God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells (best contemporary novels .txt) 📖

GOD IS COURAGE

 

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