The Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 2

VIII. Harvard’s Hocking-Not “Immortality” but “Immortability”

DR. WILLIAM E. HOCKING, ⁵¹ long-time Harvard professor, looks upon man as an immortable creature-that is, capable of becoming, or receiving, immortality. He likewise stresses the conditional phase of eternal survival, striking against Platonism’s innate Immortal-Soulism. This he does in The Meaning of Immortality in Human Experience: CFF2 925.1

1. NOT “IMMORTALITY” BUT “IMMORTABILITY.”

The soul is not necessarily “doomed to everlastingness,” he says. Immortality is but potential: CFF2 925.2

“It may well be that the survival of death is not a foregone conclusion, as if each person with or against his will were doomed to everlastingness. The soul is certainly not endowed, as Plato thought, with the fixed, substantial degreeless reality of the atom. It possesses, me think, not immortality but immortability. It depends upon itself what degree of realness it comes to possess. Immortality may be ‘put on’; one may also put on mortality. The soul may resolve to take the present, partial scene of things as final, and may by determined action upon that hypothesis make it true for its own experience.” ⁵² CFF2 925.3

2. WICKED NOT “DOOMED” TO EVERLASTING CONTINUANCE

Hocking holds that man has a choice as to whether he will have a future immortal life: CFF2 925.4

“In my own view, this is the case: survival of death is a possibility but not a necessity of destiny. We have begun this present existence without our prior consent.... If there were a soul in whom living had bred a genuine aversion, through conscious cultivation of a distaste for life—if there were such a soul, I cannot think it doomed against its will to go on. CFF2 925.5

“Or, what is more imaginable, if one became determined to deal with this life as a unique and completed whole, coinciding with the career of the body, satisfied to define himself as the rational animal ending in nothing-I can hardly think survival a necessity for such a soul (though I suspect in most who profess this attitude subconscious countercurrents which may eventuate in an agreeable disappointment!). In any event, the quality of the human self, as I conceive it, is not immortality but immortability, the conditional possibility of survival.” ⁵³ CFF2 925.6

3. No “PERSONAL LIVING” WITHOUT “BODILINESS.”

There is no surviving soul separate from a “perishing body,” says Dr. Hocking:
“Let me also note that we are not speaking of the possible survival of a ‘soul,’ as distinct from the perishing body. This body disappears beyond recovery; and with it all power of communication through present effect with the existing assemblage of human associates. Yet, without bodiliness of some sort there can be no personal living.” ⁵⁴ CFF2 926.1

There must be a resurrection of the body. CFF2 926.2