The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God

by Douglas Harding

  Eckhart

  Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.

  Jesus

  Love God, and do what you will.

  St Augustine

  Prosecution Witness No. 17

  THE ATHEIST

  Witness testifies that he has known me since childhood. We were at school together. Since then we’ve been friendly rather than friends, running into each other quite often and swapping news - if not views. Yes, he knows me well.

  COUNSEL: On the subject of views, how do you see the Accused’s notorious announcement to the world that really and truly he isn’t John a-Nokes at all, but his Creator? How far does what you know of him match up to such a claim?

  WITNESS: Match up, or match down? I guess that, so far, your witnesses have said that Jack’s not good enough to be the Creator of the world. I say he’s not bad enough! I say he’s doing himself a gross injustice!

  COUNSEL: Have a care not to commit blasphemy yourself!

  WITNESS: This is hard to believe! You serve a subpoena on me, forcing me to come here and testify against a man I’ve always liked. You make me swear to tell the truth as I see it. I start doing just that, and you as good as accuse me of committing a crime! A capital crime, at that! I appeal to the judge.

  JUDGE: As a Witness, you may count on a degree of privilege. But I advise you to watch your language and avoid giving unnecessary offence.

  COUNSEL: Obliged to Your Honour. Witness, please continue, bearing in mind what the Judge says.

  WITNESS: I was about to tell the court what Jack - the Accused - is really like. Certainly he’s no saint, and in his youth did his share of bad things along with the rest of us. But he’s become one of the kindest people I know. When I say he wouldn’t hurt a fly, I mean it literally. He’ll go to great lengths to rescue spiders from the bath-tub and the kitchen sink and put them in a nice safe place in the garden. I’ve seen him distressed to find he’d trodden on some creepy-crawly. He has a hard job chucking out a moribund house-plant he’s lived with for a year or two. As for humans, while he doesn’t enjoy being cheated or ridiculed by them any more than you or I do, and is apt to be careful to the point of meanness in little matters, in big matters he’s over-generous and very forgiving. If you’re in trouble, you’ll find it easier to relieve Jack of fifty thousand pounds than of fifty. Others’ hurt is his hurt. He can’t insulate himself from their pain and their joy. He really likes people. He even admires politicians... I tell you, this man - for all his many faults - has the warmest of hearts. I suppose I’m biased in his favour. If I weren’t, I guess I’d call him a sucker.

  JUDGE: The Jury will want to know what all this - however edifying - has to do with the crime the Accused is charged with. Many murderers have been kind to animals, many violent thieves have been good and loyal friends, but this hasn’t helped their Defence one little bit. Blasphemers, for all I know, may be model husbands and fathers and reeking with social charm, but they are blasphemers.

  WITNESS: If blasphemy is getting way above yourself and altogether too big for your human boots, if it’s publicly pretending to be far better than you are, then the Accused is certainly no blasphemer. Very much to the contrary. In claiming to be the Creator of a world like this, he’s making himself out to be a monster, subhuman and not superhuman. As I say, he’s putting himself down, doing himself a great injustice.

  COUNSEL: I must repeat my warning...

  WITNESS: All I’m doing is to point out what every schoolboy knows - or at least what every schoolboy mugging up his biology should know. We moan about infant mortality as if it were unnatural. In fact, survival to maturity is a miracle. What earthly chance of making it has the new-born cod, or garden spider? Or, come to that, the human sperm? Need I remind you about Nature red in tooth and claw, about life mercilessly preying on life, about the immemorial victory of might over right, about the hideous cruelty and needless pain? I’m talking of what’s blatantly on show, there for everyone with half an eye to see and shudder at. But think of the filthy dirty tricks that darling Mother Nature secretly descends to. Her hordes of fifth-columnists who, not content with worming their way into liver and lights, can go so far as to invade eye and brain? I’m not thinking of the occasional parasite we might expect to find battening on things bright and beautiful, but of horrors - fearsomely armed with hooks and suckers - that are as normal as the creatures they batten on. Every bird that cleaves the airy way - pace William Blake - is an immense world of ticks and worms and cysts, of flukes that are no fluke at all. Many sea creatures are even worse off. Sacculina is a fiend in the form of a bag: attaching itself to the underbelly of a crab, it sends branching suckers into every part of the body of its still-living host. Tell me, what has the crab done to deserve this punishment? And so on, and on, and on. The way Life bugs and infests itself is beyond belief:

  And then, of course, there’s the human condition. Babies are born to madness, babies are born to cancer, countless babies are at this moment in agony with a hundred horrible afflictions. Look at the outrageously unjust hand-out of Life’s prizes and penalties - at the age-old and built-in pains and depravities which human nature is stuck with, that we are all victims of. If we are built to a design, the designer’s either demented or a sadist.

  John a-Nokes - bless his heart! - believes in and trusts a Creator God. So much so that, in his thinking and speaking, he actually identities himself with this Being. Tirelessly and in public, enraging the pious. But I’m glad to say that in his feeling and behaviour he puts light-years between himself and a God who could be responsible for such a universe.

  COUNSEL: Are you saying that there is a God - a Devil of a God according to you - at whose door all these abominations must be laid? Or are you saying that an Entity so malevolent is unthinkable? That the only excuse for God is that He doesn’t exist? In other words, are you one of those who maintain that the whole show is an accidental and mindless concatenation of particles, a universe that’s not so much indifferent to the human values it chances to come up with as nicely calculated to put them down?

  WITNESS: I plump for the mindless concatenation. After all, living matter in the universe is as rare and as irrelevant as disposable hypodermic needles in haystacks. Besides, the mindless concatenation is far less horrible than the alternative, which is a devilish contraption masterminded by the very Devil.

  COUNSEL: So let’s get this clear. You have arrived at exactly the same two conclusions as the other witnesses, but from the opposite direction - the first conclusion being that the Accused publicly and scandalously insists that he is the Almighty, the second being that he’s lying, and in fact he isn’t the Almighty, not by a million miles. Am I right?

  WITNESS: Well, I meant to say...

  COUNSEL: Yes, or no?

  WITNESS: Yes, but...

  COUNSEL: Make up your mind.

  WITNESS: Yes.

  COUNSEL: Jury, please note. The point isn’t how this Witness arrives at those two conclusions which, taken together, establish the Accused’s guilt, but that he does so. If he does so without intention and without malice, that only lends weight to his testimony.

  Defence: The Night-flowering Cactus

  I’m in two minds whether to let the Witness go, or to detain him for cross-examination. With a friend like this in court, who needs enemies? His flattery promises to do me as much harm as the censure of other witnesses. On balance, I decide to see how far I can win this old schoolfellow over to my side. Thereby, perhaps, winning over the odd juryperson.

  MYSELF: I can't let you get away with that caricature of God and His world. It’s only fair that the Jury should discover how it stands up to examination. You and I have never discussed your atheism before. But now it’s necessary for my Defence to do so. May I assume - seeing that my life is at stake and that, so far and at a guess, you’ve only increased the odds against it - you will open yourself to pers
uasion?

  WITNESS: Of course. Fire away.

  MYSELF: I don’t say your story lies about the facts, but that it selects them. By judicious picking and choosing, a far stronger case can and often has been made for co-operation in Nature than for cutthroat competition, for mutual aid than for exploitation. I wish I had time to tell the court about the marvellously intricate and improbable ways in which ruthlessly self-seeking creatures unwittingly support and promote the well-being of other equally ruthless and self-seeking creatures. A fast-evolving species probably owes more to its enemies than to its friends. Believe it or not, the organic unity of the myriads of creatures that constitute Life is at least as complete as the organic unity of the myriads of cells that constitute the individual life-form. In fact, John a-Nokes is less a whole than the Biosphere is, and the Biosphere is less a whole than the Cosmos is. Only God’s world, only God as His world, is One. All lesser things are incomplete, not self-contained, not all there, largely out of sight, and therefore not to be taken at face value. Only the Whole is whole.

  Only the Whole of things is in a position to appreciate itself in its unity, from the No-thing at its Centre. Which position is your position - exactly where you are and what you are right now as First Person Singular. Lucky you!

  Are you with me, so far?

  WITNESS: I’m trailing along. But I can’t do with your God. That name has for me so many bad associations...

  MYSELF: Then call Him Nobodaddy. He won't mind a little bit.

  Next, let’s look at the problem of the suffering in His world - the inside story of God’s aches and pains, you could say. There exists a great deal of suffering, no doubt, but not of the kind and intensity we project on to creatures whose levels of organization and nervous systems are very different from ours. Why, even we humans, supersensitive though we are as a rule, can - in accidents, in rapture, when caught up in some all-absorbing adventure, or simply when we’ve had a bellyful of it - feel no pain at all, though the severest of injuries is being inflicted on the body. Again, you go on about how abominably creatures behave, devouring each other like that, openly or secretly. At least as reasonably you could see their eating and being eaten as the sincerest exchange of compliments imaginable. Or even as the ultimate lovemaking. In the bedroom John says he loves Mary so much he could eat her, and Mary says she loves John so much she could eat him. Hypothetical stuff! Post-coitum hungry, they go to the kitchen, where both love sole so much they do eat sole - meunière. And love chicken so much they do eat chicken - cacciatore. Nothing hypothetical here! John and Mary’s love for the fish and the fowl is such that they turn them into John and Mary. Probably they don’t say grace before the meal, but if they do it’s more likely to be about Supernature and Holy Communion than about Nature red in tooth and claw.

  Are you still with me?

  WITNESS: Still plodding along, Jack. Not that I care for your terminology.

  COUNSEL: The Jury certainly isn’t with you, whatever your terminology. What the blazes have these bed-and-board games to do with the crime of blasphemy?

  MYSELF: A great deal. I’m not digressing at all. In effect, the charge is that I’m a mere fragment of the Whole pretending to be the Whole, thereby upsetting other mere fragments. My Defence is that this is ridiculous, at best so partial a truth that it amounts to a thundering great lie. I’m in the middle of proving this, and ask leave to proceed...

  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?