Transforming Process Theism

Page i

Transforming Process Theism

Page ii

SUNY series in Philosophy

George R. Lucas, Jr., editor

Page iii

Transforming Process Theism

Lewis S. Ford

Page iv

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2000 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, address State University of New York Press, State University Plaza, Albany, N.Y. 12246

Production by Kelli Williams Marketing by Michael Campochiaro

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication DataFord, Lewis S. Transforming process theism / Lewis S. Ford. p. cm. — (SUNY series in philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0791445356 (HC : alk. paper) — ISBN 0791445364 (pbk.: alk. paper)1. Whitehead, Alfred North, 1861–1947—Contributions in concept of God. 2. God—History of doctrines—20th century. 3. Theism. 4. Process theology. I. Title. II. SeriesB1674.W354 F68 2000 211'.3—dc21 9904712810 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Page v

CONTENTS

Foreword xi

Preface xv

Abbreviations xxi

Introduction The Intelligibility of Future Activity

I. Meanings of the Future Appropriate to God 1

1. Meanings of the Future 1

2. Ways in Which God Is Future 3

3. Ways in Which God Is Not Future 4

II. Three Ways Whitehead Revises Traditional Expectations 4

1. Divine Persuasion Replaces Classical Omnipotence 5

2. God Need Not Be Conceived as Creator Ex Nihilo 7

3. Becoming Is Primary; Being Is Derivative 8

III. Toward a New Conception of the Future 9

1. Modes of Actuality 10

2. The Future as Actually Indeterminate 11

3. The Future as the Source of Creativity 12

4. The Future as the Source of Aim 13

5. The Nature of the Future as Actual 14

IV. The Plan of This Book 14

Part One Whitehead's Successive Concepts of God

Chapter One: The Principle of Limitation 21

I. Background 21

II. Criticisms 27

III. Types of Limitation 38

Page vi

Chapter Two: Deconstructing Theism 41

I. Introduction 41

II. The Final Concept: God as Temporal and Concrescent 46

III. The Middle Concept: God as Nontemporal and Concrescent 49

IV The Early Concept 57

Chapter Three: Reconstructing Nontemporal Theism 59

I. A Comparison of Concepts 60

1. The Initial, Minimal Concept 60

2. The Final Concept 61

3. The Middle Concept 65

II. Possible Solutions to the Riddle 68

1. Natural and Experiential Theology 68

2. The Role of Religion 72

3. Temporalist Implications 74

III. A Possible External Influence 78

1. Henry Nelson Wieman 78

2. Whitehead's Reaction 80

IV. The Initial Concept of God 81

1. Actual Entity 82

2. Transcendence 83

3. SelfCausation 84

4. Instance of Creativity 85

5. The Ontological Principle 85

V. The 1926 Metaphysical Principles 86

1. The Principle of Solidarity 87

2. The Principle of Creative Individuality 87

3. The Principle of Efficient Causation 88

4. The Ontological Principle 88

5. The Principle of Esthetic Individuality 88

6. The Principle of Ideal Comparison 88

Page vii

VI. The 1927 Metaphysical Principles 89

VII. The Middle Concept of God 90

1. Preconditions for the Middle Concept 93

2. Precipitating Factors 96

Chapter Four: Reconstructing Process Theism 103

I. Preliminary Considerations 103

1. Exemplifying the Metaphysical Principles 104

2. Nontemporal Subjectivity 106

II. Precipitating Factors 114

1. Temporal Subjectivity 114

2. Locus of Integration 117

3. Is 'Consciousness' the Reason for Process Theism? 120

4. Is 'Everlastingness' the Reason for Process Theism? 122

5. What about the Provision of Subjective Aim? 124

6. The Intensification of Process 125

III. Whitehead's Problematic Legacy 130

1. How God Affects the World 131

2. The Fourth Phase 132

3. Apparent Responsiveness and Nontemporal Valuation 134

4. Later Writings 138

Part Two The Search for the Prehensibility of God

Chapter Five: The Divine Power in the Present 147

I. William A. Christian 147

II. Marjorie Suchocki 156

III. Palmyre Oomen 167

IV. Jorge Nobo 168

V. Elizabeth M. Kraus 171

VI. Lewis S. Ford 173

Page viii

Chapter Six: The Power of the Past 181

I. Nancy Frankenberry and the Power of the Past 181

II. Hartshorne and the Objectification of God 187

1. The Principle of Prehension 190

2. Objections Based on Hartshorne's Own Position 190

Objection 1 Divine Occasions are Exceptions to the Metaphysical Principles

191

Objection 2 Alternation and Asychronicity

192

Objection 3 Divine Occasions Are Not Persuasive

193

Objection 4 Divine Occasions Limit Creaturely Freedom

194

Objection 5 It Undercuts Nontemporal Subjectivity

197

Objection 6 How Is Creativity Transmitted within God?

197

3. Divine Occasions with Initial Aims 197

Objection 7 How Can the Initial Aims Be Selected?

198

Objection 8 Eternal Objects Become Everlasting

199

Objection 9 An Objection from Mathematics

199

4. The Objection from Relativity Physics 200

Chapter Seven: Process Nontemporality 207

I. Bowman Clarke 207

II. Uncreated Eternal Objects 210

III. The Metaphysical Principles 216

IV Nontemporal Decision and Determination 219

Part III The Imprehensibility of God

Chapter Eight: The Power of the Future 233

I. God and Future Creativity: Some Preliminary Objections 233

1. God and Creativity 234

2. God and Being 235

3. God and Eternity 237

4. God As Future Actuality 237

5. God As Becoming 238

Page ix

II. The Identification of God with Future Creativity 240

1. God As Personal 240

2. Divine Responsiveness 241

3. Perfect Power 242

4. God as Empty 243

III. The Infusion of Creativity 245

1. Modes of Actuality 247

2. Prehension and the Infusion of Creativity 251

3. Aim 255

4. The Interdependence of Creativity and Aim 259

Chapter Nine: Persistence and the Extensive Continuum 265

I. Persistence and Perception 265

1. Diremption 266

2. Emergence of Persistence 267

3. Atrophy 269

4. Inclusive Occasions 273

5. Physical Perception and Prehension 278

6. Future Physical Perception 283

7. Divine Consciousness 285

II. The Extensive Continuum 286

1. The Ontological Status of the Extensive Continuum 287

2. The Extensive Continuum and Societies 289

3. Relativity Physics 291

4. In Unison of Becoming 292

5. The Locus of all Locations 293

6. Locus and Passage 296

7. Divine Privacy and Publicity 298

Chapter Ten: Creativity and Contingency 301

I. Creativity 301

1. Present and Future Creativity 301

2. Eschatological Actuality 303

Page x

II. Contingency 306

1. Contingency and Interdependence 306

2. Rationalist and Empiricist Process Theology 310

3. Uniqueness and Primacy 314

4. Divine Satisfaction 319

III. Concluding Objections 320

Objection 1 If God Is Future Creativity, How Can God Also Be Personal and Individual?

320

Objection 2 Is My Claim That Creativity Is Derived from God, Too Much Biased in the Direction of Western Monotheism?

321

Objection 3 Isn't It Blasphemous to Suppose That Our Own Subjectivity Is Simply a Continuation of God's? Isn't This Simply a Kind of Temporalistic Pantheism?

322

Objection 4 Does Not the Ontotheological Stricture Exclude the Possibility of God as Future Creativity?

324

Notes 327

Index 371

Page xi

FOREWORD

Three points are worth signaling to readers at the beginning of this volume.

First, Lewis Ford has made the most far reaching and imaginative transformation of process theism yet achieved. By this I mean that it is as radical as Aristotle's extension of Plato, Scotus' of Thomas, or Spinoza's and Leibniz' of Descartes. Ford is not the first, of course, to notice that Whitehead's theology needs fixing. Bernard Loomer, Henry Nelson Wieman, and Daniel Day Williams extended process themes without much commitment to the technical arguments. Charles Hartshorne, John B. Cobb, Jr., Schubert Ogden, Jorge Nobo, and David Ray Griffin, along with their many students, have elaborated the technical categories of process philosophy to overcome difficulties or omissions in Whitehead's presentations. Others, such as Donald Sherburne and myself, dump the theological part of process thought in order to develop its philosophy of nature. Ford has made a new philosophical theology out of the resources of process thought.

This achievement must be measured in terms of Ford's own contributions to scholarship concerning Whitehead (and Hartshorne). As the founding editor of Process Studies over twentyfive years ago, he established high standards for careful scholarship in this field. Though some have accused the discussion in and around that journal of scholasticism, which is the way it looks to those who have not mastered the technical vocabulary of process philosophy, to the cognoscenti it is a source of pride that one must know whereof one speaks in process studies. Of all the scholars who participate in this ongoing conversation, Ford is the most exact. Not only does he know the texts, he knows and has pondered the secondary literature. He is famous for invoking the form criticism of biblical scholarship to analyze Whitehead's texts, elaborating a detailed compositional analysis of Science and the Modern World and other preProcess and Reality writings in his The Emergence of Whitehead's Metaphysics: 1925–1929 (Albany: SUNY, 1984). His compositional analysis is extended to Process and Reality in the present volume with respect to its three concepts of God. This is enough to justify this book to the community of process thinkers.

Ford's creative advance on process theology therefore is made with the best of its resources fully understood and deployed. This is not a loose variant on process themes or a fundamental rejection of the highly imaginative and

Page xii

careful process vocabulary for categoreal thinking. It is a deliberate, stepbystep revision of process claims to arrive at an idea of God far from what Whitehead would have envisioned, an idea that surmounts criticisms of early process theology that have long been standard.

Second, the present book (and some of Ford's earlier papers) is a genuine advance in philosophical theology. Although building on antecedent conceptions such as in Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas, Scotus, Hegel, Tillich, and Whitehead, it presents an idea that is truly new. Not crazy new, but responsibly new. Ford argues, with a massive technical apparatus, that God is best conceived as the activity of the future. People have said before that God is eternal, embracing past, present, and future. They have said that God's creation in time determines the future. Process thinkers, including Samuel Alexander and others of his time as well as Whitehead, have said that God has a future that grows with the advance of time, and Pannenberg has used this to express a Christian eschatology. But no one, to my knowledge, has said that God is the activity of the future because it has been assumed that the future has no activity of its own. Ford here elaborates a responsible categoreal understanding of the future that has a proper sense of activity to account for divinehuman interaction.

The significance of Ford's creative advance in philosophical theology can be seen by reflecting on two perspectives. The first has to do with philosophical theology itself. Scholars of religion have come to understand that religious beliefs, including theologies, are contextualized in cultural and religious practices. Christian theology is now commonly interpreted as arising from reflection on the symbols shaping the practices of the early Christian communities, especially their liturgies and worship practices. The contextualizing approach contrasts sharply with the European Enlightenment's focus on belief systems in themselves, a focus that expressed itself in the mentality of early process thinkers, including Whitehead. Nevertheless the contextualizing pendulum has swung to the end of its arc and is returning toward center. Why do religious communities reflect on their practices? To understand themselves in relation to other practices and to the terms in which those other practices are expressed. The earliest Christians needed to understand their new lives in relation to their old practices, and in relation to the religious practices of their neighbors, even of their own nonChristian family members. The New Testament letters of St. Paul are replete with theology dealing with these issues. By the second century Christianity was known, and understood itself as, a Way of Life among others in the Roman world: the ancient word for such ways of life was Philosophy. The Apologists and later Christians used the language of Greek philosophy to distinguish and defend their Way among the other philosophies. Symbolically shaped practices reach for more abstract symbols that communicate across different practices when religious communities engage with

Page xiii

alternative communities or undergo significant changes in their own circumstances. Most of the forms of European philosophy have been used in one way or another to create a theological public for European contextualizations of Christianity, as well as of Judaism and Islam.

The Protestant Reformation interrupted the extraordinarily creative and fruitful philosophical theology of the high middle ages, vigorous as it was in relating Christianity to Islam, to quasilegendary religious cultures of the Far East, to Aristotelian thought, and the nascent powers of earlymodern science. The Reformers' emphasis on the Bible, and the use of its language as primary for theology as well as worship and the interpretation of daily life, resulted in the limitation of Protestant church theology to biblical symbols. That limitation has carried down to the present day and has made altogether too much depend on finding history in the Bible, as the variously failed attempts in the last two centuries to find the historical Jesus have illustrated.

But religion is impotent unless it can address the imaginations of people at their very hearts, the imaginations that operate almost unconsciously to determine how people see their world shaped and what they take to be important. The ancient imaginative structures of the biblical world simply do not register the modern imagination as shaped by science, by the encounter with vastly different cultures than those of the religion's origins, and by the development of communications in commerce, power, and information characteristic of modernity from its earliest to its latest global stages. So alongside church theology a series of great philosophers in Europe and its colonies developed ideas of God that registered the modern imagination as well as the biblical. The great tradition from Descartes and Hobbes through Locke, Hume, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Peirce, and Whitehead now extends to Ford and his contemporaries.

The second perspective for measuring Ford's contribution is local to process theology in our situation. Whitehead's extraordinary genius in relating theological concerns to 20th century science have been matched in areas of ethics and intercultural dialogues by thinkers such as John Cobb. This is the background of contemporary multifaceted imagination that makes process thought such a rich matrix for contemporary philosophical theology, the matrix from which Ford develops.

Two standard difficulties have limited process theology. One is that, in securing total freedom for creatures to respond to God, process theology has no way of saying that God is active as Creator, a traditional commitment of the West Asian religions. By providing a way of showing how God is activity in the future, creating the possibilities for creatures, Ford addresses at least part of this criticism. Whether creating future possibilities is enough for a theory of creation, still respecting the findings of science, is a matter for future discussion.

Page xiv

The second difficulty is that the God usually described by process theology cannot be known, grasped, or, to use the technical term, ''prehended" by creatures. According to process theology, only something that is determined, finished in its creativity, and past, can be prehended. God, on Whitehead's conception, is never finished at a moment (except perhaps in an eternal nature that is indifferent to creatures), and so cannot be prehensible. Responding to this problem, Hartshorne has suggested that God is not an everlasting entity but a society of entities each of which finishes and is prehensible; but there seems too little unity in a society to be either religiously responsive or conceptually coherent. On Ford's original conception, God is known as creatures know and relate to their future possibilities.

Whether Ford's new conception is adequate will be the subject of much debate. As a longtime fellow laborer in philosophical theology, I have a different approach that emphasizes the eternity of divine creation, no more associated with the future than the past or present, no more understood in terms of efficient causes than final causes. The probation of these and other competing philosophical theologies will require not only dialectical arguments concerning concepts but assessments of their sensitivity to all the movements that affect our diverse global imagination, including philosophy of nature, ethics, communications, and the involvement of other modes of thought in philosophy and theology. Which will be the best for reflecting on religion in late modernity? Ford's surely has an important place.

The third point to signal is that this book is simply superb philosophy and theology. As benefits its subject it is monumental in size. As benefits its field it is erudite beyond compare. As befits its discipline it is scrupulous and thorough in argument to a degree rarely found in this day of oneidea books. As befits our intellectual situation it is original as well as responsibly grounded. As befits its author, it is the brilliant culmination (so far) of a long career of distinguished scholarship and creative thinking.

This is one of the very best philosophy books of our time, and I am honored to be associated with it by means of this foreword, and as friend and debating partner of its author.

ROBERT CUMMINGS NEVILLE

Page xv

PREFACE

Transforming Process Theism may suggest to some readers a broad survey of the theological options available for the process thinker. Since the adaptation of process philosophy to theological concerns requires individual initiative and creativity, there are many different options, such as in the work of John B. Cobb Jr., Bernard Loomer, or Schubert Ogden, to mention just three. 1

Instead of exploring different applications, I intend to focus rather narrowly on the core philosophical theism of Alfred North Whitehead. My title has a double meaning. In the first instance I use it to refer to the transformations in Whitehead's own theism. Most are familiar with only his final concept of God, but there are other concepts along the way. After tracing the development of these concepts, I indicate a major difficulty his philosophy lands in. The difficulty concerns the way God, reconceived as an everlasting concrescence, can be prehended. If God cannot be prehended, how can God affect the various actualities of the world? The second meaning of my title refers to my particular revision of Whitehead's theism.

Some interpreters think that the philosophy can be interpreted satisfactorily to surmount this difficulty. Others think that it must be modified, and have proposed different ways this might be done. Transforming Process Theism examines the alternatives, focusing on the question: How does God affect the world?

This is not an expository, impartial survey of the proposed options; in my judgment, the other options are ultimately inadequate. They all assume, with Whitehead, that the only mode of causal influence between two actual entities is prehension. Then only determinant actualities or definite forms can influence present concrescences. I propose that we consider another form of influence in terms of which the indeterminacy, creativity, and value of the future impinges upon the present. If so, this future may be one, cosmic, infinite, and everlasting, although less determinate than present actual occasions. I term this variously "Future Activity," or "the Divine activity of the Future."

This is not our usual understanding of the future. Hence it will be necessary to include an Introduction that is designed to give the reader a preliminary orientation toward this new conception of the future. Thus, the book contains an initial presentation of future activity, an analysis of Whitehead's theism, a survey of various options for process theism, concluding with a justification for my own proposal.

Page xvi

The determination of Whitehead's own concepts of God depends upon the compositional analysis of two books. In the case of Science and the Modem World, he devised temporal atomicity, which led to a more transcendent interpretation of eternal objects and to his first concept of God, only after he had given the lectures that comprise most of the book. With a few insertions, he determined to publish the lectures as presented. Thus, there are two strata reflecting different philosophical perspectives within the same book. The first perspective shows a nontheistic metaphysics for his earlier philosophy of nature, while the second gives a preview of what will be more fully developed in Process and Reality. Compositional analysis undertakes to separate and analyze these two strands.

The compositional structure of Process and Reality is considerably more complex, as Whitehead was apparently determined to retain everything originally intended for publication, even though he had revised his views, often many times. Rather than modify what he had already written, he would insert passages designed to persuade the reader to interpret earlier material in terms of later perspectives. By noting various anomalities and discrepancies, I have been able to isolate some thirteen layers to the text. 2 By my reckoning, there are three concepts of God in Process and Reality, though Denis Hurbuise contends there are basically only two. His excellent study, Relire Whitehead, which is the only other compositional analysis of Process and Reality, treats my first two concepts as one.3

To be sure, Process and Reality does not present itself as a patchwork of many different compositional layers. It means to be a single, unified treatise. In addition, several works together are thought by many to have a single coherent position. Whitehead writes:

The three books—Science and the Modern World, Process and Reality, Adventures of Ideas—are an endeavour to express a way of understanding the nature of things, and to point out how that way of understanding is illustrated by a survey of the mutations of human experience. Each book can be read separately; but they supplement each other's omissions or compressions. (AI, vii)

He does not quite claim that they do in fact have a single position, only that the three are relevant to each other because they are concerned with a common, very broad topic. They do supplement each other, for none of the others has the careful elaboration of the ordering of eternal objects that Science and the Modern World has, or the depiction of the ideals of civilization in Adventures of Ideas. What is not made explicit is whether any ideas have been revised, discarded, or subordinated in the process of continued reflection.

Page xvii

Here the writer's conception as to what he has achieved and, more importantly, how he intends that work to be read, can easily clash with the findings of compositional analysis. The ideal aimed at and the actual result achieved criticize each other. Only if we accept Whitehead's assertions without question is compositional analysis undermined in principle. Furthermore, the patient analysis of the text in detail can qualify professions of an ideal unity. There can be considerable disparity between general considerations and detailed empirical findings.

This problem is aptly illustrated by biblical criticism. Biblical scholars for over a century have pointed to detailed discrepancies in biblical texts. Conservatives argue, however, that because all scripture is inspired by God, no errors could be permitted to exist in the text. Here the actual and the ideal clash. There seems no resolution, because each side uses different criteria to judge the issue.

Compositional analysis likewise shows that there is a plurality of positions with Process and Reality. It does not show that the system Whitehead develops is incoherent, unless we identify his system with the book as a whole. Rather, it sees much of the book as the record of the endeavor to frame such a system, an effort that can explain and justify the resultant system which is also in the book. But the final system is only part of the book.

Another expression of Whitehead's intentions may be found in Process and Reality:

The lectures are intended to state a condensed scheme of cosmological ideas, to develop their meaning by confrontation with the various topics of experience, and finally to elaborate an adequate cosmology in terms of which all particular topics find their interconnections. Thus the unity of treatment is to be looked for in the gradual development of the scheme, in meaning and in relevance, and not in the successive treatment of particular topics. (PR, xii)

One way to develop a scheme is by the successive treatment of particular topics. That would even be the preferred way to proceed if one were comfortable with a stable general outlook. His phrase, "gradual development," is ambiguous. It may mean the unfolding of that which one already has in mind, or it may be the exploration of ideas leading to surprising results, and to unexpected relevancies, reintroducing topics already considered.

To continue:

For example, the doctrines of time, of space, of perception, and of causality are recurred to again and again, as the cosmology develops. In

Page xviii

each recurrence, these topics throw some new light on the scheme, or receive some new elucidation. At the end, in so far as the enterprise has been successful, there should be no problem of spacetime, or of epistemology, or of causality, left over for discussion. The scheme should have developed all those generic notions adequate for the expression of any possible interconnection of things. (PR, xii)

In looking over Process and Reality, Whitehead may have been acutely aware of its many repetitions. Is he here justifying a deliberate procedure, or putting the best face on the actual result? Hegel's work may be thought to be deliberately cyclical, treating the same issues on everhigher levels. Did Whitehead deliberately set out to treat these topics in such a recurrent fashion? From a compositional perspective, the repetition makes sense as the byproduct of the sort of probing Whitehead engaged in. His peculiarity is only that he chronicles not only his final result but his insights along the way.

Compositional analysis would be fairly innocuous if the layers uncovered simply contributed to one coherent whole. It challenges those who assume that the work should be interpreted as a whole if it shows tensions, inconsistencies, discrepancies between layers. Insofar as this is so, we can be justified in taking later stages to modify, even to the point of abandoning, earlier positions. Yet Whitehead rarely makes this explicit, so as not to call attention to the composite nature of his work. Just as we are rarely told what has been discarded, we are rarely told what elements are retained. It is my impression that the detailed analysis of events in Principles of Natural Knowledge and The Concept of Nature still apply to actual occasions as objectifiable, yet we are not told so very explicitly. Whitehead's attention was always drawn to what was new and problematic, not to underlying stabilities.

Compositional analysis has been developed to be sensitive to surface discontinuities in the text and in the philosophy it represents. Other techniques are needed to detect underlying continuities.

Other philosophers have changed their philosophical positions over time, and some have left implicit indications of this in their writings. Thus, compositional analysis, in some form or other, has been relevant to the work of other philosophers besides Whitehead. The studies of Werner Jaeger on Aristotle come to mind, as well as other, more recent analyses. Noting that the term matter (hyle) is absent from the Organon, Daniel W. Graham argues that Aristotle has two metaphysical systems. 4 The first system is the Organon, and explains change without matter. The introduction of matter in the second system permits the contrast between form and matter, and between actuality and potentiality. Those prior to Aristotle had a notion of matter as the stuff of the universe, but they did not see it as a substrate for what we may call absolute change, that is, the generation of substances.

Page xix

Perhaps the most striking example of compositional analysis is found in Kant scholarship. In 1902 Hans Vaihinger published a pamphlet on "The Transcendental Deduction of the Categories." 5 For many, the attempt to show how the Transcendental Deduction could be analyzed into various layers of contrasting argument threatened the integrity of the very heart of Kant's endeavor. Those who analyzed it so were intent rather on depicting Kant's prolonged effort at becoming clear about the status of the Transcendental Deduction, only achieving his goal (if then) in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason.6

H. J. Paton argues:

This line of criticism maintains, on the ground of certain alleged contradictions, that the Critique of Pure Reason in general, and the Transcendental Deduction in particular, is a mosaic, or in plainer language a patchwork, of different arguments composed at different times and representing very different points of view.7

The difficulty here is whether Transcendental Deduction refers to the body of writings Kant brought together on this topic, or to that the argument which Kant sought to formulate. If there is a contradiction within the argument itself, this would be fatal. Yet a contradiction in the bundle of writings may simply indicate that Kant changed his mind.

In many cases, however, I suspect that Vaihinger need not claim that there are contradictions in order to show the difference between two layers of composition. They might differ only in terms of anomalies, discrepancies, relevant absences, or superficial inconsistencies. These can often be systematically harmonized. Just because they can be harmonized, however, does not mean that they do not also constitute evidence for layering.

In Whitehead's case, compositional analysis rarely affects the systematic result. Insofar as we isolate Whitehead's final position, we find the philosophy becoming more consistent, not less so. The difficulties in interpretation largely arise from attempting to combine different levels of composition.

Insistence on the initial consistency of various texts can easily block inquiry. We should want as many layers as possible in order to trace Whitehead's development insofar as this is manifest. Whitehead may well have a dialectic, but it takes surprising twists and turns. In contrast to Hegel we may say it is dialectic without direction. Whitehead embarks on a true adventure that does not know beforehand where it will end.

I have arranged the various levels largely by comparison with the finished system. The more divergent, the more primitive. Reasons can be found for the progression from one layer to the next. Although I may describe these in terms of Whitehead's own thinking, they are strictly speaking logically accessible reasons and should be so understood.

Page xx

The drive for consistency can promote systematic inquiry into how all the pieces can be reconciled. It can remove superficial inconsistencies, often in order to allow deeper inconsistencies to be probed. Yet in the case of Whitehead, at least, unless it is supplemented by compositional analysis, it can prevent us from discovering the true nature of Whitehead's philosophical achievement as well as understanding its development.

This book was conceived in 1983, and has a long history of composition. Many persons have helped me along the way. Some can be named, but at the risk of omitting others who should have been named: Harry K. Jones, George Allan, David Ray Griffin, Robert Cummings Neville, C. Robert Mesle, Philip Clayton, and Denis Hurtubise. To all, I am grateful for wisdom, encouragement, and support. An Old Dominion University research grant has helped materially. I dedicate this book to my mentor, John B. Cobb Jr., although he cannot endorse its conclusions. The tutorial he granted me at Claremont, 1968, was the most intense learning experience I ever received. He had just published A Christian Natural Theology, outlining five ways in which Whitehead's position should be modified. 8 I was then conceived we should accept Whitehead as is, without modification. Though during the tutorial neither convinced the other, since then each of us has become convinced of the truth of the other.

Page xxi

ABBREVIATIONS

References to Alfred North Whitehead's major books and cited studies of Whitehead will use the following standardized abbreviations, usually entered in the body of the text. The first date refers to the original date of publication, the second to the edition here cited.

AI Adventures of Ideas (1933). New York: The Free Press, 1967

CN The Concept of Nature (1920). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957

CNT John B. Cobb Jr. A Christian Natural Theology, Based on the Thought of Alfred North Whitehead. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965

DR Charles Hartshorne. The Divine Relativity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948

EE Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki. The End of Evil: Process Eschatology in Historical Context. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988

EWM Lewis S. Ford. The Emergence of Whitehead's Metaphysics. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984

EWP Lewis S. Ford and George L. Kline, eds. Explorations in Whitehead's Philosophy. New York: Fordham University Press, 1983

FR The Function of Reason (1929). Boston: Beacon Press, 1958.

GD Giffords draft, an early part of Whitehead's Process and Reality

IS Interpretation of Science, ed. A. H. Johnson, Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1961

IWM William A. Christian. An Interpretation of Whitehead's Metaphysics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959

LL Lowell Lectures of 1925. Earliest stratum of Whitehead's Science and the Modern World

ME Elizabeth M. Kraus. The Metaphysics of Experience: A Companion to Whitehead's Process and Reality. New York: Fordham University Press, 1979

Page xxii

MT Modes of Thought (1938). New York: The Free Press, 1968

PNK An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1919

PR Process and Reality (1929). Corrected Edition, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: The Free Press, 1978

R The Principle of Relativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922

RM Religion in the Making (1926). New York: Fordham University Press, 1996.

SMW Science and the Modern World (1925). New York: The Free Press, 1967.

S Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect. New York: Macmillan, 1927.

TPP Lewis S. Ford, ed. Two Process Philosophers, Hartshorne's Encounter with Whitehead. Scholars Press: AAR Studies in Religion #5, 1973

WMES Jorge Luis Nobo. Whitehead's Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986

WM Ivor Leclerc. Whitehead's Metaphysics: An Introductory Exposition. London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1958

WRT Henry Nelson Wieman The Wrestle of Religion with Truth. New York: Macmillan, 1927

INTRODUCTION— THE INTELLIGIBILITY OF FUTURE ACTIVITY

The notion of God as the activity of the future is surely perplexing. At the very least it can only be rendered intelligible by stretching the meaning of our terms by giving them new interpretations. This applies, above all, to the term future. The meaning I propose to give to the future is not current in philosophy or theology, not even in the process theism of Alfred North Whitehead, which forms the basis of this undertaking. It is an extension of Whitehead's analysis of the concrescence or actualization of a present act of becoming, proposed as a way of explaining how the everlasting divine concrescence can influence present occasions.

I— Meanings of the Future Appropriate to God

Before justifying this conception of God we must explore some extended meanings of "future" and select those that are appropriate from those that are not. On the usual meaning of the future, there can be no activity in the future, because the future contains no beings. Whitehead has taught many of us to reconceive the present in terms of subjectivity, the past in terms of objectivity, but he did not reconceive the future. In a sense I am simply seeking to extend his new conceptuality to the future. If the past is determinate being, and the present is the becoming that determines being, the future could be pure becoming, a becoming that does not terminate in being.

1— Meanings of the Future

Naturally, when any term, in this case the future, is called upon to function in new and very unfamiliar ways, its customary meanings are apt to be stretched and pulled to some extent. It will acquire new meanings, sometimes discarding old ones. In many ways the ordinary sense of future is still serviceable. Before proceeding further, we need to sort out which are appropriate and which are not for my particular purpose.

Here perhaps we can distinguish two meanings of the future: (1) the future conceived in terms of being, which is the ordinary sense, and (2) the future as becoming, our extended sense.

(1) According to the ordinary temporal matrix of being, there are as yet no beings in the future, so there cannot be any activity in this kind of future. The future is merely potential. The future may contain potentialities, or it may simply be that upon which our plans, hopes, and fears are projected. The only determinateness it possesses comes from causal necessities derived from the present and past.

Each actualization lays down causal and historical conditions upon its successors (AI, ch. 12). In a general and abstract sense these conditions will someday be actualized, but precisely how they will be concretized has yet to be determined. In that sense they constitute what will be. They are conditions God as future activity must conform to, but they do not constitute the future that comes from God, unless past causal conditions were to constitute a complete causal determinism.

Whitehead supposes that because there cannot be any future occasions, these conditions must be ontologically grounded in present occasions. He did not reckon with the possibility that there could be one future actuality that is not an occasion, which is their proper grounding.

There is a certain ambiguity that the future as being has toward the present. Even if the present, as pure subjectivity, lacks all objectivity, it still differs from any future, which is as yet practically nothing, which has no being. We, at least, are present to ourselves, and we experience ourselves as definitely something. In that sense the present shares with the past the sense of being, as contrasted with the realm of the future (as being), which is the realm of nonbeing.

On the other hand, if Whitehead is correct in distinguishing between subjective becoming and objective being, present becoming lacks the determinate unity of the past. It is ontologically distinct. Instead of the simple dichotomy of being and nothingness, 1 he proposes a threefold distinction between being, becoming, and nothing. Yet since becoming is objectively nothing, we should reexamine our understanding of the future. The future is objectively nothing, but it could be subjectively becoming.

If we reverse our perspective from the future as that which does not yet have being to the being that the future will someday have, the future appears as that which will be. Someday the future will become actual, no matter how near or distant that future might be. Since only then does the future become determinate, only then does it fully acquire being. Then, however, it is present (or past), no longer future. To be sure, it (e.g., January 2100) will be still what was future from our present standpoint. It is still that event. But it would have lost its qualitative futurity, that is, its indeterminateness and its position relative to the creative advance.

(2) It would be more accurate to say that the future is that which might be, but even that is not sufficient. What might be is often conceived as a static array of more or less definite possibilities. God's imprehensibility forbids any indirect prehension by means of anything objective, even such as possibilities. The divine future is the dynamic source of objective possibility, to be sure, but it is as yet not objectified. (The status of eternal objects will be examined in chapter 7, part 2.)

That which might be includes our plans and purposes projected upon the vast indeterminate field of the future. Ontologically we may see these as projected upon the divine field, and not just hung out over a void, but in the end it is our projections that come into play.

According to the future as becoming, that is, the future as interpreted in terms of becoming, the metaphysical qualities of the temporal modes are essential. This metaphysical differentiation is levelled by determinism, since it assigns determinate being to all three modes. Then the future is simply what will be.

Determinisms of all sorts can ascribe being to the future because they deny its indeterminacy. In that case the temporal modalities are undercut, except in terms of their position to the creative advance. Determinism treats all occasions as determinate; only our ignorance prevents us from seeing the future as what will be.

To summarize: The metaphysical qualities of the modes are: that which is future to the creative advance is pure becoming, less determinate than the present; that which inhabits the creative advance is the becoming resulting in being, thus further determining the aim it inherits, while that which is in the past of the creative advance is completely determinate.

2— Ways in Which God Is Future

In a preliminary way, there are two features which link God to the future:

1. God has the temporal quality we associate with the future. Past actualities are concretely determinate. Present occasions are finite processes of determination resulting in the determinate. The future is indeterminate, openended. Since incapable of being objectified, God would have to be pure indeterminacy. While God is an activity of determination, it has no finite completion.

2. It is meaningful to say that God is located in the future. Every process of concrescence comes out of the future to become determinate. Whitehead analyzed its present and past status. His analysis is here extended to include the future, to include that which has not yet

separated itself out of the divine. In one sense, its locus does not change, although the temporal quality of that locus is constantly changing. As God withdraws into a more distant future, the present actualizes itself and becomes past. The same locus was once part of the divine, is now our present subjective immediacy, and will become past fact, as the creative advance moves on.

3— Ways in Which God Is Not Future

On the other hand, God is not future in the sense that God will first be active after we have completed our activity. God is in unison of immediacy with us. This is the most important insight of those conceiving God to be present. The everlasting divine subjectivity will overlap with our own at some juncture. Since we are present, the juncture will also be in the present experience of God.

Here ''present" is ambiguous. It can mean "immediate to experience," which it surely is. Yet it can also mean, "taking place in the locus of the present."

In some sense we are redefining "present" and "future" here with respect to "unison of immediacy." Such redefinition has already taken place in relativity physics, where contemporaries are present in one sense but not in another. They are not present in that they are causally independent. Contemporaries are in unison of becoming with the present occasion, even though not directly present to it. So we may conceive of God as in unison of becoming with present occasions, yet in their future in the sense that its indeterminate activity will become the activity of present occasions subsequently.

II— Three Ways Whitehead Revises Traditional Expectations

This conception of God, though clearly different from Whitehead's own, grows out of his. For there is a very important sense in which God for him is the source of our future. For Whitehead, God provides each actuality with its own initial aim, which is the possibility for its own future, which it strives to actualize. In this sense God creates the relevant future in terms of which each actuality can experience and integrate its past into a determinate achievement.

That God is our future providing the aims we strive for is the fulcrum by which Whitehead's philosophy can emancipate us from some longstanding difficulties of the tradition. It entails several revisions of classical theism, which clear the way for my project. Without them, it would be unlikely that my views could be recognized as appropriately theistic.

1— Divine Persuasion Replaces Classical Omnipotence

The nature of persuasion is that it can only be effective with the consent of the persuaded. This is an appropriate way of understanding the process of actualization, for it requires both divine aim and creaturely response. Both are necessary, but neither is sufficient. On the other hand, the exercise of omnipotence is unilaterally determinative, although in most cases it is limited by ad hoc considerations. Commonly, God is conceived to create the being of the creatures, who then can freely act. This presupposes the notion of enduring substantial beings, with all the difficulties that concept entails. For Whitehead the concrescence, the coming into being of the occasion, can be considered its own creation, insofar as the creature itself participates in its own creation.

Whitehead analyzes divine persuasion in terms of hybrid physical feeling, which is the feeling of an actuality in terms of the possibilities it displays. Although hybrid feelings, since physical, can be classified as efficient causes, they function solely as formal causes. The aim is a possibility guiding the construction of a final end for the concrescence, not a prehended actuality that must be included. It is not part of the multiplicity to be unified, but as a possible form for the unity to be achieved, it can be modified or even evaded. Otherwise the occasion would have no freedom. 2 The necessities inherent in prehended actualities function as its efficient causes, while the subjective aim functions as a dynamic final cause, resulting in the final formal character of the satisfaction.

Some interpreters construe divine causation as primarily efficient. This is necessarily true if one adopts the modification introduced by Charles Hartshorne. Instead of holding to the one divine everlasting concrescence (which cannot be prehended), Hartshorne proposes that God should be reconceived as a society or series of momentary divine occasions. Each past divine occasion, like every past actual occasion, is physically prehended, and functions as one of its efficient causes. We shall examine this view in detail in chapter 6. I agree that some modification is necessary, for Whitehead's theory is incomplete on this point. The modification I propose, however, is made in terms of future final causes, not in terms of past efficient causes.

Persuasion is typically contrasted with coercion. That is the natural contrast in ordinary situations, but it is highly misleading in this context. Coercion and persuasion both presuppose the will. If one is persuaded, one's will is engaged. If a bank employee nervously opens the safe under threat of a gun, he is being coerced, for he is doing something against his will. Simple efficient causation is neither persuasive nor coercive, for it need not involve will at all. This is particularly true of transcendent divine creation, which first brings the will of the creature into being.

Persuasion and coercion are the positive and negative forms of codeterminative activity. Both require two agencies for effecting their results. The bank robber cannot of his own accord open the safe, so he threatens the employee to open it for him. Without the threat, moreover, the employee would not have opened it. Both are necessary, neither sufficient, just as in the case of acts of persuasion.

Divine power may be persuasive, but it is not ordinarily coercive. As we have seen, this is an inappropriate contrast. Either God determines the being of the creature unilaterally or the determination is achieved by other factors as well. In Whitehead's case, it necessarily requires also the selfcreating creature. The appropriate contrast is between the determinative and the persuasive, rather than the coercive and the persuasive. Which alternative we adopt hinges on whether freedom is an ad hoc limitation upon omnipotence or a necessary concomitant to creation. But determinative omnipotence ought not be confused with coercion, for by definition determinative action precludes selfcreativity from playing any relevant role, whether positive or negative.

I believe the Bible typically and for the most part symbolizes God as the King of the Universe, not as the omnipotent determinative creator. A king achieves his ends primarily by means of other people. As John B. Cobb Jr. has somewhere pointed out, the general of an army exerts more power than does a child playing with tin soldiers, but only the child directly affects his soldiers by efficient causation. The general and the king command, but this is really authoritatively sanctioned persuasion, since it must enlist the (perhaps grudging) consent of the soldier to be effective. The Bible does not speak of divine persuasion in so many words, but very frequently of commands and threats. The threats are coercive, but they speak to our freedom of response. The twofold structure of God and creature is presupposed. If God were able to actualize the divine purposes without taking the creature into account as essential to the process, all these commands and threats would be superfluous.

There is a minimum conception of persuasion that I don't think is terribly helpful. It construes unilateral determination as coercive, and judges any divine power that is less than alldeterminate as persuasive. To be sure, the absence of unilateral divine determination, together with the absence of causal determination, are necessary preconditions for any freedom or selfcreativity. Something more, however, is needed. Whitehead construed freedom as the progressive modification of the initial aim divinely provided. For freedom without aim simply results in random activity. In fact, concrescence or unification is all but impossible in the absence of some common goal toward which all the feelings can strive. Persuasion necessarily requires final causation. The absence of final causation typically occurs when divine activity is primarily conceived in terms of efficient causation. We need to see that God does not act upon us from the past, but lures us forward to the future.

2— God Need Not Be Conceived As Creator Ex Nihilo

If the notion ultimately makes sense, then only an omnipotent being could create the world ex nihilo. 3 Only an alldeterminative act could bring some being into being if there were no other resources involved. Yet there is a way of understanding creation differently in terms of divine persuasion involving selfcreative creatures. Each concrescence builds on its antecedents, for these form the multiplicity to be unified, resulting in the new being.

This general principle of concrescence takes on special meaning for the history of evolution. Science reports that over the past four billion years or more there has been the emergence of elementary particles, atoms, molecules, macromolecules, cells, plants, animals, and humans, each building upon and developing out of its predecessors. One can understand divine persuasion as coordinating and directing this process, though not controlling it. The process surely has its contingencies, its quirks, its dead ends. For the actual outcome is as much, or more, the result of what went before, as well as the decisions of the creatures, as it is the result of divine aim. Without that divine aim, however, there would only chaos and extreme improbability; with it, this mighty world has come into being out of practically nothing.

Augustine thought out the logic of divine omnipotence. The world ought to be created instantaneously. Darwin's theory made agnostics out of so many Christians, who saw that an omnipotent creator ought to be able to do better, and quicker, than the evolutionary record indicated. Here, creation by divine persuasion fits the facts better than classical theism can. Classical theists may reply that their view fits the character of the biblical Book of Genesis better, but that all depends upon how we understand it. Should we construe statements such as "Let the earth produce growing things" (Gen. 1.11) as alldeterminative fiats or as commands? What is the role of this refrain: "and God saw that it was good"? Is it a selfcongratulatory remark to an omnipotent being who ought to get it right the first time? Or is it an evaluation of the diligence and obedience of God's servants? It might be considered almost a daily report card, an incentive or reinforcement for their activity.

Whitehead, as we shall see, was deeply agnostic, even atheistic, from his late thirties to his early sixties. The key issue for him was the traditional notion of God as creator ex nihilo, which he rejected, presumably for its deterministic implications. He became a theist later not because of some religious conversion, but because he found a meaningful concept of God that did not entail that God was "creator." For him the term creator always had negative connotations. I interpret his thought in terms of creation, for I find this an illuminating way to understand concrescence. But I must make clear that I am here departing from his usage.

3— Becoming Is Primary; Being Is Derivative

As we have seen, Whitehead conceives of a concrescence or act of becoming as unifying a multiplicity of causal influences. 4 Each causal factor has its measure of being (unity), but the collection of causal factors are not yet unified. Thus, in all incomplete phases the concrescence lacks any unity of its own and hence lacks any being. Only in the final result does being emerge. This means that being is used contrastively with becoming. What becomes lacks being, and vice versa.

Even in this restricted usage, Whitehead's notion of being covers most of what philosophy has meant by being down through the ages. It covers almost all of the events and objects described in Whitehead's own philosophy of nature. Two very important domains are excluded: subjectivity and God.

Only beings can directly influence other actualities. In that sense they are objects or become objectified for these actualities. A concrescent process that has not yet attained to the status of being is thus incurably private. Concrescence can be identified with the essence of subjectivity, provided we generalize subjectivity to apply to all actualities, not just to conscious actualities or even living ones.

Becoming understood as subjectivity defines the problem I have designated as "Whitehead's legacy," for it is an intractable difficulty at the heart of his theory of God, and it led to Hartshorne's modification mentioned above. The consequent nature of God is the divine experience of all temporal actualities, which grows with the creative advance of nature. Since God is always experiencing the world as more and more actualities come into being, the consequent nature is conceived to be an everlasting concrescence. Yet if it never comes to completion, if it never results in being, it can never be objectified. The everlasting concrescence is pure subjectivity, pure privacy. Yet if so, how can God ever influence the world in terms of the divine experience? Later chapters address this problem in terms of the various solutions put forth by his followers, including my own previous theory.

Since beings are produced by becoming, and not vice versa, many argue that only present concrescence has primary existence, while past beings exist only in a derivative sense dependent upon present concrescence. This is a form of the ontological principle, articulated primarily in terms of the general Aristotelian principle, which declares that eternal objects derive their existence from present actualities. This is extended to past entities, seen also as objects dependent on present actualities.

The primacy of becoming over being leads to a reevaluation of the notion of divine perfection. Classical theists argue that process theists limit God by arguing that God can be enriched by an experience of future contingents that only comes into existence in the course of the creative advance. God, they

reason, is a perfect being, complete in every way, and therefore incapable of being enriched. The argument presupposes that God is a perfect being, rather than perfect becoming. Since becoming is primary, God should be conceived as perfect becoming, and the perfection of becoming includes being enriched by that which comes into being. 5

The contrast between being and becoming may suggest a way of ranking time and eternity. Whitehead designated his forms as "eternal objects," meaning by this that they were "objects devoid of time." Eternity is usually thought to transcend time. If by eternity we really mean everlastingness, then it is a temporal notion embracing past, present, and future. But the Greeks conceived of eternity as timelessness, and felt that only timelessness could properly and completely transcend time. But if Whitehead's "timeless objects" were dependent upon becoming for their existence, then it is possible to conceive of them as derivative from temporal actualities.6 They are abstract because they abstract from time. Rather than eternity being transcendent to time, time transcends timelessness. In that case God's way of transcending the world and ourselves must be found in time, not in some timeless realm. As we shall see, should God transcend us temporally, it must be that God transcends us as our future.

III— Toward a New Conception of the Future

One of Whitehead's greatest achievements, for many of us, has been a reconception of subjectivity and objectivity in terms of temporal modes. Descartes, who deepened our sense of subjectivity more than any other modern thinker, could not understand the relationship between these two modes except in terms of two distinct substances, res cogitans and res extensa. This generated an intolerable dualism of subject and object, on the one hand, and led to the solipsism of the present moment, on the other. Few found Descartes's appeal to the mediating presence of God very helpful. There have been many attempts since to conceptualize their proper relation to each other, but few have been as illuminating as Whitehead's analysis of subject and object as different aspects of the same actuality.

This analysis makes two presuppositions: (1) Every actuality is a spatiotemporal event that cannot be subdivided into smaller occasions, which are equally actual (PR, 69).7 (2) The present activity of an occasion, the way it comes into being, is a process of unifying all the causal factors that impinge upon it. This is a subjective process whereby the present occasion feels or prehends past actualities, and these prehensions are "grown together" (con + crescere) into a new concrete determinateness. Thus, concrescence is present immediacy, and vice versa. What is prehended or appropriated for present activity is the past relative to it, which has the status of object.

1— Modes of Actuality

Put another way, all present becoming is subjective; all past being (the outcome of becoming) is objective, here understood in terms of ontological categories. If this is true of the present and the past, what of the future? Here, the ordinary understanding of the future is of little help, for the future is often conceived as lacking any being. It is thought to be a domain having nothing (yet) actual within it, although in later times it will be populated by actualities, once they come into being. At best, the future is filled with real possibilities. Or it is thought to be an indeterminate backdrop against which we project our plans, hopes, and fears. None of these views ascribe any actuality to the future.

The chief reason why this should be so is that we assume "actuality" to have a univocal meaning. Aristotle initiated the tradition of conceiving the actual to be something concretely determinate. As indeterminate, the future cannot be actual in this sense. Another mark of actuality has been activity, of being able to act upon others. Substance philosophy, not recognizing temporal differences as essential, could comfortably regard actuality as both presently acting and as concretely determinate.

Process philosophy must consider the temporal difference. Some interpreters, assuming that the univocity of actuality requires its restriction to one temporal mode, have argued that only acting occasions can be actual occasions. 8 It follows then that past actual occasions are no longer actual. Does this mean that concretely determinate entities, thought to be actual by Aristotle and many others, should be excluded from the category of actuality? Whitehead treated both concrescing occasions and concrete occasions as actual, at least insofar as both can serve as basic reasons, according to the ontological principle (PR, 24).

Whitehead has discovered a common element between these two types of actuality: decision. Concrescence, the reduction of many alternative ways of integration to a final one, is a process of deciding, while the outcome is something decided. In either case there is decision, the cutting off of alternatives. "'Decision' cannot be construed as a casual adjunct of an actual entity. It constitutes the very meaning of actuality" (PR, 43).

We can take "decision" to be primary, and thus understand the other meanings to be derived from this basic univocal meaning of actuality. Or we can take the differing temporal modes of actuality as primary, recognizing how intimately related acting in concrescence and concrete determinateness really are. From the second perspective actuality means that which has primary existence, that upon which other entities depend. Followers of Whitehead are often oriented toward the present mode of actuality, seeing everything as ontologically dependent upon present acting.

It is from this perspective that the past is reduced to the status of being "no longer actual." Yet the past can be seen to have its own primary existence

as concretely determinate. All degrees of abstraction from the concretely determinate are ontologically dependent upon its past actuality.

If the present and the past constitute distinct forms of actuality, why cannot the future also have its own distinctive kind of actuality? If the future is in any sense actual, it needs to be reconceived. Here, Whitehead's own account is not very helpful, for he conceived the future in terms of the causal conditions that the present (and past) lays down upon it. The future borrows its reality for present projections, and this does not even include the domain of real possibilities (Adventures of Ideas, ch. 12).

Like most of us, Whitehead assumes that the present (and past) alone are actual. Then the future is merely possible. Then God is presently actual or merely possible. If only possible, God is an imaginative projection of our own making. Now, at some level this alternative should always be taken seriously, for the existence of God is an objective uncertainty held fast by a propriation process of the most passionate inwardness, as Kierkegaard reminds us. 9 Subjectively, for us, it is a matter of faith. But faith in God's existence would be ungrounded were God not really there. For God to be really actual as future, then what exists in the future must be more than an imaginative projection.10

Let us try to reconceive the future in such a way that its actuality is conceptually possible. If so, it must be less determinate than either the present or the past. It should be the source of creativity for the present, and it could also be the ultimate source of aim.

If so, there are three modes of actuality: the past as determinately actual, the present as the activity of determination, and the future as activity, transferring the power of creativity to the present.11 There may be a parallel understanding of causation. Causation has been increasingly understood in terms of past efficient causes, but this is inadequate for grasping Whitehead's account of prehension. Typically, causes produce their effect, but the active element in prehension is the present occasion prehending the causal factors in its past.

We may restrict causation to the causal factors alone, but for Whitehead the present occasion is actively engaged in the process of causation. Thus, it is also appropriate to extend the notion of "cause" to include the selfcausation of prehending and integrating the multiplicity of past causes.

From whence comes the creative power of present causation? I argue that it comes from the transfer of creativity from the future to the present. This transfer can be conceived as future causation.

2— The Future As Actually Indeterminate

A past occasion is absolutely determinate with respect to its own character. All indecision as to what it is has been overcome in the process of

concrescence. If it had not been overcome, there would still be some further process of determination. Present concrescence, then, is the transformation of indeterminacy into determinateness. Whatever the future is, it must be less determinate than either the present or the past.

We might conceive of the future in terms of eternal objects or perhaps in terms of real possibilities. In some sense this might be true, but these could not be the sole features of the future, for in themselves they lack actuality.

On the other hand, creativity is power. As the underlying power of concrescence, it is the basis of present actuality. Creativity has the proper indeterminateness. In one sense it is even more indeterminate than an eternal object, for it cannot be objectified.

3— The Future As the Source of Creativity

Creativity either comes from within an occasion or from beyond it. The first alternative is strongly implied by Process and Reality. 12 The second alternative was proposed by Whitehead in The Adventures of Ideas, and has been championed by Nancy Frankenberry in "The Power of the Past."13 There are difficulties with both.

An individual occasion lacks the resources to be the source of its own creativity. Its creativity is limited to the task it faces in unifying the multiplicity it receives, which is exhausted in the process of concrescence. An occasion is nothing but what it receives, and what it can make of what it receives. Whatever it prehends it receives; should it not also receive the power of prehending? How could this creativity simply well up from within?

The past, as past, lacks all active power, for any individual past actuality is completely devoid of creativity. This is true even though the past, particularly the immediate past, can exert tremendous influence over the present once prehended. That prehension is crucial, for it is only through the creativity found in the present that the past can exert influence.

To be sure, Whitehead seems to suggest in Adventures of Ideas that creativity can come from the past. More precisely, he holds that in, with, and through the elements of the past, creativity is given to the occasion at the outset of its concrescence. "The initial situation includes a factor of activity which is the reason for the origin of that occasion of experience . . . [T]he passive objects [past actualities prehended] derive their activity from the creativity of the whole" (AI, 179). But individual past occasions lack the creativity that is ascribed to the whole, and there is a whole only from the standpoint of the supervening present occasion, as found in its initial situation.

As long as the future is thought to contain nothing actual, everything that an occasion needs must be derived from the past. Under that restriction it makes sense to derive creativity from the past, even though every individual

past actuality has no creativity. (If it had any creativity, it would still be on the way to becoming past. There is no real pastness unless its creativity has perished.) If the future is actual, and particularly if the future is creativity itself, it can be the source of creativity. If creativity cannot simply well up in the present, nor come from a creativityless past, it must come from the future.

Pure creativity underlies both the actuality of the future and the many actualities of the present. In the future, creativity constitutes a single activity, unbounded in its forward reaches, which then becomes pluralized into the many finite present actual occasions in the creative advance of nature.

4— The Future As the Source of Aim

For Whitehead aim is either derived from the past or from a process modelled on the past. Initially, he seems to have thought that he could derive aim from conceptual reproduction and reversion, thus getting all real possibilities out of the past physically prehended. Later, considering this to be insufficient, he derived aim from a hybrid physical prehension of God's primordial nature. The primordial nature, to be sure, was not past but timeless, but it was conceived as the outcome of a nontemporal concrescence. The option of deriving aim from the future was not open to him. Yet aim signifies the very real future toward which each concrescence aims. It is the occasion's own future, and it is appropriate that it should come from the future.

Aim is only derivatively existent, but it does not depend upon present or past actualities for its existence. Aim exists as characterizing creativity, the actuality of the future. It does not characterize creativity the way eternal objects or objective forms do. For then the creativity could be prehended in terms of its characteristics, whereas creativity is so indeterminate as to be imprehensible. Aim characterizes future creativity by means of a subjective forming that never becomes objective. 14

When the one future creativity is pluralized into the many present concrescences, the creativity of the nascent occasion is directly continuous with the nearest portion of the future. The subjective forming of that nearest portion is most directly relevant to the nascent occasion, such that the aims of the future become the aims of the present. This involves no objectification. Objectification is required for influence when two distinct acts of creativity are involved. Here, the nascent occasion starts out as part of the future actuality, and only in the process of concrescence individuates itself as a distinct act of creativity.

Aim is needed by creativity in order to give it form. Pure creativity (without form) is the same in all of its instances. Creativity could only be distinguished in terms of actual occasions if it did not have any form of its own.

5— The Nature of the Future As Actual

According to this account, we should reconceive the future positively as a domain less determinate than the present, as one infinite creativity characterized by aim, albeit an aim that cannot be prehended. (Were it prehensible, it could not be less determinate than the present.) The future contains a living activity, a spiritual presence if you will, but it cannot be objectified or prehended in any way.

Let us return to our initial discussion of the modes of actuality. The present is actual as concrescence, an activity resulting in the concretely determinate, which is capable of affecting others. The past is actual as this concrete being, fully determinate with respect to itself. In what sense, then, could the future be actual? As pure creativity.

This should be ''creativity" and not "creativity with aim," for only the creativity is primarily existent. Aim is derivatively existent. To be sure, present concrescences are instances of creativity, but what distinguishes the present from the future is that each present concrescence transforms itself into something concrete. The aim inherent in each occasion as that toward which it strives, perishes in the attainment of its goal. Each present instance of creativity is shaped and focused by its particular concrescence, which is its acting.

In contrast, future creativity is always moving on, deeper into the far future even while becoming pluralized in the immediate future into the many acts of present activity. It is forever future. The primary existence of the future lies in its creativity, whereas present concrescences function as reasons for their particularity.

IV— The Plan of this Book

Although my book will examine many facets of Whitehead's theism, this Introduction has been largely concerned with the concept of the future, for the modified meaning I attach to it is clearly unfamiliar and is apt to lead to misunderstandings. My concept overlaps with the ordinary concept only partially. In particular, it challenges our ordinary concept of the future as lacking all activity. I retain "future" for my concept primarily for two reasons: (1) The future is indeterminate in contrast to the past, which is determinate, while the present is the process of achieving the determinate. Although God has a subjective life far surpassing any other subjective life, the way God influences us, I shall argue, is precisely as indeterminate. (2) Any particular locus in the creative advance was once future, that is, part of the divine activity, now present, and will shortly be past.

We may be affected by that which pertains to our own spatiotemporal locus, or by that which occupies other loci. Past actuality affects us from other loci. This requires determinate prehension to traverse the distance from there to here. On the other hand, that which will become past in our own locus cannot affect us as now concrescing, for it has not yet become actual. With respect to our spatiotemporal locus, we are affected by the initial conditions for our concrescence, which comes to us from the future. While the future inhabits all spatiotemporal loci prior to their present activity, it is only as inhabiting our locus that the future is effective. 15

A succinct way of putting the difference between Whitehead's theory and my own is: is the future a locus of creativity? For Whitehead all creativity is concentrated in the creative advance, which is the present in its cosmic extent. Therefore, the future, like the past, is devoid of creativity. I extend the locus of creativity to include the future as well.

This means that the creativity for a particular locus was once part of the divine activity, but becomes a finite concrescence resulting in determinate actuality as that locus shifts relative to the creative advance. There is continuity between the immediate future and the initial situation of the occasion, even though the finite part is merely a very small portion of the divine immensity. All present decisions, however, are incremental determinations of that divine input. Just as we don't ascribe to the underlying creativity the way a creative decision is made, or to God the modifications made in subjective aim, so those features introducing what the occasion does with its initial input should not be ascribed to God. God is in us the way the future is in the present, which is like the way that the initial aim is in each occasion, according to Whitehead. God as such is purely future.

If creativity extends to the future, then the way creativity affects the present must be different than by way of prehension. Prehension is possible only if its datum is either definite or determinate, and creativity is neither. On the other hand, I shall also argue that the everlasting divine concrescence also cannot be prehended. Neither creativity nor the divine concrescence can influence the world unless we modify a more basic underlying assumption that Whitehead makes, that the only means of (causal) influence between two actualities for Whitehead is prehension.

In this Introduction I have only sought to familiarize ourselves with this more active understanding of the future. Justification of this concept will be resumed with chapter 8. Meanwhile we shall examine alternative ways of understanding how God affects the world. I shall argue that this issue cannot be resolved by means of simple interpretation. Here, Hartshorne is correct; Whitehead's theory requires modification on this point. But the modification, I submit, should to be made in quite the opposite way from his. Instead of as

determinate, I shall argue that the way God influences us is precisely less determinate than our process of determination. This discussion (chapters 6–8) of alternative interpretations and modifications should prepare the way to a more direct account.

This problem of God's effectiveness in the world is peculiar to Whitehead's theism. Theories of omnipotence are usually sufficient to show that God affects the world. The substitution of divine persuasion for omnipotence introduces the difficulty. Even so, as long as Whitehead conceived God as purely nontemporal, the eternal objects primordially envisaged could influence nascent occasions. It is only when he introduced the everlasting concrescence of the consequent nature that the problem arose.

If the consequent nature cannot influence the world, then God as a whole would be impotent. God becomes an epiphenomenon, fully capable of experiencing the world but with no means of interacting with it. For all practical purposes, this is atheism. 16 Atheism should be preferable as the simpler hypothesis. We might be tempted to abandon the everlasting concrescence, but Whitehead sees it as our sole basis for affirming divine subjectivity and personhood. His analyses of subjectivity identified it with present immediacy, such that without temporality God could not be subjective.

Before we explore these alternatives, it will be helpful to consider the various stages by which Whitehead arrived at his full concept of God. The unsuspecting reader may assume there is only one concept, God with two natures, primordial and consequent. But close examination of the texts reveals that Whitehead once affirmed a notion of God as a purely nontemporal actual entity. Here we can distinguish between an initial preconcrescent conception, when God was not conceived in terms of concrescence, and a concrescent version, in which God is the conceptual realization of all eternal objects.17

For most philosophical texts it is impossible to determine earlier concepts of crucial features. Authors ordinarily revise and correct their drafts to agree with their final views. They strive for consistency of exposition. We expect to be able to interpret a book as a whole, in accordance with its final view. Process and Reality (and Science and the Modem World) is peculiar in this regard. Here, as in the Bible, smaller hermeneutical units are often more illuminating. It is possible to isolate passages that are consistent in themselves, but not in a wider context. Many of these can be ordered as earlier and later in the compositional process, using some of the techniques developed in biblical criticism. I sought to work out a general compositional analysis in The Emergence of Whitehead's Metaphysics. 18

The present study prefaces its critique and constructive project by a study of the concept of God as it evolves in Process and Reality. Chapter 1 provides some necessary background about Whitehead's earliest concept of God (in SMW). Chapter 2 provides an overview distinguishing the three con

cepts of God. The initial concept of a nonconcrescent, nontemporal actual entity persisted through the early stages of Process and Reality, stages that included the complete drafts for parts II and III. A transitional concept, concrescent but nontemporal led to the final concept most are familiar with. Chapter 3 tries to reconstruct Whitehead's reasoning in developing his final concept of God, starting with Religion in the Making.

Two enduring contributions of process theism have been divine persuasion and temporalistic theism. The idea that God could be affected by the course of the temporal world has been one of its most distinctive features, and dramatizes its difference from classical theism. 19 Temporalistic theism is the direct outcome of the final concept, God as primordial and consequent, since heretofore Whitehead considered God to be purely primordial and nontemporal.

The theme of divine persuasion in contrast to classical omnipotence is no less a basic characteristic of process theism. It is the basis of all process theodicy. Its technical formulation in Whitehead's thought is the divine provision of the initial subjective aim. As I plan to show, this was worked out as an implication of the his middle concept of God as nontemporal yet concrescent.

Not only are divine persuasion and temporalistic theism the products of different concepts of God (held at Whitehead at successive stages), but he seems never to have been able to coordinate them. All the texts concerning the provision of aim are antecedent to any notion of the consequent nature. Even the famous fourth phase, which suggests God's impact upon the world (PR, 350f), says nothing about subjective aim. Many commentators have suggested that the best way a temporal deity could interact with the world would be by some sort of consequent modification upon the provision of aim, but there is no hint of this solution in Process and Reality. This is the problematic legacy Whitehead has left to posterity. I shall explore this legacy in chapter 4, as well as the difficulties surrounding the traditional notion of nontemporal subjectivity.

Thus, Transforming Process Theism has three successive but interrelated foci. First, it examines Whitehead's own quest for a satisfactory concept of God, ending in his wellknown process theism. Unfortunately this resulted in a major difficulty: how is the consequent concrescence effective in the world?

Secondly, chapters 5–8 explore various interpretations or modifications designed to overcome this difficulty, which consider God's effectiveness either as present, past, or nontemporal.

Chapter 6, for example, considers two different ways in which God affects us as past. Nancy Frankenberry argues that God can be construed as the power of the past, basing her analysis on the source of creativity in Adventures of Ideas. Charles Hartshorne proposes that Whitehead's view be reconceived as a society or series of divine occasions. A divine occasion, like an actual occasion, must terminate in unity to be prehensible. Thus though the divine personal

society is always in concrescence, it is only as having concresced, only as past, that it is causally influential.

Hartshorne and others affirm the principle that all influence must be prehensive, and he modifies the assumption that there is only one divine concrescence. In the final part I affirm a single concrescence but call into question the prehensive principle. Future influence is different. It is the still, small voice that calls the world into being out of practically nothing.

PART I— WHITEHEAD'S SUCCESSIVE CONCEPTS OF GOD

Chapter One— The Principle of Limitation

I— Background

Up until the spring of 1925 Whitehead was very diffident about mentioning God in his published deliberations. Since most of the early writings concerned education or the philosophy of nature, this is quite understandable and appropriate. Yet the absence of any discussion of God in most of "Religion and Science" (April 1925), is more striking. 1 In the Lowell Lectures themselves, delivered earlier in February 1925, he cuts short a discussion of God with this remark: "The delineation of final metaphysical truth is no part of this lecture" (SMW, 92).2 In the next few months, before he sent these lectures to the publisher (June 1925), Whitehead did an about face. By including a chapter on ''God" in Science and the Modem World, he was now willing to go on record as a theist.

It is not surprising that Whitehead should have come to embrace the necessity of a principle of limitation. As we shall briefly indicate, it was a natural consequence of his reasoning. Nor is it even surprising that some philosopher should call this principle "God"; philosophers have been known to call all sorts of entities and principles "God." What is surprising is that someone of Whitehead's religious sensibilities, seemingly so confirmed in an agnosticism of a quartercentury's standing, should embrace this strange principle as "God," and that in such a short time.

It is difficult for us to appreciate fully the strangeness of the principle of limitation, since we tend to interpret it in the light of the more refined concepts of Religion in the Making and especially of Process and Reality. But what would we think of Whitehead's theism if Science and the Modern World were all that we had? How does this principle have any commonality with received notions of God? This principle is no Creator, certainly not an individual personal Creator creating the world out of nothing. It is not even the ground of being, nor the final totality including everything. It is not clear how it could redeem. To be sure, more specialized notions such as the Redeemer of Israel or the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, appeal to particular religious

traditions, while Whitehead's presentation moves on a level of abstract generality. Yet how could these two levels be coordinated?

Much of this strangeness can be explained, but the process is complex. First, we need to sketch how Whitehead came to endorse the principle of limitation in order to understand its central role in his thought. Then we need to reconstruct, as far as possible, a coherent account of his religious sensibilities during the years preceding 1925, for these present the clue to the suddenness of his shift. This means a study of Whitehead's criticism of the traditional image of God as found also in later writings, for there is little evidence that he ever modified this criticism once he became a philosophical theist.

As I have argued elsewhere, 3 the major shift from Whitehead's early philosophy of nature and his later metaphysical writings occurs within the composition of Science and the Modern World, between the original Lowell Lectures and the supplemental materials. The metaphysical excursions in the Lowell Lectures really sketch out a philosophical synthesis that is more consonant with the earlier philosophy of nature than with later developments. Its basic categories were "events" and "objects." These events may have been thought as modal differentiations of an underlying substantial activity,4 but this was not called God, lest there be Spinozistic determinism. Since an event was understood as any spatiotemporal region, any event includes other events (ad infinitum), and is included within other events. While past, present, and future could be distinguished as spatiotemporal loci relative to the creative advance, there was no ontological difference between such events.

To be sure, the term eternal object is introduced in the Lowell Lectures, but in one sense it is simply another name for the senseobject. In his philosophy of nature Whitehead had distinguished several different kinds of objects: senseobjects, perceptual objects, scientific objects, even percipient objects. In the Lowell Lectures he grouped them in two different classes, depending on their relation to time: they were either timeless (as were senseobjects) or they were enduring (the other objects). Basically, eternal objects constituted the external characteristics of events. They had no role assigned to them other than being the determinates of events, apart from which they have no existence.

The atomic theory of occasions, which I take to be the heart of Whitehead's basic shift, changed all that. If the present occasion is understood to be a momentary yet indivisible process of determination, it is ontologically distinct from a past occasion, which is fully determinate. Heretofore eternal objects had been understood as inherent in events; how can they be inherent in the future if there are no future occasions? (That which renders occasions atomic is the present process of determination, so there can be no future occasions, no future ontological units of actuality.) Since eternal objects could no longer be understood to function immanently in future events, they were reconceived to function transcendently as possibilities, that is, as characteristics that might

be realized in present processes of realization. Eternal objects were not just to be regarded as the eternal characteristics of what was already realized, but as internal possibilities to be realized. Not all would be realized, yet they could influence the process of realization.

Unlike most theories, where possibilities influence only freely acting, conscious beings, primarily humans, Whitehead's possibilities influence all occasions, since all prehend eternal objects, and all undergo a process of determination that is initially undetermined to some degree. Thus, with the expansion of the role of eternal objects as including transcendent possibilities, their scope of influence is enormously increased. Now, the world must be understood not only in terms of the requirements of the actual but also of the possible. Taken just in itself, all sorts of things are possible; not only those things that conform to the general contours of what is already actual. The actual world is already somewhat ordered, but what is the guarantee that future possibilities will conform to that order, rather than introducing a complete counter order, or complete disorder?

The Lowell Lectures had no principle of limitation, nor any need of one. The need first becomes evident when the eternal objects assume the transcendent role of possibilities in a philosophy that envisions all occasions to be internally related to eternal objects. If there are all sorts of eternal objects, not just those that characterize actual occasions, or even actualizable occasions, then there threatens the danger of absolute chaos, unless there is some sort of a constraining principle. This constraining principle can limit the entire range of "possibilities" to those that are actualizable. If only those that conform to the general order of the actual world are deemed actualizable, then that order can be maintained. The principle that guarantees that order cannot simply be an another eternal object, for then it would be simply another possibility to be limited, rather than the actual limit imposed on all possibilities.

By providing for the general metaphysical order of the world the principle of limitation fulfills the role of cosmic orderer. This role was traditionally assigned to God, as the teleological arguments for God's existence attest. The unsatisfactoriness of traditional formulations of this argument lay in its assumption of an omnipotent creator. As cosmic orderer such a God should create complete order; yet if so, why is there still disorder and evil? The principle of limitation provides a place for a cosmic orderer without that consequence. The world can be partly ordered without being totally ordered. The principle of limitation, by limiting the world to the actualizable, influences the process of actualization but does not determine it.

It is this discovery about partial ordering that revolutionizes Whitehead's thinking about God. Many see in his later adoption of temporalistic theism the primary contribution of Whitehead to theism, but equally important if not

more so is his rethinking of the whole nature of creation such that God is not conceived to be the sole creator. While Whitehead's theory of partial divine ordering was considerably refined over the next three or four years, it has its impetus in thinking of God as the principle of limitation.

Since Whitehead avoided any public discussion of God prior to 1925, we must rely upon the testimony of others as to his earlier religious reviews. Here the views are sharply contrasting. Edmund Whittaker wrote in his obituary notice of Whitehead that his early religious convictions "lost their hold on him, and for a time he became an outspoken and even polemical agnostic." 5 W. R. Matthews, Dean of King's College, London, when Whitehead was professor at the Imperial College of Science and Technology records a very different picture. He finds Lucien Price's Dialogues6 defective because "they do not convey the religious spirit of Whitehead's thinking." While ''sharply critical comments on the apparent contradictions and confusions in Christian teaching are authentic and characteristic," they fail to show that Whitehead "spoke from within the fellowship of the spiritually awakened. He was a worshipper."7

These comments by Whittaker and Matthews may be partially reconciled by referring the first to Whitehead's later Cambridge period and those of Matthews to his postwar London period. Bertrand Russell confirms this: "Throughout the time that I knew him well—that is to say, roughly, from 1898 to 1912—he was very definitely and emphatically agnostic."8 Yet the death of Whitehead's youngest son Eric, killed in the war in 1918 may well have led him to a different religious attitude: "The pain of this loss had a great deal to do with turning his thoughts to philosophy and with causing him to seek ways of escaping from belief in a merely mechanistic universe."9 Yet while the quest for religious peace may well have intensified after 1918, it is another thing whether Whitehead then found any concept of God he could consider satisfactory. Without such a concept it would be more confusing than helpful to espouse belief in God, since he would be bound to be misunderstood. Even when later he was armed with what to his mind was an adequate concept, he was misunderstood by ardent students of his philosophy of nature who thought he was a toughminded empiricist done with all notions of divinity.

Matthews records that Whitehead was a worshipper, but this does not necessarily say that he was a believer. Whitehead, we may say, worshipped an Unknown God. If, as I believe, the lecture "Religion and Science" was delivered before Whitehead had discovered his initial concept of God,10 that lecture supplies a very good clue as to what he may have then worshipped:

something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realised; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present

facts; something that gives meaning to all that possesses, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest. (SMW, 191f)

This is what religion seeks, but could it be conceptually articulated?

Whitehead grew up in an Anglican parsonage. His father, the Rev. Alfred Whitehead, was vicar of St. Peter's, Isle of Thanet, and honorary canon of Canterbury. His elder brother Henry ultimately became bishop of Madras. 11 He was schooled at Sherborne, originally founded in 741 by Benedictine monks. Among other things, he was reading the Bible in Greek.12 As an undergraduate he had a lively interest in foreign missions. "We do not know what many of our Lord's sayings mean," he is remembered as saying, "but the commandment to go into all the world and preach the gospel is perfectly clear."

He was nearly converted to Roman Catholicism under the influence of Cardinal Newman about the time of his marriage in 1890. The question of papal infallibility ultimately deterred him, but a sense of the genuinely religious must have attracted him. This he found lacking in the religion of his youth. As Norman Pittenger recognizes, "He criticized Anglicanism, the religion in which he had been brought up, because with all its advantages—the Prayer Book itself, the glory of its cathedrals, the historical splendor of its parish churches—it has (he said) 'everything except religion.'"13

From 1884 to 1888 Whitehead was an active member of an intense discussion group of undergraduates and graduates known as the Apostles. Victor Lowe has reported on some of the titles of the papers read, and the way the members voted afterward.14 On May 2, 1885, the question was put: "Do we believe in God?" Whitehead voted yes, as he did two years later when the question was whether a personal God is a satisfactory explanation of the universe. Once the question was "Shall we transcend our limitations?" "Yes," Whitehead wrote in the book, ''I want to see God." One night in 1886 the Apostles divided on the issue, "Should Churchmen go to Rome?" Whitehead wrote: "Yes—or in the other direction."15

Victor Lowe conjectures that by "the other direction" "he meant, I believe, towards dropping all Christian belief." I support this conjecture, for it makes good sense of the long theological quest Whitehead undertook (from 1890 to 1897), which began with the near conversion to Roman Catholicism and ended in the agnosticism known to Russell and Whittaker.16

In the preface to Adventures of Ideas Whitehead mentions Paul Sarpi's History of the Council of Trent as one of six books singled out as having "chiefly influenced my general way of looking" at its topic (AI, vii). In an earlier book, a vivid example taken from Sarpi's book is discussed (SMW, 8f). This book, which made such an impact on Whitehead, was most likely read

early in his period of personal religious quest. 17 What impressed Whitehead most in reading Sarpi was the sharp contrast between the medieval thinkers who were committed to reason, while the various sixteenthcentury parties all relied upon authority to settle disputes. These authorities were various: the traditions of the Church in the case of the Catholics, sola scriptura in the case of the Protestants, and empirical evidence in the case of the scientists.

Whitehead found himself in sympathy with the medieval rationalists, acutely aware of the limitations of any method that seeks to circumvent reason. This may well have clarified his rationalist commitments, giving him a definite criterion by which to weigh his options besides fidelity to religious tradition, or the deliverances of the scientific community.18 In the end it was not the religious sensibility that was found wanting. It was the ability of the best theology of the time to make sense of that sensibility in rational terms. As he later said to Dean Matthews, "The older I get, the more certain I am that nearly all the things Catholics do are right, and nearly all the reasons they give are wrong."19

Later, during his second religious quest after World War I, Whitehead may have been more successful in distinguishing religious insights from the notion of God, and finding a way of nurturing religious concerns in the absence of any satisfactory concept of Divinity. This does not seem to have been so initially during his period of agnosticism. (Pittenger describes this period as "brief," Lowe puts it at "about twenty years.")20 Then something that was previously found precious had been excised. It had been meticulously judged over nearly a decade and been found wanting, therefore rejected.

"Whitehead's son North," Lowe reports, "once said to me that there was something a little odd about his father's agnosticism. The tone was a bit like that of a priest celebrating a Black Mass. It was as if he wanted to be religious, and was being defiantly atheistic. At least, though the conclusion of the long private debate was perfectly definite, it was not altogether welcome. The process had been agonizing, nothing one would go through again or like to see one's children go through. Accordingly, most of the theological library was sold."21

In the light of these descriptions of Whitehead's earlier agnosticism, we suspect that Dean Matthews did not come to know him until after the war. Then Whitehead seems to have arrived at a renewed appreciation for the religious vision, all the while recognizing that no concept of God he knew was at all satisfactory. World War I represented a tremendous loss to Whitehead: not only his son Eric but generations of students he had known. The loss evoked the religious question, which he later formulated most generally as "the question whether the process of the temporal world passes into the formation of other actualities bound together in an order in which novelty does

not mean loss" (PR, 340). There is material persistence, but it cannot preserve novelty. Is there some cosmic memory that can?

I think that religion for Whitehead then did not mean particular religious traditions and authorities, but rational religion. Religion as the human response to the ultimate might even embrace our quest for existential meaning. If rejecting common concepts of God makes him an unbeliever, then he is an unbeliever with an extraordinarily high estimate of religion:

It is the one element in human experience which persistently shows an upward trend. It fades and then recurs. But when it renews its force, it recurs with an added richness and purity of content. The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience. (SMW, 192) 22

When he finally discovered an adequate concept of God in the course of his metaphysical reflections on the nature of possibility, he was prepared on very short notice to announce it to the world, even though that principle is quite divergent from nearly all received notions as to God's nature. In the final analysis the principle of limitation is God because it satisfies Whitehead's personal religious sensibilities. It serves as the culmination of a religious quest begun as early as 1890, if not before.

II— Criticisms

If only the principle of limitation satisfied him, what was it about traditional conceptions of God that he found so unsatisfactory? Here the biographical evidence already marshalled does not help us. Perhaps if we review the criticisms of traditional theism and religious practice that run through his books, we can obtain some clue. Whitehead's criticisms may explain why he rejected those concepts of God known to him, and how his own concepts were designed to overcome them.

1. First let us consider some of the criticisms with respect to religion generally. Perhaps with respect to his own upbringing, Whitehead could observe that "religion is tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life" (SMW, 188), but religion could also be savage; consider the horrors that attend it:

[H]uman sacrifice, an in particular the slaughter of children, cannibalism, sensual orgies, abject superstition, hatred as between races, the

maintenance of degrading customs, hysteria, bigotry, can all be laid at its charge. Religion is the last refuge of human savagery. The uncritical association of religion with goodness is directly negatived by plain facts. (RM, 37; cf. Al, 12)

The idea that religion is necessarily good is "a dangerous delusion" (RM, 18). "In your religious experience the God with whom you have made terms may be the God of destruction, the God who leaves in his wake the loss of the greater reality" (RM, 17). As long as the only God he knew was so perceived, the earlier Whitehead would feel justified in rejecting God.

In Adventures of Ideas Whitehead reflects on the reasons for this persistence of savagery. The basic reason may be found in cultural lag, primarily because religion in our day is resistant to rational criticism.

Profound flashes of insight remain ineffective for centuries, not because they are unknown, but by reason of dominant interests which inhibit reaction to that type of generality. The history of religion is the history of the countless generations required for interest to attach itself to profound ideas. For this reason religions are so often more barbarous than the civilizations in which they flourish. (AI, 171)

This criticism is applied to the patristic church and to the Reformation: "The failure consisted in the fact that barbaric elements and defects [left unspecified] in intellectual comprehension had not been discarded, but remained as essential elements in the various formulations of Christian theology, orthodox and heretical alike" (AI, 166).

The resistance to rational criticism extends to the mutual criticism of the various religious traditions, and to criticism by science. "The decay of Christianity and Buddhism, as determinative influences in modern thought, is partly due to the fact that each religion has unduly sheltered itself from the other" (RM, 146). Religion has been unsettled by scientific advance, but it need not be, if religion could only adopt a spirit of willingness to be transformed by rational criticism. "A clash of doctrines is not a disaster—it is an opportunity" (SMW, 186). "The clash is a sign that there are wider truths and finer perspectives within which a reconciliation of a deeper religion and a more subtle science will be found" (SMW, 185).

These general reflections on the interaction of science and religion give us a little insight into Whitehead's specific difficulty. They can easily be endorsed by theistic scientists reflecting on their profession with respect to the life of the church. There does not seem to be any particular scientific controversy (such as evolution) which may have occasioned Whitehead's own

stance. The general accent on rationality, however, is important to his general outlook.

2. The particular rationality that Whitehead sought requires general metaphysical principles which God could exemplify (PR, 343). Expressed another way, "God's existence is not generically different from that of other actual entities, except that he is 'primordial' in sense to be gradually explained" (PR, 75). 23 If this were not the case, reality would be split up into separate realms that need not be connected to one another. We should have incoherence in the special sense Whitehead specified: "the arbitrary disconnection of first principles" (PR, 6). For Descartes, the two realms were those of mind and matter. While mind and matter express in some way obvious features of ordinary experience, there is no fundamental reason, within Descartes's philosophy, why it should not be possible for there to be a world consisting solely of minds, or of matter. By the definition of substance adopted, "this system makes a virtue of its incoherence" (PR, 6), for the independence of these substances dissolves necessary interconnection. But ''there is no entity, not even God, 'which requires nothing but itself in order to exist"' (RM, 108).

In his quest for a generic rationality Whitehead opposes all dualisms, not only the Cartesian, but the division into nature and supernature, and the bifurcation between causal nature and apparent nature. Some charge that Whitehead himself bifurcates nature into events and objects, but that is to miss the nature of the fallacy. It lies in the arbitrary disconnection between first principles. Objects and events, however, are necessarily interconnected: events can only be characterized by objects, while objects receive their temporal instantiation from events.

Notice the parallel between causal nature and God as creator. Both operate behind the scenes, so to speak, to bring about the world we experience. Unless there are principles spanning both realms, by which this causation or creation can be understood, the transcendent component is unknown, beyond all criticism. It is just possible that Whitehead's longstanding dissatisfaction with the notion of a Creator God exempt from general metaphysical principles eventually led him to discern the parallel phenomena in the philosophy of nature, and to oppose any reliance upon causal nature. The effort to explain nature within the bounds of experience has its parallel in the enterprise of understanding God within the limits of generic principles.

This insistence that God be conceived within the general characterization of the whole is the one requirement Whitehead specified before he publicly espoused theism. In all probability his rejection of those theistic concepts that do not meet this requirement was a central concern during his agnostic period. Just after Whitehead refused to declare himself on the question of God's existence, he wrote:

My point is that any summary conclusion jumping from our conviction of the existence of such an order of nature to the easy assumption that there is an ultimate reality which, in some unexplained way, is to be appealed to for the removal of perplexity, constitutes the great refusal of rationality to assert its rights. (SMW, 92)

We should not infer some ultimate reality behind the scenes that can explain what we directly encounter only by being completely different from it. Whitehead demands rather that whatever ultimacy "from which our formulation starts should disclose the same general principles of reality, which we dimly discern as stretching away into regions beyond our explicit powers of discernment" (SMW, 93).

Much later he levelled the same sort of objection against the Trinitarian theologians: they failed to make the needed generalization. He has very high regard for their achievement: "These Christian theologians have the distinction of being the only thinkers who in a fundamental metaphysical doctrine have improved upon Plato" (AI, 167). 24 In rejecting the Arian concept of Christ as creature, they rejected Platonic imitation in favor of the direct immanence of Christ in God. Suitably generalized, this means that one actuality could be directly immanent in another. Aristotle flatly rejects this possibility,25 but the temporal distinction Whitehead draws between the past and the present renders it plausible, for present subjects can prehend and thereby appropriate past objects.

Unfortunately, the theologians never made this advance into general metaphysics. The reason for this check was another unfortunate presupposition. The nature of God was exempted from all the metaphysical categories which applied to the individual things in this temporal world. The concept of him was a sublimation from its barbaric origin. He stood in the same relation to the whole World as early Egyptian or Mesopotamian kings stood to their subject populations. Also the moral characters were very analogous. In the final metaphysical sublimation, he became the one absolute, omnipotent, omniscient source of all being, for his own existence requiring [required?] no relation to anything beyond himself. He was internally complete. (AI, 169)

If the concept of God were exempt from the metaphysical principles, it could escape the refinement of rational criticism. Barbaric vestiges could still remain. This is an apt summary of classical theism, emphasizing those features Whitehead as agnostic may be supposed to have opposed. He also criticizes those of this era who would abandon metaphysics for limited pursuits.

Duller men were content with limited accuracy and constructed special sciences: thicker intellects gloried in the notion that the foundations of the world were laid amid impenetrable fog. They conceived God in their own image, and depicted him with a positive dislike of efforts after understanding beyond assigned methodologies. Satan acquired an intellectual character, and fell by reason of an indecent desire to understand his Creator. (AI, 104).

The insistence on metaphysical generality leads to some suspicion of the category of God's will, since that can be appealed to in explaining the inscrutable. "The new, and almost profane, concept of the goodness of God replaces the older emphasis on the will of God. In a communal religion you study the will of God in order that He may preserve you; in a purified religion, rationalized under the influence of the worldconcept, you study his goodness in order to be like him" (RM, 42). Here the concern is with morality and religious discernment, but metaphysics as well "requires that the relationships of God to the World should lie beyond the accidents of will, and that they be founded on the necessities of the nature of God and the nature of the World" (AI, 168).

This also applies to the epistemological device used by Descartes and Leibniz of guaranteeing human knowledge by the appeal to the goodness of God's will. "It is a device very repugnant to a consistent rationality. The very possibility of knowledge should not be an accident of God's goodness; it should depend on the interwoven natures of things. After all, God's knowledge has equally to be explained" (PR, 190). In another context, where God's goodness functions to provide, which initiates the new concrescence, he recognizes that God can be said to be the creator of that occasion. But he immediately qualifies himself:

But the phrase is apt to be misleading by its suggestion that the ultimate creativity of the universe is to be ascribed to God's volition. The true metaphysical position is that God is the aboriginal [nontemporal] instance of this creativity, and is therefore the aboriginal condition which qualifies its action. (PR, 225)

Creativity ensures the everlasting coexistence of God and world, each requiring the other. The world's comingintoexistence is not dependent upon God's will, as it must be in every theistic attempt to explain its temporal origin.

We may not consider the nonexemplification of generic principles to be a decisive objection to theism, largely because Whitehead has designed his own concepts of God to get around this difficulty. Yet it may be plausible to suppose that all concepts known to him previously were subject to this objection,

particularly if it becomes necessary to modify traditional theism to overcome this problem.

3. One particular form of theism, at least in its usual forms, cannot meet this objection: the doctrine of God as personal transcendent creator. In one passage Whitehead gives summary judgment, speaking of "the doctrine of an aboriginal, eminently real, transcendent creator, at whose fiat the world came into being, and whose imposed will it obeys, [which] is the fallacy which has infused tragedy into the histories of Christianity and of Mahometanism" (PR, 342).

In Religion in the Making the transcendent creator is introduced as one of the three main simple renderings:

The Semitic concept of a definite personal individual entity, whose existence is the one ultimate metaphysical fact, absolute and underivative, and who decreed and ordered the derivative existence which we call the actual world. This Semitic concept is the rationalization of the tribal gods of the earlier communal religions. It expresses the extreme doctrine of transcendence. (RM, 68)

While perhaps not in the same way as in Whitehead's time, many biblical scholars see the monotheistic God of Israel as arising out of an earlier polytheistic context in which exclusive allegiance was demanded: "Thou shalt have not other gods before me" (Ex. XX.3). Whitehead here means to describe this concept simply and unqualifiedly, adopting the strategy (rather unfairly, with respect to the Jews) of reserving qualifications for its Christian appropriation. Yet in the end "the Church gradually returned to the Semitic concept, with the addition of the threefold personality. It is a concept which is clear, terrifying, and unprovable" (RM, 74f). It is clear as unqualified, terrifying by placing us totally dependent on divine will, and unprovable because it transcends all our categories.

Although the notion of an individual personal creator is criticized, it is not the question of God's personality that is at stake. That this should be so is rather remarkable given that when Whitehead drafted this passage he most likely still affirmed the impersonal principle of limitation as God, now understood as the principle of rightness. It may even be at this time that Whitehead believed that all attempts to prove the personality of God transcended the metaphysical principles at our disposal. What he objects to is something more general, the doctrine of creation itself, "the Semitic theory of a wholly transcendent God creating out of nothing an accidental universe" (PR, 95). 26 If God is basically related to the world as its creator, and our rational knowledge is limited to the world, then we are ultimately dependent upon the inscrutability of the divine will.27

In Religion in the Making Whitehead specifies two main difficulties. "One of them is that it leaves God completely outside metaphysical rationalization. We know, according to it, that He is such a being as to design and create this universe, and there our knowledge stops. If we mean by his goodness that He is good. But such goodness must not be confused with the ordinary goodness of daily life. He is undeniably useful, because anything baffling can be ascribed to his direct decree" (RM, 70).

This argument passes over in silence one alleged source of knowledge about God: revelation. Yet for epistemic purposes, revelation may be exactly parallel to creation. Both are directly initiated by God, and wholly dependent on his will. Both make the distinction between the hidden source and what is made manifest. But instead of criticizing the doctrine of revelation, Whitehead determines to bypass it in his quest for rational religion. This leads to a revised understanding of dogma, which is no longer necessarily tied to that which is revealed. "The dogmas of religion are the attempts to formulate in precise terms the truths disclosed in the religious experience of mankind" (RM, 58). The definition enables him to be critically open to all the religious traditions of mankind without having to solve the insuperable problem of determining which revelational claims are true. If we relinquish all claims to revelation, then it is exceedingly difficult to see how knowledge of an absolutely transcendent God could be possible.

"The second difficulty of the concept is to get itself proved . . . Any proof which commences with the consideration of the character of the actual world cannot rise above the actuality of this world. It can only discover all the factors disclosed in the world as experienced. In other words, it may discover an immanent God, but not a God wholly transcendent" (RM, 71, my italics).

Some transcendence can be ascribed to God, just not complete transcendence, at least with respect to Whitehead's later understanding of the primordial actuality. "The notion of God . . . is that of an actual entity immanent In the actual world, but transcending any finite cosmic epoch—a being at once actual, eternal, immanent, and transcendent" (PR, 93). This sense of transcendence might be thought to be peculiar to God, but Whitehead immediately corrects this misapprehension: "The transcendence of God is not peculiar to him. Every actual entity, in virtue of its novelty, transcends its universe, God included" (PR, 93f).

The same difficulty continues to be Whitehead's concern elsewhere, as, for instance, applied to Newton's acceptance of a supernatural origin to the world. This entails a version of "the cosmological argument, now generally abandoned as invalid; because our notion of causation concerns the relation of states of things within the actual world, and can only be illegitimately extended to a transcendent derivation" (PR, 93). By a parallel argument, we may insist that our understanding of causes applies only to apparent nature,

and cannot be extended to causal nature, as required by any bifurcation of nature.

Whitehead's opposition to God the creator extends throughout his writings. One way of understanding his enterprise is as a persistent search for an alternative understanding of creation. In Adventures of Ideas he sums up the issue thus:

There are two current doctrines as to this process. One is that of the external Creator, eliciting this final togetherness out of nothing. The other doctrine is that it is a metaphysical principle belonging to the nature of things, that there is nothing in the Universe other than instances of this passage and components of these instances. Let this latter doctrine be adopted when the word Creativity expresses the notion that each event is a process issuing in novelty. (AI, 236)

Each event is a creation insofar as it is new. It is not a creation out of nothing, insofar as it appropriates past actualities, but something that has been brought into being, and that deserves this name. The traditional creation out of nothing need not have the monopoly on concepts of creation. In the developed theory, creativity provides for subjectivity, freedom, and novelty, themes that may not have been able to flourish in a conceptuality dominated by God the creator.

"The creation of the world—said Plato—is the victory of persuasion over force" (AI, 83; cf. 25). Whitehead follows Plato here in favoring persuasion. It becomes the basis for his next basic objection to traditional notions of divine power.

4. If God is conceived to be the hidden cause of the world, and only the world exemplifies metaphysical principles, then we have no means of reflectively refining the traditional understanding of divine power. Whitehead never tires of pointing out the barbaric origins of our notions of divine power, notions that remain unless thoroughly criticized. The Psalms celebrate

joy in the creative energy of a supreme ruler who is also a tribal champion . . . [But] this worship of glory arising from power is not only dangerous: it arises from barbaric conception of God . . . The glorification of power has broken more hearts than it has healed. (RM, 55f)

This glorification meant that God was conceived to have the unchecked power of oriental despots. "The Church gave into God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar" (PR, 342). Interwoven with Christian ideals, "there has survived throughout history the older concept of a Divine Despot and a slavish Universe, each with the morals of its kind" (AI, 26). "In the origin of civilized religion, gods are like dictators" (MT, 49).

In the origin of theism, this is perhaps to be expected. Whitehead's criticism is that these barbaric notions should persist so long. His point is that they resist any effective criticism because God is conceived as exempt from the ordinary canons of rationality. By being placed outside the universe, God's creative power is unchecked by the competition with other powers.

By Process and Reality Whitehead had worked out a notion of divine power that effectively criticized classical notions, but it is first in Adventures of Ideas that he introduces the contrast between "persuasive" and "coercive" power in reliance upon Plato.

The alternative doctrine [to creative persuasion], prevalent then and now, sees either in the many gods or in the one God, the final coercive forces wielding the thunder. By a metaphysical sublimation of this doctrine of God as the supreme agency of compulsion, he is transposed into the one supreme reality, omnipotently disposing of a wholly derivative world. (Al, 166)

The contrast is perhaps not quite right, for those worshipping the traditional Creator do not perceive him to be coercive. Only that which has a will can be compelled to act against its will, and that which has not yet been created has no will. "Persuasion" and "compulsion" can be seen as contrasting forms of indirect power, whereby the power of the patient must be engaged by the primary agent to bring about the intended end. Traditional theism is based rather upon solitary power, whereby the end sought is brought about solely by the primary agent, independently of any secondary powers. Solitary power is really the notion Whitehead means to oppose, for the creation of the world out of nothing by omnipotent fiat is the supreme instance of solitary power. 28

Although the explicit contrast between "persuasion" and "compulsion" first makes its appearance in late writings, Whitehead's criticism of divine power is deep seated, going back to the days before he explicitly espoused theism. Thus in the early lecture on "Religion and Science" he noted: "The presentation of God under the aspect of power awakens every modern instinct of critical reaction'' (SMW, 191). It certainly awakened his critical instinct.

5. Finally, there is some criticism directed toward the concept of God as unchanging: "The vicious separation of the flux from the permanence leads to the concept of an entirely static God, with eminent reality, in relation to an entirely fluent world, with deficient reality" (PR, 346). In part this view came about from the Greek infatuation with mathematics:

The human mind was dazzled by this glimpse of eternity. The result of this revelation was that Greek philosophy—at least in its most influential school—conceived ultimate reality in the guise of static existences with

timeless interrelations. Perfection was unrelated to transition. Creation, with its world in change, was an inferior vocation of a static Absolute. (MT, 81)

This criticism, however, is noticeably absent from earlier writings, such as Religion in the Making. It seems to have been evoked by the shift to temporalistic theism in Process and Reality. Once Whitehead clearly affirmed divine temporality, it is natural for him to criticize the bested alternative. Beforehand, however, he did not seem to have been troubled by the problem. Characteristically, he termed God the nontemporal actual entity, and the original contrast between God and the world was a simple contrast between permanence and flux. I cannot suppose that this later critique of God as timeless goes back to his atheist days.

The other three attributes of God criticized (God as exempt from metaphysical principles, God as transcendent Creator, God as solitary power) are intrinsically connected, and may well form the basis for the early Whitehead's rejection of theism. The rationalist objection is not commonly made but Whitehead alludes to it frequently. For if we exempt the concept of God from the criticism that conformity to metaphysical principles demands, then we have lost a major way of correcting our preconceptions. If unrefined, the barbaric origins of our notion of divine power persist. The trouble with the doctrine of creation, as traditionally conceived, is that it justifies this denial of rationality by placing divine power beyond the reach of the world, and of any interaction with worldly powers.

The traditional notion of divine power early evoked Whitehead's critique, as the essay "Religion and Science" (April 1925) indicates: "The presentation of God under the aspect of power awakens every modern instinct of critical reaction" (SMW, 191). However it affected others, it certainly awakened such instincts in Whitehead, although he does not seem to trust himself to spell them out here. Whitehead's sympathy for religious sensibilities had travelled a long way from the empathic agreement he shared with Bertrand Russell during the first decade of the century; nevertheless, all the alternatives he knew were inextricably bound up with the notion of a transcendent creator, which evoked the wrong sense of divine power. While sympathetic to the aims of theism, Whitehead could not then espouse theism as long as it inevitably contained insuperable difficulties.

It is very difficult to ascertain which of the first four criticisms, if any, were reasons that led Whitehead to give up theism in the first place. Presumably one of the books he read during the sevenyear period of theological inquiry was Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. If so, perhaps judgments formed during that reading may have left their mark. For example,

he notes that classical theism fashions "God in the image of an imperial ruler, God in the image of a personification of moral energy, God in the image of an ultimate philosophical principle. Hume's Dialogues criticize unanswerably these modes of explaining the system of the world" (PR, 342f). In Whitehead's opinion, Hume has excluded all the traditional alternatives, so if theism is rationally possible, there must be a fourth alternative. This he claims to have found, at least by the closing pages of Process and Reality: "What follows is merely an attempt to add another speaker to that masterpiece, Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion" (PR, 343).

The criticism that classical notions of creator and created generate an impassible gulf is also referred to Hume:

The worst of a gulf is, that it is very difficult to know what is happening on the further side of it. This has been the fate of the God of traditional theology. It is only by drawing the long bow of mysticism that evidence can be collected from our temporal World. Also the worst of unqualified omnipotence is that it is accompanied by responsibility for every detail of every happening. This whole topic is discussed by Hume in his famous Dialogues. (AI, 169; cf. PR, 94)

These quotations referring to Hume touch upon all the facets of Whitehead's criticism of traditional theism except with respect to divine immutability, suggesting that they do indeed go back to his reading of Hume, which may well have taken place during the 1890s.

The criticism that traditional omnipotence requires God to be responsible for all details is very fundamental, even if voiced infrequently: "If this conception be adhered to, there can be no alternative except to discern in aim the origin of all evil as well as of all good. He is then the supreme author of the play, and to Him must therefore be ascribed its shortcomings as well as its success" (SMW, 179).

Such theistic determinism may well be challenged by philosophies of substance that sharply distinguish between creative power and innerworldly powers. A being is first brought into being, who then freely acts. But in the event ontology Whitehead increasingly adopted, this was not possible. To describe an event's being means to analyze the means whereby it comes to be. These means could be described in purely naturalistic terms, as in the first Lowell Lectures, bracketing all questions of ultimacy. But if so, God's relation to the natural order remains unclarified. The problem lies in explaining an event ontology in creationist terms. If the classical model of a transcendent creator is used, determinism results, for the unlimited power of divine creativity excludes all others from the process of bringing an event into being.

III— Types of Limitation

The strength of the principle of limitation lies precisely in its combining a traditional divine function (providing for cosmic order) with an event ontology that does not preclude creaturely freedom. There is some order in the universe in any case, although there may be many ways of explaining its existence. Whitehead mentions "chance" as one possibility (SMW, 179). The rational relationships among the infinite array of possibilities is not enough. He tells us that God's existence is "the ultimate irrationality" (SMW, 178), even though some limitation is required for the emergence of actuality. What is irrational is rather the nature of God by which this the particular kind of limitation is made, which can only be empirically discerned. "No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality'' (SMW, 178). 29

Several types of limitation are listed:

This limitation takes three forms, (i) the special logical relations which all events must conform to, (ii) the selection of relationships to which the events do conform, and (iii) the particularity which infects the course even within those general relationships of logic and causation. (SMW, 177)30

We are given no explicit guidance as to how these different types of limitation connect with God's limiting function. Yet some cosmic limitation is needed. Moreover, with the third kind of limitation Whitehead is open to the possibility that this may extend to what are usually regarded as contingent features of the universe. His example is the threedimensionality of the space we live in,31 but that does not focus on the features of cosmic order necessary for human survival the way some recent reflections have. Discussions of the socalled "anthropic principle" have isolated a number of pervasive cosmic constants which within very narrow perimeters must be what they are in order for life to emerge anywhere in the universe. Typically these are physical constants that can be measured and that could, from a more abstract perspective, have other values.

The cosmic order is wonderful in its fragility. We are fundamentally dependent upon the basic constants of the universe such as the speed of light, the gravitational constant, Planck's constant, the electric charge of the proton and the electron, and the properties of subatomic particles. Alterations in any of these constants could "cause huge changes in the structure of atoms and atomic nuclei. Even when the changes are only slight, most atomic nuclei are unstable and cannot exist."32 If this were so, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen would not exist, as well as all life forms dependent upon

them. 33 Moreover, slight changes in the values of these constants can cause large changes in the structure and evolution of stars, even to the extent that luminous stars would not exist at all, or have lifetimes too short to sustain the evolution of life.

Even more strikingly, Stephen Hawking writes:

[A] reduction of the rate of expansion [of the universe] by one part in 10 to the 12 at the time when the temperature of the Universe was 10 to the 10 K would have resulted in the Universe starting to recollapse when its radius was only 1/3000 of the present value and the temperature was still 10,000 degrees. The only "explanation" we can offer . . . is that . . . our existence requires the Universe to have certain properties . . . [including] the existence of gravitationally bound systems such as stars and galaxies and a long enough timescale for biological evolution to occur. If the Universe were expanding too slowly, it would not have this second property for it would recollapse too soon. If it were expanding too fast, regions which had slightly higher densities than the average or slightly lower rates of expansion would still continue expanding indefinitely and would not form bound systems. Thus it would seem that life is possible only because the Universe is expanding at just the rate to avoid recollapse.34

An appropriate cosmic order is necessary to accomplish this.35

In Science and the Modern World, this cosmic order is achieved by an impersonal principle of limitation, not by any agent or activity. This is required by the metaphysics Whitehead then espoused, based on events (later, actual occasions) and its underlying substantial activity. God could not be identified with the underlying activity. Too often, he found, the "unfortunate habit has prevailed of paying to [God] metaphysical compliments." If then God were conceived to be the foundation of the metaphysical situation, there could "be no alternative except to discern in Him the origin of all evil as well as of good" (SMW, 179).

On the other hand, if God were then conceived as an actual occasion, then God would just be one more efficient power competing with others. Also, the determination of the divine occasion would either conflict with some actual occasion or occasions, or there would be gaps in the plenum of actual occasions.

Since reality was conceived exclusively in terms of events and objects, if God could not be an event, God must be constituted solely of objects. This entailed that God would be an uncreated principle of limitation that was incapable of participating in the underlying activity. In the later conceptuality (of RM), God could not be an instance of creativity, since not an event.

There seems to be a third alternative. Why could God not be conceived as an agency that was not event? Why could God not be "outside" spacetime? Insofar as this expression has any extensional meaning, even in a very extended sense, God could be conceived as "within" this generalized extensive continuum, and then would have the generalized properties of an event. What is most often meant, however, is God is not part of the extensional matrix. In that case, Whitehead insists that our account of God, like that of other actualities, "should disclose the same general principles of reality, which we dimly discern as stretching away into regions beyond our explicit powers of discernment" (SMW, 93).

Later it becomes possible to conceive of God in temporalistic terms as exercising creativity, but at the outset, God is not an event, either as the totality of events or a part, nor "outside" the spatiotemporal realm. If so, God can only be conceived as a principle constituted solely of eternal objects.

Although by later standards the principle of limitation is a somewhat primitive concept of God, it marked a decisive step for Whitehead. It provided a workable alternative to the notion of a transcendent creator with all of its attendant difficulties, and it could still assign God a cosmic role in nature. It placed God clearly on the side of final (or at least nonefficient) causation. It determined that God's creative role would be among the necessary rather than the sufficient factors. Within these guidelines Whitehead's conception of God could develop in tandem with the development of his metaphysical outlook. But the concepts of God as a nontemporal actuality, subsequently as also temporal, should be looked upon as refinements of this initial concept, not its rejection.

Chapter Two— Deconstructing Theism

I— Introduction

This chapter seeks to deconstruct the text of Process and Reality with respect to its concept of God. The method I use is compositional analysis, for it is possible to determine to a considerable extent its various layers of composition. By examining the way in which Whitehead put it together, we can gain some insight into the creative process at work. Thus, my purpose is not to cast suspicion on the constructive task of speculative philosophy, but to clear the ground for a powerful reconstruction of theism. We can trace the steps by which traditional theism was transformed into process theism.

The principle of limitation, which we have just sketched as Whitehead's earliest concept of God, is effective in the world, although in a purely formal manner. By limiting the forms to those that could be actualized, God establishes the very generic features of the world's order. At the time, he thought that this was the most that could be determined philosophically, and looked to revelation to flesh out this deistic order (SMW, 178f). Perhaps revelation could show that God was personal and more responsive to the specifics of the world.

His next book, Religion in the Making (1926), the next year's set of Lowell Lectures, promised to do just that. Its final chapter portrays God as quite personal, although it is less clear how such a God influences the world contingently. As we shall see, it seems to be a persistent problem for Whitehead's conceptuality. It almost seems as if insofar as God is effective, God is not personal, and vice versa.

Pure chronological sequencing would dictate that we should consider Religion in the Making next. But we shall defer its examination until after we have looked into the compositional history of Process and Reality (1929). This will show that the concept of God Whitehead considers in the first two hundred pages or so of his composition is simply "the nontemporal actual entity" and what this directly entails. In particular this concept is not specified as

personal. There appears to be a strong discontinuity between the final chapter (of RM) and this first layer of composition. Why should this be? We need to probe the character of Religion in the Making to see what led Whitehead to draw back so profoundly from his earlier assertions.

There is a peculiar idiosyncrasy in Whitehead's writings (at least with respect to SMW and PR) that gives us great insight into how he constructed his philosophical system. His mind was exceptionally creative, constantly revising and improving his ideas. At the same time he seems equally determined to see that everything he had intended for publication should appear just as originally written. Most authors try to revise earlier expressions to fit later ideas. Not so Whitehead. Instead of modifying what he had written, he would typically insert additional passages to persuade the reader to read earlier formulations in the light of his more recent ideas.

It is not so much that Whitehead was indifferent to revision. It is more that he refused to revise at all, at least in any ordinary way. If everything intended for publication is retained, then insertions are needed to persuade the reader to interpret early texts in accordance with later ideas.

To take a minor but instructive example, at one time Whitehead worked up a theory of simple causal feelings (PR, 239f), later renaming them physical feelings. It would have been a very simple matter to have replaced all mention of causal feeling, since they all occur on those two pages. Instead, Whitehead stipulates: "Therefore simple physical feelings will also be called 'causal' feelings" (PR, 236).

Perhaps the most important stipulation was introduced once Whitehead finally determined that God is the one actual entity that is not also an actual occasion. Yet he had already written part III in terms of actual entities, even though some features do not directly apply to God, such as conceptual reproduction (PR, 248). God does not need to derive conceptual feelings from physical feelings. So he stipulates: "In the subsequent discussion 'actual entity' will be taken to mean a conditioned actual entity of the temporal world, unless God is expressly included in the discussion" (PR, 88). In other words, actual entity will now mean actual occasion unless otherwise noted.

In order to determine how a given text of Whitehead's is composed, we may follow such steps as these:

1. Be alert for any anomalies, or discrepancies such as inappropriate connectives (e.g., "but" where "and" is called for), or "misnumbering" of sections. Such surface difficulties are more readily apparent in terms of the 1929 Macmillan edition, but the editors' notes to the corrected edition are often quite informative. Frequently these "misnumberings" reflect earlier arrangements Whitehead had given his text.

2. Identify any insertions, which can be of almost any length, varying from a word, a phrase, 1 a sentence, or a paragraph,2 to an entire section3 or more.4 Frequently this can be detected by recognizing the continuity between the portions separated by the insertion, which can be greater than the continuity between the context and the insertion.

3. Interpret the context (i.e., the original text apart from the insertion) in terms of its most primitive meaning. Determine its meaning by considering only what the text says in the light of earlier texts. This calls for a measure of hermeneutical asceticism, for we must renounce all attempts to read meaning into the context based on later layers of meaning. In particular the contrast in meaning between context and insertion should become evident.

Sometimes we consider a philosopher's total corpus as a single hermeneutic context. The question as to whether there are any "shifts" in a philosopher's career concerns whether we elected to interpret his corpus as a single unit or some subgrouping thereof. Ordinarily, however, we treat each book as one hermeneutic unit. Given Whitehead's mode of composition, however, we should treat each layer of composition as a distinct unit.

4. Arrange passages in terms of complexity. In practice this is a scale that moves from those views most dissimilar to those largely approximating the standard systematic interpretations of Christian and Leclerc. As new and powerful concepts arise, new terms are usually introduced.

5. Discrepancies of a conceptual or terminological nature often signal the presence of insertions.

6. Once the layers of composition have been discerned, we can reflect upon the reasons that led Whitehead to move from one level to the next. Often these can be determined, even though he usually risked appearing dogmatic by not making his reasons explicit. But insofar as they were reasons for revising his own conceptuality, they would call attention to the fact that he was now rejecting a position already stated in the text. Too many cogent reasons would undermine the appearance of the unified treatise he claimed Process and Reality to be.

By these methods it is possible to isolate and to order various strata in the composition of this work. My previous study, The Emergence of Whitehead's Metaphysics, specifies thirteen layers.5 Since each is distinguished from its predecessor by the fact that it requires substantive revision of what has gone before, we see that his creative insights were quite plentiful. Compositional analysis is an arcane discipline in its own right, but it yields a rich reward. It

enables us to trace the growth of his philosophy at nearly every turn. The usual synoptic interpretation can now be supplemented by a genetic interpretation examining this growth and explaining many of the book's peculiarities. In some cases it enables us to sort out different meanings for the same word, such as God or concrescence.

The primary conceptual shift in Process and Reality is not about "God" but about "concrescence." This occurs between what I have termed the "Giffords draft" (C) and subsequent writing. The "Giffords draft" is not the Gifford Lectures given at Edinburgh in June 1928. It is what Whitehead during 1927 intended to be his Gifford Lectures. 6 As it turned out, however, this was merely the first draft. He substantially revised his ideas, adding parts III, IV.1, V.2, thereby reorganizing the actual lectures.

The Giffords draft presupposed a twofold process of actualization: first, the determination of the physical datum through a process of transition, followed by a second process of concrescence based on this physical datum (PR, 150, 208–215). Actualization required a sequence of two acts of unification, which constituted the two species of fluency. "The creativity in virtue of which any relative complete actual world is, by the nature of things, the datum for a new concrescence is termed 'transition' " (PR, 211). Concrescence, the other form of fluency, springs from this original datum. After the Giffords draft, this double unification was reduced to one by the introduction of physical prehensions. Whitehead had used an earlier notion of prehension in Science and the Modern World based upon the role of eternal objects to mediate between occasions.7 This was felt to be inadequate to express causation because of its abstractness, so it was largely absent from Process and Reality until he could introduce it in revised form as a physical prehension, which had the actual entity, and not just the eternal object characterizing it, as its datum. Because concrescence based on physical prehensions incorporates the past actual world, no distinct process of transitional unification was needed.8

This shift affects our understanding of being and becoming. Put most simply, the Giffords draft envisions a being that becomes. (The datum is the being from which concrescence springs.) The final revision envisions a becoming that becomes a being. For the first view, becoming is a transformation of an already existent being. Becoming is an aspect or part of the being. This allows everything to be regarded as a being or as having being. On the second view, there is no allinclusive designation such as being, since becomings are not beings. Even so, being specifies what Whitehead had been concerned with in his philosophy of nature (events and objects). It includes all that we observe, and most of what other philosophies designate as being, except subjectivity.

The radical novelty of the final revision is that the concrescence in its concrescing is not based upon any unified being. It prehends and integrates many beings, but these do not become one being until the final satisfaction.

Thus, the becoming of concrescence is not itself a kind of being. Becoming and being (i.e., most of what other philosophers regard as being, except for subjectivity) are thus contrasted. Moreover, since concrescence produces being, becoming is ontologically prior, while being is derivative.

That beings first come into being by concrescence, however, is obscured for us by the inclusion of the Giffords draft, whose two hundred pages were written from the more traditional perspective.

Whitehead's first accounts of the revised theory of concrescence (III.1DE) were incomplete because he was uncertain whether all conceptual feelings should be derived from physical feelings. This, his version of Hume's principle, appeared to be unable to cope with novelty. The invention of reversion, however, enabled him to adopt Hume's principle (F), using it to complete part III, including a final chapter (III.5H) on consciousness. 9

Since the notion of "subjective aim" and the reasoning leading to the abolition of reversion are to be found in apparent insertions to this material, these ideas were added later.10

The chapters on "Strains" (IV.1K) and "Coordinate Division" (IV.1M), not appearing in the Prospectus of the Gifford Lectures (EWM, 325f), were presumably added later. The remaining stratum, identified as (L), is more problematic. For reasons we shall consider later, both "hybrid prehension" and the abolition of reversion are inextricably involved with the emergence of "subjective aim" at (G). Moreover, they provide the conceptual resources necessary for the theory of the Living Person (11.3.5–11).

Just before the Gifford Lectures were to be delivered in June 1928, Whitehead discovered the contrast between the primordial and consequent natures of God, which is the foundation of process theism (I). Here, God is conceived as personal and everlasting, as well as being nontemporal. We shall call this his final concept of God, recognizing that during most of the time leading up to the lectures, as reflected in the composition of the book, he did not (yet) hold that view. My Emergence book (EWM) conceived his prior concept of God to be a purely conceptual concrescence. I further inferred that this mental occasion enjoyed subjectivity, which meant that God could be both personal and nontemporal, in continuity with the fourth chapter of Religion in the Making.

Since then, an additional level was discovered, just before (I), that holds God to be purely nontemporal yet concrescent, and carefully avoids ascribing any personalistic language to God. Let us call this his middle concept of God, which is found only in insertions to the completed initial version of parts II and III.

Since this conceptuality appears to be freshly discovered, it was important to determine just what concept of God underlay the original text. This early concept turns out to be little more than the assertion that God is the one nontemporal actual entity.

Thus, we have three concepts of God: the early concept as nontemporal and nonconcrescent, the middle concept as nontemporal and concrescent, and the final concept as temporal and concrescent. 11 To be sure, the final concept holds God to be nontemporal as well as temporal (properly speaking, as everlasting), but I have characterized each according to its essential contrast with the others.

In order to justify these claims in a way that clarifies the significance of these distinctions, let us consider each of these layers in greater detail. We could present this in simple chronological order, which would be appropriate if the notion of different concepts of God were commonplace. It is not, for many readers assume that there is a single concept throughout. This assumption is easy to make since Whitehead rarely indicates that more than one concept is present.

Since readers are all familiar with the final concept, the one Whitehead presents as his view of God, it seemed wise to start with that concept first, peeling off the different layers as we go. That procedure is also justified by the fact that the earliest layer is best defined negatively, as that which is left over once the insertions belonging to the final and to the middle concepts have been removed.

II— The Final Concept: God As Temporal and Concrescent

The whole account of the consequent nature of God, on which process theism is based, could have originated to resolve a problem concerning consciousness. At least this was my earlier theory (EWM, 227–229). According to Whitehead's sophisticated theory, consciousness is the subjective form of an intellectual feeling, which requires both physical and conceptual feelings (PR, 266f). God, if heretofore conceived as having only conceptual feelings, would then be unconscious (PR, 343). Moreover, the introduction of God's physical nature, so eloquently expressed in the final chapter (V.2.I), does not seem to have arisen before the introduction of intellectual feelings (III.5H).

Or it might have arisen from simple experimentation on Whitehead's part: what would happen if we ascribe physical feeling to God, treating God in this respect just like all other actual entities? In any case, the first passage expressing this new point of view seems to be the third paragraph of V.2.6, which expresses the new conceptuality without however using the new terminology of the primordial and consequent natures. Then God is first described as having only one nature, which however has a conceptual and a derivative side (PR, 345). There are also indications that this chapter was originally planned to terminate at 2.5, then at 2.6, before adding 2.7 as a brilliant afterthought.

Such developments within the chapter on "God and the World" (V.2) could be regarded as largely consistent with the view that Whitehead had the double nature of God in mind all along, but simply worked out the details in writing up the chapter. After all, the "consequent nature of God" had already been mentioned (PR, 12f, 32, etc.). Moreover, the contrasting term, the "primordial nature of God" had been used even more frequently (e.g., PR, 31–33, 44). Mention of either contrasting term should indicate that Whitehead had the contrast in mind throughout the composition of his book, reserving detailed presentation until the end.

It would, if these were not later insertions, which were put into the manuscript to correct the impression that Whitehead had once conceived of God as purely nontemporal. Scrutiny of the mentions of "primordial" and "consequent natures" shows that some must be insertions, and all can be plausibly construed so. 12 Consider, for example, Whitehead's discussion of the threefold character of an actual occasion:

(i) it has the character "given" for it by the past; (ii) it has the subjective character aimed at in its process of concrescence; (iii) it has the superjective character, which is the pragmatic value of its specific satisfaction qualifying the transcendent creativity. (PR, 87)

This passage probably stems from the original text of "The Order of Nature" (II.3.1C) written during the summer of 1927. Nearly a year later he may have added this comment:

In the case of the primordial actual entity, which is God, there is no past. Thus the ideal realization of conceptual feeling takes the precedence. God differs from the other actual entities in the fact that Hume's principle, of the derivate character of conceptual feelings, does not hold for him. (PR, 87)13

At this point no mention is made of the "consequent nature," nor of any contrasting "primordial nature." In place of the "primordial nature" we have "the primordial actual entity" as a designation of the entire divine nature. If God were then conceived as having physical prehensions of the temporal world, "the primordial actual entity'' would be a strange and inexact way of referring to the God of process theism. God is described solely in terms that later would refer only to the primordial nature, as "the ideal realization of conceptual feelings."14

Still later, however, it looks as if Whitehead inserted a second comment, reconciling his position on God more with the first passage:

There is still, however, the same threefold character: (i) The 'primordial nature' of God is the concrescence of a unity of conceptual feelings . . . (ii) The 'consequent nature' of God is the physical prehension by God of the actualities of the evolving universe . . . (iii) The 'superjective' nature 15 of God is the character of the pragmatic value of his specific satisfaction qualifying the transcendent creativity in the various temporal instances. (PR, 87f)

The juxtaposition of these two comments on the threefold character of an actual occasion indicates that Whitehead proposed at least two different conceptions of God in Process and Reality, and at least one of the passages depicting the final concept is an insertion.16

Another passage makes this same point. The italicized portion is a partial depiction of the middle concept in which the whole of God is conceived as an infinite totality of conceptual feeling; the part in ordinary print indicates how this account could be revised, by means of insertion, to accord with Whitehead's final view.

Viewed as primordial, he is the unlimited conceptual realization of the absolute wealth of potentiality. In this aspect, he is not before all creation, but with all creation. But, as primordial, so far is he from "eminent reality," that in this abstraction he is "deficiently actual"—and this in two ways. His feelings are only conceptual and so lack the fullness of actuality. Secondly, conceptual feelings, apart from complex integration with physical feelings, are devoid of consciousness in their subjective forms.

Thus, when we make a distinction of reason, and consider God in the abstraction of a primordial actuality, we must ascribe to him neither fullness of feeling, nor consciousness. He is the unconditioned actuality of conceptual feeling at the base of things; so that, by reason of this primordial actuality, there is an order in the relevance of eternal objects to the process of creation. His unity of conceptual operations is a free creative act, untrammelled by reference to any particular course of things . . . (PR, 343f)

These passages illustrate some of the reasons for thinking that there are several concepts of God to be found in Process and Reality, and that justify the project of stripping off that material belonging to the final project, so that we can see how the final concept of process theism was forged.

Some insertions enable him to express and expand upon occasional thoughts. Thus, he locates "the truth itself" in the consequent nature of God (PR, 13). The question concerns the status of the truth in a world that is

always coming into being and perishing. In terms of finite entities, the truth itself would be perishing also; what we mean by truth would be only a human construct with no ultimate referent. The consequent nature of God provided a way of preserving the truth.

In general, the chapter on "Speculative Philosophy" (I:1) makes an excellent introduction to the subject of metaphysics without getting into the intricacies of Whitehead's own system. It can be read with profit by those unfamiliar with the system, that is, all but this paragraph. Nothing in the preceding pages will prepare the reader for such concepts as "the consequent nature of God" or for "the ontological principle," for that matter. I take this to be strong evidence that this paragraph was an afterthought, momentarily disregarding the chapter's general purpose, which was to provide an introduction to speculative philosophy in general.

III— The Middle Concept: God As Nontemporal and Concrescent

If we bracket the final concept, is there simply one other concept of God to consider? I originally thought so (in EWM), and saw that other concept as simply a continuation of Religion in the Making, chapter 4. There, God was conceived as nontemporal, personal, and subjective, which makes best sense by conceiving God to be a purely mental occasion, that is, a concrescence of only conceptual feelings.

This view seems consistent with such a passage as:

He is complete in the sense that his vision determines every possibility of value. Such a complete vision coordinates and adjusts every detail. Thus his knowledge of the relationships of particular modes of value is not added to, or disturbed, by the realization in the actual world of what is already conceptually realized in his ideal world. (RM, 153f)

This God is conceived as a purely nontemporal subjectivity, and the view that God is a nontemporal concrescence immediately prefaced the adoption of the consequent nature.

There is a subtle but crucial gap in the preceding argument. Just because God is conceived as personal, we cannot conclude that God is necessarily concrescent. Concrescence may have been considered to be inherently temporal, and hence inappropriate to that which is purely nontemporal. Creativity, which is the basis for all concrescence, was conceived as essentially temporal (RM, 90).

Also, according to the early theory of concrescence, there must exist a physical datum from which the concrescence springs. There is no counterpart

for God, unless it be the unified realm of eternal objects. In that case any further unification in concrescence would be redundant.

Or, if we adopt the revised theory of concrescence in which all actual entities have both physical and conceptual feelings, why should it take so long to apply this theory to God? After all, God is also an actual entity.

The difficulty is to be found in that last assertion, for it does not have the same meaning that God is an "actual but nontemporal entity" (RM, 90) had earlier. The issue hinges on whether God is to be considered an individual actual entity, and this is only finally resolved in the final concept with the addition of the consequent nature.

It may sound strange that there could be an actual entity that is not an individual, but the class of actualities in the two books are different. God is not part of that class (in RM), which is limited to actual occasions. These actual occasions are constituted by contingent and necessary features, the latter being the three formative elements (creativity, the ideal entities, and God). In the later theory the class of actualities is expanded to include God (thus implicitly leaving only the two remaining formative elements as the constituents of actual entities). Although in the earlier theory God was excluded from the class of (individual) actualities, the actual occasions, nevertheless God was actual. Creativity and the eternal objects could be nonactual, but if God were nonactual, God would be simply another eternal object, since both were also nontemporal.

The "actual but nontemporal entity" is an entity but not an individual entity. It should be construed as the "actual but nontemporal formative element." Only "entity" is sufficiently general to apply to formative elements as well as actualities. When Whitehead expanded the class of actual occasions to the class of actual entities, he was including God as actual, not yet as an actual individual. God was the nontemporal actual formative element exemplifying all the metaphysical principles of actuality. This notion depended on God's not having the contingent properties of an individual actual occasion, such as its prehending other contingent occasions. For God to be constitutive of that which renders all occasions actual God must exemplify only their necessary features.

The notion that God is an actual entity but not an actual occasion is so firmly rooted in the interpretation of Whitehead that it is astonishing to us that it should have taken him so long to realize this. The first clear statement only appears after God is conceived to have a consequent nature:

In the subsequent discussion, 'actual entity' will be taken to mean a conditioned actual entity of the temporal world, unless God is expressly included in the discussion. The term 'actual occasion' will always exclude God from its scope. 17 (PR, 88: I in C)

In other words, "actual entity" should mean "actual occasion" unless otherwise noted. It is a stipulative definition, introduced because he had come to the realization that much of what he had written, particularly in part III, could not apply to God, or at least had no relevance to God as an actual individual, such as the categories of conceptual derivation, reversion, and transmutation.

This insertion was probably entered together with his explanation of the threefold character of God, including the "superjective" nature (PR, 88f), and thus comes late in the formulation of the final concept. Heretofore the interchangeability of "actual entity" and "actual occasion" seems to have been his position:

'Actual entities'—also termed 'actual occasions'—are the final real things of which the world is made up. (PR, 18)

Thus actual entities are creatures; they are also termed 'actual occasions.' (PR, 22) (see also PR, 141, 211)

What makes these statements so puzzling to us is that it means God should be conceived as an actual occasion, if only implicitly. For if later these two concepts are distinguished, it is only because God is one and not the other. Earlier, the class of actualities meant the actual occasions, although God was described as "the actual but nontemporal entity" (RM, 90).

Whitehead then expands the class to include all the entities that are actual, so that "actual entities" initially means all individual actual occasions and the actual formative element. But the formative element, to be actual, must exemplify all the metaphysical principles, that is, those features that make something actual. Since the divine formative element is strictly nontemporal, it does not have any of the contingent or temporal features of the occasion. It is actual, but not itself individual. We could conceive of the divine formative element as an abstract actual entity. For in every respect the occasion as actual God is actual. All exemplify the same metaphysical principles.

Yet it is very misleading to consider God "abstract," for that would mean that God would be derived from something more concrete. That would mean that God's existence would be dependent upon concrete occasions, when the opposite is intended. The divine component is constitutive of every occasion, for without it they could not be actual. Because God is actual, those occasions constituted by the divine formative element are also actual.

Yet it is purely form, since nontemporal, abstracting from the temporality of creativity and of its instances. The relation of the divine formative element and eternal objects is somewhat perplexing, since both are purely formal. Insofar as the eternal objects are understood as possibilities, abstracting from actuality, however, there is a clear contrast.

Since there is no distinction with respect to actuality, Whitehead would be very shy about making any distinction between "actual entity" and "actual occasion" for fear of establishing a dualism. As it happens, he does not introduce the distinction until after the reversal of the poles contrasts God and the occasions (PR, 348f). Then God and the occasions constitute the two species of actual entities.

In considering the text of Process and Reality genetically, we have to be careful not to read "actual entity" as applying to God too quickly, as referring to individual actual entity rather than to a formative element.

What took so long was the reconception of God as an individual actuality. For the concept of God as a formative element seems to underlie Whitehead's thinking throughout the early and middle concepts. It is the notion that God should have contingent physical prehensions that leads him to conceive God as an individual actuality, rather than the other way around.

Once God was conceived as a nontemporal concrescence of conceptual feelings, it would be only a short step to wonder whether such a God could also entertain physical feeling. The major breakthrough, in my judgment, was the introduction of the middle concept, which does not seem to have been reached until most of his theory of concrescence was already in place. Then it was perhaps only a matter of weeks before this notion was superseded by the notion of God's consequent experience.

The middle concept proposes that God is the nontemporal conceptual realization of all eternal objects. This is not explicit in the earlier concept, and the final concept adds the consequent nature. Passages pertaining to this middle concept are largely hidden in the text, because they seems to occur only in insertions, and in not very many of these. 18 Consider this example:

The limitation whereby there is a perspective relegation of eternal objects to the background is the characteristic of decision. Transcendent decision includes God's decision. He is the actual entity in virtue of which the entire multiplicity of eternal objects obtains its graded relevance to each stage of concrescence. Apart from God, there could be no relevant novelty. Whatever arises in actual entities from God's decision, arises first conceptually, and is transmuted into the physical world (cf. Part III). In "transcendent decision" there is transition from the past to the immediacy of the present; and in "immanent decision" there is the process of the acquisition of subjective form and the integration of feelings. (PR, 164, G in C)19

In the original text (here italicized) "transcendent decision" refers to transition in contrast to the "immanent decision" of concrescence. It is written from the standpoint of the earlier theory, whereby concrescence springs

from the prior transcendent decision effected by transition (EWM, 189–198; cf. PR, 150). Later (in G) that distinction is no longer operative, and Whitehead is free to use "transcendent" in a broader sense: since "immanent decision" refers to selfdecision, "transcendent decision" can signify otherdecision, which would include the divine decision for that occasion.

Unlike the insertions about the final concept, which were made after Whitehead had largely worked out his theory (in PR, V.2), these insertions show growth from one to the next as implications are being explored. Here we can see how the theory is being made. By arranging them in their probable genetic order, we can to study his philosophical creativity in detail.

This is probably the passage that introduced the middle concept:

In what sense can unrealized abstract form be relevant? What is its basis of relevance? "Relevance" must express some real fact of togetherness among forms. The ontological principle can be expressed as: All real togetherness is togetherness in the formal constitution of an actuality. So if there be a relevance of what in the temporal world is unrealized, the relevance must express a fact of togetherness in the formal constitution of a nontemporal actuality . . . Such a primordial superject of creativity achieves, in its unity of satisfaction, the complete conceptual valuation of all eternal objects. 20 This is the ultimate, basic adjustment of the togetherness of eternal objects on which creative order depends. (PR, 32: G in I.3.1G+ my italics for emphasis)

The key notions here are "relevance" and "togetherness." Relevance poses no difficulty for realized eternal objects, since they are referred to the actual entities that realize them. But what about unrealized ones? It possible that Whitehead had not yet adopted the general Aristotelian principle.21 Or if he had, he may have conceived of all eternal objects, as formative elements, inhering in every actual occasion. Then unrealized eternal objects, like all others not in immediate use, would constitute part of the objective lure, part of the penumbra that is not admitted into "subjective efficiency" (PR, 87). This may now appear to Whitehead now as somewhat unsatisfactory, for it insufficiently accounts for the novelty of that which is not yet realized.

In particular, it doesn't distinguish between realized eternal objects in the past of an occasion and those that are not yet realized. Relevant possibilities, hitherto unrealized, are genuine novelties. Also, the way in which they could be relevant to actuality needs to be specified. They were already conceived as related to each other in terms of the realm of eternal objects (SMW, ch. 10). But this had not yet been connected with the ontological principle.

In order to account for all eternal objects in a more intensive way, including the unrealized one, he introduced the notion of nontemporal concrescence whereby the multiplicity of eternal objects are ordered into one final satisfaction. The notion of an ordered realm is retained, but reconceived as the outcome of a nontemporal concrescence, not as that which exists apart from God's activity. The idea of a nontemporal concrescence was difficult to achieve, because concrescence, with its initial phases and final satisfaction, seems inherently temporal, whereas Whitehead continued to consider God as purely nontemporal.

The bridge appears to be the notion of "togetherness." Togetherness is mentioned only rarely, but at a crucial juncture in the formation of his revised theory of concrescence. Things are together only from one experiential standpoint. Otherwise they are simply sidebyside. Togetherness is the complex relatedness of many things to one experient:

There is a togetherness of the component elements in individual experience. This 'togetherness' has that special peculiar meaning of 'togetherness in experience.' It is a togetherness of its own kind, explicable by reference to nothing else . . .

The contrary doctrine, that there is a 'togetherness' not derivative from experiential togetherness, leads to the disjunction of the components of subjective experience from the community of the external world. This disjunction creates the insurmountable difficulty for epistemology. (PR, 189fC+ in II.9.2C)

Whitehead writes this passage from a purely epistemological concern for the "subjectivist" doctrine. But once its metaphysical implications become apparent, it leads inexorably to the demise of the original datum as originating concrescence.

Much later (after writing most of part III: DEFH), he comes to generalize the principle of no nonexperiential togetherness so that it may apply to the eternal objects as well. The former position conceiving of a purely objective interrelatedness of the forms into a single realm presupposed just such a nonexperiential togetherness. Another way of putting the principle would be: all unity must be first achieved by some process of concrescent unification.

Whitehead never abandons the objective unity and internal relatedness of the eternal objects, but this principle requires him to reconceive God as a nontemporal concrescence in order that their nontemporal unity can be established. But while the idea of nontemporal concrescence is the basis for his new conception, he does not call it a concrescence, for term connotes temporality and subjectivity, both of which are foreign to his understanding of God. In

fact, the word God is avoided altogether by the circumlocution "primordial superject of creativity." In place of concrescence, the text suggests that "formal constitution" is a higher genus with divine unification and temporal concrescence as its species.

The next passage relates this notion of nontemporal concrescence to the general Aristotelian principle:

By reason of the actuality of this primordial valuation of pure potentials, each eternal object has a definite effective relevance to each concrescent process. Apart from such orderings, there would be a complete disjunction of eternal objects unrealized in the temporal world. Novelty would be meaningless, and inconceivable . . .

By this recognition of the divine element the general Aristotelian principle is maintained that, apart from things that are actual, there is nothing—nothing either in fact or in efficacy . . . (PR, 40G in II.1.1C)

The ontological principle is broader than the general Aristotelian for it sought to ground all reasons ultimately in actualities, not just the reasons for the existence of eternal objects. In many it can be considered a pluralistic version of Leibniz' principle of sufficient reason. Because of his particular metaphysics, all reasons were vested in God, who must act in accordance with what is best. Since for Whitehead reasons are vested in actual occasions as well as in God, what exists can be less than the best.

The principle of nontemporal concrescence is particularly appropriate to the general Aristotelian principle, as accounting for unrealized eternal objects more adequately. In further passages, Whitehead works out additional implications. The third coordinates it with the uncreatedness of these objects (PR, 257). One series of inferences moves toward an unanticipated result: the provision of initial subjective aims (PR, 224). Another leads up to the superfluity of reversion, so that finally the category is abolished (PR, 249f). In our text it is abolished in the very next paragraph after it was established, but a considerable period of time and several conceptual reorientations occurred in between.

At first Whitehead conceives the divine influence to affect all phases of concrescence equally (PR, 40). The problem is how to get an unrealized eternal object, which is part of the divine nontemporal concrescence, located in an actual occasion. By the theory of reversion, the occasion first prehends some past actuality, then in its second phase it derives an eternal object from the initial physical feeling, then in a third phase there can be a reversion to a cognate or near alternative of the eternal object given in the second phase. This cognate eternal object is the unrealized one in God. He recognizes that it would be quite arbitrary for God to influence just the third phase, so he argues that God influences all phases equally.

The first mention of "subjective aim" seems to be an insertion found in the account of the eighth categoreal obligation (PR, 278). There, it is the selection of the balance amid the given materials. How the aim interacts with the other feelings within concrescence is not clearly specified, but a later passage develops the notion of subjective ends, which express the subjective aim as modified by previous phases of concrescence, and as affecting subsequent ones (PR, 224). Here, two principles are clearly established: the divine influence affects only the initial phase, and the aim can be autonomously modified by the occasion.

If God influences the initial phase, and if only physical feelings constitute that phase, it would seem that the occasion should physically prehend God. Up to this point, however, only (pure) physical feelings, feelings of concrete particulars, had been contemplated. The provision of initial subjective aims is presented without any mention of hybrid physical feelings (PR, 244f). The very next section then expands the concept of physical feeling to include the hybrid physical feeling of actual entities in terms of the eternal objects they entertain (PR, 245–247). 22

There is a minor theme running through several passages. Whitehead had adopted Hume's principle, which, interpreted into his conceptuality, means that all eternal objects must be derived from actual entities (the fourth categoreal obligation). He comes first to realize that God proves to be an exception to this principle (PR, 87, 247). With the development of hybrid prehension, however, he believes that no exception is necessary (PR, 247). Although it is true that all actual entities, including God, can now be physically felt, God is an exception to Hume's principle in another way, in that the eternal objects primordially ordered are not derived from any physical feelings.

As Whitehead reflects further on the implications of the nontemporal concrescence, the role of reversion begins to fade. When reversion was formulated, eternal objects constituted a single realm not ordered by any one particular actuality. Presumably an eternal object derived according to the fourth category of conceptual reproduction gave that occasion some kind of access to its near neighbors. Now the realm of eternal objects is reconceived in terms of the divine concrescence, and the occasion's access to any reverted objects is expressed in terms of God's influence on the occasion.

What happens to reversion when God's influence is restricted to the initial phase, as it must be in order to protect the occasion's freedom to modify the aim? If all relevant unrealized eternal objects are given in the initial phase, then reversion as a source of unrealized objects is quite redundant. Since all unrealized objects are found only in God, and are available only in terms of hybrid prehensions of God, that conclusion seems inevitable.

Given these considerations, it is not strange that the category of reversion should be abolished as superfluous. What is strange is the manner in

which it is abolished, by the stroke of the pen. Most authors are careful to remove all traces of the notion. If Whitehead were intent, however, to preserve every word intended for publication, this would seem perhaps the only way to effect it.

One passage has a particularly complex compositional history. It started out as a systematic summary of the divine nontemporal concrescence (PR, 343f). Later, he added one paragraph, comparing divine lure for feeling with Aristotle's reflection on the Unmoved Mover. 23 Adding this paragraph led Whitehead to sacrifice part of what he had already written. That part finally ended up as the first paragraph of ''Some Derivative Notions" (PR, 31).

IV— The Early Concept

As we have seen, all the passages concerning the consequent nature outside the final chapter (V.2), as well as all the passages concerning God as a nontemporal concrescence, may well be insertions. On the other hand, very few of the passages mentioning God in the rest of the text can plausibly be construed as insertions. From these considerations we may conclude that Whitehead wrote most of Process and Reality before he introduced either the middle or the final concept. This means that he had already written everything except some preliminary materials (I:2–3), the ninth categoreal obligation (II.1.4), strains (II.4.9, IV.4, 5.1), and coordinate division (IV.1).24

If, as I argue, there are indeed these insertions, then it is the original text, as so reconstructed, that we ought to compare with Religion in the Making. If there is any continuity of ideas between the conceptions of the two books, it should be in terms of the original text, before Whitehead adopted those ideas that so revolutionized his philosophy as to create process theism. If so, there is little continuity. On the contrary, there seems a distinct impoverishment in the theological conceptions used.

The original stratum of Process and Reality (except for V.1) was not directly concerned with God, as Whitehead was primarily developing his metaphysics. Even so, what it does say is peculiarly noninformative. We may summarize its affirmations as holding that God is a nontemporal actual entity, transcendent, immanent, eternal, cause of itself, the basis for reasons of the highest absoluteness, and possibly the source of the eternal principles of value. By studied omission it remains quite neutral on the question whether God is personal or impersonal. The idea that God could be conceived in terms of concrescence is not considered. Most of the properties stated can be inferred from what is generically required for a nontemporal actual entity (RM, 90). It is as if we had only the third chapter of Religion in the Making, with none of the richness of chapter 4.

Some of the its more interesting statements include:

'Actual entities'—also termed 'actual occasions'—are the final real things of which the world is made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real. They differ among themselves: God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence in faroff empty space. (PR, 18)

The reasons of things are always to be found in the composite nature of definite actual entities—in the nature of God for reasons of the highest absoluteness, and in the nature of definite temporal actual entities for reasons which refer to a particular environment. The ontological principle can be summarized as: no actual entity, then no reason. (PR, 19)

The description of the generic character of an actual entity should include God, as well as the lowliest actual occasion, though there is a specific difference between the nature of God and that of any occasion. (PR, 110)

The immanence of God gives reason for the belief that pure chaos is intrinsically impossible. (PR, 111).

These statements are as insightful as any, and more than most of the other mentions of this early concept scattered throughout the more than two hundred fifty pages which comprise the original text, which he intended for the Gifford Lectures in natural theology. Yet they are remarkably modest in view of what Whitehead had already written. For example, they hardly reach the level of insight expressed in this passage:

God has in his nature the knowledge of evil, of pain, and of degradation, but it is there as overcome with what is good. Every fact is what it is, a fact of pleasure, of joy, of pain, or of suffering. In its union with God that fact is not a total loss, but on its finer side is an element to be woven immortally into the rhythm of mortal things. (RM, 155; EWM, 144f) 25

This excerpt (and others like it) proposes a richer conception of God than Whitehead permits himself for this early concept. Why? What happened to cause Whitehead to draw back from this magnificent portrayal of God? This is the real riddle of Religion in the Making.

Chapter Three— Reconstructing Nontemporal Theism

In the previous chapter we have surveyed those texts mentioning "God" in Process and Reality. We found that they fall into three groups:

1. Many (final) texts express the view ordinarily associated with Whitehead: God as having two natures, a primordial envisagement of all eternal objects and a consequent experience of the entire temporal world. This is the subject of most of the final chapter on "God and the World" (V.2) and a group of insertions. Since these introduce these newly won insights into the earlier text, this final concept appears to be a constant feature of Process and Reality even though it was achieved only toward the end.

2. Some (middle) texts, collected in the second part of chapter 2, conceive of God simply as primordial and not as consequent. Instead of a primordial nature, Whitehead refers to a primordial actuality. This is more like the traditional concept of God as purely eternal, but God is conceived as a concrescence ordering all the eternal objects in a final unity. Since all subjectivity is temporal, the nontemporal concrescence is not subjective. These passages all appear to be insertions. They do not seem to have been introduced prior to the completion of the first version of part III (DEFH).

3. Those (early) passages found Whitehead's original text, before any insertions and before the composition of the final chapter (V.2), do not consider God to be either concrescent or temporal. 1 They mostly describe features the concept of God shares with other actual entities: transcendent, actual, cause of itself, reasons why things are so and not otherwise. God is differentiated mostly by being primordial as the one nontemporal actual entity (PR, 75).

The first and second groups mostly contain insertions, strongly suggesting that Whitehead was pulling the fabric of his original manuscript apart to

find room for fresh insights. It is easier to discern these insertions in Whitehead's writings because he so tenaciously retains those formulations that have been superseded. This enables us to trace the development of Whitehead's conception of God.

From this analysis of texts the most natural conclusion we should draw is that Whitehead began with a rather minimal conception of God as both nonconcrescent and nontemporal. In the light of his revised theory of concrescence, particularly as emended by the adoption of Hume's principle, he devised a revised view of God as the nontemporal concrescence of all eternal objects. This was further revised by the addition of divine physical feelings to the concrescence of conceptual feeling. This second revision resulted in the standard understanding of Whitehead's process theism. This conclusion would be most natural were it not for one thing.

Religion in the Making portrays a richer notion of God than the earliest conception of God in Process and Reality does. How could a philosopher's conceptuality sink back to a lower level as we move from one book to the next? We can understand the concept remaining the same, or acquiring further complexity, but the contrast between Religion in the Making and the initial minimal concept of Process and Reality poses quite a riddle. 2

On the other hand, many passages in Religion in the Making seem to reflect the middle concept of God as nontemporal concrescence or even the final concept as everlasting concrescence, whereas in Process and Reality these steps are only achieved by apparently difficult conceptual struggle. Because of these anomalies it is important that we consider some examples from Religion in the Making where they appear to illustrate (or not to illustrate) these three later concepts.

I— A Comparison of Concepts

1— The Initial, Minimal Concept

It is precisely with this initial concept that we should expect to find the greatest continuity with the earlier book. In all the passages pertaining to the initial concept, negatively defined as those passages not definitely pertaining to the middle and final concepts, there is no affirmation of divine subjectivity. (To be sure, it is not so much denied as passed over in silence.) Religion in the Making, however, makes this claim.

Thus, the following passage seems to ascribe selfinterest, selfvaluation, enjoyment, and the experiencing of value to God:

The purpose of God is the attainment of value in the temporal world. An active purpose is the adjustment of the present for the sake of

adjustment of value in the future, immediately or remotely. (RM, 100)

The passage continues by analyzing the properties of an actual entity in terms which stress its interiority.

Only one passage discussing the initial concept mentions value:

The mental pole introduces the subject as a determinant of its own concrescence. The mental pole is the subject determining its own ideal of itself by reference to eternal principles of valuation autonomously modified in their application to its own physical objective datum. (PR, 248F) 3

The element of divine personal involvement is far less obvious here, if it is present at all. In fact, it is not at all clear whether the "eternal principles of valuation" refer to God. If they do, these principles are much more akin to very general metaphysical principles than to the explicit valuation of specific possibilities. The occasion determines the specific possibilities by reference to these very general principles.

Much the same theory is expressed in the earlier book:

Also God, as conditioning the creativity with his harmony of apprehension, issues into the mental creature as moral judgment according to a perfection of ideals. (RM, 119)

This passage could easily have been expressed in terms of the principle of permanent rightness. But when couched in terms of "harmony of apprehension," it suggests divine subjectivity. "Apprehension" signifies conscious activity, which presupposes subjectivity. Why should this be so? Why is there such discontinuity between the books?

Before considering some answers, we need to examine the final and middle concepts further.

2— The Final Concept

Although the initial concept seems foreign to the richness of many passages in Religion in the Making, it is quite different with the final concept. Many have found striking affinities with this complex concept, reached only after considerable reflection and modification. That these passages outside V.2 appear to be insertions should indicate that they were not part of Whitehead's original conception, and yet this is mocked by their apparent presence in Religion in the Making. For some commentators, the continuity is sufficiently

strong to warrant the neglect of any significant development of theistic concepts within Process and Reality. Consider this passage:

The world is at once a passing shadow and a final fact. The shadow is passing into the fact, so as to be constitutive of it; and yet the fact is prior to the shadow. There is a kingdom of heaven prior to the actual passage of actual things, and there is the same kingdom finding its completion through the accomplishment of this passage. (RM, 87) 4

The "kingdom of heaven" is simply another description of God (RM, 155). If we understand "the same kingdom" to be a divine individual remaining the same through the vicissitudes of varying experiences, then the "kingdom of heaven prior to the actual passage" could be the primordial nature, while the consequent nature finds "its completion'' by prehending into itself that actual passage of nature. To be sure, the conceptual distinction between the primordial and consequent natures is not found in this passage, but it expresses substantially the same idea.

On the other hand it is possible to interpret this passage in a purely nontemporal sense. If we take "the same kingdom" to be absolutely the same, then the "kingdom of heaven" could refer only to a primordial ordering of all eternal objects, which would remain the same both before and after the passage of nature. This would be particularly the case if only one nontemporal nature were contemplated at the time of this writing.

To be sure, on this interpretation the kingdom finds its completion in a more indirect fashion. It does not act to achieve its completion as in the temporal version, but is more passive; it is the actual things that accomplish the passage, thereby completing the primordial ordering by actualizing what otherwise would be merely possible.

The kingdom of heaven is not the isolation of good from evil. It is the overcoming of evil by good. This transmutation of evil into good enters into the actual world by reason of the inclusion of the nature of God, which includes the ideal vision of each actual evil so met with a novel consequent as to issue in the restoration of goodness.

God has in his nature the knowledge of evil, of pain, and of degradation, but it is there as overcome with what is good. Every fact is what it is, a fact of pleasure, of joy, of pain, or of suffering. In its union with God that fact is not a total loss, but on its finer side is an element to be woven immortally into the rhythm of mortal things. (RM, 155: EWM, 144f)

How could God have this knowledge of evil, pain, and degradation apart from actual physical prehension of the actualities of the world as they happen? Also,

how is the fact united with God unless God integrates that physical feeling into the divine concrescence? Again the technical concepts may be missing, but the thought is already there.

On the other hand, this passage can be interpreted nontemporally. To do so requires the discipline of trying to read Religion in the Making on its own terms, and not to read into it ideas learned from later books such as Process and Reality. Everything depends on its conception of divine knowledge. The "synthesis of omniscience" is described as including "all possibilities of physical value conceptually, thereby holding the ideal forms apart in equal, conceptual realization of knowledge" (RM, 153). Nothing is said about omniscience including any direct prehension of actuality.

Judged by the standards of Process and Reality, this understanding of omniscience is clearly inadequate. Yet it is quite appropriate to a strictly nontemporal deity. God's knowledge of evil, pain, and degradation is then "the ideal vision of each actual evil" to which God has an alternative ideal that can "issue in the restoration of goodness," or so Whitehead hopes.

Again, just as in the previous passage, God cannot actively unite the actual and the ideal as would be possible on the temporalist interpretation. Rather, the union of the fact with God's ideal is presumably achieved by the ingression of the novel consequent in the actual fact.

He is the ideal companion who transmutes what has been lost into a living fact within his own nature. (RM, 154f: EWM, 146)

This powerfully suggests the role of the "everlastingness" of things as taken up into the consequent nature (PR, 345–51). Our interpretation here will largely follow the interpretations of the last two passages. The temporalist interpretation has a naturalness based on an active understanding of "transmutes."

If God is strictly nontemporal, then it may not mean that anything is done to or on behalf of the imperfect actuality. Rather, God's "ideal vision of each actual evil" is transmuted (changed into something else) by the addition of its "novel consequent" (PR, 148).

Whitehead may well have intended this sentence, as with all others in Religion in the Making, in a strictly nontemporal sense, in accordance with a long tradition of classical theism, but the fact remains that some, like this, can be very naturally read in a temporalist sense. He may not have recognized this at first, but come to appreciate it after publication.

Each actual occasion gives to the creativity which flows from it a definite character . . . In another way, as transmuted in the nature of God, the ideal consequent as it stands in his vision is also added. (RM, 157f: EWM, 146)

Either the ideal consequent is transmuted in God by being integrated within the divine concrescence, or God's ideal (conceptual) vision of that actuality is supplemented within by its consequent, here described as "ideal" and as standing "in his vision."

These passages just quoted have often been read as endorsing divine temporality, particularly by those schooled in Whitehead's final vision from Process and Reality. Yet I hope to have shown that another interpretation is possible, one that conceives God to be "personal, conscious, dynamic" but quite nontemporal. Unfortunately, when I was writing The Emergence of Whitehead's Metaphysics, I added the phrase, "possibly even receptive to the temporal world" (EWM, 140), because I thought that the paragraph concerning ''God's conceptual realization," whereby "God's nature is ever enlarging itself" (PR, 349), could possibly be continuous in concept with Religion in the Making. That was before the middle concept in Process and Reality was discovered, and the stark contrast between the initial concept and Religion in the Making uncovered. I now think that the paragraph in question (PR, 349), which lacks the characteristic terminology of the final concept, is in fact its first articulation before Whitehead settled on his terms. Hence, the concept of God in Religion in the Making, at least the concept Whitehead intended, is definitely not "receptive to the temporal world."

Building on this unfortunate phrase, David Griffin offers this interpretation of Whitehead's development:

It is indeed true that a viable hypothesis about the development of Whitehead's ideas would require that the doctrine of God with which Whitehead ended RM not be more advanced than the one with which he began the lectures which become PR. But there surely could be hypotheses that would not require doing violence to the text of RM by denying that it contained the CN [in the broad sense]. For example, we could assume that Whitehead began PR with the idea of God as dynamically primordial, i.e., as a primordial actuality which knows and interacts with the world . . . Accordingly, when he came to speak of God, it would have been natural for him to think in terms of what Ford calls "dynamic nontemporality" (EWM, 140). We could then suppose that when Whitehead developed the idea of the CN [in the narrow sense], he created the "primordial nature" as a contrasting term. God's effects upon the world were then attributed to this primordial nature, which had a static, impassible character (at least according to most passages) not true of the earlier "primordial actuality." This hypothesis would make sense of the present text of PR without supposing that Whitehead began working on the Gifford Lectures only with a noninteractive God little different from the abstract principle of concretion of SMW. 5

Yet if we examine the early texts assembled in chapter 2, which are all the significant mentions of God in the first twothirds of Process and Reality (according to the order of composition), they present "a noninteractive God little different from the abstract principle" of Science and the Modern World. That evidence militates against the natural assumption that the concept of God should be at least as advanced at the beginning of Process and Reality as at the end of Religion in the Making, which just shows how unusual the situation is. I interpret this to mean that we must not simply look at the concepts expressed, but also at the reasons Whitehead had to justify the use of those concepts.

It is also natural for Griffin to assume that if Whitehead had an undifferentiated notion of God "as dynamically primordial, that is, as a primordial actuality which knows and interacts with the world," he could by differentiation derive the technical contrast between the primordial and the consequent natures (i.e., CN in the narrow sense). But such "dynamic nontemporality" is absent from the initial concept, and only present in the middle concept if nontemporal concrescence must be deemed to be dynamic. Even so, it does not know or interact with the world.

I am afraid that "dynamic nontemporality" was a misleading oxymoron, coined solely to take into account that one possible later passage (PR, 349) that turns out in the end not to be part of Whitehead's earlier view after all. The middle concept is strictly nontemporal and noninteractive, so the later consequent nature is a pure addition rather than any sort of differentiation from a more primitive notion. 6

3— The Middle Concept

Although the affinity between the final concept of Process and Reality and Religion in the Making has been most often noted (probably because of our familiarity with Whitehead's final position), the similarity is more striking with the middle concept:

God, who is the [nontemporal] ground antecedent to [temporal] transition, must include all possibilities of physical value conceptually, thereby holding the ideal forms apart in equal conceptual realization of knowledge. Thus, as concepts, they are grasped together in the synthesis of omniscience . . .

He is complete in the sense that his vision determines every possibility of value . . . Thus his knowledge of the relationships of particular modes of value is not added to, or disturbed, by the realization in the actual world of what is already conceptually realized in his ideal world. (RM, 153: EWM, 139)

The things which are temporal [actual entities] arise by their participation in things which are eternal [eternal objects]. The two sets are mediated by a thing which combines the actuality of what is temporal with the timelessness of what is potential . . . By reason of the actuality of this primordial valuation of pure potentials, each eternal object has a definite effective relevance to each concrescent process. Apart from such orderings, there would be a complete disjunction of eternal objects unrealized in the temporal world. Novelty would be meaningless, and inconceivable. We are here extending and rigidly applying Hume's principle, that ideas of reflection are derived from actual facts. (PR 40)

There is little difference, if any, between these passages. In each a nontemporal God conceives of all possible eternal objects in all relationships of value. Only by God's agency are eternal objects effectively connected to actualities. (This is not expressly stated by the Religion in the Making passage, but follows from other passages discussing the principle of concretion.) Nothing disturbs or modifies the conceptual realization. Such a God does not interact with the world. Thus:

He is complete in the sense that his vision determines every possibility of value . . . Thus his knowledge of the relationships of particular modes of value is not added to, or disturbed, by the realization in the actual world of what is already conceptually realized in his ideal world. (RM, 153f.)

Unfettered conceptual valuation, "infinite" in Spinoza's sense of that term, is only possible once in the universe; since that creative act is objectively immortal as an inescapable condition characterizing creative action. (PR, 247)

This is also entailed by God's role as a formative element:

Also, the ideal forms are in God's vision as contributing to his complete experience, by reason of his conceptual realization of their possibilities as elements of value in any creature. Thus God is the one systematic, complete fact, which is the antecedent ground conditioning every creative act. (RM, 154)

All these passages insist that the divine valuation is not affected by the vicissitudes of the world. That is also a central contention of classical theism, but Whitehead's analysis, based solely on eternal objects, is different. Classical theism has been able to maintain immutability by declaring future contingents to be timelessly knowable. This seems to imply also that future contingents must be timelessly determinate in order to be knowable.

There is no evidence that Whitehead ever endorsed such a view, and it would be seriously contrary to his understanding of an open future. Rather, he seems to have held that since God knows all possibilities whatsoever, and these contain all formal features of actuality, his knowledge would not be affected by any further knowledge of actualities. That knowledge would be redundant.

Further, compare these two texts:

Also, the ideal forms are in God's vision as contributing to his complete experience, by reason of his conceptual realization of their possibilities as elements of value in any creature. (RM, 154)

[God] is the actual entity in virtue of which the entire multiplicity of eternal objects obtains its graded relevance to each stage of concrescence. (PR, 164)

In both passages God achieves nontemporally the complete conceptual realization of all eternal objects, and that for the sake of its relevance to finite occasions.

Yet despite these and other similarities, the fact remains that Whitehead wrote twothirds of his first draft of Process and Reality using a minimal conception of God having none of these features, and the passages most similar to Religion in the Making are later insertions in a text written from a different perspective. There is something very strange going on here if we consider only conceptual development. Justification of concepts is also important.

In the fall of 1936 A. H. Johnson had a tutorial with Whitehead, keeping a nearverbatim account. In the course of one session he reports:

Whitehead considered his Religion in the Making a complete failure. Yet it has proved one of his most successful works. He had wanted to write a much longer book, but Dean [Willard] Sperry [of the Harvard Divinity School] has restrained him. 7

Why did he consider it to be a failure? He might have thought that its theory of religion was rather amateurish, but this seems an inadequate basis. From our perspective, at least, it has made genuine contributions to the theory of religion,8 particularly for its time. More likely, however, he found its conception of a nontemporal formative element illustrated by various religious traditions to be inadequate in itself and to his developing metaphysical outlook. Whatever similarities there might be with later concepts, there was the continuing problem of justification.

I do not think we can appreciate the significance of Whitehead's judgment unless we link his implicit repudiation of Religion in the Making with

his subsequent practice of employing (in early PR) a very minimal conception of God. Thus, his judgment that the earlier project was a "complete failure" seems to have been already made before Process and Reality was begun, at least before its earliest passages pertaining to God were drafted in 1927. The further evolution of his theistic notions would not alter the unsatisfactoriness of the earlier concepts or their justification.

II— Possible Solutions to the Riddle

Thus sometime between Whitehead's delivery of the four lectures comprising Religion in the Making in February 1926 and the following summer Whitehead seems to have experienced a profound disillusionment with that project, remembered in 1936 as a "complete failure." No direct evidence for this is available. Whitehead's book, Symbolism, and his essay on "Time," which appeared during this interval, are not relevant to the topic on hand. Since Whitehead's unpublished papers were destroyed at his death, and his extant letters make no mention of this, we are forced to rely upon the two clues at our disposal: the disparity between the texts, and the remembered comment of 1936.

Nevertheless, let us hazard three guesses concerning the reason (or combination of reasons) that might have prompted this disillusionment:

1— Natural and Experiential Theology

Whitehead was not convinced that God as the principle of concretion was solely determinable in terms of metaphysical principles: "The general principle of empiricism depends upon the doctrine that there is a principle of concretion which is not discoverable by abstract reason. Why further can be known about God must be sought in the region of particular experiences, and therefore rests on an empirical basis" (SMW, 187). Religion in the Making can be seen as just such an investigation of the religious experiences of humankind.

Since the initial minimal concept may be seen as largely continuous with the principle of limitation (in SMW), and Process and Reality (like SMW) can be construed as a work in natural theology, it makes good sense to consider Religion in the Making as an essay in experiential theology. To be sure, it is not merely based upon Christian experience, but means to encompass all the religious traditions. If so, the differences can be understood as strictly methodological. Whitehead first introduces the concept of God, but very sketchily (SMW). He avails himself of a richer conceptuality of God as presenting the teachings of the great religions insofar as they are consistent with his metaphysics (RM). Confronted with the task of presenting the Gifford Lectures, which specifically concern natural theology, Whitehead may have reverted to the purely metaphysical approach he had previously adopted.

Whitehead recognizes four stages in the evolution of religion: ritual, emotion, belief, and rationalization. Though this is not made very explicit, we may understand Whitehead's endeavor as a contribution to this final stage. To rationalize beliefs based upon religious experience is to coordinate them with one another in a consistent fashion. "Rational religion is religion whose beliefs and rituals have been reorganized with the aim of making it the central element in a coherent ordering of life. . . " (RM, 31). This has been task of theologians down through the ages, but Whitehead does not intend to restrict himself to Christian belief alone, or to any other religious tradition, and he has a novel metaphysics by which to coordinate these beliefs.

"Religion starts from the generalization of final truths first perceived as exemplified in particular instances. These truths are amplified into a coherent system and applied to the interpretation of life" (RM, 124). There is no difference as to the level of generality between dogmas, as Whitehead terms these religious truths, and metaphysical truths (cf. EWM, 133–37). As we can readily see, this is a idiosyncratic stipulative definition of "dogma." Ordinarily it refers to the teachings of some religious authority, and often concerns contingent, particular matters, such as Jesus' life under Pontius Pilate, death, and resurrection. Yet for Whitehead, "a dogma is the precise enunciation of a general truth, divested so far as possible from particular exemplification" (RM, 126). The difference between a religious dogma, so understood, and a metaphysical principle appears to lie primarily in its warrant.

Thus, Whitehead, convinced that metaphysical methods alone will yield nothing more than that God is the nontemporal principle of concretion, turns to deliverances of religious experience for any further knowledge. In rationalizing and coordinating the various religious traditions, he means to extract religious truths—dogmas—that can supplement his metaphysics. See the section termed "The Contribution of Religion to Metaphysics" (RM, 86ff). Insofar as these dogmas are the necessary presuppositions of warranted religious truths, and are consistent with the rest of Whitehead's metaphysics, they are incorporated into the system.

The argument (of SMW) yielded a God impersonal in nature. But by his metaphysical generalization of the philosophy of nature analyzed in terms of events and objects, God would have to be classified as either an event or an object. A divine event, however, would compete with other events, but they together constitute a plenum. (This argument, however, remains wholly implicit.) If not an event, God must be an object, although perhaps as a special object characterizing the entire substantial activity.

While pure metaphysics cannot give us any reason to hold God to be personal, the religious experience of humankind may provide some. On the issue immediately at hand, the evidence is disappointing, because it is so

diverse. "If, at this stage of thought, we include points of radical divergence between the main streams, the whole evidential force is indefinitely weakened. Thus religious experience [taken most broadly and inclusively] cannot be taken as contributing to metaphysics any direct evidence of a personal God in any sense transcendent or creative" (RM, 86f). (I have italicized the final qualifying phrase to indicate the conception of God that Whitehead is objecting to.)

On the other hand, "there is a large consensus, on the part of those who have rationalized their outlook, in favor of the concept of a rightness in things, partially conformed to and partially disregarded" (PR, 65). This is the basic "dogma" (i.e., generalization based on religious experience) that Whitehead discerns. It can be understood as a basic structure of value inherent in the nature of things, guiding but not determining the course of the world. Or it can be conceptualized as the expression of the will or reason of a personal God. Either way it is a basic ordering of values whose presence can be discerned in the various religious traditions.

Besides this, however, there may be indirect ways for determining God's nature. Whitehead proposes three simple renderings:

1. The Eastern Asiatic concept of an impersonal order to which the world conforms . . . The concept expresses the extreme doctrine of immanence.

2. The Semitic concept of a definite personal individual entity, whose existence is the one ultimate metaphysical fact, absolute and underivative, and who decreed and ordered the derivative existence which we call the actual world . . . It expresses the extreme doctrine of transcendence.

3. The Pantheistic concept of an entity to be described in the terms of the Semitic concept, except that the actual world is a phase within the complete fact which is this ultimate individual entity . . . This is the extreme doctrine of monism. (RM, 68f)

"The three extremes of simple notions should not represent in our eyes mutually exclusive concepts" (RM, 77). For example, he argues that the first and third concepts invert each other (RM, 69). At any rate, when the argument is resumed, only the first two concepts are considered: "The extremes are the doctrine of God as the impersonal order of the universe, and the doctrine of God as the one person creating the universe" (RM, 150).

If these are the extremes, what is the mean? The task of rationalized religion is to find such mediating concepts as it seeks the necessary presuppositions for this religious data understood broadly. Although these must be compatible with his metaphysical system, that is not enough by itself. What he

seeks might be termed world theology, principles that best fit the evidence of religious experience in the various traditions.

The mean might well be a God who is not transcendent of the world as its creator, but who is present within the world in terms of the permanent order of rightness. If the order were unilaterally imposed by a transcendent creator, it would be an order the world would be required to exemplify, but as it is, this order is partly exemplified, partly disregarded in the history of the world, both natural and human.

To appreciate the contribution of religious experience, let us briefly review the somewhat minimal results of his metaphysical inquiry, which may be grouped under four headings:

(a) Nontemporality. Because God is not an event or an occasion, not even an allencompassing one, God is conceived as a nontemporal object. (See chapter 1.)

(b) Principle of Concretion. In its most abstract form, the argument for the principle of limitation (in SMW) is put simply in terms of order (RM, 104f), but it is also spelled out in terms of possibility and actuality:

The boundless wealth of possibility in the realm of abstract form would leave each creative phase still indeterminate, unable to synthesize under determinate conditions the creatures from which it springs. The definite determination which imposes ordered balance on the world requires an actual entity imposing its own unchanged consistency of character on every phase. (RM, 94) 9

This activity of ordering does not involve any dynamic responsiveness to the vicissitudes of the world, but is a nontemporal character affecting every occasion. From the vantage point of Whitehead's final concept we may say that this "unchanged consistency of character" is merely God's abstract, primordial nature, but there is no hint of the distinction between primordial and consequent in Religion in the Making, where the total actuality of God is unchanged. This is consonant with Whitehead's reflections about the unchanging consistency of the principle of limitation in the light of event and object.

Note that this argument, either merely in terms of order, or as augmented by the dialectic of possibility and actuality, is too abstract to determine whether God is personal or not.

(c) Formative Element. The world is made up of actual occasions, and these are analyzed in terms of formative elements, "factors which are either nonactual or nontemporal, disclosed in the analysis of what is both actual and

temporal" (RM, 89). The three formative elements are: (a) creativity, which is temporal but nonactual; (b) the eternal objects, which are both nontemporal and nonactual; and (c) God, who is actual but nontemporal.

This crossclassification is complete and exhaustive. A temporal God could not be categorically distinguished from actual occasions (some other means of distinction would have to be found). More to the point, in terms of the argument for the principle of limitation, God must be actual, since otherwise, as nontemporal, God would be indistinguishable from eternal objects. Another eternal object could not function as the limit to the realm of eternal objects. 10

God as actual is independent of the world (RM, 153f), imposing its own unchanged consistency of character on every phase (RM, 94) as the one systematic, complete fact, which is the antecedent ground conditioning every creative act (RM, 154).

(d) Actual Entity. The divine formative element is introduced as: "The actual but nontemporal entity whereby the indetermination of mere creativity is transmuted into a determinate freedom" (RM, 90). (Note again that this does not entail subjectivity.) God so orders the situation of each occasion that its otherwise chaotic creativity can be mastered and utilized as freedom. Also, with respect to our immediate purposes, note that God is described as an entity which is actual.

This does not yet place God in the same class as actual occasions. The class of actual occasions is restricted to itself. God is an entity as a formative element constitutive of the members of this restricted class. Nevertheless, this classification may suggest a train of reflection leading to an allinclusive class of actual entities, once God is conceived as an individual entity.

2— The Role of Religion

If God were simply the principle of concretion which is an actual, but nontemporal entity functioning as an element in formation of actual occasions, our knowledge of God would be greatly restricted. Whitehead allows the evidence of religious experience, not restricting himself to one tradition alone. The one universal principle he discerns is the principle of permanent rightness, expressed in both the personalistic and the impersonalistic traditions. But on the issue as to whether God is personal this consensus fails. Also, as we have seen, the metaphysical inquiry fails to resolve that point.

In mediating the extreme traditions, on the one hand holding that a personal God creates the world unilaterally out of nothing, or on the other hand, holding that the ultimate is to be understood as the impersonal order of the universe, Whitehead proposed that God be conceived as the orderer of

the cosmos providing occasions with the order they could seek to emulate. This view can be understood as a rationalization of the theistic religious traditions, purged of their errors (as seen from the perspective of Whitehead's metaphysics). Or it can be understood as compatible with the concept of the ultimate as an impersonal order that is gradually introduced into the world order.

The reasons for God's nature are diverse. Some reasons are grounded in metaphysical inquiry, others in the funded religious experience of humankind. In particular, the claim that God is personal comes solely from religious experience, not from metaphysics, at least from Whitehead's perspective.

Some would restrict the contribution of religion to contingent factors. If so, metaphysics would be an independent enterprise unaffected, at least directly, by religious considerations. That does not seem to be Whitehead's view, at least in writing Religion in the Making. Religious dogmas appear to have the same generality as metaphysical principles (RM, 32, 126). If so, they could modify the purely metaphysical teachings. Thus, it may be that he intended chapter 4 to offer his most complete description of God, while chapter 3 presented its metaphysical presuppositions from which this description was derived as informed by religious experience.

At any rate, there are passages in chapter 3 that seem to express God's personal being, for example, those speaking of God as purposive: "The purpose of God is the attainment of value in the temporal world. An active purpose is the adjustment of the present for the sake of adjustment of value in the future, immediately or remotely" (PR, 97; cf. 100).

Another passage uses unmistakable subjectivistic language: "Also God, as conditioning the creativity with his harmony of apprehension, issues into the metal creature as moral judgment according to a perfection of ideals" (RM, 119). The term prehension is not used in Religion in the Making, although it is used both before and since. Here he substituted "blind perceptivity" (RM, 101, 108, 153f). "Apprehension," however is the conscious form of prehension, presupposing subjectivity. In most cases, Whitehead remains abstract with respect to his metaphysical presuppositions. Here, he could have substituted the impersonal "ideal order'' for the "harmony of apprehension," but he did not.

On the other hand, while there is strong continuity between the divine formative element (in RM) and the initial concept of God (in PR), there seems to be a massive retreat from the rich personalistic conceptuality of the concluding sections of Religion in the Making. It may be that a methodological resolve to bracket the deliverances of experiential religion can account for the massive diminution in the concept of God between these books. In particular, the notion of God's subjective interiority could have been omitted because it was only justified by religious insight and not by any inferences that can be made from basic metaphysical principles. That is, of course, only until he found sufficient justification for his final concept.

The project of Religion in the Making seems to be to show that both personal and impersonal understandings of God, as expressed in experiential religion, could illustrate the divine formative element discovered by metaphysical inquiry. Chapter 4 shows how God in Western theistic experience is compatible with the metaphysical principles developed in chapter 3. Whether God is ultimately personal or impersonal is left an open question.

I think we need to reckon with the possibility of variability of conviction in Whitehead, because for him questions of justification are paramount. When he was an atheist, particularly in the latter years after World War I, it would be a mistake to think that he was unwilling to accept theism. Once it became possible to dissociate the idea of God from its usual unacceptable features (unilateral creator of the world), he readily became a theist. Likewise, we can suppose that he could easily accept personal theism once it could receive adequate justification. The rationalization of religious doctrine, whereby its general metaphysical features could be discerned, may well have provided just that justification. Only the realization of a fundamental conflict with his underlying metaphysical scheme would be likely to call such justification into question.

3— Temporalist Implications

There is another way of accounting for the severe restriction of the concept of God besides the methodological limitation we have just considered. Whitehead may have discovered that some of his formulations had temporalistic implications, implications that his current metaphysics could not (yet) support. These alternatives are not exclusive. Both may have been operative, but with different strengths at different times.

Whitehead's early acceptance of divine nontemporality did not extend to the traditional conception of nontemporal subjectivity, at least not in the formulation of the divine formative element. The traditional idea stems from the integration of the Biblical image of God as personal with Greek notions of nontemporalistic perfection. But as we have seen, his reasons for adopting nontemporality were far from traditional. God could not be an event, neither the whole of events nor a particular event among others. And if not an event, then a very complex sort of object.

In Religion in the Making he proposed to illustrate this austere concept by revelatory means. The religious traditions of the East showed how the divine formative element could be embodied in an impersonal manner, while Western theistic traditions demonstrated how this formative element could be properly illustrated in a personal manner. Both were possible ways in which this abstract core could be fleshed out so as to command assent and worship. Later, however, he considered the book to be failure (EWP, 8f).

I suspect he came to that conclusion by realizing how ineluctably the formulations of personal theism he used were based on nontemporal theism while his metaphysics came to require the intrinsic temporality of subjectivity. The contrast between the concrescent becoming and concrete being, coupled with the identification of becoming with the present immediacy of subjectivity, showed him how the contrast between subject and object could be understood in purely temporal terms. If so, the notion of a nontemporal subjectivity contemplating the entire realm of ideal forms in complete conceptual realization (e.g., RM, 154) becomes highly problematic.

Faced with this difficulty, Whitehead could have argued that since God is subjective, God cannot be nontemporal. At this juncture, however, this would have meant that God was an event competing with other events. All evidence that we have, both from Religion in the Making and the concepts of God up to (but not including) the last, indicates that he concluded that since God was not temporal, God could not be subjective.

At any rate, Process and Reality, as work methodologically restricted to natural theology, could not make use of this revelatory supplement. Also, Whitehead may have resolved not to elaborate his distinctive theology until after he had completed the basic cosmological inquiry. In the course of working out that cosmology, however, he would be reinforced in his rejection of nontemporal subjectivity. Concrescence came increasingly to be understood in temporal terms. In concrescence there is the perishing of present immediacy in order to attain objective immortality. What is objective is the past, while subjective immediacy is the present. If so, subjectivity is necessarily temporal, excluding any nontemporal subjectivity.

In my previous book, I identified seven passages that could be interpreted in temporalistic terms (EWM, 142–47), though I sought to show that Whitehead then intended to give them a nontemporalistic meaning. Whether any of these particularly gave him difficulty we can only conjecture. But let us consider one of them (EWM, 142):

Thus if God be an actual entity, which enters into every creative phase and yet is above change, He must be exempt from internal inconsistency which is the note of evil. Since God is actual, He must include in himself a synthesis of the total universe. There is, therefore, in God's nature the aspect of the realm of forms as qualified by the world, and the aspect of the world as qualified by the forms. His completion, so that He is exempt from transition into something else, must mean that his nature remains selfconsistent in relation to all change. (RM, 98f)

God is first of all described as utterly changeless. How can such a God include "the aspect of the world as qualified by the forms"? This may ultimately

be possible only by means of a consequent nature, but that need not mean that this adequately reflected Whitehead's meaning that early. It may simply mean that readers schooled in the conceptuality of Process and Reality can only make sense of the passage in terms of the consequent nature or some earlier equivalent thereof. 11 Yet if our interpretation is to be genuinely genetic, focused on what Whitehead meant at that time, it has to be restricted to this passage and its context in Religion in the Making.

One control on our interpretation may be found in the notion of "completion." Its opposite, incompleteness, is described as:

This protean character of the creativity forbids us from conceiving it as an actual entity. For its character lacks determinateness. It equally prevents us from considering the temporal world as a definite actual creature. For the temporal world is an essential incompleteness. It has not the character of a definite matter of fact, such as attaches to an event in past history, viewed from a present standpoint. (RM, 92, my italics)

The series of occasions constituting the world cannot be complete, for there are always more to come. In like manner, the consequent nature cannot be completed. At this juncture, however, God is conceived as a nontemporal completion, intolerant of any additions.

We do not find in Religion in the Making any distinction between complete and incomplete aspects within God. What we do find is the contrast between the temporal world as incomplete and God as complete. The temporal world's incompletion and evil show that it is "to be construed in terms of additional formative elements which are definable in the terms which are applicable to God" (RM, 99). While there are common generic features of all actual entities, there must be important contrasts. At this juncture Whitehead considered the incompletion of temporality to be one of these.

Yet if this is so, what did Whitehead mean by claiming that "since God is actual, He must include in himself a synthesis of the total universe" (RM, 98)? It is easier to see why Whitehead said what he did than to fathom its detailed meaning. It is an idealization of his notion of an actual entity as a concretion (cf RM, 92f above). Or in the language of the metaphysical principle of solidarity he was shortly to adopt, "every actual entity requires all other entities, actual or ideal, in order to exist" (EWM, 312). Or again, as he writes here, ''each actual entity is an arrangement of the whole universe, actual and ideal" (RM, 101; cf. 108, 112).12 If every actual entity unifies and orders all the is actual and all that is ideal, can God do no less?

Exactly what did Whitehead mean by his claim that there is "in God's nature the aspect of the realm of forms as qualified by the world, and the

aspect of the world as qualified by the forms" (RM, 98)? This is difficult to determine, and he may himself have come to think that it only made sense in temporalistic terms. At the very least it required divine subjectivity, which for him came to be considered exclusively temporalistic.

While some passages can be perhaps naturally interpreted in temporalistic terms, and many more can be so read from the perspective of the final theory (in PR), I believe that Whitehead originally intended them to have a purely nontemporalistic fashion. While they were often couched in the personalistic imagery of Western religious experience, the underlying metaphysics they presupposed required nontemporal objectivity. Insofar as these statements implied that God was subjective and therefore temporal, he concluded, they must be excluded.

Thus, there may have been a previous occasion in which Whitehead entertained the possibility that God was subjective and hence temporal. It was presented in the form of a dilemma: either God was nontemporal and impersonal, or temporal and personal. Later, he adopted the second alternative (or better, saw a way to embrace both), but from the evidence of the early strata of Process and Reality, Whitehead first chose the former. What his reflection about the knowledge of actualities seems to show is that if God is a knower, then adequate knowledge requires that God be temporal. Moreover, God must be personal (subjective) in order to know. But there is always the possibility, one Whitehead had already embraced, that God is not subjective. As impersonal, the question of divine knowledge would be irrelevant.

The same considerations that led Whitehead to decide that God was an object rather than an event would still be operative. A divine occasion would usurp some ordinary occasion's place. In what way would a divine temporal occasion transcend other occasions? A divine occasion or series of divine occasions could more adequately prehend (know) actual occasions, but in what other ways could it meet the needs of divinity? The primordial envisagement of eternal objects is needed for transcendence before a temporal event could be considered as sufficiently divine.

If God is thus shown to be nontemporal, and subjectivity requires temporality, there can be no divine subjectivity. This requires a reassessment of the experiential grounds by which God as personal was justified. Implicitly, at least, Whitehead holds to his rationalization of religion as long as they do not conflict with his underlying metaphysical principles. The conflict over divine subjectivity, however, comes to be recognized as acute. This calls into question the use of rationalized religion in establishing his premises. As a result, the whole enterprise of Religion in the Making in supplying such premises comes into jeopardy.

III— A Possible External Influence

1— Henry Nelson Wieman

With or without the problems sketched above, Whitehead may have been induced to restructure his approach as the result of the contemporary reactions to Religion in the Making. One of these, probably the most enthusiastic and extensive, constitutes three chapters of Henry Nelson Wieman's Wrestle of Religion with Truth. 13 We know the book was published in 1927, the same year that Whitehead started writing Process and Reality in earnest, but not whether it influenced him at the time.

So we can only proceed on supposition: If Wieman's views did influence Whitehead then, these three chapters present an interpretation Whitehead would probably want to repudiate. To guard against Wieman's reading, Whitehead might have taken the drastic step of eliminating all appeal to rationalized religion.

Wieman was drawn to Religion in the Making because he read into it a different view of God as an immanent dynamic ordering of the world. Wieman did not distinguish between God and creativity, which enabled him to conceive of Whitehead's God as a very dynamic ordering principle, the formal aspect of the divine creativity.

In order to come to such a reading, Wieman had to disregard two of its most prevalent features. One was its considerable reliance upon rationalized religion, both as the outcome of a general discussion of religion, and as the source of specific dogmas or metaphysical principles contributing to Whitehead's metaphysics. Wieman probably thought that this discussion belonged to experiential theology, whereas his concern was with the metaphysical core it presupposed.

The second feature was more difficult to ignore: the insistence that Whitehead gave to the nontemporality of God. After all, he termed God the nontemporal actual entity (RM, 90), and this feature metaphysically distinguishes between God and the actual occasions.14 Whitehead's God excluded all creativity, whereas Wieman's was its supreme (and in many ways its exclusive) embodiment. Wieman's God was totally immanent in the temporal world, sharing its temporality. From Wieman's perspective, the way God dynamically impacted on the temporal world was far more important than any traditional baggage Whitehead may have brought with him. Indeed, he may have thought that divine nontemporality represented God's transcendence, and did not see how that could be consistently combined with God's immanent temporality.

Wieman may have assumed that nontemporality meant transcendence, because it had been a commonplace in the tradition for God's transcendence to be conceived in the way in which eternity transcended temporality. But for

Whitehead this was not so: it was as nontemporal that God was objective and hence purely immanent in the world. The principle of concretion comprised the invariant metaphysical principles governing the process of actualization; it was the same for (and in) every occasion.

Consider how Wieman describes the principle of concretion:

It is God who constantly reorganizes this realm of abstract forms in order to preserve and often enhance the concreteness of each thing and of the universe. God does not do this as an external agent, for he is simply that persistent order of all being by virtue of which this reorganization constantly occurs. Because of the principle of concretion all the infinity of abstract forms assumes a different relevance whenever any new thing comes into existence. (WRT, 194f: EWM, 148)

Wieman conceives the ordering of the principle of concretion to take place on the most concrete level possible; hence, it must be appropriate to each particular situation as much as possible. It would be like the provision of particular aims for particular circumstances (cf. PR, 351), to speak in a later conceptual idiom. Yet for Whitehead, what God can and should do is restricted by the claim of nontemporality. The principle of concretion must operate on a very abstract level, abstracting from all temporal features, in order to be equally available to all.

Some of Whitehead's remarks might appear, however, to be susceptible to Wieman's interpretation:

There is an actual world because there is an order in nature. If there were no order, there would be no world. Also since there is a world, we know that there is an order. The ordering entity is a necessary element in the metaphysical situation presented by the actual world. (RM, 104)

Order comes on many levels. Metaphysical order is invariant for all time, while cosmic order, which we might call the order of nature, is invariant for this cosmic epoch. Wieman, however, understood "the order of nature" quite differently:

This single totality, which includes the different systems of spacetime, but which cannot itself be called spacetime, is designated by Whitehead as the order of nature or the creative process of nature. Now this order of nature is a continuous flow. (WRT, 191)

Given these differing notions of order, we can understand how the principle of concretion, itself the basic principle of order, and "the ordering entity"

itself could be understood in radically diverse ways. Whitehead must wait until the end of Process and Reality before proclaiming the temporalistic theism that is the hallmark of process thought; Wieman has already read process theism back into Religion in the Making. 15

Just as the principle of concretion for Wieman could be variable, so could its result. Things could be more or less concrete (EWM, 148), whereas for Whitehead every actuality is equally concrete as fully determinate. This allowed Wieman to identify concretion and goodness (WRT, 201), whereas for Whitehead every actuality is an instance of concretion, and not for that reason necessarily good.16

If God were conceived as a temporal orderer as Wieman suggests, what would prevent God from becoming a total orderer, that is to say, an alldeterminer?

2— Whitehead's Reaction

It is precisely because God is conceived as a nontemporal orderer that the determinism cannot arise. The timeless order must abstract from all temporal contingency, which gives the world and its creatures sufficient room for selfdetermination. All Whitehead need do to meet this challenge is to guard against misunderstanding:

This doctrine applies also to the primordial nature of God, which is his complete envisagement of eternal objects; he is not thereby directly related to the given course of history. The given course of history presupposes his primordial nature, but his primordial nature does not presuppose it. (PR, 44)

The use of "primordial nature" indicates that this passage was written in the light of the final contrast with the consequent nature. It makes clear that the primordial nature need not involve a changing order of abstract forms to match the flux of history, and underscores its abstract invariance. This would be just as true of the earlier concepts of the primordial actuality.

Were God associated with changing patterns, Whitehead would have to postulate a series of divine occasions, each illustrated by a different pattern. If God were conceived in terms of a society, God as nontemporal would be identified with its defining characteristic, not with the changing patterns. In the absence of any theory of everlasting concrescence, these patterns could only be seen as accidental to the divine nature, not really part of the divine at all.

Most importantly, Whitehead would have to explore an issue Wieman bracketed from consideration. Following his empirical method, Wieman attends only to what God does. In this case God "constantly reorganizes this

realm of abstract forms in order to preserve and often enhance the concreteness of each thing and of the universe" (WRT, 194f). How God does this remains a mystery. What some see as the virtue of this empirical method, others see as a vice, for it effectively blocks any further inquiry into the divine nature.

If God could rearrange the forms, as Wieman supposes, and if we advance inquiry beyond the empirical prohibition, God would have to possess a divine temporal mind, with all its attendant difficulties. To avoid this, Whitehead may have taken a very drastic step. He not only abandons the concept of divine mind and personality, but he may have abandoned that upon which this concept is justified: the deliverances of rationalized religion. From here on he means to use only considerations derived from his metaphysics, at least until his cosmology should have been completed.

It is highly ironic that the one person to become most excited by Religion in the Making held such diametrically opposed views concerning God's relation to creativity. For Wieman, creativity was divine. For Whitehead, creativity underlay all activities, whether events or occasions. Since some resulted in conflict and evil, creativity could not be divine. In fact, the divine was conceived in purely objective terms, devoid of creativity. Then again, their concepts of creativity differed. Whitehead conceived of an activity underlying all events whatsoever, whereas for Wieman it was an activity among others, as that activity which promotes growth and the achievement of the good.

IV— The Initial Concept of God

Because it does not rely on rationalized religion, the opening twothirds of Process and Reality has a very minimal concept of God. To be sure, God is mentioned only in incidental statements made in passing, concerning other themes. Since the discussion of God was only partly finished during the summer of 1927 (V.1), we cannot know what it would have looked like if it had been written. But it is most striking that all that is said about God in this initial stratum can be inferred from the one basic statement: God is the nontemporal actual entity. In being actual God is different from eternal objects, and in being nontemporal different from the temporal actual occasions (so RM, 90).

There is no mention of the principle of concretion in this portion (of PR). It is difficult to assess this omission. On the one hand it may persist with full force and validity, Whitehead seeing no reason to reiterate his previous position. On the other hand, he may have come to feel, in the course of working out Religion in the Making, that the order of the world required an ordering entity (RM, 104), which could only be described by a primordial mind. Since he found he could only justify a primordial mind or subjectivity

by rationalized religion, he now found he had an inadequate basis for the principle of concretion.

I suspect a mediating position is possible. Without some sort of cosmic orderer a Whiteheadian God is scarcely conceivable. "The immanence of God gives reason for the belief that pure chaos is intrinsically impossible" (PR, 111C). God accounts for there being some order in the world, without being the total orderer an omnipotent being should be able to exert. If the world were to receive no order from the divine, God would be impotent. Thus, I cannot see Whitehead giving up on the claim, "The ordering entity is a necessary element in the metaphysical situation presented by the actual world" (RM, 105); on the other hand, he may well feel that he does not yet know how to express this more fully.

God is no longer described as a formative element (cf. RM, 90), although possessing all the properties of a divine formative element. God is still that "actual entity which enters into every creative phase" (RM, 98) and is thus immanent within every occasion, necessarily providing the basis whereby it can transform mere possibility into actuality. Originally, Whitehead held that "God is not concrete, but He is the ground for concrete actuality" (SMW, 178). Then, God was conceived as an "actual, but nontemporal entity'' (RM, 90) The contrast is perhaps not so great as appears from hindsight. In both cases God is not conceived as an individual actuality but as a contributing factor to the makeup of an individual actuality. The reason for designating God "actual" in the second instance was to distance God from the nonactual eternal objects, also formative elements. So specified, however, God as a formative element is an entity (as all "things" are), and so are all the actual occasions.

Yet while actual occasions had been Whitehead's allinclusive class (in RM), now actual entities became that class. 17 This establishes a new program: to determine whatever features God and actual occasions could have in common. We can discern some five features:

1— Actual Entity

The description of the generic character of an actual entity should include God, as well as the lowliest actual occasion, though there is a specific difference between the nature of God and that of any occasion. (PR, 110C)

This assertion is purely formal: those features that God and actual occasions have in common are the features of an 'actual entity'. We naturally assume that the nature of an actual entity is well defined (as it has been worked out largely in terms of later developments), and

we "anachronistically" apply that concept to its earliest formulations. This leads us to suppose that more is said about God early on than need be the case. We need to consider that 'actual entity' at first (in RM) has very minimal meaning, perhaps no more than "not merely possible, not merely ideal," and only gradually acquires the meaning we are accustomed to.

As long as God is conceived as a formative element, and hence not as an individual actuality, God could have all the necessary features of an actual entity, without the particularizing contingent features that ordinary actual occasions would have. Then we might consider God to be the abstract actual entity, whose properties are contingently actualized in each occasion:

'Actual entities'—also termed 'actual occasions'—are the final real things of which the world is made up. There is no going behind a\ctual entities to find anything more real. They differ among themselves: God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence in faroff empty space. (PR, 18C)

The parenthetical phrase is most troublesome. To be sure, all actual occasions are actual entities, but according to Whitehead's final stipulation (PR, 88) the divine actual entity is not an actual occasion. However, if God were conceived earlier as a formative element, then the abstract actual entity could be considered to be an abstract actual occasion. The divine formative element is actual in the sense that the earlier principle of concretion was actual as the source of the concrete, and it constitutes them as concrete by stamping on them the very same principles of actuality it exemplifies. Moreover, it is by being abstractly actual that it can also be nontemporal. Since as abstract it is not an individual, it is immanent within all occasions without ever having to be prehended.

2— Transcendence

[The notion of God] is that of an actual entity immanent in the actual world, but transcending any finite cosmic epoch—a being at once actual, eternal, immanent, and transcendent. The transcendence of God is not peculiar to him. Each actual entity, in virtue of its novelty, transcends its universe, God included. (PR, 93fC, my italics)

In this instance Whitehead is intent upon transferring a traditional divine attribute upon actual occasions, thereby making it a generic trait of actual entities, and hence of God. So long as it is purely a divine trait it is only justified by traditional usage, but by making it generic he is then rationally justified in ascribing it to God. Note that the way Whitehead uses "transcendence" of God is quite unexceptional: as the eternal transcends time, so God's nontemporal nature transcends the vicissitudes of the various cosmic epochs.

However, how do temporal occasions transcend one another and God? By their novelty, by their contribution to the ongoing world, which goes beyond what they have received. (Note that they do not transcend God in that they affect God, for as yet the consequent nature has not made its presence known.)

Whatever common meaning there is between these two kinds of transcendence, however, it cannot lie in novelty. The nontemporal nature, particularly when restricted to the metaphysical principles as here, is neither new nor old.

3— SelfCausation

All actual entities share with God this characteristic of selfcausation. For this reason every actual entity also shares with God the characteristic of transcending all other actual entities, including God. (PR, 222C, my italics)

Since only that which the actuality can produce of itself can be new (everything derived being old), the way it transcends its past must be in terms of selfcausation. This generic trait is applied to God. When compared with Whitehead's final theory, this notion of "selfcausation" is not worked to any great degree. We do not know how this is possible, but that it was to be had already been affirmed: "There are not two actual entities, the creativity and the creature. There is only one entity which is the selfcreating creature" (RM, 102).

If so, it would seem that every selfcreation must be an instance of creativity. Does this mean that God as an actual entity is then an instance of creativity? If so, God cannot also be an irreducible formative element whose necessary properties exclude creativity. This passage apparently asserts that God is such an instance:

4— Instance of Creativity

In all philosophic theory there is an ultimate which is actual in virtue of its accidents. It is only then capable of characterization through its accidental embodiments, and apart from these accidents is devoid of actuality. In the philosophy of organism this ultimate is termed "creativity"; and God is its primordial, nontemporal accident. In monistic philosophies, Spinoza's or absolute idealism, this ultimate is God, who is also equivalently termed "The Absolute." (PR, 7: C+ or G in I.1.2C) 18

The problem lies in determining how "accident" is to be understood. In Spinozistic terms, does it embrace both modes and attributes, or just modes? If modes, then when translated into Whitehead's conceptuality, every accident, including God, would be an instance of creativity. On the other hand, if both modes and attributes are accidents, then God as an attribute or formative element need not be an instance of creativity. In either case, God is an accident of creativity since the divine nature cannot be rationally derived from creativity alone.

The problem in interpreting "accident" as "instance of creativity" is that Whitehead is unwilling to ascribe creativity to God until the consequent nature is introduced. But by then the description of God as [solely] "primordial, nontemporal" has been superseded. Also, there is a text making clear that Whitehead speaks of God as ''the eternal primordial character" of creativity (PR, 225).

Finally, there is one more generic feature to consider: actualities serve as a reason why things are so and not otherwise:

5— The Ontological Principle

[T]he reasons of things are always to be found in the composite nature of definite actual entities—in the nature of God for reasons of the highest absoluteness, and in the nature of definite temporal actual entities for reasons which refer to a particular environment. The ontological principle can be summarized as: no actual entity, then no reason. (PR, 19C)

This appears to be the first mention (in PR) of the ontological principle, derived from the principle that actual occasions affect and are affected by other occasions, and therefore explain the contingent nature of things. The

occasion A explains feature a in B because it so affected B. Since God provides the generic structure of actuality, God is the reason for the most general features of any actuality, thereby exemplifying the ontological principle. 19

The ontological principle also serves as an ideal guiding Whitehead's further speculation, for when he raises the question as to the reason for the unrealized eternal objects, he will direct his attention to actualities. Moreover, to noncontingent actuality, since the contingent conditions are not sufficient. (If they were, the unrealized would have already been realized.) There is this difference, however: the necessary principles that function as reasons of the highest absoluteness are actualized by all actual occasions, while the unrealized eternal objects have been actualized by none.

God is thus conceived as an actual entity, transcendent, selfcaused, an instance of creativity, and functioning as a reason according to the ontological principle. Yet these are also traits of all the other actual entities, even including transcendence. This is a very narrow basis upon which to construct a metaphysical theism. It hardly bodes well for an enterprise that aims to be a natural theology, a purely metaphysical account of the nature of God. Yet this is what the Gifford Lectures were intended to be.20 It is possible, however, that when Whitehead committed himself to give the Gifford Lectures he planned to continue in the vein of Religion in the Making. The difficulties leading him to abandon this approach may have arisen afterward, although in any case before he undertook any serious writing during the summer of 1927. At any rate, his strategy for developing a natural theology then became the task of working away at his general metaphysics in the hopes that it would shed light on the question of God. The strategy succeeded, but only at the very last, just before he had to present his lectures at Edinburgh in June 1928.

V— The 1926 Metaphysical Principles

For this strategy to be effective the concept of God would have to exemplify all pertinent metaphysical principles, besides the generic features of actuality listed above. Although this is not made explicit until later (PR, 343G), it is already evident in some remarks Whitehead made to his students at Harvard in the fall of 1926 about the six metaphysical principles he had then formulated:

These principles are essential to actuality, and so apply equally well to God (pure act). It follows that God is a creature; the supreme actuality is the supreme creature. The only alternatives are to say that God is not actual or that God lies beyond anything of which we can have any conception. (EWM, 313f)

That God exemplify the necessary principles as required by rationality is a constant theme with Whitehead, first announced in his Lowell Lectures of 1925: "[A]ny summary conclusion jumping from our conviction of the existence of such an order of nature to the easy assumption that there is an ultimate reality which, in some unexplained way, [removes the] perplexity, constitutes the great refusal of rationality to assert its rights" (SMW, 92). To explain the role of God is to situate the divine with respect to the order of nature exemplified by the principles.

In the light of later developments it may seem surprising to think of God as pure act, but here God is conceived to be eternal, unchanging, and fully actual. Moreover, insofar as God is identical with the metaphysical order of necessity, there can be no contingency, no alternatives to be realized or to be left unrealized. No potentiality could be transformed into actuality, so the actuality is pure.

To be sure, God is also described as creature, but this follows from his understanding of selfcreation. The creator and the creature are not distinct, as we have seen (RM, 102).

If these six principles apply to God, we need to ascertain just what that means in each case with respect to a nontemporal, nonindividual actuality. 21

1— The Principle of Solidarity

Every actual entity requires all other entities, actual or ideal, in order to exist.

If "require" were to mean "to prehend," such that the prehension constitutes the actuality in question, then for God this requirement is not met with respect to ideal entities until the middle concept was introduced, and with respect to actualities not until the final concept. But it is possible to find a less stringent meaning for "require."

As the principle of limitation, God requires the ideal entities as that in terms of which the selection is made. With respect to actualities, if they did not exist, there would be nothing for which God could be the principle of concretion. The principle of concretion requires something concrete in order to be effective.

This metaphysical structure is actual (i.e., exists) only insofar as it is ingredient in individual actualities.

2— The Principle of Creative Individuality

Every actual entity is a process which is its own result, depending on its own limitations.

The creature is the outcome of its own creativity. God is the limiting case of this process, where the process is totally absorbed in its own product.

3— The Principle of Efficient Causation

Every actual entity by the fact of its own individuality contributes to the character of processes which are actual entities superseding itself.

This early expression of the principle of relativity (the fourth category of explanation, PR, 22) pertains to God inasmuch as God contributes to every actual entity its basic metaphysical core.

4— The Ontological Principle

The character of creativity is derived from its own creatures and expressed by its own creatures.

While not the same as the later "ontological principle" (in PR), this principle has perhaps a better title to the name. God exemplifies it by expressing the general character of creativity, just as the individual actual entities express its particular character.

Actualities serve as reasons why certain conditions are so because they express and therefore effect these conditions on their successors. Thus, as we have seen, "the reasons of things are always to be found in the composite nature of definite actual entities—in the nature of God for reasons of the highest absoluteness, and in the nature of definite temporal actual entities for reasons which refer to a particular environment" (PR, 19).

5— The Principle of Esthetic Individuality

Every actual entity is an end in itself for itself, involving its measure of selfsatisfaction individual to itself and constituting the result of itselfasprocess.

As with the second principle of creative individuality, God is the limiting instance in which process and result coincide. God is an end in itself, and for the world. "Thus God is the measure of the aesthetic consistency of the world" (RM, 99).

6— The Principle of Ideal Comparison

Every creature involves in its own constitution an ideal reference to ideal creatures: (1) in ideal relationship to each other, and (2) in comparison with its own selfsatisfaction.

God is the supreme instance of an ideal reference to the ideal entities, for as the principle of limitation God structures the relationship of the ideal entities to the world. "This ideal world of conceptual harmonization is merely a description of God himself. Thus the nature of God is the complete conceptual realization of the realm of ideal forms" (RM, 155). 22

VI— The 1927 Metaphysical Principles

The metaphysical principles were reformulated in terms of eight principles23 that guided Whitehead's philosophical effort in constructing the original part II of Process and Reality. Though governing his compositional efforts, the principles are not present in their original form.24 Their original form is available from class notes of October 1927 (EWM, 323f). Closer inspection, however, shows that several are not relevant to the initial minimal conception of God Whitehead entertained at that time.

The first three principles, and the seventh, pertain to "becoming," while God was then conceived as pure, eternal being. All three principles would become relevant to the conception of God as nontemporal concrescence, and particularly to God as temporal concrescence. The third principle does not apply very well to God as nontemporal concrescence with respect to actual entities, but this is remedied in the final concept. The seventh principle, "that how the actual entity becomes constitutes what the actual entity is," applies quite well to divine concrescence, whether nontemporal or temporal.

The fourth principle postulates "two primordial genera of entities: (a) eternal objects and (b) actual entities" (EWM, 323). God clearly exemplifies this principle as an actual entity. But the fifth principle only pertains to eternal objects.

The first half of the sixth principle pertains to being as objectifiable, and hence to God as being. But the second half does not pertaining to becoming. If so, the initial concept of God as pure being violates the demand "that two descriptions are required for an actual entity" (EWM, 323), one of being, the other of becoming. The middle concept can be conceived as both being and becoming, but the final concept, while it satisfies pure becoming, is more problematic with respect to being.

Finally, the eighth is the ontological principle, which all three conceptions of God satisfy, but in differing ways. For the meaning of actuality, on which the principle depends, also shifts.

God was regarded as actual, but not as an instance of creativity. This, however, is also true for past occasions, which Whitehead never regarded as "no longer actual."25 Past occasions and God were both determinants of present occasions, though in different ways. The divine formative factor partially

determined the form of the occasion, by which the occasion unifies its determinate contents derived from past occasions. These alone constituted the reasons why things were what they are, according to an early formulation of the ontological principle:

That every condition to which the process of becoming conforms in any particular instance has its reason in the character of some actual entity whose objectification is one of the components entering into the particular instance in question (the ontological principle—or principle of extrinsic reference). (EWM, 323f)

Actuality was thus understood as the determinateness that can make a difference to subsequent occasions. But with the middle concept, the sense of actuality shifts.

VII— The Middle Concept of God

After working out the theory of concrescence in part III, Whitehead realized that the ontological priority that actuality signifies ought to be vested in the process of concrescence itself. Becoming is prior to being as its source. Thus, we may say, in an oxymoron, that concrescence is more "concrete" than concrete being. This is only an apparent contradiction, because "concrete" is used here in different senses. In the first instance it means ontological priority, in the second determinateness. If so, the ontological principle whose reasons depend on actuality must be revised: reasons must be grounded in the formal constitution of an actuality.

In what sense can unrealized abstract form be relevant? What is its basis of relevance? "Relevance" must express some real fact of togetherness among forms. the ontological principle can be expressed as : All real togetherness is togetherness in the formal constitution of an actuality. So if there be a relevance of what in the temporal world is unrealized, the relevance must express a fact of togetherness in the formal constitution of a nontemporal actuality. (PR, 32 G in I.3.1C)

For actual occasions, the locus of actuality (at least in this transitional text) has shifted from the concrete outcome to the concrescence. 26 Yet this formulation of the ontological principle is couched not in terms of concrescence but in more general terms, "the formal constitution of an actuality." Since concrescence was understood in purely temporal terms, and could not apply to a nontemporal actuality devoid of concrescence and creativity, Whitehead therefore devised a more generic concept. Presumably it has two species, the temporal

concrescence of occasions and the nontemporal "conceptual valuation of eternal objects" (PR, 32).

This conceptual valuation may be conceived as an extreme limiting case of concrescence insofar as concrescence is the ordering of a multiplicity into complex unity. Because what is so ordered are eternal objects, the ordering is deemed nontemporal. To be sure, no temporal distinction between the ordering and the order achieved can be made. Also, it may be wondered whether there can be any activity in the absence of all temporality. Whitehead proposes a more generic concept of "formal constitution" in order to maintain, provisionally at least, that concrescence is inherently temporal.

Alternatively, instead of stretching "formal constitution" to cover this nontemporal instance, we may stretch the notions of concrescence and prehensive unification, allowing for both kinds. That has been my rationale for characterizing the divine conceptual valuation as a nontemporal concrescence, although Whitehead does not use this terminology until after the addition of the consequent nature. Then "the 'primordial nature' of God is the concrescence of a unity of conceptual feelings" (PR, 87). Whether we stretch "formal constitution" or "concrescence'' to cover the nontemporal instance is basically a matter of conceptual semantics. 27

The notion of conceptual realization which Whitehead now crafts is highly nuanced, for it is patterned after the notion of a concrescent unification of a multiplicity while at the same time denying the temporal creativity inherent in every finite concrescence. This also means denying it any subjectivity, which may be conceived as the individualization of creativity for a given actuality. In this way the present conception differs from the "conceptual realization" of the earlier statement: "Thus the nature of God is the complete conceptual realization of the realm of ideal forms" (RM, 154). This requires a divine subjectivity to contemplate the forms, much as in middle Platonism. That, however, would require God to be an instance of temporal creativity.

An instance of creativity, at this conceptual juncture, could only be an event occupying a region within the extensive continuum. Moreover, it could not function as a formative element, for then it would place its own divine creativity within the occasion's concrescence. No two acts of creativity can determine the same region, for they could potentially determine it in different ways. This is one reason why acts of creativity and subjectivity cannot be directly prehended, because one creativity cannot be included in another.

Thus the notion of a divine conceptual realization is reintroduced in order to conceive of God's actuality in terms of a formal reality, but now Whitehead takes care that it is strictly fashioned so as to function like the former divine formative element.

There are several ways, however, in which conceptual realization differs from the formative element. For one thing, it had become considerably more

complex. The formative element only contains a few necessary principles. Conceptual realization, on the other hand, embraces the entire infinitude of all eternal objects, whether realized or unrealized. The formative element could function as a constituent component that every occasion possessed. But it is highly implausible to suppose that each occasion would somehow include all eternal objects.

Moreover, his new concept was meant to show the novelty of unrealized objects hidden in God. One of the difficulties of his earlier notions supposed that the eternal objects were somehow inert or latent within each occasion, some of which were admitted to subjective efficiency (PR, 87C). This did not allow for any novel ingression of eternal objects, certainly not from any distinct transcendent source. His new concept of conceptual realization could overcome these difficulties only by showing that God was not just purely immanent as before, but also transcendent.

The new accent on divine formal reality permitted the distinction between the formal (transcendent) and the objective (immanent) aspects of God. Then the wealth of unrealized eternal objects could be housed in the God's formal constitution, while only those that are directly relevant to the occasion need be objectively present to any given occasion. Thus, God as objectively relevant functions as the former formative element, including all the metaphysical features of actuality. But the reality of God is not exhausted by these objective features. The unity of God lies in the formal reality, which is assigned no spatiotemporal locus.

Now the novelty of unrealized eternal objects can be placed in sharp relief. Heretofore they could only be somehow implicit within occasions, so their novelty consisted only in explicit actualization. Now unrealized eternal objects were hidden in the formal activity of the divine, inaccessible to the world except as made relevant.

Another shift concerns the way in which God affects the world. From the establishment of the principle of limitation until the introduction of conceptual realization, Whitehead does not distinguish between the way God and the way past determinate actualities affect occasions. Both can be classed together in the early formulation of the ontological principle. Each partly determines the nature of the outcome. 28 But as yet God does not persuade through ideals.

To be sure, Whitehead had introduced the "apprehension of character permanently inherent in the nature of things," partly conformed to, partly disregarded (RM, 61). Since evil resulted from its being disregarded, the principle of rightness could not function by means of (partial) determination. There is no clear way in which the functioning of the formative element and the principle of rightness can be coordinated, until the former is transformed into the conceptual realization of all eternal objects. Then it becomes possible

for God to function in the persuasive role of providing ideals, once the communication of initial subjective aims is worked out.

With this sketch of the nature of the middle concept, let us see how it came about.

1— Preconditions for the Middle Concept

From the meager features of the initial concept, little more than what it means to a nontemporal actual entity, Whitehead was able to construct process theism, using the pivotal conception of nontemporal concrescence. How was this accomplished? From a conceptual perspective, the move to the middle concept was more difficult than the move to the final concept. The move from the divine formative element to divine concrescence had to be made by a thinker profoundly mistrustful of notions connoting nontemporal subjectivity.

In studying this move to nontemporal concrescence, we need to review its preconditions, without which it could not have come to being.

(a) The Ontological Principle. This principle is already firmly in place, although the nature of the actuality it presupposes will be refined. It will serve as a guide for his quest, when he asks: what is the reason for unrealized eternal objects? What is the actuality or actualities in which this reason can be located?

(b) The Revision of Concrescence. If God is already conceived in terms of several generic characteristics of an actual entity, it would seem that God should also be a concrescence, since all the actual occasions are concrescences. Yet just because some trait is generic to all occasions need not mean that it is a generic trait of actualities. Previously, for example, all occasions were temporal when God was eternal. Some traits are common to both, some distinguish God and the occasions. Sorting out which are which was precisely Whitehead's continuing endeavor. Once concrescence is ascribed to God, the question becomes: should physical feeling, generic to all actual occasions, be attributed to God? Once the answer is affirmative, then the question becomes: what then distinguishes the two kinds of concrescence?

Let us go back to the theory of the Giffords draft of 1927. As long as Whitehead held to his original conception of concrescence in the Giffords draft, there could be little hope that God could be reconceived in terms of any kind of concrescence. The early theory of concrescence starts from a single datum (PR, 150C). "The objectified particular occasions together have the unity of a datum for the creative concrescence" (PR, 210; cf. PR, 111, 113). 29

This datum is not the initial nor the objective datum that pertains to individual prehensions; it is datum conceived as a determinate unity for the concrescence as its presupposition; it is replaced in the revised theory by the multiplicity of past actual occasions that were physically prehended and synthesized. 30

What could serve as the original datum of a nontemporal concrescence? The only thing available would be the realm of eternal objects, but if it is already unified and ordered, then the nontemporal concrescence would be superfluous. The ordering of the eternal objects needs to be the result rather than the precondition of divine concrescence. Thus, it is only when concrescence is revised so that it arises out of the multiplicity of past occasions that it becomes possible to devise a theory of nontemporal concrescence arising from the multiplicity of eternal objects.

(c) Conceptual Feeling. The nontemporal concrescence unifies conceptual feeling; finite concrescence primarily unifies physical feeling. Originally this similarity would be difficult to discern, because Whitehead started from different notions of prehension and ingression. Events (actual occasions) were related to other events in terms of prehension. Since each event was constituted from its prehensions of all other events, it became increasingly the case that their inner activity consisted of absorbing and synthesizing these relations.

The general relation of objects to events was conceived otherwise: "The ingression of an object into an event shapes itself in virtue of the being of the object. Namely the event is what is, because the object is what it is" (CN, 144). It was a purely neutral relationship by which some characteristic or property illustrated that which it was ingredient in.

If the relationship between eternal objects and actualities were purely understood in terms of ingression, there could be no divine ordering of eternal objects. There would only be the order the eternal objects had when entering into the divine nature. The relation between eternal objects and actualities first had to be reconceived in terms of conceptual feeling before nontemporal concrescence would become possible.

This may well have come about as a result of the revised theory of concrescence (PR, 239D). In any case, they would have been needed to derive conceptual feelings from physical feelings as a result of Whitehead's adopting Hume's principle (F).

(d) Multiplicities. For any divine concrescence, there must be a multiplicity to be unified. If it is to be nontemporal, it can only be unifying eternal objects. Yet how can this be, if the eternal objects already form a realm?

The objective ordering of eternal objects among themselves into in a realm including various abstractive hierarchies may have seemed sufficient at the time (in SMW, "Abstraction"), but later he came to realize that a purely formal order is insufficient:

There is not, however, one entity which is merely the class of all eternal objects. For if we conceive any class of eternal objects, there are additional eternal objects which presuppose that class but do not belong to it. (PR, 46)

Thus, God as the principle of concretion is called upon for another task, that of providing for the total order of eternal objects. Since it cannot be provided by any eternal object, something actual is needed to give final unity. The order of eternal objects thereby needs an orderer. This does not yet mean that the source of that order must lie in a nontemporal concrescence, only that something actual must be the ground of its order. It is not yet seen as requiring any nontemporal decision.

Apart from that actual grounding, he can refer to "the total multiplicity of Platonic forms" (PR, 43). "Platonic forms" is used as a way of making his remarks generally accessible, and the next paragraph makes clear that he means the eternal objects. 31

It is very difficult to determine whether this description of the eternal objects as a multiplicity rather than as a realm meant these two designations were exclusive to Whitehead's way of thinking. At this point he may have felt that they were better described as a multiplicity although there was enough unity and relatedness among the eternal objects themselves to ensure the relevance of any of them.

This understanding of "multiplicity" may be found in the next chapter (11.2.2): "the 'general' potentiality, which is the bundle of possibilities, mutually consistent or alternative, provided by the multiplicity of eternal objects" (PR, 65/102).

The notion of "multiplicity" takes on intensified meaning with the shift from the original to the revised theory of concrescence. Whitehead describes the revised view as: "In this [first] phase there is the mere reception of the actual world as a multiplicity of private centers of feeling, implicated in a nexus of mutual presupposition" (PR, 212).32 Whereas concrescence had been conceived as a process from one kind of unity (the original datum) to another (the satisfaction), now it was clearly a single process of unification, requiring a many to be unified. The many occasions of the actual world are there to be unified in the ensuing concrescence, and so are regarded as a many without any unity of their own. Any unity the many might have would detract from the

concrescent unity to be bestowed on them. Thus the initial data are conceived as constituting a mere multiplicity.

In analyzing the nature of a mere multiplicity Whitehead is concerned to emphasize its lack of any intrinsic unity: "The only statements to be made about a multiplicity express how its individual members enter into the process of the actual world . . . It can be treated as a unity for this purpose, and this purpose only . . . A multiplicity has solely a disjunctive relationship to the actual world. The treatment of a multiplicity as though it had unity belonging to an entity of any one of the other six kinds produces logical errors" (PR, 29f). 33 The confusion leading to the "appeal to a class to perform the services of a proper entity is exactly analogous to an appeal to an imaginary terrier to kill a real rat" (PR, 228D). Thus, multiplicities are improper entities, lacking the unity of any of the seven kinds of proper entities (PR, 224).

This analysis of a mere multiplicity, introduced with respect to the actual entities to be unified in concrescence, also applies to other kinds of multiplicities: "The ground, or origin, of the concrescent process is the multiplicity of data in the universe, actual entities and eternal objects and propositions and nexus" (PR, 224). While Whitehead may already have had reason to regard the eternal objects as a multiplicity (since there is no class of eternal objects), the new theory of concrescence gave him added reason.

While it may not have been alone sufficient to lead Whitehead to conceive the nontemporal concrescence, the idea of the eternal objects as a mere multiplicity is a necessary precondition. As long as he was satisfied that the eternal objects formed a systematic unity on their own, any ordering of them by God would be purely superfluous. On the other hand, if there were nothing eternal to unify, there could be no nontemporal concrescence.

2— Precipitating Factors

(a) Reversion. These four preconditions were necessary for the construction of a nontemporal concrescence and its identification with God. Without the ontological principle, Whitehead would not be directed to search for the ultimate reasons for things in actuality, expanding this to the actuality of the process of coming to be. Without the revision of concrescence as a single unification of a multiplicity into concrete unity, he would not have conceived of the nontemporal concrescence as a single act of unification, for he would have been hampered by his older requirement of a unified datum to initiate the process. Without the substitution by conceptual prehension for ingression, he would have found it difficult to conceive the divine concrescence as a unification of prehensions. Unless the eternal objects would be

conceived as an initial multiplicity, any unification of them would be superfluous. There would have been no multiplicity to unify.

These preconditions, against the background of Whitehead's metaphysics, provide a hospitable context for the emergence of the middle concept of divine conceptual realization. Only the first, the ontological principle, was fully in place before the initial revision of concrescence (D), but the implications of that revision account for the other factors. Thus, the conception of the nontemporal concrescence could have arisen at almost any time thereafter. It awaited a precipitating cause, Hume's principle.

Whitehead's adoption of this principle required adjustments in his account of novel possibility. Previously, not all eternal objects had been so strictly tied down to physical feeling. As formulated by Hume: "That all our simple ideas in their first appearance, are derived from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent" (PR, 86). For Whitehead, this means that conceptual feelings are derived from physical ones, or that eternal objects are abstracted from actual occasions in terms of a realistic epistemology. 34

Whitehead initially resisted the adoption of Hume's principle because it derived everything from past determinateness. Where would there be any room for the new? As we shall see, reversion permits novelty with the context of Hume's principle. Devising reversion directed Whitehead's attention to the question of novelty, posed in terms of the ontological status of unrealized eternal objects.

As long as Whitehead was satisfied with reversion, however, that question was not posed with radical seriousness. When it was, and reversion became increasingly problematic, he developed the notion of a divine conceptual realization of all eternal objects that could house the unrealized as well as the realized ones.

In that longrange sense, Hume's principle acted as catalyst. But the story leading up to "reversion" is more involved.

Earlier, in the Giffords draft, he had made room for novel possibilities in the "objective lure," which is either conceived as part of the datum from which concrescence starts or as its conceptual counterpart:

The 'objective lure' is that discrimination among eternal objects introduced into the universe by the real internal constitutions of the actual occasions forming the datum of the concrescence under review. This discrimination also involves eternal objects excluded from value in the temporal occasions of that datum, in addition to involving the eternal objects included. (PR, 185)

The point is illustrated by the Battle of Waterloo, a definite actuality, surrounded by many possible alternatives, "a penumbra of eternal objects, constituted by relevance" to that battle (PR, 185). If there is to be genuine novelty

in the world, occasions must receive more than simple actuality. Whatever it is, it is old, and the present quests for what is new. Our question only concerns how the novel possibility is communicated.

In this passage Whitehead appeals to "the real internal constitutions" of the past occasions. Yet otherwise the internal becoming of concrescences is strictly inaccessible. Here, it is postulated because the final satisfaction (the determinate objective actualization) of these occasions excludes those eternal objects not realized. In order to have novel eternal objects vested in the past, only those additional ones subjectively entertained by past occasions will do.

Yet how do eternal objects inherent within concrescence, and not manifest in the resultant satisfaction, get communicated to present occasions? We are not told. Presumably it is by "ingression," conceived as a parallel activity to the (objective) decision of past actualities (PR, 150). Whatever the theory, it will be precluded by the revised theory of concrescence, which excludes any such communication from "the real internal constitutions" of actual occasions.

If concrescence starts from the multiplicity of past actualities physically prehended, then something such as Hume's principle is necessary in order to obtain any conceptual entertainment of possibility within concrescence. But Whitehead does not take that route right away. What interests him initially about Hume's principle is precisely Hume's recognition of the exception, the missing shade of blue, which can be imagined even though never perceived (PR, 86f). 35 This is an element of novelty not to be found in the past, perceived world.

After he abandons the idea in the Giffords draft of a single datum from which concrescence starts, he does not immediately adopt the past world of occasions alone as the proper starting point. The intermediate theory is best illustrated in the chapter on "The Primary Feelings" (III.2.2&4E).36 Section 2 begins: "Conceptual feelings and simple causal feelings constitute the two main species of 'primary' feelings. All other feelings of whatever complexity arise out of a process of integration which starts with a phase of these primary feelings" (PR, 239).

Nothing is said about any derivation of the primary conceptual feelings from the causal feelings. Both kinds are equally primordial. The causal feelings refer to the old datum initiating concrescence, now suitably pluralized. We may assume that the conceptual feelings refer to the objective lure, perhaps also in some pluralized form, but we are not told on this point. What may well be new here for the first time is the use of conceptual feeling as parallel to causal feeling, neither derived from the other.

This chapter makes its own comment on Hume:

Hume, with opposite limitations to his meaning, asserts the same doctrine [as Plato's theory of recollection]. He maintains that we can never conceptually entertain what we have never antecedently experienced

through impressions of sensation. The philosophy of organism generalized the notion of "impressions of sensation" into that of "pure physical feeling." Even then Hume's assertion is too unguarded according to Hume's own showing. But the immediate point is the deepseated alliance of consciousness with recollection both for Plato and for Hume. (PR, 242)

The text is ambiguous as to whether Whitehead appropriates Hume's principle for himself. Does he generalize the principle itself, or only the notion of "impressions of sensation"? I incline toward the latter interpretation, if I am correct that the time was not yet ripe for its adoption. What hinders Whitehead is the problem of novelty: how is it possible to derive any new ideas from the prehensions of a past world?

It was not until Whitehead devised the category of reversion that it would be possible to introduce anything new on the basis of Hume's principle. Whitehead may have been on the verge of formulating this category. Certainly he was searching for ways in which strict derivation from senseexperience could be evaded. Recollection is one such avenue: "It recalls earlier phases from the dim recesses of the unconscious" (PR, 242). Yet while this evades derivation from present senseexperience, it still draws upon the past, not the radically novel. 37

Hume's principle was adopted in the fourth category of conceptual valuation (PR, 248F), which is immediately followed by the fifth category of conceptual reversion (PR, 249F), introducing conceptual feelings not directly derivable from the primary phase of physical feeling. Again, he recognizes that Hume "makes two concessions which ruin his general principle. For he allows the independent origination of intermediate 'shades' in a scale of shades, and also of new 'manners' of pattern" (PR, 260f). Now, however, he is confident he can account for this in a regular fashion: "Both of these cases are allowed for by the principle of 'reversion'" (PR, 261).

Thus, devising the category of reversion enabled Whitehead to adopt his version of Hume's principle, thus simplifying the initial phase of concrescence to simple physical feelings alone. A primary reason for this simplification would have been greater conformity with the ontological principle, which vested all reasons in actual entities. On the other hand, reversion later proved to be unsatisfactory to him because of several assumptions that he operated with:

(1) The eternal objects were uncreated (PR, 257).38 Reversion may be plausible as long as we suppose that we can imagine slightly different ideas "partially identical with, and partially diverse from" the original ones (PR, 249). Yet for every form that appears in the mind or in the world, there must have been an uncreated one hidden from the foundations of the world. Where could it have come from?

(2) "Everything must be somewhere; and here 'somewhere' means 'some actual entity' " (PR, 46). Earlier, he was content to argue, in accordance with the fourth category of explanation (PR, 22), that "every item of the universe . . . is a constituent in the constitution of any one actual entity" (PR, 148C). Thus, it was quite possible to construe the general Aristotelian principle without reference to God (PR, 40). 39

(3) His third assumption, that radically new forms were out of this world, showed the inadequacy of the first two. As long as all the forms were already somehow in the world, then the new could only be derived from the old. Theories of latent, inert eternal objects not admitted in subjective efficiency or theories of negative prehensions would not completely disguise this. Only if an eternal object could be completely excluded from the world could its appearance be radically new. That could never happen as long as it was uncreated—unless there were a transcendent cosmic formal reality hospitable to it.

If there is to be anything radically new in the world, it would have to be an "unrealized eternal object": something never before seen on land or sea. As long as Whitehead seeks to account for all the eternal objects simply in terms of actual occasions, all eternal objects are "realized" at least in the sense that they are somehow ingredient in actual occasions, even though in a latent or inert state. Negative prehension will dismiss them below the level of subjective efficiency (PR, 87), but they are not therefore negligible (PR, 41). Insofar as actuality meant that which was already determinate (either as a past actuality or a divine formative element), there was no room for unrealized ones. For no reason could be assigned for their existence according to early versions of the ontological principle (EWM, 323f). The thrust of Hume's principle with respect to novelty drives inexorably to the question of the status of unrealized eternal objects, whose status the principles were as yet unable to account for.

(b) Priority of Concrescence. In responding to this problem, Whitehead resorts to a timehonored solution and places the forms in the mind of God. To be sure, he is able to sanitize this concept by removing all traces of nontemporal subjectivity. In the process, however, he discovered an important ontological truth. What is it that makes something actual? Heretofore, he had simply assumed that whatever is concretely determinate was actual. This was the meaning of actuality for the actual occasions (of SMW) and there had been no occasion to revise it. If, however, unrealized eternal objects could only exist in a mind, then the contents of mind would have to exist in some dependent sense.

This requires mind to be actual. Since mind was understood in terms of concrescence, then actuality had to be extended to include concrescence as well as concrete being.

In some ways, concrescent becoming is more fully actual than being since it is capable of bringing being into being. It is possible that general reflection on the ontological priority of becoming over being led Whitehead to declare that ''The ontological principle can be expressed as: All real togetherness is togetherness in the formal constitution of an actuality" (PR, 32). I do not take this to be meant as a definitive form of the ontological principle. Neither this nor the general Aristotelian principle is to be taken as the ontological principle (PR, 40). Rather, they are descriptions of different facets of this manysided truth. If it were the principle, then it would exclude concrete determinateness from being actual, which is nowhere else Whitehead's intention.

Reflection on the ontological priority of becoming may have led Whitehead to propose divine conceptual realization, but it lacks the specificity and urgency that the question of unrealized eternal objects would have had for him. But either route is possible.

Whitehead's interest in nontemporal concrescence, however, was relatively shortlived, as we shall see in the next chapter.

Chapter Four— Reconstructing Process Theism

Whitehead's most distinctive contribution, in the eyes of many, has been the introduction of temporalistic theism. Once the preliminary moves had been made, however, the final step required no more than the ascription of physical feeling to God, a step that readily suggests itself as making God more like the other actual entities.

I— Preliminary Considerations

By this apparently simple expedient, Whitehead could endow God with subjectivity. His previous analysis of subjectivity in terms of the present immediacy of concrescence led to a dichotomy between temporal subjectivity and nontemporal nonsubjectivity. His rejection of nontemporal subjectivity was not caused by some principled objection to biblical anthropomorphism but by an appreciation of the requirements of nontemporality. Once God was conceived as temporal, however, it was perfectly possible and even desirable to conceive God as both subjective and personal.

Many heirs of Western personalistic monotheism could now endorse Whitehead's conception of God. The way Religion in the Making was constructed would have disguised its conceptual impersonalism from them. Most of Process and Reality also conceived of God nonsubjectively. What if it lacked the final chapter (V.2) and those inserted passages referring to the consequent nature? Many readers would have found the impersonal theism the remainder of the book expounds to be quite bewildering and uncongenial. To be sure, most early readers were not sure what to make of the frank espousal of temporalistic theism contained in the complete version, but that might have been less of an offense. The text directly proposing the consequent nature is only four sections (V.2.3–7). Other writings, chiefly those by Charles Hartshorne, have nurtured its further development, but these seven pages (PR, 344–351/ 523–533) were sufficient to inaugurate process theism.

Some have seen these few pages as an accidental appendage. For George Allan, the consequent nature "seems so arbitrarily tacked on to an argument

doing quite well without it." 1 Others, schooled in the final theory, have wondered why Whitehead should have been so diffident in espousing process theism. Since every actuality has both physical and conceptual feelings, how could God exemplify the metaphysical principles without having physical feelings? Since Whitehead was not willing to treat God as an exception even before he reclaimed theism (SMW, 92f), why didn't he adopt physical feelings for God from the start?

1— Exemplifying the Metaphysical Principles

The assumption underlying this concern is that there should be a fixed set of metaphysical principles for God to exemplify. But like many other features of this book, the principles were under construction. What pertains to all actualities and what differentiates God from the actual occasions was being sorted out as his theory develops.

The fact that the earlier nontemporal actuality lacked physical feeling need not mean that God did not exemplify the metaphysical principles as then understood. The metaphysical features are those ascribed to all actual entities, and this did not then include having physical feelings, even though all actual occasions had them. There are properties of concrescence that even in his final theory are not universal. The divine concrescence need not achieve determinate closure. The closure of unification in unity is not regarded as a metaphysical principle to which God is an exception.

Without ascribing physical feeling to God, Whitehead was able to depict a basic contrast between the one nontemporal conceptual actuality and the many temporal physical actualities. Since physical feelings were associated with the material world of finite actuality, he may have considered this contrast as the contemporary equivalent of the contrast between an immaterial God and the material world. Or, because concrescence could be deemed to have necessary closure, the introduction of physical feeling into God could result in rendering God finite. That of course happens in the case of Hartshorne's divine occasion, but this result is mitigated by the infinite series of such occasions.2

Even so, it seems that Whitehead could put forth general definitions for actuality that God, as then conceived, could not exemplify. For example, what if actuality is defined in terms of composition?

In the philosophy of organism it is assumed that an actual entity is composite. 'Actuality' is the fundamental exemplification of composition; all other meanings of "composition" are referent to this rootmeaning. (PR, 147C)3

Composition as characteristic of actuality may well stem from Whitehead's enthusiasm for Locke's use of "constitution." Many understand constitution as the result of the activity of constituting, but it is in the sense of constituting that excites Whitehead. 4 If Locke is so construed, the similarities with concrescence become evident.

It is not fully clear whether Whitehead means to make "composition" the defining essence of actuality, or simply affirm that the rootmeaning of composition is to be found solely in actualities. There are nonactual composite entities, such as complex eternal objects, but these are derivatively composite at best. They are not composite in the primary sense as resulting from composition (concrescence). In any event God as a formative element (the operative concept at this time) could only with difficulty be construed as actual in the sense of composition.

Since this passage comes from the Giffords Draft, we must conceive of God as nontemporal and nonconcrescent, as simply "the nontemporal actual entity" which is not much more than the principle of concretion. The determination of composition as the mark of actuality was insufficient to suggest to Whitehead that God should be conceived as composite, that is, as concrescent.

The principal obstacle lies in the early theory of concrescence. Concrescence there springs from an original datum out of which everything is derived that the actual entity will use. It is essentially a process of analysis and reconstitution. What could be the counterpart of the physical datum initiating concrescence in the divine instance? The most likely candidate would be the eternal objects, but they would already been ordered and unified into a realm to serve as the original datum, rendering any divine ordering superfluous.

On the other hand, what if God's concrescence were to derive from a single physical datum? Perhaps with divine imagination conceived as a rudimentary form of reversion the divine concrescence could reorder what it receives from such a physical datum. Unless, however, there is a succession of physical data, not everything that happens could be included with the divine concrescence. But the real problem is to account for the physical datum itself. Whence could it ever arise and where could it be located? Can physical causes alone conspire together to constitute a datum sufficient for the divine?

In any case, if Whitehead once conceived composition to be essential for actuality, it appears to have been shortly superseded by "decision."5

The word 'decision' does not here imply conscious judgment, though in some 'decisions' consciousness will be a factor. The word is used in its root sense of a "cutting off." . . . 'Decision' cannot be construed as a casual adjunct of an actual entity. It constitutes the very meaning of

actuality . . . 'Actuality' is the decision amid 'potentiality.' It represents stubborn fact which cannot be evaded. (PR, 43C)

In the Giffords draft Whitehead construes "decision" objectively. It refers not to any process of subjective deliberation, but to the determinate effect of an actuality upon its successors. Thus, decision does not form part of the process from datum to satisfaction, but to the transition from one satisfaction to the superseding datum (PR, 150C). More clearly than composition, decision marks the difference between actual occasions and eternal objects. As mere potentiality, the eternal objects do not cut off alternatives. More importantly for our present purposes, the notion of God as a nontemporal actuality, as the principle of limitation, constitutes the most universal "decision" of all, cutting off impossibilities.

There is another characterization of actuality, however, that ill befits Whitehead's concepts of God:

To be actual must mean that all actual things are alike objects, enjoying objective immortality in fashioning creative actions; and that all actual things are subjects, each prehending the universe from which it arises. (PR, 56C)

The earlier concepts of God are sufficiently objective, but lack subjectivity, while the final concept, while quite subjective, lacks complete objectivity. Yet Whitehead here demands both.

To summarize: just because Whitehead holds God to exemplify the metaphysical principles (PR, 343), this does not automatically mean that God should have physical feelings. The real obstacle was his hesitancy in attributing subjectivity to God, for he questions the possibility of any purely nontemporal subjectivity. Nontemporal subjectivity might be an abstract aspect of subjectivity, but that which is wholly nontemporal would be an object, not an event or any conceptual descendant therefrom.

2— Nontemporal Subjectivity

The closest Whitehead came to nontemporal subjectivity was his middle concept of God, in which he was careful to distinguish its formal reality from subjectivity. It was, however, a very transitional notion, lasting only a few weeks at most. It was superseded by the final concept before he could devote a complete chapter to it. On the other hand, the notion he implicitly questions has proved to be very durable, lasting from the Greeks to this day. Why should this be so?

For Plato, the Form of the Good, the Ultimate, is impersonal, and Whitehead originally followed this model. We do well to think of the principle of limitation not as the Christian God but as the Form of the Good. Both, at least in some contexts, are understood as ordering the forms. Souls for Plato are subordinated to the eternal forms. According to the Sophist, souls have "life and motion" and hence partake of time. Whitehead follows this temporalist understanding of soul as subjectivity, although not their subordination to the forms. For both the early Whitehead and Plato, the ultimate was nontemporal, and for this reason both found it to be nonsubjective.

Two considerations probably led Aristotle to assert nontemporal subjectivity as best suited for the ultimate. One was his conviction that the highest form of (human) life was thinking, the other his affirmation of pure act. If the object of thinking is other than the thinking itself, the thinking must receive the object somehow to think it, and this implies potency on the side of the thinker. For this potency to be eliminated in the case of the pure activity of thinking, it must be thinking on thinking itself. Although it might be anachronistic to put the issue in this way, Aristotle could be the first thinker to assert the identity of subject and object in the divine instance.

Some have questioned whether thinking on thinking has any content that is humanly intelligible. 6 Also, it may well be that receptivity is an activity, not a potency.7 In Christian circles it was held that God creates the objects to be thought, so no passivity need accrue to the divine thinker. Yet the important point is that God is constantly assumed to be a thinker, and hence a subject. At the same time the insistence upon the exclusion of all potency from the divine ensures that God be a nontemporal subject.

Later Platonism was able to affirm the transcendence of the central Platonic forms and still recognize Aristotle's insistence on moderate realism through the stratagem of "conceptualism." It could agree with Aristotle that all the forms inhere in actualities, while the highest forms were thoughts in the mind of God. Here, mind could be invoked for those forms that the world could not actualize or could actualize only imperfectly. This argument requires a nontemporal mind to match the atemporality of the forms contemplated. Thus, the perfection of some transcendent forms can maintained within the context of moderate realism.

Whitehead approaches this issue from a somewhat different angle. Conceived in terms of conceptual realization, God can house all unrealized eternal objects, which are all the forms transcending finite actualization. The forms inhere in some actuality or other, which is then recognized as an exemplification of the general Aristotelian principle of moderate realism (PR, 40). In this case one might say that divine conceptualism suggests moderate realism, although it is usually the other way around, where moderate realism suggests divine conceptualism.

Aristotle could have been influenced in his conception of the ultimate as subjective by the popular Greek understanding of the gods as personal individuals. But then Plato managed to transcend the popular imagination. It is more likely that Aristotle was influenced by his high regard for life and mind.

In any case, classical theism as it emerged in the Middle Ages gradually adopted the Aristotelian model of God as the great contemplator. But in all of its forms—Jewish, Christian, and Muslim—it was built on the strong beliefs of those schooled in the biblical and qur'anic traditions. In these traditions God was as a matter of course conceived to be subjective and personal. Moreover, particularly in the Hebrew Bible, God was assumed to act temporally. Thus, we learn that the Hebrews, in the particular historical hardship of their bondage in Egypt, cried to the Lord. When, in that day, the Lord heard their cry, God brought them forth out of the land of Egypt. This established a particular historical interchange by which Israel was shaped as the people of God.

Classical theists sharply reinterpreted these traditions in the light of the Greek valuation of eternity over time, but the element of divine subjectivity was never lost. It was reconceived as abstract nontemporal contemplation, sometimes of the forms alone, more usually of actualities as well, taking in everything within the scope of an immutable omniscience. Such contemplation, if completely nontemporal, might seem to be indistinguishable from nonsubjectivity, but the background of Biblical personalism, whether in tradition, personal piety, or in the liturgical life of the church, was always present, fusing the nontemporal with subjectivity. This fusion was always considered to be both nontemporal and personal.

Divine subjectivity was very minimally affirmed in terms of pure contemplation. In that way the nontemporality of God could be maintained. But what if divine subjectivity should require more than such inner contemplation?

Whitehead's years of deep agnosticism, from about 1898 to 1925, may well have weaned him away from the lingering authority of biblical personalism. Thus, he could reexamine the nature of theism dispassionately, on purely logical grounds. Others, Spinoza excepted, had almost always approached the theistic quest with the memory of the Lord God of Israel lurking somewhere in the back of their minds.

Logically, there were only two alternatives: God could be nontemporal and nonsubjective, or subjective and temporal. At first Whitehead sided with the first alternative. At first the issue was framed in terms of events and objects, and God was not an ordinary event, nor an occasion with its particular spatiotemporal standpoint. God's being a pure object entailed nontemporality, and he never found reason to modify that view. That is, right up until the very end, when he adopted the second alternative.

Although this issue can be expressed in terms of a logical dilemma, it is likely that it presented itself differently to Whitehead. It was commonly assumed that God was nontemporal, and his analysis of divine objectivity confirmed this. Considering God to be objective, however, was definitely swimming against the current. The primary contrast would be between subjectivity and objectivity. In that case the rejection of nontemporal subjectivity reinforces his commitment to divine objectivity.

One way of appreciating his reluctance to consider God as subjective lies in tracing out the implications of a fundamental decision that Whitehead appears to have taken at the very start of his theism: the nonidentification of God and creativity. To see how this unfolds we should go back to the metaphysics underlying the Lowell Lectures, prior to the introduction of epochal occasions and God. Though we must reconstruct his original view from later texts, it is fairly clear what it was. There was an underlying substantial activity that could be articulated by means of various events, themselves characterizable by the eternal objects (SMW, 177).

These eternal objects were mostly sensa, having existence only as illustrating different events. But the advent of epochal occasions transformed this, because there were no future occasions to ground possibilities. Possibilities now had to be understood purely in terms of their formal properties as independent eternal objects. Eternal objects were now free to form various orders of abstractive hierarchies.

Whitehead evidently hoped to explain the nature of actuality solely in formal terms, but found this project to fail. There was some limiting factor on pure formal possibility which actuality required. This factor need not be only necessary; it could include contingent factors. This element of contingency foreshadows the contemporary concern for cosmic constants, those particular values for basic physical properties that have been found to be necessary (within narrow parameters) for the emergence of life. (Investigation of the "anthropic principle" has focused attention upon these constants, which are pervasive throughout the universe since the Big Bang.)

This limitation is a partial ordering of the possibilities, which by themselves would constitute chaos. In that sense it is God exercising a cosmological function as orderer. But the decision must be made: is the limitation effected by an agency or a principle?

If God brought about the limitation by divine activity, God would either be the whole of the substantial activity, or a part. It is not the whole, for then God would be a Spinozistic alldeterminer. But neither is it a part or mode. For the underlying activity constitutes the world in its presentness. If God were a part, it would displace some worldly event or it would determine that which the event should be determining. Then either the event determines God's activity or vice versa, or the two determinations

conflict—which makes no sense. No event can be determined in two different ways.

Thus, God is not an event. In part Whitehead is here simply accepting the traditional view that God is purely nontemporal. But it is also very difficult to see how God could be an event among other events in this conceptuality. A divine event would occupy some portion of the extensive continuum. Then either the totality of worldly events would not wholly constitute the continuum, or the divine event would compete with some worldly events for the determination of some region. The place of God in the universe has become problematic ever since Copernicus. Classical theism, conceiving God's eternity to be somehow "outside" time, resolved the problem by placing God also "outside" the "space" of the extensive continuum. If God were given any temporal features, it seems that God would have to partake of the extensive continuum.

In his final formulation (PR) the temporality of God is possible because the primordial nature distinguishes God from the actual occasions. God's standpoint or precise relation to the extensive continuum is not specified. God is everlasting because the primordial nature with its universal subjective aim is supplemented by physical prehensions of temporal occasions. They lend their temporality to God. God is not temporal in the sense of occupying a particular region of the extensive continuum.

There are two ways in which a definite region could be assigned to God. In Hartshorne's conception of a society of divine occasions, each divine occasion can be considered to occupy a region that is spatially coextensive with the universe but temporally lies between any two occasions. Then we have the difficulty that each divine occasion defines a privileged meaning of simultaneity contrary to relativity physics. We shall examine this difficulty later.

The problem with divine regions competing with actual regions is based on the assumption that all actualities can be actual only in the present. If, as I argue, God is the activity of the future, then God occupies the region of the future. There is no basis for possible conflict if the regions of both are thus distinct.

At any rate, Whitehead did not determine how God should be specified in terms of the extensive continuum. The everlasting divine concrescence is not an event that must be insinuated within the totality of finite events. Although nontemporal concrescence was conceived as devoid of subjectivity, it had the structure of prehensive unification, which could then accomodate supplementary physical prehensions. Thus, the primordial actuality, now relativized as the primordial nature, became the basis for divine concrescence.

Actual occasions have temporal subjects, with their standpoints the outcome of the past occasions they prehend. But subjects, strictly speaking, are neither temporal nor nontemporal. Their temporality (or nontemporality, as the case may be) is a matter of relatedness and influence. Actual occasions

have temporal subjects because of their physical prehensions. If divine subjectivity were inherently nontemporal, as God traditionally conceived, temporal experience would be at best purely accidental, more likely excluded altogether. But a subjectivity neutral in itself and only nontemporal in terms of the eternal objects it contemplates could easily acquire temporal prehensions.

In any case, the everlasting divine concrescence is only partially spatiotemporal. It is temporal in the sense that it is influenced by every actual occasion it prehends. It is not temporal in the sense that it does not influence any occasion spatiotemporally, that is, no occasion can prehend it. It is spatiotemporal only in becoming, but not in being. If the divine concrescence were to have a determinate satisfaction, it would overlap with finite occasions either in whole or in part. Then the same region would be doubly determined, or creaturely freedom would be impossible. If there is no determinate satisfaction, God cannot be prehended. If so, either God cannot influence occasions spatiotemporally, or some other mode of influence must be possible.

The concept of a primordial envisagement and everlasting concrescence is a very complex and sophisticated concept of God. Until this concept was developed, Whitehead could not risk considering God to be an instance of creativity. Until then all instances of creativity would be considered to be events occupying particular regions. They are were all modes. To be sure, "the ultimate is termed 'creativity'; and God is its primordial, nontemporal accident" (PR, 7). An accident, however, need not be an instance of creativity, for the way God is an accident differs from the way modal actual occasions are accidents. God was originally conceived as a nontemporal attribute or as a formative element. This was another way of being actual, that is, a way of being an accident. Both kinds constitute accidents in the sense that their specific nature is not entailed by creativity.

If God could neither be identified with the underlying activity, nor with one of its modes, then only eternal objects could constitute God. For eternal objects and the underlying activity are the basic constituents of all things. It then becomes crucial to specify how God could be actual, since the eternal objects themselves are merely possible. Whitehead argues that the principle of limitation is actual because it makes a difference to all actual occasions. Quite apart from any inherent necessity that the eternal objects by themselves possess, there are certain metaphysical features and pervasive contingent factors that are required in order that any occasion could be concrete. God is not concrete in the sense that actual occasions are concrete, "but He is the ground for concrete actuality" (SMW, 178).

The many actual occasions, rather than the underlying substantial activity, became the ontological basis of reality in Whitehead's theory (in RM). This meant that God was no longer thought to be an attribute of the underlying activity, but a formative element constitutive of each and every occasion. God

was that which rendered each occasion actual. This principle of concretion was presumably the general metaphysical order each occasion exemplified. God was not an individual contingent temporal actual occasion, for strict nontemporality entailed the exclusion of all more particular conditions.

This God, as purely nontemporal, was conceived as immanent within every occasion, having no transcendent, independent status. For only that which is concrete can exist independently. Let us designate this as 'formal pantheism'. It is not a substantial pantheism like Spinoza's nor a dynamic pantheism like Henry Nelson Wieman's.

It is difficult to appreciate the extent to which Whitehead's early metaphysical concept of God was nonsubjective and purely immanent for the last chapter of Religion in the Making is devoted to the project of showing how the religious apprehension of a personal God could supplement his metaphysical concept. At the time he apparently thought this was quite feasible. Then the last chapter of Process and Reality, which so thoroughly transforms this formal pantheism into a temporal personal theism, is usually construed as being his meaning throughout the book, if not the meaning of Religion in the Making as well.

In the course of exploring his middle concept of God as conceptual realization, Whitehead was apparently willing, at least once, to stretch the notion of creativity to include the extreme instance of nontemporal creativity:

The true metaphysical position is that God is the aboriginal instance of this creativity, and is therefore the aboriginal condition which qualifies its action. It is the function of actuality to characterize the creativity, and God is the eternal primordial character. (PR, 225 G in D)

(While creativity might be nontemporal, concrescence and subjectivity were held to be strictly temporal.)

Note that in the second sentence God functions the way the creatures do as characterizing creativity. This is just the way the divine formative element had functioned. But the new element lies in the opening phrase: ''God is the aboriginal instance of this creativity." This moves toward greater coherence, for now God is not possible apart from creativity. Heretofore the divine formative element could be conceived as uncreated and thus external to creativity. This modification, however, does not alter the way in which God conditions the temporal creatures.

Thus, the notion of conceptual realization that Whitehead works out is highly nuanced, for it must affirm the notion of a concrescent unification of a multiplicity while at the same time distancing itself from any connotation of creativity or subjectivity. (Subjectivity may be conceived as the individualization of creativity.) In this way, "the formal constitution" of God differs from

the earlier statement about conceptual realization: "Thus the nature of God is the complete conceptual realization of the realm of ideal forms" (RM, 154). There, a divine subjectivity contemplates the forms, much as in middle Platonism. That, however, requires God to be an instance of creativity, rather than a formative element devoid of all creativity.

An instance of creativity, at this point in his reflection, would be an event occupying a region within the extensive continuum. Moreover, it could not function as a formative element, for then it would have its own divine creativity within the creativity of the occasion. No two acts of creativity can determinate the same region, for they could potentially determine it in different ways. This is the reason why acts of creativity cannot be directly prehended. Only the concrete is prehensible, not the concrescence. Subjectivity in its own present immediacy cannot be objectified.

When the notion of a divine conceptual realization is reintroduced, Whitehead takes care to place it on a different ontological footing. Previously (in RM) it presupposed nontemporal subjectivity, which is incompatible with his conception of a purely temporal subjectivity. In basing the actuality of a conceptual realization on its formal constitution, he intended it to be devoid of subjectivity and hence of creativity. It was to be understood in terms of the older notion of a divine formative element.

There are several related features, however, in which the new conception differs from the previous one. First of all, it was considerably more complex. The formative element was limited to a few necessary principles. The conceptual realization, on the other hand, embraces the entire infinitude of all eternal objects, whether realized or unrealized. The formative element functions as a component embodied by every occasion. Now it would be highly implausible to suppose that each occasion could somehow exemplify all eternal objects so ordered. Moreover, his earlier notion suggested that the eternal objects were all somehow latent within each occasion. This did not allow for any novel ingression of eternal objects, certainly not from any distinct transcendent source. His new concept of conceptual realization was intended to overcome just this problem.

Secondly, his present distinction between the formal and the objective aspects of God permits unrealized eternal objects to be housed in the formal constitution, while only those that are directly relevant to the occasion need be objectively present for any given occasion. Thus, God as objectively relevant would be immanent within every occasion, and this would include the metaphysical features of the former formative element. The transcendent unity of God lies in its formal reality.

Now the novelty of unrealized eternal objects can be placed in sharp relief. Heretofore they could only be somehow implicit within occasions, so their novelty consisted only in explicit actualization. Now unrealized eternal

objects were hidden in the formal activity of the divine. As unrealized they may not even be objectified.

In an earlier essay on "The NonTemporality of Whitehead's God," I argued:

Far from being always (at all times) prehended by God, it is more accurate to say that God never (at no time) wholly prehends the entire primordial nature, for at no particular time, nor for the summation of all particular times, is it necessarily wholly relevant. 8

This discussion of course is written from the perspective of the final concept of God, but it gets at the nonobjectified character of irrelevant eternal objects. As ingredient within the formal nontemporal constitution of God they are not yet objectifiable and hence prehensible by actual occasions.

Now, we move to a very different conceptuality of the nature of God when we include God's consequent experience. What led him Whitehead to adopt this radically new conceptuality? We may recount several different possible reasons.

II— Precipitating Factors

1— Temporal Subjectivity

The deep consistency of the consequent nature with the rest of Whitehead's metaphysics ensured its ultimate success, but that does not fully explain why he undertook introducing the notion in the first place. One passage may provide us with the clues, since it appears to be his first discussion of this topic. It is so early that its distinguishing marks, the use of the term consequent nature and the ascription of physical feeling is not employed. I refer to the third paragraph of the penultimate section of the book (PR, V.2.6). It should be isolated from the first two introductory paragraphs, which do use the distinguishing marks. I shall analyze the third paragraph in two sections:

But God's conceptual realization is nonsense if thought of under the guise of a barren, eternal hypothesis. It is God's conceptual realization performing an efficacious role in the multiple unifications of the universe, which are free creations of actualities arising out of decided situations. (PR, 249.29–32a)

Originally, it seems this fragment held two cognate passages which presently appear in two diverse parts of the book: two or three paragraphs from the last chapter (PR, 343.38–344.11 or 18) and one paragraph from the first chapter

(PR, 31.4–18a). These passages pertain exclusively to the divine conceptual realization. The first considers "the unconditioned actuality of conceptual feeling at the base of things," which is described as the primordial actuality (PR, 344). The second analyzes how this primordial actuality affects the world (PR, 31). In its original context, "But God's conceptual realization is nonsense" (PR, 249) is a rhetorical device to mark the transition from a discussion of the primordial actuality in itself to a consideration of how it affects the world. Overstating his case, he argues that the primordial actuality, if merely considered in itself, would be "nonsense." Without, say, its provision of initial aims, it would play no role in the scheme of things.

In its present context, Whitehead has used the rhetorical device to introduce the consequent nature. Now it means that the primordial nature is nonsense without the consequent nature. Because of its appropriateness to this new situation, he apparently expropriated it from its original context (PR, 343f), severing the connection between the two parts. 9

The second sentence, alluding to "the multiple unifications of the universe," may have prompted Whitehead to wonder whether there might be another prehensive unification beyond the finite unifications. They were all occasions (events) based on particular spatiotemporal standpoints. Perhaps there could be a more universal prehensive unification based on a nontemporal realization:

Again,10 this discordant multiplicity of actual things, requiring each other and neglecting each other, utilizing and discarding, perishing and yet claiming life as obstinate matter of fact, requires an enlargement of the understanding to the comprehension of another phase in the nature of things. In this later phase, the many actualities are one actuality, and the one actuality is many actualities. Each actuality has its present life and its immediate passage into novelty; but its passage is not its death. This final phase of passage in God's nature11 is ever enlarging itself.12 In the complete adjustment of the immediacy of joy and suffering reaches the final end of creation. This end is existence in the perfect unity of adjustment as means, and in the perfect multiplicity of the attainment of individual types of selfexistence. The function of being a means is not disjoined from the function of being an end. The sense of worth beyond itself is immediately enjoyed as an overpowering element in the individual selfattainment. It is in this way that the immediacy of sorrow and pain is transformed into an element of triumph. This is the notion of redemption through suffering which haunts the world.13 (PR, 349.32b–350.7)

Whitehead calls for "another phase in the nature of things" beyond the world of occasions and God as primordial, as a way of unifying the world.

Although they are not explicitly mentioned, this calls for divine physical feelings, since the totality of conceptual feelings already constitutes a complete whole. There must be, he urges, a universal prehensive unification as well as the particular prehensive unifications that the occasions are, and this cannot be achieved by God as previously conceived.

This implies that we contribute to the divine experience, and thereby acquire an ultimate value we can anticipate: "[T]he sense of worth beyond itself is immediately enjoyed as an overpowering element in the individual selfattainment." God's consequent experience up to the present, and the experience of an imagined deity having an immutable omniscience up to that same moment, would have precisely the same content. There is this difference, and it is momentous. Each of us contributes to the consequent experience, and our contribution is valued for that purpose. But nothing can be given to the One who has it all.

This passage is a fairly intuitive articulation of a new insight, to be fleshed out with more precise conceptual means later (e.g., V.2.3–5). 14 In order to have confidence in this insight, he needed the support his notions of concrescence, subjectivity, and temporality provided. He avoided ascribing any subjectivity to nontemporal concrescence, even avoiding the term, because he understood temporality to be exclusively temporal. Yet if the enlargement of unification required physical feeling of temporal occasions, that meant divine temporality and hence subjectivity. If subjective, then God is wholeheartedly an everlasting concrescence.

This divine concrescence carries over into how the primordial nature is understood:15

His conceptual actuality at once exemplifies and establishes the categoreal conditions. The conceptual feelings, which compose his primordial nature, exemplify in their subjective forms their mutual sensitivity and their subjective unity of subjective aim. These subjective forms are valuations determining the relative relevance of eternal objects for each occasion of actuality. (PR, 344)

Since God is now conceived as subjective, it is perfectly natural to endow God with a subjective aim. The divine aim coordinates and unifies all divine feeling by means of the subjective forms, which determine the relevance of the eternal objects to actual occasions. (While it may come close to saying that God provides the occasions with an incipient subjectivity by means of their initial subjective aims, it does not. This is consistent with the earlier theory that occasions in their subjectivity determine how they will receive and utilize relevant eternal objects.)

What is important for our purposes is the use of subjective forms. Every prehension has a subject, a datum, and a subjective form. Thus, a nontemporal concrescence of conceptual feelings would have attendant subjective forms, and this would seem to imply subjectivity.

This observation turns on merely terminological considerations. Whitehead could have avoided it by fiat. Instead of "subjective forms" he could have introduced a wider class of "concrescent form." While finite, temporal concrescent forms were subjective, the nontemporal concrescent forms of God could be nonsubjective. His actual strategy was otherwise. As long as God was conceived solely as nontemporal, there is no talk of "subjective form" for God. Once divine subjectivity was introduced, such talk becomes most helpful.

2— The Locus of Integration

Within a few weeks of entertaining the notion of God as the conceptual realization of all eternal objects, he was able to dream of the possibility that God might be temporal. This was rarely if ever achieved in the entire history of classical theism. What were the factors that predisposed him in this direction?

Classical theism was handicapped by its notion of nontemporal subjectivity. To be nontemporal, its experience had to be unchanging; nothing could ever be added to it. To maintain this immutability, divine knowledge had to include all events as determinate, whether past, present, or future. God had eternal knowledge of all future contingents. It was argued that this was possible for an eternal knower, even though such contingents did not yet exist from any temporal perspective. Each event could be known in the intersection between eternity and time, although whether the knower was dependent on known, or the known on the knower, was much less clear.

Whitehead did not accept this type of perspectivism. Knowledge of the future is restricted to possibility: "God holds "the ideal forms apart in equal, conceptual realization of knowledge. Thus, as concepts, they are grasped together in the synthesis of omniscience" (RM, 153). But since nothing can be added to this nontemporal subject, the actualities that do come to pass do not seem to be known by God, any more than by Aristotle's God.

A nontemporal subject excludes temporal experience. But God as a formative element, or even as a formal reality, is not a subject. In devising this middle concept Whitehead has carefully qualified the notion of a concrescent unification of many forms to one to remove all traces of subjectivity. We illustrate this in terms of internal relations. Simple internal relations are quite objective: if x is less than y, then y is greater than x. The whole network of eternal objects are internally related to each other by the principles proposed

in the chapter on "Abstraction" (SMW). The whole cannot be what it is apart from its parts. But these internal relations do not require any subjectivity, as the original realm of eternal objects indicates.

Subjectivity may be understood as the progressive, temporal constitution of a subject by that to which it is internally related. We speak of an internal relation as affecting the inner nature of an actuality. "Constitution" might be better, especially for a theory that holds that the subject is wholly constituted by such relations. The relations do not come capable of achieving the unity the subject seeks. So the subject is active in the reception and integration of these internal relations into a final whole. 16

If so, subjectivity is inherently temporal, receiving and integrating relations. Thus, the middle concept may be conceived as a nontemporal concrescence that has no subject. This is the precise way in the earlier conceptual realization (in RM ch. 4) differs from the later concept (in PR). Earlier, he had imagined God as personal, subjective, as in the whole Western tradition; later the same conceptual notion, yet abstracted from that element of subjectivity.

It is highly questionable he could have made the shift to temporalistic theism had he retained the earlier notion of conceptual realization (e.g., RM, 154). But if there were no subject within the divine concrescence, there could be no nontemporal barrier to the admission of temporal prehensions. Moreover, if temporal prehensions could be admitted, then there could be successive temporal stages of experience, and it could be appropriately considered a temporal concrescence with its own subject.

It is all a problem of which is the inclusive factor. An analogy might be drawn from the history of logic. Aristotelian logic is a predicate logic; Stoic logic a propositional logic. Because of the prestige of Aristotelian logic, unsuccessful efforts were made to incorporate propositional logic into predicate logic. The same unsuccessful effort was made in the late Middle Ages. The proper relationship, that predicate logic is an aspect of propositional logic, was only achieved in very recent times. All efforts to incorporate temporal experience within the nontemporal seem to run into difficulties, but Whitehead's temporalistic theism inverts the two factors.

In general, the middle concept of conceptual realization becomes the primordial nature considered as a objective element included within the everlasting subject. Once, Whitehead speaks of the primordial nature as "the concrescence of a unity of conceptual feelings," which may be considered the nontemporal aspect of the everlasting concrescence (PR, 87). But there is no independently existing primordial subject. The primordial nature is "efficiently actual" (PR, 343). It would be an instance of misplaced concreteness to treat it as if it were actual by itself.

So far, I have explained how Whitehead avoids the pitfalls of nontemporal subjectivity. But there is also another obstacle to overcome: what prevents God as temporal from just being an event among other events? The answer in brief is that God has no spatiotemporal standpoint.

Still, there must be some focus for the integrating activity whereby the physical prehensions are unified together. Let us call that a 'locus of integration', which in every actual occasion is a spatiotemporal standpoint, but which is not spatiotemporal in the exceptional divine instance. Thus, a divine physical prehension for Whitehead is only onesidedly temporal. Its objective datum is a temporal actual occasion, and these divine physical prehensions are successively felt, but the locus in which they are experienced is not itself spatiotemporal.

While the locus is not spatiotemporal, God is sufficiently temporal to enjoy subjective experience and hence have a general purpose for such experiencing:

The perfection of God's subjective aim . . . prehends every actuality for what it can be 17 in such a perfected system—its sufferings, its sorrows, its failures, its triumphs, its immediacies of joy—woven by rightness of feeling into the harmony of the universal feeling . . . (PR, 345f)

Finite standpoints circumscribe an occasion's world, and hence the physical prehensions it is called upon to integrate. God's 'locus of integration' permits the scope of God's experiencing to be allinclusive, incorporating every occasion as it comes into being.

For this reason the divine concrescence is everlasting, never achieving the terminus required by complete unity. Thus, it cannot be prehended. If prehension is the only way God can influence the world, God is powerless to affect the course of events. Fortunately, however, that need not be the case, although alternatives require a revision of Whitehead's basic assumption that only prehension is efficacious in the relations between actualities.

We should not be quick to seek for any terminus to divine concrescence. If God should become a concrete being, that being is either inside or "outside" spacetime. If "outside," its concreteness would be questionable. In any case, it could only affect us in terms of its conceptual component. If inside, it would compete with worldly occasions. To be sure, the divine occasions of the societal alternative don't compete, but only because they lurk in the empty spaces of this world.

The integration of temporal feelings on a nontemporal basis is a tremendous achievement, which inaugurated and fuelled much of process theism ever since. Nevertheless, there are problems with it, such as the imprehensibility of the consequent nature. At present let us compare the particular theory with

the other alternatives. Hartshorne locates the locus of integration in a series of divine occasions, which must each be past to be effective. The notion of a universal, everlasting integration is abandoned in favor of a series of finite divine standpoints. To be sure, these standpoints are spatially universal, but they are temporally particular.

We might locate the locus in the present, but if in a particular present, it usurps the existence of some occasion, and if in a universal present, it usurps the existence of all occasions. No two concrescences can occupy the same spatiotemporal region; for then they will determine that region in potentially conflicting ways. Nor can the divine present (as opposed to the nontemporal) be absent from worldly spacetime. Spacetime is all encompassing, and even if the divine present were somehow "outside" spacetime, it would be a contemporary. Contemporaries are mutually independent, and cannot influence each other.

Whitehead's solution is exempt from these difficulties. But this solution lacks the spatiotemporal leverage to specify which aim belongs to which nascent occasion. The occasion, not even born yet, can hardly select the aim out of the vast array of possibilities the primordial nature displays. A future divinity, on the other hand, prehending the precise situation facing the nascent, can value its real possibilities to provide the appropriate initial aim. Nontemporal valuation cannot match the spatiotemporal situation of the nascent occasion with its appropriate aim. 18

Note that a future standpoint enjoys similar advantages with Whitehead's 'locus of integration'. The future does not compete with present finite concrescences, nor would it compete with concrete beings, or require itself to be inserted within the empty spaces of the world. It is a different region from the temporal world of the present and the past, without having to abandon a general spatiotemporal status.

To return to our basic theme, we see how it was possible for Whitehead to embrace the consequent nature despite his initial determination to treat God as an object rather than as an event. I have identified the precipitating factor to be the desire to enlarge "multiple unifications" beyond those of actual occasions (PR, 349). But there may be other factors as well, which we should investigate.

3— Is 'Consciousness' the Reason for Process Theism?

In The Emergence of Whitehead's Metaphysics, I argued that it was the completion of his theory of consciousness that led Whitehead to ascribe physical feeling to God, and thereby effect the revolution bringing about process theism. Originally Whitehead had understood consciousness in terms of propositional feeling. But he then discovered that propositional feeling and physical

purpose, devised for quite distinct purposes, had the same structure, for both were integrations of physical and conceptual feeling. Since physical purpose applied to all actualities, this common structure meant that all occasions would have to be considered to be conscious to some degree or other. To avoid this consequence, Whitehead developed the further complexity of intellectual feelings, which alone were deemed conscious. They are integrations of propositional and physical feelings. Since the propositional feelings are derived from the physical feelings they are contrasted with, consciousness arises from the contrast between what something might be with what it is (EWM, 224–227).

This theory entails that any purely conceptual divine concrescence, since it lacks physical feeling, would have to be unconscious (PR, 343). In order to sustain the perfection of consciousness in the context of an altered theory as to its nature, I argued that it would be necessary to add physical feeling to the divine concrescence (EWM, 227–229).

This argument presupposed that divine nontemporality would be subjective for Whitehead, and such perfect subjectivity would enjoy consciousness. That assumption is flawed. It means reading into the texts concerning nontemporal concrescence a measure of subjectivity. 19 This may happen because of some supposed continuity with the teachings of Religion in the Making. Or it may arise by extending the principle that all finite concrescence is subjective: since all finite concrescence is subjective, divine concrescence would be subjective as well. While Whitehead is very circumspect on the topic, we have seen some reasons for his initial unwillingness to ascribe subjectivity to God.

From compositional analysis we learn that the process leading to the ascription of subjectivity to God first appears in later insertions to the initial draft of part III (DEFH). By then the theory of consciousness had been completed (H).

The theory of consciousness is an additional reason for not regarding the early theory of God as subjective. If God had then been subjective, we should expect some reflection on divine consciousness in that chapter (111.5). On the other hand, since God was then conceived as purely objective, the topic of consciousness would be simply irrelevant.

God as the conceptual realization of all unrealized eternal objects provides a better explanation for novelty than reversion was able to, thereby justifying its abolition (PR, 249f). If the passages on conceptual realization were written before the development of intellectual feelings, we should expect the chapter on intellectual feelings (111.5) to lack any mention of the reversion that has already been abolished. As it is, however, that chapter mentions reversion throughout, indicating that the abolition was drafted later than the theory of consciousness.

Far from being the primary factor for Whitehead's move to process theism, it is not even a precipitating factor. For the doctrines of intellectual feelings and conceptual realization can exist side by side, as long as God is conceived in purely objective terms.

On the other hand, a theory of consciousness requiring physical feeling could confirm his decision to adopt the consequent nature. Both intellectual feeling and the consequent nature require physical feeling. The conceptuality of adding physical feeling lies close at hand once the notion of a divine concrescence is introduced. Should Whitehead then accept divine subjectivity and with it divine temporality, the addition of physical feeling would be the way to express this temporality. He could be reinforced in making this move by realizing that in so doing he is in the same stroke ensuring that God is conscious.

Thus, we can sum up this reflection by saying that his theory of consciousness does not lead to divine subjectivity, but divine subjectivity, since it requires physical feeling, easily leads to a theory of divine consciousness.

4— Is 'Everlastingness' the Reason for Process Theism?

Whitehead taught that creaturely achievement is cherished 'everlastingly' in God's consequent experience. Since Whitehead had already used the natural term objective immortality otherwise, he characterized the way occasions objectify themselves in the divine experience as 'everlastingly.' 20 Since this is a form of objectification, as specified for divine experience, 'everlastingness' is ''the final application of the doctrine of objective immortality" (PR, 351). Could concern for immortality in God been a reason for the adoption of the consequent nature?

Victor Lowe thinks so: "Whitehead's doctrine of immortality in God gives permanent meaning to the tragedy of his son's death. In all probability it was part of his motive for writing it, but that does not warrant our dismissing it."21

Eric Whitehead was killed in action in March 1918, and is eloquently memorialized in the dedication of An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919). Russell and others suggest that this had much to do with Whitehead's turn toward religion in order to give meaning to this tragedy. It is one thing to give expression to this concern once Whitehead felt it was conceptually possible to do, quite another to suppose that the concern for Eric was the basic reason why these concepts were developed. Were this so, we should expect some anticipations in the intervening books.

Lowe finds such a text in Religion in the Making: that what passes away "contributes its quality as an immortal fact to the order which informs the world" (RM, 80).22 Lowe interprets this order to be God, as the footnote indicates: "The detailed theory of this contribution will not appear until Whitehead delivers the final part of his Gifford Lectures."23 From the later perspective this

makes good sense, but in context all that need be meant is the impersonal order of the world. Even if Whitehead considers this order divine, it need not enjoy any subjectivity. Every action forms a definite contribution to this order.

If the search for a meaning to Eric's death were the prime motivating factor in Whitehead's religious inquiry, we should expect a more searching examination of immortality in Religion in the Making, particularly as at that time Whitehead was willing to give the testimony of religion its strongest say in metaphysical matters. Yet it does not explicitly differentiate between subjective and objective immortality, let alone 'everlastingness.' As he expressly says, "It is entirely neutral on the question of immortality, or on the existence of purely spiritual beings other than God" (RM, 111).

Not only is there no basis for 'everlastingness' in God in Religion in the Making, there is none in the meager concepts of God that Whitehead works with throughout most of Process and Reality. The middle concept of God as nontemporal concrescence only applies to eternal objects and not to actualities, and provides no toehold for their everlastingness. There seems no way in which concern for the divine significance for the perishing of actualities could have provided the occasion for the notion of a divine consequent experience.

On the other hand, once Whitehead affirmed the existence of the consequent nature, he assiduously explored its ramifications for religious significance, including the notion of 'everlastingness.' As we have seen, it is already present in the very first formulation of the final concept (PR, 349f). I suspect that there was a rich and complex religious sensibility to Whitehead's makeup, kept in check by the conceptual framework he subscribed to. Before 1925, all concepts of God he knew of seemed to require omnipotence. His response was agnosticism, if not atheism. Once it became possible to disentangle the notions of God and omnipotence (unilateral power), he found it possible to embrace theism. He could now allow his religious sensibility fuller sway. Once God could be conceived as temporal and receptive, his concern for Eric, and for all the others, colleagues and students, who had died in World War I, could be given expression in the eloquent words that close the book.

In commenting on the absence of evidence concerning the turn from agnosticism to theism, Lowe remarks on Whitehead's lack of interest in himself. "All his thought and action were outwardly directed. The kind of selfknowledge he thought it important for a thinker to seek was not awareness of his motives, but awareness of the limitations of the concepts he was using; and this, being a matter of stretching the outwardly directed imagination, is not selfknowledge at all." 24 While I doubt whether we can overestimate the depth of Whitehead's religious sensitivies, it would be a mistake to see in them the cause of his basic concepts of God. It is primarily the other way around. The new concepts that arose in the course of his prolonged reflection first made the expression of the religious concerns possible.

5— What about the Provision of Subjective Aim?

There is another inappropriate theory by which Whitehead could have been persuaded to adopt divine physical feeling. It is quite plausible. It makes a very attractive alternative because of its clarity and explanatory power, but suffers from one glaring defect. There is no evidence that he ever adopted this approach.

Many process theists deem that God's receptivity of the world is essential for the specification of initial aims. This could have been Whitehead's concern. God's experience of the concrete particular situation facing a nascent occasion could have determined which possibilities best fit that situation, and thus which particular aim is most appropriate for that occasion. 25

Before he adopted the consequent nature, however, he had already proposed to derive initial aims from God, and saw no need then to particularize them any further than by means of nontemporal valuation.26

Later, with the consequent nature, he seemed unable to devise a way by which it could be done. To be sure, he envisions a fourth phase in which "the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back into the world" (PR, 351), but this is not developed in terms of the detailed concepts that would show how it is possible. All the explicit texts derive the initial aim solely from the primordial nature.

Consider, for example, this remark in the final chapter (V.2), that actual occasions require "the primordial permanence of God, whereby the creative advance ever reestablishes itself endowed with initial subjective aim derived from the relevance of God to the evolving world" (PR, 347). It is the primordial nature that establishes this relevance. Only the primordial nature is complete; therefore it alone can be prehended, and only it can be the source of initial aims.

This reliance on the primordial nature exclusively extends even to the chapter on "Coordinate Division" (IV.1), which was probably the last chapter written (EWM, 238–240). Whitehead uses initial aim to explain the origin of the quantum that is the extensive locus of a given occasion:

The quantum is that standpoint in the extensive continuum which is consonant with the subjective aim in its original derivation from God. (PR, 283M)

Here, God is not further specified; Whitehead probably did not feel it relevant to specify the primordial nature, but a related passage makes this clear. There is an insertion in the earlier chapter on "The Extensive Continuum" (II.2.2C) reflecting this late theory:

In the mere extensive continuum there is no principle to determine what regional quanta shall be atomized, so as to form the real perspective standpoint for the primary data constituting the basic phase in the concrescence of an actual entity. The factors in the actual world whereby this determination is effected will be discussed at a later stage of this investigation. They constitute the initial phase of the 'subjective aim.' This initial phase is a direct derivate from God's primordial nature. In this function, as in every other, God is the organ of novelty, aiming at intensification. (PR, 67.13e–21M in II.2.2C) 27

Yet how can God determine nontemporally the size and location of every actual occasion that should ever arise? Even supposing the possibilities entertained by God to be real possibilities, this seems very difficult. If these real possibilities mean that pure possibilities can be evaluated in terms of differing possible conditions, the conditions and not the exact location determine their character. With respect to a pure locus, all sorts of possibilities are equally relevant. In fact, any given locus could have any size for its standpoint, and any distribution of prior conditions. Possibility of location is indistinguishable from the divisibility of the extensive continuum. How would it be possible to determine present standpoints without real experience of past conditions? If Whitehead refers only to the primordial nature in the provision of standpoints, it can only mean that he was not then able to integrate the consequent nature into its provision

Attractive as it would be to process theists, Whitehead nowhere integrates God's consequent experience into the process of providing particular aims for emergent occasions. This limitation of aims to the primordial nature is even extended to the specification of standpoints, a very late doctrine, with difficult results. Perhaps it was a mistake to derive standpoints from God, but if this is attempted, it needs input from both natures.

We cannot expect that the doctrine of subjective aim gave rise to the notion of the consequent nature, except in the very broad sense that Whitehead might have hoped that divine temporal experience would help to specify the initial subjective aim. If this had been his hope, he was destined to be disappointed.

6— The Intensification of Process

The adoption of the consequent nature was a complex affair. It was facilitated by the transitional flexibility of his middle concept, which while strictly nontemporal provided a locus of integration for temporal experience, as well as guarding against the difficulties that would arise if God were conceived

as too much like an ordinary event. The increased extension of prehensive unification of occasions appears to have given the nudge, rather than other proposed alternatives, such as the theory of consciousness, objective immortality in God, or the specification of initial aims.

Extending prehensive unification from occasions to God is one result of a longstanding concern of Whitehead's: to enlarge the role of "process" whenever possible. This is a guiding concern, which accounts for much of his prolonged reflection and repeated willingness to revise himself. Whitehead had an abiding concern for process, and could be expected to experiment with a conception of God along process lines. Yet this commitment to process seems to function more like a background context for his thought rather than as an explicit factor. Process does not function as a principle or premise from which implications can be drawn. It does not pose a problem or introduce a conflict that calls for a solution. Rather, we may see it as a steady concern. It is more like the active entertainment of a vague ideal to be achieved, but it can be articulated only when the opportunity arises. Thus, its application to God waits until almost the very end of his metaphysical endeavor. Whenever his evolving conceptuality would permit it, Whitehead sought to deepen his understanding of process.

Whitehead announced his commitment to process as early as 1924, in Notes to the second edition of Principles of Natural Knowledge:

The book is dominated by the idea . . . that the relation of extension has a unique preeminence and that everything can be got out of it. During the development of the theme, it gradually became evident that this is not the case, and cogredience had to be introduced. But the true doctrine, that 'process' is the fundamental idea, was not in my mind with sufficient emphasis. Extension is derivative from process, and is required by it. (PNK, 202)

The early part of Science and the Modern World, however, afforded little scope to the development of process. Its own notion of prehension as the relation between two events in virtue of a common eternal object abstracts from the creative advance. To such prehension it makes no difference whether the event is past, present, or future. 28

To be sure, "nature is a structure of evolving processes. The reality is the process" (SMW, 72). Yet what he here calls "process" is simply the changing character of events. This is what he comes to call the reality of occasions, in contrast to the their concrescence in Process and Reality. The notion of an act of the coming into being of an occasion had not yet been anticipated in the earlier book. To be sure, the world is constituted by events in accordance with

the creative advance, but this was his theory even before he appreciated the singular importance of process. 29

The most significant notion furthering the cause of process was the concept of an underlying substantial activity. This was something like Bergson's elan vital, whose particular aspects could be understood in terms of events and their prehensions. Each event was supposed to express this underlying dynamism, but his conceptuality was unequal to the task. By the early theory of prehensions, if every event prehended (mirrored) every other event without any necessary distinctions between past, present, and future events, it could only be externally related to the creative advance.

Temporal atomicity afforded the first real opportunity for deepening the sense of process. The notion that present actualization required a certain quantum of time opened up the possibility of an ontological differentiation among the temporal modes. Present differed from future, for there are no future atomic occasions. The contrast between ordinary temporal continuity and the discontinuity of present realization opened up a new temporal "dimension" to be explored in terms of process.

Now it became possible to think of occasions as actual (EWM, 96–101). As long as his theory was based on events of any size whatsoever, they were weak candidates for actuality, which was monistically vested in the underlying substantial activity. Now each occasion could be considered an immanent instance of creativity capable ultimately of creating itself: "There are not two actual entities, the creativity and the creature. There is only one entity which is the selfcreating creature" (RM, 102).

Yet almost as soon as the opportunity for deepening his understanding of process opened, it closed. For Whitehead seems initially to regard the atomicity of occasions as meaning that they are absolutely indivisible, impervious to any kind of analysis. Although he toyed with placing mentality within actual occasions in the final stratum of composition for Science and the Modern World,30 thereafter mentality is placed outside the atomic occasion. The next conceptuality replaces the actual occasion (of SMW) with the physical occasion, to be superseded by the mental occasion (RM), which is followed by the contrast between the original datum and the concrescence based upon it (GD).

In each case the synthesis of the past is achieved by the first member, but in a way that defies any selfanalysis. The second member derives all of its content from the first by analyzing this synthesis and achieving a new integration. This can be considered a process, but it is merely a process of change, in which there is the succession of determinate beings, first the datum, then the satisfaction. The being of the original datum, underlies the process of "becoming."

The analysis of process concentrated on the concrescence, as it was conceived during the Giffords draft. Concrescence then becomes a curious appendage to the initial atomic actualization. Insofar as it can be examined, process occurs within the actuality rather than between occasions. That is one of the reasons why the notion of prehension largely disappears. Another is that prehension was originally conceived as a relation between events that could serve as an alternative to causation. 31 Thus, the way in which one occasion causally constitutes another was not initially explained in terms of prehension. On the other hand, the theory of feelings, those relations that take place solely within concrescence, was elaborated considerably.

This does not mean that creativity was not inherent within atomic actualization, only that it was so difficult to express. Whitehead came to distinguish between two kinds of fluency, the concrescence within an actuality, and the "transition from particular existent to particular existent" (PR, 210). These are like two kinds of prehensive unification, one outside, leading up to the occasion, and the other within. Whereas earlier the datum initiating concrescence was exclusively one, now it could be conceived as either one or many (PR, 211).

As long as there was a single datum, there would a succession of unifications. Transitional unification would bring out the datum, from which concrescence starts, to bring out the final concrete unity of the satisfaction. The double unification was how Whitehead conceived before and even in this text. Yet if we reconceive the 'datum' as many data, then it would be possible to think of a transitional unification as essentially incomplete. Then the same relation from the past occasion, hitherto being transitionally unified, could be seen as continuous with concrescent feeling. Instead of first transition, then concrescence, there could be the one concrescent process starting from the past actualities themselves.

If the process need not be divided into transition and concrescence, perhaps it need not be divided at all. This suggestion may have led Whitehead to locate temporal atomicity not in the occasion as a whole, or in the datum for concrescence, but in the process itself. What is indivisible is the individual act of becoming for each occasion:

The conclusion is that in every act of becoming there is the becoming of something with temporal extension; but that the act itself is not extensive, in the sense that it is divisible into earlier and later acts of becoming which correspond to the extensive divisibility of what has become. (PR, 69)32

Whitehead's analysis in "Time" (1926) had referred to "timequanta," but not to ''acts of becoming" (EWM, 308). These indivisible timequanta could

not be further analyzed, for the analysis would introduce something like earlier and later phases. This may well be one of the major reasons so many interpret concrescence as not in time at all, not just not in physical time. 33

The Zenolike argument applies more successfully to acts of becoming. By shifting to acts of becoming time recedes into the background. Time is not atomic but rather the act of becoming, which is indivisible only in a specific way. An act of becoming is a process from indetermination to determination. It results in a determinate satisfaction. Were it divisible into smaller acts of determination, each would have determinate satisfactions. Thus, when the larger occasion is still indeterminate, the smaller acts would be determinate. Since it cannot be both determinate and indeterminate with respect to the same phase of itself, the act of becoming must be atomic.

Note that this reasoning does not preclude there being a different kind of division into earlier and later phases of concrescence, provided these are phases of determination, with only the final satisfaction being completely determinate. In other words, this reconceptualization of atomicity preserves genetic analysis.

The meaning of process was transformed by this revised theory of concrescence. As long as concrescence started from a single datum, it was based on the being of that datum. Concrescence was a process of change based upon an underlying being. Once the initial phase is understood as a multiplicity, however, two things become possible. Indeterminacy came to be understood in terms of the multiplicity of determinate things. They are determinate in their own unity, but the way the multiplicity is to be determined is still indeterminate. Determination thus becomes relative.

Also, if we identify being with unity (as they were convertible for medieval philosophers), then the initial phase has no being of its own. Each of the actual entities prehended has its being, but the prehensions constitute a becoming that has no being of its own. Its being first emerges in the satisfaction. Thus, concrescence is understood as sheer becoming, which has no substratum of being. This is possible if being is seen as appropriate not to the present but the past. This means that temporal modes are ontologically significant.

Moreover, since acts of becoming produce whatever contingent being there is, becoming is prior to being. The whole tradition of the primacy of being is thereby overturned.

Now it would seem a rather straightforward matter to apply this notion of the primacy of becoming to the concept of God. The evidence suggests otherwise. The breakthrough that led to the first version of part III did not produce any implications with respect to God.

Even when Whitehead began to use the conceptuality of concrescence for God as the nontemporal ordering of all eternal objects, he refused to use the term concrescence, even though it would now be possible to generalize temporal concrescence to its nontemporal instance. 34 But concrescence was essentially subjective, and he found the notion of nontemporal subjectivity suspect.

I doubt if more than a few weeks passed between the introduction of the divine conceptual realization and the adoption of the consequent nature. In the course of exploring the implications for nontemporal theism he saw the opportunity for a further unification of the world in God. The factors we have already analyzed suggest some of the reasons for making this move, but underlying these we find Whitehead's abiding concern to intensify "process" whenever possible. That it should take him so long is mute testimony to the power of his conviction that God should be conceived as an object rather than as an event.

In the absence of any further conceptual breakthroughs, however, Whitehead is left with an incomplete concept of God, judged from the standpoint of the primacy of becoming. His concept combines the being of the primordial nature with the becoming of the consequent nature. Even if the primordial being is the outcome of nontemporal concrescence, it is as a being that the primordial nature influences the world and even God as consequent. Since the divine concrescence starts from this conceptual datum, Whitehead's final concept of God is like the earlier theory of concrescence we find in the Giffords draft. It is a being acquiring physical feelings rather than a pure concrescence of many feelings becoming a new being.

A pure everlasting concrescence of physical feeling without any primordial nature would be pure becoming, with no admixture of being. This would be more appropriate to a philosophy based on the complete primacy of becoming. The conceptual breakthroughs necessary in order to allow becoming full sway are twofold: (a) An alternative account of eternal objects, so that they need no longer be considered uncreated. If temporally emergent, they need not be derived from some nontemporal reservoir.35 (b) An alternate account of divine effectiveness which does not depend on prehension. For it is difficult, if not impossible, for there to be any prehension of the consequent nature, at least if it is to provide any guidance in the provision of initial aims. In the next section I shall explore that difficulty, while in later chapters I seek to develop an alternate account of divine effectiveness, one that does not rely upon prehension.

III— Whitehead's Problematic Legacy

Despite the many excellences of Whitehead's philosophy and the riches that the paradigm of his temporalistic understanding of God has made avail

able, he has left us with a serious issue to wrestle with: how can that which never reaches determinate unity nevertheless influence us? This problem functions in process thought very much like the problem of the thinginitself did in postKantian idealism.

Years later Whitehead admitted that he had separated the primordial and consequent natures too much. "In one passage in Process and Reality he almost suggests that God as primordial might be a separate kind of actual entity" (EWP, 6). In part this results from his habits of composition, in which passages speaking of the nontemporal concrescence as the nontemporal actual entity were left standing, because the addition of the consequent nature did not lead to any thorough revision of how he had expressed the prior doctrine.

In part, however, this stems from his explanation of God's effectiveness solely in terms of the primordial nature. It must be prehensible in order to provide initial aims, and it must be complete to be prehensible. On the other hand, the consequent nature, as everlasting, could never be completed. What prevents a separation of the two natures? What is there to prevent this completed, objectifiable nontemporal nature from being a distinct actual entity in its own right? This was part of the problem that Whitehead was to bequeath to his followers and supporters.

1— How God Affects the World

How God influences the world is not a problem peculiar to process theology. It affects other approaches as well. Many have tried to explain God's relation to the world in terms of creatio ex nihilo. Philosophers, beginning with Parmenides and his disciples, have judged the notion to be unintelligible. At best we can say that it is an unanalyzed and probably unanalyzable notion, invested with prestige by its claim upon Western faith. Theologians reason from it rather than to it.

Others say that God's mighty acts are revealed to us. Like creation ex nihilo, this depends upon the faith community for its acceptance. There may well be a place for revelation, but I suspect it concerns the contingent details of the sacred story, not its necessary, metaphysical framework which impinges upon, and may conflict with, other spheres of human endeavor such as science and culture.

Thomism bases its account upon causation, particularly the fragile principle that the effect resembles the cause, even while analogy is invoked to underscore the dissimilarities between God and the world.

Others hold that faith and science give two different, internally consistent, interpretations of reality, without necessarily being connected. 36 This seems like an ingenious surrender to despair, abandoning all hope of speculative reconciliation; it hardly satisfies our concern for solidarity.

2— The Fourth Phase

The most celebrated account in Process and Reality of God's influence upon the world finds itself in the very last section of the book (V.2.7). Whitehead sketches "four creative phases in which the universe accomplishes its actuality. There is first the phase of conceptual origination, deficient in actuality, but infinite in its adjustment of valuation" (PR, 350). "Conceptual origination" by itself could suggest the origination of subjective aim within an actual occasion, but then it could not be infinite. The first phase signifies the primordial nature, apart from the world, the second the world, the third the consequent nature. The fourth phase is very poetic, very edifying, but the underlying conceptuality is difficult to fathom. There are at least two possibilities: it could be taken to refer to the way the consequent nature affects the world, as many take it, or refers to the primordial nature's impact on actual occasions, as I interpret it.

If so, why should he write: "What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world. By reason of this reciprocal relation, the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again into the world" (PR, 351)? This sounds as if the same love, the same reality that affects God floods back into the world, but it could also mean that what is transformed into a reality in heaven (the consequent nature) is not "the reality" the primordial nature) that affects us. The love of God passes back into the world, but this again may refer to the primordial love God has for the world, not to a love informed by the consequent nature.

Another passage also appears to favor the consequent nature: "It is the particular providence for particular occasions" (PR, 351). Does this not involve God's experience of the world in directing the timeless primordial aims to the temporal situations to which they are most suited? So it would seem, but the fact remains that Whitehead was able to use just this language in describing the divine provision of initial aims in a passage written without any anticipation of the consequent nature: "Thus the transition of the creativity from an actual world to the correlate novel concrescence is conditioned by the relevance of God's all embracing conceptual valuations to the particular possibilities of transmission from the actual world" (PR, 244G, my italics).

Why need there have been a fourth phase at all? The previous section (V.2.6) outlined only three phases, including the primordial and the consequent natures. 37 Since the impact of the primordial nature was already well established, why was the section on the fourth phase written if it refers only to the primordial nature? Moreover, the inclusion of another section prevents him from ending the book with what could have been a most fitting conclusion: "The concept of 'God' is the way in which we understand this incredible fact—that what cannot be, yet is" (PR, 350, last sentence of V.2.6).

Although the core paragraph of the previous section was probably Whitehead's first attempt to introduce the concept of the consequent nature, it makes a fitting summary for the chapter. Of itself it does not prompt any further reflection on a fourth phase, for it regards the third phase is the last: "This final phase of passage in God's nature is ever enlarging itself" (PR, 349). Why add another phase?

I suspect the answer may be found in another late insertion. Earlier Whitehead had analyzed an actual entity in a threefold way:

(i) it has the character "given" for it by the past; (ii) it has the subjective character aimed at in its process of concrescence; (iii) it has the superjective character, which is the pragmatic value of its specific satisfaction qualifying the transcendent creativity. (PR, 87)

The insertion which follows suggests that Whitehead felt challenged to apply this threefold description to his final concept of God. The 'primordial nature' and the 'consequent nature' fit, with qualification, the first two characteristics of the actual entity. Note, however, what is termed the 'primordial nature' in this account is not that by which God is objectified, but is restricted to the nontemporal concrescence, what God is in godself (PR, 87f). 38 That allows him the opportunity of introducing a 'superjective' nature,39 which he describes in exactly the same words as the superjective character of the actual entity.40 I take the primordial and 'superjective' natures here to refer to the two aspects of the nontemporal nature: in itself, and with respect to the world. The 'superjective' nature is often taken as the way the consequent nature affects the world. This presupposes that the account of the first nature (designated the "primordial nature") includes the way it influences actual occasions. Although it describes how the primordial concrescence readies "the eternal objects into relevant lure of feeling severally appropriate for all realizable basic conditions" (PR, 88),41 it does not specify how the primordial nature affects occasions by providing their initial aims. This, I submit, is reserved for the 'superjective' nature, which is properly the superjective character of the primordial nature, the only nature Whitehead was able to show could be effective.

Let me suggest that the four phases result from this threefold description of God, adding a phase for the actual world. Just as the 'superjective' nature is the pragmatic aspect of the primordial nature, so the fourth phase can be construed as a poetic expression of the way the primordial nature influences actual occasions. Naturally, we are tempted to read into these expressions our desires to see some sort of objectification of the consequent nature. Even if intended, this was never fully articulated in terms of welldeveloped concepts.42

At one time Whitehead may have hoped he might be able to show how the consequent nature could affect the world. But he was never able to redeem the promise for an "objective immortality of his consequent nature [to be] considered later (cf. part V)," in precise, usable concepts (PR, 32). Whatever his hopes, the fourth phase and the superjective nature passages are so phrased that they could be restricted to the way the primordial nature affects the world, for that was the only conceptuality he was able to work out.

3— Apparent Responsiveness and Nontemporal Valuation

The majesty of the fourth phase may inspire and beckon us forward, but hard conceptuality only reaches as far as the hybrid physical prehension of the primordial nature. This is a significant difficulty. If all initial aims are supplied solely by the primordial nature, then God only appears to respond to our situation and needs. If so, it only appears that God is responding to our particular situation here and now, when in effect the conditions are assessed and the specific aim is given wholly in accordance with the nontemporal order. 43 God may experience our temporal circumstances to the fullest, but this could have no impact upon the provision of initial aims, if this is the result of a nontemporal valuation. Whitehead was committed to divine nontemporal valuation, moreover, before he affirmed any divine temporality, and did not revise his position afterwards. Thus, he wrote that the "aboriginal actuality"

is complete in the sense that his vision determines every possibility of value. Such a complete vision coordinates and adjusts every detail. Thus his knowledge of the relationships of particular modes of value is not added to, or disturbed, by the realization in the actual world of what is already conceptually realized in his ideal world. (RM, 153f)

This is neither temporalistic omniscience of process theism nor the immutabilistic omniscience of classical theism. On this view God does not know actualities, nor anything else dependent on the temporal course of affairs. It is an exhaustive knowledge of possibilities (i.e., what might be) but which cannot distinguish between what might be and what might have been.

Classical omniscience has been criticized for being deterministic. A robust determinism is willing to argue that God knows by determining the known, even though finite knowledge is determined by that which is known. Even if God refrains from directly determining, it is still the case that the known must be determinate in order to be known. If it is nontemporally or immutably knowable, it must be determinate, allowing no room for the freedom of further determination. Whitehead avoids such determinism by restricting divine knowledge strictly to possibilities.

How could a nontemporal God know what occasions determine in their selfactualization? Short of some sort of nontemporal determination, it seems impossible for a purely nontemporal God to know this. With the introduction of the consequent nature, to be sure, God does know future contingents, but this knowledge does not affect the primordial valuation of all possibilities.

The excess ballast nontemporal valuation requires is staggering. Consider all the might have beens. This includes not only all simple might have beens, but also all those dependent on others. There are all those possibilities for modern European history that would be generated had Caesar not crossed the Rubicon or had Alexander never been born. Then there are the possibilities attendant upon these possibilities, ad infinitum. All these alternatives, no matter how remote from the actual course of affairs, would have to be nontemporally valued. It is not just pure possibilities that are valued; the ways in which each pure possibility could be actualized in all possible concrete situations need also be nontemporally valued.

This notion of valuation carries over into Process and Reality, as we might expect, since God is originally conceived as purely nontemporal. "The primordial created fact is the unconditioned conceptual valuation of the entire multiplicity of eternal objects" (PR, 31G). On its basis, "the objectification of God in each derivate actual entity results in a gradation of the relevance of eternal objects to the concrescent phases of that derivate occasion" (PR, 46). Thus: "By reason of the actuality of primordial valuation of pure potentials, each eternal object has a definite effective relevance to each concrescent process" (PR, 40).

Whitehead retains this doctrine of nontemporal valuation even after the introduction of the consequent nature. In his first contrast between these two natures he remarks: "This prehension into God each creature is directed with the subjective aim, and clothed with the subjective form, wholly derivative from his allinclusive primordial valuation" (PR, 345, my italics). God's experience is not allowed to contribute to the divine valuation. 44

On the other hand, it is most natural to suppose that valuation should be temporal. Possibilities are inclusive: if x is possible, nonx is also possible. The range of alternate possibilities constitutes an infinitely divisible continuum. Actuality is stubborn fact, excluding alternatives as at best might have beens. We might even say that actualities are competitive, because their insistence on being diminishes and even excludes the possible actuality of others. Possibilities as such do not conflict; only when they become actualized. If everything were merely possible, there would be no need for valuation. If possibilities are valued, it is only with respect to the inexorable demands of actuality.

In terms of pure possibilities, Whitehead recognizes that value does not reside in its formal character, but in terms of the circumstances of its actualization: "Insistence on birth at the wrong season is the trick of evil" (PR, 223). An ideal may be good or evil, depending upon the conditions whereby it

is realized: "We must conceive the Divine Eros as the active entertainment of all ideals, with the urge to their finite realization, each in its due season" (AI, 277). 45 The ideal to be realized, as a formal structure, may be neither good nor bad in itself but first acquires value in the fray of historical contingency, depending on how its actualization harmonizes or conflicts with its neighbors. "History can only be understood by seeing it as the theatre of diverse groups of idealists respectively urging ideals incompatible for conjoint realization. You cannot form any historical judgment of right or wrong by considering each group separately. The evil lies in the attempted conjunction" (AI, 276f).

Thus, value does not reside in the formal interconnectedness of possibility but in the contingencies of actualization: "There is not just one ideal 'order' which all actual entities should attain and fail to attain. In each case there is an ideal peculiar to each particular actual entity, and arising from the dominant components in its phase of 'givenness.'" (PR, 84C).

Despite all these indications that Whitehead recognizes that value emerges out of the conjunction of actualization in the arena of the world, divine valuation remains steadfastly primordial, even after he pioneers an exciting understanding of God's involvement in history. There are at least two reasons for his intransigency:

(1) First, possibility is conceived in terms of eternal objects. A possibility may be regarded as any formal component that contributes to an actualization. This can be of any specificity whatsoever, for if something is actual, it must have been possible. Other theories are able to treat possibilities as indefinite entities, primarily as pure possibilities seeking the conditions of their actualization. But if possibilities are uncreated eternal objects (PR, 257), they must be completely definite, and this definiteness may include any conditions required for their actualization. Everything that can become determinate in the course of historical actualization must already be nontemporally definite. Otherwise some formal structure could emerge in time, contrary to the uncreatedness of the eternal objects. Such specificity of all possibilities requires primordial valuation.

(2) Primordial valuation is intolerant of any modification: "Thus his knowledge of the relationships of particular modes of value is not added to, or disturbed" by any experience of the actual world (RM, 153). The primordial nature is determinately complete, and hence objectifiable. If complete, it brooks no additions. God's consequent experience certainly affects the divine subjectivity, but not the primordial nature itself. If God is to be the source of value and aim for

occasions, and they can only come from the primordial nature, it must be deemed capable of providing the valuation of all pure possibilities, including all the possible ways in which these pure possibilities could be actualized. The possible, nontemporally conceived, must not only include everything that will be the case, but everything that might possibly be, or might have been, no matter how improbable.

This strikes me as exceedingly ponderous and artificial, for it is only required by the exigencies of a theory that can find no constructive meaning in the imprehensibility of the consequent nature. If God's experience of the world permitted a temporal valuation, God could respond to the circumstances that each nascent occasion faces with an initial aim peculiarly appropriate to its needs. Valuation need then only be temporal. There need be no primordial valuation whatever, for these timeless objective forms might turn out to be simply abstractions from temporal processes. Pure possibility may be neutral as to value, acquiring value only with respect to the temporal conditions of actualization. To be sure, this is not and probably could not be Whitehead's own theory, for it would require revision with respect to both eternal objects and the way God influences the world. 46

In summary, according to Whitehead's theory, the world affects the consequent nature, but the consequent nature cannot affect the world because it cannot be prehended. Such nonreciprocal influence is a form of epiphenomenalism, in this case applied to the relation of God and the world rather than to mind and body.

An early observer, Henry Nelson Wieman, was acutely aware of the apparently superfluous character of that which could not affect the world.47 This may have occasioned his wellknown and perceptive remark: "Whitehead's system could not stand without the primordial nature. It enters into the essential structure. The consequent nature, on the other hand, is added on like dome and spire."48

The primordial nature is effective in the world, but it is independent of the world's temporal vicissitudes. If God is going to be able to respond to the particular situations of his creatures, there must be some way in which his consequent physical experience of the temporal occasions of the world could have some effect upon the world. We seem to be told that it must be so, for otherwise how can we account for God's "particular providence for particular occasions" (PR, 351)? But this particular providence, if dependent on God's contingent experience, is an article of faith. Ultimately we should abandon it unless we can find out how it can be so. It is difficult to see how God's physical feelings could ever be objectified. He does speak of a primordial satisfaction which might conceivably be objectified for the world (PR, 32, 88), but his everlasting temporal concrescence can never terminate in a final completion.

4— Later Writings

Whitehead's awareness that the consequent nature was impotent in its influence on the world is reflected in his rhetorical treatment of the divine in the Adventures of Ideas. He rarely mentions ''God" by name, speaking mostly of the Divine Eros, which is explicitly identified with the primordial nature (AI, 253). This name for God probably stems from his enumeration of the seven Platonic generalities, among which is Eros (AI, 275, 284). For him, "the Eros is the urge towards the realization of ideal perfection" (Al, 275). This eros is present within each actual entity in the form of appetition (cf. PR, 32), but God as primordial would be its supreme instance.

The fullest account of the Divine Eros may be found in this comment: "We must conceive the Divine Eros as the active entertainment of all ideals, with the urge to their finite realization, each in its due season. 49 Thus a process must be inherent in God's nature, whereby his infinity is acquiring realization" (AI, 277). While the emphasis throughout the Adventures of Ideas is placed on the Divine Eros, the last sentence of this quotation points to the necessity of the consequent nature.

The consequent nature is not denied, but its presence is considerably muted, as in this comment: "The everlasting nature of God, which in a sense is nontemporal and in another sense is temporal, may establish with the soul a peculiarly intense relationship of mutual immanence" (AI, 208). This is quite tentative, exploring a possible alternative. We are apt to read "nontemporal and temporal" as referring to the primordial and consequent natures, but it probably refers to the consequent nature alone.50 The "everlasting nature" is Whitehead's term for the consequent nature (PR, 345), which is further described as "not temporal actuality, but is the transmutation of that temporal actuality into a living, everpresent fact" (PR, 350). The consequent synthesis unifies its temporal elements by means of nontemporal ones.

Otherwise, his discussion of the consequent nature is confined to the last two pages of Adventures of Ideas, arguing that "we supplement the notion of the Eros by including it in the concept of an Adventure in the Universe as One. This Adventure embraces all particular occasions but as an actual fact stands beyond any one of them" (PR, 380). The concept of the consequent nature is not denied, but it is no longer as prominently displayed as in Process and Reality.

Yet there is a careful justification for the consequent nature in the chapter on "Peace," if we are alert to Whitehead's indirection. "God" is hardly ever explicitly mentioned, yet the discussion is focused on the divine. Many readers tend to read the chapter on "Peace" as the way in which God experiences the world, yet there seems to be little warrant in the text for this. Except for the final section, a more "secular" interpretation can be more readily defended.51

Let me propose this functional definition of "Peace": it is the experience of that which can hardly be experienced. It is primarily a partial and fragmentary experience of what God as consequent would be like, if it were possible to prehend it. It also applies to the primordial nature, for although it can be prehended, it cannot be consciously experienced except by supplemental means.

Whitehead faces a severe problem of justification for the consequent nature. It plays an enriching role in his theism. It is the foundation for process theism. On the other hand, how can its reality be affirmed if there is no way in which it can be prehended? I see all of the chapter on "Peace" as leading up to the final section. If he can show that we have, in our very best moments, experiences which are like what divine consequent experience would be like, then we may be justified in entrusting ourselves to this divine reality, even though we may lack full rational grounds for claiming its existence.

Peace, though, must be seen in context. It is the final ideal of five singled out for the ordering of civilization. Having pretty much exhausted the novelties in constructing a metaphysics he found a new area to explore: philosophical anthropology. 52 The human being may be described as the civilized actuality. Humanity at its best strives to actualize the five ideals.

It is quite possible that Whitehead explored these ideals because his preliminary definition of Beauty might well have been: "the mutual adaptation of Appearance and Reality." This is clearly related to the traditional meaning of Truth as the conformation of Appearance to Reality, and to the definition of Art as the "purposeful adaptation of Appearance to Reality" (AI, 267). The hackneyed definition of Truth takes on new life in terms of Whitehead's understanding of Reality in terms of what is initially, or physically felt, and Appearance as its conceptual supplement. We can only be consciousness of Appearance, but we seek truthful Appearance grounded in Reality.

The fourth ideal, Adventure, is the search for new perfections. It shares with Art a concern for novelty. The final ideal reconceives Peace so that it can embrace Adventure.

Classically, perfection meant that God must be complete, unalterable, and hence incapable of any adventure. Divine consciousness would then include whatever could be experienced, now and forever. One would think that such experience would sooner or later lead to utter boredom. There would be no possibility of ever experiencing anything new or surprising. Some could object that boredom is strictly anthropomorphic, though it has been observed in the animal kingdom. Yet what is the warrant for restricting boredom to finite creatures, other than the apriori difficulties implicit in the notion of a perfect being?

There is no problem with divine perfection, but only with perfect being. If God is reconceived as becoming, as always being enriched by novelty from the contingent world, divine perfection can embrace Adventure. 53 The novelties God savors and explores can only be derived the world. An infinite mind would have no other source for novelty than that which is other than itself. A world that could be exhaustively known, containing no surprises, would not be worth creating, at least not from a divine perspective. Such a world is indistinguishable from what a perfect mind could imagine. Novelty, even of a very minimal degree, is the way the world achieves any independent ontological status, detaching itself from the divine imagination.

If Peace were simply the absence of conflict and discord, it would lack Adventure. God does not exclude discord and conflict from the divine experience, rather they are interwoven into a higher Beauty by means of the infinite conceptual supplementation God brings to the experience of the brute factors of the world. This, however, is the task of the consequent nature, whose reality must be justified even though Whitehead recognizes that it cannot be prehended.

Three basic descriptions are acutely sensitive to the indirection this justification requires. Peace is "a quality of mind steady in its reliance that fine action is treasured in the nature of things" (AI, 274). We are ultimately peaceful if we can rely on the worthwhileness of things because they can contribute to the divine life everlastingly.54

This sense of peace was already articulated at the end of Process and Reality:

Throughout the perishing occasions in the life of each temporal Creature [in particular, each human being] the inward source of distaste or refreshment . . .is the transformation of Itself, everlasting in the Being of God. In this way, the insistent craving is justified—the insistent craving that zest for existence be refreshed by the everpresent, unfading importance of our immediate actions, which perish and yet live for evermore. (PR, 351)

In this case the inward source of distaste or refreshment comes from our sense of the permanence of our actions. If we affirm God's everlasting experience of all what we do, then the most ephemeral gesture takes on added meaning. In Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead's language is more guarded. Instead of declaring that "the insistent craving is justified," he describes a quality of mind "steady in its reliance." Both approaches, however, are directed toward the same end, "that fine action is treasured in the nature of things.''

Elsewhere we learn that "[t]he essence of Peace is that the individual whose strength of experience is founded upon this ultimate intuition, thereby is extending the influence of the source of all order" (PR, 292). Peace cannot be meaningfully attributed to momentary occasions, but becomes significant in the lives of discursive individuals. If these individuals are grounded in the intuition of Peace, that is, if they rely on their actions being treasured by God, then they will extend the divine influence in the world. "Source of all order," "nature of things'' seem to be circumlocutions for God. Although we may be "founded upon this ultimate intuition" of peace, we need not have any direct experience of divine everlastingness. Nor need we give assent to any particular conception of God, or even to the idea of God, to be so grounded.

In another description, Peace "is primarily a trust in the efficacy of Beauty" (AI, 285). That beauty is not merely ephemeral, but can have power and influence. There is beauty in the world, but its ultimate source lies in the divine ordering. There is also beauty in the way God orders the experience received from the world, maintaining it everlastingly. It is not the efficacy of Beauty, but our trust in it which brings Peace.

"Amid the passing of so much beauty, so much heroism, so much daring, Peace is then the intuition of permanence" (AI, 286). This sense of permanence may be vague, yet profoundly felt. For Whitehead's conceptuality, only the consequent nature can guarantee such permanence, but it can at best be only intuited, not definitely known.

"Peace is the understanding of tragedy, and at the same time its preservation" (AI, 286). Frequently, as in the last three quotations, Peace pertains primarily to the consequent nature. Peace, however, is primarily a trust in God as a whole, including the primordial nature. By itself, that nature is unaffected by tragedy, which may be understood broadly to apply to all actualization insofar as it falls short of the ideal.

As far as creatures are concerned, Youth is "Life as yet untouched by tragedy" (AI, 287). "Youth is peculiarly liable to the vision of that Peace, which is the harmony of the soul's activities with ideal aims that lie beyond any personal satisfaction" (AI, 288). These ideal aims need not be verbalized or even consciously felt; the essential element is the consonance of purpose. There is in addition an element of selftranscendence, also reflected in this passage: "Such conformation of purpose to ideals beyond personal limitations is the conception of that Peace with which the wise man can face his fate, master of his soul" (AI, 291).

Buddhism also seeks this kind of Peace, which is: "selfcontrol at its widest—at the width where the 'self has been lost, and interest has been transferred to coordinations wider than personality" (AI, 285). The methods may be different, because Buddhists do not focus on specific ideals in this way.

Their quest is usually not for the divine, but the quest can be conceived in terms of a harmony with divine aims. 55

The chapter on "Peace" serves two purposes. On one level we are given intimations of God's nature, which cannot directly be prehended. On another level we are directed toward experiences of Peace that would be experiences of God were it possible to experience God in that way. In particular, these experiences lay a foundation whereby we can be justified in trusting ourselves to the divine everlastingness. The chapter builds up to the final section as its climax. The Adventure of the Universe as One can make its appearance because we have been shown how to imitate the presence of Peace in our lives.

This roundabout procedure shows that Whitehead was quite aware that he had not been able to show how God as consequent could possibly be prehended. The problem is an exceptionally stubborn one. Years later in informal conversation Whitehead acknowledged the difficulty. In 1936 A. H. Johnson asked Whitehead: "If God never 'perishes,' how can he provide data for other actual entities? Data are only available after the internal existence' of the actual entity 'has evaporated'" (PR, 336). Whitehead could only reply: "This is a genuine problem. I have not attempted to solve it" (EWM, 9f).56 This is his legacy, which is left to his followers to solve, if it can be solved at all.

Nevertheless, the consequent nature is not summarily dismissed. It lives on in his final writings, though in a rather subdued fashion. Thus, in Modes of Thought the supreme being is described in these terms:

Its function in the world is to sustain the aim at vivid experience. It is the reservoir of potentiality and the coordination of achievement. (MT, 94)

The reservoir of potentiality holds all eternal objects in readiness to provide aims, while the finite achievements of the world are integrated into God's consequent experience.

He also argues that the reality of value requires the "everlastingness" of the consequent nature:

There must be value beyond ourselves. Otherwise every thing experienced would be merely a barren detail in our own solipsist mode of existence. We owe to the sense of deity the obviousness of the many actualities of the world, and the obviousness of the unity of the world for the preservation of the values realized and for the transition to ideals beyond realized fact. (MT, 102, my italics)

This argument from value is applied to personal individualities in "Immortality," his last public lecture:

Also he is the unification of the multiple personalities received from the Active World. In this way, we conceive the World of Value in the guise of the coordination of many personal individualities as factors in the nature of God. 57

God as consequent continues to be a persistent factor in Whitehead's thought despite all difficulties. If we summarize his thinking on the topic, we see an interesting vacillation between God's effectiveness and God's subjectivity. In terms of the initial principle of limitation (in SMW), there was no question that God was effective, yet in a very abstract way. In the fourth chapter of Religion in the Making, God is conceived as personal, yet God's effectiveness in the world is not clarified. In the early levels of the composition of Process and Reality, where God is conceived simply as a nontemporal actuality, God is effective in providing initial aims. But with the addition of divine physical feelings, whereby God becomes also an everlasting concrescence, God's effectiveness again becomes problematic.

This is not really a problem for traditional theism. Whatever the defects of omnipotence may be, a lack of effectiveness is not one of them. Omnipotence, if anything, affects us too much, not too little. Also, God's nontemporal subjectivity is rarely questioned, even though it is established more on biblical than on rational grounds. It is a problem for Whitehead because his general analysis of subjectivity and objectivity in terms of becoming and being precludes one actuality being both simultaneously.

That which Whitehead said about philosophical systems also applies to his own:

[W]hile a philosophical system retains any charm of novelty, it enjoys a plenary indulgence for its failures in coherence. But after a system has acquired orthodoxy, and is taught with authority, it receives a sharper criticism. Its denials and its incoherences are found intolerable, and a reaction sets in. (PR, 6)

In this case the incoherence in Whitehead's legacy to us is the lack of connection between the divine experience and God's temporal valuation of the aims for present actualizations.

These difficulties form a challenge for many of Whitehead's followers, including myself. We turn now to the various solutions they have proposed, by way of either interpretation or modification. Some refuse to believe that his system cannot accommodate this anomaly, and seek a solution without introducing any fundamental modification by close and perhaps ingenious interpretation of the texts. Chapter 5 is devoted to those who primarily conceive

God as a single present everlasting concrescence, while chapter 6 considers Nancy Frankenberry's proposal that God be conceived as "the power of the past."

Others recognize that modifications are in order. Charles Hartshorne proposed the most influential of all modifications. Chapter 6 also examines his proposal, that God be conceived as a society or series of divine occasions. The nontemporal character of God within a process context is considered in chapter 7 with respect to the work of Bowman Clarke and Robert Neville.

These three chapters are basically critical, clearing the way of possible alternatives and objections. The constructive part of the essay is reserved for the last three chapters.

Rather than having the objectivity and determinateness of past being, I see God as radically indeterminate. Rather than considering imprehensibility a defect, I take it to be a virtue and explore the ways in which this subjectivity of the future can influence us.

Whitehead saw that difference between subjectivity (self) and objectivity (world) was best understood temporally. I seek to deepen that insight by adding the dimension of the future. God as the future and the world as the past influence us in temporally opposite ways. The future rather than the eternal is the mode of divine transcendence.

PART II— THE SEARCH FOR THE PREHENSIBILITY OF GOD

Chapter Five— The Divine Power in the Present

For Whitehead, an actuality is constituted out of its relations to other entities. The nontemporal actuality was constituted out of its relations to all the eternal objects, and its reconceptualization as also consequent included its relations (prehensions) to all temporal occasions. That enlargement in constitutive relatedness transformed nontemporality into an unending concrescence, but that meant that God could not be prehended. Since prehension is the sole means recognized by Whitehead whereby one actual entity can affect another, the fact that God cannot be prehended signifies that God cannot effectively influence actual occasions.

We shall consider ways Whitehead's philosophy can be modified to overcome this difficulty in subsequent chapters. There are some significant efforts, however, to mediate this issue without introducing any modifications. To those efforts we now turn.

I— William A. Christian

One of the earliest, and most illustrious, interpreters championing a divine concrescence capable of affecting the world is William A. Christian. 1 Christian understands the satisfaction of an occasion to be a pause in the midst of the flux, which contains the whole temporal thickness of the occasion (IWM, 29f). Perishing, then, is the termination of this subjective satisfaction, marking its finitude. The objectification of the occasion is independent of its perishing, although presumably based upon the determinateness of the satisfaction (EWP, 319–322). Christian explains:

In the case of actual occasions, transition requires perishing. The satisfaction must be final in the sense that the occasion has no immediate experience after its own satisfaction.2 Becoming objectively immortal means ceasing to have subjective immediacy. The satisfaction must be the end or terminus of the internal process of the occasion. (IWM, 297)

Objectivity puts a stop to subjectivity, 3 but it is not made clear why this must be so. On my interpretation the attainment of being results from the perishing of subjective immediacy. It is based on three assumptions: (1) Being is convertible with unity, as several medieval philosophers declared long ago. (2) For Whitehead, unity depends on unification. He applied this to actual entities primarily, but it may be generalizable to all entities. (3) If being is identification with unity, and is objectifiable, becoming can be strictly identified with unification, and with subjectivity. Whitehead's language of perishing and objective immortality is an elaborate metaphor to explain the temporal transition from present immediacy to past objectivity.4

This proposes a duality between subjects and objects, between becoming and being. Such duality, however, need not entail the incoherence of dualism. Here, being is the necessary result of becoming (and cannot come about any other way), while becoming is the unification of prior beings. Each is dependent on the other.

If this is strictly adhered to, objective being is strictly excluded from subjective becoming. Christian may not be able to endorse my interpretation because his approach takes the satisfaction to be primarily subjective.

What this entails takes on added importance when we consider the nature of any divine satisfaction. We have at least these alternatives: (a) God has a primordial satisfaction, and possibly a consequent satisfaction.5 (b) Because God is always becoming, always in concrescence, God does not terminate in any objectifiable being. (c) There is a rhythmic alternation of concrescence and satisfaction within God. (d) God is always in concrescence and always in satisfaction.

Whitehead himself favored the first alternative. Whenever his argument was technically precise, he argued that God was objectified in terms of the primordial nature. This approach is sometimes adopted by his adherents (e.g., Cobb, Oomen, Suchocki), but it means that God is effective only as unchanging, as nontemporal. The dynamic responsiveness introduced by the consequent nature does not come to the fore in this interpretation.

The second alternative, which I shall champion in the final chapters, entails that God never comes to satisfaction. I should not be misunderstood to mean that somehow God is perpetually frustrated and dissatisfied. On the contrary, God experiences the entirety of the divine life at every moment as a harmonious whole. This could well be called "satisfaction," but I will be using this term as implying further the notion of something capable of objectification. Actual occasions are acts of becoming terminating in satisfaction as a being capable of being prehended. I conceive of God as pure becoming with no admixture of being, and hence incapable of being prehended. In this sense there is no divine satisfaction.

The third alternative is proposed by Hartshorne's societal model, for each divine occasion constitutes an alternation of concrescence and satisfaction. There are many successive divine satisfactions, each of which affects the world. The everlasting continuity of the divine life is sustained in that each divine occasion in turn perfectly includes all of its predecessors. We shall examine this alternative further in the next chapter.

The fourth alternative, that God is always in concrescence and also always in satisfaction, is proposed by Christian, among others. It assumes that God influences by way of prehension, and the prehensibility of God requires that the divine satisfaction is always objectifiable. The satisfaction must be everlasting to provide aims for finite occasions in the distant past without beginning as well as now.

If God is always in concrescence as well as in satisfaction, then the satisfaction must be subjectively felt. This means that the determinate unity God achieves must in some sense be felt by God, as contrasted with the view that God feels the whole in harmony. On the latter view, what God feels is the final contrast between the final aim particularized for that situation and the physical prehensions of the world. The unity is achieved by the way the divine becoming forges this final multiplicity together, rather than its having an objectifiable unity capable of sustaining itself alone. A satisfaction, even if subjectively entertained, has an objective unity by itself, according to its own nature, whereas the multiple components of the final contrast are held together by the concrescent subject.

For ordinary occasions the distinction is slight, since if there were a subjective satisfaction, it would be quite momentary and fleeting at best. In the case of God, however, it must be everlasting as the way of holding concrescence and satisfaction together forever.

The notion of a subjective satisfaction is implicit in Christian's argument. Jorge Nobo makes the distinction explicit: Whitehead

employs the phrase "subjective satisfaction" [quoted from PR, 52] to mean the same as "subjectively felt satisfaction." Since Whitehead explicitly asserts that a subject cannot feel its own satisfaction (PR, 129f), we have here [an] instance . . . of the carelessness with which Whitehead develops and employs the technical terminology of his philosophy. To make sense of his inconsistent uses of the term 'satisfaction' we have carefully to distinguish between the satisfaction which a subject can and must feel, the subjective satisfaction, and the satisfaction which a subject cannot feel—what I have previously referred to as the superjective satisfaction.

The subjective satisfaction is the final creative phase of an actual occasion. (WMES, 28f his italics)

This is one way of reconciling conflicting texts. It is possible that Whitehead chose the term satisfaction with the meaning of subjective resolution or completion uppermost. Yet he seems to have become uncertain whether the satisfaction is really part of concrescence.

In an early text, "datum" and "decision" are distinguished from "process" and "satisfaction.'' Since decision and datum concern "the transition from the settled actual world to the new actual entity" (PR, 150C), it is easy in contrast to lump process and satisfaction together under concrescence. But the term concrescence is not used in this passage, although it was already being used by Whitehead (EWM, 308, 311ff). The issue is left open. If concrescence is the covering term, then the satisfaction is included. If only process is identified with the concrescence, then the satisfaction is excluded.

The next passage definitely teaches that:

No actual entity can be conscious of its own satisfaction; for such knowledge would be a component in the process, and would thereby alter the satisfaction. In respect to the entity in question the satisfaction can only be a creative determination, by which the objectifications of the entity beyond itself are settled. (PR, 85)

This claim could be generalized as "no actual entity can prehend its own satisfaction," for the reasons given would be exactly parallel. It does not depend upon the peculiarities of consciousness, or of Whitehead's particular theory of conscious. 6 Concrescence is a process of determination resulting in one determinate satisfaction. "The final 'satisfaction' is intolerant of any addition" (PR, 45), because any addition would change the nature of the one being already attained. The process results in that being and not another. If so, it cannot incorporate the subject's prehension of that satisfaction.

There cannot be a selfprehension of the satisfaction for another reason. Once satisfaction has been attained, there can be no further becoming. Unification ceases in the unity achieved. So when the satisfaction comes, there can be no more subjective activity to prehend it.

Thus,

the 'satisfaction' is the 'superject' rather than the 'substance' or the 'subject.' It closes up the entity; and yet is the superject adding its character to the creativity whereby there is a becoming of entities superseding the one in question. The 'formal' reality of the actuality in question belongs to its process of concresence and not to its 'satisfaction.' This is the sense in which the philosophy of organism interprets Plato's phrase 'and never really is'; for the superject can only be interpreted in terms of its 'objective immortality.' (PR, 84)

The very next paragraph repeats the phrase, "It never really is" (PR, 85), strongly suggesting when Whitehead wrote the second he forgot that he had already used that quotation before. 7 While the insertion includes that paragraph, it might also include the passage we quoted (PR, 85.10–14), or also the next two (PR, 85.10–16) or three sentences (PR, 85.10–17). If any of these four alternatives is omitted, there is reasonable continuity in the remaining text.8

The term satisfaction often has strong subjective connotations. Only subjects can be satisfied, or so it seems. If these subjective connotations played any role in Whitehead's selection of the term, he excluded them when the implications of his identification of subjectivity with becoming were clarified. The satisfaction as determinate being must be excluded from the process of its coming to be. It is more likely that as a mathematician he had such objective meanings in mind as that which satisfies certain conditions. Note that whatever satisfies a doubt causes the doubt to perish.

He may have had a pragmatic meaning of "satisfaction" in mind: that which satisfies, and thereby terminates, the activity of inquiry. Creativity may be understood as an ontological generalization of the epistemological endeavor of inquiry. Satisfaction is the attainment of determinateness, which is able to terminate creativity as the process of determination. "Here, as always, the term 'satisfaction' means the one complex fully determinate feeling which is the completed phase in the process" (PR, 26).

In any case, this objective meaning is reiterated in other texts, such as:

The actual entity terminates its becoming in one complex feeling [must this feeling have a subject feeler?] involving a completely determinate bond with every item in the universe, the bond being either a positive or a negative prehension. This termination is the "satisfaction" of the actual entity. (PR, 44).9

The satisfaction is that which is objectifiable, that is, that which is capable of being prehended:

In Descartes' phraseology, the satisfaction is the actual entity considered as analyzable in respect to its existence "objective." It is the actual entity as a definite, determinate, settled fact, stubborn and with unavoidable consequences. (PR, 219)10

If the satisfaction is determinate, satisfying the creative urge so as to close off the concrescence, would it make sense to say that God's everlasting concrescence ever results in satisfaction? Christian is quite clear on this point: "Whitehead certainly means to say God has a satisfaction (PR, 32, 87f, 88)" (IWM, 294). The second text mentions the satisfaction of actual entities, but

the next page cautions us to interpret this as referring only to actual occasions unless God is specifically mentioned (PR, 88). The first text clearly refers to God: "Such a primordial superject of creativity achieves, in its unity of satisfaction, the complete conceptual valuation of all eternal objects" (PR, 32). This is clearly Whitehead's middle concept of God as a nontemporal concrescence, before the everlasting consequent concrescence was conceived. A nontemporal concrescence, since limited to the entirety of eternal objects, can be complete. Moreover, since temporal distinctions are irrelevant, its process and outcome coincide. We have the tendency, judging it purely from a temporal perspective, to consider the primordial nature as solely something objective and definite, but it is at once also in concrescence.

Yet it is not a temporal satisfaction, whether as a whole or in part. Any temporal satisfaction has been completed and therefore lies in our past. As Whitehead notes with respect to the consequent concrescence, "By reason of its character as a creature, always in concrescence and never in the past, it receives a reaction from the world; this reaction is its consequent nature" (PR, 31).

It seems that Whitehead was certain that the primordial satisfaction was complete and objectifiable, and could be prehended for the provision of initial aims. 11 On the other hand, he is silent with respect to any satisfaction for the consequent nature, while the assertion that the consequent nature is never in the past implicitly indicates that there is no divine temporal satisfaction.

Yet what about the superjective nature? Whitehead writes:

The 'superjective' nature is the character of the pragmatic value of his specific satisfaction, qualifying the transcendent creativity in the various temporal instances. (PR, 88)

I have already argued that this insertion was introduced to match the threefold description of an actual entity in the previous paragraph (PR, 87). Since the first two features of the actual entity match the 'consequent nature' and the 'primordial nature,' Whitehead matched a third, 'superjective character' of the actual entity with a corresponding 'superjective' nature, of which no mention is made outside this passage. It corresponds word for word with the description of the third feature of the actual entity except for the word nature, obviously chosen to correspond to the primordial and consequent natures, and for the addition the last four words.

The superjective nature is sometimes taken to be a distinct nature of God.12 More often it is taken to be the satisfaction of the everlasting concrescence, for this is how many would like it to be interpreted. In the absence of other supporting texts, however, I think we should interpret it in terms of Whitehead's statements, which envisage only the primordial nature to be

objectifiable. The term specific satisfaction was chosen to parallel with the superjective character of the actual entity, but God's specific satisfaction, for Whitehead, would be the primordial satisfaction.

To be sure, the primordial satisfaction can be further completed, but on a different plane. The primordial actuality has permanence, but requires fluency for its completion, in terms of "the completion of God's primordial nature by the derivation of his consequent nature from the temporal world" (PR, 347). Yet the primordial satisfaction is nontemporally complete, whereas that which "completes it," or better, complements it, is never complete.

What Whitehead calls simply the "satisfaction" Nobo calls the "superjective" satisfaction. Almost all references are to the superjective satisfaction. Thus, "the satisfaction of each actual entity is an element in the givenness of the universe . . . '' (PR, 220D). This usage extends throughout the book, to its final level of composition: "But with the attainment of the 'satisfaction,' the immediacy of final causation is lost, and the occasion passes into its objective immortality, in virtue of which efficient causation is constituted" (PR, 292fM).

How do we then account for the two mentions of "subjective satisfaction" (PR, 52)? We should first note that both occur within an insertion within this chapter (PR, 52.2b–22a). There is strong continuity in the absence of this passage: "Thus the form of its constitution is to be found by an analysis of Lockian ideas . . . Locke's ideas [are] explained in his Essay (II, 1, 1)" (PR, 52). The insertion contains ideas and terms such as subjective form and positive prehension, which were first introduced after this section (II.1.6C) was written. 13

The clearest account of what a subjective satisfaction might be is given in the second mention: a past actuality is a datum for feeling, presumably the simple physical feeling, and for "the [final] feeling whereby this datum is absorbed into the subjective satisfaction" (PR, 52). The problem is, whether the subjective satisfaction is the same as the occasion's final feeling. We are given no guidance. At the first mention the subjective satisfaction is "'clothed' with the various elements of its 'subjective form.'" Could it possibly be an ordinary satisfaction with its attendant subjective form being emphasized? ("Subjective form" was a relatively novel idea when this insertion was written, and its dimensions had not yet been fully explored.) Or could it be the outcome of the particular concrescence of the various subjective forms of all the occasions' feelings?

At any rate, when Whitehead wished to call attention to this subjective aspect of satisfaction, he could specify it by name. None of the texts referring to God's satisfaction qualify it in this way. There seems to be a weak textual basis for Christian's understanding of a satisfaction enjoyed within concrescence, whether for God or for actual occasions. In the case of God his interpretation seems to be governed by the exigencies of showing an everlasting

concrescence to be prehensible. If God had a satisfaction that could be felt by godself, perhaps actual occasions could also. This may be the line of reasoning leading to Christian's teaching of "the pause that refreshes," that in every actual occasion the satisfaction is the temporal extent of the occasion and it is subjectively felt by that occasion (EWP, 319–321; IWM, 29f).

If there is no "satisfaction from within the [divine] concrescence" (IWM, 299), we should consider the possibility of a superjective satisfaction. To be sure, it might render this proposal questionable as to strict monotheism, unless the satisfaction were conceived as a nondivine product, in which case God could not be directly experienced in terms of initial aims. If God could be conceived as a present activity capable of ever renewing its creativity, then this satisfaction could be everchanging, ever coming into being by the perishing of the divine creativity that just was. Christian seems to understood God in some such terms, as evidenced by this aphorism: "Actual occasions perish but do not change. God changes but does not perish" (IWM, 296). Since "change" is defined as ''the difference between actual occasions comprised in some determinate event," God also changes on the societal model, insofar as there are differences between successive divine occasions. But if God is an everlasting future concrescence, God always becomes but never changes.

The greatest difficulty with this alternative, however, is that it must treat this satisfaction as determinate, even in supplying initial aims. For God and the nascent occasion need to be spatiotemporally coincident. As Christian points out,

God is prehended by actual occasions in the contexts of their respective actual worlds. As prehended by a certain actual occasion, God is that unity of feelings which results from the integration of his primordial nature with his prehensions of the past actual world of that actual occasion. (IWM, 395f, his italics)

As I argued years ago, "is it possible to prehend that past actual world except from the standpoint of that occasion itself?" 14 This spatiotemporal coincidence is not a problem, although I would not see the difference between God and creature as primarily defined in terms of their differing subjective aims.15 For me now the occasion is present, God future, and the point of coincidence lies on the boundary between.

The combination of determinateness and coincidence, however, is disastrous. For if the region (even on its surface) the actual occasion is to occupy is already determinate, then its own creative activity is already stifled or becomes redundant, since it has already been rendered determinate, and that in the best possible manner, a way the occasion can hardly hope to emulate. On the other hand, if divine satisfaction for that region is not determinate, then

it cannot be prehended, and the nascent occasion cannot receive its initial aim by prehension.

I believe the coincidence is necessary if the aim is to be fully appropriate for that occasion, but rather than being fully determinate and thereby interfering with the concrescent occasion, it is less determinate. It cannot be prehended, to be sure, but it influences the occasion in terms of the way it colors the of creativity received from a divine future source.

Prehension of the divine satisfaction entails that it be at least partially determinate. This requires some sort of "perishing" as Whitehead understands it: a transformation of subjective becoming into objective being, a unity attained by the completion (and cessation) of becoming. At that particular standpoint God has prehended and integrated every actuality in that nascent occasion's world. All creativity with respect to that suboccasion within God has perished so that it might be determinate and prehensible.

Conceived in this way, Christian's alternative begins to look like a more complicated version of Hartshorne's divine society. Instead of a single thread of divine occasions there would be many contemporaneous divine suboccasions, one for every actual occasion in existence. Presumably these would be contained within an overarching divine subjectivity coordinating the activity as a whole. 16

The problem here lies in Whitehead's strict division between becoming and being. It forbids this kind of partial determinateness. As long as there is any subjectivity, there is becoming. Being, complete unity, cannot be attained without the cessation of subjective becoming. The satisfaction must satisfy the restless urge of creativity. If any remains, the satisfaction has not been reached, and there is nothing determinate to prehend.

Christian evades much of this argument by exempting God from space (IWM, 393–96).17 This is quite appropriate to most forms of classical theism, but not for Whitehead's temporalistic theism, which fuses together space and time in terms of spatiotemporal occasions. Should not God be conceived as both spatial and temporal at once? Yet it must be admitted that while Whitehead himself pioneered a temporal understanding of God, he did not clearly specify the relation between God and space.

If God is spatial, there are at least two alternatives. John B. Cobb Jr. has argued for the omnispatiality of God, suggesting that we may think of "the region of God as including the regions comprising the standpoints of all the contemporary occasions in the world."18 Christian counters with a closely reasoned argument why there cannot be any overlapping regions (IWM, 93104).19 Nevertheless, it seems possible that God and an occasion could occupy the same region. The question is rather whether it is necessary because no other satisfactory relationship can be found.20

If God is spatial, there is still a way in which this could be possible without the questionable assumption of regional inclusion. God could exist in

precisely those regions in which there are no actual occasions: the spatiotemporal domain of the future. Then the extensive continuum is supported by actuality in all of its reaches.

II— Marjorie Suchocki

Like Christian, Marjorie Suchocki's proposal conceives of God as beyond the finitude of space and time. 21 Her account is distinctive in exploiting the reversal of the physical and mental poles in God as a way of explaining the prehensibility of God in terms of a primordial satisfaction.

Whitehead notes that whereas actual occasions originate from past actualities, deriving their conceptual feelings from these physical feelings, God originates from the conceptual feelings of the primordial envisagement (PR, 36). He works out some of the implications of this divine reversal in terms of six antitheses concerning God and the World (PR, 346–349), declaring: "In every respect God and the world move conversely to each other in respect to their process" (PR, 349). Suchocki builds on this by proposing that all general differences between these two types of actual entities can be thus explained: "God and the actual occasions exhibit the same metaphysical principles, yet conversely to each other" (EE, 173n2).

This principle is very important, for while God is an actual entity like all others, God is noncontingently different from actual occasions.22 It is not the case that God is an actual occasion, except for a few quirks, such that we can achieve greater coherence by making God more like other actual occasions. Were the difference between actual entity (the category including God) and actual occasion (the category excluding God) merely contingent, it might not exist, and then it would be possible that God might not exist either. For her, the reversal of the poles is that noncontingent difference.

She then introduces a reversal that Whitehead does not employ: whereas in actual occasions there is first concrescence, then satisfaction, for God concrescence grows out of a primordial satisfaction. "Thus the satisfaction of God lies in this conceptual atemporality; it is primordial, underlying and pervading the reality of God . . . it can only move from satisfaction . . . in continual and dynamic realization of that satisfaction" (EE, 139).

This is a striking notion, for we ordinarily conceive of satisfaction as the end result of a concrescent process. But if we attend to the rich possibilities inherent in God primordially, we can appreciate how that prior envisagement might be capable of including everything subsequently prehended, no matter what it might be: "God is primordially one, namely, the primordial unity of the relevance of the many potential forms: in the process God acquires a consequent multiplicity, which the primordial character absorbs into its own unity" (PR, 349).

God "acquires" the multiplicity by means of physical prehension, and "absorbs" it the same way, by the integration of physical and conceptual feeling. By her interpretation, however, the agency by which this absorption is accomplished should be the primordial satisfaction itself. To be sure, the primordial satisfaction is capable of including everything within itself, and of remaining unaffected thereby, but does it possess the active agency of effecting that inclusion?

If we limit ourselves to the conceptual side of God, "there is no way in which the satisfaction of the envisagement can be essentially altered . . . There simply are no new possibilities which could alter the satisfaction" (EE, 142) The essential nature of the satisfaction pertains to its formal side, and absolutely all forms are already included within it. "Thus the satisfaction of God is complete, since it is the fullness of all possibility and all actuality [so far achieved] in transformative union, and yet demands further completion. It is a satisfaction which is in principle dynamic and unending" (EE, 142).

Something that is complete, yet demanding further completion is at best an oxymoron. This is at the heart of the matter, for if God's concrescence is incomplete, it would seem to be imprehensible. Her argument that God can be prehended is based on the primordial satisfaction as essentially unchanging. "The quality of God's satisfaction does not change" (EE, 145). Here, change is conceived as the formal difference between two successive occasions. But in God there are never different successive forms since all forms are already (primordially) inherent in it. Notice that change is analyzed only with respect to form in this argument (EE, 142).

However, there is what we might call "nonessential" change in that the total reality of God includes more and more: "But the components of this satisfaction are continuously increasing . . . [T]he concrete actuality of just how these qualities are manifested has changed and is always changing" (EE, 145).

Consider another formulation: "[T]his is a dynamic harmony, in principle incapable of exhaustion, since the primordial vision is infinitely manifestable, and infinitely increasing in its complexity through the continuous addition of ever new occasions from the world" (EE, 146). Here, the primordial satisfaction is prehensible because it is exhaustively complete. It would not be the envisagement of all possibilities if there were any left out. On the other hand, this primordial vision is inexhaustibly hospitable to all actuality, whenever it should be prehended. The only question is whether this integration of physical and conceptual feeling is effected from the side of God's ongoing everlasting nature or whether it is effected somehow by the primordial vision itself.

Now, this theory of the reversal of concrescence and satisfaction in God, such that there is a definite primordial satisfaction to be prehended, is essentially based on one text from Process and Reality:

By the principle of relativity, there can only be one nonderivative actuality, unbounded by its prehensions of an actual world. Such a primordial superject of creativity achieves, in its unity of satisfaction, the complete conceptual valuation of all eternal objects. (PR, 32) 23

Notice that this passage depicts Whitehead's middle concept of God, as a primordial actuality having (as yet) no physical prehensions. It is extolled as the "one nonderivative actuality" because it is not limited by any "prehensions of an actual world." This actuality is described as having the status of a superject in terms of a primordial satisfaction.

Another text that could have been adduced in support of a divine primordial satisfaction is: "The objectification of God in a temporal subject is effected by the hybrid feelings with God's conceptual feelings as data" (PR, 246f). To be sure, Whitehead refers here to God's conceptual feelings, but the only ones objectifiable would be part of the satisfaction. This passage belongs to the section introducing hybrid feelings (111.3.2), which we have seen reason to place also with the middle concept. While Whitehead generalizes the doctrine so as not to appear ad hoc, its only important application at this time is to the prehension of God. Every other actuality was physically prehended, but that did not seem appropriate for prehending an actuality that was purely conceptual. Hence the invention of hybrid prehension, first applied to a satisfaction that was purely conceptual. Subsequently it was applied to living persons (PR, 107–109).

Occasionally in the literature one encounters the expression, "the hybrid physical prehension of the primordial nature."24 This formula is not to be found in Process and Reality. When he spoke of hybrid prehensions of God, he conceived of God as a single conceptual actuality. When he added a consequent nature, reconceiving this conceptual actuality as the primordial nature, he was silent as to how God was to be prehended.

The status of the primordial actuality is considerably transformed by the addition of divine physical feeling. Without physical feeling it is complete, having exhausted its creativity in one nontemporal concrescence ordering the total multiplicity of eternal objects into one final unity. Since that which is nontemporal cannot be ordered by "before" and "after," it is at once concrescence and outcome. With physical feeling, however, there is the ongoing activity of prehension as occasions come into being, necessitating that there be continuing divine creativity.

The notion of a fixed primordial nature ultimately rests on that prior conception of a primordial divine actuality. Eternal objects are derived either from past occasions or from unrealized elements of the primordial envisagement. In either case they should come from satisfactions, finite or primordial. But the primordial satisfaction dissolves once it is reconceived as

part of an ongoing activity. Again, if by satisfaction we mean simply that God's desires and aims are met, God is always satisfied. But the particular technical meaning of satisfaction for Whitehead is the completion of unification in unity such that the creative urge is satisfied.

If we regard the primordial nature as an abstraction within God as the totality of divine conceptual feeling, there can be a primordial concrescence that is nontemporally complete. But the divine subjectivity, and creative activity, has been reconceived as the activity of integrating physical and conceptual feeling. Instead of an objectifiable fixed primordial nature, the ghost of the former primordial actuality, there is a vast web of divine conceptual feeling in readiness to mate with the ongoing physical feeling. It is not clear whether such prehensions can themselves be prehended by finite occasions. Hybrid prehensions depended upon there being satisfactions to be felt in terms of their conceptual feelings. In the divine case, satisfaction is problematic because the divine creativity has not been satisfied.

We may consider the problem in another way. What prehends is subject, while what is prehended is object. This simple dichotomy, developed in terms of ordinary occasion, is stretched once it is discovered that God is not prehensible because incurably subjective.

Let us express this in terms of types of relations. That which concresces is internally related to that which it prehends. The actualities and atemporal objects it prehends affect its inner nature. This is ultimately that which gives interiority to the subject. The interiority of subjectivity is the capacity of being affected, and thereby of being internally related to others. This active potentiality remains as long as it can be affected. It requires the activity of creativity.

Unless there is interiority there is no individual that can be affected. A mass of clay can be shaped by an artist, but the individual particles are not affected thereby. (Otherwise put, that which has only an exterior is only externally related to others, not having any capacity to be affected.) If a concrescence is to integrate its internal relations, it requires some means of activity. If it is to be affected by others, and if it must integrate all instances of being affected, it needs creativity as its activity of integration.

As Hartshorne has shown, the basic structure of a prehension is internal with respect to the subject, external with respect to the object. 25 While the subject is affected, the object is not. It remains what it is, regardless of subsequent vicissitudes as incorporated into further concrescences. Its prehensibility is a function of its fixity, its definiteness, its absence of creativity, because it is ingredient in the original satisfaction prehended.

This fixity of eternal objects, because of their ingredience in satisfaction, is obscured for us by Whitehead's doctrine of their uncreatedness. Ultimately, we can only ground the definiteness of eternal objects in their lack of origin.

They have "eternally" been exactly the way they are, and as definite they are prehensible.

If the ontological principle were suitably generalized, then every entity, not just every actuality, would have to be explained in terms of its coming into being. 26 "Eternal" objects appear to be without origin because they abstract from their process of origination. This origination for "eternal objects" involves both divine and creaturely activity, resulting in a novel finite satisfaction. Then all atemporal objects, including novel ones, would be abstractions from (the satisfactions of) actual occasions. The determinateness of actuality would be the precondition for any definite abstractions.27 In this way "emergent objects" could replace eternal objects.28

The datum or object of prehension is fixed; it is fixed as an element in satisfaction precisely because that satisfaction lacks creativity. If it is transformed in any way, it is ultimately because of some creativity external to itself. It is what it is, regardless, and hence is externally related to everything and anything. If it were capable of being affected, it would have an interiority capable of being affected, and this interiority would be opaque to any prehender. Insofar as anything can be prehended it lacks interiority, which in a dynamic universe requires creativity to sustain it. The subject must have creativity to prehend; the object cannot have any creativity to be prehended.

From still another perspective, let us recall that the original (SMW) conception of prehension such that an event constituted out of its relations to all other events, past, present, and future was ultimately reduced to one kind of prehension, in which a present prehender prehends some past datum. The present is taken to be active, for all activity is in the present.29 Our usual intuition concerning the past is that it is devoid of activity. The past is what it is. If the datum of prehension is past, then its pastness, its lack of creativity, is precisely what makes it objective.

Now, eternal objects are timeless, not past. If, as we argue elsewhere, each atemporal object is an abstraction from its own act of emergence, then to prehend a timeless object is to indirectly prehend a past context, namely the past act of emergence from which it is extracted. Be that as it may, the primordial envisagement of all eternal objects, though timeless in one sense, is past in another. If an actual occasion prehends it, it lies in its past.

To be sure, when the primordial nature is taken up into the larger context of the final concept with additional physical feeling, Whitehead can write: "Viewed as primordial . . . he is not before all creation, but with all creation" (PR, 343). God as primordial is a constant feature of the divine life, which is in unison of becoming with all occasions. It may be with all occasions, but they prehend the primordial nature as something prior to themselves. It is something they experience, and it must have already been there

to be experienced. The primordial envisagement is a timeless concrescence, if such is possible, but in some sense it has already occurred, for it is as satisfaction that it is prehensible. If it were with the occasions as a present reality, it would not be something prehended. It would be part of the means of prehending, as a subjective form constituting the transcendental conditions by which any experience would be possible.

So even the prehension of the timeless appears to conform to the present/ past structure, which is also the subject/object structure. For our present purposes, it is the structure of creative activity for the concrescence, with a satisfaction that is prehensible because devoid of creativity. Suchocki seeks a primordial satisfaction that is prehensible all right, but it is also that from which concrescence can spring. Then the primordial satisfaction must also contain the creativity for the concrescence. These seem to confront us with contradictory demands.

However, there is another text upon which the notion of a primordial satisfaction could be based. As we have seen, the one explicit text was written when Whitehead conceived of the primordial concrescence, with its satisfaction, to be the totality of the divine actuality. This may take on quite a different meaning in the wider context of the final concept. This second text has the advantage of coming from the context of Whitehead's full, final concept of God as having consequent feelings:

The 'superjective' nature of God is the character of the pragmatic value of his specific satisfaction qualifying the transcendent creativity in the various temporal instances. (PR, 88) 30

Now, the troublesome part of this description of the "superjective" nature is to determine what "the pragmatic value of its specific satisfaction" means. We know what it means in the initial case for an actual occasion. An actual entity is

an attainment which is a specific satisfaction. This satisfaction is the attainment of something individual to the entity in question. It cannot be construed as a component contributing to its own concrescence; it is the ultimate fact, individual to the entity. (PR, 84)

It is not part of the concrescence because devoid of creativity, but as a specific, definite, individual satisfaction it is objectifiable. Subsequent occasions can prehend it and thereby be affected by its pragmatic value.

There are at least three interpretations of the "specific satisfaction" in the case of God, depending on how we understand God's "pragmatic value," the way God affects the world.

(1) The most common interpretation identifies the specific satisfaction primarily in terms of God's consequent experience of the world. The primordial nature is taken to be hybridly prehensible, and hence not in need of any distinct objectification. The ongoing concrescence of the consequent nature does. This is "the objective immortality of his consequent nature" (PR, 32), which is considered later in part V, in terms of the fourth phase:

It is the particular providence for particular occasions. What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven [in God's consequent nature], and the reality in heaven passes back into the world. (PR, 351)

Clearly, Whitehead was seeking for a way in which God's consequent experience could influence the world. It would provide for a genuine responsiveness whereby God provides a particular providence for individual occasions.

The difficulty is that although these texts express Whitehead's goal, they do not show how it could be obtained, nor how this could be justified. Sometimes these texts are cited to demonstrate that God as superjective influences the world in terms of the consequent concrescence, despite the fact that no concrescence is objectifiable.

I think we should regard these texts as promissory notes. They point in the direction in which Whitehead hoped to complete his system. But he was caught in a dilemma of his own making. Having shown that subjects and objects were radically distinct, such that no subject could be (simultaneously) an object, nor vice versa, it turns out that God must be conceived as a pure everlasting subject. As Whitehead conceived it, at least, only objects could influence others, so God could have no influence on the world solely as an object.

We hope to be able to redeem these promissory notes in a different way than Whitehead had anticipated, by showing that there is another way in which God could influence the world than by objectification.

(2) Marjorie Suchocki identifies the "specific satisfaction" with the "primordial satisfaction," as this statement modeled on our earlier quotation (from PR, 88) bears out:

The superjective nature is the pragmatic effectiveness of the primordial satisfaction as it is manifested through the consequent nature. (EE, 144)

This primordial satisfaction remains essentially unchanged from a purely formal perspective, even though it is being continually enriched by God's ongoing experience of a temporal world. The total satisfaction is evergrowing, but its prehensibility is a function of the primordial satisfaction from which it springs. That nontemporal satisfaction is complete, exhausting the creativity

of the nontemporal concrescence. If actually complete, then determinate, and if determinate, objectifiable.

Since determinateness and objectifiability are required for prehension, there is no categoreal reason why God may not be prehended by an occasion, despite the fact that the divine concrescence is everlasting . . . (EE, 147)

In other words, the nascent occasion does not so much prehend the total ongoing satisfaction as prehend the primordial core that orders all the additional content into a harmonious whole. The total satisfaction may be incomplete, eluding objectification, but the primordial satisfaction is fixed.

Insofar as the nascent occasion's prehension is taken to be hybrid, prehending God's conceptual possibilities, the influence of God's physical feelings can be ignored. The possibilities received from God are infinite and inexhaustible, and can be communicated to each occasion purely in terms of the primordial envisagement.

God, knowing all potentiality, has valued a quality of existence which would work toward the enhancement of any conceivable actuality. But which potentialities will be selected by finite, temporal occasions await the decisions of such occasions. (EE, 152)

If so, there is no need for God's consequent experience to influence the provision of divine aim. Although God experiences the world in terms of both eternal objects and actual occasions, God affects the world only in terms of the primordial nature. For there is only the primordial satisfaction since the everlasting concrescence cannot be objectified.

To be sure, the primordial satisfaction is manifested through the consequent nature because each actuality prehended fits into the overall nontemporal pattern, illustrating its abstract contours. That does not alter the fact that only the abstract pattern is prehensible. This is a very private "manifestation" indeed.

This interpretation does salvage the superjective character of the primordial satisfaction, and may well have been intended by Whitehead, although we must reckon with the possibility that he meant this passage in terms of one of the other alternatives. It is difficult to see how God could provide particular aims without employing the consequent nature. The primordial envisagement is absolutely immense, invariant for all time. How can an occasion at the very outset select the one eternal object most appropriate to itself? We can understand how an occasion can select further goals by modifying the initial aim, but how can it select the initial aim, since it needs some aim by which to select its aim?

Again, this becomes another instance of ''apparent responsiveness." God appears to respond to our particular needs, but it turns out that just this initial aim would be given to us in any case, since they are all part of the primordial envisagement. God may experience us temporally, but he "responds" only nontemporally. The two aspects are not integrated, at least with respect to us.

The criticisms of the last two paragraphs presuppose that there is an objectifiable primordial nature. As we have seen, that presupposition would be perfectly justifiable were God's actuality exhausted by the nontemporal concrescence and satisfaction, as was true of the middle concept. This means, however, that God's creativity would be nontemporally exhausted, since this particular unification is completed in the absolute unity of conceptual feeling. There would be no divine creativity left over to animate an ensuing everlasting concrescence.

We may generalize our reflection in terms of this principle: no creativity inherent to a concrescence can transcend its satisfaction, for the urge to further unify is satisfied by the complete unity achieved. There may well be transcendent creativity, the creativity of another, but then the first satisfaction is included as objectified.

There could be a divine primordial satisfaction, followed somehow by a divine everlasting satisfaction incorporating the first within it, but then there would be two distinct acts of concrescence, and two actualities. This would meet the demands of immanent and transcendent creativity, but it is a strange and unnecessary form of ditheism.

On the other hand, if we assume there is only one divine concrescence, the everlasting one, then there could not have been any single objectifiable primordial satisfaction cutting off that concrescence. There is a primordial order all right, but it consists of conceptual feelings that are always ready to be integrated with physical feelings of temporal occasions. The problem is not with the order, or even the completeness of eternal objects, although later we shall argue that these are just as temporally emergent as the occasions. The problem is with the termination of creativity that satisfaction entails for Whitehead.

(3) The "specific satisfaction" might be God's satisfaction specific to the spatiotemporal standpoint of a particular occasion. This builds on Christian's argument that God is prehended in terms of "the integration of his primordial nature with his prehensions of the past actual world of that actual occasion" (IWM, 395f). God is so intimate to the occasion that their common standpoint is shared. Both unify the particular past multiplicity that exists for that standpoint, but in God's case it is fully integrated with the riches of the primordial nature. For both the unification is complete, but in God's case it is a determinate unity available for the occasion.

If God should confront each occasion in the guise of a fully determinate occasion, the effect would be overwhelming. It should shoulder out all other competing occasions for the concern of the concrescing occasion. Since God would have already fully synthesized the past multiplicity of the occasion, there would be nothing for the occasion to do. Moreover, why do occasions only hybridly prehend God? If God were so determinately actual, should not God be purely physically prehended, with the initial aim being derived according to conceptual valuation? 31

In some ways this is like Hartshorne's society of divine occasions. The society is increased, for now there is a divine occasion for every standpoint, while Hartshorne has only one for a given moment. To be sure, this is that privileged meaning of simultaneity that raises problems for relativity physics.32 Christian's approach avoids this problem in that no one divine occasion can be construed to define absolute simultaneity. If these were really divine occasions, however, they would have that "faint scent of polytheism" that Paul Fitzgerald spoke about.33

Christian avoids the difficulty by implicitly distinguishing between God's overall (subjective) satisfaction and these individual (objective) subsatisfactions. Yet the nature of satisfaction, particularly in relationship to creativity, requires that it apply to the whole concrescence. Socalled subsatisfactions or included satisfactions are not really satisfactions because they do not exhaust creativity. From the standpoint of the inclusive concrescence they are simply more members of the multiplicity requiring satisfaction. The ongoing concrescence is a corrosive dissolving the determinateness, that is, the objectifiability or prehensibility, of any included satisfactions.

Another version of Christian's account of divine satisfaction can be derived from Suchocki's version by placing the accent upon the consequent nature. We may call this (she apparently does not) an evergrowing satisfaction, concentrating on the components to be unified rather than on the formal means of unity:

The integrating process whereby God interweaves the prehended world with his primordial satisfaction is the concretization of this satisfaction, the brilliantly moving experience of its reality.34

Looked at solely in terms of the primordial satisfaction, God's essential nature is always the same, envisaging and ordering all possibilities. This formal unity permits the ongoing unification of all occasions prehended into a final integration. From one standpoint it is statically definite, from the other quite dynamic:

Since the whole of his nature is one of every expanding actuality, no relationship within that nature is ever static: the satisfaction of God is one of dynamic harmony. 35

In some ways these quotations show how easy it is to describe God's satisfaction as either a primordial satisfaction or an evergrowing satisfaction, depending on whether we put the accent on the form or the matter. Either way, the concept faces difficulties. If it is a primordial satisfaction it is subject to the objections already raised. If it is an evergrowing satisfaction, it is in effect a summation of all of Christian's specific subsatisfactions. Each is fully determinate with respect to a particular standpoint, which the evergrowing satisfaction unifies together. Then the objections we entered with respect to Christian apply.

Suchocki's own position is based on the prehensibility of the primordial satisfaction. As a way of establishing this, she argues:

Efficacy depends upon determinateness . . . We maintain that it is determinateness which allows causal efficacy, rather than the pastness of concrescence as such.36

According to the twentieth category of explanation, determinateness needs more than definiteness, which eternal objects have. A definite entity is determinate if it also has "position," described as "relative status in a nexus of actual entities" (PR, 25). Position is not simply locatedness in the extensive continuum. That meaning is irrelevant here. If an actuality is positioned relative to other actual entities, it must be able to prehend them and integrate those physical prehensions by means of definite patterns of unity. In this sense a primordial satisfaction would be definite all right but not determinate.

An evergrowing satisfaction is either determinate, determining the whole into concrete unity and thereby cutting off any further immanent creativity, or it is simply a determinate component in an ongoing concrescence which can never be satisfied, always remembering that satisfaction here does not mean having one's desires and aims fully met.

While efficacy depends on determinateness, determinateness may well depend on pastness. There are three candidates for efficacy: past occasions, God, and eternal objects. If God should not be prehensible, then God is not a candidate for determinateness. If my argument elsewhere shows that apparently eternal objects are really emergent, then every efficacious element would have arisen from the past. This is in accordance with a generalized version of the ontological principle, that the reason why some objective entity is the way it is can be found in the past act which brought it forth.

III— Palmyre Oomen

The next proposal we should consider is found in an essay by Palmyre Oomen on "The Prehensibility of God's Consequent Nature," recently published in Process Studies. 37

In many ways her essay is a more fully developed version of Marjorie Suchocki's approach. Both find a central role for the reversal of poles in God, and extend its interpretation beyond Whitehead's explicit account. Both require a strong interpretation of the primordial envisagement. Yet where Suchocki tends to focus on how God as a whole can be prehended, Oomen concentrates on the determinateness and consequent prehensibility of individual divine physical feelings. This avoids some awkward difficulties concerning divine subjectivity and agency.

Oomen argues that God eternally envisages not only all pure possibilities, but also every possible situation in which these pure possibilities might be actualized. Then, whatever actual situation God experiences, God already (or more precisely, eternally) has the conceptual means whereby that situation is to be determinately ordered. If so, every state prehended by God is at all times determinate, and hence prehensible. There is no indeterminacy within the divine concrescence. The totality of determinate prehensions that constitute the consequent nature is never complete, for there are always further experiences to be added to it. This incompleteness is basic to the ongoing character of the everlasting concrescence, but it does not undercut its prehensibility, which its determinateness ensures.

This may be the only account that can consistently show that the consequent nature can be prehended, but only at an unacceptably high cost. A strong primordial nature, which values all real possibilities as well as pure ones, usurps any place for temporal valuation, and temporal valuation is the basis for any genuine divine responsiveness to the world.

If we restrict ourselves to divine nontemporal valuation, we neglect many of Whitehead's best insights about value. Value does not pertain so much to the pure possibility itself as to the context of its actualization. Thus "there is not just one ideal 'order' which all actual entities should attain and fail to attain. In each case there is an ideal peculiar to each particular actual entity, and arising from the dominant components in its phase of 'givenness'" (PR, 84). Not the possibility itself, but "Insistence on birth at the wrong season is the trick of evil" (PR, 223). "There is evil when things are at cross purposes'' (RM, 97). "Evil, triumphant in its enjoyment, is so far good in itself; but beyond itself it is evil in its character of a destructive agent among things greater than itself." "We must conceive the Divine Eros as the active entertainment of all ideals, with the urge to their finite realization, each in its season"

(AI, 357). Even "the ultimate evil in the temporal world" concerns how present actualities obstruct past ones (PR, 340), not pure possibilities. If only Whitehead had found a way to demonstrate the effectiveness of the everlasting concrescence, he could have reaffirmed these insights in his theory of the provision of initial aims.

In fact, it may well be that pure possibilities alone cannot be valued. What does fairness mean in a lifeless world? Are volcanos destructive on the surface of Venus? Should "justice" be conceived in the sweeping terms of Anaximander?

The issue of divine temporal valuation concerns the very nature of God as a living God. The Bible certainly portrays God as directly responding to his people. The immutabilist assumptions derived from the Greek ideals sought to explain this responsive activity as merely apparent, but the Hebrews understood it as genuinely temporal. 38

Thus, the action of God appears to take place in time, even though God knows all future contingents beforehand. Oomen rejects such immutabilist omniscience, which undercuts any genuine freedom. A strong theory of nontemporal valuation does allow for freedom, but it is like omniscience in other respects. For God knows from all eternity just what action will be taken under whatever circumstances. In both cases a fantastic imaginative construct is proposed in order to meet extrinsic concerns: in the first case, divine perfection as classically conceived; in the second, the threatened imprehensibility of the consequent nature. In both case, genuine temporal divine responsiveness, so graphically portrayed in the Hebrew Scriptures (e.g., Gen. 6.6, I Sam. 15.35, 2 Kings 20), is sacrificed.

Whitehead had worked out his notions of nontemporal valuation and the provision of initial aim within the context of a purely nontemporal conception of God. The consequent nature had not yet been introduced. Suchocki and Oomen39 in effect extend these nontemporal theories to account for the new reality of a temporal, everlasting God. What is needed is an understanding of everlasting concrescence that can transcend finite occasions as well as be effective in the world. The resources of this new divine temporality need to be developed anew, if a simple extension of the earlier conceptuality will not do. If the concept of an everlasting concrescence is sufficiently worked out, it can absorb the function of the primordial nature. Divine transcendence can be transformed within the context of temporality into future concrescence, eliminating any need for nontemporality.

IV— Jorge Nobo

Like the theory of an evergrowing satisfaction, Jorge Nobo's theory attempts to combine the determinateness of the satisfaction with an everlasting

divine subjectivity. His view of the divine satisfaction is epochal for the most part, such that each completed stage resembles one of Hartshorne's divine occasions in spatiotemporal extent:

[E]ach completed stage in the supersessional development of God's consequent nature is causally objectifiable because it constitutes a complete physical synthesis produced by the consequent creative activity out of all the attained actualities already in existence relative to the beginning of that stage of the divine development. (PR, 344–346/ 523–524) 40

This approach substitutes the divine occasion for Christian's notion of a divine integration at every point, thereby risking some of the drawbacks which the divine occasion notion is subject to, such as specifying a privileged meaning to simultaneity and not aiding the new occasion in finding its appropriate subjective aim. If God's satisfaction were fully integrated at every point, synthesizing conceptual feelings along with the physical feelings, then God could thereby provide the new occasion arising from that standpoint with its aim. Nobo sides with Christian against Hartshorne is affirming a continuous subjectivity.

Christian can affirm an ongoing divine subjectivity because no partsatisfaction, in his eyes, could exhaust God's creativity. Hartshorne assumes that divine subjectivity is intermittent, terminating at the end of one occasion, yet being renewed at the next.41 Also, anything common to the divine occasions belongs to the abstract nature of God, and it is purely objective, leaving no room for any common subjectivity or creativity.

Hartshorne assumes that divine occasions are like actual occasions with respect to causal objectification. As Nobo notes,

To be causally objectified in another actuality, a temporal actuality must be completely determinate . . . Its objective immortality is a function of its completion . . . [F]or a temporal actuality to be a superject, or for it to have superjective or objective functioning, it must be complete, and its completion is the perishing of its subjective immediacy. (WMES, 188, his italics)

I have italicized the term temporal to indicate that while many interpreters would apply these strictures to all satisfactions, Nobo exempts the divine satisfaction: "[A] superject need not be a concrete actuality but may be, instead, an abstract aspect of an actual entity."42

His warrant for this claim is one five–word phrase, "the primordial superject of creativity":

Is it the case that whatever is a superject must be devoid of subjective immediacy? Now, the fact that Whitehead refers to God's conceptual pole as the primordial superject of creativity suggests that lack of subjective immediacy is not a requisite for being a superject. (PR, 32; WMES, 189)

Without any further examination to determine whether Whitehead's claim can be justified, the notion of superject is applied to an abstract aspect of actuality, thereby evading the requirement that the superject closes up the creativity of an actual entity. On the strength of this, Nobo generalizes the definition of superject to be: "any complete synthesis of data, which is then applied to each stage in the supersessional development of God's consequent nature" (WMES, 189).

Nobo may be interpreting "the primordial superject of creativity" to mean "creativity's superject," that is, the superjective aspect of creativity, or better, the superjective aspect of divine subjectivity. If so, God enjoys superjective subjectivity while actual occasions express superjective objectivity. Both are superjective in that they affect subsequent occasions, but God affects them without sacrificing subjectivity. I interpret the phrase differently: this is the superject of the nontemporal instance of creativity.

Whether this refers to the completion of concrescence or to some partsuperject that exempts God from the requirement of the exhaustion of subjective immediacy depends on the larger context in which this phrase, which occurs only once, is found. It belongs to the "togetherness" paragraph we have already examined in terms of its compositional analysis. 43 It is probably the first articulation of the idea of a primordial envisagement. Whitehead applies the notion of concrescence, heretofore used only of finite occasions, to God, the one nontemporal actual entity. A nontemporal concrescence starts from a multiplicity, but it is a multiplicity of uncreated eternal objects, and reduces them to unity. "Such a primordial superject of creativity achieves, in its unity of satisfaction, the complete valuation of all eternal objects" (PR, 32).

God as primordial is here conceived as a complete actuality; there is no hint in these texts of the middle concept of any consequent nature or of divine physical feeling. Nobo's interpretation turns on interpreting words written from an earlier standpoint within the context of the final theory. In that context there is no primordial superject, because God's conceptual feelings alone can never effect the absolutely final outcome of the everlasting concrescence.44

Note that this primordial superject meets all the general requirements for a superject, those Nobo reserved for temporal actualities only. It is completely determinate, its concrescence is complete. What shall we say on the last requirement: is its completion the perishing of its subjective immediacy? This is difficult to determine, precisely because it concerns the nontemporal. In one sense, the nontemporal concrescence must be over, if it

is to be determinate. If we are able to prehend the primordial satisfaction, it must be that it has fully exercised its creativity. On the other hand, the nontemporal concrescence occurs in a unison of becoming with present (and future) occasions. These are some of the paradoxes of nontemporal concrescence, a notion ultimately absorbed into the final everlasting concrescence. In the end, Whitehead affirms that concrescence is thoroughly temporal, the nontemporal being only abstract.

V— Elizabeth M. Kraus

In her account of how God affects us, Elizabeth M. Kraus appears to evade the problem we have posed. God's concrescence has "simultaneity with that of all finite occasions . . . All creatures, all spaces, and all times, past, present, and future, are everlastingly knit together in beauty in the divine consciousness" (ME, 168). 45 To be sure, future occasions still to be actualized only become contemporaneous with the divine concrescence when their time comes, but the sentence is correct if the verb is understood tenselessly. If we define contemporaries as those that are in unison of becoming with one another, then the everlasting consequent divine concrescence is our contemporary.46

In one context God is described as "atemporal, immediately connected with each creature's actual world, contemporaneous with every creaturely concrescence" (ME, 163). Yet surely this does not mean "atemporal" in the sense that eternal objects are timeless. Rather, I take her to mean that God is not "temporal" in the sense of having a particular limited spatiotemporal extent, but includes all times, somewhat in the way that Boethius had defined eternity as "an endless life whole and perfect in a single moment." Thus, ''the divine actual world includes all actual worlds simultaneously and all spatiotemporal drops emerging from those actual worlds in unison of becoming. From the divine perspective, time becomes space in the sense that all 'times' are copresent in divine feelings . . . " (ME, 164).

Yet if God and occasions are contemporaries, how can either prehend the other? As she notes elsewhere, "The only possible universal meaning of contemporaneity is causal independence" (ME, 77). Because occasions perish and are objectified, God can prehend them, although not as contemporary. The occasions can never prehend the contemporaneity of God.

Kraus suggests two ways of evasion:

(1) In another context she recommends that "in order to resolve its latent inconsistencies, God must be granted certain exemptions from the rules of metaphysics. But at least the spirit of Whiteheadian thought is retained" (ME, 165n). Her solution in some sense may be in Whitehead's "spirit," but it is not in his spirit as trying to conceive

God as rigorously as possible in terms of the metaphysical principles applicable to all actual entities (cf. PR, 343). 47 Insofar as God is made an exception it is possible to evade the difficulties we need to address. It may be one way of blocking further inquiry.

(2) If there cannot be any direct causal connection between the creature and God, perhaps there is a "presentational objectification" of God's as the superjective nature.

But . . . the superjection is not to be construed in the same terms as a finite superject, functioning objectively as efficient cause of futures, for the divine concrescence is never in the past of any occasion. It is a superjection graspable only through faith: tenderly leading through inspiration, gently redeeming through a love whose effect must be freely seized by the creature, which thus becomes its own coredeemer, divinized through its willing absorption into the divine. (ME, 169)

This may well be plausible if "creature" is understood to be "human creature," but it makes less sense if we apply it to subhuman creatures, particularly to, say, the living occasions within plant cells. The more general property of responsiveness, indicating the freedom of the occasion in actualizing divine aims, which are not to be understood simply in terms of efficient causation, would have been more apt.

Responsiveness is not enough. There is also the variation in initial aims according to the particular situation of the actuality. Humans greatly differ, and the aims appropriate to the living occasions within cells will differ even more. Without these subhuman initial aims, however, there seems to be no way in which God can create our world by persuading others to create themselves.

For all the variation in response to God's aims, unless those aims are suited to the particular circumstances of the occasions they cannot be effective. Faith in God in general is not enough. The necessary variety of aims must be given by God, and they must be prehended. These are necessary preconditions for the occasion's own concrescence, without which it could not respond at all.

To be sure, the hybrid prehensions of God differ from the simple efficient causation of pure physical prehension, but they are still prehensions. In terms of all finite occasions, all hybrid prehensions still forms of efficient causation, although they also mediate final causation. A divine concrescence contemporary with ourselves is imprehensible, so the problem how God can communicate appropriate aims is still our problem.

VI— Lewis S. Ford

Many of the criticisms that I have brought against Christian, Suchocki, and Nobo apply with equal, if not greater force against my own earlier (1973) attempt to reconcile divine subjectivity with the demands of objectification. 48 It follows the same strategy of finding an element within the divine life that might be sufficiently definite to be objectified, without jeopardizing the continuation of divine immanent creativity. For years I thought that I had successfully handled the problem, but evidently not. (For greater clarity I shall refer to my earlier self in the third person.)

In that earlier essay Ford conceived of the divine concrescence as housing a vast multiplicity of quasiconcrescences, one for each standpoint. When those standpoints are future, only part of its actual world has been prehended. Yet

God's appetition for a particular standpoint grows in specificity and richness as he prehends more and more of the actual occasions which belong to its actual world, culminating and terminating in the prehensive unification of its entire actual world, thereby exhausting his immanent creativity relative to that standpoint.49

Although the creativity has been locally exhausted, Ford argued that God's creativity as a whole could not come to an end until the divine subjective aim were complete. Yet this is impossible, since God has the appetition that every pure possibility should somehow be actualized.

Here is the strategy of local divine satisfactions that could be objectified and prehended, while safeguarding a total continuous satisfaction. Ford may not have expressed myself that way, at least not emphatically, because more and more I came to believe that satisfaction entails the perishing of creativity. We are then faced with a dilemma: either God never reaches satisfaction, or God perishes. Most of those conceiving God as a single concrescence hold that God does reach satisfaction but in an exceptional way, so that God never perishes. I hold that since satisfaction basically means for Whitehead the satisfaction of aim and the satisfaction of the dynamic means to that aim, creativity, God never perishes because God is never satisfied in any final sense.

The argument for God's total creativity based on the infinity of the divine aim seems sound, but it appears to demonstrate that God is never satisfied, not that a local definiteness marking the exhaustion of creativity for that standpoint is compatible with an ongoing total creativity. What is called "definiteness" here is the complete unity of divine feeling for a given standpoint. Since it is complete, no further unification is possible, and so it is

deemed objectifiable. We shall consider this property of definiteness two paragraphs hence. My concern here is rather with the total creativity.

"Creativity" quickly becomes a kind of dynamic matter that easily passes from one actuality to another. We forget that it was coined by Whitehead in Religion in the Making in order to a generalize upon selfcreation. Since every occasion could create itself, there needed to be one common property indicating this power of selfcreation, creativity. While it is true that locally no further unification is possible, it is not true that at that standpoint God has created godself. That is an infinite task.

If creativity means selfcreation rather than simply creation, the unity achieved for a given standpoint simply marks a spatiotemporal phase within the entire divine concrescence. For its unity is not the exhaustion of the immanent divine creativity, allowing for transcendent creativity beyond. Rather, local exhaustion of immanent creativity is immediately surrounded by the immanent creativity of the ongoing divine concrescence. It is more like a genetic phase of becoming than something definite to be prehended. There must also be transcendent creativity by means of which there can be prehenders to prehend that definiteness.

Yet is any part of God's concrescence definite? In this context definiteness is used instead of determinateness for two reasons. (Definiteness simply means completeness of form, while determinateness means that the fully definite form has been actualized by the totality of past actualities that are unified by that form [PR, 25; CE, 20].) A fully determinate divine satisfaction, even if only a part of the total satisfaction, including physical prehensions, would simply overwhelm a new occasion. Also, since it is only hybridly felt in terms of its conceptual feelings, one might conceive of the partsatisfaction as predominantly, if not exclusively, conceptual.

Actual occasions have finite concrescences, for their task is to unify the particular multiplicity they confront, and their aims are tailored to this specific purpose. The situation is inverted in the divine instance, however, which starts from its conceptual pole (PR, 348f). God's aim is infinite, seeking the realization of every pure possibility, each in its own season. Fulfilling that aim requires an infinite, everlasting concrescence.

Although Whitehead refused to assign subjectivity to his earlier concepts of God as primordial actuality, Ford conceives of nontemporality in terms of "that subjective activity exercised in independence from temporal passage." 50 This describes the nontemporal concrescence, if every concrescence enjoys subjectivity in its coming to be. This is a dimension that gets overlooked in the tendency to objectify the primordial nature from the perspective of consequent experience. This is particularly so if the nontemporal becomes reduced to the abstract aspect of a society of divine occasions.

Yet can subjective activity be independent of temporal passage? Only if it is formally distinct from temporal subjectivity. Subjectivity means the dynamic capacity to be affected by another. It is internal relatedness in the process of coming to be. The components of a concrescence affect its subjectivity. A nontemporal concrescence has as its components eternal objects, and they affect the coming into being of the subject's satisfaction, which is one complex object. A temporal concrescence has both temporal actual occasions and eternal objects as its components. In that sense the temporal concrescence is wider and more inclusive than the nontemporal concrescence. Having no temporal locus of its own, we may think of the nontemporal concrescence as participating in every temporal concrescence, and the nontemporal satisfaction as ingredient in every temporal satisfaction.

Although the divine satisfaction does not figure so prominently in "The NonTemporality of Whitehead's God," there are some remarkable affinities with Marjorie Suchocki's endeavor, speaking of a "primordially actual satisfaction." 51 Later the primordial satisfaction is qualified as an abstraction of the nontemporal component of the divine everlasting satisfaction.52 Ford makes no use of the reversal of the poles, but both analyses emphasize the priority of the nontemporal side of the divine. Both are based on the insight that the primordial envisagement, by ordering all conceivable possibilities, is capable of integrating whatever it might receive. "Each occasion prehended is instantaneously absorbed into this conceptual unity.''53

Instead of the reversal of the poles, Ford's account was formally based upon the notion of a nontemporal decision. Nevertheless, the objections we have already encountered in terms of part satisfactions, in terms of the perishing or satiation of creativity for objectification, and the requirement that creativity be selfcreation, also apply to this proposal.

All these objections necessitate the revision of the ideas articulated in this early essay. Yet there is an important continuity leading to my present project. In contrast to Ford's earlier defense of eternal objects,54 I now argue that they should be conceived as atemporal objects that can be abstracted from temporal occasions. Whitehead already permits for this abstraction by means of categoreal valuation (CO4), except for novelty, but even that can be explained in terms of emergence.55 The Nontemporality essay proposes a theory of halfway emergence. Eternal objects subsist nontemporally, but they are emergent temporally.

We are apt to think that what exists nontemporally is therefore permanent, and is permanent relevant to all occasions. This is true of whatever is metaphysically necessary, since all occasions must exemplify it, but it is not evident of eternal objects characterizing contingent conditions, particularly those not immediately relevant to us. These same considerations apply to God: The primordial concrescence

is a nontemporal act, only gradually and partially coming into temporal existence as it is synthesized with physical prehensions within the total concrescence of God . . . Far from being always (at all times) prehended by God, it is more accurate to say that God never (at no time) wholly prehends the entire primordial nature, for at no particular time, nor for the whole summation of all particular times, is it wholly relevant. 56

We are so familiar with temporal prehending that this all sounds unnecessarily paradoxical, forgetting that God (on this conception) only prehends the entirety of eternal objects nontemporally. For Ford, it is only their temporal status that is emergent, following Whitehead's view that the eternal objects are uncreated (PR, 257). Yet it is possible to show that nearly all can be created. Then they only appear to be "eternal," since such atemporal objects abstract from their temporal origination.57 This transforms certain features of God. There is no need for any separate primordial nature, as all atemporal objects can be derived by abstraction from God's physical prehensions of the world.

This may seem like a simple shift from the primordial to the consequent nature, yet while the Nontemporality essay emphasized the primordial side of God, it always presupposed the temporal side. God's total satisfaction was always more than the primordial satisfaction, and required involvement in time. The primordial abstraction should not be mistaken for the total reality of God. If the new concept were simply an everlasting present concrescence, the primordial side would be absent. But the pure possibilities of the nontemporal have been transformed into real possibilities rooted in particular temporal situations to become a future concrescence. Both sides are involved, yet integrated into a new reality.

We may say either that God enjoys an evergrowing satisfaction, or that God's concrescence never reaches satisfaction. As we have seen, this depends on how we understand satisfaction. Is it the satisfaction of a specific goal for this particular situation, or is it the realization of an infinite drive toward actualization?

Is it the achievement of the integration and harmonization of what has just been prehended, utilizing all the depths and riches of intellectual supplementation at God's disposal,58 or is it the harmonizing integration of the entire world order? In addition to these concerns, satisfaction will never be attained if it means the satiation or completion of the creative urge, for the end of all immanently divine creativity would also mean the end of the divine concrescence. Concrescence is unification, and unification both achieves, and ends in, unity. While God is always satisfied proximally, in the ultimate sense he never is satisfied.

If God is never satisfied, God never comes into being. This must seem extremely paradoxical to those who regard being as the most inclusive word for anything that has the slightest existence whatsoever. We must keep in mind, however, that for Whitehead all these (objective) beings, so carefully described in his earlier philosophy of nature, are based on concrescence, which is to be regarded as becoming rather than being. As his philosophy unfolds, beings are the products of acts of becoming. 59 Becoming, which is the locus of subjectivity, is prior to being.

This means that if becoming and being are mutually exclusive,60 then it is far more important that God be an act of becoming than that God be a being. Thus, we agree with Paul Tillich that God ought not be considered a being; nevertheless, God exemplifies the categories for these are categories of becoming for Whitehead, not being.61

Wolfhart Pannenberg, whose approach is somewhat similar to mine, formulates the issue somewhat differently: "[I]t is necessary to say that, in a restricted but important sense, God does not yet exist."62 For God will have being at the end of the world, while now, "God's being is still in the process of coming to be."63 However, "what turns out to be true in the future will then be evident as having been true all along."64

Where Pannenberg is constrained to say that God does not yet exist in some sense, I would say that God most fully exists in the divine becoming, and where he says that God comes into being, I would say that God could no longer exist. Although we agree in seeing the most profound meaning of deity in the future, he assumes that God must have being. In Whiteheadian terms he sees the process of God's coming into being as a concrescence embracing the entire world age. To result in being this process must terminate, bringing about both the absolute end of the world and the emergence of God.65

Yet if the world and its end is understood relatively, as Whitehead does, there could be no absolute end to the world or to history. Each occasion consummates the whole of the world prior to itself, but there are always occasions succeeding it. The problem with any absolute, whether of time or the world or history, is that nothing temporal can succeed it, only eternity, whatever that means. Then the temporal modalities are radically altered. If the end of history became realized, the divine activity of the future would become present, losing the transcendence it enjoys as future. As present, God would become concretely determinate and hence finite. The role Pannenberg assigns to the final consummation is fulfilled another way, for God includes all finite actuality within the divine life, reconciling its conflicts to overcome evil, but in an ongoing fashion, dealing with the world of each occasion in its turn.66

Though he appreciates the role of process, his approach in the end is determined by the primacy he gives to being over becoming. If being alone is

seen as fully actual, then becoming can only be derivatively actual. The matter is reversed for some Whiteheadian scholars. Thus, Ivor Leclerc argues that for Whitehead "an actual entity is an acting entity" (WM, 85f) 67 such that past actualities "are, in the strict sense, no longer 'actual' " (WM, 101). This justifies Leclerc's distinctive formulation of the ontological principle: "[A]n 'entity' can exist only either as itself 'actual' (i.e., acting), or as implicated in the activity of some actuality" (WM, 102).

There is a long and honorable tradition, however, that identifies the actual with the determinately concrete particular. Whitehead, perhaps inconsistently, defers to this tradition in referring to past, nolongeracting events as "actual occasions." For him, both concrescing occasions and past outcomes are actual. This is particularly evident in formulations of the ontological principles, which vest ultimate reasons in actualities. An early formulation given to his Harvard class in 1927 lists past occasions as the only reasons,68 and his most definitive version lists both concrescing and past occasions as the actualities that can serve as reasons (PR, 24).69

This does not mean that actuality is equivocal, but that perhaps we should explore its meaning relative to temporal differences. As a first approximation we might understand actuality as the fullness of existence. As such it is primary, and everything else (in that same temporal mode) is derivative. The concreteness of determinate particulars is the actuality that things in the past have, from which objective abstractions have only derivative existence. Concrescence, or perhaps more precisely, its contingent decisiveness whereby its creativity is exercised, is present actuality. Both the concrescence and the concrete are actual, but in different modes.

Time also has a future mode. Is there a distinctive form of future actuality? We shall argue later that there is: creativity, that is, as not "yet" pluralized into the particular instances we encounter in present concrescences. This future creativity is infinite in spatiotemporal extent, and is the transcendent source for all finite instances of creativity. Since this divine creativity has only one instantiation of its own, it constitutes one everlasting concrescence prehending all actualities into one final harmonious whole, responding to the needs of every creature.70

These are large claims, requiring much of later chapters to justify. In this context I shall touch only on two points.

1. God is not simply creativity, but creativity as the mode of future actuality. Here, I am extending Whitehead's account, which was written from the perspective of the present: Creativity is only "capable of characterization through its accidental embodiments, and apart from these accidents is devoid of actuality" (PR, 7). His ultimate is not

actual in itself. It is not God, not being worthy of worship, but is comparable to the role of being in other philosophies.

In the present creativity is pluralized. The mark of present actuality is the contingent decisiveness whereby a particular concrescence integrates what it prehends from the past into a final unity (PR, 43). This requires the activity of creativity to be sure, but as a means whereby this decision is arrived at. In present instances we may regard creativity, as a factor, along with past actualities and aim, in the achievement of this actuality. Here, creativity is actual only in its embodiments.

The one divine concrescence, from one perspective, is the single future instantiation of creativity, but it does not result in any final prehensible unity closing off immanent creativity. On the contrary, as we shall see, the public side of the divine concrescence is the communication of creativity to the present occasions. Creativity is independently ultimate in this mode, for it is the heart of the future concrescence, and that which the future makes available to the present.

2. The positive argument for there being any activity of the future still has to be made, but we can introduce some negative considerations now.

Traditionally, God has been considered eternal or nontemporal. Whitehead followed this assumption in his first two concepts of divinity, even though they diverged from traditional concepts in other ways. His final concept may be regarded as a synthesis of the nontemporal and the everlasting.

For Hartshorne, the nontemporal aspect becomes simply the abstract aspect of the temporal series of divine occasions. Eternal objects can be seen for the most part (novelty excepted) as derivative from temporal actualities. Although Whitehead may have been tempted to strike a balance between the temporal and the nontemporal, the tendency in process theism has been to regard time as primary, and the nontemporal as derivative.

Heidegger and others have been suspicious of the role that nontemporal deity and atemporal metaphysics has played, and have called for a conception of reality within the context of temporality. Process theism may offer a conception of God as appearing within the horizon of temporality. 71

Let us then seek to devise a theory of the divine within the context of time. What temporal modes are open to us? No one would consider God as merely past. The past is inert, devoid of creativity.

God as present is our contemporary. Contemporaries, however, cannot interact. The difficulty with the notion of an everlasting concrescence is that

then divine and finite concrescences are in unison of becoming, neither as yet achieving the being necessary for objectification and interaction.

That leaves God as future. To be sure, the future concrescence, not being completed, is in unison of becoming with us. Like contemporaries, God is imprehensible. But God as future can influence us in a radically different way. The one creativity of the future can become many present instances of creativity.

Chapter Six— The Power of the Past

There are two very different ways in which the past has figured prominently in explaining how God affects the world. Charles Hartshorne has generalized the way in which actual occasions affect their successors to apply in the divine instance. God is then reconceived as a society or series of divine occasions. As each divine occasion becomes past and determinate, it affects all succeeding occasions capable of prehending it. It is by becoming devoid of creativity that each divine occasion becomes causally influential.

On the other view, others have located divine power not in terms of particular past data but rather in terms of the creativity inherent in the totality of the past. It is as the source of creativity that God's power is primarily appreciated, and this power is seen as issuing from the past.

I— Nancy Frankenberry and the Power of the Past

Several thinkers have proposed this interpretation of Whitehead, such as Jorge Nobo, 1 W. Norris Clarke, S. J.,2 and Marjorie Suchocki,3 but the most thorough discussion of this approach is to be found in two essays by Nancy Frankenberry.4 She recognizes that her identification of God with the power of the past modifies Whitehead's own position, which intends to distinguish God from creativity rather strictly, but argues this modification is desirable in the light of our religious experience of God's power as the source of creativity. Moreover, she argues, the view of efficient causation her analysis implies is closer to Whitehead's own stance than the usual received interpretations of causal objectification in terms of the transfer of form.5

The evidence for her interpretation is drawn primarily from the chapter on "Objects and Subjects" in Adventures of Ideas. Let me quote extensively from her presentation:

The language Whitehead uses there makes it clear that the creativity of the past is far from being passive or static as though only inertly "given"

to the present. Rather, Whitehead speaks of "the throbbing emotion of the past hurling itself into a new transcendent fact," "a flying dart hurled at the future," "provoking some special activity of the occasion in question," ''energizing in the present," "imposing . . . on the novel particular in process of creation" (Al, 177, 177, 176, 188, 188). In discussing "objects," which he also terms "data" for an occasion, Whitehead describes the process of experiencing as "constituted by the reception of objects into the unity of that complex occasion which is the process itself" (AI, 179). But lest it appear that all the activity is on the side of the subject, he immediately suggests that there is something defective about this choice of terms: "Both words ["objects" and "data"] suffer from the defect of suggesting that an occasion of experiencing arises out of a passive situation which is a mere welter of many data . . . The exact contrary is the case. The initial situation includes a factor of activity which is the reason for the origin of that occasion of experience. This factor of activity is what I have called 'creativity.' " (AI, 179, her italics) 6

In terms of these passages, it certainly seems as though the creativity exercised by present occasions is derived from the past. Why then is this interpretation resisted by many Whiteheadian scholars? I submit the issue primarily depends on the locus of interpretation. Which texts do we select as central to our interpretation? Frankenberry has chosen part III of Adventures of Ideas, while Christian, Leclerc, Sherburne, and Kline opt for the final doctrine in Process and Reality. In the effort to render Whitehead's theory consistent throughout, the texts in Process and Reality are accommodated to the interpretation from Adventures of Ideas (so Frankenberry) or vice versa (the others). This suggests that there is considerable conflict between the two sets of texts, perhaps even contradictions.

According to the final theory of Process and Reality, creativity is active only in the present.7 The past is past precisely because its creativity has perished (passed away). That there might be future activity is not considered. There may be many present concrescent activities, to be sure, but none are present to each other, so none can communicate creativity to the other. Hence, Whitehead can only conclude that creativity is intrinsic to every present moment, welling up whenever there is a multiplicity to be unified (PR, 21f).

While Whitehead may be reduced to this impasse, following out the rationality of his approach to the fullest, it may be questioned whether it is ultimately satisfactory. It certainly does not appear so from a Thomist perspective. Father Clarke is puzzled: "Why this creativity should bubble up unfailingly and inexhaustibly all over the universe through endless time, with no active causal influx or gift of actuality from another already existing actual entity, remains a total enigma."8

There can be no question but that Whitehead sought at least to correct the impression left by Process and Reality that "an occasion of experiencing arises out of a passive situation which is a mere welter of many data" (AI, 179) by emphasizing many active verbs such as "hurling," "provoking," "energizing," suggesting that there is a transfer of energy from the past to the concrescing occasion. Whitehead wished to lay stress on ''the doctrine of the continuity of nature [which] balances and limits the doctrine of the absolute individuality of each occasion of experience" so clearly articulated in the 1929 book (AI, 183).

In criticizing this impression he insists that "The initial situation includes a factor of activity [i.e., creativity] which is the reason for the origin of that occasion of experience." But where does this factor come from? "The initial situation can be termed the initial phase of the new occasion. It can equally be termed the 'actual world' relative to that occasion" (AI, 179). Interpreting this passage simply in terms of the immediate context, Whitehead can be seen as insisting upon the continuity between the past as a multiplicity of concreta suffused with creativity and the initial situation of the present occasion. But if we were to adopt the stance of a systematic interpretation inspired by Process and Reality, then the actual world with its creativity would simply become an alternative way of describing the initial phase of concrescence, whose data are derived by simple physical feeling but whose creativity would be purely and simply inherent within that occasion itself. In other words, Whitehead here would be accommodating himself to the ordinary intuition of the transference of energetic activity from the past, while managing to interpret it in terms of the systematic doctrine he had already espoused earlier.

Frankenberry's interpretation requires that "the energy of [the concrescent] process [be] transformed into the energy of a fully formed object that will play its causal role in the creating of later occasions of experience. Satisfaction spells the death of the process of unification but not the end of the creative energy involved." 9 What is this energy of the object? Prehension, as I understand it, requires that its datum be determinate, admitting only external relations. The datum, if it were still being determined, could generate a possible conflict of determination between the object and the prehending subject. The actuality could be determined in two different ways at the same time. The object, in order to be an object, must be devoid of any inner creativity.10 Even in the later book, "the 'satisfaction'. . . marks the exhaustion of the creative urge for that individuality" (Al, 192). If there is still creativity, it surrounds the data, and does not inhere in any of them, for the satisfaction requires the perishing of any internal creativity. Whitehead admits this later when he recognizes that "the passive objects . . . derive their activity from the creativity of the whole. Viewed in abstraction objects are passive, but viewed in conjunction they carry the creativity which drives the world" (AI, 179).

So far our analysis remains inconclusive, since the key texts (at least in AI) seem to be capable of either interpretation. There is at least one text, however, that is very difficult to interpret in terms of the interpretation based primarily on Process and Reality. In speaking of Lucretius's dart, hurled beyond the bounds of the world, Whitehead might have spoken of energy hurled into a new occasion. Energy could then have been understood in terms of the transference of a form characterizing the inherent creativity of the new occasion. However, Whitehead chooses to emphasize that it is precisely "the creativity of the world [that] is the throbbing emotion of the past hurling itself into a new transcendent fact" (AI, 177). Transference of form, or any process of physical prehension ultimately connecting form, character, matter, or energy cannot explain this. Only the introduction of new creativity somehow derived from creativity to be found in that which is antecedent to the occasion itself can make the necessary connection.

According to Process and Reality, creativity cannot be considered as something past hurling itself into each new occasion. Hence, we should conclude that the understanding of creativity in these two books is different, and that Whitehead significantly changed his outlook between the two books. The unsatisfactoriness of the claim that creativity was simply inherent in concrescent occasions, having no source, which was his final position in Process and Reality, evidently prompted him to explore the alternative of conceiving of the past as its source in Adventures of Ideas, and this reconception led to a new understanding of this and related concepts.

If creativity itself is transmitted from the past, then Whitehead accepts our ordinary way of experiencing existence as derived. We experience it as immediately derived from our past being. Some of us are willing to acknowledge that ultimately our existence is derived from God, so that it makes sense to identify the power of the past with God. 11 Process and Reality addresses neither of these experiential conditions, opting for purely inherent, underived creativity on essentially rationalistic grounds.

Yet its reasons for opting for a purely immanent creativity are very insistent. If we now adopt the view that creativity is derived, some sort of response must be given to those reasons. There is only one way of receiving input from the past: physical prehension. Yet it is impossible to prehend creativity, whether purely or as embodied in particular concrescences. Prehension is an asymmetrical relationship between a datum as being and a subject as becoming. To be prehensible the datum must already have unity. Hence, subjects, insofar as they are still in process of becoming, cannot be prehended. This protects the subject's intrinsic and absolute privacy. Creativity cannot be a datum, because it names the process of unification. It must be the indeterminate becoming determinate, and hence cannot be prehended.

This doctrine of prehension is repeated unchanged in Adventures of Ideas (AI, 176f), and Whitehead nowhere relates that discussion to the transmission of creativity. Thus, "nonsensuous perception," his version of perception in the mode of causal efficacy, is discussed on the very next page after "creativity," but he never indicates any connection, such that creativity is somehow nonsensuously perceived. Nor does he suggest that the concept of prehension can be broadened to accomodate creativity. How could that which first empowers prehension be itself prehended? Nor does he consider any other way in which its transmission might be possible. This issue is simply avoided, and it is extremely difficult to see just how past creativity could infuse the present except by resorting to traditional notions of causality Whitehead had long since abandoned.

Whitehead does not suggest that past creativity causes present existence. For then the occasion (or at least its underlying datum) would come into being by means of such activity, and this he had already rejected in an earlier theory of transition (in PR). 12 On the contrary, his cardinal position had become that each occasion, by its own act of becoming, creates itself. I do not see that he has retreated from that stand (in AI), but that he is now looking for some extrinsic source whereby each occasion has this power of selfcreation. Rather, the creativity that may be associated with the past really belongs to the present occasion: "The initial situation includes a factor of activity which is the reason for the origin of that occasion of experience. . . . The initial situation with its creativity can be termed the initial phase of the new occasion" (Al, 179).

The imprehensibility of past creativity parallels the imprehensibility of the everlasting divine concrescence, the problem prompting this investigation. To be sure, it is sometimes couched in the language of perishing. Thus, A. H. Johnson asks: "If God never 'perishes,' how can he provide data for other actual entities? Data are only available after the 'internal existence' of the actual entity 'has evaporated' (PR, 336)."13 In contrast, according to the later formulation (of AI), the past perishes in providing the present with its creativity. God neither perishes in this sense nor in the clearly different sense of perishing that Johnson refers to, a perishing that makes a transcendent past immanent within the present, by which it could be objectified. Objectifying the divine past (as in a series of divine occasions) would deprive God of subjective immediacy with respect to the way God influences present actualities.

As long as we insist upon conceiving of this transmission of creativity in terms of the power of the past, we shall have difficulty. Phenomenologically, Whitehead's careful description deriving creativity from the past is quite convincing, but it cannot be squared with basic insights from Process and Reality, and these also need to be affirmed. I suspect the term past is ambiguous in

this context, for it can mean both that which is earlier than the present, and that which is fully determinate, capable of serving as the datum for prehension. Creativity is certainly past in the first sense, because if it is in any sense derived it must come from that which is earlier than the present occasion, for any creativity to be exercised contemporaneous with or later than that occasion would have no influence upon it. But creativity cannot be past in the second sense, since it is indeterminate, both requiring and enabling a process of further determination.

Whitehead's designation of earlier and later phases of concrescence hints at the possibility that there may be different senses to the earlier/later distinction. We are all familiar with the order of being according to which all the determinate actualities earlier than the creative advance are past, while all later are regarded as future. This is the "physical" time which does not express the growth of an occasion (PR, 283). These words are often taken to mean that the concrescence is somehow nontemporal, a puzzling interpretation when we recognize that each occasion must be temporally thick, and each is a growing, concrescing activity. It also makes nonsense out of an "epochal theory of time" for it is the becoming that is epochal, not the resultant being. 14

Could it be that there are two orders of temporality, one for being, the other for becoming? While the order of being classes all events as either determinate beings (the past) or as nonbeings (the future), the order of becoming ranks the phases of the present according to their degree of determinateness. Each present act of becoming progresses from that which is primarily indeterminate to that which is completely determinate (having the character of the past). Earlier phases of concrescence are the least determinate, hence most like the future. If we extend Whitehead's analysis beyond the concrescence, we find that if there is any indeterminate creativity that is earlier than an occasion in order to infuse that occasion with its creativity, then it would lie in its future, at least according to the order of becoming.

Thus, we find that that which is earlier than the occasion, from which it is derived, consists of two very distinct parts: a multiplicity of past actualities, each fully determinate and devoid of any inner creativity, and the creativity the new occasion needs for its own selffunctioning. Past actualities are clearly past, but qualitatively at least creativity belongs to the indeterminate future. It is not something objective, to be prehended by present subjects, but something presubjective, constituting the very subjectivity of present subjects by means of which they have the capacity for prehending. Transcendent creativity is future, but it, like past actualities, is earlier than the present. Only it is earlier according to the order of becoming, not according to the order of being. Since God is not a completed, determinate being (not having yet perished in subjective immediacy), the order of being does not apply. But if we

introduce the order of becoming, we find that the "power of the past" is transformed into the "power of the future."

This need not mean that God be simply identified with future creativity. Every actuality has a transcendent, private aspect that is its own concrescence, as well as a public aspect by which it is immanent in others. An actual occasion, by virtue of the determinate objectification it becomes, is immanent in its successors. In the case of God, the everlasting concrescence prehending the entire course of the world constitutes the transcendent private side, while the creativity God provides (as qualified by divine aim instigating creaturely subjective aims) makes up the immanent, public side. 15

II— Hartshorne and the Objectification of God

Charles Hartshorne was one of the first to recognize that Whitehead's theory would have to be revised, and proposed the most influential modification: reconceive the single everlasting concrescence into a series or personally ordered society of divine occasions.16 Each divine occasion fully prehends all those occasions that have just come into being,17 as well as prior divine occasions. Since each divine occasion, like every other actual occasion, integrates and unifies its many prehensions into one determinate satisfaction, this satisfaction may be prehended by succeeding generations of occasions. Thus, not only God's primordial orderings but God's particular responses to particular situations can be communicated to the creatures.

This is a very effective solution to the problem, and has been adopted by a great many of Whitehead's followers in some form or other. Yet Whitehead did not adopt it. In a carefully recorded conversation with A. H. Johnson, Whitehead did consider the alternative of conceiving God as a society, "since a society is what endures, and an actual entity passes away." But he had rejected it because "in a society the past is lost. One ordinary actual entity fades away and only some of its data are passed on to another actual entity. But in God, his past is not lost. Yet, in a sense, God is a society in that actual entities passing into God as consequent do provide a group or society of distinguishable components, even though the actual entities as such do not survive."18

Whitehead's objection to the societal view may be difficult to sustain. In an everlasting concrescence subjectivity is never lost. God is directly and immediately experiencing all past occurrences, just as vividly as those happening right now. In an everlasting concrescence there is no remembering (no prehension of the prehensions of previous occasions in the same society), for remembering is replaced by direct experiencing. Yet how does this differ from the divinely perfect memory, which divine occasions could have? As Hartshorne

argues, "[I]n God there is no lapse of memory, no loss of immediacy, as to occasions already achieved." 19

While this particular reason is difficult to sustain, Whitehead's basic intuitions might be quite sound. He conceived God as a single everlasting subjectivity. Hartshorne's modification introduces a perpetual alternation of subjectivity and objectivity, of becoming and being. The fact that on Whitehead's original formulation God cannot be prehended may constitute an elaborate indirect argument that God cannot (and perhaps should not) be objectified.

Many religious thinkers, in particular Martin Buber, have contended that God is pure subjectivity and cannot be adequately objectified. We take this to be profoundly true, but it remains a bare assertion in the absence of any argument. Process thinkers often disregard this claim because pure subjectivity would make any prehension of God impossible. If, as they believe, no influence between actualities is possible except by means of prehension, divine subjectivity would have no effect upon the world. God would have to objectified somehow to be prehensible.

Since it is more important that God be effective in the world than that God be purely subjective, most process thinkers, whether they try simply to defend an interpretation of Whitehead's philosophy or modify it in some way, conceive of God as prehensible. This means that God is to some degree objectifiable, since every prehension has some subject prehending a datum as its object. I contend that God should be conceived as absolutely imprehensible, and hence as purely subjective. Then God cannot influence the world unless we question the underlying assumption that there cannot be effectiveness apart from prehension. As we shall see later, revising that assumption could mean that each nascent occasion receives its formed creativity from future creativity, thereby empowering it to prehend past actualities and to integrate these into a new unified satisfaction.20

Thus, after years of resisting any modification in Whitehead's philosophy, I have come in recent years (since about 1977) to agree with Charles Hartshorne that some modification must be made. Yet we make modifications in the opposite fashion. Hartshorne, finding Whitehead's God incapable of being prehended in terms of the everlasting concrescence, renders God a series of divine occasions alternating subjective and objective aspects, thereby ensuring divine effectiveness. God is objectified, because only as objective is God influential.

Hartshorne's emendation is perhaps the most effective way of ensuring God's influence on the world, assuming divine objectification. But objectification poses serious difficulties. We shall consider a number of these later in this chapter, but one should be mentioned at the outset, that objectification requires finitude.

As Whitehead points out, "[E]very occasion of actuality is in its own nature finite" (AI, 276). For every occasion achieves a determinate satisfaction. Its determinateness, which is also its finiteness, ensures its subsequent prehension. Each divine occasion must also be so determinate. Even though each divine occasion in turn supersedes and includes its predecessor, such that God becoming ever more inclusive, God is nevertheless at all times finite, in order to be prehensible. 21

God is both finite and infinite for Hartshorne.22 God constitutes an infinite series of divine occasions, and there are no limits to the depth and power of God's unitive response to the world. Each occasion prehends the entire world as well as its own predecessor, thereby including all divine predecessors. Each divine occasion includes all there is or could be. In the succession of divine occasions God is everenlarging godself. Nevertheless, each divine occasion is finite. If it weren't finite, it could not be determinate. If it weren't determinate, it could not be prehensible, and God could not influence the world through prehension.

Process theism, particularly in Thomistic circles, is often charged with making God to be finite. This may be based on an extrapolation from Whitehead's claim that "every occasion of actuality is in its own nature finite" (AI, 276). Since God is an actuality, therefore God must be finite. This overlooks the fact that "occasion of actuality" here functions as Whitehead's term for "actual occasion," which expressly excludes God from its scope (PR, 88). More significantly, every actual occasion results in a determinate, objectifiable satisfaction which is finite. In this sense it is actual as concretely determinate.

That is not the only meaning of actuality, however, for it can also mean concrescence and process: "One principle is that the very essence of real actuality—that is, of the completely real—is process" (AI, 274). While ordinary actualities result in determinate outcomes, nothing in the nature of process itself requires that it do so, so the divine concrescence could be, and in Whitehead's case is, everlasting.

Not all thinkers regard infinity as an indispensable attribute of divine perfection. The Greeks did not think so, and considered the sphere as the most perfect geometrical form. Since at least medieval times, infinity has increasingly been appreciated as a property of the divine. In fact we commonly characterize the nondivine as the finite. To be sure, if there are compelling reasons to conceive of God in some sense as finite, then it may be necessary to qualify infinity as a notion of perfection. On the other hand, if it is possible to conceive of process theism as infinite and also effective in the world, the logic of perfection should persuade us to adopt that alternative. From its perspective, divine occasions may be seen as an extremely subtle form of idolatry, for it is substituting the determinate for the living God.

1— The Principle of Prehension

Hartshorne's modification is based, as we have seen, on the unexamined assumption that God can only be effective in the world if God is prehensible. Let us call the general principle this is based on the principle of prehension. It holds that the sole way actualities influence each other is by means of prehension. We recognize that some modification is necessary. Yet should we modify the concept of God by introducing objectification in order to maintain the principle of prehension, or should we modify the principle of prehension in order to preserve the pure subjectivity and infinity of Whitehead's concept of God?

I am persuaded that we must qualify the principle of prehension. To be sure, this principle is rarely questioned by Whitehead's followers, in large part because Whitehead never did. However, it is not a principle he explicitly justifies. He seems to assume that it has no significant alternatives. Had alternatives been explored, it might have been easier to recognize that the very imprehensibility of God amounts to a strong affirmation of pure, nonobjectifiable divine subjectivity. Because Whitehead endorses the principle of prehension, divine imprehensibility has been widely regarded to be a major difficulty with his philosophy.

(By the "imprehensibility of God" I mean the totality of God as the integration of physical and conceptual feelings, for while Whitehead recognized the imprehensibility of divine physical feeling he affirmed that God as primordial could be prehended.)

My general objection to Hartshorne's modification is that it undercuts the depth of God's pure subjectivity. To be sure, it may be wondered whether pure subjectivity is a good thing. But I hope to show that divine objectification is not necessary. There are many other modifications entailed by my alternative, including the dissolution of the primordial nature, but the reaffirmation of divine everlasting concrescence is most central to my endeavor. It is the most radical form of pure becoming. Let us turn now to some specific objections to Hartshorne's project.

2— Objections Based on Hartshorne's Own Position

Later, in section 3, we shall consider some objections to the position combining the notions of divine occasions with initial subjective aims. These are not objections to Hartshorne's own position, since he rejects the use of eternal objects presupposed by initial aims. In section 4 we shall examine the most celebrated objection which concerns the way each divine occasion constitutes a privilege meaning of simultaneity, contrary to the principles of relativity physics.

Objection 1— Divine Occasions Are Exceptions to the Metaphysical Principles.

Despite Whitehead's insistence to the contrary (PR, 343), 23 his concept of God seems to be an exception to his basic metaphysical principles. If so, this would be a serious flaw in his undertaking, since it undercuts one of its most central tenets. "The presumption that there is only one genus of actual entities constitutes an ideal of cosmological theory to which the philosophy of organism endeavors to conform" (PR, 110). That this is his ideal, however, suggests that we should interpret the assertion as "God ought not be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, (although perhaps to some of them)."

As evidence for exceptional treatment, A. H. Johnson notes "the apparent difficulty that, whereas ordinary actual entities have a brief duration, and then disappear, God is unique in that he has unending duration."24 In the light of this, Cobb undertakes "to develop a doctrine of God more coherent with Whitehead's general cosmology and metaphysics than are some aspects of his own doctrine," a revision that supports Hartshorne's society of divine occasions.25

Surely there are major differences between God and any actual occasion. Whitehead's claim is not that God should be treated as much as possible like the actual occasions, but that both are species of actual entities (cf. PR, 135). This is masked by the fact that there is only one unique member of one species, while there are indefinitely many members of the other species. Moreover, there is a systematic contrast between these two species: the first, God, is constituted by one, infinite nontemporal actual entity,26 whereas the second, the world, consists of many, finite temporal actual occasions. Moreover, each requires the other to be what it is.27 These two species together constitute the totality of what is, God and the world, whose study is twofold, (natural) theology and cosmology.28

If, in order to minimize the difference, God is likened to a society of actual occasions, there would always be some necessary difference between divine and actual occasions. Thus, while God could exemplify all principles pertaining to the genus "actual entity," God would always be an exception to those principles that simply pertained to "actual occasions."

The difference is there; it simply depends on what level it applies. For particular actual occasions are contingent; they might not have been. All of the societies to which they belong will eventually come to an end. Even the extensive continuum will alter itself beyond recognition. In contrast, each divine occasion belongs to a necessary everlasting society that shall never end.

Were this not so, God could not enjoy necessary existence. If divine occasions are truly actual occasions in every metaphysical sense, God's existence would be contingent; God might not have been. But if, by Anselm's principle that God either necessarily exists or necessarily nonexists, the possibility that God might not exist would exclude the first alternative just as surely as Anselm's argument that God might exist excludes the second

alternative. Unless there is a systematic difference between God and the contingent world derivable from the categoreal conditions they both exemplify, God's existence could be contingent and fall subject to the negative form of Anselm's argument.

The metaphysical principles God exemplifies are not those that apply particularly to actual occasions, for then God would necessarily be an exception. They apply generically to all actual entities, in which case the difference between God and the world can be as great as their systematic contrast warrants.

Furthermore, the endeavor to make God more like actual occasions renders God more like the determinate world than need be the case. If God is pure subjectivity, God would contrast sharply with the objective world. Both subjects and objects, despite being so systematically diverse, would still belong to the common genus of actual entities.

Objection 2— Alternation and Asynchronicity.

Although John Cobb once championed Hartshorne's modification, more recently he has written privately: "For me the crucial difficulty with the living person view is that for God to adjust the aim offered to a successor to the achievement of the predecessor in a creaturely living person, the divine occasion would have to be temporally after the predecessor and before the successor." 29

For Cobb it is possible for God to occupy the entire spatiotemporal continuum (CNT, 192–16).30 Thus, God's region includes the regions of finite occasions. This theory of regional inclusion, when applied to the divine society theory, generates an anomaly. If divine occasions and finite occasions alternate, they need not occupy the same regions. There need not be any divine regional inclusion. If they do occupy the same regions, at least part of the time, God is effective only in those regions not occupied by finite occasions. Insofar as God and occasion occupy the same region, there is no interaction. Thus, the divine society is problematic from the standpoint of region inclusion.

This alternation of divine and finite occasions means an excessive brevity for the divine occasion. For there must a divine occasion just prior to each occasion which prehends that occasion's past world. Assuming that actual occasions concrescence in unison with each other, in successive waves of actualization, this would require that every divine occasion would have to be as brief as any actual occasion.

Yet there is no reason to make this assumption. Actual occasions could concrescence in any temporal order. Yet each divine occasion is cosmic in scope. This means that each divine occasion would have to be so brief that it could satisfy the requirements of any combination of actual occasions concrescing out of synchronization with one another. For the divine occasion

has to concrescence after the past world of any occasion has occurred, yet before that particular occasion.

John Robert Baker has calculated just how brief the divine occasion would have to be for various combinations of circumstances. 31 It means that a divine occasion would generally be considerably shorter than the briefest of actual occasions. This in itself is not an absolute objection, for it is not selfcontradictory for this to be so. It does seem to be an anomaly, particularly if we understand the length of an occasion to be proportional to its complexity. Human mental occasions may have a duration of approximately one twentieth of a second. From our perspective this may seem very short, but then certain atoms vibrate more than a million times per second, and we may suppose that each vibration represents one or two occasions. Judged in terms of complexity, divine occasions ought to be longer than the longest actual occasion rather than shorter than the shortest.32

In fact, we may judge the complexity of divine concrescence, involving the prehension and integration of the entire universe, to require an infinite duration. It should be everlasting. Of course, then there could be no series of divine occasions.

Notice, however, how the very brief divine occasions approximate vanishingly small points, which could constitute the dense continuity of the everlasting concrescence. The difference is that the everlasting concrescence is only potentially divided, whereas the divine society is actually divided into distinct occasions. From its perspective it must be so divided, if God is to really influence the world. To maintain that God is truly a single concrescence, we must find another way of explaining divine effectiveness.

Objection 3— Divine Occasions Are Not Persuasive.

That is, not persuasive in Whitehead's sense. This appears at first glance to be quite paradoxical, for Hartshorne has great admiration for Whitehead's notion of divine persuasion:

This divine method of world control is called ''persuasion" by Whitehead and is one of the greatest of all metaphysical discoveries, largely to be credited to Whitehead himself. He, perhaps first of all, came to the clear realization that it is by molding himself that God molds us, by presenting at each moment a partly new ideal or order of preference which our unselfconscious awareness takes as object, and thus renders influential upon our entire activity . . . Only he who changes himself can control the changes in us by inspiriting us with novel ideals for novel occasions. We take our cues for this moment by seeing, that is, feeling, what God as this moment desiderates. (DR, 142)

Here, Hartshorne is presenting Whitehead's theory, except for the mention of control. The past world each occasion confronts limits but does not determine its own outcome.

However far the sphere of efficient causation be pushed in the determination of components of a concrescence—its data, its emotions, its appreciations, its purposes, its phases of subjective aim—beyond the determination of these components there always remains the final reaction of the selfcreative unity of the universe. This final reaction completes the selfcreative act by putting the decisive stamp of creative emphasis upon the determinations of efficient cause. (PR, 47)

Both thinkers affirm that there must be leeway for creative decision, but Whitehead also requires that the concrescing occasion be able to respond to divine ideals.

Hartshorne, when he comes to develop his own position, stresses the limits God imposes on our freedom, rather than the ideals God inspires.

Process would come to an end if limits were not imposed upon the development of incompatible lines of process. The comprehensive order of the world is enjoyed, but not determined or created, by ordinary actual entities. Since the particular order is logically arbitrary, it must be either a blind fact wholly opaque to explanation or the result of a synthesis which deliberately selected it . . . A divine prehension can use its freedom to create, and for a suitable period maintain, a particular world order. This selection then becomes a "lure," an irrestible datum, for all ordinary acts of synthesis. (WP, 164)

An irrestible lure is not an initial aim the occasion might modify, even quite drastically, in the course of its becoming. It functions not as an inspiring ideal to strive after, but like some past determinateness that must be taken into account. It's possible to understand this as persuasion, but it is not persuasion as Whitehead understands it. 33

Objection 4— Divine Occasions Limit Creaturely Freedom.

Hartshorne's conception of God limits rather than inspires individual creativity. God's role is seen like that of any other actual occasion, as conditioning the freedom of the nascent occasion. Each occasion has its own creativity, which it can exercise in terms of the multiplicity of data it inherits by means of physical prehension. Some sort of limitation on creativity is necessary, for otherwise any occasion could become anything it chose, and all causal connection would be dissolved. This limitation is to be found in the actual world an occasion inher

its. If its world be impoverished, the occasion can do very little. The ultimate reason a lithium atom remains a lithium atom is because the past world it inherits will not permit it to be otherwise. As we move up the evolutionary ladder, creativity is enhanced, as the complexity of the inherited past introduces greater room for its expression. In human experience creativity matures as freedom. The richness and complexity of each occasion's immediate past makes such freedom possible, but it also limits what this freedom can accomplish.

As one of these past conditioning factors, God, as conceived by Hartshorne, both enables and limits freedom. Basically Hartshorne conceives of God as determining the general laws of nature for our present epoch. These are determined in terms that offer the maximal conditions for freedom without permitting the world to degenerate into chaos, a condition altogether possible if there were no overarching principles. 34 Note Hartshorne's additional remark: "I know of no proof that God's influence upon creatures is only that expressed by the natural laws giving order to worldly happenings. From the unsurpassable power and wisdom of God I deduce that if the divine influence would produce better results for the beauty of the world by going beyond the mere ordering in question, then the influence does go farther. But I doubt our human wisdom to know this further limiting of freedom would produce better results."35

Hartshorne's view of God's role is very much like Whitehead's first conception of God as the principle of limitation, which operates as a principle of cosmic order preventing "indiscriminate model pluralism" (SMW, 177). The main difference stems from the fact that Whitehead did not then distinguish clearly between metaphysical and cosmic limitation.36 When he did, God was assigned the role of establishing metaphysical conditions (PR, 64), while the average behavior of actual occasions in any particular cosmic epoch determined the laws of nature (Al, 111–113).

Hartshorne's conception differs from Whitehead's in that God's role is not conceived as primarily being the source of novelty for the world. This is a difficult point to establish, because Hartshorne always expounds Whitehead's theory appreciatively. It is difficult to see, however, how this influx of novelty is possible on his view. What is given for a nascent occasion is only the past multiplicity of conditions it must unify. Neither the unifying power nor the way in which it will unify that multiple past is given. In Hartshorne's terms, the antecedent situation is somewhat indefinite, awaiting final definiteness by the decision of the occasion. To be sure, that situation is also indeterminate for Whitehead, but the occasion also receives from God whatever novelty is not derived from the past, which enables the occasion to make its final determination. Were the occasion merely to inherit the world, its options would be limited to the possibilities inherent in previous occasions, but God's activity ensures the inclusion of new possibilities hitherto not yet contemplated, if such be needed. This provision of novel possibility and direction enhances the

occasion's creativity beyond the conditioning it inherits from the past. On Hartshorne's view, all of God's activity has to be interpreted in terms of the limitations past determinateness imposes.

Hartshorne makes good use of the mind/body analogy for the relation of God to the world, but understands the way the mind influences the body by means of past causal conditions. 37 In Whitehead's terms, Hartshorne limits all physical prehensions to pure prehensions. The category of hybrid physical prehensions is not utilized, but this is for Whitehead the primary way in which both God and the mind (the living person) can influence their environments, whether it be the world as a whole or the body interacting with an individual mind. The mind is the organ of novelty for the body.

While it is only the past that limits us, according to Whitehead, it is God acting by means of past divine occasions that also limits us:

God can set narrow limits to our freedom; for the more important the objects to the subject, the more important is its effect upon the range of possible responses. Thus God can rule the world and order it, setting optimal limits for our free actions, . . .(DR, 142, his italics)

These limits are overwhelming when we consider that every divine occasion fills all space. This means that each occasion can only immediately prehend God, and only mediately prehends the world. Many argue that present actual occasions can be causally influenced only by those actual entities directly prehended. Whatever other causal influences from more distant occasions must be mediated by immediate actual entities. Combining that theory of mediation with Hartshornean divine occasions yields the result that the immediate divine occasion determines the present occasion. There is no multiplicity to be freely unified, for all multiplicity has already been unified within the divine occasion, the only actuality the present occasion can directly prehend.

To be sure, the divine occasion becomes transparent to the past world behind it if God influences us principally in terms of possibilities and values. This requires eternal objects functioning as initial aims, and hybrid prehension, which we have found to have its own problems. Possibilities functioning as aims are essentially indeterminate, which does not survive the transfer from one actuality to another if this must be conceived in terms of objectification.

Hartshorne's approach assumes the past to be determinate and therefore restrictive. It is not a source for creativity. As we saw in the previous chapter, if the past were sufficiently indeterminate so as to serve as the source of creativity, it would be imprehensible. Past occasions are individually determinate and prehensible, but not taken together. It is a mere multiplicity awaiting unification in and by present occasions.

The next objections can be stated summarily, as I have developed them elsewhere. 38

Objection 5— It Undercuts Nontemporal Subjectivity.

If God is a series of temporal occasions, then the primordial side of God cannot be conceived as a nontemporal concrescence, but only as the abstract defining characteristic of this divine society.

In terms of a divine conceptual realization, this notion underlay Whitehead's middle concept, acquiring subjectivity first in terms of the nontemporal aspect of the everlasting concrescence (PR, 87f). But this is a nontemporal subjectivity whereby the eternal objects are ordered in a concrescent activity. Any theory of divine occasions necessarily reduces any such concrescent activity to its resultant order. At most, the primordial nature is preserved in each divine occasion; the primordial activity is absent.

To be sure, I have grave reservations about the nontemporal aspect of this divine concrescence. We should be as uncompromisingly temporal as possible. Here, I agree with Hartshorne. Yet we need not restrict temporality to presently occurring occasions that inevitably become past. Temporality has another mode. Future concrescence is like Whitehead's nontemporal concrescence in its subjective dynamism and resists its reduction to a series of occasions.

Objection 6— How Is Creativity Transmitted within God?

This objection has cogency only if we adopt Nancy Frankenberry's position that creativity is derived from the past, and is not simply intrinsic to each occasion. If so, from whence does each divine occasion receive its own creativity? It cannot receive it from its predecessor, for in order to become determinate and objectifiable, it had to exhaust its own creativity. Perhaps the present divine occasion could derive it somehow from the past activity of the world, but this would mean the inversion of traditional thought: instead of God creating the world, the world would have to create God.

3— Divine Occasions with Initial Aims

In Hartshorne's theory there is no place for eternal objects. One popular version of the societal approach combines it with the use of eternal objects as a way of explaining how God responds to each particular situation so as to provide it with its special initial aim. Though it does not embody Cobb's present understanding, A Christian Natural Theology (CNT) is the classic expression of this alternative, which enjoys wide support. It provokes its own set of objections.

Objection 7— How Can the Initial Aims Be Selected?

On this view each successive divine occasion inherits the entire primordial nature with all the eternal objects from its predecessors. How can the divine occasion, filling all space and containing all possible aims, be specified in terms of the particular aim needed by each nascent occasion? Clearly, God, having a perfectly adequate knowledge of all things, both temporal and nontemporal, can discriminate among individual occasions, recognizing each in terms of its own particular needs and concerns. But the divine occasion is objectified as a whole, in terms of a satisfaction integrating and unifying all of its feelings together. How can any one finite occasion select from the divine satisfaction that which properly applies to it?

The problem is acute because it is only by means of that specific divine aim that the occasion has any subjectivity by which to make any discriminations. The satisfaction of the divine occasion is unitary. It forms one single concretum, yet somehow it must be pluralized into the many distinct aims corresponding to the many distinct occasions. How can the nascent occasions do this all by themselves, unless they have already somehow been particularized? Assuming the occasions are already somehow localized, how can they prehend the immediately past divine occasion in precisely such a way as to obtain the initial aim appropriate for that occasion? 39

This is no serious problem for Hartshorne, because on his view God's primary influence is to determine the limits imposed on each cosmic epoch (TTP, 75–77). Nor does the theory of concrescence play a role in his account.40 If concrescence is made central, however, the essential role of initial aims cannot be denied. If the theory of concrescence as alternative explanation of creation is taken to be Whitehead's primary insight, then the initial aim becomes absolutely essential, and some account of its transcendent novelty, heretofore expressed in terms of eternal objects, becomes quite necessary. For subjective aim requires some antecedent possibility to function as the lure for concrescence to become its determinate actualization.

This is also an objection to Whitehead's own account of the primordial nature. It contains all eternal objects, all pure possibilities. On some accounts it also includes all real possibilities, that is, pure possibilities ordered to every possible context of actualization that could ever arise. These possibilities are all evaluated in terms of the harmony and intensity they could achieve. The primordial nature is made available to each nascent occasion. How can the occasion select the aim appropriate to it?

I submit, however, that the objection is more acute for the societal alternative, for one of the hopes inspiring this revision is to show how the two natures of God, the primordial envisagement and the everlasting experience, can be integrated to provide appropriate aims. Ideally, God could respond to each situation as it arises in terms of values drawn from nontemporal re

sources. On either account, however, God apparently cannot provide the aims in any specific way.

There is a third alternative. Neither God nor the nascent occasion may select the aim, but the past actual world could. This view requires that the primordial nature order and evaluate all real possibilities. Since the past actual world of any given occasion constitutes one of these possible these contexts of actualization, it fits one of contexts primordially evaluated. The valuation of this context, this past actual world, is the initial aim for that occasion. 41

Yet the ontological principle raises a nagging question. Every reason must be vested in some actual entity. In this case, some actual entity must bring about the specification of aim. The past actual world cannot do this, because it is a multiplicity needing unification, not itself capable of unifying anything into a single aim. Also, we should not underestimate the incommensurability between the primordial ordering, present to all creation, and the needs of the immediate moment. By what means are these incommensurables correlated? The occasion, as yet unborn, can't do it. The primordial valuation, being beyond time, can't do it. The actual world, lacking unity, can't do it. Nor can any one past occasion do it.

Objection 8— Eternal Objects Become Everlasting.

If the primordial nature becomes the everlasting common component of each successive divine occasion, then the elements of the primordial nature also become everlasting. Instead of existing only sometimes in temporal occasions, if in any occasions at all, whatever eternal objects there are must exist at all times.

As part of an everlasting concrescence, eternal objects need temporally exist only when relevant.42 Only those which are necessary must be present at all times. The requirement that all be instantiated in every divine occasion eliminates this distinction between the necessary and the contingent while adding unnecessary ballast to the theory.

Hartshorne reduces the plethora of eternal objects to those that are necessarily exemplified in all occasions. Hence, the primordial nature is simply the abstract necessary aspect. But those adopting a larger sense of eternal objects must accept their everlastingness. This is out of keeping with the fragile timelessness Whitehead assigns to eternal objects.

Objection 9— An Objection from Mathematics.

A mathematical theory is said to be complete if it possess axiomatic unity, that is, if every statement expressible within that theory is either an axiom or can be deduced from the axioms of that theory. Each complete domain can be unified by a single complex eternal object. If so, can there be a complete domain of eternal objects?

Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem,43 announced in 1930, proves that even arithmetic, let alone anything more complex, forms an incomplete domain. As

applied to Whitehead's philosophy this means that the totality of eternal objects cannot have the unity of a complex eternal object. For given any eternal object, there are further eternal objects not included within it. 44

If this is the case, then the primordial nature cannot be an eternal object functioning as the abstract defining characteristic of a society of divine occasions, and still be the locus of all eternal objects.

4— The Objection from Relativity Physics

Perhaps the most persistent objection, ever since it was first raised by John Wilcox in 1961, has come from relativity physics.45 This has nothing to do with the velocity of God's prehensions, as some seem to suppose,46 for an omnipresent being is spatially contiguous with every occasion to be prehended. It is rather that the unification of space and time entailed by relativity physics precludes any privileged meaning to simultaneity. A historical analogy may help. In an Aristotelian universe the earth was clearly at its center. In a Newtonian world of infinite space there can be no single center. Any point can equally serve as its center, since there is an infinite extension in every direction. To say that there is a privileged meaning to simultaneity, which God occupies in relativity physics, would be like placing God in the center of an infinite Newtonian space. Simultaneity, like centeredness before it, has lost its absolute status, and become relativized.

A Hartshornean occasion, being at once temporally momentary and yet filling all space, necessarily defines a sense of simultaneity. Since this is divine, it must be privileged in some sense.47 We should note that this is a problem peculiar to Hartshorne's modification. An everlasting divine concrescence need not define such a sense of simultaneity. Moreover, if we were to pluralize the divine occasions spatially as well as temporally, there could be a reconciliation with relativity physics.48

But there are reasons why the divine occasion must be both temporally momentary yet omnispatial. In order for a divine occasion to influence a nascent occasion in terms of its past actual world, the divine occasion must have prehended that actual world, yet it must also have perished in order to be prehended by that occasion itself. The divine occasion must insinuate itself in this vanishingly brief time, made even shorter by the requirements of other contemporary occasions, which need not be in precise synchronicity with that occasion.

As we have seen, temporal pluralization does not undercut God's individuality, since God can be precisely defined as a personally ordered society in which each member fully includes all of its predecessors. If we resort to spatial pluralization to evade the relativity problem, however, we run into grave difficulty with monotheism. Contemporary divine occasions could not include

one another, and the sense of God's single individuality would be lost. Fitzgerald's "faint odor of polytheism" would become very strong indeed.

The seriousness of this objection is underscored by Hartshorne's later attempt to evade it. In 1977 he endorsed Henry Peirce Stapp's proposal to revise the physicists' understanding of spacetime such that all events are causally ordered in a single sequence. 49 Thus to overcome this objection from relativity physics he has found it necessary to undermine the foundations of relativity physics and its definition of simultaneity. Now this is a conceivable procedure, which we should be willing to entertain if the physics community showed evidence of taking Stapp's challenge seriously. In the meantime, I find the conceptual cost it demands far too high.

One consequence of Stapp's view is that there would be no contemporaries. Every finite occasion would be in the past or in the future of every other. Then divine occasions could alternate with every physical occasion. Since there would be no contemporaneity, there could be no simultaneity. I understand that the thought experiment on which Stapp bases his speculations, showing a nonlocalized influence upon two separated particles, has since been successfully demonstrated using empirical methods. Nevertheless the interpretation remains highly controversial in the physics community, particularly with respect to relativity physics.50

The most extensive essay on this topic first appeared in 1992, after a hiatus of fifteen years: David Ray Griffin, "Hartshorne, God, and Relativity Physics."51 It builds upon Bell's theorem, and the work of Stapp and Bohm that suggests that there might be instantaneous connections between events, and calls into question whether relativity physics can adequately express God's relation to the world. For it may be that the true metaphysical view of things, at least with respect to God, should be founded upon nonlocalized supraluminal influence. Contemporaries should be defined primarily in terms of what is in unison of becoming. The divine occasions are in unison of becoming with present occasions, but because the causal independence introduced by the finite velocity of light does not apply, the divine occasion does not constitute any privileged sense of simultaneity.

This proposal contains a mix of physics and metaphysics. To what extent does recent evidence for supraluminal influence mean that the propagation of light is not an absolute maximum limit? How these findings qualify the received interpretation of relativity physics is something best left to the physics community. I shall restrict myself to any metaphysical reasons there might be for relativizing relativity physics.

Griffin has defined "contemporaries" in terms of what is in unison of becoming. This differs from the definition current in relativity physics, which needs an empirical method for specifying what is contemporary. Physics uses

a causal definition: two events are contemporary if neither affects nor is affected by the other. This method is effective if there is an upper limit to the velocity of transmission from one event to another. This upper limit is taken to be the finite velocity of light.

Now, Whitehead's philosophy is certainly inspired by and builds on relativity physics, particularly the claim that contemporaries cannot prehend one another. But it has not made much use of the claim of the finite propagation of light. Prehension, when first introduced (in SMW), abstracted from all considerations of transmission, 52 and later he suggests that there might be direct physical prehensions of the distant past (PR, 226f). Prehensions (not just divine prehensions) may be regarded as instantaneous connections between events.

What renders contemporaries mutually independent is not the finite velocity of prehension but whether there is something to be prehended. The revolution in our understanding of contemporaries concerned their classification. Were they like past causes or more like the future, which does not yet exist? They are not yet sufficiently determinate to be prehensible, and yet they exist privately, subjectively. The theory of epochal becoming and concrescence articulates a status for contemporaries that is independent of theories of transmission.

The challenge relativity physics poses for divine occasions, however, remains. It concerns the notion of cosmic simultaneity. Simultaneity is a special arrangement among contemporaries. It does not depend on whether contemporaries are understood in terms of lightsignals or in terms of the unison of becoming. It specifies a particular crosssection among the contemporaries to a given event, in which every event is contemporary with every other.53 This is Whitehead's notion of a duration. "A duration is a complete locus of actual occasions in 'unison of becoming,' or in 'concrescent unison.' It is the oldfashioned 'present state of the world'" (PR, 320f; cf. 322f). Normally this crosssection is determined by the inertial frame to which the central event belongs, relative to which it is at rest or in motion.

This is not how divine occasions constitute simultaneity. Since the divine experience is not limited by the velocity of light, there is nothing actualized (i.e., objectively prehensible) that God does not prehend. Griffin concludes: "All that is necessary is that there be, for every divine occasion, a set of worldly occasions that is unambiguously in the past and another set that is unambiguously in the future. The only cosmic 'now' that is needed is a divine 'now.'"54

This divine "now" constitutes those occasions that are in unison of becoming with it, for these occasions have not yet become actual and hence are not yet prehensible. They constitute the first wave of occasions to come into

being for the immediately next divine occasion. As long as they are experienced in the divine privacy, there is no conflict with relativity physics. If so, however, the societal or serial view of divine occasions has not done the job for which it was introduced in the first place, namely, to show how God could act upon the world.

The conflict arises with the objectification of the divine ''now." On this theory God's experience of the ongoing world is ordered by a series of divine occasions, of divine nows. Each occasion prehends what has just become determinate, yet fills all space. By virtue of what it is, each occasion constitutes what from the standpoint of a relativity physics of material entities is an absolute meaning of simultaneity. For if the totality of events embraced by a single divine occasion were conceived as those events simultaneous with a given actual occasion, that occasion would require an absolute inertial framework. Instead of these contemporaries being in rest or motion in differing contingent ways, all would be ordered according to a single framework applicable to the entire universe.

There is still an orderly creative advance of the world, which God synoptically experiences. The key issue does not concern the events themselves but the way these are ordered according to inertial systems. 55 There is no absolute rest or motion for the entire universe. Rest and motion are relative to the inertial systems (material societies) actualities inhabit. Now, in a duration, such as in a moment of the creative advance of nature, some but not all of its occasions need belong to the same inertial framework. Some will be at rest but most will be in some sort of motion relative to the others. Diverse inertial frameworks will determine different senses of simultaneity.56 Thus, the member occasions of the duration will make differing determinations of simultaneity, according to their inertial frames. Although the divine occasion is not in rest or motion, the simultaneity by which it is objectified projects a uniform rest or motion for the entire universe. Although individual occasions are prehended in terms of their local inertial systems, the divine counterpart prehending these occasions is objectified in terms of a single cosmic order mimicking a single universal inertial system.

We need to emphasize that the conflict does not concern the nature or experience of God, but our experience of God. If relativity physics expresses the truth about all material systems, we cannot experience any privileged meaning to simultaneity. As already noted, simultaneity is to spacetime the way centeredness is to the spatial universe. We no longer see ourselves at the center of the universe. In infinite space any point is equally distant from the perimeter. Since all are centers, none is the privileged center. We might claim that nevertheless God is at a center that is not part of the world.

There need be no conflict with our other beliefs, provided such divine center could never be experienced. Similarly, the divine now, which is not part of our world, would generate no conflict.

The difficulty is not evaded by introducing instantaneous connections, for there is a serious ambiguity whether such instantaneous nonlocalized influence takes place between occasions, or within a single occasion. The physics literature on Bell's theorem necessarily concerns connections between occasions. Griffin uses instantaneous connection, however, for the activity which occurs within the divine concrescence. God's prehension of all concresced occasions "can be instantaneous because, thanks to the divine omnipresence, there is no distance for the causal influence from any worldly occasions to travel." 57

Now, there is no difficulty with instantaneous nonlocalized influence within concrescence. The mutual sensitivity of feelings is just such an influence. In the absence of a substantial subject directing the various feelings, there must be some influence of the feelings on one another to shape them into one final satisfaction. Mutual sensitivity is really subjectivity conceived pluralistically in terms of the individual feelings. This mutual sensitivity brings all the feelings together, insofar as they are all part of the same actual entity.

Mutual sensitivity seems a poor candidate for nonlocalized influence between actualities, since Whitehead's occasions are so small. I have argued elsewhere that with suitable modifications there could be larger, more inclusive occasions.58 In any case, the divine occasions Hartshorne proposes must extend throughout all space. Whitehead, to be sure, does not specify God's relation to the extensive continuum; my notion of divinity requires that God is coextensive with future spacetime. If there really is mutual sensitivity among God's feelings, then on both Hartshorne's and my proposals there would be instantaneous nonlocalized influence from one end of the universe to the other, provided it all took place within the divine subjectivity.

Only if this instantaneous influence is objectified, however, does it become relevant to relativity physics. Yet the way it is objectified on the societal model poses the difficulties. Each divine occasion is objectified in terms of a divine now that divides the world into past and future occasions. This divine now, as prehensible, constitutes an ordering of contemporaries, which relativity physics must regard as determined by a universal inertial system.

Because of this uniform inertial basis, each divine occasion is perceived as giving an absolute meaning of simultaneity. Yet each actual occasion prehended into that divine occasion is felt in terms of its own direction and momentum, hence in terms of a plurality of inertial frameworks determining different senses of simultaneity.

Naturally, these divine physical prehensions become integrated within the divine life. On the everlasting concrescence view, however, those integra

tions are never fully achieved relative to the ongoing world. The objectivity of the societal model, however, requires that each divine occasion achieve full determinateness. Each occasion must then integrate all the diverse momenta it prehends into a common momentum in order to achieve a common framework coincident with a determination of simultaneity in accordance with its duration.

In terms of our spatial analogy, every occasion constitutes itself as the center of its world. An everlasting concrescence never constitutes itself as center, whereas each divine occasion becomes the center for all occasions. If so, the Hartshornean process theist can only make peace with relativity physics by following cardinal Bellarmine's advice. The Cardinal thought that for astronomical calculations it is best to conceive of the sun as the center of the solar system but theology (and metaphysics) requires that the earth be its center.

On my view there is a cosmic now, but because it is composed of many different contemporary actual occasions, most with their own inertial systems, this cosmic now does not lead to any absolute simultaneity. It is only the objectification of divine experience, which presupposes a unified satisfaction, that poses the problems.

The objectification of God, however, is absolutely necessary if God can only be effective by being prehended. That is the assumption that must be challenged and revised. The notion of God as future that I propose is an attempt to find a way by which an indeterminate and imprehensible activity can nevertheless influence us, so much so as to perform the functions ordinarily ascribed to God.

Chapter Seven— Process Nontemporality

Thus far we have explored ways in which God might interact with the world in terms of present or past modes. Later I shall introduce a constructive account of the divine activity as future. Before we turn to that alternative, we need to consider some further explanations for God that rely primarily on the nontemporal. Typically, the nontemporal is only an aspect within process theism, but how large or how small a role it plays varies considerably. This study of the nontemporal will preface our account of God as the activity of the future by suggesting that there is a definite, though minimal role that nontemporality should play in the divine economy.

The three approaches I will consider are Bowman Clarke's interpretation of nontemporal concrescence, Whitehead's own use of uncreated eternal objects, and Neville's employment of nontemporal determination.

I— Bowman Clarke

Clarke claims that not only the divine concrescence, but all concrescence, should be considered nontemporal. This is a daring move, for he must introduce the oxymoron of a "nontemporal process." Normally all processes take time, but concrescence as the process of becoming is said to take no time at all. The argument is built on three claims:

(1) Whitehead concludes his analysis of Zeno with the claim that "in every act of becoming there is the becoming of something with temporal extension; but that the act itself is not extensive" (PR, 69).

(2) The genetic passage is expressly said not to be in time. (PR, 283).

(3) Whitehead talks of two kinds of fluency, concrescence and transition (PR, 210). Since by (1) and (2), concrescence is not extensive and outside time, transition must be ordinary temporal process. It refers not only to the succession of occasions, but, Clarke argues, to the succession of parts of occasions, to the coordinate divisions of

outcomes. Thus, processes are ordinarily temporal as instances of transition. Only the processes of becoming are nontemporal.

There may well be difficulties in understanding concrescence to be temporal in any ordinary sense, but Clarke's account has its own share of problems. How does the nontemporality of concrescence differ from the atemporality of eternal objects? We may say that one is subjective, the other objective, but with respect to the abstraction from time, they differ not at all. How is the "logical" succession of genetic phases different from the succession of aspects of an eternal object from its simplest to most complex parts? If nontemporality simply means "not temporal," it is too indiscriminate.

"Concrescence" stands between the nontemporal and the temporal. To which should it be assimilated? In terms of which alternative can we best understand its particular meaning?

As a first approximation, we need to pay close attention to the qualifications Whitehead makes with respect to (1) and (2). Thus, in (1) he gives a strict interpretation as to what sense of extensiveness is intended: it is "not extensive, in the sense that it is divisible into earlier and later acts of becoming which correspond to the extensive divisibility of what has become" (PR, 69, my italics). Thus, if A is an actual occasion, whose satisfaction can be divided into an earlier part B and a later part C, A's concrescence cannot be divided into smaller concrescences B and C.

In a concrescence there is a gradual growth from an indeterminate multiplicity into one concrete unity. The process of determination results in a determinate outcome. The initial stages are more or less indeterminate; the intermediate stages are more and more determinate; the satisfaction is wholly determinate. This rhythm of indeterminacy to determinateness would be interrupted were there fully determinate stages partway through, but that is precisely what would happen should the concrescence as a whole (A) be itself divided into smaller processes of determination (B and C). What becomes all at once is the final being of the occasion; it cannot become fully determinate in piecemeal fashion.

There is no reason why an indivisible act of becoming cannot contain many phases of becoming, some of which are more determinate than others. Further, some can be earlier and some later, for the process of determination works on the earlier, more indeterminate phases to turn them into later, more determinate ones. Both before and after the restriction to indivisible acts of becoming Whitehead talks of such phases, such as in this passage: Each actual entity "is a process proceeding from phase to phase, each phase being the real basis from which its successor proceeds towards the completion of the thing in question" (PR, 215C). This does not sound like the nontemporal, logical succession of the cardinal numbers.

Yet if concrescence is temporal, why does Whitehead say (2) that genetic passage is not in time? Again, we must carefully attend to the qualification: "This genetic passage from phase to phase is not in physical time" (PR, 283). That is, it is not the time that physics uses, which is the Bseries that McTaggart identified by which the determinate being of objective events can be analyzed. This is a negative judgment, excluding one alternative. By itself it does not tell us whether concrescence is nontemporal or of a different kind of temporality than that of physics.

Again, would it make more sense to assimilate concrescence to nontemporality or temporality? Since the nontemporal does not of itself distinguish concrescence from the atemporality of eternal objects, we should not resort to that desperate alternative if it is possible to give an intelligible account of concrescence as temporal, although not temporal in terms of physics. 1

Let us consider provisionally concrescence and transition as two contrasting kinds of time, concrescence pertaining to becoming, and transition to being. In this context we are considering events, not things, so the determinate being of an event concerns its occurring. Events may be the way persistent things come into being. If so, the being of the event is the becoming of the thing. But we are concerned not only with the being, but the becoming of the event—how does it come into being? That is the task of concrescence.

We need to consider an interesting supporting argument Clarke adduces in support of his nontemporalist contention. He cites Kant and Hume as engaged in a similar endeavor to analyze experience by making hypothetical constructs of what would be involved for experience to be possible. "Just as Kant's [or Hume's] phases of construction, or concrescence, cannot be temporally ordered, neither can Whitehead's."2 This argument is strong insofar as these analyses of experience by Kant and Hume cannot meaningfully be temporally ordered. It may well be that Whitehead's analysis, insofar as it pertains to the analysis of experience, also cannot be temporal. For example, it is difficult to see why the phase of conceptual valuation deriving an abstract possibility from concrete actuality must be later and not simultaneous with the initial phase of physical reception.

Concrescence, however, is more than experience. It is also the process whereby events come into being. That requires a process of determination that can be analyzed in terms of some kind of time, such as the time that distinguishes between different genetic phases.

Clarke's essay, "God and Time in Whitehead," is a detailed critique of the interpretations of John B. Cobb Jr., and William A. Christian in order to support his contention that God ought to be conceived as a nontemporal concrescence. Clarke finds that their difficulties stem from confusions between concrescence and transition. "I would like to further argue that [their

misunderstandings] are based on a confusion of Whitehead's two kinds of process and their relationship to time." 3 Cobb and Christian are confused because they take both concrescence and transition to be both kinds of temporal process, whereas Clarke sees the first as nontemporal, the second as temporal. But there is also no need for confusion if both are temporal, the first pertaining to becoming, the second to being.

If we regard concrescence as nontemporal, leaving transitional as temporal, Clarke can make a striking conclusion. This means that concrescence is not before satisfaction.

The satisfaction, I would maintain, is no more the temporal end, or the finis, of a concrescence than it is the temporal beginning of the concrescence. The temporal beginning of an actual entity is the beginning of the satisfaction, and the temporal end of an actual entity is the end of the satisfaction.4

In that case the divine everlasting concrescence is always determinately satisfied. The divine satisfaction is coextensive with the everlasting concrescence. As determinate this satisfaction is prehensible.

I have examined Clarke's arguments in greater detail elsewhere.5 This view of the relationship between concrescence and satisfaction seems to hold if all concrescence were nontemporal. For then there would be no real temporal succession of (genetic) phases within concrescence, so that the stage of complete unity does not follow upon phases of increasing integration. As long as any temporal sense of before/after applies exclusively to the being of satisfaction, and is denied to concrescence, then only other events in their satisfaction can be before a given event, and it can only be before those events that succeed it. There would be no room for the concrescence to be before the satisfaction.

While this consequence follows rigorously from Clarke's premises, it is certainly counter to the usual interpretation. The satisfaction comes into being (= unity) as the product of the process of concrescence. As such it should come later than the process from which it emerges. If this is not a temporal relation, we may wonder whether there is any necessary connection between concrescence and satisfaction. On the other hand, if some satisfaction were preceded only by other satisfactions, we might wonder whether any concrescence is needed at all.

II— Uncreated Eternal Objects

Whitehead's own notion of a special divine nontemporal concrescence was forged in contrast to the temporal concrescence of actual occasions. It did

not depend on any general theory of the nontemporal concrescence for all actualities. While only made fully explicit once (PR, 87f), it was implicit within the middle concept of God, developed as a way of ordering the eternal objects in accordance with the general theory of concrescence already worked out in part III of Process and Reality. By this means greater coherence is achieved, for now God could be considered as actual in the sense of being an instance of concrescence. The eternal objects are thus more tightly related to divine activity, and the ontological principle is extended to the eternal objects. However Whitehead had previously explained the ontological principle to himself with respect to the eternal objects, he now had a superior explanation: the eternal objects were related to one another as they were by means of the determination of the nontemporal actuality.

The eternal objects themselves, however, were deemed to be uncreated. While there may be the only text in Process and Reality explicitly espousing this doctrine (PR, 257), he had written earlier that "the forms belong no more to God than to any one occasion. Apart from these forms, no rational description can be given either of God or of the actual world" (RM, 150).

Here, an analogy with the world is close at hand. Just as every finite concrescence requires a multiplicity of past actual occasions, each of which requires its own multiplicity, ad infinitum, precluding any absolute beginning to the world, so God requires an antecedent multiplicity for the divine concrescence. This requirement of an antecedent multiplicity prohibits any creatio ex nihilo, whether of actualities or of eternal objects.

But if the eternal objects antedate the nontemporal divine concrescence, what exactly does the divine activity consist in? According to Science and the Modern World, each eternal object has its individual essence, what it is in itself, and its relational essence, how it is (internally) related to all others. We may suppose that uncreated eternal objects are simply the individual essences, while the relational essences are formed in the divine concrescence. Or, according to a later analysis into sensa and patterns, we may take the sensa to be uncreated and the patterns to be created (PR, 114f). Yet earlier, Whitehead evidently thought of relational essences and patterns as themselves uncreated. Nor does he now specify any role for God in the constitution of eternal objects, perhaps for fear that it would generate two sets of eternal objects, those uncreated and those nontemporally created in divine activity.

One thing is clear, though: Whitehead's conception of God as conceptual realization requires preexistent eternal objects, which would be possible only if they were uncreated. Later, when God was reconceived in terms of the consequent nature, he did not simply replace the primordial nature but retained both. For God without primordiality would be a supreme actual occasion, experiencing the world from a totally allinclusive standpoint. Such a divine occasion would either simply reduplicate the world (if God were derived from

finite occasions), or it would determine their activity (if they were derived from God). It would be functionally similar to the underlying substantial activity of Science and the Modern World, which Whitehead had refused to identify with God.

That which gives God transcendence and individuality from the world is the primordial nature, which would be impossible without the eternal objects. The primordial nature prevents the consequent nature from sinking back into the world. Moreover, in working out how God influences the world in providing initial aims, Whitehead falls back on the primordial nature, for it alone could be deemed objectifiable.

Thus, Whitehead's notion of God depends upon the existence of transcendent eternal objects. While undoubtedly important and even essential in many respects, these atemporal abstract entities are problematic with respect to their uncreatedness. It may be possible to overcome this difficulty while preserving the positive values the eternal objects provide.

Eternal objects are timeless or atemporal because they are features mostly abstracted from actual occasions in accordance with the fourth categoreal obligation of conceptual valuation. Since they abstract from all traces of their temporal origination, they appear to have none, whether from occasions or from God.

Now most of the functions eternal objects are called upon to perform can be met by those derived from prior actuality. Everett W. Hall, in his classic essay, "Of What Use Are Whitehead's Eternal Objects?" 6 lists five functions: identity, permanence, abstractness, universality, and potentiality.7 To these five I add at least two more: value and novelty. Value could be handled satisfactorily by existing actualities, on Aristotelian assumptions. A Platonist such as Whitehead might hold out for a transcendent source of value. My modification vests the origination of valuation in the divine activity and thus preserves this concern for a transcendent source, even though objective forms are in the end derived from finite objectification.

The final function, novelty, cannot be derived from past actuality in any simple fashion. As Whitehead has it, "Either of them, God and the World, is the instrument of novelty for the other" (PR, 349). The eternal objects constitute the means whereby God could communicate a form that is novel for an occasion. It is novel in that it cannot be found otherwise within the occasion's past actual world. The actualization of that form provides in turn something novel for God's consequent experience.

If all form were to be explained as derived from determinate actualities, then there could be no novelty in terms of unrealized atemporal objects. This is one reason militating against any moderate realism that ignores the role of the divine. Even if the divine is taken into account, as for example, in Charles Hartshorne's conception of God as a society or series of divine occasions, the

issue is not changed. If all form were derived from prior occasions, whether creaturely or divine, all form would be already actualized in that prior actuality. There would no room for novel actualization of something hitherto unrealized.

Sometimes novelty is "explained" in terms of the recombination of elements derived from prior actualities. If so, there is no form in present actuality not already ingredient in the past actualities of the world. Then the doctrine that there are no unrealized forms is embraced with increased emphasis. The recombination is not explained; it happens by chance. This "explains" novelty only by explaining it away, for there is no new form ingredient in the present actuality. Also, novelty is not simply the actualization of that which hitherto never existed. It transforms reality so that it is in some sense better than what had been. As the increase in order, novelty is simply value conceived dynamically, temporally. Neither the form nor the value of the novel can be accounted for by simple recombination.

Novel actualization thus requires unrealized form, and this can be provided only by atemporal objects. Although such forms are the means of achieving novelty, they are not novel in themselves. They abstract from time, which is the basis by which the new can be contrasted with the old. Timeless, they can be neither old nor new. In the end it is actualization that is novel, but for this the forms are indispensable. This is the case whether the atemporal objects are created or not.

So far we have been considering alternatives to the uncreatedness of eternal objects, but there are also definite reasons why eternal (atemporal) objects should be conceived as emergent.

In "Perfecting the Ontological Principle," 8 I argue that Whitehead had no single formulation of the ontological principle, but provides an array of meanings as he strives to improve and perfect his own formulations in order to obtain greater coherence with his evolving system. Some tend to identify the ontological principle with the general Aristotelian principle that eternal objects depend for their existence upon actualities (PR, 40). But that is only one application of his concern to insist on vesting the reasons for things, in this case the reason for the existence of eternal objects, in actualities. Rather than one final meaning, he has given us a trajectory of meanings. Perhaps we can improve upon this account by tracing out further extensions of the trajectory.

If the reasons for things are to be found only in actualities, they are ultimately to be explained by acts of becoming, whether present or past. The ontological principle is used to explain the existence of eternal objects, how they are ingredient in actual entities, but could it be extended to explain their nature as well? "There is no justification for checking generalization at any particular stage" (PR, 16). Then the reasons for any being (include the nature

of an eternal object) are to be found in some act or acts of becoming. The demands for complete rational explanation press on to some such expanded ontological principle as this.

The claim that eternal objects are simply uncreated and cannot be the result of any process of actualization frustrates this rational quest. There are then no reasons why they are what they are, no reason why they have the specific nature they do, if there is no way they can come into being. On the face of it, the immense array of uncreated eternal objects, including all possible sensa and patterns, taxes our credulity.

To be sure, some might argue that God creates the eternal objects by fiat. While this might not push the obscurity back very far, it would at least be a response to the demand for rationality found in the ontological principle. As uncreated, the eternal objects are regarded as exempt from the principle that every being is the result of some act of becoming, and as such exempt from the ontological principle. Such exemptions block any further inquiry.

What is needed is an account of the emergence of novel eternal objects. Of course, that is impossible in Whitehead's world of uncreated eternal objects, and any eternal object appears to be perfectly without any temporal origin. An atemporal form, which abstracts from its history of emergence, cannot be distinguished from its counterpart eternal object, which is uncreated. Both that which has, and that which has no origin, are exactly identical. So if there is a way to show how atemporal objects can temporally emerge, they would have the exact same properties of eternal objects, except for their uncreatedness.

It appears possible to account for their emergence by the following steps:

(1) By the fourth category of conceptual reproduction, every occasion can extract whatever eternal objects are inherent in the satisfactions of the occasions constituting its past actual world. Were this sufficient to account for novelty, we would have to look no farther. All eternal objects could be derived by abstraction from determinate actuality. But that cannot include unrealized eternal objects, and precisely those are necessary for novelty.

(2) We are seeking an alternative to uncreated eternal objects or even their eternal creation by God. But if God were to create them temporally, there would still be difficulties. Were God their sole author, there is no reason why all of them could not be created at once. Even if God's creation were in response to the temporal contingencies of the world, there is no a priori limit we should assign to the divine creative imagination.

Still, without aim there would no initial unity in terms of which the occasion could grow together, and no cosmic coordination of actualities. Aim, however, need not be identical with Whitehead's initial subjective aim, which has a definite eternal object as its datum. Then the modification of subjective aim requires either the selection of form from a multiplicity of alternatives or the replacement of one definite form by another. Yet if there must be a selection, who does the selecting? What provides the unity of the subject in process of coming to be? If replacement, how can the new form be deemed better than the one God has judged most appropriate for it? Yet without the possibility of modification, there could be no freedom.

Definite eternal objects, on my account, are the outcome of divine and creaturely activity. The aim as initially received is quite vague, indefinite. In the finite occasion aim renders itself more and more definite, becoming finally the form of unity of the satisfaction whereby it can unify all the simple physical feelings together.

(3) The concrescing occasion renders the indefinite aim determinate by means of the definite eternal objects it abstracts from past determinate actualities, but the determination of what to abstract, and the way in which the final form acquires its overall shape depends upon the subjective activity guided by and responding to its aim. This final form as a possibility of achievement can exist only privately, as prehended by the subject. Its instantiation in that occasion would perish with subjective immediacy, were it not also the form for the unity of its matter.

The (proximate) matter for an occasion is constituted by all the past actualities prehended. The final contrast integrates this multiplicity of matter with its final form. Put another way, the concrescence determines the final form as the way its physical feelings are felt together in a single concrete unity. The past actualities, so unified, sustain the final form in being, rendering it capable of objectification. The final form is the form of the satisfaction.

In this way concrescence can generate objective form, which in some cases are newly emergent eternal objects. Objective form has the fixity that determinateness confers. Becoming is fluid; its form is like the shape of waves, perpetually changing and being changed. (This is metaphorical talk, for actual waves have being.) Aim shapes and is shaped by the process of concrescence, by what it inherits, responds to and integrates with physical feeling.

(4) Insofar as there is objective novelty, it is expressed in the satisfactions of finite actualities. God certainly contributes to this novelty, but its form has no objective existence, even as a possibility to be contemplated, until it is expressed in finite satisfaction.

Such novelty exists in actuality before it is abstracted as an eternal object. 9 It exists in the satisfactions attained, but such being is already a firstorder abstraction from becoming, and hence from temporality. The satisfaction serves as datum for supervening occasions (as opposed to the past concrescence itself) because it can be extracted from its act of becoming. The novel eternal object is obtained by conceptual reproduction, and is thus a double abstraction. It not only abstracts from the temporality of the formative concrescence, but also from the spatiotemporal locatedness of the past actuality.

Naturally, since the eternal object is abstracted from all temporal circumstance, it appears to be without origin. It is atemporal, and can appear wherever it is wanted. We can even project it back into the distant past. Yet it need not be considered to be eternal in the sense of being uncreated, for every objective form (except metaphysical principles) may be temporally emergent.

This account apportions the origination of novelty between the divine and the creaturely. Both are necessary, neither sufficient. Creaturely actualization is necessary in order to bring about actual novelty. The occasion may modify and particularize aim it receives by its responsive reception and integration of physical feeling. The objective form is not given at the outset, but is worked out in concrescence, to be fixed in the satisfaction, and can only be first detached in supervening prehension.

All this could not be achieved without some aim derived from a transcendent source. In the absence of aim, there would be no guidance directing the feelings to aim at any common goal. To be sure, if there were an underlying substantial subject, it could supply the direction, but that alternative has its own difficulties. Also, if the occasion were able to determine its aim entirely de novo, there would be no guarantee, even of a very rough and ready sort, that all contemporary occasions would act together in a common world. Each occasion would go its own way—entirely. This would generate conflict and disorder many magnitudes of the evil we now experience. All order would degenerate into chaos.10

III— The Metaphysical Principles

On the other hand, the emergence of created eternal objects poses a stubborn difficulty concerning the metaphysical principles, which are considered to

be exemplified by all events whatsoever. In what sense could these be said to temporally emerge, since no prior events could lack them? These forms, at least, must have a nontemporal status we should examine here. I have previously argued that they would be established by a divine nontemporal decision. 11

In God, Power and Evil,12 David Griffin argues that once ''the distinction between arbitrary cosmological principles and necessary metaphysical principles has been made, Whitehead should no longer speak as if the latter required grounding in a decision."13 For decision, which is the root meaning of actuality in concrescence, cuts off alternatives (PR, 68f). Yet metaphysical principles have "characteristics so general that we cannot conceive any alternatives" (PR, 288). He proposes restricting the ontological principle to contingent decisions, for these are always made from among alternative possibilities. Presumably this means that when God is appealed to for "reasons of the highest absoluteness" (PR, 19), this should refer to the pervasive features of the widest cosmic epochs, and not to the metaphysical principles. For God's primordial nature "presupposes the general metaphysical character of creative advance, of which it is the primordial exemplification" (PR, 344).

The principle of limitation did not clearly differentiate between necessary features and the widest contingent features such as threedimensionality of space. The distinction between "cosmic epoch" and "metaphysical principles" first emerges in the Giffords draft (C). Yet it is not until later, when Griffin holds Whitehead should not be talking about primordial decision, that Whitehead first introduces this notion: "The scope of the ontological principle is not exhausted by the corollary that 'decision' must be referable to an actual entity." Everything must be referable to an actual entity, and for unrealized eternal objects this means "the nontemporal actual entity" (PR, 46G). He then kept this notion of a primordial decision throughout the remainder of the book, for in a later passage we read of the decisions constituting what is given for a particular occasion: "the decision of God's nature and the decisions of all occasions" (PR, 47L).

The notion of a primordial decision may have been intelligible to Whitehead because of his presupposition of a multiplicity of uncreated (and unordered) eternal objects. The divine nontemporal concrescence of this multiplicity, by which they are ordered, could be conceived as a decision, for the one order obtained excludes alternative ways the eternal objects could have been ordered. (If it did not exclude other ways, then the nontemporal concrescence would have had no effect.)

These alternative ways, however, are not possibilities. The primordial envisagement is possible only once (PR, 247). What it excludes is forever excluded as impossible. The metaphysical principles derivative from this primordial act are without possible alternative, unlike their more specific contingent articulations.

By restricting the ontological principle to contingencies, Griffin exempts a minimal order (the interdependence of God, creatures, creativity, and the eternal objects) from its scope (cf. PR, 225, 257). Yet "there is no justification for checking generalization at any particular stage" (PR, 16). Chaos may not need any explanation, as Charles Sanders Peirce observed, but any measure of order, however minimal, may require explanation, which for Whitehead means an appeal to some actuality. To be sure, God's primordial nature "presupposes the general metaphysical character of creative advance, of which it is the primordial exemplification" (PR, 344). I take that to mean, not that there is some presupposed order, but that there is some ordering activity, creativity, of which God is its primordial instance.

While Griffin wishes to restrict the ontological principle, I have argued for its expansion to account for the nature as well as the existence of eternal objects. Explanation ultimately has reference to concrescence and emergence.

The extension of the scope of the ontological principle leads to the affirmation of Robert C. Neville's nontemporal determination. This is a necessary corrective to nontemporal decision, provided that nontemporal act is restricted to the formation of metaphysical principles. Griffin's restriction of the ontological principle entails the rejection of Neville's project. Reflecting on divisions of this sort, Neville suggests that there are two broad sensibilities as to the nature of an ultimate explanation. The rationalists, like Griffin, hold "that an ultimately satisfying explanation is a reduction of things to first principles." 14 For an empiricist like Neville, "to be satisfied is to see the loci of decisive determination."15

This is a strange form of "empiricism." It has nothing to do with publicly verifiable determinations of contingents, which is the main staple of ordinary empiricism. If anything it is more speculative and more abstract than rationalism. Let us accept the term stipulatively, as at least meaning: opposed to rationalism.

Both Neville and Griffin take these to be opposed positions, but I do not see why they cannot be complementary. Just because a principle is without possible alternative need not mean that it exists in the absence of any further determination, while just because it has been nontemporally determined does not mean that it cannot be without possible alternative. Both may be necessary for the existence of metaphysical principles, yet neither sufficient in itself.

The ontological principle can be understood either way. It is a reduction of things to first principles by which all nonactual entities whatsoever derive their existence from the one species of actuality. Yet it specifies the loci of decisive determination in the various actual entities that exist. The reason actual entities are the only reasons is rooted in the fact that concrescence or actualization brings into existence whatever is.

If we see metaphysical principles as the outcome of divine nontemporal determination, they display an excellence that the divine should display. The metaphysical criteria of consistency, coherence, adequacy, and applicability (PR, 3) should apply, particularly the coherence that establishes the interdependence of basic factors, thereby ensuring its metaphysical stability. In any situation where A depends upon B, but not vice versa, it is possible for B to persist in the absence of A. To that extent the system is instable. If A and B are mutually dependent, neither can be absent without the other.

Does God determine the metaphysical principles because they are the most excellent, or are the principles most excellent because God determines them? If these are taken as exclusive alternatives, difficulties arise. If God determines them because most excellent, it seems that we can dispense with the divine agency. If they are excellent because God determines them, they are the result of arbitrary decision. The proper way out is to affirm both together as inclusive aspects of the same reality. In this context, "God" specifies the nontemporal determination; the metaphysical principles specify what is thereby determined. The goodness of God is reflected in the metaphysical principles, and vice versa.

The rationalist admires the excellence and economy of first principles. Neville seeks the locus for the determination of these principles in the divine nontemporal act. Both God and the good found in the excellence of these principles are necessary; neither are sufficient.

IV— Nontemporal Decision and Determination

Whitehead argues that decision is the fundamental meaning of actuality: "'Decision' cannot be construed as a casual adjunct of an actual entity. It constitutes the very meaning of actuality. An actual entity arises from decisions for it, and by its very existence provides decisions for other actual entities which supersede it" (PR, 43). Though Whitehead does not make it explicit, this meaning of "actuality," suitable for ordinary concrescences, is also applicable to the divine actuality, particularly in terms of its nontemporal concrescence. The notion of a nontemporal decision provides the basic framework around which my essay on "The NonTemporality of Whitehead's God'' was based.

A decision, however, is a selection among preexisting alternatives. Yet what could be prior, in any sense of prior, to a nontemporal decision? From Whitehead's perspective, the eternal objects are prior. After all, God "does not create eternal objects; for his nature requires them in the same degree that they require him" (PR, 257). 16

These preexistent eternal objects are either the individual essences or both individual and relational essences.17 Either way there are difficulties. On

the first alternative, the primordial concrescence orders the eternal objects by constituting the relations between their individual essences, thereby creating all their relational essences. This may be possible for a nontemporal concrescence, but not for a nontemporal decision, for nothing is excluded. Whitehead reminds us that the word decision "is used in its root sense of a 'cutting off'" (PR, 43). What would be cut off by this decision?

On the second alternative, if all relational essences preexist as well, the primordial concrescence can be a decision. Acting as a principle of limitation, God determines by exclusion which of the preexisting relational essences are to apply. The preexisting relational essences must specify all relations, whether possible or otherwise. It is not enough to say that they represent all possible relations, for the result of the divine decision determines the bounds of possibility. They much exceed what is (ultimately) possible, and yet we have no way of specifying the excess except as impossible. The limits of rationality have been reached. Moreover, we have vastly multiplied the domain of forms simply to save the dogma of uncreated eternal objects. To include relational essences, we must postulate far too many initial eternal objects.

Either way, in some sense eternal objects will be considered prior to the nontemporal decision. Yet in what sense can anything be prior to what is nontemporal? Moreover, a decision seems to be inherently temporal. It requires first an indeterminate state consisting of various alternatives, a decision, resulting in a determination limited to one course of action. The order cannot be reversed. The many are prior, the one after, the decision. If it is inherently temporal, how can it be nontemporal? 18

At this point we can either simply stipulate that necessary structures are eternal in the sense of being exemplified by all occasions, or seek to revise the notion of nontemporal concrescence to avoid the problems of nontemporal decision. I opt for the latter alternative, drawing support from Robert C. Neville's concept of "nontemporal determination."

Broadly stated, his principle requires that "everything determinate needs determination." Nontemporal determination differs from both the nontemporal concrescence and the nontemporal decision we have been examining in that there is no preexistent multiplicity for determination. Everything determinate needs explanation, but not the absolutely indeterminate. Ultimate metaphysical principles, being determinate, require determination. That act of determination must be nontemporal; otherwise there would be some events that did not exemplify them. The nontemporal act both determines the basic principles of the world and God as the creator of the world so characterized.

Since these principles are the minimal determination of what is, only pure indeterminacy could possibly precede them. Whitehead's usual notion of indeterminacy is insufficient in this context. He sees any multiplicity of individually determinate actualities as indeterminate, at least in the sense of that

which requires determination by temporal concrescence. The multiplicity of definite (uncreated) eternal objects is the corresponding indeterminacy for nontemporal concrescence. Neither is absolutely indeterminate. If there were indefinite forms gradually acquiring definiteness, however, that out of which definite forms could be created, this might do. Such indefinite forms, traced to their source, fade into nothing. Neville's indeterminacy is indistinguishable from sheer nothing. The determination of the metaphysical principles is thus literally created ex nihilo.

Since there is no preexistent multiplicity, there are no preexistent alternatives to decide among. The basic metaphysical order established by the nontemporal determination has no alternatives. Here we must distinguish between two senses of the "contingent." It can mean both that which could have been otherwise, and that which depends on another. Although contingency ordinarily refers to what could have been otherwise, both senses are appropriate as interconnected. If it could have been otherwise, there must be a reason that it is so and not otherwise, and that reason needs to be found in the actuality (or actualities) it is dependent on.

The metaphysical order is contingent, however, only in the second sense, for while it is dependent upon the nontemporal act of determination, it is noncontingent in that it cannot be otherwise: it has no possible alternatives. If it did, these would preexist the creative act, which could not then be nontemporal.

Process thinkers are often at a loss to know what to make of Neville's basic argument, which I have briefly sketched. Creation ex nihilo is usually thought to be impossible, because every occasion prehends its predecessors in turn, ad infinitum. The chain of efficient causation is endless, not being initiated by God. 19 While this is true, such cosmological meanings are not what Neville has primarily in mind. While there are further extensions and ramifications to be investigated, the fundamental argument concerns the determination of metaphysical principles.

Neville distinguishes between ontology, which examines the divine act of nontemporal determination, and cosmology, the way the world has been metaphysically structured by this act. Cosmology is thus metaphysics without God. Since God could determine the structure of the world quite differently, an indefinite number of metaphysical proposals are compatible with Neville's ontology. In his first book, God the Creator (1968),20 Neville used as his cosmology largely the work of Paul Weiss, but turned to Whitehead for his cosmology in the very next book, The Cosmology of Freedom,21 and has stayed with it ever since. Although the rhetoric of Whitehead's terminology has been muted, I find that there has been an everdeepening naturalistic appropriation of his metaphysics. In Reconstruction of Thinking, for example, this is evident from the cosmological sections of part two, forming the backbone of his analysis.22

Because Neville's ontology is compatible with any number of cosmologies, the choice of a Whiteheadian philosophy for that cosmology seems rather ad hoc to many. It seems that he has grafted classical theism to process stock. In one respect, however, his theology has decisively broken with classical thought. It stresses divine immutability of God, which requires that God be the same before and after the creation of the world. By contrast, Neville conceives God apart from creation to be radically indeterminate, only acquiring a determinate character as the creator of this world through the act of nontemporal determination.

The distinction between ontological creation and cosmological causation enables Neville to exempt God from all metaphysical principles as their creator, a move process thinkers object to. Also, while these principles depend upon God, there is no reciprocal dependence of God upon them. This is only partial coherence in the sense that Whitehead uses this criterion (PR, 3). Full coherence would require interdependence. 23

Many process thinkers have been content with underived first principles, on the grounds that they are underivable. Whitehead, however, appealed to God to establish "the categoreal conditions" (PR, 344). He did not consider the first principles to be selfsufficient. He appeals to the ontological principle, that "reasons of the highest absoluteness" are to be found in the nature of God (PR, 19). In general, the reasons for things must be found in the actions of things, a principle that seems more like Neville's empiricist principle rather than any rationalist principle. Neville finds Whitehead's use of the principle somewhat restricted.

Whitehead's ontological principle, emphasizing that actual entities are to be accounted for by reference to decisions in various actual entities, accords with this sensibility on the cosmological level. But Whitehead fails to extend the reference to decision to the ontological level, and thereby slips into rationalism. (EWP, 269)24

Whitehead, I submit, does move to the ontological level, or can be interpreted that way. Both nontemporal decision and nontemporal concrescence as already examined were efforts to apply the ontological principle on the most ultimate level. The reason Neville resists this concerns Whitehead's distinction between God and creativity, which Neville seeks to identify. Whitehead rejects any such identification, for it would make God the sole creator and undercut the important similarities between efficient causation as othercreation and freedom as selfcreation. If there are finite as well as divine acts of creativity, creativity cannot simply be identified with the divine act. Yet without denying contingent, temporal acts of creativity we can also affirm one fundamental and necessary nontemporal act.

Another reason process thinkers have difficulty with Neville may be found in his tendency to formulate his basic requirement such that every multiplicity, without exception, needs something that could unify it. 25 This is not very convincing when principles rather than actualities make up the multiplicity, when the principles are necessary rather than contingent, and when further the principles are mutually interlocking, each requiring the others. This interdependence constitutes a kind of superunity, appearing to require nothing beyond itself.

Consider, for example, the three elements of the category of the ultimate (PR, 21). Without the many, there would be nothing to unify, and nothing to become one. Without creativity, there would be no activity whereby the many could become one. Without the one, creativity could not be a process of unification. Without the one, there could be no contribution to any supervening many, for the many is constituted out of ones. Neville notes that "One, many, and creativity cannot be defined either by themselves or in terms of one another, but what is indefinable in each one is relevant to the others" (EWP, 260). If they are also interdependent, forging a superunity, how can there be any need of anything more ultimate?

More recently, however, Neville has rephrased his basic requirement such that everything determinate needs determination.26 This formulation grows out of his previous one, since a multiplicity is indeterminate with respect to its unity, but it is not burdened with the problems of that formulation. It can reinforce its critique of any multiplicity of first principles, for the superunity of interdependent principles is not enough. For that unity is itself a kind of determinateness, and hence requires an ultimate determination.

Most exciting of all, his present formulation can be interpreted as a version of the extended ontological principle, vesting in God the Creator "reasons of the highest absoluteness" (PR, 19). Whitehead's own ontological principle locates the reasons for actualities either in past actualities or in their own process of concrescence. Why a thing is what it is should be found in its antecedents or in its own selfactualization. It is a principle of causation, broadly construed.

I have urged that we generalize the principle to apply to all beings as well, not just to actualities. Then the reasons for any being are to be found in some act or acts of becoming. Now, an act of becoming or concrescence is a process of determination, which produce a determinate actuality. Such a determinate actuality, or abstraction thereof, is determinate in Neville's sense, and requires a process of determination that provides the reasons why it is so and not otherwise.

Neville's formulation, "anything determinate requires determination," is perfectly general. While it can be applied to concrescence, it is not dependent upon Whitehead's particular theory of actualization. It is perhaps the best generalization of the ontological principle that has yet been proposed, extending

it as far as possible. Barring other difficulties, Whitehead would have approved: "When a general idea has been obtained, it should not be arbitrarily limited to the topic of its origination" (Al, 304).

Neville's extended ontological principle is so important that we should reexamine the generality with which the category of the ultimate is phrased. The relation between creativity and the ontological principle is somewhat problematic, since it is difficult to see how creativity could be explained by any actualities.

Responding to this difficulty, William A. Christian held that creativity was a "presystematic term" such that "all that can be said about creativity can be put into systematic statements about the concrescences of actual entities." 27 In order to make rigorous sense of Process and Reality, Christian distinguishes between those concepts that are part of Whitehead's mature philosophy (e.g., parts III, IV.1, and V) and those less rigorous ones he had used in a more preliminary way (roughly, part II).28 The designation of creativity as a presystematic term is, however, is singularly unfortunate. From a genetic perspective, the major exposition of creativity, the section on the Category of the Ultimate (PR, 21f), was probably the last thing that Whitehead wrote for the book (EWM, 240).29 But if it were a presystematic term, then on Christian's grounds, it would have to be exhaustively accounted for in systematic concepts.30

More importantly, Christian relies on the unrevised ontological principle: only actual entities are fully existent, and all other entities are derivatively existent. Only actualities have primary existence, which excludes any independent role we might assign to creativity. Christian writes that the ontological "principle clearly rules out creativity as an ontological ground. It calls for actual entities, and creativity is not an actual entity, nor indeed an entity of any other systematic kind."31 The ontological principle thus justifies his endeavor of reducing all statements about reasons to statements about what is truly ontologically prior, the actual entities.

In a fine essay on "The Ultimacy of Creativity," William J. Garland challenges the adequacy of Christian's attempted reduction with respect to creativity (EWP, 212–238). He argues that this reduction does not "express the fact that novel actual entities are always coming into being," ''that selfcreation and othercreation are but two different exemplifications of a single principle," or "Whitehead's doctrine of the unity of all creative action in the universe" (EWP, 214–217)." As Whitehead had observed, "A mere system of mutually prehensive occasions is compatible with the concept of a static timeless world" (EWM, 305).

Thus, there are features of creativity that cannot be adequately explained by actual entities, but "creativity explains how it is that actual entities can exhibit the two types of causality [efficient and final] which make it possible for them to be cited as reasons under the ontological principle" (EWP, 232). While

the ontological principle provides the reasons why beings are what they are, creativity provides the reason why the ontological principle is the way that it is.

The category of the ultimate is phrased in terms of unification, such that its nontemporal instance runs into difficulties, as we have seen. For nontemporal concrescence on Whitehead's terms requires an antecedent multiplicity of uncreated eternal objects. The purpose of that antecedent multiplicity, however, is simply to provide an indeterminacy to be determined. If we limit ourselves simply to that purpose, then we can substitute absolute indeterminacy for the partial indeterminacy of multiplicity. But an absolute indeterminacy is indistinguishable from nothing. Nontemporal determination is then the transformation of absolute indeterminacy into something determinate. It is creation out of nothing.

Seen from this perspective, Whitehead's category of the ultimate, with its rhythm of the many and the one, whereby an antecedent multiplicity is reduced to unity by creative unification, a unity that is added to a new multiplicity then to be reduced to unity, ad infinitum, is an important temporal version of determination. He recognizes that a multiplicity is indeterminate, not with respect to its members individually, but with respect to the way the multiplicity will be unified. Since every unity, once achieved, contributes to a new multiplicity, we are assured that there will always be creative unification until the crack of doom. There is no danger of premature closure as with Hegel's dialectic.

It is a version of creative unification admirably suited for temporality and contingency. The problems that attached to the old nontemporal concrescence of the uncreated pertained solely to the attempt to apply this temporal version of the reduction of multiplicity to unity to its nontemporal instance. If the common factor is not multiplicity to unity but indeterminacy to determinateness, the problems can be solved. Whitehead's multiplicity is simply a relative indeterminacy with respect to the unity of the whole. Since in the nontemporal instance absolute indeterminacy is reduced to determinateness, there is no prior multiplicity to be unified. Determination must take place by other means, by a creation out of nothing.

There is an asymmetry in the relation between creativity and the ontological principle. The original nontemporal act establishing the metaphysical principles is absolutely unfettered (cf. PR, 247). Another set of principles could have been established in its stead. It is nevertheless true, however, that the principles as finally established have no possible alternatives. This sounds paradoxical, but only because the principles exclude what is impossible. Only the possible remains.

On the other hand, creativity can only be effective by means of particular acts of creativity, whether by the one divine act Neville envisages or by means of particular actual entities. The ontological principle simply asserts this

connection by holding that the most fundamental reasons are derived from actualities as particular acts of creativity.

For both Whitehead and Neville the nontemporal instance of creativity is ontologically paramount, because it determines the underlying metaphysical structure. This is not an act of divine selflimitation, however, because there is nothing to limit. There are no preexisting alternatives, possibilities, potentialities, or powers; simply nothing. Rather than limiting possibility, nontemporal determination first makes possibility possible. By articulating the character of metaphysical necessity, it exhibits all possibilities by excluding the impossible. No possibility is restricted, while all are enabled to be possible.

There is no necessary restriction on possibility, except to rule out the impossible. Contingent restriction, however, is quite a different matter. While the necessary articulation enhances the domain of the possible, contingent restriction diminishes it. Nontemporal determination is not a decision among preexisting competing alternatives, so there is no nontemporal restriction. This means that there are no possible alternatives to that which is nontemporally determined. Otherwise stated, all apparent "alternatives" must in the end prove to be impossible.

What constitutes the metaphysical structure? We might naturally assume that it was composed of eternal objects. If so, there would be some eternal objects that are truly eternal, that is, necessarily instantiated in every occasion. There would be at least some that were uncreated, lacking any history of emergence.

There is another alternative, however. We might treat all the metaphysical principles as in the first instance categories on analogy with the categoreal obligations. These are the conditions to which every concrescence must conform in order to be an instance of experience and actualization. They are the necessary means whereby an occasion experiences and synthesizes its world. We may thus conceive these metaphysical conditions as necessary subjective forms, for they are the way in which data are appropriated. In Kantian language, they are the necessary, transcendental conditions for all possible experience. 32

The primordial nature is: "not before all creation, but with all creation" (PR, 343, his italics). To be sure, Whitehead conceived of the primordial nature, even as objectifiable, to be nontemporal. Yet if most temporal objects are emergent, such that both actual entities and eternal objects must be first objectified before they can be prehended, then they must be past to be experienced. If so, even the primordial nature must be prior to each occasion that prehends it. On the other hand, if the primordial nature signifies that which God nontemporally selfdetermines as the transcendental conditions for prehension, then the it exists "with all creation." The necessary is that by means

of which we prehend, the transcendental conditions, while the contingent constitutes what is prehended.

These conditions are with every present act of creation as informing its subjectivity. Subjective forms function here better than objective forms, which are vehicles for external relations. Whitehead once wrote that the primordial nature

is the unconditioned actuality of conceptual feeling at the base of things; so that by reason of this primordial actuality, there is an order in the relevance of eternal objects to the process of creation. (PR, 344) 33

A distinct, objective primordial nature composed of pure conceptual feelings would be unaffected by the contingencies of the world. But the primordial nature can be reconceived in terms of the transcendental conditions of actualization. Instead of being constituted of definite objective forms to be prehended, it could consist of subjective forms, which could be the means whereby God experiences the world.

There is simply one divine experience of the world, not a primordial envisagement independent of consequent experience. The determinate actualities and definite forms (eternal objects), both contingent, would be what is experienced, and it would be experienced by means of the indefinite subjective forms. Only subjective form would be determined nontemporally.

For all the importance of nontemporal determination, we must insist upon its limitations. Specifically, it does not determine anything contingent. Only the necessary must be determined nontemporally. Since everything else can be determined contingently, it should be determined contingently.

If something contingent were determined nontemporally, then the domain of the possible would be forever restricted. All alternatives to that contingent determination would be possible, according to the meaning of contingency (that which could be otherwise than what it is), yet such possibilities would be forever unactualizable. In the end, they are either impossible possibilities or possible impossibilities. What is contingent ought to be determined contingently, by innerworldly actualities.34

The only notion of a nontemporal order of contingents that has found favor with process thinkers is a conception of the primordial nature as a branching order of all possibilities whatever, divinely valued as to their contribution to actuality.35 Then the nascent occasion, not God, must pick out the possibility to serve as its initial aim, but how it can do so remains a mystery.

Another way of stating our basic rule would be: whatever can be explained temporally ought not be explained nontemporally. This has a bearing on "God of the gaps" arguments. In principle there is nothing wrong with arguments

of this sort. In fact, if the world can be adequately explained without recourse to any divine being, then God's relevance is called into question, if not God's very being. The general form of a theistic argument shows that there is some deficiency which can be remedied by God's presence. All too often, however, specific arguments for God's existence turn on features for which a secular explanation is found in due course.

The form of the argument is valid. The fallacy lies in the overbelief that informs its content. Secular inquiry provides the means for paring down that overbelief. Our rule here should be: "whatever can be explained secularly ought not be explained theistically." This is but a version of our basic rule: "whatever can be explained temporally ought not be explained nontemporally."

Our particular determinateness can be explained as a combination of past efficient causes and the freedom of our present selfdetermination. This determination is not interfered with by any necessary determination of transcendental conditions, since these are presupposed by all events whatsoever. But if any contingent conditions were nontemporally determined, there would be interference. The same contingency would seem to be determined in conflicting ways, but this is impossible. Or if the same contingency were determined both nontemporally and temporally in the same way, there would be redundancy. Since temporal conditions are sufficient, there need be no nontemporal contingent conditions as well.

If this line of reasoning is correct, nontemporal determination should be limited to the determination of the necessary subjective forms that constitute the metaphysical structure of reality, God included. Yet Neville speaks of God's creative act as creating more than just this. It creates the whole world.

To be sure, this is the traditional language. The question is only whether he is entitled to it. In order to make his case, he insists upon a distinction important to his endeavor, between ontology which concerns divine creation, and cosmology, which concerns that which is created, including its efficient causes and its free acts, which for Whitehead are marks of creativity. Whitehead regards efficient causation as othercreation and freedom as selfcreation. Neville regards all such features, along with their products, as created. God alone creates, again following tradition.

The language of determination casts everything in a new light. Whitehead has been a longstanding opponent of God as creator. He adopted theism when he came to the conviction that the principle of limitation, odd though it might be, was a more suitable description of God because it did not entail that God was creator. His reason for opposing God as creator may be that he understood creation as a form of determination. If God were the infinite determiner, then there would be no room for other forms of determination.

In all the forms of theism Whitehead espoused, the possibility of efficient causation as otherdetermination and freedom as selfdetermination was maintained and even encouraged. However theism was to be understood, it should not interfere with these contingent features. Divine activity, therefore, could at best be understood as partial determination.

In keeping with his opposition to God the creator, Whitehead does not interpret his own conceptuality in terms of "creation." Yet a concrescence is the temporal coming into being of a being. What is that but a creation? A concrescence creates by means of that which it inherits, and by means of its own selfintegration of that inheritance. Partly it is created by others and partly it creates itself. So we can recognize three forms of creation: the othercreation by the past, the selfcreation by the present, and the divine creation. Provided these are seen as partial and as necessarily complementary, there is no conflict.

Whitehead protects selfcreation by conceiving of divine power in terms of persuasion, and divine knowledge as dependent on the creative acts of creatures. Neville regards these as ways of giving cosmological functions to God. Only ontological issues should count, for this is the proper domain in which God is creator. But the separation of ontology from cosmology only intensifies the element of arbitrariness in the nontemporal determination. If God is solely creator, the divine relationship with the world must remain completely onesided. There is no interdependence of God and world which could promote metaphysical stability and strengthen the fabric of the whole.

Another "cosmological" feature is time. By pluralizing creation in terms of particular finite acts of concrescence, Whitehead conceives of the present as creative, the past as created. We shall argue in the next chapter that the future is divinely creative.

Neville in contrast argues that time in all of its modes must be created, which means that time must be determined by nontemporal determination. Time is not the sort of determinate thing that could require a single determiner. Time is the measure of the contingent process of determination, and requires several activities of determination acting in concert. For if the nontemporal determines the necessary, the temporal must determine the contingent.

In summary, we have seen how temporality is intimately bound up with the existence of actualities other than God, and the distribution of creativity to these actualities. Such actualities are radically finite and contingent. Both their finitude and contingency are nowhere better illustrated than in terms of their temporality. Each origin and each conclusion is finitely determined. It need never have existed, or it could have existed in a very different form. This temporality is differentiated in terms of past and present.

The future is usually conceived as empty, devoid of any actuality. It has been deemed necessary to understand it in terms of the conditions the present lays down on the future in order to conceive the future in accordance with the ontological principle. But such measures consider the future only objectively, without reflecting upon its own intrinsic subjectivity, by which it could be actual in itself.

Yet the future has better warrant for being infinite than either of the other modes. Every present actual occasion we are acquainted with is finite. It must be in order to achieve determinateness. While the past taken collectively may be infinite in extent and number, each individual past occasion is finite, as well as being devoid of creativity. On the other hand, if the future has its own subjectivity, the creativity it so possessed undividedly would be infinite in scope and power. 36

PART III— THE IMPREHENSIBILITY OF GOD

Chapter Eight— The Power of the Future

God could affect the world insofar as God was conceived as purely nontemporal, as the nontemporal actual entity. But when Whitehead adopted a more complex view of God as including also a consequent nature, he found the prehensibility of the everlasting concrescence more problematic. At least he was apparently unable to integrate the provision of initial aims with God's responsive interaction with the world through his consequent experience. This meant that two primary themes of process theism, divine persuasion and temporalistic theism, are given no final synthesis.

His disciples and interpreters have fared little better. Those who adhere most closely to the text can only affirm partial divine prehensibility. The most common modification, Hartshorne's, achieves complete prehensibility by reconceiving the everlasting concrescence as a series of actual occasions. It reduces the transcendence of God to the abstract features of this society, which all too easily coincide with the most general features of the world. It has the defect of its virtues: in treating God more like an occasion some apparent coherence is achieved, but at the expense of treating God too much like the world. 1 It treats pure subjectivity as if it could be objectified.

All of these options assume that God can be effective in the world only insofar as God can be prehended. I think we need to explore options that accept the imprehensibility of God.

Also, they assume that either God influences the world in terms of God's present concrescence or in terms of divine pastness. Or by various stratagems God is considered influential as nontemporal. One temporal modality, however, has not been considered: God as future creativity, the source of our own creativity. That will be our task in the rest of this book.

I— God and Future Creativity: Some Preliminary Objections

It is one thing to plead for the actuality of future creativity; it is another thing to identify it with God. We will do well to ponder some prelimi

nary objections, which collectively constitute a major obstacle to this enterprise.

1— God and Creativity

Whitehead nowhere identifies the two. At one point he considered them to be contrasting formative elements of all actual occasions (RM, 90), the one as actual but nontemporal (God), the other as nonactual but temporal (creativity). While by the end Process And Reality God no longer functions as a formative element, creativity and the eternal objects could be considered the formative elements of all actual entities.

There are at least four reasons for not identifying creativity and God:

(1) In that way we avoid the omnipotent determinism of a Creator God. In Science and the Modern World he had distinguished between the underlying substantial activity and its various modes. This is surely reminiscent of Spinoza, who conceived the world as the deterministic outcome of the divine substance, but Whitehead inverted the order of actuality: the modes are the actual occasions, not the underlying activity. This carries over. Creativity is actual only in terms of its accidents, the particular actual entities (PR, 7).

If divine creativity were coincident with present creativity, either the divine would determine present creativity, or vice versa. Thus, we would have either divine determinism, which Whitehead rightly rejects, or God's activity would be indistinguishable, and as pluralized as the world's. Neither need result if the divine determination preceded present determination, in such a way as to be less determinate than the present. Then present determination would be free to be what it is by further determining creativity.

(2) God can be prehended; creativity cannot. This objection would be decisive if prehension were the only way God could influence us. It is the way the past influences us, either concretely in terms of actual occasions or abstractly in terms of eternal objects. 2 Yet God could also influence us in terms of the future, were God identified with future creativity. The transmission of future creativity to the present could not be a prehensive relation, because the occasion must first have creativity in order to prehend. Yet there could be divine influence if the present occasion is the present instantiation of what just was part of the future divine creativity.

(3) A third objection is that God, not creativity, is supremely worthy of worship. Pure creativity is without any character of its own. It is the engine of all activity, good or bad, and can be neither praised nor blamed for what happens.

This objection certainly applies to pure creativity, but future creativity is a distinctive kind of creativity, informed by aim. The divine exercise of creativity in the future is different from the various activities of creativity in the present. We have been accustomed to conceiving of creativity as restricted to the present, where it underlies all worldly activity, good or evil. That need not be so concerning the future.

(4) A fourth objection is that distinctive features of God, such as divine individuality and personhood, cannot be derived from the nature of future creativity. I do not think that such a derivation is necessary. Divine individuality and personhood must be compatible with future creativity, to be sure, and that I hope to show below.

2— God and Being

In many circles, to say that God has no being is tantamount to asserting that God does not exist. In that context being is the allinclusive designation of reality, whereas Whitehead uses being and becoming contrastively. Pure becoming such as the consequent nature is an everlasting process of unification, which does not terminate in any final unity. It has no unity or being, but for all that it is something real.

Whitehead, however does not conceive God as pure becoming. This would be an appropriate way of characterizing the everlasting concrescence of the consequent nature, but there is also primordial nature. In itself this is the primordial or nontemporal concrescence of all eternal objects, but it functions as a timeless objective fact within the everlasting concrescence. As such it is the nontemporal being within everlasting becoming.

Hartshorne's modification of this divine conception also imports being into becoming. Each divine occasion, like each actual occasion, is both a concrescent instance of becoming and the concrete prehensible being that results from this concrescence. The divine series thus alternates between becoming and being, for it is only as being that God can be prehended.

If God is future creativity, God must be conceived as pure becoming, without any admixture of being. Then God must be imprehensible, although this need not mean that God could have no influence upon the world. It simply means that God does not influence the world the way the past does, by means of prehension. It means that under certain conditions the everlasting concrescence need not harbor any primordial being.

The issue really turns on whether there are any uncreated eternal objects. If there are, these must be nontemporally ordered, yet if all can be derived from the concrete actualities by abstraction, they can be ordered in the everlasting divine concrescence. There is the special case of novelty, which

requires further examination. Whitehead held God to be the instrument of novelty for the world, providing unrealized eternal objects, those that had never before been temporally actualized. These could not be derived from past actuality, he held, because you cannot derive the new from the old.

Yet it might be possible for an actual occasion, inspired by a nonobjectifiable aim, to actualize a form hitherto absent from the world. God would still be the ultimate source of its novelty, but not by means of an objective form. An indefinite aim is capable of being rendered definite by the concrescing occasion. The novelty first becomes definite, that is, first becomes an eternal object, by this temporal process. If we can thereby affirm the atemporal character of objective forms while removing their supposed uncreatedness, this should be sufficient to obviate any need for a distinct primordial nature, and any need for multiple natures. 3 God is simply the single everlasting concrescence that constitutes future creativity for others.

As long as God is conceived as a being, there is an opposition between Whitehead's theory and Paul Tillich's. Consider the contradiction between these two statements: ''God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse. He is their chief exemplification" (PR, 343). "The being of God cannot be understood as the existence of a being alongside others or above others . . . Even if he is called the 'highest being' in the sense of the 'most perfect' and the 'most powerful' being, this situation is not changed. When applied to God, superlatives become diminutives."4 Whitehead insists that God must exemplify the metaphysical categories, while for Tillich God, who is not a being, transcends them all.

In the context of that debate we may wonder whether Tillich's assertions about God are finally intelligible. His via symbolica may degenerate into a simple via negativa.5 If God is not a being, none of the terms we apply to beings can be appropriate for God, except in an entirely different sense. But then we could assert that God is multicellular, just not in the sense that particular beings might be multicellular.

The context shifts dramatically if we reconceive God as pure becoming. Such becoming is not a being, but it is not conceptualized simply in negative terms. Pure becoming may be construed as a positive version of Tillich's notion of God as "not a being." Moreover, God can still be conceived as an instance of the metaphysical categories, for in Whitehead's hands these are no longer categories of being but primarily categories of becoming (concrescence.)6

But if divine becoming is not a being, then in what sense could it be said to be personal? Tillich seems to have concluded that if God is not a being, then God is not a person. He is thoroughly aware of the issues involved, and of the centrality of divine personhood to the biblical faith, but

that seems to be his final conclusion in Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality. 7

3— God and Eternity

If we identify God with the activity of the future, doesn't that prevent God from encompassing all time?

God can encompass the modes of time by being one and knowing the others. Usually, God is conceived as eternal, yet knowing past, present, and future. I am profoundly skeptical whether any eternal knowing is possible, at least if eternal means what is timeless or immutable. Timeless knowing abstracts from an essential condition for subjectivity, namely, temporal duration itself. Objects can be timeless because abstract (whether created or uncreated).

God is thought to know past, present, and future, but process theism has argued that future contingents cannot now be known as actual, and God can only know the knowable. The present, as opposed to the immediate past, is also unknowable. Only being, not becoming, is knowable. Subjectivity, both in terms of the interiority of experience and the freedom of decision, cannot be objectified in the form of being.

Tillich and others conceive of the divine eternity as an enlarged presentness. If so, God is a present subjectivity, including both past and future by knowing them. Yet how can there be any determinate future to be known?

The past cannot know the present and future for the same reason timelessness cannot. Both lack the subjectivity necessary for knowing.

God as future encompasses the temporal modalities the best, because it compensates for not knowing a future lacking all objective being by actually being now our whole future. When the future does become determinately actual, of course, it will be knowable, but then it will no longer be future but past. The future qua future is unknowable since nonobjectifiable, but it can be encompassed in another way. God cannot gain any epistemic distance on the future since it constitutes the very being of the divine. Since the future is God, it cannot be divinely known as separate from God.

To be sure, God cannot know the present, except indirectly in terms of the creativity and aim God provides, and by knowing the total situation of past actualities each event confronts, and by knowing the occasion's decision once made. But the decision making is unknowable, even for God.

4— God As Future Actuality

Langdon Gilkey, while quite sympathetic to the power of possibilities that call us forward into a new future, which he traces to the writings of Ernst

Bloch, objects to the eschatological theologians influenced by Bloch (e.g., Moltmann, Pannenberg) for whom "the possibility of the future has been hypostatized into the God of the future who effects or causes the present from the future, i.e., as an active agent causes." 8

Clearly there are similarities between their view and mine. In both God is an active agent who affects the present from the future. On the other hand, there is an essential difference. From my perspective, they have conceived the actuality of God in terms of present actuality. Put in Whiteheadian terms, Pannenberg at least conceives God as an immensely longlasting concrescence embracing all the time in the world, yet like all present occasions finally comes to an end in a cosmic satisfaction. It is essential to Pannenberg's conception of actualization that there be this final satisfaction, for without it God would not exist as an actual being.

On my view the static quality of future possibility has been transformed into the dynamic quality of future divinity. To that extent, possibility has been hypostatized, "made more of." But this is not in the ordinary sense in which possibility has been rendered more determinate. In both cases, whether in terms of ordinary possibilities or the activity of divinity, the future is less determinate than the present, and always will be so. On Pannenberg's view God will become in the future the most determinate reality imaginable, determining how all concrete actualities will be ordered together.

5— God As Becoming

Another concept, which is sometimes named the God of the future, must be distinguished from my concept. It is the notion of a God who will or might come into being in some later age. Perhaps the earliest expression of this notion was developed in Zoroastrianism: Ahura Mazda is not yet powerful enough to overcome Ahriman (Satan) and the evil he causes, but Ahura Mazda will someday soon be able to do so. When he binds Ahriman, evil will be no more, including the evil of death. Then all will resurrected to live in the age to come. At present God is weak, but then he will be omnipotent.

Kazantzakis's struggling God, or Samuel Alexander's future deity, or der werdende Gott (God as becoming) articulated particularly by Schelling and Hegel are examples of this God who will be. Teilhard de Chardin would also represent this alternative if God were completely identified with Christ (this is neither clearly affirmed nor denied). Then the Omega Point would be a dramatic and ultimate transformation of the power of Christ. This has striking affinities with the eschatological visions of Moltmann and Pannenberg, except that (for Pannenberg at least) the existence of God is problematic apart from that final actualization.

Characteristic of these proposals is the claim that the essence, the necessary structure of God, is subject to change, usually by means of an internal dialectic. The conception I propose holds that God does not change in terms of any inner nature, but only in terms of experience. Any change entails contingency: the perishing of what was, and the emergence of what had not yet been. That which is necessary is contextindependent, and hence invariant in every temporal situation.

Der werdende Gott was a laudable effort to import temporality into the divine, but it retained the traditional assumption that God was wholly necessary. Necessary change within God could then only be understood in terms of logical necessity, whether conceived with deductive rigor or in a more relaxed dialectical manner. Only the problematic identification of logical and temporal transition could import temporality. Contingency might be included, but only accidentally, as illustrating the necessary structures attained.

Unless there are special safeguards, the very possibility of change in the inner nature of God is open to many undesirable alternatives: God might become vindictive, merciless, hateful, indifferent, evil. The dialectic must be sufficiently convincing in that it moves ever onward and upward toward greater richness and complexity. This is in turn suggests that the earliest stages were unworthy of God.

In differing degrees with respect to the present nature of God, all these proposals envision that God will really be God when finally fully determinate. They assume that God is to be understood in terms of the modality of the present, where concrescence always terminates in determinate actuality. From Whitehead's perspective, this is the actuality of the past. Then God is immutable as in traditional theism, but only because the process has been fully achieved. For Pannenberg, as we have seen, God cannot be fully actual until the final consummation. I concentrate rather on the actuality (better, activity) that God has in the process.

As we shall see, Whitehead once conceived God as the primordial (nontemporal) actuality that was above all change. Specifically, God was then conceived as the nontemporal unification and ordering of all the eternal objects. That notion of God as primordial was not altered in his final concept, but it was relativized by the addition of second, consequent nature in which God experienced the ongoing contingency of the world. The traditional assumption that God is wholly necessary is retained in the form that the primordial nature, God conceived apart from the world, is wholly necessary (and nontemporal).

In order to affirm a meaningful divine process, Whitehead relies on contingency. In the final analysis, change presupposes a contingent shift from something that passes from being, to something else that comes to be.

Contingency is the world's contribution to God, just as necessity (and its order) is God's gift to the world.

II— The Identification of God with Future Creativity

There is a double problem here: the identification of God and creativity and the intelligibility of future activity.

For many, the chief reason for resisting any identification of God and creativity is the danger of pantheism. If actual occasions are purely activated by a divine creativity, moreover, there is the additional danger of determinism. Even if actual occasions freely determine themselves as instances of divine creativity, the divine cannot be conceived as having its own unity and individuality. This is comparable to the problem of distinguishing the divine spirit from our spirits. If creativity is something all actualities participate in, how can it be something individual in its own right?

This is one strong reason why Whitehead rejects the claim that God is the source of creativity. It would be a decisive objection, if (as most assume) creativity were restricted to the present. In the present there is a great multiplicity of actualities partaking of a necessarily nonindividualized creativity. For God to be personal, God must be an individualized instance of creativity, which is only possible if creativity has a future instance. 9

Let us consider four advantages for characterizing God in terms of future creativity, including a further exploration of the theme of God as personal.

1— God As Personal

Present acts of determination result in determinate being. Such acts of determination pluralize the creativity they receive. But there are no such acts of determination in the future. There is, to be sure, the everlasting concrescence, but it is not like a present act of determination since it never terminates in being. Because it is not pluralized by any acts of determination, the creativity of the future is one single process of unification.

Thus, creativity has two fundamental aspects, monistic and pluralistic. But these contrasting tendencies do not operate within the same domain where such tendencies could become contradictory. In the future domain creativity is concentrated in a single cosmic act of concrescence; in the present it is expressed by the many concrescences of the actual world.

In its inner activity the divine future concrescence is exactly like Whitehead's divine concrescence. However, he assumed the everlasting concrescence to take place in the present, which would seem to entail that the same spatiotemporal region is occupied by both God and actual occasions.

Then the creativity of that region would be exercised by different and often conflicting actualities, which would be impossible.

For me creativity fills the present and the future, the past being devoid of creativity. There is no overlap, however, between future and present, as long as these are conceived in terms of a fourdimensional spacetime. Even though the spatial coordinates might be the same, future space is not present space. Yet the interface between future and the whole of worldly (present) space fills all space. As active along that interface, God is omnipresent, actively interacting with the present from the standpoint of future space.

Thus, God is subjective, prehending all possibilities and actualities as they come into being, valuing all concrete situations and providing their aims. No inner property of God's everlasting concrescence as conceived by Whitehead is modified, except with respect to the uncreatedness of the eternal objects and what this entails for the primordial nature. Yet God is also pure spirit. In this context this means that God has no being, only pure becoming. Whitehead has shown that subjectivity, understood as concrescence, can be different from objectivity. If there is any pure concrescence that does not result in being, then it could have as rich a subjective life as Whitehead can ascribe to God.

2— Divine Responsiveness

Divine personality does not merely mean inner subjectivity, even if this includes the contingent experience and inner relatedness to temporal actualities. If so, God would be superfluous to the working of the world, powerless to affect it. Moreover, theists seek more than simply a general or universal divine influence. Is there a way in which God can respond to the world as well, not merely in general, but with "particular providence for particular occasions" (PR, 351)?

Whitehead assumes that there can only be influence by means of prehension. Thus, in order for God to influence a nascent occasion, God must in some sense be objectified (become or be a being) in order to be prehended. But he has wrought the system too well: God (except primordially) is imprehensible. Therefore it would seem that God has no influence on the world.

I come at the problem from a different perspective, by challenging the assumption that all influence must be prehensive, and by asking, What kind of influence could an imprehensible God have? Or more basically, What must God be like to be imprehensible?

Note that these questions only affect God's outer nature, the way God relates to us, not to God's inner nature, which retains the same rich subjectivity Whitehead ascribes to it.

If imprehensible, God must be less determinate than that which can be prehended. God contains no being, whether of actual entities or eternal objects. In order for God to be something and not merely nothing, God must be identical with the one "thing" left, creativity.

That answers the question about influence: God basically influences the actual occasions by imparting to them some of God's own creativity, thereby empowering them to prehend and to achieve integration. They appropriate this creativity as their own. Yet if that were all, there would be no special or particular influence on an individual occasion. Thus, God also provides the occasion with its initial aim, provided this is accomplished in a way that does not involve uncreated eternal objects.

Aim is diffused through the divine future. Its more general thrust remains the same: it seeks the most intense and harmonious experience possible. The divine aim more concretely is largely concerned with integration of the prehended past into this experience, harmonized with conceptual supplementation. But in the regions of the divine future near to the present interface, the concern of aim is more with how present occasions can and will actualize themselves with respect to this general aim.

As present occasions come into being, they partake not only of the future creativity adjacent to them, but also of the aim that suffused that portion of divine creativity. Here the divine aim is adjusted to the needs and concerns of that particular region of creativity, once divine, now creaturely.

3— Perfect Power

The conception of God I propose is not possible if it is assumed that omnipotence is the only proper form of perfect power. Before it was possible, there had to be a reconception of divine power replacing omnipotence by persuasion.

We can differentiate the various forms of perfect power modally, in terms of whether power is characteristically exercised by the past, the present, or the future:

(1) Past power is efficient causation, with omnipotence as its perfect instance. For Whitehead, each occasion brings itself into being out of past actualities functioning efficiently. Since there is always room for unifying any given multiplicity, there is always some residual freedom for the occasion. Yet if the causal power were complete, there would be determinism, for then the past would completely cause whatever the present is.

There are many ways to mitigate this conclusion, but to be satisfactory, they need to establish some power in addition to the divine power. Most hold divine power in abeyance most of the time, interrupting the natural course of

things occasionally. Then we confront the question of theodicy: God could eradicate egregious evil, but appears not to be willing.

(2) Perfect present power could constitute a form of control. Such power would be based upon the selfcreative power of the occasion taken to its extreme. Actual occasions, by and large, control very little, not even their destiny. But embodied occasions might control their own bodies by persuasion, and their surroundings either by persuasion or determination. The extreme of perfect present power might be the control of the entire world, conceived as its body.

Yet the world does not seem to be that well coordinated to function as the vehicle of present power. Also, if it did come under the complete control of one being, the freedom of the parts could be jeopardized.

(3) Future power, also in its perfect instance, is persuasion. The "still small voice" is neither determinative nor controlling. I mean by it the aim derived from the future, freed from many of the connotations of human persuasion, from which the notion is taken. It seeks the wellbeing of the present occasions coming into being rather than to shape them to some ulterior ends. What happens does determine the particular character of the divine experience, but God by conceptual supplementation can transform its gross evil into tragic beauty. 10

4— God as Empty

In Buddhist aspiration, the ultimate is conceived as "nirvana," the cessation of all attachment or desire. For Buddhists, nirvana (or shunyata) is "that than which nothing greater can be conceived."11 More recently, particularly in Mahayana Buddhism, the ultimate goal has been understood in terms of shunyata or emptiness. Empty of what? Provisionally this has meant empty of attachment; ultimately, it has been taken to mean empty of being.

Attachment pertains to subjective form, the way in which what is prehended is felt. The goal of nonattachment seem to be the prehension of the many actualities of the world with no positive attraction to any. All the subjective forms would then have a flat, neutral affect. This may or may not be achievable, or even desirable, yet it is worth exploring whether my conceptuality is able to express some of these Buddhist concerns.

For Whitehead, however, every occasion must have some aim. Otherwise there would be no way for its prehensions to be directed to a common goal. If it cannot be so directed, there could be no concrescence, no actualizing unification. Since the aim directs the subjective forms, it would not be possible for them to be absolutely flat or nonexistent and the aim to be

effective. Some aim is necessary, but it could still conform to a Buddhistic ideal.

It then becomes a question of the nature of the aim. It could be very narrow and particular, or very broad, as Whitehead described Peace:

It enlarges the field of attention. Thus Peace is selfcontrol at its widest,—at the width where the "self" has been lost, and interest has been transferred to coordinations wider than personality. (AI, 285)

The aim governing these subjective forms has lost all selfinterestedness in the attainment of compassion. 12

Whitehead's conceptuality has been very helpful in analyzing Buddhist concepts, for both see enduring personality in terms of a series of occasions, and creativity can express much of the character of emptiness. While emptiness is not a being, it surely is not nothing. The relation between God and creativity in process philosophy is akin to the relation between the Christian God and Buddhist emptiness. John B. Cobb Jr., who has explored these relations in detail,13 distinguishes between God as the ultimate actuality and creativity as the ultimate reality.

This is surely proper, given Whitehead's conceptuality. All instantiations of creativity are present, individualized in terms of the different actualities these instantiations create. Creativity itself is completely formless. It has no subjectivity, for all subjectivities participate in it. Put another way, we might conceive of subjectivity as the interiority of creativity, but it can be realized only as individualized. If God is one of these individuals, even as the ultimate actuality, then God cannot be identified with the creativity of emptiness.

If creativity can be future as well as present, then it need not be only that indeterminate activity that all individuals participate in. There is one mode of creativity exempt from the necessary dialectic of plurality. God does not participate in future creativity alongside other participants, God is creativity as future. God is not specified or individualized by anything other than this creativity. The sense in which God is actual is modally specified in the same way. Then, to use Cobb's terms, God is the ultimate actuality as the ultimate reality of creativity.

God as future is empty. The future as yet has no being, since being belongs exclusively to the present and past, most properly to the past. Yet at the same time God has inwardly a rich subjectivity of an everlasting becoming, which never terminates in being.

Many have seen the fact that the everlasting concrescence never comes to completion, never comes to "satisfaction," as a defect. We should understand "satisfaction" in purely metaphysical terms, not as some state of happiness, but simply as the achievement of unity, the point at which present

becoming attains determinate being. That everlasting concrescence never reaches satisfaction means that it never becomes past. This is what distinguishes the future from the present.

If God were to achieve satisfaction, God would become a being. Such a God could not be empty, that is, devoid of being. Other conceptions may not be able to equate God and emptiness, but I believe that future creativity can. To be sure, to conceive of God as empty by itself does not establish the divine existence, but if this were established on other grounds, it would strengthen the possibility of positive interaction with Buddhism.

To treat God as a being is to make God too much like the beings of the world. To reconceive God as a series of divine occasions simply compounds the problem. God is then too much like the past, and not like the future. Yet this may be necessary unless divine influence is not restricted to the way in which the past is prehended by the present.

III— The Infusion of Creativity

Now that we have seen some of the advantages that would be ours if future creativity could be appropriately ascribed to God, let us see whether that claim can be justified and that present creativity can be derived from it. It must be shown that it is meaningful for creativity to be qualified in some way, such that future creativity may be distinguished from any other creativity.

Whitehead argues that creativity has no characteristics. "It is only then capable of characterization through its accidental embodiments," the actual entities (PR, 7). Creativity is the conceptual descendant from the underlying substantial activity, which could be characterized only by events, which are its modes (SMW). That meant that ontological primacy was given to the substantial activity, but once he recognized that actual occasions, as instances of indivisible concrescence, could properly serve as the units of actuality, the relationship was inverted. Henceforth creativity was a formative element, actual only as constitutive of actual occasions (RM, 90; cf. EWM, 96–101).

This in itself is not sufficient reason to claim that creativity cannot be characterized except by actualities. There are seven nonactual types of entities. They may have no existence apart from actual entities, but their characterization does not depend on the actual entity they inhere. If eternal objects, for example, had no character apart from the actuality they happen to inhere, they could not function as that which remains the same in diverse occasions. Epistemological realism would not be possible without that invariant identity.

Creativity, however, is not listed among the categories of existence (PR, 22). All other things can be adequately interpreted as complex unities of the entities listed: actual entities, prehensions, nexus, subjective forms, eternal objects, propositions, multiplicities, and contrasts. Creativity is far too simple

for that. Just because it is a formative element does not exempt it, for the other two formative elements, eternal objects and God as an actual entity, are definitely entities.

Creativity is excluded because of the basic dialectic between creativity, one and many (PR, 21f). Standing in necessary contrast, creativity is neither one nor many. Only that which has unity can be an entity. Even multiplicity, in spite of the unities each member of the multiplicity has, does not itself have sufficient unity to qualify as a regular entity. It is an improper entity (PR, 29f).

Yet the fact that creativity is not actual nor even an entity may not be the deepest reason why is without any character of its own. '' 'Creativity' is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact" (PR, 21). Some have supposed that since it is a universal, it must be a form, but this assumes that only forms can be universal. The "universal of universals" applies to all actualities as the power of its becoming. It cannot be a form if it is the element of unrest, the activity of actualization at the heart of every actuality. To be the "universal of universals," however, it must abstract from every particularity, and from every other entity. It is without any character of its own because it abstracts from every entity that could characterize it.

In addition, creativity for Whitehead can only be indirectly characterized by means of actualities, that is, in terms of their determinate being. The present immediacy that is the creativity of becoming must perish in order to achieve concrete determinateness. 14 Determinate being can be characterized. Both postconcrescent and nonconcrescent objects are devoid of creativity. This lack of creativity means that while eternal objects are well suited to characterize determinate actuality, they are ill suited to characterize creativity itself.

Creativity and eternal objects are externally related to one another. Neither can affect, nor be affected, by the other. Creativity cannot be characterized by eternal objects, and they are what they are quite apart from creativity. This would mean an ultimate dualism, were these substantial actualities and not formative elements that abstract from actuality. It is only the involvement of creativity in actuality that permits us to distinguish between different expressions of creativity.

Even if it cannot be characterized, creativity can be located. It is intrinsically connected with the many it unifies, and with the one it results in. The activity of creative unification takes place in the locus of the one being it becomes. In this way present creativity is localized within many particular concrescences. Insofar as the creative advance could extend beyond the present into the future, there would be a universal concrescence with its own infinite future locus.

Creativity and region are intrinsically interconnected. The region is divisible into future and present, and into the particular present regions. Whitehead does not make the first distinction, for he does not entertain the possibility

of future activity. Yet it is also because he does not conceive of different (temporal) modes of actuality, but simply of the present and past aspects of the same actuality.15

In order to introduce the future mode of actuality in terms of its own creativity, let us consider the way in which actuality can be expressed in terms of its different temporal modes. We can understand actuality in terms of the ontological principle.

1— Modes of Actuality

For many, the ontological principle is epitomized by what Whitehead calls "the general Aristotelian principle" (PR, 40). For Aristotle, the forms exist only as inherent in substances. The general rule here is that there is only one species of actuality, that is, beings that have primary existence. Insofar as there are other entities, their existence is dependent upon primarily existing actualities. Philosophies conceive of such primary existences variously: Aristotle's substances, Leibniz's monads, Whitehead's actual entities. Let us call this the principle of ontological primacy.

Whitehead describes and uses the ontological principle in many different contexts. Its meaning is rich and variegated. It cannot be reduced to ontological primacy alone.16 Many characteristic formulations emphasize the role of reason, that the fundamental reasons for things are to be found only in actualities (e.g., PR, 24). To be sure, ontological primacy explains the ontological principle: it is because only actualities exist in the primary sense that all reasons must be ultimately rooted in them. Also, the ontological principle justifies ontological primacy. In the case of the Aristotelian principle, eternal objects exist in actual entities because those actual entities are the final reasons for the existence of the eternal objects. The two principles imply each other, and can be easily confused. For our present purposes, let us concentrate solely on the principle of ontological primacy.

This principle, that there is only one species of actuality, prevents incoherence. "Incoherence is the arbitrary disconnection of first principles. In modern philosophy Descartes' two kinds of substance, corporeal and mental, illustrate incoherence. There is, in Descartes' philosophy, no reason why there should not be a onesubstance world, only corporeal, or a onesubstance world, only mental" (PR, 6).

Whitehead strives to frame a univocal conception of actuality, capable of embracing both God and the outermost puff of empty space. That single species of actuality may be conceived as presently concrescing activities. The upshot of Whitehead's inquiry is that becoming is ontologically prior to being, such that the activity of concrescence should have the primary status in existence. On the other hand, if concrescence is actual, and its outcome merely

"no longer actual," what do we make of the long standing tradition that identifies actuality with concrete determinateness? Whitehead is not willing to regard past determinateness as nonactual; they serve as perfectly good reasons according to the ontological principle.

In regarding both present activity and past concreteness as actual Whitehead is affirming two metaphysical traditions simultaneously. Yet it should carefully be noted that while these alternatives may conflict so as to be treated as excluding one another in other philosophical contexts, they do not conflict here. Nor do they have the incoherence of disconnected principles. Present concrescences are not complete, and hence not completely actual, unless they result in concrete particulars. Also, no determinate actuality can exist except as the outcome of concrescence. As the principle of process puts it, [H]ow an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is" (PR, 23).

Since the temporal difference between past and present does not introduce the incoherence the principle of ontological primacy was designed to guard against, I propose we adopt a more restricted principle: Only one species of actualities primarily exists in any particular temporal mode. In the present mode only concrescences primarily exist. In the past mode only concrete determinants primarily exist. Actuality signifies whatever has ontological primacy in a given temporal mode.

The incoherence that dualistic philosophies introduce results from placing several species of actuality within the same temporal mode, usually the present. These species must be independent and disconnected, for if the different species were intrinsically related to one another, one would be dependent on another. Then the dependent member would lack the primacy actuality requires. On the other hand, if the species were temporally different, each could be fully actual in its own mode. Intrinsic relatedness need not entail loss of ontological primacy. 17

Besides the two modes of (past) concrete determinateness and (present) concrescent activity, there could be a third, future mode of actuality. The future as ordinarily conceived is constituted of inactive possibilities, which are indeterminate, awaiting determination by present concrescent activity. The future is usually thought not to contain anything actual, but if there were anything ontologically primary in the future, it would be an infinite yet indefinite activity. As future it would constitute the indefinite initial conditions for each present occasion. In the present there are many occasions, each with its own locus. That particular locus was once part of the allinclusive future locus. The single region of creativity in the future pluralizes itself into the many finite regions of the present. In passing from the future to the present there is an ontological transformation, but not a change in locus. What was once a partlocus in the future is now the locus of a present occasion, to become the locus of a past actuality, dependent on the creative advance.

Although each is ontological primary in its own mode, there is a natural ranking of the three modes. Whitehead's whole analysis of becoming as producing new being indicates the present's priority over the past. Thus, in a very real sense the concrescent is more "concrete" than the concrete itself, not in the sense of being more determinate but in the sense of being more fully actual. Future activity is superior to present activity in terms of whole over part. For future activity is creativity monistically conceived.

Thus, it is possible to regard universal becoming as ontologically prior to particular becoming, and particular becoming prior to particular being, if we ignore temporal modes. This does not violate the principle of ontological primacy, since it is restricted to the temporal modes, while it is only within the individual modes that incoherence threatens. In any case the distinction between primary and derivative existence is still needed within each mode.

Whitehead himself did not use these modal distinctions, for he regarded the actual occasion to have present and past aspects. If we introduce the future mode, however, we need to reconceive actuality in different modes. For the particular present activity can only emerge from the universal future activity. It cannot simply be the same actuality that is both future and present, for many present activities stem from the one future activity.

As noted, present and past actuality can occupy the same finite locus. Physical time is constituted by all these loci in their determinate states. (We must remember that determinate being is not therefore static; it is composed of objective dynamic events.) From the perspective of determinateness, any given locus is either determinately actual, or does not yet (objectively) exist. Concrescence occupies the same spatiotemporal locus (in the present) as the event it becomes. Although the future is not (yet) subdivided, each present locus is continuous with its particular future. Each locus has future, present, and past aspects.

Usually, we consider only that which occupies a given finite locus as one individual actuality. Whitehead certainly did, not only conceiving concrescence and concrete determinateness as aspects of one actuality, but its creativity as well: "But there are not two actual entities, the creativity and the creature. There is only one entity which is the selfcreating creature" (RM, 102). If we so identify actuality with its locus, however, we lose the possibility of deriving its creativity from beyond the occasion itself. If the creativity is intrinsic to the occasion, it simply becomes an inexplicable surd.

Actuality may depend upon individuality, but individuality need not be dependent on a particular finite locus. Past determinate individuality is derived from particular concrescent individuality, and does have a finite locus. But individuality itself is based on the unification of creativity, and this creativity can be either universal or particular. Usually, however, particular regions of creativity are conceived as subdivisions of a universal region. This is necessarily the case if there is no modal differentiation between regions, so that

all creativity is essentially present activity. Then particular instances can only participate in a common, nonindividualized universal creativity. If God is identified with creativity, this results in pantheism. The whole can have individuality only if there is a distinct future domain. That future domain is universal in its reach yet individual in its unifying power. 18

There are other systematic modal differences between present and future activity. Present concrescence reaches its satisfaction in objectifiable being as the present becomes the past. Whitehead describes this transition in terms of "perishing" and "objective immortality": The subjective immediacy of becoming is used up in the attainment of objective being. (This does not mean that its actuality is lost; rather, that its present mode of unification is replaced by the past mode of concrete determinate unity.) The future never perishes in this sense, because it never becomes past being. In the transition from the universality of the future to the particularity of the present there is a continuous flow of creative activity. Concrete being is always particular, and being can only arise from the original, divine creativity by means of an intermediate present process of particularization.

God is an actual entity for Whitehead. Since there is only one species of actuality, God must exemplify the metaphysical principles describing this one species (PR, 343). Nevertheless, it is possible to distinguish between the general class of actual entities, which includes God, and the more particular class of actual occasions (PR, 88). In an earlier essay I described the systematic contrast indicated by this distinction as: God is the one nontemporal infinite actual entity. The actual occasions are many, temporal, and finite.19

I would now express this contrast in terms of modal difference. The contrast between God and occasions make sense in terms of the modal difference between the future universal individual and the many particular individuals of the present, while the contrast between finite concrescence and its objectification marks the contrast between present and past.

We have no good word for the univocal core of meaning common to all three modes. "Actual entity," spans present acting and past entityhood. "Actuality" is a timehonored word for that which is ontologically primary, and can be used in that sense for all three modes, nevertheless suffers from a lack of activity, particularly when pure activity is meant and not some being engaged in activity. "Activity" will not do either, for it cannot apply to past actualities devoid of any creativity. Depending on context, then, we shall describe the ontologically prior as either actuality or activity.

Actuality refers to that which is most concrete, but it does so in the most abstract way. While the metaphysician's tools are abstract concepts to describe necessary conditions, it is important that none of these conditions be left out. There is a great temptation to abstract from the temporal modalities. We must take time even more seriously by including all of its dimensions in our account

of actuality. The attempt to analyze actuality apart from activity, both present and future, leaves us with a truncated result.

Yet there is a formidable obstacle to overcome. How can creativity become particularized? How can it pass from its universal to its particular instances, especially when creativity cannot be prehended?

2— Prehension and the Infusion of Creativity

Whitehead accounts for the transfer of influence from one actuality to another in terms of physical prehension. The datum is a past determinate actual entity, which is incorporated into the activity of the present concrescence. This modal character is less evident in the hybrid physical prehension, whose objective datum is an eternal object, particularly when its initial datum is God.

Whitehead's assumption here, of course, is that eternal objects are uncreated (PR, 257), and that God's contemplation of them is timeless. If our critique in the last chapter is correct, however, eternal objects should be derived from past actuality. The definiteness of eternal objects is not the result of being uncreated, but from being abstracted from the determinateness of the past. 20

Since God cannot be prehended, it would be a mistake to fashion divine influence in terms of how the past affects the present, such as in terms of efficient causation. Nor can it be modelled after the way eternal objects affect the present, if their definiteness is ultimately derived from past determinateness. Moreover, Whitehead's concept of the primordial nature is ultimately dependent on the assumption that eternal objects are uncreated. The primordial envisagement is then the divine ordering of all eternal objects. Instead of this nontemporal ordering there could be an ongoing temporal valuation yielding initial aims.

If not from the past to the present, what about from the future to the present? How could the future affect it? Not by anything determinate or definite. Also, the present seems to acquire all that it needs from the past. Yet there are two things that present concresceing cannot obtain from the past: the power by which the occasion can prehend and concrescence, and the initial means for integrating the many prehensions it receives.

Creativity is the activity enabling prehension. Since creativity is only actual as instantiated in actual entities (PR, 7), Whitehead restricts creativity to the creature only, omitting the larger creativity for the creature. To be sure, we could then say that creativity simply wells up within each concrescing occasion, but this is really no explanation. Still later, he tries to explain the origin of creativity in terms of the past (Al, 179). While past occasions, taken together as a many, may be thought to stimulate creativity (cf. PR, 21), they

are individually devoid of all creativity. Whence can creativity come, if not from the past, nor from the present? Could it not come from the future?

The future could be its source, if it were active. Usually the creative advance is assumed to be limited to the present, but what if it were able to be extended to the future as well? We do well to mediate upon an undeveloped reflection of Whitehead's:

The passage of nature which is only another name for the creative force of existence has no narrow ledge of definite instantaneous present within which to operate. Its operative presence which is now urging nature forward must be sought for throughout the whole, in the remotest past as well as in the narrowest breadth of any present duration. Perhaps also is the unrealized future. Perhaps also in the future which might be as well as the actual future which will be. (CN, 73)

If the future is active, the everlasting divine concrescence could be that future, and still be indeterminate toward the present. Two contemporary occasions are too indeterminate to be prehended by one another, but they occupy different loci. Future creativity as a whole is in unison of becoming with present occasions. Relative to a particular spatiotemporal locus, however, the immediate predecessor (according to becoming) of a nascent occasion is its future. Future creativity can influence the nascent occasion because both occupy the same locus successively. Future creativity can influence the present in that locus by continuing its creativity into the present, thereby empowering the present concrescence to prehend.

More precisely, the future activity in all of its other loci is in unison of becoming with a given occasion. For that occasion, however, the future occasion has determined its initial situation insofar as it is determined, which is admittedly not very much. Future activity now becomes the present activity at that finite locus. There is an interface between future and present, but no overlap. If there were, there would be potentially conflicing determinations, rather than successive determinations. The atomic character of the act of becoming (PR, 69) means that the locus of an occasion cannot be subdivided with respect to its concrescence.

The way creativity is transferred from the future to the present is quite distinct from the way physical prehension transfers the initial datum "out there" to the objective datum "in here." The subject of the concresing occasion occupies its own spatiotemporal locus, while that which is prehended occupies another locus. In order to be the same datum in both loci, to be prehended from one to the other, the datum must be determined. It is externally related to the supervening occasion, for otherwise epistemological realism would be compromised.

Whitehead implicitly recognizes this distinction between the same locus and different loci in considering contemporaries. Contemporaries occupying different loci cannot be prehended, for there is nothing determinate to prehend. On the other hand, there is mutual sensitivity among prehensions with the same phase. These prehensions might be considered as contemporaries, except for the fact that they occupy the same locus.

The way a concrescing occasion is related to its own determinate satisfaction is different from prehension, because all of its phases occupy the same locus. The earlier phases occupy it as indeterminate, awaiting determination, while the satisfaction occupies it as determinate. This is also true for future creativity. The future, which affects the occasion, shares its locus. The occasion can only prehend that which occupies other loci, and insofar as these are future, they are imprehensible. As long as a given finite locus lies in the future, it is merely a potential division of this universal creativity. When the locus becomes present, the future aspect of divine activity constitutes its initial situation. God and the satisfaction thus indicate its future and past boundaries.

It is not quite accurate to consider creativity to be transferred or transmitted. These terms are appropriate for physical prehension, which requires different loci for datum and subject, but creativity employs only one and the same locus, once future, now present. Yet there are two actualities. Usually we think that only one actuality can occupy one locus, and that is true of contemporaries and of past actualities. Since future and present actualities occupy the same locus successively, transference is inappropriate in suggesting a move from one locus to another. Let us term the way creativity is passed on as infusion. 21 Future creativity infuses the appropriate creativity to the nascent occasion, thereby actualizing its locus. (This marks a difference between present and future, in that the present merely actualizes its own locus further, while the one future activity actualizes all the many loci of the present.)

Whitehead usually considers creativity in abstraction from locus, yet every portion of creativity has a definite location.22 This would be appropriate for the analysis of a formative element, but not for creativity derived from the future.

Because he considers creativity often so abstractly, it appears as axiologically neutral. Creativity undergirds all things, whether good or evil. With others, he may have coined the word,23 but it has not kept the neutral, perfectly general sense he originally intended. Creativity usually means the production of worthwhile novelty, particularly in the arts. For some thinkers, creativity also names the source of human good. Then creativity unfailingly provides the good, although we can sometimes obstruct it.24 Yet why creativity should always provide the good is problematic, unless it derives from the future. Creativity from the future is a universal activity brooking no rivals. Unlike the present, there are no competing future activities that could generate conflict, the basis of evil.

As we have seen, creativity is only actual as instantiated in actualities (PR, 7). No creativity could be transferred or infused in present occasions except from some actuality. Any actuality that is not completely determinate (such as present or future actuality) must be individually active, and it cannot be so except by informing the creativity it instantiates. For example, the creativity of an occasion and its aim inform each other, and the occasion receives its own creativity as so informed. 25

If the creativity received from the divine future were absolutely pure, important themes of temporalistic theism and divine persuasion could not be explained in terms of divine infusion alone. Yet as informed by aim, that is, as qualified in a distinctive way, the creativity that is peculiarly future can express the role of God's consequent nature toward us.

How God prehends the world, in the privacy of divine subjectivity, becomes the way future creativity is informed for its infusion in nascent occasions. In this way God exemplifies the principle of process, "that how an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is" (PR, 23) even though God never becomes determinately objectifiable. Instead, God provides each creature with an informed qualification of creativity.

Is this a form of transition? In his critique of Christian's reduction of creativity to the activity of actual occasions, Garland urges that supersession or transition is broader than simply the series of concrescences to which Christian restricts himself. I have elsewhere questioned whether "transition" is a systematic concept in Whitehead's revised theory of concrescence, but Garland can counter:

[T]he absence of any detailed treatment of transition must not obscure its basic importance to Whitehead's doctrine of temporal ongoingness. Transition processes must occur if we are to have any new processes of concrescence, for the past must be transcended in order for novel actual entities to arise. (EWP, 228)

Transition is then analyzed in these terms:

Once it receives the completed superjects, [the occasion] passes them on as data to be synthesized through new processes of concrescence. In receiving the past, it also provides the data for the present. Thus creativity explains the transition from the completion of old actual entities to the becoming of new ones. (EWP 228)

In the absence of future creativity, could creativity explain the transition from a completed occasion to a new one? The old occasion has exhausted its subjective immediacy, for its activity of unification ceases with the attainment

of concrete unity. There must be an influx of creativity for there to be any new occasions, but how can creativity come from that which is devoid of any further creativity (activity of unification)?

As we have seen, an intrinsic selfgenerating creativity explains nothing, while the past cannot supply it. The influx of creativity is best explained by the future. Future creativity can account for the ultimacy of creativity transcending the present. On the other hand, Christian's contention, based on the ontological principle, that creativity must be found solely in its actual instances, can be affirmed as well. The future instance of creativity was the one instance left out of account by both Christian and Garland.

Creativity and the ontological principle are interdependent. The ontological principle grounds reasons, or ordinary explanations, in actualities, while creativity provides the ultimate explanation why actualities are the only reasons. For "actual entities prehend their predecessors because they are all linked together as the particular 'creatures' of a single creative process" (EWP, 222).

As Garland notes, Whitehead is

not claiming that creativity is somehow more real than actual entities are. Although it is Whitehead's ultimate principle, it must always be instantiated in specific actual entities; it has no independent reality of its own. (EWP, 225)

Yet if it has no independent reality, it is difficult to see how it has the power to be the creativity for occasions yet to be (RM, 92). Thus, on Whitehead's terms we have this dilemma: Creativity explains the concrescent unification of feelings that brings about decision. Decision is the basis for actuality and reason whatsoever (PR, 43, 45). On the other hand, pure creativity by itself, since not actual, lacks the ontological primacy to provide this ultimate explanation, if it is restricted to present actualities alone. Creativity in some form needs to be actual in its own right, and this is possible only in terms of future creativity.

Put most generally, "the ontological principle means that actual entities are the only reasons" (PR, 24). God as the future actual entity is the ultimate reason why there can be the ongoingness of concrescences. The infusion of future creativity explains why present occasions actively concresce, and why they can be actual as ontologically primary in their own domain of the present. If actuality is to be differentiated according to its temporal modes, then there must be a future actuality of universal creativity.

3— Aim

The provision of initial aims posed a special problem for Whitehead. Divine persuasion required some sort of influence of God upon occasions, and

influence was only interpreted in terms of physical prehension. But a pure physical prehension would not do, because of the character of the satisfaction it prehended: ''The actual entity terminates its becoming in one complex feeling involving a completely determinate bond with every item in the universe" (PR, 44). This would seem to exclude any indeterminateness that the conceptual feeling of a possibility might have. So Whitehead devised the problematic notion of hybrid physical feelings, the physical prehension of a conceptual feeling, to account for divine persuasion. God was not wholly prehended in terms of this hybrid prehension, for only the primordial envisagement was sufficiently definite to be prehensible.

I deem the provision of initial aim as essential to any process theism, for it is the means whereby God influences the world by divine persuasion, coordinating its activities. For my purposes, neither hybrid prehension nor eternal objects (objective definite forms) are serviceable. Rather, we should look for the interdependence of creativity and aim in the initiation of concrescence.

A concrescence is an integration of many prehensions, each having its own subjective form as well as a datum and subject. These subjective forms are shaped by the occasion's subjective aim as it is progressively modified (PR, 224). The subjective forms are the factors by which a prehended datum is appropriated and integrated into the final satisfaction. The subjective forms collectively constitute the ways in which the creativity of that occasion is shaped and individualized. 26

Whitehead explains divine persuasion by means of subjective aim, but subjective aim is mediated by eternal objects. Creativity is too indeterminate to be objectifiable, even by eternal objects. What is not objectifiable cannot be objectified by objects inhering in it. Objects are aspects of beings, not becoming. They cannot characterize infused creativity. Therefore, I explain divine persuasion not by Whitehead's "subjective aim" but by 'aim' in a sense I shall stipulate shortly. Such 'aim' is mediated by "subjective forms," if reenaction were rigorously excluded.

"Subjective forms" are accorded a distinct type of existence different from eternal objects. They are "private matters of fact," specifying the way a particular feeling prehends its datum (PR, 22). They are particular aspects of subjectivity, and exist only as inherent in such creativity. This privacy is partially breached by the possibility of the reenaction of subjective form, which is introduced to explain the continuity of emotional feeling. Reenaction means that in some sense the prior subjective form is objectified for the successor prehension, to be replicated in its subjective form. Reenaction turns what otherwise is an indefinite subjective form into a definite eternal object.

As noted, eternal objects cannot characterize creativity, and hence cannot be used for the infusion of aim. On the other hand, if future creativity were to lack all form, it could not affect the present at all. Besides, divine

persuasion requires some sort of guidance, which subjective aim and reenacted subjective form provided, even if these particular modes of persuasion must be ruled out.

Let me stipulate the notion of 'aim' as a purely private form of becoming. Thus, instead of conceiving the initial aim in terms of eternal objects, we can think of it in terms of purely private "subjective forms." 27 If eternal objects are objective forms, then this is by contrast a subjective form, a form of subjectivity. Since, however, what Whitehead terms "subjective forms" are liable to objectification in terms of reenaction, it is best not to confuse matters by designating my private forms by the same term. An aim shapes creativity, but it cannot be abstracted from its creativity to be objectified. Objectification requires a certain definite being that is to be objectified, and this creativity lacks, even if informed by aim.

While purely private forms of subjectivity cannot be objectified, they can be transferred from future to present. Future creativity cannot infuse the present unless it is pluralized, and such pluralization requires some sort of form. Without there being some intrinsic features inherent in the creativity, infusion would be impossible. As we have seen, infused creativity is less definite than the occasion's decisions within concrescence, which in turn are less definite than the satisfaction.

The form of the satisfaction alone is definite, and hence is objectifiable. Only what is objectifiable is capable of abstraction. The aim and other purely private forms of creativity are incapable of abstraction, for there is no being from which they could be abstracted. If they cannot be objectified or abstracted, purely private forms can only be communicated to feelings within the same subject28 or to subjects successively sharing the same locus, such as God or inclusive occasions.29

Concrescence is primarily the integration of many physical prehensions into one determinate satisfaction. These prehensions are ways in which the occasion is internally related to past actualities. It is a process of reducing the collective indeterminacy of the initial multiplicity of relations to a determinate unified synthesis. The initial indeterminacy pertains only to the way in which past actualities will be integrated, for each actuality individually is fully determinate.

There is concomitant process of determination among the initial forms to determine the way in which the concrescence will proceed, only, unlike the past actualities, these forms are initially individually indefinite. At the outset they are vague. Indefinite form is open to all other influences within concrescence, for it is in the process of becoming internally related to them. This is the notion of the mutual sensitivity of feeling. By means of definite objective forms (eternal objects) abstracted from physical prehension (PR, 248), as guided by a progressively defined aim, the occasion wields these forms, both definite and

indefinite, into the one final definite aim capable of unifying all its physical prehensions. While the aim is indefinite in becoming, it is definite in being.

At the outset the aim is that value most appropriate to the particular world of actualities existing for that occasion. The aim, with its creativity, is the subject in the making (PR, 244). The aim, however, must be vague. Whitehead, because he regarded eternal objects to be uncreated, could only admit definite forms. Hence, the initial subjective aim was taken to be definite, derived from a nontemporal definite valuation, independent of the temporal course of events. This nontemporal valuation, itself complete, excludes any further temporal valuation. On the contrary, I regard valuation to be firmly rooted in the temporal process of actualization of a given locus, first in divine future activity and then in present creaturely decision.

Divine valuation in the immediate future is valuation for a given potential locus within its own universal creativity. This locus is then actualized with the value and creativity it had just before it became a separate concrescence. Then the occasion renders that aim increasingly definite so that it can function as the form of the satisfaction, the form by which all of its physical prehensions are synthesized together. The determinate satisfaction requires definite form, but without the nonformal component supplied by the physical prehensions the form would be merely a possibility awaiting actualization. This is a hylomorphic theory of actualization, with the physical prehensions functioning as its "matter."

Actualization makes objectification possible. Objective definite forms (eternal objects) can be abstracted from determinate actuality. Both actualities and definite forms are prehensible, while indeterminate concrescence and indefinite form are not. What we can introspect, at least insofar as it is objectifiable, stems from prior occasions, not from the present. Introspection is retrospection. While we can talk about indefinite forms as part of our theory, the definite terms we use are simply our means for considering that which cannot be directly experienced. Such analysis is analogous to the procedure Whitehead prescribes for inferring prehensions in genetic growth by tracing out the genesis of any objective component of the satisfaction (PR, 235).

A definite form is invariant from locus to locus, for it is only externally related to its surroundings. Indefinite forms are unstable, being continually affected by their surroundings within concrescence. An indefinite form may not be properly an entity. It is not one of Whitehead's proper entities. 30 He designates only one category of improper entities: multiplicities. They lack the unity of (proper) entities, not individually, but as a whole. Indefinite forms lack definite unity, both individually and collectively. Rather than being the forms of either the one or the many, they are more accurately the form of the creativity binding the other two together (PR, 21).

When Whitehead first revised his theory of prehension in terms of conceptual derivation, reversion, and integration (FH), the problem of the subject in the making was not clearly seen. But what can function as the subject bringing all things together, when there is only a multiplicity of various feelings at the outset? He had already rejected the notion of any being underlying the act of becoming. Ultimately he found a suitable candidate in the initial aim.

The initial aim's role in determining the satisfaction was secondary to its role in supplying the initial subjectivity. Whitehead needed an initial subjectinthemaking, which could be contrasted with the definite form of the satisfaction.

If the initial aim and its successive modifications can be understood only in terms of definite forms, the aim could be modified only by the stepwise substitution of cognate definite forms. The form itself cannot be rendered any more definite than it already is. There can be no satisfactory collaboration of the creature in the process of any further determination. Since the aim is already the best for that impasse (PR, 244), creaturely modification can only make it worse. Yet without modification, there can be no selfcreation. Without free response there can be no genuine persuasion.

At one place Whitehead suggests that the initial aim is multiple: "This basic conceptual feeling [subjective aim] suffers simplification in the successive phases of the concrescence. It starts with conditioned alternatives, and by successive decisions is reduced to coherence" (PR, 224). Then the initial aim may be a range of alternatives, some perhaps conflicting, among which the occasion makes its selection. But if so, where is the initial unity, without which there can be no subject, not even in becoming, to make the selection.

In contrast, I propose that we conceive of the aim as one and indefinite, which, vivified by creativity, can function as that which ultimately becomes the subject. Then the occasion could derive definite forms from past actualities and fashion them together to form the final definite form of the satisfaction, instead of these being superfluous activities not needed by already definite forms. If the initial subjective aim and its modifications were all definite, there would be little need for the categoreal conditions.

4— The Interdependence of Creativity and Aim

In the process of concrescence indefinite forms inform creativity, while the creativity provides the activity whereby they are progressively altered to become more and more definite. This of course departs from Whitehead's analysis, which restricts itself to the way eternal objects and creativity are externally related. If aim and creativity are ever to be internally related, thereby promoting interdependence of basic elements, then indefinite forms are required. Definite forms, even if temporally emergent, abstract from all creativity.

If, as for Whitehead, all form is definite, there can only be pure creativity. There cannot be different kinds or flavors of creativity, for it can have no intrinsic form. All creativity is the same. Since some instances generate conflict and evil, it cannot be wholly good. Creativity cannot be identified with God.

On the other hand, indefinite form can be intrinsic to creativity, permitting its temporal modes to be distinguished. Then God can be the future instance of creativity distinct from its many present instances. This future instance is also the ultimate source of present creativity. Interdependence ensures that this empowerment is necessarily directed by the appropriate aim for each occasion.

We might illustrate the way aim is inherent in creativity by considering the ocean. The liquidity of water may well symbolize the dynamic flow of creativity. Yet at every instant the ocean has its particular form. The analogy is only partial because the successive forms for each wave are definite and prehensible. In the case of becoming, however, the successive forms are indefinite and imprehensible. Nevertheless, form can be indefinite as well as definite. If so, there can be no particular instance of creativity without its own form, which as indefinite is fluid and everchanging. It is more a process of forming, perhaps, generating a series of interrelated forms, rather than a single form. It is "onesided," informing creativity only "on the inside." Not being definite, it cannot be objectified, but it can be transmitted by infusion, providing that the source and the recipient occupy the same locus. Thus, God's activity at that locus is continuous with the activity of the initial phase of the occasion.

In order for the aim to be received, some portion of divine creativity must be infused into the nascent occasion. The infusion of creativity and aim go hand in hand. The provision of aims becomes the means whereby the one infinite future creativity is distributed to the many finite present occasions.

The present occasion, by its activity of selfcreation, is able to achieve ontological detachment for its host. By means of the creativity it receives the occasion has the freedom to determine the indefinite aim it inherits. Were there no freedom, it must be questioned whether there would be the basis for considering it a separate occasion from God. This freedom is achieved by playing its causal factors derived from the past against the aim derived from the future, and the aim against the causal factors. If either element were omitted, there would be either divine determinism or causal determinism.

My account clearly depends upon the notion of indefinite form, so we need to explore it some more. Any indefinite form could be understood as a dense infinity of definites constituting a circumscribed continuum. Then determination would be a process of selection. Both procedures, either "definition"

of indefinites or selection among definites, result in a single definite form, which can be used for the unification of an occasion. In the latter case, however, a concrescing occasion merely selects one alternative that is already definite. By the first way, the occasion has a hand in rendering it definite. Indefinites empower the mentality entertaining them. Actual occasions can participate in making them definite, but this is not possible if all are already definite because uncreated.

There lurks the temptation to convert an indefinite form into an abstract definite form, whose more concrete properties await further determination. This temptation arises from our concern for objectification, which requires as much definiteness as possible. Yet the indefinite is not the abstractly definite. Wittgenstein aptly illustrated this with respect to the vague spot in the middle of the rug. It is quite meaningful to refer to the spot, if we do so vaguely. The spot lacks any precise boundaries, and we falsify its vagueness by trying to ascribe definiteness to it.

Definite forms are only externally related to their context. Indefinites, on the other hand, must be intrinsic to the subjectivity in which they inhere. 31 As we have seen, creativity and aim are interdependent. This interdependence extends to subjectivity as the individualization of creativity, and to other indefinite forms as well. While indefinite forms give character to subjectivity, subjectivity shapes the indefinite forms into one final definite form. Without aim or value, subjectivity is aimless.32 Yet without subjectivity, indefinite possibility has an even more precarious hold on existence than an eternal object. An eternal object is what it is in another actuality, but each indefinite form exists only in and for its particular subject.

To be sure, values can be either definite or indefinite. Typically, the same basic value may inform both the concrescence and the outcome. Its very vagueness excites the endeavor for the realization of that ideal. This excitement, however, would come to naught without the creative power of actualization individualized in the occasion's subjectivity. The final definite value is usually a particular rendering of an initially given indefinite value.

Though Whitehead uses "subjective aim" primarily to express subjective unity throughout concrescence, the aim must be sufficiently inclusive as to embrace all possible outcomes. Otherwise there could be some outcome that escaped initial valuation. Since there cannot be many subjective aims for any one occasion, the initial aim should be the valuation of alternatives. As Whitehead puts it, "This basic conceptual feeling [i.e., the subjective aim] suffers simplification in the successive phases of the concrescence. It starts with conditioned alternatives, and by successive decisions is reduced to coherence" (PR, 224).

If the initial aim consists only of uncreated definite eternal objects, it must contain a dense infinity representing every conceivable alternative, all

divinely valued. If, however, the aim is understood more in indefinite terms, there need be only the vague excitement to realize the appropriate ideals.

Rendering possibility more precise is required for the formation of the self in concrescence. In determining what it should become so as to affect others, it also determines itself as the agency of becoming. Could it be that the model of selecting from an array of definite possibilities implicitly presupposes more of a stable, completely formed self than is justified by the notion of selfformation?

Whitehead's subjective forms are indefinite forms, insofar as they are not yet objectified in satisfaction. The theory of the reenactment of subjective form requires that they be then transformed into definite forms that can be prehended by successors. Whitehead also considers subjective form as a component of prehension, along with the datum and subject. I have not considered indefinite form in that role, but see no reason why the way a prehension is felt could not be indefinite. Only the datum must be definite or determinate.

On the other hand, indefinite forms need definite forms to respond to, either in the form of determinate actualities or as definite forms abstracted from actualities. Response requires either perception or conception, either physical prehension of the determinately actual, or conceptual prehension of the definitely possible. Unless indefinite forms become definite, they cannot influence others. Indefinite forms by definition are insufficiently determined to be objectifiable.

The progressive definition of the indefinite is sufficient to render it definite, but only definite forms can unify the various physical prehensions. The concrescence thereby achieves sufficient definiteness of form to integrate the data physically felt into a final satisfaction.

There must be reasons for both elements of this interdependence. The aim has its initial reason in God, while the reason for its continuation lies in the occasion. Likewise, the particular exercise of creativity lies in the subjectivity of the occasion, since subjectivity is the individualization of creativity. The initial reason for this creativity would be its general nature. There must be a reason why an occasion can prehend and integrate its prehensions. The occasion is the reason for its particular response, but what is its reason for having the power to make decisions at all? Is it sufficient simply to say that it is intrinsic to the occasion?

According to the ontological principle all reasons are ultimately vested in actual entities, in actual occasions for particular reasons, and in God "for reasons of the highest absoluteness" (PR, 19). The reason for the creativity whereby creatures make decisions ought to be found in God. It is not, because Whitehead assumed that all influence from one actuality to another can only be effected by prehension. Since only definite forms can be prehended, and all definite forms are external to creativity, creativity cannot be prehended. There

is also another reason. There is no way to know whether pure creativity could be transmitted from one actuality to another. Since pure creativity abstracts from all forms, it would be impossible to specify either source or recipient. It would be the same in every instance.

The infusion of creativity, to be explained in terms of the ontological principle, requires some intrinsic indefinite concrescent forms. Then it is possible to distinguish between the one infinite cosmic future creativity and its many particular present instances. The indefinite individual aims enable the particular occasions to define themselves, thereby making definite contributions to the ongoing world.

So far, however, this analysis of the influx of creativity as informed by aim has not addressed one basic problem: How can the seamless whole future creativity be pluralized into the many actual occasions comprising the present? This question will be taken up in the next chapter in the discussion of the nature of persistence.

Chapter Nine— Persistence and the Extensive Continuum

I— Persistence and Perception

Since the many present occasions all participate in a creativity received from the future, yet future activity is one, there must be some process of pluralization or diremption, whereby the one instance of creativity becomes many. One possibility ascribes the means for this diversification to God. This approach was adopted by Whitehead, at least with respect to the standpoint for a nascent occasion: "The quantum is that standpoint in the extensive continuum which is consonant with the subjective aim in its original derivation from God" (PR, 283).

Thus, for Whitehead God determines the initial locations and thereby the initial atomizations of the extensive continuum, using the provision of the initial subjective aim as the vehicle of determination. If we apply that solution to our problem, then God would pluralize future creativity into its many present instantiations. God would be the reason for the manifoldness of present creativity, and hence the principle for the world's many occasions.

Such an approach has the disadvantage of assigning to God a role that can be performed by the world. God could do it, but only at the cost of ascribing superfluous functions to God that could be fulfilled otherwise. It is somewhat like Islamic occasionalism, which holds that all events are the result of God's direct efficient causation. All are miracles, in other words, those happening in a regular pattern being the result of God's ordinary habits. Following Aquinas, most thinkers have found that the laws of nature could explain empirical phenomena better. The whole of scientific inquiry is based on this assumption.

The theocentric theory seems unnecessarily complex. It places an additional burden on God's provision for present occasions, in order to be able to determine precisely the appropriate standpoints required. This determination seems otherwise to flow automatically from the nature of the past.

It also seems to pose a question of theodicy. If God ought to realize the good whenever possible, it would seem that in many instances better consequences

might result from some alteration in the initial standpoints of the present, perhaps by halving or doubling the size inherited from immediately past occasions. But this rarely seems to happen.

On the other hand, there may be exceptional instances in which divine initiative is called for, particularly in the emergence of complex occasions. Consider the nature of macromolecules on the threshold of life. The past may be able to account for the standpoints of the molecular occasions, but not of a living, more inclusive cellular occasion. 1 Here a divine response may be required, but it is a response to a particular past, which is a necessary constituent for the emergence of life.

1— Diremption

Generally speaking, the contingent particularities of the past could determine how creativity is divided into the many present occasions Here we need to consider those elements that could serve to divide the future continuum of creativity. In general the activity of occasions exhibits stabilities and fluctuation. Since the fluctuations do not constitute any continuing, persistent pattern, they are of little help in determining the outward character of later occasions. Stabilities, on the other hand, conceived in terms of their continuing momenta, can determine the way inherited creativity could be atomized. The momenta inherent in past occasions persists beyond itself into the present, dividing it into a new plurality of many occasions.

Let us call very primitive occasions 'persistencies.' These are personally (more often, corpuscularly) ordered series of occasions, in which each successor occasion merely reproduces its predecessor. These constitute all sorts of inorganic entities, but they also provide cellular structures for plants and for animal bodies. They play an essential role in protecting the delicate fabric of life from potentially harmful influences. These persistencies provide a stable structuring framework within which all finite subjectivity, mentality, and life take place.

Most generally, they pluralize creativity into the finite quanta by which finite concrescence can proceed. If we abstract from all other features, the mass and motion of a past occasion determine the parameters for its successor. Persistencies form the framework or container for the creativity of each occasion.

Persistencies form the stabilities of being. These are taken up into present occasions by means of physical prehension, and become the basic multiplicity to be unified by the occasion. By prehending determinate being the occasion finally becomes determinate being. The divine concrescence, on the other hand, never terminates in finite being. This is usually taken to be so because

the divine concrescence is infinite, but there may be another reason as well. It does not end in determinate being because it never includes determinate being in the process of its unification.

A persistency penetrates beyond the past into the present only insofar as it is present. It cannot penetrate into the future (of becoming), which is exclusively divine, nor into the future (of being), which has not yet come to be. Present occasions have a different relationship to the immediate past than God has, because present occasions are constituted by their prehension of persistencies in ways that God is not.

We started with the problem of the pluralization of creativity, but have found another way of distinguishing present and future ontologically. The present contains the past so far as it persists. The future is beyond the persistence of the past. No matter how massively or how far the past might persist, it can penetrate only into the present, never into the future.

2— Emergence of Persistence

How could these persistencies arise? According to ancient atomistic theory, the material atoms could neither arise nor perish; they were everlasting. Whitehead recognizes that the practical restriction of evolution to biology is arbitrary, and ought to be extended to the most primitive actualities:

This rapid outline of a thoroughgoing organic theory of nature enables us to understand the chief requisites of the doctrine of evolution. The main work, proceeding during this pause at the end of the nineteenth century, was the absorption of this doctrine as guiding the methodology of all branches of science. By a blindness which is almost judicial as being a penalty affixed to hasty, superficial thinking, many religious thinkers opposed the new doctrine; although, in truth, a thoroughgoing evolutionary philosophy is inconsistent with materialism. The aboriginal stuff, or material, from which a materialistic philosophy starts is incapable of evolution. This material is in itself the ultimate substance. Evolution, on the materialistic theory, is reduced to the role of being another word for the description of the changes of the external relations between portions of matter. There is nothing to evolve, because one set of external relations is as good as any other set of external relations. There can merely be change, purposeless and unprogressive. But the whole point of the modern doctrine is the evolution of the complex organisms from antecedent states of less complex organisms. The doctrine thus cries aloud for a conception of organism as fundamental for nature. (SMW, 107)

How matter might emerge, however, is not spelled out. Although my own account is bound to be quite tentative, let us speculate a bit on his principles regarding how this might come about.

The most primitive events appear to be nonsocial occasions in extragalactic space. We would be tempted to regard such space as simply a void, an absence of all occasions whatsoever, except for the following considerations: If creativity is the dynamic aspect of the extensive continuum, at least in the present, then there must be plenum of occasions, as Whitehead affirms (PR, 77). 2 Also, we should consider future creativity as constituting a plenum, since any ''holes" in the heavenly garment would conflict with God's perfection and unity. This future plenum should translate into a plenum of present occasions.3 Finally, if there were an absolute void between galaxies and possibly between stars, how would there be any transmission of light and other electromagnetic radiation?

The nonsocial occasions Whitehead primarily considered are considerably more sophisticated. They are found inside of living cells, where the other social occasions (e.g., macromolecules) can support and protect them. More importantly, these other occasions provide the means whereby the sophisticated nonsocial occasion can effect their decisions with respect to the life of the entire cellular society.

The decisive difference is that the nonsocial occasions can be influenced by alternative possibilities. They have a modest measure of freedom, at least in the sense of deciding among alternatives. The most primitive occasions, at least in their ordinary behavior, appear to be uninfluenced by any possibilities. They simply reproduce whatever comes their way. Any light or other electromagnetic activity they prehend, they pass along precisely as received. There is no individual modification by which they could be detected. They are the true conservatives of the universe, even more so than other inorganic elements, which Whitehead described as "vehicles for receiving, for storing in a napkin, and for restoring without loss or gain" (PR, 177).4

Material entities are then not the most primitive of actualities, but may have emerged from simpler occasions. A persistency, whether material or purely energetic, binds occasions in a society, either personal (singlestranded) or corpuscular. It differs from a primitive occasion in that the persistent element (the defining characteristic of the society) inherited by each occasion enables the occasion to selectively prehend its environment. It need not positively prehend all the features of that environment, in fact it probably ignores (by negative prehension) all but its most massive aspects. What it prehends, first and foremost, is its dominant predecessor and the way in which that predecessor has determined what to prehend and how to integrate those prehensions. What it thus prehends is its predecessor's final form of unification, its defining characteristic. In terms of that form of unity it can then order whatever else it prehends. In this way, that material sequence is propagated to successor occasions.

This is determinism. It is not the other occasions in general that determine it, for it is determined as to its form of unification by the dominant predecessor. There are no alternative ways of ordering its prehensions. These cannot be valued by any aim, for there are no possibilities to value. Persistencies cannot be influenced by the divine source of aim.

There may well be intermediaries, but our theory can presently only trace persistencies back to the occasions constituting what is apparently simply empty space. Presumably an occasion arises out of the "chance" combination of other occasions. This occasion apparently concentrates itself, whether in terms of matter or energy or both, so as to promote the propagation of its form in successor occasions.

The notion of "chance" is very tricky, and has different meanings in different contexts. According to the ontological principle, every actuality either determines itself or is determined by other actualities. Chance sometimes means indetermination, but not here. Here it means that the occasion is entirely determined by antecedent occasions. There is nothing left over, such as the ordering of the whole, that is determined either by self or by God. The part causes determine the whole.

Persistencies have no mentality, which I understand as the capacity to be influenced by possibility. If there are no possible alternatives, there is nothing to choose between. We might be tempted to conclude that a persistency need not be composed of a rhythm of epochal occasions. It might just be a determinate element of the past, which is simply able to persist beyond its own spatiotemporal locus into other loci now present.

This trades, however, on an unexamined assumption concerning inertial motion. The context for inertial motion is efficient causation, conceived in terms of a past cause actively bringing a present effect into being. The notion of prehension reverses that model, for it is the activity of prehending that incorporates the past into the present concrescence. By itself the past is totally inert. It can do nothing. Because it lacks any creativity, the past lacks the power even to persist beyond itself into any other spatiotemporal locus. The past can only be in its own locus. Whatever persistence we ascribe to the past is really the activity of concrescing occasions bringing that element of the past into the present.

Thus, while a persistence derives its form from its past origination, it can persist only by means of the series of occasions reenacting that form by means of a power ultimately received from the future.

3— Atrophy

So far I have considered only a deterministic model for primitive persistencies, which we may identify with elementary particles, whatever they may be, bearing in mind that these may also be routes of energy. Such deter

minism would have no room for aim, which Whitehead ascribes to all occasions whatsoever. Now let us consider that alternative. Although it might not apply in the most primitive instance, it is more likely to apply to the more complex forms of persistency: quarks, protons, atoms, molecules, macromolecules. The greater the complexity, the greater the range of alternative possibility. Then it need not be the case that the "chance" combination of antecedent occasions would entirely determine the outcome. There could then be alternative possibilities for selfdetermination, and these possibilities could be differentially valued in terms of the occasion's aim.

This could well play a role, particularly in the early stages of the universe, when the emergence of enduring matter or energy was new. Novel form ultimately depends upon unrealized eternal objects entertained by God, or (as in my theory) upon novel indefinite subjective forms informing future creativity. 5

Whitehead assumed that every occasion could achieve novelty. "Thus the 'production of novel togetherness' is the ultimate notion embodied in the term 'concrescence"' (PR, 21). "An actual occasion is a novel entity diverse from any entity in the 'many' which it unifies" (PR, 21). Since every occasion has a different world, there will be novelty in this sense, which we may call novelty of actualization.

We may contrast this with novelty of form. When a hitherto unrealized form, derived from God's resources, is actualized in the world, novelty of form has been achieved. This to my mind is genuine novelty, not to be confused with the more pedestrian reactualization of the same form under slightly different circumstances. Genuine novelty is rare, and should be highly prized, for it is increased order coming into the world.

Whitehead's determination that every actual occasion should be novel, or at least be capable of being novel, has farreaching implications. Everything in the structure of a concrescence is designed to make this so. That is one reason for its complexity. Yet it sits ill with the other claim that they "are the final real things of which the world is made up" (PR, 18). To be sure, the plethora of occasions can be reconciled with novelty in all instances by devaluing novelty to the level of the novelty of actualization. Yet this allows for no real contrast.

To be sure, most actual occasions may simply be novelties of actualization. Every occasion is new in that sense, since "each actual occasion defines its own actual world from which it originates. No two occasions can have identical actual worlds" (PR, 210). Since the actual worlds are ever different, the physical prehensions integrated by each occasion are different, even if the form of unification is the same. If this form is simply derived from the past, the elaborate structure designed to achieve novelty of form is not needed: initial aim, conceptual derivation, conceptual reversion,

modification of aim. The form of unification could be the defining characteristic of a material society, and could be simply inherited from a predecessor occasion.

Yet new forms are introduced into the material world, if there is any truth to the evolution of matter. The more complex material entities become, the more acute becomes the need for the explanation of their form. Also such factors as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle come into play. If the principle means that past causes only determine the outcome within fixed parameters, to that extent the concrescing occasion confronts alternative possibilities. This is a necessary precondition for selfdetermination, but selfdetermination also depends on other conditions: whether the occasion has the resources and power for selfdecision, and whether the alternatives can be differentially valued. If one alternative is just as good as any other, any decision would be quite arbitrary.

In any case, there is emergent novelty in the material order, especially as we ascend to greater complexity. One reason for a theory of occasions sensitive to novelty is to account for evolution. Such novelty can be explained by actual occasions. Their categoreal structure is designed to actualize unrealized possibilities, thus responding to divine persuasion. If emergent novelty is not just the result of blind chance, there must be some receptivity to ideal novelty. In terms of his theory, there must always have been occasions around capable of being persuaded by God for the natural order to have come into being.

Just because some occasions are receptive to ideal novelty does not mean that all must be. It may be possible for persistencies to atrophy. Successor occasions may not have the same responsiveness as the initiating occasion. The element of selfdetermination might have been inherited by successor occasions, but if they merely reiterate the form of unification without alteration, and their successors follow suit, any selfdetermination these occasions might have had could wither from disuse over time. If selfdetermination is not exercised, it is likely to atrophy. Such occasions have either exhausted the novelty available to them, or through habit and repetition have become insensitive to new possibilities.

Whitehead warns us against accepting the bastard substitute for Peace, Anaesthesia. Peace seeks a widening of interests permissive of Adventure, the quest for new perfections. Adventure is the cultivation of our receptivity for novelty, while Anaesthesia is the destruction of "life and motion" (Al, 285). Anaesthesia has strong similarities to what I have been designating as atrophy, although it seems to be restricted to conscious experience.

Many find panpsychism difficult to accept. Whitehead's version of panpsychism is not the ordinary pluralistic idealism such as Leibniz's, for each occasion has a physical as well as a mental pole. As we have seen, Whitehead's

commitment to novelty leads him to posit a mental pole for every occasion. To be sure, only true individuals (occasions) and not mere aggregates have mentality. There would be no need to ascribe mentality, however, to those occasions whose responsiveness has atrophied. Such occasions would have a limited categoreal structure: physical prehension, including prehension of the form of unification from its predecessor, and satisfaction. No possibilities are needed, nor could they be entertained. If most inorganic actualities then lacked mentality, the amount of subjectivity in the world would not be all that different from ordinary estimates.

Atrophy may explain a curious phenomenon in evolutionary history. Each organism displays considerable variation in early stages, but then seems to settle down to a state from which no further evolutionary change is likely.

As far as I can discern, the inorganic realm is impervious to any continued novelty, and hence needs no mentality. Only life and mind need novelty. That means we live in a world surrounded by actualities that are now dead, though once they were alive in their own way, perhaps in the deep past. Yet once the novelties for which they were suited were exhausted, they became insensitive to any others.

Actualities now dead, that is, now having lost all mentality, cannot hear God's call. That means that God's power is restricted, insofar as that power is purely persuasive. Earthquakes, the weather, the collision of comets, etc. are outside God's direction, though God once had a hand in creating them. This may apply also to most plants and animals, and, more problematically, to brutalized humans.

Evolutionary theory has relied on two great principles: chance (specified as random mutation) and natural selection. The second principle states that once an organism is suited to its environment, it will produce offspring at a greater rate than its competitors. In other words, it will manage to persist, and has no need to evolve further. If so, natural selection may be an added reason for the lessening sensitivity to divine aim. Novel actualization gives way to persistence. Persistence signifies the power of the past in contrast to the power of the present, which is finite concrescence.

This need not be an absolute either/or, either novelty or complete inertia. There are all sorts of limited uses of novelty. Hawks and other birds are reputed to have keen eyesight. They have a sensitivity by which they can respond to novel events in their visual field for miles around. Yet this sensitivity to novelty is restricted to the practical goal of finding food. Other goals are beyond their ken.

Among humans, routine deadens our receptivity to novelty. Literature celebrates first encounters, the first day on the job, because these moments are fraught with greater wonder. On other days we have settled into a comfortable rut. A child's efforts at walking or at tying one's shoes bring back that

sense of novelty. Typewriting, learned with hard effort and acute awareness, easily sinks back into an unconscious habit. The sense of novelty is replaced by the persistence of habitual routine.

Humans vary widely with respect to their capacity for novelty, which ultimately means their sensitivity to divine persuasion. Only very few are alert to it in any breadth or depth of intensity. Yet they are the ones who often are the great contributors to our culture.

4— Inclusive Occasions

Persistencies come into various grades of complexity: quarks, protons, atoms, molecules, macromolecules. Generally speaking, the more complex includes the less complex among its components. This is true if we also include living cells and minds. Whitehead's strategy is to regard only the least complex as occasions, and treat all other grades of actuality as societies of occasions, whether living or nonliving.

Among others, Fetz is quite critical of this strategy: "Whitehead's concept of an 'actual entity' is not so much for us a matter of doubt as is Whitehead's exclusive identification of (actual) entities with the final occasions even beyond the smallest known units of physics." 6 Such entities are never given in experience, and are only known to us hypothetically on the basis of investigations in physics. Whitehead's approach does not seem to do justice to the natural unities of lived experience.

Wallack boldly claims that all interpretations limiting occasions to their smallest members are false, and that every occasion includes subordinate nexus or societies.7 Perhaps this is what Whitehead should have held, but did not. Her argument for spatiotemporal inclusion cites Whitehead's authority on many points, but only by systematically neglecting the specific context of his remarks. Whitehead is usually analyzing the way in which present experience can include past data, never the way in which the present can include the present within itself.

Leclerc challenges the assumption "that the ultimate physical existent or substance in the strict sense of the term is to be identified with the final constituents of compounds, and that consequently no compound entity can be a substance."8 He proposes that the acting of occasions and the acting of compounds are both fully actual. In a compound substance there can be a mutual, fully reciprocal activity between the components that constitutes a single total act.9 Leclerc clearly recovers a sense of the actuality of larger entities, but only by substituting activity between components for activity within concrescence, and must sacrifice the advantages of the contrast between past objectivity and present subjectivity. That he is willing to do so is testimony to the awkwardness of Whitehead's own position.

Since it would be advantageous for Whitehead to introduce larger occasions, what were the reasons that may have hindered him from doing so?

(1) Atomicity. Temporal atomicity was introduced to resolve a difficulty concerning the coming into being of an occasion, not its being. Initially, this difficulty was couched in terms of Zeno's paradoxes, but the core issue centers on the nature of concrescence, which is the unification of the many simple physical feelings into the one final satisfaction. There are various phases of integration, each less indeterminate than its predecessor. These phases are not individual acts of becoming, because they do not terminate in complete determinateness. Only the final satisfaction is such. For that reason the total occasion, although genetically divisible, is atomic in the sense that it is not "divisible into earlier and later acts of becoming" (PR, 69).

Many readers suppose that atomicity per se is the reason for Whitehead's tiny occasions, but an atomic act of unification can be of any size whatsoever. 10 Atomicity is essential to the account of concrescence, and to Whitehead's distinction between present subjectivity and past objectivity. Also, it enabled to Whitehead to ascribe actuality to events. Prior to the introduction of temporal atomicity his theory of events applied to any spatiotemporal volume whatsoever. Thus, it applied to both actualities and to nonactualities alike. In such a world only the whole, the underlying substantial activity (SMW) could be regarded as actual. Events were indefinitely subdivisible. Only occasions that were ultimately indivisible could be actual, from which the rest of the world could be constructed.

On the other hand, the indivisibility of the act of becoming, which is the basis of temporal atomicity (PR, 68f), appears to preclude the possibility of any included occasions. By an included occasion I mean a smaller occasion sharing in part the same locus as the larger or inclusive occasion. If both larger and smaller occasions were to concresce to determinateness, it is possible that they would determine some part in different ways. This would be impossible for determinate actuality, which establishes a definite bond with every member of its universe (PR, 41).11

(2) Change. Atomicity may not require that occasions be small, but change does. It requires that there be at least one group of very small occasions, given Whitehead's understanding of change: "The fundamental meaning of 'change' is 'the difference between actual occasions comprised in some determinate event'" (PR, 73; cf. 80).12 Thus, for any change, there must be successive occasions small enough to account for it.

Occasions need not be of uniform size. A highly complex occasion of human experience may be as long as one twentieth of second, but this is long enough for billions of vibrations by a lithium atom.

(3) Inclusion. While the theory requires very small occasions, there seems to be no way by which larger occasions could include smaller ones within themselves. The epistemological realism of prehension provides a way of really including the past, but this provides no means whereby an occasion can include other present occasions. For contemporaries cannot prehend one another. Whitehead has thoroughly incorporated that dictum from relativity physics within his philosophy, and makes no exception for any possible included occasions.

Now, there is a way in which the present event of a persistency can be understood as a single actual occasion. Each persistency could be considered as actual in itself, potentially divisible into its components. 13 Thus, a "molecular occasion" could be actual, but its successors might be protonic. When the occasion had been actual as molecular, these "protonic occasions" were merely potential divisions of the molecular occasion. At some point in the history of succession, several atomic occasions might inherit from one molecular occasion, and several protonic occasions from one atomic occasion, etc.

The usual way of thinking about molecules as always composed of actual atoms, if not also of protons and neutrons, and so forth is based on particle assumptions rather than event assumptions. The proton is a component of the atom because under certain conditions the atom decomposes into protons, and so forth, Why not argue that it is first under those conditions that the proton becomes actual, only possessing a persistent potential status before?

While occasions are atomic, there is no necessity in this theory that particles be atomic. Any particle could split, that is, be inherited by several smaller occasions. There need be no elementary particles; there could be splitting "all the way down."

This theory can explain compound persistencies, but its scope is restricted. It cannot be extended to inclusive occasions pertaining to life and mind. It gives no insight into the novelties of response required by living occasions.

For such occasions, we need to reconceive the temporal relationship between the larger inclusive occasion and the smaller included occasion.14 For if they were contemporaries, there would be no causal influence between them. Since smaller occasions can concresce and be objectified while the larger occasion is still in process, however, they may be prehended by the inclusive occasion. More specifically, the initial phase of simple physical feeling for the larger occasion may be extended to include such concresced smaller occasions as well as the occasions of its ordinary past. The difference between ordinary past occasions and included occasions is that past occasions are not influenced by the inclusive occasion, whereas the included occasions are.

While inclusive occasions can prehend included ones, included ones cannot prehend the larger, inclusive occasion, for it has not yet become

determinate. For there to be influence, there must be the communication of aim by means of a continuity of its indefinite forms. Just as future creativity infuses aim into the inclusive occasion, it appropriates and modifies that aim by rendering it more definite, and infuses this modified but yet indefinite aim into the included occasions. The inclusive occasion never becomes determinate, however. Actual occasions in the full sense, which physically prehend their past and achieve full determinateness, only exist on the lowest level. Were inclusive occasions to achieve determinateness of their own, there would be double determination of the same locus. This is the absurdity the indivisibility of actual occasions was designed to prevent.

This theory of inclusive occasions distinguishes between the act of becoming and locus. These are assumed to be the same for Whitehead, and we must respect the reason why this is so. For there to be influence from an inclusive occasion to included ones, there must be infusion of aim, and this depends upon an inclusive locus actualized by the inclusive concrescence.

If so, the inclusive occasion cannot achieve determinateness without potentially conflicting with the determinateness achieved by its included occasions. Since there cannot be double determination, the inclusive occasions must terminate short of final determination, allowing only the included occasions as actual occasions to become fully determinate.

Although there cannot be an excess of determination for any sublocus, there is no necessity that the entire locus of the original inclusive occasion become determinate. Only those included occasions must become determinate. Only they can be prehended. The spaces in between appear to be empty, yet they pulsate with the creativity of the inclusive occasion. This distinguishes inclusive occasions from actual occasions, which render their loci fully determinate.

They are also distinguished in other ways. Both are acts of becoming; both are processes of unification; but only actual occasions become fully determinate beings. Inclusive occasions contribute to processes of unification, but do not fully achieve it. They are essentially mental occasions concerned with the refinement of aim, which they pass on to the included occasions, still in indefinite form, as they terminate. They are imprehensible, but function somewhat like the intermediate phases of concrescence. But where the intermediate phases terminate in one determination, the inclusive occasion coordinates the many included determinations. While there can be no double determination of the final satisfaction, there can be the successive determination of the aim.

Within the same inclusive locus, therefore, there may be several acts of becoming. They function differently with respect to that locus. The inclusive occasion inhabits the whole locus, while each included occasion occupies a distinct region within that locus. Each is distinct from other included occa

sions, and is not influenced by the others, in order to prevent double determination. But each is influenced by the inclusive occasion. There is overlap between the whole and the part, but this involves only successive determination. The inclusive occasion determines the aim it infuses, but does not determine the satisfaction actualizing the partlocus. Such overlap does not have the invidious consequences that the overlap of full determination would have, which may well have been the reason why Whitehead avoided any overlap. 15

There is clearly a sense in which the inclusive occasion lies in the future of the included one, but this is strictly relative. It pertains to the way the two occasions are related to one another. In other senses, both are present. Both together function as present occasions, drawing the indeterminate future into the determinate past. Both are finite parts of the creative advance of the present. Future creativity does not have the plurality of distinct concrescences, which they share with other actual occasions.

We might be tempted to understand the way the larger occasion influences the smaller in terms of Whitehead's notion of a hybrid physical prehension of the subjective end evolved for that phase (PR, 224). The subjective end is a particular eternal object marking the provisional unity of that phase. There are no hybrid prehensions within concrescence, for it is all one actuality, but there might be hybrid prehensions between actualities, particularly in terms of subjective ends.

But is a subjective end sufficiently determinate to sustain prehension? There are no prehensions of occasions still in process of concrescence, and there does not seem to be reason to warrant an exception here. Also, prehensions require a determinateness or at least a definiteness incompatible with the future status of the inclusive occasion relative to its inclusion.

Rather than definite objective forms, which eternal objects are, I have substituted indefinite subjective forms. The inclusive occasion receives its aim as informing the creativity it receives from the future valuation of its situation. Its own subjective responses also affect this aim, modifying what has been received. The subjective indefinite forms of this valuation inform the creativity to be infused into the included occasion.

Infusion of aim by way of inclusive occasions may well be a way of intensifying it. Each inclusive occasion may particularize the aim it receives in ways most relevant to its purposes. In particular the interaction between living occasions and persistencies should be considered. Persistencies, insofar as they have atrophied, are imperious to aim. But those that constitute the material components of cells and bodies seem still to be responsive to persuasion. By the inclusion of persistencies in larger occasions the purposes governing these living occasions may affect the behavior of the persistencies. Divine aim then becomes indirectly influential through the agency of the mind and other living occasions within the body.

Lacking a theory of inclusive occasions, Whitehead conceived of ''entirely living occasions" existing side by side with persistencies, thereby enlivening them. Living occasions make anarchic bids for freedom, arising wherever needed. They formed no persistencies. Being ephemeral, they were imperceptible, dwelling in apparently empty regions, yet they constituted the life of the cell and the mind of the brain. Whitehead mused that the mind is "perhaps some thread of happenings wandering in 'empty' space amid the interstices of the brain" (PR, 339; cf. 109).

Inclusive occasions, on my theory, replace these sporadic living occasions enlivening the persistencies of the cell, for the cell as a whole is to be understood in terms of one or a series of inclusive occasions, including its material components. The function of Whitehead's living occasions, to supply the needed novelty of response for the cell as a whole, can thus be accounted for in terms of the aim of the inclusive occasion, which is then shared with its subordinate occasions. In like manner Whitehead's living person lurking in the interstices of the brain is replaced by an inclusive mindoccasion pervading the entire region of the brain.

Since there are also cellular living occasions, the application of my theory also calls for intermediate inclusive occasions. The mindoccasion includes cellular occasions, which include material included occasions. This causes no modification of the theory, for both levels of inclusive occasions mediate infused aims, and do not terminate in determinateness.

Just as the material components form part of the locus of a cellular occasion, so that cellular occasion forms part of the locus of the mind. This is a spatiotemporal locus, but it is not a material locus in the sense that pertains to the material components. 16

5— Physical Perception and Prehension

Except for the most primitive of all occasions, those that occupy "empty" spaces, all occasions are either persistencies, or include persistencies as subordinate elements. These persistencies determine the spatiotemporal regions of actualities, either directly for themselves or indirectly for the inclusive occasions they participate in. The position and velocity of these persistencies determine where the next generation of actual occasions will be. They atomize the continuum inherited from the future into its many occasions.

This is a more realistic alternative to Whitehead's proposal that God determines the initial standpoint of the occasion (PR, 283). For the sake of the continuity of persistencies and other societies, that task can safely be delegated to the world.

However, the continuum of future creativity is not atomized by the activity of persistencies alone. They determine how it should be atomized, but

cannot bring about that atomization apart from the creativity they receive from the future. Without it they could not bring their past particularity into the present. So we should say most precisely, that the future creativity brings particular persistencies into the present whereby it becomes atomized.

Descartes held that were God to withhold the divine power from the world, it would vanish in an instant. 17 That is true for divine creativity, for without it there could be no further advance into the present. Yet in other respects the world is quite durable. Much of it can persist without aim. If we think of spirit as source of aim, the biblical writer is more accurate: "If he should take back his spirit to himself, and gather to himself his breath, all flesh would perish together, and man would return to dust."18 Life and consciousness depend on novelty, but not necessarily the primitive elements.

The transfer of creativity from the one cosmic future to the many occasions of the present depends upon persistencies for its dispersal, but it also requires the exact determination as to which aim is appropriate for which occasion. This is not clearly specified on Whitehead's account, yet this is not something the nascent occasion can do for itself. Not having yet received any informed creativity, it lacks the discernment or the power to select its proper aim from the myriads of aims found in God. If so, the determination of the appropriate aim must be provided for it by God, but how?

The interface between the future and the present provides a way, but first we need to make a distinction between what we shall call 'physical perception' and physical prehension. Physical prehension prehends actual entities in all their concreteness, as opposed to the abstractness of conceptual prehension. Physical prehension is also the way persistence from the past is maintained. This is most evident in the structure of concrescence, which individualizes the process of creativity, whereby the many become one. The many are the many past actualities that persist into the present occasion. The one is the one final feeling of satisfaction that unites all these persistent elements.

Most of Whitehead's attention was absorbed by the task of finding or constructing the form of the final satisfaction, which is the means whereby the many prehensions of past actualities can ultimately be unified. This is the task of the mental pole, and involves conceptual reproduction and reversion (in one theory), or the modification of initial aim (in another). Conceptual feelings come and go as needed for the final form. But the physical feelings are there all along. The persistencies inherited from the past are incorporated into the satisfaction to be that which persists into the new present.

Persistence is essential if we wish to explain causation, as Process and Reality does. Yet if we look back to Science and the Modern World, we find that he avoids any consideration of causation, because he is seeking a way around the bifurcation into apparent and causal nature. Instead of causation,

he sought to understand things in terms of a different notion of prehension. His original metaphysics was based on one major assumption, that an event is constituted out of its prehensions of all other events, past, present, and future. "The aspects [prehended] are aspects of other events as mutually modifying, each the others. In the pattern of aspects they stand in their pattern of mutual relatedness" (SMW, 151; cf. EWM, 28). No distinction is made between past and future prehension, or between immediate and distant prehension of the past.

Efficient causation concentrates on that part of the past that persists into the present. For that reason it restricts itself to the immediate past and that part of the past that can be mediated or transmitted to the immediate past. Since the scope of prehension in the earlier book (SMW) is much broader, I propose for clarity's sake that we rename its notion of prehension 'physical perception'. Whitehead's model was clearly perception, but he wished to generalize from ordinary perception: "I will use the word prehension for uncognitive apprehension" (SMW, 69). Does "uncognitive" mean simply "nonconscious but subjective" or "nonsubjective''? We are not given any explicit guidance, but I take it to be nonsubjective. For "subject" is not used generically of "prehension" in the earlier (SMW) theory, 19 although in later theory it appears as one of the essential factors of prehension (PR, 23, 141). Early prehension is primarily the relation between two events in terms of a common eternal object. Looked at from one end it functions as a generalized form of perception.

Physical perception is formed on analogy with "physical memory."20 Both memory and perception are here conceived to be generally devoid of subjectivity. Physical perception further differs from the later notion of physical prehension21 in that perception abstracts from the means of transmission involved. For physical prehension signifies that kind of perception that is also causation, that carries with it an element of persistence. In contrast, physical perception abstracts from persistence. Consider this passage:

Thus the senseobject is present in A with the mode of location in B. Thus if a green object be the senseobject in question, green is not simply at A where it is being perceived, nor is it simply at B where it is perceived as located, but it is present at A with the mode of location in B. (SMW, 70)

At first blush this seems to contradict the dictum that no one thing (actuality) can be at different places at the same time. But the entity in question is not an actuality but the sensum green, which is an eternal object. Because it abstracts from any spatiotemporal embodiment, the eternal object green is exactly the same at either location. There can be an apparently instan

taneous transfer from A to B, simply because all means of transmission have been abstracted from.

Whitehead does not recognize my distinction between physical perception and physical prehension, because he had largely abandoned the earlier notion of prehension (what I call 'physical perception') after Symbolism. This book is couched in terms of a polemic against Hume's account of perception, but it may equally well apply to prehension as originally formulated. Both theories cannot do justice to the vagueness and massiveness of causal efficacy, for they conceive of the datum of perception too abstractly. 22 Prehension is not reintroduced until the revised theory of concrescence in Process and Reality (D), when it becomes possible to prehend actual entities directly, and not just their eternal objects. Such physical prehension can explain causation.

Whitehead may resist any distinction between physical prehension (causation) and physical perception because this would establish (for causation) dominant predecessors in the immediate past, in contrast to more distant occasions (cf. PR, 226).23 Only dominant predecessors could introduce any persistence. An efficient cause is the persistence of the past into the present. Such persistence may well have been felt to be a vestige of the substantialism Whitehead sought to eradicate.

On this point Whitehead may not have kept an appropriate balance between persistence and flux. His strictures against undifferentiated endurance are well taken with respect to present change. When substance theory tries to explain change by reference to the accidents of some underlying essence inherent in the actuality, it must perforce abstract from the total concrete actuality. What changes must be less than the total concrete actuality. If this were not so, there could be no accidental features to be exchanged. On the other hand, unchanging substantial persistence is a very accurate description of the past, which remains what it is unchanged. In itself the past is forever the same. Theories of substance cannot explain change as well as theories of process. But they may be able to explain stability and persistence better than theories of process.

Whitehead resists any distinction between causation and perception in physical prehension in his account of the influence between contiguous and noncontiguous occasions (PR, 307f).24 He allows for the probable restriction of causal prehensions to contiguous occasions in this cosmic epoch but argues that "[i]t is not necessary for the philosophy of organism entirely to deny that there is direct objectification of one occasion in a later occasion which is not contiguous to it" (PR, 307). This is fully justified in terms of physical perception, but not in terms of physical prehension, which requires the continuity needed by persistence.

Physical perception contrasts with the persistent elements of physical prehension. The sensa that occasions perceive from distant occasions shape

our inner experience, but its objectification has little impact, except indirectly in terms of its subjective response expressed in terms of its subjective forms. Each of us enjoys a rich inner perceptual experience, but this has little impact on any successor occasions other than upon one thread of personal experience and memory.

Physical perception may explain one feature of our ordinary perception better than prehension. Prehension is either in concrescence or satisfaction, that is, either in unification or final unity. Unification suggests a measure of indeterminacy, yet we can perceive sharply and clearly. If perception were indeterminate, we should expect everything to be slightly out of focus, as it were. On the other hand, the unity of satisfaction is intolerant of any addition. Anything occurring subsequent to the satisfaction can only be externally related to it. Yet not only is perception determinate, but it is capable of receiving further sensations. The subjectivity of the perceiver transcends what has been already perceived to allow for subsequent perceptions as well.

Because physical perception abstracts from elements of persistence, it may not be so rigidly tied to the requirements of the concrescent unification of as ordinary occasions are. Consciously perceiving occasions are both sophisticated and temporally inclusive occasions capable of entertaining many ongoing provisional unifications. Our perception of motion, for example, requires that the percipient occasion endure long enough so as to include successive inputs of sensa. The strict rhythm of physical prehension and integration required for the sake of material persistence need not apply to the larger inclusive occasions that build upon them.

Lastly, it should be noted that physical perception has the same formal structure as a hybrid physical feeling: it is the physical prehension of an actual entity by means of one of its eternal objects. Formal similarities between prehensions with very different functions sometimes happen because of the limited number of possible combinations for prehensions. Another case of similarity obtains between propositional feeling and physical purpose (see EWM, 224f). That ambiguity led Whitehead to devise a further class of intellectual feelings (PR, 266ff).

Since Whitehead had already abandoned his earlier explanation of prehension in terms of physical perception before introducing hybrid prehension, it was not necessary to distinguish them any further.

I aim to reintroduce physical perception, but not in competition with hybrid prehension. For hybrid prehension is superfluous in a world where God influences occasions by the infusion of creativity informed by aim, and where in place of living persons inclusive occasions share their creativity informed by aim with included occasions. Whitehead discards physical perceptions before introducing hybrid prehensions; I do the reverse. In neither case are both kinds of prehensions affirmed together.

6— Future Physical Perception

The importance of physical perception becomes evident when we consider how God as future perceives past actual occasions. For the past can only persist as far as the present. Physical prehension is the means of bringing the past forward. If there were future physical prehensions, the past could persist into the future.

Future perception abstracts from the partial persistence inherent in physical prehension. By the same token, there are no physical prehensions for God to unify, as is the case with finite occasions. If there were, it would be possible for the future to bring about a determinate past without the intervention of the present. The present differs from the future in that it can bring about the determinate past. The future, by indefinitely formed creativity, brings about the present instead.

I am here departing from Whitehead's strict doctrine that God has the same kind of physical feelings as all other actual entities. Yet I do not abandon its essential element. He insists that divine feeling be physical as well as conceptual, for if it were purely conceptual, it could be entirely independent from the world. Then the coherence and interdependence between God and the world would be lost, for God would be independent from the world as in classical theism. Yet interdependence can also be preserved if we require that divine experience be perceptual as well as conceptual.

Perceptual feeling is inherently particular and temporal. The actualities are perceived in terms of their sensa, to be sure, but the actualities perceived result from concrescence, and each has its location. The experience of God would be the same, whether God were to physically prehend or to perceive the world.

We have contrasted physical prehension and physical perception. Physical prehension retains an element of persistence, whereas physical perception does not. Both may be conceived as two species of a more general notion of physical prehension. Then we could take the retention of location to be the distinguishing character of the genus, with two species: causal and perceptual. This would have the advantage of showing that although God responds to the contingencies of the world, God is not caused or coerced by the world, since perceptual prehension abstracts from this coercive element.

On the other hand, causal and perceptual prehensions too easily correlate with the two modes of perception. Perception in the mode of presentation immediacy abstracts from the massive experience of causal efficacy. It is seen to be somewhat effete, heavily dependent on causal efficacy, and subject to the errors of delusion and illusion. What prevents similar ills from befalling divine perception?

Divine perception ranges over the entire domain of the past. It is direct even for distantly situated actualities, for it perceives their sensa, abstracting

from all intermediate transmission. Just as the green is here with its mode of location there, any sensum can be here with its mode of location anywhere in the entire past.

In the rhythm of becoming, there is an instant between the end of one occasion and the beginning of another. At that instant there is no present, for the previous present is now past, and the next present is yet to be. At that point God immediately perceives the newly emergent past, and retains that memory forever. Whether we call this perfect memory or immediate experience is immaterial, for God experiences every past in complete immediacy, what just happened now or thousands of years ago.

The derivation of presentational immediacy depends upon the interpretations given to the partial persistents retained in causal efficacy. Divine perception is independent of any objective persistence, since it is derived from the perfection of divine memory, the epitome of subjective persistence.

Pure subjective persistence is really only possible for the future. Present subjectivity is too momentary and fragmentary. It may turn out that the fundamental reason for the momentariness of the present lies in its task of unifying the persistencies derived from the past. Freed from any objective persisting of the past, the future may retain its concrescent immediacy and hence subjective persistence forever. By not having any past persistents to unify, future concrescence has nothing to objectify. This is one reason why God is imprehensible.

Besides the internal integration of sensa for God's experience, there is also the refocusing of divine perceptions at each potential standpoint along the interface between the future and the present. These standpoints are determined by the way the persistencies atomize the future continuum. In order to provide each nascent occasion with its appropriate aim, God needs to experience precisely the same experience that the nascent occasion will at the outset of its concrescence. By anticipating that standpoint, God can perspectively draw upon the immediate divine experience of occasions just achieving determinate being. In this way divine perceptions and present physical prehensions exactly parallel each other, except that the physical prehensions also incorporate persistent elements from the past.

The divine experience from that standpoint evokes an evaluative response. Purely abstract, nontemporal possibilities do not evoke such evaluations, except indirectly, for the true good or evil consists in the way possibilities are realized under particular conditions. "Insistence on birth at the wrong season is the trick of evil" (PR, 223). The key question is whether those conditions can harmoniously be integrated, and how. The way God experiences those conditions together shapes the indefinite subjective forms, which inform the creativity that is infused in the nascent occasion. Because God shares the same standpoint and experience with the occasion, albeit on the future side of the

divide, the aim devised by God will be naturally appropriate to every contingency that arises.

7— Divine Consciousness

The claim that God has only perceptions, not physical prehensions, calls into question whether God can properly be said to be conscious. According to Whitehead's account, only intellectual feelings are conscious, and they are contrasts between propositional feelings and their corresponding physical feelings (PR, 266f). If God has no physical prehensions, how is consciousness possible?

The problem arises because we have distinguished three kinds of feelings, physical prehensions, perceptions, and conceptual prehensions, in place of Whitehead's twofold distinction. Should perceptions be classified with physical or conceptual prehensions with respect to the structure of consciousness?

On the one hand, if a feeling must contain some element of persistence to be physical, then all future feelings can only be conceptual. Perception (SMW prehension) abstracts the sensa (eternal objects) from the actuality felt, and thus may be regarded as conceptual. If so, the requisite contrast between physical and conceptual feeling would be missing for God.

On the other hand, since Whitehead makes no distinction between physical prehension and perception, we can profitably ask which best suits the contrast he was seeking to explain consciousness.

Persistence is largely unconscious, and does not need conscious direction. It is the continued presence of the past operating independently from any present reaction to it. Only concrescent response is enhanced by consciousness. If consciousness requires physical prehension, the physical prehension is largely redundant, for the final contrast will incorporate all the initial physical prehensions into the final form. Every physical prehension found in the intellectual feelings will only be reduplicated in the final satisfaction.

Perception is physical in the sense that it perceives the sensa of a given actuality, and it perceives those sensa as spatiotemporally located in the actuality. It is, however, not physical in the sense that it abstracts from the persistence of the actuality. For the purposes of consciousness, I submit that the former sense is the more relevant. Perception contrasts with other conceptual feeling which abstract from the spatiotemporal locatedness of the actuality as well.

Thus, on this view consciousness arises from the contrast between propositional feeling and its corresponding perception, not its corresponding physical prehension of persisting elements. If so, God is conscious in the same way that sophisticated occasions are. Perception is the basis for consciousness, not persistence. Though there may be instances of perception without consciousness,

there do not seem to be any instances of consciousness without perception, or its derivative in imagination.

My ascription of consciousness to future activity may strike many as passing strange. It is no more than a temporalization of the thesis that God is the soul or mind or spirit of the world. Spirit, however, is often considered something we acquire by participation. Participation in a spirit or power or creativity means that what is participated in is not an individual. This is the truth of pantheism. It holds that the immanence of the divine in particular actualities requires that it be nonindividual.

This is true of God's public aspect. The way divine creativity is infused in individual occasions is quite impersonal. The divine interface is simply the totality of the initial creativities of the universe. Were there only one mode of actuality, the present one, then divine creativity would have only the nonsubjective features Whitehead ascribes to it.

The modality of the future enables divine creativity to be individual. Divine creativity in the future is one activity in contrast to the present. The present is individualized into many potentially competing occasions, but the future is individualized as a whole. Individualization, not size, is the relevant factor. Subjectivity is the individualization of creativity, for it is the activity of a subjectinmaking ordering its experience into a coherent whole. In interacting with the present, God acts pantheistically, but this is compatible with a theism, provided the theistic activity takes place in a future mode. 25

Divine creativity is necessarily very indeterminate, if it is the task of present occasions to render actuality determinate. But there need be no necessary correlation between the intensity of experience in subjective concrescence and the determinateness of objectification. In some ways, very primitive material components have the strongest determinateness. Cellular and particularly occasions of the mind have much richer subjective experience, yet are only indirectly objectified. The infinite subjective divine experience results in no finite determinateness, yet its infusion of informed creativity fuels and coordinates the activities of the universe.

II— The Extensive Continuum

One issue we need to address is the way future creativity is more precisely related to present concrescences and past actualities. This requires their location, that is, we need to consider how they are located within a common spatiotemporal region. When generalized, this is the extensive continuum, which is the

one relational complex in which all potential objectifications find their niche. It underlies the whole world, past, present, and future . . .

This extensive continuum is "real," because it expresses a fact derived from the actual world and concerning the contemporary actual world . . . The reality of the future is bound up with the reality of this continuum. It is the reality of what is potential, in its character of a real component of what is actual. (PR 66)

We have rather straightforward ways of understanding this continuum, as long as we suppress the ontological differences the temporal modalities introduce. Those differences are already evident in Whitehead's account, but they are intensified by my revisions with respect to the future.

Some have regarded God as "outside" spacetime, as if this were possible. Perhaps more precisely, they have thought of God as not extensive at all. This has long been a traditional option, based on the opposition of eternity and time. But this is less of an option for a process theist, since God's consequent nature is everlasting.

It is true that Whitehead avoids ascribing extensionality to God. This made sense in terms of his earlier nontemporal divine concepts, which acquire location only derivatively from the actual occasions of which they were constituent elements. Yet when the consequent nature is conceived as everlasting, extensionality seems to follow inexorably, provided we assume the fusion of space and time. In any case, my modification presupposes divine extensionality, in order to account to the way the active future impinges on the present.

1— The Ontological Status of the Extensive Continuum

The extensive continuum is intended to span the modes. It is neither actual nor potential, for it can be the same when characterizing the potential and the actual. The extensive continuum is not listed among the categories of existence, nor is it a distinct formative element. 26 Nor can it be understood in terms of one of the formative elements, God, creativity, or eternal objects (RM 90).

For Whitehead it cannot be understood in terms of God, because throughout the time Whitehead was developing the extensive continuum (C), God was conceived as a nontemporal principle, thus "outside of" or "transcending" the entire extensive continuum. Even when God was reconceived with a consequent nature, he made no attempt to assign any extensional properties to God with respect to the extensive continuum.27

Could the extensive continuum be understood in terms of creativity? Both could be understood in terms of potentiality. One is dynamic and internal, the other static and external, but even if those differences could be surmounted, creativity cannot extend to the realm of the past.

That leaves us with just one alternative, the eternal objects. Should we then conceive the extensive continuum as a dense infinity of points extending

from an the unlimited past into the unlimited future providing a common location for every actuality and every possibility? Here, we assume that points can be understood in terms of eternal objects.

This would render the extensive continuum more explicit than Whitehead did, particularly with respect to points. In some ways it even falsifies his account. The continuum is potentially divisible without limit, but that need not require that the division has been fully carried out. Whitehead analyzed points as the termini of extensive abstraction (PR, 297–300). Extensive abstraction is itself a form of potential division, introduced in order to avoid the problematic status of points divorced from extensive experience. Extensive abstraction conceives of points at the tail end of a process of division, rather than as uncreated eternal objects.

The problem with uncreated eternal objects as points is that every definite locus must have already existed throughout all time. Yet if some loci are now definite, there must already be eternal objects corresponding to all other loci. Thus, the points based on uncreated eternal objects must have existed from time immemorial, constituting a dense infinity extending through space and time limitlessly.

Moreover, such eternal objects cannot really constitute a continuum. A continuum requires that between any two forms there is a third. If forms are uncreated, then the intermediate forms must already exist, all the way down. If, however, the forms could be temporally emergent, then the intermediate forms need only exist as far as the division is carried out, for there is always the potentiality for the emergence of the next required intermediate form.

From this follow two implications for our proposal:

(a) If objective forms are not uncreated but emergent, as I have argued elsewhere, 28 the future domain of the extensive continuum needs to be reconceived. It is not "already" fully spread out before us in objective fashion, but is still in the making.

This does not mean that the past is constituted by a fully definite continuum. The task of coordinate division renders the continuum more definite, but this task need not be completed.

(b) Insofar as the extensive continuum is constituted out of objective forms, then it pertains primarily to objective being. Future and present becoming inhabit loci of the extensive continuum, to be sure, but until those loci are determinately actualized, the loci remain merely projections from the past.

While our own anticipations may project features on the future, such as times and places for meetings, etc., the primary projections for the extensive continuum are natural projections, arising

from extensive tendencies of determinate persistencies. Here the motions of the heavenly bodies may be used as an example, since their wellestablished momenta are expected to continue unchanged into regions of the far future. 29

On the other hand, the future loci of the extensive continuum are not just projected out over nothing. According to the ontological principle, the divine future concrescence grounds their existence. (If God were a present concrescence, that grounding would be problematic, as there would be no actuality inherent in the future.) That these future loci have derivative existence depends on God, but what they are follows from the projections from the past and present.

2— The Extensive Continuum and Societies

If the past is constituted by determinate actualities, the present by concrescing occasions, and the future by the divine concrescence, then we can reconceive the extensive continuum in terms of the common extensional properties of one vast society embracing all actualities and all temporal modes.

While he avoids specifying the extensive continuum as a category or metaphysical principle, and discusses it in the context of the widest societies of our cosmic epoch, he never clearly designates it as a society. To be sure, we may be tempted to understand the extensive continuum as "the fundamental society" in the following passage:

[F]rom the standpoint of our present epoch, the fundamental society in so far as it transcends our own epoch seems a vast confusion mitigated by the few, faint elements of order contained in its own defining characteristic of "extensive connection." We cannot discriminate its other epochs of vigorous order, and we merely conceive it as harboring the faint flush of the dawn of order in our own epoch. (PR, 97)

From the context Whitehead is speculating about other cosmic epochs from the standpoint of our own. The properties of cosmic epochs, while extremely general, are nevertheless contingent. They are not universally necessary, as metaphysical principles would be. They are the defining characteristics of present, contingent societies, those societies containing all the actualities of that cosmic epoch.30

The extensive continuum, on the other hand, pertains to all actualities whatsoever, and is not restricted to any cosmic epoch or epochs. It is described as a metaphysical feature in one late text: "Some general character of coordinate divisibility is probably an ultimate metaphysical character, persistent in

every cosmic epoch of physical occasions. Thus some of the simpler characteristics of extensive connection, as here stated, are probably such ultimate metaphysical necessities'' (PR, 288M).

Yet note the restriction to "physical occasions." He may have contemplated the possibility of cosmic epochs that contained only purely mental occasions for whom coordinate divisibility would be irrelevant (cf. PR, 285), as it is irrelevant to the divine concrescence, whether on Whitehead's view or mine.

This suggests a reason for his earlier reticence as to the status of the extensive continuum. He may have hesitated putting it forth as a metaphysical principle if for his theory it could not apply to God. On my theory, the extensive continuum can apply to the divine creativity of the future as potential extensionality, even though not in any objectified form capable of coordinate divisibility.

For God to interact with his creatures, we are told, "he must either occupy a region coextensive with the regions occupied by his creatures or relate to them nonextensively." 31 These alternatives are not exhaustive, for we must then interpret omnipresence as requiring God and the creature to coexist in the same region or forgo any sort of extensional connection. There are at least two other alternatives. It is possible in terms of Hartshorne's divine society for divine occasions and actual occasions to alternate with each other. In that case, some divine occasion will be in the immediate past of every actual occasion without there being any regional overlap. Another alternative becomes significant if there is divine future creativity. Then God can be forever future, allowing present occasions to enjoy their own regions. Neither alternative precludes omnipresence, understood as omnispatiality. In a fourdimensional world, space constitutes a threedimensional interface between past and present (for Hartshorne), or future and present.

While past actualities concretely manifest one portion of the extensive continuum, and the divine concrescence fills future regions, we cannot say that the future extensive continuum objectifies God. It is more accurate to say that past (and present) occasions objectify the region of God, for the influx of future creativity into present occasions first becomes objectifiable in terms of their finite outcomes. Yet while this may be thought to be an objectification of the region God inhabits, it is not purely that. The future extensive continuum is not an objectification of any actuality, but a projection on the future in terms of past objectifications.

Actual occasions were conceived by Whitehead as extremely small, giving them a very sharp standpoint from which to prehend and order the world. In contrast God as future has an extremely large standpoint, for the divine region reaches from the present to the most distant place in the far future as is necessary to encompass synoptically the entire multiplicity of the world. The divine experience is always unifying itself, but at any one instant it is only

provisionally unified. Insofar as divine experiences are unified, however, it would be in terms of the total broad standpoint, not substandpoints within it. The standpoint of an actuality is determined by the spatiotemporal extent of that actuality.

3— Relativity Physics

The extremely large standpoint of God diffuses any possible conflict with relativity physics. The difficulties some forms of process theism have are caused by too narrow an understanding of divine temporality. Each divine occasion, in terms of Hartshorne's model, lasts a fraction of a second, yet fills the universe spatially. This divine present defines a privileged cosmic simultaneity, which is contrary to relativity physics. Yet on my proposal divine activity is not restricted to the narrow scope of the present but extends to a very broad range of the future. Insofar as meanings of simultaneity are relevant, they pertain only to potential divisions within the divine, not to actualities. Simultaneity is derived from inertial frameworks, which express the velocity component of persistencies. There are as many different simultaneities as there are differently ordered persistencies. God actualizes none of them, as is proper, for any that God would define would be unique and privileged.

That does not mean that God does not experience the different inertial systems of the world, and the mass and motion that lie behind them. In each place God experiences what is, according to its inertial system. Problems arise if all these divine experiences are immediately unified. This defines a moment of divine simultaneity, which rides roughshod over the individual differing inertial systems.

In order for God to experience and to reconcile the differing inertial systems, God must be temporally thick. Actual occasions differ widely, but still within very narrow parameters. It is the nature of the present to be very brief in comparison with the past and the future. The active future, on the other hand, is potentially infinite. This extensiveness allows for there to be intermediate unifications of divine experience, first according to a particular inertial framework, then mediating activity enabling the experiences of differing frameworks to be unified or allowing for experience to be ordered in another way that obviates the need for any frameworks. Ultimately, but only in the distant future, God would experience the entire universe as one.

Each experience would require God to project godself into a more future perspective, thereby enlarging the extent of the active future. Surrendering the near future to the present is counterbalanced by reclaiming the far future from the nothingness beyond.

The requirement of temporal thickness also applies to the creative advance. The creative advance is usually understood to be simply the present, on

the grounds that the present is the sole arena of creative becoming. Then it is in danger of constituting a privileged meaning of simultaneity, if it were additionally to constitute a single inertial framework. On the usual views of time, which are limited solely to being, there is only activity in the present as things become actual. The past is already fixed, and the future contains nothing actual. If, however, the future is active, then there is activity not only in the present but in wide reaches of the future. In addition to the becoming of determinateness, there is the preparatory becoming of the future with its own partial determinateness. 32 A creative advance embracing both present and future is broad enough to run no danger of conflict with the simultaneities of relativity physics.

4— In Unison of Becoming

We may conceive the creative advance as whatever is in unison of becoming with the present concrescing occasion. For classical physics this was rather unproblematically considered as all events simultaneous with the present. It needed to be reconceived by relativity physics to include all contemporaries, which differ from the present by their causal independence. The duration of contemporaries can still be defined as the "complete locus of actual occasions in 'unison of becoming,' or in 'concrescent unison' " (PR, 320).

We require a further reconception in order to accommodate God as future. When Whitehead tells us that God is "in unison of becoming with every other creative act" (PR, 245), he means that God is in our present, as another text indicates: "There is a unison of becoming among things in the present . . . " (PR, 340). William L. Reese remarks that this "sounds like panentheism."33 It suggests that God's immediacy literally includes the world's immediacy. That could be avoided if God and the present were contemporaries, but that assigns a contingent particularity to God that would be inappropriate, as well as rendering any interaction between both problematic. These problems can be overcome by conceiving of God as future. Then God "now" occupies regions of the extensive continuum that we will occupy later on, yet in those regions God is in unison of becoming with us. The scope of what is in unison of becoming with us needs to enlarged to include both contemporaries and future activity.

Since the future is to be understood primarily in terms of the de facto activity inhabiting it, we would be advised to conceive it not as an actual infinity, but as a potential infinity, that which is capable of being increased without any limit. God can of course project out his intentions and valuations to any extent whatsoever, yet at the expense of becoming increasingly irrelevant to the world and to the divine experience of the world. It is not so much these projections that constitute the future as it is the standpoints God adopts

to experience the world synoptically. We might say that God initially projects these standpoints but then takes them up as standpoints for God's own experience.

Insofar as the divine activity extends farther into the future, it makes sense to say that God thereby creates that spatiotemporal region. God has activated that region, although the region may already have its extensionality apart from any process of becoming. On the other hand, God is "in" spacetime in the sense that any actuality, God included, is temporal. Spacetime, however, places no limits on God, as it is ever expandable.

5— The Locus of all Locations

We may conceive of the extensive continuum as the abstraction of extensional properties as objectified. This is the way it has been traditionally understood, as Whitehead reports "space is conceived as unchanging from eternity to eternity, and as homogeneous from infinity to infinity" (MT, 129). Objective spacetime as experienced is projected on all future space. This obviously fits the past, and makes a tolerable fit with the present, as the region of any concrescing occasion can be defined in terms of its objective outcome, but it reduces the future simply to those natural and conceptual projections the present world casts upon it. Those projections in turn derive their objective features from the character of the past. To be sure, if we ignore all contingent and possibly novel features, we can extend our projections into the future as far as desired.

Another way of conceiving of the extensive continuum, however, is to see it as the universal locus of all locations, considered both objectively and nonobjectively. Then it would be the locus of concrescence as well as the locus of objectification. I agree with Nobo's proposal of an ultimate substratum combining both creativity and extension. Yet there is no claim, implicit or otherwise, that this reformed extensive continuum has both properties at every location. The temporal modalities require that any given location in the future, or in the past, be primarily characterized one way or the other. Only the present can be both. To be sure, every region will eventually become objectively determinate, if it is not so already, but while it is future (and present), that region must be characterized by the indeterminacy of creativity.

Coordinate division applies not only to every determinate outcome of present concrescence, but also to every abstractly objective region. It applies to the past and to the past's derivative projections on the present or future. It applies to all being, which as continuous is infinitely divisible. The proper mode for discriminating becoming, however, is genetic division. Genetic division applies not only to every finite present concrescence, but to the divine future concrescence as well. If we consider the process of determination in terms of

the degrees of determinateness obtained, rather than as a sequence of discrete phases, it is also continuous. As the divine life from the far future approaches the near future, and finally interfaces with the present, there is an increase in determinateness, but it is slight, remaining below the threshold of indeterminateness with which present occasions commence.

Genetic and coordinate division are ways of analyzing two kinds of time. This is sometimes challenged on the grounds that genetic division analyzes the phases of concrescence, which are deemed to be nontemporal, because they are not in physical time (PR, 283). Physical time is the time of physics: "Physical time makes its appearance in the 'coordinate' analysis of 'satisfaction'" (PR, 283). Just because genetic phases are not in physical time does not mean that they could not be in time in some sense.

If it is preferred to reserve time to physical time, then we might consider becoming as pretemporal, as that which produces time. Yet it is misleading to label it as nontemporal. The "nontemporal" is reserved for the timelessness of God, and it is difficult to see how timelessness could generate time.

Genetic and coordinate division differ as to what it is that they divide. Coordinate division analyzes the determinate outcome of concrescence, its being. Thus, at least with respect to its becoming, every segment is just as fully determinate as every other. Concrescence, on the other hand, is a process of determination. Its initial phase is quite indeterminate, and by gradual stages it attains the complete determinateness of satisfaction. Each successive phase is more determinate than its predecessor. Each incomplete phase, however, is necessarily indeterminate, thereby lacking an essential feature of physical time.

There is, however, a succession of earlier and later phases: "The process can be analyzed genetically into a series of subordinate phases which presuppose their antecedents" (PR, 154). Later (i.e., more determinate, closer to achieving full actualization) build upon earlier ones. In general, earlier phases are what they are apart from later ones, but not vice versa. These properties of successiveness and asymmetrical relatedness signify that concrescence is at least partially temporal, even if not temporal in the physical sense. 34 The usual alternatives, temporal or nontemporal, are simply not enough; we need a tertium quid. Genetic succession is certainly not timeless the way in which complex eternal objects are.

Evidently Whitehead was perplexed about the exact relationship between genetic succession and physical time. In physical time, what is earlier than a given occasion lies in its past, while later, as yet nonexistent occasions lie in its future. In genetic succession, the order seems to be reversed. The initial phase, which is the most indeterminate, is most like the future. Even though it draws all of its content from the past, the degree of determinacy it has comes from the unity it achieves over its content, and

this is minimal. Later phases, on the other hand, tend to resemble the past in their determinateness. The final phase, moreover, has all the determinateness of past being.

Thus, the orders of being and becoming are reversed. Being is rooted in the past, although later occasions are continually being added out of becoming. Becoming, applied to earlier and earlier phases still earlier than the initial phase of a finite act of becoming, extends out in the future. 35

The reversal of flow with respect to being and becoming also explains why each present occasion is an atomic epoch. If there were simply the being or the occurring of events, there would be only the familiar passage from past to future as events emerged fully determinate. If there were only the becoming of events, then there would be simply the passage from the future to the past as events become progressively more determinate. But the present involves both the influx of future becoming and the ingredience of past being. Without the future influx of creativity and aim, the present occasion would lack the power to prehend and to integrate what it receives from the past. Without the past, it would have nothing to prehend. It requires both future becoming and past being.

The present occasion unifies the multiplicity of being it receives from the past into a whole that is completely determinate with respect to that multiplicity. In so doing it exhausts the creativity it has received from the future, and can use it no more. It is impossible for an act of determination to become more than fully determinate toward its past (it is as yet indeterminate with respect to its successors). It receives its quantum of creative activity at the outset of concrescence and is then left to its own devices.

If time were thought to come solely from the past, creativity would have to be conceived either as welling up in the present (PR), or as coming from the past (AI). Neither is satisfactory. We need to see the movement of time in a twofold direction. There is the time (of being) that comes from the past, but there is also the time (of becoming) that bears creativity, as coming from the future. The present is the region where past and future overlap. It is the region of their interaction, drawing upon elements from both.

Both being and becoming are needed. Since present subjectivity as yet has no objective being, being pertains only to the past. From the standpoint of being, the future is nothing (yet), while from the standpoint of becoming, the past is no longer, all creativity having perished.36

The extent of the overlap between past and future making room for the present appears to be determined primarily by how far the past is able to penetrate. The past contains persistencies, whose brief occasions reiterate a material structure persisting into and defining a new present. These persistencies also determine the spatial extent of present occasions.

6— Locus and Passage

In order to do justice to the complexities of time, we need to distinguish between the locus of an event and its passage. The event of January 2100 can serve us well as an example of a locus. In terms of Whitehead's earlier philosophy of nature, an "event" is simply a bare spatiotemporal region, a locus, when abstracted from the "objects" that characterize it. The important point is that a locus is independent of temporal passage. 37 January 2100, as a bare locus, simply designates a spatiotemporal place, regardless of whether this event is past, present, or future. A locus is exceedingly abstract, merely designating a particular region of the extensive continuum. We habitually identify determinate happenings in terms of their locus, but the locus as such is completely independent of its content. This is why calendars work. They do not attempt to predict.

The event of my present immediacy, to take a specific example, will shortly recede into the past. The event retains the same locus, but shifts with respect to the creative advance. What was present is now past. It is no longer an act of becoming; its subjective immediacy has perished in attaining the status of past being. As in transubstantiation, the event retains all of its contingent characteristics, but changes its metaphysical status.

What about the event that will house my present immediacy when its locus is still in the future? That locus would be part of divine concrescence, as yet not specified to any particular present occasion. Does this mean that I am somehow in God? No, because as long as the event is located in God, it has none of the contingent and finite features that characterize me. What is in God is not yet me, neither with respect to my becoming nor with respect to my being. The event in God can be characterized only by aim, by the general divine purpose as adjusted to the actualities prehended. As the creative advance approaches the locus, that aim is increasingly specified for the occasion that locus will eventually designate.

There are levels of determination we can specify: (a) Those metaphysical determinants that apply to all events whatsoever, including the divine future; (b) The general divine aim, which remains too indeterminate to be prehensible; (c) The creaturely determination that transforms the indeterminate situation it inherits by prehending and integrating past determinates by means of its selfinstantiation of creativity as guided by its aim; (d) The level of complete internal determinateness of a past actuality, which, however, remains indeterminate as to its relations to that which comes after it; (e) Atemporal abstractions from this determinate past.

As we have seen, "earlier" and "later than" have opposite meanings depending on whether being or becoming is designated. Events as specified by their locus move oppositely to their passage. Let us see how this might be so

by designating one locus A as onehundred units earlier than another locus B. As both recede farther into the past, A remains exactly onehundred units earlier than B. When A was present, B would be onehundred units later in its future. In this sense (applying to determinate being), the future is later than the present.

If we consider, on the other hand, a present act of becoming as a process of determination, the earlier phases of concrescence are less determinate than later phases. If so, that which is earlier than the earliest phase, that which is earlier than the occasion, will be less determinate than that first phase. In this sense, according to the nature of becoming, the indeterminate future is earlier than, not later than, present becoming.

Within concrescence the past is regarded as earlier than the present. Not in the sense that each individual past actuality is determinate, but in the sense that the multiplicity of past actualities prehended is indeterminate as to its unity. That unity is still to be determined by that occasion. Both the past multiplicity and future creativity are earlier than, and necessary for, the concrescing occasion. We are accustomed to a linear procedure from past to present to future. Since on this view the present is the utmost verge of being, the future is (nearly) nothing. If, on the other hand, the future is not nothing, but constitutes the divine activity, we need to think of both past and future as contributing to the concrescence of occasions. Time is not simply linear, for the present is the confluence of future and past.

Because of this reversal of the directionality of time within an occasion and with respect to other actual occasions, we need to pay close attention to the locus defining a single actual entity. Let us call this locus its actual locus. The actual locus is the place an occasion occupies. Like a cell membrane, the locus "protects" the occasion's concrescing activity from prematurely interacting with the surrounding activity. The actual locus is bound up with the occasion's atomicity. If the actual locus were divisible during concrescence, this process of unification could not proceed.

This raises the question of how atomicity takes place. Only actual occasions are atomic in the sense that they pluralize what was otherwise a single domain of future creativity. The divine infusion of creativity determines the extent of a nascent occasion and hence its actual locus. Creativity and locus are thus correlate. Less creativity, a smaller locus, and vice versa. Other than the actual locus, everything within the occasion is indeterminate. But without its protective boundary, the occasion could not function. It is more an enabling than a restrictive factor.

While it is conceivable that an occasion could determine whether its concrescence is longer or shorter, I don't see how it is possible for it to modify its spatial dimensions, for that would affect the character of the past actual world it is called upon to unify. With a different multiplicity it becomes a

different actuality than the one it is called upon to become. It would also affect the boundaries of its immediate neighbors, when there is no possibility of contemporaries interacting. Whitehead seems to consider the possibility of an occasion determining its own boundaries (PR, 284), but it would be strictly impossible, either spatially or temporally, on my notion of the infusion of creativity. That determines the actual locus, and it is not open to any further subjective determination.

7— Divine Privacy and Publicity

I have analyzed the extensive continuum as an allinclusive region within which a divine future region becomes pluralized into the many present regions inhabited by the occasions. This analysis is necessarily abstract. In particular, it has neglected the divine subjectivity. The relation between God's subjectivity and the divine future region needs to be clarified. Otherwise God's responsive role in providing aim remains problematic.

Ordinarily, we would make here a distinction between subjectivity and objectivity. But objectivity characterizes past determinateness, and is not a feature of concrescence, let alone of God. God cannot be objectified. Yet we may still make the distinction between God in godself and God as influencing others. Let us call that the distinction between privacy and publicity. Objectivity is also a form of publicity, but not its only form.

God interacts with others in terms of future creativity, which also extends throughout the region of the active future. This public aspect has been largely introduced by my modifications of Whitehead's metaphysics. On the other hand, I intend the private aspect to be the same as his. God as private is an everlasting concrescence, which experiences, integrates, and imaginatively supplements the divine prehensions of the world. 38

The basic difficulty in achieving a correlation between the public and private aspects is that extension seems to be divisible, whereas subjectivity is not. This problem is exacerbated in God's case, because the region of divine activity extends over the entire future. But it is an issue for actual occasions as well. There is a standpoint for any perception. Most theories assume the standpoint to be a point. Then the indivisibility of the subject applies to the indivisibility of the standpoint. Whitehead's standpoint, however, is coextensive with the region of the occasion. As extended, it is at least (coordinately) divisible.

However we regard the standpoint, the subject of the occasion is indivisible. The subject shares in the atomicity of the concrescence, as the focus of all prehensions, and as the agency of unification. The subjective aim coordinates all the prehensions. "This subjective aim is this subject itself determining its own selfcreation as one creature. Thus the subjective aim does not share in this divisibility" (PR, 69).

The fact that future creativity becomes pluralized in the present does not mean that it is not atomic in its own domain. That one occasion is succeeded by another does not preclude each from being atomic. The notion that future atomicity would have to persist into the present trades on the property of persistence of material atomism, foreign to Whitehead's temporal atomism.

Creativity and subjectivity are closely connected. Creativity is the activity by which any subject can act. Subjectivity is creativity as limited to a particular actuality. We have mostly written of creativity for that is what is transferred from the future to the present. Creativity abstracts from subjectivity as that power or activity shared by different actualities, but creativity is individuated as subjectivity.

Subjectivity is inherently one. The creativity infusing a single actuality acts as one subject, because every concrescence is a single concrescent unification directed by a single subject having all the prehensions. 39 If this is true of all present occasions, it is also true for the divine concrescence. Despite its vast reaches, there is one divine subject animating the whole.

The distinction between creativity and subjectivity enables us to understand why loss of creativity from God to the creature does not mean any loss to God's subjectivity. First of all, the retention of that creativity would frustrate God's aim at contingent, concrete actualization. The individual aims which energize the creatures can only be mere possibilities within the divine life. Secondly, there is no perishing of the creativity itself, which is simply passed on. There is no perishing of the divine concrescence as long as it has creativity, and its supply is inexhaustible.40 To suppose that the infusion of creativity meant a loss of creativity would presuppose that God is a static entity, defined by immutable boundaries. Then the present would encroach on the divine with every creative advance. But God is a dynamic entity with evershifting boundaries, forever receding as the present advances. God is forever future.

For pantheism the divine has no individuality, and hence no subjectivity. In terms of our analysis, pantheism finds the divine on the interface between present and future activity. Here present subjects become individuated. There is no room for any divine individual, because all the finite individuals together constitute a plenum of contemporary spacetime. Any divine individual is crowded out of the present.

While the divine cannot be part of the present, it does impinge upon the interface between present and future. This is where it influences the present, without whose influence there cannot be origination of finite creativity or aim. Pantheism could find its nonindividualized divinity on this interface. That this need not preclude theism is convincingly portrayed by Bernard E. Meland's phenomenological account of the interaction between the divine and the human in The Realities of Faith.41 Since Meland eschews all further metaphysical

speculation, his account is compatible with both Henry Nelson Wieman's pantheism and Whitehead's theism.

Eastern spiritual disciplines may be understood as efforts to uncover creativity in its purity. Ordinary present creativity fuels all sorts of finite activities, ranging from the noblest to the most base. It is by no means appropriate for that which the mysics seek. The underlying pure atman Hindu mystics seek may be conceived as the recovery of creativity just as it comes from the divine future in the initial phase of the occasion. Like the overcoming of selfcenteredness within Buddhist meditation it could be the purification from all attachments to selfdecisions within the occasion to experience the purity of divine creativity at this interface. The interface may be described theistically as God's omnipresence 42 or pantheistically as nonindividualized divinity.

The essential concerns of pantheism to participate in a nonindividuated divinity can be endorsed along with those of personal theism if God as a cosmic individual occupies a separate temporal region. Since the future region is not (yet) pluralized into many regions, it can be individualized as a single actuality. The region is one, and has one (divine) individualization. This is the presupposition of its subjectivity, in terms of which it can respond to contingent circumstances. This personal response is the basis of the provision of aim, the basis for divine persuasion.

Chapter Ten— Creativity and Contingency

I— Creativity

1— Present and Future Creativity

The qualification of creativity by indefinite forms enables us to distinguish between present and future creativity. Present creativity is amply described by Whitehead: all occasions instantiate the creative rhythm of the many into one in their own acts of becoming. Whitehead did not identify God with creativity for fear of jeopardizing our own exercise of creativity. If God's centered activity and control is given maximal importance, particularly if it is conceived as a present reality, then our freedom is merely the exercise of God's activity through us. On the other hand, if the divine creativity is really expressed by our activities, then the individuality of God is dispersed into a myriad of diverse and often conflicting actions. The identification of God with present pluralistic creativity leads necessarily to pantheism with its loss of divine personality.

That need not be the case of future creativity. Although Whitehead said that ''no future individual occasion is in existence" (AI, 193), this does not of itself preclude there being future actuality. That future cannot exist of present occasions in competition with one another, occasions that quickly become past. Future actuality is a single everlasting concrescence that never results in being. Future creativity, unlike present creativity, can be concentrated in the one single activity, for there are not many future occasions.

This permits a succession in the exercise of creativity, from the one divine activity to the many finite activities, ensuring both divine and creaturely autonomy. Concurrent creativity, on the other hand, would only produce confusion in which the claims of divine action and creaturely action would resist final clarification. If successive, God provides the power and the general direction for the world, while the present creativity of the actual occasion can then freely determine itself from the features it has inherited.

Present and future instantiate creativity diversely. Divine concrescence transforms pure creativity into a qualified indeterminacy, by means of which finite concrescence can then transform the multiplicity it inherits into determinate being.

God and the finite creatures may be said to be engaged in cocreating the ongoing world. Because of the arbitrariness and contingency of concrete actualization, the divine thrust toward ultimate unity breaks off before the determinate actuality is achieved. Only contingent decision can achieve that final determinateness. Determinateness, even the act of final determination, pluralizes creativity such that it can only be undertaken by finite occasions. The future remains forever future, forever indeterminate, while the each present occasion perishes in its present immediacy to become determinately past.

God is the creator of the world is the sense that divine determinations, both in terms of general metaphysical and cosmic principles and aims for particular occasions, constitute the dominant cosmic ordering principle. God both orders the world and supplies it with its power of acting. On the other hand, if creation is strictly construed as the coming into being of determinate actuality, then all creation is selfcreation. The individual actual occasions create themselves, for they have no being until after their acts of becoming are completed. Thanks to the creativity they receive, as well as the guidance provided by divine persuasion, the finite occasions have the particular freedom they need for this task.

Earlier, Whitehead had characterized God as an "entity whereby the indetermination of mere creativity is transmuted into a determinate freedom" (RM, 90). He thought this entity would be nontemporal, that is, having the mode of transcendence "outside time." I think that God is transcendent, but "inside'' time, as future. In each case God is the transcendent entity.

Whether nontemporal or future, God is the locus of all "eternal" (i.e., atemporal) objects. The primordial nontemporal nature contains the absolute wealth of eternal objects. Since from Whitehead's perspective, none can be created, all must already be resident in the primordial nature. This is unnecessary ballast if atemporal objects can temporally emerge, yet appearing quite "eternal" because they abstract from their temporal origination. Then God as future includes all the atemporal objects that have emerged, but more may emerge later on that can be added. 1

The notion of a distinct primordial nature persists in Whitehead's philosophy primarily for two reasons. The first is strategic. Whitehead had originally conceived God to be purely nontemporal. It would require a major overhaul to revise everything in terms of an everlasting consequent dimension. He found that he could retain most of what he had already written simply by labelling his former conception the "primordial nature" in contrast to the new notion he was working with, the "consequent nature."

The second reason lies in the independent character of the primordial nature. The primordial nature as a whole, and each eternal object within it, is what it is with total indifference toward anything else. To be sure, God and the eternal objects require each other (PR, 257). Otherwise the primordial concrescence would have nothing to unify. On the other hand, the primordial nature has no need of actual occasions, nor does it even require the consequent nature. Both actual occasions and the consequent nature are dependent upon the primordial concrescence, to be sure, but this is only oneway dependence, not full interdependence. Interdependence is the ideal Whitehead seeks.

Future concrescence can restore the coherence of reciprocal dependence: The divine locus of atemporal objects depends upon actual occasions for the emergent situations from which atemporal objects can be abstracted, while the world is dependent upon the total activity of God for its creativity and aim. Since the locus of atemporal objects is totally derivative from God's everlasting experience of the world, there is no point regarding it as a distinct divine nature. Only very abstractly, in terms of general metaphysical principles, could there be any element of independence, which applies equally to God and the world.

2— Eschatological Actuality

If God is purely future, what prevents God from being merely a possibility? All possibilities are future oriented, though they are usually conceived as rooted in the present. They are present anticipations projected upon the future. While in this sense all possibilities are future, it does not follow that everything future is only possible. Future creativity is more than a merely inert possibility, and my analysis of the modes of actuality shows the sense in which the future could be actual.

The question of the actuality of the future is particularly important in the light of Wolfhart Pannenberg's vision of God as the power of the future. 2 He adopts a nonmodal conception of actuality. Actuality in general for him means what I take past actuality to be: concrete determinateness. Thus, for him the actuality of God is not yet, but is first realized in the eschaton, the Biblical "last days." God finally appears as the unity of all things in concrete determinateness.3

Seen in terms of Whitehead's conceptuality, God is here considered as extended but finite concrescence terminating into one determinate satisfaction. The criterion of actuality for actual occasions, that they concrescence and reach determinate unity in satisfaction, is here applied to God on a cosmic scale. The key problem becomes: what happens next? How can there be anything after the divine concrescence, if this is seen to be utterly allinclusive?

For from a process perspective, if nothing comes next, everything collapses into nothingness, including God.

While the question may be rephrased in terms of the end of history, it is really the question of the end of time that is at stake. Either at the eschaton time comes to an end, and with it everything, or time merges with eternity. Either way the allinclusiveness of time becomes provisional, for it is enveloped by something else. The ongoingness of history, and the allpervasiveness of time, are severely compromised by any sort of eschatological determinate actuality.

I have argued that "actuality" should designate what is ontologically primary in each temporal mode, and not be restricted to a single mode. Concrete determinateness adequately names past actuality, but not present acting. Another way of putting the issue is in terms of subjectivity and objectivity, and in the special way in which subjectivity is housed: in terms of mind and body. Mind expresses present subjective activity, while body both protects and enhances the mind while at the same time being influenced by it.

"God" names future cosmic activity, which however is not therefore some determinate future being. It is not some reality that will be some day, but that presently is nothing. It is future becoming, already in unison of becoming with us, yet quite imprehensible. Hartshorne has popularized the notion of the world as God's body. A similar analogy would be that God is the mind or spirit of the world. If it were somehow possible to isolate it from the body the mind would turn out to be quite imperceptible. Just because the mind or the mental activity of the universe is imprehensible does not mean that it is nothing.

As noted above, it is meaningful to say both that God is located in our future and that God is in unison of becoming with us. To be sure, this means that "unison of becoming" applies to more than our contemporaries. It means extending creative advance to the future as well as the present. Ordinarily we restrict ourselves to present acts of becoming as the domain of that which becomes progressively determinate. The divine domain also becomes progressively determinate, but only partially so, rendering our own domain to be accessible to our own powers of further determination.

Whitehead recognized that we lay down necessary conditions on the future that must be actualized in some way. "The future is immanent in the present by reason of the fact that the present bears in its own essence the relationships which it will have to the future" (AI, 194). The necessities the present imposes upon the future are part of the selfdetermined character of the present. 4 He puts the issue in this way because there is no ontological basis, in his opinion, for these necessities in the future itself, and therefore they must be conceived as projections of the present. But a prehending activity

in the future could satisfy the requirements of the ontological principle. By internally relating itself to these necessities, future activity can become progressively determinate, though not so determinate as to become prehensible or to undercut the present creativity. Present creativity, in taking over its share of future creativity, has the power to prehend all the conditions introduced by prior generations of actual occasions.

Pannenberg clearly recognizes "that, in a restricted but important sense, God does not yet exist," for "God's being is still in the process of coming to be." 5 We can only have faith in a reality unseen. On his view, should the consummation be determinately actualized at the end, "what turns out to be true in the future will then be evident as having been true all along.''6 This argument presupposes that only determinate actuality is truly actual. If, on the other hand, God is actual precisely as future becoming, our interest is directed toward the reality that has been true all along, even though it may never receive any final eschatological verification.

What then is the status of this continuing reality? From Pannenberg's perspective it can only be as a possibility, hardly just a present projection for it is grounded proleptically in the coming actuality of God. It is a possibility that is independent of creaturely anticipations, although they may anticipate it as well.

From one perspective a possibility may be regarded as an incomplete actuality. Because the possibility lacks independent existence, however, it loses any standing of its own should its corresponding actuality never come into existence. Possibilities, taken broadly, are the enabling factors by which some actuality comes into being. Whitehead often distinguishes between two types: past actualities physically prehended that serve as efficient causes (usually termed "potentialities") and the formal features that serve to unify the multiple past determinates (usually termed "possibilities" more narrowly construed). Even so, formal possibilities and potentialities together are not able to bring about any determinate actuality in the absence of the unifying power of creativity.

Our language admits of "logical possibilities," propositions depicting consistent states of affairs free from selfcontradiction. Such possibilities are not really possible, however. To be really possible they must conform to the necessary principles of actualizability as well as to the particular contingent potentials that support that formal possibility's bid for actualization. The consideration of possibility has often ignored these factors, allowing for an identification of possibility with its eternal object or objective form.

If definite forms (eternal objects) are temporally emergent, there would be an earlier stage of possibility prior to definite forms. Indefinite forms, including aim, are capable of becoming the more definite possibilities of Whitehead's theory.

II— Contingency

1— Contingency and Interdependence

Possibilities are necessarily connected to necessity and contingency. Necessity indicates what is common to all possibilities, for that which is beyond the boundary of the necessary is impossible. Yet there would not be any alternative possibilities without contingent actualization. Within the limits of the necessary, that is, the domain of the possible, there are those that are actualized and those that are not. While there may be some universal contingent determinations made by God, all others are particular determinations made by particular actual occasions, in accordance with the principle of process (PR, 23).

Temporality is necessarily distinguished into three domains, past, present, and future, which require each other. Temporality also generates the extensive continuum as an abstract matrix characterizing the past, and by extension, the other domains as well. There cannot be any particular actualization without present determination, nor present determination without the influx of future creativity, so in that sense the past as the outcome of actualization is contingent upon God. God in turn is dependent upon the past for the particular content of the divine experience.

Most theologies, and not only those that are rigidly classical, hold to the model in which God is wholly independent, and everything else is completely dependent on God. Descartes's definition of substance, "that which requires nothing other than itself to exist," is applied a fortiori to God. This affirmation of divine independence is nowhere better illustrated than in contemporary theological reflection on divine suffering. As Grenz and Olson have observed: "That God suffers is almost a truism in contemporary theology. In a single theological generation the traditional doctrine of God's impassability has been overturned, so that it is now almost heresy to reassert it." 7 Yet apart from process thinkers, theologians are very reluctant to recognize that God is in any way dependent on another.

Moltmann and Kueng argue for the historicity and suffering of God, and Rahner seems to recognize change in God so long as it is not caused by something outside God. But they draw the line by denying that God is dependent upon the world. Rahner says, "God does not become dependent on the world, but remains free visavis the world and grounded in himself."8 Moltmann agrees: "God's experiences of conflict, pain and suffering in history are not due to some inherent interdependence between God and the world."9 Rather, it stems from divine selflimitation: ''God 'feels' the world; he allows himself to be affected, to be touched by each of his creatures."10

A subsidiary thesis asserts that any dependence on external actualities would amount to coercion. Kueng argues:

God is not forced, but he is able to do what he does in history; and he has a power and ability to perform these acts which are rooted in his nature. The nature of the living God is a nature which is capable of selfhumiliation, even though not compelled to take this path . . . 11

William J. Hill, O.P., affirms that while God is immutable, the members of the Trinity are (contingently?) selfdetermining, although this is understood as free from "all coercion from without."12

Note the rhetoric of "force" and "coercion." Determination by another would be more neutral language. One can only be coerced if acted upon against one's will. Selflimitation is not sufficient to rule out dependence, if one has willed to allow such dependence. Selflimitation, allowing for interdependence, may be assumed within the context of the metaphysical and cosmic principles of the world.

However, behind most of these theologians' concern to protect God's independence lies the towering work of Karl Barth:

God would still be love even if he did not choose to love the world . . . God has perfect love and fellowship within himself—in his triune life—before and apart from his love for and fellowship with the world . . . If God needed the world as the object of his love, then his would not be purely gracious love and the world would be necessary to God's being. God would then be robbed of his deity.13

If God is utterly independent, then any divine selflimitation presupposes a context in which God exists apart from the world, that is, from anything other than what is divine. If there is such a state, it is exceedingly abstract. From the perspective of interdependence, God wills to be in a state of mutual dependence precisely because this enriches the divine life, which could not be complete otherwise. The clash of these two ideals—independence and interdependence—means that different ideals of divine perfection are involved. According to independence, the perfect being is utterly complete and selfsufficient. On the other hand, according to independence the perfect becoming is continually being enriched by what it receives from outside itself.

Interdependence is not a term that Whitehead uses, yet it is the ontological correlate of a basic epistemological criterion, coherence. Coherence does not mean simply that metaphysical principles are compatible or internally

consistent. It is the requirement that they mutually require each other for their existence and truth. I find Whitehead's way of putting this slightly misleading: they "presuppose each other so that in isolation they are meaningless . . . [I]t means that what is indefinable in one such notion cannot be abstracted from its relevance to the other notions" (PR, 3). It's not so much that these principles are meaningless in isolation, but that they are incomplete without the others. The fundamental notions require each other.

Thus, actual entities require eternal objects for any characterization they might have, while eternal objects derive their existence from the actual entities they characterize. Actual entities without eternal objects would be indistinguishable from one another; eternal objects alone would be relativity nonexistent. Again, creativity requires actual entities as instances of actuality, and actual entities need creativity for their existence and activity. 14

Coherence is a strong way of ensuring the strict unity of a philosophical endeavor. In contrast, "incoherence is the arbitrary disconnection of first principles" (PR, 6), as in Descartes's dualism of mind and body. This is a special meaning of "coherence": Descartes's dualism is not incoherent in ordinary senses, such as basically inconsistent, or as contradictory, or as generating nonsense. Except for the demands of adequacy to experience, however, there is no reason why there couldn't be a onesubstance theory, either of mind (Leibniz) or of body (Hobbes). What's needed is for minds to require bodies necessarily, and vice versa. They should depend upon each other.

This is the essence of interdependence. Its values are primarily metaphysical. It ensures unity in comprehensiveness. Descartes achieves a unified theory of mind, and one of body, but a theory that can unite both is to that degree more comprehensive. Since single principles can rarely encompass the whole of reality, several principles are needed. The ideal would be several principles requiring each other which could encompass the whole of reality.

Interdependence establishes joint necessity, for one principle entails that the other exists. It is the guarantor of metaphysical stability, for it is not possible for the one to exist without the other. With respect to such metaphysical principles the world cannot go out of existence piecemeal.

Few thinkers have extended this metaphysical ideal of interdependence to God. The traditional religious ideal has been just the opposite: God exists in pure perfection apart from everything else, so much so that the creation of the world is seen as a purely gratuitous act (so Barth). Pressed hard enough, however, pure gratuity appears to be purely arbitrary.

To ensure a coherence including God, Whitehead stipulates: "God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse. He is their chief exemplification" (PR, 343). Otherwise we have a dualism of God and the world. This does not mean that there are no necessary differences between these two species of actual entities. Here it is

important to observe an important difference: God is an actual entity, but not an actual occasion (PR, 88). God exemplifies all the features of an actual entity, but is necessarily different from the many finite actual occasions of the world. 15

From the perspective of my theory, present actual occasions depend upon God for their creative power and aim, whereby they can create themselves as determinate beings. Since their creativity is the basis of their existence, they owe their existence to God. God does not depend upon the world for existence, but God does for the content of the divine experience. Apart from the world that experience would be radically deficient. God does not know by creating, as the ancients would have it, but by knowing what has been created by others.

In the deepest sense, divine necessity acquires contingency from finite occasions, while they acquire a measure of necessity from God. God apart from the world would be purely necessary. This was the classical ideal, for it would ensure the eternity and immutability of God. From a process perspective God would be radically impoverished, unless it were to acquire some contingency. On the other hand, there are two ways in which the world acquires necessity. In one way this is the necessity of the metaphysical principles, or better, the transcendental conditions governing the various processes of concrescence. In another way it is the creativity that necessarily flows out of future activity. But the world aquires more than power from God. The particular aims could not be appropriate to their particular situations unless they were contingent, arising from God's responses to the particularities experienced.

Contingency in turn is presupposed by such features as temporality, becoming, creaturely freedom, and novelty. For example, time depends on the contrast between different events. If all events merely exemplified necessary principles, there could be no contrast. Any necessary principles must be exemplified by all events. The differences could only be those features that some events have, and some do not, and these would be all contingent.

Becoming, and change in general, presupposes a contrast between the outset and the conclusion. This contrast can only be contingent.

Creaturely freedom presupposes alternative possibilities, from which only one would be actualized. If there were no genuine alternatives, there would be no freedom. There could be no present determination if all features were antecedently necessary. To be genuine alternatives, the possibilities would have to be capable of being actualized—or of not being actualized. That which is actual, but might not have been, must be contingent.

Necessity must always be instantiated in actualities. Genuine novelty is an unrealized possibility. Since it does not yet exist, it can only be a contingent.

Perhaps personhood furnishes the most important reason for ascribing contingency and interdependence to God. A person must be dynamically

responsive to contingent circumstances. God is responsive, prehending the particular past situation of every nascent occasion, and responding to it in terms of an appropriate aim. To be sure, classical theism has its way of handling this. Speaking of the incident when the Israelites fashioned the golden calf in the wilderness (Exodus 32), the writer to the Hebrews comments: "'As I swore in my wrath, They shall never enter my rest,' although his works were finished from the foundation of the world" (Hebrews 4.3). The response is here and now, the anger to match the offense, but it was readied from all eternity. 16 To my mind, this is merely apparent responsiveness. Genuine responsiveness, which is the basis for personhood, must be based on the contingency of the present situation experienced here and now.

Contingent features pertaining to God have tremendous religious significance. The major theistic religions of the world largely agree on the necessary features. Where there is disagreement, it is as much if not more within one religion as between religions. Yet on the role of the Exodus, Sinai, the Crucifixion, the revelation of the Qur'an, they differ considerably. These contingent circumstances excite loyalty and faith, not the attendant necessary universal features. As St. Ambrose has remarked, "It is not by philosophy that God is pleased to save his people" (AI, 295).

Theology has often neglected the full range of divine contingency available to us. The fragility and fragmentariness of ordinary experience has led many people to remember and celebrate crucial experiences in our tradition as peculiarly illuminating of divine power. The events gain their poignancy precisely because they could have been otherwise. Despite St. Anselm's Cur Deus Homo Jesus could have lived an obscure but peaceful life. Those Hebrew slaves in Egypt could have simply remained there. These events are revelatory, having the power of disclosure, in part because they could have been otherwise.

Philosophical analysis is essential for the precise determination of the generic character of the divine and its interaction with the world. However, in the absence of divine contingency, and our awareness of it through experience and tradition, we would be greatly impoverished.17

2— Rationalist and Empiricist Process Theology

Reconceiving God as future creativity may help to mitigate a tension between these two kinds of process theology, the rationalists (Hartshorne, Ogden, Cobb, Griffin et al.) and the empiricists (Loomer, Meland, Frankenberry, Dean). In terms of methodology, this may not be a sharp division, but largely a matter of emphasis. For those I have here termed rationalists recognize that the empirical criteria of adequacy and applicability of experience are essential for speculative philosophy (PR, 3f). They seem necessary for any fallibilistic

rationalism. Once one no longer has confidence in any absolute starting points, the rational criteria of consistency and coherence are no longer adequate, and some matchup between the theory and experience is called for. A confident absolutistic rationalism can try to cover up any discrepancy, with an attitude of "so much the worse for experience." But if there is a disparity with experience, fallibilistic rationalism should take this as a challenge for further revision.

Also, rationalists and empiricists alike agree in affirming Whitehead's appeal to the radical empiricism introduced by William James and John Dewey. Empiricism does not simply mean the experience of individual sensa, but includes also necessities, relations. This thicker sense of experience is most evident in the perceptive mode of causal efficacy. For the most part this mode lies below the surface of consciousness. It is vague, massive: "The light made me blink." Ordinarily we attend to the perceptive mode of presentational immediacy, which is so aptly described and explored in Hume's doctrine of impressions. Hume is correct in denying causal connections between his impressions, because the mode of presentational immediacy abstracts from all causal relatedness. It abstracts from the richness that is the basis of our commonsense conviction of causality.

Process empiricists such as Bernard Meland take the appeal to experience one step further. They locate the activity of the divine in the depth of experience, in that aspect that does not lend itself to rational analysis, to that which is unmanageable in concrete fullness of lived experience. Now, that is congruent with the nature of causal efficacy. Causal efficacy points to elements in perception not easily managed by the sensa of presentational immediacy. It is more concrete, sensa more abstract. The depths of lived experience may be even more concrete than causal efficacy, but they don't in any wise conflict with causal efficacy. Yet the fact remains that Whitehead regarded the theory of causal efficacy as applying only to perception, and never developed it in the direction of divine activity. How could such an extension ever be justified?

Although the contrast between process rationalists and empiricists is usually portrayed in methodological terms, it can been seen in substantive terms. How is divinity experienced? For the empiricists it lies in causal efficacy intensified, in the surd of physical prehension which is not abstracted into presentational immediacy. 18 By employing the criteria of consistency and coherence as these crystallize in terms of the philosophy's first principles, and tracing out their implications, process rationalists locate our primary experience of divinity in the reception of initial aims. Occasions unify the multiplicity of past actualities they inherit, but would have no way of doing so by themselves. Not belonging to any enduring substance, each occasion must start from scratch. It needs initial guidance, even if it can modify this aim to

its own ends. It also needs the aim for its incipient subjective unity. A survey of possible sources indicates that the aim can only come from God. 19

How is that initial aim received? According to Whitehead, by a hybrid physical prehension. The occasion prehends God by means of a divine conceptual prehension. Whether that conceptual prehension is abstracted from the hybrid physical prehension by means of conceptual derivation (the fourth categoreal obligation) or is immediately felt in the initial phase, its datum is an eternal object. In other words, God is experienced in the abstraction from the full concrete physical experience. On the empiricist approach, God is experienced precisely in what remains after abstraction has been made. Here the two approaches seem diametrically opposed.

Nancy Frankenberry's power of the past adapts Meland's concern for the unmanageable richness of experience adumbrated in causal efficacy to Whitehead's account of the origination of creativity in Adventures of Ideas. It is a helpful way of connecting radical empiricism with specific textual resources, hitherto unnoticed. The difficulty, not just for her but for Whitehead, is that the past is conceived as utterly devoid of creativity. How can that which lacks creativity be its source? We also saw, however, that the socalled power of the past could be converted into the power of the future.

To be sure, as long as time is regarded as unidirectional, then the sources of any occasion can only lie in its past. That is the primary reason for supposing that creativity must be a power derived from the past. For if creativity has its source outside of the occasion, it could only come from that which is earlier. If, however, time is not unidirectional, creativity can come from without without necessarily coming from the past.

Then this would enable us to distinguish the power of the future, which is properly divine, from the power of the past. Perception of causal efficacy is the root experience of the power of the past. Only the confusion of past and future, both necessary antecedents and causal sources for the present occasion, can apparently justify the search for the divine in an extrapolation of unmanageable properties of causal efficacy. Meland guards against this confusion by identifying God with "the sensitive nature within nature," but Loomer seems to have affirmed the identity of God with nature late in his career.20 As Tyron explains Meland's enigmatic phrase, "God is not nature as such or an essential structure of nature, but the sensitivity working toward a more subtle and complex range of meanings within nature."21

Epistemological realism finds the real within experience, in order to claim that there is the real beyond experience.22 Meland finds the real in experience in that which resists any final conceptual clarification. Yet his deep commitment to experience as the only basis for the religious life makes it difficult to discern the real beyond experience. In terms of my perspective his analysis limits itself to the interaction of the human and the divine on the

interface between the present and the future. His study of The Realities of Faith is an exquisite delineation of the concrete dynamics of this interface in a mode quite compatible with speculative process thought, yet without venturing beyond the interface. 23

As long as we restrict ourselves to this interface, several of Meland's other findings make sense. God can be designated as "a reality in the creative passage bent on qualitative attainment, winning the creative passage for qualitative emergence."24 This does not warrant, however, that this reality is one. As Inbody expounds, "[T]he assumption that there is a single, organic tendency at work in the universe which may be designated God is an oversimplification of the facts."25

If God lacks unity (or perhaps more properly, individuality), then personality becomes problematic. "Meland argues that to understand the idea of God in terms of the analogy of personality overstates the case. The 'cosmic reality' cannot be understood in terms of personality, for personality is itself an emergent synthesis so is not of absolute or even ultimate significance."26

As the divine source of aims for the myriads of newly emergent occasions, God appears most pluralistically at the immediate interface. Throughout most of the divine concrescence God's activity is unified, but as it approaches the present it verges on being completely pluralized. (Once pluralized, of course, it passes over into the many occasions of the world.) The comprehensive purposing of the divine is reordered into the many aims appropriate to the nascent occasions. A rigorous examination restricted to that interface should find more evidence of plurality than unity. Since personality depends upon unity rather than plurality, it would also be called into question by such an examination.

Yet it is the methodological limitation to immediate experience that forces all of our discussion of God to the narrow ledge between future and present. I find this limitation to be unduly restrictive. We seek the real within experience in order to know the real beyond experience. In any case we do not limit our acquaintance of the world to what we immediately experience, but rely heavily, even overwhelmingly, on the experience of others. Even here our knowledge easily outruns what any human being could experience. Our knowledge of the past, including the evolutionary past, depends upon imaginative reconstruction based on persistent elements that had their origin in that past. If we were limited to immediate experience, or even to experience in general, our knowledge would be arbitrarily confined. What makes it even plausible with respect to God is the ubiquity of God that ensures divine activity is a part of all immediate experience.

This is the ultimate division between rational and empirical process theology, for to go beyond immediate experience typically enlists the services of reason and speculative imagination. Of course, imaginative constructs are

to be rejected if they become dogmatic, resistant to dialectical criticism and the deliverances of experience. Yet if accounts of God as beyond experience are conformable with the deliverances of lived experience, they should not in principle be rejected.

We began this examination of empirical process theology as finding our access to divine activity in the depths of causal efficacy, in the unmanageable part of physical prehension that is not abstracted in conceptual prehension, while its rationalist counterpart finds that activity in the conceptual element abstracted from our physical prehension. Put in those terms, there seems to be no reconciliation possible. In terms of the modifications introduced by God as future, however, the two sides might be drawn closer together.

If we can disentangle the causal elements presupposed by each present occasion, such that the power of the past in causal efficacy could be distinguished from the source of creativity, then much of empirical theology's account of the divine activity in human experience can be appropriated in terms of future creativity. On the other hand, the rationalist account of the provision of initial aim can be criticized for its reliance upon abstractible eternal objects. This overobjectifies the future. If aim is understood rather in terms of indefinite forms, aim forms can characterize the influx of the creativity received from the future. Thus, God can be, as Meland says, "a reality in the creative passage bent on qualitative attainment."

3— Uniqueness and Primacy

There is another set of contrasting religious concerns that often conflict, but that can be reconciled with one another in terms of the future. This is the concern that the religious ultimate be conceived as unique, without a par, and also that it be the primary reality among other realities.

In the Bhagavad Gita Arjuna tells Lord Krishna, "There is no other like Thee." This happens to be uttered by a Hindu, but it could just as well be confessed by a Jew or a Christian. In many religions a premium is placed upon the uniqueness of the ultimate. The Qur'an declares, "[T]here is no god but He, the Creator of everything" (6:103). Of contemporary Christian theologians, Paul Tillich has perhaps insisted the most on God's uniqueness:

The being of God cannot be understood as the existence of a being alongside others or above others. If God is a being, he is subject to the categories of finitude, especially to space and substance. Even if he is called the "highest being" in the sense of the "most perfect" and the "most powerful" being, this situation is not changed. When applied to God, superlatives become diminutives. They place him on the level of other beings while elevating him above all of them. 27

Whitehead expresses the claim of primacy, phrased almost in direct opposition to this formulation of the claim for uniqueness: "God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse. He is their chief exemplification" (PR, 343). Whitehead's concerns are largely metaphysical, but there is a definite religious concern with primacy. It orders our loyalties, seeking to ensure that the ultimate receive our highest loyalty. That which is unique need not take precedence over all. Yet the comparison and ranking involved in establishing the highest clearly threatens the uniqueness claimed for the ultimate.

Whitehead proposes a strategy whereby the claims for primacy can accommodate the concern for uniqueness. At one level God and other actual entities are all alike as exemplifications of the metaphysical principles. Yet there is also a systematic contrast between God as the one infinite nontemporal actuality and the many, finite temporal actual occasions.

The contrast is exhaustive, for actual entities can be either nontemporal or temporal. If temporal, some precede and some succeed one another. They can be distinguished from one another only by being finite. If time and space are indissolubly linked, then there is a finitude and plurality spread out in space as well. If nontemporal, there can only be one actual entity: "Unfettered conceptual valuation, 'infinite' in Spinoza's sense of that term, is only possible once in the universe; since that creative act is objectively immortal as an inescapable condition characterizing creative action" (PR, 247). God's infinite grasp and ordering of all eternal objects thus follows from a unique act.

While my argument was developed in terms of Whitehead's final theory, 28 it really works best for his intermediate theory when God was conceived as the nontemporal actual entity. On the other hand, he was able to devise a comparable argument for God conceived as both nontemporal and everlasting, using the principle of the "reversal of the poles":

For God the conceptual is prior to the physical, for the World the physical poles are prior to the conceptual poles.

A physical pole is in its own nature exclusive, bounded by contradiction; a conceptual pole is in its own nature allembracing, unbounded by contradiction . . . Thus, by reason of his priority of appetition, there can be but one primordial nature for God; and, by reason of their priority of enjoyment, there must be one history of many actualities in the physical world. (PR, 348)

God is thus the highest of the actual entities, yet uniquely contrasted to all actual occasions.

Both this strategy and its predecessor essentially depend upon a factor we have found occasion to question: the existence of uncreated eternal objects.

If the atemporal objects are not emergent, all of them must already be in existence, not only all those that characterize reality as it is but as it might have been. This tremendous yet unnecessary ballast must be grounded by the general Aristotelian principle in the nontemporal actual entity. God is unique as the one nontemporal actuality or as proceeding from a primordial nature. What is God's uniqueness otherwise?

The notion of an active future may be regarded as oxymoronic, even as bizarre, but it is certainly unique. It is one and infinite, contrasted to the many, finite occasions of the present. The temporal modes of actuality ensure that the necessary systematic contrast between God, self, and world is maintained, while all exemplify the generic category of actuality.

While my revision affirms God's uniqueness, it does not so obviously maintain God's primacy over all other actualities as well as Whitehead's metaphysics does. It is less clear that God exemplifies the categories. Partly, however, this is due to the fact that for these purposes, ontological priority is ascribed to present actualization rather than past actuality, although we have seen that for other purposes Whitehead regards both as actual. Though God is an actual entity insofar as God exemplifies the generic features of concrescence, God is not an actuality in the way in which past actualities are actual. God is neither finite nor determinate.

Tillich held that ''[i]f God is a being, he is subject to the categories of finitude, especially to space and substance." 29 Whitehead agrees: God is not a being, as all beings are finite. For God is a present becoming. Tillich further holds that since God is not a being, God is not subject to the metaphysical categories. For Whitehead, God as a present becoming exemplifies the metaphysical categories, for they have been transformed into categories of becoming, the necessary conditions for actualization.30

Properly speaking, these are transcendental conditions governing subjectivity, which are transformed into metaphysical principles governing objectivity. Usually, actualities are thought to have both subjective and objective aspects, but these are distinct types of actualities from the perspective of the temporal modes. The conditions are transcendental in the Kantian sense as pertaining to all experience. They are the conditions in terms of which experience and actualization are possible, and they apply to God and to all present occasions equally.31

From this perspective, to exemplify the metaphysical principles is to actualize either the subjective transcendental conditions or the objective metaphysical principles. After all, these are intrinsically interconnected: "[H]ow an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is" (PR, 23).

Our discussion in this section is a speculative reflection on the perceptive study by Donald A. Crosby, Interpretive Theories of Religion.32 Building on the theories of religion proposed by Spinoza, Kant, Otto, and Tillich, Crosby

constructs six criteria for the object of religious interest. ("Object" here refers to what religious persons are ultimately concerned about, without prejudice to whether it is finally objectifiable.) This is an interpretive theory, intending to specify what is and what is not a religion, as contrasted with a normative theory, designed to specify which religions are better or worse. Each criterion is accompanied by ten or more quotations from the literature of the major world religions illustrating that quality.

Crosby's work requires an expansion of our conceptions, for our examination of God has been primarily within the context of Western theism. An adequate theory should also address brahman, emptiness, and the tao among others. In order to embrace Eastern traditions as well, the placeholder ultimate will be used. In general, Western concerns with the immediate experience of the divine, coupled with the impersonal aspects of brahman, emptiness, and the tao, may be conceived in terms of the more pluralistic interaction of the future and present, whereas Western personalism concentrates upon the center of future activity.

Thus, the quest for direct experience of the ultimate is apt to be impersonal, as Meland discovered, while the experience of divine personhood is more speculative and indirect, frequently depending on illuminating events in history and tradition. In any case, however, the two dimensions of the experience of the ultimate could be integrally connected. One expresses God in the privacy of inner subjectivity, the other the divine influence upon present occasions.

Let us consider how my revised theory of the ultimate meets the six criteria Crosby proposes for the religious object:

(1) Uniqueness. There can be only one future actuality. Any plurality of creativity is found solely within the present.

(2) Primacy. As the source of present occasions, it enjoys ontological primacy.

(3) Pervasiveness. On the personal side, ultimate concern should pervade all our concerns, thereby ordering them. On the cosmic side, it is not only unique, set apart from all other realities, but pervades all realities as their aim and source of creativity. Otherwise it could not with certainty supply their appropriate aims.

(4) Rightness. Since the ultimate is held to be incomparable in goodness, it must be able to determine the relative status and importance of all else. By providing each occasion with its aim valuing all possibilities confronting it God fulfills this role.

(5) Permanence. The ultimate must rescue our lives from transitoriness and extinction. "No thoughtful person can escape the disturbing awareness that even the best results of his pursuit of cultural ideals, whether in art, philosophy, science, or morality, will suffer corrosion, if not extinction, by the relentless passage of time." 33 This is the sense in which Whitehead refers to time as the ultimate evil: "It lies in the fact that the past fades, that time is a 'perpetual perishing'. . . . The process of time veils the past below distinctive feeling" (PR, 340).

Unfortunately, religions often go to the opposite extreme, imagining God to be immutable. Sometimes God is conceived as immutable but everlasting; then there is still the distinction between before and after, which is one precondition for change. But God as timeless, as lacking any temporal distinctions, cannot help but be wholly immutable.

It is difficult to see how an actuality could be both immutable and personally responsive, without entailing determinism, or how it could be timeless and subjective. We have already seen Whitehead's difficulties on this point when he considered God to be purely nontemporal.

Immutability is a form of permanence appropriate to the past, or more precisely, to the persistence of the past into the present. The past is absolutely unchanging, but lacks power in itself. Whatever power it acquires is bestowed upon it by present occasions. Persistence is real, but pertains to the most primitive actualities. What religion calls for is a permanence appropriate to life and activity.

Present occasions are appropriately subjective, capable in some instances of broad experience, but the present is inherently transitory. Each finite present occasion by its act of becoming results in a determinate being. It necessarily passes over into the past. Its present immediacy perishes in the attainment of being.

Only future activity can be both subjective and permanent. It never perishes. It is everlasting. It alone has a permanence that is not mere persistence, nor is it mere eternality. It can preserve our every achievement, because it perfectly perceives every present activity, and perfectly retains that experience forever.

(6) Hiddenness. This quality recalls the religious person's inability to find resources within thought or speech adequate to capture the depth and richness of the ultimate. The ultimate is something inexhaustibly mysterious in and of itself. On the other hand, if it is absolutely mysterious, it becomes problematic how we could ever experience it.

Another way of putting this property is to say that the ultimate absolutely resists being objectified. Since Whitehead and his followers have assumed that all causal influence between actualities requires prehension, and

prehension requires the objectification of one actuality for the other, they have searched in vain for ways in which God might be objectified. That God is imprehensible as pure subjectivity means that God is necessarily, intrinsically "hidden." This is no accidental property of the divine, but follows from the nature of its innermost being.

On the other hand, future subjectivity can have an influence on present occasions by the transfer of creativity and aim, thereby allowing a way in which God can be experienced by us, even if in a nonobjective mode.

As we have argued, future subjectivity is the proper mode of permanence with respect to the divine. Present subjectivities are inherently unstable, going over into past determinateness. The many become one in the final satisfaction of the present concrescence. Since satisfaction in this sense entails determinateness, pastness, and objectification, it cannot apply to God. If satisfaction can apply to God in any sense, it must be different from this.

4— Divine Satisfaction

The immanence of physical persistence in present actual occasions may well explain how satisfaction is usually conceived by Whitehead. Because of the overriding importance to actual occasions to achieve satisfaction in terms of the unity of its initial physical prehensions, satisfaction is primarily portrayed as the resultant being that terminates becoming.

The process of concrescence terminates with the attainment of a fully determinate 'satisfaction' and the creativity thereby passes over into the 'given' primary phase for the concrescence of other actual entities. This transcendence is thereby established when there is attainment of determinate 'satisfaction' completing the antecedent entity. Completion is the perishing of immediacy . . . (PR, 85C)

As Whitehead makes clear, the determinate outcome is outside the process of determination, which is its concrescence. As determinate it is objectified for subsequent occasions. We do not learn, however, why the termination of concrescence should be called a "satisfaction."

More importantly for our purposes, we should note that this account does not consider satisfaction with respect to God. Most likely it was formulated long before Whitehead conceived of any divine everlasting concrescence. Only the notion of a divine concrescence would render the idea of divine satisfaction meaningful and relevant.

We may find a clue to Whitehead's initial understanding of "satisfaction" in an earlier book. We are told that value is the intrinsic reality of an event (SMW, 93, 192). How is this intrinsic reality attained?

Realisation therefore is in itself the attainment of value. But there is no such thing as mere value. Value is the outcome of limitation. The definite entity is the selected mode which is the shaping of attainment; apart from such shaping into individual matter of fact there is no attainment. The mere fusion of all that there is would be the nonentity of indefiniteness. (SMW, 94)

I have italicized those words that at a later stage will be called "satisfaction." If there is such a direct continuity, then "satisfaction" was originally chosen to represent the realization of value by means of concrescence. In actual occasions, to be sure, that realization of value entails the termination of creativity, but there is no general reason why this should be so.

God's general aim is to achieve the maximum intensity and harmony possible from the divine experience of actual occasions as they emerge, as integrated together with God's unlimited conceptual resources in supplementing whatever is received into a satisfactory total experience. If satisfaction is realization of value, then God reaches satisfaction at every moment. Since each divine physical perception, and each conceptual supplementation adds to the satisfaction already attained, we may properly speak of an evergrowing divine satisfaction.

This sense of satisfaction, however, does not give us warrant for conceiving of God as prehensible. In ordinary contexts, to be, determinate satisfactions are objectified for subsequent occasions. But the divine satisfaction does not constitute a fully determinate unity, for it does not terminate concrescence. There is no perishing of immediacy (cf. PR, 85 immediately above). Satisfaction as the realization of value provides us with a broader meaning, in terms of which satisfaction as termination of subjective immediacy may be seen as restricted to the way actual occasions are satisfied. Divine satisfaction does not require any termination of immediacy, and by the same token it does not entail objectification.

With this much of a preliminary sketch in mind, perhaps certain points can be further clarified by considering some objections:

III— Concluding Objections

Objection 1— If God Is Future Creativity, How Can God Also Be Personal and Individual?

As we saw in chapter 3, Whitehead seems to have had grave reservations about the traditional concept of God as a nontemporal subject. It is only because God is a temporal concrescence that God can be subjective. That much of his argument is accepted here, together with the realization that an

everlasting concrescence is imprehensible. Divine influence on actual occasions requires very different means from prehension.

It seems, however, that an ongoing divine concrescence would be more than creativity. Yet a concrescence is the gradual integration of prehensions, each of which can be analyzed in terms of subject, datum, and subjective form. The subject is the intimate center that remains forever inaccessible and inexpressible. The subjective form, the way the datum is felt and integrated, is an element of indefinite form that can be communicated with the creativity. That leaves only the data.

In a finite occasion, the data constitutes the material to be unified in the final satisfaction, by which it is objectified. Yet in the case of perception, not all the data perceived find their way to the final satisfaction, at least as the occasion is objectified for occasions other than its immediate conscious successors.

Since for God there are no unities of determinate actualities, only pure becoming, the pure process of unlimited concrescence, all data are like data experienced without constituting further objectification. In other words, divine prehensions, while truly referring to past actuality, simply make an impress upon the divine subjectivity, without having any determinate or definite element in themselves. If so, divine experience is constituted only by indefinite forms, which would be the basis for the informed creativity it bestows on present occasions.

Pure creativity, as experienced by finite occasions, is quite plural and impersonal. Since it is a common activity participated in by many occasions, it could only be an impersonal substratum for the centered and personal activities of higher occasions. Yet as future, as the common source for present activities, creativity is one, expressible in terms of a single concrescence.

Objection 2— Is My Claim That Creativity Is Derived from God, Too Much Biased in the Direction of Western Monotheism?

"God" is here used as an abstract philosophical concept for that which is common among the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious traditions with respect to their common understanding of the Ultimate. The particular traditions diverge, but these contingent matters are indispensable for the religious task, which differs from the purely conceptual task of philosophy, as they seek to establish strategies for reconciling the believer with God.

Can this conceptual undertaking be extended to nonmonotheistic religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism? The philosophical task here (not the religious one) is to achieve some sort of unified conception of the Ultimate. I submit that this model of God and creativity offers a way this might be achieved, by conceiving of many of the nonWestern religions as directed

toward creativity (particularly in its pluralistic manifestations) rather than toward God.

If so, there seem to be only three possibilities with respect to these ultimates: either creativity is derived from God, God is derived from creativity, or the two are identical. Creativity as the immanence or the spirit of God present in the world is clearly the option of Western theism. Hindu thought generally pictures God as derivative from a more ultimate impersonal brahman. Or if we think of brahman as truly God, then creativity and God are identical, but the personhood of God is lost.

Faced with these alternatives, I have mainly chosen the first, deriving creativity from God. Some interpret Whitehead as having derived God from an alien generic creativity because of his unfortunate statement: "Both [God and the World] are in the grip of the ultimate metaphysical ground, the creative advance into novelty" (PR, 349). What does this mean, but that every actual entity, including God, is an instance of selfcreativity seeking novelty? Creativity is not some disembodied higher power, but is always the selfcreativity of some actuality. The irony of this statement is that divine freedom is precisely expressed as being "in the grip of" something.

For creativity to be derived from God, the local present creativity of concrescing occasions must be derived from infinite resources of future creativity. As future, God and creativity are identical. This does not mean that God is impersonal, since future creativity, unlike present creativity, which is participated in by many, can be one and individual. One individual spans the infinitude of the future.

Thus, by making the proper distinctions, we may say both that God and [future] creativity are identical, and that [present] creativity derives from God.

There is even a sense in which God derives from creativity, if creativity is conceived as pure activity having two species, future and present. It is in this sense that God postulated creativity as the metaphysical ultimate. Such an ultimate, however, is actualized both in terms of good and evil, and is not to be worshipped. It is not the religious ultimate that Whitehead conceived God to be. It is ultimate rather in the sense of being basic and allpervasive, more like "being" in traditional philosophy. To be religiously ultimate, creativity must be nuanced in some way.

Objection 3— Isn't It Blasphemous to Suppose That Our Own Subjectivity Is Simply a Continuation of God's? Isn't This Simply a Kind of Temporalistic Pantheism?

In our conception each occasion's inner subjectivity expresses its own present activity of creativity, which is a localization and finitization of the one divine future creativity. In Whitehead's view, to be sure, each actual entity's

subjectivity is an expression of creativity, but creativity is considered purely as a neutral feature by which subjectivity is to be analyzed. Along with eternal objects it is one of the formative elements of all actuality. No flow of creativity from God to the occasion is contemplated, nor is it characterized any indefinite forms. God influences the distinct subjectivities by means of initial aims, which are characterized by definite eternal objects.

In my view, as the divine creativity becomes present, it pluralizes itself into many finite, local actual occasions. Their creativity must be conceived as a continuation of divine creativity, to be sure, yet under very different circumstances. These circumstances make it possible to overcome the charge that this constitutes an unacceptable confusion of the divine and the creaturely.

Continuity undergirds identity within any one temporal modality. A concrete determinate past actuality remains precisely what it is throughout its career as a past event. God as future is forever God, and the momentary present occasion is the same occasion in its growth and determination. It is this sense of continuity that suggests to us that the continuation of future creativity into the present represents an unacceptable mingling of the divine and creaturely. But the supposed mingling is not a continuation within one temporal modality, but crosses over among them.

Whitehead shows the significance of the transition from the present to the past: it is the perishing of subjective unification in the attainment of objective unity. To be sure, we do recognize continuities between present concrescences and their objective outcomes. But these are based on the contingent factors of the present occasion's concrete situation and the nature of its decision, which is carried over objectively into the outcome. On the modal level, however, there is the metaphysical shift from subject to object.

My proposal suggests that the shift from God to the occasion is more like that between subject and object than like that from one individual to another. From this perspective we may speak of three realities, God, self, and world. The world as the totality of past actualities is the temporal achievement of the many present selves, themselves the outcome of divine creativity. The world is the outcome of God in the lapse of time, but the insertion of the present, with its pluralistic and potentially conflicting determinations, means that it is not simply the outcome of God but requires actualization in the present as well.

There are other factors besides the continuation of creativity in the transition from future to present. As the divine experience approaches the present, we may conceive it to be concerned with the particular situation that the projected present occasion will face. This is God's response to that particular situation, which is expressed in terms of divine subjective forms. These subjective forms, being purely subjective, constitute an intrinsic informing of the creativity which then becomes atomized and localized in the present. The divine informing of creativity becomes the way the creature receives its creativity

with aim. The only difference between the future creativity targeted to that occasion and the occasion itself is the atomization of the continuum.

Expressed in Whitehead's conceptuality, this is none other than the way divine conceptual feelings harbor the same aim that the nascent occasion inherits. Both theories aim to express this continuity of aim, although only one is expressed in terms of eternal objects. Whitehead's poses fewer problems, because we assume that there are distinct subjectivities here, and the continuity is only objective. But from whence arises the subjectivity of the present occasion? Does it simply well up from within? This is a variation of the question concerning the origination of creativity itself.

While the successiveness of creative decisions, first divine and then creaturely, safeguards the integrity of creaturely freedom in ways that their identification cannot, the continuity of the creative flow expresses the mystery of grace and freedom. Both components are present, yet in such a way as to be distinct in their contributions. Whatever its special manifestations may be, as borne out in the various religious traditions, the generic grace of God lies in the empowerment of each occasion with its creativity and aim.

There is a limited parallel for this continuity of creativity in the philosophical literature. Aristotle distinguishes between the passive intellect, which is simply passive toward sensory impressions, and the active intellect which integrates and orders these experiences by the exercise of reason. As separable from the passive intellect, the active intellect is immortal. For the Greek sensibility, to be immortal is to partake of the divine. On the other hand, the active intellect, precisely because it abstracts from the individualizing features of the passive intellect, is quite nonindividual and impersonal. 34

While creativity points to an activity much broader than thinking,35 it certainly includes it. The active intellect in which all minds participate is like the pervasive present creativity that all occasions instantiate. But there is also that other instance of active reasoning, the Unmoved Mover. The relationship between the Unmoved Mover and the active intellect is perplexing. They seem to have the same attributes of abstract active thinking, contemplation of forms, etc. They differ only in that while the active intellect is a nonindividualized activity many minds can participate in, the Unmoved Mover is a centered individual. In our conceptuality, while both express the activity of creativity, one pluralizes it into many present occasions, and the other individualizes it as one future actuality.

Objection 4— Does Not the Ontotheological Stricture Exclude the Possibility of God as Future Creativity?

In a very influential essay on "The OntoTheological Nature of Metaphysics,"36 Martin Heidegger stressed the importance of the distinction

between beings and being itself. This can be interpreted for theological purposes as requiring that God cannot be identified both with being itself and with a being.

If God is personal, God must be an individual, and hence a being. Yet as the future source of creativity, God is also being itself, and hence in at least apparent opposition to Heidegger's ontotheological stricture.

A superficial evasion depends on the distinction between being and becoming. God is not a being as something concretely determinate. Whitehead can agree with Paul Tillich that God is not such a being. 37 In that sense God is not a being but being itself. In this ontotheological discussion, however, it is not the contrast between being and becoming that is at stake, but the distinction between being itself, whether understood in terms of being or becoming (creativity), and its instances. Put in Whitehead's terms, the prohibition becomes: God cannot be both creativity and an instantiation of creativity (i.e., a being in this sense).

Consider the consequences, however, if God is not both. (a) If God is not a being, God is not an individual, but this is the precondition for any subjectivity. (b) On the other hand, if God is not being itself, it is not clear how God could be source of being, or how God could be infinite. Individuals are limited by other individuals, thereby introducing finitude. J. G. Fichte found real difficulty in reconciling divine individuality and infinitude in the early 1800s, and the problem has not become any easier since then. Paul Tillich has vigorously championed one side of the tension: God is beingitself and therefore not a being, but this runs into difficulty with divine subjectivity. He has wrestled mightily with the biblical tradition of divine personalism, yet without resolution.38

Process theists have split on the issue. John Cobb, recognizing the problem, has decided in favor of God as a being.39 Then creativity may be considered as the ultimate reality, while God is the ultimate actuality.40 Theists may be tempted to identify God with the religious ultimate, seeing it as that which is supremely worthy of worship, but Hindus may find in ultimate reality itself that which is the supreme goal of the religious quest. Surely, they say, ultimate reality must be closer to brahman or sunyata than any being could be.

On the other hand, Jan Van der Veken and Andre Cloots take the opposite side.41 Following Heidegger's hint of a holy being, they conceive God as the primordial characterization of creativity. This proposal leaves little room for the consequent nature as the divine experience of, and hopefully response to, the temporal world. The personal character of God seems to be relegated solely to the religious life, having no place in the philosophical account of the divine.

As long as we conceive both God and creativity as essentially present activity, there will be an intractable problem. Creativity must be a

nonindividualized activity, which beings can participate in. If nonindividual, creativity must lack subjectivity. Individual beings, however, compete for the same space, such that none can be infinite.

If the divine being is future, it can be infinite without competing with any of the present actual occasions. Since God is the sole occupant of the future, future creativity is not something God participates in, for it is all exercised by the divine. God individualizes future creativity. As such God is both (future) creativity and an instance of creativity.

NOTES

Preface

1. These three types are ably examined and criticized by Michael Welker in Universalitaet Gottes und Relativitaet der Welt: Theologische Kosmologie im Dialog mit dem amerikanischen Prozessdenken nach Whitehead (NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1981).

2. These are outlined in The Emergence of Whitehead's Metaphysics, 19251929 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984).

3. Relire Whitehead: Concepts de Dieu et Process theology (Quebec: Les Presses de l'Université Laval, forthcoming). My own detailed compositional analysis may be found in ''The Growth of Whitehead's Theism," Process Studies Supplements, vol. 1.

4. Aristotle's Two Systems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).

5. See Moltke S. Gram, Kant: Disputed Questions (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), for a convenient presentation of both sides, including a translation of Vaihinger's essay.

6. Whether the Transcendental Deduction is essential to Kant's project, or merely an ideal never fully achieved, is also disputed.

7. Gram, 63.

8. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965.

Introduction— The Intelligibility of Future Activity

1. JeanPaul Sartre opposed these two categories in his famous book, Being and Nothingness (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956). A third might mediate this dualism.

2. This is put more formally: "All the actual entities are positively prehended, but only a selection of the eternal objects" (PR, 219)

3. In chapter 7 we shall consider more sophisticated senses of creatio ex nihilo, but for the present only the more ordinary sense is intended. See my essay on "An Alternative to Creatio ex Nihilo," Religious Studies 19/2 (June 1983): 205–213.

4. There is evidence in Process and Reality, particularly in part II, that Whitehead initially conceived of a unified datum determined by the efficient causal past, from which the concrescence developed. In this case the occasion has being throughout its concrescence rather than first acquiring it at the end.

This earlier view is analogous to the traditional notion of God creating the creature, which then freely acts in its concrescence.

On the transition to the later view proposed in part III, see my essay on "The Concept of 'Process,': From 'Transition' to 'Concrescence,' " in Whitehead and the Idea of Process, ed. H. Holz and E. WolfGazo (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 1984), 73–101.

5. See my essay on "Process and Thomist Views Concerning Divine Perfection," 115–129 in The Universe as Journey: Conversations with Norris Clarke, S. J., ed. Gerald A. McCool, S. J. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1988).

6. This is necessarily a limited account, with implicit assumptions. For a fuller account, see my essay on "The Creation of 'Eternal' Objects," The Modern Schoolman 71/3 (March 1994): 191–122.

7. This does not preclude its being subdivided into genetic phases, for no phase is a complete occasion.

8. So Ivor Leclerc, Whitehead's Metaphysics, an Introductory Exposition (London: George Allen and Unwin), chapter 2.

9. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944), 182.

10. See David J. Bryant, Faith and the Play of Imagination (Mercer University Press, 1989), 207f: "The experience of coming to faith is rooted not in one's more or less autonomous efforts to provide an overall framework of meaning for life but in the fact that the Christian tradition engaged and leads one's imagination."

Gordon Kaufman, in The Theological Imagination (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1981), concentrates on the constructive powers of the imagination, while Garrett Green, Imagining God: Theology and Religious Imagination (Harper, 1989), concentrates on its receptive powers. Bryant provides a nuanced and balanced articulation partaking of both. By the receptive powers of the imagination Bryant and Green mean the way the imagination is already profoundly shaped by its embeddedness in tradition. Neither seems to consider the way in which God might be actively informing and transforming our imaginations.

11. See my essay on "The Modes of Actuality," The Modern Schoolman 67/4 (May 1990): 275–283.

12. See the presentation by George L. Kline in "Form, Concrescence, and Concretum," in Explorations in Whitehead's Philosophy, ed. Lewis S. Ford and George L. Kline (New York: Fordham University Press, 1983), 104–146.

13. Process Studies 13/2 (Summer 1983): 132–142.

14. To be sure, initial aims are hybridly prehended in Whitehead's account. He used uncreated eternal objects to function as indeterminate aim. On the contrary, I

shall argue that eternal objects are temporally emergent as features abstracted from novel actual occasions. See my essay on "The Creation of 'Eternal' Objects," The Modern Schoolman 71/3 (March 1994), 191–222. If so, both objectified actualities and eternal objects come from the past. Aim, on the other hand, is directly derivable from the future.

15. Those occasions that are members of some persistent society occupy the same spatial locus, but our distinction depends on the identity of spatiotemporal loci. While of the same spatial locus, they are of different (already determinate) spatiotemporal locis.

We need to carefully distinguish the spatiotemporal locus (which is invariant) from the qualitative features of future, present, and past, which vary with the creative advance.

16. There are atheistic versions of whitehead's philosophy, such as Donald W. Sherburne, "Whitehead Without God," 305–328 in Process of Philosophy and Christian Thought, ed. Delwin Brown, Ralph E. James Jr., and Gene Reeves (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1971); and George Allan, "The Primacy of the Mesocosm," 25–44 in New Essays in Metaphysics, ed. Robert C. Neville (New York: State University of New York, 1987). I have examined Sherburne's essay in "An Appraisal of Whiteheadian Nontheism,'' The Southern Journal of Philosophy 15/1 (July 1977): 27–35.

See also Explorations in Whitehead's Philosophy, 332–336.

17. See "The Riddle of Religion in the Making," Process Studies 22/1 (Spring 1993): 42–50.

18. Sigla after citations from PR, e.g., PR, 180B, will refer to this analysis. This stratification will be provisionally retained for ease of reference, even though in some cases further investigation suggests revisions. Thus, it turns out that what was labeled G (nontemporal concrescence and subjective aim) consists of insertions, after the original version of part III (DEFH) was completed.

19. I accept and even radicalize that doctrine: God is completely in time, for the timeless is merely an abstraction from time. This does not undercut God's transcendence, however, for God transcends our present as our future.

Chapter One— God As Principle of Limitation

1. An address delivered at the Phillips Brooks House at Harvard, April 5, 1926. Harvard Crimson, April 6, 1925. (Noted by Prof. John E. Skinner, Episcopal Divinity School.)

The final paragraph of the chapter, with its more theistic expression, may have been added when Whitehead was editing the essay for the book. The penultimate paragraph makes a more dramatic ending to Whitehead's address, but Whitehead may have wanted a more positive ending which would tie it in with his newly discovered notion of God.

2. The only hint of an incipient theism that may be found embedded in the Lowell Lectures is given by two paragraphs from the lecture on "The Nineteenth Century"

(SWM, 105f). In all likelihood, however, these two paragraphs (with the immediately preceding one) were inserted into this chapter later. Notice the strong continuity that persists if these three paragraphs were excised. This "triple envisagement" passage is discussed in The Emergence of Whitehead's Metaphysics, chapters 1 and 5.

3. "Whitehead's First Metaphysical Synthesis," International Philosophical Quarterly 17/3 (September 1977): 251–264, and in the first three chapters of The Emergence of Whitehead's Metaphysics.

4. Although this description first appears in the later chapter on "God" (SMW, 177), it may well have been implicit in the philosophy of the Lowell Lectures. The notion of a single substantial activity makes better sense as sustaining a world of events. Events are not individually actual, as occasions are.

5. As quoted by Victor Lowe, Understanding Whitehead (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1962), 232.

6. Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, as recorded by Lucien Price (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1954).

7. W. R. Matthews, Memories and Meanings (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1970), as quoted by Norman Pittenger, Catholic Faith in a Process Perspective (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1981), 119f.

8. Letter of September 26, 1959, to Victor Lowe, as quoted in Understanding Whitehead, 232.

9. Russell, Portraits from Memory (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), 93. Quoted in Understanding Whitehead, 221.

10. "Religion and Science" was given April 5, 1925. The first intimations of temporal atomicity present themselves in his Harvard class on April 7, and no connection is yet made between temporal atomicity and theism. The middle term (transcendent eternal objects) is also absent. See my The Emergence of Whitehead's Metaphysics, 281–283 for a transcription of William Ernest Hocking's notes of that lecture.

11. Edmund T. Whittaker, "Whitehead, Alfred North," 952 in the Dictionary of National Biography, 1941–1950 (Oxford University Press, 1959).

12. One indication of the thoroughness of his Christian training can be seen in "Whitehead's References to the Bible," Process Studies 6/4 (Winter 1976): 270–278. Frederic R. Crownfield has collected some 117 biblical quotations from Whitehead's writings. From internal evidence it appears that Whitehead quotes from memory, probably from what he had learned in the 1890s, if not before.

13. Pittenger, Catholic Faith in a Process Perspective, 125.

14. Victor Lowe, "A. N. W.: A Biographical Perspective," Process Studies 12/3 (Fall 1982): 137–147. See also his Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and His Work, vol. I (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), chapter 7.

15. Process Studies 12/3: 140.

16. Understanding Whitehead, 231.

17. The book was impressive in quite another way. Jessie Whitehead (his daughter) recalls from her childhood in the Mill House near Cambridge, that Whitehead suffered insomnia: "He read, often in Sarpi's History of the Council of Trent; when Jessie was wakened by the thump of that big book on the floor, when knew that Daddy had at last fallen asleep." Lowe, Alfred North Whitehead, vol. 1, 206.

18. Sarpi's influence on Whitehead has been carefully studied by Frederic R. Crownfield in "Whitehead: From Agnostic to Rationalist," Journal of Religion 57/4 (October 1977): 376–385. Crownfield argues that Sarpi's rationalism helped lead Whitehead gradually out of his agnosticism. Certainly it is an important influence in Whitehead's thinking, but initially it is likely to have contributed to his agnosticism.

Lowe, in Alfred North Whitehead, vol. 1, page 187, writes: "An Anglican who asks himself with the utmost sincerity whether he should go to Rome is assuming that authority is essential for religion, and is seeking that authority. When Whitehead first asked himself this question, the authority of Newtonian concepts in physics was absolute." By 1900 that authority had collapsed for many physicists. While religious authority may have been uppermost in Whitehead's mind at the outset, his reading of Sarpi could easily have redirected his concern to rational inquiry.

19. Pittenger, Catholic Faith in a Process Perspective, 119.

20. Pittenger, 123; Lowe, Process Studies 12/3 (Fall 1982): 142.

21. Lowe, ibid.

22. I regard this as the fitting conclusion to his Phillips Brooks address on "Religion and Science."

23. Thus, with respect to the most general metaphysical principles, God is like the actual occasions in that both are actual entities, yet as the one primordial actual entity God is systematically different: God is one, infinite, and nontemporal, whereas the actual occasions are many, finite, and temporal. See my "Whitehead's Categorical Derivation of Divine Existence," The Monist 54/3 (July 1970): 374–400.

24. This remarkable sentence has become the basis for a wideranging reconstruction of Whitehead's view on God. Laurence Wilmot sees a subordination of God to creativity within Process and Reality, which he interprets as both Platonist and Arian, from which Whitehead frees himself in the direction of Athanasian orthodoxy in Adventure of Ideas. See his Whitehead and God: Prolegomena to Theological Reconstruction (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1979).

Whitehead is certainly capable of such dramatic shifts, but this particular proposal ignores the persistence of his fundamental objections to orthodox Christian theism, which continue to appear in Adventure of Ideas and Modes of Thought. It also neglects the strong qualification he gives this sentence, for he believed that those Trinitarian theologicans erred by not generalizing their claim. They affirmed only the direct immanence of the divine actuality in the actuality of Christ. For Whitehead any actuality (as objectified) is present in other actualities, but modesty prevents him from proposing that generalization to the Trinitarian divines.

See my review in the Journal of Religion 61/1 (January 1981): 96–99; Delwin Brown, Process Studies 9/1–2 (SpringSummer 1979): 41–45; and above all David Ray Griffin, Encounter 42/2 (Spring 1981): 168–188.

25. See Sheilah O'Flynn Brennan, "Substance within Substance," Process Studies 7/1 (Spring 1977): 14–26.

26. The footnote (PR, 95n8) that "the book of Genesis is too primitive to bear upon this point" suggests that Whitehead does not appreciate the possibility that the Genesis creation account may support his understanding of creation as much as, if not more than, the traditional account. Here see my "Alternative to Creatio ex Nihilo."

27. A very sophisticated example of the position Whitehead is here opposing is provided by Robert C. Neville's God the Creator (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). Neville's theory of the world is largely Whiteheadian, but his theory of God is not. God apart from the world is wholly indeterminate, first becoming determinate in creating the world. Any sort of world (and world structure) might have been created. The categories so created structure the world, but do not extend beyond the world to characterize God. On the issue of God and creation, Neville and Whitehead are programmatically opposed; nevertheless, some mediation is possible. See my essays, "Neville's Interpretation of Creativity," EWP, 272–279 and "Creativity and Concrescence," 165–186 in Interpreting Neville, eds. J. Harley Chapman and Nancy K. Frankenberry (State University of New York Press, 1999).

For another appropriation of Whitehead's theory, also restricting its scope to the world and justifying this by the doctrine of creation, but otherwise quite different from Neville's project, see Michael Welker, Universalitaet Gottes und Relativitaet der Welt.

28. For a further development of this theme, see my essay on "The Rhetoric of Divine Power," Perspectives in Religious Studies 14/3 (Fall 1987): 233–238.

29. As long as God is conceived as an uncreated formative element, this argument holds. Later, however, actuality (including God) comes to be reconceived in terms of concrescence rather than in terms of concrete being (PR, 32G) and the ontological principle is expanded so that actualities are in part their own reasons (PR, 24). Then God could be considered to determine godself and in so doing to determine the ultimate principles. If so, the divine activity itself would be their ground and reason. Whitehead does not make this very explicit, except in the one sentence: "His conceptual actuality at once exemplifies and establishes the categoreal conditions" (PR, 344G).

30. A fourth kind of limitation is mentioned on the next page: valuation. Whereas the first three constitute a "limitation of antecedent selection," presumably restricting the logical possibilities to those that are in fact actualizable, valuation assigns different values to the actualizable ones.

31. The apparent irrationality of threedimensionality may be mitigated somewhat by the notion of cosmic epochs, suggesting that other principles are exemplified in other epochs. It does not appear that Whitehead availed himself of the notion of cosmic epochs as early as Science and the Modern World.

32. Edward R. Harrison, Cosmology: The Science of the Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 111. I am indebted to Kevin J. Sharpe, MacLaurin Chaplain, University of Auckland, New Zealand, for this and the next two references.

33. Arthur Peacocke, Creation and the World of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 66.

34. Stephen W. Hawking, "The Anistropy of the Universe at Large Times," page 285 in Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observational Data, ed. M. S. Longair (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1974).

35. The evidence for cosmic constants may be found in an accessible, if somewhat derivative form, in M. A. Corey, God and the New Cosmology: The Anthropic Design Argument (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1993).

Chapter Two— Deconstructing Theism

1. Thus, "God" is frequently modified by the phase "the primordial nature of."

2. E.g., the last paragraph mentioning "subjective aim" on PR, 69.

3. E.g., I.3; II.1.4; III.1.3; 111.3.1–2.

4. E.g., II.3.5–11.

5. The various compositional strata discerned in Process and Reality have been designated by sigla A through M.

6. In EWM I limited the Giffords draft (c) to the chapters Whitehead wrote during the summer fo 1927. But it also meant the view that concrescence starts from a single datum. By that criterion the extent of C needs to be extended, for he seems to have continued this early theory of concrescence during the fall of 1926, since even such terms as subjective form (a very late term in the Giffords draft) only gradually appears in the later stages of his lectures at Harvard, Fall 1927. Furthermore, his comment that "I have now got nearly 9½ chapters completed" (EWM, 179) is ambiguous. I then took it to mean that he had written those 9½ chapters that summer, but it may well have included previously written chapters as well (i.e., the materials of A and B).

One chapter on the EWM list is very problematic: 8. The Original Theory of Concrescence. The section (111.2.2) listed is barely a page, and may represent a transitional passage to his new theory (D) beyond the Giffords draft. While Whitehead may have refined his judgments concerning the major modern philosophers during the summer's writing, he may have postponed writing up "Locke and Hume" (11.5) and "From Descartes to Kant" (11.6) until the fall. Likewise, he might have then written "Process'' (II.10) as a summary of his position. He may well have intended to include more on the other kind of fluency, "transition," but this was overtaken by the event of his revised theory of concrescence. Some psychological distance between "The Final Interpretation" and "Process" (II.10) is necessary, in order for Whitehead to be willing to plunder his own writing in composing "Process" (EWM, 186f). He was willing to

plunder the original V.1.4 quite a bit more subsequently: see Denis Hurtubise, "The Original Version of Process and Reality, Part V: A Tentative Reconstruction," Process Studies 22/1 (Spring 1993): 1–12.

Even if these three chapters were written during the fall semester, they still retain the same conceptuality discerned in the Giffords draft proper. In the light of these considerations I now tentatively propose as the best match for the 9½ chapters the following:

A. 4 chapters before summer:

1. IV.2 "Extensive Connection"

2. IV.3 "Flat Loci"

3. IV.4.2–5 and IV.5.2.3–6, perhaps titled "Projection and Presentational Immediacy" (EWM, 234, 326, lecture 9)

4. II.4.5–8 and 11.8, the Original Treatise on Perception (EWM, 181f)

B. 5½ chapters during summer 1927:

5. I.1 "Speculative Philosophy"

6. II.1 "Fact and Form"

7. 11.2 "The Extensive Continuum"

8. II.3a and 4a Giffords Lecture 5, "The Order of Nature" (EWM, 326, 184f)

9. 11.9 "Propositions"

½ V.1. (Whitehead intended to complete this account later. When he did, he divided "The Final Interpretation" into two chapters, with this as the first.)

Since by this reckoning the historical chapters, 11.5 "Locke and Hume" and 11.6 "From Descartes to Kant" and II.10 were not part of the 9½ chapters, they were probably written during the ensuing fall semester. Because all these chapters presuppose the earlier theory of concrescence as derived from a single datum, we should enlarge the scope of the Giffords draft to include them as well.

7. See "Panpsychism and the Early History of Prehension," Process Studies 24 (1995): 15–33.

8. There are several theories of "transition" that have been designed to be consistent with Whitehead's final theory in PR. These may well be significant and illuminating. I only wish to insist that they are not Whitehead's own understanding of transition as a transitional unification preparatory to concrescence. Since this is a notion he abandoned in composing part III, it plays little role in systematic accounts based on the later theory.

9. In chapter 4, Whitehead had not yet discovered the structural similarity between "physical purpose" and "propositional feeling" (EWM, 224). Chapter 5 overcomes that difficulty by the invention of "intellectual feeling" and rewrites most of chapter 4 in its terms. This renders chapter 4 largely redundant, but it is kept anyway, in line with his determination to keep everything once intended for publication.

10. See my essay, "Subjectivity in the Making," Process Studies 21/1 (Spring 1992): 1–24.

11. Denis Hurtubise, in Relire Whitehead argues that there are basically only two concepts of God in Process and Reality. He points out that my early and middle concepts are not inconsistent with each other, and should count as one. My concern is more with the growth and revision of the concepts, recognizing that the earlier concepts proceed in the absence of the later ones.

These concepts, particularly the middle and final concepts, are examined in more detail in Process Studies Supplements, vol. 1.

12. I have listed the probable insertions in the notes to "The Riddle of Religion in the Making," Process Studies 22/1 (Spring 1993), 42–50.

13. Denis Hurtubise first recognized this passage as belonging to the middle concept.

14. David Ray Griffin proposes "that Whitehead began PR with the idea of God as dynamically primordial, i.e., as a primordial actuality which knows and interacts with the world . . . We could then suppose that when Whitehead developed the idea of the consequent nature in the narrow sense, he created the "primordial sense of the present text of PR without supposing that Whitehead began working on the Gifford Lectures only with a noninteractive God little different from the abstract principle of concretion of SMW' (PS, 15: 200).

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any evidence (in PR) for primordial actuality knowing the world prior to the development of the final view. Earlier, the nontemporal "synthesis of omniscience" encompasses only possibilities, and is not affected by any contingent actualizations (RM, 153f). There is no indeterminate notion from which the contrast between the primordial and the consequent could emerge. First there is the primordial nature, narrowly conceived, existing by itself, to which the consequent nature is added.

15. I am following the original punctuation of the 1929 edition. The corrected edition has 'superjective nature,' assimilating this instance to 'primordial nature' and 'consequent nature,' overlooking its specific difference.

Although there is ample mention of the "primordial nature" and the "consequent nature," this is the only mention of any "superjective" nature. Note that Whitehead's formulation is identical with the superjective character of an actual occasion. It seems that Whitehead was able to present a threefold character in appearance only, signalled by the single quotation marks around the "superjective" nature.

See my note, "Is There a Distinct Superjective Nature?" Process Studies 3/3 (Fall 1973): 228.

16. Another passage to consider is PR 31. It is primarily a text introducing the nontemporal concrescence as "the unconditioned conceptual valuation" of the eternal objects. The inserted words modifying the passage in the direction of the final concept are readily apparent.

17. In making this last statement, he may have forgotten: "For effective relevance requires agency of comparison, and agency belong exclusively to actual occasions" (PR, 31G).

18. A list of the passages mentioning the middle concept are given in "The Riddle of Religion in the Making."

19. This passage is further analyzed in Process Studies Supplements, vol. I.

20. Though Whitehead seems to avoid the phrase, this sentence clearly presupposes the notion of a primordial concrescence. I had assumed that such a concrescence would necessarily entail subjectivity, as all finite concrescences are subjective. So I argued in "The NonTemporality of Whitehead's God," International Philosophical Quarterly 13/3 (September 1973): 347–76. This need not be the case: "When did Whitehead Conceive God to be Personal?" Anglican Theological Review 72/3 (Summer 1990): 280–291.

One indication that Whitehead did not ascribe subjectivity to the primordial concrescence is that he nowhere employs subjective forms to effect this conceptual valuation.

21. This depends on the extent of the insertion at PR, 40, which is considered in detail in Process Studies Supplements, vol. 1. In any case, he had adopted the ontological principle (a more general principle) before adopting the general Aristotelian principle: "Perfecting the Ontological Principle," 122–149 in Metaphysics as Foundation: Essays in Honor of Ivor Leclerc, ed. Paul A. Bogaard and Gordon Treash (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).

22. See Process Studies Supplements, vol. 1 for particulars.

23. PR, 334nl indicates that F. J. Carson, presumably a student of Whitehead's in the fall of 1928, called this passage to his attention.

24. Here see EWM, 233–244.

25. Many believe that this divine knowledge of evil, pain, and degradation is not possible apart from the actual physical prehension of the actualities of the world as they happen. Also, how is a fact united with God unless God integrates that physical feeling into the divine concrescence? While the technical concepts may be missing, many insist, the thought must be already there.

On the other hand, the evidence of compositional analysis suggests that Whitehead first introduced the notion of a nontemporal divine concrescence after most of Process and Reality was written, and the notion of adding physical prehensions to this concrescence came even later. The means for an understanding of God as everlasting is absent for the first two concepts, for which God is the nontemporal actual entity.

If so, this passage should be interpreted nontemporally. To do so requires the discipline of trying to read Religion in the Making on its own terms, and not to read into it ideas derived from Process and Reality. Everything depends on its conception of divine knowledge. The "synthesis of omniscience" is described as including "all possibilities of physical value conceptually, thereby holding the ideal forms apart in equal, conceptual realization of knowledge" (RM, 154). Nothing is said about omniscience including any direct prehension of actuality.

Judged by the later standards of Process and Reality, this understanding of omniscience is insufficient. Yet it is quite appropriate to a strictly nontemporal deity. God's knowledge of evil, pain, and degradation is then "the ideal vision of each actual evil" to which God has an alternative ideal that can "issue in the restoration of goodness," or so Whitehead hopes.

Chapter Three— Reconstructing Nontemporal Theism

1. These passages are to be found on 7, 18, 19, 65a, 75, 93, 95, 110, 111, 220, 222, 248, 256, and 325.

2. See "The Riddle of Religion in the Making."

3. For the sake of convenience, we are retaining the sigla from The Emergence of Whitehead's Metaphysics, 1925–1929. DEFH constitute the revised theory of concrescence, while the middle concept of God belongs to stratum G, the final concept to I. (Because it is desirable to retain the sigla of EWM, even though some revisions are necessary, G is now stipulated as coming after H in this listing.) Mentions of "God" of a nonconcrescent sort are to be found in the earlier levels (A–H).

4. This passage is also discussed at EWM, 143.

5. David Ray Griffin, "Critical Essay on The Emergence of Whitehead's Metaphysics," Process Studies 15/3 (Fall 1986): 194–207, 200.

6. Let me comment on Griffin's other criticisms seriatim:

1. Pansubjectivity and Panpsychism. Griffin was a reader for manuscript of EWM, and persuaded me to revise much of what I had written in the direction of greater recognition of panpsychism in SMW. Apparently my revision was not completely rigorous from his perspective. Later reflection on the problem, however, convinces me that there is no panpsychism this early work. All the texts that appear to be so attribute mind to some events, not to all. Since all these passages are prior to temporal atomicity, they conceive events to be of any size whatsoever. If all such events were subjective or mental, then such events as the fall of the Roman empire or the perturbations of Mercury would enjoy subjectivity. See my essay, "From PrePanpsychism to Pansubjectivity," 41–61 in Faith and Creativity: Essays in Honor of Eugene Peters, ed. George Nordgulen and George W. Shields (St. Louis: CPB Press, 1987).

Later, wondering whether the notion of eternal object could not lead to the idea of prehension, I came to see that prehension, though the term generalizes from perception, is really a relation between two events by virtue of a common form. As such it abstracts from all subjectivity. See "Panpsychism and the Early History of Prehension," Process Studies 24 (1995): 15–33.

3. Ordinary and Religious Metaphysics. Griffin sees no need for this distinction. He is correct that it is superfluous if, for purely metaphysical reasons, God is conceived as both personal and temporal in Religion in the Making.

I do not believe that is the case, and hold that Whitehead does make an important distinction here, which I have tried here to express in somewhat different terms.

4. Time, Incompleteness, and Asymmetry. Griffin may well be correct.

5. The Superfluity of Transition. Our differences over "transition" stem primarily, if not exclusively, from my efforts to use the term 'transition' as used by Whitehead, not as it has been used by most Whiteheadian scholars. Nearly all interpret the system systematically, and try to find a place for transition in the final theory. Whitehead only used it for the transitional unification of past actualities to constitute the original datum of concrescence (PR, 150). Along with concrescence, it was conceived a distinct species of process (PR, 210). This was, however, before he devised his revised, and more inclusive interpretation of concrescence in part III. The term 'transition' appears in few later texts. This is not to deny the importance or reality of what is commonly known as transition.

7. A. H. Johnson's report of "Some Conversations with Whitehead Concerning God and Creativity," in Explorations in Whitehead's Philosophy.

8. See particularly Donald A. Crosby, "Religion and Solitariness," in Explorations in Whitehead's Philosophy.

9. Since there are no phases of concrescence in RM, I take Whitehead to mean "every phase" "every occasion," including the "physical" and "mental occasions" by which he analyzed occasions in RM.

10. See EWM 137–139 for a more complete study of the formative elements, particularly in comparison with SMW.

11. Consider the final sentence: "His completion, so that He is exempt from transition into something else, must mean that his nature remains selfconsistent in relation to all change" (RM, 95F). David Ray Griffin is able to interpret this in temporal terms:

The passage does not say that God as a whole must be unchanging; it only says that God's nature must remain selfconsistent. It would be questionbegging to assume that Whitehead could not at that stage have distinguished between an abstract nature of the deity, which would be more or less unchanging, and deity's full actuality, which would be qualified by the temporal world. (Process Studies 15/3: 200)

Whitehead could have made the distinction then, but is he likely to have? As far as the evidence indicates, when he introduced the primordial envisagement as the second concept (of PR), he conceived of God as concretely existing by itself as the primordial actuality. The idea that the primordial nature was an abstract feature first emerges with its contrast to the consequent nature in the final concept.

Now, it is true that Whitehead does not guard himself against the interpretation, naturtal from the standpoint of Process and Reality, that only one aspect of God is unchanging. In fact, he makes himself doubly vulnerable to this reading by his use of God's "nature." In dealing with early texts, however, we should not expect authors to qualify themselves against possible misinterpretations that have not yet occurred to them. No text

in Religion in the Making suggests different natures to God, and the long tradition of divine simplicity denies that there are different natures. Only if there are several natures could one be abstract, since if there were only one nature, it would refer to God as a whole.

12. " . . every entity is in its essence social and requires the society in order to exist. In fact, the society for each entity, actual or ideal, is the all inclusive universe, including its ideal forms" (RM, 108).

"Each such instance embraces the whole, omitting nothing, whether it be ideal form or actual fact. But it brings them into its own unity of feeling under gradations of relevance and of irrelevance, and thereby by this limitation issues into that definite experience which it is" (RM, 112).

13. New York: Macmillan, 1927. Chapters 11–13 (hereafter, WRT).

14. As Mesle notes in his study of Wieman and Whitehead: "Wieman never responded here to Whitehead's references to God as a 'nontemporal actual entity' (RM, 90)." C. Robert Mesle, "Sharing a Vague Vision: Wieman's Early Critique of Whitehead," Process Studies 20/1 (Spring 1991): 23–36, at 31.

15. Wieman's subsequent repudiation of the consequent nature is puzzling to many. The consequent nature is often seen as introducing temporalistic theism, away from the completely static primordial nature, which for Hartshorne becomes God as merely abstract. But because Wieman had already interpreted the primordial nature along dynamic lines, his objections lay elsewhere. With the consequent nature God is conceived as individual, subjective, and conscious, properties he rejected for God. Technically, the divine formative element was transformed into an actual entity having both conceptual and physical feelings.

See C. Robert Mesle, Process Studies 20/1 (Spring 1991): 44.

16. See Whitehead's later doctrine of the satisfaction of concrescence. All actualities must have satisfactions, but those satisfactions can vary in terms of strength (order) and feebleness (disorder): PR, 84f.

17. There is a possible intermediate step. "Actual entity" could become Whitehead's preferred term for the inclusive class of individual actual entities. At that point a divine formative element might be excluded as nonindividual.

Actual entity is identified with a temporal actual occasion in his Harvard Lectures (Fall 1926) recorded by George Bosworth Burch:

The ultimate real actual entity is to be considered an actual occasion—something that happens, and its timefullness is of the essence of it—which is an individuation or concretion of the entire universe into one real actual entity . . . (EWM, 310)

Thus, we go from the class of actual occasions to the class of actual entities, which eventually includes God as that entity that is actual, perhaps because (as we shall see) it was conceived as the abstract structure of actuality.

18. The two central sentences may or may not be an additional insertion, as suggested by the continuity of the surrounding italicized context, but the larger passage (PR, 6.44–7.29, not here quoted) to which this belongs shows strong signs of

insertion. See the Editors' Notes for the daggers to pages 6 and 7 in the corrected edition. The Cambridge edition apparently has "§ III" at its equivalent of 6.44 and "Section III" at 7.30. The Macmillan edition found this redundancy too confusing, and omitted both headings, going directly from section II (its p.6) to section IV (its p. 14). Following a suggestion by Denis Hurtubise, I propose that Whitehead wrote an additional page, marking it "§ III" to mark it off from section II, but without paying attention to its relation to the rest of the chapter.

19. For further details, see my essay on "Perfecting the Ontological Principle," pages 122–149 in Metaphysics as Foundation: Essays in Honor of Ivor Leclerc.

20. He was invited to give "The Gifford Lectures in Natural Theology" in a letter dated January 19, 1927, and he formally accepted the invitation on April 6. Victor Lowe, Alfred North Whitehead, The Man and His Work. Volume II: 1910–1947, ed. J. B. Schneewind (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 219f.

21. These six principles are given on EWM, 312f.

22. How this principle of ideal comparison applies to ordinary actual occasions is less clear.

23. For a detailed comparison of these two sets of principles, see EWM, 162–168.

24. The third principle is once referred to: PR, 212. See Editors' Notes to 212.37 in the corrected edition.

25. See Ivor Leclerc, Whitehead's Metaphysics: An Introductory Exposition, 101. See also my essay on "Perfecting the Ontological Principle."

26. His final formulations of the ontological principle, such as the familiar eighteenth category of explanation (PR, 24), places the ultimate reasons in actuality both as concrescence and concrete outcome.

27. In the course of exploring his middle concept of God as conceptual realization, Whitehead was apparently willing at least once, to stretch the notion of creativity to include the extreme instance of nontemporal creativity:

The true metaphysical position is that God is the aboriginal instance of this creativity, and is therefore the aboriginal condition which qualifies its action. It is the function of actuality to characterize the creativity, and God is the eternal primordial character. (PR, 225 G in D)

(While creativity might be nontemporal, concrescence and subjectivity were held to be strictly temporal.)

Note that in the second sentence God functions the way the creatures do as characterizing creativity. This is just the way the divine formative element had functioned. But the new element lies in the opening phrase: "God is the aboriginal instance of this creativity." This moves toward greater coherence, for now God is not possible apart from creativity. Heretofore the divine formative element could be conceived as uncreated and thus external to creativity. This modification, however, does not alter the way in which God conditions the temporal creatures.

28. In the language of the third metaphysical principle of 1926, this is termed "the principle of efficient causation" (EWM, 313).

29. This characteristic feature of the Giffords draft is explored in EWM, chapter eight, especially 189–191.

30. For analysis of the earlier and revised theories of concrescence, see EWM, 198–217.

31. 11.1.3 appears to include a good many insertions: (a) The third paragraph seems to be an addition occasioned by the distinction between the primordial and the consequent natures of God. (b) The fifth through the ninth paragraphs were inserted, as the transitional phrase at 45.34 indicates: "Returning to the correlation of 'givenness' and 'potentiality,' we see that . . . "Notice the continuity between the end of the fourth paragraph, and the tenth, minus this transition: "The meaning of 'givenness' is that what is 'given' might not have been 'given'; and that what is not 'given' might have been 'given.' . . . 'Givenness' refers to potentiality,' and 'potentiality to 'givenness' . . . " (c) The twelfth paragraph on the ontological principle refers to the role of God as nontemporal concrescence in ordering unrealized eternal objects. That doctrine had not yet been established at the time the core of 1.3 was written. (d) The thirteenth paragraph, together with the preceding sentence, also presupposes the primordialconsequent distinction. This leaves only the first, second, fourth, eleventh, and final paragraphs for the original text of 1.3. One slight indication that the final paragraph belongs is that it uses the same terminology, "multiplicity of Platonic Form." The preceding paragraph speaks rather of "the Platonic world of ideas."

32. To be sure, this passage is from II.10, generally part of the Giffords draft, but this section (II.10.3) appears to be the first formulation of the stages of concrescence of the new theory, inserted in this older material.

33. The mention of only six kinds of proper entities suggests that Whitehead framed his argument before introducing the last category of existence, contrasts.

34. Since Hume holds to a representative theory of perception, however, it is really a derivation of higher ideas from localized sensa, another species of eternal objects. "Sensa" illustrate perception in the mode of presentational immediacy. Thus, we have three factors, actualities, sensa, and ideas, but both theories admit of only two. In his later analysis, Whitehead appears to be mainly silent on the role of sensa. Aside from the specialized theory of "Strains" (IV.4K), they are mentioned once, as including some members of the subjective species of eternal objects (PR, 291).

35. The term data at PR, 87.12 suggests that there might be a later insertion in this paragraph commenting on the Hume excerpt, but if so, its character has not been satisfactorily determined. But the phrase at PR, 87.10, "that there is an origination of conceptual feeling," without any reference to any prior physical feeling, suggests that Whitehead had not yet fully committed himself to Hume's principle.

36. That is, sections 2 and 4 only. III.2.1F is a restatement of 2.2 from the standpoint of Hume's principle, renaming its "causal feelings" "physical feelings,"

while 2.3F relies on the category of subjective harmony, first introduced at PR, 254f (III.3.5F).

37. Many theories of novelty and creativity rely primarily upon the unconscious. Whatever may be said about them, they are not the final theory Whitehead proposes. It sees novelty as the emergence of order, and this ordering activity requires the initial aims God provides.

38. I have explored this assumption in great detail in "The Creation of 'Eternal' Objects."

39. See "The Growth of Whitehead's Theism," Process Studies Supplements, vol. 1, for its discussion of the general Aristotelian principle (PR, 40).

Chapter Four— Reconstructing Process Theism

1. Review of Victor Lowe, Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and His Work, Process Studies 26/1–2 (SpringSummer 1997): 155.

2. Whitehead, however, declines to conceive of God as a society: TTP, 9.

3. This passage opens II.6.3, but was probably composed earlier, for it interrupts a discussion of Hume, which carries over from 6.2 to 6.4. It may have been placed here because it mentions two senses to Locke's term idea (PR, 149).

The section as whole appears to be composite. The first part, down to 149.40, discusses actuality in terms of composition, and may have been composed in conjunction with Locke's notion of "constitution" in the last two sections of "Fact and Form" (11.1.6–7). The two other known references to actual entities as composite stem from these sections: PR, 51.42, 58.15.

The second part discusses the four stages constitutive of an actual entity (datum, process, satisfaction, decision). Even though "Fact and Form" had declared "decision" to be the essence of actuality (PR, 43), this part does not discuss the role of composition in actuality, nor does the earlier part mention "decision."

Thus, the parts seem to have been drafted as independent essays, and placed together in 11.6. The second part (6.3b) may well be dependent upon 11.1.2, the section introducing actuality as decision (PR, 43).

4. For an analysis of the two senses of this and other key words, see George L. Kline, "The Systematic Ambiguity of Some Key Whiteheadian Terms," 150–163 in Metaphysics as Foundation: Essays in Honor of Ivor Leclerc.

5. See n. 3 for the discussion in PR of composition with respect to actuality. To be sure, "decision" is introduced in "Fact and Form" (11.1.2) but that does not prevent it from having been initially composed later. 11.1.4 on categoreal obligation nine is obviously later, since the original version of part III only recognized eight categoreal conditions. But 1.2–3 may also have been inserted, perhaps much earlier than 1.4, when it was realized that "decision" was a more appropriate mark of actuality.

6. Whitney J. Oates, Aristotle and the Problem of Value (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 241f.

7. See my essay on ''Whitehead's Transformation of Pure Act," The Thomist 41/3 (July 1977): 381–399.

8. International Philosophical Quarterly 13/3 (September 1973): 347–376, at p. 361. It errs with respect to Whitehead's understanding of nontemporal subjectivity, but not, I think, in its latter sections with respect to the nonobjectification of unrealized objects.

9. Whitehead was capable of rearranging his texts: V.1.2 was once a stately essay of perhaps twentythree paragraphs, but now only a scant two paragraphs are left: Denis Hurtubise, "The Original Version of Process and Reality, Part V: A Tentative Reconstruction," Process Studies 22/1 (Spring 1993): 1–12.

For further details on 343f+349+31, see my essay in Process Studies Monographs, vol. 1.

10. Whitehead often introduces insertions with "Again."

11. God in this passage has only one nature. The familiar distinction between the two natures has not yet been introduced.

12. This final phase is the third phase of "perfected actuality, in which the many are one everlastingly" (PR, 350). The final section (V.2.7) adds a fourth phase.

13. I believe the last sentence to this paragraph was an afterthought, but see no way of proving that: "It is the generalization of its very minor exemplification as the aesthetic value of discords in art."

The next paragraph was intended as a rhetorical flourish to end the book, until it was upstaged by the next section. He might have drafted it as early as the summer of 1927.

14. It is comparable to the account of the provision of initial aims (III.3.1), which is then justified in terms of hybrid prehensions (111.3.2). I suspect that the four phases (V.2.7) was just such an intuitive passage, but one for which Whitehead failed to find the proper means for justifying it.

15. This passage is best understood as written about the primordial nature from the vantage point of having already accepted the consequent nature, though there may have been an earlier version that assumed only divine nontemporality.

The first sentence may even go back to the earlier conception of God as a formative element, which as the totality of categoreal obligations (partially) constitutes each actual occasion. The establishment of these obligations, however, would require a dynamic conceptual realization.

16. For this reason the subject is active throughout its concrescence, although it does not become a unified being until superjective satisfaction. At least this is his teaching in PR, part III, especially with the introduction of initial aims.

Jorge Luis Nobo, Whitehead's Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), prefaces these phases with other phases drawn from part II, but it is unclear how that which is purely objective can contribute to its further integration. This could be the reason Whitehead appears to have abandoned the theory of part II for his final theory.

17. I take this to mean that each occasion is initially prehended for what it is, but this simple prehension is then imaginatively supplemented by God's conceptual feelings into a greater harmony. See my essay on "Divine Persuasion and the Triumph of Good," The Christian Scholar 50/3 (Fall 1967): 235–250. Reprinted in Process Philosophy and Christian Thought, 287–304. See particularly the final section.

18. I have explored the difficulties of specifying the aim on purely nontemporal grounds in "The Consequences of Prehending the Consequent Nature," Process Studies 27/1–2 (1998): 142–155.

19. As I did in "The NonTemporality of Whitehead's God," especially with respect to PR, 31. International Philosophical Quarterly 13/3 (September, 1973): 347–376.

20. 'Everlastingness' is often confused with "objective immortality," but what Whitehead termed "objective immortality" was different. Objective immortality is that which survives the perishing of subjectivity, and has no necessary connection with God. "Objective immortality" has its roots in the 1926 essay on "Time" (EWM, 305f), years before the consequent nature was introduced. It was primarily a way of understanding subjectivity and objectivity in terms of temporal transition, and does not require divine receptivity at all.

21. Alfred North Whitehead, The Man and His Work. Volume II: 1910–1947, 271.

22. Ibid., 200.

23. Ibid., 363n54.

24. Ibid., 189.

25. I have developed this approach further in "When Did Whitehead Conceive God to Be Personal?" Anglican Theological Review 72/3 (Summer, 1990): 280–291.

26. The principle of a nontemporal valuation of all possibilities has been worked out by John B. Cobb Jr. in A Christian Natural Theology 196–203. It is developed even further in Palmyre Oomen, "The Prehensibility of God's Consequent Nature."

While accepting the concept of process omniscience, Richard E. Creel argues that God's will, and hence his evaluation of possibility, is immutable: "God's will has always been resolved with regard to every possibility, and because it is impossible that God could improve upon his decisions by the discovery of some hitherto unknown fact, it is unreasonable to believe that he might want to change his mind or would change his mind." Divine Impassibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 21.

27. Since the theory of basing standpoints on initial aims is otherwise foreign to this early section (11.2.2), I am predisposed to regard this paragraph as an insertion. There is continuity of context, if we consider the very next sentence, "This conclusion

can be stated otherwise," as a transitional device designed to smooth over the presence of the insertion.

28. See my essay on "The Early History of Prehension and Panpsychism," Process Studies 24 (1995): 15–33.

29. Thus, "The various timeseries each measure some aspect of the creative advance, and the whole bundle of them express all the properties of this advance which are measurable" (CN, 178).

30. See the final section of "The Early History of Prehensions and Panpsychism" for a discussion of SMW, 170.28–172.2, which may be the final insertion in the book.

31. Quite early he writes: "It is evident that the ingression of objects into events includes the theory of causation. I prefer to neglect this aspect of ingression, because causation raises the memory of discussions based upon theories of nature which are alien to my own. Also I think that some new light may be thrown on the subject by viewing it in this fresh aspect" (CN, 146). This strategy is comparable to Edmund Husserl's bracketing of existence. I believe Whitehead continued this approach at least through the composition of SMW.

32. The discussion of Zeno's paradoxes (PR, 68.2–70.4) seems to have been inserted into this chapter on "The Extensive Continuum" (II.2.2C). The material it displaced may be found at 1.1.3 (PR, 35.30–36.23). "Some Derivative Notions" (I.3) seems to be a repository for material excluded from other places. The first paragraph of this section (I.3.3) may have come from the Preface, at xiv.4.

Whitehead made several false starts before identifying the atomic with "the act of becoming." See "Locating Atomicity," Process Studies Supplements, vol. 1.

33. I take "physical time" to be the time of determinate events, which is different from the "genetic time" of concrescent determination (PR, 283). If it's desired to restrict "time" to "physical time," then we can consider concrescence as "pretemporal,'' for it is constitutive of physical time. Under no circumstances should be it regarded as "nontemporal," which properly applies only to God's primordial nature and by extension to eternal objects. A concrescence is hardly an eternal object. See my essay "On Epochal Becoming: Rosenthal on Whitehead," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 33/4 (Fall 1997): 973–980.

34. Remember his dictum: "There is no justification for checking generalization at any particular stage" (PR, 16). Cf. PR, 42.

35. So my essay on "The Creation of 'Eternal' Objects."

36. For a survey of some of the contemporary options, see Owen C. Thomas, ed., God's Activity in the World: The Contemporary Problem (Chico, Cal.: Scholars Press, 1983).

37. This same threefold structure is also developed a few pages earlier: "The universe includes a threefoild creative act composed of (i) the one infinite conceptual realization, (ii) the multiple solidarity of free physical realizations in the temporal world, and (iii) the ultimate unity of the multiplicity of actual fact with the primordial conceptual fact" (PR, 346).

38. This is the only passage in which Whitehead refers to a primordial concrescence. Since God is now conceived as enjoying subjectivity, he has no difficulty in ascribing concrescence to the primordial nature.

39. I follow here the orthography of the Macmillan edition for PR, 87f. I believe that Whitehead distinguished between "'primordial [or consequent] nature'" and "'superjective' nature" in order to signal that this was no third nature on a par with the other two, but was a distinction to be made only for this specific comparison.

40. To be sure, there is an additional qualifying phrase, "in the various temporal instances," which simply makes explicit that the superjective character affects these subsequent actual occasions.

41. This is another description of the primordial nature capable by itself of specifying particular aims for particular occasions.

42. Denis Hurtubise also interprets the fourth phase in terms of the primordial nature: "The Enigmatic 'Passage of the Consequent Nature to the World' in Process and Reality: An Alternative Interpretation," Process Studies 27/1–2 (1998): 1–16.

43. This is analogous to the way immutabilist accounts of divine action in history were fashioned: "just as God has said, 'As in my anger I swore, they shall not enter my rest,' though his works were finished at the foundation of the world." (Hebrews 4:3) The writer wanted to correct the "misperception" that God got angry when the Israelites misbehaved in the wilderness, and not from the beginning. But apparently the writer could not accept the full Greek appreciation of timelessness, but allowed for a period of divine activity in creating the foundation of the world. On the seventh day God rested, and that rest gives ample room for divine immutability henceforth.

44. Two late passages indicate that Whitehead conceived subjective aim, the vehicle of this evaluation, to be wholly derivative from the primordial nature, even after the distinction between the two natures is introduced: PR, 67.12b–21 and 189.4–17.

45. I have identified ideals with pure possibilities, but their relation is not made explicit. It may be that ideals constitute a subset of pure possibilities, in which case there is a secondary valuation of good pure possibilities. We are also not told what the criteria would be for this valuation.

46. I make the necessary modification in "The Creation of 'Eternal' Objects."

47. He could disregard the revolutionary character of the consequent nature, for he interpreted Religion in the Making in terms of temporalistic theism.

48. Henry Nelson Wieman and Bernard E. Meland, American Philosophies of Religion, 237.

49. How can it be nontemporally determined what is the proper "season" for a given ideal? The development of this qualification may involve the consequent nature, but no moves in this direction are attempted, at least not in this context.

50. The 'everlasting' is like the temporal in that it comes into being, but it differs from the temporal in that it never perishes.

51. So George Allan, The Realizations of the Future (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 247–252.

52. Considering how many shifts in Whitehead's metaphysics occur during the composition of PR, it is rather surprising how few shifts take place between PR and AI.

53. This theme is further explored in my contribution to The Universe as Journey: Conversations with Norris Clarke, S. J., ed. Gerald A. McCool, S. J. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1988).

54. Note that here and in other descriptions of Peace the conceptuality of the divine is avoided, partly to give a freshness of insight and expression, but mostly to urge that it can be experienced on purely nontheistic grounds as well. The experience of Peace requires no theistic presuppositions, but it can point to what God's consequent experience is like if (per impossible) it could be prehended.

55. For a further discussion of these themes, see my essay on "Whitehead's Appropriation of the Teachings of the Buddha," Religion in Life 45/2 (Summer 1976): 184–190.

56. Leonard J. Eslick quotes this passage at the outset of his essay, "Divine Causality," The Modern Schoolman 62/4 (May 1985): 233–247. He holds it a problem Whitehead eventually overcame: "However, late in the composition of PR, and I would guess after the remark to A. H. Johnson, Whitehead discovered socalled 'hybrid physical feelings,' direct and unmediated feelings of the conceptual feelings of other actual entities, including God . . . Hybrid physical feeling is not subject to the timespace conditions of efficient causalty" (p. 247).

Hybrid physical feeling does ensure that divine conceptual feelings can be felt, if these conceptual feelings are objectifiable at all. Here, there is a problem, because we might think of those conceptual feelings as part of an ongoing total synthesis of God's experience. Since that is not objectifiable, Whitehead implicitly falls back on the part that can be objectified, namely, the primordial satisfaction.

The problem, however, is not so much whether God can be prehended, but whether God's physical experience can contribute, in part or in whole, directly or indirectly, to that objectification. Hybrid physical prehension will not help us here.

Whitehead saw this as a problem after he had introduced "hybrid physical prehension." The comment to A. H. Johnson was made in 1936 (EWP, 3), long after the completion of Process and Reality.

57. Essays in Science and Philosophy (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), 69. "Immortality" is also found in The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (New York: Tudor, 1941, 1951), 694.

Chapter Five— The Divine Power in the Present

1. An Interpretation of Whitehead's Metaphysics.

2. This explanation of PR, 85 will occupy us further when we consider Nobo's distinction between "subjective" and "superjective satisfaction."

3. In a similar fashion I once argued that perishing was not directly required for objectification, but "indirectly, however, it is involved, since it is required for the emergence of later occasion. Objectification demands perishing only insofar as objects require subjects." "Whitehead's Conception of Divine Spatiality," Southern Journal of Philosophy 6/1 (Spring 1968): 1–13, at 9a.

Yet objectification also requires the emergence of prehensible being, which is dependent upon the culmination of the process of becoming unified.

4. Besides this perishing of subjective or present immediacy, Whitehead also distinguished a second superjective perishing of the past as ingredient in the present. See EWM, 195f.

5. "Possibly a consequent satisfaction" is based on just two texts: the passage about the divine "superjective" nature (PR, 88) and the "fourth phase" (PR, 351).

6. According to the compositional strata proposed in EWM, this passage was thought to belong to C, whereas the theory of intellectual feelings for consciousness belongs to H. But PR, 237F and 267H suggest that as late as H, Whitehead assumed that an occasion was conscious of its satisfaction.

7. There is another example that quotes a passage twice within a page of each other. He quotes "he giveth his beloved—sleep" (PR, 341, 342). The quotation is from Psalms 127:6.

8. The chapter II.3 is generally earlier than 11.6, to which PR, 150 belongs, but the material from PR, 84–85 may all be later insertions. The compositional analysis of 11.3 is complex and not yet complete. If PR, 150 should turn out to be later, then consistency with PR, 84–85 would require that "process" be definitely identified with "concrescence," leaving satisfaction outside of both.

9. This is part of an insertion (44.34–45.34) to 11.1.3. Note the remaining continuity concerning "giveness" and "potentially" without the insertion, and the very abrupt transition at the end of the insertion: "Returning to the correlation of 'giveness' and 'potentiality,' we see that . . . " (PR, 45).

10. See also PR, 29: "Actual occasions in their [objective] constitutions are devoid of all indetermination. Potentiality has passed into realization. They are complete and determinate matter of fact, devoid of all indecision." The text has "formal" where I have substituted "objective," for "formal'' seems to be a simple mistake. See PR, 219f on the distinction.

11. Christian, however, along with many others, finds this inadequate (IWM, 307–9), because it does not permit any real dynamic responsiveness to particular circumstances.

12. See especially Alix Parmentier, La Philosophie de Whitehead et le Probleme de Dieu (Paris: Beauchesne, 1968), 433–438.

13. On "subjective form," see EWM, pp. 205–207; on "positive prehension," EWM, pp. 213–217.

Note also how Whitehead gets back to a discussion of Locke's ideas from an account of subjective satisfaction: PR, p. 52.18–22. First, he discards Locke's term idea,

but he must justify that move by generalizing it in terms of objects, of which there are four main types, while Locke refers only to eternal objects.

14. "Whitehead's Conception of Divine Spatiality," at p. 7ab.

15. Ibid., 11f.

16. Bowman Clarke reached similar conclusions in "God and Time in Whitehead," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 48/4 (1981): 564–579, at 568:

"What Christian is doing—in saying that actual occasions do not change and perish, but God changes and does not perish—is to atomize the everlasting satisfaction into a sequence of finite satisfactions . . . He explains in this way: 'For any actual occasion A, God is objectified as a specific satisfaction, which results from God's prehensions of all the occasions in A's past actual world.' [An Interpretation of Whitehead's Metaphysics, p. 332] . . . this 'specific unity of satisfaction' presented to A does not include any occasion in As future . . . In other words, the everlasting actual entity is not one. His satisfaction is shattered into a sequence of finite specific satisfaction, each different for each finite actual occasion. At this point, I must confess, I would be hard pressed to distinguish between Cobb's and Christian's resolution of Cobb's difficulties. What Christian calls an everlasting actual entity which changes by virtue of a sequence of finite specific satisfactions, Cobb calls a society of finite actual occasion, sequentially ordered."

17. His argument is more nuanced than this quick summary indicates.

18. A Christian Natural Theology, Based on the Thought of Alfred North Whitehead (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965), 196. The discussion of "God and space" is found on pp. 192–196.

19. See also the exchange between Cobb and Donald W. Sherburne, "Regional Inclusion and the Extensive Continuum," Process Studies 2/4 (Winter 1972): 277–295.

20. It might seem that my argument that smaller occasions can be included within larger ones would commit me also to some form of regional inclusion. See "Inclusive Occasions," pp. 107–136 in Process in Context: Essays in PostWhiteheadian Perspectives, ed. Ernest WolfGazo (Bern/Frankfurt: Peter Lang Verlag, 1988). Yet it need not be so, if we consider a very homey illustration: the empty holes in a slice of Swiss cheese could be occupied by the included occasions without the inclusive occasion (the Swiss cheese itself) occupying the selfsame space. The included occasions are where the inclusive occasion is not, even though they are entirely surrounded by it.

Here, I am merely adapting Whitehead's observation that entirely living occasions lurk in the interstices (empty spaces) of the cells and the brain.

If perishing were not essential to the production of being but merely indicates the boundaries of finite occasions, it might be possible to work out a theory of inclusive occasions. Occasions could not only be of different sizes (as Whitehead recognized), but smaller occasions could prehend the earlier part of a larger occasion's satisfaction, provided it gradually enfolded the way in which the divine satisfaction did. The larger occasion might last long enough to prehend in turn the smaller occasion, in this sense including it. No such theory, of course, was worked out by Whitehead.

21. Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, The End of Evil: Process Eschatology in Historical Context, 148f.

22. Following this principle, I once argued that where God is nontemporal, infinite, and one, the actual occasions are temporal, finite, and many: "Whitehead's Categoreal Derivation of Divine Existence." Now I consider the category of actual occasions in two temporal modalities, present concrescences and past determinate actualities, with God as the future actuality: "The Modes of Actuality."

23. Quoted at EE, 140.

24. For example, in Leclerc, Whitehead's Metaphysics: An Introductory Exposition, 207.

25. See The Divine Relativity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948). There is a broader meaning to prehension in Whitehead. In Science and the Modern World they seem to be symmetrically internal, a meaning that may carry over into the definition of nexus in terms of mutual prehensions in Process and Reality.

26. See my essay on "Perfecting the Ontological Principle," especially the final section.

27. An actuality is determinate. That which is definite abstracts from the interrelatedness of actualities. See category of explanation xx (PR, 25).

28. This theory is worked out in chapter 8, section 2, and in my essay, "The Creation of 'Eternal' Objects."

29. So Whitehead and most others assume. I understand activity, at least in some sense, to extend to the future as well.

30. Quoted by Suchocki, EE, 140.

31. These objections equally well apply against my essay on "Whitehead's Conception of Divine Spatiality," perhaps even more so.

32. See chapter 6, "The Objection from Relativity Physics."

33. "Relativity Physics and the God of Process Philosophy," Process Studies 2/4 (Winter 1972): 262.

34. Marjorie Suchocki, "The Metaphysical Ground of the Whiteheadian God," Process Studies 5/4 (Winter 1975): 237–246, at pp. 244f.

35. Ibid., 245.

36. Ibid., 246.

37. Palmyre Oomen, "The Prehensibility of God's Consequent Nature," Process Studies 27/1–2 (SpringSummer 1998): 108–133.

38. Thus Hebrews 4:3 paraphrases: God swore in his wrath, that the worshippers of the golden calf would not enter the promised land (Psalm 95: 7–11). Recognizing that God appears to be responding to those idolaters then and there, the

writer enters the qualification: "although his works were finished from the foundation of the world."

Apparently he (and his community) could not quite believe that God was utterly atemporal, but he could still reconcile his views with Greek immutability by drawing upon the traditional views of creation in seven days. God was active laying the foundations of the world during the first six days, but then God rested, a rest that embraces our time. Thus God is unchanging with respect to our temporality, even if not ultimately.

39. And recently, John Cobb. See my essay on "God at Work: The Way God Is Effective in a Process Perspective," Encounter 57/4 (Autumn 1996): 327–340.

40. Jorge Luis Nobo, "God as Essentially Immutable, Imperishable and Objectifiable: A Response to Ford," pp. 175–80 in Harshorne, Process Philosophy and Theology, ed. Robert Kane and Stephen H. Phillips (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 179.

41. How it could be possible for the next occasion to acquire creativity, when all the occasions it prehends (both worldly and divine) are devoid of creativity (to be prehensible), is not addressed, as it was not addressed by Whitehead. If creativity simply wells up for present occasions from no discernible source, it will well up within God's present occasion as well.

42. "God as Essentially Immutable," 178.

43. Process Studies Supplements, vol. I.

44. Remember that the one passage about the hybrid prehension of God (PR, 246f) also belongs to this middle concept. It is a hybrid prehension of a purely conceptual superject, not to elements of an ongoing integration of divine physical and conceptual feelings.

45. She dismisses Hartshorne's alternative with this argument: "God would be compelled to perform successive redemptive acts [redeeming the past 'from loss, from partiality, from temporal limitation, from finitude' (ME, 162)]. In consequence, there would be many 'arrests' of divine existence, many episodes of divine redemption linked in the unity of a personally ordered society by redemption linked in the unity of a personally ordered society by a divine defining characteristic. By the principle of relativity, each of these episodes would be superjected to the world, would become part of the objective datum for future creaturely process, would become fact, stubbornly insistent, incapable of being negatively prehended. In other words, an enduring creature would be confronted willynilly with the fact of its past redemption and compelled to accept it, to integrate it as part of its determinateness in the same way as it must appropriate any other fact in its actual world" (ME, 163f).

I applaud her recognition that God must be experienced in a very different way from the past world. By its being "incapable of being negatively prehended," I take her to be referring to dictum that every actuality must be prehended, but possibilities may be evaded. The argument clearly carries weight if God were prehended by means of pure physical prehensions, but the claim that God is hybridly prehended offers a way

of avoiding her consequences. God persuades rather than compels, whether God is conceived as a single concrescence or a society of divine occasions.

46. In that sense the divine future concrescence (to be examined in the final chapters) is also our contemporary.

47. Nevertheless, there is an essential difference between the one infinite God and the many finite actual occasions. See "Whitehead's Categoreal Derivation of Divine Existence," The Monist 54/3 (July 1970): 374–400. In that essay I made the fundamental contrast between God as nontemporal and actual occasions as temporal. I now understand nontemporality to be derivative from temporality, and that this distinction does not adequately reflect the difference between concrescing occasions and their determinate outcomes, both of which should be classed as actualities.

The final chapter will defend the thesis that actualities are basically distinguished by temporal modes: the one infinite future concrescent, the many present finite concrescents, and the many past postconcrescents.

48. "The NonTemporality of Whitehead's God."

49. Ibid., 350f. For a parallel account, see Kenneth F. Thompson Jr., Whitehead's Philosophy of Religion (The Hauge: Mouton, 1971), 81.

50. "The NonTemporality of Whitehead's God," 357.

51. Ibid., 369.

52. Ibid., 370.

53. Ibid.

54. See "Whitehead's Differences from Hartshorne," pp. 58–83 in Two Process Philosophers: Hartshorne's Encounter with Whitehead, ed. Lewis S. Ford (American Academy of Religion: Studies in Religion, number 5, 1973).

55. See chapter 8, section 2, and "The Creation of 'Eternal' Objects."

56. "The NonTemporality of Whitehead's God," 361.

57. I seek to justify these claims in "The Creation of 'Eternal' Objects."

58. So the last part of my essay on "Divine Persuasion and the Triumph of Good," in Process Philosophy and Christian Thought.

59. Here see Jorge Nobo, "Whitehead's Principle of Process," Process Studies 4/4 (Winter 1974): 275–284.

60. Robinson B. James may have shown this implicitly in arguing that "actual" (as becoming) and "entity" (as being) are nearly selfcontradictory, in ''Is Whitehead's 'Actual Entity' a Contradiction in Terms?" Process Studies 2/2 (Summer 1972), 112125.

61. See my "Notes Toward a Reconciliation of Whitehead and Tillich," Union Seminary Quarterly Review 39/1–2 (1984): 41–46.

62. Theology and the Kingdom of God, ed. Richard John Neuhaus (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1969), 56.

63. Ibid.

64. Ibid., 63.

65. For a more nuanced exploration of the affinities and differences between Pannenberg and process thought, see my essay on "The Nature of the Power of the Future," pp. 75–94 in The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg, a volume honoring Wolfhart Pannenberg for his sixtieth birthday, ed. Philip Clayton and Carl Braaten (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1988).

66. See part V of my essay on "Divine Persuasion and the Triumph of Good."

67. See also pp. 70, 100, and 107 of Whitehead's Metaphysics.

68. See EWM, 323f.

69. See my essay on "Perfecting the Ontological Principle."

70. These ideas are further developed in "Creativity in a Future Key," pp. 179198, in New Essays in Metaphysics, and in "The Modes of Actuality."

71. I have addressed this issue in "Whitehead and the Ontological Difference," Philosophy Today 29, 2/4 (September 1985): 148–155.

Chapter Six— The Power of the Past

1. See his argument for transitional creativity in "Transition in Whitehead: A Creative Process Distinct from Concrescence," International Philosophical Quarterly 19 (1979), although to my knowledge Nobo does not ascribe this transitional creativity to God.

2. The Philosophical Approach to God: A NeoThomist Perspective (WinstonSalem: Wake Forest University, 1979). I have responded to this very interesting NeoThomist adaptation of Whitehead in "The Search for the Source of Creativity," Logos 1 (1980): 45–52.

3. See the letter quoted in Norris Clarke's book, 76f.

4. "The Power of the Past," Process Studies 13/2 (Summer 1983): 132–142 and "The Emergent Paradigm and Divine Causation," ibid., 13/3 (Fall 1983): 202–217.

5. She cites here Christian, Leclerc, Sherburne, and Kline: Process Studies 13:142.

6. Process Studies 13/2: 133f. I have modified her page citations to conform with the Free Press edition.

7. Earlier, superseded theories of the transmission of decision (PR, 150C) or of the fluency of transition (PR, 210C) did ascribe activity to the past actualities.

8. W. Norris Clarke, S. J., ibid., 73.

9. Process Studies 13:137.

10. Others have suggested that only its subjectivity, not its creativity, must perish in the attainment of objective status. It must lose final causation to acquire efficient causation. But the multiplicity of past actualities with its attendant creativity, is identified with the initial situation, which I understand to include the initial subjective aim. There is no efficient causation without final causation, nor efficient causation outside the concrescence of the prehending subject. See my essay on "Efficient Causation within Concrescence," Process Studies 19/3 (Fall 1990): 167–180.

11. Process Studies 13:298.

12. See The Emergence of Whitehead's Metaphysics, passim, esp. 199–201, 213217.

13. Whitehead answered: "This is a genuine problem. I have not attempted to solve it." EWP, 9f.

14. See "On Epochal Becoming: Rosenthal on Whitehead," Transactions of the Charles S. Pierce Society 33/4 (Fall 1997): 973–980.

15. This critique is further developed in my essay on "Nancy Frankenberry's Conception of the Power of the Past," American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 14/3 (September 1993): 287–300.

16. The theory was first fully worked out in Hartshorne, "Whitehead's Idea of God," 513–560 in The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp, in the Library of Living Philosophers series (New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1941). For earlier hints, see my essay, "God as a TemporallyOrdered Society: Some Objections," Tulane Studies in Philosophy 34 (1986): 41–52, at n.4.

In "Whitehead's Idea of God," however, the cluster of problems concerning the interaction of God and the world is not brought up, nor is the program of conceiving God more like an actual occasion made a central theme. Hartshorne's essay is not closely hewn to the texts, being more an explanation or defense of Whitehead's philosophy as he appropriated it. It is primarily based on the contrast between the absolute and the relative in God.

17. Initially, in his panentheistic enthusiasm, Hartshorne argued that God included all reality, contemporaries as well as the (immediate) past, but that sometime in the 1950s came to agree with Whitehead that God could not prehend contemporaries. See Frederic F. Fost, "Relativity Theory and Hartshorne's Encounter with Whitehead," TPP, 89–99.

18. "Some Conversations with Whitehead Concerning God and Creativity," p. 9 in Explorations in Whitehead's Philosophy.

19. Charles Hartshorne and William L. Reese, Philosophers Speak of God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 247a.

20. Jorge Nobo also argues that God's subjectivity militates against the societal approach: "[T]he conception of God as a serially ordered society of divine actualities is incompatible with the attribution of any essential, or eternal, subjective character to God; for if God is such a society of actualities, then by God's eternal character no more can be meant than the divine society's defining characteristic . . . "We differ, however, in that Nobo nevertheless holds that God is objectifiable: "A Response to Ford," p. 176 in Hartshorne, Process Philosophy, and Theology.

21. This may be one of the problems concerning the past. If the past is finite, then there would be occasions having no past actualities to prehend, while if the past is infinite, then God's inclusion of this infinite past ought to be infinite, rendering it impossible for God to be prehended. Hartshorne, Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1970), 63.

22. Hartshorne's views are more fully explored in my essay, "In What Sense Is God Infinite? A Process Perspective," The Thomist 42/1 (January 1978): 1–13, 2–6.

23. The first paragraph of this section (V.2.2) probably was written as an extension of "The Ideal Opposites" (V.1) during the summer of 1927 (C). (For similar material, though not this particular passage, see Denis Hurtubise, "The Original Version of Process and Reality, Part V: A Tentative Reconstruction," Process Studies 22/1 [Spring 1993]: 1–12.) At this time the metaphysical principles consisted only of the eight Whitehead presented to his class in October 1927 (see EWM, 323f). The third to fifth paragraphs probably were written considerably later (G), after he had completed the initial draft of parts II and III, and has most of the categoreal scheme in place. See [911], Process Studies Supplements, vol. 1.

The sentence, "God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse" (PR, 343), bears few clues as to its origination. Most likely, it belongs with either of these stages. I incline toward the earlier, mainly because this is a principle Whitehead had enunciated before. Even before Whitehead hit upon what to him was a satisfactory notion of God (the principle of limitation), he noted that it should "disclose the same general principles of reality, which we dimly discern as stretching away into regions beyond our explicit powers of discernment" (SWM, 93). He repeated this demand to his class during the fall of 1926: "These [six] principles [of metaphysics] are essential to actuality, and so apply equally well to God (pure act)" (EWM, 313). (Given Whitehead's extreme reticence about discussing God in class, any mention is rather remarkable.)

Once enunciated for publication, Whitehead was reluctant to modify it in the light of further principles. In writing part III, he did not guard against the misunderstanding that the categoreal obligations, particularly conceptual valuation and transmutation, do not apply to God. Later he inserted the qualification that "in the subsequent discussion [especially part III], 'actual entity' will be taken to mean a conditioned actual entity of the temporal world [i.e., actual occasion], unless God is expressly included in the discussion" (PR, 88 I+). When most of part III was being drafted (DEFH), God had not yet been conceived as a concrescence so he did not think the categoreal obligations applied.

24. A. H. Johnson, Whitehead's Theory of Reality (University of Western Ontario, 1952; Dover Publications, 1962), 68.

25. John B. Cobb Jr., A Christian Natural Theology, 176.

26. This part of the contrast strictly applies, to be sure, for the earlier conception (A–G), before God was reconceived as also having a consequent nature (I).

27. I spell out this systematic relationship in "Whitehead's Categoreal Derivation of Divine Existence." From my present perspective, the nontemporal/temporal contrast needs to be developed in terms of modal differentiation: future divine concrescence, present finite concrescences, and past determinate outcomes, all of which are interdependent.

28. Although Process and Reality embodies Whitehead's Gifford Lectures in natural theology, the preponderance of material on actual occasions led him to subtitle the work, "An Essay in Cosmology."

29. Letter to author, June 29. As best I can reconstruct, 1977.

30. Cobb defends this position further in an essay with Donald W. Sherburne, "Regional Inclusion and the Extensive Continuum," Process Studies 2/4 (Winter 1972), 277–295.

If two actual entities were to occupy the same region, it would seem that the creativity of that region would be determined in two different ways. This would be impossible, for then the same creative act would have different determinations. Perhaps it would be possible to evade this by supposing that there is no correlation between the region and creativity. Then we would have to abandon the notion that creativity is the subjective aspect of the extensive continuum, just as the extensive continuum is its objective aspect. Creativity would then simply reside in the actual entity, not in the region it occupies.

If creativity were simply inherent in actualities, the dissociation of region and creativity might be satisfactory. Yet if present creativity is inherited from future creativity because present occasions occupy the same spatial regions once occupied by future activity, the correlation between region and creativity is necessary. Note, however, that these are two different spatiotemporal regions. Likewise an included occasion occupies a region also occupied by a larger, more inclusive occasion, but the creativity the inclusion occasion exercises is either prior to the included occasion, supplying its aim, or afterward, receiving its determinate result.

31. John Robert Baker, "Omniscience and Divine Synchronization," Process Studies 2/3 (Fall 1972): 201–208.

32. David Ray Griffin has proposed just that, noting that longer mindoccasions offer tolerable guidance for much shorter bodyoccasions. "Hartshorne, God, and Relativity Physics," Process Studies 21/2 (Summer 1992): 85–112, at p. 97. This suggests a more deistic stance toward the world. It does not allow for the perfect responsiveness divine personality requires.

33. Note that in this passage the laws of nature, which are probably meant by "the comprehensive order of the world" are not determined by actual occasions, but are divinely imposed. Whitehead holds otherwise, as we shall see in the next objection.

34. See, e.g., Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 18, 118.

35. Ibid., 119. The issue of the laws of nature is discussed in my essay in Two Process Philosophers, 75–79.

36. Hartshorne considers only cosmic limitations to be divinely imposed, for metaphysical principles, being analytic a priori, have no author.

37. See Omnipotence, 80–82.

38. "God as a TemporallyOrdered Society: Some Objections," Tulane Studies in Philosophy 34 (1986): 41–52.

39. This objection is explored further in my essay on "The Origin of Subjectivity," The Modern Schoolman 62/4 (May 1985): 265–275.

40. Charles Hartshorne, Whitehead's Philosophy: Selected Essays, 1935–1970 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972), 2: "I never cared for his analysis of the becoming of an actual entity (a concrete unithappening) into 'early' and 'late' phases."

41. See my essay on "God at Work: The Way God Is Effective in a Process Perspective," for John Cobb's explanation of this alternative.

42. For this and the next objection, see "God as a TemporallyOrdered Society: Some Objections."

43. Since this theorem is perhaps the single most important mathematical discovery bearing upon philosophical presuppositions made in recent decades, many will want to consult a fuller nontechnical exposition such as Goedel's Proof by Ernest Nagel and James A. Newman (New York: New York University Press, 1958), or their essay by the same name in the Scientific American for June 1956.

44. See PR, 46. For a further discussion of these themes, see Granville C. Henry Jr., Logos: Mathematics and Christian Theology (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1976), and my review of his book in Process Studies 7/1 (Spring 1977): 57–59.

45. "A Question from Physics for Certain Theists," Journal of Religion 40/4 (October 1961): 293–300.

46. E.g., Royce Gordon Gruenler, The Inexhaustible God: Biblical Faith and the Challenge of Process Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1983).

47. This issue has been explored in greater detail in my essay, "Is Process Theism Compatible with Relativity Theory?" Journal of Religion 47/2 (April 1968): 124135, and in Paul Fitzgerald's essay, "Relativity Physics and the God of Process Philosophy," Process Studies 2/4 (Winter 1972): 251–276.

48. Fitzgerald: 258–262.

49. "Bell's Theorem and Stapp's Revised View of SpaceTime," Process Studies 7/3 (Fall 1977): 183–191. For an exposition of Stapp's position, edited by William B. Jones, "Quantum Mechanics, Local Causality and Process Philosophy," Ibid: 173–182.

50. I published some further comments on Stapp's theory, not about this problem but about its implications for the conservation laws, in Process Studies 7/3 (Fall 1977): 181f. (To avoid confusion, this should have been designated "the general editor's note.")

51. Process Studies 21/2 (Summer 1992): 85–112.

52. See "Panpsychism and the Early History of Prehension."

53. In terms of the Minkowski lightcone diagram, all the events in the causal elsewhere are contemporaries, while only a specific straight line through the contemporaries marks out what is simultaneous.

54. Ibid. Emphasis his.

55. Here, see my explanation in terms of two inertial systems, the second moving to the left at onehalf the velocity of light, in "Is Process Theism Compatible with Relativity Theory?": 125–127.

56. Simultaneity is always a determination among contemporaries; an occasion may have more contemporaries than those defined by its duration of simultaneity.

57. Griffin, Process Studies 21:105.

58. "Inclusive Occasions," 107–136 in Process in Context: Essays in PostWhiteheadian Perspectives, ed. Ernest Wolf–Gazo (Bern/Frankfurt: Peter Lang Verlag, 1988).

Chapter Seven— Process Nontemporality

1. This contrast between the succession of completely determinate occasions, which is physical time, and the succession of progressively more determinate phases of concrescence is more fully explored in my essays "On Genetic Successiveness: A Third Alternative," Southern Journal of Philosophy 7/4 (Winter 1969–1970): 421–426, and "On Epochal Becoming: Rosenthal on Whitehead."

2. Clarke, "God and Time in Whitehead," The Journal of the American Academy of Religion 48/4 (1981): 564–79, at 253.

3. Ibid., 567.

4. Ibid., 571.

5. "Can Whitehead's God be Rescued from Process Theism," 19–39 in Logic, God, and Metaphysics, James F. Harris (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992).

6. Alfred North Whitehead: Essays on His Philosophy, ed. George L. Kline (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: PrenticeHall, 1963), 102–116. (Reprinted 1989 by the University Press of America).

7. In "The Creation of 'Eternal' Objects," I analyze these functions, as well as the history of Whitehead's understanding of eternal objects.

8. An essay in Metaphysics as Foundation: Essays in Honor of Ivor Leclerc, 138–168.

9. This may well be Henri Bergson's point in his essay on "The possible and the real" in The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (Totowa, N.J.: Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1975), 91–106.

10. The argument of this section is expanded in "The Creation of 'Eternal' Objects."

11. "The NonTemporality of Whitehead's God."

12. David Ray Griffin, God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976), 297–300. Neville makes the same distinction (EWP, 269, quoted below, note 24), but draws different conclusions.

13. Ibid., 299.

14. Creativity and God: A Challenge to Process Theology (New York: Seabury, 1980), 46.

15. Ibid., 47.

16. There are at least three reasons for Whitehead's position: (a) It limits the scope of divine creation; Whitehead was suspicious of endeavors to ascribe unlimited creative powers to the divine; (b) it resolves a traditional thorny question along roughly Platonic lines; and (c) it establishes a solid interdependence between God and the eternal objects.

At the time of writing this passage, Whitehead most likely did not contemplate any consequent divine experience of the world. The interdependence of God and eternal object is what it is quite apart from the contingent vicissitudes of the World. To that extent Whitehead has achieved only partial coherence.

17. For the distinction between individual and relational essences, see Science and the Modern World, chapter 10 on "Abstraction."

18. In "The NonTemporality of Whitehead's God," I sought to evade this difficulty by an appeal to two concrete examples of nontemporal decisions: personal integrity and the basic postulation for axiomatic systems. I found over the years, however, that I could not appreciably extend this line of examples. What seemed at first a provocative oxymoron gradually disintegrated into a simple selfcontradiction.

19. In this vein I offered process theism as "An Alternative to Creatio ex Nihilo." For an exploration of additional meanings of creation ex nihilo, in interaction with Neville, see "Contrasting Conceptions of Creation," Review of Metaphysics 45/1 (September 1991): 89–109.

20. God the Creator: On the Transcendence and Presence of God, reprinted, with a new Introduction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).

21. The Cosmology of Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).

22. Reconstruction of Thinking (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981). His appropriation of Whitehead's theory is not slavish: he rejects subjective aim and eternal objects, and considerably modifies any reliance upon temporal atomicity.

23. Because Neville is so close to Whitehead's philosophy as cosmology, yet so far from it as theology, he occupies a particularly advantageous perspective from which to criticize process theology: Creativity and God: A Challenge to Process Theology (New York: The Seabury Press, 1980). Charles Hartshorne, John B. Cobb Jr., and Lewis S. Ford respond to Creativity and God in Process Studies 10/3–4 (FallWinter 1980): 93–109, and Neville responds to their critiques in Process Studies 11/1 (Spring 1981): 1–10.

For a more general assessment, see his "Contributions and Limitations of Process Philosophy," Process Studies 16/4 (Winter 1987): 283–298.

24. Neville uses Griffin's distinction between contingent cosmological principles and necessary metaphysical principles. See note 12.

25. See, e.g., Creativity and God, chapter 3, or "Whitehead on the One and the Many," in EWP, 257–271, at 269.

26. See Robert Cummings Neville, A Theology Primer (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1991), chapter 3.

27. "The Concept of God as a Derivative Notion," 183–184 in Process and Divinity: Philosophical Essays Presented to Charles Hartshorne, ed. William L. Reese and Eugene Freeman (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1964).

28. This roughly corresponds to my distinction between (presystematic) strata ABC and (systematic) strata DM. See EWM.

29. Whitehead's Harvard Lecture of Octrober 8, 1928 (unpublished), indicates that he had not yet worked out the dialectic of one, many, and creativity, at a time when nearly all of Process and Reality had been formulated (EWM, 240).

30. "Concept of God as a Derivative Notion," at 183f.

31. "Whitehead's Explanation of the Past," Alfred North Whitehead: Essays on His Philosophy, 98.

32. See James Bradley, "Transcendentalism and Speculative Realism in Whitehead," Process Studies 23/3 (Fall 1994): 155–191.

33. This passage originally articulates Whitehead's middle concept for God, as the expression "primordial actuality" indicates.

34. To be sure, Whitehead argues for some contingent determinations by the divine principle of limitation: "For there is a categorical limitation which does not spring from my metaphysical reason. There is a metaphysical need for a principle of determination, but there can be no metaphysical reason for what is determined. If there were such a reason, there would be no need for any further principle: for metaphysics

would already have provided the determination. The general principle of empiricism depends upon the doctrine that there is a principle of concretion which is not discoverable by abstract reason" (SMW, 178).

I think he implicitly abandons this line of argument later through two devices: the introduction of cosmic epochs and the reinterpretation of God's relation to the external objects in terms of a nontemporal concrescence. The idea of successive temporal cosmic epochs permits pervasive contingent physical features to determine its contingent features. No appeal to God is needed.

35. Cobb's view in CNT, 196–203 is further developed by Richard E. Creel in Divine Impassibility: An Essay in Philosophical Theology. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

36. This critique of Neville's notion of God as creator is further developed in my essay on "Creation and Concrescence," in Interpreting Neville, ed. J. Harley Chapman and Nancy K. Frankenberry (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 165–186.

Chapter Eight— The Power of the Future

1. If God is treated as metaphysically like actual occasions in all respects, then the distinctiveness of divine transcendence is lost. On the other, if God is treated as metaphysically different in all respects, unintelligibility would ensue, as in the case of Paul Tillich. (See my essay on "Tillich and Thomas: The Analogy of Being," Journal of Religion 46/2 [April 1966]: 229–245.) What coherence requires in the case of God and the world is to show that while both are similar as actual entities, their contrasting differences complement and require each other. For an early attempt in that direction, see my essay on "Whitehead's Categoreal Derivation of Divine Existence."

2. This presupposes the modification I argue for in "The Creation of 'Eternal' Objects." I argue that objectively definite forms (eternal objects) emerge from the progressive determination of indefinite forms (roughly, subjective forms) within concrescence. They appear to be timeless precisely because they have been abstracted from the history of the origination.

3. See previous note.

4. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. I (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951), 235.

5. See my essay on "Tillich and Thomas: The Analogy of Being."

6. See my essay on "Notes toward a Reconciliation of Whitehead and Tillich."

7. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955. (The James W. Richard Lectures in the Christian Religion, University of Virginia, 1951–52.)

8. Reaping the Whirlwind: A Christian Interpretation of History (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), 405n95; see also 234f, 105–110 for Bloch.

9. This theme is further developed in my essay on ''Pantheism v. Theism: A ReAppraisal," The Monist 80/2 (April 1997): 286–306.

10. See my contribution on "Divine Persuasion and the Triumph of Good" to Process Philosophy and Christian Thought, 287–304, particularly its final section.

11. Relative to Western theism, Anselm's criterion clearly specifies God. Yet it can be generalized to apply to any ultimate, however that is understood in differing religious traditions. It does not specify the content of the ultimate so much as indicate the logic of that which adherents take to be ultimate.

12. See my "Whitehead's Appropriation of the Teachings of the Buddha," Religion in Life 45/2 (Summer, 1976), 184–190.

This account differs from "The Creation of 'Eternal' Objects," 208–210, but more in terminology than in conceptuality. To explain what is here called "aim," I used "concrescent forming" and "subjective forming" and even "subjective form" if sharply contrasted from "objective form" (eternal object). But now I see that it is preferable to consider the shaping of creativity in terms of aim, so that subjective form can be understood in terms of attachment.

13. Beyond Dialogue: Toward a Mutual Transformation of Christianity and Buddhism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982).

14. Some argue that there is a residual transitional creativity that continues beyond the completion of concrescence. While it is possible to interpret the early theory of concrescence (C) as affirming transitional creativity, I find little use of "transition" in the revised theory of concrescence of part III (DEFH). Becoming perishes in the attainment of being.

15. George L. Kline, "Form, Concrescence, and Concretum," EWP 104–146, esp. 132–138, has proposed that the concrescence and the concretum (the determinate being) should be regarded as distinct entities. As a matter of interpretation, I am convinced that Whitehead conceived them as different aspects of the same actuality.

16. See my essay on "Perfecting the Ontological Principle," 122–149 in Metaphysics as Foundation: Essays in Honor of Ivor Leclerc.

17. See my essay on "The Modes of Actuality."

18. This theme is further developed in "Pantheism v. Theism: A ReAppraisal."

19. I have explored this contrast in "Whitehead's Categoreal Derivation of Divine Existence."

20. See my essay on "The Creation of 'Eternal' Objects." Even novel forms, which Whitehead construed in terms of unrealized eternal objects, can be so explained: 209–214.

21. This may be a new use of the word, devised for our special needs. The prefix in is intended to signify that the process takes place within a single locus. Fusion here borrows its meaning from e.g., "transfusion" where there is a transfer from one actuality to another.

22. One exception might be this passage: Creativity is "the pure notion of the activity conditioned by the objective immortality of the actual world [which would locate it] . . . It cannot be characterized, because all characters are more special than itself. But creativity is always found under conditions, and described as conditioned" (PR, 31).

23. The Oxford English Dictionary, published in 1930, does not include the word creativity. A supplemental volume cites Whitehead's Religion in the Making (1926) and one other for the 1920s.

24. E.g., Henry Nelson Wieman, The Source of Human Good (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945).

25. I may be coining a new use for the word inform. I mean by it an indefinite form that shapes subjective experience without affecting the external being of that actuality. When we are informed of some happening, our experience is altered thereby, but it need not change our outward demeanor. In + form is a form within. It contrasts with a definite character. Creativity cannot be characterized, but regions of creativity can be informed.

26. This function of the "subjective forms" in making the necessary intrinsic connections between creativity and its data may well be akin to Kant's understanding of the necessity of "schemata" to connect intuitions with the categories.

27. The notion of a private subjective form is defended in my essay on "The Creation of 'Eternal' Objects": 209–214.

28. Whitehead refers to the mutual sensitivity of feeling, which is possible among the components of a genetic phase of concrescence. In other words, they share the same locus. John W. Lango has pointed out that these are contemporaries, but they enjoy a mutual influence denied to contemporary occasions. Whitehead's Ontology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1972). The difference is that contemporaries occupy different loci.

29. For inclusive occasions, see chapter 9, part I section 4.

30. Perhaps they should be classified as subjective forms, but subjective forms may be entities only insofar as they eventually become definite in the final satisfaction.

31. For this reason indefinite concrescent forms differ from Whitehead's "subjective forms" in that they cannot be reenacted. Reenaction requires objectification, which abstracts from the subjectivity of the predecessor occasion.

32. Albert Camus has given us a vivid portrait of the futility of aimlessness in The Stranger.

Chapter Nine— Persistence and the Extensive Continuum

1. Inclusive occasions are discussed in part I, section 4, of this chapter.

2. See also Paul F. Schmidt's discussion of this passage in "A Query Concerning the Plenum," Process Studies 16/1 (Spring 1987): 35–37.

3. This sketch presupposes a plenum of present occasions, but there is also another possibility: a plenum of mixed future and present creativity. In that case creativity pervades everywhere, but in some places the universal creativity is not particularized into occasions. These, being imprehensible, appear to be utterly empty.

4. Whitehead is alluding to the parable of the Talents which a nobleman gave to his servants to invest. Luke 19.12–27.

5. Response to aim is not likely to account for the cosmic constants sketched at the end of chapter 1. Cosmic constants are contingent features all occasions exemplify in this cosmic epoch, without which the emergence of life billions of years later is not possible. They may be universal definite features of all aims provided this cosmic epoch. Just as necessary principles or transcendental conditions are common to all possibilities whatever, so cosmic constants could be common to all accessible possibilities. Aims, particularly their valuations of real possibility, are indefinite, but they may contain definite features as well.

6. Reto Luzius Fetz, Whitehead: Prozessdenken und Substanzmetaphysik (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 1981), 251f.

7. F. Bradford Wallack, The Epochal Nature of Process in Whitehead's Metaphysics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985).

8. Ivor Leclerc, The Nature of Physical Existence (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972), 284.

9. Ibid., 308–312.

10. Properly speaking, the occasion has no size but is productive of size. The beings so produced, as coordinately divisible, can have differing sizes, and these are correlated with the concrescences according to the principle of process (PR, 23, cat. expl. x).

11. In my essay on "On Epochal Becoming: Rosenthal on Whitehead," I argued: "The incomplete successive phases of concrescence, whereby the occasion reaches determinateness, are in varying degrees indeterminate. If the process of determination were divisible into determinate states, it would be both determinate and indeterminate at the same time" (973). Note that this difficulty calling for temporal atomicity applies only to entire phases of concrescence. There might be determinate included occasions embedded in some incomplete phase, which is indeterminate with respect to the whole, undecided how all this shall be ultimately synthesized. The real conflict pertains rather to the possible double determination of elements of the satisfaction.

12. See also PNK, 62–63. For an account of how Whitehead arrived at the atomicity of becoming, see "Locating Atomicity," Process Studies Supplements, vol. 1.

13. See my critical study of Ivor Leclerc, The Nature of Physical Existence, Process Studies 3/2 (Summer 1973): 109–118.

14. Physical prehension needs determinateness in order to traverse different spatiotemporal loci with the same invariant datum. While prehension ordinarily traverses

different loci, it is the determinateness of its datum alone that is the basic for prehension. Thus, an inclusive occasion prehends a determinate included occasion, even though both inhabit the same inclusive locus.

15. Thus Christian, interpreting Whitehead, finds no grounds for overlapping occasions: IWM, 92–104. See also Jorge Nobo, WMES, 310f.

16. For an initial conception of "Inclusive Occasions," see my essay in Process in Context: Essays in PostWhiteheadian Perspectives, ed. Ernest WolfGazo (Bern/ Frankfurt: Peter Lang Verlag, 1988), 107–136. It must be revised in several respects, for its use of objective rather than indefinite subjective forms is unwarranted, if there are no uncreated eternal objects. Hence, its notion of the hybrid physical prehension of subjective ends within concrescence (124–126) must be revised in terms of subjective forms.

17. Descartes wrote: "It is . . . perfectly clear and evident . . that in order to be conserved in each moment in which it endures, a substance has need of the same power and action as should be necessary to produce and create it anew." Quoted by Michael P. Levine in Pantheism: A NonTheistic Concept of Deity (London: Routledge, 1994), 157.

18. Job 34.14–15.

19. Contrary to EWM, which is confused on this point, I now find no evidence for panpsychism in SWM, although later he came to espouse pansubjectivity in PR. The evidence usually adduced for panpsychism in SMW is either based on his understanding of prehension in terms of noncognitive perception or upon passages in which Whitehead was trying to find a place for mind in nature. Panpsychism in LL (and all these passages are from LL) would mean that all events whatsoever, including the event of the Washington monument, or the Crimean War, enjoy subjectivity. See my essay on "From PrePanpsychism to Pansubjectivity," 41–61 in Faith and Creativity: Essays in Honor of Eugene Peters, ed. George Nordgulen and George W. Shields (St. Louis: CPB Press, 1987), and particularly "Panpsychism and the Early History of Prehension."

20. In his essay on "Time" (1926), Whitehead begins to introduce causation, maintaining that "physical memory is causation" (EWM, 306 = IS, 244).

21. SMW has only "prehension," not different kinds of prehension.

22. Here see my essay on "Efficient Causation within Concrescence," Process Studies 19/3 (Fall, 1990), 167–180.

23. Whitehead's early assumption (in SMW) that events are constituted out of their prehensions of other events reappears (in PR) as the principle that an occasion prehends all the actualities of its world, near or distant (PR, 226f). This has been resisted by many process thinkers, such as Donald W. Sherburne, who admit only immediately contiguous physical prehensions. See "Whitehead without God," in Process Philosophy and Christian Thought, 321.

In effect Sherburne seeks to restrict physical prehension to persistent features, while Whitehead wants to hold on to some aspects of physical perception. Since it

abstracts from all questions of transmission, there is no difficulty with the direct physical perception of distant or unmediated occasions.

24. While the chapter on Flat Loci (IV.3) is generally very early (A), this discussion was added later (G+, perhaps even K) by the simple expedient of increasing the questions to be answered from one (the second paragraph) to two (PR, 307.20ff).

25. This claim is argued for in "Pantheism v. Theism: A ReAppraisal."

26. Nobo remarks: "If what Whitehead says in Al about the Receptacle is given its due weight, the absence of the extensive continuum from both the list of formative elements and the categoreal scheme can signify no more than an oversight on Whitehead's part" (WMES, 252). He cites Whitehead's prefatory pleas to supplement the omissions and compressions of one work by those of another (WMES, 253f). This is subject to two interpretations: that Whitehead's various works constitute a systematic whole, and therefore need each other (Nobo). Or that Whitehead realized that no one individual work did justice to his project, as he was constantly revising his ideas, and that only the entire series of different alternatives could be adequate (Ford).

On this specific point, Nobo holds that the difference between the metaphysical extensive continuum with the spatiotemporal continuum first becomes explicit in AI with the teaching about the Receptacle (WMES, 254). Are we to suppose that Whitehead was "implicitly" aware of the difference earlier (in PR), and simply chose not to emphasize it, when a sentence or paragraph would have sufficed? Or is it possible that Whitehead first became aware of the difference when he was reflecting on the character of the Receptacle (in AI)?

27. See William A. Christian, An Interpretation of Whitehead's Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 393–396.

28. "The Creation of 'Eternal' Objects."

29. To be sure, while rotations are likely to continue into future spatiotemporal regions, they only penetrate into a region once it becomes present.

30. The paired notions of "societies" and "cosmic epochs" seems to have been introduced together in 11.3.2 (PR, 89–92).

31. John B. Cobb Jr., and Donald W. Sherburne, "Regional Inclusion and the Extensive Continuum," Process Studies 2/4 (Winter 1972): 277–295, at 277. Here, Cobb is summarizing Sherburne's position.

32. My early essay, "Boethius and Whitehead on Time and Eternity," International Philosophical Quarterly 8/1 (March, 1968): 38–67, suggests some of this view of the future. Its diagram indicates that there are different degrees of determinateness to be assigned the future.

33. "The 'Trouble' with Panentheism—and the Divine Event," 187–202 in The Philosophy of Charles Hartshorne, ed. Lewis E. Hahn (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1991), at 190. William A. Christian has marshalled some important arguments why Whitehead is not a panentheist: An Interpretation of Whitehead's Metaphysics, 403–409.

34. In saying that "the genetic" process is not the temporal succession" (PR, 283), I take "temporal" to mean "in physical time," as the context of that paragraph indicates.

35. These issues are further explored in my essay "On Epochal Becoming: Rosenthal on Whitehead."

36. Note that my reformed extensive continuum interprets the future primarily in terms of present becoming. It is the present extended beyond itself, freed from the constraints of the past. Usually, insofar as the future is ordinarily thematized, it is thematized in terms of projections derived from past being. This is true even of present conceptual projections, because we must imagine our projections objectively in order to prehend them.

37. Temporal passage as concrescence is extensively analyzed in Process and Reality, but not in the earlier philosophy of nature, whose theory of events forms the basis of a theory of extension.

38. On imaginative supplementation, see the final section of my essay on "Divine Persuasion and the Triumph of Good," in Process Philosophy and Christian Thought, 287–304.

39. Kant's argument for the synthetic unity of apperception seeks to make the same point.

40. If extension and creativity entail each other (at least in the present and the future), then new creativity comes into being when the active future is extended. God may be projecting ever future standpoints from which the entire universe may be experienced as one.

41. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962.

42. In line with my critique of omnispatiality, I do not conceive of God and occasions as occupying the same spatiotemporal regions. But the interface between the future and the present is a threedimensional, purely spatial, "plane" between two fourdimensional realities. Since this interface pervades all space, it is appropriate to describe it in terms of omnipresence.

Chapter Ten— Creativity and Contingency

1. As we have seen in the previous chapter, Whitehead's conception of the eternal objects as uncreated commits him to an actual infinity of eternal objects. Many contemporary mathematicians find the notion of an actual infinite rather questionable. Emergent atemporal objects are only potentially infinite, a more acceptable notion.

2. Pannenberg's maxim that "God is the power of the future operative in the present" has been enormously stimulating to me as a programmatic guide. For a long time I tried to effect a synthesis uniting Whitehead and Pannenberg, but in the end I see what I accomplished as a creative transformation of Whitehead's philosophy using

Pannenberg's maxim as a fulcrum. For a Whiteheadian reflection of Pannenberg's achievement, see my essay on "The Nature of the Power of the Future," pp. 75–94 in The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg, a volume honoring Wolfhart Pannenberg for his sixtieth Birthday, ed. Philip Clayton and Carl Braaten (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1988).

3. It is unclear to whom God appears, for everything else is incorporated within the divine unity at that time.

4. More precisely, the past, for it is only as fully concrescent and objective that it can affect the future.

5. Richard John Neuhaus, ed. Theology and the Kingdom of God (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1969), 56.

6. Ibid., 63.

7. Stanley J. Grenz and Roger E. Olson, 20th Century Theology: God and the World in a Transitional Age (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1992), 266f.

8. Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith (New York: Seabury, 1978), 78.

9. Grenz and Olson, 180.

10. Juergen Moltmann, God in Creation (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985), 279.

11. Hans Kueng, Theology for the Third Millennium (New York and London: Doubleday, 1988), 452.

12. William J. Hill, The ThreePersoned God (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1982), 211.

13. Grenz and Olson, 73, drawing upon the Church Dogmatics II/1, 280, 281, 275.

14. Thomas E. Hosinski, Stubborn Fact and Creative Advance: An Introduction to the Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993), 212–214, demonstrates the interdependence of creativity, God, actual occasions, and eternal objects.

15. Hartshorne recognizes the necessity of some criterion distinguishing between God and other actualities. Besides (1) rules valid for all individuals, "(2) There must be rules valid for all individuals except God . . . (3) There must be a criterion for the distinction between the two sets of rules. (4) There must be reasons why the distinction needs to be made." A Natural Theology for Our Time (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1967), 37.

16. Not quite from eternity, which would suit classical thinkers better, but from the foundations of the world. Hebrew thinkers found it necessary to exclude from eternal repose God's temporal activity in creating the world. It found that it could accommodate most of the Greek concerns by capitalizing on the notion of God's rest: "For he has somewhere spoken of the seventh day in this way, 'And God rested on the seventh day from all his works'" (Hebrews 4.4).

17. These themes are expanded considerably in my book, The Lure of God: A Biblical Background for Process Theism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978).

18. If it is appropriate to identify the perception of causal efficacy with pure physical prehension, then perception as presentation immediacy would be a conceptual derivation. Sensa are localized eternal objects perceived as illustrating particular actual occasions.

19. For a survey of these alternatives, see my essay on "An Appraisal of Whiteheadian Nontheism," The Southern Journal of Philosophy 15/1 (July 1977): 27–35.

20. "The Size of God," American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 8 (January & May 1987): 20–51. For the contrast between Meland and Loomer on this point, see Tyron Inbody, The Constructive Theology of Bernard Meland: Postliberal Empirical Realism (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995), 192–198.

21. Ibid., 197.

22. This theme is ably articulated by Whitehead in "The Relatedness of Nature," chapter 2 in The Principle of Relativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922).

23. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962.

24. Bernard Meland, Faith and Culture (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1955), 126.

25. Inbody, 184.

26. Inbody, 182. This early Meland (1931) had perhaps not yet encountered Hartshorne's argument that personality is an intensification of subjectivity which is a feature of all actualities, not an emergent. Meland's selective appropriation of Whitehead enables him to avoid the issue of "panpsychism." (See Inbody, 115.)

I argue that subjectivity as responsiveness to novel possibility is the prerequisite for genuine emergence, and hence cannot itself be an emergent.

27. Systematic Theology, volume one (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 235.

28. See my essay on "Whitehead's Categorical Derivation of Divine Existence."

29. Tillich, vol. 1, 235.

30. This is further developed in my "Notes toward a Reconciliation of Whitehead and Tillich."

31. This theme is more fully developed in "Structural Affinities between Kant and Whitehead," International Philosophical Quarterly (September 1998): 233–244.

32. The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1981.

33. Crosby, 293f.

34. It is quite possible that his is the moral that Aristotle drew from Plato's Phaedo. The dialogue ostensibly purports to demonstrate the immortality of the individual Socrates, but all the arguments are couched in terms of Socrates the reasoner. No one in history has epitomized the life of pure reason more than Socrates, so that in showing his immortality Plato may be really showing the immortality of the life of reason he embodied.

35. In particular, the alleged passivity of the passive intellect can be reinterpreted as active receptivity, and hence an instance of creativity. See my essay on "Whitehead's Transformation of Pure Act," The Thomist 41/3 (July, 1997), 381–99.

36. An essay included in Martin Heidegger, Essays in Metaphysics, translated by Kurt F. Leidecker (New York: Philosophical Library, 1960).

37. See my "Notes toward a Reconciliation of Whitehead and Tillich."

38. See his Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1955).

39. "Being Itself and the Existence of God," pp. 5–19 in Existence of God: Essays from the Basic Issues Forum, ed. John R. Jacobson and Robert Lloyd Mitchell. (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1988).

40. John B. Cobb, Jr., Beyond Dialogue: Toward a Mutual Transformation of Christianity and Buddhism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), 112f.

41. Jan Van der Veken and Andre Cloots, "Creativity as General Activity," pp. 98110 in Metaphysics as Foundation: Essays is Honor of Ivor Leclerc.

INDEX

A

act of becoming, 274, 276

actual entities, 82

actual occasions as small, 290–291

actuality as composition, 109

as decision, 105f

as finite, 189

as subjects, 106

actuality in formal terms, 109

actualization, 44

Adventure, 144

Adventures of Ideas, xvi

aim, 215, 255–263

Alexander, Samuel, 238

Allan, George, xx, 103, 342n1

"The Primacy of the Mesocosm," 329n16

The Realizations of the Future, 347n51

always in concrescence, always in satisfaction, 149

Ambrose, St., 310

anaesthesia, 271

Anglicanism, 25

anomalies, xix, 42

Anselm, St., 192, 362n11

Cur Deus Homo, 310

Apostles, the, 25

Aristotelian principle, 53, 107

Aristotelian principle, general, 343n39

Aristotle, xviii, 30, 107, 108, 370n34

atheism in process terms, 16

atomicity, 22, 274

atrophy, 269–273

Augustine, 7

B

bagatelle, 27

Baker, John Robert, 193

"Omniscience and Divine Synchronization," 356n31

Barth, Karl, 307

Beauty, 141

becoming, act of, 128

being and becoming, 44

and unity, 148

Bergson, Henri, 127

The Creative Mind, 359n9

Bible, 6

Hebrews 4.3–4, 310, 368n16

Hebrews 4.3,

Psalm 95:7–11, 350n41

Bloch, Ernst, 237–238

Bradley, James, "Transcendentalism and Speculative Realism in Whitehead," 360n32

Brennan, Sheilah O'Flynn, "Substance within Substance," 332n25

Brown, Delwin, review of Wilmot, 331n24

Bryant, David J., 11

Faith and the Play of Imagination, 328n10

Buddhism, 28, 141, 243, 244, 300.

See Ford on "Whitehead's Appropriation of the Teachings of the Buddha," 347n55

Burch, George Bosworth, 339n17

C

Camus, Albert, 363n32

Causal efficacy, 311–312

feelings, 42

causation, efficient, 88, 280–281

causes, efficient, 5

final, 5

chance, 38

change, 157, 274

chaos, 195

Christian, William A., 147–156, 182, 209, 255, 349n16, 366n27

on creativity as presystematic, 224

''Whitehead's Explanation of the Past," 360n31

"The Concept of God as a Derivative Notion," 360n27

Christianity, 28

Clarke, Bowman, "God and Time in Whitehead," 349n16, 358n2

Clarke, W. Norris, S. J., 181, 182

The Philosophical Approach to God, 353n2

clash of doctrines, 28

Clayton, Philip, xx

Cloots, Andre, 325

"Creativity as General Activity," 370n41

Cobb, John B., and Sherburne, Donald W., "Regional Inclusion and the Extensive Continuum," 356n30

Cobb, John B. Jr, xv, xx, 6, 155, 191, 192, 209, 244, 325, 344n26, 356n25

"Being Itself and the Existence of God," 370n39

Beyond Dialogue, 362n13, 370n40

A Christian Natural Theology, 349n18

"Regional Inclusion and the Extensive Continuum, 349n19

coercion 6, 35

coherence, 29, 313–314

comparison, ideal, 88

"complete failure" [of RM], 67

compositional analysis, sigla, xvii, xviii, xvi–xix, 41–58, 348nn6–9, 355n23, 356n26, 362n14, 366n24

layer, xix

strata, 333n5

structure of PR, xvi

compound substances, 273, 275

conceptual realization, 91, 118.

See also God's conceptual realization, 121

reproduction, 214

conceptualism, 107

concrescence, 297

divine and nontemporal, 209–210

early theory of, 44

nondivine and nontemporal, 207210

nontemporal, 220

revised theory of, 45

revised theory of, 93

consciousness, divine, 285–286

constants, cosmic, 38

contemporaries, 178, 201

contingency, 309

contradiction, xix

Corey, M. A., "God the New Cosmology," 333n35

cosmic constants, 364n5

epoch, 217

epochs, 332n31

order, 38

cosmology, 191, 356n28

contrasted with ontology, 221

creation ex nihilo, 7, 34

ex nihilo, 221

creativity, 111, 112, 113, 174, 184, 251–253, 295, 363n23

and aim, 259–63

and the ontological principle, 255

as characterized, 252

as located, 252

as prehensible, 185

instantiation of, 332

present and future, 301–303

creator, 6, 37, 74

Creel, Richard E., Divine Impassibility, 344n26, 361n35

Crosby, Donald A., Interpretive Theories of Religion, 316–319, 369n32

"Religion and Solitariness," 338n8

Crownfield, Frederic R., "Whitehead's References to the Bible," 330n12

"Whitehead: From Agnostic to Rationalist," 331n18

D

datum from which concrescence originates, 128

decision, 217, 255

nontemporal, 218, 219–230

primordial, 217

definite, 257

form, 259, 261

definiteness, 173–174

Descartes, 31, 247, 365n17

determinateness and definiteness, 166

determination, 6, 257

nontemporal, 218–230

diremption, 266–267

division, coordinate and genetic, 293294

dogma, 69, 70, 73

dogmas, 33

E

earlier and later, 296–297

earlier and later phases, 186

earlier and later phases of becoming, 208

emergence, 266

empiricist process theology, 310–314

"empiricists," 218–219

empiricism, radical, 311

end of the world, 177

entirely living occasions, 278

eschatological actuality, 303–305

Eslick, Leonard J., "Divine Causality," 347n56

eternal objects, 9, 160

as definite, 262

as everlasting, 199

as transcendent, 23

as uncreated, 55, 210–216, 219

as unrealized, 53, 54, 90, 92

functions, additional, 212

specified by Hall, 212

individual and relational essences, 220

everlasting nature of God, 138

everlastingness, 344n20

evil, 81, 167

evolution, 7

extensive abstraction, 288

extensive continuum, 40, 110, 113, 286–298

in AI, 366n26

its ontological status, 287–289

F

feeling, conceptual, 99f

Fetz, 273

Whitehead: Prozessdenken und Substanzmetaphysik, 364n6

Fitzgerald, Paul, 165

"Relativity Physics and the God of Process Philosophy," 357n47

Ford, Lewis S. "An Alternative to Creatio ex Nihilo," 327n3

"An Appraisal of Whiteheadian Nontheism," 329n16, 369n19

"Boethius and Whitehead on Time and Eternity," 366n32

"Can Whitehead's God Be Rescued from Process Theism," 358n5

"Concept of 'Process,' The," 328n4

"Consequences of Prehending the Consequent Nature, The," 344n18

"Contrasting Conceptions of Creation," 359n19

"Creation and Concrescence," 332n27, 361n36

"Creation of 'Eternal' Objects, The," 328n6, 328n14

"Creativity in a Future Key," 353n73

"Divine Persuasion and the Triumph of Good," 344n17, 362n10

early theory, 173–179

"Early History of Prehensions, The," 30, 344nn28

"Efficient Causation within Concrescence," 354n10

Emergence of Whitehead's Metaphysics, 45, 62, 63, 65, 79

"God at Work," 351n42

"Growth of Whitehead's Theism, The," 333n1, 342n39

"In What Sense Is God Infinite?" 355n22

"Inclusive Occasions," 349n20, 358n58, 365n16

"Is Process Theism Compatible with Relativity Theory?" 357n47, 358n55

"Is There a Distinct Superjective Nature?" 335n15

"Locating Atomicity," 364n12

Lure of God, The, 369n17

"Modes of Actuality, The," 328n11

"Nature of the Power of the Future, The," 367n2

"Nature of the Power of the Future, The" (on Pannenberg), 353n68

"Neville's Interpretation of Creativity," 332n27

"NonTemporality of Whitehead's God, The," 173–180, 219, 336n20, 343n8, 359n18

"Notes Toward a Reconciliation of Whitehead and Tillich," 352n64

"On Epochal Becoming," 345n33, 354n14, 364n11

"On Genetic Successiveness," 358n1

"Origin of Subjectivity, The," 357n39

"Panpsychism and the Early History of Prehension," 334n7

"Pantheism v. Theism," 362n9

"Perfecting the Ontological Principle," 213, 336n21, 362n16

"Process and Thomist Views Concerning Divine Perfection," 328n5

"Rhetoric of Divine Power, The," 35, 332n28

"Riddle of Religion in the Making, The," 329n17, 335n12

"Structural Affinities between Kant and Whitehead," 369n31

"Subjectivity in the Making," 334n10

"Tillich and Thomas: The Analogy of Being," 361nl

"When Did Whitehead Conceive God to Be Personal?" 336n20

"Whitehead and the Ontological Difference," 353n74

"Whitehead's Appropriation of the Teachings of the Buddha," 347n53

"Whitehead's Categoral Derivation of Divine Existence," 352n50, 356n27

"Whitehead's Conception of Divine Spatiality," 353n3

"Whitehead's Differences from Hartshorne," 352n57

"Whitehead's First Metaphysical Synthesis," 330n3

"Whitehead's Transformation of Pure Act," 343n7, 370n35

formal constitution, 91

formative element, 51, 71, 82f

form, definite, 215

objective, 215

Fost, Frederick F., "Relativity Theory and Hartshorne's Encounter with Whitehead," 354n17

Frankenberry, Nancy, 12, 181–187, 312

"The Power of the Past," 328n13

future 1–4, 9–14

G

Garland, William J., 254–255

"The Ultimacy of Creativity," 224

Green, Garrett, 11

Imagining God, 328n10

genetic succession, 294

Giffords draft, 44, 127–129, 217, 333n6

Gilkey, Langdon, 237

Reaping the Whirlwind, 361n8

God and creativity, 234–235

and the reversal of the poles, 157

as actual but nontemporal entity, 50, 51, 57

as actual entity, 50, 72, 82, 85f

as a person, 309

as an exception, 191

as Becoming, 238–240

as being, 235–237

as conceptual realization, 211

as conscious, 120–122

as cosmic orderer, 82

as creature, 86

as despot, 34

as (determinate) future actuality, 237–238

as effective, 188

as empty, 243–245

as eternal, 237

as exempt from metaphysical principles, 171

as exempt from space, 155

as finite, 189

as formative element, 332n29

as future creativity, 233–264

as hidden, 318–319

as imposing limits, 194–196

as individual, 50, 52, 320–321

as instance of creativity, 85

as locus of integration, 117–120

as nontemporal in RM, 71, 78

as objectified, 187–200

as object, not event, 71, 80, 82

as omnipotent, 242

as perfect, 189

as perfect power, 242–243

as permanent, 318

as personal, 240–241, 320–321

as personal or impersonal, 74

as primary reality, 314–316

as primordial actuality, 115

as responsive, 241–242

as selfcaused, 84

as superjective, 133–134

as "superjective" nature, 152, 161, 172, 335n15

as the power of the future, 233–263

as transcendent, 83, 302

as unchanging, 35

as unconscious, 46

as unique, 314–316

early concept of, 57–58, 60–61, 343n1

final concept of, 46–49, 61–65

is not an event, 113f

middle concept of, 49–57, 65–67, 90–101, 335n18

precipitation factors for, 96–101

preconditions, 93–96

reversal of the poles, 315

Semitic concept of, 32

superjective nature, 47–48

three concepts of, 43, 46, 59

God's Adventure of the Universe as One, 138, 142

apparent responsiveness, 164

conceptual realization, 114, 117

determinateness, 154–155

divine Eros, 138

effectiveness, 131

evergrowing satisfaction, 165–166, 168, 176

everlastingness, 122–123

fourth phase, 131–134

knowledge of evil, 336n25

nontemporal decision, 182

nontemporal subjectivity, 203

nontemporality, 174

nontemporal valuation, 134–37

particular providence, 132, 137

persuasion, 256

primordial nature as timeless, 160161

primordial satisfaction, 153, 156157, 161–166, 171

primordial superject of creativity, 170–171

responsiveness, 172

responsiveness, as apparent, 134–137

satisfaction, 319–320

specific, 152–153, 161–162, 165, 171

subsatisfactions, 165

valuation, 258

Goedel, Kurt, 199. See 357n43

goodness, 33

grace, 324

Graham, Daniel W., xviii

Aristotle's Two Systems, 333n5

Gram, Moltke S., xix

Kant: Disputed Questions, 333n5

Grenz, Stanley, 306

20th Century Theology, 368n7

Griffin, David Ray, xx, 64

"Critical Essay on EWM," 335n14, 337nn5–6, 338nll

God, Power and Evil, 217, 359n12

"Hartshorne, God and Relativity Physics," 201–205, 356n32

review of Wilmot, 331n24

grip, in the grip of the creative advance, 328–329

Gruenler, Royce Gordon, The Inexhaustible God, 357n46

H

Hall, Everett W., "Of What Use Are Whitehead's Eternal Objects, 212, 359n8

Harrison, Edward R., 39

Cosmology: The Science of the Universe, 333n32

Hartshorne, Charles, 159, 187–197, 200–201, 304, 368n15

and Reese, William L., Philosophers Speak of God, 354n19

"Bell's Theorem and Stapp's Revised View of SpaceTime," 358n49

Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method, 355n21

Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes, 357nn34–37

"Whitehead's Idea of God," 354n16

Whitehead's Philosophy, 357n40

Hawking, Stephen, 39

"The Anistropy of the Universe at Large Times," 333n34

Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm von, xviii

Heidegger, Martin, 179, 324–326

Essays in Metaphysics, 370n36

Henry, Granville C., Jr. Logos: Mathematics and Christian Theology, 357n44

Hill, William J., O.P, 307

The ThreePersoned God, 368n12

Hinduism, 300

Hosinski, Thomas E., Stubborn Fact and Creative Advance, 368n14

Hume, David, 209, 311, 341n34

Dialogues, 36, 37

Hume's principle, 45, 56, 97

Hurtubise, Denis, xvi, xx, 334nll

"The Enigmatic Passage of the Consequent Nature to the World," 346n42

"The Original Version of PR, Part V," 333n6, 343n9

Relire Whitehead, 333n1

hybrid physical prehension, 158

prehensions, 256

hylomorphic, 258

I

ideal forms, 67

immutability, 37

Inbody, Tyron, The Constructive Theology of Bernard Meland, 369n20

inclusion, regional, 192

occasions, 273–278, 364n16

incoherence, 248

incompleteness, 76

indefinite form, 258, 260–262

individuality, creative, 87

esthetic, 88

inertial systems, 203, 291

infinity, potential, 292

infusion, 368n21

of aim, 276, 277

of creativity, 245, 251, 253

initial aims, provision of, 256

insertions 47, 48, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 341n31

interdependence, 259–63, 308

interdependent, 255

irrationality, ultimate, 38

J

Jaeger, Werner, xviii

James, Robinson B., "Is Whitehead's 'Actual Entity' a Contradiction in Terms," 352n63

Johnson, A. H., 67, 147, 185, 187, 191, 347n56

"Some Conversations with Whitehead Concerning God and Creativity," 354n18

Whitehead's Theory of Reality, 356n24

Jones, Harry K., xx

K

Kant, 209, 367n39

Kaufman, Gordon, 11

The Theological Imagination, 328n10

Kazantzakis, Nicholas, 238

Kierkegaard, Soren, 11

Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 328n9

Kline, George L., 12, 182

Alfred North Whitehead: Essays on His Philosophy, 358n6

"Form, Concrescence, and Concretum," 328n12, 362n15

"Systematic Ambiguity of Some Key Whiteheadian Terms, The" 342n4

Kraus, Elizabeth M., 171–172

ME 351n48

Kueng, Hans, 306–307

Theology for the Third Millenium, 368n11

L

Lango, John W., Whitehead's Ontology, 363n28

Leclerc, Ivor, 10, 178, 182, 273

The Nature of Physical Existence, 364n8

Whitehead's Metaphysics, 328n8, 340n25

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 31, 271

Levine, Michael P., Pantheism, 365n17

limitation, types of, 38

Locke, John, 153, 348n13

locus, 249, 252–253, 276, 288–289, 296–98

of all locations, 293–295

partlocus 277

logic, 118

Loomer, Bernard, xv, 312

"The Size of God," 369n20

Lowe, Victor, 25, 26, 122123,

"A. N. W.: A Biographical Perspective," 330n14

Alfred North Whitehead, 340n20

Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and His Work, 330n14

Understanding Whitehead, 330n5

Lowell Lectures of 1925, 23

M

Matthews, W. R., 24, 26

Memories and Meanings, 330n7

Meland, Bernard E., 311313

The Realities of Faith, 299

Faith and Culture, 369n24

mentality, 269, 272

Mesle, C. Robert, xx

"Wieman's Early Critique of Whitehead," 339n14

metaphysical principles, 104106, 191, 216219, 221

for 1926, 86

for 1927, 94f

metaphysics, 31

moderate realism, 107

modes of actuality, 11

modes (temporal) of actuality, 247251

Moltmann, Juergen, 238, 306

God in Creation, 368n10

momenta, 266

monotheism, 321322

multiplicity, 9496, 258

mutual sensitivity, 204

N

Nagel, Ernst and Newman, James A., Goedel's Proof, 357n43

nature, causal and apparent, 29

Neville, Robert Cummings, xx, 218–224

A Theology Primer, 360n26

"Contributions and Limitations of Process Philosophy," 360n23

Creativity and God, 359n14, 360n23

God the Creator, 221, 332n27, 359n20

Reconstruction of Thinking, 221, 360n22

The Cosmology of Freedom, 221, 360n21

Newman, John Cardinal, 25

Newton, Isaac, 33

nirvana, 243

Nobo, Jorge, 149, 153, 168–170, 181, 293, 366n26

"God as Essentially Immutable," 351n43, 355n20

"Transition in Whitehead: A Creative Process Distinct from Concrescence," 353n1

Whitehead's Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity, 344n16

"Whitehead's Principle of Process," 352n62

"nothing greater can be conceived," 243

novel eternal objects, emergence of, 214

novelty, 212–216, 270–271

origination of, 216

O

Oates, Whitney J., Aristotle and the Problem of Value, 343n6

objective immortality, 148, 344n20

objective lure, 97

occasions, as future, 2

Ogden, Schubert, xv

Olson, Roger, 306

20th Century Theology, 368n7

omnipotence, 5, 7, 37

omnipresence, 290

omniscience, 336n25

omnispatiality, 290

ontological primacy, principle of, 247251

ontological principle, 91f, 93, 178, 199, 218

ontological principle generalized, 160

ontology contrasted with cosmology, 221

ontotheological stricture, 324–326

Oomen, Palmyre, 167–168

"The Prehensibility of God's Consequent Nature," 350n40

P

panentheism, 292

Pannenberg, Wolfhart, 177, 238–239, 303–305, 367n2

Theology and the Kingdom of God, 353n65, 368n5

panpsychism, 271

in SMW, 365n19

pantheism, 299, 322–324

formal, 112

Parmentier, Alix, La Philosophie de Whitehead et le Problème de Dieu, 348n12

passage, 296–298

Paton, H. J., xix

Peace, 138–141, 347n54, 244

Peacocke, Creation and the World of Science, 333n33

perception, physical, 278–282

future, 283–285

perish, 246, 250

perishing, 148, 348nn3, 4

persistence, 265–273, 275, 279, 282, 285

emergence of, 267–269

persuasion, 6, 34, 35, 193

divine, 5, 256

phases of becoming, 208

Phillips Brooks House, 329n1

physical feelings, hybrid, 256, 353n56, 365n16

physical feeling of God, hybrid, 351n47

Pittenger, Norman, 25, 26

Catholic Faith in a Process Perspective, 330n7, 330n13

plan of chapters, 5–10, 143–144

Plato, 30, 107, 108

Phaedo, 370n34

plenum, 39, 364n3

possibilities, pure, 135, 136

power, divine, 36

solitary, 35

prehension, 184–185

as uncognitive apprehension, 280

early theory of, 44, 280–282

hybrid physical, 5, 277, 282

physical, 44, 278–282

principle of, 190

presentational immediacy, 311–312

Price, Lucien, 24

Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, 330n6

principle of concretion, 81, 105

principle of limitation, 21–40, esp. 3840, 195

as having contingent determinations, 360n34

principle of rightness, 32, 71

principles, metaphysical, 40

privacy and publicity, divine, 298–300

Process, intensification of, 125–130

Psalms, 34

public, 286

Q

Qur'an 6:103, 314

R

Rahner, Karl, Foundations of Christian Faith, 368n8

rationalist process theology, 310–314, 317, 320

rationalists, 218

receptacle, 366n26

Reese, William L., 292

and Hartshorne, Charles, Philosophers Speak of God, 354n19

"'Trouble' with Panentheism—and the Divine Event, The," 366n33

regional overlap, 290

regions, overlapping, 155

relations, internal, 117, 159

Relativity Physics, 200–205, 291–292

relevance, 53

religion in RM, 72–74

religion, rational, 69

reversion, 96–100

abolition of, 57–59

Roman Catholicism, 25

Portraits from Memory, 330n9

Russell, Bertrand, 24, 36, 122

S

Sarpi, Paul, 25

Sartre, JeanPaul, Being and Nothingness, 327n3

satisfaction, 147–177, 210

subjective, 149–151

superjective, 153–154

Schmidt, Paul F., "A Query Concerning the Plenum," 363n2

selection, 260

sensa, 280, 284, 341n34

Sharpe, Kevin J., 333n32

Sherborne, 25

Sherburne, Donald W., 182

and Cobb, John B., "Regional Inclusion and the Extensive Continuum," 356n30

"Whitehead without God," 329n16, 365n23

shunyata, 243

sigla for compositional analysis, 329n18

simultaneity, 200

as cosmic, 202

size of an occasion, 364n10

Skinner, John E., 329n1

societies, 289–291

solidarity, 87

spatiotemporal coincidence, 154

spatiotemporal region, 120

Spinoza, Benedict, 22, 108

standpoint, 265, 292

Stapp, Henry Peirce, 201, 358nn49–50

subjective aim, divine provision of, 124–125

emergence of, 55f

end, 277

form, indefinite, 284

God's, 119

selection of, 198–199

private (indefinite), 363n27

subjective forms, 257, 262

indefinite, 257, 365n16

subjectivity, nontemporal, 106–114

temporal, 114–117, 118

substantial activity, underlying, 22, 111

Suchocki, Marjorie, 156–166, 181

The End of Evil, 350n21

superject, 150, 170

superjective character, 133

synchronicity, 192

T

Talents, parable of, 364n4

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 238

temporal modes, 3, 10

temporality, two orders of, 186

theology, experiential, 68

Thomas, Owen C., ed. God's Activity in the World, 345n36

Thompson, Kenneth F. Jr., Whitehead's Philosophy of Religion, 352n52

Tillich, Paul, 177, 236, 314, 316, 325

Biblical Religion, 370n38

Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality, 237, 361n7

Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 361n4

"Time," 1926 essay by Whitehead, 128

time, physical, 209, 294, 345n33

togetherness, 53, 54

transcendence, 33

transition, 44, 254, 263, 334n8

transmute, 63

Trinitarian theologians, 30

U

ultimate, 323

criteria for, 316–319

unification, acts of, 44

unison of becoming, 201, 202, 292–293

unison of immediacy, 4

V

Vaihinger, Hans, xix

valuation, nontemporal, 167

Van der Veken, Jan, 325

Creativity as General Activity," 370n41

W

Wallack, F. Bradford, 272

The Epochal Nature of Process, 364n7

Weiss, Paul, 221

Welker, Michael, 332n27

Universalitaet Gottes und Relativitaet der Welt, 327n1

werdende Gott, der, 238–239

Whitehead, Alfred (father), 25

Whitehead, Alfred North, Adventures of Idea, xvi, 139–142, 181–185, 189, 195

Concept of Nature, 345n31

"Immortality," 142, 353n57

Modes of Thought, 142–143

Principles of Natural Knowledge, 126

"Relatedness of Nature, The," 369n22

Religion in the Making, 39, 41, 47, 58, 60f, 61–63, 65–67, 70, 71, 73, 74, 76, 79, 82f

Science and the Modern World, xvi, 41, 126, 195, 280

Whitehead, Eric Alfred (son), 24, 122

Whitehead, Henry (brother), 25

Whitehead, T. North (son), 26

Whittaker, Edmund, 24

entry to Dictionary of National Biography

Wieman, Henry Nelson, 78–80, 81, 112, 137, 300

Wrestle of Religion with Truth, 339n13

with Bernard E. Meland, American Philosophies of Religion, 346n48

The Source of Human Good, 363n25

Wilcox, John, 200

"A Question from Physics for Certain Theists," 357n45

will, 31

Wilmot, Laurence, 30

Whitehead and God, 331n24

world as God's body, 304

Y

Youth, 141

Z

Zeno, 207, 274, 345n32

Zenolike argument, 129

Zoroastrianism, 238

Transforming Process Theism

Documents

Transcript of Transforming Process Theism