The worm in the apple

I’ve finally answered the God-question. Whether I’ve solved it for the world, or just for myself, is for the world to decide.
When a discovery is made, it’s important to know how and in what circumstances; for they are not plucked from some realm where all the answers sit waiting to be claimed, in some metaphysical Lost Property office. I arrived at mine through wayfaring.

By “wayfaring”, I refer to a certain acquired freedom, one that’s bought at a price, or else granted, like a scholarship. The wayfarer is not tied down. His true home is highway, meadow, forest and shoreline. He does not shun the metropolis or any built-up area. He belongs wherever he is. He is rich in owning no land and having no debts, for then he is free from obligations. A certain ruler asked how he might inherit eternal life. Having ascertained that he was obedient to the ten commandments, Jesus advised him to go, “sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven.” Or, having nothing to sell up, you could just go with pockets empty, sponsored by nothing more definite than Grace. This is the allegory of the Wayfarer, something like The Pilgrim’s Progress.

I’m no full-time wayfarer, for I don’t have to look for somewhere to lay my head, or depend each day on the kindness of strangers. I have a pretty little house, that’s to say it’s pretty on the inside. Its immediate surroundings, to be honest, are not of my choosing. The pilgrim joyfully chooses choicelessness. I submit gladly to the world as its child, or as a harp submits to the player, or perhaps as an aeolian harp submits to the ghostly caress of the wind, to vibrate with it. The OED offers an apt quotation:

1910 Encycl. Brit. XI. 656/1 Some [rocks] .. are accumulated by the drifting action of wind upon loose materials, and are known as ‘aeolian’ formations. Familiar instances of such wind-formed deposits are the sand dunes along many parts of the sea coast.

Let me then be shaped by the wind. Wayfaring is the method, but the purpose is hidden. What I’m drawn to is walking without knowing where I am going, the opposite of what’s considered desirable. To succeed in this world, they say, you must visualize your goal and pursue it tirelessly. That never worked for me. My objectives were unsuitable, and led me to misery. These days my wisdom is to follow my nose, obey the mysterious impulse. The concealed purpose of my life is concealed especially from me. I open myself to the guidance of something other than the conscious mind. Within this surrender is a more deeply concealed purpose: to take down the dictation, to be the stenographer, of an inner voice, without troubling what that inner voice may be or where it comes from.

There is inevitably something “hit and miss” about this type of wayfaring. For instance, I’ve been asking myself why I’m bothering with a study of the Bible, especially after discovering therein a God whose wickedness is greater than that of the reader. Is it for the purpose of deriding Christianity and despising Judaism? Is it to try and understand the roots of a form of behaviour apparent in present-day Israel and the United States? Merely following my nose, I cannot know.

I walked through the woods yesterday communing with myself, voice recorder as my silent witness, pondering the questions of God’s existence and nature. It was plain I could place no dependence on the authors of the books of Samuel. Their clear purpose was to present the life and lineage of David, and the influence of God on the historical narrative. They were more concerned to demonstrate that Israel’s fortunes were the result of the interplay between God and man, than to present a God for the approval of future generations. Those generations have cherished the storytelling, and the Bible as a whole has remained the world’s most popular book, inspirer of paintings, sculptures, oratorios, hymns, negro spirituals and medieval cathedrals. But I see no role models, no spiritual insights, in the books of Samuel.

So then it occurred to me that the Lord depicted in these books is a construct, a literary device springing from the needs of the narrative. He functions as a thread helping the listener or reader detect at every twist and turn who is right and who is wrong. This is no easy job in the case of David, whose family engage in adultery, rape, incest, fratricide, war crimes and genocide. Not all of these are condemned by the Lord.

But if God is a construct in Samuel, what about in the other books, Genesis for example? How else was it possible to explain how we, and our world, began? Could it be that “God” is always a construct, derived from some need to label and explain, that varies with the time and the speaker?

It seems to be part of human nature to grant reality to expressed ideas, at the expense of unexpressed experience. Say something, write it down, and then it acquires a spurious reality, discussed, argued about, even fought and died for; regardless of whether it has any other existence or not. Whereas a private feeling or sensation may stay unacknowledged, unexpressed, unvalued — even if millions have felt the same thing. Richard Tarnas says:

Plato maintained a strong distrust of knowledge gained by sense perceptions, since such knowledge is constantly changing, relative and private to each individual. . . . Knowledge based on the senses is therefore a subjective judgement, an ever-varying opinion without any absolute foundation. True knowledge, by contrast, is possible only from a direct apprehension of the transcendent Forms, which are eternal and beyond the shifting confusion and imperfection of the physical plane.

I shall call this “Plato’s mistake”. I cherish knowledge based on the senses, and claim it is the only knowledge, no matter how it varies. I’m suspicious of intellectual ideas, which the Western mind clings to as its greatest achievement. To me, it seems absurd that there should be a “Western mind” at all. I’d like to repudiate the error so deeply embedded in its psyche, this worm in the apple of both Christianity and science, that so easily divorces concepts from reality. I have no belief in Plato’s transcendent Forms. “Hold on,” you protest. “Science constantly checks its concepts against reality. For this reason, we may say that its truths are objective.” Furthermore, you may argue, the Western mind, which I have the temerity to challenge, is the bringer of technology, capitalism, science as we know it, progress. Its victory is all but won. All that stands as a barrier in its march is “superstition”, says one point of view. Another point of view deplores the godlessness of mankind.

So we watch from the sidelines a bitter and violent battle. I suspect that Christians wouldn’t defend their Old Testament God or any aspect of their religion, if they weren’t under attack from their declared enemies: humanists, atheists, scientists generally.

Defending ideas is a certain path to falsehood. I shan’t do it. I won’t even defend that promised answer to “the God-question”, which shall now have to wait till my next.