Abstract

Whitehead's God, the ‘fellow sufferer who understands’ and the ‘worldly poet’, shares the fate of the world but can only exert an influence on it by means of enticement, the ‘lure of feeling’. In reverse, this thesis is an attempt to understand the fellow sufferer and to fathom the tragedy of the divine poet, by indeed using poetry. God wants the best for all creatures but is unable to achieve his aim because of the stubborn ‘natural order of things’, for all too often ethical or aesthetic values come into conflict, and at most, only one of two equally high ideals can be realised. This is, in brief, Whitehead's conception of tragedy, which obviously leads to the problem of evil and will eventually inspire a ‘theopoetic defensio’.