4
THEISTIC HUMANISM
by Charles Hartshorne
The question is, do we live for ourselves and other human beings alone,
or do we live for something in principle superior to humanity? The word
“alone” is important. No one can help living for oneself and
others, for no one is completely indifferent to his or her own fate
and no one is wholly without fellow feeling. In the Judeo-Christian
religion, and to a considerable extent in all religions, we are expected
to love ourselves and are admonished to love their neighbor likewise.
So far, humanism is an element in religion in general. One might think
that theistic religion can only add; besides loving humanity love also
God, but this will not do. God is so conceived that there can be no
mere also. God is not just another object of devotion “Thou shalt
love God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind
and with thy strength.” How could language say more plainly that
God is the total object of loyalty. There is to be nothing in the person
which is not love of God. How, then, can there be love of self and neighbor?
Only in one way: if we are all entirely included in the divine reality.
If pantheism meant only that there is nothing outside God, then in my
opinion pantheism would be religiously imperative. Historically the
term has had further meanings which I do not wish now to consider but
which have given it unpleasant connotations. Theism does not add an
additional object of devotion to those of humanism; it claims to make
explicit the full context of the ordinary objects. It claims to reveal
what human beings really are, namely members of the divine life. There
are, for theism, no people outside God to love, but only people in God
who would be bare nonentity except for this status in the divine.
This means that theism fully and without residue embraces humanism,
except for the latter’s negations. Any form of theism of which
this cannot be said is merely a perversion. It may be that many an orthodoxy
is tainted with such perversion; I have here no concern with what is
orthodox or heretical, apart form the orthodoxy that God is to be loved
as total object of loyalty. In my opinion this is entirely capable of
justification by secular philosophy, without appeal to revelation. There
is no reasonable way to conceive God as merely another important reality
besides the ordinary ones. Such a reality would be as ineffective in
meeting the requirements of philosophical rationality as in fulfilling
those of high religion. It would be one more item to explain, not the
universal principle of explanation.
Theism is not an alternative to humanism as a positive system of values.
It neither adds nor subtracts, except in a subjective sense. Subjectively
it adds consciousness of what unconsciously, according to the claims
of theism, must already have been there in experience. It makes the
implicit explicit, that is all. It makes clear what the humanity we
love not only is—but alone could possibly be—namely some portion
of the content of the cosmic Life. Let us attempt to sketch some of
the advantages of lifting this implication into consciousness, rather
than leaving it to unanalyzed, unsymbolized feeling.
If humanity is a final end in itself, not constitutive of a superhuman
life and value, what then? The most glaring difficulty is that of transience.
Our experience is ever fleeting. That we die is hardly the essential
aspect of this transience. Anyone’s youth is already dead when
he/she is middle-aged. Indeed, each yesterday is dead today. Yesterday
I was in heaven; today I have discovered that this joy was based on
an illusion; today I am in grief. What good now is that having been
joyous a short time ago? A few faint echoes in present consciousness
are all that is left of tens of thousands of past experiences, many
of them vivid and rich when they were present. Compared to this wholesale
loss of values, death, wars, pestilences are minor threats to the meaning
of our lives if we think rationally about our existence. We talk of
posterity, children, works of art and of science, and practical achievements
as means of handing on value to the future, but all these are beside
the main point. Nothing has value save experiences, and every experience
is fleeting, a bubble about to burst. If, even for me, youth is already
lost, save for a few evershifting echoes in the present, will it not
be even more lost in posterity, which will not even have these echoes?
The problem of transience is that of unity of value through time. Each
present has value, but only while it is present, it seems. Most of us
strive not merely to be happy just now, but to be happy through as much
of a long life as possible and this we desire for our children and friends
as well. Where, however, in what present, is there such a thing a “happiness
throughout a long life?” Actually there seems to be only happiness
now, whatever the now may be. Thus value seems, from the human standpoint,
to lack unity through time. We aim at total value: at the very least,
happiness of lives, and this cannot be actual in human terms. Still
less can the happiness of humanity, through the generations, ever be
an actuality. Only happiness now seems real, but it is not happiness
now that satisfies us as a goal. Indeed, happiness now is not a goal,
but rather the satisfaction gained in pursuing the goal. Happiness is
not presently aimed at, but the joy of aiming.
There is another problem, that of unity through space. One lives partly
for self, partly for others, but how can our purpose be thus split up?
What is the overall or total objective? We speak of the general welfare.
But in what experience is the general welfare an actuality? Who really
cashes in on the “happiness of humanity?” Surely no human
being can do this. How can one add together one’s happiness and
that of every other person into a greatest happiness of humanity. Yet,
unless we are selfish, must we not in principle live for some such inclusive
happiness even though no such happiness seems to exist. There is only
my happiness, your happiness but not a happiness consisting of mine
and yours.
In both cases, the question of unity of value through time and of such
unity through space, humanity apart from anything superhuman does not
furnish what seems implicit in our purposes, but humanity does furnish
the clue to the nature of the unity involved. The clue in the case of
time is memory, in the case of space is sympathy. Both are perhaps only
one basic function, since memory is a sort of sympathy with one’s
past experiences. There are, we have said, a few faint, ever changing
echoes of past experiences in present experience. Experience is not
absolutely evanescent. True, nearly all the vividness of the tens or
hundreds of thousands of previous experiences is lost to us now, it
being plainly impossible to crowd them into a human present except in
the form of exceedingly dim or subconscious memories. Thus, there is
no effective unity of value through time in simply human terms, but
there is a principle operative which, in a radically superior mode of
operation, would constitute an effective unity. If the attention span
could expand just as fast as new experiences were actualized, so that
memory need not be pale or subconscious but could be wholly vivid and
distinct, then indeed having been happy through a long life would be
an actual value in the present. The goal of striving would be achievable.
Similarly, whereas our sympathy with our neighbors in space is slight,
everfluctuating, there might be a sympathy not thus restricted, but
effectively participant in the lives of all the denizens of space. A
life whose present always preserved consciously all lives no matter
how remote in the past and no matter where in space would be one whose
value included and made actual the total general welfare we aim to promote
as humanists. All the humanist values would be accepted, but it would
no longer be an excruciating and unrelieved paradox how out of these
values a general or total good could be formed by means of which the
relative importance of various ends could in principle be measured.
In my opinion, a theism which understands itself (there has not been
too much of such theism, I dare to think) will realize that “God”
stands for something that, whatever other aspects it may have, conforms
to the above stipulation. The divine life “inherits” all our
experience, in its full vividness of individuality, and cherishes it
forevermore. This is not well expressed by saying that we become mere
means to the divine self-realization or fulfillment. For we enjoy our
fleeting experiences as contributory to the divine experience, and it
is good that such an experience was realized; or, here is a good experience
and whatever may come it will be at least something that it has occurred,
but for whom will it be something that has occurred. Not, save fleetingly,
for ourselves. Not for posterity. What will they have of my experience?
Besides, there might not always be a posterity? The only way to make
conscious what is involved is to make conscious the implication that
though we forget, not only others but even ourselves, our own precious
experiences, there is that which never forgets and which always treasures
our achievements of joy and beauty. A something which will be our definitive
posterity and heir. To lose this something is only to love that which
makes sense out of our aims. People have loved all sorts of fantastic
things because they thought these things made sense out of their aims.
How can we separate ourselves from our aims, or our aims from their
implications? Only by self-misunderstanding can we fail to love God,
if God is the aim of all our aims.
What practical value is there in all this? From one aspect, the answer
has just been hinted at. If we do not see the reasonable aim implicit
in all our aims, we set up an unreasonable one. We try to think of something
less than deity as the inclusive and imperishable good. We pretend we
will never die, we try to build indestructible tombs; we half forget
humanistic values while we dream of a heaven “beyond the bounds
of space and time;” we try to think of the state as the sole important
heir of our achievement; we dream of human omnipotence and all-sympathetic
goodness, while the modest powers and virtues really open to us are
not cultivated. Everywhere we seek something perfect or quasiperfect,
something lasting or quasi lasting, some inclusive or quasi inclusive
good. Everywhere, too, we are disappointed and frustrated in this search
(except as we find God). Still worse, the real human possibilities are
overlooked. We long for the perfect and the abiding and the inclusive.
This longing is either just stultified, repressed, and the whole zest
for life weakened in apathy or cynicism; or it is expressed; and if
expressed, then either through illusion, through some more or less dangerous
idolatry, or through truly finding the One whose Life really abides
and really inherits all our achievements, and really is perfect in its
power of making a synthesis of these achievements, doing with them all
that their value permits.
The divine perfection is not simply the inclusiveness of the divine
sympathy in time and space, but the ideal way in which the “data”
are woven together in a total experience than which no experience of
those data could be more beautiful. True, this beauty cannot be our
conscious possession, but those who die for a cause and do not themselves
enter the promised land do not necessarily die discontented. That the
land will be entered is the sense of our aim, not that we shall enter
it. That the other who enters is not even human but radically superhuman—well,
it is a strange doctrine that we can only love our equals. We can only
have the love of equal companionship with equals, but there is another
love, love of the one whose sympathy for us is infinitely more complete
than even our self-sympathy. How shall one not love One whose love for
us is the ideal which our self-love could never approach? God loves
all our past, which we almost entirely fail vividly to recall, and all
the dim depths of our present potentialities for the future, of which
we are only slightly conscious. In love for the One who loves all, our
love for all can be entirely included and unified. This humanism, past
forms of theism have all too often failed to elucidate. Perhaps, after
all, it is the future, more than the past, which must show what both
humanists and theists have really been driving at.
"Theistic Humanism," written in 1950 and here published for the first time.