The autobiography of God; an interpretation

Foreword

“God is His own interpreter And He will make it plain.”

Wuen I had finished reading these lines from Cowper I was glad to close my book and walk out in the garden for a breath of fresh air. I was weary in body and soul and needed rest. Passing by our little brook, I came upon a patch of Shasta daisies arrayed in their immaculate bonnets of white bloom, and thinking of Linnezus I bowed my head in reverence.

It was already late in a sun-drenched afternoon— the clouds had begun to pile up fantastic pagodas in the sky. . . . There was a nip of mysticism in the air and I began to brood. . . . Is it possible—I asked myself—for one human being to make satisfyingly near and clear to another the reality of God?

Sleep did not come to me that evening—only a Vision disturbed by a supreme effort of just one soul to touch the hem of Infinity. There by my little brook I felt like Jacob wrestling at Jabbok. To-morrow would bring its victory and then I could ask for a blessing, with the assurance that there would be no refusal.

vi FOREWORD

For myself I wished nothing, except strength to help my fellow men to a clearer “sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused.” So many misconceptions of God have long become fixed in the mind of man that it is an undeniably pressing and paramount necessity to clarify our thinking. Besides, there has been (and for that matter, still is) a great deal of mockery. Some who had earnestly believed have recently lost the heritage of faith now pitilessly ground up and pulverized in those vast mechanical transformations that are sweeping man’s little world. Others, again, if they do not dismiss God with a disdainful wave of the hand, regard Him as a superstition. Still others—perhaps the vast majority—have just become indifferent.

My observations on these matters, touching the profound unsettlement of belief that characterizes contemporary thinking, were not those of a solitary mind; they were amply confirmed by others. “The old scenery of faith has faded,” writes Joseph Fort Newton, “and for not a few there is nothing to take its place. Some are smitten mute by a great awe, lest in trying to utter God they lose the Unutterable God, before whom silence is eloquence and wonder is worship. Others put the whole matter out of mind, so far as may be, taking refuge in a cynical indifference or a dim and blurred agnosticism. Still others are deeply troubled in mind, finding it difficult, if

FOREWORD Vil not impossible, to form any conception of God. The universe is so vast, life is often so baffling in its suffering and sorrow, its tragedy and cruelty, and the untoward happenings of the last ten years—dark, dreadful, and confused—have made the problem perplexingly acute for sensitive and _ reflective minds.’*

With these words of Dr. Newton uppermost in my mind, I felt justified in my request. From time immemorial there has been such a woful misunderstanding of God, despite the vast amount of books that already choke the shelves of our libraries, that it seemed singularly good, especially in these days when men are welcoming a re-writing of knowledge, to know more of Him “who alone is permanently interesting.” :

As reverently as it was set forth, it was nevertheless a rather bold thought to suggest that God make available His own biography. Now that I have come to think of it more soberly, I can only say that I was lured by that strong but blindingly simple reality of a Vision, where anything like arrogance is utterly unknown. Caught in the grasp of a pure desire, I was conscious of no violation of the sanctities, but quite on the contrary, I felt an ecstasy like that of a child in the loving embrace of its parent whose living touch is upon all its limbs. “Thou would’st not seek

*Newton: My Idea of God, p. vi, Boston, 1927.

Vill FOREWORD

Me unless thou did’st possess Me,” are the words that Pascal represents God as addressing to the human soul—and this I experienced in my Viszon.

There has remained with me—undimmed these many years—that one request made to God beside the little brook. Only a Vision! ... But visions have a curious way of defying all things; for it is here that the heart has its reasons that Reason does not know...

With the slow passage of time I began to feel that divine gifts are also divine tasks and that my request to God simply awaited fulfilment at my own hands. From this there grew the unique assurance that if I were at once bold enough and humble enough to take pen in hand God would co-operate with me in every conceivable manner so that His biography could be set down here with forgivable anthropomorphism and in so easy and plain a style that no one on earth could possibly fail to profit thereby exceedingly much. Ernest R. TRATTNER.

January, 1930.

Contents

PAGE

ForEWoRD ; Vv Boox I: Cosmic PERSPECTIVES I THE GOD NOBODY KNOWS 3 “FATHER, WHERE ART THOU?” 5 BUILDING THE UNIVERSE 7 MY YOUTH 10 “SOME CALL IT EVOLUTION—”’ 18 CREATOR 16 FROM FINGERS TO VOICE 20

THE STRANGE CASE OF PROFESSOR BERINGER 24

Book I Cosmic Perspectives Book I Cosmic Perspectives

THE GOD NOBODY KNOWS

To attempt biography where there is no Beginning and bring it to an end where no End is in sight is rather a uniquely venturesome task in the realm of letters. Flesh and blood has a distinct advantage over Me just here, for a human being can at least begin with his parents—if he does not choose to talk immediately about himself... .

Long before the modern era, ancient man—who already had inherited from primitive society a heavy trafic of supernatural ideas—assumed that he had arrived at a full knowledge of My ways. Believing himself in possession of an infallible revelation from Me, he concluded that inasmuch as he knew all things it was only natural to speak of My Divinity with the positive familiarity of a next-door neighbor. Of those countless paths that forever wind about the sum totality of the universe he was blissfully ignorant—and for that reason singularly free from profound and disturbing uncertainties.

But the boxlike world of antiquity, with its little mechanical system, proved’ to be nothing more than a figment of his imagination. Like the morning mist it has been dissolved, and in its place man, with wideopen eyes, suddenly beheld a solar system of which his earth is only an infinitesimal grain of sand on the seashore of infinity. With the old finalities gone, the new universe of illimitable infinities suddenly began to oppress him: was it not an unspeakable presumption that any human being should have claimed to fathom the unfathomable? Dissatisfied with his ability to compass My nature or attain to absolute knowledge of My essence, he has frequently arrived at pure negation—‘‘a nameless Nothingness,” as Suso called Me, “a Nog of all the things that man can think or say.”

. .. But an unknown God is one thing, and an unknowable God is quite another. (It is the wnknown that always awaits man’s recognition and gives to mortal life a curve of hope.) Set down in the midst of an infinite variety of existences it is by no means easy for man, who was only born but yesterday, to grasp the meaning of the heights beyond his own world. Often he is discouraged by his feeble comprehension and, like William Watson, he goes to a cemetery to undeceive himself:

I wandered far in the wold And after the heat and glare

I came at eve to a churchyard old: The yew-trees seemed at prayer.

And around me was dust in dust And the fleeting light, and Repose, And the infinite pathos of human trust In a God whom no man knows.

To the emergent soul that has in some measure disentangled itself from mere appearances there stretches out the road of the wide prospect. While it sees but little, it vzstons more, until it comes to know that to man’s deepest questionings there will be no complete solutions and no final answers, only this: an ever-increasing illumination.

With the deepening of experience, with the growing sense of the mystery of things that eludes all definition, there eventually comes a sure confidence in Me, beyond the limits of any formula in which theology has sought to resolve My unknowability:

And though thy soul sail leagues and leagues beyond,— Still, leagues beyond those leagues, there is more sea.*

“FATHER, WHERE ART THOU?”

Despite his firm-rootedness in the vast unknown and un-understood forces of nature, man has frequently lost his upward wondering faith, in a wild and blundering despair.

One of the most poignant and bitter cries that was ever uttered by human lips came to My attention a little over a century ago. It was about that time that

*D. G. Rossetti: Sonnet 37, ‘The Choice.”

Jean Paul Richter gave vent to his lonesome feelings. “There is no God,” sobbed Richter. “I have traversed the worlds, I have risen to the suns, I have passed athwart the great waste places of the sky. There is no God. I have descended to the place where the very shadow cast by Being dies out and ends. I have gazed into the gulf beyond and cried, ‘Father, where art Thou?’ But no answer came, save the sound of the storm which rages uncontrolled. We are orphans, you and I. Every soul in this great corpsetrench of the universe is utterly alone.”

There have been—and, I suppose, there will continue to be for a long time to come—hosts of sincere men and women who will cherish a subtle resentment against Me, feeling perhaps that I ought, in some unmistakable self-disclosure or by some kind of assured revelation, answer the poignant cry of the human soul (especially when it is dipped in such stygian darkness and gloomy despair as_ befell Richter). It is indeed fanciful to picture Me violating My own laws in order to give a startling proof of My existence to all the forlorn men of earth. But —harsh as it may seem to some—that cannot be My ineluctable way. It would be just as reprehensible for Me to do this as it would be to change the mathematical table for a child perplexed by some difficult problem. )

For man is organic to the world in which he lives and Life is an endless series of opportunities, to be experienced within this medium. But sometimes man becomes impatient and frequently loses sight of the fact that the use he makes of things depends on himself. Under such conditions he is apt either to think foolishly or act rashly. Of one who had committed suicide a kindly friend wrote these verses:

When he went blundering back to God, His song half written, his work half done, Who knows what paths his bleeding feet trod,

What hills of peace and pain he won?

I hope God smiled and took his hand,

And said: “Poor truant, passionate fool! Life’s book is hard to understand;

Why could’st thou not remain at school?”*

BUILDING THE UNIVERSE

I was a long time building the universe. In fact, it is not complete even now. Nor will it ever be. The average man—simply because he is still very ignorant—has little or no idea what a colossal growth of infinite processes this world really is. Some people even now think that the cosmos is nothing more than an accident, a jest of circumstances or a shifting phantasmagoria without meaning or purpose. They imagine that the sun and the moon and the stars joined hands with the vast myriads of planets and all came together by blind forces. Such a view re-

*Charles Hanson Towne: “Of One Self-Slain.”

gards My universe as a mere happening or “an accidental concourse of atoms driven in chaotic whirlwinds of star-dust.” |

That the universe is not chance-produced has long been evident to a significant number of careful thinkers in all ages. Taking the case of a flower, Professor Bosanquet, the English philosopher, observes that “it is ridiculous to say that such a product arises by accident; that is, as a by-product of the interaction of elements in whose nature and general laws of combination no such result is immanent.’* Equally well chosen is the less philosophical but no less accurate language of A. Maude Royden:

If I see a picture like, for example, “The Last Supper” of Leonardo da Vinci, I cannot help believing that it is the product of a mind. If I read a play like Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” it makes the same impression on me. I know not much about Leonardo and almost nothing about Shakespeare. I see also that the picture is defaced and faded—the play in parts incomprehensible. I, for that reason, cannot believe that the picture happened by chance, or that a number of children threw a box of paints on the wall and the resultant splashes formed what I now like for a picture. I cannot believe that a number of compositors flung type into the air and as it fell it happened to arrange itself into the lines _ that we call the play of “Hamlet.” I believe that both play and picture were created by a mind. It is true that I cannot prove it, but I believe it.t

If it were supposed—just for argument’s sake—

*Bosanquet: The Principle of Individuality and Value, p. 147. Gifford Lectures for 1911-12.

T'Royden: I Believe 42 God, p. 8, New York, 1927.

that chance alone brought about all things it would then be necessary to know how order and rationality could be educed from it, particularly that kind of order which may be anticipated and made the subject of calculation. For it cannot be rationally conceived that chaos heaped upon chaos could issue into a cosmos. It is, therefore, becoming increasingly evident to thoughtful men that I am not the author of any accidents, happy or unhappy; that the mechanism of the universe together with the fitting of life to the earth on which it rests is far from being a chance product; that there is no evidence in the stars above or on the earth beneath that anything exhibits itself as the result of a fortuitous clashing of atoms.

The universe in its broadest sense represents the aggregation of intelligence, energy and order that no chance could produce. At its very best, chance could only bring out possible variations in an order that already exists. “It takes a girl in our factory,” once declared an American business man, “about two days to learn to put the seventeen parts of a meat-chopper together. It may be that these millions of worlds, each with its separate orbit, all balanced so wonderfully in space—it may be that they just happened; it may be that by a million years of jumbling together they finally arranged themselves. I don’t know. I am merely a plain manufacturer of cutlery.

But this I do know; that you can shake the seventeen parts of a meat-chopper around in a wash-tub for the next seventeen billion years and you'll never make a meat-chopper.”

Creation, backed as it is by the manifestation of orderly developments, makes it impossible to regard My universe as a causeless or lawless production. No fortuitous concourse of atoms, even with all eternity for them to clash in, could account for the complex arrangements that make up the retina of the human eye, nor could they explain the marvellous parts that form the web of a duck’s foot.

MY YOUTH

Man is slowly beginning to realize that, despite the vast age of the world, all of Nature is eternally young and that in consequence of this majestic fact he who has the youthful spirit—no matter at what age—is en rapport with My creation.

It was while drinking the intoxicating sunshine of the Mediterranean lands that Sara Teasdale exclaimed:

O when God made Italy He was gay and young ...

I should like to have the larger truth known: that I was young and gay when I made the whole world. For all of creation is the work of youth. Nature, through which I am expressed, is never weary and

COSMIC PERSPECTIVES II never despondent, but always striving toward recovery and new life.

At no time have I been old or blasé. Those artists who have presented Me under the appearance of an old man have done a grave injustice to the radiant and immortal spirit of reality. It is really curious how medizval ideas still cling. There is nothing more strange in modern art than that fresco in the Boston Public Library, where the painter, Mr. John S. Sargent, has attempted to portray Me in living colors as an aged man of ineffable dignity seated upon a huge throne. He has made My appearance gloomy and forbidding, a typical medieval Jehovah. Like some familiar figure of the Dark Ages I look out of this canvas upon a strange new world moving below Me.

Such representations are better called “misrepresentations.” They are all wrong. “Few passages in Scripture,” declares the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick, “better deserve a preacher’s attention than God’s accusation against his people in the 50th Psalm: “Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such a one as thyself.’ The universal applicability of this charge is evident to any one who knows the history of man’s religious thought. If in the beginning God did make man in His own image, man has been busy ever since making God in his image, and the deplorable consequences are everywhere to be seen.

From idolaters, who bow down before wooden images of the divine in human form, to ourselves, praying to a magnified man throned somewhere in the skies, man has persistently run God into his own mold.”*

It has been the habit of man to think of Me as like himself. So long as old age is regarded as more divine than youth just so long will I be pictured as an aged Jehovah. But creation is far from being old. For even now, after the passage of untold millions of years, everything in the vast structure of the universe bears the hallmark of vigor. Take, for example, these things: the freshness of the early morning, the pris-_ tine beauty of the flowers, the song of the skylark, the brightness of the evening star, the crystal purity of a mountain stream, the smile of a baby dimpling the earth with joy, or two lovers in passionate embrace—could old age create these buoyant realities?

Stoutly rebuking the traditional conception Mr. H. G. Wells speaks of Me in terms of vigorous youth:

I know of no Christian attempt to represent or symbolize God the Father which is not a bearded, aged man. White hair, beard, bearing wrinkles, a hundred such symptoms of senile decay are there. These marks of senility do not astonish our modern minds in the picture of God, only because tradition and usage have blinded our eyes to the absurdity of a time-worn immortal. . . . But the God of this new age,

*Fosdick: Christianity and Progress, p. 217, New York, 1925..

we repeat, looks not to our past but our future, and if a figure may represent Him it must be the figure of a beautiful youth, already brave and wise, but hardly come to his strength. He should stand lightly on his feet in the morning time, eager to go forward, as though he had but newly arisen to a day that was still but a promise. .. .*

It was with evident irony that a disgruntled mortal once said that youth is sure of all things, middleage only a few, and old-age is sure only of death. Beyond its obvious pessimism, this comparison enunciates a vital truth: as I am sure of all things I must be Eternal Youth.

But what of death? Harsh as it may seem, still the law will hold good: until man learns the secret of Life he must undergo this transition. When his science becomes less infantile he will be eternally young in an eternally young world.

When that day arrives I will prepare a new chapter in My biography.

“SOME CALL IT EVOLUTION—”

An astonishing characteristic of My biography will doubtless be the large number of extracts culled from the writings of mortal man. There is a sweetness in human speech even though it be no more articulated than the lisp of a babe. But a beautiful thought well expressed is like a violin bow drawn across the resonant fibres of the heart. Rarely has any

*Wells: God the Invisible King, p. 164, New York, 1927.

mind, pondering the mysteries of My universe, caught a deeper insight than William H. Carruth when he penned the following stanza:

A fire-mist and a planet, A crystal and a cell, A jelly-fish and a saurian, And caves where cave-men dwell; Then a sense of law and beauty, And a face turned from the clod—

Some call it Evolution And others call it God.

Men have so long thought in unscientific terms about the origin of the world that it becomes no easy matter for them to change their mental habits. For almost every race and almost every religion has produced its own classic report on cosmogony. When one compares the exalted ideas of Carruth with those extremely naive accounts that abound in the records and folklore of primitive peoples it can easily be seen how far modern man has travelled beyond the rude knowledge of his ancestors. Endless hours could be spent in examining these early narratives which were handed down from generation to gen- | eration by word of mouth. But they are all pretty much the same in their lack of methodical inquiry. It is undeniably true that they frequently contain flashes of genuine insight; but these are like feeble torches in the dark places of ignorance.

In all parts of the world men have fashioned their myths and legends attempting to explain creation in mechanical terms. An essential part of these older cosmogonies is the thought of the world being the product of carpenter’s and joiner’s skill accomplished within a given period of time. Accordingly, I am often pictured as a great master-mechanic far off in space who once for all constructed, out of hand or voice, this universe with its numberless wheels within wheels. Having endowed it with power— wound it up and set it going—I then rested from My labors precisely as a man might.

Now that scientists have popularized the subject of evolution in all its myriad phases, I trust no one will accuse Me of heresy against Myself when I say that the world was not created mechanically. Neither was it fashioned in six days (consequently I did not rest on the seventh). All these stories of creation, crude products of man’s early thinking, are such as might be expected from infant peoples making the first tiny explorations of the infinite complexity of the universe.

But I have never rested on any day. Creation is in no sense a finished product: it is a growing organism, a continuous act (not an accomplished fact). The popular picture of Me existing detached from My universe in solitary bliss—happily static and statically happy—enjoying a perpetual state of perfection is altogether a fiction of man’s own imagination. Far from being on the outside of the world process, modern Science has re-discovered Me very much on the inside of all things:

The belief that God wound up the world in the beginning and set it running and that it has been running by itself ever since, except for a little regulating now and then, is rank materialism. We believe in God the Sustainer as well as God the Creator. We believe in the God of the present— not merely a God who did something once but a God who does everything now.*

Slowly and very gradually men are removing from My shoulders the tawdry trappings of regal pomp attached to a kingly artificer. As human knowledge widens, one sees a sure surrender of all those mechanical ideas that have so long clustered about man’s vision of My activity. The universe is not a finished product and for that reason I sit upon no easy chair with folded hands, or upon a monarch’s throne amid pomp and circumstance. On the very contrary, I am just as much at work fashioning My creation now as when I began at a time when there was no beginning.

I am ceaseless Activity.

CREATOR

People frequently speak of Me as Creator. There ought to be no objection to the use of this very ex- *Slosson: Sermons of a Chemist, p. 88, New York, 1925.

pressive word, providing it is employed in a carefully guarded sense.

It will take civilization many centuries before the average man has weaned himself from the habit of picturing Me as a God who magically charmed things out of nothing. It will also take a long stretch of time before the mechanical conception of creation dies out, particularly that intensely popular but pestiferous notion which represents Me as having wound up and started the universal machinery as one winds up a mechanical toy and then tosses it off into space.

Instead of understanding My activity as inherent in nature, in whom men live and move and have their being, people have long held the absurd opinion that My world is only a machine, a machine directed by Me but detached from Me and that I bear the same relation to it as an engineer does to the locomotive he invented and now superintends. Such a view supposes Me to have been once upon a time intensely active during a period of just six days, but, having exhausted My creative power in six original efforts, to have been comparatively inactive ever since (except for a little needed adjustment and alteration such as any well-regulated machine requires from time to time).

Most opinions concerning My creativity seem to be based on analogies and they suffer in that one important particular. Nowhere is this inadequacy more evident than in the machine analogy, which borrows the idea of My universe existing detached from Me from those contrivances of human workmanship that can function without the aid of the original agency that manufactured them. If human skill—so it has been argued—can construct a machine which will act by laws and forces inherent in itself then why cannot Infinite Wisdom construct one which will do the same on an infinitely larger scale? It is true that man can make a machine but he does not make the laws nor does he create the forces by which it acts.

In view of the vast strides that scientific men have made in the last one hundred years it would be quite an intellectual throw-back to argue that I created the world as a watchman creates a watch. That was the famous analogy of William Paley, an English theologian of the nineteenth century. “When we look at the watch,” wrote Paley in his Natural Theology, “we know that this instrument is the result, not of accident, but of deliberate design. The parts did not tumble together by chance; they were put together by a mind that knew exactly what it wanted to do.”

In a large sense Paley’s words are true and they would be altogether true zf (and this “if” is the rub) I actually created the Universe as a watchmaker makes a watch, a separate, externally posited effect.

FLOWER IN THE CRANNIED WALL

The universe was not made, but has grown. . . . It is not a machine at all, but an organism with an indwelling principle of life!

As a manufactured article a. watch is fashioned by assembling various parts and co-ordinating them: that is man’s method. My method, on the other hand, represents an altogether different process, for I manufacture nothing. What I create grows—that is to say, it evolves. In other words, everything that now is has come from something that existed before. “What we have in this universe,” wrote John Fiske, “4s not a machine at all, but an organism, with an indwelling principle of life. The universe was not made, but has grown.” Consequently, “the last inch of ground is cut away from under the theologians who suppose the universe to have come into existence through a supernatural process of manufacture at the hands of a Creator outside of itself.”*

If analogies about My creative activities must be used (and men seem as yet to have no escape from a helpless surrender to such inadequacies) then it is much better for intelligent people to discard Paley’s analogy of the watch and use Tennyson’s verses on the “Flower in the Crannied Wall,” and for this reason: because My universe is something that has grown like a rose—an expression of evolution, a prodigious inner effort and an unceasing outreach. It is not a something created like a clock... .

*Fiske: The Idea of God, pp. 131-133, Boston, 1885. Had Joyce

Kilmer been familiar with the writings of Fiske, in all probability he would have said:

Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can grow a tree! ©

Flower in the crannied wall,

I pluck you out of the crannies,

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little fower—but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is.

FROM FINGERS TO VOICE

The question of the origin of things is nearly as old as man himself, for early in the childhood of the race there came the promptings of natural curiosity. Gazing upon the purple-tinted mountains that surrounded his dwelling, primitive man wondered— who piled up these stones against the sky? Who causes the sun to make his daily round across the heavens? Who is responsible for the procession of the stars at night and alters the size and shape of the moon?