Where Science and Religion Meet

by William Scott Palmer

CHAPTER V

Where Love is the Lover, Love streaming from

the Lover is the Lover; the Lover streaming from

himself, and existing in another Person.

Traherne.

Aut Deus aut homo non bonus—so Christians have said and believed. The dilemma, though comfortable for not a few among them, and having about it a certain truth, often involves a false conception of both man and God. The truth it holds is not their comfort; they do not know that. What most people mean when they use the dilemma is that the prophet of Nazareth was either as a person God and not as a person man, or he was as a person man and a bad one. It seems conclusive, this either-or. But there is no logical weapon more fatal to our discovery of the truth of spirit and life. 'Either-or' comes from a field of interest where things stand out conspicuous and apart, and cannot be thought of as communicating virtue and riches and themselves one to another. It brings with it an insinuating suggestion, if not assertion, that the affairs of spirit and life are in the same case. Personality, which is an affair of spirit and life, seems no more to admit of such intercommunication than does materiality. Two persons can no more communicate themselves to each other than two stones. Which, on the crude exposed face of it, is nonsense. They can, they do; and we know it.

Unquestionably the great prophet spoke with the authority which lesser prophets attributed to God. He made claims, very high claims. Was he only an arrogant and blasphemous man? (He might, perhaps, have been deluded, though the dilemma ignores that possibility—as well it may.) Or was he God? There is no half-way house of vital identity between man as person and God as person, any more than there is a half-way house of material identity between a diamond and a pebble off the beach. Either-or. So this dilemma goes. It is very simple, all too simple. It applies beautifully to pebbles and diamonds; why not to living persons? Particularly and excellently, why not to man and God?

Now, as a matter of fact, I am trying to communicate to you at this very moment something that is mine. My knowledge (or my ignorant opinion) is written down on the paper before you, and you will or may receive it—to do with it what you choose. Henceforth it is, or may be, yours as well as mine. Again, I try to communicate to you the content of my will for you. You know and feel that I want your will to be brought to coincide with mine, so that my will and yours shall be vitally identical in regard to what I am writing about. In some degree or another you and I may become one in this regard. I shall then have communicated my knowledge (or my ignorant opinion) and my will to you and they will to some extent or another be both yours and mine. This communication and co-operation is a matter of our choosing to enter into it and be and work together. We have it in our own hands. It is quite different from the relation we have to each other as being parts in the universe, or elements in God looked upon as the pantheist looks upon him, which makes him no more than the universe. We can't help that relation. We share it with the stones as well as with each other and with God. It is a purely abstract business and belongs to 'the night in which all cows are black.' Our cows, on the other hand, are of every sort of colour; and we find, we actually do find, that we can pass on our colours to each other, dye the different cow to our tinge and in turn be dyed. We are concrete, not abstract; and our vital identity one with another is concrete too. It may be and might not be. We choose whether it shall be or not. And, happily, we choose that it shall be, up to a point, far more often and more steadily than we choose that it shall not. Hence the existence of a human community in common knowledge and reason and common will—up to a point.

I give you here in these pages, or at least proffer you, as I have said, 'something of mine.' That is what it looks like. But, enquiring further, I ask whether as a matter of fact 'I' am separate from 'something of mine,' as, let us say an engine is separate from the power it produces and the work it does. Do I produce thought and knowledge as an engine produces so much horse-power? Is my will or my reason a sort of thing that produces activity as a flower produces its scent? The scent is not the flower; the horse-power is not the engine. There is always a producing thing behind such products. Is there a producing thing behind my knowledge and activity? And the only reasonable answer we can give to this question is that there is not. In my spirit and life there is nothing in the least like a thing or a machine; and when we reason about spirit and life as though there were we plunge into a very sea of confusion. My reason and my will are myself. I am not a thing and I do not produce like a thing. I give and I communicate my very self in giving and communicating my knowledge, my purpose, my will. And in so far as you receive these and take them into yourself you receive me—spirit and life—as person. By harmony between us our wills and reason, our selves, coalesce; they become identical in the concrete, vital identity peculiar to persons, impossible to things, and dependent for its maintenance on the maintenance of harmony by their own free activity. Very partial it is, no doubt, seen by all of us 'as in a mirror darkly'; but it points, with a finger that should draw all eyes, to a great fulfilment. That fulfilment is 'the goal, not the starting-point of human endeavour.' The blank identity of co-existence in a universe is, you may say, a starting-point for reflexion; but real concrete mental coalescence between each and all of us is a real concrete starting-point of life in a personal world. The goal lies far ahead, where that union of persons foreshadowed in our fragmentary intercourse and the low beginnings of our community of life shall be won through that which alone can give it, our union and communion with God. This is more or less a philosopher's way of putting the matter; but it means the same as the Christian's.

Now there is a question that forces itself upon us here. Can there be a coalescence of mind and will, an identity, between God and man, of this living, spiritual—that is, real, concrete—kind? Or is God so different from man as to be incommunicable to him? Is he remote from man in his own nature or, indeed, not only remote but alien? The answer to this is that if he is even remote, not to say alien, he is nothing to us and we may ignore him.