Dorothy Emmet

The Will of God

‘Doing the will of God’, or seeking to do it, is a notion close to the centre of, at any rate, Christian, Jewish and Moslem religion. So too is the notion of accepting happenings as God’s Will—Fiat voluntas tua. In the latter notion, God’s Will is something to be accepted rather than accomplished. Where the Will of God is something to be sought and accomplished, then it may be given as a final reason for doing what is believed to be in accord with it. Is it then connected necessarily or contingently with morality? If necessarily, then what is added to ‘This is right’ by saying ‘This is the Will of God’, at least as far as the content of the action goes? If the connection is contingent, then the moral judgement that this is right could conflict with the religious judgement that this is in accordance with the Will of God, and if both can be given as finalising reasons we could be faced with two conflicting ultimate demands. If there is a divergence, and the moral demand is said to be subordinate to the religious demand, this would be a claim that religion should in such cases supersede morality.

Events and Facts

I have said that the concept of a process is constantly used, but little discussed. Not so that of events. There is a considerable literature on events, and the word has become something of a term of art. I shall be looking into some of the literature with the restricted interest of trying to see how events differ from processes, and asking whether some of the uses to which events are put in philosophy would be better served by processes.

On ‘doing what is right’ and ‘doing the will of God’

‘Doing the will of God’, or seeking to do it, is a notion close to the centre of at any rate Christian, Jewish, and Moslem religion. So too is the notion of ‘accepting’ something as Gods will: Fiat voluntas tua. In the former case, the notion of ‘doing the will of God’ is invoked in connection with what would be right to do in a practical situation; in the latter in connection with happenings and circumstances outside our control and as something to be accepted rather than accomplished. I shall be concerned here with the notion of the will of God as something to be accomplished, asking what, if anything, to say that an action is in accordance with the will of God adds to saying that it is right. I shall also look at ways in which we think of relations between our wills and those of other people when we say that one person is doing the will of another person, and ask whether these help us at all in trying to see what might be meant by ‘doing the will of God’.

Creativity and Order

To be is no other than to be one. In so far therefore as anything attains unity, in so far it is. For unity worketh congruity and harmony, whereby things composite are, in so far as they are: for things uncompounded are in themselves, because they are one ; but things compounded imitate unity by the harmony of their parts, and so far as they attain to unity, they are. Wherefore order and rule secure being, disorder tends to not-being.— ST. Augustine.

Kierkegaard and the “Existential” Philosophy

It is a wise child who knows his own father; and the climate of thought of a generation may be subtly changed without conscious recognition of the formative minds which have been, if not the parents, at least the godparents of that change. That is to say, they have sponsored the baptism of ideas which would only be safe so long as they renounced the world, the flesh, and the devil; but, as is so often the case, when the offspring grow up they form a pact with those very powers. To make Soren Kierkegaard spiritually responsible for the present war would have as little, and perhaps as much, truth in it as the facile explanations which made Hegel responsible for the last one. But it is part of the demonism of policies of power and ambition to be able to pervert to their own ends religious ideas which in their intention are a protest against those very ambitions; and, by so doing, to win a response from people who, in a dim, unconscious way, are feeling after the ideas themselves, but have neither the powers of self-criticism nor of radical thinking to resist travesties of them which appear to justify their own self-assertion. When Hitler informed Sir Nevile Henderson that he was a man of “ ad infinitum decisions” we may question the extent of his knowledge either of the Latin language or of the existential philosophy; but the phrase awakes an echo of the religious philosophy of circles far removed from National-Socialism. Both Nazi apologists and their Confessional or independent opponents are consciously or unconsciously moved by a way of thinking which puts the decision of the individual, made in the concrete moment, above any objective or universal norm of ethics or of reason by which it can be either justified or criticized.

An Enabling Universe

‘To make the external internal, the internal external’. So Coleridge saw the task of the poet, and so too it is the task of the philosopher in Coleridge and in ourselves. The poet finds symbols. The philosopher seeks concepts. For the world is not simply there for us to report, as naive realists would have us believe. Nor is ‘the world’ a projection of our thoughts and emotions. Experience is the joint product of our active interpretation and the action upon us of the environment in which we live. As embodied selves, we are a part of nature with its outward forms; as conscious beings we are centres of thought and feeling, shaping what comes from without by means of our inner powers. This may seem obvious, but its implications for our knowledge of the world are by no means obvious and are still debated. Coleridge himself was preoccupied with the relation of ‘Subject-Object’. There is a story of how, in later life when he was living in Highgate, someone came upon him standing on the side of the road talking about ‘Subject-Object’. When the man passed him and his companion again some time later he was still talking about ‘Subject-Object’. Philosophers are likely to go on doing so.

Anthropologists on Myth

‘A story connected with a ritual’ is one of the ways in which anthropologists have defined a myth. I do not think that all myths need have a ritual associated with them, any more than that all rituals (for instance those of a ceremonial kind) need be associated with myths. Of course, as with all matters of definition, this is largely how we choose to use words. We could choose to say that rituals which have no symbolic reference to a story behind them are ceremonies; we could say that stories not concerned with rituals, but with how something began, or with doings in a heroic past, partly remembered, partly imagined, or with transactions between men and animals and superhuman beings, are legends or sagas or fairy tales. I think this would unduly narrow the range of what has been counted as myth, as should become apparent in looking at some of the theories that have been held about it. Nevertheless, the association of myth with ritual calls attention to a feature of some myths which may be of importance not only for the social anthropology of religion but also for their religious significance.

The Limits of Function

The sociological interpretation of religion by a functional approach was largely developed by social anthropologists in studying societies which used to be called ‘primitive’. The word now tends to be dropped, no doubt because it sounds patronizing, and the preferred term is ‘traditional’. This is not just a euphemism; it makes the point that in these societies there are established ways of thinking and acting derived from the past. I have spoken of how these could be expressed and also reinforced by rituals and about how those taking part also lived and worked with one another in other spheres of life, which also had their established forms. Moreover, activity in one sphere could support activities in other spheres in a network that had not been planned but had become established through recurrent practice. Motivation to behave in these ways would be internalized in upbringing, and there were sanctions for bringing deviants back into line. Such societies were generally small, and kinship in an extended family had an important place in them.

The Ground Of Being

The phrase ‘the Ground of Being’ came to the attention of a number of people owing to the fact that John Robinson, then the Bishop of Woolwich, used it in his Honest to God (London, 1964) as a way of speaking of a God who is not ‘up there’ or ‘out there’. ‘Ground’ in ordinary speech certainly suggests something ‘down there’, though ‘down’ is of course as much a spatial metaphor as ‘up’. But the metaphor also seems to offer a way of talking about ‘Being’ as something in which we are somehow ‘grounded’ without having to imagine ‘a Being’ apart from the world. Paul Tillich was the philosophical theologian to whom Robinson was indebted for this way of thinking.1

Coleridge on Inner Powers

That the philosopher killed the poet in Coleridge is an often told tale. Wordsworth suggested it; Carlyle had his taunt about ‘transcendental life preservers, logical swim bladders’; it was repeated in substance by Professor Quiller-Couch: He had landed in Germany a poet… he embarked from Germany not yet perhaps the ‘archangel a little damaged’ (as Charles Lamb described him some sixteen or seventeen years later) but already — and worse for us — a poet lost… The man came back to England intensely and furiously preoccupied with metaphysics. This, I suggest and neither opium, nor Mrs. Coleridge’s fretfulness, was the main reason why he could not recall his mind to poetry.1