God as the Face of the Deep
First published in 2003, Catherine Keller's Face of the Deep proposes that God is the face of the deep and also that the deep is more than God.
As I read her work, the deep is akin to Whitehead's idea of creativity and to what Wallace Stevens calls the nothingness from which the earliest single light adds itself to the evening sky.
If you have Buddhist leanings, you might imagine the nothingness as that creative abyss, sunyata, from which all things create themselves in response to inherited situations. Or to the godhead of which some Christian mystics speak, Meister Eckhart and Jakob Bohme, for example.
The deep is not the personal God in whom Jesus placed his faith: the Eternal Companion to the world's joys and sufferings. It is not a still small voice within the heart luring toward wisdom, compassion and creativity. It is not the One who seeks to creatively transform and thus redeem all that happens in the world. It is, I suggest, the self-creativity of each and every actuality, God included.
A unique feature of Whitehead's work is that, in his view, the nothingness is real in its way, and God is real in God's way. Catherine Keller offers a perfect metaphor for thinking about God. God isn't the whole of the deep, but God is the face of the deep.
In our pandemic age, it may be tempting to think that viruses are created by God. I think they create themselves, as do we, as does God. I find comfort and courage in the idea that God isn't the deep as a whole, but the face of the deep who seeks the well-being of each and all, who is a healing presence, and whose steadfast love endures forever. And I am grateful to Catherine Keller for giving me the language.
-- Jay McDaniel, April, 2020
As I read her work, the deep is akin to Whitehead's idea of creativity and to what Wallace Stevens calls the nothingness from which the earliest single light adds itself to the evening sky.
If you have Buddhist leanings, you might imagine the nothingness as that creative abyss, sunyata, from which all things create themselves in response to inherited situations. Or to the godhead of which some Christian mystics speak, Meister Eckhart and Jakob Bohme, for example.
The deep is not the personal God in whom Jesus placed his faith: the Eternal Companion to the world's joys and sufferings. It is not a still small voice within the heart luring toward wisdom, compassion and creativity. It is not the One who seeks to creatively transform and thus redeem all that happens in the world. It is, I suggest, the self-creativity of each and every actuality, God included.
A unique feature of Whitehead's work is that, in his view, the nothingness is real in its way, and God is real in God's way. Catherine Keller offers a perfect metaphor for thinking about God. God isn't the whole of the deep, but God is the face of the deep.
In our pandemic age, it may be tempting to think that viruses are created by God. I think they create themselves, as do we, as does God. I find comfort and courage in the idea that God isn't the deep as a whole, but the face of the deep who seeks the well-being of each and all, who is a healing presence, and whose steadfast love endures forever. And I am grateful to Catherine Keller for giving me the language.
-- Jay McDaniel, April, 2020
The Deep as Self-Creativity
Interpreting Wallace Stevens' Phrase
in a Whiteheadian Way
Q = Question
S = Suggestion
Q: What does it mean to say that the single light adds itself?
S: It means that the light is an act of self-creativity: an act of decision by which the event creates itself in response to its past actual world.
Q: How does that create a new universe?
S: The universe is not something that already exists fully-formed. It is always coming into existence, new at each moment. The newness is a result of the self-creativity within its depths. There is more to the universe after the self-creation than there was before. Being is becoming, and becoming includes novelty.
Q: Where does the act of self-creativity or decision come from?
S: The act of decision does not come from the past, although it is responsive to the past. It does not come from the future, although it will affect the future. It is not generated by eternal objects (pure potentialities in the mind of God) because they have no agency of their own. It is not created by God because, if it were, is would not be self-creative. It comes from the spontaneous depths of the new event itself. “Decision is the essence of actuality,” says Whitehead in Process and Reality.
Q: So it does not come from any thing other than itself?
S: That’s right. It is the essence of actuality.
Q: Is this act of self-creativity a thing?
S: No, it is not a thing. It is more like a no-thing, a process. John Cobb compares it to Buddhist nothingness, as interpreted by the Kyoto School of Japanese Buddhist philosophy.
Q: So the new light comes from no-thing-ness, or nothingness.
S: Yes, it comes from nothingness. As the poet says: the single light creates out of nothingness.
Q: Are all events expressive of this nothingness?
S: Yes, all actual entities, even God, create themselves out of the nothingness?
Q: Is there another name for this nothingness than, well, nothingness?
S: Whitehead calls it creativity. It is, for him, the ultimate reality.
Q: Isn't God the ultimate reality?
S: No, God is the ultimate actuality: a primordial expression of creativity. God is the cosmic mind, the all embracing event, who embraces all other actualities in a spirit of love, creating a new universe of God's own, which then floods back into the universe, moment by moment, as traces of healing and love.
Q: Is that what the Torah and the New Testament and the Qur'an say?
S: In a way, yes it is. Their focus is on the ultimate actuality not the ultimate reality. Generally speaking, these texts were not preoccupied with the question: "Of what are all things a manifestation?" They were preoccupied with "In whom can we place our faith?" Their answer was God.
Q: Does this demean God? Isn't creativity more actual than God in way?
S: No, creativity or nothingness is actual only in its manifestations. It has no agency other than the agency of its manifestations. Don't think of it as in competition with God; just think of it as expressed in God's own actuality (God is self-creative, too) and in the actuality of all other existents.
Q: I myself am influenced by the biblical faiths. Can you point me to where this might be in the Bible?
S: Well, some theologians, Rabbi Bradley Artson and the Christian writer Catherine Keller, say that it is like the tehom, the Great Deep, from which God creates the world in the book of Genesis. If you wish, you can say that creativity or nothingness is the Great Deep and you can say, with Catherine Keller, that God is the Face of the Deep.
Q: But if creatures are self-creative in some way, is it really honest to say that God creates them?
S: God doesn't create their self-creativity. God lures them to create themselves in ways that add vitality and beauty to the world. In process theology this luring takes the form of 'initial aims.'
Q: Should I have faith in creativity?
S : No, you best have faith in God, in love. You can awaken to creativity, but that is not enough. That's just a kind of mysticism. What it important is how you live. Faith and love are much more important.
S: It means that the light is an act of self-creativity: an act of decision by which the event creates itself in response to its past actual world.
Q: How does that create a new universe?
S: The universe is not something that already exists fully-formed. It is always coming into existence, new at each moment. The newness is a result of the self-creativity within its depths. There is more to the universe after the self-creation than there was before. Being is becoming, and becoming includes novelty.
Q: Where does the act of self-creativity or decision come from?
S: The act of decision does not come from the past, although it is responsive to the past. It does not come from the future, although it will affect the future. It is not generated by eternal objects (pure potentialities in the mind of God) because they have no agency of their own. It is not created by God because, if it were, is would not be self-creative. It comes from the spontaneous depths of the new event itself. “Decision is the essence of actuality,” says Whitehead in Process and Reality.
Q: So it does not come from any thing other than itself?
S: That’s right. It is the essence of actuality.
Q: Is this act of self-creativity a thing?
S: No, it is not a thing. It is more like a no-thing, a process. John Cobb compares it to Buddhist nothingness, as interpreted by the Kyoto School of Japanese Buddhist philosophy.
Q: So the new light comes from no-thing-ness, or nothingness.
S: Yes, it comes from nothingness. As the poet says: the single light creates out of nothingness.
Q: Are all events expressive of this nothingness?
S: Yes, all actual entities, even God, create themselves out of the nothingness?
Q: Is there another name for this nothingness than, well, nothingness?
S: Whitehead calls it creativity. It is, for him, the ultimate reality.
Q: Isn't God the ultimate reality?
S: No, God is the ultimate actuality: a primordial expression of creativity. God is the cosmic mind, the all embracing event, who embraces all other actualities in a spirit of love, creating a new universe of God's own, which then floods back into the universe, moment by moment, as traces of healing and love.
Q: Is that what the Torah and the New Testament and the Qur'an say?
S: In a way, yes it is. Their focus is on the ultimate actuality not the ultimate reality. Generally speaking, these texts were not preoccupied with the question: "Of what are all things a manifestation?" They were preoccupied with "In whom can we place our faith?" Their answer was God.
Q: Does this demean God? Isn't creativity more actual than God in way?
S: No, creativity or nothingness is actual only in its manifestations. It has no agency other than the agency of its manifestations. Don't think of it as in competition with God; just think of it as expressed in God's own actuality (God is self-creative, too) and in the actuality of all other existents.
Q: I myself am influenced by the biblical faiths. Can you point me to where this might be in the Bible?
S: Well, some theologians, Rabbi Bradley Artson and the Christian writer Catherine Keller, say that it is like the tehom, the Great Deep, from which God creates the world in the book of Genesis. If you wish, you can say that creativity or nothingness is the Great Deep and you can say, with Catherine Keller, that God is the Face of the Deep.
Q: But if creatures are self-creative in some way, is it really honest to say that God creates them?
S: God doesn't create their self-creativity. God lures them to create themselves in ways that add vitality and beauty to the world. In process theology this luring takes the form of 'initial aims.'
Q: Should I have faith in creativity?
S : No, you best have faith in God, in love. You can awaken to creativity, but that is not enough. That's just a kind of mysticism. What it important is how you live. Faith and love are much more important.
The Many Become One and are Increased by One
interpreting Whitehead's phrase "the many become one and are increased by one"
in the context where it appears. Lesson Nine of the Whitehead Video Series.
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Lesson Nine considers selected passages from six paragraphs in a section of Whitehead's Process and Reality called The Category of the Ultimate. One of the most important ideas presented in these passages is that Creativity is, in Whitehead's words, "the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matters of fact." His idea is that every actual fact in the universe -- every actual entity -- is a "production of novel togetherness." This means that an entity is not simply "one" but also "many." It is the many becoming one. The video uses the example of a child's relationship to her parents to illustrate the point. Her parents are part of who she is, and in her very inclusion of them within her own life, she is more than them. Always she is becoming herself, and the self who becomes at any given moment becomes part of a many which influence her in the future.
-- Jay McDaniel |