument has already shown. As Santayana says, “A beauty not perceived is a pleasure not felt, and is a contradiction.” Thus, to say that the world as a whole has some degree of beauty but that it is not enjoyed by anyone is to affirm and deny the same thing. A3: Could the Aesthetic Value of the World Be Enjoyed Only By Non-Divine Creatures? The repetition of the logic of the epistemic argument is again evident in Hartshorne’s refutation of A3. Hartshorne writes,

Our enjoyment…is utterly disproportionate to the beauty in question. This disproportion would be an absolute basic flaw in reality, such as never could be eliminated. It must have always obtained, and it could not be merely contingent, but must rather be an eternally necessary yet ugly aspect of things. Always God ought to have existed to enjoy his creation, and always he failed to exist. To think such an eternal deficiency is to form a thought without intrinsic reward. Nor has it any pragmatic value either. It is just a drooping of spirits, not a genuine concept. Its real meaning is as an experiment to bring us to the realization that the beauty of the world could not fail to have its spectator.

The first point in this passage is that the fragmentary experience of the beauty of the world by such finite creatures as human beings is utterly “disproportionate” to the very concept of the beauty of the whole. This again parallels Hartshorne’s refutation of A2 of the epistemic argument; the supposition that our fragmentary knowledge of reality is disproportionate to the whole of reality. As reality must be defined in terms of a knowledge adequate to its totality, so the beauty of this reality must be defined in terms of an appreciation adequate to its totality. For this task, human appreciation cannot suffice. All-inclusive beauty thus entails, according to Hartshorne, an all-inclusive appreciator of beauty.

There can be an all-inclusive beauty only if there be an all-inclusive appreciation of beauty, and what could that be if not a cosmic sympathy? Cosmic beauty as a value must be actualized in some cosmic experience….

The second central point of the passage quoted in refutation of A3 is that the deficiency implied in the supposition that only non-divine creatures experience beauty would be necessary, not contingent, deficiency. This too parallels Hartshorne’s refutation of A2 of the epistemic argument. There, we saw, the limitations of finite creatures in terms of their knowledge (and hence of their appreciate of beauty) was not contingent—as though these limitations could ever be wholly overcome. Such “fragmentation” is, rather, part of what it means to be contingent finite creature. We do not, and cannot, experience reality with perfection. But it is impossible, according to Hartshorne, for a necessary truth to be “ugly.” The necessity of beauty means that the necessary features of the world cannot be ugly or indifferent. To be “regrettable”—ugly or indifferent—means that one would prefer an alternative. But concerning necessary truths there are no conceivable alternatives. Hence, valid metaphysical insights must constitute “truistic beauty.”

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Necessary truths are, therefore, necessarily positive, and thus it cannot be a necessary truth that there is (regrettably) no appreciator adequate to the beauty of the world as a whole. Finally, and closely related to this, the passage cited above notes that the concept of “the missing God” is pragmatically meaningless. Given that there is a beauty to the cosmos as a whole, what pragmatic significance is there in adding that no one appreciates it? Because it is a strictly negative concept, it can make no difference in our thought or life. Thus, the only positive content the A3 supposition has is by negation: it shows us that “the beauty of the world could not fail to have a spectator.” T: God the All-Inclusive Beauty of the World If A1-3 are agreed to be untenable, then, according to Hartshorne, the only remaining alternative is “T”: “There is a beauty of the world as a whole and God alone adequately enjoys it.” The God who has previously been shown to be the all-inclusive contingent synthesis of the world, and hence the all-inclusive, all-sensitive, and omni-influential orderer; the God who has previously been shown to be the all-inclusive and perfect knower of the world as well as the One who inspires and eternally encompasses its moral value, is now shown to be the all-inclusive beauty of the world. God experiences, appreciates and incorporates within Godself the beauty of the world as a de facto whole at every moment. The world contributes to, and is thus immortalized in, the ever increasing beauty of God. The sixth foundational statement of Hartshorne, “aesthetic experience occurs,” thus works out to entail that “a divine aesthetic experience occurs.” The Theological Implications of the Moral Argument: God’s Goodness Difficulties With the Classical Conception of God’s Goodness We have at this point in previous chapters first discussed the classical conception of the attribute under discussion before moving on to difficulties implicit in this conception. Concerning both the goodness and beauty of God, however, we see no need for a distinctive exposition of these attributes, for the classical tradition has, on the whole, offered little on these attributes which has not already been covered in our discussions of God’s perfection as such, God’s power, and God’s knowledge. The Futility of Religious Service In contrast to Process thought, we find no difficulty with the classical conception of God being good in and of Godself, apart from any interaction with a non-divine world. So long as the divine reality can intelligibly be understood as being that which alone is necessary, there exists no difficulty in ascribing supreme goodness to this reality apart from any contingent “good” relations this One may or may not have. The difficulties which attend the classical conception of God’s goodness rather attach to the fact that there is, in this view, no room for God to be consistently understood to “step out” of this One’s necessity and interact with contingent creatures. Just as a statically conceived conception of God’s perfection could not consistently leave room for any genuinely contingent mutual relationship between God and the world—viz., it could not leave room for God’s contingent but supreme passivity, God’s contingent and hence changing knowledge—so too this static conception cannot conceive of God’s goodness in such a way that our contingent good achievements make any difference to this One.

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And again Hartshorne writes, “If God’s awareness of us contributes no value to God, then our existence is idle. The glory of God is the inclusive value; if we add nothing to it, then our existence adds noting to reality as a whole.” Thus, unless God’s concrete experience of goodness is contingent in the sense of being open to our contingent achievements, it seems that all service for God is really irrelevant to God. Whatever God’s goodness comes to, then, it has nothing to do with us in the classical scheme.

Can God’s Goodness To A Contingent World Be Absolutely Non-Contingent? A second closely related difficulty involved in asserting the goodness of God while yet hold that God is “pure act” is that it becomes problematic as to how God can be good to us who are contingent while yet being wholly non-contingent. A minimal definition of goodness as an ethical category might be that it consists in a recognition of the needs of another and responding to this other in a manner favorable to the other. But if God is in no respect contingent, how are we to conceive of God responding to our needs at all, let alone in a “good” fashion? If God is devoid of all potentiality, and hence all “passivity,” how can God “respond” to anything? A related problem can be raised in the light of the problems we have noted in connection with the other classical attributes we have examined. If God knows us by knowing God’s own eternal and unchanging essence, and if our actual contingent states thus do not contribute to God’s knowledge but rather arise from this divine knowledge (God’s knowledge, according to Aquinas, is “causative,” not “responsive” or “inferential”), then, while a “fortunate” life may be inclined to call God “good” (for the good fortune is divinely caused), would not an unfortunate life be justified in calling God evil? Or to say it another way, if God’s eternal knowledge is identical with God’s power, then God’s eternal knowledge of evil must be identical with God’s power to cause evil (God’s “permissive” will). But in this case, how is God to be called “all good”? Neville seems consistent when he concludes that from the supposition that God’s willing and knowing (they are identical) lie behind all things one can conclude that God’s character is “only as good as experience shows it to be as creator of just this world and no more.” This is another version of the difficulty in accounting for evil within a theistic system when genuine openness to the future, genuine freedom, is in principle rules out. The Neo-Classical Conception of God’s Goodness God’s goodness, within Hartshorne’s system, is essentially identical with God’s knowledge, power, and love. It consists in the abstract principle that God always responds to actual occasions in “an ideal manner.” God prehends and immortalizes the concrete goodness of the contingent world as an ingredient in this One’s own new self-constitution. And God in turn offers God’s own newly constituted self to be prehended by the non-divine world. The goodness of God, then, refers to the supreme sensitivity with which God considers and responds to others, and the unsurpassable appropriateness and influential relevance of the subjective aim which God offers each occasion at the beginning of its concrescence. The divine aim is what is ideal for the individual creature as well as what is ideal for the whole cosmos. Since God’s altruism and self-interest coincide—the world is God’s own “body”—God’s goodness to the world is at once God’s goodness to Godself. For God to do evil to the world would be for God to do evil to God’s concrete self, for this new divine self must utilize the just past world as material for its self-constituting aesthetic experience.

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It is important to note in all of this that though God’s concrete expression of goodness is contingent, and though God’s experience of the goodness of the world ever increases as the sum value of the world increases, it is nevertheless not the case that God’s goodness itself increases. God does not “become better.” God’s categorical supremacy encompasses both ideals which do and do not admit of maximal instances. According to Hartshorne, for example, God’s beauty does not admit of a maximal instance, for there is no conceivable maximal instance of beauty. It therefore “increases.” God’s power, however, is eternally unsurpassable, for there is a conceivable maximal instance of power, namely, “omnipotence” (meaning, all conceivable power, given a multiplicity of powers). So it is with God’s goodness. The abstract quality of goodness has an intelligible maximal limit. This defines God’s abstract being eternally and unchangingly. God thus does not improve ethically. How God is concretely good at any given moment and how God concretely experiences goodness at any given moment are contingent. But that God is supremely good is necessary and cannot be improved upon. A Critical Evaluation of the Neo-Classical View of God’s Goodness The Unintelligibility of Moral Responsibility Hartshorne’s conception of God’s goodness, we see, has some definite philosophical advantages over the conception of God’s goodness when God is conceived of as actus purus. But as with the other neo-classical divine attributes we have examined, it also has several difficulties which must be examined and which, we shall argue, ultimately necessitate a trinitarian reconstruction of this Process understanding of God. The first difficulty which the neo-classical conception of God’s goodness faces is that it has not yet rendered intelligible free moral responsibility, and hence, moral virtue. We have already argued that morally responsible freedom is not intelligible so long as freedom is equated with sheer spontaneity as Hartshorne argues. Chance, regardless of how complex it is, cannot itself produce moral responsibility. Creativity and freedom, we have argued, are what move something from possibility to actuality, from the past to the present, from abstraction to concreteness. But this move cannot be intelligible, certainly not intelligible as morally responsible, so long as there is no category to mediate it. So long as concreteness and abstraction are the only two categories, the move between them must be irrational, for this move is not itself either concrete or abstract. The “leap” here is necessarily capricious and subjectless, for being neither concrete nor abstract, there quite literally is nothing left in the universe of Process thought to give this “leap” a reason or a subject matter—let along a moral dimension. Now it is true that Process thought attempts to mediate this “leap” by appealing to the category of creativity and the concept of God’s superjective nature which offers each occasion a subjective aim, as we have seen. Creativity, in this scheme, purportedly grounds the fact that things advance, and the superjective nature of God purportedly grounds how they advance. This move, however, is problematic, for given the ontological principle, it is also held that creativity is only an abstract description of actual occasions, and hence cannot coherently function as a prescriptive abiding law governing actual occasions. Moreover, the subject aim from God is conceptualized as preceding the concrescence of the actual occasion, and hence it cannot account either for the freedom

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of the occasion or for the essence of the occasion. The subjective aim is what the occasion’s decision is about: it cannot, therefore, account for the occasion’s decision itself. The “freedom” of each occasion, we have therefore argued, is capricious and self-less, and, among other things, this cannot be squared with moral responsibility. In contrast to this, we have argued that “freedom” presupposes an antecedent creativity which is not a mere abstraction and is more determinate than the Process view of creativity as such. It presupposes a creativity which is ordered, which is predisposed, to actualize itself in certain ways: in this case, disposed to be rational, to deliberate between alternatives, to be constituted by moral principles, etc. And it presupposes that this disposition, this ordered creativity, is constituted of the essence of the agent, not antecedent to it. This, we maintain, is the dominant subjective aim of the self, and it doesn’t therefore antedate the self. It rather constitutes the essence of the self. Hartshorne’s metaphysics, however, understands creativity indeterminately and abstractly, and he understands the subjective aim as being antecedent to and non-constitutive of the self. Hence the “leap” from abstraction to concreteness is not ontologically mediated. And hence neither the conception of human freedom, nor the conception of God’s freedom, can have an intelligible moral dimension to it in his system. The goodness that humans achieve, and thus the goodness that God experiences and remembers, must ultimately be understood to be the goodness of fortune, not responsible volition. And this, clearly, is drastically at odds both with our ordinary experiences as well as with what is meant in Scripture, in the Church, and in most ordinary theistic talk about God’s goodness. God’s World-Dependent Experience of Goodness We have seen that Hartshorne argues, against the classical tradition, that God must have a contingent aspect to God if God is to be open to the genuinely contingent acts of goodness performed by the creature. We cannot, in the classical view, be said to “serve” God unless our acts make a difference to God. This critique we regard to be essentially correct. A problem arises, however, when Hartshorne further argues that our “contribution” to God must mean that God would be “less” without it. The sum total of God’s experience of goodness (though not the quality of God’s abstract character) would be less if God did not experience and remember our moral achievements. This inference does not necessarily follow. If we can distinguish between the inner self-sufficiency of God and the outward expression of this sufficiency, as has been argued (III.vi.3, IV.iv.2), then we may conceive of human (and other creaturely) acts in such a way that they do contribute to God, but do not thereby increase God. The value of creaturely acts is experienced and eternally appreciated by God, and in this sense they contribute to God’s contingent experience of goodness. But this contingent divine experience of goodness is not what constitutes the essence of God’s experience of goodness. It rather expresses in a novel way the unsurpassable experience of goodness which is already God’s from all eternity. This essential goodness of God is not merely abstract, but rather constitutes God’s necessary, concrete, eternal social actuality. And as necessary, it is not world-dependent. God’s “More Than Necessary” Goodness As we have seen, the goodness of God for Hartshorne is equivalent to the metaphysical requirement that God prehend the totality of the world with perfect sensitivity and reconstitute Godself in an ideal

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way, thus offering to the subsequent world and aim which is ideal for its own subsequent self-creativity. In contrast to Gunton, Mason, Neville and others, we have no difficulty with the concept of the necessary goodness of God itself. We agree with Hartshorne that a freedom to “sin” or do less than what is ideal is not a genuine freedom. It is, therefore, no limitation on God to say that God is necessarily good. Our difficulty with the neo-classical conception of divine goodness lies elsewhere. First, as we have already argued in relation to the other attributes of God, the necessity of God’s “abstract” goodness has not been rendered intelligible in Hartshorne’s scheme. There is no sufficient reason for why the actual occasions which constitute God’s concrete nature in fact always become in an ideal manner. Every other actual occasion becomes in a certain fashion because of the subjective aim offered it by God and other antecedent occasions (plus uncaused spontaneity). But there is no reality, no antecedent actuality, “guiding” the concrete pole of God. God’s abstract nature purportedly functions in this capacity, yet abstractions are supposed to be dependent upon the concrete, not vice versa. The necessity of God’s character, we therefore argue, cannot be an abstraction from the concrete pole of God. It must itself be actual, and eternally so. And what God is contingently must be based on this, not the other way around. Secondly, even if one grants the intelligibility of the necessary goodness of God according to Hartshorne, it must from our perspective be pointed out that this conception does not yet capture, or even allow for, a biblical view of God whose goodness is “more than necessary.” Because God’s goodness must be expressed, and expressed to a necessary world order—in other words, because God is not antecedently actual and therefore internally social in Hartshorne’s scheme—God is not able to go beyond the strictly necessary. Hence, in this system of thought God is not free to go beyond the necessarily ideal good response to the world. God is not free to take the radical, and unexpectedly good, initiative which Christianity claims God can, and has, taken. God is metaphysically good, in Hartshorne’s scheme, but this goodness exhausts God’s goodness. God is not good out of the unnecessary overflowing abundance of this One’s being, but only insofar as the situation, combined with the metaphysical laws, requires. God’s goodness is limited to the goodness we should expect: it cannot surprise us. As such, the neo-classical conception of divine goodness cannot allow for, let alone render intelligible, the gracious and particular goodness of God witnessed to in Scripture. We shall subsequently argue that our aesthetic conception of God’s internal sociality, when coupled with our previously developed category of disposition, allows for an intelligible rendering of both the necessary and the “more than necessary” aspect of God’s goodness. The Theological Implications of the Aesthetic Argument: God’s Beauty Difficulties With The Classical Conception of the Beauty of God The beauty of God has not been a dominant theme in the classical tradition. The concept of God’s beauty has found some expression in a handful of theologians and in certain Church hymns, but as Barth notes, it has, on the whole, been ignored. The difficulty of the concept in a classical scheme again surrounds its applicability to a view of God as actus purus. It is these difficulties which we now need to render explicit before turning to an evaluation of Hartshorne’s view. The Unintelligibility of a Beautiful Actus Purus

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According to Hartshorne, the very notion that God could be beautiful apart from this One’s interaction with a non-divine world is mistaken. And since the view of God as actus purus supposes this, it is untenable. Thus, Hartshorne says,

First-type (classical) theism endeavors to persuade us that God has all the value of variety except variety. The reply is that the value of variety is variety, just as the value of unity is unity.

Could the variety and unity of God, conceived of as triune, perhaps render the classical concept of unsurpassable beauty intelligible, as we have been suggesting? Hartshorne, in continuation of this same passage, argues that it could not.

Even the trinity gives no sufficient, even if only conceivable, contrast. What is required is maximal contrast, not only on one level, as between the persons of the Trinity, but between levels within the unity of God—for instance, between the contingent and the changing and the necessary and immutable.

The argument here is basically that if God were absolute in all respects, if God were actus purus and thus devoid of all potentiality, then even the supposition that this God is internally related does not help in rendering intelligible the unsurpassable beauty of God. For this contrast is not extreme—it is “on one level.” Such a self-related God would therefore lack the beauty of rich contrast such as the contrast between the contingent and the necessary. Such a self-related God would also lack the wide divergent multiplicity of contrasts found in the non-divine world. Thus, the concept of the Trinity does not itself render intelligible divine beauty. The non-divine world is, for Hartshorne, necessary to account for this. Finally, it is, as we have seen, logically impossible for God to enjoy all possible value simultaneously, for values are incompossible. God cannot enjoy the value of just this actual world which could have occurred at just this time and place. The exclusion of possibilities is one central mark of contingent actualities. Hence, time is required to accrue contingent value, and, we are reminded again, there is for Hartshorne no maximal limit to possible variety and hence aesthetic value. Thus, the time of this accretion is eternal. The understanding of God as actus purus, however, misses all of this and thus must be judged, in Hartshorne’s view, as being ill founded. The fundamental presupposition to this criticism, of course, is that the intensity of an aesthetic experience is directly proportionate to the scope and complexity of the variety which constitutes the experience. But just this we have already had occasion to reject, at least as a necessary truth. It is true that God, conceived of as triune, would not within Godself possess all possible value, for, as Hartshorne rightly argues, “the value of variety is variety,” and finite possibilities are incompossible. What is more, if we are talking about God ad intra, apart from any relationship to a non-divine creation, all talk of finite actualities is in any case beside the point. God and the Beauty of the World

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A second difficulty concerning the issue of God’s beauty within a classical theological framework we find more compelling: it has to do with God’s openness to the beauty of the world. If potentiality is conceived of as a deficiency, and hence is thought to be an unworthy characteristic of God, then it must be asked how God can be open to experience the temporal beauty of the contingent world as the aesthetic argument requires. This is, in essence, another way of stating our previous objection concerning a purely actual God’s inability to be open to and appreciate the goodness of the contingent world. If God possesses all possible beauty, and thus is open to no further increase; if God is pure actuality, and thus is in no respect contingent and passive; and thus, if the apparently contingent relationship between the purely necessary God and the wholly contingent world is in fact real to the world, but not to God, then, it seems, the world has nothing aesthetic (or otherwise) to genuinely contribute to God. In this view God is, as it were, “locked up” in God’s own beauty. The beauty of the lives we, with God, create in ourselves and in others, must in the end be “idle,” as Hartshorne says. This is both counter intuitive, and involves the difficulties raised in A1-3 of the aesthetic argument. The beauty of the world, it was there argued, must be appreciated to be meaningfully conceived and spoken of. But how is this intelligible unless God has the potentiality to do so, and thus the contingent relativity to do so? The Neo-Classical Conception of God’s Beauty The Centrality of God’s Beauty In sharp contrast to the classical tradition, the beauty of God is a central concept for Hartshorne, as it is for all Process thought. This is what should be expected given the sixth foundational proposition of Hartshorne’s system. The fundamental telos of every actual occasion is, we have seen, as “aesthetic satisfaction.” Everything aims at creating itself as a synthesis of past objectified data, which is to say that everything aims at being constituted by an aesthetic experience of a multiplicity of unified contrasts. To be is to be an aesthetic experience and the material for subsequent aesthetic experiences. Since God, in Process thought, is no exception to the metaphysical principles, but is, rather, “their chief exemplification,” God too is to be defined, most fundamentally, as the supreme, all-inclusive, aesthetic experience of the world. God is “the completed ideal of harmony” of the world. God is “the poet of the world” who appreciates the beauty of the world and furthers this beauty by transforming it as a contribution to God’s own self-constituted and self-defining aesthetic experience. As aesthetic experience is, therefore, the most concrete and most fundamental thing by which reality can be defined, so the divine aesthetic experience is the most concrete and most fundamental thing which can be said about God. God’s power, knowledge, love and goodness are in reality all aspects of God’s beauty—God’s appreciation for the beauty of the world, and God’s aim at constituting Godself by an ever-increasing intensity of aesthetic satisfaction. Advantages of the Neo-Classical Conception of God’s Beauty It is clear that this position avoids the difficulties of attributing beauty to God when God is conceived of as actus purus. There is here no difficulty of conceiving of how God could contain, within Godself, all possible aesthetic value. This possibility is simply denied. There is here no problem of finite incompossibilities. Possibilities are realized successively, and aesthetic richness increases as the new possibilities are actualized and synthesized with God’s infinite memory of past actualities. And there is, clearly, no problem in the neo-classical account in maintaining God’s openness to the beauty of the

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world. God is concretely defined by God’s contingent openness to, and transformation of, the aesthetic value of the world. A Critical Evaluation of the Neo-Classical View of God’s Beauty Hartshorne’s conception of God’s beauty, we see, is in some respects more defensible than any conception within the classical framework for the simple reason that the concept of beauty presupposes potentiality. The concept of “pure actuality” and “unsurpassable beauty” thus seem mutually incompatible. Still, as with the other neo-classical attributes of God we have examined, the neo-classical conception of divine beauty is not without its own problematic points. The Necessary Material for God’s Beauty The first objection which must be raised against Harthsorne’s conception of God’s beauty is that, as with his rendition of the other attributes of God, it necessitates the eternal existence of the world. As God needs an eternal counterpart to be concretely perfect, an eternal “other” to know, an eternal non-divine multiplicity to influence and be influenced by, and an eternal free self to create and appreciate, moral goodness, so we now see that God needs eternal data to synthesize into an aesthetic experience. God’s concrete aesthetic experience is thus completely world-contingent. All of these arguments say essentially the same thing, but with a different emphasis. If God needs the world to attain a maximal self-defining aesthetic experience, then the fact that the vectoral quality of this self-constitution furthers the beauty of the world is again simply a matter of necessity, not grace. God seeks to render the world beauty because God has to do so. God cannot choose to be “the poet of the world,” any more than God can (for the same reasons) choose to create the world. God is, in this conception, a poet metaphysically bound to her pen, and metaphysically bound to the material she must work with. Clearly, in such a scheme, the radical surprising, unexpected and gracious freedom of God portrayed throughout the biblical narrative can only be heard as utter nonsense. The Necessary Absence of the Beauty of Grace The point we are arguing here may be expounded upon further by the following observation: it seems that there is, in Hartshorne’s conception of the beauty of the world and the beauty of God, one form of beauty which is necessarily lacking: namely, the beauty of grace. The aesthetic value in experiencing a life, a wholeness, a love—an aesthetic satisfaction—which was in no sense necessitated, is ruled out. The beauty of the experience of that divine love which is not contingent in any regard upon the worth of its object, but rather creates the worth of its object in its very act of loving, is utterly unintelligible in Hartshorne’s scheme. Grace and love, defined in this sense, violate a priori truths. But this, it seems to me, is a negative necessary truth in Hartshorne’s scheme. This denial is, to use his own terms, “a thought without intrinsic reward.” To some of us at least, it seems that this constitutes an eternal, an unchangeable deficiency in the nature of things. It seems to constitute an eternally “regrettable” state of affairs. Always it would have been beautiful for such unconditional gracious love as this to have existed, but always, and by metaphysical necessity, this love failed to be exemplified. The universe can only know love which takes into account the intrinsic value of the object loved. It can never know that love which creates the value of its object in its very act of loving.

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But if, as we have seen Hartshorne contend, necessary truths can only be positive and indeed beautiful, how could such a potential beauty be necessarily lacking in reality? Hartshorne’s only response can be that the concept of grace I am talking about is neither beautiful nor even possible. It is “mere verbiage.” “Love means adequate awareness of the value of others….” Thus, a “love” which is not constituted by such an awareness is, for Hartshorne, nothing coherent. The fact that there are some people who think they experience this kind of love from God, and therefore think that it makes sense to talk about a love such as this, must be, for Hartshorne, wholly illusory. Unconditional love, a love which is not based on the “intrinsic worth” of its object, a love which initiates and does not only respond, can on a metaphysical level have no coherent meaning for Hartshorne. To state it most bluntly, then, this entails that the central feature of the Christian worldview must be considered wholly illusory and utter nonsense on Hartshorne’s scheme. We, in contrast, have had occasions to reject the foundational statements which have brought about this anti-Christian view of love. Our modifications and supplementations of the candidates for a priori truth in Hartshorne’s thought opens the way for our rejection of this aspect of his system. For this implication of his system is, like everything else, ultimately simply a working out of these foundational propositions. Because of our revisions, then, we can intelligibly affirm that God is complete within Godself. And hence we can intelligibly affirm that what God does with and to “another,” or whether there even be “another” at all, is all a matter of grace, not necessity. Indeed, not only can we say these things: on an a priori basis, we must say these things. The Necessary Denial of the Beauty of God’s Victory There is a third criticism, related to the second, which needs to be raised. We have already seen that a final victory over all forms of evil is impossible in Hartshorne’s scheme. The necessary freedom of creatures is such, in his view, that the non-divine world can never be rid of its evil. On a “high” level of freedom (viz., human freedom), this means that the world will never be rid of forms of oppresion, injustice, hatred, violence, cruelty, etc. But wouldn’t it be beautiful if this were possible? Wouldn’t it be beautiful, in other words, if the eschatological promises of the New Testament were at least a historical possibility? But now the question must be asked, how could such a beautiful hope be necessarily excluded from the world in a schema where metaphysical truths are, supposedly, “truistically beautiful”? How could there be such a necessary “deficiency” in the world? If such beauty is necessarily ruled out, it must constitute a virtual self-contradiction. But how can a self-contradiction be beautiful and, for millions, at least, inspiring? If this hope is in fact self-contradictory and absurd, it is not obviously so. Indeed, one could argue that the intelligibility of such a hope is at least tacitly presupposed in our most significant ethical endeavors. Do we not presuppose the coherence and beauty of this hope when we work towards bringing an end to (say) world hunger? Is it only the particular children who are suffering in this particular time and space that we are trying to save—though we secretly know that starvation will always be an earthly fact? Or is it not also hunger itself, considered as a general fact, that we are fighting against? Do we really engage in nonsense when we experience anger and work against not just particular social evils here and there, but against evil as such?

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The Inconceivability of an Eternally Increasing Aesthetic Intensity The final difficulty which must be raised against Hartshorne’s conception of God’s beauty has already been touched on. We thus need only mention it here. It is this: while we concede that an “ultimate” simultaneous combination of all possible contrasts is not intelligible, we have argued that an “ultimate intensity” of aesthetic experience is conceivable. Indeed, it is the concept of an every-increasing intensity of aesthetic experience which does not seem genuinely conceivable. But is it not the case that we can always imagine a more intense experience than any experience we have ever had, and simply increase this conception infinitely? We know the relation between our peak experiences and our more mundane experiences, so may we not now, by analogy, conceive of an experience next to which our own peak experiences are mundane? And having done this, can we, as it were, “climb up the ladder” infinitely to conceive of how God’s experience is eternally intensifying? I do not deny that it is possible to analogously conceive of God’s “infinitely intense” experience in this way. This is roughly how we conceive of all of God’s other attributes. But the decisive issue is not addressed by this thought experiment. With regard to God’s love, God’s goodness, God’s knowledge, etc., we climb up the ladder of analogy to conceive of the particular attribute, assuming that when we reach it, we can go no further. There is no conceivable “further” to go. God’s love, God’s goodness, God’s knowledge, God’s power cannot be improved upon—even by God. An absolutely unsurpassable exemplification of these attributes is conceivable, however vaguely. The decisive question is why God’s self-defining aesthetic experience should differ from these other attributes in this regard. There is a basis in our experience, in our logical thinking itself, for saying that the possible combinations of finite forms are endless. But we have no such grounds, I argue, for supposing that the intensity of God’s experience, in contrast to every experience we have ever had, is eternally improvable. An intensity of experience does depend on a harmonious multiplicity, but we know from experience that the intensity of an experience can reach a threshold, even though the quantity of what we are experiencing cannot. Thus, as we can analogously conceive of a maximal instance of goodness and love in God, so, I maintain, we can analogously conceive of a maximal instance of divine aesthetic satisfaction. And this is enough to show that the link between a diversified harmony and the intensity of an aesthetic experience is not necessarily proportional. If one insists that it is so for God, one is making this aspect of God’s being a blatant exception to the manner in which we treat all of the other divine attributes. God’s Goodness and God’s Beauty: A Trinitarian Reconstruction In Chapter IV we outlined a conceivable alternative to the neo-classical view of God’s perfection which at once captures the advantages of the neo-classical view over against the classical view, while avoiding the difficulties of both the neo-classical and the classical view. This, we suggested, consisted in a view of God as self-sufficiently actual, and, hence, as internally related. We further outlined in that chapter a view of God wherein the self-sufficient actuality of God could be conceived of as necessary, while yet allowing for a contingent “expressive” actual aspect to God’s being. Our rejection of Hartshorne’s thesis that concrete relationality is necessarily asymmetrical, and that experience necessarily consists of a creative synthesis, opened the door to this alternative. We could

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now conceive of God in such a way that God’s essence was identical with God’s self-defining existence without necessitating the difficult view of classical theism that God is actus purus. In our reconstruction in chapter V we sought to confirm and further fill out this thesis with specific regard to the issues surrounding God’s power and knowledge. There, we argued, the difficulties of classical theism as well as the internal difficulties and anti-Christian implications of Hartshorne’s view could be avoided only by postulating a view of God as self-sufficient, and, hence, as necessarily internally related, but who nevertheless has potentiality for contingent expression. God’s power, we therefore argued, is the power to create, or not to create (viz., because God is internally relational, God’s power towards whatever is non-divine is free and gracious): and God’s knowledge need not be knowledge of non-divine subjects, but may have Godself as its sole content. Hence, who God is at any moment is defined by God alone, though how God is expressed is defined by the totality of what is real (which may or may not involve non-divine realities). In what follows we wish to complete our trinitarian reconstruction of Hartshorne’s view of God as arrived at by the six theistic arguments, built up from the six foundational propositions of his system. We shall in this section be seeking to further substantiate and render more coherent the trinitarian alternative we are proposing. We shall argue that only by postulating something which approximates the traditional trinitarian view of God—and postulating it in such a way that certain elements of Process thought are retained—only in this way can we avoid the previously discussed difficulties of both classical and neo-classical theism concerning the goodness and beauty of God. The Benevolence of the Trinity Once we have determined that God is to be conceived of as antecedently actual, internally relational, and “more than” self-sufficient, there is no longer any need to postulate an eternal world to provide the ground and the material for God’s concrete experience of goodness. God is, in this view, good within Godself, and this means that God can experience goodness within Godself—apart from the world: God’s goodness ad intra is not simply “abstract.” In contrast to all possible and actual evil, God experiences God’s own triune sociality as unsurpassably good. The “More Than Necessary” Benevolent Openness of the Trinity The eternal goodness of the Trinity does not, in our reconstruction, necessitate any view that God is not, or could not, be open to appreciate the goodness of the contingent world. Our agreement with the classical tradition in affirming that God’s essence is identical with God’s (“necessary self-defining”) existence did not, we have seen, rule out the presence of genuine contingent elements in God, for God can be more than what defines and constitutes God’s necessary actuality. This openness to contingency is all that is logically needed to avoid the classical paradoxes of relating a necessary actus purus to a contingent world. God can be immanently involved in the contingent temporal processes of the world, in the manner in which Hartshorne specifies, while yet being eternally and self-sufficiently actual within Godself. Indeed, we have argued that God’s contingent pole requires an antecedently actual pole to be rendered intelligible.

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Hence, the goodness which characterizes God in any particular contingent circumstance, then, expresses, but does not essentially constitute, the concrete goodness of God. God does enjoy and appreciate the relative goodness of the world as God participates with it in overcoming evil, but God enjoys it as an external expression of this One’s own eternally perfect goodness, not as an essential constituent in this One’s experience of goodness. The benevolence of the Trinity, then, consists in the fact that God unnecessarily creates a world to share in the aesthetic experience of existence. It consists in the further fact that God is unsurpassably good in this One’s creation, and ceaselessly works with the world to bring about God’s foreordained Kingdom in the world—the final extinguishing of all evil from the earth. What is more, the benevolence of the Trinity consists in the fact that God is continually leading the world, with much cost in suffering to Godself, to the place where it can, in its own non-divine way, reflect the goodness which characterizes the goodness which God eternally enjoys within Godself. And the benevolence of the Trinity consists in the fact that God appreciates, and eternally remembers, the goodness acquired in the world along this journey, transforming it in a way that “feeds back into the world” to further its progress. The Trinity and the Beauty of God The Unsurpassable Intensity and Inexhaustible Expression of God’s Triune Beauty We have agreed with Hartshorne that the experience of beauty presupposes a harmonious multiplicity. There can be no aesthetic harmony, and hence no aesthetic satisfaction, without a unified multiplicity. This is, in a sense, the aesthetic dimension to the problem of the one and the many. But we have disagreed with Hartshorne (following Whitehead) that the intensity of an aesthetic satisfaction is necessarily proportionate to the quantity and complexity of what is aesthetically unified. There can be, we have argued, no necessary proportioning between aesthetic quality and quantity. This denial, we shall now see, has tremendous significance for our understanding of God’s essential being. If God is, as the theistic arguments all attempt to demonstrate, a being “greater than which none other can be conceived,” and if, as Hartshorne has argued, beauty is inherent in the idea of existence itself, then the unsurpassable reality of God must be an unsurpassable experience of beauty. What this means for the supposition that the unsurpassable reality is internally related and self-sufficient is that a) this internal relationality must be most fundamentally defined as an experience of beauty, and b) this experience of beauty must be utterly unsurpassable. Our previously argued distinction between the intensity of an aesthetic experience and the quantity of contrasts synthesized in an aesthetic experience renders these implications intelligible and explains their concomitant difficulties. God’s essential and necessary existence is, on this scheme, most basically defined by the unsurpassable intensity of aesthetic enjoyment which characterizes the triune sociality of God. God experiences Godself with an intensity which can under no circumstances conceivably be improved upon. As with Hartshorne, we are here most fundamentally defining God’s transcendence in terms of God’s aesthetic satisfaction. But against Hartshorne we are also affirming that this aesthetic satisfaction is the same whether or not there is a non-divine world for God to enjoy. God is no “greater” for fellowshipping with the world, for it is God’s fellowship with Godself, not the world, which constitutes and characterizes the necessary

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unsurpassability of God’s aesthetic satisfaction. God’s gracious fellowship with the non-divine world simply expresses this primordial eternal fellowship. To use Whitehead’s terminology, it is the “perfection of subjective form” defined in terms of “strength” (viz., intensity) which defines God as God ad intra. It is this qualitative category which expresses the necessary perfection of God. But, pace Whitehead, this God-defining intensity is not dependent on the “comparative magnitude” or “massiveness” of what is experienced. It is only Hartshorne’s (and Whitehead’s) insistence that the “perfection” of God must be defined quantitatively—which is itself derivative from their theory of aesthetic satisfaction—which prevents Hartshorne from seeing God’s aesthetic self-definition as being absolute in the same sense as is God’s ethical self-definition. Does this then mean that the multiplicity of the non-divine world which God experiences means nothing to God? We have already seen that this does not follow. It is only Hartshorne’s belief that “intensity” and “massiveness” are necessarily correlated which leads him to suppose that (say) a work of art must be constitutive of an artist’s experience for the work to be genuinely related to, and significant to, that artist. Hence, too, the world, in his view, must be a constituent of God for the world to “matter” to God. In contrast to this, however, we have maintained that a work of art can be significant to an artist not as a constituent of the artist’s experience, but as an expression of it. If the artist, under ideal conditions, has attained a zenith of his or her ability to intensely experience beauty, then it is as an expression of aesthetic intensity that the work will be experienced. The work cannot constitute an increase in the intensity of the hypothetical artist: it rather constitutes the occasion for the expression of the unsurpassable intensity which is already present. So we may, I believe, conceive of God’s relationship to the world. Since God has freely chosen to actualize God’s potentiality to be Creator of a non-divine world, God can create and appreciate the aesthetic value (and hence the moral value) of a non-divine world. The world becomes part of God’s concrete contingent experience, and is, in this sense, constitutive of God. To this extent we side with Hartshorne over and against the classical tradition. But, we further hold, this God-defining zenith of aesthetic intensity has been constituted in the triune sociality of God from eternity. This is necessary, and as such it is neither increased nor diminished by the contingent and temporal affairs of the world. Rather, God’s experience of the contingent world—indeed, the entirety of God’s “contingent pole”—serves to express the eternal divine intensity of God’s triune self-experience. Hence, God enjoys the world—the world “means something” to God—not as an essential element in God’s necessary self-constitution, but as an expression of God’s self-constitution. The world provides a new occasion for the unsurpassable beauty of God, defined in terms of divine intensity, to be expressed and in a sense “repeated” in a novel form. The entire process of the contingent, temporal order, then, can be said to be constituted by God’s aim at expressing Godself—the infinite delight of the triune sociality—ad extra. Since God’s deity-defining intensity of aesthetic satisfaction is infinite, the potential for expressing this delightful beauty is inexhaustible. Divine Suffering and the Beauty of the Trinity Does this view that God is eternally and unsurpassably “satisfied” within God’s eternal triune sociality imply that God does not partake in the suffering of the world? Is the portrait of God we have here painted a view of God as insensitively independent in God’s own self-contentment? If God’s self-

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experience is unsurpassably intense, regardless of the state of the world’s state of affairs, is not the “virtuous mutability” of God undermined? Are we not back in the position of God as actus purus? In chapter IV, we utilized the analogy of an experiential subject who was composed of actual occasions with differing “specious presents” to argue that a subject—viz., God—could be both actually necessary and actually contingent in differing respects. There is, it seems, no contradiction in maintaining that a being can be self-content on one level, and yet suffer at another. For example, a person need not sacrifice their self-love, their contentment with who they are, their own internal “fullness of life” in order to genuinely enter into the sufferings of another. Indeed, it seems that the person who enters into the sufferings of others with a sense of internal fullness is in a better position to genuinely enter into these sufferings than one who lacks such “fullness.” To speak more specifically, a person who suffers for another because she needs the other—e.g., needs this other to make her “feel good” about herself, to feel loved and needed, etc.—is more inclined to yet have herself as the object of concern, and thus more inclined to be, to that extent, shut off to the real needs of the other. In contrast, one who enters into solidarity with a sufferer but who is self-content, who loves herself, who possesses an internal fullness which is not destroyed by the suffering, is free to have the sufferer as the sole object of her concern. She is free, in a sense, to “forget herself” in devotion to another. In the case of the former person, one who “needs” the other to arrive at her self-love, the act of entering into solidarity with a sufferer is an expression of her deficiency. In the case of the latter person however, the act of entering into solidarity with a sufferer is an expression of her wholeness. And the more whole she is, the more perfectly she can suffer with and for the other. We may, then, conceive of God as one who is both unsurpassably self-content in God’s essential sociality, while being, at the same time, fully incarnated in the sin and suffering of the world in God’s expressive sociality. Indeed, implied in what we have argued thus far is the supposition that God is free to enter into and redeem the sufferings of the world fully precisely because God is eternally self-sufficient within Godself. The Expressed Delight of God in Suffering Grace But how, it must be asked, can the suffering God, epitomized by the cross, express the unsurpassable intensity of God’s triune aesthetic satisfaction? The answer, as I see it, is that it does so by expressing, in the most extreme manner possible, the “more than necessary” love of God. The qualitative self-defining triune experience of God in eternity is expressed and repeated ad extra in the extreme contrast between the unsurpassable love of God for humanity and the unworthiness of humanity for this love. This is “the beauty of grace.” The beauty of God’s eternal sociality is expressed in the beauty of the unnecessary, radical act which shows the unthinkable extreme to which God will go to establish sociality with another—another who in sin wants nothing more than to be rid of this sociality. The intensity of the social union of the Trinity is, when it is turned outward, the suffering intensity of God’s gracious love for social union with free and fallen humanity. The enormity of the gulf and the extremity of the sacrifice needed to cross it, all reveals outwardly in time the intensity of the love and beauty which defines God inwardly throughout eternity. The suffering intensity ad extra is an expression of the divine intensity ad intra.

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There is another aspect to our reply to the question we are considering. The intense love manifested in the cross expresses in its own way the intensity of the love which binds the eternal Trinity. But it does not yet express the intense delight of God ad intra. This it shall do, however. God does not, of course, delight in dying on a cross as a man. But God does delight in the harmonic sociality between God and God’s creation which this act shall bring about and is already in the process of bringing about. The cross expresses the intensity of God’s social love, and it brings about the expression of God’s social delight in the ultimate victory of the Kingdom of God. The eternal triune dance of God with God shall incorporate the dance of God with the world, and the latter shall express the former. Jonathan Edwards And The Divine Aesthetic Disposition Ad Intra and Ad Extra We have distinguished between the unsurpassable intensity of aesthetic satisfaction which eternally defines God as God and the multiplicity of non-divine contrasts which expresses God as God ad extra. This, we have seen, allows us to intelligibly hold together God’s dynamic immanence in the contingent world (with Hartshorne) with God’s primordial self-sufficient actuality (with the classical tradition). We must, however, now inquire more precisely into this relationship between the ad intra divine aesthetic intensity and the ad extra creaturely expression of this intensity. How is God’s internal triune sociality, God’s necessary and essential pole, related to God’s creaturely sociality, God’s contingent and “externally” expressive pole? The answer, I believe, lies in our previously articulated concept of disposition. The Concept of Disposition In continuity with a large segment of the dynamistic strand of Western philosophy, a strand best exemplified in a theological context by Jonathan Edwards, we have opted to call this reality “disposition.” It is, as we have argued, this concept alone which can render causality, becoming, spontaneity, and freedom intelligible. It is the reality of dispositions which constitutes the enduring dynamic essence of “beings” though their actuality is in constant flux. And it is this reality which functions as their sufficient reason, without thereby necessitating their every action or every detail which characterizes their actuality. The ontological parity of being and becoming are grounded in the reality of dispositions which mediates between them. Jonathan Edwards On The Dispositional Essence Of The Trinity These observations can, I believe, now be fruitfully applied to our understanding of God and this One’s relationship to the world. And, as we have said, the theologian who is, in our estimation, most helpful in providing for us a paradigm for how this can be accomplished is Jonathan Edwards. Though Edwards on occasion slips back into speaking of God in strictly classical terms, his overall view of God is thoroughly dynamic and very untraditional. For Edwards, God’s essence consisted most fundamentally in a primordial divine disposition to enjoy with a maximal intensity God’s own social existence. And God’s existence, in turn, was most fundamentally defined by Edwards as the exercise of this primordial divine disposition. In this sense God’s essence and existence were one for Edwards, for there never was a time when God’s essence was not fully realized as God’s existence. God’s being was at once identical with “God’s power” (disposition) and the exercise of God’s power ad intra. Edwards’ understanding of the triunity of God arises out of this conception.

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According to Edwards, the Father is “the essence of the Godhead in its first subsistence.” The perfection of this first divine subsistence entails, according to Edwards, that the Father is not only fully actual but is also “disposed to communicate himself” through perfect “self-reflexivity”: the Father is disposed to “have a perfect idea of himself” or to “see himself reflected.” This One’s perfection is not, then, actus purus in the classical sense, but is, rather, a “dispositional actuality.” With Hartshorne, Edwards would affirm that the Father’s perfection is a perfection of potentiality, but he would not thereby deny that this entails that it is also a perfection of actuality. This “perfect idea” of the Father, when actualized (as it eternally is, for the Father could never be less perfect) brings forth (“eternally generates”) the Son who is the “perfect repetition of the Father.” The Son is everything the Father is, except his existence is derivative whereas the Father’s is “direct.” The Son is, as the New Testament proclaims, the perfect “Logos,” “image,” “form” or “expression” of the Father. And this constitutes deity “subsisting in a second mode.” Edwards goes on to suppose that the Father not only eternally knows himself perfectly, but loves himself, in the person of the Son, with a perfect intensity. This too is part of the God-defining disposition of the Father. “[T]he Father loveth the Son as a communication of himself as begotten in pursuance of his eternal inclination (disposition) to communicate himself.” Similarly, the Son who is the perfect repetition of the Father, and thus of the Father’s inclination to love, reciprocates in a perfect way, in “an infinite degree,” the love of the Father. Here the “deity becomes all act,” for “the divine essence itself flows out and is, as it were, breathed forth in Love and Joy.” This constitutes “yet another manner of subsistence”—the “Third Person of the Trinity.” We need not accept the particular manner in which Edwards works out his doctrine of the Trinity along the lines of Lockean psychology to appreciate the insightful if not revolutionary manner in which Edwards combines a dynamic view of God with a view of God as being self-sufficient and eternally full within Godself. God’s being is defined by God’s eternal disposition to delight in Godself and the eternal actualization of this disposition within the triune life of God. It is the unsurpassable intensity of the beauty of the divine sociality—their shared love “to an infinite degree”—and God’s eternal “inclination” to eternally be such, which defines God as God and thus most fundamentally distinguishes God from creation, for this divine sociality needs no other sociality to be what it is. Yet, because this social actuality is something which is always “aimed at”—it is eternally the exercise of the Father’s disposition which brings it about—there is, we shall see, eternally “room for expansion.” Because God, for Edwards, is not merely “actual” but is also “disposed,” this One can be self-sufficient without being locked up in eternity. God’s being is defined as an eternally on-going event, and an event which is dynamic and open. Thus, while there is some inconsistency in Edwards on this point, it is true to the general tenor of his thought to say that God is not for him actus purus in the sense that all possible actuality is experienced in an eternal moment. The divine disposition, though always and necessarily results in the unsurpassable delight of the triune God, can do so in novel ways. And this means, as we shall now turn to see, that there is room for the creation of a genuine contingent world to share in this sociality. Edwards On The Trinity And The Creation Of The World The full benefit of the dynamic trinitarian conception of God which Edwards’ conception of disposition opens up for us is seen in this articulation of how the doctrine of the Trinity relates to the doctrine of Creation. The essential disposition of God, we have seen, is to “communicate” himself. This applies first

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and foremost to the “Father” whose eternal disposition to “communicate himself”—to see, understand, love, and delight in himself—generates the Son in his perfect likeness. But it also applies to the Son as well. As the Father’s perfect likeness, the Son is disposed to love and delight in the Father. And the “perfect communication” of the Father and Son is the Holy Spirit. Thus, the essential being of the Father works out, via the concept of disposition, to the necessity of a triune conception of God. Neither the Father, nor the Son, nor the Spirit is conceivable apart from each other. The Godhead, for Edwards, is essentially dispositional, essentially the exercise of this disposition, and thus essentially and actually triune. This disposition to communicate—which is, in essence, God’s disposition for sociality—is perfectly satisfied within the Trinity. The general thrust of Edwards’ thought (despite some inconsistencies cited above) is that God is completely self-sufficient. The world is not necessary for God to be God. The triune actuality of God is in itself unsurpassably delightful, unsurpassably beautiful, to each member of the Trinity. It cannot, in essence, be increased. But the divine disposition to communicate and delight in itself, while being satisfied within the Trinity, is nevertheless inexhaustible in Edwards’ view. There is, then, no deficiency or limit in the dynamic actuality and life of the Trinity: there is, rather, an inexhaustible abundance of life. Edwards simply denies the classical Aristotelian notion that all potentiality and movement implies deficiency. The triune actuality which the divine disposition eternally “aims at” and eternally “arrives at” unsurpassably “satisfies” the aim of God: yet still, the divine disposition to “communicate” abides. Edwards concurs with Madden and Hare that dispositions may endure even after their exercise . And, in the case of the one necessary reality, the endurance is eternal. The disposition of God to create the world, to see Godself “repeated” or “mirrored” in a novel way, is the same disposition which constitutes God as unsurpassable in this One’s trinity. God’s “aim” for delightful sociality with the creaturely world is essentially one with God’s “aim” to delight in Godself. But it is, as such, an expression of who God actually is, viz., of who God is as eternally satisfying this One’s dispositional nature. It is not identical with this divine disposition as a feature of God which is essential to the satisfaction of this divine nature. It is, therefore, Edwards’ basic thesis that the world expresses, but does not constitute, the perfection of God’s beauty, even though Edwards himself lacked the necessary distinctions in his aesthetic theory to articulate this thesis consistently. The Divine Disposition and the Freedom of the World The Eternal Spontaneity of the Trinity With Edwards we may hold that God’s essential being is an eternal event—the event of the perfect and eternal exercising of God’s disposition to be God; the eternal event of God relating to Godself with unsurpassable beauty and love; the event of God eternally becoming triune and celebrating this trinity. And with the dominant strand of Edwards’ thought, we may further hold that the actuality of the triune life perfectly satisfies this primordial divine disposition, precisely because this actual life is unsurpassable in the intensity of its love and beauty.

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But, in contrast to the dominant strand of Edwards’ thought, we are compelled to maintain that the unsurpassability of the divine life describes the inner quality of God’s sociality in distinction from whatever quantity (scope) of aesthetic contrasts this divine sociality may or may not create. The constitution of God’s essential deity has nothing to do with the universal scope and complexity of the non-divine beauty God encompasses. This latter capacity of God constitutes God’s contingent actuality, not God’s necessary actuality. The scope and complexity of the non-divine beauty which God encompasses expresses, but does not constitute, the quality of life which defines God as God. Moreover, we are compelled to part with Edwards by maintaining that the way this unsurpassable qualitative divine life is “arrived at,” the precise manner in which God actualizes this One’s disposition to relate to Godself as God, involves spontaneity. That God is God, that God is unsurpassably related to Godself as Father, Son and Spirit is necessary: but how God in detail enjoys this triune sociality is not. There is contingency, spontaneity and freedom within the divine life, even before and apart from the creation of the world. It is this distinction between the intensity and scope of an aesthetic experience, and this element of spontaneity internal to the eternal divine sociality, which allows us to assert, with consistency, both the self-sufficiency of the triune God and this One’s gracious, immanent involvement in the contingent world. For on this scheme, the creation of the world and God’s real involvement in the world are one of the contingent ways God has chosen to exercise God’s disposition to be God. In the most fundamental sense, the tradition has been correct in saying that God created the world “for his own pleasure.” The contingent act of being Creator, Savior, and Sanctifier is the way God has now creatively chosen to delight in Godself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. If you will, the eternal ecstatic dance of the Trinity now aims at expressing itself through creating new partners in their dance. God’s necessary self-portrait now freely includes a stroke—a bold and daring stroke—which is the free world in which God will paint Godself on the cross, and thereby paint Godself on the throne. Hence, the ceaselessly spontaneous life of the triune God now encompasses the risky adventure of creating a non-divine order and wholly submerging Godself in this order. With Barth, Jüngel and Moltmann we proclaim the Scriptural truth that “God is now not willing to be God without humanity.” And God is willing to die with humanity to achieve this will. The Divine Disposition and the Essence of Humanity The conception of the divine disposition and its relationship to the contingent world which we have here been arguing for allows us now to answer an issue which, we have seen, is highly problematic within a Process framework. This is the issue of how God can be conceived of as immanent within the human subject, without thereby destroying the free autonomy of the subject. How is it to be held, at one and the same time, that a) God is closer to the essence of the creature than the creature is to itself, while b) the creature is nevertheless distinct from God? Process thought, we have seen, maintains the distinctness of the creature from God, but cannot affirm that God is immanent in the subjectivity of the creature. God thus only experiences and knows the individual after the individual has “become.” This, we have seen, is not only theologically inadequate, but philosophically inadequate as well.

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Royce and Neville, on the other hand, maintain that God is indeed dynamically immanent in the subjectivity of all subjects—the subjective aim is God in a determinate form—but they cannot then consistently specify how the creature is, in any significant sense, autonomous from God. In the end, there is but one real agent in the world, though this One can take the form of contingent creatures. In the end, creatures are but “the termini of God’s creative act.” How are we to arrive at a position which can assert immanence without implying pantheism or assert autonomy without denying immanence? I believe that the revised Edwardsian aesthetically conceived concept of disposition worked out in this work provides for us the needed category. The very category which, we have argued, was needed to mediate between causation and determinism, between abstraction and concreteness, between freedom and capriciousness also, we now claim, mediates between the immanence of God and the autonomy of the creature—for precisely the same reason it mediates between the other polar concepts. We may most effectively argue this point by first defining what a non-divine reality is, and then pointing out the way in which the concept of disposition allows us to articulate the dependence, and independence, of this non-divine reality in relation to the divine reality. Edwards and Hartshorne On the Nature of Non-Divine Reality We have seen that both Edwards and Hartshorne argue that God is most fundamentally distinct from the world in terms of God’s beauty. God is distinct in many other ways too, of course, but for both of these thinkers the aesthetic uniqueness of God is what is most fundamental. With this we have agreed, though we have redefined the definition of divine beauty from a quantitative to a qualitative conception. God can thus be defined, most fundamentally, as the unsurpassably intense event of beauty. It follows, then, that non-divine reality can most fundamentally be defined in terms of its surpassable beauty. This too is precisely in keeping with the thought of both Edwards and Hartshorne. A reality is non-divine if it is the subject of, and/or the contributor to, a surpassably intense aesthetic satisfaction. One may also define non-divine reality, and its contrast with divine reality, in terms of its limited perspective on being—its limited receptivity to, and activity upon, other beings. But this, again, is not what is most fundamental if one accepts with Edwards and Hartshorne the fundamentally aesthetic nature of being. God’s Relationship to Non-Divine Reality The disposition of God to create a non-divine reality—which is itself a contingent feature of God’s necessary disposition to be God—is thus a disposition to create experiential centers of, and contributors to, non-divine beauty. It is a disposition to create a matrix of relations with ordinal centers, each of which enjoys and/or contributes to an approximation of divine beauty. The divine disposition “diffuses itself” (Edwards) into a multiplicity of dispositions which “aim at” a unique actualization, a unique perspective on reality, which is defined either as a contribution to, and/or an experience of, beauty. It is at the point of this “diffusion” that the distinction between God and the non-divine world occurs. The multiplicity of dispositions toward non-divine realities are themselves non-divine in their concrescence. The “termini” of God’s creative act is not (as with Neville) the creaturely act itself, but the beginning of the (not wholly determined) disposition of the creature which shall act. The non-divine

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disposition arises out of God—it is an aspect of God’s self-disposition to delight in Godself—and results in what is not God. As with Edwards, we can in this way assert that God’s creativity is, in one sense, “the substance of bodies,” the “ens entium” of all things, without thereby endorsing pantheism. But this is in our scheme carried through more consistently than was possible in Edwards because we have not held that this creativity toward non-divine realities is in any sense necessary. The relative autonomy of the non-divine dispositions is manifested in their autonomous—viz., not divinely determined—creativity, though their relative dependence is manifested in their tie to the primordial disposition of God as the ground of their creativity. The divine ground defines the parameters within which the preordained role of the entity within the matrix of being can be played, though exactly how this creativity is in particular actualized is their own doing. The divine ground thus defines the essence of the non-divine creature without thereby undermining the autonomous integrity of the creature: indeed, it is the divine ground of the creature’s essence which allows the creature space to be autonomous. The Paradoxical Dispositional Essence of Humanity The relative autonomy of the creation is most clearly exemplified in the activity of humans. For the dispositional essence of ordinary humans is not only a subjective aim to creatively fulfill a divinely granted destiny, but is also a disposition to do so in a manner which includes rational deliberation. Our freedom, in other words, is not only the freedom of undetermined spontaneity, and not only the freedom to creatively fulfill a preordained general plan, but also the freedom to do so with and through rational choice. But this element of our disposition implies that we have the ability to paradoxically turn away from our essential God-given destiny—the very dynamic drive which constitutes our “soul.” Our disposition, in other words, is in part a disposition toward “self-disposing.” Our essential self is paradoxically open to the possibility of destroying our essential self. We have the creative capacity to radically abuse the ground of our creativity. We have the freedom to live in contradiction to the subjective aim which is, we have seen, the “ought” which serves as the call over our lives. And this means, in a word, that we have the freedom to destroy our true freedom. The Dispositional Solidarity of Humanity Why is there presently such a powerful and universal inclination to turn away from our exocentric call and live a life in contradiction to our God-given essence? The “self-disposing” away from our original essence is no mere occasional individual decision. As the Scripture consistently portrays it, this “turning away” rather characterizes humanity as a whole, both at an individual and a societal level. Indeed, as Edwards rightly saw, the very universality of sin in the history of humankind would demand the postulation of some sort of corporate solidarity in some sort of “fall,” even if we had not been told this in Scripture. Only upon this supposition, Edwards argued, can this universal penchant toward evil be accounted for. Now we have, following the lead of Madden and Hare, maintained that dispositions must be seen as being multifarious in their scope and generality. The concept is implicit in Edwards and Leibniz as well. They are all “powerful particulars,” but they are particular at many different levels. This observation may now serve to begin to render intelligible the unity of humanity in its “self-disposing” away from our original divine call.

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Whereas the reductionistic methodology of Process thought cannot account for the biblical portrait of the solidarity of humanity—anymore than it can account for the phenomenological wholes or the “transcendental” wholes (e.g., “morphogenetic fields”) which some of the organic sciences are at present postulating, the dispositional-ordinal approach we have been utilizing not only allows for, but requires, the supposition of such realities. There is no vacuum between God’s primordial disposition to be God, and the smallest, shortest conceivable even (if there be such events) within the created order. Every event has its sufficient reason, and this sufficient reason is to be found in the antecedent reality of a disposition to be something like that event. Any other supposition results in the Process paradox of events occurring ex nihilo, without a reason and without a subject. This being the case, there is no problem in understanding the unity of humankind at a fundamental (or “transcendental”) dispositional level. The reality of what humanity is has its sufficient reason in the reality of a creative disposition of being to be human. The subjective aim of God is not simply to atomistic occasions, as Hartshorne and Process thought in general maintain. Nor is it simply constitutive of individuals, considered as phenomenological wholes. Beyond this, God has an aim for humanity as a whole, and this aim, being a dispositional reality, is constitutive for what humanity is. Humanity, like individual human beings, has a “soul.” But as with the constitutive disposition of individuals, it is also an aspect of this fundamental disposition that we actualize this disposition freely. Humanity is disposed to be “self-disposing.” As with individuals, then, humanity as a whole has the ability to turn away from what it essentially is and attempt to be what it is not. It has the ability to turn away from its proper role in the created order and attempt to define its own role—to its detriment, and the detriment of the creation it is a part of (as we are seeing, for example, in our present ecological crises). This “self-disposing” need not be seen as the act of a transcendental will, distinct from the wills of the individuals which corporately constitute humanity. It may, rather, be conceived of as the mutual influence our self-disposing has on one another. At a transcendental level, as Sheldrake has been attempting to prove on a biological basis, we affect and modify one another. In the same way that an event in my body has some effect on my whole person, the total organism which constitutes my self, so the self-disposing acts of individuals can be seen as affecting the self-disposition of humanity as a whole, and vice versa. As ancient peoples (especially in the East) seem to see much clearer than modern first-world people, sin is not principally individualistic. In a very real sense there is no strictly “private” sin. It is the biblical proclamation that we have all fallen “in Adam.” With Edwards we would agree that even if Scripture had no revealed this, some such transcendental “fall,” and some such transcendental solidarity, would have to be postulated to account for the phenomenon. That something has gone fundamentally awry with humanity, and with us the whole world, is an insight shared in the mythology of most of the world’s major religions. The Church has traditionally attempted to come to terms with this insight through various theories of how humanity as a whole is tied to the fall of Adam—usually conceived of as a singular, historic individual. The theories have ranged from a realist understanding (we were actually there “in Adam”) to the “Federal Head” theory (Adam was our representative) to the “social influence” theory (Adam’s fall began a lineage of bad examples).

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A dispositional understanding of the matter could, I believe, incorporate valid elements from all these theories. Indeed, the treatment of Jonathan Edwards on this matter does just this, though he leans most strongly towards a realist understanding . There is a real, though not actual, identification of all humans with “Adam” (whether “Adam” be understood as an individual or a state of being). There is here also the truth that “Adam” represents us, for in a real sense, we all fall, to some extent, when one falls. And it is also true that “Adam” represents what we all actually become, what is in fact true of each one of us. And, finally, there is also here a dimension of “social influence,” though we need not restrict this to the examples society sets before us which we inevitably imitate. We influence each other also by affecting the transcendental-dispositional essence which we all share. Human Solidarity and the Incarnation Our understanding of the dispositional solidarity of humanity not only illuminates what we are “in Adam,” but also what we are “in Christ.” If “in Adam” we are all infected with a distorted disposition, an inclination to turn away from our eschatological essence, “in Christ” our “essential nature” has been, in principle, restored. Christ was who we most essentially are, and he was this under the universal conditions of the fall. Though we cannot of course here even begin a discussion of the accomplished work of Christ, what ordinarily falls under the topic of the atonement, it can at least be said that the concept of disposition opens the way to a conception of the work of Christ which would effectively mediate between the “objective” (Anselmian) and “subjective” (Abelard) poles which have characterized most Christian reflection on this issue throughout the Church’s history. The work of Christ can, on the one hand, be seen as objective, for he really has realized anew the eschatological essence of humanity. He has, as Irenaeus conceived of it, begun to recreate a “new humanity.” The effect of his objective achievement is increasingly bringing salvation, wholeness, and “shalom” to humanity in this “transitional” stage. Eschatologically, humanity has been “made right” with the Creator. Ye the work of Christ can, on the other hand, also be understood in line with subjective theories of the atonement. Indeed, it can be said that within this framework the two theories traditionally treated as antithetical come to the same thing. For the dispositional reality which Christ restores is at once an objective (though not actual) reality which also constitutes the innermost self of each individual. Thus, in contrast to Process thought which, we have seen, must limit the significance of Christ to a “representation” of what God does at all times in all places, and which undermines this work as being a gracious self-initiated work of God, the dispositional ontology we have proposed allows for an intelligible understanding of the work of Christ more in line with Christian tradition, as utterly unique and gracious. The Two Natures of Christ Our modified understanding of Edwards’ understanding of disposition can, we believe, also lay the groundwork for a fruitful understanding of the person of Jesus Christ in line with the Chalcedonian Confession as well as with modern non-substantival categories. On this too, nothing more than a summarizing word can be said.

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As has been frequently pointed out in recent times, the most fundamental difficulty which the traditional understanding of Christ poses for the modern mind concerns its substantialist categories: Christ is said to be “two natures” in “one person.” If the concept of an “enduring substance” as the ground of an entity’s actual attributes has become problematic to the categories of modernity, how much more problematic is the concept of two such realities “crammed” into one person…“without division” and “without confusion”? A dispositional understanding of “essence,” however, while it by no means abrogates the paradox of the God-man, does render this paradox more intelligible within the dynamic categories of our contemporary milieu. Within the framework of this ontology, Christ may be said to be distinct from all other human in that in this one person the disposition which defines God as God, and the disposition which defines humanity as human, converged. In Christ, and through Christ, the unsurpassably intense sociality of God is replicated ad extra. Thus, we might say that the dynamic essence of the man Jesus was wholly taken up into the dynamic essence of God so that God now “aims” at Godself—as God eternally does—but now God does so through this one man. In this one man, God achieves Godself anew. The necessary triune disposition for primordial satisfaction now encompasses this spontaneous feature: it now encompasses the person and work of this one man. The event of God, one might say, now includes the event of the man Jesus, and through him, the event of the entire creation. The Incarnation is thus most fundamentally the dynamic convergence of these two events. Christ does not here cease to be a man, for his non-divine relationality, his non-divine perspective on, or role within, being is retained. The concrescence of his human disposition is yet what it is. But just as this human God is disposed to be God. “The Word became flesh” (Jn. 1:14). Precisely through the subjective aim which constitutes the man Jesus, the subjective aim which constitutes God as God is creatively (viz., unnecessarily) achieved anew. The dynamic nature of dispositions allows this to be affirmed without the problematic connotations which the traditional substantival categories have for the modern mind. And it arrives at this dynamic conception without the radically unorthodox implications which, we have seen, the Process scheme necessitates. The ultimate effect of this dynamic Incarnation is the redemption of the world. In the expansion of the divine sociality to essentially include the man Jesus, the process of the Trinity expands to include the process of the world (Jn. 17:24ff). The ceaseless achievement of the expression of God’s deity in the Trinity will now eternally include the expression of beauty of the non-divine order, and all of this through Christ. This is the Good News of the New Testament. Conclusion: Hartshorne’s Thought And The Construction Of A Process Trinitarian Metaphysics It will perhaps be helpful to conclude this work by summarizing, in as succinct and schematic a manner as possible, the basic conclusions we have arrived at. 1. We have argued that Hartshorne’s thought can be best understood by locating six fundamental statements which form the foundation of his metaphysics. These are the statements “something exists,” “something is concrete with abstract characteristics,” “experience occurs,” “experience is concretely asymmetrically related to its object,” “creative synthesis occurs,” and “aesthetic value is experience.” All

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of these statements are, in Hartshorne’s understanding, a priori. Indeed, the latter five are, in his view simply aspects of the first a priori, “something exists.” 2. While we accepted Hartshorne’s a priori methodology and much of his analysis of what is and is not a priori, we rejected Hartshorne’s contention that the asymmetricality of relationality and experience as a creative synthesis is a priori. These latter statements are, we have contended, the result of an assumed “ontological preference for the small.” In contrast to this, we accepted the anti-reductionistic insights from Buchler’s and Ross’ ordinal/perspectival metaphysics and Merleu-Ponty’s Phenomenology that all manifestations of being are on an ontological par with one another. 3. We have further argued that Hartshorne’s concrete/abstract distinction, while a priori, is not exhaustive, and is in itself insufficient to provide a through metaphysical description of reality. The mediating category of disposition, we have argued, is also needed if the becomingness of being from abstraction to concreteness is to be rendered intelligible. 4. We have agreed that the aesthetic dimension of experience is its most fundamental teleological dimension, we have nevertheless argued against Hartshorne’s and Whitehead’s quantitative analysis of the aesthetic experience in which they hold that the intensity of an aesthetic experience is necessarily dependent upon the magnitude and complexity of an antecedent prehended multiplicity. Our contention has been that virtually all of the alterations we have made in Hartshorne’s understanding of God have arisen from these foundational “adjustments” to his system. And, moreover, virtually everything in Hartshorne’s system which placed it at adds with the trinitarian view of God as traditionally related and self-sufficient, arose from these elements in Hartshorne’s system. 5. We largely agreed with the neo-classical view of God’s existence and power arrived at via Hartshorne’s ontological and cosmological arguments. We have concurred with Hartshorne that there are insurmountable difficulties with the classical understanding of divine perfection, and we argued that there is much in the neo-classical view which is an improvement over the classical view. But we have also demonstrated that the neo-classical view itself runs into difficulties because, theologically, it necessitates the existence of a non-divine world and, philosophically, it cannot render intelligible the necessary “abstract” character of God. We have maintained that a view of God as internally social, as along actually necessary, and as actually infinite while nevertheless being open to contingent expressions of this antecedent necessity, fulfills all a priori requirements and retains the advantageous elements of both the classical and neo-classical views of God while avoiding the difficulties of both. 6. Similarly, we largely agreed with the view of God arrived at via Hartshorne’s design and epistemic arguments. We have maintained, with Hartshorne, that there are numerous difficulties in the classical conception of God’s power and God’s knowledge, and that the neo-classical view, therefore, offers some advantage over this view. But there are, we have nevertheless seen, grave difficulties with the neo-classical view itself—all owing to what we deem to be erroneously construed foundational aspects of Hartshorne’s system. The world is again necessitated. Freedom has not yet been rendered intelligible. God is unnecessarily restricted in

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this view. A great deal of what Scripture and Christian tradition wants to say about God is here necessarily ruled out. And there are a number of other unsolved philosophical quagmires in this view. The advantages of both the classical and neo-classical views are retained while their disadvantages are avoided, we argued, the moment we assert (and render metaphysically intelligible) that God is alone necessary, is internally social, is antecedently full and self-sufficient, but is nonetheless open to a contingent expression of this antecedent divine fullness. And this we can do once the erroneous foundational aspects of Hartshorne’s system are rejected. 7. We were again largely in agreement with the view of God arrived at by Hartshorne’s moral and aesthetic arguments. We concede to Hartshorne that there are serious difficulties involved in the classical understanding of God’s goodness and beauty, and thus that the neo-classical view has some advantage over it. But, we have also shown that the neo-classical view itself has difficulties which are, again, the result of erroneously construed foundation aspects of Hartshorne’s a priori system. Hence, the world is again necessitated here. Moral value is yet unintelligible. The “more than necessary” (viz., gracious) goodness of God as portrayed in Scripture is here unintelligible. Indeed, the beauty of grace and the goodness of an ultimate triumph over evil are here necessarily ruled out, and this, we insisted, constitutes (per impossibile) a necessary “ugly” truth in the universe. And, finally, a great deal of what Scripture wants to say about God simply cannot intelligibly be said within this system. Once one admits the inherent, necessary, self-sufficient sociality of God’s essential being, however, the advantages of both the classical and neo-classical views are retained while the disadvantages of each are avoided. Indeed, once the erroneously construed features of Hartshorne’s system have been modified, then the rest of his system not only allows for this internally social view of God: it metaphysically requires it. 8. We have, finally, attempted to show (in outline) that when this is further worked out in the light of Edwardsian aesthetically conceived concept of disposition, we arrive at a trinitarian view of God in which God’s being is understood to be this One’s free becoming, without thereby sacrificing this One’s self-sufficiency. Indeed, God’s eternally creative becoming establishes this One’s self-sufficiency. We further arrive at a dynamic understanding of God in which God graciously open’s Godself up to encompass the becoming of the world as an aspect of this One’s own self-realization—again, without thereby compromising God’s self-sufficiency. And, finally, we arrive at a view of God in which the revealed truths of the Incarnation, the solidarity of humanity “in Adam” and “in Christ,” and the redemption of the world are rendered intelligible within a thoroughly dynamic worldview, but without the unorthodox implications of doing so from a strictly Process perspective. Hence we have arrived at what constitutes the outline for a trinitarian dispositional metaphysics, grounded on a priori truths, and compatible with the dynamic, non-substantival process categories of modernity as well as with Scripture and the Christian tradition. The relationship between the Trinity and the world process is that the creative process of the self-sufficient God graciously grounds and encompasses the creative process of the world. And the ultimate result is the world’s redemptive sharing in the eternal self-delight which characterizes and constitutes the creative self-becoming of the triune God.