Theosophy - Case of the Missing Messiah by Alvin Boyd Kuhn
THE
CASE OF THE MISSING MESSIAH
by ALVIN
BOYD KUHN, Ph.D.
Content:
Foreword
Prologue
The case of the missing messiah
Souls migrate to earth
Groping amid shadows
The voice of ancient Egypt
Wisdom hidden in a mystery
A ghostly voice from the past
Critique of the esoteric view
The coming of messiah
Was Jesus the founder of Christianity?
Scriptural writing was allegorical
Precariousness of the evidence
How was the logos made flesh?
Where was god before 33 A.D.?
FOREWORD
In 1944 the author of this essay
published his volume "Who Is This King of Glory?" It stood as perhaps
the most forthright and uncompromising critique of the fundamental tenets of
Christianity that has been put forth up to that time, or even to the present.
It assembled and correlated a vast body of documentary and factual data which,
if it could not be successfully confuted, rendered the verdict of the non-historicity
of the Gospel narrative and its central figure, Jesus of Nazareth, final and
no longer controversial. Its thousands of readers are almost unanimous in the
conviction that it closed the case beyond debate and on the negative side. In
the wide sweep of its searching survey, all that hitherto had, in the general
mind of religionists, been assumed to stand as solid historical substantiation
of the physical life and exalted preaching of the Nazarene personage disappeared
completely from view; or at any rate was seen as incompetent to testify in the
category of historical evidence. While on the other side, the more minute the
examination of the data adduced, the higher the mountain of evidence piled up
in disproof. In fact, when the question was canvassed with the lens of a discerning
knowledge of ancient esoteric practice and schematism in the inditing of religious
literature, it was found that there was virtually no evidence that could be
accredited as factually historical in support of the existence of Jesus. And
just as surprisingly it was seen that all the evidence that could rate as historically
authentic was marshalled on the contra side. In fine, all the evidence bore
heavily against the thesis, and what had been assumed to be evidence for it
vanished into the mists of allegory.
This astounding determination
of course found little acceptability in orthodox religious ranks. It seemed
incredible that all Christian scholarship, all theological erudition, over some
eighteen centuries could have been either unconscionably blind or hopelessly
stupid, or consciously knavish, that it could either have totally missed the
discovery of this glaring error, or could have successfully conspired to suppress
the truth and permit the Christian system of beliefs based on the life of this
dramatic character dominate the mind of the most progressive half of present
humanity for nearly two millennia. There is no question but that this complication
in what is undoubtedly the most significant and fateful item in the field of
religious hypnotization in the Western segment of humanity is both supremely
incredible and totally incomprehensible to the general mind. That one scholar,
working almost alone and in obscurity, should now establish beyond dispute (though
it will be disputed) what the learned gentry of the world had missed for so
many centuries, is likewise a prediction that will not find credence anywhere.
This observation, however, need not appear so exceptional a phenomenon, since
the discoverer is ever the one who singly has come upon some secret, some great
truth, that all the world has missed. It is the presupposition in all discovery.
The debate is one that could
hold the fate of our world in the balance. It would be difficult to adduce a
general theosophical concept more fateful for the world (or the Occidental half
of it) than the idea that man must discount his own powers, indeed surrender
them abjectly, and look for his salvation to a power exterior to his own proper
endowment, and not integral with that endowment, in all the crises in his history.
The question whether man is the architect of his own destiny under universal
cosmic law, or must turn to an outside power to plead for his salvation, is
ultimately the most crucial psychological
determinant in the realm of his conscious being. It represents the difference
between his acting in the first case resolutely on the highest knowledge and
wisdom available to him, and in the second instance, defaulting in any action
and cowering in craven spirit at the feet of the postulated saving power, begging
for a blessedness he frankly confesses he does not merit.
The eminent psychologist Jung
has now elucidated the disastrous psychological determent of holding the Messiah-Savior
concept as presented by the religionists. It is the simplest of logical theses,
that by as much as the human focuses his interest, his faith, his yearnings,
his cries of distress upon a power extraneous to himself, by precisely so much
does he commit to atrophy a power that all true religion has predicated as innately
potential within himself. And it is as mathematically as precise in its operation
as it is logically sound in theory. In proportion as you use a crutch you will
lose a muscle.
Probably in the end the division
of ancient religion into the two categories of exoteric milk for babes in wisdom
and esoteric meat for stronger minds, was fundamentally one that made religion
a matter of the science of personal development of the individual’s own inner
spiritual capabilities; or made it a cultus of powers localized in gods or deific
powers external to man’s own nature. The capable and the instructed were taken
into the mysteries of the spiritual kingdom within; the less capable were taught
"in parables", that is, regaled with stories that could be apprehended
for initial benefit in their bald literal form, so framed as to carry obvious
moral lessons. When Christianity made its appeal to the mass of the ignorant
populace, it purveyed this sort of teaching, which shortly it permitted to be
taken and canonized as the truth of the Gospels. Hence the religion of exoteric
teaching that in popular conception reduces always to factual untruth, came
to dominate the Christian world, the esoteric sense being sequestered with the
few philosophers in their secret studios.
Therefore the question of the
historicity of Jesus is for the West the most vital and critical one in the
field of religious philosophy. It needs no abstruse psychological dissertation
to establish the point that the fateful issues of history now as always hinges
upon whether human groups are moved to resolute and forthright action on the
knowledge that their problems must be met and solved by the best initiative
they are capable of, or whether, though Sons of God in their own right, they
can stand inert and helpless, while crying to their supernal deity to save them
the trouble of saving themselves.
The cultus of an external divinity
binds man’s hands tight in the pleading attitude of prayer. This form of religious
expression certifies man’s surrender of his divine potential to an outside power.
A digest of the whole argument can be put forth in the sharp and graphic statement
that the issues of history depend upon the human choice in religion between
our acting upon our own initiative in dependence upon our own powers, and our
running in prayer to an overlord of life localized somewhere in the cosmos.
The running to God with all our problems in prayer, as Jung says, keeps the
potential divinity within ourselves in the weakness of its childhood. By ignoring
it we leave it unexercised and undeveloped; we give it no chance to exert its
fledgeling energies and thereby grow.
It is true to the last degree
of verity that mankind will never rise to the status of conscious lordship over
its destiny until it turns from the worship of gods exterior to itself and cultivates
the deific forces all too latent within its own nature. Shocking as it is going
to be to the pious, but psychologically true past debate, it must be stated
that it is precisely this hypostatized
figure of the historical Jesus that stands between man and his own divinity,
and blocks the path of each human to his God. For while he fills all their vision
and receives the full meed of their devotion, they, as Jung says, neglect to
make real the divine power needing attention and cultivation within themselves.
Not until "he" is removed out of the way will Western man come at
last to the realization that whatever salvation is available to him will be
that released by the birth of the Sun of Righteousness, rising with healing
in his wings, from out the depths of his own combined human and divine natures.
An errant religious bent that
turned the heart and mind of the West to seek sanctification from a power localized
outside the human individual, gave rise to the cult of miracle, evinced strongly
in most religions, but excessively in Christianity. Not the power at work in
the natural order, but a power able and disposed to manifest supernatural phenomena
became the focus of religious unction. It was along this path that religion
proceeded from the grounds of a sound and efficacious spiritual science to the
overweening eccentricities of a pseudo-magic. In this diversion from true line
it transferred the seat of spiritual culture from the inner courts of the human
nature and endowment to the outer thrones of a power always dubiously localized.
The most succinct form in which this disastrous transfer can be expressed is
to say that it caused man to look for "miracle" outside himself and
not within himself. From the limited purview of the human it is no overworking
of poetic or mystical propensity to aver that life is all miracle. The mortal
who does not find ground of eternal and ever-deepening wonder at the stupendous
magnitude, order and majesty of nature and the cosmos, is lacking in all the
rudiments for any culture. There is no end of marvel as well outside man’s little
sphere of personal being as in the depths of his own selfhood. Both should elicit
his adoring reverence.
But it is ever the miracle within
the human soul that religion, as distinct from secular human physical science,
must cultivate and place in living control of life, if human life is to be harmoniously
related to the world, to the body, to the orderly course of evolutionary progress.
There is not observable any power in the world of physical nature, such as it
is asserted the ancient uncivilized tribes of the forest and the sea isles personalized
djinns, kobolds, salamanders, pixies, gnomes, dragons, elves and nature sprites,
wood nymphs, dryads, oreads and Pan-Gods, that in any direct way co-act with
or effect the conscious ordering of the individual human life. The final initiative
and the responsible authority in the shaping of our life reside deep within,
proceeding from an inner core of consciousness.
Even the most unbending Fundamentalist
orthodoxy must see that its basic concept of sin, through which man forfeited
his right to any divine consideration and made his salvation dependent only
on cosmic "mercy", is itself disqualified dialectically if it is asserted
at the same time that the power that alone can save man is a power outside and
beyond his own range of control. For sin is not sin if it is not perpetrated
in violation of conscious control and responsibility. And responsibility can
be charged only against an agency that is in conscious control of the order
and process infringed. The error and illegitimacy of the sin theology reside
in the fact that it at one and the same time charges the human (and from the
very first moment of his creation) with the responsibility of obedience to divine
law and amenability to the penalties of its violation, yet refuses to commit
into his hands the crucial and final power to save himself from sin. In the
same breath it asserts that man will be punished for sin, but that the saving
power is not in his hands, but in God’s. Christian theology has ever held this
anomalous, this self-conflicting doctrinism, which indeed makes indigestible
hash of all its vaunted message of
salvation. Out of one corner of its mouth it threatens its devotees with the
horrendous penalties of sin; yet from the other corner it protests that no power
within themselves can save them from sin, that they are in fact doomed to sin,
and must cast themselves on the mercy of a power immeasurably beyond their reach,
in the hope that their pleadings may chance to be favorably countenanced by
an arbitrary and, from the record of his dealings with his people in the Old
Testament, a whimsical, capricious, jealous and vengeful Deity.
The inherent absurdity in all
this arises, however, from the same stupid blunder, the wretched failure of
esoteric genius in the first Christian centuries, the mistaking of outward representations
of inner deific powers in man for outer deities themselves, which gave rise
to the idea of man’s sinning against a power outside himself.
The ancient exalted arcane science
of the soul rested on the principles of knowledge underlying the origin, constitution
and destiny of the divine essence of spirit incorporated successively in mortal
bodies. It dealt primarily with the interrelations subsisting between the four
basic elements of his conscious existence, sensation, emotion, thought and spiritual
aspiration, for out of these interrelations came the evolution of his inner
bodies making possible the expansion of his conscious being. The deeper intricacies
and involvements of this science were the secret teaching of the arcane spiritual
brotherhoods, and were perforce confined to men of the highest development.
The point of great moment is
that nowhere was there in the manuals of this great science the predication
of the need of any item, element or factor of force, in any form or degree essential
to the perfect operation of the telestic technique, for which the aspirant had
to look outside himself. All the agencies necessary for the
normal perfection of the theurgic unfoldment were in man’s own hands, innate
elements in his own constitution. Nowhere was there the postulation of the need
for the human to reach out beyond his own endowment, to grasp at a power whose
extraneous aid would be decisive or in any way crucial for his success. It was
the science of man himself, soul and body, and the soul itself being the God-potential
lodged within the area of his own range of consciousness, and needing only to
be cultivated to its growth to glory. For the injection of any exterior influence
to modify or implement the transaction, there was no need, there was indeed
no place. The idea of his having to plead with a God without, when he already
sheltered the god within, was a development only made disastrously possible
by the fatal debacle of sense and sanity that turned sublime esoteric truth
into a reason-devastating theology.
In the true soul science there
is, therefore, no place for the concept of salvation through any force, potency
or agency impingeing upon man from outside, and above all from a radiation engendered
by and in the physical body or life of any one man in history. The predication
of such a force has afflicted the mass consciousness of the Western world with
the most direful of all tragic delusions ever to derange the human reason. Those
who contribute to the perpetuation of this delusion do but prolong the crucifixion
of the Christos still nailed on the cross of low human grossness, bestiality
and ignorance.
PROLOGUE
The "present writer"
has no wish to be considered an iconoclast, much less an "anti-Christ",
nor even an anti-Christian. He has no fell purpose to smash sacred images, either
physical or mental, that have dominated, whether for good or evil, the minds
and hearts of humans.
But--since many of the readers
of this essay will be those who look to the stars in the heavens for the rationale
of human actions and character traits--he may state that he was born in the
last moments of the sun’s occupancy of the sign of Virgo,--September 22--and
that the ordinary account of the characteristics of the Virgo native as found
in any authentic work on the zodiacal significances, positively reads like a
description of his mental traits and qualities. Being a pronounced Virgo, then,
he will not shrink from the imputation of being powerfully influenced or motivated
by the pronounced flair of the Virgian, the passion to have things as exactly
right and true as it is humanly possible to get them. When, of course,, this
predilection is not exercised with proper intelligence and balance, the Virgo
person can become a meddling, nagging, censorious dog-in-the-manger sort of
critic and snarler at everything. But--if the general principles of astrology
can be relied upon to point to true intimations--even here he has the ground
for presumptive defense against the charge of scurrilous and crass criticism
that will seem almost sacrilegious to many, in the odd fact that his birth moment
fell almost precisely on the cusp between the sign of the critical mind and
the sign of Libra, the Balance. So that it may be presumed that he has the natural
proclivity to exercise the function of meticulous logical analysis with due
and rightful balance of all factors entering into any problem. Virgo is "ruled"
by Mercury, god of the swift and nimble mind, and all in all, this brand of
intellectual quality is quite likely to discern alike both the massive aberrancies
of common thought (and in certain things the mass-ideation is always wrong!)
and the subtle fallacies that persist in traditional obsessions of belief.
The statement in the Upanishads
of India referring to the great universal mind-principle of the Atman pervading
all things, that "by sharp and subtle intellect is He beheld", must
allude to the Mercurial mind. It has unfortunately to be said, with only too
much historical testimony to corroborate it, that in particular the religious
life of mankind, where the forces of even the most consecrated devotion, faith
and loyalty are predominantly in play, has been tragically twisted all awry
by lack of the balance that should have been supplied by keen functioning of
the intellectual faculty. The sapient Sages who laid down the canons of wisdom
for the ancient Egyptians called the Christ-mind, which they prefigured as the
seed power of our divine nature implanted in the very flesh of humanity, to
germinate, grow, blossom and flower to glorious beauty in the course of evolution,
the "Lord of the Balance", a configurated representation of one of
the twelve radiations of his power. For his advent and eventually full release
of power is to bring "peace" to the chaotic turbulence of the lower
sensual, emotional and irrational elements that cause the
Biblical "tempest" on the sea of human life and which can be subdued
to beneficent function by the superior intellectual principle. This is St. Paul’s
war of the "law which is in my members" against the law of the mind,
and only with the coming in every life of the kingly rulership of the diviner
reason over the seven "elementary powers" that generate the "seven
deadly sins" will "peace" spread its benign mantle over the confused
and disorderly human scene.
The tragedy of the debacle which
ensued in that fateful third century and laid its palsy upon the mind and soul
of Western man ever since, lies in the fact that the splendor of truth and the
beauty and glory of illuminated consciousness that inhered potentially in the
creeds, doctrines, rituals and the Scriptures of the ancient world only to be
perpetuated in frightful distortion in the Christian upsurge, have been lost
or turned into inane senselessness for the millions in the ensuing centuries.
The extent of this loss and tragedy is beyond all calculation. The birth of
that genius of grace and charity that will well up and set the human heart athrob
to the impulses of love and beauty, and which, as old Egypt averred, comes continuously,
periodically ever more and more, might have by now been far advanced if stolid
ignorance had not held in thrall the surgent forces of the spirit, and turned
the brilliant semantic ideographs of divine truth into the absurdities of alleged
"history".
The transformation, the transfiguration
of man can take place only through the marriage of soul and sense within the
inner core of the human consciousness. As the Christian creed--an ancient formulary
taken over from old Pagan runes and rituals--so well says, speaking of the descent
of the son-units of God-soul into the life of the human body, the Christ was
conceived by the Holy Spirit in heaven, and born of the Virgin Mary, mother-matter,
body, on earth. "Begotten, not created" the creed says; i.e. begotten
in heaven "before all worlds", but created on earth, as indeed all
things are. They are conceived in mind, then created in matter. Where and where
only must it be seen that this father-conception and mother-birthing of the
Christ can be consummated? The answer sets irrevocably the seal of truth on
every word of this essay: it can be consummated only within the heart, mind
and body of every human being on earth individually and consciously.
The idea that it could be accomplished
by one-only Son of God, a man not of our human order, vicariously for us all--and
we needing only to "believe" this theorization to win its full efficacy
for ourselves--must be written down as close to the crowning fatuity of all
religious maundering. No god was ever sent to earth to transfigure man by saving
him the evolutionary work of transfiguring himself. And no man will be rightfully,
happily, efficiently oriented to this task unless and until he knows that within
his own mind and in his very body of flesh resides that Christ-child who is
in fact his own sonship from his Father. Through that realization, and through
it only, can and will his entire dynamic of psychic energy be focused, like
the sun’s rays through a lens, upon the seed-power of Christly consciousness
and cause it to burst into flame. How sagely the ancient Egyptians spoke of
the soul of Christhood coming to earth "to kindle a fire in the underworld".
The ancient Sages and Seers depicted
the Christ-nature as a living flame dampened and often almost extinguished by
the water of the fleshly corpus, or as a unit of divine soul shut up here in
the body as in a prison, grave or tomb. In the Greek language body (soma) and
tomb (sema) are the same word. These knowing philosophers represented the soul
as a bird in a prison or a cage beating its wings ineffectually against its
clammy dungeon walls. How is it to be freed, how is the imprisoned splendor
to be released? In the Bible allegory
it is declared that the soul must convert its gaoler, who with a change of heart
will then let it out. This is the task of the outer man, the human, who alone
and in the domain of his personal life can liberate the deity whose benignant
rays of living love will transfigure him.
The infinite tragedy of the West’s
religion is that, by directing the eyes and the devotion of its millions of
believers to the image of a carnalized dramatic figure of two thousand years
ago, he is all too likely to be missing from his place in their lives, in their
hearts and minds.
THE
CASE OF THE MISSING MESSIAH
In the swirl of the confusion
still prevalent in human society it is tragically true that the unenlightened
human mind conceives and fastens upon its plastic substance images believed
to be the shapes of truth, which it worships as idols in its addiction to the
propensity to follow hallowed ideals. It turns its ideals into idols. Much is
owed in our modern day to the eminent psychologist C. G. Jung for his astute
discernments in the consciousness of the human psyche of the presence and dominance
of such "images" in the directional life of the world. These type-forms
are for the most part the psychic deposit in mass mind of formulated and set
immemorial traditions, generally alleged to have been derived from some divine
source and in time fixated in tribal or national life by hoary custom. An almost
universal legend of the provenance of a body of supernal wisdom vouchsafed to
early humanity by beings rated as gods or celestials of superhuman order has
prevailed in the consciousness of the ancient world as a whole. The sources
of this world-wide persuasion of a divine heritage of human wisdom have been
by modern savants consistently attributed to the childish imagination of primitive
people, grasping in infantile ignorance at a comprehension or explanation of
natural phenomena by anthropomorphic analogies. Thus thunder was conceived to
be the roar of God’s angry voice, and lightning the fiery blaze of his wrath.
But unless the time called ancient is pushed vastly farther back than the three
to five thousand years at which we place it in current supposition, the "primitive"
view of the origins of religious customs must be abandoned.
Possibly as much as ten thousand
years B.C. there were already extant some of the world’s "sacred Scriptures",
and the theoretical characterization of these revered tomes as documents of
primitive child-mindedness is rebuffed by their obvious quality of philosophical,
spiritual and ethical profundity and sagacity, expressed in the sublimest forms
of literary beauty. They have won and held right down to the present the almost
universal reverence of the most cultured elements of mankind. Indeed the homage
paid to them has passed the bounds of regard for any work of assumedly purely
human production and has taken on the psychological character of worship of
a thing considered superhuman and hence called divine.
It is extremely likely that the
best present sagacity in attempting to determine the origins of mundane culture-systems
has not at all rated at its true interpretative value the challenging fact that
the races of the earth have with virtual unanimity in past ages considered human
life to be overshadowed, and in a more or less overt fashion ruled by the intelligence
or intelligences of a world "above" that of the earth. Could human
life on the planet have been generated and given initial push to self-dependence
by the grades of divine beings standing next above man in the evolutionary hierarchy?
In animal orders the young generation is parented and reared through youth by
its progenitors, then cast adrift to fend for itself, with little knowledge
of its connection with ancestry. Speaking from the large implications of analogy,
it could well have been that the race of mortal men was thus fathered by the
lower orders of the hierarchies of the gods, given rudimentary codes and formularies
of wisdom by them, and then sent out to battle the elements of an evolutionary
career with their own inherent
capabilities. The accredited wise Scriptures were in all likelihood devised
by our progenitors of a higher race as moral and spiritual primers for us, their
children of a new creative cycle on this planet. Children of God, or of the
gods, we are called in those Scriptures. And these Scriptures also refer to
themselves as books expressing the diviner wisdom of gods, even hinting at their
dictation by gods to "holy men of old", men high enough in culture
at any rate to have been able to transcribe their sapient codes.
One of the Chaldean Oracles proclaims,
with the human soul as the speaker: "I am a child of earth and the starry
skies, but my race is of heaven alone." Since to be here on earth at all
the soul must consider itself as the product of both a heavenly unit of spiritual
essence and a physical earthly body, it has to include earth in its dual parentage.
But since it can belong to no permanent line of being by virtue of its physical
body, which disintegrates at death, it must assert that its true racial home
is in celestial worlds, where its evolutionary gains in lives in lower worlds
are garnered in imperishable "spiritual" bodies, as the ancient wisdom
asserts.
SOULS
MIGRATE TO EARTH
But, precisely as happens in
the case of the individual human child, the youthful race of potential divinities
had not at the start developed maturity of either consciousness or knowledge
to enable it to utilize the codes of primal wisdom given it by its godly parents,
and instead plunged into the adventure of bodily life in nearly complete oblivion
of its celestial home ties and in initial incomprehension of the manuals of
instruction handed to it by its progenitors. Wayward youth, faced with the enticing
delight of bodily existence under its own power, turned at first almost wholly
extrovert to enjoy the Lila of conscious life, paying little heed to the astute
prescriptions for a well-ordered, restrained philosophical governance of its
activities. In the exuberance of sensuous existence and the incitements of the
physical procreative function and earthly interests, the young souls, as Plotinus
tells us, "swung away as far as they were able", forgetting their
origin in the palaces of the cosmic King of Life in worlds above. Like wild
youths bent on adventure they plunged headlong into the exercise of their divine
prerogative of creation at their own level, being young gods (junior gods, Plato
calls them) sent forth from their Father’s house to try their hands at building
a world of their own.
Only, said the Demiurgus,
or Father-power, you must build your own little world in the image of the one
I have created. You must not let errant fancy carry you off into the creation
of bizarre worlds irrationally conceived. "See that thou build it after
the pattern I have shown thee in the Mount, the pattern of the heavens."
If you observe the modes and fashions of the physical universe in which I have
sent you to grow into the mastery of life, you will detect the order and frame
of the minor universes you are to fabricate.
In his great doctrine of the
"oblivion of souls" and the consequent necessity of recovering the
lost memory of celestial archetypes--oblivion and then "reminiscence"--Plato
has presented the basic paradigm of human knowledge. Man has lost his Paradise
and must recover it. However, it is a prime principium of all understanding
of this basic element of knowledge that the descending Children of God do not
exchange, as it were, the real gold of conscious bliss for the vile dross of
earth. They lose nothing that they had ever intrinsically won by their own conscious
exertion, which is now and eternally the only
condition under which power or blessedness can be won. As babes and children
of God in the heavenly kingdom, they lived only the dreamy life of yet unconscious
felicity, as children do here. Bliss, to be enjoyed in all the fullness and
sweetness of ecstatic delight, must have been consciously won in a polarized
balance against opposition. The Christ consciousness must have been brought
to birth in the soul’s battle against the Satanic tempter and tester. It must
undergo on earth the trial by water, air and fire, the four grades of sensible
experience. It must come forth tempered to finest mettle from the ordeal in
the fiery furnace of human bodily passions, lusts of the flesh and desire and
pride of life. Old Egypt’s books speak of the weighing of the soul in the balance
of polarized energies here on earth--mistaken for some locale in the post-mortem
state--and calls the place of judgment "the lake of flame and the sea of
fire."
Thus, through the immaturity
of youth and their translation from the unconscious potential of heavenly felicity
to the initial stages of conscious existence, the incarnating souls found themselves
confronting the world at the beginning of their active life in self-consciousness
with no knowledge of the fundamental archai, or fixed principles ordained by
their cosmic Father for the course of all conscious life. The pattern to which
they would have to conform their creative operations within the sphere of their
individual and collective activity, was at the start unknown to them. By virtue
of their progenation from their Father and their inheritance of his nature which
had been germinally imprinted upon the inner core of their constitution, they
carried within themselves the seed potential of all possible knowledge of the
pattern to be unfolded. But since this inner core was deeply buried under a
series of coarser vestures, which soul had to put on as proper garments to meet
the changed conditions of energic life on each lower level in their descent
from "pure" being into conditioned modes of lower existence, the clarity
of the primordial pattern was obscured to their vision. Greek philosophy in
particular and with the clearest voice speaks of this obfuscation of our potentially
divine vision by the soul’s descent into the "dark meadow of Ate"
and the gloomy realms of a Plutonic underworld, wherein, as in the Proserpina
myth, souls have to spend the half of each cycle of existence. The soul wanders
long through the dim hall and darksome corridors of this benighted underworld,
guided only by the Ariadne’s thread of the inherent instinct for truth, which
speaks always more surely as experience brings greater knowledge.
GROPING
AMID SHADOWS
A philosophical preamble of this
sort has been necessary to clarify at the start the situation in reference to
which alone it is possible to understand how and why the codes and majestic
formulae of primordial truth, embodied in myth, drama, allegory, symbol, number
graph, constellational pictography and finally in the sacred Scriptures, have
become distorted in meaning, and from being helpful manuals guiding humanity
safely along its evolutionary road, have been corrupted into the most calamitous
misconceptions in all the history of human groping for knowledge. And beyond
challenge as to its truth there stands in the historical record of our mundane
culture the most horrendous of all misconceptions, the sad outcome of a decline
of literary genius and philosophical sagacity about the second century of the
Christian era, the incredible but actual confusion of the central character
representing the potential divinity in our human nature with a supposititious
man of flesh, the Christ in one physical body. The central figure of our innate
godhood and type of our eventual
evolutionary glorification as Christs, had been in all the ancient Mystery cult
dramatizations, indeed was never absent from the ritualistic representations,
nor was it misconceived in its reference to our own divinity. No one, even the
most ignorant, ever mistook it, or "him" to be a historical person.
Not until there had fallen on the collective mind of the near-Eastern world
that incredible blight of philosophical genius which alone made possible the
perpetration of the most fatuous and fatal blunder ever to obsess the human
intelligence,--the mistaking of the dramatic-ritualistic figure of our potential
Christliness for one man asserted to have lived in the period that was later
fixed as the beginning date of recorded historical time.
How the truth of this direful
episode in the course of the race’s history is ever to be brought convincingly
home to the sober sense of the Western world is a question of the utmost gravity.
So great will be the shock to traditional thought, so stern and rebuking will
be the blow to our pride of knowledge, so severe the condemnation of our stupidity
in our failure to discern the difference between allegory and history, so stinging
the realization that the scholars of seventeen centuries could have been duped
by a ruse of esoteric methodology employed by the Sages of antiquity, that the
task of bringing the academic world to recognize and admit its colossal error
will seem hopeless. Human life is largely a conflict between fixated persuasions,
indoctrinations, established norms and dispositions of the collective mass-mind,
on the one side, and sound reason on the other, and the latter often remains
bound in subservience to the sway of the former for ages in spite of obvious
considerations to the contrary. Those overriding predilections throttle the
rational operations of the mind and hold it in bondage to the power of irrational
elements that are fixed in sensual and emotional habitudes, or subject to the
sheer automatism of custom. It will seem preposterous that such unconscionable
ineptitude as was necessary to originate and then perpetuate so stupendous and
tragic a mistake as was that of turning a spiritual principle or grade of consciousness
into a man of flesh could have gained the day at any time and have completely
subverted the profound spiritual-mystical sense of the Scriptures into ridiculous
travesty of truth. That this is what has in fact occurred becomes positively
clear and overwhelmingly demonstrated to any mind that will go deeply enough
into the extant evidence to see its inevitable truth.
The rebuke to the crass stupidity
of so many centuries of theological scholarship, great and incredible as it
really is, will be as nothing in comparison with the fatality of the blow which
it will administer to the basic tenets of the Christian faith. It will demonstrate
that Christianity was originated in ignorance and was exploited and perpetuated
by ignorance. A writer of obvious high status, Allan Upward, actually was impelled
on the evidence to write that Christianity has the unenviable distinction of
being perhaps the only religion that was founded completely on the fraudulent
exploitation of false premises. The fine Swedish scholar, Georg Brandes, published
a book entitled Jesus a Myth. Some forty years or more ago a coterie of capable
investigators, J. M. Robertson, W. B. Smith of Tulane University, Arthur Drews
in Germany, Dupuis in France, and others, put out books aiming to present the
case for the allegorical interpretation of the Gospels and other Biblical books.
The famous work of D. F. Strauss, published in 1835, The Life of Jesus, advanced
the same thesis and threw the theological world into a stir of excited controversy.
Renan’s equally famous Life of Jesus further embroiled the situation in turmoil.
Possibly a hundred scholars of great learning have been led by their studies
and researches to put out books questioning and many overtly denying the existence
of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. Their aggressive essays have carried sufficient
weight of data and argument to have elicited books from
the orthodox ecclesiastical side in efforts at refutation. And in reading these
one really begins to be aware of the want of solid evidence, or even of convincing
argumentative material to assure us of the historical authenticity of the Gospels.
The case against the historical truth of the New Testament grows ever stronger,
its defense grows ever less convincing. And in our own day we have a declaration
from an authority within the Christian scholastic ranks whose utterance can
not fail to command both attention and respect from all parties. Dr. Albert
Schweitzer is justly rated as among the most eminent theologians of the Christian
Church. His statement is put forth near the end of a work which demonstrates
to any reader the stupendous range and thoroughness of its author’s survey of
the whole field of literary criticism of the New Testament. Indeed his book,
The Quest of the Historical Jesus, stands as unquestionably the most searching,
as well as the most perspicacious, work ever produced on this vast and complicated
subject. We give his declaration for its startling significance and the weight
of its incontestable authority. Taken from page 398 of his book, it reads thus:
"The Jesus of Nazareth
who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the
ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth,
and died to give his work its final consecration, never had any existence.
He is a figure designed by
rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism and clothed
by modern theology in a historical garb."
This, then, is the grand upshot
of the life study of one of the most consecrated, learned and respected Christian
theologians. Yet it will be disregarded in ecclesiastical circles as if it had
never been uttered. And the hierarchical power of the Christian Church will
continue broadcasting the legend of its origination by the physically born Son
of the Creator of the Universe, dispatched to earth in the year 1 A. D.
But beyond cavil the scholar
who has presented the most telling body of evidence in the case for the non-historicity
of Jesus and the non-historical basis of virtually all Bible books, is one whose
monumental writings assemble such a prodigious mass of data of the most overwhelmingly
conclusive character that the vested interests of the ecclesiastical world have
had to put the stamp of official disapproval and repudiation upon his challenging
books. Too dangerous to publicize his data by public refutation, his books have
been given the treatment of silence. This scholar is Gerald Massey, and his
six great volumes under the titles of The Book of the Beginnings, The Natural
Genesis, and, greatest of all, Ancient Egypt, The Light of the World, each work
in two volumes. When one goes studiously through these truly revealing tomes,
the mass and character of the data presented leave only one conclusion possible:
the existence of the Gospel figure of Jesus, considered as a man human born,
is not a predication that can be accepted by a rational mind.
Considered from many points of
view, these books of Massey are among the most strategically important ever
written, since they establish beyond cavil the baselessness, the complete falsity
of the claims and basic theses on which the historical edifice of the great
Christian religion is grounded.
THE
VOICE OF ANCIENT EGYPT
Rated as a minor poet in any
history of English literature, Gerald Massey devoted forty years of his life
to the study of the Egyptian backgrounds of the Jewish-Christian
Scriptures. While never gaining the recognition due him as a great Egyptologist,
it is obvious to any open-minded reader that he came many percentage points
closer to understanding what the sage tomes of ancient Egyptian religious literature
were really talking about than the greatest of the reputed savants in that field.
With a mind emancipated by his discoveries from the inveterate persuasion of
all previous study that ancient religious documents were childish mythology
or crudely reported history, he was the first scholar to pierce through the
veils of Egyptian nature symbolism to descry the forms of cosmic truth and spiritual
law adumbrated by living naturographs. Finding here the lost keys to recondite
significance in constructions that had been mistaken for outlandish history,
he was able to redeem the great mass of Egyptian lore from imputed infantilism
of primitive thought to the sublimest of esoteric formulations.
The picture of real history portraying
the unfoldment of Christianity from antecedent religious and philosophical backgrounds,
as it came out in ever clearer outline to his discerning mind, was one of the
most thrilling and portentous that it was ever the lot of a scholar to envisage.
The Christian hierarchy had for some seventeen centuries cried aloud the legend
of the provenance of their religion from the life and teachings of the cosmic
Logos, who was declared to have appeared for the first and only time (with hints
of a second appearance proclaimed by many groups to be impending in the always
immediate future) about the year one of the new era that was later dated from
this alleged event. But the English scholar, scanning the great field of ancient
literary production, was amazed to discover that virtually the entire body of
extant documents in which the tradition of the birth and life of this Logoic
personage was recorded, was to be found in the newly recovered and translated
literature of old Egypt, dating back to as much as five thousand years B.C.
One can imagine the shock and consternation, tempered by the thrill of discovery,
experienced by this scholar, as piece by piece, book by book, the volume of
literature asserted to have been first written by a half dozen men between the
years forty to eighty of this first Christian century turned up under his eye
in the vast mass of writing that had lain for some twenty-five centuries buried
out of sight in ancient Egyptian tombs, temples and pyramids. We can vividly
relive his experience, his amazement, his overwhelming sense of having brought
to light a secret that would shatter a tradition that had gripped a third of
the world for two millennia, that might shake kings loose from their thrones
and overthrow the reign of an ecclesiastical system that had dominated the lives,
both personal and political, of some billions of human beings by a baseless
fabrication of historical assertion. What a sense of isolation must have been
his as he stood in contemplation of the evidence which for the moment he and
he alone held in his hands! For one has only to read those massive works of
scholarly erudition to realize that at some one moment of his lifetime of research
and brooding over the wondrous revelation of Egypt’s forgotten wisdom, Gerald
Massey stood face to face with the realization, and with the positive evidence,
that it was finally and conclusively impossible that he could be wrong in his
deductions. A towering mountain-heap of solid facts had by then crushed out
all possibility of his having arrived at an erroneous judgment. The case stood
before him clear and indubitable; every item that might still support and save
the Christian claims was closed off and ruled out. The whole Christian fortress
lay in ruins before him. How was he to tell this story to the Christian world,
that would regard it as a scholar’s madness? How could he make the world see
it? His heart must have sunk under the recognition that he could never bring
other men to see what he had seen so clearly. All, too plain was the fact that
the mighty power of an established religious tradition and the terrible grip
of a sanctified ecclesiastical system on the stolid mental inertia of the masses
under the hypnotic control of a venerated priestcraft, all
would block the reception of his epochal and revolutionary pronouncement. He
would be the great modern Cassandra, doomed to be greeted by dumb unbelief when
he announced his world-shaking discovery.
And so it has been. His fearsome
apprehensions have been more than fulfilled. For its own very life the entrenched
ecclesiastical system had to let his books relapse into desuetude. Yet, as affairs
stand in the world today, the only chance for the survival of sane religion
may be contingent upon their renaissance.
It has always been that when
truth affronts the settled mores or dominant mental idols of the great human
masses, it has to stand, as the Christians allege their personal Messiah stood
before those who blindly disregarded his message, a helpless Lamb of God led
to the sacrifice. Nevertheless it will in time be registered on the tablets
of mundane history,--this shame of the failure of a world of potentially great
sagacity to sense and profit by the epochal revelations of submerged truth in
Gerald Massey’s prodigious labors and brilliant discernments, possibly surpassing
for momentous significance the work of any scholar in centuries. Such has ever
been the blighting power of indoctrinated religious fixations upon the common
human mind. It is nothing to the Church of Christ that this great student of
religion (and others in lesser degree) confronted it with a crushing array of
incontestable facts, with a mass of documentary evidence tracing ninety percent
of all its alleged first-century literature directly back to ancient Egyptian
sources. When pietism becomes vested in gold and power and fixed habitudes of
belief, an unwelcome and disturbing truth will knock in vain at its temple doors.
And so it has been that the invaluable gift of truth and light made by this
devotee of conscientious scholarship haunts only the dark recesses of second-hand
bookshops and from that obscure academy seeks to spread its hidden radiance
of truth out to a few stray researchers, who themselves lack the time, the patience
or the insight to rediscover his brilliant legacy.
It is no rebuttal of this estimate
of Massey’s greatness and depreciation of the immense value of his contribution,
to specify that he committed two blunders, or formulated two misconceptions,
in his vast reconstruction of the sagacious ancient Egyptian wisdom. He had
gone so incredibly far in his repudiation of Christian theological orthodoxy
that he could not dream that his negation of old beliefs had to go still farther
to complete overthrow of practically all the fundamentals of Christian dogma.
He therefore clung to two determinations of Christian systematism, the first
of these being the mistaken meaning of the words "death", "the
dead" and "to die"; the second being also the Christian mislocation
of the Greek "Hades", the Christian "hell", the Hebrew "Sheol"
and the ancient Egyptian "underworld", or "nether earth"
of "Amenta". He never quite came to the perception that would have
thrilled him all afresh, that this fabled "underworld" of mythology
and religious drama was all the time this good earth of ours; and that the "dead"
are those souls that inhabit these tombs of a living "death", our
familiar physical bodies. (In Greek body is soma and tomb is sema, essentially
the same one word, implying that the body is the tomb of the soul incarnating
in it). The body is the "grave" of the soul in the ancient philosophical
sense that souls descend into mortal bodies and there lie long in a seed-like
torpidity--or "death"--until they are resurrected in a new "germination"
(as the Egyptians called it) and renewal of growth.
The discovery of the recondite
significance of these two basic items of ancient dramatic ritualism was missed
by Massey, and is the achievement of only
very recent studentship. While his apprehension of them would have lifted his
books to a still loftier pinnacle of brilliance and lucidity, it is quite true
to say that his failure to discern them does not too materially reduce the value
of his splendid work. Never, perhaps, can his contribution be surpassed in the
service it renders in demonstrating that all the Christian documents asserted
to have been written about the hypothecated Jesus personage in the years shortly
following his "life" in the first century A.D. were all the while
extremely ancient literature of Egyptian religion. If scholarship finds that
the "life", the acts, the sayings, the date of personal existence
ascribed to a character claimed to have lived in the first century A.D. were
all written down in documents of a remote antiquity, there is but one conclusion
open to fact. The merit of the demonstration, the proof of this stupendous realization
belongs to Gerald Massey above all others, though his work has had a vast supplementation
by other writers, notably Godfrey Higgins in his monumental work, The Anacalypsis.
If the world was not asleep in a vast hypnotization under the power of a tradition
sanctified by time alone, it would recognize and repay its inestimable debt
to Massey. It is a felt obligation of the present scribe to emphasize it to
all who have a prime concern for truth.
Theologians have gone on for
all these centuries speculating, controverting, wrangling over a thousand points
of interpretation that arise in the study of the "life" of the predicated
Jesus figure in the Gospels, when all the while Massey’s gigantic contribution
held the keys to the resolution of every question. His voluminous work supplied
a formula, the use of which would quickly have ended every debate. The line
of the studious (mostly) German Bible exegetists from Reimarus to Albert Schweitzer
in the course of their unwearied and sleuth-minded investigations into the whole
body of Bible and even Apocryphal literature, have done a really thorough job
of analysis, sifting and comparing of data, weighing fact against fact, canvassing
possibilities or probabilities, building or demolishing theses on conjecture,
surmise, presumption, straining the imaginative faculty to reconstruct situations
outlined or projected by the narrative, hinting at scribal errors or the fraudulent
machinations of copyists and redactors in the manipulation or mutilation of
Gospel texts, seeking with often remarkable mental ingenuity to introduce rational
order and acceptable understanding into the whole of the literary corpus on
the basis of which Christianity was erected,--and in the end they virtually
one and all confess that the entire predicament remains the more entangled,
confusing and insoluble the deeper it is gone into. They find the problem grows
ever more complex and indeterminable the more exhaustively it is explored. It
ends in a vast mass of pure speculation (as Schweitzer has said) and virtually
resolves into a guessing contest, the award of merit, but no decision, going
to the cleverest guesser.
The more honest of the scholars
admit at the outset that they have no firm ground of historical data to build
upon, and that the whole effort must rest on the ingenuity of the speculative
mind to discover some principles under which the scant facts of "history"
can be subsumed with fair plausibility. Most, if not all, have found the task
a hopeless one. A mind of conscientious integrity like Schweitzer’s was forced
in the end to throw up the whole matter in despair, declaring that the Jesus
personage was a creation of the imagination of theologians. Jesus’ alleged life,
its acts and influence, Schweitzer saw all too clearly, were a web spun out
of the theological spider’s body. He had the courage to say so. It was the same
despairing outcome that led another eminent German exegetist, Baur, to fling
out in the height of his mental impasse over the problem the really honest conclusion
to which he had been forced:
"There was no Jesus
of Nazareth."
And all this is what needs to
be said now, what honesty should have led all investigators to say, and what
nothing but a blind stupidity bred by the hallucination of a complete false
indoctrination has prevented the thousand of scholars over eighteen centuries
of Christian dominance from seeing and proclaiming. It can be said with full
truth that every Christian exegetist who set himself the task of writing a "Life
of Jesus" or a "Life of Christ" over all these centuries proceeded
from and built his work upon the sheer assumption that the Gospels were factual
histories written in the first century A.D., and that the historical existence
of the man Jesus was a fact established beyond question or debate. Not a single
one of them ever questioned his right to speak of this character with the designation
of the third personal singular pronoun "he", which of course is applicable
legitimately only to a known living person, when as a matter of simple fact,
now more and more demonstrable, the existence of the man of flesh to whom the
pronoun was made to refer had never been established on grounds of historical
factual evidence. None of the host of biographers has ever had the perspicacity
to discern that all proper reference to the Christ character and function, whose
activity in the life of mortals was the theme of all ancient religious literature,
could justifiably only speak of this power with the pronoun "it",
or "It," if the capital was needed to carry the deific significance.
Never had the mind of one of these writers opened to the discernment of the
actual fact that the entire difficulty of the whole exegetical problem sprang
from the terrible mistake, perpetrated by an age of ignorance, of mistaking
the impersonal divine "It" for the personalized "He".
Massey was perhaps not alone
in sensing this mistake, but he stands virtually alone in having buttressed
the proof of it with impregnable scholarship in more than sufficient quantity.
The full, free and frank threshing out of the vast contribution of his studentship
could have led to the final insights that would have provided the only rational
and unchallengeable principles of solution. He had discovered the one formula,
the one prescription that alone resolves all confusion into clarity, all inconsistency
and contradiction into rational agreement, all incomprehension into lucid understanding.
And that key datum is the simple fact that the Gospels of the New Testament
are not, and never were intended to be, veridical histories of first century
events, were never the biographies of a living man, whether divine-human or
human-divine, of that first century period; and that the Jesus figure was just
the dramatized, ritualized type-character of our divine nature, mistaken after
centuries of gross ignorance for a man of flesh.
When the mass mind has been long
obsessed by an indoctrinated persuasion in the aura of religious sanctity, it
remains impervious to all considerations from the side of reason. Had a stultification
of this sort not occluded the mentality of the Western world under the influence
of Christianity over the centuries, one item alone must at some time have broken
into the perspective of studentship and demonstrated in a startling way the
non-historical, the non-biographical character of the Gospel books. The convincing
evidentiality of this one item, if sagaciously envisaged, can best be seen in
the light of its relation to a supposititious modern eventuality. Let it be
supposed that tomorrow’s newspapers should publish the announcement of the discovery
in some near-East land of a "fifth Gospel", clearly related to and
supporting the four of the New Testament, and apparently genuine and authentic.
What would be the value of such a document discovered today? It would arouse
the thrilled interest of all the Christian world; it would be held to be of
priceless value; and it would
be studied to the last syllable for additional new light and new clues to the
life of Jesus. It would outvalue the Rosetta Stone and would be sequestered
in some great museum.
Yet from Irenaeus, first Bishop
of the early Christian faith in France, writing as early as the second century
A.D. we have the statement that there was a "multitude of Gospels"
extant in his day, and not only the four chosen for special reasons to go into
the Canon at the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. Some fifteen thereabouts of these
have come down to us, but they have been held to be of little consequence, and
have been thrust aside as "Apocrypha." These were held in such slight
estimation of value that they have been suffered almost to disappear and some
such have undoubtedly been lost, the "Gospel of the Egyptians" being
one of them. (It may be well to clarify the meaning of this word "Apocrypha".
It has come to mean books that were not considered sufficiently in line with
orthodox doctrine to be accredited or sponsored by the Church. Its true original
meaning was quite different: it designated books that portrayed the profoundest
esoteric truth in forms too recondite for the masses and that consequently were
designedly held back from the people at large).
This situation, on reflection,
presents such anomalies as to provoke in any thinking mind a critical observation
that is of potential menace to all Christian claims based on the Gospels as
reputed histories,--and all Christian claims are so based. It at once inspires
the serious question, why, out of a large number of Gospels, only four were
considered to tell the real story of the Savior’s life and were chosen for canonization,
while the others were disregarded as not even worth saving. The answer is obvious
and it is full of grave portent for the Christian claims as to the divine origin
of the faith. For it proclaims in the most voluble, if tacit terms, that "Gospels"
in those early centuries were not considered to be the biographies of one, or
of any, living earthly person, but were held as the literary forms of a universal
dramatical representation of the experience of our divine souls in the mortal
body here on earth, ritualistic Mystery scenarios of mystic imagery and poetic
pageantry, depicting the descent of our units of divine Sonship into the dark
underworld of physical existence, their immersion in the deep dungeon, pit,
grave and tomb of the fleshly body, their temptation, trial, suffering and "death"
on the cross of matter’s opposition to spirit, and their eventual purgation,
glorification (transfiguration), resurrection out of these bodily "graves"
and ascension to their Father, who in the first place sent them forth to win
the crown of conscious immortal life in their own right.
The "multitudes of Gospels"
afloat in the world of the near-East in Irenaeus’ day were certainly not supposed
to be the factual chronicle of the life of the Galilean peasant-God, or they
would have been treasured in every last word and verse. And reflection brings
us face to face with the next item that logically emerges from this discernment,
the fact that on every open presumption in the case, the four which received
the vote of certification for the Christian Bible were picked for the reason
that in them the allegorical character of the dramatization was less openly,
less patently discernible as it was in most of the others, being presented in
a form which simulated a historical narrative. When it is remembered, or at
any rate once succinctly determined as fact, that the very methodology of ancient
religious writing of "holy Scriptures" employed the aid of semantic
devices, nature symbolism (as in the New Testament parables), ingenious mythicism,
adroit number graphologies (as three, seven, twelve and forty), and in some
instances concealed the profoundest truths under the guise of legends, fables
and paralogues, in short aimed
to depict the deepest and most occult recognitions of spiritual truth and the
realities of a higher conscious exaltation of our human nature, all under the
construction of a human narrative, which also was then enacted either as a mystery
play or as ritual, then and only then will the stupefied Christian mentality
awaken from its childish enchantment to recognize that the Gospels are not histories
of first century people and their actions. They will realize, as Massey so "massively"
proves, republications, rescripts, reeditings of clusters of very ancient documents
of wholly allegorical-ritual character, with the scenes and actors standing
as the several type-models of the divine-human elements in the constitution
of nature. For this determination, which many have often, but never with adequate
evidence, surmised, Massey has assembled his gigantic volumes of indefeasible
proof. He thereby merits almost the rating of potential savior and redeemer
of the Western mind from an aeonial obsession of error which has in fact derationalized
its intellectual sanity.
WISDOM
HIDDEN IN A MYSTERY
In and under the lethal power
of the mental hypnotization of the West by the historical interpretation of
the Gospels, even the clearest statements, not to mention the covert, but plain
hints at their allegorical character found in the Scriptures themselves, have
signally failed to open blind mental eyes to the representative methodology
of the ancient writings. In his Epistle to the Galatians (Chap. 4), St. Paul
declares outright that the Abraham-Sarah-Hagar-Isaac-Ishmael story in the Old
Testament "is an allegory". In Revelation (11:8) the mystic seer makes
the staggering statement that "our Lord" "was crucified"
in a "city spiritually called Sodom and Egypt", thus, if true, overtly
contradicting the whole narrative of the trial and crucifixion of the personal
Jesus in Jerusalem. In II Timothy (2:18) St. Paul states that the brethren should
"shun profane and vain babblings" of such false teachers as Hymenaeus
and Philetus, "who, concerning the truth have erred, saying the resurrection
is past already," when, according to the very corner-stone assertion of
the Christian faith, who at another place says that the whole Christian System
of belief is vain and empty "if Christ be not risen," would write
to the brethren warning them to give no heed to vain babblers who claim that
the resurrection has already occurred and is now a past event! Likewise can
we look to them to explain why the "beloved disciple" John, writing
on the isle of Patmos (as alleged) in his age, should so far have forgotten
the events of Passion Week, in which he had himself participated as the dearest
friend of the crucified Galilean, as to have written that our Lord was not crucified
in Jerusalem, but in a city named Sodom and Egypt, and a city to be thought
of only "spiritually",--another translation giving it as "mystically"?
Only rarely does any exegetist venture to glance, and then only tangentially,
at such verses in their own Christian Scriptures. Never do they sense or face
the patent implications as verifying a non-historical rendering of the writings.
However, they display shamelessly their duplicity, when confronted with situations
in which a historical literalness is too egregiously absurd, or involves elements
of flat self-contradiction, by taking refuge from the obvious untenability of
their position in recourse to admitted allegory. Yet the claims of allegory
are denied when it seems possible to avoid the admission. Had they scanned the
ancient field as thoroughly as Massey has done, they would have learned that
in the remote time when spiritual Scriptures were conceived and
put in literary form, allegory, along with myth, drama and ritual devices, was
the method universally employed by the "inspired" originators of these
venerable tomes of a transcendent wisdom and knowledge.
Writers among the ancient learned
rabbins of Jewry state the case for the esoteric nature of Scriptural compositions
when they specify three distinct levels at which the sacred graphs may be read,
roughly described as the physical, mental and the anagogical (highest mystical),
and that he who reads them only literally and factually is of all men the greatest
"fool and simpleton". Only such men, they assert, attempt stupidly
to read them thus. It is clear that the refusal of the Jewish party to go along
with the early Christian sweep toward the new religion based on the "carnalized"
Christ (as Massy calls it) was simply due to their knowledge that these misguided
ignorant people were taking their venerated Scriptures wrongly by reading them
literally. The Jewish haggada, the halaka, mishna and gemara, the Talmud and
the Torah, were never taken historically until ignorance in time overtook the
Jewish mentality as it had the Christian. The Encyclopedia Britannica in its
article on the Essenes says of them that "they preserved in their libraries
the writings of the ancients and read them with great reverence, but not without
an allegorical interpretation." This is a tremendously significant datum,
the importance of which is going to loom larger on the horizon of Scriptural
science, more particularly perhaps as the consequence of an amazing new discovery
of ancient documents which may vindicate the Essene approach to Biblical literature.
The academic world of the West
is at this moment agog with interest both expressed and suppressed over the
astounding discoveries of obviously pre-Christian documents running into the
hundreds in caves some short distance back from the waters of the Dead Sea in
Jordania. Through this discovery, the result of a Bedouin shepherd boy’s fortuitous
impulse to toss a stone into the mouth of a cave near which one of his goats
had wandered, we now actually have in our possession the great bulk of one at
least of those Essene libraries. The books are in Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic
and Iranian. All that is wanting in our ability to turn these almost incredible
discoveries to the fullest profit for our enlightenment is our willingness,
or our genius, to read these hoary documents "not without an allegorical
interpretation". (The books already put out by the most eminent scholars
investigating the scrolls stand as a sad attestation of their blindness to the
allegorical method. If this does not give way to a more esoteric conception
of ancient sacred writing, we may lose the entire value of the sensational discovery.)
But the scrolls at any rate introduce a totally new force of evidence that holds
the possibility of compelling a most radical revision of the postulated foundations
of Christianity. As one scholar expresses it, the appearance from out the remote
past of these antique documents carries with it the potentiality not only of
enforcing a great revolution in the traditional assumptions of Christianity,
"but a whole torrent of revolutions".
There is not space here to enter
into any comprehensive dissertation on these remarkable finds, but a summary
of the stronger implications in the case might be condensed in the general statement
that the books found in the great jars in the Dead Sea caves add close to overpowering
testimony to the thesis that Christianity owes less and less to occurrences
allegedly taking place in the early part of the first Christian century, and
more and more to literary units that were extant certainly antecedent to "the
time of Christ". If one might seize upon the phrase just used to present
the new situation epigrammatically, it might be said that if the first thirty-three
years of the first century
A.D. may be legitimately dubbed the "time of Christ", certainly the
period reaching back as far as the third century B.C. might just as justifiably
be termed the "time of the Christos".
Fully equal in calamitous consequences
for world religion with the transposition of the pronoun "It" to the
pronoun "He," was the similar transposition of meaning from the prior
use of the Greek term Christos (rather always ho Christos, the Christos) over
to the Anglicized "Christ". For the shift of terms eventuated ultimately
in a shift of the meaning, with practically the fate of millions of Europe’s
best people determined by the issue, from the Christos as a spiritually immanent
principle of divine consciousness germinating in the hearts and minds of all
humanity, over to "Christ", the man of Galilee. The first meaning
sanified, rationalized and exalted all human understanding of the significance
and value of our earthly life, as the nursery bed of an experience that would
birth the Christ(os) in all mankind; the second demeaned, derationalized and
depressed all such human conceptions by depriving all humanity save one lone
individual of the divine potential. For the exaltation and apotheosization of
one solitary man to cosmic grandeur and exclusive Godhood inevitably reduced
all others to spiritual poverty. His exaltation to celestial status and unique
relation to the Father debased all other humans, for none could rise to stand
beside the solitary paragon. The wretchedly bungled translation of the Greek
monogenes as "only-begotten", in reference to the Christos principle,
became, when that immanent principle was transmogrified into the carnalized
man of Judea, the bond of a mental hypnotization that crucified all afresh the
divine initiative and prerogative of man’s inalienable intellectual genius.
The transplantation of the meaning
from an immanent Principle (fully deserving the capital P) to a man of flesh
is the nub and core of the history of Western religion for the centuries since
the third. That it has eluded the discernment of the whole of Christian studentship
until Massey’s eye caught it, is a story of incredible opacity of intellectual
vision that has now to be told. Quite independently of Massey’s illuminating
revelation, however, and in this case without the same profound support of Biblical
research and exegesis, the same great fact has been brought to light through
purely psychological insight by our age’s most eminent psychoanalyst, the now
venerable Carl G. Jung, of Zurich, Switzerland. His statements lifting the veil
of misguided pietism from off the face of Christian misconception and exposing
the psychiatric weakness of the orthodox Jesus-of-Nazareth thesis, are set forth
in several of his most recent books. One briefer excerpt from these states the
matter trenchantly and can be cited as the gist of the discernment:
"The Imitatio Christi
(the imitation of Christ) will forever have this disadvantage;
we worship a man as a divine
model, embodying the deepest meaning of life,
and then out of sheer imitation
we forget to make real the profound meaning present in ourselves.
"If I accept the fact
that a god is absolute and beyond all human experience, he leaves
me cold.
I do not affect him, nor does he affect me. But if I know, on the other
hand,
that God is a mighty activity within my own soul, at once I must concern
myself with him."
Here is the heart, the gist and
digest of what might be called the psychology of the whole religious history
of the West since the Christian movement swept over its terrain. The Pagan world
was motivated religiously by the spirit of Pantheism or Deism, which through
common stolidity of the masses became warped badly into forms of animism and
undue veneration of symbolic images, approaching
fetishism in the crudest tribal civilizations. "By sharp and subtle intellect
is He beheld," avers a Hindu Upanishad. And where intellect is not sharp
and subtle--unfortunately this condition is all too ubiquitous--the popular
mind shifts meanings always from a true inner or esoteric form of apprehension
and experience out to the more objective periphery of sensual interpretation
and produces the grossly unspiritual exoteric versions. Ancient theological
sagacity distinguished between the two forms or levels of human recognitions
of truth, so that the more capable initiators of religious systems organized
religious teachings in two modes of presentation, namely the Greater and the
Lesser Mysteries. Paul distinguishes the "milk for babes" from the
"meat for strong men" in mental capability.
For a brief first epoch of its
existence even Christianity had its inner and its outer schools, and kept even
such a document as the creed in secrecy from the laity for the first centuries.
Later, as is so dramatically stated by the Theosophical scholar, G. R. S. Mead,
the whole mass of the plebeian population that (largely from the hope of economic
and political deliverance from the oppression of Rome) had flocked into the
Christian movement, overwhelmed the minority esoteric influence in the Church,
broke open all the spiritual treasure-chests of occult teaching and scattered
their sacred revelations abroad to the multitude, which, true to the Biblical
allegory, became the swine that trampled the precious pearls of wisdom in the
mire of ignorant fanaticism. The decay of philosophical insight that the Periclean
Age of Greece had sharpened to such acuity and subtlety had progressed downward
to such abject incomprehension of the allegorical representations of high mystical
truth by the time of the third century A.D., that the few upholders and transmitters
of the occult hierarchical teachings in the early Church could no longer hold
ground against the pressure of exoteric unintelligence, and so it came about
that the Christian movement was torn completely away from its original rootage
in Pagan esotericism, and was swept far out on the sea of crude popular and
always ignorant misinterpretation of august antique documents.
This, in fine, stands as the
greatest cultural catastrophe in world history. Its incidence virtually blinded
all later Christian view and negatived all possibility of discerning the primal
spiritual verity of the Scriptural constructions. For it achieved the fatal
goal of focusing all spiritual and psychological insight upon the one primary
"Exhibit A" of the Christian system, the man of Galilee, as the locus
of all value in the Christian life. With its gaze centered completely on him,
the institution of the Christian faith became blinded, like a horse with blinkers,
to the presence and blessing of deity around it on every side, and particularly
within the individual himself. Jesus, so to say, blocked out of sight, hid from
view, the occult truth of the Christos power in common man; he obstructed all
view of the inner world, since to ignorance any idol of physical form can occlude
all vision of the noumenal abstraction which it may legitimately be intended
to depict. So it has come about, as Jung sees so clearly now, that when Christianity
condensed all deity in the Carpenter-paragon of divine virtue, it destroyed
its chance to develop its keener vision of the Christos immanence.
A
GHOSTLY VOICE FROM THE PAST
Prof. Edmund Wilson, brilliant
scholar and author of one of the books dealing with the Dead Sea Scrolls, notes
with keen sense of its significance the reluctance of all the prominent religious
parties, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, to face up to the possible implications
of these new-found antique documents,
and to admit the ostensible evidence of their age. All are in fact trembling
with fear of the outcome of the impact of these books on their traditional basic
claims. Having a quite realistic sense of the unsubstantial historical foundations
of their systems of faith, they stand in fear of such documents, because the
very dating of their existence throws a potential monkey-wrench of veridical
historical fact into the fragile machinery of their almost wholly supposititious
origination. Prof. Wilson analyzes the substance of their fears in saying that
"these new documents have thus loomed as a menace to a variety of rooted
assumptions, from matters of tradition and dogma to hypotheses that are exploits
of scholarship." "One feels," he says again, "a certain
nervousness, a reluctance to take hold of the subject and to place it in historical
perspective." The Jewish side is afraid, he intimates, that the books will
impair the authority of the Masoretic text, which dates from as late as the
ninth century A.D., and would not welcome the appearance of evidence that the
"religion of Jesus" could have grown in a natural way out of certain
trends and "pressures" in Judaism itself.
On its side the Christian wing
fears "that the uniqueness of Christ is at stake," quoting a Dr. Brownlee.
The essence of this concern is very simply the dread that it may now be demonstrable
that Christianity arose out of the development of trends having their motivating
root causes in actual historical and quite human situations in the realms of
both outward physical conditions and inward esoteric philosophies, without the
need of assuming the miracle of a special gratuitous and magnanimous act of
God to implement the salvation of the human race in that particular epoch. In
short the menace and the alarm grow in face of the possible outcome of the testimony
the books will present to prove that the entire context of the Gospels, on which
documents alone Christianity stands--or falls--may be found traceable to extant
antecedent literature of Judaic or Egyptian origin. What a horrendous and devastating
denouement it would be if these documents establish beyond dispute that Christianity
can be completely accounted for in every item, aspect and feature of its composition
without the presence or the contribution or the driving incentive furnished
by the alleged only-begotten Son of God! How shattering to all Christian assumption
it would be if it can now be demonstrated that the religion this Son of God
is claimed to have founded on a completely new revelation of truth unknown before,
probably drew its every fundamental tenet, doctrine and rite from a religious
culture immediately antecedent and environmental to it! How staggering the blow
it must receive when every "new truth" he is claimed to have uttered
as unique wisdom from the skies, every new principle of ethic and maxim of mystic
power he is declared to have enunciated as the new dispensation to supplant
the old order of evil for evil, is found to have been recited in the Mystery
dramas by the character representing the Sun-God Messiah in many lands centuries
ahead of him! And how inexplicable the stunning realization that if he was the
immaculately born and only Son of the cosmic God, when he did come to earth
to lift the "curse" off humanity’s destiny, and to inject a new evolutionary
force into the aura of the earth to inoculate the lower nature of man with a
sanctifying healing potency, the best literary tack he could think of, the highest
eloquence he could command, was to repeat the already extant verses of antique
rituals and the dramatic speeches of figures in the ancient Mystery plays which
had been recited from immemorial antiquity in Egypt and other lands!
The Essene library books are
now available to clinch the proof of many a surmise, many a conviction that
has taken hold of the intelligence of more than one honest scholar, that Christianity
owes nothing to special divine events of the first thirty-three years of the
"Christian" era, and that it owes everything
to a natural development, under the particular circumstances prevailing at that
epoch in the religious situation. In fine, they now stand at hand with possibly
inexpugnable evidence that Christianity was not a product of a unique missionary
effort of God’s only Son on this earth, but arose out of forces extant in the
religious world of that time. They are ready to establish the fact that, not
only was his presence and his message not necessary for the launching of the
"first true religion"; they were not even essential to the event.
It is clear that this religion could and would have been what it has become,
as well without him as with him. So far from being the creator of this religion,
its formulator and promulgator, it could have, and with practical certainty
did, come forth without him.
It is a world-shaking revelation
the Dead Sea Scrolls promise to bring to light. Yet it will merely add corroboration
to what Gerald Massey has already revealed. The difference is that the work
of Massey can be ignored, slighted, misrepresented and kept from the concentrated
focus of general attention, and so suppressed or committed to desuetude. Not
so the new-found Essene library. Scholarship is so alerted en masse to the implications
of the new study that they will not be able to be concealed. (This is not to
say that the parties menaced by the texts of the old books will not be found
resorting to all subtle measures either to destroy actual portions of the scrolls
or to twist the translations, or otherwise evade the issues of an honest scrutiny.
This is to be expected, as past history confirms its likelihood).
The eye of scholarship is eagerly
scanning the Essene scrolls as they are read for mention of the man Jesus. The
presence or absence of his name in the books is a point about which many questions
and decisions would center. If their dating is accepted as of the last centuries
B.C., there would be no expectation of finding him mentioned, and his non-appearance
in the volumes would constitute no argument against his existence in the first
century A.D. Naturally the life of a person is hardly expected to appear in
histories written before his time. (Yet this astounding phenomena is precisely
what Massey has proved to be the case with the Jesus Character,--his words and
deeds are actually found in the oldest Egyptian books long antedating his day).
But much speculation is already being ventured as to the relevance of certain
characters found in the Old Testament books, such as the "Suffering Servant"
of 53 Isaiah, and similar figures which are claimed to be the prophetic prototype
of Jesus, who was to be their fulfillment in history. All this leads into abstruse
and involved problems with which scholarship will have to wrestle long and in
the main fruitlessly.
A frank discussion of the great
question of the actual existence of Jesus of Nazareth would have to handle the
case in its large aspects so as to meet and counter the claims and postulations
of the whole Christian theology and Christian Biblical exegesis, Old and New
Testaments alike. A critique of the subject, however, would have to resort to
some quite exceptional considerations if it is to take into account and meet
certain points of view advanced by that special segment of religious study which
might be called the esoteric or occult view. Cult groups such as Rosicrucians,
Theosophists, Anthroposophists and others more or less imbued with the same
basic philosophy, approach the question of the historical Christ from the background
of certain premises of understanding or of ancient teaching which condition
their quest of a proper answer in specific ways that need to be scrutinized.
Although this perspective is different from that of Christian orthodoxy, it
is to be feared that it, too, has involved itself in certain anomalous and untenable
commitments and conclusions, and needs drastic reconsideration.
CRITIQUE
OF THE ESOTERIC VIEW
This view, in the main, is not
committed to a completely historical interpretation of the Scriptures, as is
orthodoxy. But, on the other hand, neither is it completely assured of the allegorical
nature of their composition. Its position is thus a sort of compromise between
the historical and the allegorical methodology. And it is this indecisiveness
that puts its exegetical theses and conclusions in jeopardy of both inconsistency
and illogicality.
While the orthodox view holds
that the Old Testament recites ancient Jewish history and the New gives early
Christian history, there has always been a murmur of dissenting opinion from
a minority line of scholars who claim that the Bible is only properly read as
allegory. This dissent has waxed strong enough at times to draw rebuttal from
the ecclesiastical side. Strauss’ famous Life of Jesus in 1835 threw so much
consternation into the ranks of the churchly forces because he put forth a vigorous
case for the allegorical character of the sacred literature. Orthodoxy has been
able to fight off the attack from this angle; or at any rate it pursues its
even course and maintains its historical position mainly by ignoring the proddings
of the allegorists. The latter have never been able to marshal convincing force
behind their contention, because they have, until now, lacked the keys of philosophical
and theological exegesis by which they could have released the full power and
weight of their assault. Those decisive keys were lying rusting in the tombs
and temples of old Egypt for two and a half millennia. But now with Massey’s
prodigious clarification and the correction of his two pardonable oversights
referring to the "deadness of the soul in the body, and not the demise
of the body itself"--those keys are now refurbished for use in opening
the doors to admit into the dark labyrinth of the Bible’s cryptic signification
the full light of clear understanding. With the application of these keys to
the present Jewish-Christian Bible, to the Apocrypha and to the now recovered
books of the Essene monasteries, a new day of rational religion is about to
dawn upon the world.
Esotericism, too, in much the
same way, but considerably less disastrously, is, like orthodoxy, hung up midway
between the history and the allegory of Scriptures. It has to a great extent
been pushed into this anomalous position by the writings of H. P. Blavatsky,
founder of the modern movement to revive the ancient theosophical philosophy.
She has with apparent full commitment declared for the allegorical rendering
of the Bibles, and she has even gone some distance into the province of their
reinterpretation on the allegorical basis. Yet she speaks of the "time
of Moses", when, if the Old Testament stories are allegories, there could
have been no Moses as a man. Likewise she compromises, though still diverging
in ways from the orthodox view, on the historicity of a Jesus personage. Stating
at one place (The Esoteric Character of the Gospels, p. 2) that "Christ,
the true esoteric Saviour, is no man, but the divine principle in all humanity",
she elsewhere posits the historical existence of a Judean Adept, of the Jesus
name, and rates him among the minor Boddhisatvas, or at any rate a human Master
spiritually evolved. Theosophical leaders, and in their wake the Theosophical
membership (likewise the Rosicrucian and Anthroposophical bodies and other esotericists)
have followed this presentation in the large. So that the general consensus
of the so-called occult religions must be said to hold a divided opinion on
the subject, maintaining that the Scriptures are in their literary form allegorical
productions, yet rest on at least a basis of historical fact.
How much of the narrative
is history and how much is allegory thus becomes the nub of the whole question.
But little do the esotericists seem to realize that the entire power, utility
and influence of the Bibles as moral and spiritual guides hinge upon our having
some dependable determinations resting upon specific data in the case. The matter
indeed stands much as the American nation stood when Lincoln declared that it
could not exist half slave and half free; the Theosophical conception of the
deity that is dramatized in every Bible likewise can not exist half subjective
and half objective in human consciousness. Ambiguity impairs the dynamic potential
of a moral-spiritual system.
And, after all, the point at
issue is not one that can support a divided opinion. Some questions can have
a choice of alternative, yet tenable solutions. Not this one. The matter of
the existence or non-existence of a certain man in human history is not dual
in nature. Either Jesus, the Gospel Figure, was a person in human body, or he
was not. "He" can not be both a man and a purely typal character in
a literary production. Oddly enough, religious opinion, both orthodox and occult,
maintains the singular position that "he" was both these. There seems
to be no difficulty in either camp of accepting "him" in the role
of our divine model, the dramatic representation of the god-nature in our constitution.
But, the claim is, "he" was this living divine model in a fleshly
body, born in Palestine about the year 1 A.D., and ostensibly the carpenter
in the Gospels. It is stoutly maintained that nothing less than the embodiment
of the divinity in an actual human personality could carry dynamic effectiveness
for the uplift of the world. Thus esoteric philosophy has constituted "him"
both the typal dramatization and the living embodiment of our divinity. Christianity
declared "him" to be the only mortal ever to embody this divinity;
esotericism does not assent to this exclusive limitation of the Christ power
which is to deify all men. Christianity grounds its claim to being the world’s
supreme religion of dynamic efficacy on the thesis that it alone presents to
the world this one and only divine model in our own human form. It asserts that
no model of our perfection but a living one could exert saving power in our
lives.
Precisely at this point and directly
on it, the ancient philosophical Pagan and the Christian worlds differ and diverge.
It is of the utmost momentousness that the issue here outlined and at stake
be delineated and envisaged with the sharpest clarity. Be it stated, then, that
never had there been a time in at least some thousands of years immediately
prior to the "time of Christ" in which the great mystico-spiritual
religions did not present to their millions of votaries the dramatic figure
of our immanent potential of sonship of God. Never--contrary to all ignorant
Christian assertion--had the precise model, type and picture of our inner divinity
been absent from religious ritual and worship, or wanting in doctrinal formulations.
The Sages of old, men of the stature of those who structuralized the ancient
systems of theology in the Scriptures, had been at the utmost pains in the exercise
of a veritable superhuman dramatic genius to put into every myth, every apologue,
every rite, ceremony and stage drama the characteristics, the nature and the
experience of the divine segment of God’s own potential glory that he had implanted
as seed in the bodies of the superior animal races, to be his own children and
eventually gods in their right. "Ye shall be as gods," he assured
them.
Concerned the ancient seers and
"prophets" were, then, that no man seeking knowledge of his nature
and destiny should miss it if he was earnest enough to knock at the doors of
the Mystery Brotherhoods, or enter the cult associations that were functioning
in the various Near-East lands. These abounded
in associations of the kind, the just-discovered Essenes being among the best
of them. The list of such spiritual enterprises runs into scores, from distinctly
ritualistic orders to schools and academies of philosophical bent. There were
the Orphic Mysteries, the Eleusinian, the Dionysian Mysteries, the Mithraic,
the Manichaean, the cults of Osiris, Isis, Serapis in Egypt, of Sabazius, Atis,
Cybele, Adonis, Zagreus in the Syrian world, of Ishtar (to whom even Solomon
built a temple), Marduk (Ishtar and Marduk becoming Esther and Mordecai in the
Hebrew rendering) in Judea; the schools of Pythagoras, Plato, Mandaism and Therapeutism
of varied orders, the outstanding colonies of the Essenes, whose libraries have
now tumbled down out of antiquity upon our very heads. Search deeply enough
into the profundities of the teachings and ceremonials of these groups and one
will find at the heart of all of them the glorified type-figure of our divinity-to-be.
Utterly a base and baseless canard it is, then, that the Christians bandy about,
of mankind’s having had no ensampler or true picture of its divinity until God
awoke to the needs of his world about the year 1 A.D. and sent his only Son
to put on exhibit for the first time a model of our perfected life.
Ah but,--cry the orthodox--these
were only images, lifeless representations, powerless to inspire mortal men
to strive for the attainment of the virtues of the living Christ. Jesus showed
us by his life in the flesh how our path to divinity was to be trod. His life
is true, it is realistic, it is actual; it generates our love, our loyalty,
our worship, our yearning to measure up to the beautiful ideal. And, be it succinctly
stated, in this express sentiment rests all the claim that the Christian faith
advances to elicit the devotion of the world to its tenets. This is, in fact,
its one sole point of appeal sharply different from those of other religions.
It alone possesses and offers to mankind the historical Son of God.
How will the cult of the non-historical
Jesus meet this claim and this asserted postulate of Jesus’ existence? The Pagan
world antecedent to the year 33 A.D. of course, can have no voice in the debate,
because the subject of the debate, either historically real or not, had not
then come to earth. The question is no question, has no pertinence, at least
until after the first claims of a nascent Christianity came to expression. And
these claims were first heard only after about the second century A.D.
THE
COMING OF MESSIAH
It may be a fairly sobering consideration
for religionists of all segments of Christianity that, although the ancient
world had for ages predicted and anticipated the advent of Messiah--it was indeed
the main element in a universal religious doctrinism, veritably the hope of
the world--it never took the form of a belief of its fulfillment in the birth
of a human babe from mortal mother until well onto three centuries after the
alleged date of the Jesus birth in "Bethlehem". (Bethlehem is, at
any rate, as the "house of bread", a figurative designation of the
human body, in which of course the divine "babe" of our infant divinity
must have its birth--where else?). When one wonders, will the religious mentality
be brought to see the telltale significance of the fact that not until the grossest
ignorance had overridden the surviving esotericism in the early Christian movement
was the advent of the Messiah traduced into the terms of a human birth?
Messiah was to come;
yes, never was the idea absent from ancient expectation. But never until a decadent
third century of Christian fanaticism had stultified the mass mind of the Judean
world was Messiah’s appearance expected in the form of a mortal babe. Many myths,
legends, the occult tradition portrayed under varied but appropriate forms of
imagery the birth of the Christos in a stable or a cave, amidst the animal orders,
the child of virgin matter (mother, mater, Mary). But it remained for purblind
exoteric misconception from about the third century to supplant the spiritual
Christos, as an inner light coming to its shining in all humanity, with the
human babe in the Bethlehem cowstall. It was only the abject default of ordinary
intelligence in handling the old books of occult truth that precipitated the
catastrophe, that fatal blunder of taking beautiful poetry-drama for eccentric
actual occurrences. It gives us an idea of the deplorable depths to which general
philosophical discernment had sunk some four hundred years after its peak of
glorious flowering in Plato’s day. As long as the capable genius of Pagan philosophy
prevailed and dominated the general consciousness, there was never a thought
that the Messianic advent would be historicized in the person of a son of man,
or indeed of its occurring as an overt event at any specific time. The sagacious
Egyptians always spoke of it as "ever coming", "coming continuously
and periodically", "coming daily", "coming each year",
referring of course to the gradual evolution of the Christ consciousness in
the minds and hearts of all mankind. So it is quite the truth to assert--and
history supports it--that the particular elements of belief which gave birth
to Christianity were a rank growth out of the soil of ignorance.
Christianity challenges the world
since the third century at least to accept its claims as to the existence of
this unique historical personage, the carpenter of Galilee. And it bases its
egregious claims to being the one true and dynamic religion in the world because
it injects this personage, as God’s only Son, into the stream of history. Does
the non-Christian world have an adequate rebuttal to the Christian argument
for the unique psychological power of this personalized God in our human life?
On a surface view the Christian asseveration that Jesus as a living embodiment
of our divinity exerts a psychological dynamism for the exaltation of human
life that no merely dramatic model could ever do is a strong one; it has won
the assent of the millions of Christian followers over these centuries. It has
seemed reasonable to their grade of intelligence. Can the Pagan position be
supported which, in lack of any such living incarnation of God in the flesh,
asserted that the dramatic but non-living example of our divine nature was as
efficacious for motivating the divine aspirations of humanity as the life of
any man could be? The Pagan philosophical answer to the question would have
had to be a positive "yes", for its answer was formulated before "Jesus"
had become an element in the debate, before there was any debate about it. And
its answer was as good after the alleged "life" of the Jesus personage
as before it.
If the redemption of humanity
from animal grossness to divine graciousness was in any degree contingent upon
the human birth of a babe in Judea in the year 1 A.D., there is no need, no
warrant, no utility in religion as a science of soul development implemented
by mankind itself. For this throws the redeeming force outside man’s initiative,
places it beyond his control, except in the narrow and inadequate sense that
he must "accept" it. If the salvation of the race was to be effectuated
by one personal human, all the inner self-initiated resources of the mind and
heart of all humanity would be rendered of no avail, in fact superfluous and
irrelevant. Such indeed is the never-failing affirmation of the cult of the
Christian Jesus, since it declares unequivocally that there is no other way
under heaven whereby a mortal may
be saved than through the intermediary offices of the physically born man of
Galilee. The fervent assertion of this cult is that man’s best righteousness
is as filthy rags in the estimation of the great All-Father of the universe.
If Jesus does not intercede to save us, we are not saved, is the authoritative
preachment of this Western religion.
C. G. Jung, the top-most psychologist
of our day, has reported the answer and it has been given here. The utmost that
a mortal can do in the presence of a paragon of the virtue and divine perfection
of man in God is to imitate the model as best he may, says this eminent authority.
But in the very effort at imitation, he makes clear, the devotee slants the
psychological efficacy of his effort directly away from the locale where it
needs focusing, namely, in the inner core of the individual’s own consciousness,
where--rather than in ancient Judea--lies the seed-power of incipient Christhood
awaiting development. The postulates of the Christian system, if not by immediate
instruction, then surely by the direct implications of its theology, expressly
disengage the implementation of man’s salvation from any dependence upon man’s
own exertions, or even from his achievement of an evolution of his own powers.
In point of fact it positively asserts that man’s own efforts, faculties and
human powers stand blocking the way to his divinization and must be surrendered
and eliminated before the Christ power can become dominant and exert its saving
grace. In terms of the most uncompromising and unequivocal decisiveness, Christian
doctrinism positively puts human salvation outside the area of man’s own initiative,
or his own accomplishment. Without the Judean personage man can not be saved,
for he can not save himself. And if Christian doctrinal statements, reiterated
a thousand times and never rescinded, do not bind the system to what they assert,
the faith should close its doors.
Ah, but, it is rejoined, the
human heart must "believe on" this man and his function, if the power
of this Christ is to be made available and effective for his salvation. Here,
certainly, the Christian theology runs out in the unsubstantiality of a mere
word. For if the eternal destiny of the members of a whole race on a planet
is contingent upon a mere mental pose, an attitude of mind that may be nothing
much more than a sudden rush of feeling, persuasion of an idea or even a play
of fancy, then again its shallowness, its insufficiency, its ineptness is glaringly
obvious. If eternal salvation is to be won for the price of a mere turn of mental
assent in the direction of a propagated theological persuasion, the thing affronts
man’s budding instinct of divinity, slaps his own intellectual integrity in
the face, insults his divine faculty of reason, and cuts the root of any and
all motive to self-advancement in the scale of being. It stamps the seal of
worthlessness, of futility, of negation on all self-initiated effort at uplift.
And, if the crucial efficacy
in human salvation is this "belief" on the power that was manifested
in and through this one man, why would not the same efficacy to transform human
life be released by the belief, whether or not the power had been manifested
through him? The nub of the debate seems at this point to narrow down to the
question of whether the operative efficacy of the Christ-power is contingent
upon the recipient’s psychological attitude--belief--or upon the once-upon-a-time
manifestation of the power through the one man Jesus. Christianity asseverates
that it depends upon both its manifestation in Jesus and the belief of Christian
devotees. If this power is to be rated as a psychological influence of a given
character, frequency, wave length, and, like any other such radiation, able
to be brought to manifest expression when an instrument of requisite nature
and construction is developed to register it, what, it must be asked, stood
in the way of its manifestation
at any time in the cognitive or mystical sensibilities of any mortal the moment
his apparatus of brain, nerves and inner bodies became sufficiently sensitized
to vibrate to the impact of that radiation in consciousness? Why could the power
not become effective for human uplift until it had first manifested in this
one man? Christian theologism, caught in the dilemma of this predicament, weakly
protest that to be sure there could have been and doubtless were "good
men" before the year 33 A.D., but still no one had quite achieved the divine
life before Jesus opened the door into the Christian sheepfold. Does Christianity
maintain still that the power of righteous life, divine aspiration, selfless
love and regimes of self-discipline and moral rectitude would not generate their
natural product, a spiritualized and so-far divinized grade of consciousness
if the alleged events in Galilee had not happened two thousand years ago? Obviously,
to be consistent, it would have to stand on a straight "no", in answer,
because it has without end declared that all man’s best righteousness is as
filthy rags in the sight of God. But logic can lay hold of no principle which
would make the efficacy of righteousness dependent upon its having been--only
once--channeled through a carpenter in Judea.
It seems to have remained for
Jung also to voice the verdict of rational intelligence on this Christian theology,
and it is a most negative verdict indeed. If Christianity offered the world
the only historically personalized Christ in our flesh, it at the same time
and by the very gift disinherited common humanity of its divinity. For it sequestered
man’s single divine agency in a far-off event and in a wholly inaccessible locale,
and paradoxically it asked its following to imitate a paragon which it simultaneously
declared none could ever hope to equal. If Christianity offered a real world-savior
in our flesh, it offered him in such form that all chance of man’s attainment
of the ideal was precluded. A far-away imitation, as Jung states, left man leagues
short of equating the exalted ideal. The devotee was in fact discouraged even
from attempting, yes, even from hoping to match the idolized model.
The Pagan, on the contrary, while
it offered mankind the purely pictured, allegorized and dramatized ensampler,
did at least foster the positive presumption that indeed the figure of human
perfection was put before men as the idealization of what man could become,
and not what he never could hope to match. It was put forth with every incitement
to the devotee to identify himself with it. For the restoration of the power
of a Christian religion, it will have to be seen that Jung is right: the point
of crucial importance is not whether the ensampler’s typal figure is dramatized
or personalized, just a picture of our perfection or a living personal demonstration
of that perfection. For the deification of the worshipper its virtue and efficacy
are wholly contingent upon our ability to make the living demonstration ourselves.
The ultimate question in the debate is and always must be the birth of the Christos
in us. Its birth under any other circumstance or anywhere else than in the life
of all humans is a matter of insignificance and irrelevance. Anything less than
that, if not a deception, is at best a futility, the teasing of man with an
impossible vision in the skies.
The anomaly in the case comes
to view in the paradoxical operation of the two directions of the incentive.
The orthodox view still insists that the living model--Jesus--exercises a greater
driving power than any non-living picturization could do, because of our sympathy
with a man of our own humanity, which incites us to aspire to be like him, while
the mere type-figure in the
abstract leaves us less moved. Yet the effect actually works out in almost contrary
fashion. For Christian dogma steps in and puts up the impassable bars between
us and that dream of being like him. It asserts that we can not even be worthy
of receiving his grace; we must simply cling to the hope that he will stretch
forth his hand and save us.
On the contrary, the Pagan, who
was never enticed with the alleged example of a one and only Christ in the flesh,
lived in the constant understanding that he could, and in the due course of
earnest endeavor, would become a duplicate of the exalted divine type. In the
case of the Christian the divine model absorbed the whole of the worshipper’s
adoration, and the latter was rendered negative and made, as it were, static
and immobile inwardly. With the philosophical Pagans the model was made abstract,
a typal representation; but the living dynamic that could exalt the human participant
was focussed in the worshipper himself.
And, furthermore, the psychology
generated in the two cases needs study for the discernment of still another
divergent outcome. Again it is a corroboration of Jung’s courageous delineation
to consider that the greater moral effect is bound to flow from a dramatic figurism
to that locale where the personal meaning is understood to become relevant.
Say what Christians will, the comparison between the mental-emotional reactions
of a Christian and his Pagan forebear, will accentuate in unmistakable vividness
the greater moving power of the Mystery ceremonials and initiations than that
released in Christian worship, from the observation of the effects of both forms.
It was the actual experience in the Mystery rituals that the candidates and
initiates were thrilled to the profoundest depths of their sensible natures
in undergoing the dramatic run of the scenic representations. One must ask why
this was so. The answer gives us the decisive determinant in the whole argument:
it was because the instructions given by the hierophants in these Brotherhoods
left never a doubt in the mind of any participant that the dramatized experience
of the model divine figure was at every step and turn of the play exactly typal
of his and of our living experience.
In Christian worship the body
of sensible afflations, the feelings and the sympathy go quite in the opposite
direction; that is, they go out from the consciousness of the worshipper to
the figure of the Galilean Christ. All our burdens of feeling, thought, sympathy
and love go out from the hearts of devotees and are concentrated upon the person
of Jesus. If one questions this let him go through the services of any Christian
Church during Passion Week. In the Pagan worship there was no such figure haunting
the thought or consciousness or imagination of the participant. Therefore there
was no diverting image, no distraction from the one and only focus of meaning
and pertinence which the rituals were designed to accentuate,--the consciousness
of each member himself.
From the accounts of such men
as Cicero, Plato and others, it seems warrantable to make the claim that the
psychological efficacy of these ancient Mystery ceremonials exercised a salutary
moral purification and a spiritual catharsis upon the lives of the sharers of
the ceremonies which were far and away more dynamic than what one sees--or fails
to see--accruing to the pew occupants in the Christian services. The basic reason,
that should truly startle all Christian theologism, is obviously that the worship-forms
were enacted in the never-absent realization that they depicted most movingly
the experience of the Christos in the actors themselves, the meaning being never
referred to the figure of any man outside in the historical scene. It must be
seen as beyond all debate and cavil that a ritual whose every feature strikingly
adumbrated and by the subtlest of dynamic suggestiveness touched the inner consciousness
of the actors as being their own intimate experience, must exercise a far more
potent psychological effect than any amount of sentimental sympathy or adoration
poured out upon a person outside in history.
The ancient world of philosophy
and religion consistently asserted that it was a blasphemy of the holiness of
life for man to worship any power outside himself. This did not preclude what
we would in rebuttal declare to be the mighty transcendent power manifesting
in the universe exterior to our life. But ancient sapiency discerned that all
being and power manifesting universally were of one kind, comprehending both
his life and that of infinite magnitudes of being outside him in the one same
totality and unity. If ancient man centered upon his inner selfhood the adoration
of heart and mind, it was because he knew himself to be integrally in and of
that all-embracing Oneness, but that the germ of consciousness innate within
his own core of being was for him the one avenue of access to the magnified
core of the universal being. He focused his attention upon that inner unit of
total being. He knew that within himself and there alone were the instrumentalities
and the directive agency that could integrate his unit life with that of the
Whole. The sweep and swirl of the external universe in its vast reaches and
magnitudes beyond his little sphere would be of intimate relevance to him only
as he reverenced, cherished and fructified the tiny fragment of the Whole which
constituted his area of supervision. No amount of veneration directed outward
upon the cosmos could impregnate the individual life and make it productive,
if at the same time the consciousness within the unit creature did not flower
beautifully within its own garden. Adoration of the mighty works of the cosmic
Deity will hardly arise until a reverence for the divinity ensconced within
the single unit has been brought to birth.
WAS
JESUS THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTIANITY?
It has ever been considered an
unanswerable and clinching argument of "occult" students that it would
have been impossible for Christianity to take its rise and run on to great growth
and expanding power without the historical presence of some outstanding personage,
some man, who had been there to give it an impetus and focus interest to a point
of specific unit strength to make it a movement able to generate wide interest
and gather following. How are we to account for the rise and sweep of such a
mighty current of force without the initial push of some dominating figure?
Religions do not take form out of the air without human agency. It seems impossible
to these people that a new religion could have been launched, inaugurated, solidified
and stabilized for growth, as it were, gratuitously, with no great figure present
to furnish driving force to its movement. It must have been the work of some
great man.
The specious force of this argument
has been cogent enough to hold the minds of esotericists to the affirmation
of the existence in Galilee of the figure accredited by nearly universal Christian
belief as Jesus the Nazarene. It is to be shown here that the position not only
rests on pure theory, wholly wants evidence to support it, is completely untenable
from more than one angle, but is entirely and directly controverted by a series
of facts and considerations which overthrow it at every turn.
Christianity, the occult
theorists assert, was a new religion; it was neither Judaism, Gnosticism (in
spite of the fact that its first and most intelligent promoters were Gnostics!),
Manichaeism, Essenism, Platonism, Orphism, Mithraism, Hermeticism, Chaldean
Magism or any of the existing and environing cult religions of the Time. It
was a new and totally unique expression of religious pietism and doctrinal systematism.
It must therefore have been the formulation of some prominent person or agency
that came forward with a totally new and different body of truth-teaching to
promulgate. This is the thesis behind the argument under discussion. Almost
it might be reduced to the self-proving theorem that if it for the first time
in world history proclaimed the preachment that the Deity sent his only-begotten
Son down into the world to save it by the magical power of the only message
ever transmitted from heaven to man, it could not have assumed this form unless
indeed it had been brought and disseminated by that divinely commissioned Son
himself. For who else would know about a heaven-initiated mission and purpose
of the sort but the One sent with the message? It has thus ever seemed to be
a matter of stating the case in such a way that it could not have been conceived
and so stated unless it was true. The elucidation and analysis here set forth
indeed constitutes the basic psychology on which the great Christian religion
rests. Since the framework of the theology could not have been the sort of thing
humans would invent of themselves, there must have been the messenger from the
superworld to have originated it.
The first counterblast to this
seemingly indubitable conclusion comes forth in the form of a shocking fact
that flatly contradicts the nub element in the theorization just propounded.
It has by now been more than abundantly demonstrated as a fact, provable to
any one who will compare Christian with pre-Christian literature of Judea, Chaldea,
Egypt and other ancient lands, that in blunt truth, Christianity introduced
to the world not one single item, doctrine, revelation of moral and spiritual
truth that had not already been in the cult religions and the sacred books of
antiquity for long antecedent time! Some change of expression there is, and
variation in modes of representation of the old truths, but it is still true
to say that there is not one single presentment of ancient spiritual light and
wisdom in the Christian literature that is not matched by, and obviously taken
from, pre-extant books, rituals or liturgies of the old Pagan religions. This
will sound like arrant and scurrilous blasphemy in the ears of orthodoxy. Therefore
we repeat: it is demonstrable and provable to any one who will go into it and
survey the extensive ground where lies the massed evidence. And denial of its
factual truth by one who has not examined that great body of evidence is not
admissible in the case. It rests on evidence; opinion based on no acquaintance
with the evidence is disqualified.
Madame H. P. Blavatsky accentuates
the force of this datum in a singularly strong passage, in which she says that
we have the sorry spectacle of a grandiose anti-climax to the whole Christian
drama in the fact that when, at the apex of history’s sublime culmination in
the coming of the whole world’s breathlessly awaited Messiah, the very Logos
of God himself, to thrill humanity with the celestial heralding of the Kingdom
of God on earth, to deliver the message from the Father of the universe that
would cause all nature even to shout aloud its joy over the redemption of the
human race from darkness to divine light, all that this majestic Prince of the
Aeons could do when he came into the world was to plagiarize, in his great cosmic
code of righteous principle, the sayings, or Logia, of one or another of some
twenty antecedent Messianic characters! Not a new, not a purely heavenly note
did he strike to enlighten the mundane mind and sweeten the course of human
life. Every statement he made
had been uttered before him by other teachers, and in some instances far more
fully and clearly expressed!
But the world before him, we
hear the religious theorists parroting, had lived under the old Pagan dispensation
of strict legalism in religion, the lex talionis, the law of an eye for an eye
and evil for evil. It was Jesus who brought the second and higher dispensation,
the great and liberating Law of Love. What must be said as to this traditional
assertion is that it, too, crashes to meaninglessness under the impact of the
solid and impregnable fact that it, likewise, is simply not true. Neither was
there an old dispensation that made legalism a universal practice, that knew
not nor gave play to the power of love as motive of human action; nor was it
true that this Jesus brought love as the fulfillment of all law into the counsels
of religion for the first time in history. All the assertions underlying the
frame of this argument are as factually unfounded and untrue as the claim that
Jesus brought a message of completely new truth.
It eventuates, then, that not
only was the foundation and spread of the new religion not dependent upon the
initial impulse from a dominant personage, but, even assuming that this Gospel
figure may have originated the movement, he used only the material of philosophy,
ethics and theology that was not his own contribution in any original sense
whatever, but was extracted from the literature of religious systems on all
sides about him. It was dependent upon him for nothing new or newly enlightening
or freshly inspiring. For he only expatiated upon the extant wisdom and the
traditions of his past.
It must be seen, then, that the
theory, apparently so well recommended to an uncritical and somewhat naive approach,
smashes to bits on the hard fact that, even if the Jesus figure lived and preached
as the orthodox case assumes, it is conceivable that he might indeed have fomented
a popular upheaval of religious cast, but in it used none but old "standard"
material as the gist and content of his "message".
It has never seemed to strike
the intelligence or the logical sense of any one in the exegetical field that
the dialectic of such a situation can work backward as well as forward, so to
say. The premises of the orthodox logic have been broadly these: history shows
there was a great stir and final consolidation of a new religious movement bringing
new truth (or alleged to have done so); it takes an outstanding or dynamic personage
to produce such a development; therefore the assumption is warranted that such
a great character then lived and brought the new movement. All logical process
depends for its correctness, first upon the truth of its premises, then on the
truth and accuracy of its reasoning methodology. First, then, the orthodox first
premise must be corrected to bring it into conformity with the truth of fact,
namely, that while there was a great religious ferment in the first century
that brought Christianity, it did not bring any new truth. Likewise the second
premise, that such a movement could have come only as the result of the presence
and activity of some outstanding person, while it is a quite reasonable assumption,
need not necessarily have been true in the case of Christianity,--since other
causes could conceivably bring such a result. (And it can be shown that in fact
other causes did launch the movement). Therefore, the syllogism, with premises
amended to be in line with the truth of fact, would work out to a dead end for
the Christian, and as well the esoteric, claims that the movement could not
have come without the activity of Jesus. For it would then read about as follows:
First premise: There was a great agitation in the first century that brought
Christianity. Second premise: It introduced nothing new in the religious world.
Conclusion: Therefore there is no necessary
implication that a great figure preaching new truth had anything to do with
it. The basis of the assumption that there must have been on the scene a teacher
of great wisdom and stature has always rested on the belief or the tradition
that the movement thus launched brought a whole new code of moral and spiritual
truth and law. Now that this tradition is blasted by the sheer fact of history
(known and acceptable, however, as yet to few), the conclusion which rested
on its presumptive truth is no longer supportable.
The absence of a new message
does not of itself preclude the possibility of there having lived a dynamic
near-divine personage at the time. All we adduce is that it disqualifies the
argument that the wondrous new message proves the existence of the messenger.
If any message was given, it was neither new nor wondrous beyond earlier messages
of similar nature. At any rate no new message has been historically discoverable,
though the Christian world has believed that it was. Research brings to light
nothing but old, indeed very ancient, Pagan formulations in the entire body
of Christian doctrinism.
About 1945, Dr. John Haynes Holmes,
of the Community Church in New York City, preached and printed two sermons which
should have created widespread excitement and led to definite action of more
or less drastic character. The first was entitled: Christianity’s Debt to Judaism:
Why Not Acknowledge It? In it he adduced that Christianity owed its (alleged)
founder, Jesus, to the Jews (he might have added also its actual founder, St.
Paul, a Jew); secondly, it derived five-sixths of its Bible--the Old Testament--from
the Jews; thirdly it owed everything that its (alleged) founder, Jesus, said,
did and functioned as, to the Talmud, the Mishna, the Gemara, the Midrash, the
Torah and other haggadoth (sacred books) of the Jews. The inference stands that
what Christianity did not derive from the Jews was practically nothing at all.
It is quite likely that the evidence
forthcoming from the Dead Sea Scrolls will add considerable strength to this
determination.
His other sermon was entitled:
The Religion of the Pharaoh Akhnaton. In it he expatiated upon the singular
historical fact that at a date some thirteen hundred years B.C. the young son
of Amenhotep, coming to the throne before the age of thirty, introduced into
the priestly religion of old Egypt the elements of a reform movement which on
examination prove to fall so closely in line with the highest, purest and truest
character of Christianity that Dean Weigal, of the Yale Divinity School, has
pronounced them fully equal in spiritual loftiness to anything in Christianity.
The fact that one of the most prominent clergymen in New York City could release
two such absolutely disruptive disclosures of factual truth as these, and see
them make not even a ripple of impact upon the religious thought of the day,--in
fact see them ignored and forgotten, doing nothing to loosen the grip of centuries-old
falsehood in belief and tradition--is conclusive evidence, not only of the stolid
inertia of the mass mind, but also of the fear of the whole priestly fraternity
that new truth will undermine the structure of its dominance of popular credulity.
Millions of dollars are annually
appropriated to further religious education, with the objective of empowering
it with greater dynamism to vivify a deeper spiritual culture. One must ask
what is the good of expending a largesse of wealth to bring forth new and challenging
truth and understanding, if the new light thus generated is to be suppressed
and forgotten. Why were these two most significant disclosures of a New York
minister, both substantial
enough to challenge the truth of basic Christian claims, not broadcast and dealt
with for their eventual edification of present religion?
The answer, unfortunately and
distressingly, is that every clergyman is so keenly aware of the tenuous and
precarious nature of the historical claims on which his religion and his Sabbath
preachments rest, that he chooses to remain silent and to let the general public
remain as silent as it will when such disclosures are made. Now we have the
discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, mutely eloquent of many things which likewise
challenge the historical claims of Christianity. And Prof. Edmund Wilson, in
his fine little book, The Scrolls From the Dead Sea, makes an astonishing statement
that reflects again the fear of the established religious hierarchy of facing
any such new evidence when he says that New Testament scholars evince almost
without exception a reluctance to be interested in these new-found documents.
He says that substantially they have boycotted the whole subject of the scrolls.
If it was duly recognized, this
aspect of things, so often, in fact invariably redemonstrated in every turn
of affairs that threatens conventional religionism, is what should arouse the
world of intelligence to a demand that a fair investigation be given these scrolls
and that chicanery and duplicity be excluded from their handling. Nor is it
too late for the academic world to undo the gross injustice which the world
of theological scholarship has inflicted upon the prodigious contribution of
Gerald Massey, whose brilliant studies in the field of comparative religion
have given us perhaps the greatest light ever released upon the mighty literature
lying behind the Old and New Testaments. If Christianity is to survive--and
it is being throttled to death in half its former area of the world at the moment--it
must survive as truth, not as a compound of some basic truth, a great body of
eccentric half-truth, and a mass of sheer preposterous untruth that has been
built up on a false historical reading of the Gospels. To survive and wield
beneficent power to elevate mankind, it must undergo a far more thorough-going
sweep of reformatory spirit than that which swirled it out of the clutch of
Roman tyranny in the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. If it
can purge itself of inherent falsehood, tear the poison of hypocrisy and bigotry
out of its heart and cleanse its soul with the cathartic virtue of the whole
white light of truth, it may endure the assault that threatens it now and become
a benignant influence in the world that needs such a purgation. If it will not
do this, it is, as Edward Carpenter said in his Pagan and Christian Creeds,
almost certainly doomed to extinction.
SCRIPTURAL
WRITING WAS ALLEGORICAL
A not inconsiderable number of
competent scholars have pursued the very thrilling quest of the origins of Christianity.
What all of them have encountered is a mass of belief, legend, tradition, so-called
"prophecy" and an almost irreducible minimum of authentic history.
Joseph Warschauer, an eminent European exegetist, in the first sentence in his
book, The Historical Life of Christ, which aims to uphold the historicity of
Jesus, says that of this great character whose life was to change all human
history we know practically nothing at all. But, he surprisingly adds, exactly
because we know little or nothing of him, we really know everything of him!
It is indeed the oddest of circumstances that while those of his own generation,
including St. Paul, Philo, Apollonius and even Josephus, never apparently heard
of this man’s existence, nor did any one speak of the Messiah as a man of our
humanity close on to two hundred
years after his day, writers who delineate his life and actions nineteen hundred
years after the alleged event, can tell graphically of his every activity, reveal
his every motive, portray his personal features, with life-like precision. This
it is that impelled Dr. Albert Schweitzer to pronounce as the final conclusion
of his life-time study of the Gospel literature, that the figure of this Jesus
of Nazareth is purely a fabrication of the free imagination of the theologians.
Warschauer’s paradoxical remark about our knowing everything of Jesus because
we know nothing, stands to us as evidence that, given a few basic data which
the Gospels (taken as history--which they are not) supply, the whole story of
this assumed life has been built up to conform to what Christian theology demanded
to buttress its doctrines and its asseverations. To put it in brief, Jesus had
to be made the kind of figure that would harmonize as beautifully and impressively
as possible with the presuppositions of the Messianic personage and event. The
very paucity of the historical material made this task the easier, since it
freed the theological imagination from the limitations and restraints of factual
data.
But this opportunism did not
reckon with the phenomenal scholarship of Gerald Massey, who pulled from under
the feet of this engaging enterprise of fancy the rug of what little data the
four Gospels of the New Testament had provided, by revealing that some nine-tenths
of the Gospel literature was nothing but ancient Egyptian spiritual allegorism
that had finally slipped out from the custodianship of the Mystery cults and
Essene societies and had been re-edited and reissued about the early centuries
of Christian history. Over the first two centuries of that history it was the
defense and the boast of the Christian party leaders that the new religion was
in no wise a departure from or a movement hostile to antecedent Pagan religion.
Justin Martyr, the chief apologist for Christianity in the second century A.D.,
is at pains to show that the new development was completely in accord with the
premises of Pagan worship. Also a little later its exponents were claiming that
it was the unfoldment of Judaism into the fulfillment of that religion’s own
prophesies of the coming Messiah.
In his work just referred to,
Joseph Warschauer, writing as said, to fortify the thesis of Jesus’ personal
existence, takes the odd tack of discounting what amounts to about three-fourths
of the recorded "events" in the Gospels’ narrative of Jesus’ life,
explaining them on other grounds than factual occurrence. They were introduced
into the story, he claims, as poetic embellishment of the bare facts of the
hero’s life, lyric legend, romantic tradition, ancient prophecy, the irrepressible
outcropping of the poetic tendencies of the Hebrew religious spirit. It is surely
a strange strategy in an author’s labor to strengthen a given thesis, if in
doing so he sets out to disqualify about three-quarters of his available supporting
data. Most of the "miracles", the expulsion of demons from obsessed
persons, the natural phenomena attending the birth and the crucifixion episodes,
some elements of Jesus’ preaching, the Logoic role of the Nazarene and other
items, Warschauer pushed aside as inadmissible for historical evidence in the
case. On the quite infinitesimal residue of assumed authentic history Warschauer
stakes the case for Jesus’ existence and influence on history. Other scholars
are agreed that this is too frail and unsubstantial a base on which to rest
the claims of the Christian faith.
One of the greatest of modern
German theologians, Johannes Weiss, affirms that no longer now, as in the days
of our pious forefathers, can faith rest placidly
assured on the assumed true historicity of a Gospel narrative "full of
contradictions and impossibilities".
Indeed if one were to search
through the voluminous literature on the career of Jesus for evidence of its
non-historical character, one would surprisingly cull more from books designed
to maintain the historical thesis than he would find in works aimed at demonstrating
the allegorical structure.
Reverting to the position of
the parties advancing the esoteric view of the Jesus question, we find the matter
complicated by a number of other considerations springing from a differing predication
of elucidative principles. As said before, the schools of occultism maintain
that the Jesus figure, who, they say, appeared in that first Christian century,
was one of a line of "Masters" who were members of the spiritual hierarchy
of the world, living in one of his advanced incarnations to revive and perpetuate
the recondite truth of the spiritual life, was of course a historical personage.
Some of the prophets of this thesis definitely identify him with, or as, Apollonius
of Tyana; some others make him to have been Jehoshua ben Pandira, a figure mentioned
in the Talmud and the Babylonian Gemara, who is dated at about 115 B.C. Others
assert that he was neither of these two, but was his own proper Jesus self.
Some existing evidence gives ground for the theory that Apollonius is the historical
person behind the Biblical characters of both Jesus and Paul. The evidence that
at any rate he was the real personage behind the shadowy figure of St. Paul
is strong enough to deserve weighty consideration. The occult theorists, however,
explain the status and mission of this "Master Jesus" quite apart
from the role and function of the Gospel Jesus of the churches. Their position
might be formulated in the statement that he was the Jesus of the spiritual
hierarchy and not the Christian Jesus of the Gospels, the only-begotten Son
of God and member of the cosmic Trinity. It is asserted that he incarnated in
the Judean life not for the purpose of founding the Christian ecclesiastical
system, but to restate and revivify the everlasting truths of occult wisdom,
being one of those periodical Avatars which the Great White Lodge of the Himalayas
send out to keep alive the tradition of the great secret knowledge of spiritual
truth.
It is the allegation of this occult
theory that this particular Master of the Wisdom lived in Judea at the time
at which the Gospels presumably place the life of the founder of Christianity,
and that through a habitual bent of the religious mind of that day there came
to be accreted about him the traditional legends and sacred allegories which
had from earlier times been the almost universal embellishments of all Messianic
literature. The claim thus makes the Master Jesus of the esotericists stand
as ostensibly the historical prototype of the Gospel Jesus. This predication
holds that the real Jesus was not, so to say, the Gospel Jesus, but was the
personage in history whom legend and poetic tendency turned into the Christian
Master. As definitely as one can determine what is all too loosely put forward
in the Theosophical construction, it stands about as outlined here.
But those advancing this elucidation
have apparently not realized the difficulty of maintaining it in the face of
certain factual data and a host of considerations that arise to challenge it.
The thesis tacitly but by direct implication leaves its proponents holding that
their Master Jesus and the Gospel Jesus are one and the same person, even though
he is scanned from two different angles, the Christian and the Theosophic. It
assumes that first century religionism simply dressed up the Avataric Master
in the robes and dignities of the cosmic Logos. If the claim does not go quite
as far as this, it at any rate
leaves the esoteric devotees broadly assuming that the Jesus character in the
Gospels is there because his story rests upon the factual existence and healing
and teaching career of the Theosophical Master.
Right here, however, the thesis
encounters obstacles of so concrete a character as to jeopardize seriously its
chances of holding its ground. In the first place there is found virtually no
evidence whatsoever for the living existence of either the Master of occult
wisdom or the cosmic Son of God in human person. When one discusses a question
of history, the one and only veridical basis of judgment is evidence. The Christian
party confesses and deplores the lack of evidence in support of its contention
as to the existence of Jesus of Nazareth, but, as shown, has expanded the modicum
of assumed historical evidence into a mountain of "proof". On its
part, the side of occultism advances the evidence of clairvoyance, the extrasensory
power of reading the impressions imprinted on the "akashic ether"
of sub-atomic essence, or what might be called the indestructible photographic
memory of nature. On the hypothesis that capable development and psychic faculty
makes possible the ability to fix the eye of higher vision upon past events,
the claim has been advanced that persons of such highly trained capabilities
have looked back upon the events of the period of history in question and have
thus, by immediate vision, certified the existence of the hierarchical Master
Jesus, who, these have stated, was a man of such purity of life that he had
won the quite exceptional privilege of yielding up his body for a period of
three years to the tenancy and use of the great spiritual Lord of the World,
an entity of cosmic greatness under the name of the Hindu Lord Maitreya, his
own individual self-conscious principle being held in a state of suspended consciousness
in a monastery in Lebanon.
Thus one party rests its claims
on scanty evidence, all of very dubious character--the other bases its hypothecations
on evidence furnished by clairvoyance. Of the veridical sort of evidence that
historical judgments require for credibility and common human acceptance, there
is flatly none to help either side. The assumed evidence adduced to uphold the
orthodox Christian contention evaporates into empty air when the sunlight of
Massey’s (and others’) inexpugnable data of comparative religion spreads its
clear rays over the scene and dissolves the mists of ignorant and unsupportable
assumption. For this research establishes the fact that the Gospels of the New
Testament are not literary productions of the first century A.D., but are rescripts
of old, old books of the Egyptians. Therefore they can not be the history of
any man living in that first century. Had such a man--that man--lived and been
able to read the books of Egyptian religious lore--already at that time lying
unread and unreadable for five hundred years, and destined to remain so for
two thousand years more--he would have been amazed to find his own "life",
as Christians believe he lived it, detailed in particular, his sayings already
written in musty documents, his virtues extolled, his cosmic function delineated,
his magical acts recounted, all a bit surprising to him. He would have had to
marvel at finding himself the fulfillment of world prophecy, discovering that
he was in fact the heaven-sent Messianic hope of the world. (Let the reader
of this brochure reflect at this point that this, precisely this, is what hundreds
of authors of the life of Jesus have asserted that he did come to realize in
all serious actuality, as they one and all speculate at what time in his career
it was that he knew of a certainty that he was the Messiah, Son of God, and
second member of the Trinity).
PRECARIOUSNESS
OF THE EVIDENCE
This invincible datum neither the
orthodox faction nor the occult side has reckoned with in any realistic way.
Obviously it would show the claims of both parties practically "null and
void" for assured acceptance. The whole question, the entire debate, rests
upon the dating of the four documents known as the Gospels of the Christian
New Testament. Always the assumption has been that they were written as original
literary productions in the years between about forty and eighty of the first
century A.D. As already set forth, no doubt to the surprise of most readers,
Massey’s work alone dispels this view with an overwhelming marshalling of data
of comparative religion. Eusebius himself says that the New Testament Gospels
and Epistles are old books preserved by the Essenes in their libraries. The
now available Dead Sea Scrolls seem certain to validate his statement. With
the certification of this item, the status of the whole Christian religion becomes
increasingly precarious. The documents threaten to support what Massey revealed
so authoritatively, and this turn of the current of history threatens the basic
and distinctive Christian claims.
As to the confirmation of the
existence of Jesus, the Master of occult power, by clairvoyance, the equally
precarious nature of this type of evidence need hardly be descanted upon. It
could be true; it could be faulty in part; it could be completely erroneous.
Not to be discounted gratuitously or summarily as wholly incompetent, it yet
stands outside the pale of the brand of evidence that world opinion demands.
From the very side that has adduced it as possessing authentic value have come
repeated admonitions that evidence of so subjective a character is ever to be
accepted with the utmost caution and circumspection, as being egregiously subject
to error and deception. It is at best highly questionable, and indeed is always
to be held suspect until it can advance factual data that will supplement its
purely internal testimony with objective fact. And, if its data are found to
run afoul of positive factual historical evidence, they must stand as disqualified.
It is to be noted that in the
case of the evidence submitted by clairvoyance no such supplementary supporting
testimony has been offered. It rests upon sheer individual assertion alone.
This renders it tenfold suspect. One need not be held captious, carping, unduly
suspicious, or of a closed mind, to express at least the mild wonder why those
who have asserted their clairvoyant verification of the existence of Jesus have
left their declarations stand at the point of sheer pronouncement that the Master
lived at the time specified. One must be permitted to think that if they could
see him in his personal life at any time, they must have seen him in his environment,
seen him in relation to the circumstances of his immediate existence. They must
have noted his person, his features, stature, complexion, type, eyes, dress
and speech. They must have heard him speak, heard him say something that would
give some light on his life, work and mission. Without such powers of observation
they would have to be challenged to validate their ability to identify him at
all.
Add to that, they would have
to be challenged to demonstrate how they could identify a person thus clairvoyantly
seen with a character alleged to have lived at that epoch, whom, however, they
had never seen, whom they had no way of knowing--unless of course by previous
exercise of clairvoyance. No court would permit the submission of testimony
of a witness as to the identity of a defendant brought before him unless the
witness could prove that he
had seen or known the defendant before. It is certainly within the pale of legitimate
privilege that a skeptical world should demand to be shown how a modern clairvoyant,
no matter of what probity, could presume to identify any ancient personage,
let us say Plato or Cicero, if such was brought within the range of clairvoyant
vision, if he had not lived at the same time as these characters, or had at
least seen photographs or other likenesses of them. In the case of Jesus, either
Master or Logos, it is as certain as anything like that can be, that no likeness
of his personal figure was ever made or remained in existence. Therefore nobody
could identify him. And all evidence resting on subjective visioning is thus
summarily ruled out of court.
If the claiming clairvoyant investigators
had positively seen the person in such situations and under such circumstances
as would have tended to give some certitude to their vision, it is odd that
they have not considered it worth while to adduce at least some of the attendant
features, matters of incident, coincident data, which would give their testimony
something of the semblance of veridical realism, things minor and/or major that
would have lent presumptive validity to their seeing. Had such been given, it
would have lent something in the way of credibility to their reports. It could
be evaluated for what it seemed worth, much or little. But we look in vain for
the offering of any such circumstantial testimony. It is alleged, and in occult
circles widely believed that the clairvoyance of certain persons has demonstrated
the existence of the Master Jesus, and the assertion stands without any subsidiary
support. On such grounds it must be asked whether these persons accredited with
extraordinary psychic gifts should ask us to accept their reportings when they
offer us nothing in support of their asseverations.
When the matter of identification
of a given person is under scrutiny, it is in point to note that no one ever
seems to have taken a factual or realistic view of this matter of identification
of the man Jesus from another approach, which certainly must be considered to
be vital to the whole theses of Jesus’ personal existence. The Church that he
is said to have founded claims for him, a man of our human flesh, the sole and
unique character of the Logos of God, the cosmic mind of the total universe.
The Gospel narrative discloses of course that he was not generally recognized
in this superhuman and celestial character. . . . Yet it is revealed that by
certain persons, and eventually by the disciples, he was recognized as the cosmic
Logos, the Messiah of the ages, the fulfillment of world prophecy and apocalyptic
expectation. In reading the Gospels we are led to accept as factual the account
of this recognition. It is dramatically portrayed that Peter, for instance,
at one moment of exalted heightening of inner vision, suddenly knew that this
Jesus person he was consorting with was no ordinary human of our earthly race,
but was of cosmic stature. "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living
God." We are led to feel that Jesus infused some ray of overwhelming dynamism
into the gaze he might be thought to have fixed on the disciple at the moment,
which spoke with convincing power of the Messianic presence in the man beside
him.
The question must arise in this
connection, however, how is a cosmic Messiah or the Logos of creation to be
recognized when embodied in the form of an ordinary human? How is the Messiah-Logos
to be identified from a man of the human estate? What marks or distinctive aspects
does this Messiah wear, by which a fisherman might "spot" him as of
an order infinitely transcending humanity? How is it to be understood and accepted
that Galilean peasants could tell, when this man came walking down the village
street, took an order to make a kitchen table, or stepped of a Sabbath into
the synagogue, that he was the Lord of Creation? How did they know, how could
they know? And if this Jesus
were to fulfill the loud predictions of his Fundamentalist followers and descend
to earth for his "second coming" in this modern age, how could he
persuade the world, or even those followers, that he was that personage assumed
to have been historically delineated in the four Gospels?
But we hear our argument shouted
down with the reminder that this matter presents no difficulties: why he himself
declared it; he announced his Messianic function! So he did, so he did,--if
the Gospels recite true history. And what blind fatuousness of obsessed minds
it must be that prevents pious devotees in their literal acceptance of the Scriptures
from seeing that this claim puts the dunce cap of final folly on the head of
the misguided Fundamentalist! Is there still left in minds thus bewitched a
remnant of power to visualize in full realism the unconscionable actuality of
any man’s stalking forth in human society on this earth and formally announcing
himself as the cosmic Sun of Righteousness, God’s only Son, the world Cosmocrator?
Can these absurdly conditioned minds create in imagination what would happen
if some man, be he a Washington, an Emerson, a Lincoln, a Churchill, even the
acknowledged greatest and best beloved and most exalted of our race, should
stand forth and proclaim in utter seriousness that he was the one Son of the
eternal Father, sent to earth to charge its history and open the till then closed
door to human salvation? The moment such a one presumed to wrap himself in this
mantle, all public confidence in his sanity would be destroyed and he would
be summarily rushed off to the nearest mental sanatorium. Were he the true Messiah
indeed, the last thing he would think of doing would be to attempt to proclaim
it to the world, for common sense would indicate that it would invite immediate
ridicule and defeat of his mission. It is beyond the bounds of the remotest
possibility in the case that any man could ever declare himself to be this cosmic
personage in human frame, and be believed. And, as things go in the world, it
would be only those of virtually imbecile intelligence who could be persuaded
to hear him seriously. And from what meager data that real history furnishes
us on the period in which he is believed to have lived, it was just about this
grade of mental puerility that inspired the originally esoteric upsurge of the
Christian movement to hate learning, burn books, murder students of occult spirituality
and convert the Bible allegories of mystic truth into senseless and preposterous
"events".
It should be evident to all who,
following the sage advice of ancient philosophers, look beneath the surface
meaning of the words of the Scriptures for a deeper understanding of its message,
that the theses which in the main the modern "occult" movements have
endorsed, accepted and sponsored in their cult teachings, thus stand in most
precarious situation, if indeed they are not fully disqualified by the open
logic in the case. There may have been--who can know?--one character of near-Christly
grade of evolved spiritual consciousness living in the early part of the first
century; there may even have been twenty persons of this status alive then.
What age can we think of in which there may not have been exalted humans approaching
the summit of divine development? Some members of our humanity, and more and
more of them, must be nearing the point of graduation into divinity. This must
be postulated if there is such a thing as spiritual evolution.
But that the antique sacred writings
of ancient Egypt, giving birth to a great flood of documents extant from two
to five thousand years ago, with elements in man’s constitution depicted in
all of them, should ever have been mistaken for the factual history of a man,
or men and women, living at a specified epoch, is something that Massey’s stupendous
work has at any rate made utterly inadmissible. The Jesus in the Gospels--and
it is to be remembered that
Eusebius says these were ancient books of the Essenes--can not have been a living
man. No man’s life has been written down in books some thousands of years before
he lived. The living experience of a Christly grade of consciousness, however,
could be, and was, dramatically delineated in the old books; and it could be
seen to apply, and was meant to apply, to those who have lived, those now living
and those who will live hereafter. Such a frame of reference, it can now be
seen from the mountain peak of a great mass of evidence, is exactly what the
sacred Scriptures of antiquity were written to structuralize.
It is not a diversion from the
main theme, then, to set forth that possibly nine-tenths of the material embodied
in the Christian Scriptures has been taken for ancient Jewish history, when
in truth those documents are almost entirely a collection of aboriginal mythical
constructions. So obvious is this to competent students who have surveyed this
field long and searchingly, that one writer, Kalthoff, has declared it his well-considered
opinion (Entstehung des Christentums) that:
"The sources from which
we derive our information concerning the origin of Christianity
are such that in the present state of historical research no historian would
undertake the task of writing the biography of an historical Jesus."
And he adds to this a similar
observation (Ibid, p. 10):
"To see behind these stories
the life of a real historical personage would not occur to
any man if it were not for the influence of rationalistic theology."
This is an observation of subtle
discernment. The simple but deplorable truth is that the very perpetuation of
priestly and ecclesiastical religionism made it a psychological necessity that
the mass mind (of the West) be conditioned to an aura and posture of humility,
faith and pious tradition--which Kalthoff here calls "rationalistic theology",--so
as to be kept perpetually susceptible to the influence of the Christian doctrinism.
It is true to say that every mind thus indoctrinated reads the Gospels and interprets
them as it were, through the haze and mist of a psychic mirage of entrenched
pious "belief". If these minds could first dispel this artificially
agglomerated psychic fog which arises the moment thought throws itself into
the posture of pietism, they would clearly discern that those Gospels surely
do not read like history. Pietists read them under the spell of a mystical glamor.
They become to them a divine fairy-tale that is believed. For assuredly they
can not stand up as history. Frequently the writers, even when upholding the
historicity of Jesus and the general Gospel narrative, say in reference to this
or that item of the story, "Whatever else this incident may be, it certainly
is not and can not be history."
HOW
WAS THE LOGOS MADE FLESH?
The development of the theme
to this point brings us at last to the crowning realization that from the very
first and all through the history of religion should have enlightened the understanding
of both the ecclesiastics and the occult societies. It must be said in fairness
to the latter group that they have not so glaringly erred on this point as have
the orthodox.
Still they do not escape
its challenge. We have said that there may have been one man of divine or near-divine
status living in the first Christian century. There may have been a score of
them, or a thousand. In fact there is found to have been born in about the same
year as that of Jesus’ birth a Master of Wisdom so outstanding that his fame
for knowledge, godliness, healing power and superhuman character resounded throughout
the near-Eastern world, whereas nobody for about two centuries seems to have
heard of the man of Galilee. And there is a growing opinion among astute scholars
that when the Jesus personage began to be written about in the third century,
the reference was in fact to this other assumedly living man, who was none other
than Apollonius of Tyana, with whose life the religious theorists had confused
the figure that came to be called Jesus. The presuppositions in the case grow
more intriguing the deeper this matter is gone into.
But whether there was one "Messiah",
or two, or seven or a score (and among those who were actually pushed forward
for the honor might be named Jehoshua ben Pandira, Marcion, Apion, Mani, Montanus,
Simon Magus and several others, as was St. Francis of Assizi in the twelfth
century, a new Avatar being expected every six hundred years, with several claiming
the role for themselves today), the final consideration that should have dictated
sanity instead of gullible fatuity in the understanding of the advent of deity
on this earth, is the recognition of the simple fact that the second Person
of the cosmic trinity, that unimaginable Logos that, as John says, was with
God and was God, never could be incarnated in the frail body of a six-foot physical
man on earth! The idea that it could, a notion generated out of rabble ignorance
in that benighted third century and made dominant over the whole of Christendom
ever since, has been probably the most devastating delusion that ever hypnotized
the mind of a great segment of the human family. The Logos could be and was
made flesh, yes, but only in a profoundly recondite sense, and certainly not
in the full measure of its universal extent and power, and never in the body
of one mortal. The unthinkable power that has created and still ensouls, still
vivifies the total of all worlds, solar systems, galaxies,--how could this power
ever be conceived to have focused its illimitable energies in the compass of
one human body on this globe? To bandy about and take seriously any assertion
to this effect requires first the complete drugging of good human minds with
a lethal hypnotization. It has come as the perpetuation of the doltish folly
of early Christian fanaticism and has grown into the most disastrous hallucination
perhaps of all history. The body of the Logos is the entire physical universe
or galaxies of universes, not the tiny frame of a human. Says the oft-quoted
couplet of Alexander Pope:
"All things are parts
of one stupendous whole,
Of which the body Nature
is, and God the soul.
If God is the soul, or spirit,
of the universe, the Logos, his Son, is its mind. It is that total cognitive
power that gives plan, order, purpose and meaning to the whole creation. To
maintain that this power gathered itself up, so to say, in a nutshell and condensed
its entire dynamism and intelligence in one fleshly body on this most insignificant
among quintillions of planets and systems, is to insult the human intellect.
The principia of a great and
luminous Greek philosophical systematism must be studied before it can sanely
be conceived how the Logos was made flesh. This illuminating exegesis of cosmic
principles expounds how the supreme powers of primordial Being, when projected
forth in creative work, "proceeded from on high as far as to the last of
things". These streams of living energy, "rivers of
vivification", carrying a mental mold or form of ideation,--the archetypal
ideas of the Logos mind--in their vibratory expression, radiate outward and
"downward" in space to impress these forms on plastic matter. Then,
as a serially increasing density of matter is encountered,--analogized by the
conversion of invisible water vapor into cloud, then into mist and rain, then
into liquid and finally into ice--the original homogenous energy is broken into
diversified modifications, and the total quantum of its force is spent in an
infinity of minor expressions, each embodying finally a tiny fragment of the
primal power. To use the fine Greek expression for it, "the gods distribute
divinity". Each higher being receives his quantum of the power from above
him in the scale, transforms it into lower potency and passes it on down to
the grade next below him, which repeats the process in the further dissemination,
with, however, a reduction of the force at each descent. It should not be a
task overtaxing modern acumen to grasp the idea that the One Creative Fire of
universal mind-power has to break itself up into infinite fragments (represented
by the "dismemberment" of the gods in all ancient mythologies and
Scriptures) in order to distribute its energy radiations out to vitalize the
lives of its creatures to endless multiplicity.
It is all dramatized so unmistakably
in the Gospels, when the Jesus figure takes a loaf, and after giving thanks
to God, breaks it into fragments, giving a piece to each of his disciples, saying
that they must "eat his body" if they would come into the inheritance
of eternal life. Once this "distribution of divinity" is grasped in
the stately simplicity of its reference to the lodgment of a seed of the god-life
in each mortal, it should not be hard to understand that the Logos was made
flesh, not conceivably in its entirety, but in the tiny units of its potential
entirety, in the galaxies of heaven, in the solar systems, the planetary bodies,
and finally in the bodies of mortal man. Indeed, all lesser creatures are the
possessors and wielders of that respective measure and expression of life’s
one primal power and intelligence that each grade of bodily organization could
entertain and manifest.
The ancient philosophies give
us the amazing detail of this magnificent cosmographic structuralism, even naming
the grades and orders of the several levels of graduated organic beings, from
the great Gods to lesser gods, archangels (the primary seven), archons, angels,
heroes, souls, the "thrones, principalities and powers" mentioned
in the New Testament, "He maketh his angels messengers and his ministers
and flame of fire." What is to be clearly apprehended before sanity can
interpret aright the Scriptural language, is that ho Christos, "the Christ"
of Greek religious parlance, is that minute fragmentation of the spiritual Monad,
itself a further fragmentation of the Logos, which can find embodiment and expression
in the life of one individual human being. In the same breath in which one would
say that the Logos could not possibly be embodied in the physical frame of a
mere man on earth, one can just as truly say that each human life does embody
a tiny ray of that infinite Logoic power, which indeed is that power’s seminal
essence, destined in eons of evolving growth to attain the fulness of its potential
greatness and glory. The Logos was made flesh, not in one man, but as potential
deity in all men. The religion that postulated its incorporation in one man
only thus deprived all other men of its benison. No creature can endure more
of divine radiant energy than the capacity of its vessel will accommodate. No
man in Galilee or anywhere else ever sustained in his corporate life more than
a mortal’s allotment of the infinite Logos. So that in no rational sense could
one individual human being, born of woman, be the Logos of God. And catastrophically
it has to be said, in that fatal and disastrous sense has the Christian Church
promulgated its doctrine of perverted truth.
But how joyous and thrilling
an item of knowledge it will be, then, for every son and daughter of man, to
realize that each life is ensouled by a germinal seed-portion of the cosmic
Logos, the same being that nucleus of rational intelligence, that genius of
divine love, that, through an acquaintance with the beneficent laws of the universal
order, can guide life upward to happiness and beauty! But if we are told, as
Jung says, that the whole order and quantum of Divine Grace was embodied in
some strange and incredible way in but one exceptional and solitary Son of God,
and he a man of our ordinary human grade, the predication is both unfair, incomprehensible
and finally to us without import. As the psychologist so courageously insists,
if it is to be a power relevant to us and vital, indeed (as the Church shouts)
crucial for us, it must be a power indwelling in us, and not only in one who
could after all not live our lives for us.
If this clear realization does
not soon dispel the fogs of corrupt and distorted doctrinism, the world is doomed
to go on for ages longer suffering every woe of psychiatric delusion, befuddlement,
disappointment and defeat. The continued celebration at the winter solstice
of the alleged birth of the one and only man overshadowed by the divine nature
will but accentuate and perpetuate the spiritual disfranchisement of all humans.
That celebration will never release its true potential of beauty and efficacy
to bring the Christ-love into the world until it is realized in full truth that
the Yule festival should hail and adore the advent of the Christos, "the
King of Love and Light", in all human hearts and minds. As Angelus Silesius,
a mystic of the twelfth century, expressed it:
"Though Christ a thousand
times in Bethlehem be born;
But not within thyself, thy
soul will be forlorn;
The cross on Golgotha thou
lookest to in vain
Unless within thyself it
be set up again."
When we can bring the gifts of
the gold of love, the frankincense of sweet charity and brotherliness and the
fragrant myrrh of graciousness in daily living to the Christ-child lying cradled
in the manger of our very bodies, where indeed we, the animal humans, can "eat"
by spiritually digesting it, his spiritual body, then will we be the "wise
men" who come to welcome the advent of the Messiah on earth. It is thus
seen that Christianity has given the world an ideology that has made all its
movement spiritually "eccentric". That is, it has put the central
pivot of all moral and spiritual motion away off center, far out near the periphery
of the turning wheel of life. For it has made a supposititious life of one man
in Galilee two thousand years ago the focus of all Christian devotionalism,
when the true focus should be within the heart and soul of each individual worshipper.
There alone it can be truly centralized.
WHERE
WAS GOD BEFORE 33 A. D.?
By an odd coincidence the turning
on of our radio recently brought to our astonished ears a sentence in an address
by the popular evangelist, Billy Graham, which provided us with most timely
material for this the next paragraph. What he let slip in a moment of uncritical
oratory is indeed notable and well deserves the treatment it called forth. Said
he: "God stepped into human history in the person of his Son in Galilee."
It is desirable to call
attention to the fact that the evangelist was uttering here no idea peculiar
to his own thinking. He was but reiterating a pronouncement that faithfully
echoes the doctrines of orthodox theology. He was not inventing a new and catchy
slogan. What, then, must be our opinion of the status of a theology that in
twenty centuries has been purveying this item of creedology which, on critical
examination proves to be a flagrant misconception utterly repugnant to the most
rational intimations of the mind?
To speak of God stepping into
world history at a given moment in history’s age-long course is to set at defiance
the whole consensus of sane and instinctive human opinion and natural logic.
For by direct and irrefutable implication it asserts that God had not been in
human history until the date of the birth of his Son in Judea. This implication
is inescapable, since one can not step into anything unless one is outside it.
The meaty slogan iterated here by the fervent exhorter to godliness commits
the Christian theology to the incredibly stupid and wholly inadmissible corollary
that God had not been an influential agency in world history until the first
century of the era designated to signalize an event that there is no credible
evidence whatever to substantialize. In this and other subsidiary items of belief
the Christian theologism has perpetrated the most fatal breach of the logical
sense of the human mind, flouting the race’s invincible conviction of the immanence
of Deity throughout the whole range of history. If God only stepped into the
life history of his children in the year 30 A.D., the ineluctable conclusion
is that he had not been concerned in it before that date. Further it can be
said that if God was not a force, indeed the all-ruling force, in human history
until the first century A.D., there can be accredited no meaning to history
in toto. A world history, with any period of it not considered as under the
governorship of the Creator, has no claim to being a meaningful phenomenon,
can not be made amenable to rationalization as a philosophy of history. Had
the first century really marked the entry of God into human history, there should
have been a complete regeneration of the nature of man and an epochal advance
in the spiritual cultures of the world. All ancient Messianic theory in fact
laid heavier stress upon the expectation of the coming of the kingdom of God,
and the reign of peace and a return to paradisiacal blessedness, even the apocalyptic
consummation of all things, rather than upon the birth of a personalized Son
of Heaven. The Jewish conception of the event envisaged the coming of Messiah
as the fulfillment of the destiny promised by God to Father Abraham, and it
was therefore to be consummated by the exaltation of the Hebrew race. Christians
erred in looking for it in the birth of a babe; the Jews erred in looking for
it in the apotheosization of their nation. The world is still looking for it
in the growth to kingship of the Christ-spirit in the hearts of all men. Not
until the spirit of Christos rises to dominant power in the conscious living
of earth’s citizens will the Christ be born, Messiah reign.
The arrant misconception of the
significance, as well as the modus, of the coming of Messiah arose as one of
the freakish products of first century ignorance. More than once a single phrase
in the old formularies of cosmic interpretation, misconceived and then misapplied
to ostensible "history", has victimized common ideation with a demonstrable
falsity. The principles of the esoteric science, dragged out of the Mystery
associations and twisted out of all semblance to their inner mystical purport,
filled the general Christian mind with a precipitate of the weirdest fallacies
and virtually derationalized thinking power. Tragically every phrase embodying
occult truth, carrying a lofty, abstruse and mystically apprehensible beauty
and significance to capable intellects, came inevitably in the popular level
of conceptuality to purvey
a grossly literal and factual meaning, that was not only an utterly wretched
travesty of its true sense, but a thing wholly untrue as fact.
To illustrate what is asserted
here one need look at two items of ancient esoteric teaching, the crucifixion
of deity on the cross, and its death and resurrection. These transactions truly
relate to the living experience of the divine Christos principle in its incarnation
in human lives. But when they became twisted by the rabble mind into the physical
nailing of a personal Christ’s quivering body on a wooden cross, his demise
in body and then that body’s awakening and walking out of a rocky tomb on a
Galilean hillside, they are no longer true, but are falsehoods--blunt, bald
and blank. Likewise it is true that we are saved by the Christ’s divine blood
shed for the remission of sins; but when the metaphysical "blood of the
Lamb" is converted into the gory streams issuing from the speared side
of a man’s physical body on a cross on a given day in history, it becomes the
most repulsive and revolting of absurdities. The "blood" of gods and
Christs spoken of in the old Scriptures is a reality, being the dynamic currents
of mental and spiritual power coursing through the bodies of higher cosmic beings.
The one thing it can not possibly be is any man’s human body blood. On these
counts the Christian theological interpretation has frightfully blundered in
ways that reveal the utmost poverty of knowledge imaginable. It is more than
childishly inept and imbecile. And what Western humanity has suffered from these
and concomitant distortions of esoteric truth is a tale of tragedy infinitely
shameful and harrowing.
The entire theme here under discussion
has come into its present form as the result of the inevitable conversion of
occult mystico-spiritual truth when its ingenious formulations and representations
were purveyed to the masses of uncritical people. Christianity, as has been
shown, was itself a vicious revolt of the herd mind in its early day against
all higher learning, all esoteric religious cultism, all philosophical and intellectual
culture. Its mobs of ignorant zealots overrode the headship of the churches,
crushed the esoteric minorities, closed up the Platonic Academies, put an end
to the Mystery schools, and swept in frenzied fanaticism to the burning of the
Alexandrian library (perhaps the most costly crime in history) and to the fiendish
murder of Hypatia, scraping the flesh off her bones with oyster shells as she
knelt before an altar in the temple.
It should be a sobering reflection
that when one upholds the literalized meaning of Gospel "history",
one is aligned with the side of those ignorant zealots. Clement of Alexandria,
the great scholar Origen, as well as other leaders in the early Christian surge
expressly maintained the allegorical interpretation of the Bible. Christianity
indeed took its rise in the atmosphere of sage esoteric interest. But three
hundred years had not passed after Origen’s day until his discerning esoteric
renditions were swept out of the Christian doctrinal system and a curse was
pronounced upon any one reading his books, all available copies of which were
destroyed. Mass ignorance swept in a fell besom of obliteration upon the great
ancient interest in the wisdom of the gods, that, as Paul says, was "hidden
in a mystery", and a sheer husk of religionism, unctuous with heavy morbid
pietism due to the "sin complex", and driving its fanatical dupes
into orgies of blood-lust, rack-torture and fire-vengeance against the most
intelligent students for fifteen hundred years, fed the unintelligent masses
in Christian Europe on arid and jejune caricatures of truth. Need we wonder
why a present world still stands in imminent danger of self-extermination, when
religious hallucination has aligned vast human groups against other human groups,
depriving the good mortal mind-sense of otherwise well-disposed people of its
native instinct for right and truth?
Esotericists, bent nobly
on emendation of this outrageous distortion of inner wisdom formulations, have
gone some way along the path of repudiation of crude exoteric beliefs towards
restoration of credible, logical and edifying restatement of exalted wisdom
and knowledge. But they have so far failed to grasp the full measure of that
debacle of sense, sanity and understanding that, from the fatal third century
A.D., wrenched all sound esoteric science away from its true home in the enlightened
mentality of initiates and illuminati and plunged the entire body of inner teaching
down into the muck and mire of common dullness, wreaking havoc upon its true
nobility and beauty. Only when it is realized how incredibly low the human mind
has sunk in its turning the glorious wine of spiritual truth into the "vinegar"
of literalized untruth,--the Book of the Dead of old Egypt speaks of "the
bread that has gone stale, and the beer that has gone sour" (!)--will it
be known how drastic and sweeping must be the reconstruction of the whole sorry
ruin.
Pietism will protest, devotional
fervor will register outrage, ecclesiastical power will rage and threaten, but
one fact will stand as an impregnable rock in the storm of controversy: search
diligently as you will through all the literature and the history of the "time
of Jesus", you will find no record, no historical evidence, of the existence
of Jesus of Nazareth. The figure of the man whose "life" and "teachings",
as every Christian historian of him piously asserts, changed the course of human
history and elevated the nature of the human race, is missing. The great Messiah
on whose "life and works" the Christian faith purports to have been
built, is missing. "He" himself is recorded as having declared that
the apocalyptic consummation of all things in a universal cataclysm would take
place before the end of the generation in which he "lived". If "he"
was the Anointed of God, the universal intelligence-power that was with God
from the foundation of the worlds, it must be reckoned as singular indeed that
he had not intelligence and prophetic vision sufficient to keep him from committing
himself to this egregious blunder! If he was the fulfillment of the world’s
hope for the divinization of mankind, his mission must be written down as the
most lamentable anticlimax and universal disappointment of the ages. For "he"
himself said that he came to bring not peace, but a sword, and a candid view
of world history since that time evidences that, instead of bringing to mankind
a halcyon age of peace and happiness, the movement "his" alleged visitation
launched upon the tide of history has, more than any other single influence,
drenched the area it dominated in blood. The mighty transfiguration of human
life that all ancient Messianic tradition looked for with the coming of Messiah
is nowhere to be seen. It could hardly be disputed that the two thousand years
following "his" advent have recorded the foulest inhumanity of man
to man ever to defame the pages of history. And the appalling, the frightening
fact in this regard is that the most horrendous of this chronicle of atrocities
were perpetrated in the name and actuated by the love of this gently Jesus.
Under the inspiration of no other religion in the world does history exhibit
so shameful a vitiation of good human motive into the ghastly flare of bigotry,
fanatical zealotry, superstition, murderous frenzy, war and slaughter, deceit
and greed of power as burgeoned out in centuries of European life under the
spur of the Christian faith. And so anaemic was its vaunted divine message that
in some seven hundred years after its launching, the near-East countries where
it allegedly had its birth swept it summarily aside and flocked to the standard
of Mohammed. Likewise it is staggering to realize in our modern day that two
of the nations whose entire life had been most completely dominated by this
Christian power and saturated by its spirit for some thirteen centuries, Germany
and Russia, suddenly in our own generation threw off the spell of its time-hallowed
tradition and stamped it violently in the dust. It indeed would almost
seem to have been demonstrated that the violence and savagery of inhuman motive
was in exact proportion to the completeness of a nation’s dominance by the Christian
spirit, for Spain, the country most abjectly subjected to the influence of this
religion, shows in her record of the Inquisition, her war with Protestantism
in the Netherlands and her incredibly brutal and consciousless mistreatment
and slaughter of the American natives in Cortez’ conquest of Mexico and Pizarro’s
similar adventure in Peru, a degradation of the human spirit shocking and shameful
to the last degree.
The frightful debacle of sense
and sanity that ensued in the centuries following the upsurge of Christianity
has been recognized by many. It is found reflected in the third verse of E.
H. Sears’ wording to the beautiful and well-known Christmas carol, "It
Came Upon the Midnight Clear" which we give here:
"Yet with the
woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered
long;
Beneath the angels’ strain
have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man,
hears not
The tidings which they
bring;
O hush ye noisy men of
strife,
And hear the angels sing.
It is history’s verdict: Christianity
did less to bring peace on earth, good will among men, and more to bring hatred
and strife, than any religion one can study. Could all this corruption of the
normal human instinct for good have come because this religion turned the focus
of man’s devotion away from the locale of its homely operation in the common
human heart and centered it upon this shadowy figure of a man fabricated of
the straw and moonbeams of the theological imagination, as Albert Schweitzer
has asserted? So indeed has our greatest modern psychologist, Jung, intimated.
With minds freed at last from the obsessions of ecclesiastical bias and hypnotizing
pietism, so have some hundreds of able, learned, conscientious scholars declared
frankly the same opinion.
The tragedy of the debacle that
ensued in that fateful third century and cast its blight upon the mind and happiness
of humanity in the West ever since, lies in the fact that the beauty, the splendor
and the glory of a higher life for all men that lay hidden germinally in the
creeds, doctrines, rituals and Scriptures of antiquity, which Christianity perpetuated
but also distorted into frightful caricature of their real meaning, have been
lost for the millions in these ensuing centuries. The extent of this tragic
loss is beyond calculation. The birth of that radiant light of charity and grace
that will cause the human heart to throb to the impulses of love and beauty,
and which, as old Egypt said, comes continuously, steadily and with increasing
power, might by now have been far advanced if ignorance had not held in thrall
the gently forces of the spirit, by turning the luminous ideographs of divine
truth into senseless "history".
The transfiguration of man can
take place only through the operations of the growth of the soul within the
inner core of our human consciousness. As the Christian creed--an ancient formulary
taken over from the old Pagan rituals--so well says, in speaking of the descent
of the divine units of God-Mind into the flesh of human bodies, the Christ was
conceived by the Holy Spirit in heaven and born of the Virgin Mary, mother-matter-body,
on earth. Verily it was "begotten, not created", as the creed states;
that is, begotten in the heaven
of spirit conception, but having to be created on earth. This power was conceived
in cosmic mind, but created in earthy matter. Where and where only must it be
seen that this father-conception and mother-birthing of the Christos can be
consummated? The answer sets irrefutably the seal of truth on every word of
this essay: it can be consummated only within the heart, mind and body of every
human on earth individually. The idea that it can be accomplished vicariously
for all of us by one-only Son of God, a man of our flesh but not of our humanity,
and we needing only to "believe" this theorization to win its full
blessing for ourselves, must be written down as close to the supreme fatuity
of the religious mind. No Son of God was ever sent to earth to transfigure man
by some remote magic and save him from the evolutionary task of transfiguring
himself. And no man will be rightly, happily and successfully oriented to this
task until he knows that within his own mind, yes, within his very body, dwells
the divine power that must be florified in him. When this is known with certitude
he will begin to focus his entire dynamic of psychic energies upon stirring
the god’s latent nature into its awakening. How sagely the ancient Egyptians
spoke of kindling a fire in the underworld, of causing a burning within the
sea! For every man’s inner life is a flaming forge of living fires, and within
that "crucible of the great house of flame" the figure of the Christ
must be molded and shaped to its shining beauty.
Crowning the whole analytical
structure, two items of dialectical cogency arise out of the springs of thought
to challenge the factuality of the existence of the historical Jesus of the
Gospels. The first is the reflection that appears to negate with finality the
allegation that the spirit, soul or mind, or ego of the spiritual Lord Maitreya
first extruded the ego-consciousness of the man Jesus from his body and then,
somewhat in the fashion of a schizophrenic obsession, took possession of the
nerves, brain and body of the agent so as to bring his divine power and intelligence
in direct relation to the world of events in the first century, the better to
perform the task of releasing the age-old message of Avataric delivery at periodical
junctions in human history.
In substance this presentment
of occult theory appears to be the same as that prevalent in the early days
of the Christian movement, having been chiefly advanced by one Cerinthus, a
member of the Nazarene-Ebionite sect of Jewish Christians. It is described and
denounced by three or four of the earliest Christian historians in their books
entitled Against Heresies, and has sometimes been called "The Heresy of
Cerinthus". Its major thesis was that at the baptism of Jesus by John in
the Jordan River the divine spirit of Christos obsessed the man Jesus and exalted
his nature to Christhood. The Christ-soul remained active in the life of Jesus
until just before the crucifixion and death of the latter, when it withdrew
so as to evade the pains which it would have suffered in connection with the
physical body’s tortures. It was an element in the debate as to whether the
soul of the Christ suffered physical pain when the Jesus body was impaled on
the cross. The question had arisen as to whether God the Father suffered when
his Son, identical with him in substance, was nailed on the cross. It was the
dispute over what was called Patripassionism, or the suffering of the Father.
To any who knows that the Scriptures
are collections of spiritual allegories of the soul’s experience in fleshly
incarnation, it is clear that the whole series of such theories, dogmas and
doctrines, over which Church Councils wrangled with tigerish fierceness for
some two centuries, arose out of the unintelligent mental efforts of the early
Christian parties to comprehend
the mystery of the allegory of the baptism. In its simplest sense it is a dramatization
of the soul’s going down under the water of the physical body in incarnation.
It symbolically prefigured naturally the introduction of a higher grade of consciousness
into man the merely human being, introducing potentially the power of godhood
into the order of human life. If the terms are properly understood, it might
be expressed as the overshadowing of the human grade of consciousness by the
mind of divinity. But where ignorance dominates to the point at which mystical
representations have become transmogrified into supposed factual events in the
lives of given characters, it is but a short step for a naive mind to translate
it all into the belief that the spirit-soul of a divine personage, Christ or
Lord Maitreya, was projected into the body of a human individual. And this form
it obviously took in the minds of such ignorant speculators as Cerinthus. The
wreckage of sane human understanding through the miscarriage of ancient allegorical
writing into assumed history is so far beyond the comprehension of people generally
that the sheer statement of its staggering results in religious history would
be incredible.
As has been intimated earlier,
the revival of the technological foundations of the arcane soul-science of the
ancient occultists had put modern students in this field in possession of resources
enabling them to explain psychic and mystical phenomena in ways that were not
available to the less sophisticated efforts of orthodox religion. Esoteric science
sees man as composed of a congeries of bodies (seven in all, four lower ones
developed and in function, three unevolved to conscious use as yet), physical,
astral, mental and spiritual, the more sublimated and ethereal interpenetrating
the lower coarser ones; i.e., their finer atoms occupying the interstitial spaces
within coarser ones. Modern atomic discovery makes the postulation of such a
situation tenable, if not plausible. Occult theory then finds itself free to
juggle the possibilities envisaged in this basic psychic anatomy, and credits
superior powers to Adepts and the spiritual hierarchy in manipulating the interrelation
of one or other of man’s finer bodies in various ways, making semi-legitimate
such a theory as that of Cerinthus.
Let it be assumed that Life may
have more complicated resources in such things than we normally are cognizant
of. Still we are not free to plunge into predications against which considerations
based on obvious factual knowledge would weigh heavily. We know how empirically,
how delicate is the balance between all the forces, functions and faculties,
physical, biological, physiological, nervous, emotional, intellectual and those
of higher essence in the human constitution. There is perhaps too little knowledge
of the phenomena connected with the interplay of these elements of more attenuated
essences in the human make-up to justify apodictical judgments. Nevertheless,
on the basis of our very competent medical knowledge of the always delicately
balanced harmony of forces in the psycho-physical economy of bodily life, it
is quite within reason to claim that such an infusion of tremendously higher
voltages of psychic dynamism as that contemplated in the thesis of the Lord
Maitreya’s entry into even the best of normal human bodies, no matter how "pure",
would subject the brain and nerve mechanism of the latter to a strain that would
throw all functioning of the usual forces into violent disturbance. This is
indeed to state the case with great restraint. It might be legitimate even to
assert that such a supercharge of psychic energies would "blow out the
fuse" of the receiving mechanism. It is psychological knowledge that even
such a matter as the impact of a single new idea, a sweeping new insight,a
new force of inspiration, a dynamic resolve, a bright vision of higher achievement
can throw the whole psychic battery into unbalanced relations and endanger equilibrium.
Sudden news, either good or bad, has killed people on the instant.
What the possibilities would
be that must be postulated in the case of the sudden complete displacing of
the normal voltages of the subject’s usual psychism with those of an immensely
more powerful charge must be considered as an item demanding some explication,
and not left to blind blank presupposition. And not only must this predicament
be satisfactorily explained, but both the rationale and the legitimacy, as well
as the mechanics of the deprivation of the subject entity of his own physical
body and its abnormal experience in yielding it to another being, with all the
extraordinary procedures the transaction would involve, must be met with something
more acceptable than unctuous credulity. And why a higher entity would be considered
as having to resort to the bizarre strategy of ensouling the body of a human
being in order to do a bit of work in the world, when it would appear more naturally
reasonable to expect that it could come to earth in an appropriate body of its
own, attuned to its own vibrational rates, must be answered with some show of
actual data of elucidation.
And no matter how speciously
explained by the adventitious resources of the more detailed recondite psychic
science, it is going to remain to common thought an eerie and abnormal method
in the realm of nature. Doubtless the religious mind is prepared to accept extraordinary
techniques in the domain of angelology, and spiritistic phenomena can be expected
to present marvels of accomplishment; but it is straining an elastic credulity
when the theory exchanges souls in a living historical personality. Is the alleged
divinest transaction in world history to be understood as just a case of supernormal
schizophrenia? With all its trappings of pious sacrosanctity, this is a mite
too exotic for general religiosity.
The second of the two considerations
is a point that likewise will carry home to common thinking through the force
of a similar aberrancy upon the general mind. Once an intellect is released
from the hypnotic obsession of beliefs indoctrinated in childhood, and given
enough effort at sober reflection, it will seem as weirdly illogical to pivot
the salvation of the human race on the agency of a transfiguring power implemented
through the historical person and life of one man of the human order, as it
would be to predicate that God would provide for the elevation of the mineral
kingdom through a power expressed and implemented by one particular paragon
mineral; or the exaltation of the vegetable kingdom through the special power
released in one particular plant or king tree; or the higher advance of the
animal orders through the dynamic expressed in the life and body of one perfected
animal. Perhaps no analogue could more vividly spotlight the irrationality of
the basic tenet of the world-savior theory, when it involves any measure of
the vicarious salvation function, than this. It should be seen and universally
admitted that any force that is to "save" or "redeem" or
exalt in grade of being the members of a race, a species, a grade of life, must
be one that is made operative distributively throughout all the individuals
of the category. Its embodiment or expression in one sole member of the group,
whatever influence it might exert by way of example, will mean nothing in factual
efficacy for the rest.
How the force exhibited in the
one exemplar can be made available and effective for all the others is the nub
of the question; and neither in theology nor in life has there ever been proffered
by any religion a rational techniquewhich
grounds this supposititious transmission on acceptable science. Paul’s injunction
to "let that same mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus" comes
closer to being a rational statement of the assumed transfer of power from the
living Christ to all his "believers". But this is still whole worlds
removed from the status of a transmission of force from the exemplar to the
recipient, in the sense of its being a tapping into the exemplar’s own quantum
of force, and draining one’s share off for oneself. The force that he embodied
is, as far as all others are concerned, a universal force, as free to all others
as to him; and its receptivity or expression by others is conditioned on their
development of the requisite evolutionary organs or faculties, irrespective
of whether the exemplar demonstrated their full exploitation or not. In no remotest
sense is our receptivity to it dependent upon its prior manifestation in him
(except always in the limited function of a paragon to be copied).
In no sense do we or can we get
it from him; it is free (as all Scriptures aver over and over) to all who can
generate the necessary paraphernalia for its deployment from out the depths
of their own inner potentiality. It is not a something to be appropriated from
any external source, or from a source supplied by any one human. Like anything
developing out of seed potential, it is generated from an inner seed core of
being. Its manifestation in any one individual member of the human race becomes
a light glowing in darkness, and it beams forth as a goad, an inspiration for
others to bring the same light to shining within their own sphere of life. But
in no actual sense is it communicated from one to another in its living substance;
never certainly does its manifestation by any one depend upon its having once
shone in one sole epiphany of its beauty and glory. True indeed is it that its
shining forth in the mass of humans is a matter of communal influence, its glow
in each helping to bestir its companion glow in the lives of all others in common
relation to it. But this, so far from validating the preachment of its dependence
upon one sole exemplar, expressly confirms its universality and distributive
function.
In final statement, never could
its flaming forth in one personal life be the only torch from which, exclusively,
it could be communicated to all others. The brightness of the Father’s glory,
as it rises to irradiate the life of any son of man, is as authentic a beam
of divine light in the darkness as that which, according to a twisted theology,
gleamed only in the life and person of one Jesus of Nazareth. And its beauty
beaming on the countenance of any humble mortal, or on the brow of any philosopher
exalted to Spinozistic "intellectual love of God", is to its degree
as veridical a paragon of its power and majesty as would have been its manifestation
in the case of this Jesus. By all the certitude of fact and logic alike, its
implementation for the exaltation of humanity could never have been effectuated
through its shining in one man only of our order.
Too small the channel, too remote
the conduit, too narrow the gate has Christianity made for the river of blessing
that is to inundate the lowly life of man and elevate him to the kingdom of
the gods. How idiotic for the human mind to believe that we must look to one
spot in Judea and to one special run of unnatural incredible events in that
spot at a given epoch in world history, for the springs of our evolutionary
drive to a higher grade of consciousness and blessedness of being!
Under the seductive influences
of pietistic religion the spirit of man has down the centuries yielded all too
readily to priesthood’s glamorous siren exhortation
to surrender all personal, all human initiative toward a diviner life and turn
all the psychic power of man’s nature outward in pleading to a divinity asserted
to have lived in mortal form two thousand years ago. Jung has now sharply delineated
the tragic error of this exhortation. Before him our oracular Emerson had enunciated
the same profound truth. Said he: "Man is weak to the extent that he looks
outside himself for help. It is only as he throws himself unhesitatingly upon
the God within himself that he learns his own power and works miracles. It is
only when he throws overboard all other props and leans solely upon the God
in him that he uncovers his real powers and finds the springs of success." |