Perennial Phil Ch 19 GOD IS NOT MOCKED [4,1912]

Perennial Phil Ch 19 GOD IS NOT MOCKED [4,1912]

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A quick summary:

0] Meaning of the Title: "GOD IS NOT MOCKED": 

It is easy for us as believers to point the finger at those outside the church who mock God. But the most subtle mockery of God, and the most dangerous, comes from those of us sitting in church. 

We are guilty of mockery when we behave with an outward show of spirituality or godliness without an inward engagement or change of heart.

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Why hast thou said, 'I have sinned so much,
And God in His mercy has not punished my sins'?
How many times do I smite thee, and thou knowest not!
Thou art bound in my chains from head to foot.
On thy heart is rust on rust collected
So that thou art blind to divine mysteries.
When a man is stubborn and follows evil practices,
He casts dust in the eyes of his discernment.
Old shame for sin and calling on God quit him;
Dust five layers deep settles on his mirror,
Rust spots begin to gnaw his iron,
The colour of his jewel grows less and less.

Jalal-uddin Rumi

IF there is freedom (and even Determinists consistently act as if they were certain of it) and 

if (as everyone who has qualified himself to talk about the subject has always been con­vinced) there is a spiritual Reality, which it is the final end and purpose of consciousness to know; 

then all life is in the nature of an intelligence test, and 

the higher the level of awareness and the greater the potentialities of the creature, the more searchingly difficult will be the questions asked. 

For, in Bagehot's words, 

'we could not be what we ought to be, 

if we lived in the sort of universe 

    we should expect. . .

• A latent Providence, 
• a confused life, 
• an odd material world, 
• an existence broken short in the midst and on a sudden, 

are not real diffi­culties, but real helps; 

for they, or something like them, are essential conditions of a moral life in a subordinate being.' 

Because we are free, it is possible for us to answer life's questions either well or badly. If we answer them badly, we shall bring down upon ourselves self-stultification.273 274 

Most often this self‑stultification will take subtle and not immediately detectable forms, as when our failure to answer properly makes it impos­sible for us to realize the higher potentialities of our being. 

Sometimes, on the contrary, the self-stultification is manifest on the physical level, and may involve not only individuals as individuals, but entire societies, which go down in catastrophe or sink more slowly into decay. 

The giving of correct answers is rewarded primarily by spiritual growth and progressive realization of latent potentialities, and secondarily (when cir­cumstances make it possible) by the adding of all the rest to the realized kingdom of God. 

Karma exists; but its equiva­lence of act and award is not always obvious and material, as the earlier Buddhist and Hebrew writers ingenuously imagined that it should be. The bad man in prosperity may, all unknown to himself; be darkened and corroded with inward rust, while the good man under afflictions may be in the rewarding process of spiritual growth. 

No, God is not mocked; but also, let us always remember, 

He is not understood.

Pert nella giusthia sempitérna la vista che riceve vostro mondo,

com'occ/zio per lo mar, dentro s'interna,

ckê, benc/lê dalla proda veggia ilfondo,

in pelago nol vede, e non di meno

Ii, ma cela liii l'esser profondo.

('Wherefore, in the eternal justice, 

such sight as your earth receives is engulfed, like the eye in the sea; 

for though by the shore it can see the bottom, in the ocean it cannot see it; 

yet none the less the bottom is there, but the depth hides it.')

 Love is the plummet as well as the astrolabe of God's mys­teries, 

and the pure in heart can see far down into the depths of the divine justice, 

to catch a glimpse, not indeed of the details of the cosmic process, but at least of its principle and nature. 

These insights permit them to say, with Juliana of Norwich, that all shall be well, that, in spite of time, all is well, and that the problem of evil has its solution in the eternity, which men can, if they so desire, experience, but can never describe. 275

But, you urge, if men sin from the necessity of their nature, they are excusable;

you do not explain, however, what you would infer from this fact.

Is it perhaps that God will be prevented from growing angry with them?

Or is it rather that they have deserved that blessedness which consists in the knowledge and love of God?

If you mean the former, I altogether agree that God does not grow angry and that all things happen by his decree.

But I deny that, for this reason, all men ought to be happy.

Surely men may be excusable and nevertheless miss happiness, and be tormented in many ways. A horse is excusable for being a horse and not a man; but nevertheless he must needs be a horse and not a man.

One who goes mad from the bite of a dog is excusable; yet it is right that he should die of suffocation.

So, too, he who cannot rule his passions, nor hold them in check out of respect for the law, while he may be excusable on the ground of weakness, is incapable of enjoying conformity of spirit and knowledge and love of God; and he is lost inevitably.

Spinoza

Horizontally and vertically, in physical and temperamental kind as well as in degree of inborn ability and native goodness, human beings differ profoundly one from another. Why? To what end and for what past causes? 

'Master, who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?' 

1. Jesus answered, 'Neither hath this man sinned nor his parents, but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.' 
2. The man of science, on the contrary, would say that the responsibility rested with the parents who had caused the blindness of their child either by having the wrong kind of genes, or by con­tracting some avoidable disease. 
3. Hindu or Buddhist believers in reincarnation according to the laws of karma (the destiny which, by their actions, individuals and groups of individuals impose upon themselves, one another and their descendants) would give another answer and say that, owing to what he had done in previous existences, the blind man had predestined himself to choose the sort of parents from whom he would have to inherit blindness.276 

These three answers are not mutually incompatible. The parents are responsible for making the child what, by heredity and upbringing, he turns out to be. The soul or character incarnated in the child is of such a nature, owing to past behaviour, that it is forced to select those particular parents. 

And collaborating with the material and efficient causes is the final cause, the teleological pull from in front. This teleo­logical pull is a pull from the divine Ground of things acting upon that part of the timeless now, which a finite mind must regard as the future. 

Men sin and their parents sin; but the works of God have to be manifested in every sentient being (either by exceptional ways, as in this case of supernormal healing, or in the ordinary course of events)—have to be mani­fested again and again, with the infinite patience of eternity, until at last the creature makes itself lit for the perfect and consummate manifestation of unitive knowledge, of the state of 'not I, but God in me.'

'Karma,' according to the Hindus, 'never dispels ignorance, being under the same category with it. Knowledge alone dispels ignorance, just as light alone dispels darkness.'

In other words, the causal process takes place within time and cannot possibly result in deliverance from time. Such a deliver­ance can only be achieved as a consequence of the intervention of eternity in the temporal domain; and eternity cannot inter­vene unless the individual will makes a creative act of self-denial, thus producing, as it were, a vacuum into which eternity can flow. To suppose that the causal process in time can of itself result in deliverance from time is like supposing that water will rise into a space from which the air has not been previously exhausted.277

The right relation between prayer and conduct is not that conduct is supremely important and prayer may help it, but that prayer is supremely important and conduct tests it.

Archbishop Temple

The aim and purpose of human life is the unitive knowledge of God. 

Among the indispensable means to that end is right conduct, 

and by the degree and kind of virtue achieved, the degree of liberating knowledge may be assessed and its quality evaluated. 

In a word, the tree is known by its fruits; 

God is not mocked. [?]

Religious beliefs and practices are certainly not the only factors determining the behaviour of a given society. 

But, no less certainly, they are among the determining factors. 

At least to some extent, the collective conduct of a nation is a test of the religion prevailing within it, a criterion by which we may legitimately judge the doctrinal validity of that religion and its practical efficiency in helping individuals to advance towards the goal of human existence.

In the past the nations of Christendom persecuted in the name of their faith, fought religious wars and undertook cru­sades against infidels and heretics; 

today they have ceased to be Christian in anything but name, and 

the only religion they profess is some brand of local idolatry, such as nationalism, state-worship, boss-worship and revolutionism.

From these fruits of (among other things) historic Christianity, what infer­ences can we draw as to the nature of the tree? 

The answer has already been given in the section on 'Time and Eternity.' 

If Christians used to be persecutors and are now no longer Christians, the reason is that the Perennial Philosophy incor­porated in their religion was overlaid by wrong beliefs that led inevitably, since God is never mocked [?], to wrong actions. 

These wrong beliefs had one element in common—namely, an over-valuation of happenings in time and an under-valuation of the everlasting, timeless fact of eternity. 

Thus, belief in the supreme importance for salvation of remote historical events resulted in bloody disputes over the interpretation of the not very adequate and often conflicting records. 278 

And belief in the sacredness, nay, the actual divinity, of the ecciesiastico-politico-financial organizations, which developed after the fall of the Roman Empire, not only added bitterness to the all too human struggles for their control, but served to rationalize and justify the worst excesses of those who fought for place, wealth and power within and through the Church. 

But this is not the whole story. The same over-valuation of events in time, which once caused Christians to persecute and fight religious wars, led at last to a widespread indifference to a religion that, in spite of everything, was still in part preoccupied with eter­nity. But nature abhors a vacuum, and into the yawning void of this indifference there flowed the tide of political idolatry. The practical consequences of such idolatry, as we now see, are total war, revolution and tyranny.

Meanwhile, on the credit side of the balance sheet, we find such items as the following: an immense increase in technical and governmental efficiency and an immense increase in scien­tific knowledge—each of them a result of the general shift of Western man's attention from the eternal to the temporal order, 

first within the sphere of Christianity and then, inevi­tably, outside it.

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