Charles Hartshorne on Socinianismus http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/Hartshorne/6newworld.html What follows is an item of Unitarian history that will be unfamiliar to many readers.

Nearly four centuries ago, the Italian theologian Faustus Socinus criticized the traditional deification of Jesus of Nazareth; in addition, though scarcely any encyclopedia or history will say so, he rejected the traditional idea of God as an unmoved mover, an immutable and all-determining power. Believing that human beings have genuine freedom, Socinus denied that God either determines or eternally knows our free acts. Rather, we determine the acts, and God knows them only after the fact or as they occur. This view implies real novelty in the divine consciousness, it means that we cause changes in God. In this bold break with tradition, Socinus anticipated our current process theology. What he chiefly lacked was the insight that the idea of creaturely freedom, which creates novelty even in God, should be generalized to apply to all creatures, even the humblestfor instance, atoms. Human creativity is then no sheer exception in an otherwise divinely determined world but is only an extremely special, high-level case of creaturely freedom. Before the physics of the late nineteenth century, this generalization could scarcely be entertained, but about a hundred years ago a number of thinkers, more or less independently, did entertain and defend it. Among them were Peirce, Boutroux and later Bergson, both in France, Varisco in Italy, and Whitehead. [] I had to read a little-known German work by Otto Fock entitled, Der Socinianismus, to find out what the Socinians believed about God. [] FROM PROCESS PHILOSOPHY: Socinus and Lequier attacked the theological center of the philosophy of being and absoluteness and proposed a definite alternative, but they failed to generalize this alternative. Only human freedom (and Gods knowledge of us) was clearly taken out of the old context; the rest of nature could still be looked upon as unfree, and as subject to immutable divine knowledge. This is where Bergson and Whitehead, preceded at least vaguely by Fechner, come in. Bergson treats all life as to some extent free or creative, and definitely hints, in his later works, that all nature is to some extent free. In Whitehead this implication is made sharply explicit. Not only is each human being a self-created creature but every individual is, in some slight degree at least, self-creative, a maker of its own decisions, and so of itself. Divinity is the eminent or supreme form of self-creation, anything else is an inferior form. Whitehead combines this with the Socinian insight that a self-creative creature must also create something in God, for we who make something in ourselves make something in the knowledge of all those who know us, and so make them to a certain extent. We make our friends and enemies just in so far as we are free and they know us. It could not be otherwise, given the

essential meanings of free and know. Since God knows all creatures, and a creature is merely an inferior case of what in God is supreme selfcreativity, all creatures whatsoever are in part creators of something in God. Whitehead refers to God as Creature, or to the divine Consequent Nature God as consequent upon or partly created by the world. This is how deity must be conceived in a consistent metaphysics of process. http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/Hartshorne/9devproccessphilosphy.html

History of the Christian Church, Volume VIII: Modern Christianity. The Swiss Reformation. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/hcc8.iv.xv.x.html?bcb=0 Socinianism, as a system of theology, has largely affected the theology of orthodox Protestantism on the Continent during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and was succeeded by modern Unitarianism, which has exerted considerable influence on the thought and literature of England and America in the nineteenth century. It forms the extreme left wing of Protestantism, and the antipode to Calvinism. The Socinians admitted that Calvinism is the only logical system on the basis of universal depravity and absolute foreknowledge and foreordination; but they denied these premises, and taught moral ability, free-will, and, strange to say, a limitation of divine foreknowledge. God foreknows and foreordains only the necessary future, but not the contingent future, which depends on the free-will of man. The two systems are therefore directly opposed in their theology and anthropology. And yet there is a certain intellectual and moral affinity between them; as there is between Lutheranism and Rationalism. It is a remarkable fact that modern Unitarianism has grown up in the Calvinistic (Presbyterian and Independent) Churches of Geneva, France, Holland, England, and New England, while Rationalism has been chiefly developed in Lutheran Germany. But the reaction is also found in those countries. The Italian and Polish Socinians took substantially the same ground as the English and American Unitarians. They were opposed alike to Romanism and Calvinism; they claimed intellectual freedom of dissent and investigation as a right; they elevated the ethical spirit of Christianity above the dogmas, and they had much zeal for higher liberal education. But they differ on an important point. The Socinians had a theological system, and a catechism; the modern Unitarians refuse to be bound by a fixed creed, and are independent in church polity. They allow more liberty for new departures, either in the direction of rationalism and humanitarianism, or in the opposite direction of supernaturalism and trinitarianism.

Long ago certain truths were seen, but so were certain half-truths with which they are easily confused or which obscure their meaning. One truth seen long ago is that the only self-justifying ideal is to love others as we love ourselves. The major religions have taught this; it may be called the ultimate ideal, but other and partly incompatible ideals and beliefs have continually clouded that vision. Western philosophers, for the most part, have taught that we love ourselves because we are ourselves and love others only for our own sake. Enlightened self-interest was made the first principle, and altruism was taken as wholly derivative. This is not to love others as we love ourselves. What the ultimate ideal means is that one should love people, ourselves included, as one person among many. One should love oneself for the sake of others as truly as others for our own sakes. But few Western philosophers really understood this principle. Two who did were Peirce and Whitehead. How can it be logical, you may ask, to love others not primarily for our own sakes but for their own? In Asia, the Buddhists saw the reason with a clarity denied to Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Immanuel Kant. David Hume perhaps came closest to seeing it before Peirce. The point is that selfidentityI with myself, you with yourselves throughout lifeis a highly relative and partial identity. I am not simply and absolutely one with myself as a child and old man, asleep and awake, delirious or in my right mind. I am not simply different from other people. The truth is much subtler and more complex. Personal identity is not the key to love. Love is not something caring for itself; it is a relationship between two entities. If I love myself, then I and myself are genuinely two, not one. Thus, I, as I am right now, may love myself as I was yesterday or as I may be tomorrow. I may also feel antipathy toward my other selves. Nor is self-interest in the form of genuine care for ones own future automatic. Immediate pleasure often blots out any regard for future consequences, even to oneself. Why should one aim at future good for anyone, even for oneself? In the longterm future, we are dead. Is it for the good of corpses that we are striving? Taking the whole future into account, the self is a wasting asset. To make it the ultimate good is to turn life into Macbeths tale/Told by an idiot/full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing. An elder citizen like myself sees this fact more readily than the young are likely to; yet I was twenty years old when I first saw it. Present experience, as I then began to understand, is a contribution, a gift, to future experience; otherwise, in ultimate perspective, it is indistinguishable from nothing. The present becomes the past for an ever

new present, and in this perpetually renewed contribution to the future is our only permanent reality. To make a huge fuss about whether the new present that later inherits from this one will always be a state of selfrather than of descendants, pupils, friends, strangers, or even life in nonhuman for is to show a failure to understand our mortal existence. The final question is what we can contribute to the future of life, any life that can be supposed able to receive and adequately appropriate our contribution. Of course, we are all more or less selfish. Any vertebrate animal sees and feels itself as the center of the world, Here I am; there you are, background for my career. As Reinhold Niebuhr saw so well, this feeling translates itself readily in a thinking animal into an egocentric attitude that carried to the limit, amounts to self-deification. Only a divine ego could be the real center of the world. Thus, our animal experience puts us at the center of the world, while our reason tells us that every other human person is as central as we are, so that neither is central. The other is, in principle, as permanent or impermanent as we are. As Shakespeare said, We are such stuff/As dreams are made on, and our little life/Is rounded with a sleep. Unfortunately, much Western philosophy and, to some extent, nearly all philosophy and still more nearly all religion have cheated us here. They have flattered our individual or collective conceit with theories of personal immortality and have tried in every way to explain away death, instead of helping us to accept it for what it is. The ancient Jews were the great exception, honor to them. Even when individual death has been accepted, however, the human species has often been regarded as though it were immortal. Species do last longer than individuals, but they, too, are mortal, and basically for the same reason, that they are contingent creatures of the creative process, dependent for continued existence upon circumstances. A newspaper report credits a professor of sociology with the memorable sentence, Life promises us nothing but experience. In other words, all actual value is felt, enjoyed value. The rest is only the possibility of value, checks that can be cashed only in experience. Each experience is momentary; it falls into the past, where its only worth is in its value for new experience. What are my or your childhood experiences unless someone now remembers or benefits from them? At the time, we felt they were important, and so they were, but importance cannot be defined as a relation of the present to the present; it must be a relation to the future.