THE DIVINE PERSONALITY

While in our last three chapters we have been dealing with certain theories which implicitly or explicitly deny the Divine Personality, and while an impersonal God can be, as we have already seen, of no value for religion, there is no mistaking the fact that this very question whether, i.e., it is possible and legitimate for us to think of God as personal constitutes one of the most typical of modern “difficulties.” It is probably correct to say that this difficulty, like others we have reviewed, dates practically from the collapse of Deism, a creed which possessed a certain hard lucidity satisfying to many for the very reason that it required no very profound insight for its understanding. That a Deity localised in a far-away heaven, seated on a celestial throne and surrounded by an angelic court, should be a person, like any other sovereign, presented no problem to the understanding; but if God was not merely transcendent but also immanent not merely somewhere but in some indefinable manner everywhere then to predicate personality of {75] such a One seemed a very paradox. In one of Feuillet’s novels there occurs a phrase which sums up in a few expressive words a very common spiritual misadventure: the hero says, “J’avais vu disparaître parmi les nuages la tete de ce bon vieillard qu’on appelle Dieu” “I had seen the head of that good old man called God disappear amongst the clouds.” His naïve material conception of the Eternal had dissolved and dissolved into nothingness. May we not surmise that nine times out of ten this is precisely what has happened when we hear the question asked, “But how can God be personal?”

In by far the greater number of cases, that is to say, the problem arises simply and solely from the questioner’s failure to dissociate personality from materiality; a “person” suggests to him a tangible, visible, ponderable form, with arms and legs and organs of sense and when he has reflected sufficiently to understand that such a description cannot apply to God, he concludes that therefore God cannot be personal. The next step is usually that, having seen this visibly outlined Deity disappear parmi les nuages, he passes into absolute unbelief; for somehow an impersonal “Power,” while it may possibly inspire awe, cannot move us to worship, cannot present to us a moral imperative, cannot, above all, either claim our love or give us its affection. It is really the identical difficulty, stated a little {76] more pretentiously, which the “rationalist” author of The Churches and Modern Thought presents to us by remarking that in all our experience that which makes up personality is “connected with nerve structures,” so that we cannot attribute such a quality to “a Being who is described to us as devoid of any nerve structure.” “I know of no answer,” he quaintly adds, “that could be called satisfactory from a theistic standpoint.” {1] It is evident that Mr. Vivian does not remember the famous passage in the Essay on Theism where John Stuart Mill explains that “the relation of thought to a material brain is no metaphysical necessity, but simply a constant co-existence within the limits of observation,” and concludes that although “experience furnishes us with no example of any series of states of consciousness” without an accompanying brain, “it is as easy to imagine such a series of states without as with this accompaniment.” {2] According to Mill hardly a champion of orthodoxy there is no reason in the nature of things why “thoughts, emotions, volitions and even sensations” should be necessarily dependent upon or connected with “nerve structures “; so that Mr. Vivian’s argument palpably fails.

But what about this popular notion which identifies personality with materiality, and {77] therefore denies the former attribute to God? One would think that even the most circumscribed experience, or reflection on such experience, must suffice to dispose of such a misapprehension; let us use the most obvious of illustrations for showing where the error lies. We have only to imagine one of those everyday tragedies that make a short newspaper paragraph say, the case of a man passing a house in process of erection, and being killed on the spot by a piece of falling timber. He is left as a material form; he is decidedly not left as a person. Something has disappeared in that fatal moment that no one had ever seen or handled his self-consciousness, his intelligence, his will, his affections, his moral sense: with these he was a person; without them, he is a corpse. If, then, it is these unseen, intangible qualities, and not flesh and bones, muscle and “nerve structure,” that constitute human personality, is it not rather childish to argue that, unless God possesses a body of some sort, the Divine Personality is a contradiction in terms? If we can validly affirm in the Deity qualities corresponding to those which in human beings we call consciousness, intelligence, etc., we shall obviously be compelled to assign personality to Him; the question is, Have we sufficient grounds for making such an affirmation?

But before we are allowed to answer that question, we have to meet another preliminary {78] objection; for it seems that we are in conflict with philosophy or, to be more exact, with a certain philosophy which, while no longer perhaps in the heyday of its influence with students, still enjoys a good deal of popular vogue. We are, of course, referring to the Spencerian system, in which the word “Absolute” is used as a synonym for what we should call the Deity; but, argues the Spencerian, since “Absolute is that which exists out of all relation,” {3] whereas “even intelligence or consciousness itself is conceivable only as a relation,” it follows that “the Absolute cannot be thought of as conscious.” But if God cannot even be thought of as conscious, how much less can He be thought of as personal!

Such an inference would, indeed, be irresistible if only the premises on which it rests were sound. But is it legitimate, we ask, to identify God with “the Absolute,” or is not this merely a way of begging the question? “Absolute is that which exists out of all relation,” we were just told, and such a genuine Absolute would be genuinely “unknowable,” because its very existence could not be so much as guessed at; but the Spencerian Absolute is the most certain of certainties, described by Professor Hudson as “the one Eternal Reality, the corner-stone of all our {79] knowledge” otherwise as “the Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things proceed.” But the corner-stone of all our knowledge can be such only because, so far from being unknowable, it is intimately related to all our experience which is tantamount to saying that it is not absolute at all; and again, if God be the Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things proceed, that Energy must be thought of as related to all things in other words, it is the very reverse of absolute. And hence the imaginary impossibility of thinking of the Deity as conscious and intelligent vanishes at one stroke. If God were really absolute, in the sense of the definition quoted above, it would certainly be, as Professor Hudson says, “from the standpoint of philosophical exactness” quite inadmissible “to speak of the Divine Will, or a Personal Creator, or an intelligent Governor of the universe”; but as we have seen that this absoluteness is purely fictitious, it follows that we may legitimately inquire whether consciousness, intelligence, will and hence personality are predicable of God, without heeding a veto which rests on imaginary foundations.

It is true Professor Hudson raises two further objections; these, however, will not long detain us. We are informed in the first place that “the further progress of thought ’must force men hereafter to drop the higher anthropomorphic characters given to the First {80] Cause, as they have long since dropped the lower’”; but since our guide, a few pages later, quotes with approval the dictum that “unless we cease to think altogether, we must think anthropomorphically,” we may be pardoned for declining to believe that “the further progress of thought must force men hereafter” to “cease to think altogether.” Such a suicide of thought would furnish an odd comment upon philosophic “progress.” We shall, of course, continue to think anthropomorphically of God; our thought will thus inevitably fall short of the Reality, but it will be truer than if we did not think of Him at all. Again, Divine Personality is declared to be a self-contradiction because

“Personality implies limitation, or it means nothing at all. To talk of an Infinite Person, therefore, is to talk of something that is at once infinite and finite, unconditioned and conditioned, unlimited and limited an impossibility.”

To this plea there are, however, two answers. The first may be made in the unprejudiced words of Mr. Vivian, who observes,{4]

“We must not forget that in philosophy and theology the word ‘person’ simply implies ‘a nature endowed with consciousness,’ and does not involve limits.”

But secondly, without committing ourselves to Professor Hudson’s dictum that personality implies limitation, we have to point out that we are not concerned to defend any inference that might be drawn from the infinity, in the sense {81] of the “allness” of God. We do not deny, but on the contrary affirm, that in the act of creation God imposes limitations upon Himself; so that this last obstacle also is disposed of.

So far, then, we have dealt with the a priori arguments against the Personality of God, and have seen why none of these neither that from His non-materiality, nor from His alleged absoluteness or infinity raises any real bar to His being thought of as personal. We are now in a position to inquire positively whether there is sufficient ground for regarding Him as conscious, intelligent and purposive; if He possesses these qualities, we repeat that He certainly possesses that of personality.

The method by which we must proceed is obvious, and will at once occur to the reader who recalls our opening chapter; the question resolves itself simply into this Are the phenomena of nature such as to indicate intelligence and directivity in their Cause? We submit that incontrovertible proof of the absence of such directive intelligence would be furnished, if the world were, as a matter of fact, chaotic if it disclosed neither regularity nor continuity if, in a word, we could never be sure what would happen next. True, in such a state of things life itself could not be sustained, for life is only possible in a world of orderly sequences and uniform laws; but seeing that as a matter of fact such orderly sequences and uniform laws meet us everywhere {82] in nature, is not the inference fairly inevitable? Let us be quite clear on one point: there are two ways, and two only, in which any phenomenon can be accounted for design or chance; what is not purposed must be accidental. Does, then, nature impress us as the outcome of chance? If we saw a faultlessly executed mathematical diagram illustrating a proposition in Euclid, should we really be satisfied with the statement that it represented the random pencil-strokes made by a blindfolded child ignorant of geometry? On the other hand, if a fretful baby is allowed to divert himself by hammering the piano keys, is the result ever remotely akin to a tune? We know perfectly well that we never get harmony, order, beauty, rationality by accident; and there is only one other alternative design, purpose, guidance. Professor Fiske quotes a quaint observation of Kepler’s illustrating this very point, which we may be allowed to reproduce:

Yesterday, when weary with writing and my mind quite dusty with considering these atoms, I was called to supper, and a salad was set before me. “It seems then,” said I aloud, “that if pewter dishes, leaves of lettuce, grains of salt, drops of oil and vinegar, and slices of eggs, had been floating about in the air from all eternity, it might at last happen by chance that there would come a salad.” “Yes,” says my wife, “but not so nice and well-dressed as mine is!”

Mrs. Kepler’s shrewd, homely remark gives its last touch of absurdity to the suggestion {83] that a world which we see to be pervaded by unfailing law has come together by sheer, incalculable accident. Not so much as a salad of respectable calibre could be accounted for upon such a theory; how much less credible is it that the universe began with a cosmic dance of unconscious atoms whirled along by unconscious forces, and happening so to combine as to produce order and sequence, life and consciousness, will and affection!

But not only does the universe exhibit a sublime order which is the very contrary of what we can associate with the blind workings of chance; not only do the circling immensities of the stars and the microscopic perfections of the snow-crystals alike point to a shaping and directing Mind and Will: what nature reveals what is implied in the very term evolution is not merely order but progress. As Fiske has it, “Whatever else may be true, the conviction is brought home to us that in all this endless multifariousness there is one single principle at work, that all is tending towards an end that was involved in the very beginning.” In other words, the supreme certainty brought home to us by the researches of modern science is that all creation is thrilled through by an all-encompassing Purpose. We really ask for no more than such an admission; that, in short, is our case. We can clinch the whole argument with one quiet sentence of Mr. Chesterton’s: “Where there is a purpose, {84] there is a person.” If Mr. Spencer’s “Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed” is purposive, that is equivalent to saying that God is what we mean by personal.

But ought we not to have shown first of all that He is conscious? No, for the greater includes the less, and purpose is unthinkable apart from consciousness. In saying this we are aware that a philosopher like Eduard von Hartmann speaks of “the wisdom of the Unconscious,” of “the mechanical devices which It employs,” of “the direction of the goal intended by the Unconscious,” etc., etc.; but this, we are bound to say, is to empty words of their meaning. To intend, to direct anything requires at least that the one so doing should be conscious of what it is he is doing. And consciousness, intelligence, directivity are constituents never found apart from personality. But, we are told, “the choice lies, not between personality and something lower, but between personality and something inconceivably higher.” {5] We reply that we have already made the acquaintance of this idea of a “super-personal” Deity, and found that for all practical i.e., religious purposes the super-personal is simply the impersonal under another name.{6] And when we remember that the “inconceivably higher than personal” ultimate Reality of the agnostic possesses neither {85] consciousness, nor will, nor intelligence, we simply fail to see how a Power lacking these attributes could be even personal, to say nothing of its being more than personal. Be this, however, as it may, the decisive fact remains that we are persons, and therefore personality is the highest category under which we can think; and if we, the children of the Eternal, are endowed with personality, it is sufficient for us to know that a cause must be at least adequate to produce the effects that have flowed from it. Nothing can be evolved but what was first involved. On this ground alone, whatever else God may be, He is at least personal; and that is all we were anxious to establish.

That is all but it is also all-important; for it cannot be too emphatically insisted that without a personal God religion simply ceases to be. It is a strange and delusive fancy on Professor Hudson’s part, and that of a good many people, that “the religious emotions” will survive the de-ethicising, depersonalising of the Deity, and that men will remain “deeply religious” even when it is recognised that the “Great Enigma,” the “eternal and inscrutable energy,” the “ultimate Reality” cannot be spoken of as “a Personal Creator, or an intelligent Governor of the universe.” For our own part, we find it difficult to believe that such a forecast could have been framed by anyone possessing a first-hand knowledge of what “the religious {86] emotions” are; we say with the utmost confidence that no such emotions can be felt towards a Power which “cannot be thought of as conscious,” let alone as benevolent or personally interested in us. We well know that we can be nothing to such a Power nor can It be anything to us; for a God who does not care, does not count. We cannot commune with this chill and awesome Unknown; we can only pray to One who hears; we can only love One who has first loved us. In the last analysis, an “impersonal Deity” such as one hears occasionally spoken of, is a mere contradiction in terms, the coinage of confused and inaccurate thought. Where the meaning of personality is so much as understood, doubt as to the Divine Personality vanishes; and least of all will that truth be doubted by those who see the supreme revelation of God in Jesus Christ. He, the Incarnate Son, has shown us, not a Power but a Person the Person of the Father and, to-day as of old, “it sufficeth us.”