God and the Godhead
The Metaphysical Ground
of the All-Loving God
"Neither God, nor the World, reaches static completion. Both are in the grip of the
ultimate metaphysical ground, the creative advance into novelty. Either of them,
God and the World, is the instrument of novelty for the other."
- Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 349
"In the philosophy of organism this ultimate is termed ‘creativity’,
and God is its primordial, non-temporal accident."
- Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 7
"‘Creativity’ is another rendering of the Aristotelian ‘matter,’ and of the
modern ‘neutral stuff.’ But it is divested of the notion of passive receptivity..."
- Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 31
ultimate metaphysical ground, the creative advance into novelty. Either of them,
God and the World, is the instrument of novelty for the other."
- Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 349
"In the philosophy of organism this ultimate is termed ‘creativity’,
and God is its primordial, non-temporal accident."
- Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 7
"‘Creativity’ is another rendering of the Aristotelian ‘matter,’ and of the
modern ‘neutral stuff.’ But it is divested of the notion of passive receptivity..."
- Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 31
In the depths of religious experience, two dimensions of the universe—Creativity as the ground of creaturely and divine freedom, and God as beckoning Love—are often intertwined, like two faces of a single mystery: one silent, without character, yet generative; the other tender, invitational, and morally animating. Whitehead’s philosophy offers a way of honoring both sides of this intuition.
On the one hand there is the sheer, unformed generativity at the base of all becoming, which he calls Creativity. Creativity is the pure activity embodied in all things good and all things evil, incarnate in the self-creativity (freedom) of each actual entity and in the creative advance of novelty - a creative advance that includes God and the universe, who are instruments of novelty for one another.
On the other there is the felt presence of a guiding, empathic Love that moves through the world and through us. This Love is both an inwardly felt lure within each creature for flourishing, relative to what is possible in the situation at hand, and an encompassing field of compassion who feels the feelings of each and every creature with tender care. There is more to Creativity than this divine Love, but this Love is the primordial 'accident' or 'form' of this Creativity.
With Whitehead’s help, we can affirm both dimensions: the personal God who loves the world with the tender care that nothing be lost, and Creativity as a groundless ground of which all entities are expressions, itself beyond good and evil. And we can see that, together, they make space for what, below, I call a spirituality of horror and a spirituality of beauty.
God and the Godhead
When I speak of God in this essay, I have in mind the God of love who is so important to open and relational theologians and also many others, including many a classical theist. You find this image of God in various aspects of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, in the Pure Land traditions of Buddhism (under the rubric of cosmic Bodhisattva), and in various strands of Bhakti Hinduism. For Christians, the most influential origins of this ideas are in the Bible and in the life, death, and healing ministry of Jesus.
When I speak of the Godhead in the Godhead, I mean this Creativity. Here my use of the word Godhead is in the tradition of, and a variant of, Meister Eckhart, who distinguished between Gott and Gottheit—between the personal God who relates, loves, and responds, and the abyssal depth beyond all names and attributes. In adapting this distinction for a Whiteheadian framework, I am not importing Eckhart’s Neoplatonism wholesale. Rather, I am drawing upon the structural intuition he articulates: that there is an ultimate which is not a being, not even the highest being, but a formless generativity in virtue of which any being is possible at all.
Of course, open and relational theists tend to emphasize the personal God rather than the Godhead. Some will resist the very use of the word Godhead, because it suggests an ultimate reality that is in some way 'deeper' than God. Nevertheless, as Whitehead makes clear, Creativity is the metaphysical ground of reality, and the God of love is “in its grip.” God and the world, Whitehead says, are “instruments of novelty for one another,” and this mutuality is made possible by the Creativity that lies at the base of all things.
Creativity as Universal Self-Creativity
What, then, is this Creativity? It is interpreted in different ways. However, judging from the three passages from Process and Reality offered below, Creativity is a groundless ground of pure activity, of which all events and entities are expressions: a formless “prime matter” that, while not an agent with preferences, stands at the base of all actuality, including divine actuality. This Urgrund, this primal ground, is not an entity among entities. It is not a creator or a personal God. Rather, it is a formless energy that becomes actual only through the self-creativity of each and every actual entity—whatever decision it makes—and through the transition from past to present and from present to future. It is the creative advance into novelty: the deep within the deep.
Even if open and relational theologians may not describe things this way—even if they prefer to treat Creativity as a mere abstraction from creaturely acts of self-creativity and from God’s own self-creative act—they nevertheless feel its presence in and through their affirmation of creaturely freedom. A sense of the irreducible freedom and contingency of creatures lies at the heart of open and relational theology. This conviction leads them to say that God is not all-powerful, even if God is very powerful. It also leads them to recognize that the unfolding of creation possesses a spontaneity of its own, one that cannot be reduced to God’s will and that can give rise to great horror as well as great beauty.
A Spirituality of Horror
A spirituality grounded in Creativity and creaturely freedom must make room for horror—not as something divinely intended, nor as something permitted by an all-controlling deity, but as a tragic possibility inherent in a world where every actual entity possesses its own measure of self-creativity. Horror arises when this freedom bends toward cruelty, distortion, or the rupturing of relational life. In such moments the groundless ground remains silent, offering no guarantee of protection and no metaphysical exemption from suffering.
Yet the personal God, in Whitehead’s vision, does not stand aloof. God feels the world’s anguish from within, shares in its wounding, and works ceaselessly to weave the painful facts of existence into whatever harmony is possible. God also provides fresh possibilities for renewal and constructive novelty, relative to whatever horror is suffered. A spirituality of horror, then, does not deny the terror of freedom. It acknowledges the shadows built into the very structure of becoming and turns toward the divine companion who suffers with the world and seeks to heal what can be healed.
A Spirituality of Beauty
Yet the same world that can give rise to horror is also capable of extraordinary beauty. Creativity, in its spontaneity, opens pathways for tenderness, artistry, communion, courage, and the many forms of excellence that arise when freedom inclines toward life. Beauty is not imposed from above; it emerges through the self-creativity of beings who respond, however faintly or fully, to the divine lure toward richness of experience. In this sense, beauty becomes a primary sacrament of the universe—a revelation of the ways in which the world, despite its tragedies, continually offers new possibilities for harmony and intensity.
The personal God, who is the living embodiment of this lure, rejoices in every instance of beauty and preserves it forever in the divine life. A spirituality of beauty, therefore, is not naïve. It is a disciplined practice of noticing the world’s capacity for renewal, of attuning oneself to the invitations that emerge in each moment, and of participating in the ongoing creation of a world where life may flourish.
Finding the Right Language
For some people, the language of “God” and “the Godhead” will not work, and they will seek alternative ways of speaking—often language that unites Creativity and God rather than distinguishing them. They will want to use the word God to name both the Creativity of the universe (including the interior freedom of each actual entity) and the primordial form this Creativity takes, the all-loving lure at the heart of things. In this view, God is the name for the whole: the generative Creativity that permeates all becoming, and the tender, beckoning Love that works within it to guide the world toward richness of experience and the well-being of all.
The value of this approach is that it retains the image of a single ultimate that evokes fear and awe as well as—on the all-loving side—trust, devotion, and affection. It seems to me that this is a viable option, so long as it is recognized that the word God then names the horror as well as the beauty, the violence as well as the compassion, the chaos as well as the lure toward harmony. In this usage, the all-loving God is but one side of God—not the whole of God—and the name God stretches to include the entire Creativity of the universe, with its tragic, terrifying, and life-giving dimensions alike. Such a conception may work for some, but it carries a cost: the tenderness and moral aspiration traditionally associated with the divine become only one aspect of a vastly larger, ambivalent power.
A better option, at least for me, is to maintain the distinction between the all-loving God and the Godhead, and to recognize that the all-loving God has a kind of ultimacy as well: the ultimacy of being the axiological ground of creation, parallel to the Godhead as the metaphysical ground of creation. The word God is then retained as a name for that side of reality which genuinely seeks the good, the true, and the beautiful, and which shares in the joys and sufferings of each and all—a God who is love.
Might this God create the universe "out of nothing"? I would suggest that this God creates the universe out of the self-creativity of creatures, not by generating the self-creativity, because that would mean that creaturely self-creativity, including that which results in horror, is but the expression of divine activity. Instead God creates out of nothing by providing guiding and energizing possibilities to be self-actualized, and this self-creativity emerges from, and incarnates, the formless activity of the Godhead. There are senses in which this formless creativity is indeed nothing - or at least "no-thing" in any ordinary sense. It is formless until concretized by the self-creativity of creatures and of God. In this sense, God and the universe are instruments of novelty for one another. As sources of novelty, God creates the universe out of no-thing, and the universe creates God out of no-thing. The no-thing is not itself a creator. It is the creativity of both God and the universe.
On the one hand there is the sheer, unformed generativity at the base of all becoming, which he calls Creativity. Creativity is the pure activity embodied in all things good and all things evil, incarnate in the self-creativity (freedom) of each actual entity and in the creative advance of novelty - a creative advance that includes God and the universe, who are instruments of novelty for one another.
On the other there is the felt presence of a guiding, empathic Love that moves through the world and through us. This Love is both an inwardly felt lure within each creature for flourishing, relative to what is possible in the situation at hand, and an encompassing field of compassion who feels the feelings of each and every creature with tender care. There is more to Creativity than this divine Love, but this Love is the primordial 'accident' or 'form' of this Creativity.
With Whitehead’s help, we can affirm both dimensions: the personal God who loves the world with the tender care that nothing be lost, and Creativity as a groundless ground of which all entities are expressions, itself beyond good and evil. And we can see that, together, they make space for what, below, I call a spirituality of horror and a spirituality of beauty.
God and the Godhead
When I speak of God in this essay, I have in mind the God of love who is so important to open and relational theologians and also many others, including many a classical theist. You find this image of God in various aspects of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, in the Pure Land traditions of Buddhism (under the rubric of cosmic Bodhisattva), and in various strands of Bhakti Hinduism. For Christians, the most influential origins of this ideas are in the Bible and in the life, death, and healing ministry of Jesus.
When I speak of the Godhead in the Godhead, I mean this Creativity. Here my use of the word Godhead is in the tradition of, and a variant of, Meister Eckhart, who distinguished between Gott and Gottheit—between the personal God who relates, loves, and responds, and the abyssal depth beyond all names and attributes. In adapting this distinction for a Whiteheadian framework, I am not importing Eckhart’s Neoplatonism wholesale. Rather, I am drawing upon the structural intuition he articulates: that there is an ultimate which is not a being, not even the highest being, but a formless generativity in virtue of which any being is possible at all.
Of course, open and relational theists tend to emphasize the personal God rather than the Godhead. Some will resist the very use of the word Godhead, because it suggests an ultimate reality that is in some way 'deeper' than God. Nevertheless, as Whitehead makes clear, Creativity is the metaphysical ground of reality, and the God of love is “in its grip.” God and the world, Whitehead says, are “instruments of novelty for one another,” and this mutuality is made possible by the Creativity that lies at the base of all things.
Creativity as Universal Self-Creativity
What, then, is this Creativity? It is interpreted in different ways. However, judging from the three passages from Process and Reality offered below, Creativity is a groundless ground of pure activity, of which all events and entities are expressions: a formless “prime matter” that, while not an agent with preferences, stands at the base of all actuality, including divine actuality. This Urgrund, this primal ground, is not an entity among entities. It is not a creator or a personal God. Rather, it is a formless energy that becomes actual only through the self-creativity of each and every actual entity—whatever decision it makes—and through the transition from past to present and from present to future. It is the creative advance into novelty: the deep within the deep.
Even if open and relational theologians may not describe things this way—even if they prefer to treat Creativity as a mere abstraction from creaturely acts of self-creativity and from God’s own self-creative act—they nevertheless feel its presence in and through their affirmation of creaturely freedom. A sense of the irreducible freedom and contingency of creatures lies at the heart of open and relational theology. This conviction leads them to say that God is not all-powerful, even if God is very powerful. It also leads them to recognize that the unfolding of creation possesses a spontaneity of its own, one that cannot be reduced to God’s will and that can give rise to great horror as well as great beauty.
A Spirituality of Horror
A spirituality grounded in Creativity and creaturely freedom must make room for horror—not as something divinely intended, nor as something permitted by an all-controlling deity, but as a tragic possibility inherent in a world where every actual entity possesses its own measure of self-creativity. Horror arises when this freedom bends toward cruelty, distortion, or the rupturing of relational life. In such moments the groundless ground remains silent, offering no guarantee of protection and no metaphysical exemption from suffering.
Yet the personal God, in Whitehead’s vision, does not stand aloof. God feels the world’s anguish from within, shares in its wounding, and works ceaselessly to weave the painful facts of existence into whatever harmony is possible. God also provides fresh possibilities for renewal and constructive novelty, relative to whatever horror is suffered. A spirituality of horror, then, does not deny the terror of freedom. It acknowledges the shadows built into the very structure of becoming and turns toward the divine companion who suffers with the world and seeks to heal what can be healed.
A Spirituality of Beauty
Yet the same world that can give rise to horror is also capable of extraordinary beauty. Creativity, in its spontaneity, opens pathways for tenderness, artistry, communion, courage, and the many forms of excellence that arise when freedom inclines toward life. Beauty is not imposed from above; it emerges through the self-creativity of beings who respond, however faintly or fully, to the divine lure toward richness of experience. In this sense, beauty becomes a primary sacrament of the universe—a revelation of the ways in which the world, despite its tragedies, continually offers new possibilities for harmony and intensity.
The personal God, who is the living embodiment of this lure, rejoices in every instance of beauty and preserves it forever in the divine life. A spirituality of beauty, therefore, is not naïve. It is a disciplined practice of noticing the world’s capacity for renewal, of attuning oneself to the invitations that emerge in each moment, and of participating in the ongoing creation of a world where life may flourish.
Finding the Right Language
For some people, the language of “God” and “the Godhead” will not work, and they will seek alternative ways of speaking—often language that unites Creativity and God rather than distinguishing them. They will want to use the word God to name both the Creativity of the universe (including the interior freedom of each actual entity) and the primordial form this Creativity takes, the all-loving lure at the heart of things. In this view, God is the name for the whole: the generative Creativity that permeates all becoming, and the tender, beckoning Love that works within it to guide the world toward richness of experience and the well-being of all.
The value of this approach is that it retains the image of a single ultimate that evokes fear and awe as well as—on the all-loving side—trust, devotion, and affection. It seems to me that this is a viable option, so long as it is recognized that the word God then names the horror as well as the beauty, the violence as well as the compassion, the chaos as well as the lure toward harmony. In this usage, the all-loving God is but one side of God—not the whole of God—and the name God stretches to include the entire Creativity of the universe, with its tragic, terrifying, and life-giving dimensions alike. Such a conception may work for some, but it carries a cost: the tenderness and moral aspiration traditionally associated with the divine become only one aspect of a vastly larger, ambivalent power.
A better option, at least for me, is to maintain the distinction between the all-loving God and the Godhead, and to recognize that the all-loving God has a kind of ultimacy as well: the ultimacy of being the axiological ground of creation, parallel to the Godhead as the metaphysical ground of creation. The word God is then retained as a name for that side of reality which genuinely seeks the good, the true, and the beautiful, and which shares in the joys and sufferings of each and all—a God who is love.
Might this God create the universe "out of nothing"? I would suggest that this God creates the universe out of the self-creativity of creatures, not by generating the self-creativity, because that would mean that creaturely self-creativity, including that which results in horror, is but the expression of divine activity. Instead God creates out of nothing by providing guiding and energizing possibilities to be self-actualized, and this self-creativity emerges from, and incarnates, the formless activity of the Godhead. There are senses in which this formless creativity is indeed nothing - or at least "no-thing" in any ordinary sense. It is formless until concretized by the self-creativity of creatures and of God. In this sense, God and the universe are instruments of novelty for one another. As sources of novelty, God creates the universe out of no-thing, and the universe creates God out of no-thing. The no-thing is not itself a creator. It is the creativity of both God and the universe.
Three Texts on Creativity
Creativity as a Groundless Ground (actual in virtue of its accidents)
"In all philosophic theory there is an ultimate which is actual in virtue of its accidents. It is only then capable of characterization through its accidental embodiments, and apart from these accidents is devoid of actuality. In the philosophy of organism this ultimate is termed ‘creativity’, and God is its primordial, non-temporal accident. In monistic philosophies, Spinoza’s or absolute idealism, this ultimate is God, who is also equivalently termed ‘The Absolute.’ In such monistic schemes, the ultimate is illegitimately allowed a final, ‘eminent’ reality, beyond that ascribed to any of its accidents. In this general position the philosophy of organism seems to approximate more to some strains of Indian, or Chinese, thought, than to western Asiatic, or European, thought. One side makes process ultimate; the other side makes fact ultimate." (Process and Reality, p. 7)
Creativity as Prime Matter (Pure Activity)
‘Creativity’ is another rendering of the Aristotelian ‘matter,’ and of the modern ‘neutral stuff.’ But it is divested of the notion of passive receptivity, either of ‘form,’ or of external relations; it is the pure notion of the activity conditioned by the objective immortality of the actual world— a world which is never the same twice, though always with the stable element of divine ordering. Creativity is without a character of its own in exactly the same sense in which the Aristotelian ‘matter’ is without a character of its own. It is that ultimate notion of the highest generality at* the base of actuality. It cannot be characterized, because all characters are more special than itself. (Process and Reality, p. 31)
Creativity as the Ultimate Metaphysical Ground
God and the World stand to each other in this opposed requirement. God is the infinite ground of all mentality, the unity of vision seeking physical multiplicity. The World is the multiplicity of finites, actualities seeking a perfected unity. Neither God, nor the World, reaches static completion. Both are in the grip of the ultimate metaphysical ground, the creative advance into novelty. Either of them, God and the World, is the instrument of novelty for the other. (Process and Reality, p. 349)
Three Texts on the All-Loving God
God as the Fellow Sufferer Who Understands
For the kingdom of heaven is with us today. The action of the fourth phase is the love of God for the world. It is the particular providence for particular occasions. What is done in the world is transformed 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. (Process and Reality, 351)
God's Tender Care that Nothing be Lost
The perfection of God’s subjective aim, derived from the completeness of his primordial nature, issues 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 wisdom of subjective aim prehends every actuality 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 always immediate, always many, always one, always with novel advance, moving onward and never perishing. The revolts of destructive evil, purely self-regarding, 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. (Process and Reality, 346)
God as a Spirit who Slowly and in Quietness Operates by Love
“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.” (Process and Reality, 343)