So I’m writing a paper on Gilles 
Deleuze and Whitehead called 
uh...
“Worldly religion: on the possibility 
of a secular divinity.” 
and uh...
For Deleuze this is especially a serious 
act of buggery on my part.
Deleuze of course approved of that 
method in his own projects, 
but I wonder if he would approve
of the baby jesus child that 
I’m trying to make him have in this paper. 
I’m directing Deleuze’s 
demand that we philosophers think 
immanently by believing in the world 
toward an interpretation of the Christian 
religion and faith. This is exactly what
Whitehead does in Adventures of Ideas 
where he looks to Christianity for the
exemplification of something that the 
philosopher Plato first divined as an ideal. 
Plato made an intellectual discovery, 
as Whitehead puts it,
or as Deleuze would say he
created a concept. Rather than a concept 
of divinity as a transcendent and omnipotent 
imposer of form and order and law upon 
an entirely separate derivative world, as in
many traditional monotheistic theologies, 
with plato you have the idea of divine
immanence in the world working through persuasion
––through desire, eros, beauty, and love––
to transform the world “slowly and in quietness,”
as Whitehead puts it, rather than by 
hurling fire down from heaven.  
Plato invented this new idea of God 
that works through
love, which is a kind of power, 
but not the power of brute force.
God is no longer a 
creator who shapes the whole thing from outside,
 rather God is involved in, caught up in
the process of cosmogenesis 
and spatiotemporal becoming. 
God is a part of that.
The world is as necessary for the nature of God 
as God is for the nature of the World. 
Whitehead thinks that the person of Jesus 
at least as our historical––and granted 
scattered and somewhat contradictory historical 
records show, what we do know about 
this particular supreme historical event,
at least for the Christian religion, as Whitehead 
puts it: “There can be no doubt as to what 
elements have evoked a response from all 
that is best in human nature: 
The Mother, the Child, and the bare manger: 
the lonely man, homeless and self-forgetful, 
with his message of peace, love, and sympathy: 
the suffering, the agony, the tendered words as 
life ebbs to final dispair: 
and the whole with 
the authority of supreme victory. 
I need not elaborate.
Can there be any doubt that the
power of Christianity lies in its revelation in act
of what Plato divined in theory?”
