The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God (45 page)

WITNESS: Well, God’s your judge, not me. Some of what you say raises my hopes that our Lord’s saving love is gaining admittance to your heart. Other things you say suggest that it’s to yourself rather than Him that you are looking for salvation, and I tremble for you. Many of your ideas I can’t grasp at all. They don’t accord with the scriptures I know, or with the faith of Christians I know. All the same, in the Father’s house are many mansions. Earnestly I pray that you may find yourself in one of them, and not in outer darkness.

MYSELF: Well, let’s leave it at that. May I just pass on to you the thought that the true spiritual life is all paradox, and that the more Christ
is
you and me the more he’s altogether adorable as
other
than you and me?

It’s to the Jury and to His Honour that I now turn, with the earnest request that each of you will drop all prejudice and carry out a very small but all-important investigation. One which will in seconds summarize and make perfectly clear to you, without verbal complications, what I’ve been saying at length in reply to Counsel and his Witness.

First, please refer again to Diagram No. 15 [see Witness 15 The New Apocalyptic] and note once more the spectacular contrast between yourself as second/third person and as First Person.

Next, please glance around the court and check that
on present evidence
all those other people are built to that second/third-person pattern. All, without exception, are in the normal human condition. The New Bailey is no Bluebeard’s chamber.

Then please - for the very last time in this Trial - stretch out your arms widely at shoulder height, and simultaneously look down at yourself. What you see there is the most significant, the most tremendous of all the sights you have ever seen or will ever see. And the most overlooked because the most feared. Feared not without reason...

I’m grateful to His Honour, and to you two (or is it three?) members of the Jury, for complying. To the remaining nine or ten let me say that I do understand your terror. Crucifixion is a nasty business. However, it happens also to be universal and inescapable. And, when seen and accepted for what it is, it is your entry into the Heaven of God’s love and God’s peace for ever.

So I appeal to you ten once more. In the end my Defence is for seeing, not understanding...

JUDGE: The Accused is on trial for his life. I must ask you to do this little thing for him, sincerely and with full attention. Otherwise, you’re in danger of going away from here with the blood of an innocent man on your hands. [They comply hurriedly, but with an eye on the Judge rather than themselves...]

MYSELF: Among my dear friends who, by thus facing and embracing the wide world, awakened to What lies at its Centre, I think specially of Anne. She happened to be hanging out the washing. To the Jury I say: it’s never too late to hang out the washing, Anne-fashion; it’s never too late to be built for loving, God-fashion; it’s never too late to experience dying and resurrection, Christ-fashion.

As for myself, how slow I’ve been to fathom the depth and power and persuasiveness of this simple act of enfolding Christ’s own world in Christ’s own arms - arms proceeding from no lack lustre Jack’s shoulders, but from the deathless brilliance right here! But at last I find myself saying, with Gerard Manley Hopkins:

I am at once what Christ is,

since he was what I am,

and this Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood,

is immortal diamond.

Or, less beautifully but not less passionately, with Ruysbroeck:

Holy Scripture teaches that God, the heavenly Father, created all men in His image and in His likeness. His image is His Son, His own eternal Wisdom, and St John says that in this all things have life. And the life is nothing else than the image of God, in which God has everlastingly begotten all things, and which is the cause of all creatures. And so this image, which is the Son of God, is eternal, before all creation. And we are all made in this eternal image, for in the noblest part of our souls, that is in the properties of our highest powers, we are made as a living, eternal mirror of God, in which God has imprisoned His eternal image, and into which no other image can ever enter.

Or, in St Paul’s incomparable style:

Ye have put off the old man with his deeds; and have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him: Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.

So that I can, with George Herbert, sing and shout:

Christ is my onely head,

My alone onely heart and breast,

My onely musick.

Prosecution Summing-up

Ladies and gentlemen of the Jury, blasphemy is unique. Like other very serious crimes - such as murder, robbery with violence, and rape - it is a crime against our species. But blasphemy is also the crime against our Creator, and therefore immeasurably more terrible than any other. It is this most heinous of offences with which John a-Nokes stands charged - and of which, the Crown maintains, he has over and over again, in your presence, been proved guilty.

I shouldn’t be at all surprised, however, if you felt that the Defence has sometimes had the better of it in the course of this Trial. That it has occasionally had the Prosecution tied in knots. Well, knotted or unknotted, the Prosecution wishes (and can well afford) to pay tribute to the ingenuity with which Mr John a-Nokes has turned a number of its twenty-seven witnesses into witnesses for the Defence - seemingly. And neutralized others - seemingly. Seemingly, I repeat. For in fact he has done nothing of the kind. Not one of them testified to Nokes’s innocence of the charge brought against him under the Blasphemy Act. Not a single one.

The Defence has shot its bolt - with lots of spectacular skirmishings and flashes and bangs. The only snag is that the missile falters in mid-air and falls far short of the target. Now it’s the Prosecution’s turn. The time has come finally to expose the structural weakness of the Defence. No need of a popgun, let alone artillery fire, from our side. A touch is enough to bring that lofty card-castle tumbling. Never mind how it might briefly stand up outside this court; here, it’s not to be taken seriously for a moment. It’s a game. More precisely, an elaborate
diversion.
The Accused has made good use of the ploy whereby, if you have no answer to the charge brought against you, you unobtrusively substitute for it one you can answer, and then make a great song and dance proving your innocence. Rather as if the Knave of Hearts, accused of stealing tarts and hoping against hope that the Queen has forgotten they were treacle tarts, swears he never, O never stole any jam tarts; and then begins a long spiel about how he hates jam tarts anyway, and how they make him sick, and so on. In that playing-card court, Jack has some chance of getting away with it. In this court of law, Jack has no chance at all. The game’s up, Jack! Your diversions have ceased to divert the course of justice.

Let me remind him and you the Jury of the substance of the Act. The Prosecution is required to prove that the Accused has so outraged people’s religious susceptibilities that they have been driven to take the law into their own hands. It is enough to show that he goes out of his way to scandalize those people, by pouring contempt and derision on an Object or Person or Being they revere - say (to take the extreme example) by falsely claiming to be that very Object or Person or Being. Did he, in fact, do precisely this, persistently? That’s the question that you, the jury, must address.

Can there be the shadow of a shadow of a doubt about the answer?

In his summing-up, the Accused will doubtless make a lot of that little word ‘falsely’. He will say that he has proved that he
really
is the Supreme Being. Well, practically every Witness has testified to the contrary. If any doubt remains in our minds, let’s see whether he can give us a last-minute demonstration of his supremacy by performing I-don’t-know-what wonder. By arranging for the New Bailey to be struck by lightning, perhaps.

Not surprisingly, the Accused follows the rule that the best defence is attack - specially when your own fortifications are crumbling or non-existent. Accused of blasphemy, he goes on to prove, to his own total satisfaction, that he’s practically the only one in court - if not the world - who isn’t guilty of blasphemy! A bold and successful stratagem, maybe, in a few small circles outside this court, but not inside. Here we decline to accept for a moment, in place of the Crown’s definition of blasphemy, that of the Accused. Which in any case (leaving the Act aside for the moment) is a bad definition - one that doesn’t define and mark out boundaries but defaces and rubs out boundaries, and is therefore no definition whatever. To accuse
everyone
of blasphemy, or of any other crime, is to accuse no one. All it does is to show how antisocial, how misanthropic you are.

It’s the nature and the business of every self to be centred on itself, to announce itself distinctly, to get up off its bottom and do and be its own thing; otherwise, the world’s reduced as in a blender to a tasteless soup, with no taster. A man is, and stands for, that man and no other. Such is the human condition the wide world over and down the ages - like it or loathe it. If that’s blasphemy, I like it. And everyone likes it. And everything shows that God likes it, too. So I say to Nokes: Come on! A blasphemous
species
- what on Earth does that mean? The trouble with your Defence is that it’s too clever-clever, too immoderate, too damned radical by half - and therefore self-defeating. It pushes its arguments so far and so hard against the brick wall of common sense that they rebound and knock out the Defender. Knock him cold.

I turn to the Jury. Your job, no matter what you happen to think of the two wildly different definitions of blasphemy that have been put to you - Nokes’s version and the Crown’s version - is to go by the latter. If you’re sensible, you’ll approve of it. But whether you approve or disapprove is beside the point. It’s the law. This is a court of law. Juries serve in it under oath to uphold the law, regardless of their private opinions.

The Accused makes out he’s above the law. I say that at least part of him isn’t, and that’s the part the law can chop. He makes out that he has an inalienable natural right to announce to an unbelieving world his true and superhuman identity, which he alone is in a position to check up on, to introspect. Well I say that his fellow men have an inalienable and natural right to announce and denounce what
they
make of him, and to subject his apparent and human identity to apparent and human laws - to the extent, if need be, of terminating his apparent and human life. If, as he claims, he isn’t what he appears to be - if in reality and as First Person he’s not a product but the Producer of the universe - then he should be able to cope with the slight hiccup of the execution by legal process of that little third person called John a-Nokes. If indeed it is a hiccup, and not a chuckle coming from the real Producer, as He gives Nokes his comeuppance.

Nokes goes on and on about the good sense and practicality of his philosophy. Only gaze and gawp long and hard enough into your One-off Interior Blank (says he, in effect) and all will be tickety-boo. Oh, really? Look at the fix that this priceless jewel of wisdom has landed him in already, to say nothing of where he’s going from here. Look, members of the Jury, and be warned.

The Accused’s credo must strike you the way it strikes most people - as nonsense. Philosophers have for centuries had a word for it: namely,
solipsism.
By which they mean that extreme subjectivism - that blown-up blend of naïvety and conceit - which cries: ‘Hey, guess what! I’ve never met another I! They’ve all been hims and hers and its - motorheads and robots to the last man, woman and child. I alone am Consciousness Indivisible, the only One! Wow!’ No philosophers worthy of the name waste time on this daydream. It’s not that they can disprove it. It’s not even that they strongly disapprove of it, but that they have no use for it. It’s short of meaning and sense, a non-starter and dead end. Solipsism ranks no higher than an occasional pastime - a very dull game of solitaire - which not even the player (if he has any marbles left at all) takes seriously for a moment. Much less the non-player.

Psychologists have an even ruder word for it, namely
regression.
By which they mean a falling back into infantile self-centredness and illusions of omnipotence, a retreat from the bleak and harsh realities of adult life to the time when things and people weren’t other, or separate from oneself. When all existed to serve oneself. And further back still to the solitary warmth and safety of the womb. Here’s an illness born of fear of the real world and unwillingness to take up its challenges. In other words, a refusal to grow up, evasion on a grand scale, a drop-out’s dream of kingship and world dominion. The pipedream of an addict.

Yes, you can get hooked on Nokes’s hallucinogen all right!

In this courtroom, for almost four weeks, we’ve been treated to an extraordinary presentation (as if to a panel of physicians and psychologists and social workers) of a severe and chronic case of solipsistic regression. Fascinating and ingenious, say some of us. Pathetically simplistic and naïve, say others. Sick, sick, sick, say yet others. More menacing than crack or heroin, say the rest. But the general feeling is that the Accused’s pretensions are perverted, deeply immoral. In some indefinable way they are
shameful.