Werner Heisenberg is well worth reading. He is a suspect figure as he was the head of the German Atomic-Energy Establishment during the War. He claims he de-railed the making of an atomic bomb, by telling Hitler that it would take far longer than the war was likely to last, and that his research was only to do with the peaceful uses of atomic energy. Well, that is very interesting! But one must admit he writes well, and is brilliant at explaining complicated issues in the clearest language, particularly when he describes the malign influence Descartes had on the future of European thought. He says that whereas the Greeks sought for a unifying principle to solve the mystery of the God-World-I Triangle, Descartes sought to solve it by division. He raised God so high, He was beyond reach, & divided mind from matter, soul from body, “res cogitas” from “res extensa”. Heisenberg is generous enough to allow that Descartes only gave expression to a tendency that had already shown itself in the Renaissance and the Reformation; and anyway he can hardly be blamed for getting a first attempt wrong. But whatever his excuses, the fact is that whereas the Greeks sought a unifying principle, Descartes sought to achieve order by a division of mind and matter; whereas nowadays mind and matter are often regarded as complementary ways of looking at the same thing: the fundamental “stuff” of the universe. As a result Descartes’s influence on European thought has been malign, in that he preached a distortion of the God-World-I Triangle, which has been perpetuated in the pattern of European philosophical thought down through the centuries. Everyone knows about Descartes’s Dualism, and the philosophical problems it raises about Freewill. If material things are mechanical, how can spiritual things be free? How can mind influence matter? And as we know, Science developed res extensa with extraordinary success; and the resultant technology has swept everything before it, and landed us in a materialistic world, in which God and religious thoughts have been destroyed in the minds of large swathes of the population. Maybe more by luck than design, my concept of the “Perfectly Relaxed Consciousness” (which is the whole theme of Man’s Relationship with God) avoids all the mistakes Descartes made, and resolves the God-World-I Triangle into a tightly unified whole of relationships. Of course these thoughts take hundreds of years to mature; and mistakes take hundreds of years to put right. So I expect I am far too late to do any good; but at least I was on the right lines.
So what is the answer today, because it is no good our thinking that all we have to do is to want to be immortal like Jesus? Even if it is correct that He believed that He was immortal, it would take us a very long apprenticeship before we could follow him 2000 years later. And Jesus may not even have been correct! Professor Caird, I think, has the answer in his Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers, his Gifford Lectures of 1900 & 1901. He says you want a unity with God, but not one which is independent of conduct. So if you are bold enough to consider having a dynamic unity with God, then I would say, you should try to imitate Jesus by using your judgement and discretion with the same independence of mind and will as he did, to solve the problems which you believe need solving in our age and in our society. The result may be dramatically different from what the Historical Jesus would have done; but that is because we live in a different age and a different society. In other words, we have to enlarge the concept of the incarnation to include US. We have to carry on from where Jesus left off: see the Last Discourses. And not shelter behind his sacrifice.
I have always utterly repudiated the point of view that salvation is independent of conduct. A man only shares God’s nature in acts of right conduct. At the very end of my book, Man’s Relationship with God, I write that man shares God’s nature “briefly”. Another way of expressing it is that we must continue the Evolution which Jesus fulfilled. And perhaps faintly in the distance we can hear the music of the spheres, which Pythagoras and Kepler dreamed about so long ago.