"A Gracious, Simple Mode of Life"
Whitehead on the Appeal of Inclusive Love
"A gracious. simple mode of life...endowed mankind with its most precious instrument of progress—the impracticable ethics of Christianity."
In this ideal world forgiveness could be stretched to seventy times seven, whereas in the real world of the Herods and the Roman Empire a sevenfold forgiveness touched upon the impracticable."
Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas
There is something naive, something absurd, about the Christian idea that we should love our enemies and forgive those who persecute us. At the very least, this idea is, in Whitehead's words, "impracticable." It was impractical when it arose in early Christianity and some argue that it is equally impractical now. It was a dream of people - the early Christians - who were living what Whitehead calls an "interim ethic." They mistakenly believed that the world would soon come to an end, and they had the luxury of imagining and sometimes embodying an ideal that runs counter to the way the world necessarily operates: with goodness rewarded and evil punished, with enemies conquered and friends embraced. We humans are, and must be, a tribal people in order to survive.
And yet, says Whitehead, the ideal is relevant today as it was for the early Christians. It entered human history, thanks to the writing down of the gospels and the occasional embodiment of what he calls a "gracious, simple mode of life," which now functions as a relevant ideal by which we can rightly measure our own lives. In his words:
A standard had now been created, expressed in concrete illustrations foolproof against perversions. This standard is a gauge by which to test the defects of human society. So long as the Galilean images are but the dreams of an unrealized world, so long they must spread the infection of an uneasy spirit. (Adventures of Ideas)
What does he mean by "the infection of an uneasy spirit"? I think he means that the vision of idealized love in an ideal world, embodied in a "gracious, simple mode of life," once introduced into history, can never be forgotten. It works like a moral contagion, quietly spreading through memory and imagination, unsettling complacency, and awakening a discontent with the way things are whenever they fall short of the way things could be. True, the ideal can never be fully realized, but it can be approached and approximated in greater degrees. It draws us toward itself like an asymptote—always just beyond our grasp, yet always shaping our movement, beckoning us closer with the promise of a more gracious and loving world.
In our time, it seems to me, this infectious ideal - love - captures the imaginations of self-identified Christians and also of people who travel different religious paths or have no particularized path they follow. Many who are drawn to Buddhism, for example, hear the ideal in Buddhism's emphasis on unlimited compassion for all living beings; and some who are drawn to Marxism hear it in the ideal of a future state in which people will live from each according to ability to each according to need. In one way or another, the ideal floats across the globe, along with other ideals, some of them complementing it, such as justice and kindness and mercy, and some conflicting with it, such as vengeance, domination, and the will to humiliate those deemed unworthy. These conflicting ideals also circulate like contagions, carried in the stories we tell, the policies we enact, the media we consume, and the cultures we sustain. They, too, are “foolproof against perversions” in their own way, shaping imaginations and legitimizing certain actions as natural or necessary.
The infection of love is not the only virus in the human bloodstream; it competes with the infection of fear, resentment, and tribal pride. In moments of crisis—wars, political upheavals, economic collapse—it is often the harsher infections that seem most “practical,” while love looks naïve again. And yet, the Galilean images persist. They reappear in quiet acts of mercy that never make the headlines, in movements for reconciliation that begin at kitchen tables, in the patient refusal to dehumanize the stranger or the enemy.
Whitehead’s point is not that love will ever become the universal practice of humanity—he knew too well the stubbornness of human violence—but that, once imagined and embodied, it will always haunt us. It will always be there to trouble our certainties, to whisper “there is another way” when revenge or exclusion seems inevitable. The infection of an uneasy spirit means that no matter how hardened we become, the vision of the gracious and simple mode of life lingers like a persistent ache in the conscience of the world.
Perhaps the most subversive feature of this infection is its refusal to remain tribal. Love of enemies, forgiveness without limit—these break the boundaries of kinship, nation, and creed. They invite us into a solidarity that is more dangerous and more beautiful than anything our survival instincts alone could produce. And because it has been seen, lived, and recorded, the possibility will not go away. Even if it is dismissed as impractical, even if it is betrayed a thousand times, it remains, beckoning us toward a life that is larger than self-protection and richer than victory.
Whitehead himself believed that this ideal has been realized - no, is being realized, continuously - in another sphere of existence, overlapping but also transcending the world. We might call it cosmic Love. In Adventures of Ideas he calls this region a Harmony of Harmonies which we sometimes sense in moments of deep peace. In Process and Reality he speaks of it in more personal terms, as it reflects "the Galilean origin" of Christianity. He writes:
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. (AN Whitehead, Process and Reality)
Understood as a feature - perhaps the feature - of divinity, It is arguable that when we are grasped by the infectious appeal of love without boundaries, we are feeling something of God's own life in the immediacy of our experience, and when are embody the spirit of that love in our daily and corporate lives, we are practicing the presence of God, even if we are not sure we believe in God. It is also arguable that when nations take the "standard" of boundless love a standard for their policies, when they try to "operate by love" as does God, that they too, as nations, are partaking of love's infection.
It is worth asking whether the ideal that once seemed hopelessly impractical may, in our own time, be the most practical ideal we have. In the first century, when the early Christians voiced their ethic of loving enemies, they were a marginal, persecuted minority without political power, living under the brutal machinery of empire. Survival meant keeping one’s head down or fighting back in kind; the ethic of boundless love was a luxury of the powerless, or so it appeared.
Today the situation is different. We live in a world armed with weapons capable of destroying all life, where national and ethnic hatreds can be magnified instantly through digital networks, and where ecological collapse threatens the entire planet. In such a world, the old “practical” approach—rewarding friends, punishing enemies, defending one’s tribe at all costs—has become a recipe for collective suicide.
If survival is our aim, the tribal ethic is now the impractical one. The only viable path forward is to enlarge our sense of kinship so that it includes the former stranger, the rival, even the enemy. The Galilean standard of love without boundaries, once mocked as naïve, may be the only standard capable of steering humanity through the dangers of our own making. It is not a luxury of the end times—it is the survival ethic for our times.
This is the great reversal: what began as an “interim ethic” may turn out to be the enduring ethic, not because we have become morally perfect, but because the conditions of the modern world demand it. Love of enemies is no longer simply the dream of saints; it is the practical wisdom of a species that wishes to continue. In this light, Whitehead’s “infection of an uneasy spirit” is not merely a troubling presence in the conscience of the world—it is the saving fever that could bring us back to health.
Excerpt from Adventures of Ideas
"The greatness of Christianity—the greatness of any valuable religion—consists in its ‘interim ethics’. The founders of Christianity and their earlier followers firmly believed that the end of the world was at hand. The result was that with passionate earnestness they gave free reign to their absolute ethical intuitions respecting ideal possibilities without a thought of the preservation of society. The crash of society was certain and imminent. ‘Impracticability’ was a word which had lost its meaning; or rather, practical good sense dictated concentration on ultimate ideas. The last things had arrived intermediate stages were of no account...
The Galilean peasantry, having regard to their climate and simplicity of life, were neither rich nor poor: they were unusually intellectual for a peasantry, by reason of their habits of study of historical and religious records: they were protected from disturbance, from within or from without, by the guardian structure of the Roman Empire. They had no responsibility for the maintenance of this complex system.
Their own society was of the simplest; and they were ignorant of the conditions by which the Empire arose, of the conditions requisite for its efficiency, and of the conditions necessary for its preservation. They were ignorant even of the services which the Empire was rendering them. The alternation of procurators was like that of the seasons, some were better and some were worse; but all alike, seasons and procurators of Judaea, issued from an inscrutable order of things.
The tone of life of this peasantry provided an ideal environment in which concepts of ideal relations between rational beings could be formulated—concepts devoid of ferocity, concepts gracious, kindly, and shrewd, concepts in which mercy prevailed over judicial classification. In this ideal world forgiveness could be stretched to seventy times seven, whereas in the real world of the Herods and the Roman Empire a sevenfold forgiveness touched upon the impracticable.
But the Galilean people were unconcerned with the discipline of the Roman legions, with the imperial inspection of the doings of pro-consuls, and with the complexities of a legal system which was to impose an order upon multitudinous transactions, stretching from the hills of Scotland to the marshes of Mesopotamia. A gracious. simple mode of life, combined with a fortunate ignorance, endowed mankind with its most precious instrument of progress—the impracticable ethics of Christianity.
A standard had now been created, expressed in concrete illustrations foolproof against perversions. This standard is a gauge by which to test the defects of human society. So long as the Galilean images are but the dreams of an unrealized world, so long they must spread the infection of an uneasy spirit."