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.