The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God (26 page)

By Jack’s fruits shall you know Jack. By Your fruits shall you know Yourself.

The following excerpts - Hindu, Buddhist and Christian, in that order - make good sense when applied to Yourself the First Person, none at all when applied to yourself the third person, in isolation from that First Person.

Who can prohibit that great-souled one, who knows this entire universe to be the Self alone, from living as he pleases?

Ashtavakra Samhita

His actions will permit of no external standard of judgement. So long as they are the inevitable outflow of his Inner Life, they are good, even holy.

D. T. Suzuki

Supreme Enlightenment is realizing there is not the slightest thing to be attained.

Diamond Sutra

Into any man who is brought low God pours His whole Self in all His might, so utterly that neither of His life, His being, nor His nature, nay, nor of His perfect Godhead, does He keep aught back. He empties out the whole thereof as fruits into that man who in abandonment to God assumes the lowest place.

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 persuasion?

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...