Where Love is the Lover, Love streaming from
the Lover is the Lover; the Lover streaming from
himself, and existing in another Person.
_Traherne._
_Aut Deus aut homo non bonus_—so Christians have said and believed. The
dilemma, though comfortable for not a few among them, and having about
it a certain truth, often involves a false conception of both man and
God. The truth it holds is not their comfort; they do not know that.
What most people mean when they use the dilemma is that the prophet of
Nazareth was either as a person God and not as a person man, or he was
as a person man and a bad one. It seems conclusive, this either-or. But
there is no logical weapon more fatal to our discovery of the truth of
spirit and life. 'Either-or' comes from a field of interest where things
stand out conspicuous and apart, and cannot be thought of as
communicating virtue and riches and themselves one to another. It brings
with it an insinuating suggestion, if not assertion, that the affairs of
spirit and life are in the same case. Personality, which is an affair of
spirit and life, seems no more to admit of such intercommunication than
does materiality. Two persons can no more communicate themselves to each
other than two stones. Which, on the crude exposed face of it, is
nonsense. They can, they do; and we know it.
Unquestionably the great prophet spoke with the authority which lesser
prophets attributed to God. He made claims, very high claims. Was he
only an arrogant and blasphemous man? (He might, perhaps, have been
deluded, though the dilemma ignores that possibility—as well it may.) Or
was he God? There is no half-way house of vital identity between man as
person and God as person, any more than there is a half-way house of
material identity between a diamond and a pebble off the beach.
_Either-or._ So this dilemma goes. It is very simple, all too simple. It
applies beautifully to pebbles and diamonds; why not to living persons?
Particularly and excellently, why not to man and God?
Now, as a matter of fact, I am trying to communicate to you at this very
moment something that is mine. My knowledge (or my ignorant opinion) is
written down on the paper before you, and you will or may receive it—to
do with it what you choose. Henceforth it is, or may be, yours as well
as mine. Again, I try to communicate to you the content of my will for
you. You know and feel that I want your will to be brought to coincide
with mine, so that my will and yours shall be vitally identical in
regard to what I am writing about. In some degree or another you and I
may become one in this regard. I shall then have communicated my
knowledge (or my ignorant opinion) and my will to you and they will to
some extent or another be both yours and mine. This communication and
co-operation is a matter of our choosing to enter into it and be and
work together. We have it in our own hands. It is quite different from
the relation we have to each other as being parts in the universe, or
elements in God looked upon as the pantheist looks upon him, which makes
him no more than the universe. We can't help that relation. We share it
with the stones as well as with each other and with God. It is a purely
abstract business and belongs to 'the night in which all cows are
black.' Our cows, on the other hand, are of every sort of colour; and we
find, we actually do find, that we can pass on our colours to each
other, dye the different cow to our tinge and in turn be dyed. We are
concrete, not abstract; and our vital identity one with another is
concrete too. It may be and might not be. We choose whether it shall be
or not. And, happily, we choose that it shall be, up to a point, far
more often and more steadily than we choose that it shall not. Hence the
existence of a human community in common knowledge and reason and common
will—up to a point.
I give you here in these pages, or at least proffer you, as I have said,
'something of mine.' That is what it looks like. But, enquiring further,
I ask whether as a matter of fact 'I' am separate from 'something of
mine,' as, let us say an engine is separate from the power it produces
and the work it does. Do I produce thought and knowledge as an engine
produces so much horse-power? Is my will or my reason a sort of thing
that produces activity as a flower produces its scent? The scent is not
the flower; the horse-power is not the engine. There is always a
producing _thing_ behind such products. Is there a producing thing
behind my knowledge and activity? And the only reasonable answer we can
give to this question is that there is not. In my spirit and life there
is nothing in the least like a thing or a machine; and when we reason
about spirit and life as though there were we plunge into a very sea of
confusion. My reason and my will _are_ myself. I am not a thing and I do
not produce like a thing. I give and I communicate my very self in
giving and communicating my knowledge, my purpose, my will. And in so
far as you receive these and take them into yourself you receive
me—spirit and life—as person. By harmony between us our wills and
reason, our selves, coalesce; they become identical in the concrete,
vital identity peculiar to persons, impossible to things, and dependent
for its maintenance on the maintenance of harmony by their own free
activity. Very partial it is, no doubt, seen by all of us 'as in a
mirror darkly'; but it points, with a finger that should draw all eyes,
to a great fulfilment. That fulfilment is 'the goal, not the
starting-point of human endeavour.' The blank identity of co-existence
in a universe is, you may say, a starting-point for reflexion; but real
concrete mental coalescence between each and all of us is a real
concrete starting-point of life in a personal world. The goal lies far
ahead, where that union of persons foreshadowed in our fragmentary
intercourse and the low beginnings of our community of life shall be won
through that which alone can give it, our union and communion with God.
This is more or less a philosopher's way of putting the matter; but it
means the same as the Christian's.
Now there is a question that forces itself upon us here. Can there be a
coalescence of mind and will, an identity, between God and man, of this
living, spiritual—that is, real, concrete—kind? Or is God so different
from man as to be incommunicable to him? Is he remote from man in his
own nature or, indeed, not only remote but alien? The answer to this is
that if he is even remote, not to say alien, he is nothing to us and we
may ignore him.
The Christian's God certainly is not remote; he is all men's lover and
father and they are all his beloved and his sons. The philosopher's God
is sometimes made blankly, abstractly, identical with us, and then we
may ignore him; because a blank identity simply is, as conceived in
thought, and like the alien God it means nothing for us. But more often
nowadays the philosopher's God is like the Christian's in that he both
transcends his universe and indwells it; for the philosopher has begun
in good earnest to reckon with life and with science and human
experience at large. God indwelt Jesus Christ, and he knew God as lover
and father both. He spoke as though God had communicated himself to him
in a fulness we do not know among ourselves. There was an identity of
will, it seems, recognized by him, between himself and God, and an
identity of reason and knowledge. And if God is Spirit and Lord and
Giver of life, then, if the prophet was right, in this identity by
fulness of communication, this personal coalescence of reason and will,
God, very God, gave himself to very man, and very man entered into
personal union with very God. The transcendent God indwelt the man, was
immanent within him as the man's own self; and the man's own self was
lifted up into the self of God. The intercommunication of person with
person, which we see as the prerogative of persons, was complete.
We have confessed this to be the goal of human endeavour; let us allow
ourselves to think that in regard to us it may be the goal, also, of
divine endeavour, and that in the man who offered no opposition to God
it was attained. As long as we do not indulge in the secret materialism
of regarding a person as a thing _producing_ knowledge or activity,
instead of as _being_ that knowledge and activity, we shall have no
difficulty in recognizing the fact that where knowledge and will in two
persons coincide, there also the persons coincide. We shall be able to
see that a man is identical with God, in the only sense identity can
have for personal beings, when he fully knows the mind of God and his
will is bent on the same ends as the will of God. Then this man is both
man and God in one, for God indwells him by that activity which he truly
is.
If we object, as we frequently do, that no man can fully know the mind
of God, we must tell ourselves that if a man knows the essential,
permanently valuable truth of life which wise men have ever sought as
wisdom, then all that is worth while in knowledge, all that upon which
parts and kinds of 'knowledges' must be built up, is his, included
within his _Weltanschauung_, his living view of the world. The
principle, the ground, of all truth, and therefore of all knowledge, he
knows and has.
* * * * *
We think of the writer of the Fourth Gospel giving us, as a prayer of
Jesus, the aspiration that 'they all may be one, as thou, Father, art in
me and I in thee, that they also may be one in us.' He has the goal of
our endeavour in plain sight; he must have felt that impulse of the
spirit towards it which is not exhausted, never can be exhausted, by any
one man.
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