Weber, Michel. "Contact Made Vision: The Apocryphal Whitehead." Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought Vol. I. Edited by Michel Weber and Will Desmond. Heusenstamm, Germany: Ontos Verlag 2008. 573-599

Abstract

"Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness. It runs through three stages, if it involved to its final satisfaction. It is the transition from God the void to God the enemy, and from God the enemy to God the companion" (RM 16). The present Whiteheadian dialogue between natural process theology and Whiteheadian scholarship exploits a tangential approach that will provide new ways of contrasting Whitehead's worldview by adding an unexpected speaker: Thomas, the Gnostic Jew who wrote his Gospel perhaps as early as 60 years after Jesus' death and could thus have constituted an earlier corpus than the canonical gospels - and their hypothetical Q. Some readers may consider that the price to pay is too high to venture oneself on such a cross-interpretive path: there is no need to impose an unfashionable syncretic burden either on Whitehead or on Thomas; the inflexion required on each of them to bring them together is simply too demanding and totally unscientific anyway. At least four answers immediately come to mind: first, there is no such thing as a totally objective interpretation in these matters (even the "hard-core" scientific enterprise does not completely escape from the social construction of the issues); second, this hermeneutical wager carries important consequences for each party; third, the rapprochement is operational only at the level of the fundamental intuition - of course not at the level of the technicalities (for the most part absent in Thomas anyway); fourth, what matters above all is to highlight new ways of understanding the huamn condition, not to stick to sclerotically dead abstractions. Let us notice moreover that the strong matriarchal or at least antipatriarchal emphasis of most Gnostic sects is of good omen in the present post-modern context. Having said this, who could seriously dare claim that we should not aim at a new vision, not only globally speaking, but also on such cultural landmarks as Whitehead or Thomas? The answer is simple: nobody, unless such a vision undercuts his or her own power on the social scene (or on its backstage). Granted, it is sometimes too demanding to shake intimate convictions while compassion should prevent us from harsh judgments. The requirement of authenticity nevertheless clears this objection promptly. Transfigurative contemplation is as old as humanity (remember the emblematic Mesopotamian orant sculptures or the role of theoria in Greek philosophy, religion and politics), and there is no doubt whatsoever that it is still alive in philosophy. Samuel Alexander has for instance boldly claimed: "I read Whitehead naturally not only to understand him but to save my soul." There is evidence that Whitehead knew as least of the Oxyrhyncus logia, published in 1898 by Grenfeld and Hunt (thus far before the Nag Hammadi logia, discovered in 1945, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947). In Religion in the Making (1926), he  writes: "The notion of immanence must be discriminated from that of omniscience. The Semitic God is omnicient; but, in addition to that, the Christian God is a factor in the universe. A few years ago a papyrus was found in an Egyptian tomb which proved to be an early Christian compilation called 'The Sayings of Christ' [...] We find in these Logia of Christ the saying, 'Cleave the wood, and I am there.' This is merely one example of an emphatic assertion of immanence, and shows a serious divergence from the Semitic concept" (RM 71). Whitehead's repeated emphasis on immanence should be kept in mind when confronted with the Platonic temptation of his ontology. Gnosticism has been for too long totally despised and interpreted as a weak blend of systems hastily syncretized. From a strict philosophical perspective, Jonas' doctoral thesis remains a landmark here: he very smartly used Gnosticism to understand Heidegger and Heidegger's existentialism to cast light on Gnosticism. The present essay is, at a far smaller scale and in a more experiential fashion, in the same vein. Practically speaking, our argument will have a double focus: on the one hand, Thomas' Gospel and, on the other, Whitehead's worldview, as it is exposed in Process and Reality, and its religious significance, as it is specified mainly in Religion in the Making. This paper proceeds in three main steps. First it introduces the heuristic tools needed to interpret Thomas freely and thereby to flesh out what often appears as a rather abstract metaphysics; second, it sketches the zest of Whitehead's vision with the help of the introduction of his fundamental standpoint as it is embodied in the proto-idea of "creative advance of nature"; third, we revisit in conclusion the question of religious perennialism.