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THE UNCONVENTIONAL GOD
JOHN EDWARDS LeBOSQUET
Fall River, Mass.
Our ideas of God are suffering immeasurably from our
conventionalities. The average man, whether in the pews or
on the street, is failing to know God because of his crude mis-
conceiving of what knowing God would be. The theologians,
meanwhile, should help us here, but they are too busy running
with the hounds (with the intellectual and critical, that is) by
means of their innumerable reservations and elasticities and
tolerances, and at the same time with the unthinking church
public, the hares, by their apparent acceptance and support of
that public's traditional conceptions. 1 Very many people have
the vague idea, for example, that a real communion with God
would be a talking back and forth with him, though the fact
is that God as a clear-cut and conversationally approachable
other-than-ourselves is simply an experience none of us, at
least, has, and just to say so now and then would mightily
clear the air!
But life is too short for negatives. Let us consider in wholly
unconventional and empirical mood certain actual outcrop-
pings in our living which are possibly divine because they all
in some sort transfigure living for us. 2 Several different and
1 Professor D. C. Mackintosh's Theology as an Empirical Science should have
made this criticism unnecessary, but unfortunately his philosophizings keep him from
that getting at close grips with the concrete presuppositions of theology which one
would naturally expect from his book's title. Certain topics, such as sin, salvation,
the person of Jesus, and immortality, live up to it in brief and undistinguished fashion,
but in his discussions of God he is dealing with definitions and hypotheses, preliminary
and otherwise, the total aim of which is rather to justify the conventions handed down
than to follow the facts wherever they may lead.
3 It is, to the writer's mind, the note of augustness, of illumination, of lifting
everything to a higher plane (one throws various figures at the experience, not to
describe it but to suggest the inward " f eel " of it) which is our most dependable criterion
of the divine presence.
S78
THE UNCONVENTIONAL GOD 579
not particularly related experiences shall be brought forward:
their very variety, it is to be hoped, will serve as a succession
of "elevations" adding wholeness and solidity to the idea of
God, and in particular pointing the direction in which will lie
a more adequate conception of what knowing God is.
Most elementary and fundamental of all there is that
negative suggestion of the positive fact of God: the sense of
unreality again and again flooding our drabness and monotony.
It does not appear often when we are in the thick of our
usual everyday occupations; our energetic concentration upon
action, adaptation, effectiveness keeps us firmly fixed then in
the framework of the ordinary, actual, outer world. It does
descend upon us sometimes in the moments between, the
moments of margin which supervene beyond that minimum
which is immediately absorbed by the sheer necessity of rest.
During our pauses, now and again, there has arisen for most
of us a misty strangeness compacted of various constituents,
partly of wonder at the mere fact of existence — that same
wonder which has often been noted as the beginning of philo-
sophical reflection — partly of awe at the complexity of things
together with the resulting oppressive consciousness of our own
vast ignorance, partly of terror at the dead lift of the task of
living upon our shoulders, the task of toiling and pushing —
strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield — and
bearing, and then approaching, and then arriving at that death
with which all have a rendezvous. How pervasive, how uni-
versally experienced this sense of unreality is, may be gathered
from the widespread phenomenon of pessimism in philosophy
and literature; and pessimism is all the more significant in
that it is not only found thus in thinkers and poets, but is
keenly relished, at times at least, by the great majority of
readers. A bare reference to "the weary weight of all this
unintelligible world" starts an answering chord resounding in
us who yield ourselves to Shakespeare's magic: even the wildly
exaggerated gesture contained in his —
580 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing,
wakens our zestful interest and keen attention, not that we
agree with it — at heart surely we do not, else we could not
continue the effort living is, soon or late — but we have had in
ourselves irruptions of blackness of the same quality as the
mood which these words have permanently transfixed.
If one may leap to a contemporary, Mr. Arnold Bennett
serves this generation well, not alone by his homely, exquisitely
dumpy figures, instinct with common sense and vigor, and by
his sure literary touch in general; but most effectively in his
sinewy, realistic disclosings of the wonder of living as such,
now in quietest gray tones suffused with despair (wonder with
a negative sign), as in The Old Wives' Tale, now outlining
appreciatively the never ceasing unfolding of one's life as it
advances in years into things new and strange and amazingly
interesting, as in Clayhanger and The Roll-Call.
Those who seldom stop for thought may regard this which
I call the sense of unreality as being tainted with introspection
and at bottom decidedly morbid, and so it would be morbid
in and of itself as an unrelieved attitude. In most of us who
are aware of it, however, it does not exist alone and unmingled,
but in and among many other more commonplace ingredients :
as a flavor of bitter or sweet tang it should be welcomed, not
cried down.
Morbid or not, however, these aspects and moods which
have been hinted at are at all events real, that is, really expe-
rienced. Their significance does not lie in the fact that they
have been scientifically arrived at, by any rigorous casting up
of debit and credit, weighing over against each other the pains
and the pleasures, the advantages and the disadvantages, the
surprises and the ennuis of life. Nothing of the kind has been
THE UNCONVENTIONAL GOD 581
ordinarily even contemplated: these experiences are made up
not of reasonings but of realizings, not of reckonings but of
moods; we do not arrive at them, but are immediately aware
through them of a something not ourselves and are startled,
disquieted; in any case we are rendered self-conscious and
unsettled by this otherness looming athwart our neatly arranged
garden plots of everyday jog-trot knowing and feeling and
willing. The feeling of unreality, of being outside it all while
yet breathing and living with it all, is an experience not impos-
sibly of God. Or rather one might put it that there is here an
Ahnung of God at his shadowiest: not of what he is, but of the
fact that he is. With that we have something of him: an
incipient communion is already in effect.
But to gain any satisfactory suggestions of that to which
the foregoing experiences refer, one must look not to such
elusiveness any longer, but to another group of positive and
exceedingly vivid experiences. It is difficult to label this group
in a few words unless use is made of the question-begging
expression " God at the throttle," which expression will not do,
surely not at this stage of our consideration. What is meant
is a familiar enough experience in some form or other; to put
it neutrally, there are occasions of sheer effectiveness on our
part when what we do is in a sense the result of our minds' or
spirits' effort, and yet in another sense — and this from the
point of view of our own consciousness — there is about the
achieving an inevitableness, a sureness, and hence often a
gladness such that we feel rather carried on than carrying on.
Even this description is manifestly far from colorless, though
the anonymity of the "not ourselves" is resolutely maintained.
The trouble is that one cannot be adequate, which is to say
accurate, without mentioning and putting in a high light that
"otherness" which every experiencer, whatever his theory,
finds to be the inescapable differentia of the experience in
question.
The most striking type of cases under this rubric is that
found in creative geniuses in the broadest denotation of the
582 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION
term. These men are characteristically humble. It must be
granted that their humility is not always in evidence as regards
their attitude toward those whom they are prone to call
"philistines," the outsider class as such, but they are usually
humble in that they will admit and even insist that it is not
themselves really who bring to pass their marvelous crea-
tions. They may refer to their star or to destiny in the case of
generals or empire-builders like Napoleon or Cecil Rhodes, or
to a dissuading daimon as it was with the profound thinker-
discoverer Socrates. They may cry aloud in desperation with
the prophet Jeremiah, "It is a fire within my bones that will
not let me go!" The higher "creative" kind of scientist and
philosopher calls this otherness "truth" and toils for it and
with it in never ending investigation, or in contemplation of
the facts, now rearing cloud-capped towers of hypothesis, now
razing those elaborations and starting again and again and
again. The sense of being buoyed up and carried exultantly
on, issues in these quarters not in any sense of aid which the
truth as such imparts, but in the keen, glad livingness of the
search for the truth. When the savant is well immersed in
the concerns of his laboratory or study, it is a fact of his expe-
rience that his whole being is suffused with a zestfulness and
all-absorbedness so intense, so sublime that it can easily be
comprehended why Spinoza — one such creator — termed this
and none other "eternal life"! Such a joy in work (to trans-
late the poetic phrase into prose for the sake of clearness) is
always vital and inspiring, nay more, all-significant and all-
potent — a not-ourselves bearing us, not we it. It is open to
the work done with the hands as well as to that done with the
head, although alas its appeal seems in this snobbish age to
be becoming less and less alluring to the artisans.
It is, however, the artist who is peculiarly and classically
the channel of an effectiveness his own, yet not his own.
One may describe him as striving and travailing in a poetic
frenzy of high effort and hope, and then utterly inert and
discouraged and self-loathing; the whole to-and-fro going on
THE UNCONVENTIONAL GOD 583
apart from his volition until there appears at last that soul-
tearing but joy-bringing birth which was all along the goal.
Pregnancy with its restlessness and nerves and selfish irrita-
bilities is one current and very apt figure for the exasperating
oddities and yet profound significances of the artistic tempera-
ment. 1 There is an external compulsion there, both of that
which is to be and of that by which it is (nature) which brings
out not inappropriately the artist's experience of communion.
There is another figure, however, which more fits our idea and
is at the same time no less true to the consciousness of the
artist: it is that of a higher authority laying hold of the
musician or poet, or whatever he be, and using him as an
instrument for its ends. So that the creator's effort needs to
be expended not much, not at all as he views it, in the direct
bringing forth of his works of art: his whole labor, assuming
that he has mature command of his materials and his crafts-
manship, consists in the back-breaking, heart-sickening drudg-
ery of getting into the control and swing of that commanding
power beyond him and so infinitely greater than he. At the
outset of his career he gropes for it, not knowing where it may
be or how he is to proffer himself to it, laboring or dreaming,
sometimes for years, "to find himself" as it is called: yet this
is but a way of speaking, for it is not himself but this other
than he — though only to be found within himself — which he
is seeking, if haply he may find it.
This striving which is the artist's life-drama has its
counterpart in his every working-day. He sits down to his
easel, his music score, his typewriter, with the necessity upon
him of toiling forth from the average general-human to the
exceptional and divine-energizing attitude. To put it in
homely but apt phrase, he must crank and crank and crank
until the divine fire functions, first snappingly, then smoothly —
and he is off on the wings of the wind: no longer pushing at a
dead weight, but borne on and on, his effort now being the
1 See in particular May Sinclair's novel The Creators.
584 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION
different one of directing and steadying the exuberant flight.
Such an exertion sounds much easier than the preliminary
striving for it, and so it is, in so far as it is stimulating and
exhilarating to an extent such that no words can express
adequately its infinite attractiveness; but judging by the
vitality it takes out of a man and the unremittingness of its
demands, it is at the same time incredibly difficult, much more
so than the brute muscular (so to speak) drudgery which
preceded it. One actually grasps now the true, the beautiful,
the ultimate, or rather is grasped by them; and so the free,
happy, yet unspeakably strenuous activity goes on, until,
perhaps gradually, perhaps in a sudden insistent call, the usual,
the material resumes its sway; if nothing else, the physical
need of food, recuperation, sleep will drag him off the field of
divine action. Loath though he be, he obeys perforce, and
must strive and concentrate all over again, upon his return, to
win through to the heavenly experience: so that it is hard to
say which is the more irksome, to pause when one prefers to
go on, or to get moving, drudgingly tugging one's self by one's
bootstraps up out of the comfortable, ambling everyday.
So much for the transitional moments, the painful begin-
nings and breakings-off of artistic energy. The significant
fact for our purpose here is that during the artistic activity as
such, i.e., during its normal course irrespective of change, the
picture the artist is painting, the symphony he is composing,
the novel he is writing (and it is the same as regards the truth
the thinker is seeking to formulate, or the cause the reformer
lives and dies for — not to go into the other Protean forms
taken by this divine which we call from this point of view
imagination because we know not what else to call it) mounts
him and drives him and in every way for the time being wields
him, wearing him down and using him for its goals until at
the last it allows him (though it keenly protests even then) to
break away weak and spent. He will gaze later wonderingly
at the work accomplished in those hours of creative experience.
TEE UNCONVENTIONAL GOD 585
His name is attached to it: he has the credit for it and will
sometimes insist all but swaggeringly — human, all-too-human
as he then is — upon the praise due him; yet he knows well,
deep within, that it is not to him that the glory truly belongs,
for the work came not so much from him as through him! If
one may digress for the sake of clearer illustration into theology
(though it is not really a digression, for the whole of this
discussion, odd though this may sound, is nothing if not theo-
logical), what the Gospel according to John sees and states
with utter absoluteness, and so far as I can see with utter
truth, is this significance we are pondering, the significance of
that "other" rather than of one's self in the productions of
creative genius. For example, there is this: "The words that
I say unto you I speak not from myself, but the Father abiding
in me doeth his works" (John 10: 14). It is a strange perver-
sion, one which would be incredible if it were not nearly
universal, to regard this and other such expressions as self-
exultations rather than, what they so vividly are, disclaimers
and the very extreme of humility. In general, for that matter,
what our doctrinal statements call the divinity of Christ
signified for the writer of the Fourth Gospel — and much more,
one must think, for the consciousness of Jesus— not an exalta-
tion of Jesus, but an exaltation of God, whom Jesus was aware
of in a way analogous to that of the other creators just now
outlined, but with a unique pervasiveness and spiritual range.
Let it be freely granted that the argument thus far is being
decidedly outrun when one plumps out thus prematurely the
word "God"; our excuse is that the illustration from Jesus
becomes far clearer if the word is not omitted. That it is God
to whom these experiences point, it will be attempted to show
in due time. For the present that matter may well be post-
poned, the more as we are not done as yet with the phenome-
nology of our subject.
There must surely be mentioned, because conventional
religious experience makes so much of it (and an experience is
586 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION
not necessarily false, as so many seem to think, because it is
commonly and conventionally met with), the fact that a
striving for a right life individual, social, becomes aware simi-
larly of a something higher, abler, other than the striver as
such. "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me" is the forth-
right description of this by one clear-seeing passionate pilgrim
of this type. The reader should remark here not the name
given to that other, but solely the sheer experience focused in
such a description. Not otherwise, though in different con-
nection, the Reformation theologians ascribed the forgiveness
of sins (meaning by that what we should put as "the hope of a
wholly satisfactory living") not to one's own works, but to the
grace of God, 1 "grace abounding" in Bunyan's title.
The Roman Catholics emphasize no less this aspect of the
struggle for perfection. It is for them also a "not-ourselves"
which co-operates with our effort to redeem life. Among them
this matter is realized, for the common man at all events, by
being externalized: in that certain specific, outward relations
and officially (that is, validly) performed acts — speaking by
and large, the sacraments — are proclaimed essential to salva-
tion, the word here meaning virtually satisfactoriness. The
mechanical quality of this procedure is not congenial to our
prejudices, but it exhibits the more clearly their corporate and
age-long developing conviction that it is not in man, himself
alone, that walketh to direct his steps — and here again it is
important to observe the nature of the conviction rather than
to quarrel with its manner of expressing itself.
It need not be said that the ecclesiastical opinions here
adduced have been glanced at, not in the slightest degree as
dogmatic proofs, but to illustrate the elementary religious
perception which prompts them, a religious perception which
is met with, with more or less consciousness of it, among most
if not all of the morally and spiritually in earnest. The fact
1 For Martin Luther upon this point see Professor McGiffert's Protestant Thought
before Kant, pp. 23-27.
THE UNCONVENTIONAL GOD 587
is indeed that the sectarians and dogmatists and infallibilists,
who (in the Protestant as well as the Roman mode) are vastly
numerous in our churches, are prone to exploit in the interest
of theirpeculiar tenets this all but universal religious experience,
the experience, that is, of added impetus, of a swing forward
which the aspirant, outside as surely as inside the church fold,
becomes aware of in his energetic pushing toward deeds worth
doing. Undoubtedly this forging on is himself in one sense,
and he will, if not theologically biased, be very likely to call it
his "better self"; but however it be as to phrasings, there is
in men an immediate realization, not as religious dogma but
as religious fact, that there is something more august, worthier,
abler, more enduring than one's own (usual) personality which
must be taken into the reckoning during one's spiritual strivings.
It is, it should certainly be noted, such a spiritual striving
in one's self and most of all in society which is the context and
basal reason for the most recent and undoubtedly the most
familiar idea just now of God: I mean "the striving God" or
"the finite God" as he is commonly called. This conception
originated, for us at least, in Professor William James who put
it forth as a religious corollary to his root-and-branch anathema
against absolutism; it was enthusiastically subscribed to by
the Pluralists, including the Neo-Realists, 1 by most of the
novelists who poach at all upon this region, 2 and by many of
the thinking public, lay and liberal theological. A good case
could probably be made out for the thesis that no idea of God
but this one would do as theoretical framework for the religious
experience here being emphasized; in particular that no all-
including, diffuse God could possibly be "other" enough,
which means individual enough, to be associated with. Where-
upon the opposite side would counter, very likely, that a God
more than we (which the upholders of a finite God also insist
to be true of God) might well be more in that he includes us
1 See Professor Ralph Barton Perry, The Present Conflict of Ideals, chap, xxii,
"Pluralism and the Finite God." Neo-Realism's "Amen" to it is given on p. 379.
2 Mr. H. G. Wells and younger men of his school.
588 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION
and all men and all else; and the fact that God in the sort of
experience in question effectively functions within the experi-
ment or within society, immanently that is, decidedly indicates
an Infinite All-Container. So the argument would wax no
doubt hotter and hotter. We need not pause upon it, however,
for though it would not be irrelevant, it would be lengthy;
besides not being in the least necessary, for the only point
intended to be made in the reference to the idea of a finite God
has been gained already in the mere mention of it: the very
existence of the idea bears testimony to religious experience of
the sort referred to in this paper.
The hints or illustrations (it is plain that they are no more)
thus far brought forward by way of not so much supporting as
presenting that religious experience, are far from being exhaus-
tive; no mention has been made, for example, of what might
be termed the social increment, meaning the experience that
five people working together or even meeting together in any
effectual way are considerably more effective from many
points of view than that five times the effectiveness of one
which would naturally be expected; and so with five hundred,
or fifty million, 1 an experience well described if not precisely
meant by Jesus' remark, "Where two or three are gathered
together in my name, there am I in the midst of them" (Matt.
18:20). Furthermore there has been a complete and even
conspicuous ignoring of the much which the mystic of all ages
and all religions has to tell; this has at all events been overmuch
treated already and need not be gone over again. Despite
these and other omissions, and despite also, be it said, the
inevitable meagerness of outline throughout, it is to be hoped
that the angle of consideration intended here is by now some-
what intelligible and that it is, whether one agrees with it or
not, at any rate clear what is meant by insisting that though
the "Great Companion" is dead in the older sense, he is yet
living and communed with in another and equally admissible
sense.
1 Cf. G. Simmel, American Journal of Sociology, VIII (1902), 1 ff., 158 ff.
THE UNCONVENTIONAL GOD 589
But it is high time to turn from phenomenology to evalu-
ation, from the fixating and denoting of this particular type of
experience to the consideration of what or whom men do under
such circumstances experience. The word "God" has been
used above at more than one juncture, used prematurely, and
in strict logic unjustifiably, because of the difficulty and
unnaturalness of paraphrases. Can it be demonstrated now
that this provisional use of the term was in fact accurate ?
Can it be proven that that "other," as we usually called him
with careful neutrality, is God ? The answer to such a direct
question would of course have to be "no": God is, as such,
we might say, never to be proved, but always to be believed in.
It is at least possible to brush away certain objections to
such a belief. It will be said by some, has probably been
said often by the reader of the preceding pages, that the
experiences described above point not to God but to the
subconsciousness. I do not deny that the subconscious is
involved in these experiences, but that fact in no sense dis-
proves that the awareness in question is awareness of God.
Nothing is more self-evident to the epistemologists of the
present than that the channel through which an experience
comes cannot as such make the experience an illusory one.
In other words, the reality of anything of which we are con-
scious is not refuted by an analysis of the perceptions concerned
in bringing that reality to our consciousness. Shall it be denied
us to be as healthily realistic regarding our belief in God as we
are, by all theories of knowledge, admonished to be regarding
the outer world ? Surely the ' ' egocentric predicament ' ' cannot
bar our way here, where it is the subconscious ego which
enters into the reckoning!
In any case, though much use has been made here of the
word "other," otherness is by no means a sole and sufficient
criterion of God; for the matter of that, the whole world of
outer facts and persons, other though they are, are daily
perceived and lived with, with no remotest thought of their
being God — I am not including here the incorrigible theoretical
590 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION
pantheist, of course. The sense of otherness is an essential
element in our idea of God, as — again save for certain eccentrics
— it is essential to our idea of any reality apart from ourselves;
but in the case of God this "not-ourselves" factor is combined
with a sense of impalpableness and general elusiveness. In
addition to these characteristics, which are at bottom negative,
there would have to be certain positive notes, as most obviously
that of irresistibleness. I do not use the word "omnipotent"
which would seem to some more natural, for I am referring to
our feeling in the matter, not asserting objective might.
Even irresistibleness is too inclusive to serve us as a divine
criterion, for it may be said of it, and of all the experiences
alluded to above, that they might conceivably, even so, evi-
dence an evil power, a "devil" in some form or other. This
possibility, so far as anything thus far adverted to is concerned,
must be admitted; yet these experiences, as we shall see, have
a further precluding note. As for the possibility of a devil
being really amongst us, it cannot be denied that there are
certain very definite experiences pointing in that direction, not
those detailed above but analogous to them: take, for example,
the confidence of many a selfish adventurer in "destiny" or
in his "star," as was the case with Napoleon; or there is the
gambler relying upon his "luck" or the betting man upon his
"hunch" — these all and others like them being not-hoped-for,
but, for those concerned, actually experienced enablings.
Such a realizing sense of the Evil One is less common, usually
however, among his votaries than among his persistent oppo-
nents — for the reason probably that evil and selfishness, as
one of its many other injurious effects, slowly but surely clouds
the vision and clogs the whole perceptive apparatus.
So much for the argument from experience as indicating a
Satan as well as a God in the world. It ought to be admitted
indeed, more generally than it is, that every argument for the
existence of a personal God will, analogously applied, serve
equally well to prove the existence of a personal evil urge. So
that to object to the reasoning above because it opens the door
THE UNCONVENTIONAL GOD 591
to an Evil One is no such reductio ad absurdum as at first might
appear.
The note just now hinted at, which points to God and at the
same time debars the inference to any evil power is the note
of moral and spiritual elevation. A true sense of God will be
pervaded — and, I submit, the positive experiences adduced in
the body of this paper are pervaded — by unselfishness which
means on the one hand an utter absence of sensuality and
self-interest, and on the other hand, an outgoing and a
benevolent interest in the good of all, the whole making for
hope and unworried confidence and a gladness, not of an
individual and selfish, but of a spiritual sort — "joy," in the
religious terminology.
But whatever be the correct theoretical description of its
differentia, the sense of God is surely in no danger of becoming
confused, on the part of those undergoing the experience, with
that of God's opposite. If consequently we take our stand,
as we are here doing, upon experience, no further effort need
be spent upon the describing of this particular distinction.
What is vitally needful is that one should avoid being misled
by the smoke screens of conventional description implicit in
many words and phrases. Only actual experience ought to be
accepted as significant, which means among other things that
it is not necessarily those who speak most clearly of communing
with God who have experienced him or know anything what-
ever at first hand about him. There are so many petty minds
and erroneous parrot-repeated conceptions abroad among those
who say "Lord, Lord!" with unction, not to say gusto. And
vice versa, the profession and even the stout assertion of utter
ignorance of God (very characteristic as these are of our
inverted hypocrisy nowadays) should not in itself lead us to
suppose that religious experience is in fact absent. Here, as
everywhere else, the true procedure is that of being guided
not by appearances or opinions, but solely by the realities in
question.
