By Lionel Royer - [1], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27998038

​God and the Muses
​
divine inspiration in process perspective
​

I have a poet friend who says that she doesn't believe in God but she believes in divine inspiration through muses. I ask her what the muses are, and she says personal experiences, friendships, and animals, especially cats. "I don't just interpret them," she says, "they take me out of myself. They inspire me."

The purpose of this page is twofold. It is (1) to show how, from a process perspective as understood by John Cobb, human beings can be inspired by the spirit of God in a literal way. The inspiration is never infallible, but it is genuine. God is one among many causal factors in every experience and sometimes this causal power can have primacy such that other power are lessened we are mostly moved by ideas visited upon us and within us by God's spirit.

The second purpose is (2) to suggest that the Greek idea of muses, rendered in process terms, can be appreciated as a recognition that women can play an especially important role in inspiration (since the nine Greek muses were all women) in otherwise male-dominated societies; and, more generally that muses, understood as means through which the living Spirit of God is at world as a source of inspiration, reveal the radically pluralized, or differentiated, sources of divine inspiration. The inspiring Spirit can be present in other people, friendships, buildings, art, personal experiences, and perhaps most the natural world. 

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​John Cobb on Divine Inspiration

...We say that someone’s performance in a concert or in a play was inspired. We speak of poets as inspired. Even a preacher may be inspired. That is, people may be moved by the Spirit in extraordinary ways. They may be so totally caught up in what they are doing that they are not consciously controlling their actions. What results exceeds the best product of their ordinary voluntary acts.

A writer may find that sometimes the words “just flow.” A composer may feel that the music “comes to her.” Inspiration in this sense is rare enough to be greatly prized, but it is common enough that many of us experience it to some extent. Indeed, it is not altogether discontinuous from quite ordinary experience.

Process thought affirms that at a very basic level all life is inspired. That is, there is no life at all except as God’s Spirit participates in constituting us. It is that participation of the Spirit that leads to our being, in each moment, something more than the deterministic outcome of the forces from the past that also play so large a role in shaping us. The times when we think of ourselves as inspired are those when this creative novelty contributed by God’s Spirit plays a particularly strong and effective role and is less inhibited than usual by the other causal factors in our lives. So process theology affirms not only that the common use of the language of inspiration is meaningful but that the inspiration is truly the work of God.


​- John Cobb in answering the question "Is the Bible Inspired? in Process and Faith. The entire answer is printed below.

The Muses

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Muses and their role in Greek mythology, when they were goddesses of poetry, song, music and dance: what the Greeks called mousike, 'the art of the Muses' from which we derive our word 'music.' While the number of Muses, their origin and their roles varied in different accounts and at different times, they were consistently linked with the nature of artistic inspiration. This raised a question for philosophers then and since: was a creative person an empty vessel into which the Muses poured their gifts, at their will, or could that person do something to make inspiration flow?

With Paul Cartledge, Emeritus Professor of Greek Culture and AG Leventis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge; Angie Hobbs
Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy, University of Sheffield; And Penelope Murray, Founder member and retired Senior Lecturer, Department of Classics, University of Warwick

God and the Muses

From a process perspective, we can be inspired by God. God's spirit is one among the causal factors that influence our hearts, minds, and behavior; and there are moments when this causal power is "particularly strong and effective" because we are "less inhibited than usual by other causal factors." In these moments God's spirit can inspire art, music, dance, poetry, wisdom, justice, mathematics, hope, courage, and simple acts of kindness. 

To be sure, divine inspiration rarely comes directly. Muslims may say that it came directly to Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. But process theologians will generally be doubtful. Perhaps even Muslim process theologians will be doubtful, While texts can be inspired, they are articulated in languages that are human, and the humanity of their languages is both a gift and a limitation. God may speak, but God's language is not necessarily or exclusively Arabic. 

From a process perspective our receptivity to inspiration, along with our articulations of it, are always finite and fallible, as are our interpretations. This has implications for any religious tradition that claims a sacred text. No sacred text, however inspired, is fully and infallibly interpreted.

​Nevertheless, inspiration is real. The Spirit winds its way into our lives in every moment and its winding becomes ever more apparent in moments of inspiration. More often that not, these moments occur by means of muses: messengers of the spirit. Muses can include other people, the natural world, friendships, personal challenges, works of art, sounds (including the sounds of music) and language (including poetry).Through these many vessels we are visited by divine ideas for how we might live our lives and help heal a broken world.

In a process context ideas are not mere abstractions in the conscious mind; they are "lures for feeling" in the heart, partly conscious and partly unconscious. They beckons and call us; the lure us. In process theology they are called initial aims. Such aim embody fresh possibilities for living our lives and divine desire that they be actualized. In moments when these lures visit us, novelty opens up in our lives in a "particularly strong and effective" way that is "less inhibited than usual" by other causal factors. Inspiration happens when the inhibitions decrease or drop away and we are, as it were, animated or inspired by the idea, the lures for feeling.

This does not mean that our own agency is displaced. Our own creativity may be a means by which the inspiration occurs. We can dance our way into inspiration, or sweat our way into it, or think our way into it. These actions are like the muses that inspire us; they are vessels through which the inspiration occurs.

Needless to say, moments of inspiration - when we are visited by ideas in dramatic ways - do not make us infallible. When we are visited by ideas, we inevitably interpret the ideas, adding our finite, fallible perspectives. Often we misinterpret the ideas.

Nor does inspiration make us morally perfect. We may be visited by ideas from God and yet be jerks or worse as human beings. Even when inspired, God cannot turn us into good people without our cooperation.

For that matter, even moments of inspiration, when we are filled with the Spirit, need our cooperation. We must be open to Spirit, open to the muses, to receive them. This openness can be conscious or nonconscious, as in dreams. Either way, inspirational moments can only come if the windows of our souls are open. We must be open to the music of the muses.

I have said that muses can be elements in the natural world and in human life. They can also be spirits in the imagination. For the Greeks the muses were always female, and there were nine of them and they were goddesses:

1. Calliope - the muse of epic poetry
2. Clio - the muse of history
3. Erato - the muse of love poetry
4. Euterpe - the muse of music
5. Melpomene - the muse of tragedy
6. Polyhymnia - the muse of sacred poetry
7. Terpsichore - the muse of dance
8. Thalia - the muse of comedy
9. Urania - the muse of astronomy

They were often depicted as young women wearing flowing robes and carrying musical instruments or other tools of their respective trades. They were quite different from "God the Father" and "God the King" of much Abrahamic religion.

I cannot help but wonder if, as a species, we might be more open to divine inspiration if we reconceived divine agency and, for that matter, divine personality in must-like ways. Whitehead speaks of God as the poet of the world,. Perhaps one of her names of this poet Polyhymnia, the muse of sacred poetry, and another is Thalia, the muse of comedy.

Beyond that is the very idea that the living Spirit of God differentiates itself, or is differentiated by, multiple sources. A single, exclusive source of inspiration, understood as a text or a person or a philosophy, is a lie. In the house of inspiration there are many rooms, many muses.

- Jay McDaniel

​Is the Bible inspired?

Biblical Inspiration ​in Process Perspective

Reposted from Process and Faith: Click here.
​

Question to John Cobb:

Is the Bible inspired?

Dr. Cobb’s Response:

Like so many questions asked of process theology, the answer is that it all depends on what the questioner means. If the question comes from one who thinks in very conservative categories, the answer must be an emphatic “No!” The words of the text were not dictated by God. Certainly the hand of the writer was not controlled by God. And even in the more modest sense proposed by some proponents of divine inspiration of Scripture, that God protected the authors from error, the emphatic “No!” remains. The Bible is full of errors of fact, of moral judgment, and of theological teaching.

But if the word “inspired” is being used as in ordinary language outside the conservative theological tradition, then the situation is quite different. We say that someone’s performance in a concert or in a play was inspired. We speak of poets as inspired. Even a preacher may be inspired. That is, people may be moved by the Spirit in extraordinary ways. They may be so totally caught up in what they are doing that they are not consciously controlling their actions. What results exceeds the best product of their ordinary voluntary acts.

A writer may find that sometimes the words “just flow.” A composer may feel that the music “comes to her.” Inspiration in this sense is rare enough to be greatly prized, but it is common enough that many of us experience it to some extent. Indeed, it is not altogether discontinuous from quite ordinary experience.

Process thought affirms that at a very basic level all life is inspired. That is, there is no life at all except as God’s Spirit participates in constituting us. It is that participation of the Spirit that leads to our being, in each moment, something more than the deterministic outcome of the forces from the past that also play so large a role in shaping us. The times when we think of ourselves as inspired are those when this creative novelty contributed by God’s Spirit plays a particularly strong and effective role and is less inhibited than usual by the other causal factors in our lives. So process theology affirms not only that the common use of the language of inspiration is meaningful but that the inspiration is truly the work of God.

When we think in this way, there is no reason to be skeptical of claims that many passages in the Bible are inspired. Indeed, it would be artificial to think that ancient Hebrew poets and prophets experienced inspiration less often than our contemporaries. The contrary is a reasonable guess. Our contemporaries are on the whole less intentionally open to God that were the Hebrews, and it is at least plausible to suggest that openness to God’s inspiration is conducive to it. Also the results that come down to us show many indications of inspiration.

The high ration of inspired passages in the Bible is partly due to the process of selection. No doubt there was much very ordinary writing in ancient Israel. What we now have was selected by the community through the centuries. That a community selects on the whole the more inspired parts of what is available is to be expected.

What follows from the judgment that much of the Biblical writing is inspired in this sense? Certainly not that it is free from cultural influence or class bias or patriarchal perspective! The writings are thoroughly human, and that means just as conditioned as any writings by the contexts in which they arose. But to be conditioned is not to be wholly determined. It is the element of transcendence over that determination where we find the work of the Spirit. And there is much of that creative transcendence in the Bible.

What follows from this judgment is that we do find God’s truth transmitted to us in very earthen vessels. The texts we encounter deserve our deepest respect. Of course they should be studied by all critical methods, but when the assumptions of the critic are reductionistic, then we must be open to more than the critic finds.

But is this to be said only of the Bible? Certainly not. There is inspiration in the writings of the ancient Greeks and Hindus and Chinese as well. There is inspiration also in the writings of Shakespeare and Goethe and of contemporary poets and dramatists as well. All this deserves our respect and listening.

Hence the question of the uniqueness of the Bible cannot be answered by the category of inspiration. It must be answered in terms of the importance for us of the history of Israel. That history consists of events and their interpretations inextricably connected. Without inspired interpretations the events would not be important to us today. But without unusual events the inspired writers would not be more important than the inspired writers of other communities. For us, as Christians, the most important events are those that surrounded the person of Jesus. If it had not been for these events the history that has shaped us would have been a very different one. 

These events would not have been possible apart from inspired interpretations of previous events. We cannot appropriate them today apart from interpretations, and if these are not inspired, our tradition will die. Thus inspiration is involved at every point.

So my answer, as a process theologian, is that “Yes, the Bible contains much inspired material.” The healthy continuance of our Christian tradition depends on our intense appreciation of that material and continual recurrence to it. It depends, equally, on our distinguishing inspiration from any notion of inerrancy. And finally it depends on our inspired interpretations of that inspired material through relating it to all the wisdom we can gain from other sources.

Today, we may be inspired to reject some of the ideas that are found even in the most inspired passages of scripture. We have been inspired to see through patriarchy, for example, a patriarchy that pervades the Bible. In this and other respects, we must preach against the Bible. But if this negation is to be healthy, it must be qualified in two respects. First, we should continue also to listen to the truth even in those passages that we feel have done most harm and continue to be most dangerous. And second, we should recognize that, at least for many of us, the call to attack Biblical ideas is grounded in just that tradition we attack. For example, when we attack particular ideas of the prophets, our doing so continues the prophetic tradition. We may be taking the inspiration of the Bible most seriously when we are most free to critique its specific teachings.