The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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I have characterized our universal calling to be human as demanding that "we [each] accept both our own becoming and the becomings of all others as parts of [the] ultimate whole and then, by serving as best we can the transient goods of all the parts, to make the greatest possible contribution to the enduring good of the whole."

Another characterization that may help to answer the obvious question of just how we go about serving the transient goods of the parts, etc. is to say that we are each called to make the best possible use of the past in order to make the best possible contribution to the future—or, conversely, to make the best possible contribution to the future by making the best possible use of the past. Of course, "best possible" isn't all that much clearer than "greatest possible." But what I have in mind is doing all that one can to consummate or redeem the past by creatively appropriating as much of it as possible without eliminating any more of it than absolutely necessary in order to transmit as much harmonized contrast to the future as one can.

In this connection, I cannot but think of Mr. Wesley's characterization of "true religion" as "right tempers towards God and man," which is to say, "gratitude to our Creator and supreme Benefactor" and "benevolence to our fellow-creatures," or "the loving God with all our heart, and our neighbour as ourselves." I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that this formulation probably reflects the fateful one-sidedness of classical theism, according to which (1) we can serve the God who acts but is not acted upon only by passively allowing God to serve us; and (2) we can serve our neighbor only in the way God serves us, not by allowing her or him, first of all, to contribute to our lives, but only by actively willing and doing good to her or his life, thereby being, like God, albeit in our own creaturely ways, 'benefit machines."

Given the insight, on the other hand, that God and everything else concrete transcends itself by real internal relations to both the past and the future, we are free to think of all things as, in their different ways, consummators and thereby beneficiaries no less than as creators and thereby benefactors. In other words, God is as really our beneficiary as we are God's, and we and our fellow creatures are as really benefactors—of God as well as ourselves and one another—as God is. Similarly, gratitude is as really appropriate to our fellow creatures as it is to God.

To be sure, the symmetry here is under girded by an even more fundamental asymmetry, in that God alone is the Creator and Benefactor—universally creative of and beneficent toward all things—even as God alone is the Consummator and Beneficiary—universally consummative of and benefited by all things. But the difference between God’s strictly universal relation to all things and that of any creature, including our own, to only some things is not the absolute difference between all and none, but the infinite difference between all and some. Consequently, we have reason to be grateful to creatures as well as to God even as we have reason to be benevolent and beneficent to God as well as to creatures. But, then, we have good reason to think of gratitude as the “temper” appropriate not only to God but to the entire past by which we are created and benefited, and of benevolence as proper not only to our fellow creatures but also to the entire future, including the divine future, that we, in turn, are called so to create as to benefit.

The other thing I find myself thinking of is the teaching that seems to me to be present throughout scripture that all privileges are rightly received only as responsibilities—that is, as it is put in a saying attributed to Jesus in the synoptic tradition, “every one to whom much is given, of him will much be required” (Lk 12:48). What is this if not to say, yet again, that the entire justification of the past is its contribution to the future, even as the abiding role of the future-now-becoming-present-about-to-become-past is to mediate this justification by receiving the past’s contribution into its own.

5 April 2004

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