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Hartshorne’s Matrix or,
How to Think about God
Any process discussion of God cannot fail to mention
Hartshorne’s Matrix, his greatest metaphysical invention.
The Matrix is a square, sixteen fold, or four by four,
Sixteen squares filled with letters, cunning to the core,
It presents formal options for speaking about God
With a precision, beauty, and a rigor unflawed.
It does all this with permutations of contrasting pairs
Such as necessity and contingency, with concise care.
N is necessity, C, contingency, O, no modal status.
Divine is by capital letters named, worldly, lower cases.
Take, for example, N.c—God is wholly necessary,
The world, wholly contingent, insofar as they vary.
The matrix reveals both elegance, subtlety, and a clue:
Column III includes what is positive in columns 1 and 2,
And Row 3 includes what, in rows 1 and 2, is positive, too.
The diagonals reveal a symmetry where variables accrue.
If, of the sixteen options, only one can be true, we agree,
Then the other fifteen are false, as logically they should be.
On the matrix let us imagine and superimpose three lines,
One straight down through Column III, this will do fine,
And one straight across through the third row,
And one through the diagonal from N.n to O.o.
Where these three lines intersect, at the NC.cn position,
Is the most complex, the most positive, of the 16 options.
This is Hartshorne’s position, the dipolar or social view
That he calls “neoclassical theism” and is radically new.
Moreover, NC.cn also concisely represents
His doctrine that he calls dual transcendence.
Moreover, the matrix reveals more than 16 formal options;
As Donald Wayne Viney observes, the table invites adoption
Of similar tables that can be made for any contrasting pair,
Such as the infinite and finite, and many others to compare.
For any pair of metaphysical contrasts, there is a 4 x 4 table,
And, therefore, for any two pair in conjunction, one is able
To show that the formal alternatives number 16 x 16 or 256,
And, if n equals the number of pairs included in the Matrix,
The number of formal options are no fewer than . . . 16n.
At this one can only marvel, and say with zest, Amen!
Of all his metaphysical discoveries, Hartshorne felt that this
Was the most original, the most important, the one not to miss.
When its beauty is beheld, and all is done and said,
Hartshorne’s Matrix is leaps and bounds, light-years ahead.