Alfred North Whitehead "God and the World"

Chapter II of Part V, "Final Interpretation," of Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, New York, Macmillan, 1929; Corrected Edition, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, New York, Free Press, 1978. I am indebted to Hyatt Carter for transcribing the text, which I have only reformatted stylistically.

God and the World

One most obvious problem is how to save the intermediate imaginative representations of spiritual truths from loss of effectiveness, if the possibility of modifications of dogma are admitted. The religious spirit is not identical with dialectical acuteness. Thus these intermediate representations play a great part in religious life. They are enshrined in modes of worship, in popular religious literature, and in art. Religions cannot do without them; but if they are allowed to dominate, uncriticised by dogma or by recurrence to the primary sources of religious inspiration, they are properly to be termed idols. In Christian history, the charge of idolatry has been bandied to and fro among rival theologians. Probably, if taken in its wide sense, it rests with equal truth on all the main churches, Protestant, and Catholic. Idolatry is the necessary product of static dogmas.

So long as the temporal world is conceived as a self-sufficient completion of the creative act, explicable by its derivation from an ultimate principle which is at once eminently real and the unmoved mover, from this conclusion there is no escape: the best that we can say of the turmoil is, “For so he giveth his beloved—sleep.” This is the message of religions of the Buddhistic type, and in some sense it is true. In this final discussion we have to ask, whether metaphysical principles impose the belief that it is the whole truth. The complexity of the world must be reflected in the answer. 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.

The notion of God as the “unmoved mover” is derived from Aristotle, at least so far as Western thought is concerned. The notion of God as “emi-nently real” is a favourite doctrine of Christian theo-logy. The combination of the two into the doctrine of an aboriginal, eminently real, transcendent creator, at whose fiat the world came into being, and whose imposed will it obeys, is the fallacy which has infused tragedy into the histories of Christianity and of Maho-metanism.

When the Western world accepted Christianity, Caesar conquered; and the received text of Western theology was edited by his lawyers. The code of Jus-tinian and the theology of Justinian are two volumes expressing one movement of the human spirit. The brief Galilean vision of humility flickered throughout the ages, uncertainly. In the official formulation of the religion it has assumed the trivial form of the mere attribution to the Jews that they cherished a misconception about their Messiah. But the deeper idolatry, of the fashioning of God in the image of the Egyptian, Persian, and Roman imperial rulers, was retained. The Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar.

In the great formative period of theistic philoso-phy, which ended with the rise of Mahometanism, after a continuance coeval with civilization, three strains of thought emerge which, amid many variations in detail, respectively fashion God in the image of an imperial ruler, God in the image of a personification of moral energy, God in the image of an ultimate philosophical principle. Hume’s Dialogues criticize unanswerably these modes of explaining the system of the world.

The three schools of thought can be associated respectively with the divine Caesars, the Hebrew prophets, and Aristotle. But Aristotle was antedated by Indian, and Buddhistic, thought; the Hebrew pro-phets can be paralleled in traces of earlier thought; Mahometanism and the divine Caesars merely represent the most natural, obvious, idolatrous theistic symbolism, at all epochs and places.

The history of theistic philosophy exhibits various stages of combination of these three diverse ways of entertaining the problem. There is, however, in the Galilean origin of Christianity yet another suggestion which does not fit very well with any of the three main strands of thought. It does not emphasize the ruling Caesar, or the ruthless moralist, or the unmoved mover. It dwells upon the tender elements in the world, which slowly and in quietness operate by love; and it finds purpose in the present immediacy of a kingdom not of this world. Love neither rules, nor is it unmoved; also it is a little oblivious as to morals. It does not look to the future; for it finds its own reward in the immediate present.

Apart from any reference to existing religions as they are, or as they ought to be, we must investigate dispassionately what the metaphysical principles, here developed, require on these points, as to the nature of Cod. There is nothing here in the nature of proof. There is merely the confrontation of the theo-retic system with a certain rendering of the facts. But the unsystematized report upon the facts is itself highly controversial, and the system is confessedly inadequate. The deductions from it in this particular sphere of thought cannot be looked upon as more than suggestions as to how the problem is trans-formed in the light of that system. What follows is merely an attempt to add another speaker to that masterpiece, Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Any cogency of argument entirely depends upon elucidation of somewhat exceptional elements in our conscious experience—those elements which may roughly be classed together as religious and moral intuitions.

In the first place, God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse. He is their chief exemplification.

Viewed as primordial, he is the unlimited concep-tual realization of the absolute wealth of potentiality. In this aspect, he is not before all creation, but with all creation. But, as primordial, so far is he from “eminent reality,” that in this abstraction he is “deficiently actual”—and this in two ways. His feel-ings are only conceptual and so lack the fulness of actuality. Secondly, conceptual feelings, apart from complex integration with physical feelings, are devoid of consciousness in their subjective forms. Thus, when we make a distinction of reason, and consider God in the abstraction of a primordial actu-ality, we must ascribe to him neither fulness of feel-ing, nor consciousness. He is the unconditioned actuality of conceptual feeling at the base of things; so that, by reason of this primordial actuality, there is an order in the relevance of eternal objects to the process of creation. His unity of conceptual opera-tions is a free creative act, untrammelled by refer-ence to any particular course of things. It is deflected neither by love, nor by hatred, for what in fact comes to pass. The particularities of the actual world pre-suppose it; while it merely presupposes the general metaphysical character of creative advance, of which it is the primordial exemplification. The primordial nature of God is the acquirement by creativity of a primordial character.

His conceptual actuality at once exemplifies and establishes the categoreal conditions. The concep-tual feelings, which compose his primordial nature, exemplify in their subjective forms their mutual sen-sitivity and their subjective unity of subjective aim. These subjective forms are valuations determining the relative relevance of eternal objects for each occasion of actuality.

He is the lure for feeling, the eternal urge of de-sire. His particular relevance to each creative act, as it arises from its own conditioned standpoint in the world, constitutes him the initial “object of desire” establishing the initial phase of each subjective aim. A quotation from Aristotle’s Metaphysics¹ expresses some analogies to, and some differences from, this line of thought:

And since that which is moved and moves is intermediate, there is some-thing which moves without being moved, being eternal, substance, and actuality. And the object of desire and the object of thought move in this way; they move without being moved. The primary objects of desire and of thought are the same. For the apparent good is the object of appetite, and the real good is the primary object of rational wish. But desire is consequent on opinion rather than opinion on desire; for the thinking is the starting-point. And thought is moved by the object of thought, and one of the two columns of opposites is in itself the object of thought; . . .

Aristotle had not made the distinction between conceptual feelings and the intellectual feelings which alone involve consciousness. But if “concep-tual feeling,” with its subjective form of valuation, be substituted for “thought,” “thinking,” and “opinion,” in the above quotation, the agreement is exact.

There is another side to the nature of God which cannot be omitted. Throughout this exposition of the philosophy of organism we have been considering the primary action of God on the world. From this point of view, he is the principle of concretion—the principle whereby there is initiated a definite outcome from a situation otherwise riddled with ambiguity. Thus, so far, the primordial side of the nature of God has alone been relevant.

But God, as well as being primordial, is also con-sequent. He is the beginning and the end. He is not the beginning in the sense of being in the past of all members. He is the presupposed actuality of concep-tual operation, in unison of becoming with every other creative act. Thus, by reason of the relativity of all things, there is a reaction of the world on God. The completion of God’s nature into a fulness of physical feeling is derived from the objectification of the world in God. He shares with every new creation its actual world; and the concrescent creature is objectified in God as a novel element in God’s objectification of that actual world. This prehension into God of each creature is directed with the subjective aim, and clothed with the subjective form, wholly derivative from his all-inclusive primordial valuation. God’s conceptual nature is unchanged, by reason of its final completeness. But his derivative nature is conse-quent upon the creative advance of the world.

Thus, analogously to all actual entities, the nature of God is dipolar. He has a primordial nature and a consequent nature. The consequent nature of God is conscious; and it is the realization of the actual world in the unity of his nature, and through the transfor-mation of his wisdom. The primordial nature is con-ceptual, the consequent nature is the weaving of God’s physical feelings upon his primordial concepts.

One side of God’s nature is constituted by his con-ceptual experience. This experience is the primordial fact in the world, limited by no actuality which it pre-supposes. It is therefore infinite, devoid of all nega-tive prehensions. This side of his nature is free, com-plete, primordial, eternal, actually deficient, and un-conscious. The other side originates with physical ex-perience derived from the temporal world, and then acquires integration with the primordial side. It is determined, incomplete, consequent, “everlasting,” fully actual, and conscious. His necessary goodness expresses the determination of his consequent nature.

Conceptual experience can be infinite, but it belongs to the nature of physical experience that it is finite. An actual entity in the temporal world is to be conceived as originated by physical experience with its process of completion motivated by consequent, conceptual experience initially derived from God. God is to be conceived as originated by conceptual ex-perience with his process of completion motivated by consequent, physical experience, initially derived from the temporal world.

The perfection of God’s subjective aim, derived from the completeness of his primordial nature, is-sues into the character of his consequent nature. In it there is no loss, no obstruction. The world is felt in a unison of immediacy. The property of combining creative advance with the retention of mutual im-mediacy is what in the previous section is meant by the term “everlasting.”

The wisdom of subjective aim prehends every ac-tuality for what it can be in such a perfected system—its sufferings, its sorrows, its failures, its triumphs, its immediacies of joy—woven by rightness of feeling into the harmony of the universal feeling, which is al-ways immediate, always many, always one, always with novel advance, moving onward and never pe-rishing. The revolts of destructive evil, purely self-re-garding, are dismissed into their triviality of merely individual facts; and yet the good they did achieve in individual joy, in individual sorrow, in the introduction of needed contrast, is yet saved by its relation to the completed whole. The image—and it is but an image—the image under which this operative growth of God’s nature is best conceived, is that of a tender care that nothing be lost.

The consequent nature of God is his judgment on the world. He saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life. It is the judgment of a ten-derness which loses nothing that can be saved. It is also the judgment of a wisdom which uses what in the temporal world is mere wreckage.

Another image which is also required to under-stand his consequent nature is that of his infinite pa-tience. The universe includes a threefold creative act composed of (i) the one infinite conceptual real-ization, (ii) the multiple solidarity of free physical re-alizations in the temporal world, (iii) the ultimate unity of the multiplicity of actual fact with the primor-dial conceptual fact. If we conceive the first term and the last term in their unity over against the inter-mediate multiple freedom of physical realizations in the temporal world, we conceive of the patience of God, tenderly saving the turmoil of the intermediate world by the completion of his own nature. The sheer force of things lies in the intermediate physical pro-cess: this is the energy of physical production. God’s role is not the combat of productive force with pro-ductive force, of destructive force with destructive force; it lies in the patient operation of the over-powering rationality of his conceptual harmonization. He does not create the world, he saves it: or, more accurately, he is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.

The vicious separation of the flux from the perma-nence leads to the concept of an entirely static God, with eminent reality, in relation to an entirely fluent world, with deficient reality. But if the opposites, static and fluent, have once been so explained as separately to characterize diverse actualities, the interplay between the thing which is static and the things which are fluent involves contradiction at every step in its explanation. Such philosophies must include the notion of “illusion” as a fundamental prin-ciple—the notion of “mere appearance.” This is the final Platonic problem.

Undoubtedly, the intuitions of Greek, Hebrew, and Christian thought have alike embodied the notions of a static God condescending to the world, and of a world either thoroughly fluent, or accidentally static, but finally fluent—”heaven and earth shall pass away.” In some schools of thought, the fluency of the world is mitigated by the assumption that selected components in the world are exempt from this final fluency, and achieve a static survival. Such compo-nents are not separated by any decisive line from analogous components for which the assumption is not made. Further, the survival is construed in terms of a final pair of opposites, happiness for some, tor-ture for others.

Such systems have the common character of starting with a fundamental intuition which we do mean to express, and of entangling themselves in verbal expressions, which carry consequences at variance with the initial intuition of permanence in fluency and of fluency in permanence.

But civilized intuition has always, although ob-scurely, grasped the problem as double and not as single. There is not the mere problem of fluency and permanence. There is the double problem: actuality with permanence, requiring fluency as its completion; and actuality with fluency, requiring permanence as its completion. The first half of the problem concerns the completion of God’s primordial nature by the de-rivation of his consequent nature from the temporal world. The second half of the problem concerns the completion of each fluent actual occasion by its func-tion of objective immortality, devoid of “perpetual perishing,” that is to say, “everlasting.”

This double problem cannot be separated into two distinct problems. Either side can only be explained in terms of the other. The consequent nature of God is the fluent world become “everlasting” by its ob-jective immortality in God. Also the objective immor-tality of actual occasions requires the primordial per-manence of God, whereby the creative advance ever re-establishes itself endowed with initial subjective aim derived from the relevance of God to the evolving world.

But objective immortality within the temporal world does not solve the problem set by the pene-tration of the finer religious intuition. “Everlasting-ness” has been lost; and “everlastingness” is the content of that vision upon which the finer religions are built—the “many” absorbed everlastingly in the final unity. The problems of the fluency of God and of the everlastingness of passing experience are solved by the same factor in the universe. This factor is the temporal world perfected by its reception and its re-formation, as a fulfilment of the primordial appetition which is the basis of all order. In this way God is com-pleted by the individual, fluent satisfactions of finite fact, and the temporal occasions are completed by their everlasting union with their transformed selves, purged into conformation with the eternal order which is the final absolute “wisdom.” The final sum-mary can only be expressed in terms of a group of antitheses, whose apparent self-contradictions de-pend on neglect of the diverse categories of exis-tence. In each antithesis there is a shift of meaning which converts the opposition into a contrast.

It is as true to say that God is permanent and the World fluent, as that the World is per-manent and God is fluent.

It is as true to say that God is one and the World many, as that the World is one and God many.

It is as true to say that, in comparison with the World, God is actual eminently, as that, in comparison with God, the World is actual emi-nently.

It is as true to say that the World is imma-nent in God, as that God is immanent in the World.

It is as true to say that God transcends the World, as that the World transcends God.

It is as true to say that God creates the World, as that the World creates God.

God and the World are the contrasted opposites in terms of which Creativity achieves its supreme task of transforming disjoined multiplicity, with its diver-sities in opposition, into concrescent unity, with its diversities in contrast. In each actuality there are two concrescent poles of realization—”enjoyment” and “appetition,” that is, the “physical” and the “conceptual.” For God the conceptual is prior to the physical, for the World the physical poles are prior to the conceptual poles.

A physical pole is in its own nature exclusive, bounded by contradiction: a conceptual pole is in its own nature all-embracing, unbounded by contradic-tion. The former derives its share of infinity from the infinity of appetition; the latter derives its share of li-mitation from the exclusiveness of enjoyment. Thus, by reason of his priority of appetition, there can be but one primordial nature for God; and, by reason of their priority of enjoyment, there must be one his-tory of many actualities in the physical world.

God and the World stand over against each other, expressing the final metaphysical truth that appe-titive vision and physical enjoyment have equal claim to priority in creation. But no two actualities can be torn apart: each is all in all. Thus each temporal occasion embodies God, and is embodied in God. In God’s nature, permanence is primordial and flux is derivative from the World: in the World’s nature, flux is primordial and permanence is derivative from God. Also the World’s nature is a primordial datum for God; and God’s nature is a primordial datum for the World. Creation achieves the reconciliation of permanence and flux when it has reached its final term which is everlastingness—the Apotheosis of the World.

Opposed elements stand to each other in mutual requirement. In their unity, they inhibit or contrast. God and the World stand to each other in this op-posed requirement. God is the infinite ground of all mentality, the unity of vision seeking physical mul-tiplicity. The World is the multiplicity of finites, actu-alities seeking a perfected unity. Neither God, nor the World, reaches static completion. Both are in the grip of the ultimate metaphysical ground, the creative ad-vance into novelty. Either of them, God and the World, is the instrument of novelty for the other.

In every respect God and the World move con-versely to each other in respect to their process. God is primordially one, namely, he is the primordial unity of relevance of the many potential forms; in the pro-cess he acquires a consequent multiplicity, which the primordial character absorbs into its own unity. The World is primordially many, namely, the many actual occasions with their physical finitude; in the process it acquires a consequent unity, which is a novel occa-sion and is absorbed into the multiplicity of the pri-mordial character. Thus God is to be conceived as one and as many in the converse sense in which the World is to be conceived as many and as one. The theme of Cosmology, which is the basis of all reli-gions, is the story of the dynamic effort of the World passing into everlasting unity, and of the static ma-jesty of God’s vision, accomplishing its purpose of completion by absorption of the World’s multiplicity of effort.

The consequent nature of God is the fulfilment of his experience by his reception of the multiple free-dom of actuality into the harmony of his own actual-ization. It is God as really actual, completing the defi-ciency of his mere conceptual actuality.

Every categoreal type of existence in the world presupposes the other types in terms of which it is explained. Thus the many eternal objects conceived in their bare isolated multiplicity lack any existent character. They require the transition to the concep-tion of them as efficaciously existent by reason of God’s conceptual realization of them.

But God’s conceptual realization is nonsense if thought of under the guise of a barren, eternal hypo-thesis. It is God’s conceptual realization performing an efficacious rôle in multiple unifications of the uni-verse, which are free creations of actualities arising out of decided situations. Again this discordant multi-plicity of actual things, requiring each other and neg-lecting each other, utilizing and discarding, perishing and yet claiming life as obstinate matter of fact, re-quires an enlargement of the understanding to the comprehension of another phase in the nature of things. In this later phase, the many actualities are one actuality, and the one actuality is many actual-ities. Each actuality has its present life and its imme-diate passage into novelty; but its passage is not its death. This final phase of passage in God’s nature is ever enlarging itself. In it the complete adjustment of the immediacy of joy and suffering reaches the final end of creation. This end is existence in the perfect unity of adjustment as means, and in the perfect multiplicity of the attainment of individual types of self-existence. 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-at-tainment. It is in this way that the immediacy of sor-row and pain is transformed into an element of tri-umph. This is the notion of redemption through suf-fering which haunts the world. It is the generalization of its very minor exemplification as the aesthetic val-ue of discords in art.

Thus the universe is to be conceived as attaining the active self-expression of its own variety of oppo-sites—of its own freedom and its own necessity, of its own multiplicity and its own unity, of its own imper-fection and its own perfection. All the “opposites” are elements in the nature of things, and are incorrigibly there. The concept of “God” is the way in which we understand this incredible fact—that what cannot be, yet is.

Thus the consequent nature of God is composed of a multiplicity of elements with individual self-realiza-tion. It is just as much a multiplicity as it is a unity; it is just as much one immediate fact as it is an unrest-ing advance beyond itself. Thus the actuality of God must also be understood as a multiplicity of actual components in process of creation. This is God in his function of the kingdom of heaven.

Each actuality in the temporal world has its recep-tion into God’s nature. The corresponding element in God’s nature is not temporal actuality, but is the transmutation of that temporal actuality into a living, ever-present fact. An enduring personality in the temporal world is a route of occasions in which the successors with some peculiar completeness sum up their predecessors. The correlate fact in God’s nature is an even more complete unity of life in a chain of elements for which succession does not mean loss of immediate unison. This element in God’s nature in-herits from the temporal counterpart according to the same principle as in the temporal world the future in-herits from the past. Thus in the sense in which the present occasion is the person now, and yet with his own past, so the counterpart in God is that person in God.

But the principle of universal relativity is not to be stopped at the consequent nature of God. This nature itself passes into the temporal world according to its gradation of relevance to the various concrescent oc-casions. There are thus four creative phases in which the universe accomplishes its actuality. There is first the phase of conceptual origination, deficient in ac-tuality, but infinite in its adjustment of valuation. Se-condly, there is the temporal phase of physical ori-gination, with its multiplicity of actualities. In this phase full actuality is attained; but there is deficiency in the solidarity of individuals with each other. This phase derives its determinate conditions from the first phase. Thirdly, there is the phase of perfected actuality, in which the many are one everlastingly, without the qualification of any loss either of indi-vidual identity or of completeness of unity. In ever-lastingness, immediacy is reconciled with objective immortality. This phase derives the conditions of its being from the two antecedent phases. In the fourth phase, the creative action completes itself. For the perfected actuality passes back into the temporal world, and qualifies this world so that each temporal actuality includes it as an immediate fact of relevant experience. For the kingdom of heaven is with us to-day. The action of the fourth phase is the love of God for the world. It is the particular providence for parti-cular occasions. What is done in the world is trans-formed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world. By reason of this reciprocal relation, the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again into the world. In this sense, God is the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands.

We find here the final application of the doctrine of objective immortality. Throughout the perishing oc-casions in the life of each temporal Creature, the in-ward source of distaste or of refreshment, the judge arising out of the very nature of things, redeemer or goddess of mischief, is the transformation of Itself, everlasting in the Being of God. In this way, the insis-tent craving is justified—the insistent craving that zest for existence be refreshed by the ever-present, unfading importance of our immediate actions, which perish and yet live for evermore.

¹ Metaphysics 1072a 23-32, trans. by Professor W. D. Ross. My attention was called to the appositeness of this particular quotation by Mr. F. J. Carson.