Philotheos: International Journal of Philosophy & Theology 19.2 (2019) 218–226

Larry Hart:
The Saint Cyprian School of Theology, Orange, California

 

Abstract: Martin Buber in his famous critique of modern philosophy and psychology, described the philosophical hour through which the world is now passing as a spiritual eclipse—a historical obscuring of “the light of heaven.”1 This essay explores process thought as first formulated by the mathematician/philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, and then expounded by Charles Hartshorne, John Cobb, and other theologians as paradigmatic of Buber’s concern. Accordingly, it proposes, that when consciousness shifts in such a way that God becomes recognizable as immediately present, as the aura in which the person of faith lives, the eclipse is over.

Keywords: eclipse, God, philosophy, process, theodicy, theology, spirituality, impassibility.

Process Thought

Whitehead’s thought and writing is so complex and so dense, that one is hard put to think of anyone who has been able to convey the gist of it in only a paragraph or two; as, for example, might be done by nearly any university student with the existentialism of Jean Paul Sarte or Albert Camus. Nevertheless, here is an attempt, definitely foolhardy, to do just that for those unacquainted with Whitehead’s thought.

For Whitehead everything is in motion, everything is evolving, everything is changing, everything, including God, is in process. Molecules, algae and whales, dogs and fleas, human beings and whatever you consider as ultimate is in process. Nothing is in a static state. God is still becoming. In so far as process theology can be said to be theistic it is a naturalistic theism, not in the sense of identifying God with nature, but rather in denying the concept of a divine being who can intervene and alter the normal causal principles of the universe. God is enmeshed in time, and is neither omnipotent nor omniscient. God knows only the present with its potentialities. There is a sense in which God can inspire and persuade, but God cannot make things happen. Neither can God prevent anything from happening. Everything that exists has its own level of creativity; and, therefore, possesses the power of freedom, of self-determination and of causal influence. God, it can be said, is as affected by the world as much as the world is affected by God.

This resolves the philosophical problem of evil and suffering by arguing that while God is good, God does not intervene to end the misery of the world because God, enmeshed in

1 Martin Buber, Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation Between Religion and Philosophy (Amherst, New York: Humanity Books, 1996), 23.

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temporality, is unable to do so. Indeed, it is debated whether  God is a superfluous notion in process thought. “Actual entity” is the term Whitehead coined to refer to entities that actually exist, and that relate to other actual entities. The question that then arises is whether God is an actual entity. Whitehead’s method of metaphysical discovery begins with the careful observation of immediate experience, then moves to the free play of imagination, and finally engages in rational analysis. He believed that by employing this methodology he could encompass all of metaphysics in one philosophical system. This is obviously an over simplification of process thought, but hopefully will be sufficient to unfold it as illustrative of Buber’s criticism.

The Eclipse of God

What the Jewish scholar and mystic Martin Buber called the “eclipse of God” speaks to the way in which modern philosophy, theology, and psychology work to destroy the possibility for intimacy with an eternal, ever-present, Mystery, Thou, or God. This essay sees process philosophy as formulated by the mathematician/philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, and expounded by Charles Hartshorne, John Cobb, and other theologians as paradigmatic of Buber’s concern. Technically there is a distinction between process philosophy and process theology; however, the two are formally joined under the rubric of process thought. Understanding, much less critiquing, process thought is a rather daunting task. To begin with, in spite of its efforts to be coherent, it is not a highly linear or systematic philosophy or theology. It is rather a complex and inventive metaphysical “system” employing a number of interlocking arcane concepts. This paper, then, explores how the general orientation and core concepts of process thought are a template of the sort of philosophy Buber felt constituted an “eclipse of the light of heaven, an eclipse of the light of God.”2

Direction Determines Destination

Process philosophy has its origins in the mathematical mind; and, in this rationalistic orientation has remained constant. Alfred North Whitehead worked most of his life teaching mathematics, first as a professor at Trinity College, Cambridge (1884 to 1910), and then at The Imperial College of Science and Technology. In 1898 his A Treatise on Universal Algebra was published. In spite of the title, this book was more about the foundations of geometry than algebra. It attempted to draw together the divergent ideas of research mathematicians in a systematic form. Although this effort established Whitehead’s reputation as a scholar, it had little impact on mathematical research. Whitehead’s early work included two other books, Axioms of Projective Geometry (1906) and Axioms of Descriptive Geometry (1907).

Before the completion of these two Axioms books, Whitehead was at work on Principia Mathematica—a ten-year collaborative project with Bertrand Russell. The intention of Principia Mathematica was to work out a set of axioms and inference rules from which all mathematical truths could be proven. However, in 1931, Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem proved for any set of axioms and inference rules proposed to encapsulate mathematics, either the system must be inconsistent, or there must in fact be some truths of mathematics which could not be deduced from them.3 

2 Ibid.

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Understandably, during the carnage of WW I Whitehead’s writing began to take a more philosophical turn—his papers on relational space, while anchored in geometric thought, are explicitly philosophical. In 1919 his Enquiry into the Principles of Natural Knowledge appeared, then in 1920 his The Concept of Nature. In 1925, facing mandatory retirement at The Imperial College of Science and Technology, Whitehead accepted a position teaching philosophy at Harvard University. A year after arriving at Harvard, he delivered the prestigious Lowell Lectures. These lectures formed the basis for his book Science and the Modern World (1925). Following the Lowell Lectures, he presented the 1927/28 Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh resulting in his Process and Reality (1929).4 Later, Hartshorne, Cobb, and Griffin sought to “theologize” Process and Reality; however, Whitehead’s metaphysical system is determinative for the legitimacy of all process thought. It began and it ends, as a highly academic and esoteric enterprise. Decoding the terminology of Whitehead’s metaphysics is a major challenge. Whitehead not only used common and philosophical language in idiosyncratic ways, but also invented a series of neologisms, including: appetition, concresence, conformal, formaliter, ingression,  prehension, regnant society, and superject. While Whitehead aspired to a literal general description of reality, his obtuse style has proven frustrating for both trained philosophers, and inexperienced graduate students; and, is seen as somewhat useless by more literally minded scientists.5

And so, we are left with Pascal’s passionate declaration: “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob—not of the philosophers and scholars.” This saying, as Buber notes, represents Pascal’s, metanoia, his repentance, the turning of his consciousness from the God of the philosophers to the God Abraham and Sarah know and trust—to that sort of intimacy with which a couple may know one another when their making love is truly love making.6

Process philosophy was spawned in the sea of mathematical reason and nurtured to adulthood in the swirling speculations of academic philosophy. Indeed, the nineteenth century’s misplaced confidence in the power of science and reason was the very matrix for process philosophy. And whatever its original “spiritual intentions,” process thought has continued to follow the highly rationalistic and naturalistic trajectory plotted at its beginning. However, it is not the intention, but the direction in which one proceeds that determines final destination. If the goal, the intention, is to explore the North Pole, then traveling east along the Prime Meridian will not lead to the desired destination. If one’s desire is to experience the beatific vision, the path of esoteric intellectual concepts, will, in the end, either stop short of that destination, or miss it entirely.

3 Whitehead proposed his own theory of general relativity. Although later corrected it continued to generate problems in application.

4 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, ed. by David Ray Griffith and Donald Sherburne, Corrected edition (New York: Free press, 1978).

5 William Grassie, “Resources and Problems in Whitehead’s Metaphysics,” April 9, 2011. Metnexus.net/essay/resources-and-problems-whiteheads-metaphysics (accessed April 17, 2019).

6 Buber, Eclipse, 49. 

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Knowledge of the Second Kind

C. Robert Mesle in Process Theology and John B. Cobb, Jr. in Jesus’ Abba, both attempt to present a more unobscured and Christian friendly version of process thought. Yet, such portrayals by process theologians are, more than anything else, like ghostly images of Christianity— they are like wispy resemblances of someone who was once greatly loved but is now only vaguely recalled.7 Mesle asserts: “Even if the God of process theism should turn out not to exist, or even if there is no divine being at all, even if we find it more helpful to think of the entire venture as the creation of myths and models, I am convinced that process theology deserves our most serious attention. The ethical model that process thought shows us can transform our whole way of thinking about religion, life and values.8

A problem with Mesle’s argument, is that the ethical and moral values he endorses are derived from Judeo-Christian Scripture. More than that, historic and ecumenical Christianity believes that these values grow, so to speak, organically out of, and express the very nature, of Divine Reality. The question then becomes: If severed from their roots can these values of love, compassion and justice continue to flourish, or will they wilt and wither like cut flowers in a vase? Mesle strangely asserts that even if there is no God, or if what we thought were eternal verities and universal spiritual principles turn out merely to be helpful “models,” process thought still has the power to transform our thinking, life and values. In the end this is akin to a baker of apple pies saying: “Even if all the recipe books are wrong, or it turns out there are no apples or apple trees, my apple pie will still be delicious.”

As the Jesuit, priest, scholar and mystic, William Johnston noted, there are two kinds of knowledge. The first is the sort of discursive reasoning common to the academic enterprise. We cannot, of course, entirely escape using this sort of conceptual thinking, however, there is a supra conceptual, mystical, knowledge, a knowledge “of ” rather than “about” God, which fills one who is emptied of images and concepts—a loving light that penetrates the shadow of the eclipse.9 It is this knowledge of the second kind that process theology tends to obscure.

Equation of Suffering

The horrors of World War I were for Whitehead and his wife Evelyn immediate and personal. Their youngest son, Eric Alfred, was killed in action with the Royal Flying Corps in 1918. Whitehead was driven by his personal pain to seek a

7 C. Robert Mesle, Process Theology: A Basic Introduction (St. Louis, Missouri: Chalice, 1993); John Cobb, Jr. Jesus’ Abba: The God Who Has Not Failed (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1963).

8 Mesle, Process Theology, 8.

9 William Johnston, The Mysticism of the Cloud of Unknowing (Wheathampstead, Hertfordshire and Trabuco Canyonf, California: Source Books, 1992) 89-93.

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resolution of the equation of human suffering and evil. His answer,  more intellectual than spiritual, was that suffering exists because God is powerless to prevent it. This has continued as a foundational axiom for process theologians who are fond of the old cliche like syllogism:

  1. A god that is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving would prevent evil and suffering.
  2. Evil and suffering happen.
  3. Since evil and suffering happen, an all-powerful, all-knowing and all-loving god cannot exist.

Process thought seeks to resolve the dilemma by accepting that God is neither omnipotent nor omniscient. It is not, however, willing to relinquish the notion that God is good. The syllogism is, within itself, a somewhat obscurantist statement. That is to say, the premise obscures in that it asserts more than is or can be known.

One Who Proves Too Much

It is curious that Whitehead failed to grasp the implications of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem for his own metaphysical work, for just as surely as it ended the quest of Principia Mathematica, so it spells the impossibility of encapsulating all of metaphysics into one philosophical system.10 Qui nimium probat nihil probat.

What if process thought has it wrong? What if God is all-powerful and all-knowing, but indifferent? What if Stephen Crane’s poem is true?

A man said to the universe:

“Sir, I exist!”

“However,” replied the universe,

“The fact has not created in me

A sense of obligation.”

Or, perhaps God is pitiless. It is not unusual for psychotherapists to encounter people who believe that an all-powerful and all-knowing God exists, but that God, far from being good and kind, is heartless. They are no more likely to worship an impotent God of process theology than a loveless one.

All the great Christian philosophers, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Anselm, and St. Thomas Aquinas, to name three of the classicists, have wrestled with the philosophical problem of God’s impassibility—the logical dilemma of how to make sense of God as both compassionate and unchanging. Hartshorne resolved the problem by arguing, in agreement with Whitehead, that God is not “impassable.” While the world is affected by God, God is also affected by the world. As William Wainwright therefore correctly notes, “The controversy of God’s impassibility is, rooted in a clash of value intuitions, a deep disagreement over what properties God must have to be unqualifiedly admirable and worthy of worship.”11 For the Christian contemplative such questions are fascinating brain

10 Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem cannot be used to prove the existence of God, but does demonstrate any system of logic or numbers always rests on unprovable assumptions; and can never establish a “unifying theory” of metaphysics.

11 William Wainwright, “Concepts of God,” Dec 21, 2006; revised Dec 19, 2012. Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. plato.standford.edu. (accessed April 16, 2019).

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teasers, but in the end, to paraphrase Thomas a Kempis, onemust choose whether it is best to discuss theories of impassibility learnedly, or to experience the faithfulness of God. Process thought seeks to explain everything, but changes nothing; whereas, biblical and spiritual theology explains little, but changes everything.

There are, of course, multiple philosophical possibilities in accounting for the problem of suffering: (1) there is no God, (2) God is ineffectual, (3) God is cruel, (4) or the solution is less philosophical, and more spiritual. C. S. Lewis, echoing both Psalms 73 and The Book of Job, wrote in Till We Have Faces, “I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face the questions die away. What other answer would suffice?”12 However, with its highly academic orientation, it is precisely this last answer that is no longer visible in process thought.

Freedom

Coupled with the primacy of suffering in process thought is the theme of freedom. God is not all powerful, and knows only what is, including the potentialities of the present, and not what will be; consequently, God, who is enmeshed in temporality,13 can actualize potentiality but has no “coercive” power.14 God can invite, persuade, and entice but cannot make things happen.15 “God,” says Mesle, “is the unique Subject, whose love is the foundation of all reality.”16 But Mesle leaves process theology open to the same problems he posits in his caricatures of Judeo-Christian tradition.17 To say to someone: “God feels really terrible that you have been brutally raped, that your three-year-old has been run over by a drunken driver, that you have terminal cancer, that there is yet another famine, lethal epidemic, or genocide in the world, but unfortunately, while God feels your pain, God is impotent and cannot help,” is not particularly consoling. Process thought seems especially vulnerable to Nietzsche’s harsh accusation: “Only a God who is imperfect, or something of a sadist could delight in (actualize) a world of such immense misery, violence, pain and suffering.”18 Process philosophy, as we have seen, agrees with Nietzsche. God is imperfect in that God’s knowledge and power are both limited.

The question, however, is not even whether God is all-powerful, but does God’s power make any difference at all? Couldn’t God use a little more influence in raising up wise, competent, and compassionate world leaders rather than so many malevolent

12 C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (San Diego: Harcourt, Inc., 1984), 308.

13 What is time? Scientifically is it “imaginary;” or an illusion? Is it, as with Tillich, the power of embracing all time periods? Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume I: Reason and Revelation, Being and God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 274.

14 Langdon Gilkey, Maker of Heaven and Earth (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1959), 97.

15 The word “coerce” is a curious framing. To be warned that certain behaviors are self-destructive is hardly synonymous with being forced to do something against one’s will. Apparently, “We are free to choose, but we are not free to choose the result of our choosing.” See: E. Stanley Jones, The Way (Nashville: Abingdon, 1946), 3.

16 Mesle, Process Theology, 8.

17 Mesle, for example, uses “tradition” in multiple and confusing ways which frequently result in a caricature of Christian faith.

18 Frederick Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), trans. R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Books, 1969), 58.

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sociopaths? Couldn’t a god who actualized quantum physics, do more persuading  or revealing, or whatever, to produce some exponential breakthroughs in fighting cancer, hunger, or birth defects? Process theology not only answers “no,” but explicitly states there is no certainty that good will ultimately overcome evil.

It is not that process philosophy blocks out all light, any more than a solar eclipse blots out the entire sun. The movie O’ God, starring George Burns, is perhaps as simple and as appealing a presentation of process theology that a lay person can find—an entirely affable, but ineffectual god who wants us to do better than we are doing when it comes to treating each other with greater kindness and showing more concern for the environment. Indeed, process thought appears to be a product of modern Western culture in that it seeks a way of finding solace in a world mad with fear and suffering, but in a way that guarantees individual autonomy without accountability or personal spiritual transformation, the sort of willingness that is the essence of all spiritual progress. This then is the eclipse of which Buber wrote—the sheer “willfulness” of philosophy and theology.

Cognitive Cloud

Whitehead himself was an agnostic and it is not easy to grasp what he meant by “God.”19 Many, perhaps most, process philosophers speculate that God is an actual entity, although there is disagreement as to whether God is a series of momentary actual occasions, or a single everlasting and constantly developing actual entity. God is a kind of storehouse of both “envisaged potentialities” and of every “puff ” of experience at every level. God as a kind of storage mechanism for knowledge, might remind one of that illustration from quantum physics which says in explaining black holes, that if one’s wallet fell into a black hole the wallet would be lost, but the wallet and all it contained would remain as a kind of smear of mathematical information on the edge of the black hole. On the other hand, more than a few process philosophers maintain God is not a necessary element of the process metaphysical system, and may be deleted without diminishment to the model.

Donald Sherburne maintained in his 1971 article, “Whitehead without God,” that a non-theistic or “naturalistic” version of process philosophy is more useful and coherent. Whitehead believed, noted Sherburne, that God is metaphysically necessary because God (a) preserves the past; (b) is the ontological ground, or “somewhere” of the eternal objects; and (c) is the source of order, novelty, and limitation in worldly occasions. But, said Sherburne, these roles for God are inconsistent with the metaphysical principles of Whitehead’s system and are superfluous.20  

19 As a metaphysical system process thought “denies that ultimately only one individual (God or the Absolute) exists.” Delwin Brown, Ralph E. James, Jr., and Gene Reeves, Process Philosophy and Christian Thought (Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1971), 3.

20 Donald Sherburne, “Whitehead Without God.” Revised from The Christian Scholar, L, 3. (Fall 1967). anthonyflood. com/sherburnewhiteheadwithoutgod.htm (accessed April 16, 2019).

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Whitehead argued that ultimate reality is best described in terms of the principle of creativity. Creativity is the universal of universals, and is sometimes compared to Aristotle’s “being qua being,” or Heidegger’s “Being itself”—that is “Becoming itself.” All actual entities, even God, are in a sense “creatures” of creativity. Zeus was subject to the principle of destiny—the thread measured and cut by the three Fates, so one may ask: “Is God subject to Creativity?” And, this raises the next obvious question: “Is God, God?” Or, “Is the principle of Creativity God?” Or, “Is the Process itself God?”21

As noted, process thought uses a good deal of ink in denying God is omnipotent. Both John A. T. Robinson and Paul Tillich disliked all talk of God’s omnipotence. They thought such talk tended to make an object of God. So, whether omnipotence is affirmed or denied God is objectified either way. And, quite soon it is no longer God being discussed. Once a symbol, or a concept, is taken for the thing itself objectification has taken place—God as God has been eclipsed.22

Nearly all academic philosophy and theology done in the mode of modern scientism and materialism becomes stuck in the ditch of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness— Whitehead’s term for treating an abstraction as a concrete reality. The organization of knowledge, as Herman Daly and John Cobb note, requires a high degree of abstraction;23 consequently, the more successful and established an academic discipline in its development, and the more its practitioners are socialized to think in these abstractions, the more elaborate the abstractions themselves become. In time conclusions are confidently applied to the real world without realizing the degree of abstraction involved. This treatment of abstractions as if they were concrete and possessed functions they cannot have leads to both scientific and metaphysical confusion.24 As soon as we speak philosophically of the omniscience, omnipresence, or omnipotence of God, or employ and proceed to elaborate upon any of the concepts of process thought, we have smudged the lens through which we hope to glimpse the divine mystery.25

Conclusion

What has been posited in this paper is not that one may not be both a process theologian and Christian, but that process philosophy easily leads to that objectification and fallacy of misplaced concreteness Buber believed constituted an eclipse

21 If God’s acts are conditioned by some principle, such as creativity, God is inescapably governed by the structure of being of which God is then a part and an illustration—like Whitehead’s God “in the grip of the ultimate metaphysical ground.” God is then not free. See: Gilkey, Maker of Heaven and Earth, 97.

22 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology Vol. 1, 273.

23 Herman Dally and John Cobb, For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment and a Sustainable Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 25, 122.

24 Larry Hart, The Annunciation: A New Evangelization and Apologetic for Mainline Protestants and Progressive Catholics in Postmodern North America (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2017), 188-189.

25 Similarly, process theology speaks of models of ultimate realities, which not only reduces God to a concept (model), but leaves one wondering how many realities can be ultimate before none are ultimate; that is, before one is no longer speaking of “Ultimate Reality” at all. For example, see: Jeannie Diller and Asa Kasher, ed. Introduction to Models of God and Alternative Realities (New Springer Press, 2013).

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of God. The Quaker philosopher Elton Trueblood wrote, “Once large sections of the clergy were the standard examples of obscurantism, but today their places have been taken by the academic philosophers.”26 Charles Chestnut furnishes an appropriate conclusion:

Moses asked God what his name was, because he wanted a logical and rational theory about God. What God told him instead was simply, ‘I am what I am.’ What will save us is not a theory about God, but meeting God and recognizing that he-whom, we-confront “right in front of us” (so to speak) is the one we call God. Or, in other words, learning what the word God means, refers to learning how to recognize those events and circumstances where we can see and feel and hear God immediately present and acting in our lives.27

When we grasp, with both heart and mind, what Chestnut is saying, the eclipse is over, and philosophy no longer blots out the beatific vision.

26 Elton Trueblood, A Place to Stand (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 31.

27 Glenn F. Chestnut, God and Spirituality: Philosophical Essays (New York: iUniverse, 2010), 313.

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