God The Invisible King - H. G. Wells (grave mercy TXT) 📗
- Author: H. G. Wells
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Now having set down what those who profess the new religion regard
as the chief misconceptions of God, having put these systems of
ideas aside from our explanations, the path is cleared for the
statement of what God is. Since language springs entirely from
material, spatial things, there is always an element of metaphor in
theological statement. So that I have not called this chapter the
Nature of God, but the Likeness of God.
And firstly, GOD IS COURAGE.
2. GOD IS A PERSON
And next GOD IS A PERSON.
Upon this point those who are beginning to profess modern religion
are very insistent. It is, they declare, the central article, the
axis, of their religion. God is a person who can be known as one
knows a friend, who can be served and who receives service, who
partakes of our nature; who is, like us, a being in conflict with
the unknown and the limitless and the forces of death; who values
much that we value and is against much that we are pitted against.
He is our king to whom we must be loyal; he is our captain, and to
know him is to have a direction in our lives. He feels us and knows
us; he is helped and gladdened by us. He hopes and attempts… .
God is no abstraction nor trick of words, no Infinite. He is as
real as a bayonet thrust or an embrace.
Now this is where those who have left the old creeds and come asking
about the new realisations find their chief difficulty. They say,
Show us this person; let us hear him. (If they listen to the
silences within, presently they will hear him.) But when one
argues, one finds oneself suddenly in the net of those ancient
controversies between species and individual, between the one and
the many, which arise out of the necessarily imperfect methods of
the human mind. Upon these matters there has been much pregnant
writing during the last half century. Such ideas as this writer has
to offer are to be found in a previous little book of his, “First
and Last Things,” in which, writing as one without authority or
specialisation in logic and philosophy, as an ordinary man vividly
interested, for others in a like case, he was at some pains to
elucidate the imperfections of this instrument of ours, this mind,
by which we must seek and explain and reach up to God. Suffice it
here to say that theological discussion may very easily become like
the vision of a man with cataract, a mere projection of inherent
imperfections. If we do not use our phraseology with a certain
courage, and take that of those who are trying to convey their ideas
to us with a certain politeness and charity, there is no end
possible to any discussion in so subtle and intimate a matter as
theology but assertions, denials, and wranglings. And about this
word “person” it is necessary to be as clear and explicit as
possible, though perfect clearness, a definition of mathematical
sharpness, is by the very nature of the case impossible.
Now when we speak of a person or an individual we think typically of
a man, and we forget that he was once an embryo and will presently
decay; we forget that he came of two people and may beget many, that
he has forgotten much and will forget more, that he can be confused,
divided against himself, delirious, drunken, drugged, or asleep. On
the contrary we are, in our hasty way of thinking of him, apt to
suppose him continuous, definite, acting consistently and never
forgetting. But only abstract and theoretical persons are like
that. We couple with him the idea of a body. Indeed, in the common
use of the word “person” there is more thought of body than of mind.
We speak of a lover possessing the person of his mistress. We speak
of offences against the person as opposed to insults, libels, or
offences against property. And the gods of primitive men and the
earlier civilisations were quite of that quality of person. They
were thought of as living in very splendid bodies and as acting
consistently. If they were invisible in the ordinary world it was
because they were aloof or because their “persons” were too splendid
for weak human eyes. Moses was permitted a mitigated view of the
person of the Hebrew God on Mount Horeb; and Semele, who insisted
upon seeing Zeus in the glories that were sacred to Juno, was
utterly consumed. The early Islamic conception of God, like the
conception of most honest, simple Christians to-day, was clearly, in
spite of the theologians, of a very exalted anthropomorphic
personality away somewhere in Heaven. The personal appearance of
the Christian God is described in The Revelation, and however much
that description may be explained away by commentators as
symbolical, it is certainly taken by most straightforward believers
as a statement of concrete reality. Now if we are going to insist
upon this primary meaning of person and individual, then certainly
God as he is now conceived is not a person and not an individual.
The true God will never promenade an Eden or a Heaven, nor sit upon
a throne.
But current Christianity, modern developments of Islam, much Indian
theological thought—that, for instance, which has found such
delicate and attractive expression in the devotional poetry of
Rabindranath Tagore—has long since abandoned this anthropomorphic
insistence upon a body. From the earliest ages man’s mind has found
little or no difficulty in the idea of something essential to the
personality, a soul or a spirit or both, existing apart from the
body and continuing after the destruction of the body, and being
still a person and an individual. From this it is a small step to
the thought of a person existing independently of any existing or
pre-existing body. That is the idea of theological Christianity, as
distinguished from the Christianity of simple faith. The Triune
Persons—omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent—exist for all
time, superior to and independent of matter. They are supremely
disembodied. One became incarnate—as a wind eddy might take up a
whirl of dust… . Those who profess modern religion conceive
that this is an excessive abstraction of the idea of spirituality, a
disembodiment of the idea of personality beyond the limits of the
conceivable; nevertheless they accept the conception that a person,
a spiritual individual, may be without an ordinary mortal body… .
They declare that God is without any specific body, that he is
immaterial, that he can affect the material universe—and that means
that he can only reach our sight, our hearing, our touch—through
the bodies of those who believe in him and serve him.
His nature is of the nature of thought and will. Not only has he,
in his essence, nothing to do with matter, but nothing to do with
space. He is not of matter nor of space. He comes into them.
Since the period when all the great theologies that prevail to-day
were developed, there have been great changes in the ideas of men
towards the dimensions of time and space. We owe to Kant the
release from the rule of these ideas as essential ideas. Our modern
psychology is alive to the possibility of Being that has no
extension in space at all, even as our speculative geometry can
entertain the possibility of dimensions—fourth, fifth, Nth
dimensions—outside the three-dimensional universe of our
experience. And God being non-spatial is not thereby banished to an
infinite remoteness, but brought nearer to us; he is everywhere
immediately at hand, even as a fourth dimension would be everywhere
immediately at hand. He is a Being of the minds and in the minds of
men. He is in immediate contact with all who apprehend him… .
But modern religion declares that though he does not exist in matter
or space, he exists in time just as a current of thought may do;
that he changes and becomes more even as a man’s purpose gathers
itself together; that somewhere in the dawning of mankind he had a
beginning, an awakening, and that as mankind grows he grows. With
our eyes he looks out upon the universe he invades; with our hands,
he lays hands upon it. All our truth, all our intentions and
achievements, he gathers to himself. He is the undying human
memory, the increasing human will.
But this, you may object, is no more than saying that God is the
collective mind and purpose of the human race. You may declare that
this is no God, but merely the sum of mankind. But those who
believe in the new ideas very steadfastly deny that. God is, they
say, not an aggregate but a synthesis. He is not merely the best of
all of us, but a Being in himself, composed of that but more than
that, as a temple is more than a gathering of stones, or a regiment
is more than an accumulation of men. They point out that a man is
made up of a great multitude of cells, each equivalent to a
unicellular organism. Not one of those cells is he, nor is he
simply just the addition of all of them. He is more than all of
them. You can take away these and these and these, and he still
remains. And he can detach part of himself and treat it as if it
were not himself, just as a man may beat his breast or, as Cranmer
the martyr did, thrust his hand into the flames. A man is none the
less himself because his hair is cut or his appendix removed or his
leg amputated.
And take another image… . Who bears affection for this or that
spadeful of mud in my garden? Who cares a throb of the heart for
all the tons of chalk in Kent or all the lumps of limestone in
Yorkshire? But men love England, which is made up of such things.
And so we think of God as a synthetic reality, though he has neither
body nor material parts. And so too we may obey him and listen to
him, though we think but lightly of the men whose hands or voices he
sometimes uses. And we may think of him as having moods and
aspects—as a man has—and a consistency we call his character.
These are theorisings about God. These are statements to convey
this modern idea of God. This, we say, is the nature of the person
whose will and thoughts we serve. No one, however, who understands
the religious life seeks conversion by argument. First one must
feel the need of God, then one must form or receive an acceptable
idea of God. That much is no more than turning one’s face to the
east to see the coming of the sun. One may still doubt if that
direction is the east or whether the sun will rise. The real coming
of God is not that. It is a change, an irradiation of the mind.
Everything is there as it was before, only now it is aflame.
Suddenly the light fills one’s eyes, and one knows that God has
risen and that doubt has fled for ever.
3. GOD IS YOUTH
The third thing to be told of the true God is that GOD IS YOUTH.
God, we hold, began and is always beginning. He looks forever into
the future.
Most of the old religions derive from a patriarchal phase. God is
in those systems the Ancient of Days. I know of no Christian
attempt to represent or symbolise God the Father which is not a
bearded, aged man. White hair, beard, bearing, wrinkles, a hundred
such symptoms of senile decay are there. These marks of senility do
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