In 1981 Charles Hartshorne was commissioned to write the Foreword to a book by Keiji Nishitani called Religion and Nothingness. The book was to be published by University of California Press where John R. Miles worked as an editor. Miles decided not to use Hartshorne’s Foreword for reasons you may find more than a little amusing. Here, following the image, is his letter to Hartshorne:
Dear Mr. Hartshorne:
I have some rather awkward news to communicate. We have decided not to publish the foreword that you wrote for Keiji Nishitani’s Religion and Nothingness. We will, of course, pay you for it; but this will not really compensate you for the time and trouble you expended in the writing of it. Why are we doing this?
In one sense, because the essay you wrote is just too damned good. I mean to say that you seem so penetratingly to analyze Nishitani’s thought and then so tellingly to refute it that the reader scarcely feels inclined to read the work itself. You explain—and then quite explain away—whatever charm it may have, while offering a compelling alternative much closer to home.
In another sense, however, you did make a mistake in what you wrote, a mistake of genre. What you offer as foreword would make a brilliant review, cutting to the core of Nishitani’s position in the best manner of Anglo-American philosophy, undistracted by peripheral matters of the history or sociology of knowledge, determined only to get to the truth of the matter. But a good review is not necessarily a good foreword. Nishitani is nobody to most American readers. His publisher needs to make him somebody at least for a while, noting his intentions and the initial plausibility of his intellectual enterprise, before—if it should so happen—others make him nobody again.
I think your piece really must be published eventually. If you like, I shall be happy to propose to the editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Robert Scharlemann, who is an acquaintance of mine, that he decide now to review our forthcoming book and decide now that the assignment is to be yours. Failing that, I will simply return the piece to you. I notice that I have the ribbon copy.
With admiration and with regret,
John R. Miles
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Donald Wayne Viney, who made me aware of this, sent me the following note, ruing that the only copy of Hartshorne’s Foreword seems to be forever lost:
There is one item that I dearly wish I could locate, but I have been unsuccessful, and I fear it is lost for good. Hartshorne wrote a foreword to Nishitani’s Religion and Nothingness. The foreword was not published because an editor (at University of California Press) thought that Hartshorne had done too good a job at criticizing Nishitani’s views and of offering a better alternative to them. The editor suggested that Hartshorne’s foreword be published as an article. Unhappily, I know of no place where it was published, or whether it ever saw the light of day. The book was eventually published with a foreword by one of my former teachers, Winston King. I am attaching the letter that the editor wrote to Hartshorne. I acquired this document while in Austin helping Hartshorne’s daughter prepare his literary remains to be sent to Claremont. In 2019, my former student, Steve Hulbert, who worked in the Center for Process Studies, tried to find the foreword, without success. Very disappointing.
HyC