The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God (24 page)

The Witness, of course, won’t ever be persuaded. Not if I were to call the nine choirs of angels to testify on my behalf. He and his kind are, with perfect sincerity, able to brand me Antichrist only because they block their ears to my message. They make certain they don’t hear a word of what I’m saying. And with good reason. If they listened it might dawn on them that it’s not I but they who are the blasphemers par excellence. Instead of the God who is love and peace at the world’s Centre, they put unregenerate man there - always an absurdity and a disaster. But they go much further. They put there the man who’s as mad as he’s cruel, a blown-up conflation of Torquemada and Stalin and Big Brother. An unholy trinity if ever there was one, Antichrist if ever he existed. This isn’t religious conviction but total lack of it. It’s witch-hunting fanaticism, ever growing to match and hide the ever-growing mass of doubts and contradictions and lies it masks. It’s paranoia at its ugliest and sickest. It’s the ultimate obscenity. And, alas, it’s endemic. In 1490, Gennadius of Novgorod, a prominent ecclesiastic, wrote in all seriousness: ‘A church council is needed not for debates on the faith, but in order that heretics may be judged, hanged, and burned.’

The irony of it all is that the cure of this foul disease is so very simple and ready-to-hand and effectual. It’s to see that the whole wretched business isn’t just a game but an illusory game, and that no one can begin to unseat the Almighty. It’s to see that His Majesty is quite safe from all pretenders to His throne. It’s to have the courtesy and good sense to let God be God at the Centre and man be man off-Centre. Then God is Godlike and humans are humane.

The Witness and his unquiet supporters up there in the gallery can’t hear me, I know. I hope the Jury can, and that I'm getting across what I deeply feel about the absolute distinction between God and man, no less than their absolute inseparability.

COUNSEL: May I point out that the court couldn’t care less about your deep feelings - so long as they stay deep? It’s your disinterring and displaying them without regard for others’ feelings which finds you in the dock today. In fact I’d go so far as to say that no one’s objecting to your wearing your feelings on your coat-sleeve, but only to your taking your coat off and flinging it in the public eye - a most delicate organ. With serious consequences for public order. A small indication of which this court has just witnessed.

MYSELF, with some heat: Your Honour, I must complain that Counsel is abusing his position to mislead the Jury about my lifestyle. I fling nothing at the public. Who was ever forced to read my books or turn up at my meetings? What’s more, I swear I’ve never, myself, set up any workshop or seminar or lecture or broadcast, but have simply responded to invitations. I’ve never pushed anything at anybody, and please God I never will. And when - as on that plane to Vancouver - I do find myself holding forth, I always say ‘Don’t believe anything I tell you. Try it out. Look for yourself.’

COUNSEL: All the same, people do come and hear you, and buy your books and read them and are convinced. Your message gets around and you can’t wash your hands of that. And the message that this Witness gets and spreads around is that you publicly deny that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, and this denial brands you as Antichrist.

MYSELF: This is barefaced libel, members of the Jury. So far from denying that Christ has come in the flesh, I treasure that truth beyond all others - as will become clearer than clear before this Trial ends. If I’ve said little so far, publicly, of God incarnate in Christ, it’s not out of indifference. On the contrary. It’s because he’s too precious and near my heart to talk about when there’s no occasion to do so. How can I convince the court of this, and so bring my Defence against this Witness and his terrorist gang - these odd disciples of Him who is the embodiment of loving-kindness - to a fitting conclusion? I confess I’m baffled. Anyway, let me try.

I believe that the noblest and truest, the deepest and most daring of all insights, is that the Majesty back of the universe is none other than self-giving Love. That He is the one whose tenderness is such that He deliberately takes on no less than all the joy and the sparkle and the incredible richness of His world, every tear and groan, all its dreadful privation and darkness and guilt - thereby gaining for it the joy that has no shadow, the peace that can be won no other way, and no less expensively. Not that I can prove this formally. No amount of argument, I don’t care how penetrating or silver-tongued, can persuade anyone of the truth of the Incarnation. As a dogma it may well seem altogether absurd, to fly in the face of all the evidence. No - the proof is in the seeing of it and the living of it, in one’s most intimate involvement in the saving process. One’s Christing - no less. There’s no other way. St Paul was merely being realistic when he exclaimed, ‘Not I, but Christ that liveth in me!’ Paul was out, Christ was in, and this put paid to his blasphemy. Nothing could be less anti-Christ, or more pro-Christ. The Apostle had his way of saying it. I have my way of drawing it, as you will see from Diagram No. 15.

Diagram No. 15

My Defence against the accusation of being Antichrist could run to tens of thousands of words. But still it wouldn’t say as much as this eight-word Self-portrait.

When I read that third person over there behind the glass as the old self-centred man, or Adam, and the First Person here in front of it as the new God-centred man, or Christ, the words of St Paul (grown so tired and hackneyed) at once spring to a new life that blows my top and bowls me over:

As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all
[all!]
be made alive.

The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven.

[That body] is sown in dishonour; [this body] is raised in glory. [That body] is sown in weakness; [this body] is raised in power. [That] is sown a natural body; [this] is raised a spiritual body.

Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ.

If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature.

In him [Christ] dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. And ye are complete in him.

Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you?

When my seeing and my living deny these words of St Paul, I am anti-Christ. When they proclaim them I’m not just pro-Christ: I am complete in him. I’m Christed.

‘The Infinite Goodness has such wide arms,’ says Dante, ‘that it takes in whatever turns to it.’ I have a choice. Shall I embrace the little world of that little one, or the immense world of this Immense One? Can I not see that I’m incarnate in the wide-armed One here, and not in the narrow-armed one over there? Have I, or haven’t I, blown my top and been bowled clean over - heels-over-no-head - by him and as him?

JUDGE: Are you telling us that, after all that backing and filling, you are a true Christian? That after all your theological toing and froing, after all that fancy East-West footwork, you line up in the end with the good old Christian creed? If so, you could have saved the court and the Prosecution a lot of time and trouble by saying so in the first place.

MYSELF: Jung says somewhere, Your Honour, that the Church is the custodian of mysteries it doesn’t understand. Well, I don’t flatter myself that I understand them either. Comprehension is the booby prize, anyway. Their meaning - praise the Lord! - is inexhaustible. What I do find, however, is that
I have only to LOOK to see what perfect sense these basic doctrines make.

And now, just looking to see, I don’t have to mouth a single article of faith, much less subscribe to all sorts of manifest claptrap and moonshine, in order to benefit from the underlying mysteries. Now their wonderful therapeutic power flows, unobstructed by surface doubts and reservations, and by the deep self-reproach that comes of deluding myself for the sake of the promised therapy of body and mind and spirit. The real medicine isn’t to be bought at the price of double-think, or self-deceiving compromise, or any sort of humbug. Or bought at any price. It’s scot-free to seers.

Of these great mysteries which are for seeing and for living rather than comprehending, I say unequivocally with Coventry Patmore:

The one secret, the greatest of all, is the doctrine of the Incarnation, regarded not as an historical event which occurred two thousand years ago, but as an event that is renewed in the body of everyone who is in the way to the fulfilment of his original destiny.

And, still more boldly, with Meister Eckhart:

People think God has become a human being only there - in His historical Incarnation - but that is not so. For God is here, in this very place, just as much incarnate as in a human being long ago. And this is why He has become a human being: that He might give birth to you as His only-begotten Son, and as no less.

Prosecution Witness No. 16

THE SUFFRAGAN BISHOP

Witness testifies that, though he doesn’t know me personally, he has read three of my books, including
The Autobiography of a Simpleton.
Also he has friends who do know me and are able to confirm that the
Autobiography
paints a portrait that’s reasonably true to life. That work, he maintains, is more than enough to convict me, on my own showing, of blasphemy within the meaning of the Act. Also blasphemy (the Bishop adds) as he understands it. What’s so significant, what strikes him with particular force, is the degree to which my character and behaviour are at odds with my spiritual pretensions. To cultivate mystical experience without regard for ordinary righteousness (let alone saintliness) - to claim the privileges of divinity while disclaiming the responsibilities of morality - is itself immoral. It makes
mystical
a dirty word. It doesn’t work. It ends miserably.

COUNSEL: Is it your view that if the Accused were anything like the saints and sages whose sayings he makes so free with, he wouldn’t now be standing in the dock? That if he had put his money - the working capital of his life - where his mouth is, the charge of blasphemy wouldn’t have been brought at all? Or, if brought, wouldn’t stick?

WITNESS: Precisely. The history of Christendom provides plenty of examples of saints whose manifest love and humility and self-giving were such as to excuse pronouncements which, made by the unregenerate, would have got them into desperate trouble with the Inquisition. St Catherine of Genoa, for instance (whose saying ‘My Me is God’ the Accused squeezes of juice to the last drop - and then some), was one of the most selfless of women, a model of holiness in action; so she got away with what otherwise would have earned her a roasting. The Church didn’t take that one saying of hers out of the context of her life or her teaching.

We too need to read it along with other sayings of hers to the opposite effect, clearly acknowledging her essential creatureliness.

Even more to the point is the case of Ruysbroeck. His own life, in striking contrast to the life of the wilder and more wayward mystics of his day, was blameless. And his writings largely consisted of a diatribe against them. These two pluses proved more than enough to cancel the minus of his claim ‘to be God, with God, and without intermediary’. In fact, they got him beatified. Hence his official title: The Blessed Jan van Ruysbroeck.

COUNSEL: That’s important, but it’s history. Are you expecting the unofficial successors to the Holy Inquisition, the freelance blasphemy hunters of today, to show similar tolerance in similar cases?

WITNESS: Why not? I think that, if we looked round carefully enough, we would find the occasional saint who, though technically guilty of blasphemy, is in practice acknowledged to be innocent of the crime. One whose deeds excuse his incautious words. One whose lifestyle ensures that he isn’t hauled up before a court like this.

COUNSEL: Coming back to the Accused, can you enlarge on your point that his behaviour, falling so far short of his pretensions, makes criminal nonsense of them?

WITNESS: ‘By their fruits shall ye know them.’ If the Accused’s boasted ‘seeing and being the One he really is’ were genuine, it would have resulted in radical changes in the man. On his own confession in that
Autobiography
of his, it has done precious little of the kind. How good is he? What good is he? How much is he doing for suffering humanity? I can find in him no special virtue, no appreciable self-sacrifice, no caring at all for the sick and needy, nothing to suggest that he has transcended the unregenerate human condition. The only thing about him that’s so special is his claim to be so special. So special that anything goes. His enlightenment appears only to darken the shadow side of him. He doesn’t seem bothered a little bit by the sexual misdemeanours, the weakness in the face of temptation, the fear in the face of danger, the meanness and the anger he freely confesses to, that recur in his life story. So what? he asks. And answers, in effect: