experience, which was confirmed again long after Mukerji’s
visit. It involved two monks of the modern Bengali sect of
Hinduism whose views harmonized with the idea of a deity
both unchanging and yet in some respects changing. One of
these monks, Ma-kanam Brata Brahmachari, who did his
doctoral dissertation under me, quoted a representative of his
sect who wrote of God: “Lo, the cup is eternally full, yet it
grows without ceasing.” When this man began talking to me
about “love” as a theological term I asked him what he meant
by the word. “I mean,” he said, “the consciousness of con-
sciousness, the thinking of thinking, the... of... .” I am
not sure, but he may have said, “the feeling of feeling.” If he
did, the analogy with Whitehead was close. In his disserta-
tion he writes: “God is more than the absolute.” Of course,
for a mere negative like nonrelative by itself constitutes no
sufficient account of any actuality. Plato is not relative to us,
but that is Plato’s total ignorance of us; we constitute noth-
ing of Plato’s being, whereas, by his knowledge of and hence
relativity to them, Parmenides and many others whom he
did know contributed much to his wonderfully comprehen-
sive awareness.
THE REALITY OF DIVINE LOVE. Finally, I want to focus on
the proposition “God is love.” Mortimer Adler has recently
explained why, although he is convinced that an intelligent
divine being exists as creator of all, he does not think it can
be demonstrated that this being is benevolent or loving. One
may, however, question the distinction drawn here between
divine intelligence and divine love. If God is to know us,
God must know our feelings. How can feelings be known
except by feelings? Can mere intellect (whatever that is—
perhaps a computer) know feelings while having none of its
own? And if God has feelings, what kind of feelings? Envy,
malice, conceit, hatred, inferiority complexes? What have
these to do with all-encompassing intelligence? For me, this
is a wholly absurd combination of ideas. By embracing in
knowledge all the qualities of reality, God possesses all that
anyone possesses by way of value, so what could envy mean?
Hatred would be baseless, since by willing the suffering of
creatures God would be willing divine sharing in these suffer-
ings. Whitehead’s wonderfully simple formula of “feeling of
feeling” as a basic element in knowledge excludes any ground
for Adler’s dilemma. To know others without intuiting their
feelings is scarcely knowledge at all, and such an ability
would hardly seem likely as an essential quality of an inde-
structible cosmic subject upon which all others radically de-
pend. Simple atheism would be more reasonable than affirm-
ing such a God, so far as I can see. To give intelligence
cosmic and everlasting scope, but to deny such scope to love,
seems a discordant mixture of notions. Or is Advaita
Veda ̄nta and the doctrine of ma ̄ya ̄ the alternative to love? We
think we exist as individuals, but really only brahman exists,
spaceless and timeless. We are appearances of brahman, al-
though brahman is unaware of us. Or does brahman consti-
tute us by dreaming us? I have a different theory of dreams,
and so had Bergson. Perhaps we can leave the doctrine of
ma ̄ya ̄ to the Indians, who are by no means in agreement on
the subject.
It is fair to add that there is no agreement in the West
on the reality of divine love. Can a fragment of reality com-
prehend the encompassing? I feel entirely confident that if
love cannot encompass all, including creaturely hatred as a
degenerate case of love (the total lack of which is mere indif-
ference), then nothing positively conceivable by such as we
are can do so either.
If no form of theism escapes difficulties, puzzles it can-
not solve, questions to which it finds no convincing answer,
this is perhaps to be expected. A god easily understood is not
God but a fetish, an idol. Dual transcendence removes some
of the traditional paradoxes, especially if we include a clear
doctrine of freedom as well as of more or less humble forms
of sentience and feeling for all dynamic singulars in nature.
Peirce had already done this before Whitehead took creativi-
ty as the ultimate category, applicable in the uniquely, di-
vinely excellent form to God and in humbler forms to all
creatures. But still there are puzzles. Change in God seems
to imply, and Berdiaev hints at this, a divine kind of time.
But how to relate this timelike aspect of God to worldly time
is a problem that overwhelms me with a sense of incompe-
tence. Physicists have their own difficulties with time, and
without a mathematical competence beyond that of most of
us one can scarcely begin to understand these difficulties, let
alone overcome them.
By attributing freedom as well as minimal sentience to
even the least single creatures (particles, atoms), the classical
atheistic argument from evil loses its cogency. The details of
nature are decided not by God but by the creatures con-
cerned, by atoms, molecules, bacteria, single-celled animals,
and many-celled animals, including human beings. And if
it be said that God, in deciding to have free creatures instead
of unfree creatures, is indirectly responsible for evil, the reply
is that for the new type of idealism “unfree creature” is an
ill-formed formula. As God is supreme freedom, ordinary
singular beings are instances of less than supreme freedom,
not of total lack of freedom. To be is to create, to decide what
is otherwise undecided. Decision making, freedom, cannot
be monopolized. Supreme freedom would have nothing to
do were there not also less exalted forms of freedom. Genu-
ine power is not power over the powerless. No single agent
ever decides exactly what happens. The new physics (and
even classical physics as interpreted by Clerk Maxwell, Reic-
henbach, Peirce, Whitehead, Sudarshan, and others) seems
to harmonize better with this doctrine than did classical
physics as it was usually interpreted by philosophers.
The present climate of opinion suggests the need for re-
considering many an old controversy and for questioning not
only certain assumptions of classical theologians but also
some of those of classical atheists or agnostics, including
Hume, Kant, Marx, Comte, Russell, and Nietzsche. Not all
contemporary forms of theism can be refuted by antiquated
forms of skeptical argument.TRANSCENDENCE AND IMMANENCE 9285