RELIGIOUS
Next we consider religious features of human participation in ultimate reality. In anticipation of the physicalist’s, scientist’s or skeptic’s objection to his views, Whitehead says:
“It is childish to enter upon thought with the simple-minded question, What is the world made of? The task of reason is to fathom the deeper depths of the many-sidedness of things. We must not expect simple answers to far-reaching questions. However far our gaze penetrates there are always heights beyond which block our vision.”9
For Whitehead, beyond these heights is the notion of God, where Christianity “dwells upon the tender elements of the world, which slowly and in quietness operate by love… It does not look to the future; for it finds its own reward in the immediate present.”10
Whitehead believes we connect with ultimate reality as manifest in God through feelings or emotions. He offers as an example the Christian meditating on a Gospel phrase whose concern is not its truthfulness, but the feelings it elicits. This ‘lure for feeling’ emanates from the divine and guides concrescence and satisfaction. It leads to identification of and discrimination among eternal objects introduced into the universe. A similar if more banal process occurs with meditation on the events of one’s daily life.11
Moreover God’s consequent nature which originates actual occasions, such as us, completes the deficiency of God’s mere conceptual reality. The passage of actual occasions is taken up by God towards an end of perfect unity and perfect multiplicity. While we are a ‘means’:
“The function of being a means is not disjoined from the function of being an end. The sense of worth beyond itself is immediately enjoyed as an overpowering element in the individual self-attainment. It is in this way that the immediacy of sorrow and pain is transformed into an element of triumph. This is the notion of redemption through suffering which haunts the world.”12
In short, human existence – particularly, our endless processing of emotions and feelings, our suffering and our joys – is ultimately tied to the divine as shared means and ends in the developing oneness of the universal organism. Here we have Whitehead’s version of mystical union.
(third continuation next post)
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9Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality. The Free Press, New York, 1978. ISBN 0-02-934570-7, page 342.
10Ibid., page 343.
11Ibid., pages 185-187..
12Ibid., page 350.
