Theosophy - Platonic philosophy in the Bible by Alvin Boyd Kuhn
New
Lectures on the Ancient Wisdom--No.
1
PLATONIC
PHILOSOPHY IN THE BIBLE
by ALVIN BOYD KUHN
The Christian Bible presents to the reflective mind one of the most astounding
phenomena of modern life. Though neglected and even repudiated by a large segment
of modern thinking, and evidencing few signs of a controlling influence on current
modes of life, it yet occupies a place of dominance that can only be realized
when its position and authority are challenged. More than that, it exercises through
the subtle power of tradition and child-indoctrination a totally unbelievable
thraldom over the common mind which can only be compared to a type of hypnotic
obsession. The force and sweep of the subtle acceptance is not dreamed of by the
person who has not become consciously emancipated from it and can view it objectively,
or from the outside. Few people have been able to dissociate themselves sufficiently
from their indoctrinated prepossession in this regard to objectify this phenomenon
of the psychological life of the day. Only a trained and freed mind can stand
out from under its own inherited habitudes of thought and feeling and subject
them to rational and dispassionate criticism. Few can rationally appraise mass
sentiments. This is the function of the philosopher and thinker. For the most
part, people accept as authoritative the mass conceptions amidst which they grow
up, and regard their general vogue as the seal and surety of their rightness.
In such fashion the Bible has been
accepted as the great unique work of divine authority, and, with the force of
sanctified allegiance back of it for generations, it now wields a perfectly
unrealized power over the common mind. Even those who have outwardly rejected
it are unwittingly influenced by it in ways they little dream of; for society
has been insidiously impregnated with the germs of a thousand ideas, springing
from the vast number of phrases, texts and incidents which have taken unshakable
rootage in the mass consciousness. In the area of Christendom the book is still
regarded as the supreme moral and spiritual guide of the race. And from time
to time one reads the oft-broadcast declaration from eminent divines that what
the world needs most of all as a salve for its ills,
is more consecrated study of the Bible.
We have pondered this assertion deeply
and sought what truth there may be in it. It is one of those equivocal statements
that are true without meaning much after all. The answer might be "yes" and
"no." We would say "yes," but with tremendous qualifications and reservations.
We can agree that more study of spiritual things is decidedly a need of our
time. But we face a strange situation here, which does not seem to have been
discerned by the advocates of Bible study. To begin
with, there never has been a book that has been studied so assiduously
and zealously as this. No book has received such devotion and reverence. No
other has been preached on so often and so fervently. It has been organically
dissected and analyzed without end. Thousands of volumes of exegesis have been
written upon it. Yet we are told we need to study it more. And a prominent writer
has, with general approbation, dubbed it The Book Nobody Knows, and its
central hero, The Man Nobody Knows. If this is the outcome of past study
on an enormous scale, what profit to study it further? The outcome of centuries
of consecrated effort to glean its message is held up as a nullity!
On our part, we stand ready to make
the bold assertion that it is yet a sealed book. Few, if any, know that it does
contain a message that would save the race from disaster. Few, if any, know
that it is one of the books of a grand past wisdom. And perhaps no one now living
knows thoroughly what is hidden in its pages. Our verdict, then, is that it
is futile to give it more study of the kind that it has received heretofore.
If it lacks study it is because thousands have laboured to get its meaning
and have failed. The effort has bred disappointment and resentment against its
incomprehensibility. What the modern age needs with regard to the Bible is not
more study but some comprehension; not more waste of futile wrestling with riddles,
but a few grains of understanding. In brief, what is needed is a
knowledge of the background out of which it grew, and in reference to
which alone it can be grasped.
Failure of modern effort to read
the deep message of the Book is due to the fact that modern scholars stupidly
and stubbornly refuse to see that ancient scriptural writing was esoteric or
hidden as to its meaning, and allegorical and symbolical as to its method. The
ancients did not use newspaper directness. On the contrary they put up their
secret wisdom, vouchsafed to them by the great Sages, in the form of allegories
and myths, which were to be taken as fiction in their outward dress, but as
the cinematograph of profoundest truth and knowledge in inward sense. By a combination
of symbols, nature signs and allegories, often woven into a background of real
history, they sought to portray the deepest types of spiritual experience and
an intellectual grip on reality. The Bible has been crassly taken for literal
truth about living personages on the stage of mortal history. It has been rendered
literally and historically. This is the most egregious blunder, the most grandiose
error, in all human history,--this mistaking of spiritual allegorism for literal
human narrative. We are in position to make the unqualified declaration for
the first time in the modern age that there is not one iota of history, in the
ordinary acceptation of that term, in the Bible from beginning to end. Some
portions of Jewish history are utilized as the base and frame of spiritual myths.
The several Judges, Patriarchs and Kings are made to stand for the central figure
of the Christos. Geographical names and historical
persons are mentioned but only as characters in the mystic or religious drama.
According to Eusebius, one of the three chief formulators of Roman Christian
theology, the Gospels of the New Testament are themselves nothing but old dramatic
books of the Essenes in pre-Christian days. The earliest and greatest of the
framers of Christian theology, Philo, Clement and Origen, expressly declared
it was impossible and an impiety to assert that the logos of God could take
the flesh of a human personality. New research makes it positively clear that
the Old Testament narratives are in their entirety rewritings of old Egyptian
material, distorted and obscured as it passed through later Hebrew hands. And
Egyptian scripture was never historical. It was spiritual symbology,
pure and unalloyed. The weirdest phenomenon of history transpired when later
ignorance took the Egyptian constructions and converted them into absurd literal
narrative. And the thinking of the whole world of the civilized West has thus
been based on history that never occurred, and the Christian Church has been
founded on a set of miracles that were never performed. The only miracle envisaged
in ancient theology was the transformation of human character by the indwelling
god, and this spiritual miracle was poetized, dramatized and allegorized in
a hundred forms of outward representation, all of which was absurdly taken for
personal history later.
This conversion of spiritual into
biographical history has made Christianity the instrument of the grossest degradation
of sublime ancient truth to which it has ever been subject. That is to say,
that all Christian doctrines present the ancient wisdom in a more literal and
hence cruder form of meaning than had ever been done before in national religions.
In the nailing of a personal Jesus on a wooden cross Christianity reduced the
glorious drama of the spiritual life to its grossest and most repellant form.
It is the business of enlightened
Theosophy to lift this weight of crass literal dogmatism from off the modern
imagination and conscience at whatever cost. The human soul is itself bound
on the cross of gross superstition so long as these crude notions dominate the
conscious and subconscious thought of modern man. The light of the true spiritual
Gnosis of olden times must be cast into the dark nooks and corners of modern
thinking, and disperse the mists of such errant and arrant doctrinism.
It is our declaration, based on years
of the most assiduous research, that it is impossible to understand the allegories
of the Bible without a knowledge of ancient methods
of sacred writing, and of the ancient philosophies. Our work in this field has
been rewarded by a number of the most signal discoveries which are basic for
further grasp of the material.
(1) The composers of ancient scriptures
were poets, allegorists, dramatists and mythicists.
They never wrote literally. They were in the line of generations of sages and
seers who had developed the art of spiritual representation to a point of the
utmost ingenuity and complexity, completely shrouding the intended real meaning
under veils of symbolism, which have utterly misled modern scholars who could
not pierce the outer veil to read the truth hidden underneath. Hence the works
can not be read without the keys to the myths and reference to the symbols used.
The ancients themselves testify plentifully that the scriptures are allegories.
Origen regards the whole Bible as a set of allegories. But the most astonishing
declaration to this effect is St. Paul's own statement in Galatians that
the whole story of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar is "an allegory."
(2) The ancients were also esotericists,
writing only of the inner life and for initiated pupils. They wrote of inner
things under an outer veil. They wrote of the Greater Mysteries which were never
given out to the multitude, but taught in secret to disciplined students. Spiritual
truth was not published in modern fashion. Whatever was written,
was veiled under glyph and symbol. Mostly it was taught by oral tradition.
(3) Then the ancients were "uranographers."
The "uranograph" was a chart of heaven. By this is meant a map outlined by the
early sages charting the spiritual constitution and physiology of man, the psychic
centers, areas of spiritual force, and all "after the pattern of things in the
heavens." Man, the microcosm, is a replica of the heavenly man and the universe.
From the history of man written thus in the constellation of the skies, the
early religious formulators transferred the record to earth and distributed
the various phenomena and localities over the national maps in accordance with
the heavenly chart! All nations tried to frame their own history and geography
after the pattern of things in the heavenly mount. Mainly the Egyptians and
after them the Jews made this transfer almost completely. According to this
chart each nation was given an upper and lower section, had a river flowing
from the upper down to the lower, had a lake or sea, a central city representing
the Holy City, and a score of parallel features found in every case. There was
first a division into seven nomes or districts, later into twelve. Each nation
thus strove to have its history interpreted as a fulfilment of the sacred allegory;
and its national history, thus diverted into the form of the celestial myth,
was made into the national epic. And finally came
the claim on the part of several, notably the Jews, that since their history
fulfilled the outlines of the sacred story, they were proven to be the "chosen
people" of God. There is not a scrap of evidence anywhere to identify the Israelites
as the historical Hebrews or Jews. The latter simply appropriated the distinction
to themselves and fitted their history into the sacred
scheme. As proof of this it is offered that a monument
in Egypt contained hundreds of Palestinian
place names, afterward localized in the Holy Land of Judea, before the
"historical" Exodus from Egypt. Hence
the modern discovery of a town in Palestine bearing the name of a place mentioned
in the Bible does not offer a single whit of proof that the Bible is history.
It only proves that the religious formulators of the national epic had given
to a certain place a name already found on the uranograph or spiritual chart,
much as European explorers gave sacred names such as Salem, Providence, New
Haven, Canaan, Newark, Corpus Christi and Santa Fe to new towns when they came
to America. Jerusalem, Egypt, Sodom
and others are therefore only spiritual names transferred to the map from the
celestial chart.
(4) Lastly it was our discovery that
all religious writings deal with but one central fact, the incarnation of man,
or the descent and resurrection of the soul. It is graphically outlined in the
Prodigal Son allegory. It is the whole story of religion. The old books deal
with nothing beyond this story and its involvements. It is itself the key to
all philosophy and religion. All meanings proceed from this one fact and return
thither. In the light of this one fact all complicated meanings can be reduced
to clear significance. It unravels the infinite complexities of the symbology
that have confounded the learned scholars and theologians. That man is a god
dwelling in an animal form is the central and cardinal fact of all religion.
It is well to note a few situations
in the Bible which preclude any sane mind taking it for literal truth. How the
literalist "swallows" them we know not.
First, the story
of the flood. Forty (or four hundred) days' rain would not raise the
ocean an inch, as all rain is first drawn off the ocean and only runs back into
it at the constant level. And how could millions of species
of every living thing be collected, cared for and housed in the "ark"
by a single man and his family. It would take an army many years to gather a
minute portion of all creatures. Then how could they be kept in living conditions,
fed, and tended on board for months?
And how did the children of the first
pair, Adam and Eve, go off and marry the women of another nation, as recorded
in Genesis? And in the genealogy of Jesus as of David's line, the link with
David is broken at his father Joseph, who was not his father after all. Jesus
is of David's line, yet is denied parentage from David's descendant. Then we
have the anomaly of Joshua's commanding the sun and moon to stand still at Ascalon.
The sun is not moving (relative to the earth) to begin with. It is already and
always still. And the matter of the star of Bethlehem coming and standing "over
the place where the young child lay." A star small enough to point out a small
stable in Bethlehem is a thing impossible in astronomy.
And stars never stand. They rush on with unbelievable speed. And finally how
was it humanly possible for the events of Maundy Thursday of Passion Week to
have occurred in the space of a single night? The last supper at sundown, the
long siege in the garden of Gethsemane, the arrest, the mockery, then three
separate judicial trials before three distinct courts in the dead of night
(!), then the carrying of the cross up the hill, the long agony of the crucifixion,
the earthquake, the rent veil, the opened graves, and the burial,--all in the
hours of a single night! It is incredible as human history. Like the Abraham
story, it is an allegory. Paul himself never mentions it as real history, albeit
he lived at the time.
These and a hundred other irrationalities
make it sheer folly to uphold the literal historicity of the Bible. Yet the
major theses of Christianity stand on this weak ground. There is therefore nothing
surprising in the fact that the history of the Church has been a tale of warfare,
controversy, schism, blind faith and frightful cruelty, and that it is repudiated
by about sixty per cent of the populations among which it is strongest, and
is rather loosely held by its own adherents.
We are prepared to support the statement,
then, that the Bible, sadly misinterpreted by its most loyal devotees, is in
reality a collection of ancient works that embody in veiled figures the fundamentals
of the genuine old wisdom of the hierophants. One might say indeed, that it
is a repository of the great Mystery teaching of early times. In fact it is
an assemblage of material comprising the substance of Hermeticism, Gnosticism,
Kabalism, Chaldean astrology, Greek Orphism and Hindu Wisdom, drawn mostly from
ancient Egypt. It would not inaptly
be described as a book of Platonic Theosophy. For Plato summed up most of the
elements of these systems. To an orthodox churchman it would doubtless seem
to belittle the Book to say that it contains nothing but the Platonic philosophy.
But this is only because the churchman knows nothing of the grandeur and rank
of the Platonic wisdom. It is enough to say that it could not be a great book
if it did not embody Plato's philosophy. For this was
truly "of the gods," and perhaps the most luminous presentation of spiritual
knowledge ever to be vouchsafed to the human intellect. Fortunate is Christianity
that its Bible is heavily charged with the elements of the great Divine Wisdom
of past ages.
It is a practical impossibility,
however, to expound even the crudest outline of Plato's teaching in such a lecture.
We must be content with a few statements dealing with the emanation of living
streams of being and intelligence from the first fount of all things. Plato
represents life as unfolding from within itself at the beginning of a new period
of manifestation, and proceeding outward or downward from a summit of pure spirit
into ever-denser forms of creation. The One Life pours forth its power and essence
in streams, called "rivers of vivification", "from
on high as far as to the last of things," bringing all forms of life into existence
and ensouling all forms with more or less of its own mighty being. At each step
of the way out, or down, this life takes embodiment in coarser forms of cosmic
matter, thus giving birth to the greater and lesser gods of various ranks. For
the gods are embodiments of the several grades and forms of nature's life, power
and intelligence. The whole creation forms a chain of beings reaching from the
lowest mineral crystals to the highest God. Somewhere in this chain stands man,
and Plato tells us where it is. Humanity occupies a place of great strategic
importance in the hierarchy, standing precisely at the point of junction between
the highest animal and the truly human kingdom. Man is the creature that is
fashioned to bridge the gap between the animal and the divine order. Hence his
nature is compounded of the two elements, the animal and the godlike, in one
organism, making it possible for the higher to "lift up" or humanize the lower.
In his Timaeus Plato gives us the remarkable speech of the Demiurgus
(Creative Logos) to the "junior gods," who were the divine beings commissioned
by the Lords of Karma to come to earth and be the gods embodied in an animal
race that had no chance of reaching the next level of evolution without such
tutelage. In it the Demiurgus enjoins the deities to come to earth and "unite
mortal with immortal natures," promising them that they would "never be dissolved,"
if they held fast to their oath of purity and the covenant which they made with
their Overlord. This is the covenant in the Old Testament which the Lord tells
the Children of Israel (who were these junior gods, never the earthly Hebrews!)
that they have broken times without number. For the gods, once incarnated, fell
under the cloud of oblivion (drank the waters of Lethe), lost their divine memory
and went "the way of all flesh" into carnality and beastliness. (See scores
of passages in the Old Testament books).
But after rebellion they finally
came to earth, incarnated in mortal bodies of flesh and thus linked a divine
principle of intelligence with a body and a sensual animal nature. And this
fact is the basis of all religion. Man is a god and a beast in one organism.
Rather he is a god tabernacling in the flesh of an animal. Daniel (Chaps. 3
and 5) tells the King, who represents the divine soul, that he shall come to
live with the animals and be given the mind of an animal. Ezekiel (32:4) says
that the Lord "will fill the beasts of the whole earth with thee." A hundred
texts from the old books confirm this statement of the linking of the two diverse
natures in one organism. And this great basic fact is the heart of Theosophy.
Reincarnation and Karma are ancillary to it.
We have, then, in Greek philosophy
the "descent of the soul" or the advent of the gods. This is equated in the
old Christian tradition by the legend of "the fall of the angels," the fall
of Lucifer. It is outlined in full by the Prodigal
Son allegory, and hinted at in many other places. The story of Abraham is a
glyph of it, for he, like the Prodigal Son, left his home and kindred, left
his native land, and journeyed to a far country that the Eternal promised to
show him, where he would dwell among savage beasts and eat of the grass of the
earth. (See Genesis 12.) Paul says "we are
a colony of heaven." We, these junior gods, are collectively that second Adam,
who, Paul says, "is the Lord from Heaven," following the animal man who, he
says, "is of the earth, earthy."
There were twelve legions of these
angel hosts, and this, indicated clearly by Plato, is evidenced in the New Testament,
where at the feeding of the five thousand there were gathered up "twelve baskets
of fragments"; and again in the scene in the Garden of Gethsemane, where, when
Jesus is seized by the deputation of soldiers sent out to arrest him, he says
to them, in effect: "Don't you know that I could call upon my father and he
would sent to my aid instantly twelve legions of angels?" These are the
mysterious "ten lost tribes of Israel"
(two having failed in their effort), who in two divisions of five legions each,
called the Suras or "willing (obedient) ones" and the Asuras or "unwilling ones,"
undertook the commission of the higher Lords and projected their powers in the
direction of earth. These two groups are unquestionably the five wise and the
five foolish virgins (one of their Sanskrit names, Kumaras, means "virgin
youths") of the Biblical allegory; also they are the elder and the younger brother
of the Prodigal Son myth. The Suras made the attempt, but, we are told, did
not descend far enough, and their effort proved abortive. The Asuras, seeing
this miscarriage, became recalcitrant, rebelled and refused, until at last they
were forced to incarnate. The Suras obeyed but failed; the Asuras refused but
finally complied, and took lodgment in our bodies, uniting the two natures.
The Greeks have all this depicted
in their great fable of Prometheus stealing the heavenly fire--which, be it
known, is divine intelligence, not the physical flame we cook our suppers with!--from
the gods and bringing it to man for his behoof. It was what the Theosophists
call Manas, the spark of thinking intelligence which made "man" a manasic being,
or capable of abstract thought. We, then, are angels from heaven, and higher
than the angels we shall be. For Paul, in two passages, avers that "we are to
manage angels, let alone mundane things," and adds that "God hath made man for
a little while (see Moffatt translation) lower than the angels and hath crowned
him with glory and honour." Another ancient scripture says that "angels from
their seats envy him" (man). For his experience in incarnation will advance
his station beyond that of those spirits who have not been tried in the fires
of earth and refined to purest gold.
The Nicene creed
of the Church itself, describing the Second Logos of
the Trinity, avers that it "came down from heaven, was incarnate . . . and was
made man," for us and for our salvation. John declares that no man shall ascend
into heaven save he that first came down from heaven. Jesus said he "beheld
Satan as lightning fall from heaven." Satan is Lucifer, and we came down in
the character of the bright and morning star, Lucifer, bright effluence of deity.
The Chinese have a great saying that the "stars ceased shining in heaven and
fell on earth where they became men."
The Neo-Platonic philosopher, Plotinus,
has a remarkable passage in which he makes it clear why the soul or god in man
was under the necessity of taking incarnation in an animal body. As I regard
this passage as the clearest statement of the philosophy of incarnation ever
given, I take the liberty of quoting it:
"Thus although the soul have a divine
nature, though she originate in the intelligible world, she enters into a body.
Being of the lower divine, she descends here below by a voluntary inclination,
for the purpose of developing her power and to adorn what is below her. If she
flee promptly from here below, she does not need
to regret having become acquainted with evil and knowing the nature of vice,
nor having had the opportunity of manifesting her faculties. . . . Indeed the
faculties of the soul would be useless if they slumbered continuously in incorporeal
being without ever becoming actualized. The soul herself would be ignorant of
what she possesses if her faculties did not manifest by procession, for everywhere
it is the actualization that manifests the potentiality. Otherwise the latter
would be completely hidden and obscured; or rather it would not really exist,
and would not possess any reality. It is the variety of sense-effects which
illustrates the greatness of the intelligible principle, whose nature publishes
itself by the beauty of its works."
We are on earth, then, to come to
self-consciousness as divinities, but to do it by working through and with an
animal. We are here to educate, refine, humanize and finally divinize,
an animal! We are in bodies, which properly are not ours, but those of the animal
soul, who is our appetitive or instinctual lower self. We are assigned the duty
of "taming" this creature and conforming it to ways
of intelligence and brotherhood. We must teach it the better way of curbing
its savage instincts, its lusts and greed inherited from its wild experience
in the animal orders, and must lead it upward to a final assimilation into the
nature of the angel, its tutor. Little wonder the task can not be done in a
single incarnation!
But how was the god to link his higher
nature with the body of the animal so far below his stature? The very fundamentals
of religion are interwoven with the answer to this question. For religions grew
out of this relation between the god and his animal protege. Religions were
not originally forms of mere cult sentimentalism
and piety. They were regimes of ritual and ethical practice designed to keep
man in memory of his divine estate, and to hold him to the obligations of the
"broad oaths fast sealed" (Empedocles) of his covenant to raise up the lower
self, while keeping himself "unspotted from the world."
The technique of his incarnation
is philosophically described under the terms of the great Law of Incubation.
This is announced in the Bible in John's verse: "Unless a grain of corn (wheat)
fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die,
it bringeth forth much fruit." Also it is seen in Paul's description of the
resurrection in I. Corinthians, 15: "What you sow cannot come to life unless
it die." These texts proclaim the great truth of
evolution, missed by scientific eyes, that each kingdom of nature is linked
to the kingdom below it for the nourishment of its life. The vegetable kingdom
is rooted in mineral soil, the animal is sustained on vegetable matter, the
human is built up physically of animal and vegetable elements, and in their
turn the lower divine beings must take rootage in the human bodies. As the acorn
can not develop its oak potentialities unless it descend and be buried in the
dark damp soil of the mineral kingdom, so the angels of God can not evolve to
higher perfection of their divinity unless they undergo experience in human
bodies. This is the simple law which is the philosophical basis of the incarnation,
at once its explanation and its justification. The son of man must descend into
the bowels of the earth for three "days" (aeons), one in the mineral kingdom,
one in the vegetable and one in the animal, before he rises out of matter again
as a god in the perfection of his spiritual nature in the human kingdom. In
the old scripture the advent of the god always occurs about "the fourth watch
of the night," which symbols the human kingdom, as it is fourth in order. "As
Jonas was three days in the belly of the whale, so must the son of man be three
days in the bowels of the earth,"--in the lower kingdoms of evolution, not in
a literal rocky tomb! We shall have light on the ancient scriptures when we
follow the forms of the old symbolism.
The coming of the god to inhabit
the body of an animal is in all respects equivalent to his death and burial,
analogous to the death of the old seed in the ground, and is necessary if he
is to rebeget himself anew as the risen son of the slain father. For when he
steps into the lower body, he loses all the freedom of his glorious life as
a spirit, and comes "under the law" that rules on the plane of physical matter.
He is subject to all the vicissitudes of climate, bodily needs and the hardships
of imprisonment in a body of flesh. In brief, he is in hell, and the grave or
tomb they speak of is nothing more than his physical body. This is the first
great mystery of ancient theology, lost since the third century, and now restored
through occult discovery. The words tomb and womb are of the same origin and
have the same significance. To be born from the womb
of a mortal mother is to enter the tomb of mortal life. Many passages from Greek
philosophy will confirm this interpretation.
Spirit, then, must be buried and
die in matter, to reproduce its new generation. The divine son must come to
birth in the womb of Maria (the sea of matter). "Matter is the mother of the
gods," said an ancient sage; as spirit is their father. The seminal seed of
divinity must be sown in the body of flesh. It is sown to die, or as Paul says,
"in corruption; it must rise in incorruption." It
must be sown a mortal body, and be raised a spiritual body. Paul, who was an
Orphic Mystery initiate, was simply giving one of the old symbols of the descent
and resurrection of the god in mortal life.
But the god did not come as an adult.
What life cycle starts at maturity? He came as a god in potentiality only, a
god in embryo, a seedling god, in fact a baby god. The Christmas or advent festival
celebrates the birth of an infant Christ. He is the Christ-child, the Krist
Kingle (Kindel, Kindlein, little child--German), the Jesu Bambino of Italy,
and the child Horus of ancient Egypt.
The greatest truth that we humans can be told is that the Christ principle is
born in us as a foetus in the womb of our physical bodies, struggling to be
delivered! The physical body of each person is the womb of the Christ. "I groan
and travail with you in pain," says Paul, "till Christ be
formed within you." Nature, says John, groaneth and travaileth in pain until
now, when it is to give birth to the god or Christ. And Paul says again, "For
in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which
is from heaven," the spiritual body of our resurrection, the house not built
with hands, but in consciousness and character for when the foetal god is delivered
at its final Easter morn from its imprisonment in the physical body, it must
have fashioned for itself a temple or sanctuary, of imperishable elements, "eternal
in the heavens," as its future abode. This is the temple we are masonically
building out of the materials of incarnational experience,--thought, word and
deed, day by day and life by life. This is the mystic temple in whose building,
as says I Kings, "there was heard neither sound of hammer, axe nor any tool
of iron." This is the temple that Jesus says he could build up, if destroyed,
in three "days" or aeons of natural evolution. It is the glorious house we fashion
for the soul out of the spiritual essence of human life. Every moral lesson
learned, every item of character developed, has contributed to its heightened
power to build this body of indestructible light.
In comparison with it the physical
body is named "the garment of shame" and "the body of this death." It must be
dissolved in the fervent heat of the inner spirit, to free the radiant body
of solar glory within. For the god, it is a matter of shame and degradation
to be housed in the carnal body and subject to its
animal impulses. In the body he is nailed to the cross of matter,
and the worst of his painful sacrifice and of his humbling himself to be born
of a virgin is his subjection to the carnal appetites of the animal. He must
wage a valiant warfare to avoid falling under the complete domination of these
massive impulses, until he finally brings the god to adulthood, and has prepared
the new subtle garment of light to be the eternal home of the soul after its
resurrection. He must finally dissolve the physical elements of the veil of
the temple, and the "ekstasis" (ecstasy) described as the consummation
of the drama of initiation in the Mysteries. The word ecstasy literally means
"standing out," and it referred to the actual freeing of the soul from the physical
body. It is the resurrection, when the tomb of flesh is broken asunder, the
gates of death are opened, and the dead are raised incorruptible. One reason
for the egg as a symbol of Easter is the likeness of the spiritual experience
to a chick's pecking its way out of its shell to effect its birth. Christmas
is the quickening of the foetus in the womb; Easter is the actual birth of the
human ego into the new kingdom of spiritual light. It is a delivery; whence
the ancient philosophy was at times designated as midwifery. Socrates said he
was a midwife, presiding at the birth of the soul into truth.
This glorious body, the Augoeides
of the Greeks and the Sahu of the Egyptians, can be built up only from the union
of spirit and body in the human kingdom. For it is formed on its material side
from the particles of radiant essence generated from the cells of the body,
at the center of which even modern science now declares there are "radiogens"
on intensely hot nuclei of solar fire. (See statement of Dr. Geo. W. Crile,
of the Cleveland Laboratories.) No new birth of higher life can be generated
save by the interaction or conjunction of spirit and matter in some organic
form. Man is the kingdom where these two meet to be joined in one higher union.
Paul states this clearly when he says "the wall of partition between the two
natures must be broken down, and the two made one in one body."
Having seen that the first great
law of human life is the Law of Incubation, we are prepared now to see
the operation of the other great law of nature and principle of Platonic philosophy,
the application of which to the doctrines of religion will immediately throw
them all in clear light. Especially will it illuminate that great doctrine of
the Christian Church, its most significant rite, the Eucharist.
Had this principle of ancient philosophy been kept in the knowledge of the early
Church, Christianity would not now be the outcast from modern intelligent appreciation
that it is. With this single principle restored, theology may again lift up
its bowed head and take its ancient position of kingship among human interests.
We refer to the Law of Dismemberment. It is the method of the Law
of Incubation as Reincarnation is the method of Karma. When one sees how
extensively it was featured in the Book of the Dead and other books of
wisdom, it becomes next to incomprehensible how it fell into total desuetude
in the Christian system. For it is the key to the divinity of man and the humanity
of the god. It is the basic principle beneath our understanding of all Christology.
It gives us the entire rationale of the incarnation.
Briefly the Law of Dismemberment
is thus set forth: as a principle of Plato's philosophy it is the division
or partition of unit divine nature or essence into multiple fragments, the breaking
up of the Oneness of God into many portions or gods. As the principle back of
the incarnation, it is the breaking of the unified life of the god on his own
high plane into fragments for the sake of taking lodgment in multiple bodies.
Plato informs us that as the one life flows forth or descends into manifestation,
the farther it proceeds from its source in homogeneity, the weaker is its power
and the more numerous is its fragmentation. At each step of the descent it must
suffer a reduction of its total force, which can only be effected by "partition"
into fragments. The Great Light breaks up into lesser lights, the Great Fire
into lesser sparks. A perfect analogy is seen in the letting fall of any large
compact body of water or other liquid from a high place; it is thrown into infinite
small particles by the opposition of the air and other causes. Deity breaks
up into fragments as it descends, and according to the New Testament miracle
there were twelve groups of these "fragments."
How could the total power and enormous
energy of the god be embodied in the brain and nervous system of a single human
body? It would "blow out the fuse" of any man to be suddenly subjected to the
full dynamic power of such an energy as that represented by a god. One does
not feed a child a whole loaf of bread, but gives it only fragments. So we are
fed on the broken bread of life. How again could the deific nature and power
be made universally accessible to all men, or distributed amongst them, without
dividing itself into fragments, so that a portion might be given to each individual?
It is supremely simple; yet this simple principle underlying all theology has
been lost out of Christian doctrinism. And the world has been rent with bitter
warfare, and much of the foulest inhumanity to man ever known has been perpetrated,
because this basic understanding was lost out of theology. The full power of
divinity is too high for us to sustain; it would wreck our organism. So we receive
each one a reduced portion--all we can contain.
Again the oak tree is our mentor
in spiritual truth. To propagate itself the great tree divides its unific life
into a thousand little nuclei, each of which when dropped into the soil of the
kingdom below it, has the potentiality of reproducing the whole of its parent.
So with the god. He breaks his Oneness into fragments,
and drops a seed, or infant Christ, into each human breast. This is Paul's "fulness
of the stature of Christ." The child Jesus must grow to the stature of the Christ,
or the adult god.
Tennyson knew of the Law of Dismemberment
in its spiritual sense when he wrote in In Memoriam:
We are but
broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art all in all.
The myths of the ancient gods in
many cases convey this deep meaning in the form of the (symbolic) cutting
of the body of the god in pieces, which are scattered over the earth, later
to be reassembled by the Son, who restores the deity whole. Even with these
fables of Osiris, Dionysus, Tammuz, Mithra and many others hinting at the
plain truth, Christian blindness has gone on perverting the basic meaning
of the Eucharist.
The principle explains for the
first time also the significance of the phrase, the Lord of Hosts. As each
Lord divides into a host of fragments, it is a simple matter to see him in
his divided totality as a Lord of a Host. Plato indeed says, "Each superior
god becomes the leader of a multitude, engendered from himself," his split
fragments.
But the most astonishing corroboration
of this Platonic Theosophy is found in the Bible itself at the very heart
of the Lord's own ordination of the Eucharist. Is it possible to comprehend
the crassness that has made generations of Christian theologians miss the
clearly expressed doctrine of dismemberment in their own Book of Wisdom? Hardly.
In I Corinthians (11:23, ff) Paul
distinctly states the proclamation to him by the Lord himself (in spiritual
vision) of the festival of the Eucharist, "I pass on to you what I received
from the Lord himself, namely, that on the night he was betrayed the Lord
Jesus took a loaf, and after thanking God he broke it, saying, "This means
my body broken for you; do this in memory of me." Here is the bread
of divine life offered to man, and the Lord first broke it!" If the
Christian Church had all along known what "the broken body of our Lord" meant
in terms of Platonic philosophy, the whole course of western history would
have been altered mightily. Instead it quarrelled over the Greek word rendered
"broken" in futile negation of its true meaning, and missed the true gleam
of the light of the world.
The Eucharistic symbolism of eating
the Lord's body has likewise been missed. What can it mean beyond partaking
spiritually of his spiritual nature? "God is a spirit" and he can be assimilated
only spiritually. To convey this idea to dull mortal comprehension the ancient
sages devised the outward rite, actually eating symbolic bread and drinking
symbolic wine, and Christian literalists have argued (and fought) for centuries
over the question whether the actual life of deity was
or was not in the elements themselves! In the light of such situations as
this--and it can be duplicated in scores of other doctrines--how can any one
fail to see the world's need of the Ancient Wisdom, and the restoration of
the luminous Platonic Theosophy?
John has told us in ringing passages
about "that bread which came down from heaven, whereof if a
man eat he shall hunger no more." "For he who eateth my flesh and drinketh
my blood hath eternal life." It is impossible to realize save by long study
and reflection to what extent the literalization of the Bible and the Gospel
narrative has deprived the human mind of the intellectual nourishment on which
it was expected to feed. None but one who has examined these ancient allegories
and seen point by point how they have been turned into fruitless and meaningless
miracles and earthly incidents, can appreciate the enormity of the miscarriage
of ancient truth in its symbolic transmission to modern "intelligence." It
is, when fully seen, the most monstrous prodigy of ignorance and superstition
perhaps in human history. The ancients used outward nature and human actions
to type spiritual truth. We have converted their spiritual allegories into
the merest outward husk of truth, because Christianity became predominantly
a movement among the ignorant.
A phrase in the Lord's ordination
of the Eucharist gives us the text for the final principle of Plato's system
that has to do with Christian theology. "Do this in remembrance of me," he
said. Here again ignorance has beclouded a great truth and a great light.
For here was an announcement by the Lord himself of Plato's other great doctrine--so
mystifying to the modern savants--the doctrine of Reminiscence. If Washington
or Lincoln had left an institution expressly designated by them as a means
of perpetuating their memory, we would regard them as being actuated by a
huge vanity. Was Jesus a vainglorious person, as the words of Paul make him,
if an historical character, to appear? No; Paul was expressing a grand truth
of Platonic wisdom, when he wrote of the light which came to him in this spiritual
vision. Religion was designed primarily on no other motivation than as a means
of putting into practice this phase of Platonic philosophy. Religion was not
originally merely a "system of worship." It had far deeper bases. It was instituted
to save the hosts of fragmented gods in mortal bodies from the dire fate of
losing their divinity. For they were threatened with total
forgetfulness of their real nature. Religion was designed to be a set
of psychological exercises which would subtly revive and stimulate the memory
of their former celestial state. One of the Nine Muses was Mnemosyne, the
goddess of Memory, and Mercury had the function of awakening dead memories.
Horus in Egypt came to awaken the
memory of his father Osiris in the grave. From these connotations we are enabled
to discern a totally new force of meaning in our word "remember." If the
gods on coming to save humanity were "dismembered" or fragmented into
individuals, then the resurrection or return to their primal unity in their
glorification at the end of the aeon would naturally be a "remembering"
of divided parts. We express the same idea in our other word for the same
thing, "re-collecting." The brotherhood of humanity consists simply in this
reassembling in a common spirit of unity the individualized fragments of the
twelve Lords of Hosts, the twelve tribes of Israel.
Horus is said to have come to reconstitute his dismembered father. Translated
from allegory to spiritual meaning this can signify only that the Christ spark
in us is to grow and expand until it fuses by its fiery power into the great
universal spirit of wisdom and love that is to animate the race. Paul told
us we are all members of one body, of which Christ is the head; but habits
of literal thought have prevented us from sensing this in an intellectual
or spiritual way. Our minds and hearts are to be fused in one great
spirit of love and harmony, as we enhance the glory of the god shining
within us ever more brightly unto the day of perfection. As we separated in
our descent into body, so we merge again into a mighty unity as we ascend
back to the father of lights. This is the reconstitution of the dismembered
suffering god, broken upon the cross of matter,
in order that we lower men might ascend into the kingdom of intellect and
spirit. The reconstitution is indeed the re-mem bering our broken divinity,
the re-collection of the scattered fragments of the broken body of the Divine
Lord. Only by the study of ancient origins in philosophy can we see the grand
spiritual sense back of these figures and terms. All symbols had their origin
in simple ideas, which, however, were the expressions of the loftiest truths
of early wisdom.
This reassembling of the scattered
fragments is the basis and genius of human brotherhood. The individuals of
the race, being of one identical essence, are kindred in nature. But being
attached to animal bodies, the god is subject to the separative selfish tendencies
of the lower man, until he educates this pupil to the higher motivations of
altruism and community of interest with others. As an animal he wars with
his fellows, is jealous and self-seeking, under the evolutionary impulse of
self-preservation brought up from former experience in the animal grades.
But as a god he revives the memory of his kinship with his celestial mates,
and in the glow of that warm recognition that his brother is himself, he learns
to look upon his fellow-man with that love which is described as the cement
of the universe. |