The Demands of a Pathetic God: An Exploration of Sympathy and Divine Power
“God is the great companion — the fellow-sufferer who understands.”
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 351
“I have dwelled by design on these categories of a religious experience analyzed as a phenomenon of sympathy, that is, as man’s response to the demands of a pathetic God.”
Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Ṣūfism of Ibn ʻArabī, p. 109
In this poignant section of his opus, Islamic philosopher Henry Corbin draws upon the work of Jewish luminary Abraham Joshua Heschel, the great Sufi mystics, and the late antique Neoplatonic thinker Proclus to analyze the phenomenon of Divine pathos and sketch a united vision of prophetic and mystical religion.
All the intricacies of this analysis aside, I want to dwell on just this one short phrase — “the demands of a pathetic God” — in connection with process-relational discourses on Divine power to hopefully open some new vistas of understanding.
The typical understanding of Divine power and action from the perspective of process-relational theology — staking its metaphysics of the philosophy of organism of Alfred North Whitehead — is that God’s power vis-à-vis creation is persuasive rather than coercive. Instead of being seen as the ultimate puppet master of the cosmos, God is seen instead as playing a role more akin to the conductor of an orchestra, luring creation to realize possibilities of beauty and harmony without having the ability to exercise unilateral control which would guarantee a particular outcome.
More traditionally minded theists often object to this vision of Divinity on the grounds that it makes God weak in a way that cuts against basic spiritual intuitions of Divine majesty and religious longings for a sense of coherence and purpose in the cosmos that emerge from a vision of a Divinely guided creation. While many process theists — along with their open-and-relational cousins — feel satiated with an understanding of God which views Divine power as operating in an exclusively persuasive capacity, this approach is just as liable to undue reification as is the understanding of omnipotence in more traditional forms of Abrahamic theism.
My contention is that Corbin’s analysis of sympathy and Divine pathos could form a helpful bridge between these two perspectives, seeing them less as mutually-exclusive alternatives and more as analyses of the same basic phenomenon from different vantage points.
Firstly, Corbin’s understanding of sympathy between creature and Creator problematizes the basic ontological distinction that identifies the two as wholly separate entities whereupon one may exert external causal power upon the other. Here, Corbin draws upon Proclus’ poetic image of the sunflower (the heliotrope) to illustrate the point. By its very nature, this plant orients its being towards the sun, faithfully tracking its “Lord” in every stage of this procession. The sympathy between sunflower and sun is an attractor to which the flower naturally conforms. However, this submission is anything but the consignment of one to the coercive influence of the other; rather, this con-formity is precisely the fulfillment of the essential being of the sunflower in its relational becoming. It is what it is — a heliotrope — in and through this relationship. Were it to somehow “reject” the “influence” of the sun, it would then simply cease to be what it actually is.
Instead of either a dualism that sets creature and creator in stark contrast or a monism that tries to collapse the relational poles entirely, Corbin draws upon the mystical thought of Ibn ʻArabī to suggest a relational non-duality between the dialogical and the unitive and it is here where he locates the basic compatibility of mystical and prophetic religion.
Creation is not a unidirectional emanation from a Divine essence, it is an emergence out of the nostalgic chorus of all creatures longing to be united with their Lord. And this longing for unity — which belongs at once to the creature and to the God which the creature addresses — is precisely what draws the creature forth in its own radiant individuality. Becoming what it is meant to be, following its own relational logic, is both the natural fulfillment of the creature and a self-revelation (theophany) of the Divine in and as it is now expressed concretely and definitively in this being. The basic unicity of God in the sense of Tawḥīd — making one — is obtained from every possible vantage in this inexhaustible procession of theophanies which is also none other than the yearning-to-be of all extant creatures. The unity is this whole relation — the oneness only attains as a true wholeness in and as the sympathetic dialogue of the two.
From this perspective, how can we neatly categorize activity into the buckets of coercive and persuasive power? The self-becoming of the creature is at once authentic freedom grounded in deep feeling and a thorough conformity to the mode of being supplied by its Lord. One may analyze this situation either from the vantage of the creature’s longing for the Beloved (which is none other than its own epiphanic form) or from the Divine Sigh of Compassion (Nafas Raḥmānī) which yearns to overcome its occultation through self-manifestation and thus be truly known. These are not two distinct processes, moments, or phenomena but the very creative advance of the Divine Life as cosmic life viewed either from a particular or general vantage and while it is possible to separate these perspectives for the sake of theological analysis, in actuality they are wholly existentially mutually dependent.
I want to return now to Corbin’s poignant phrase “the demands of a pathetic God” to attempt to elucidate the existential significance of this perspective and explore the transformations this could inspire in process-relational theology.
In his own theological speculations, Alfred North Whitehead suggests that Divine activity may be framed as God offering “lures for feeling” to the actual entities of the cosmos (“The primary element in the ‘lure for feeling’ is the subject’s prehension of the primordial nature of God,” PR 189; “He is the lure for feeling, the eternal urge of desire,” PR 345) and process theologians inspired by Whitehead have subsequently understood this luring function as exerting a persuasive rather than definitive influence on the concrescing subject. Through the lure, God suggests possibilities for becoming to the subject which maximize intensity and harmony but does not insist that this possibility be realized — that is ultimately up to the subject itself.
However, could it ever be the case that this lure is so profound, so evocative, that resisting its influence is existentially impossible? Embedded within the enticing facade of the fishing lure is a hook intended to snag the unsuspecting fish it attracts. Though the motives of a fisher can be said to be lacking in terms of benevolence vis-à-vis the fish, could there not be a hook present in the lure of a process-relational God, an irresistible demand from the Divine pathos?
Above I quoted Whitehead’s famous presentation of God as “the fellow-sufferer who understands.” Typically process theologians have lauded Whitehead’s presentation of Divine pathos within his broader metaphysics and attempted to draw out the theological implications of a God who is passible and affected by creation. However, considerably less attention has been paid to the human significance of Divine suffering — here, Corbin’s synthesis of perspectives from Islamic mystical traditions may prove particularly instructive. Though Whitehead makes a special point to emphasize God as fellow-sufferer, the causal significance of Divine sadness and longing — particularly as it is emphasized in the Islamic tradition — is underexplored in process-relational discourses.
To borrow a formula from Whitehead, would it not be the case that it is just as true to say that God is affected by creaturely suffering as it is to say that creatures are affected by Divine suffering? This is the basic meaning of sym-pathy, “feeling/suffering-with”. If the Whiteheadian lure could be felt with the full force of this Divine pathos, is it not possible that the opportunity for creative advance suggested therein may be irresistible, not due to coercive pressure from without but due to sympathy from within? Such is my suggestion.
Beyond these admittedly arcane theological speculations, however, one may readily identify this self-same dynamic at play within poignant loving relations between creatures. In particular, parents will regularly report incredible feats of self-sacrifice and instances where they overcame seemingly impossible circumstances because their loving sympathy for their child simply demanded such. But this demand is not felt as a constriction of opportunities to choose otherwise, as a trespass upon their freedom and agency; rather, it is precisely a fulfillment and exemplification of who they really were. The fact that the necessity emerged organically from within the individual on account of sympathy, rather than being externally imposed makes all the difference. In this context, instead of being alienated by this demand, it is precisely the condition for a deeper mode of fulfillment and freedom.
Considering that this dynamic can emerge so poignantly amongst fallible human beings, it should not be difficult to imagine it well within God’s abilities to inspire such irresistible sympathy in creatures, as classical and process theists alike affirm God’s perfection and boundless compassion.
Recentering Divine pathos in process theology by way of Corbin’s sufi-inflected analysis of metaphysical sympathy opens a number of exciting vistas. In particular, the whole polemic between “persuasive” and “coercive” models of Divine action can be bypassed. The “demand” of God is now felt precisely as Grace and individuation is spurred by a deep feeling of the Divine sadness for creation, to which one can’t help but respond.
For process theists who are primarily concerned with issues of theodicy, this exploration likely remains unsatisfying, as if it is possible that the Divine lure is felt as an irresistible demand of sympathy, the typical logical binds around the problem of evil remain active. While I won’t attempt to offer answers to this perennial theological quagmire here, I will suggest that exploring such questions in a context that has returned the God-creature relationship to a more primordial plane where the dialogical is the unitive makes for a much more interesting — and hopefully fruitful — starting point. In any case, hopefully this Corbinian intervention into Whiteheadian process theology can contribute to the evolving dynamism of process thinking generally, helping to coherently integrate more pluralistic and multi-perspectival forms of process theology to the overall field.
Bibliography
- Corbin, Henry. Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sūfism of Ibn ʻArabī. Princeton University Press, 1998.
- Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. New York, MacMillan Publishing Company, [1929] 1978.
