92 - The End of Evil: Process Eschatology in Historical Context

The End of Evil: Process Eschatology in Historical Context
By Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki
Albany, State University of New York Press, 1988. 182 pp. $34.50 ($10.95 pb).

In God-Christ-Church, Suchocki developed an imaginative and clear practical process theology, whose most innovative portions concerned immortality and eschatology. The End of Evil elaborates and grounds these themes in greater detail, exploring the nature of evil and the way in which it can be ultimately overcome. Quoting Whitehead's words that the meaning of evil is "the experience of destruction," she develops the subjective precondition of evil as freedom, its objective precondition as finitude.

Whitehead's account of evil is placed against a larger historical context in terms of Augustine and Leibniz, Kant and Schleiermacher, Hegel and Nietzsche. But the basic thrust of her study depends upon her imaginative and sensitive expansion of Whitehead's principles to show how evil can ultimately be overcome in the divine experience of the world. This is no mere summary exposition of Whitehead's texts, but rests upon a thorough appropriation of them within a new context of questions. This includes the claim that our suffering is not redeemed in God's inner life unless there is some way that we, in our own subjectivity, experience the redemption.

This may be possible within a Whiteheadian context, since Whitehead left the issue of subjective immortality open. But it is not the usual view. Suchocki's account is quite distinctive and arises out of three interpretive principles she champions.

The first is creativity, which Whitehead tells us is only actual in its instances. Usually creativity is identified with the subjective immediacy of an actuality's act of becoming, which perishes once that act attains the final unity of its being. Suchocki sees that creativity spilling over the bounds of the final objectification and serving as the new creativity of the actualities succeeding it.

In Process and Reality, the past is seen as individually devoid of subjectivity and hence cannot be the source for further creativity. But in Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead does speak of the past collectively as providing creativity for the present. Whitehead, however, does not work this out in terms of his earlier claim, in line with his ontological principle that creativity is actual only in terms of its instances. Suchocki argues that in order for the actual entities of the past to provide that transitional creativity to new occasions, concrescent creativity is not enough. There must be some creativity left over from the completion of the becoming in the satisfaction in order for there to be any to give to the next generation.

93 - The End of Evil: Process Eschatology in Historical Context

This is one way of reconciling Whitehead's derivation of creativity from the past with the ontological principle, but another alternative would be to derive all creativity from God. This would sharpen the contrast between God and finite actualities, to be sure, but some differences must be made in any case, and this could be made at less conceptual cost, since it would preserve Whitehead's usual claim that past actualities are totally devoid of subjectivity. If so, however, it may prove well nigh impossible to show how there could be subjective immortality. Needless to say, this is not Suchocki's alternative.

Prehension is the second interpretive principle, the way one actuality (usually unconsciously) experiences or takes account of another. On the usual interpretation, following Whitehead's implicit practice, we can only prehend other determinate actualities, other beings. We cannot prehend that which is still in becoming: other subjectivities, other contemporaries. It is only after they have become determinate unities that they can be prehended.

Suchocki grants that this is, certainly true of all finite experience, but wonders whether it must be true in the divine instance. (Her questioning may be akin to Charles Hartshorne, who resists the notion that subjects must first perish in their immediacy to be known by the Perfect Knower.) But every finite prehension is limited to a particular standpoint and can never prehend an actuality in its fullness. Yet, God does. If the occasion possesses creativity in its satisfaction, then God can prehend it in its own subjective immediacy. Thus, these first two principles become the basis for subjective immortality.

It is not clear to me why finite prehension is restricted only to the objective aspects of actuality. To be sure, an unrestricted knower would experience the additional creativity, but so could a finite actuality in some instances, prehending the object in part and the subject in part-assuming that there is any creativity to prehend.

The third of Suchocki's principles is the reversal of the poles in God. Every actuality, for Whitehead, has both a physical and a mental aspect or pole. Following Hume, for whom all ideas are derived from experiences, creatures first experience the world causally (physically), then derive their conceptual prehensions (ideas) by abstraction from that primal experience. In God, however, the mental pole of God's nontemporat prehension of the totality of pure possibilities (forms) is underived, and precedes the divine temporal experience of the on-going world (that is, it precedes the physical pole of God, the consequent nature). Nearly all Whiteheadian scholars recognize the reversal, but none has used it as creatively as Marjorie Suchocki. It is a way to resolve one of the most longstanding problems in process theism.

If we are to interact with God dynamically and personally, we must be influenced by initial aims informed by God's continued involvement in the world, Thus we need to be able to prehend God's temporal (consequent) experience of the world. For Whitehead, this is an ever-growing concrescence, a continuous process of becoming. As we

94 - The End of Evil: Process Eschatology in Historical Context

have just seen with respect to prehension, we can only prehend completed beings, not processes of becoming. Her first two principles enable God to prehend processes in becoming, but these won't help us with respect to how finite actualities can prehend God.

Hartshorne has proposed the resolution adopted by most process thinkers. He reconceives God in terms of Whitehead's model for a finite living person as a society (or unending series) of divine occasions, each of which prehends the entire world in a moment, completes its becoming in one final being, and which, in turn, is prehended by the next generation of actualities.

Suchocki seeks to justify Whitehead's original insight that God is a single everlasting concrescence. God can be prehended by us, however, only if there is a corresponding satisfaction. If concrescence precedes satisfaction, any final satisfaction could only come at the end, as a process version of Pannenberg might hold. Since God and the world are everlasting for Whitehead, it's not clear how this could ever be. On the other hand, our assumption that concrescence precedes satisfaction is based on a generalization from ordinary actualities to the divine instance.

What if, in God, they are reversed just as the poles are reversed? Suchocki argues that they are. In God, therefore, satisfaction precedes concrescence. God's activity in providing aims for the world draws upon and therefore grows out of the envisagement of all pure possibilities.

Because the divine satisfaction is the attained unity of God's prehensions and these now include the temporal prehensions of worldly activity, that satisfaction cannot simply remain purely timeless, but is evergrowing, incorporating the results of the divine concrescence within itself. On the other hand, the divine concrescence is ever-becoming, because it is always deriving from the satisfaction which precedes it. Because finite actualities can prehend God in her satisfaction, if not in his concrescence, we can experience God in her temporal aims for us.

In the end, The End of Evil lays out the groundwork in terms of which Suchocki seeks to show how subjective immortality is possible, not in terms of some disembodied soul, nor in terms of some physical body somehow rendered imperishable, but in terms of God's own experience. That everlasting experience becomes the appropriate environment capable of sustaining subjectivity in the hereafter.

Lewis S. Ford

Old Dominion University
Norfolk, Virginia