The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God

by Douglas Harding

  MYSELF: Which I do, unreservedly. Specially so because - unlike fallen and blaspheming humankind - they all live without question from that One Light of Awareness, from their First Personhood, and never for a moment try to snuff it out with their third personhood. They build no self-image to obstruct their Space with, acquire no face to mask their original Face. Only humans are such blockheads as to stand in and block their own Light. God in Christ shines at the Centre of each animal’s world, His throne unusurped. T. E. (‘God wot’) Brown, having killed a toad, confessed:

  I smote it cruelly,

  Then all the place with subtle radiance glowed –

  I looked, and it was He!

  Humans ought, indeed, to reverence these junior members of the family, who are all living without effort or delusion from the Clarity that sages and seers consciously live from - after many a struggle and many a backsliding.

  And, after all, what I’m saying is implicit in the Christian story, beginning with the Annunciation, nine months before the birth in Bethlehem. To take on human form, God the Son had first to take on the whole range of animal forms, from a single cell upwards, in Mary’s womb. What a telling witness to Nature’s essential Christliness! The alternative view is that Mary’s pregnancy was a phantom one, followed at the last moment - hey presto! - by the real thing! An unlikely and unlovely tale. By contrast, how convincing and poignant is the Incarnation which, occurring at one level, occurs at all levels - so that, in effect, the whole Creation (as Paul pictured it) is adopted and redeemed! Your tsetse flies and tapeworms, Sir Gerald, and all!

  Counsel, clasping his wig in a gesture of despair, recalls the Witness to the box. He asks whether she has heard all that has passed since she left it, and how she feels about it.

  WITNESS: I’ve followed every word, and am deeply saddened. It was our Lord Jesus Christ himself who said: ‘No man cometh unto the Father, but by me.’ Also ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life.’ There’s only one Jesus Christ, and he alone is our Saviour.

  MYSELF: Believe it or not, once again I entirely agree. The plain fact is that the First Person is never plural. Never, never, will you find a pair of First Persons, much less a gaggle of them. A room full of headless inverted bodies would be Bluebeard’s cold-store. The ‘I’ and the ‘Me’ that Jesus uses in those two great texts are God’s own ‘I’ and ‘Me’, and no man’s. (As Eckhart tells us, only God can truly say ‘I’.) It’s as the unique and eternal First Person who is none other than God Himself that Jesus truly claims to be the Way and the Truth and the Life, and not as the third person who showed up in his mirror - the human being who was just one of many children in Nazareth, and just one of the many carpenters in Palestine. Quite the most mysterious and marvellous and saving thing about the Christ that lives in you, my sister, and me, and everyone here in court, is that he’s in each of us unique and whole and one and undivided and the same for ever and ever. ‘Christ,’ says that well-loved Jesuit father, Gerard W. Hughes, ‘is what we are called on to become.’ Christ, not Christs.

  WITNESS: He alone suffered crucifixion for the sins of the world.

  MYSELF: Certainly. And all of us are caught up in that same suffering and that same crucifixion and that same cure for sin. It’s the cosmic pattern of things, the very blueprint and architectonic of Creation. I just can’t narrow Christ down the way so many nominal Christians succeed in doing. I don’t believe that the stigmata of St Francis and St Pio were mere hysterical symptoms, and not evidence of their Christing. Or that the transubstantiation of the bread and wine into the flesh and the blood of Christ, before they are incorporated into the body of the communicant, is nothing but pious mumbo-jumbo. Or that the day of Crucifixion should be called Bad Friday, the Day of Defeat. Or that Paul lied about being crucified with Christ. Or that the Christ-picture you have before you in that booklet is some kind of accident or trick of mine, a trompe-l’oeil. Or that the Early Fathers of the Church were deluded when they saw Christ as the Archetypal Man, man as he is essentially. ‘By dwelling in one the Word dwelt in all,’ wrote St Cyril of Alexandria, ‘so that the one having been constituted the Son of God in power, the same dignity might pass to the whole human race.’

  Let me add this: if to be a Christian is to see Christ everywhere, to feel his presence in every creature, and to be ravished by the joy and beauty of it all, then I’m a Christian all right.

  Really the truth is so simple, so gloriously self evident, if only we will stop fighting it. Every creature takes two forms and has two aspects - what it is for others and what it is for itself- and in all respects they are diametric opposites. The latter - call it by what name you like - is cruciform. The built-in nature of the First Person is to vanish in favour of third persons, to give his life for the whole world, ranging from particles to island universes. To lead others he must turn his back on them, but to save them he must face them - on the cross. No, this is not a comfortable arrangement. It’s a terrible world. But thank God it’s His world, and the secret behind it is His own Crucifixion, Calvary for ever being re-enacted in and for each one of us. And the secret behind Calvary is the most incredible love. The love which is heaven and for ever.

  COUNSEL: Are you sure that’s where you are going? The Witness has grave doubts.

  MYSELF: Will I go to heaven when I die? For light on this subject, please turn to Diagram No. 33.

  Diagram No. 33

  Will I go to a real, bright, starry heaven and no dim dream-world? Yes! Provided I die now, on the inverted T-cross of St Anthony (a-b-c-dd). I can’t ascend (a) to the heights (per ardua ad astra just isn’t on), but I can and must descend (b) to the depths, to the baseline I never in fact left, to the crossroads (c) of my No-thingness and my death as a separate being. Here, taking both directions at once (d-d), I come to a heaven which, far from being a cloud-cuckoo-land, is as concrete and physical as it is spiritual. I come to it by the low road of self-abandonment, the high road of self-development being closed to traffic. (It never was a through road, except on maps.) The embracing arms of love gain the peak that the feet lose by climbing. At (d-d), in the heaven where the deepest is the widest, I come to ‘the love that moves the Sun and the other stars.’ Don’t believe this: spread your arms and test it. As a mother loves her child because she embraces her child, so you come to love your world because you embrace your world. Because, as First Person Singular, you are cruciform, built for the loving that is God’s loving. The loving that is death and resurrection – death for the world and resurrection as the world.

  As Madame Guyon said, ‘God gives us the cross, and the cross gives us to God.’ And Thomas à Kempis:

  The cross always stands ready, and everywhere awaits you. You cannot escape it, wherever you flee; for wherever you go, you bear yourself, and always find yourself. Look up or down, within you or without, and everywhere you will find the cross. And everywhere you must have patience, if you wish to attain inner peace, and win an eternal crown.

  I don’t understand this. It’s beyond all comprehension. But with the utmost clarity I see it’s so, my pain and its relief confirm it, and my heart knows it always.

  WITNESS: Well, God’s your judge, not me. Some of what you say raises my hopes that our Lord’s saving love is gaining admittance to your heart. Other things you say suggest that it’s to yourself rather than Him that you are looking for salvation, and I tremble for you. Many of your ideas I can’t grasp at all. They don’t accord with the scriptures I know, or with the faith of Christians I know. All the same, in the Father’s house are many mansions. Earnestly I pray that you may find yourself in one of them, and not in outer darkness.

  MYSELF: Well, let’s leave it at that. May I just pass on to you the thought that the true spiritual life is all paradox, and that the more Christ is you and me the more he’s altogether adorable as other than you and me?

  It’s to the Jury and to His Honour that I now turn, with the earnest request that each of you will drop all prejudice and carry out a very sma
ll but all-important investigation. One which will in seconds summarize and make perfectly clear to you, without verbal complications, what I’ve been saying at length in reply to Counsel and his Witness.

  First, please refer again to Diagram No. 15 [see Witness 15 The New Apocalyptic] and note once more the spectacular contrast between yourself as second/third person and as First Person.

  Next, please glance around the court and check that on present evidence all those other people are built to that second/third-person pattern. All, without exception, are in the normal human condition. The New Bailey is no Bluebeard’s chamber.

  Then please - for the very last time in this Trial - stretch out your arms widely at shoulder height, and simultaneously look down at yourself. What you see there is the most significant, the most tremendous of all the sights you have ever seen or will ever see. And the most overlooked because the most feared. Feared not without reason...

  I’m grateful to His Honour, and to you two (or is it three?) members of the Jury, for complying. To the remaining nine or ten let me say that I do understand your terror. Crucifixion is a nasty business. However, it happens also to be universal and inescapable. And, when seen and accepted for what it is, it is your entry into the Heaven of God’s love and God’s peace for ever.

  So I appeal to you ten once more. In the end my Defence is for seeing, not understanding...

  JUDGE: The Accused is on trial for his life. I must ask you to do this little thing for him, sincerely and with full attention. Otherwise, you’re in danger of going away from here with the blood of an innocent man on your hands. [They comply hurriedly, but with an eye on the Judge rather than themselves...]

  MYSELF: Among my dear friends who, by thus facing and embracing the wide world, awakened to What lies at its Centre, I think specially of Anne. She happened to be hanging out the washing. To the Jury I say: it’s never too late to hang out the washing, Anne-fashion; it’s never too late to be built for loving, God-fashion; it’s never too late to experience dying and resurrection, Christ-fashion.

  As for myself, how slow I’ve been to fathom the depth and power and persuasiveness of this simple act of enfolding Christ’s own world in Christ’s own arms - arms proceeding from no lack lustre Jack’s shoulders, but from the deathless brilliance right here! But at last I find myself saying, with Gerard Manley Hopkins:

  I am at once what Christ is,

  since he was what I am,

  and this Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood,

  is immortal diamond.

  Or, less beautifully but not less passionately, with Ruysbroeck:

  Holy Scripture teaches that God, the heavenly Father, created all men in His image and in His likeness. His image is His Son, His own eternal Wisdom, and St John says that in this all things have life. And the life is nothing else than the image of God, in which God has everlastingly begotten all things, and which is the cause of all creatures. And so this image, which is the Son of God, is eternal, before all creation. And we are all made in this eternal image, for in the noblest part of our souls, that is in the properties of our highest powers, we are made as a living, eternal mirror of God, in which God has imprisoned His eternal image, and into which no other image can ever enter.

  Or, in St Paul’s incomparable style:

  Ye have put off the old man with his deeds; and have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him: Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.

  So that I can, with George Herbert, sing and shout:

  Christ is my onely head,

  My alone onely heart and breast,

  My onely musick.

  Prosecution Summing-up

  Ladies and gentlemen of the Jury, blasphemy is unique. Like other very serious crimes - such as murder, robbery with violence, and rape - it is a crime against our species. But blasphemy is also the crime against our Creator, and therefore immeasurably more terrible than any other. It is this most heinous of offences with which John a-Nokes stands charged - and of which, the Crown maintains, he has over and over again, in your presence, been proved guilty.

  I shouldn’t be at all surprised, however, if you felt that the Defence has sometimes had the better of it in the course of this Trial. That it has occasionally had the Prosecution tied in knots. Well, knotted or unknotted, the Prosecution wishes (and can well afford) to pay tribute to the ingenuity with which Mr John a-Nokes has turned a number of its twenty-seven witnesses into witnesses for the Defence - seemingly. And neutralized others - seemingly. Seemingly, I repeat. For in fact he has done nothing of the kind. Not one of them testified to Nokes’s innocence of the charge brought against him under the Blasphemy Act. Not a single one.

  The Defence has shot its bolt - with lots of spectacular skirmishings and flashes and bangs. The only snag is that the missile falters in mid-air and falls far short of the target. Now it’s the Prosecution’s turn. The time has come finally to expose the structural weakness of the Defence. No need of a popgun, let alone artillery fire, from our side. A touch is enough to bring that lofty card-castle tumbling. Never mind how it might briefly stand up outside this court; here, it’s not to be taken seriously for a moment. It’s a game. More precisely, an elaborate diversion. The Accused has made good use of the ploy whereby, if you have no answer to the charge brought against you, you unobtrusively substitute for it one you can answer, and then make a great song and dance proving your innocence. Rather as if the Knave of Hearts, accused of stealing tarts and hoping against hope that the Queen has forgotten they were treacle tarts, swears he never, O never stole any jam tarts; and then begins a long spiel about how he hates jam tarts anyway, and how they make him sick, and so on. In that playing-card court, Jack has some chance of getting away with it. In this court of law, Jack has no chance at all. The game’s up, Jack! Your diversions have ceased to divert the course of justice.

  Let me remind him and you the Jury of the substance of the Act. The Prosecution is required to prove that the Accused has so outraged people’s religious susceptibilities that they have been driven to take the law into their own hands. It is enough to show that he goes out of his way to scandalize those people, by pouring contempt and derision on an Object or Person or Being they revere - say (to take the extreme example) by falsely claiming to be that very Object or Person or Being. Did he, in fact, do precisely this, persistently? That’s the question that you, the jury, must address.

  Can there be the shadow of a shadow of a doubt about the answer?

  In his summing-up, the Accused will doubtless make a lot of that little word ‘falsely’. He will say that he has proved that he really is the Supreme Being. Well, practically every Witness has testified to the contrary. If any doubt remains in our minds, let’s see whether he can give us a last-minute demonstration of his supremacy by performing I-don’t-know-what wonder. By arranging for the New Bailey to be struck by lightning, perhaps.

  Not surprisingly, the Accused follows the rule that the best defence is attack - specially when your own fortifications are crumbling or non-existent. Accused of blasphemy, he goes on to prove, to his own total satisfaction, that he’s practically the only one in court - if not the world - who isn’t guilty of blasphemy! A bold and successful stratagem, maybe, in a few small circles outside this court, but not inside. Here we decline to accept for a moment, in place of the Crown’s definition of blasphemy, that of the Accused. Which in any case (leaving the Act aside for the moment) is a bad definition - one that doesn’t define and mark out boundaries but defaces and rubs out boundaries, and is therefore no definition whatever. To accuse everyone of blasphemy, or of any other crime, is to accuse no one. All it does is to show how antisocial, how misanthropic you are.

  It’s the nature and the business of every self to be centred on itself, to announce itself distinctly, to get up off its bottom and do and be its own thing; otherwise, the world’
s reduced as in a blender to a tasteless soup, with no taster. A man is, and stands for, that man and no other. Such is the human condition the wide world over and down the ages - like it or loathe it. If that’s blasphemy, I like it. And everyone likes it. And everything shows that God likes it, too. So I say to Nokes: Come on! A blasphemous species - what on Earth does that mean? The trouble with your Defence is that it’s too clever-clever, too immoderate, too damned radical by half - and therefore self-defeating. It pushes its arguments so far and so hard against the brick wall of common sense that they rebound and knock out the Defender. Knock him cold.

  I turn to the Jury. Your job, no matter what you happen to think of the two wildly different definitions of blasphemy that have been put to you - Nokes’s version and the Crown’s version - is to go by the latter. If you’re sensible, you’ll approve of it. But whether you approve or disapprove is beside the point. It’s the law. This is a court of law. Juries serve in it under oath to uphold the law, regardless of their private opinions.

  The Accused makes out he’s above the law. I say that at least part of him isn’t, and that’s the part the law can chop. He makes out that he has an inalienable natural right to announce to an unbelieving world his true and superhuman identity, which he alone is in a position to check up on, to introspect. Well I say that his fellow men have an inalienable and natural right to announce and denounce what they make of him, and to subject his apparent and human identity to apparent and human laws - to the extent, if need be, of terminating his apparent and human life. If, as he claims, he isn’t what he appears to be - if in reality and as First Person he’s not a product but the Producer of the universe - then he should be able to cope with the slight hiccup of the execution by legal process of that little third person called John a-Nokes. If indeed it is a hiccup, and not a chuckle coming from the real Producer, as He gives Nokes his comeuppance.