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Now this is where those who have left the old creeds and come asking
about the new realisations find their chief difficulty. They say,
Show us this person; let us hear him. (If they listen to the
silences within, presently they will hear him.) But when one
argues, one finds oneself suddenly in the net of those ancient
controversies between species and individual, between the one and
the many, which arise out of the necessarily imperfect methods of
the human mind. Upon these matters there has been much pregnant
writing during the last half century. Such ideas as this writer has
to offer are to be found in a previous little book of his, "First
and Last Things," in which, writing as one without authority or
specialisation in logic and philosophy, as an ordinary man vividly
interested, for others in a like case, he was at some pains to
elucidate the imperfections of this instrument of ours, this mind,
by which we must seek and explain and reach up to God. Suffice it
here to say that theological discussion may very easily become like
the vision of a man with cataract, a mere projection of inherent
imperfections. If we do not use our phraseology with a certain
courage, and take that of those who are trying to convey their ideas
to us with a certain politeness and charity, there is no end
possible to any discussion in so subtle and intimate a matter as
theology but assertions, denials, and wranglings. And about this
word "person" it is necessary to be as clear and explicit as
possible, though perfect clearness, a definition of mathematical
sharpness, is by the very nature of the case impossible.
Now when we speak of a person or an individual we think typically of
a man, and we forget that he was once an embryo and will presently
decay; we forget that he came of two people and may beget many, that
he has forgotten much and will forget more, that he can be confused,
divided against himself, delirious, drunken, drugged, or asleep. On
the contrary we are, in our hasty way of thinking of him, apt to
suppose him continuous, definite, acting consistently and never
forgetting. But only abstract and theoretical persons are like
that. We couple with him the idea of a body. Indeed, in the common
use of the word "person" there is more thought of body than of mind.
We speak of a lover possessing the person of his mistress. We speak
of offences against the person as opposed to insults, libels, or
offences against property. And the gods of primitive men and the
earlier civilisations were quite of that quality of person. They
were thought of as living in very splendid bodies and as acting
consistently. If they were invisible in the ordinary world it was
because they were aloof or because their "persons" were too splendid
for weak human eyes. Moses was permitted a mitigated view of the
person of the Hebrew God on Mount Horeb; and Semele, who insisted
upon seeing Zeus in the glories that were sacred to Juno, was
utterly consumed. The early Islamic conception of God, like the
conception of most honest, simple Christians to-day, was clearly, in
spite of the theologians, of a very exalted anthropomorphic
personality away somewhere in Heaven. The personal appearance of
the Christian God is described in The Revelation, and however much
that description may be explained away by commentators as
symbolical, it is certainly taken by most straightforward believers
as a statement of concrete reality. Now if we are going to insist
upon this primary meaning of person and individual, then certainly
God as he is now conceived is not a person and not an individual.
The true God will never promenade an Eden or a Heaven, nor sit upon
a throne.
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