There are (you see) three sorts of Muslims: the vast majority who put God infinitely above themselves; a much smaller number of more spiritually mature souls who put God above and within themselves; and a (fortunately) very small number who put God within themselves, and either forget about or deny His unapproachable holiness. Of these three types, the first is following the safe way; though somewhat narrow, it’s wonderfully conducive to living the true Muslim life. The second is ideal, and can be even more effective, but it’s liable to wander off into dangerous country. The third runs counter to Islam, and is notorious for leading to wild and immoral conduct. For the individual, it’s spiritual ruin. For the community, it’s a dreadful disease which - because it can spread so far and so fast - calls for the most drastic surgery.
COUNSEL: Do you link the Accused with this third and perverted type?
WITNESS: If it were not for his incursions into Islam, I would hesitate to pronounce on a non-Muslim. However, they entitle me - they oblige me - to reply to your question. My answer is: yes. Examining, in preparation for my testimony today, the writings of Mr John a-Nokes, I found them to be blasphemous. The comments I’ve just made about Mansur would seem to apply to him.
COUNSEL: What about his frequent invocations of Jelaluddin Rumi, and other Sufi masters, in support of his teachings?
WITNESS: Rumi was an eminent and inspired Muslim poet, but - like most poets - given to fantasy and exaggeration. This makes it easy to extract from his voluminous works many passages which seem to proclaim God’s immanence at the expense of His transcendence. The same is true of other famous Sufis, such as Attar and Hafiz. Also I believe that some Sufis did go (and still go) much too far in Mansur’s direction. Sufism is a hazardous province of their own country for native Muslims to venture into, let alone foreigners.
We particularly deplore the bad name given to the Faith when aspects of it are torn from their context, misunderstood and misapplied in the service of blasphemy as defined by non-Muslims.
COUNSEL, to Jury: Need I stress the importance of this extra-mural testimony confirming the guilt of the Accused? As I say, it does much to establish the Crown’s case upon a wider than Judaeo-Christian basis.
Defence: Far is High
MYSELF, to Witness: My first question may seem irrelevant, but it isn’t. It’s about the prayers with which every true Muslim punctuates his day - at dawn, noon, mid-afternoon, sunset and bedtime; prayers which are as physical as they are mental, as much the body at worship as the mind at worship. No half-measures in Islam’s adoration of Allah! At one point the worshipper’s eyes are turned heavenwards and his hands are held high. At another, his forehead’s on the ground. In between are a variety of gestures appropriate to the words being recited. Am I right so far, Reverend Sir?
WITNESS: Right enough.
MYSELF: My point is that these truly energetic prayers include, and elaborate on, the bowing exercise which - you Jurors will remember - I’ve been trying to get you to do. In fact, I go so far as to call this bowing my Defence posture, my Defence in action. My intention is that, in this cosmic down-sweep, the words shall come to life - to a Life that’s larger than life.
Back to you, Reverend Sir. I take it that, in making this deepest of bows, Muslims are re-awaking to the presence of God in God’s world, which is truly a vertical world. Here’s a lofty and profound experience which, repeated so frequently and so regularly, is a large ingredient of Islam’s genius. In these prayers can be found the secret of its social cohesion and its spectacular success in world history. Do you agree?
WITNESS: I would rather say that our prayers prevent us from forgetting Almighty God for more than a few hours at a time; neglecting them, we would degenerate into virtual atheists. And of course they do have far-reaching social consequences.
MYSELF: In traditional Christianity, as distinct from the modern sort, we paint much the same picture of God in His world - again an essentially vertical world. Take for example that magnificent hymn of Cardinal Newman’s:
Praise to the Holiest in the height
And in the depth be praise;
In all His words most wonderful,
Most sure in all His ways.
We have it again in the song of the angels at the Nativity: ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.’ Notably also, of course, in the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’ And in many Psalms which speak of our help coming from above. When very young I sang, with enthusiasm and high conviction, ‘There’s a home for little children, above the bright blue sky.’ It made up for some of the more unheavenly features of one’s earthly home. Yes, indeed: the traditional Judaeo-Christian universe is as truly a vertical one as the Muslim universe. God’s at the very apex of it, and beneath Him are descending layers - each darker and heavier and less divine than the last - with man fairly near the base. At the same time God is present throughout, from top to bottom.
That’s the way Christians felt and thought about God’s vertical world. But we did little to translate our thoughts and feelings into bodily actions. We stood and we sat at worship, and at intervals we condescended to kneel. Occasionally we nodded, but preferred not to bow. We had stiff backs - a handicap that Islam’s wonderfully free of. From its explosive beginnings some fourteen centuries ago it has made full use of the law that, to the extent that feeling and thinking are given bodily expression, they are no longer vague, sentimental, variable and half-hearted.
Reverend Sir, what do you say to this?
WITNESS: There’s much truth in it. But I’m not quite clear about its relevance to the crime you’re charged with.
COUNSEL: Nor are the Jury, I’m sure. If this is your cross-examination of the Prosecution’s Witness, it’s taking a cumbersome and long-winded form, and the point of it all is obscure.
MYSELF: I’ve finished with the Mullah for the moment, but ask him not to leave the courtroom - I may have one or two further questions for him later on. As for our exchange on the verticality - which means divinity - of the traditional world-picture in all Western religion, its importance for the Defence is about to become very clear indeed.
The modern, pseudo-scientific - and, yes, virtually atheistic - picture is of a world that has lost its vertical dimension. It was an upright world, lively, in good nick. Now it has fallen flat on its back. If you Jury members will please turn to Diagram No. 22, you will follow me easily.
Diagram No. 22
Hinged about myself here - about my Bottom Line - the high places of my childhood have become the far places of my manhood. Without my noticing, my world has been fed a Mickey Finn and laid out flat. No question of bowing now. I don’t kowtow to gods who are on my level, still less to a subhuman cosmos.
Here I have a confession to make. For fifteen years and more I had been drawing - less as a meditational exercise than as a visual aid to self-discovery - countless mandala patterns, or nests of concentric circles, for arranging my First-person universe in, region by region. And all along I had thought of the pattern as horizontal. The galaxies and stars in it were out there, not up here. It’s true that my universe soon slept off its knockout drop and opened an eye, but it still lay on its back. It was a dazed and prostrate world, stretching into the far distance.
And then it got up. The far became high. As recently as two years ago it happened. The world-door, hinged right here, suddenly opened and swung through 90°. Here was my world at last, all of it here. It had come back to me. Yet it was now God’s world again, infinitely awesome, a tall world for bowing to. It was at once more me and less me. If that’s paradoxical, I say God bless His lovely paradoxes!
However vast the floor and luxurious the carpet, you don’t bow to it - it’s for walking on. But tack the carpet to the wall, and it’s for looking at - it’s God’s tapestry, displaying the magnificent hierarchy of heaven and earth, and all of it given right here. The world’s lofty and de
ep, God’s in His heaven and I’m His child again on Earth. Once more heaven’s above the bright blue sky, and Jackie’s down here gazing up at it, wonderstruck. The real and given world’s an upstanding world, nearer than near yet more awesome than awesome.
COUNSEL, springing to his feet in great excitement, feigned or real: Hold on! If I can believe my ears you’re coolly abandoning - just like that! - the basic contention of the Defence, which is that God’s throne is set up at your very Centre. Now you’re locating it at your circumference, the very outside edge of your world. A bigger turn-around can’t be imagined. In which event - given such abject apologies to offended parties as His Honour may determine, and to the court for this shocking waste of its time - the Prosecution has no case against you. No case, I mean, that a fine or a shortish prison sentence wouldn’t atone for.
MYSELF: I fear you won’t be so ready to let me off when I piece together and fill out the tale I’ve been telling you about myself - with the help of Diagram No. 23, which the Jury should please now turn to.
1 - Infant’s Vertical World
High is high
2 - Adult’s Prostrate World
High is far
3 Seer’s Vertical World
Far is high
Diagram No. 23
Let me quickly run through the three-part story:
Chapter One is about myself the infant. I haven’t yet learned to push away and distance my world, either in space or in time. It’s two-dimensional, all of it here and all of it now. An upright world, an up-and-down world, immensely high, wide and handsome. All of it mine. All of it alive with my life.
Chapter Two is about myself the adult - the grown-up whose world has grown down. Or rather, fallen down. Hinged about myself here and now, it has collapsed into there and then and is mine no longer. I’m all at once desperately poor. And, with it, desperately proud. Now I experience myself as a superior but frightened stranger in an alien and lifeless world, as a minute oasis in that immense cosmic Sahara. I alone am worshipful. That prostrate expanse invites and urges me to commit the crime of Mansur. All that’s left to bow to is myself.
In Chapter Three I come to my senses. Encouraged by any competent artist, I look to see. His painting or photograph helps to show me what enchantment there is in the collapse of distance: it rubs my nose in the up-ended scene. I see that knocked-flat world wake up, and get up, and stay up. The well-oiled hinge works all the time, in little things as in great. The long gradient of the hill in front of me becomes short and steep, a step and not a slope at all, and I’m right up to it. The mountain, now two-dimensional - triangular instead of pyramidal - keeps its slopes on either side, but ahead is sheer. The sky - though as wide as ever - is immensely higher. The bright blue lid of the universe is halved and set up on edge. From top to bottom the world is charged with the glory of God and His grandeur. The charm and mystery of this truly brave new world is that it is all here and now and mine, yet indescribably worshipful. At once infinitely humbled and infinitely exalted, the last thing I’m interested in is, like Mansur, taking possession of God. Echoing Job, I exclaim, ‘Is not God in the height of heaven? and behold the height of the stars, how high they are!’
This is what I see, this is how I feel, this is the way I want to live.
I should like now to re-call the Witness. [The Mullah returns to the box. I address him.] Well, Reverend Sir, I hope this account of the up-ending of God’s world has done something to clear me, in your eyes, of that unbridled and unbalanced immanentism which cost poor Mansur so dear.
WITNESS: To some extent it has. I’m happy to admit that your incursions into Islamic spirituality appear less one-sided (and therefore less heretical) than I had supposed. And that if you were to convert to Islam I wouldn’t pursue you with charges of blasphemy. Provided, of course, you stick to what you’ve been telling us.
COUNSEL: I’m utterly baffled! How is it, Nokes, that in your writings (which I’ve made it my business to know pretty well) there’s no mention of this hinging and up-ending of the universe? It looks to me - and, I expect, to the jury - like panic stations, a last-minute effort to buy a favourable verdict, and by no means a change of heart. Only if you will now explicitly and without hedging withdraw all those blasphemous statements made during and before this Trial - to the effect that you are the very One that Christians and Jews and Muslims worship as the Highest - will the Crown consider withdrawing its charge against you.
Well, what have you got to say?
MYSELF: I don’t take back a word of it.
Members of the Jury, to understand why I won’t give an inch and don’t need to, please turn to Diagram No. 24. Look at the difference between that little, tiny-armed, other-way-up, paper-thin, framed-and-glazed third person who has no room for God - and this immense First Person who is the opposite of all that and brim-full of God, and whose God’s-arms visibly reach (as if up-lifted in Muslim prayer) beyond the Stars. lt's not that little one who bows before this Big One. As Angelus Silesius says, ‘God bends and bows to Himself, and to Himself doth pray’.
Diagram No. 24
The truth - so simple and obvious, yet so astounding - is that the prostrate world is man’s and the upright world is God’s. Why? Because (as I’ve already demonstrated in this court) God is omnipresent, and for Him alone far is near and high. He, and not John a-Nokes, draws the Bottom Line and oils and operates the Hinge about which His world swings vertical and magnificent.
It’s as this unique First Person who is Himself that I truly revere Him as higher than the highest. That jackass Jack is much too conceited, much too stuck-up, to begin to do so.
Only as Him am I lowly enough - and deep enough - to be Him.
I call six in support, out of scores that stand ready to testify:
He who knows about depth knows about God.
Paul Tillich
And Jacob awaked out of his sleep [in which he’d dreamed about a ladder set up between Earth and Heaven] and he said, Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not... this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.
Genesis
One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all... Now that he ascended, what is it but that he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth? He that descended is the same also that ascended up far above all heavens, that he might fill all things.
St Paul
The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide...
And he whose soul is flat - the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.
Edna St Vincent Millay
The outward man is the swinging door, the Inner Man is the still hinge. When I am one with that wherein are all things, past and present and to come, and all the same distance... then they are all in God and all in me.
Eckhart
My final Witness is Judy Taylor, author of As I See It, who lost her sight as a child. Regaining it forty years later, she asked:
‘What is that white thing sticking straight up in the air beside the house opposite? It turned out to be the drive. She got it to lie down in due course.
Prosecution Witness No. 24
THE REGISTRAR
COUNSEL: The Accused frequently asserts in his writings, and he has repeated it often enough in this court, that he was not born and therefore will not die. Well, our next Witness is the Registrar of Births and Marriages and Deaths in the Urban District of Easterton. He has looked up in his records and brought along a copy of a certain registration of birth. I’m asking him to read out this document to the court.
WITNESS: I knew the Accused’s parents personally, and I made a point of registering the birth of their son myself. Here’s how the certificate reads:
COUNSEL: I understand you also hold in your office records of the birth of the Accused’s parents. And of their deaths - which, again, you registered personally.
WITNESS: That’s right. They died at a ra
ther early age, within a few weeks of each other, in 1980.
COUNSEL: So it seems that the Accused was born all right, and born into a family subject to the normal hazards of human existence... When you told us his parents died prematurely, what had you in mind?
WITNESS: It was soon after the Accused had apostatized -
MYSELF, furiously: Your Honour! What possible motive can Counsel have for dragging in my parents other than the desire to prejudice the Jury against me by speculation and innuendo concerning our family relationships? I’m here to be tried on a specific charge, not to suffer needless character-assassination by him and this Witness. And not to have my feelings scarified at the Prosecution’s whim.
JUDGE: Is Counsel quite sure that further testimony from this Witness has a direct bearing on this case?
COUNSEL: I am, Your Honour.
JUDGE: You may proceed, then, but with a care not to give the Accused cause for further complaint.
COUNSEL: I’m obliged to Your Honour... Witness, please continue, bearing in mind the Judge’s proviso.
WITNESS: The Nokes family had for three generations been very pious people belonging to a particularly strict branch of the Primitive Methodists. They were somewhat notorious locally for their uncompromising religious views, but respected for their human qualities. I knew the Accused’s father well, because for many years he did maintenance work for me. He was a most skilled and hard-working craftsman, scrupulously honest and consistently cheerful. The greatest mistake he ever made in his life (he told me) was agreeing to his elder son going up to London University to study civil engineering. He blamed himself for what happened to Jack as a result (so he believed) of that move to a very different world.
At fourteen, Jack, to the great joy of his parents, had gone through the conversion process - the stages of conviction of sin, repentance, justification by faith, and the witness of the Spirit - much valued by the Primitive Methodists, and had promptly become a full church member. Which he continued to be, first in Easterton and then in London - till he reached the age of twenty-one, to the day. Then it was that the blow fell on the family, with absolutely no warning.
The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God Page 25
