Reflections on my dialogue with Peter Rollins

Pyrotheology Meets Process Theology

Earlier today I had the chance to speak with Peter Rollins on Rahul Sam’s podcast (UPDATE: video of our dialogue posted below). The conversation brought up many threads that have shaped my life over the last two decades. We discussed my unexpected encounter with Christ as a teenager, my interest in Alfred North Whitehead’s process theology and how it compares to Rollins radical “pyrotheology,” and how we each define and relate to so-called “spiritual experiences.” I wanted to reflect on some of this, and add some thoughts I didn’t get a chance to throw into the mix during our live conversation.

Rahul began by asking me to recount what I’ll just call my Christ experience (I’ve touched on this before here). I was 19 at the time, and from my vantage now I’d say I was a rather cocky and obnoxious atheist. My mother was (and still is) an evangelical Christian, and my father an agnostic Jew. As a teenager, I ran away from the only form of Christianity I knew, proudly embracing scientific materialism. Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins were among my heroes during this early phase of my intellectual development.

At the same time that I rejected theistic religion, I’d become enamored with various strains of Asian mysticism and had started calling myself a Buddhist. This was of course an Americanized, California-style Buddhism that drew on Alan Watts, Chögyam Trungpa, and figures from the sixties counterculture like Allen Ginsberg. The turning point was when I tried psilocybin mushrooms for the first time. Sitting at my desk in my college dorm room, pen in hand ready to journal, I had an experience that turned my worldview completely upside down. I came face to face with what I could call the Christ archetype—thus making it more understandable in a Jungian sense. But at the time it did not feel at all like a projection of my psyche. This being felt like a warmth hovering just behind my face, communicating to me but also through me via a kind of automatic writing. It identified itself as the Logos, saying (I paraphrase): “I am in you, I am in everyone. Love one another.”

Talk about ontological shock. This experience upended my lifelong skepticism toward Christianity. I’d spent years dismissing it as the most incredible (ie, unbelievable) of the world’s religions, yet suddenly I was confronted and humbled by a direct experience of the Christ Being. In the aftermath of this experience, it does not feel as though I “believe” in Christ. Rather, in that moment I knew and was known by Christ, and to this day my “faith” (which is not the same as belief) radiates from that experience of co-knowing. I came to realize the West also has esoteric and mystical streams, and that I didn’t need to look only to exotic (as they seemed me) Asian traditions for genuine mystical insight. Although I don’t attend a particular church or even feel comfortable identifying as “Christian” without a longer explanation, I do feel connected to and compelled by what I call the incarnational vector of the Biblical narrative. I remain a pluralist about these matters, as for example I also see this incarnational vector in Mahayana Buddhism’s emphasis on the Bodhisattva’s vow to return to the suffering world.

Part of why I’ve recently been more open about this experience is because it’s suddenly becoming cool to be Christian again. Many high-profile converts are emphasizing Christianity’s cultural and civilizational significance. That rationale for conversion doesn’t resonate with me; my experience had absolutely nothing to do with affirming or reconnecting with any particular culture’s civilizational project. In fact, I agree with Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa) who famously said:

“…there is no such thing as ‘Christian Civilization.’ I believe that Christianity and modern civilization are opposed and irreconcilable.”

It could not be more obvious to me that Christ calls us to overcome national and racial divisions, not to re-entrench them. So much of my current advocacy is an effort to subvert the idolatrous appropriation I see happening among Western chauvinists and so-called “Christian nationalists” (talk about an oxymoron).

Peter and I discussed how authentic spiritual experiences often don’t leave us with a neat and tidy ideology. Instead, they undo our certainties, reshaping us in ways that remain hard to explain. Spirituality is a continual process of humbling oneself in the face of the unknown, and its ethical consequences are perhaps best captured by the concept of kenosis—a self-emptying that allows ever-new depths of reality to pour in.

…

Peter asked how I came to Alfred North Whitehead’s work. I explained that my psilocybin encounter happened several years before I studied Whitehead in graduate school. Initially, I got into Whitehead’s metaphysics because I was seeking a way to reinterpret natural science outside the context of reductionistic materialism. I didn’t engage Whitehead’s theological interpreters (like John Cobb, David Ray Griffin, or Charles Hartshorne) initially. Eventually, through working with John Cobb directly beginning in 2014 until his death a month ago, I deepened my appreciation for the theological side of Whitehead’s thought.

Peter is somewhat new to process thought, so I did my best to introduce the main concepts. I discussed how process theology holds that God isn’t all-powerful in the traditional sense. Whatever power God does have emerges through us (as Whitehead put it, “God’s power is the worship [God] inspires”). Rather than a remote Creator who might simply fix everything by decree, God is an intimate Relator, a participant in cosmogenesis seeking our cooperation. When we choose to live lives of love and service, we help actualize the divine in the world; if we don’t, God’s reality is diminished. It’s a fully participatory theology—very different from petitioning an omnipotent being to intervene.

I gave what was probably a mostly incomprehensible account of Whitehead’s dipolar conception of God. There’s never an easy place to start! Given the influence that Friedrich Schelling had on some of Peter’s main sources (eg, Tillich, Zizek, Caputo), I probably should have started by comparing Whitehead’s theology to the account Schelling offers beginning with his 1809 Freedom essay and continuing into his multiple drafts of Ages of the World (there’s something philosophically appropriate about the fact that Schelling never managed to finish these drafts). Schelling differentiates between the divine ground—an unconscious depth or yearning—and divine existence, which is God growing into time, manifesting in the dynamic evolution of the cosmos, and eventually, incarnating as a human being.

Schelling and Whitehead each depict God as somewhat at odds with Itself. In Schelling’s account, God harbors a “dark ground” prior to conscious self-revelation. This ground is a pre-personal, desirous will that yearns to become fully manifest in the light of divine self-consciousness. God’s nature is an unending tension—an internal drama of darkness and light that both propels and complicates creation. Schelling sees this internal tension in the Godhead as indispensable for human freedom, since it allows for the real possibility of evil: the dark will, recapitulated within us, can break away from the harmonizing divine center. But, crucially, free human beings can also lovingly affirm the center. It is this free human decision to love that in some sense constitutes God’s self-consciousness.

There are many resonances with Whitehead’s theology, but also some dissonance that prevents any neat equation. I’ll quote his own account of the basics:

“…analogously to all actual entities, the nature of God is dipolar. He has a primordial nature and a consequent nature. The consequent nature of God is conscious; and it is the realization of the actual world in the unity of his nature, and through the transformation of his wisdom. The primordial nature is conceptual, the consequent nature is the weaving of God’s physical feelings upon his primordial concepts.

One side of God’s nature is constituted by his conceptual experience. This experience is the primordial fact in the world, limited by no ac­tuality which it presupposes. It is therefore infinite, devoid of all negative prehensions. This side of his nature is free, complete, primordial, eternal, actually deficient, and unconscious. The other side originates with physical experience derived from the temporal world, and then acquires integration with the primordial side. It is determined, incomplete, consequent, ‘ever­lasting,’ fully actual, and conscious. His necessary goodness expresses the determination of his consequent nature.” (PR 345)

Whitehead’s dipolar concept of God includes an “inexorable” or even “ruthless” aspect that emerges from the function of God as the principle of ordering all possibilities (ie, the “primordial nature of God”). In Process and Reality, he describes God’s primordial valuation of possibilities as a source of the “initial aim” for each new concrescent subject, guiding it toward what is best for its particular situation. Yet “if the best be bad,” he notes, then God’s relentless push toward some form of more intensely patterned order can assume a grim aspect, personified as Até, the Greek goddess of mischief (PR 244). In other words, there is a trickster-like ruthlessness in God’s role as the principle of concretion: once a creature is endowed with its initial aim, the process of self-causation proceeds toward whatever outcome emerges—sometimes tragic or discordant in relation to its social context.

“Each task of creation is a social effort, employing the whole universe. Each novel actuality is a new partner add­ing a new condition. Every new condition can be absorbed into ad­ditional fullness of attainment. On the other hand, each condition is ex­clusive, intolerant of diversities; except so far as it finds itself in a web of conditions which convert its exclusions into contrasts. A new actuality may appear in the wrong society, amid which its claims to efficacy act mainly as inhibitions. Then a weary task is set for creative function, by an epoch of new creations to remove the inhibition. Insistence on birth at the wrong season is the trick of evil. In other words, the novel fact may throw back, inhibit, and delay. But the advance, when it does arrive, will be richer in content, more fully conditioned, and more stable.” (PR 223)

For Schelling, the drama of history reflects the cosmic interplay of dark and light principles, so that evil is metaphysically rooted in God’s own aboriginal will. While Whitehead sees the “best” aims as sometimes culminating in tragic outcomes—thus implying a ruthless dimension in the divine ordering—he does not ground evil in a divine self-division. Instead, evil arises when the world’s finite actualities, though lured by God’s valuations, achieve a form of novelty that is out of tune with their immediate environment. The “darkness” in Whitehead’s perspective belongs more to the unintended destructive by-products of the creative advance, rather than an intrinsic conflict in God’s nature. Where Schelling sees the primary tension within God’s ground, Whitehead situates the root of discord in the complexities of finite realization, wherein creatures are lured by an impartial eternal aim while always jostling in a sea of creative unrest.

God is as subject to this creative onrush as any other creature, and it is precisely for that reason that Whitehead’s God is not all-powerful. The process conception of God offers both a source of refreshment and a sense of relevant novelty, as well as a sense of companionship, because this is not a God that exists outside the world. This is a God who suffers with the world, as much subject as object, as much a lack as a presence. I do think there is a radical negativity in this vision in the sense that creation is never finished, nor is God a completed being. God is growing with each experience, with the birth and death of every creature. The divine’s active yearning for novelty is as unquenchable as the divine’s receptivity to creaturely achievement. God is not an object that might resolve all the tensions of life and becoming; God is not a being but is becoming with us.

On Whitehead’s reading, God conditions Creativity—which by itself lacks a definite vector and can be akin to nothingness or chaos—and gives it both aim and memory, so that process can take on a historical trajectory. God instills a sense of purpose but we are never going to arrive at a final, finished state. Whitehead’s theology attempts to provide an account of aim and memory at the cosmic scale, so that we can describe the universe as a cumulative process. Nothing is ever forgotten; everything which occurs becomes objectively immortal and contributes to the further creative advance of the universe.

I tried to connect Peter’s emphasis on negativity and absence to the way Whitehead thinks about unrealized possibilities: in every moment of experience, there is a physical prehension or inheritance of what has been actualized already, but there is also a conceptual prehension of everything that has not been actualized but remains possible. This negativity, as it were, or the realm of unrealized possibilities, is haloing everything that has already been realized. One of the reasons Whitehead finds it necessary, as a metaphysician, to refer to God is that he needs some way to account for all those unrealized possibilities. He points to the divine as that which shelters these unrealized possibilities and allows them to remain accessible to us in some way. He speaks in terms of possibility and potentiality rather than negativity, but his point is the Hegelian one that a thing is not simply what it is, it is also everything it is not.

We discussed the notion of freedom. I mentioned the importance of Schelling for my thinking, and the way I have tried to appropriate him as a process philosopher. Schelling’s account of freedom in his Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom shook me. Freedom, he argues, is not merely a matter of choosing this or that option. It is a deeper cut, a primordial or eternal de-cision that determines our character and personality. If anything, it is freedom that has me, not I who have freedom. What fascinates me about Whitehead’s account of decision, which he calls “concrescence,” is that he does not limit it to human beings. For Whitehead, creativity—the capacity for self-creation—is cosmically distributed. Human beings may be self-conscious of this capacity, but we are not the only creatures capable of self-creation. His account of an actual occasion of experience, or concrescence, is a process of self-creation that always inherits a history and a context but adds something novel.

That process involves three basic phases: inheriting the objectified past, subjectively experiencing it in the present, and then perishing into what Whitehead calls superjectivity. In the superject, the values realized in that moment of subjectivity are passed on to the future for the next round of concrescence to inherit. In human terms, when we try to understand freedom as the capacity for creative self-transcendence, it depends on dying to ourselves as subjects in the present and giving whatever value we have realized to the next concrescent subject. For Whitehead, there is no single enduring subject; we are each a stream of occasions of experience that inherit from one another. I am constantly in a situation of having to interpret my present self in light of my past selves in order to construct a future self. Yet in order to affect my future selves, I have to die to myself in the present. That suggests freedom is, in some sense, self-sacrificial. It is a gift to the next occasion of experience, and note that there is only a difference of degree, not a difference in kind, between my relationship to my future selves and my relationship to others.

Whitehead says God is the ultimate irrationality in the sense that there is something contingent about God’s emergence out of Creativity. Yet, once that contingent emergence occurs, God becomes necessary for all subsequent creaturely activity and cosmogenesis. God begins as contingent and then becomes necessary. This is not the God of classical theism, not a necessary being proven through an ontological argument. Whitehead is a radical empiricist in the Jamesian sense, looking around at our more or less ordered universe and searching for an account of the origins of that at least partial order (that it is partial signals to him that God cannot be omnipotent). This is why he views God as both a primordial fact at the base of our experience and as a necessary metaphysical hypothesis providing the condition rendering our scientific understanding possible (ie, science has onto-epistemic conditions of possibility, such as nature’s intelligibility and our ability to understand it).

Whitehead was familiar with the limits of logic, having worked with Russell on Principia Mathematica. They made a valiant attempt to ground mathematics in set theory and to eliminate any need for intuition, hoping to prove that one plus one equals two. The Principia was a tremendous success in inaugurating this new approach to logical analysis, but logicism ultimately proved untenable, and Gödel explained why with his incompleteness theorems. Whitehead, especially in his last book Modes of Thought (1938), notes the implications of Gödel’s work and suggests that we must now understand logic as a subset of aesthetics. Our sense of logical truths and our ability to make logical judgments, he argues, are rooted in deeper intuitions of harmony and balance. When he thinks of the divine, it is not as some grand logician but as the poet of the world. God does not make the world but makes something of the world, allowing us to find or create meaning in the creative onrush of reality despite the wreckage of history. God leaves open the possibility of reconciliation even if it in fact never fully arrives. Indeed, many have interpreted Whitehead’s theology as saying that God is always to come. Whitehead offered a very abstract metaphysical account of the divine function. It is the barest pencil sketch, but that means theologians, people of faith, and anyone seeking to make sense of religious or spiritual experience can fill it in with color. He wanted an account of the ultimate nature of things that would include something that every religious tradition could recognize as familiar. He sought a language generic enough that everyone might find themselves in it. He was not attempting to deduce a world from logical principles but rather to begin with human experience, including religious, artistic, scientific, and everyday experience. He distilled a set of categories to describe reality that would remain open to revision.

I suggested to Peter that there are deep resonances between Whitehead and thinkers like John Caputo and with post-structural and deconstructive approaches more generally. Catherine Keller might be the bridge between Whitehead’s thought and those forms of radical theology. She develops a kind of theopoetic approach, evoking an aesthetic response to the mystery of existence and shifting our relationship to talk about God away from certainties and proofs. Theology becomes more akin to painting than science. One of the major contributions in Keller’s reading of Whitehead is her engagement with negative theology, which insists that God is not simply the highest being. God is as much in the lowest as in the highest, and God remains, in an important sense, unnameable. Whitehead himself, as a metaphysician, freely uses the word “God,” but it can be awkward to explain that this God is not omnipotent, not a creator in the traditional sense, but rather a power of relationship that suffers and co-creates with the world. The term “God” is culturally potent, and it can be dangerous, so we should be humble when using it and ready to admit its insufficiency.

I felt a growing embarrassment and anxiety talking so much about God with Peter and Rahul, because I recognize my own complete inadequacy and the limitations of any conceptual framework. Whitehead has given me a metaphysical scaffolding that feels adequate to parts of my experience, but there are still holes in his otherwise comprehensive scheme. Negative theology and apophatic traditions help keep our metaphysical ambitions in check, reminding us that we are finite, suffering, and largely ignorant beings. I also have a confessional side, because I have had a religious experience that, more than any philosophy I have read, has shaped who I am. Yet that experience remains mostly ineffable. I am always seeking a way to articulate it, but that articulation is secondary to the experience itself.

At the same time, Whitehead repeatedly insists that the universe is incomplete. The process of production never settles into a finished product. We, too, as cosmic beings, remain perpetually incomplete. This means we can intuit a radical open-endedness—sheer creativity—but also a sort of divine Eros that, despite all the chaos, brings some aesthetic order and sense of purpose to life. Nature has a tendency to be in tune, and Whitehead wants to account for that. So there is a double intuition of an ongoing creative process that never completes, and also a sense of value, beauty, or goodness, an intuition that I think can safely be called divine. Of course, this does not rule out the fact that people can do terrible things in the name of some absolute truth, whether religious or some secular ideology. We see it in politics, for instance, in the psychoanalytic difference between left-wing and right-wing enjoyment, which Peter discussed last year in an earlier podcast with Rahul. As he describes it, left-wing enjoyment is reconciled to the unavoidable alienation and contradiction of human life (a high standard for left politics which I’d say very few who identify as leftwing live up to). Right-wing enjoyment, on the other hand, often arises from the fantasy that alienation, contradiction, or lack can be overcome if only we isolate and eliminate whatever appears to be causing it. There is an assumption that a lost wholeness can be restored through an act of exclusion or scapegoating: if only we get rid of the outsiders, the unpatriotic or undesirable others, then society could finally become complete, safe, and without contradiction. It is a denial of the inescapable gap in human existence, a refusal to acknowledge the irreducible dimension of suffering, lack, and finitude that marks our lives. Much of the “Christian nationalist” discourse seems to me like it stems from this assumption.

Rahul asked us to characterize authentic spiritual experience, which I said might be marked by humility, self-emptying, and a displacement of ideological certainties. It can feel disorienting rather than confirming of a final sense of identity or an ultimate solution. That does not prevent someone, after being shattered, from picking up the pieces in ways that lead to dangerous ideologies. But I think genuine experiences of the sacred undo us before they remake us. They do not merely convert us into people with new certainties. They can break us open into deeper unknowing.

Spiritual experiences as a form of kenosis or self-emptying might mean they are inoculated against fascist appropriation. There has been criticism of the very use of the word “God” because it comes with so much baggage. I do not believe in the God Richard Dawkins rejects, and I understand the desire to avoid the term altogether. Yet I remain hesitant to simply throw it out, because to do so might be to break with a lineage of philosophical and spiritual reflection that is still vital. If we abandon it, we might lose the intense cultural resonance it carries and the depth of experience it can name—however imperfectly. Instead, we can transform and repurpose it so that it no longer points to an omnipotent creator being but rather to a relational process and precondition for loving relationship. Doing so both connects us with our theological inheritance and subverts the old comforting certainties.

The word “God” is like a stick of dynamite. It remains valuable precisely because its utterance sets off such potent cultural and conceptual reverberations. Whitehead, in his own way, used it to name something at once tender and cosmic, intangible yet inescapable, the poet of the world who does not create the world from nothing but helps us make meaning of the tragedy of history. We are swept up in a creative onrush, and God—or whatever we choose to call that principle of relatedness, memory, aim, and possibility—suffers and becomes along with us. We may remain deeply uncertain about it, but in that sense, perhaps we can finally understand why humility and open-endedness, rather than dogmatic closure, are the hallmarks of an authentic spiritual life.

Video of our dialogue: