The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God (27 page)

Back, then, to the Witness for the Prosecution - to you my old school-buddy, who I’m trying to turn into a Witness for the Defence. Let’s take next your point about the immense bulk of the inanimate stuff making up the universe, in contrast to the minuteness of the animate. You seem to be saying that the rarity of bright needles of life, in this inane and lustreless haystack of haystacks, can only mean they are irrelevant, a fluke and of no consequence - and neither sharp nor bright. Such valuation by volume is vulgar, stupid, not worth a second thought. It makes the Colosseum millions of times more interesting than the Gonzaga Cameo, and Niagara billions of times more beautiful than a dewdrop afire in the low sun of morning. If small is beautiful, Life in the universe is exquisite. All the more exquisite for shining out against such a vast and sombre backcloth.

Much the same is true of valuation by time-span. In the Himalayas there grows a cactus, dingy and spiky and unpleasant as only cactuses can be, a disgrace and a byword among weeds. But on one night in the year it puts forth a dream of a flower, a single blossom, bright with half the rainbow, scented and wonderfully complicated. In the morning, the dream over, nothing’s left of that flower but a memory and a mess. But no longer do you dismiss that cactus as a weed. Nor do you half-dismiss it as an unlovely old thing that’s privileged on rare occasions briefly to play host to a lovely new thing. Oh, no! Never mind how huge and commonplace and worn the plant, and how tiny and rare and brief the flower, the plant is from now on what all along it has been - a
flowering
plant. By the same token, that caterpillar is no mere worm-on-legs but a red admiral in mufti, that seed is no mere seed but mesembryanthemum stage one, that fertilized egg is no mere cell but Leonardo da Vinci starting off modestly. When it comes to putting a value on the small-scale and familiar lives around us, we are reasonably generous and generously reasonable. We judge the hero by what earned him his medal, the coarsest creature by its finest hour, the muck-fed root by the damask rose.

And so it should be - but by God it isn’t! - with this tragically undervalued and abused universe of His. Tricked by its size and our own double standards, we are most unreasonable and ungenerous where we need to be most reasonable and generous. Blasphemers all, we demean God’s world to the limit. Let it blossom, and we dismiss the flower as an accident and an alien, a cut flower! Let it put forth a limb, and we amputate the limb, thus proving the body dead! But why not admit that this great Organism, too, is for judging by its flower rather than its seed and root? For judging, in fact, by seed and root and flower and fruit as a strictly indivisible Whole? Viewed thus realistically, all is transformed in an instant. A coarse and colourless universe capable of coming up with Botticelli’s
Birth of Venus
isn’t a coarse and colourless universe at all. A silent and tight-lipped universe that gets around to singing ‘O Isis und Osiris’ is a full-throated singing universe. A poker-faced universe that has Jeeves and Bertie Wooster and Gussie Fink-Nottle up its sleeve is a universe that’s laughing up its sleeve. A heartless universe, which in the fullness of time gives rise to the tender and self-giving love of a Jesus of Nazareth, has at last bared its heart.

COUNSEL: Where is this
mélange
of poetry and theology and cosmology getting us? The Blasphemy Act couldn’t care less about your ecstasies concerning the relationship between man and the world and God. Even when publicly ventilated, they are your own affair and no concern of this court - so long as they don’t outrage people who hold contrary opinions, bringing what they hold sacred into contempt and threatening public disorder.

MYSELF: I was just coming to the outrageous and disorderly part. Brace yourself for what you’ll see as scandalous enough to put me in mortal danger, and what I see as plain horse-sense.

Gertrude Stein’s ‘Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose’, though it sounds like detection of the obvious pushed somewhat far, is really nonsense. The rose is not a rose, not a rose, not a rose. It’s damn all without the rose-bush and everything the rose-bush needs to be itself- which is plenty. It’s damn all without leaves and stem and root and humus and air and rain and sunlight, and so on
ad infinitum.
It’s damn all without the All. To tell the truth, it’s nothing less than the universe budding and blossoming, this coarse old universe come to a head - the handsomest of heads - roseate and rose-scented. Some rose, this! I’m in awe of this rose of all the world! But not to the extent of letting a mere plant outsmart me. What goes for the rose goes for me. I’m
not
John a-Nokes,
not
John a-Nokes,
not
John a-Nokes. I’m damn all without what it takes to be John a-Nokes, without the rest of him, which is to say without the rest of things. For me to pretend that I’m John a-Nokes all present and complete as that little fellow - as that unviable fragment which just for the sake of convenience is called John a-Nokes - is pride and poppycock and blasphemy. On the other hand, to admit that I feature as John a-Nokes only by courtesy of the whole of him - by courtesy of the Whole, of the One I really am - is humility and good sense and the medicine for blasphemy. God is flowering around here as John a-Nokes. Also flowering very prettily on the Jury benches. Where
isn’t
He flowering?

And, of course, the more lofty and fragrant the blossom, the more hushed up are its lowly origins. The rose’s barbed stem and yucky root are far less
sub rosa
than Jack’s beanstalk.

COUNSEL: These contorted witticisms and paradoxes only prove you guilty. What’s the point of trying to win the Witness over to the side of the Defence, now that you have yet once more come over to the side of the Prosecution and condemned yourself out of your own mouth? Blooming in the dock is the flower of God - the flower of all the world - it says! No shrinking violet this, born to blush unseen! It’s making sure it’s plucked before its time!

Incidentally, have you finished with the Witness?

MYSELF: Not quite. My business with him, as with all of you throughout this Trial, is perfectly sober and serious and simple. It is to arrive at and speak the truth about my intrinsic Nature. It’s the truth that sets me free from this court’s power over me. Do your worst. I can’t afford to buy from you a verdict of Not Guilty at the cost of a single lie.

Back, then, to you, my atheist friend - whether you amount to a Witness for the Prosecution or for the Defence, I don’t much care. Tell me, does my insistence on the unity of the rose and the rose-bush and the rose-root and the rose-earth and the rose-world make sense to you?

WITNESS: Good sense, bad roses. You seem to forget that this marvellous floribunda universe-bush of yours sports such blossoms as Gilles de Rais and the Marquis de Sade and Aleister Crowley. To say nothing of Julius Streicher and Caligula and Ivan the Terrible and Jack the Ripper. Viewing the bush from near or far, through rose-tinted or dark glasses, does nothing to prune its unwanted growth or cure its diseases, much less change its species. Facts are facts are facts are facts. And many are appalling facts.

MYSELF: Facts aren’t fixtures. The facts of one level are the lies of the next. It just isn’t true that the object stays the same no matter where it’s seen from. Distance is God’s magic wand and absolute wizardry. Zooming into me is zooming into wonderland. A yard and a second are enough to turn this naughty man into an Eden of innocent creatures, and a further fraction of an inch and of a second are more than enough to kill them stone dead.

Viewed from all viewpoints and at all distances, I am as object infinite in my variety, the cosmic what-have-you. How different from myself viewed by myself from no distance, viewed as Subject! Here, I’m forever one and the same. Here and now I’m Unique, the One Indivisible Awareness which is neither a thing, nor inside any thing, nor the property of any thing. On the contrary, all things are in It and from It and for It. It is Myself as the Root of my root, Myself as the First Person Singular present tense, Myself as that One Seer and One Hearer and One Consciousness in all beings, spoken of by the Upanishads.

Please turn to Diagram No. 16.

16a

16b

Diagram No. 16

Diagram 16a shows a deluded me, perversely mistaking that pinhead for the seat and centre of my consciousness, and the vantage point from which I survey the world. It shows an object masquerading as the Subject, a third person playing First Person. It shows a conceited rose posturing as its own Root. It shows me
getting above myself
by a yard - and I mean this quite literally. It shows me blaspheming like mad. Yet such is the human condition, so endemic is this fallacy of misplaced consciousness, that it’s rarely challenged. The result is a world mis-seen through and through, a dream world becoming a nightmare world, a gigantic and self-perpetuating social fiction. A fiction that is nevertheless factual enough to foul up God’s world from beginning to end.

Diagram 16b shows His world put to rights by consciously viewing it from the only place it can be viewed from anyway - from the Centre of it all, from the Origin of it all, from the Receptacle of it all. Here is the God’s-eye view of His world as very good, in every sort of contrast to that illusory man’s-eye view of it as now so-so, now a shambles, now a disaster area.

I hope these two pictures not only show clearly the shift from the blasphemer’s viewpoint to the non-blasphemer’s, but also suggest how different their two worlds have to be.

WITNESS: But they tell me nothing about what happens in my day-to-day experience. I can’t picture what difference this shift in viewpoint makes to the view - if any.

MYSELF: The consequences are many and radical and heartfelt. They are discovered by making the shift and staying shifted, not by discussing it. What I can do for your encouragement, however, is to outline the shape of three major results:

(1) The false or man’s-eye view (16a) inflicts a near-mortal wound on the world, cleaving it into one part called ‘me’ and another called ‘not-me’, into a small viewing thing here and a big viewed thing there. No wonder there’s a lot of blood about! Only God can heal such a wound, an injury so serious that it will yield only to the most drastic of treatments by the Master Physician. He reduces me to No-thing, then reconstitutes me as the Whole of things. Thus most graciously He arranges that I become the One for whom the world is intact because He claims not a particle of it for Himself, because He vanishes in its favour, because He dies for it. Only as Him here am I all there, and quite compos mentis, and seeing things as they are.

(2) The second difference is linked with the first. On the one hand is my false or man’s-eye view of a world that I’m up against, that I’m not responsible for, that I wash my hands of. Of a world much of which I don’t like, and some of which I loathe - for example, those deplorable characters we mentioned. Ivan the Terrible is - terrible, and that’s that. On the other hand is my true or God’s-eye view of a world that I am, that I’m altogether responsible for. It’s not that I like it, but that I love it, for the simple reason that one has to love oneself. Be sure of this: a loved and died-for world is altogether different from ‘the same world’ unloved, un-died-for, feared, hated. And be sure of this too: only self-giving love is clear-eyed enough, realistic and practical enough, to see through the world’s evil to the underlying goodness. The truly
evil
evil isn’t on the world’s side and intrinsic but on my side and imposed: it is the harm I do to it by washing my hands of it. Cease disclaiming responsibility, and the change is immediate and profound. This God’s-eye view is blind to no defect and indifferent to no tear, nevertheless it transforms the whole scene. Another Light bathes the world, a saving Radiance which no creature, however lovely, can call its own, or however repulsive can quench. Somehow all is embraced, loved, and - yes, in spite of everything -
endorsed!
When God’s in His heaven here, all’s right with the world over there. My anxious questioning ceases. I have no more complaints.