7. Eschatology

7.      Eschatology

Future of history

     Teilhard de Chardin wrote: “although we too often forget this, what we call evolution develops only in virtue of a certain internal preference for survival (or, if you prefer to put it so, self-survival) which in man takes on a markedly psychic appearance, in the form of a zest for life. ultimately, it is that and that alone which under lies and supports the whole complex of biophysical energies whose operation, acting experimentally, conditions anthropogenesis.

     “In view of that fact, what would happen if one day we should see that the universe is so hermetically closed in upon itself that there is no possible way of our emerging from it – wither because we are forced indefinitely to go round and round inside it, or (which comes to the same thing) because we are doomed to a total death? Immediately and without further ado, I believe – just like miners who find that the gallery is blocked ahead of them – we would lose the heart to act and man’s impetus would be radically checked and deflated for ever, by this fundamental discouragement and loss of zest”(Teilhard de Chardin, Science and Christ)

     Teilhard here powerfully puts before us the importance of hope.

     Whitehead provides grounds for hope for history

1)     First the future is fully and radically open. → it must take account of all that has been, but the past never settles just how the future will take account of it. Its freedom in relation to the present is not merely that it can also introduce wholly new elements that change the weight and meaning of those it inherits from the present, it can readjust the elements in the present world with differing emphases. Hence projections of the future are never more than warnings of what will be if …., that is, if they are not heeded, if they do not prompt new thinking and new deeds

2)     Whitehead believes that progress can occur. New ideals can enter history and slowly produce changes that make their embodiment possible. The ideals of Jesus’ message have brought us in the direction of their practicability. They can carry us farther. Institutions can be changed by ideals as well as by force. The change can be for the better.

     The conviction that the future is open and that progress is possible is even more important now than when Whitehead wrote, but is does not suffice. The degree of alienation from ordinary historical processes is such that their gradual melioration does not inspire the zest of which Teilhard wrote. Without the zest, of a much more radical change, though less “realistic” and “probable” has more capacity to produce the will to survive apart from which survival itself is threatened. Its limitation, on the other hand is that Omega seems so remote from us that it seems to many more like a dream or wishful thinking than real hope. We need some intermediate forms of hope more radical than the melioration of our present problems but more proximate than an ultimate consummation in Omega. Whitehead can help us here in ways that point in the same direction as Teilhard.

     The hope we need is for a radical change in the very quality of our existence. We have broken out of the villages and urban neighborhoods where community is established by our familial connections and our assigned roles. → this break has been partly caused by an inner dynamic in technology and economics that is not of our choosing, and partly caused by our finding those natural communities oppressive. → to become free individuals we gave up the emotional and personal security of such given community with its provision to each of us of a settled place. → we do not want to return, but we find our supposed freedom illusory.  We are free to do what we want, but we don not want anything very much. Further, our freedom is bought at the price of isolation and loneliness. Because we cannot eist without interdependence, we call on governments to mediate between us. → our freedom from persons with whom we had rich mutual relations is transformed into bondage to an impersonal system.

     When we were caught in the bondage of natural communities, we developed a vision of personal freedom. That vision gave us zest and purpose. But now that we experience that freedom as loneliness and dependence on impersonal institutions, we lack a vison of what can free us and fulfill us. Hence, there is a loss of zest and a dangerous tolerance of controls from social systems, controls 솟 we do not tolerate from personal communities.

     The vision that is needed is of new communities that are not experienced as restrictive freedom. The voluntary community must be bound by different kinds of ties, ties that are experienced as fulfillment rather than limitation. But that is not enough.→ voluntarily to accept the oppression that was felt in involuntary communities is not improvement.  Contractual community is not adequate either.   

     This is an appropriate vision for Christians. It is not with problems, of course, but is was a voluntary community in which interpersonal relations were experienced chiefly as liberating rather that restricting. For brief periods sectarian and monastic groups have recovered this sense of new community. → the ideal of inclusive membership has reduced the voluntary element and made of the church another natural community.  Or the church has usually been more a group of individuals with contractual relations than a new community of love.

     The lesson often taken from this is that a voluntary community of mutual participation is historically possible only under special circumstances and inevitably decays rapidly into a natural or contractual one.

     Other interpretations→ the original small voluntary communities grew larger and eventually become all inclusive in large geographical areas. The church continued to expand through the nineteenth century. During this expansion despite exceptions it lost its original voluntary and intimate character. → become natural community. But it nevertheless encouraged the ideal of individual freedom. This ideal broke through the natural community and either led to the abandonment of the church altogether or created new contractual institutions. Even where the church still operates by the ideal of the natural community, it is being forced away from such community by world history and by the individualism it has fostered. Also, in the twentieth century it has ceased to expand. It has become global, but n the process it has discovered other traditions over which it cannot desire to be simply victorious. It has adopted pluralism. These factors mean that, having become global, it is now forced back upon its interior life as a voluntary community, dissatisfied with merely contractual arrangements and remembering an original community of mutual participation. If that dim dream becomes a vivid desire, the church could move into a new era.

     One obstacle to the transformation of the dream into a purpose is conceptual.

     We perceive the given reality to be the individual psychophysical person, bounded by her or his skin. → in short, all relations are viewed as external. One person does thing to another and receives the effect of the actions of the other.

     If this were the ontological reality, then talk of being members one of another would be a misleading image referring at most to certain emotions of intimacy.

     But according to Teilhard and to Whitehead this is not the reality. Whitehead, using the term “body” in its conventional sense, states that it is merely the most intimate part of the environment. The whole world is the environment. Teilhard, with the same insight, speaks with a more striking rhetoric. “Hitherto, the prevailing view has been that the body (that is to say the matter that is communicably attached to each soul) is a fragment of the universe - a piece completely detached from the rest and handed over to a spirit that informs it.

     In future, we shall say that  the Body is the very Universality of things, in as much as they are centered on an animating Spirit, in as much as they influence that Spirit – and are themselves influenced and sustained by it ….. My own body is not these cells or those cells that belong exclusively to me: it is what, in these cells and in the rest of the world, feels my influence and reacts against me.  My matter is not a part of the universe that II possess totaliter. It is the totality of the Universe possessed by me partialiter.

     This is a very different vision from the one of separate psychophysical persons communicating with one another only externally. It means that in fact we are parts of one another’s bodies. That is an idea that could have profound effects as it adventures through history. Whether we must wait for centrueis before this idea can overcome the existential effects of the idea of mutually external individuals, with which we have lives so long, remains to be seen. But we can hope that its existential realization will come sooner. That would mean that the idea of mutual participation would bring into prominence in our experience the already existing fact (which we know at the prethematic level) of mutual participation, and that this would change the nature and direction of our basic purposes. The actual character of our self-identity through time would be altered. We would enter into a new structure of existence that would ground in an enduring way the community that was temporarily realized as a promise in the early church.

     In some respects, however, the community toward which this understanding points would be different from the early Christian one. That one was restricted in two ways. First a sharp line was drawn between believers and nonbelievers. Second, the intensity of the mutual participation between human beings separated the Christians farther from nature, including their own bodies, than has been the case in either Judaism or Hellenism. This double limitation was no doubt necessary tat that time to the achievement of communities of mutual participation.

     Teilhard, however, assorts that the universe is my body. Whitehead says, “The actual world is mine”. In that case the Christian communities for which we may hope would still be only the most immediate part of the environment.  The environment that is the true body would extend beyond it to all human beings and to all creatures. The sense of mutual participation with all life and even with the inanimate world would radically alter the way we treat the environment. We would realize with Whitehead that all “life is robbery” and that “the robber requires justification.”

     When we have existentially realized that we are continuous with the environment, that the environment is our body, then we will find new tiles of life appropriate to that realization.

     This vision will also change our relations to our bodies in the ordinary sense. For a long time our concepts have juxtaposed our souls or minds to our bodies. The body has thus been alien to our true selves as well as to the bodies of others. As a result, we have viewed our bodies as something to use or control. In reaction against such a view there has been in recent literature an insistence that we are our bodies. This open to us the possibility of immediate enjoyment of bodily feelings which we have repressed, and it counters false tendencies to view ourselves as purely spiritual or transcendent beings. But if taken with full seriousness, it would destroy the tendency to prize freedom and equality which had its origin in the doctrine of the immeasurable worth of the human soul independent of the health or beauty of the body. It would also leave the individual bodies mutually external and alien.

     Whitehead’s vision of the body as the more intimate part of the environment preserves the distinctness of the soul while destroying its separation from the body. The occasions of the soul’s life are constituted by the presence in it of the environment. These soul occasion are indeed nothing but the peculiarly rich prehensive unification of the universe made possible by the extraordinary construction of the body. 

     it is indeed bodily feelings that are dominantly constitutive of the soul’s experience. Our failure to appreciate this is caused by the peculiarity of consciousness in highlighting that aspect of the soul’s experience which is originated in the soul. The massive sense of inheritance from the body is overlaid in consciousness by sense perception, in which the sense of derivation from the body is largely lost; and even the perception of the body is primarily an external one. Maurice Merleu-Ponty’s phenomenological analysis of the experience of the body helps to overcome this fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Whitehead’s conceptuality can carry this task farther.

     This is a vision of a possible future. Radical changes in human self-understanding are possible, accompanied by actual changes in the structure of existence. The structure called for is the one that would most fully adapt human existence to the ontological reality that is already given, and that we already know at the prethematized level of our experience. There are forces already discernible driving us toward this ideal and toward its realization. Nevertheless, the Whiteheadian, unlike Teilhard, must assert that in this respect, too, the future is open. There is no assurance that the human species will move forward. It cannot stand still, but in the face of tis massive dangers it may decay or even destroy itself. Even if this new level of human existence were attained, and other levels beyond it, there would be no End at which the process would come to rest. This means that the problem of evil is not solved by images of historical hope.

The kingdom of Heaven

     The theoretical problem of evil has been treated at some length in Chapter 3,and 4. But it has another side. The problem is not only the theoretical one of God’s responsibility for evil, it is also a practical and existential one. Evil is experienced as an overwhelming destructive power against which we find ourselves quite helpless. Merely to see that the existence of a good God is compatible with evil does not suffice. Our concern is also that this evil be overcome or at least that we be assured that evil does not have the last word.

     This everlasting reality is the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of heaven is “the temporal world perfected by its reception and reformation as a fulfillment of the primordial appetite which is the basis of all order”

     Human life finds its special raison d’etre within this vision. For it is capable of “the more distinctly human experiences of beauty,” as well as truth and morality; and “all three types of character partake in the highest ideal of satisfaction possible for actual realization, and in this sense can be termed that final beauty which provides the final contentment for the Eros of the Universe”.

    

     Furthermore, all the other things for which were called to care have their ultimate meaning grounded in God’s responsive love. God’s Consequent Nature is not exclusive. It prehends every actuality for what it can be in such a perfected system – its suffering, its sorrows, its failures, its triumphs, its immediacies of joy – woven by rightness of feeling into the harmony of universal feeling, which is always immediate, 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 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.”

     “this immortality of the World of Action, derived from its transformation in God’s nature is beyond our imagination to conceive. The various attempts at description are often shocking and profane. What does haunt our imagination is that the immediate facts of present action pass into permanent significance for the Universe” 

     Thus the basic point is clear. It is whitehead’s explanation of his statement that , although process entails loss in the temporal world, “there is no reason, of any ultimate metaphysical generality, why this should be the whole story.” God’s responsive love is the power to overcome the final evil of our temporal existence. Because of God, life has meaning in the face of victorious evil. That meaning is that both in our own enjoyment and through our adding to the enjoyment of others we contribute everlastingly to the joy of God. That meaning is simultaneously that we are always safe with God.

     Some process theologians have believed that, though perpetual perishing is a more ultimate evil than death, personal death is also so fundamental that we must ask how God overcomes this evil as well. They have considered the possibility of renewed personal existence after death as contributing to the solution of this problem and they have found that Whitehead’s conceptuality allows for such views even if he himself did not adopt them. He himself said that his philosophy is “entirely neutral on the question of immortality” on the one hand, it gives no warrant for the belief that the human soul is necessarily immortal. On the other hand, by its clear distinction of the soul form the body and its clarification of possible relations not mediated by bodies, it leaves open the possibility that the soul may live again after death: “ in some important sense the existence of the soul may be freed form its complete dependence upon the bodily organization.” Whitehead writs that “there is not reason why such a question should not be decided on more special evidence.” Some Christian believe that such evidence is provided in the resurrection of Jesus, and if so, process theology is open to affirming personal life after death. But such an idea is difficult to formulate in a way that is not shocking and profane.”

     Whitehead was sensitive to the concern for the preservation of persons as well as events. His image of everlastingness in God was fashioned with personal existence in view. He wrote: “an enduring personality in the temporal world is a route of occasions in which the successors with some peculiar completeness sum up their predecessors. The correlate fact in God’s nature is an even more complete unity of life in a chain of elements for which succession does not mean loss of immediate unison. This element in God’s nature inherits from the temporal counterpart according to the same principle as that by which in the temporal world the future inherits from the past. Thus in the sense in which the present occasion is the person now, and yet with this own past, so the counterpart in God is that person in God.”

    

     The expression of Christian eschatology in Whiteheadian terms is till in process. There is agreement that human life is something more than a succession of events between birth and death, that God aims at personal life as the condition of intensities of experience, that God saves what can be saved. There is assurance that death and perpetual perishing are not the last word. But there remains a profound mystery which even Whitehead’s intuition could not penetrate.

Peace

     In addition to opening up the imagination for new possibilities to be realized in the historical future, and assuring us that whatever happens our actions are cherished in God, Whitehead speaks of the spiritual consummation of our lives here and now. He calls this “Peace” it is a special factor in an occasion’s enjoyment, and it is bound in a special way to the occasion’s relation to God.

     Enjoyment characterizes experiences in their individuality insofar as they attain some measure of harmony and intensity of feeling. But the attainment of enjoyment by one occasion may reduce the enjoyment possible for others, and enjoyment now may be at the expense of enjoyment later within the same enduring individual. Awareness of these tensions inhibits enjoyment in the present. → what is needed is a larger harmony, what Whitehead call a “Harmony of Harmonies” that can exclude “the restless egotism” with which enjoyment is often pursued. When this occurs, it is through the relation to God.

     It is first of all through the relation to the Primordial Nature of God. God has an aim for every experience that is in some measure felt conformally in that experience. The aim persuasively acts within that experience, but the experience makes its own decision in terms of the multiplicity of inherited interests. For example, a human being is influenced by hopes and fears derived from past moments of life as well as by the aim derived from God. If that aim calls for an action that is anticipated with fear, it may well be refused. More generally, there is a tension between the tendency to narrow self-interest and God’s aim for a self- actualization that conduced also the wider good.

     Although the initial aim derived from God is not perfectly fulfilled, it is not ineffective. Because of God’s presence in us in this form, “our purposes extend beyond values for ourselves to values for others.” Because of God we experience unrealized ideals; and adventure, morality, and religion all result form this.

     The experience of Peace is largely beyond the control of purpose. It comes as a gift. It sis the completion of the religious life.

     Moral codes are of God in several senses.

     Thus the law is holy, just, and good, it is itself a gift of God. But is does not have the power to save us. It often adds to the discord within our experience. It can render us insensitive to new modes of enjoyment struggling to be born. It can give us a false sense of rightness that blinds us to the true rightness in things.

     The presence of God in us is divine grace. It gives rise to adventure, and to art. The supreme gift is Peace. The experience of Peace is largely beyond the control of purpose.

     In the body of Christ, where the words of Jesus are rightly heard, there is Peace. Peace is the gift of Christ and the fruit of the Spirit. Hence Peace is a mark of the church as the extension of the incarnation and the eschatological community. It characterizes Christian existence as that reflects the creative -responsive love of God. It is at once Christian freedom and Christian assurance.