God the Known and God the Unknown
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Samuel Butler >> God the Known and God the Unknown
We then offer immortality, but we do not offer resurrection from
the dead; we say that those who die live in the Lord whether they
be just or unjust, and that the present growth of God is the
outcome of all past lives; but we believe that as they live in
God-in the effect they have produced upon the universal life-when
once their individual life is ended, so it is God who knows of
their life thenceforward and not themselves; and we urge that
this immortality, this entrance into the joy of the Lord, this
being ever with God, is true, and can be apprehended by all men,
and that the perception of it should and will tend to make them
lead happier, healthier lives; whereas the commonly received
opinion is true with a stage truth only, and has little permanent
effect upon those who are best worth considering. Nevertheless
the expressions in common use among the orthodox fit in so
perfectly with facts, which we must all acknowledge, that it is
impossible not to regard the expressions as founded upon a
prophetic perception of the facts.
Two things stand out with sufficient clearness. The first is the
rarity of suicide even among those who rail at life most
bitterly. The other is the little eagerness with which those who
cry out most loudly for a resurrection desire to begin their new
life. When comforting a husband upon the loss of his wife we do
not tell him we hope he will soon join her; but we should
certainly do this if we could even pretend we thought the husband
would like it. I can never remember having felt or witnessed any
pain, bodily or mental, which would have made me or anyone else
receive a suggestion that we had better commit suicide without
indignantly asking how our adviser would like to commit suicide
himself. Yet there are so many and such easy ways of dying that
indignation at being advised to commit suicide arises more from
enjoyment of life than from fear of the mere physical pain of
dying. Granted that there is much deplorable pain in the world
from ill-health, loss of money, loss of reputation, misconduct of
those nearest to us, or what not, and granted that in some cases
these causes do drive men to actual self-destruction, yet
suffering such as this happens to a comparatively small number,
and occupies comparatively a small space in the lives of those to
whom it does happen.
What, however, have we to say to those cases in which suffering
and injustice are inflicted upon defenceless [sic] people for
years and years, so that the iron enters into their souls, and
they have no avenger. Can we give any comfort to such sufferers?
and, if not, is our religion any better than a mockery-a filling
the rich with good things and sending the hungry empty away? Can
we tell them, when they are oppressed with burdens, yet that
their cry will come up to God and be heard? The question
suggests its own answer, for assuredly our God knows our
innermost secrets: there is not a word in our hearts but He
knoweth it altogether; He knoweth our down-sitting and our
uprising, He is about our path and about our bed, and spieth out
all our ways; He has fashioned us behind and before, and "we
cannot attain such knowledge," for, like all knowledge when it
has become perfect, "it is too excellent for us."
"Whither then," says David, "shall I go from thy Spirit, or
whither shall I go, then, from thy presence? If I climb up into
heaven thou art there; if I go down into hell thou art there
also. If I take the wings of the morning and remain in the
uttermost parts of the sea; even there also shall thy hand lead
me, and thy right hand shall hold me. If I say peradventure the
darkness shall cover me, then shall my night be turned into day:
the darkness and light to thee are both alike. For my reins
are thine; thou hast covered me in my mother's womb. My bones
are not hid from thee: though I be made secretly and fashioned
beneath in the earth, thine eyes did see my substance yet being
unperfect; and in thy book were all my members written, which day
by day were fashioned when as yet there was none of them. Do I
not hate them, O Lord, that hate thee? and am I not grieved with
them that rise up against thee? Yea, I hate them right sore, as
though they were mine enemies." (Psalm CXXXIX.) There is not a
word of this which we cannot endorse with more significance, as
well as with greater heartiness than those can who look upon God
as He is commonly represented to them; whatever comfort,
therefore, those in distress have been in the habit of receiving
from these and kindred passages, we intensify rather than not. We
cannot, alas! make pain cease to be pain, nor injustice easy to
bear; but we can show that no pain is bootless, and that there is
a tendency in all injustice to right itself; suffering is not
inflicted wilfully, [sic] as it were by a magician who could have
averted it ; nor is it vain in its results, but unless we are cut
off from God by having dwelt in some place where none of our kind
can know of what has happened to us, it will move God's heart to
redress our grievance, and will tend to the happiness of those
who come after us, even if not to our own.
The moral government of God over the world is exercised through
us, who are his ministers and persons, and a government of this
description is the only one which can be observed as practically
influencing men's conduct. God helps those who help themselves,
because in helping themselves they are helping Him. Again, Vox
Populi vox Dei. The current feeling of our peers is what we
instinctively turn to when we would know whether such and such a
course of conduct is right or wrong; and so Paul clenches his
list of things that the Philippians were to hold fast with the
words, "whatsoever things are of good fame"-that is to say, he
falls back upon an appeal to the educated conscience of his age.
Certainly the wicked do sometimes appear to escape punishment,
but it must be remembered there are punishments from within which
do not meet the eye. If these fall on a man, he is sufficiently
punished; if they do not fall on him, it is probable we have been
over hasty in assuming that he is wicked.
CHAPTER IX
GOD THE UNKNOWN
The reader will already have felt that the panzoistic conception
of God-the conception, that is to say, of God as comprising all
living units in His own single person-does not help us to
understand the origin of matter, nor yet that of the primordial
cell which has grown and unfolded itself into the present life of
the world. How was the world rendered fit for the habitation of
the first germ of Life? How came it to have air and water,
without which nothing that we know of as living can exist? Was
the world fashioned and furnished with aqueous and atmospheric
adjuncts with a view to the requirements of the infant monad, and
to his due development? If so, we have evidence of design, and
if so of a designer, and if so there must be Some far vaster
Person who looms out behind our God, and who stands in the same
relation to him as he to us. And behind this vaster and more
unknown God there may be yet another, and another, and another.
It is certain that Life did not make the world with a view to its
own future requirements. For the world was at one time red hot,
and there can have been no living being upon it. Nor is it
conceivable that matter in which there was no life-inasmuch as it
was infinitely hotter than the hottest infusion which any living
germ can support-could gradually come to be alive without
impregnation from a living parent. All living things that we know
of have come from other living things with bodies and souls,
whose existence can be satisfactorily established in spite of
their being often too small for our detection. Since, then, the
world was once without life, and since no analogy points in the
direction of thinking that life can spring up spontaneously, we
are driven to suppose that it was introduced into this world from
some other source extraneous to it altogether, and if so we find
ourselves irresistibly drawn to the inquiry whether the source of
the life that is in the world-the impregnator of this earth-may
not also have prepared the earth for the reception of his
offspring, as a hen makes an egg-shell or a peach a stone for the
protection of the germ within it? Not only are we drawn to the
inquiry, but we are drawn also to the answer that the earth
was so prepared designedly by a Person with body and soul
who knew beforehand the kind of thing he required, and who took
the necessary steps to bring it about.
If this is so we are members indeed of the God of this world, but
we are not his children; we are children of the Unknown and
Vaster God who called him into existence; and this in a far more
literal sense than we have been in the habit of realising [sic]
to ourselves. For it may be doubted whether the monads are not as
truly seminal in character as the procreative matter from which
all animals spring.
It must be remembered that if there is any truth in the view put
forward in "Life and Habit," and in "Evolution Old and New" (and
I have met with no serious attempt to upset the line of argument
taken in either of these books), then no complex animal or plant
can reach its full development without having already gone
through the stages of that development on an infinite number of
past occasions. An egg makes itself into a hen because it knows
the way to do so, having already made itself into a hen millions
and millions of times over; the ease and unconsciousness with
which it grows being in themselves sufficient demonstration of
this fact. At each stage in its growth {he chicken is reminded,
by a return of the associated ideas, of the next step that it
should take, and it accordingly takes it.
But if this is so, and if also the congeries of all the
living forms in the world must be regarded as a single person,
throughout their long growth from the primordial cell onwards to
the present day, then, by parity of reasoning, the person thus
compounded-that is to say, Life or God-should have already passed
through a growth analogous to that which we find he has taken
upon this earth on an infinite number of past occasions; and the
development of each class of life, with its culmination in the
vertebrate animals and in man, should be due to recollection
by God of his having passed through the same stages, or nearly
so, in worlds and universes, which we know of from personal
recollection, as evidenced in the growth and structure of our
bodies, but concerning which we have no other knowledge
whatsoever.
So small a space remains to me that I cannot pursue further the
reflections which suggest themselves. A few concluding
considerations are here alone possible.
We know of three great concentric phases of life, and we are not
without reason to suspect a fourth. If there are so many there
are very likely more, but we do not know whether there are or
not. The innermost sphere of life we know of is that of our own
cells. These people live in a world of their own, knowing nothing
of us, nor being known by ourselves until very recently. Yet they
can be seen under a microscope; they can be taken out of us, and
may then be watched going here and there in perturbation of mind,
endeavouring [sic] to find something in their new environment
that will suit them, and then dying on finding how hopelessly
different it is from any to which they have been accustomed. They
live in us, and make us up into the single person which we
conceive ourselves to form; we are to them a world comprising an
organic and an inorganic kingdom, of which they consider
themselves to be the organic, and whatever is not very like
themselves to be the inorganic. Whether they are composed of
subordinate personalities or not we do not know, but we have no
reason to think that they are, and if we touch ground, so to
speak, with life in the units of which our own bodies are
composed, it is likely that there is a limit also in an upward
direction, though we have nothing whatever to guide us as to
where it is, nor any certainty that there is a limit at all.
We are ourselves the second concentric sphere of life, we being
the constituent cells which unite to form the body of God. Of the
third sphere we know a single member only-the God of this world;
but we see also the stars in heaven, and know their multitude.
Analogy points irresistibly in the direction of thinking that
these other worlds are like our own, begodded and full of life;
it also bids us believe that the God of their world is begotten
of one more or less like himself, and that his growth has
followed the same course as that of all other growths we know of.
If so, he is one of the constituent units of an unknown and
vaster personality who is composed of Gods, as our God is
composed of all the living forms on earth, and as all those
living forms are composed of cells. This is the Unknown God.
Beyond this second God we cannot at present go, nor should we
wish to do so, if we are wise. It is no reproach to a system that
it does not profess to give an account of the origin of things;
the reproach rather should lie against a system which professed
to explain it, for we may be well assured that such a profession
would, for the present at any rate, be an empty boast. It is
enough if a system is true as far as it goes; if it throws new
light on old problems, and opens up vistas which reveal a hope of
further addition to our knowledge, and this I believe may be
fairly claimed for the theory of life put forward in "Life and
Habit" and "Evolution, Old and New," and for the corollary
insisted upon in these pages; a corollary which follows logically
and irresistibly if the position I have taken in the above-named
books is admitted.
Let us imagine that one of the cells of which we are composed
could attain to a glimmering perception of the manner in which he
unites with other cells, of whom he knows very little, so as to
form a greater compound person of whom he has hitherto known
nothing at all. Would he not do well to content himself with the
mastering of this conception, at any rate for a considerable
time? Would it be any just ground of complaint against him on the
part of his brother cells, that he had failed to explain to them
who made the man (or, as he would call it, the omnipotent deity)
whose existence and relations to himself he had just caught sight
of?
But if he were to argue further on the same lines as those on
which he had travelled hitherto, and were to arrive at the
conclusion that there might be other men in the world. besides
the one whom he had just learnt to apprehend, it would be still
no refutation or just ground of complaint against him that he had
failed to show the manner in which his supposed human race had
come into existence.
Here our cell would probably stop. He could hardly be expected
to arrive at the existence of animals and plants differing from
the human race, and uniting with that race to form a single
Person or God, in the same way as he has himself united with
other cells to form man. The existence, and much more the
roundness of the earth itself, would be unknown to him, except by
way of inference and deduction. The only universe which he could
at all understand would be the body of the man of whom he was a
component part.
How would not such a cell be astounded if all that we know
ourselves could be suddenly revealed to him, so that not only
should the vastness of this earth burst upon his dazzled view,
but that of the sun and of his planets also, and not only these,
but the countless other suns which we may see by night around us.
Yet it is probable that an actual being is hidden from us, which
no less transcends the wildest dream of our theologians than the
existence of the heavenly bodies transcends the perception of our
own constituent cells.
THE END