This book is about the presence of God and the presence of persons. The religious notion of the presence of God will be recognized by many who are acquainted with the traditions of Judaism and Christianity. The presence of persons will be less familiar. Yet the two are conceptually similar, as we will see. The two are related in that as we can speak of coming into the presence of God as is done in the Psalms, for instance in Psalm 95, so we can speak of coming into the presence of persons, although this is not a biblical notion. The first is a religious experience open to those in theistic traditions. The second is an experience open to human beings independently of religious commitment. A main thesis of this book is that the two experiences have a structural similarity that makes them analogous.1 In the nineteenth century and later the death of God became a plangent theme. In one of its meanings it too can be experienced. Another thesis of this book is that the experience of the death of God in this sense has a mirror experience that is the death of persons.
Perhaps an initial word about the relationship between the concerns and the approach of this book and personalism is in order. Personalism is a school of philosophical and theological thought with both European and American roots that gives central importance to persons. In the past it has been suggested to me that I belong to this school. It is not clear to me, however, that this is an honor I can accept, though I too give central importance to persons, as this bookās discussion will make clear.
Personalism is not a single well-defined set of principles, beliefs, and concerns. Rather it is a range of philosophical views, some metaphysical and some ethical, that relate in some way to persons and personhood (or āpersonalityā). Cheikh Mbacke Gueye observes that ā[d]efining personalism is a very difficult undertaking, if not an impossible one.ā2
Various personalist principles or concerns that have been or are held by personalists can be identified:
Persons by their nature have dignity or inherent value.
The dignity of persons provides a guiding principle for moral action.
Persons should be treated as ends and not merely as means. (This principle and the first are accepted by virtually all personalists and emphasized by ethical personalists.)
A concern with the concept of person.
God as the Supreme Being is the Supreme Person. (Within the Christian tradition God may be imaged as a Father or as a Mother, as by Julian of Norwich; in the mystical apophatic tradition, though, God is beyond human conception.)
God as a person is finite in power. (Although not held by all personalists, this view was espoused by the early American personalist E. S. Brightman [1884ā1953], apparently in reaction to the traditional problem of evil.)
The natural world is an order within the mind of God. (Held by E. S. Brightman. The debt to the idealism of George Berkeley [1685ā1753] is clear. Berkeley is among the thinkers regarded as foundational to personalism.)
All existence is the existence of minds or the existence of things in the experience of minds. (Held by G. H. Howison [1834ā1918], another early American personalist. Again the debt to Berkeleyās idealism is clear.)
Love is the proper response to other persons. (Enunciated by Karol Wojtyla [Pope John Paul II] in accord with Christian teaching. Wojtyla is counted as a personalist by many personalists, and loveās being the proper response to persons is accepted by many ethical personalists.)
Insistence on a radical difference between persons (human beings) and nonpersons, such as nonhuman animals.3
The approach of this book is closest to what has been called ethical personalism, in contrast to ontological or metaphysical personalism. Ethical personalism emphasizes the inseparable dignity or inherent worth of persons and the moral necessity of not treating persons merely as means, as does this book.4 Yet there are differences. Ethical personalists deem it necessary to analyze the concept of person.5 In this book we use āpersonā without an accretion of analysis or any further definition, relying on our shared understanding of its commonly accepted meaning. Again, while this book shares with ethical personalism a recognition of the dignity or inherent value of persons, it is not committed to seeing that inherent value as a āguiding principle.ā It is wrong to violate the inherent value of persons, but what violates the value of a person depends on many factors, including physical factors, cultural factors, individualsā commitments and beliefs, and the relationships between persons. The inherent value of persons is more a negative test than a positive guideline for the treatment of persons.
While in a prominent strain of religious sensibility in theistic traditions God may be imaged as a Divine Person in accord with the personalist view, this book recognizes that God in theistic traditions is also imaged and experienced as a Being beyond conception and human understanding in accord with a strain of religious sensibility that coexists with the other. In this bookās discussion we will have occasion to express reservations about the personalist principle that there is a radical difference between persons and nonpersons, a category that includes nonhuman animals as well as other beings that may have inherent value.
Perhaps what most deeply divides the approach of this book from personalism is its concern with the experience of coming into the presence of persons. That experience, this book argues, is analogous to coming into the presence of God, as the loss of the experience of the presence of persons is analogous to the loss of the experience of the presence of God.
The underlying themes of this bookāthe close structural analogy between the experience of coming into the presence of God and the experience of coming into the presence of persons, some persons or all persons, and the close structural analogy between the experience of the death of God and the experience of the death of personsāare developed in the following chapters.
Chapters 2ā6 treat the presence of persons and the experience of coming into the presence of persons. This experience has four interconnected elements: an experienced awareness of the moral necessity of not treating persons merely as means, an awareness of a relationship to those persons into whose presence one has come, an affective response to them, and a recognition of their inherent worth. These four elements are discussed in Chapters 3ā6.
Chapters 7ā11 treat the presence of God and the religious experience of coming into the presence of God. As coming into the presence of persons has four distinguishable but interconnected elements, so coming into the presence of God has four interconnected elements. The four elements of the one experience, as the bookās descriptive analysis brings out, are analogous to the four elements of the other experience. The four elements of the experience of coming into the presence of God are discussed in Chapters 8ā11.
Chapter 12 explores further respects in which the experience of coming into the presence of persons and the experience of coming into the presence of God are deeply analogous. In the first part of the chapter the experience of coming into the presence of persons is distinguished from the putative inference that there are other minds (an inference alleged to be necessary in response to the philosophical problem of other minds), and coming into the presence of God is distinguished from using the teleological or design argument (or any argument) to prove the existence of God. While these two patterns of inference have been alleged to be analogous, whatever analogy exists between them is very different from the analogy between the experiences of coming into the presence of persons and coming into the presence of God. Chapter 12 goes on to trace two important respects in which these two experiences are analogous. When the experience of coming into the presence of persons is coming into the presence of all persons the character of the experience is revelatory as the experience of coming into the presence of God is felt to be revelatory by the religious. The second respect in which the two experiences are analogous is that what prevents one from having the one experience may prevent one from having the other. Sometimes in both cases, it is argued, this may be self-deception, but in other cases not.
The subject of Chapter 13 is the death of God and the death of persons. In one of its primary senses āthe death of Godā is the felt loss of a consciousness of God and his presence; parallel to this sense is the experience of a loss of the felt presence of persons. This chapter explores the depth of the analogy between the religious death of God and the moral death of persons.
In Chapter 14, beyond those already identified, further moral and religio-moral implications of coming into the presence of persons, particularly the presence of all persons, are explored. The primary moral implication of coming into the presence of persons is a recognition of not treating persons merely as means (the ends principle), but there are other more particulariz...