He would never abandon his quest to find a God who was intellectually tenable and in tune with the modern world, and in that venture he would eventually become one of the primary architects of the small but important movement known as process theology.Īs a technical philosopher who taught with Alfred North Whitehead at Harvard and then taught at Emory, the University of Chicago, and the University of Texas, his scholarly writings were never aimed at a popular audience. As an adult, Hartshorne married in a Universalist church and had close ties to several Unitarian churches, although he hesitated to call himself a Unitarian. The son of an Episcopal clergyman, Hartshorne abandoned his childhood beliefs after reading Emerson as an adolescent. Few of us, though, will fully analyze such experiences, write books about them, or integrate them into an original system of philosophy.īut Charles Hartshorne, whose lifetime spanned the twentieth century (1897–2000), was one of those inventive minds not content to leave such experiences unexamined or pigeonhole them into pre-existing religious categories.
Though their intensity fades, their memory abides. Even brief glimpses of this kind can illuminate the rest of life. Many of us have had similar experiences of feeling connected to a larger something: being drawn so deeply into the peace of a landscape that we seem to be at one with the textures and sensations of the world round about, feeling our own small and obscure destiny linked to some greater and more radiant purpose. I don’t think Hartshorne is unique in his religious intuitions. Though he did not analyze it further at the time, that instant of sympathetic identification with the world made an impression that would last. He realized, he says, that the landscape he beheld was itself endowed with feelings, was sensitive, as restless and filled with nameless stirrings as he himself. But the rolling terrain, its vibrant greens and earth tones, its serenity and calm, convinced him otherwise. He says he had been thinking about the question of mind and matter and pondering the dualistic hypothesis that these are two irreducible kinds of reality: an outer world, governed by blind and unthinking forces, and an inner world of thought and emotion. Hartshorne’s other religious experience occurred as he was looking across and up the valley, at the wide, scenic landscape. Nothing compels me to think of myself miserable rather than others-those children-happy.’ Never since then,” writes Hartshorne, “have I allowed myself to identify, unless briefly, the question, Is life good and beautiful? with the question, Is my life now good and beautiful? And I have not wavered in the two convictions that there is some minimal good, beauty in all life, including my own, and that what finally matters, even to me, is the life of the Whole, the Something that includes me, outlasts me (save as I contribute myself to it), and contains more good than I can distinctly imagine.” The rest of it is not all unfortunate or wretched.
“So what? I am a tiny fragment of human life. “Suppose my own life is unsatisfactory,” he thought. “These somewhat gloomy reflections were interrupted by a simultaneous multitude of shrill sounds.” Looking to his left almost vertically down to the bottom of the cliff, he saw a school playground filled with shouting, laughing French children.
“I had been thinking of certain aspects of my life that seemed discouraging,” remembers Hartshorne. Perhaps James, who once defined “religion” as “what one does with one’s solitude,” was right in this particular instance, for it was in this isolated spot, with only the wheeling gulls for company, that the future theologian had two pivotal experiences that would shape all his later career. On a small ledge, located a few feet under the edge of the great chalk cliffs that faced the English Channel, the young man liked to sit and think, not daydreaming about wine or women or battle or any of the other preoccupations of military men, but reading William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience and thinking about the nature of ultimate reality. In his autobiography, The Darkness and the Light, the philosopher Charles Hartshorne relates an early religious experience that took place when he was a soldier stationed in France during the First World War.
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