God The Invisible King

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GOD THE INVISIBLE KING

by H. G. Wells



CONTENTS


PREFACE

1. THE COSMOGONY OF MODERN RELIGION

2. HERESIES; OR THE THINGS THAT GOD IS NOT

3. THE LIKENESS OF GOD

4. THE RELIGION OF ATHEISTS

5. THE INVISIBLE KING

6. MODERN IDEAS OF SIN AND DAMNATION

7. THE IDEA OF A CHURCH

THE ENVOY




PREFACE


This book sets out as forcibly and exactly as possible the religious
belief of the writer. That belief is not orthodox Christianity; it is
not, indeed, Christianity at all; its core nevertheless is a profound
belief in a personal and intimate God. There is nothing in its
statements that need shock or offend anyone who is prepared for the
expression 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 idea 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, so to speak, the basal elements of all theology in
the world. The writer is chary of assertion or denial in these
matters. He believes that they are speculations not at all necessary to
salvation. He believes that men may differ profoundly in their opinions
upon these points and still be in perfect agreement upon the essentials
of religion. The reality of religion he believes deals wholly and
exclusively with the God of the Heart. He declares as his own opinion,
and as the opinion which seems most expressive of modern thought, that
there is no reason to suppose the Veiled Being either benevolent or
malignant towards men. But if the reader believes that God is Almighty
and in every way Infinite the practical outcome is not very different.
For the purposes of human relationship it is impossible to deny that
God PRESENTS HIMSELF AS FINITE, as struggling and taking 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 immortal, whether the God in our hearts is the Son of
or a rebel against the Universe, the reality of religion, the fact of
salvation, is still our self-identification with God, irrespective of
consequences, and the achievement of his kingdom, in our hearts and
in the world. Whether we live forever or die tomorrow does not affect
righteousness. Many people seem to find the prospect of a final personal
death unendurable. This impresses me as egotism. I have no such appetite
for a separate immortality. God is my immortality; what, of me, is
identified with God, is God; what is not is of no more permanent value
than the snows of yester-year.

H. G. W.

Dunmow, May, 1917.




GOD THE INVISIBLE KING


CHAPTER THE FIRST

THE COSMOGONY OF MODERN RELIGION


1. MODERN RELIGION HAS NO FOUNDER


Perhaps all religions, unless the flaming onset of Mohammedanism be an
exception, have dawned imperceptibly upon the world. A little while ago
and the thing was not; and then suddenly it has been found in existence,
and already in a state of diffusion. People have begun to hear of the
new belief first here and then there. It is interesting, for example,
to trace how Christianity drifted into the consciousness of the Roman
world. But when a religion has been interrogated it has always had
hitherto a tale of beginnings, the name and story of a founder. The
renascent religion that is now taking shape, it seems, had no founder;
it points to no origins. It is the Truth, its believers declare; it has
always been here; it has always been visible to those who had eyes to
see. It is perhaps plainer than it was and to more people--that is all.

It is as if it still did not realise its own difference. Many of those
who hold it still think of it as if it were a kind of Christianity.
Some, catching at a phrase of Huxley's, speak of it as Christianity
without Theology. They do not know the creed they are carrying. It has,
as a matter of fact, a very fine and subtle theology, flatly opposed
to any belief that could, except by great stretching of charity and
the imagination, be called Christianity. One might find, perhaps, a
parallelism with the system ascribed to some Gnostics, but that is far
more probably an accidental rather than a sympathetic coincidence. Of
that the reader shall presently have an opportunity of judging.

This indefiniteness of statement and relationship is probably only the
opening phase of the new faith. Christianity also began with an extreme
neglect of definition. It was not at first anything more than a sect
of Judaism. It was only after three centuries, amidst the uproar
and emotions of the council of Nicaea, when the more enthusiastic
Trinitarians stuffed their fingers in their ears in affected horror at
the arguments of old Arius, that the cardinal mystery of the Trinity
was established as the essential fact of Christianity. Throughout those
three centuries, the centuries of its greatest achievements and noblest
martyrdoms, Christianity had not defined its God. And even to-day it has
to be noted that a large majority of those who possess and repeat
the Christian creeds have come into the practice so insensibly from
unthinking childhood, that only in the slightest way do they realise the
nature of the statements to which they subscribe. They will speak
and think of both Christ and God in ways flatly incompatible with the
doctrine of the Triune deity upon which, theoretically, the entire
fabric of all the churches rests. They will show themselves as frankly
Arians as though that damnable heresy had not been washed out of the
world forever after centuries of persecution in torrents of blood. But
whatever the present state of Christendom in these matters may be,
there can be no doubt of the enormous pains taken in the past to give
Christian beliefs the exactest, least ambiguous statement possible.
Christianity knew itself clearly for what it was in its maturity,
whatever the indecisions of its childhood or the confusions of its
decay. The renascent religion that one finds now, a thing active and
sufficient in many minds, has still scarcely come to self-consciousness.
But it is so coming, and this present book is very largely an attempt
to state the shape it is assuming and to compare it with the beliefs
and imperatives and usages of the various Christian, pseudo-Christian,
philosophical, and agnostic cults amidst which it has appeared.

The writer's sympathies and convictions are entirely with this that he
speaks of as renascent or modern religion; he is neither atheist
nor Buddhist nor Mohammedan nor Christian. He will make no pretence,
therefore, to impartiality and detachment. He will do his best to be as
fair as possible and as candid as possible, but the reader must reckon
with this bias. He has found this faith growing up in himself; he has
found it, or something very difficult to distinguish from it, growing
independently in the minds of men and women he has met. They have been
people of very various origins; English, Americans, Bengalis, Russians,
French, people brought up in a "Catholic atmosphere," Positivists,
Baptists, Sikhs, Mohammedans. Their diversity of source is as remarkable
as their convergence of tendency. A miscellany of minds thinking upon
parallel lines has come out to the same light. The new teaching is also
traceable in many professedly Christian religious books and it is to be
heard from Christian pulpits. The phase of definition is manifestly at
hand.



2. MODERN RELIGION HAS A FINITE GOD


Perhaps the most fundamental difference between this new faith and any
recognised form of Christianity is that, knowingly or unknowingly, it
worships A FINITE GOD. Directly the believer is fairly confronted with
the plain questions of the case, the vague identifications that are
still carelessly made with one or all of the persons of the Trinity
dissolve away. He will admit that his God is neither all-wise, nor
all-powerful, nor omnipresent; that he is neither the maker of heaven
nor earth, and that he has little to identify him with that hereditary
God of the Jews who became the "Father" in the Christian system. On the
other hand he will assert that his God is a god of salvation, that he is
a spirit, a person, a strongly marked and knowable personality, loving,
inspiring, and lovable, who exists or strives to exist in every human
soul. He will be much less certain in his denials that his God has a
close resemblance to the Pauline (as distinguished from the Trinitarian)
"Christ." . . .

The modern religious man will almost certainly profess a kind of
universalism; he will assert that whensoever men have called upon any
God and have found fellowship and comfort and courage and that sense
of God within them, that inner light which is the quintessence of the
religious experience, it was the True God that answered them. For the
True God is a generous God, not a jealous God; the very antithesis of
that bickering monopolist who "will have none other gods but Me"; and
when a human heart cries out--to what name it matters not--for a larger
spirit and a stronger help than the visible things of life can give,
straightway the nameless Helper is with it and the God of Man answers to
the call. The True God has no scorn nor hate for those who have accepted
the many-handed symbols of the Hindu or the lacquered idols of China.
Where there is faith, where there is need, there is the True God ready
to clasp the hands that stretch out seeking for him into the darkness
behind the ivory and gold.

The fact that God is FINITE is one upon which those who think clearly
among the new believers are very insistent. He is, above everything
else, a personality, and to be a personality is to have characteristics,
to be limited by characteristics; he is a Being, not us but dealing
with us and through us, he has an aim and that means he has a past and
future; he is within time and not outside it. And they point out that
this is really what everyone who prays sincerely to God or gets help
from God, feels and believes. Our practice with God is better than our
theory. None of us really pray to that fantastic, unqualified danse a
trois, the Trinity, which the wranglings and disputes of the worthies
of Alexandria and Syria declared to be God. We pray to one single
understanding person. But so far the tactics of those Trinitarians at
Nicaea, who stuck their fingers in their ears, have prevailed in this
world; this was no matter for discussion, they declared, it was a Holy
Mystery full of magical terror, and few religious people have thought
it worth while to revive these terrors by a definite contradiction. The
truly religious have been content to lapse quietly into the comparative
sanity of an unformulated Arianism, they have left it to the scoffing
Atheist to mock at the patent absurdities of the official creed. But one
magnificent protest against this theological fantasy must have been
the work of a sincerely religious man, the cold superb humour of that
burlesque creed, ascribed, at first no doubt facetiously and then quite
seriously, to Saint Athanasius the Great, which, by an irony far beyond
its original intention, has become at last the accepted creed of the
church.

The long truce in the criticism of Trinitarian theology is drawing to
its end. It is when men most urgently need God that they become least
patient with foolish presentations and dogmas. The new believers are
very definitely set upon a thorough analysis of the nature and growth
of the Christian creeds and ideas. There has grown up a practice of
assuming that, when God is spoken of, the Hebrew-Christian God of Nicaea
is meant. But that God trails with him a thousand misconceptions and
bad associations; his alleged infinite nature, his jealousy, his strange
preferences, his vindictive Old Testament past. These things do not even
make a caricature of the True God; they compose an altogether different
and antagonistic figure.

It is a very childish and unphilosophical set of impulses that has led
the theologians of nearly every faith to claim infinite qualities for
their deity. One has to remember the poorness of the mental and moral
quality of the churchmen of the third, fourth, and fifth centuries who
saddled Christendom with its characteristic dogmas, and the extreme
poverty and confusion of the circle of ideas within which they thought.
Many of these makers of Christianity, like Saint Ambrose of Milan (who
had even to be baptised after his election to his bishopric), had been
pitchforked into the church from civil life; they lived in a time
of pitiless factions and personal feuds; they had to conduct their
disputations amidst the struggles of would-be emperors; court eunuchs
and favourites swayed their counsels, and popular rioting clinched their
decisions. There was less freedom of discussion then in the Christian
world than there is at present (1916) in Belgium, and the whole audience
of educated opinion by which a theory could be judged did not equal,
either in numbers or accuracy of information, the present population of
Constantinople. To these conditions we owe the claim that the Christian
God is a magic god, very great medicine in battle, "in hoc signo
vinces," and the argument so natural to the minds of those days and so
absurd to ours, that since he had ALL power, all knowledge, and existed
for ever and ever, it was no use whatever to set up any other god
against him. . . .

By the fifth century Christianity had adopted as its fundamental belief,
without which everyone was to be "damned everlastingly," a conception
of God and of Christ's relation to God, of which even by the Christian
account of his teaching, Jesus was either totally unaware or so
negligent and careless of the future comfort of his disciples as
scarcely to make mention. The doctrine of the Trinity, so far as the
relationship of the Third Person goes, hangs almost entirely upon one
ambiguous and disputed utterance in St. John's gospel (XV. 26). Most of
the teachings of Christian orthodoxy resolve themselves to the attentive
student into assertions of the nature of contradiction and repartee.
Someone floats an opinion in some matter that has been hitherto vague,
in regard, for example, to the sonship of Christ or to the method of
his birth. The new opinion arouses the hostility and alarm of minds
unaccustomed to so definite a statement, and in the zeal of their recoil
they fly to a contrary proposition. The Christians would neither admit
that they worshipped more gods than one because of the Greeks, nor
deny the divinity of Christ because of the Jews. They dreaded to be
polytheistic; equally did they dread the least apparent detraction from
the power and importance of their Saviour. They were forced into the
theory of the Trinity by the necessity of those contrary assertions,
and they had to make it a mystery protected by curses to save it from a
reductio ad absurdam. The entire history of the growth of the Christian
doctrine in those disordered early centuries is a history of theology
by committee; a history of furious wrangling, of hasty compromises, and
still more hasty attempts to clinch matters by anathema. When the muddle
was at its very worst, the church was confronted by enormous political
opportunities. In order that it should seize these one chief thing
appeared imperative: doctrinal uniformity. The emperor himself, albeit
unbaptised and very ignorant of Greek, came and seated himself in the
midst of Christian thought upon a golden throne. At the end of it all
Eusebius, that supreme Trimmer, was prepared to damn everlastingly all
those who doubted that consubstantiality he himself had doubted at the
beginning of the conference. It is quite clear that Constantine did not
care who was damned or for what period, so long as the Christians ceased
to wrangle among themselves. The practical unanimity of Nicaea was
secured by threats, and then, turning upon the victors, he sought by
threats to restore Arius to communion. The imperial aim was a common
faith to unite the empire. The crushing out of the Arians and of the
Paulicians and suchlike heretics, and more particularly the systematic
destruction by the orthodox of all heretical writings, had about it none
of that quality of honest conviction which comes to those who have a
real knowledge of God; it was a bawling down of dissensions that, left
to work themselves out, would have spoilt good business; it was the fist
of Nicolas of Myra over again, except that after the days of Ambrose the
sword of the executioner and the fires of the book-burner were added to
the weapon of the human voice. Priscillian was the first human sacrifice
formally offered up under these improved conditions to the greater glory
of the reinforced Trinity. Thereafter the blood of the heretics was the
cement of Christian unity.