The Theatrocrat: A Tragic Play of Church and Stage

by John Davidson

Man is the Universe alive and conscious, and with the capacity of entire self-consciousness. This capacity, undeveloped and misunderstood, is the source of all man's misery, the hotbed of the idea of Sin and the idea of God. Unable to comprehend it, the Greek and the Norseman projected their trouble into Olympus and Hades, Asgard and Nifelheim, gods and goddesses, titans, giants, furies, valkyrs. Every people cast out and projected its self-consciousness as Other World in some form. A unique race, the Jews, threw its shadow on the Universe as Jehovah, the One God, jealous, vengeful, inhuman. The European Aryans laid hold of this, but in a decadent, Christianized form; and as they lacked in general the intense individuality of the Hebrew, they soon brought it into a deliquescence of the Trinity, the Mother of Heaven, Saints, transubstantiation, the God of love, etc. The hardier northern races, however, reverted to a more Hebraic form, preferring the God of battles to the Madonna; and withal the idea of the One God remained dominant in Christian countries, being recruited by the sudden rise and rivalry of Islam, with its strident profession of monotheism. The material source of this uneasy self-consciousness which projects itself into Other World is twofold. One of these is the Nature of Man, formerly called Original Sin, God and Sin being in this regard convertible terms. I have stated this source clearly enough in the "Prime Minister," in that passage where the protagonist overcomes the desire to pray, conjuring himself to—

"think
Instead what God is, sanely think; and what
The sanguine source of our immortal hope;
Think how some common drudging neighbour-wight
(Not Hercules nor a titan of the war
Venerean; no, but any honest Jack)
Could happily beget for fifty years
A hundred wholesome children annually:
How every rosy Jill encloisters germs
Of many thousand brats; think this and laugh
Aloud, delighted with the naive, the rich
Conceit of immortality and vast
Exuberance of the race that swells and throbs
In every man and woman, strings the nerves,
Ignites the brain and thunders in the heart
With God and life eternal."

The other source of the idea of God is in the Ether. I have not yet dealt with this by name in any of my writings, and had intended to reserve it for my "Testament of a Deliverer"; but having elected to prepare a brief and general account of my message, I must at least mention it here. My statement of the Ethereal source of the idea of God is not nearly mature yet. Nevertheless, the idea is simple and clear; it is indeed self-evident. Every molecule of which man consists is not only saturated in the all-pervading Ether, but is kneaded of it, visible, ponderable Matter being a condensation of the invisible, imponderable Ether. In a last analysis, which takes us back to the first synthesis, man is therefore the Ether become conscious. It is not a question of bulk. Man is an inhabitant of the earth, which is one of the smallest planets of one of the smallest systems in the Universe; but man consists of the Universe, of the whole Universe in its condensed form, and also of the whole Universe in its invisible, imponderable form, being permeated and pervaded by the omnipotent, omnipresent Ether, being soaked in it, being drunk with it, being it. There is nothing anywhere higher than man; there can be nothing higher than the Universe become self-conscious. In his uninstructed time man called the Ether which permeates him, which is his ecstasy, God and gods: "Out of God he came," he thought; "and back to God he should return;" or he called it Nirvana and an infinite peace. Imagination is the radiation of the omnipotent Ether. Only the whole Universe become conscious could have imagined God the Creator. Now man knows that there is no God; that nothing was made; that all is a becoming; that he is the Ether, condensed, evolved; and that he will devolve again into that invisible, imponderable form of Matter: and this knowledge inherent in himself is infinitely satisfying. All the imaginings about the source of his being which man has maddened over, which he has clung to in good report and ill, which he has died for in battle and at the stake, have their roots in Material truth. The idea of the Trinity, for example, is clearly the effort of the Universe become conscious in man to express that visible and invisible being and that power, namely, Ether, Matter, Energy, which we now know to be the triple form of the Universe; and the sublime idea of the Immaculate Conception has the same profound significance as the union of the gods with the daughters of men in all mythologies; it means that man procreates something more than man; it means that he procreates a conscious Universe. I think it unlikely that Matter has become conscious anywhere else than on our earth. In man the Ether and the principal forms of Matter are conscious and self-conscious. It is not conceivable that some other dozen elements might become conscious; Matter cannot imagine life and consciousness without carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus. It is not necessary that other elements should become conscious, because every element is a form of the one substance: therefore in man the whole Universe is conscious. I should say that there is not now, that there has not been at any time, a mate or a peer of man; and—I repeat it once more—there cannot be anything higher than man, because man is the whole Universe become conscious and self-conscious. This is a great thing: it is the greatest thing that has been told to the world. It will destroy all existing religions, governments, institutions, morality and all moralities, all philosophy, all literature, all art. It puts an end to man's mistaken effort towards an impossible Divinity by way of an impossible Humanity: he will leave that henceforth to the bees and the ants; he is higher than the bees and the ants; he is more Material than they. But that prolonged, deadlift agony towards an impossible Divinity by way of an impossible Humanity sprang, like all man's travail, from a Material truth. Man's aim at something higher than man meant that there is nothing anywhere higher than man. There is nothing anywhere higher than man. The terror and splendour of this will give the world pause; nor will the world yield to it easily, for here is an actual new-birth at last: to know that there can be no first cause, no metaphysic; that there can be no Other World; that man is the Material Universe become conscious. A thousand years' war would not be too terrible a travail for the birth of the world's self-consciousness: thereafter man could be and do something; heretofore he has been and done nothing.

The generative power of man and the all-pervading Ether, conscious in him, are the Material sources of the idea of God. From the first source there comes also the idea of Sin cognate and isomeric with the idea of God. (The Devil, the personification of God as Sin, has been so long a joke that he is out of court.) These twin ideas God and Sin died together on Calvary two thousand years ago. The history of Christendom is the history of the obsequies of these ideas, of the devolution of these ideas. ("The Testament of a Prime Minister," pp. 76-81.) Out of Matter the Myth of God and Sin and Heaven and Hell arose. Return that myth in which the imagination of Christendom still dwells in all serious moods and times of passion, return it to its Material source, and let the world's imagination go with it and be born again, to live no longer in a myth but in the Universe itself. I say, with the Prime Minister, let

"the passionate heart of man,
The proud imagination and the dream
That hovers homeless as the myths decay,
Exempt from fabulous wonder, rooted deep
In Substance one and multiform, and breathed
In all the mystery of the things that are,
Create indomitable will to truth,
An open mind at home in space and time,
A stainless memory splendidly endowed
With actual knowledge, a Material soul
At one with the Material Universe."

With the Bishop of St. James's I watch the future, an actual world wherein an actual man shall be and do greatly

"In majesty Material, the Nessus-shirt
Of spirit, warp and woof of legend, dyed
In many-coloured Sin, the mordant shame
That cankered life, and clung, a grafted hide
About his innocent flesh, fallen off, or flayed
With hideous woe, and in its proper filth
Corrupted into naught. Forthwith the world
Begins again, not even a pallid dream
Of legendary pasts to cloud the dawn.
I say it simply:—With the Universe
Man clothes himself; arrayed in time and space,
In darkness and in light, no lamp, no gleam
He follows, for the sun illumines him
And every sun his kinsmen in the skies,
The systems, constellations, galaxies.
At home in the empyrean, issuing thence,
His free imagination momently
Remembers flame pellucid, which it was
And will be in the nebula again
When all the orbs that stock the loins of night
Return into the sun, and fill with seed
Of chastest fire the impassioned womb of space."

To conclude for the present: Whence is the Universe and Why? The Universe itself is the only answer to these questions. Whence is the Universe? There is no whence; it fills space. Why is the Universe? It cannot tell: it is neither necessary nor unnecessary: it is. There are, properly, no answers to these questions; therefore these questions are not. The Universe says always and only, "Here and Now."

THE THEATROCRAT A TRAGIC PLAY OF CHURCH AND STAGE

"This is the freedom of the Universe"
Wordsworth