Master at St. John's, Part Two

2006 September 17; The Master at St. John's, Part Two

This is the chasm at the lip of which we stopped at last time:

"Divinity cannot be comprehended because it is comprehending."

Talk about God is always problematic. You end up like Sinbad the Sailor, going ashore and exploring what you think is an island, then you look down and see that you are walking on the back of a whale. Retreat as fast as you can! Or, you are like a man-in-the-street interviewer who tries to interview his television viewers. As soon as he pinholes one, that person ceases to be a viewer and becomes a subject. And meantime a thousand other viewers await unseen in a thousand other locations. So it is with images and words about the One, which is why in His law of love He kindly disallows all attempts to do what we cannot do anyway, and what would not be good for us even if we could. The Master continues,

"Man, who has also a real existence, is comprehended by God; therefore, the Divinity which man can understand is partial; it is not complete. Divinity is actual Truth and real existence, and not any representation of it. Divinity itself contains All, and is not contained."

This can be demonstrated with an object lesson. I hold up an object, it does not matter what it is. How much can I understand of this thing? I may be a physicist and think that I know how every atom whirling around inside it works. But even if I were a perfect physicist with that kind of perception, a chemist, even an imperfect one, might come up here and see an entirely different set of relations in this hunk of matter. The sum of what this thing is would still be greater than the sum of what we know, since you could add an interior designer, an historian, and any number of other specialists, and each would have something new to say about this object.

Let us say for argument's sake that we could combine the sum of human knowledge about this thing and know it completely, to the uttermost bounds of human knowledge. That would still be inherently limited. To have a complete understanding we would have to trace the history of its every atom since the beginning of the universe. Then we we would have to know its future. Nobody can know what has not happened yet. So here we are, stymied trying to grasp a mere piece of dumb inanimate matter.

Imagine then that this is an intelligent human being standing here instead of a chunk of minerals. It would be harder still to really grasp what it is, wouldn't it? We do not even use the word object for this, it becomes a "people lesson" instead of an object lesson. Or let us up the ante and imagine that it is a space alien standing before us here, a representative of a race that we have every reason to believe is more intelligent than we are. Its unknowns would be orders of magnitude harder to grasp. Or think that it is an angel or some other minister of grace from another world, a dimension beyond ours. This entity too, just based not on what it is but only on what it has seen, would be way beyond the knowledge and experience of whatever we know.

We have struck out three times here, and we have not even got to the word "God," much less His reality.

This humbling stumbling over our basic limits was broached by Socrates, but in its full implications it can be categorized under the broad ranging set of discoveries made in the Twentieth Century commonly known as "post-modernism." All of it could have been grasped centuries ago if Westerners had bothered to study the Qu'ran with the attention it deserves. Instead for over a thousand years you got bigoted blanket denunciations like the one recently quoted by Pope Benedict. Muslim demagogues have their minions all in a lather about this, but the real losers, the real denizens of the Dark Ages are us. We in the West are utterly clueless about how to begin to think about the elementary concept, the very idea of God and His Oneness. Here, the Master gives a crash course.

Talking about the kafuffle over the Pope's comment, yesterday I quoted the reaction of the Master to the astonishment of passers at the strange dress of his entourage. This took place in Denver, on Tuesday, September 24, 1912, about a year after giving this talk. They were strolling Denver's public parks and boulevards (for those young people who have never seen one, this was a public walkway where human beings could walk without being struck by automobiles, poisoned by their fumes, or having their voices drowned out by their noise. Only a precious few true boulevards remain today.) Mahmud records another observation the Master made that afternoon.

"As the Master passed by the government buildings, monuments and statues of American heroes, He remarked: 'Their victories are trifling in comparison with the first victories of Islam, yet they are famous and a source of honor to all who know them. But these great victories have been completely forgotten.'" (Mahmud, 284)

Lest there be any doubt about the veracity of this historical observation, the early Muslim conquest was by primitive tribes over advanced, living, thriving civilizations. The so-called Indian Wars were the opposite, civilized Europeans fighting rear guard actions against diverse, distributed tribes. The most advanced of these peoples had just been devastated by disease that Europeans unknowingly carried with them, diseased caused by the filthiness of their urban lifestyles. Baths were considered dangerous -- natives could smell their approach before they could see them. In some cases White settlers came upon fully cultivated fields, their owners just killed by the new epidemic diseases they carried.

Compare that to the conquest of remote, illiterate Arab traders mounted on camels over two vast, literate and advanced empires, Christian Byzantium and Zoroastrian Persia. There are few if any historical parallels for such a rapid conquest. Admittedly, Rome started off small too, but its imperialism was gradual, taking centuries to reach its full extent. Even the entry of Moses's people into the Promised Land was slow, partial and abortive in comparison; David and Solomon, glorious as their rule no doubt was, ruled over a small portion of the Holy Land.

Does Western historical amnesia justify the rancorous bitterness of Muslims today? Perhaps. But as the Master seems to be saying, hero worship in the West is just as ephemeral. I cannot offer any first hand observations of the statues remaining in Denver, but by bet is that few of those seen by the Master still remain standing. I recall Schlosser's observation in Fast Food Nation that only one kid in a Colorado High School was wearing a cowboy hat. In the heart of cowboy country the overlordship of rappers is complete. Cowboys used to be the big heroes of the American West, and now they are rapidly being eliminated by industry and forgotten in popular lore. And so it is with the Indian fighters and generals of that era. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Tomorrow we will proceed to the next point made by the Master,

"Although the mineral, vegetable, animal and man all have actual being, yet the mineral has no knowledge of the vegetable. It cannot apprehend it. It cannot imagine nor understand it."