God The Invisible King, H. G. Wells [best self help books to read txt] 📗

of a faith different from and perhaps in several

particulars opposed to his own. The writer will be found to be

sympathetic with all sincere religious feeling. Nevertheless it is

well to prepare the prospective reader for statements that may jar

harshly against deeply rooted mental habits. It is well to warn him

at the outset that the departure from accepted beliefs is here no

vague scepticism, but a quite sharply defined objection to dogmas

very widely revered. Let the writer state the most probable

occasion of trouble forthwith. An issue upon which this book will

be found particularly uncompromising is the dogma of the Trinity.

The writer is of opinion that the Council of Nicaea, which forcibly

crystallised the controversies of two centuries and formulated the

creed upon which all the existing Christian churches are based, was

one of the most disastrous and one of the least venerable of all

religious gatherings, and he holds that the Alexandrine speculations

which were then conclusively imposed upon Christianity merit only

disrespectful attention at the present time. There you have a chief

possibility of offence. He is quite unable to pretend any awe for

what he considers the spiritual monstrosities established by that

undignified gathering. He makes no attempt to be obscure or

propitiatory in this connection. He criticises the creeds

explicitly and frankly, because he believes it is particularly

necessary to clear them out of the way of those who are seeking

religious consolation at this present time of exceptional religious

need. He does little to conceal his indignation at the role played

by these dogmas in obscuring, perverting, and preventing the

religious life of mankind. After this warning such readers from

among the various Christian churches and sects as are accessible to

storms of theological fear or passion to whom the Trinity is an

ineffable mystery and the name of God almost unspeakably awful, read

on at their own risk. This is a religious book written by a

believer, but so far as their beliefs and religion go it may seem to

them more sceptical and more antagonistic than blank atheism. That

the writer cannot tell. He is not simply denying their God. He is

declaring that there is a living God, different altogether from that

Triune God and nearer to the heart of man. The spirit of this book

is like that of a missionary who would only too gladly overthrow and

smash some Polynesian divinity of shark’s teeth and painted wood and

mother-of-pearl. To the writer such elaborations as “begotten of

the Father before all worlds” are no better than intellectual

shark’s teeth and oyster shells. His purpose, like the purpose of

that missionary, is not primarily to shock and insult; but he is

zealous to liberate, and he is impatient with a reverence that

stands between man and God. He gives this fair warning and proceeds

with his matter.

 

His matter is modern religion as he sees it. It is only

incidentally and because it is unavoidable that he attacks doctrinal

Christianity.

 

In a previous book, “First and Last Things” (Constable and Co.), he

has stated his convictions upon certain general ideas of life and

thought as clearly as he could. All of philosophy, all of

metaphysics that is, seems to him to be a discussion of the

relations of class and individual. The antagonism of the Nominalist

and the Realist, the opposition of the One and the Many, the

contrast of the Ideal and the Actual, all these oppositions express

a certain structural and essential duality in the activity of the

human mind. From an imperfect recognition of that duality ensue

great masses of misconception. That was the substance of “First and

Last Things.” In this present book there is no further attack on

philosophical or metaphysical questions. Here we work at a less

fundamental level and deal with religious feeling and religious

ideas. But just as the writer was inclined to attribute a whole

world of disputation and inexactitudes to confused thinking about

the exact value of classes and terms, so here he is disposed to

think that interminable controversies and conflicts arise out of a

confusion of intention due to a double meaning of the word “God”;

that the word “God” conveys not one idea or set of ideas, but

several essentially different ideas, incompatible one with another,

and falling mainly into one or other of two divergent groups; and

that people slip carelessly from one to the other of these groups of

ideas and so get into ultimately inextricable confusions.

 

The writer believes that the centuries of fluid religious thought

that preceded the violent ultimate crystallisation of Nicaea, was

essentially a struggle—obscured, of course, by many complexities—

to reconcile and get into a relationship these two separate main

series of God-ideas.

 

Putting the leading id a part against evil.

 

The writer believes that these dogmas of relationship are not merely

extraneous to religion, but an impediment to religion. His aim in

this book is to give a statement of religion which is no longer

entangled in such speculations and disputes.

 

Let him add only one other note of explanation in this preface, and

that is to remark that except for one incidental passage (in Chapter

IV., 1), nowhere does he discuss the question of personal

immortality. [It is discussed in “First and Last Things,” Book IV,

4.] He omits this question because he does not consider that it has

any more bearing upon the essentials of religion, than have the

theories we may hold about the relation of God and the moral law to

the starry universe. The latter is a question for the theologian,

the former for the psychologist. Whether we are mortal or immortaea of this book very roughly, these two

antagonistic typical conceptions of God may be best contrasted by

speaking of one of them as God-as-Nature or the Creator, and of the

other as God-as-Christ or the Redeemer. One is the great Outward

God; the other is the Inmost God. The first idea was perhaps

developed most highly and completely in the God of Spinoza. It is a

conception of God tending to pantheism, to an idea of a

comprehensive God as ruling with justice rather than affection, to a

conception of aloofness and awestriking worshipfulness. The second

idea, which is opposed to this idea of an absolute God, is the God

of the human heart. The writer would suggest that the great outline

of the theological struggles of that phase of civilisation and world

unity which produced Christianity, was a persistent but unsuccessful

attempt to get these two different ideas of God into one focus. It

was an attempt to make the God of Nature accessible and the God of

the Heart invincible, to bring the former into a conception of love

and to vest the latter with the beauty of stars and flowers and the

dignity of inexorable justice. There could be no finer metaphor for

such a correlation than Fatherhood and Sonship. But the trouble is

that it seems impossible to most people to continue to regard the

relations of the Father to the Son as being simply a mystical

metaphor. Presently some materialistic bias swings them in a moment

of intellectual carelessness back to the idea of sexual filiation.

 

And it may further be suggested that the extreme aloofness and

inhumanity, which is logically necessary in the idea of a Creator

God, of an Infinite God, was the reason, so to speak, for the

invention of a Holy Spirit, as something proceeding from him, as

something bridging the great gulf, a Comforter, a mediator

descending into the sphere of the human understanding. That, and

the suggestive influence of the Egyptian Trinity that was then being

worshipped at the Serapeum, and which had saturated the thought of

Alexandria with the conception of a trinity in unity, are probably

the realities that account for the Third Person of the Christian

Trinity. At any rate the present writer believes that the

discussions that shaped the Christian theology we know were

dominated by such natural and fundamental thoughts. These

discussions were, of course, complicated from the outset; and

particularly were they complicated by the identification of the man

Jesus with the theological Christ, by materialistic expectations of

his second coming, by materialistic inventions about his

“miraculous” begetting, and by the morbid speculations about

virginity and the like that arose out of such grossness. They were

still further complicated by the idea of the textual inspiration of

the scriptures, which presently swamped thought in textual

interpretation. That swamping came very early in the development of

Christianity. The writer of St. John’s gospel appears still to be

thinking with a considerable freedom, but Origen is already

hopelessly in the net of the texts. The writer of St. John’s gospel

was a free man, but Origen was a superstitious man. He was

emasculated mentally as well as bodily through his bibliolatry. He

quotes; his predecessor thinks.

 

But the writer throws out these guesses at the probable intentions

of early Christian thought in passing. His business here is the

definition of a position. The writer’s position here in this book

is, firstly, complete Agnosticism in the matter of God the Creator,

and secondly, entire faith in the matter of God the Redeemer. That,

so to speak, is the key of his book. He cannot bring the two ideas

under the same term God. He uses the word God therefore for the God

in our hearts only, and he uses the term the Veiled Being for the

ultimate mysteries of the universe, and he declares that we do not

know and perhaps cannot know in any comprehensible terms the

relation of the Veiled Being to that living reality in our lives who

is, in his terminology, the true God. Speaking from the point of

view of practical religion, he is restricting and defining the word

God, as meaning only the personal God of mankind, he is restricting

it so as to exclude all cosmogony and ideas of providence from our

religious thought and leave nothing but the essentials of the

religious life.

 

Many people, whom one would class as rather liberal Christians of an

Arian or Arminian complexion, may find the larger part of this book

acceptable to them if they will read “the Christ God” where the

writer has written “God.” They will then differ from him upon

little more than the question whether there is an essential identity

in aim and quality between the Christ God and the Veiled Being, who

answer to their Creator God. This the orthodox post Nicaean

Christians assert, and many pre-Nicaeans and many heretics (as the

Cathars) contradicted with its exact contrary. The Cathars,

Paulicians, Albigenses and so on held, with the Manichaeans, that

the God of Nature, God the Father, was evil. The Christ God was his

antagonist. This was the idea of the poet Shelley. And passing

beyond Christian theology altogether a clue can still be found to

many problems in comparative theology in this distinction between

the Being of Nature (cf. Kant’s “starry vault above”) and the God

of the heart (Kant’s “moral law within”). The idea of an antagonism

seems to have been cardinal in the thought of the Essenes and the

Orphic cult and in the Persian dualism. So, too, Buddhism seems to

be “antagonistic.” On the other hand, the Moslem teaching and

modern Judaism seem absolutely to combine and identify the two; God

the creator is altogether and without distinction also God the King

of Mankind. Christianity stands somewhere between such complete

identification and complete antagonism. It admits a difference in

attitude between Father and Son in its distinction between the Old

Dispensation (of the Old Testament) and the New. Every possible

change is rung in the great religions of the world between

identification, complete separation, equality, and disproportion of

these Beings; but it will be found that these two ideas are,