(with Bonaventure producing the most thoroughgoing at-
tempt to interpret divine love), and found also in medieval
Islamic and Jewish writings, and the theism that I call neo-
classical, which has been set forth by some recent philoso-
phers and theologians (e.g., Nikolai Berdiaev, Alfred North
Whitehead, Rudolf Otto, Otto Pfleiderer, John Oman, Al-
fred Ernest Garvie, and Edgar S. Brightman). Whitehead’s
assertion that “to attribute mere happiness to God is a profa-
nation” hints at this rejection of Anselm’s doctrine, and his
further statement that “God is the fellow sufferer who under-
stands” makes the contrast quite clear. Berdiaev is no less
plain on this point.
The denial that love, however generalized, can charac-
terize deity is implied by Plato, who, in his Symposium, inter-
prets love as the longing for absolute beauty and hence a con-
fession of imperfection. The nearest Plato comes to
attributing love to God is to say that there is no envy in the
divine nature, and hence God is willing to have creatures
sharing existence with him. Plato does definitely attribute to
God knowledge of the creatures, whereas Aristotle denies
this. All his deity thinks is the generic nature of thinking it-
self, totally free from the contingency and particularity that
go with individuals in the world.
In India, the Advaita Veda ̄ntins, often regarded as the
orthodox Hindus, thought of the highest and only genuine
reality as beyond anything that could be called love. The lat-
ter is a social relation, presupposing a plurality of subjects in
space and time, whereas brahman is without temporal or spa-
tial plurality. In India, however, there are also various propo-
nents of pluralism. Ramanuja and Madhva are the most ob-
vious examples, but there are others whose views show
striking analogies to the Western “process” view, the greatest
single representative of which is Whitehead. To appreciate
adequately the strength of the worldwide effort to find some-
thing greater and better, or more real, than love at its best,
we need to relate the issue to the problem of anthropomor-
phism. We human animals are social, and it has with some
justice been said that an absolutely nonsocial animal does not
exist. God, however, is in principle superior to any animal.
God is uniquely excellent, without possible rival or equal.
The Christian doctrine of the Trinity is an attempt to
have it both ways. In some sense, the Son and Holy Spirit
are equal to God the Father; in some sense God is supreme.
The three divine persons could love each other, even were
there no creatures. This doctrine is too paradoxical to be de-
fended apart from revelation. Apart from some such doc-
trine, either God does not love anyone or the being in princi-
ple superior to all conceivable others loves these lesser beings.
Even with the trinitarian doctrine, the question remains rele-
vant: must not God, conceived by analogy to what we know
of ordinary beings (and how else can we conceive anything?),
cherish the creatures? If we can sympathize with children and
other kinds of animals, must God view them and us with
mere indifference? If so, was not Aristotle right in saying that
God does not know particular, contingent individuals be-
cause they are “not worth knowing”?
EXTREMIST AND MIDDLE-GROUND STRATEGIES. History
shows two ways of approaching philosophical disagreement.
One way, in practice taken by some of the wisest philoso-
phers, is to suspect extreme views and look for a “middle
way” between opposite extremes. Some of the ancient Bud-
dhists did this explicitly. With regard to transcendence and
immanence, one extreme is gross anthropomorphism, taking
God to be, as Matthew Arnold put it, “a magnified, nonnat-
ural man.” The opposite extreme is to say, as Karl Barth once
did (he later partly rescinded the statement), that God is
“wholly other” than ourselves. The middle way is to look for
a difference in principle between God and all else and yet
also, consistent with this, a resemblance in principle between
God and all other beings. Many philosophers and theolo-
gians have more or less consciously proceeded in this fashion,
and two of these, Plato and Whitehead, have been especially
successful (at least according to some scholars strongly influ-
enced by Whitehead). However, conditions in the ancient
world were unfavorable to this side of Plato; and for many
centuries a quite different way was taken in the West (begin-
ning with Aristotle and the theologian Philo Judaeus).In India, also, it was not a middle way that was the
mainstream of thought. Instead, an extremist strategy was
followed, though with some inconsistency. It was taken for
granted that truth is an extreme with error its opposite. The
maxim, without ever being so stated, perhaps, was “Let us
find the view that is most hopelessly wrong and affirm the
opposite.” That the God of all the worlds is like a localized
and mortal animal, dependent for its very existence on an en-
vironment, is clearly wrong, the absurd error of anthropo-
morphism. So, let us deny of God, or the supreme reality,
all traits that animals and still lesser beings have in common,
and, by achieving the opposite of anthropomorphism in
characterizing God, we will come as close to the truth as is
in our power. All animals and lesser beings are finite, change-
able, subject to influence by others, complex, and have feel-
ings as well as thoughts (if they have the latter). Let us say,
therefore, that God is infinite, unchangeable in every way,
wholly impassible, immune to influence by others, wholly
simple, incapable of feeling, but with purely intellectual
knowledge (whatever that may be). It was David Hume who
first indicated the possible fallacy in all this. What is to guar-
antee that, when we have denied all that constitutes reality
as we experience it, anything is left to distinguish God from
mere nonentity? The famous negative way, the via negativa,
must, after all, be supplemented by something positive, or
we may end up worshiping a mere nothing or a mere verbal
formula.
As a matter of fact, the premise of the negative way—its
characterization of beings in the world—is seriously inaccu-
rate. What is common to ordinary individuals is only inade-
quately or ambiguously described as finite, changeable, sub-
ject to influence by others, and complex. Furthermore, the
distinction between awareness as feeling and awareness as
pure thought or knowledge is problematic. What thought orTRANSCENDENCE AND IMMANENCE 9283