Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - The Foundation in Royce's Philosophy for Christian Theism (The Philosophical Review, 1916-05-01).pdf/9

Rh experiences them and “knows [them] to be whatever they are.”

Even in its supreme conception of God as suffering, as ‘touched with the feeling of our infirmities’ and ‘afflicted in our affliction,’ the Christian doctrine that God is Father of men follows at once from the absolutist’s conception of God—and from this conception only. The pluralistic theist, who teaches that God shares human experience, must meet insistent difficulties: How should God know me if I am separate from him? And how can he share my experience when he is all-wise and all-powerful and I am so palpably ignorant and so piteously ineffective? But this Roycian God is my Greater Self; I am ‘identically a part’ of him. I exist, and even my erroneous conception exists, only as each is a transcended object of his experience. He is indeed afflicted in my affliction, for it is real only as he experiences it.

At this point emerges another peculiarly Christian feature of Royce’s theism. ‘God, in his being,” the Westminster catechism continues, “is wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth.” But Christian philosophy from its very beginning has found difficulty in justifying God and has found itself obliged to sacrifice now the belief in God’s goodness, now the conviction of his power, to the flinty facts of pain, stupidity, and sin. Royce’s philosophy is, as all readers of him know, an optimistic conception of a good God. It is an invincible optimism for it cherishes no illusions, and affirms instead of ignoring the ‘capriciousness of life,’ ‘the degradation of the sinner’s passive victim,’ the ‘brute chance’ and the mechanical accidents to which the nature-world is prey. Professor Royce does not, to be sure, claim to offer a specific explanation of specific evils. But he guides the thought of the Christian philosopher into a peaceful way, a metaphysical assurance that the world, inclusive of this my dastard sin or blinding grief, is expression of the will of an all-wise chooser who is himself suffering every grief and stung by every sin. Though “he knows [the evils] as we in our finitude can not,” yet “he endures them as we do. And so, if knowing