Photo by Steven Van Loy on Unsplash
Dear Process Theologian,
When I love my daughter am I loving God? Is my daughter part of God?
Jack
*
Dear Jack,
Yes, you are loving a part of God. God is many as well as one.
Process Theologian
Dear Process Theologian,
When I love my daughter am I loving God? Is my daughter part of God?
Jack
*
Dear Jack,
Yes, you are loving a part of God. God is many as well as one.
Process Theologian
The Consequent Nature of God
Thus the consequent nature of God is composed of a multiplicity of elements with individual self-realization. It is just as much a multiplicity as it is a unity; it is just as much one immediate fact as it is an unresting 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.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28) (p. 350). Free Press. Kindle Edition.
God's Manyness
It is as true to say that God is one and the World many, as that the World is one and God many.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality
Monotheists say that there is one God and that God is One. The oneness of which they speak is different from the number 1. It is not something that comes after 0 and before 2. It is not the answer to 3 minus 2.
It is a felt oneness. It feels a little like the harmony of music in that it includes the plurality of the world. The Oneness of God is the multiplicity of the universe itself as enfolded into an everlasting melody, with dissonance as well as consonance. This melody is God's ongoing life. This kind of oneness turns the heart of the believer toward the world as a place where God is found. To love your daughter is to love part of God. God's oneness includes her.
It is best to avoid a more abstract, dogmatic oneness. There is a great danger of monotheism when it prioritizes a more abstract oneness over plurality and turns oneness into an idol of the mind. When believers succumb to this temptation, they become obsessed with a focal object of the imagination, calling it God; and leave behind the world of experience with its manifold beauties and needs. They - we - fall into godolatry.
An antidote to this idolatry is to keep in mind the ultimacy of plurality and to remember that God, too, is many as well as one. The purpose of the remainder of this page is to lend support to this antidote in two artistic poetic ways:
Mozart's Symphony #42
Louis MacNeice's poem Plurality.
Both make a case for multiplicity, for plurality, for manyness. Mozart presents the many in the one without losing the many; MacNeice shows how one without many is but a lifeless abstraction in the mind.
The page is supplemented by some ideas in Whitehead's philosophy that likewise lend support to the idea that God is many. Faith in God's manyness is faith that the world itself, even amid its pain, is part of God's life, not in the sense that God controls it, but in the sense that it is woven into God's heart. To love the world, to trust that it matters, to love life itself, is to love God's manyness. It is to love your daughter and know she is part of God.
- Jay McDaniel
It is a felt oneness. It feels a little like the harmony of music in that it includes the plurality of the world. The Oneness of God is the multiplicity of the universe itself as enfolded into an everlasting melody, with dissonance as well as consonance. This melody is God's ongoing life. This kind of oneness turns the heart of the believer toward the world as a place where God is found. To love your daughter is to love part of God. God's oneness includes her.
It is best to avoid a more abstract, dogmatic oneness. There is a great danger of monotheism when it prioritizes a more abstract oneness over plurality and turns oneness into an idol of the mind. When believers succumb to this temptation, they become obsessed with a focal object of the imagination, calling it God; and leave behind the world of experience with its manifold beauties and needs. They - we - fall into godolatry.
An antidote to this idolatry is to keep in mind the ultimacy of plurality and to remember that God, too, is many as well as one. The purpose of the remainder of this page is to lend support to this antidote in two artistic poetic ways:
Mozart's Symphony #42
Louis MacNeice's poem Plurality.
Both make a case for multiplicity, for plurality, for manyness. Mozart presents the many in the one without losing the many; MacNeice shows how one without many is but a lifeless abstraction in the mind.
The page is supplemented by some ideas in Whitehead's philosophy that likewise lend support to the idea that God is many. Faith in God's manyness is faith that the world itself, even amid its pain, is part of God's life, not in the sense that God controls it, but in the sense that it is woven into God's heart. To love the world, to trust that it matters, to love life itself, is to love God's manyness. It is to love your daughter and know she is part of God.
- Jay McDaniel
Mozart's Symphony No. 41, in C, known as the Jupiter symphony, was the composer's last. It is an amazingly complex composition characterized by constant alterations of contrasting elements and styles, melodies and phrases that keep coming in and out and back together again. For all its diversity of musical expression, the Jupiter is comprehended as one harmonious whole. Unity does not come to us easily, but when it does, as here, there is nothing quite like it!
- Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spirituality and Practice
- Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spirituality and Practice
Plurality
by Louis MacNeice
It is patent to the eye that cannot face the sun
The smug philosophers lie who say the world is one;
World is other and other, world is here and there,
Parmenides would smother life for lack of air
Precluding birth and death; his crystal never breaks--
No movement and no breath, no progress nor mistakes,
Nothing begins or ends, no one loves or fights,
All your foes are friends and all your days are nights
And all the roads lead round and are not roads at all
And the soul is muscle-bound, the world a wooden ball.
The modern monist too castrates, negates our lives
And nothing that we do, make or become survives,
His terror of confusion freezes the flowing stream
Into mere illusion, his craving for supreme
Completeness means be chokes each orifice with tight
Plaster as he evokes a dead ideal of white
All-white Universal, refusing to allow
Division or dispersal—Eternity is now
And Now is therefore numb, a fact he does not see
Postulating a dumb static identity
Of Essence and Existence which could not fuse without
Banishing to a distance belief along with doubt,
Action along with error, growth along with gaps;
If man is a mere mirror of God, the gods collapse.
No, the formula fails that fails to make it clear
That only change prevails, that the seasons make the year,
That a thing, a beast, a man is what it is because
It is something that began and is not what it was,
Yet is itself throughout, fluttering and unfurled,
Not to be cancelled out, not to be merged in world,
Its entity a denial of all that is not it,
Its every move a trial through chaos and the Pit,
An absolute and so defiant of the One
Absolute, the row of noughts where time is done,
Where nothing goes or comes and Is is one with Ought
And all the possible sums alike resolve to nought.
World is not like that, world is full of blind
Gulfs across the flat, jags against the mind,
Swollen or diminished according to the dice,
Foaming, never finished, never the same twice.
You talk of Ultimate Value, Universal Form--
Visions, let me tell you, that ride upon the storm
And must be made and sought but cannot be maintained,
Lost as soon as caught, always to be regained,
Mainspring of our striving towards perfection, yet
Would not be worth achieving if the world were set
Fair, if error and choice did not exist, if dumb
World should find its voice for good and God become
Incarnate once for all. No, perfection means
Something but must fall unless there intervenes
Between that meaning and the matter it should fill
Time’s revolving hand that never can be still.
Which being so and life a ferment, you and I
Can only live by strife in that the living die,
And, if we use the word Eternal, stake a claim
Only to what a bird can find within the frame
Of momentary flight (the value will persist
But as event the night sweeps it away in mist).
Man is man because he might have been a beast
And is not what he was and feels himself increased,
Man is man in as much as he is not god and yet
Hankers to see and touch the pantheon and forget
The means within the end and man is truly man
In that he would transcend and flout the human span:
A species become rich by seeing things as wrong
And patching them, to which I am proud that I belong.
Man is surely mad with discontent, he is hurled
By lovely hopes or bad dreams against the world,
Raising a frail scaffold in never-ending flux,
Stubbornly when baffled fumbling the stubborn crux
And so he must continue, raiding the abyss
With aching bone and sinew, conscious of things amiss,
Conscious of guilt and vast inadequacy and the sick
Ego and the broken past and the clock that goes too quick,
Conscious of waste of labour, conscious of spite and hate,
Of dissension with his neighbour, of beggars at the gate,
But conscious also of love and the joy of things and the power
Of going beyond and above the limits of the lagging hour,
Conscious of sunlight, conscious of death’s inveigling touch,
Not completely conscious but partly—and that is much.
Louis MacNeice, “Plurality” from The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice. Copyright © 1967 by Louis MacNeice. Reprinted by permission of David Higham Associates, Ltd.
The smug philosophers lie who say the world is one;
World is other and other, world is here and there,
Parmenides would smother life for lack of air
Precluding birth and death; his crystal never breaks--
No movement and no breath, no progress nor mistakes,
Nothing begins or ends, no one loves or fights,
All your foes are friends and all your days are nights
And all the roads lead round and are not roads at all
And the soul is muscle-bound, the world a wooden ball.
The modern monist too castrates, negates our lives
And nothing that we do, make or become survives,
His terror of confusion freezes the flowing stream
Into mere illusion, his craving for supreme
Completeness means be chokes each orifice with tight
Plaster as he evokes a dead ideal of white
All-white Universal, refusing to allow
Division or dispersal—Eternity is now
And Now is therefore numb, a fact he does not see
Postulating a dumb static identity
Of Essence and Existence which could not fuse without
Banishing to a distance belief along with doubt,
Action along with error, growth along with gaps;
If man is a mere mirror of God, the gods collapse.
No, the formula fails that fails to make it clear
That only change prevails, that the seasons make the year,
That a thing, a beast, a man is what it is because
It is something that began and is not what it was,
Yet is itself throughout, fluttering and unfurled,
Not to be cancelled out, not to be merged in world,
Its entity a denial of all that is not it,
Its every move a trial through chaos and the Pit,
An absolute and so defiant of the One
Absolute, the row of noughts where time is done,
Where nothing goes or comes and Is is one with Ought
And all the possible sums alike resolve to nought.
World is not like that, world is full of blind
Gulfs across the flat, jags against the mind,
Swollen or diminished according to the dice,
Foaming, never finished, never the same twice.
You talk of Ultimate Value, Universal Form--
Visions, let me tell you, that ride upon the storm
And must be made and sought but cannot be maintained,
Lost as soon as caught, always to be regained,
Mainspring of our striving towards perfection, yet
Would not be worth achieving if the world were set
Fair, if error and choice did not exist, if dumb
World should find its voice for good and God become
Incarnate once for all. No, perfection means
Something but must fall unless there intervenes
Between that meaning and the matter it should fill
Time’s revolving hand that never can be still.
Which being so and life a ferment, you and I
Can only live by strife in that the living die,
And, if we use the word Eternal, stake a claim
Only to what a bird can find within the frame
Of momentary flight (the value will persist
But as event the night sweeps it away in mist).
Man is man because he might have been a beast
And is not what he was and feels himself increased,
Man is man in as much as he is not god and yet
Hankers to see and touch the pantheon and forget
The means within the end and man is truly man
In that he would transcend and flout the human span:
A species become rich by seeing things as wrong
And patching them, to which I am proud that I belong.
Man is surely mad with discontent, he is hurled
By lovely hopes or bad dreams against the world,
Raising a frail scaffold in never-ending flux,
Stubbornly when baffled fumbling the stubborn crux
And so he must continue, raiding the abyss
With aching bone and sinew, conscious of things amiss,
Conscious of guilt and vast inadequacy and the sick
Ego and the broken past and the clock that goes too quick,
Conscious of waste of labour, conscious of spite and hate,
Of dissension with his neighbour, of beggars at the gate,
But conscious also of love and the joy of things and the power
Of going beyond and above the limits of the lagging hour,
Conscious of sunlight, conscious of death’s inveigling touch,
Not completely conscious but partly—and that is much.
Louis MacNeice, “Plurality” from The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice. Copyright © 1967 by Louis MacNeice. Reprinted by permission of David Higham Associates, Ltd.
So What About God's Oneness?
What does it mean to say God is One? It is to recognize the unity of what Whitehead calls the primordial nature of God: that side of God which is beyond space and time, timelessly envisioning the realm of pure potentiality. And it is recognize the manifold unity of the consequent nature of God: where the many "contrasting elements and styles" of the universe are gathered into a harmonious whole. In the latter respect, God is the harmonious whole of the universe, woven in Love.
We never stand outside this unity; we are always already inside it and it is always already more than us. Faith is one way of reaching out to this unity. We may even sense that this unity, appearances to the contrary, is good and loving, trustworthy. We may, in the words of Jesus and the Psalms, surrender our spirits to it, not only as we die but also in each moment of our lives. We may live from the unity.
But we must always remember that the unity can never be placed inside our mental frames. We cannot place it inside a verbal box of our own making. Faith is living within the unity, embracing the multiplicity as Love's body.
- Jay McDaniel, July 22, 2020
Six Ways to Think of God
God's Multiplicity is in #3 and #4
