The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God (5 page)

Erich Fromm

God is alive and well - and living guess where.

Graffito in a lavatory

Prosecution Witness No. 3

THE SCHOOLGIRL

COUNSEL: Your Honour, in the public gallery there’s a class of schoolchildren aged between ten and twelve. They are here as part of their education in citizenship. I’m told by their teacher that any one of them whom the Accused may choose is willing to take the stand and give evidence. Provided, of course, Your Honour and the Accused agree.

The peculiar nature of the offence, and the informality of these proceedings, encourage me to make this proposal. The reason for making it is that the Accused, in books and lectures and now here in court, insists that the children are on his side, and that if only we become like them we shall see eye to eye with him. Well, the Prosecution wishes to co-operate with the Defence to arrive at the truth. Let it not be said that the Crown is unfair. Have I Your Honour’s permission to take the evidence of one of these children?

JUDGE: You do. Provided the Accused is willing —

MYSELF: I am, Your Honour.

JUDGE: — and provided the child hasn’t been biased by parents or teachers against the Accused. Or, too strongly, for him.

COUNSEL: I’m assured that what little prejudice there may be is in favour of the Accused.

JUDGE addressing me: So you agree that the Prosecution goes ahead?

MYSELF: Certainly, Your Honour. As for which child testifies, let’s say the youngest...

The teacher brings one of the children down from the gallery, and takes her to a chair placed in front of the witness-box.

COUNSEL, to Witness: Will you please tell us your name and how old you are.

WITNESS: I’m Mary. I’m ten.

COUNSEL: Mary, what do you know about Mr John a-Nokes there in the dock?

WITNESS: Our teacher told us he asks funny questions about himself. Like, is he
really
Mr Nokes?

COUNSEL: What do you say about that, Mary?

WITNESS: I think he’s being silly. All he’s got to do is look in the mirror.

COUNSEL: Will you please repeat that a little louder for the benefit of the Jury?

WITNESS: I feel sorry for him. All he’s got to do is look in the mirror.

COUNSEL: Thank you, Mary. Now, Mr Nokes will ask you some questions.

MYSELF: Mary, do you have any brothers and sisters?

WITNESS: I’ve got a brother. His name is Dick. He’s eighteen months old.

MYSELF: How does he react to what he sees in the mirror?

WITNESS: When he was very little he didn’t take any notice. Now he’s started making noises at the baby behind the glass and playing with him. Of course he’s too young to realise it’s himself. He’s like a robin I saw who started pecking at his own reflection in a window-pane.

MYSELF: Mary, I know a little girl called Madge. She made up her face with her mother’s lipstick - applying it to the bathroom mirror.

WITNESS: That’s silly! She’ll soon grow up.

MYSELF: That’s all, Mary. Thank you for being so helpful and answering our questions. Please go back to your class now.

COUNSEL, to Jury: In the course of his Defence against the previous Witness - the Humanist, you’ll remember - the Accused said two things that I want to draw your attention to now: first, that to see the truth about himself he must become childlike; and second, that when he does so he loses his human face and takes on a divine one. Or words to that effect.

Well, I should be surprised if Mary’s testimony hasn’t shaken his monolithic complacency somewhat.

We shall see what this asker of silly questions (I’m using Mary’s language) has to say for himself.

Defence:
The Tenfold Unmasking

MYSELF: Every important discovery began by asking a silly question. Ladies and gentlemen of the Jury, I don’t feel quite as chastened as Counsel thinks I should. Not at all. Mary’s testimony provides the perfect introduction to the story I have to tell.

Like all convincing stories, it comes in three parts. She supplied and illustrated the first two. It will be up to an adult - a truly grown-up grown-up - to supply the third.

COUNSEL, oozing irony, to the Jury: And we all know
who
that is, don’t we?

MYSELF: The whole tale runs like this:

(1) The animal and the infant, in their direct experience of themselves, are faceless. Unconsciously they are living from Who they really, really are - from the Clear-faced One at the Centre of their universe. None is so deluded (and so blasphemous) as to superimpose on this central Clarity or No-thing any features of their own. Every one of them, from Mary’s little brother in his play-pen down to the barely visible insect on the nursery window, and beyond, is
for itself
as immense and wide open as the cloudless sky. I think we should all go down on our knees to beg forgiveness for having despised these humble but majestic ones who - unlike all us humans - have never for a moment been guilty of blasphemy. And go on to recite Blake’s lines:

Seest thou the little winged fly, smaller than a grain of sand?...

Withinside wondrous and expansive: its gates are not clos’d:

I hope thine are not.

(2) But the infant grows into the child. Mary pays her literally immense subscription to the human club - namely, her Mary-free wide-openness - and gets in acknowledgement and exchange her card of identity and membership, her Mary-face. Finding herself in the mirror, she shrinks almost overnight from boundless Capacity for all things to just that one thing. No discredit to Mary. It’s a stage we all have to go through.

(3) But now let’s look forward to the day - that rebirthday – when Mary decides that her subscription to the human club is far too high. Accordingly she withholds it, secretly cancelling her standing order, yet without ceasing to enjoy the club's innumerable amenities. She reclaims her true Face, absolutely clear and immense and non-human, but is careful to hang on to her club membership card with its picture of that little human face – keeping it in that glass-fronted showcase over there. She again takes on her Original Face, and makes sure that acquired face stays where it belongs, a yard or so away. Now she looks in that showcase – which is her mirror – to see what she
isn't
like! She's herSelf again.

Your Honour and members of the Jury, you will have noticed the mirror stuck on the front of the booklet of diagrams that each of you has been given. Will you please now look in that mirror, as if for the first time, and without prejudgement take what you find, where you find it. No – don't look at me. Look steadily into your mirror – to see, for a change, not yourself but a close friend. Close, but not too close. A friend, but not too friendly.

COUNSEL: This is farcical! John a-Nokes, I see you’ve got one of those mirror-covered booklets of yours. I challenge you to look in that glass right now and tell the court in all seriousness that it’s not your face that you see.

MYSELF, complying carefully with Counsel’s request: No! that’s not my face!

COUNSEL: Then for heaven’s sake
whose
face is it?

MYSELF: Good question! I can truthfully tell you it doesn’t belong to me

COUNSEL: I can’t believe my ears! Just give me one reason why that face you’re looking at isn’t yours.

MYSELF: I’ll give you
ten!

COUNSEL: Funny man!

MYSELF: Your Honour and members of the Jury, let’s address this very funny and very serious matter together, very carefully. And very humbly, prepared to follow whithersoever the facts lead us. I’m asking you not to look at me when I go through these ten reasons, but look in your mirror and check up whether what I’m saying about me is true also of you.

That face is
not
my face, because:

(1) It’s the wrong way round — faces inwards instead of outwards.

(2) It’s the wrong size — a miserable three inches across.

(3) It’s in the wrong place — off-centre by upwards of ten inches.

(4) It’s all over the shop — liable to come at me from any angle, incapable of getting its act together.

(5) Appropriately, it haunts crazy rooms, where clocks go anti- clockwise and printing reads back to front.

(6) It’s locked in one direction, unable to glance up or down or sideways.

(7) It’s intangible.

(8) In these and all other respects it’s the opposite of what I find on these shoulders, and therefore not my face but someone else’s.

(9) A conclusion I check by slowly bringing the mirror right up to me. On the way here, I try to catch hold of that face, turn it round, enlarge it to full size, and plant it on these shoulders — thereby setting John a-Nokes up at the centre of my world . . . I can’t. This place won’t take it. Anyway, it vanishes without trace just before arrival.

(10) And if, instead of this mirror, a friend’s camera makes the same journey, it comes up with the same pictures. Out there it registers that face. On the way here, parts of it. Here, none of it.

Ten reasons why that face is not my face. How many would you like, Sir Gerald? There are lots more, but perhaps ten’s enough to be getting on with.

COUNSEL:
Whose
face is it then, for God’s sake?

MYSELF: John a-Nokes’s, of course. The face of a fairly close pal of mine. One whose charm is that he’s about as different from me as he could be. It’s often that way with friends, you know.

COUNSEL: Specious stuff, members of the Jury! But what does it boil down to? To this: we adults are wrong, the children are wrong, and only infants and Mr Nokes are right. So let’s all go infantile. Back to the cradle! This isn’t the way to be taken seriously in a lawcourt, which of all places on earth is reserved for grown-ups.

MYSELF: I’m not saying ‘back to infancy’ but ‘forward to sanity, to true adulthood, to sagehood, to the wisdom of God which is foolishness with men’ — in a word, to Godhood.

COUNSEL, flourishing his brief wildly, shouts: To blasphemy!

MYSELF: To truthfulness! It’s all so very simple and sensible. To find out who you are — whether you are George or Henry or Marmaduke or Lady Godiva or whoever—I look at your face.
To find out who lam - whether I’m Jack or Jill or the Elephant Man or whoever — I look at my face.
How else, for goodness’ sake? I look at my true and present and naked Original Face, instead of at that acquired face over there in its glass case, with its tenfold disclaimer, its tenfold denial that it’s mine. I look at the bright and charming Face of the One I really, really, really am.

However did I come to trade This for that, to disfigure myself so? Wasn’t my Original Face attractive enough, its complexion clear enough? Was it losing the bloom of youth? Did looking myself in the Face suddenly become — absurd, wicked, impossible?

Between Dick’s age and Mary’s, I learned the art of self-dodging, of deliberately looking for myself
in the wrong direction
- as if were now to seek myself on the Judge’s bench instead of in the dock! I looked
there
in the glass – in that glass case – to see myself
here
in God’s fresh air! But now I look in it to see my buddy, my mate, my opposite number. I used to say to myself, ‘That’s me!’ Now I say, ‘Hello there! I like you because I’m unlike you!’ The very same gadget which tricked me into hallucinating a small, coloured, opaque, tightly packed, complex, dying LUMP of a fellow at the Centre of my world now relieves me of him. Taking him clean off me, I’m left free here to be - Myself. And the fellow who was my enemy here is now my faithful companion there, at home in his stuffy glass-fronted house, my good neighbour. A relentlessly inquisitive and housebound insomniac he is, nevertheless nice to have around.

So this hugely underrated gadget called a mirror turns out to be more eloquent of my Nature, infinitely more direct and convincing, than all the scriptures in the world. It began with a good name:
mirror
derives from
mirari,
which is Latin for to wonder at. I gave it a bad name - toy, illusionist, trickster - but it was I who played tricks with it, turning a blind eye to its tenfold illusion-shattering Revelation. And now, every time I compare that tiny and flawed and ageing man-face behind the glass with this immense and immaculate and immortal God-face in front of it, I’m Myself again.