In the beginning , for unknowable reasons, the ground of being, or
chose to give itself over to the chance and risk and endless variety of becoming.
And wholly so; entering into the adventure of space and time, the deity held back nothing of itself; no uncommitted or unimpaired part remained to direct, correct, and ultimately guarantee the devious working-out of its destiny in creation.
On this unconditional immanence the modern temper insists. It is its courage or despair, in any case its bitter honesty, to take our being-in-the-world seriously: to view the world as left to itself, its laws as brooking no interference, and the rigor of our belonging to it as not softened by extra mundane providence.
The same our myth postulates for God's being in the world. Not, however, in the sense of pantheistic immanence; if the world and God are simply the same, the world at each moment and in each state represents his fullness, and God can neither lose nor gain.
Rather, in order that the world might be, and be for itself,
divesting himself of his deity-to receive it back from the Odyssey of time weighted with the chance harvest of unforeseeable temporal experience; transfigured or possibly even disfigured by it.
In such self-forfeiture of divine integrity for the sake of unprejudiced becoming, no other foreknowledge can be admitted than that of possibilities which cosmic being offers in its own terms: to those, God committed his cause in effacing himself for the world.
And for aeons his cause is safe in the slow hands of cosmic chance and probability-while all the time we may surmise a patient memory of the gyrations of matter to accumulate into an ever more expectant accompaniment of eternity to the labors of time-a hesitant emergence of transcendence from the opaqueness of immanence.
. . . And then he trembles as the thrust of evolution, carried by its own momentum, passes the threshold where innocence ceases and an entirely new criterion of success and failure takes hold of the divine stake.
The advent of man means the advent of knowledge and freedom, and with this supremely double-edged gift the innocence of the mere subject of self-fulfilling life has given way to the charge of responsibility under the disjunction of good and evil. To the promise and risk of this agency the divine cause, revealed at last, henceforth finds itself committed; and its issue trembles in the balance.
The image of God, haltingly begun by the universe, for so long worked upon-and left undecided- in the wide and then narrowing spirals of pre-human time, passes with this last twist, and with a dramatic quickening of the movement, into man's precarious trust, to be completed, saved, or spoiled by what he will do to himself and the world. And in this awesome impact of his deeds on God's destiny, on the very complexion of eternal being, lies the immortality of man.
With the appearance of man, transcendence awakened to itself and henceforth accompanies his doings with the bated breath of suspense, hoping and beckoning, rejoicing and grieving, approving and frowning-and, I daresay, making itself felt to him even while not intervening in the dynamics of his worldly scene: for can it not be that by the reflection of its own state as it wavers with the record of man, the transcendent casts light and shadow over the human landscape?
- From Hans Jonas' The Phenomenon of Life * (pp. 275-277). New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1966
* As Excerpted from Terence McKenna's
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