Chapter II
The modern zeal to exploit “the practical” is about
one part good philosophy and nine parts sheer fatuity. The whole matter has been
involved in the utmost fog and mental haze. The groundlessness of current
notions of what constitutes “the practical” is readily disclosed by asking
the question: What does modern man do with the gains which his practical effort
has brought to him—wealth, comfort, means, freedom, competence? They bring him
certain satisfactions, no doubt, and the answer in part is there. But often the
satisfactions turn to ashes in his hands, or melt away as he reaches out to
grasp them, or prove hollow soon or late. Their inadequacy and shallowness
attest their futility and give “practical” philosophy the lie.
The entire question rests on the determination of what
constitutes ultimate values in life itself, and this is only fixed by an
adequate philosophy. To be sure, a basic ingredient in philosophy is experience,
and a philosophy is largely a digest of experience. But philosophy is finally
and inexorably the mind’s grasp of a set of formulas of meanings which array
the data of experience into a meaningful pattern, or structural design, which
design must eventually match the outline of the archetypal noumenal thought form
projected by Cosmic Mind for this area of creation. Harmony with this immanent
pattern is the insistent demand, as well as the touchstone and seal of truth.
The lower mind in man, being a fragment of cosmic intellect, is by nature keen
to recognize and register, by an expansive pleasure, the concord of its ideas
with the overshadowing form of truth. Some knowledge of the features of this
living mosaic is essential to the final allocation of values, else there will be
no criterion other than an unauthoritative sensual hedonism to determine whether
an experience or a philosophy is good or detrimental. All actions and opinions
rate a final appraisal on the ground of a deposit they leave in consciousness,
according as
35
they harmonize or disagree with the cosmic thought
structure that is working to manifestation in the process. They accord, or not,
with the elemental pattern of creation. Deep within is a sense that registers in
the outer mind the thrill of that accord or disagreement. The acuteness of this
barometer of values may be viciously blunted, so that its registering sense is
sadly vitiated. Yet in the end it speaks in the stern language of pain and
discord for violation of its principles, and positive pleasure for virtuous
action. And the final definition of “the practical” is that which relates
the life of man ever closer to the form and substance of the primordial pattern
laid down for human evolution.
Early theology presented the general cast and outline of
the great cosmic plan of creation, in the reflected light of which mortal mind
could frame the more or less definite graph of the structure of this life on
earth. The profound philosophy, then, that rested on this stratum of basic
knowledge brought the offices of the enlightened intelligence to the aid of the
outer and less reliable pragmatic criteria in the ego’s effort to direct the
evolution of the organism. Philosophical understanding thus in large measure
could be made to obviate the toilsome methodology of trial and error, and both
conserve available force and save valuable time and much suffering. One of the
deep principles of the Buddha’s system was that “right knowledge” must
come to save the individual from pitiable suffering arising from ignorance. If,
as he averred, it is a fundamental truth that ignorance is the cause of sorrow,
then knowledge is its antidote. And all the great religions of antiquity make
this assertion. Says Hermes: “The vice of a soul is ignorance; the virtue of a
soul is knowledge.” The Book of Proverbs in the Bible enjoins at length the
prime necessity of getting wisdom, understanding, knowledge. Its preciousness is
set above “all the things that thou canst desire.” It is glorified as an
ornament of grace and a crown of life unto its possessor. In this document it is
not placed second to Love or Christly Charity. By an invincible dialectic Plato
and Socrates work out in dialogue after dialogue the proposition that one cannot
be good until one knows what the good thing is, and even what it is good for.
According to Rhys Davids in his Hibbert Lectures of 1881 on The Origin and
Growth of Religions: Buddhism (p. 208), “it is not by chance that the
foundation of the higher life, the gate to the heaven that is to be reached on
earth, is placed, not in emotion, not in feeling, but in knowledge, in the
victory over delusions. The
36
moral progress of the individual depends, according to
Buddhism, upon his knowledge. Sin is folly. It is delusion that leads to
crime.” An editorial in the New York Times of June 20, 1938, well says that
the hearts of such folks as the German persecutors of Jewry “are bitter only
when their minds are dark,” and cites Voltaire’s trenchant utterance that
“men will continue to commit atrocities as long as they continue to believe
absurdities.” In so far as men act for reasons—instead of sheer brute
impulse—the soundness or the imperfection of their “philosophy” in the
case determines the good or evil quality of their deeds.
Knowledge has long been apostrophized as a beacon light,
a lamp unto the feet. It seems to be an inexpugnable datum of history that fully
enlightened sages of the past gave to infant humanity mighty formulations of
cosmic truth, evolutionary schematism, wisdom of the last practical utility, and
supernal knowledge of the worlds of men and of angels. They placed this torch in
the hands of the early races for the advantage and behoof of all succeeding
humanity. Precautions of the most extraordinary nature were taken to safeguard
the deposit. But, miserabile dictu, the doltishness of historical groups at
various times so far imperiled the gift that in a long period, roughly from the
third century of Christianity until almost the present day, the open
promulgation of the high teaching invited the bitterest persecution from the
entrenched forces of cruder belief. Esoteric philosophy was forced to hide
underground and make its way through the centuries by subterranean channels and
covert devices. Barbarism threatened the utter extinction of previous light.
Supervening ignorance swooped down upon and buried earlier knowledge. But in one
of the resurgent waves of revival, the ancient light is breaking through the
incrustation of ignorance once again. Wisdom is having its rebirth.
Obscuration enveloped brighter enlightenment because
mankind seems unable to maintain its hold on the golden mean between extreme
views. It is constantly following the swing of the pendulum from one movement to
violent reaction in an opposite direction. Religious history is in the main a
record of oscillation between arrant supernaturalism and soulless naturalism.
The group mind bends far over to mystic or spiritistic faith on one side, and
then sways equally far over to a dead materialism. It is either believing in
angels, ghosts, spirits, saints, virgin births, elementals, divine
interventions, miracles, transfigura-
37
tions, salvations, vicarious atonements; or it is
rebounding from these to blank mechanism which rates all such things as
delusions. In his revulsion from eccentric mysticism man has sought always the
wrong antidote—a barren naturalism. In his revulsion from the latter he has
again always gone too far into uncritical mysticism. But there is a middle
position that meets the essential truth between both attitudes. And the soul
science of old set forth this median position. It presented mystic elements
without irrationality, and advanced such knowledge of spiritual experience as to
make the negation of such values impossible. Ancient theology was the science
that dealt with the more sublimated essences and forces latent in the human
endowment, exploiting them for the vast enrichment of the conscious life. It was
the science of spiritual growth without mystic extravagance, the science of
dynamically real elements in the psychic constitution of man, the very existence
of which mechanistic science has disregarded. What the ancients called esoteric
science is but the steady direct penetration of human intelligence into the
deeper heart of nature, to manipulate creatively her hidden springs of power. It
was based on a knowledge of the laws ruling the higher octaves in the diapason
of consciousness. It was firmly grounded on premises which authenticated the
existence of the soul as an entity. The soul has ever been the scarecrow in the
garden of positive science. But modern science has itself re-established the
ground for such a predication in its recent findings with regard to the more
sublimated constitution of matter, making a way for the reification of bodies of
sub-atomic or ethero-spiritual composition, in which a unit of soul might find
subsistence when disengaged from a fully substantial body. Late physics has gone
far toward hypostasizing St. Paul’s asserted “spiritual body,” and his
other statement that he knew a man “who was caught up into the third
heaven.” In the rarer forms of matter now hypothecated by our adventuring
science will be found the rarefied physical implementation of whole octaves of
“spiritual” phenomena catalogued by ancient psychic discernment, but looked
at skeptically by positivism in our day. There is a spiritual evolution
proceeding pari passu with the physical, and implemented by it. Our late science
has only now come into view of nature’s sublimated matter of varying
gradations of density, enabling it for the first time to give body to the beings
of ancient hierarchies and to give veritude to the ancient affirmation of
“spiritual bodies.” In proportion as the
38
redoubtable solidity of science’s basic stuff melts
down into mere swirls of force, to that extent can the angels and demons of
ancient systems stalk forth in something like veritable substantiality.
A penetrating view of the interior sublimation of matter
opened to the eye of antiquity a fuller and more detailed charting of the basic
components of man’s constitution. Human nature was seen as a compound of at
least four segments or strata of being, possessing four bodies of differentiated
substance ranging from dense physical coarseness through etheric and mental
gradients to spiritual tenuity. In short man has a physical, an emotional, a
mental and a spiritual body, each finer one interpenetrating successively its
coarser substrate and being held in linkage to it by vital affinities. Hence the
deep lore of old dealt with a keen analysis and formulation of the laws of
interaction between the several “men” in us and catalogued the extensive
schedule of reactions in consciousness in that amplified psychology to a degree
that proves astonishing to students of our time. The psychology of past days has
names for a host of sharply drawn segmentations of subjective activity that
modern probing has never systematically distinguished. Their “gods” were the
living energies of nature and of mind, realities of the cosmos, and by no means
fanciful and fictitious nonentities. They were the personified rays and energies
that our science is now discovering. The broad field of what is termed mystical
experience was mapped, with every section of its area charted in relation to the
economy of the whole. It was no realm of whimsical idiosyncrasy, of sheer
feeling. The revelation that the ancient East had perfected the technique of an
elaborate spirito-psychological science, surpassing anything yet adduced by
modern genius, is a marked denouement of current history. The renaissance of
this buried “science of the soul” is giving birth again to the knowledge
that man may pass from unconscious drifting with the tide of evolution to a
conscious self-directed mastery of his progress. He may step from the status of
a victim of evolution’s forces, such as he is when without cognizance of its
laws, into the ranks of those who work intelligently with its plan. Hence he can
advance more smoothly and swiftly with the tide, as Shakespeare asserted,
instead of being tossed about by cross and counter currents whose play he does
not understand. The vitalizing item of ancient knowledge was the prime datum
that man is himself, in his real being, a spark of divine fire struck off like
the flint flash from the Eternal
39
Rock of Being, and buried in the flesh of body to support
its existence with an unquenchable radiant energy. On this indestructible fire
the organism and its functions were “suspended,” as the Orphic theology
phrased it, and all their modes and activities were the expression of this
ultimate divine principle of spiritual intelligence, energizing in matter.
Philosophy so grounded was able to meet the exegetical demands of the
“mind-body problem” by its hypothecation of states of rarefied matter
mediating between immaterial spirit and gross body and linking them commodiously
in one organism. How the gross body holds connection with sheer
“anima”—how it holds on to its “ghost”—was readily understood in the
terms of their knowledge of intermediate structures which bridge by several
steps the wide gap between pure spirit and palpable matter.
At the summit, or in the interior heart, of man’s
nature was the divine and immortal Atma or spirit; on the lower level there was
the body, with its twofold equipment for sensation and emotion. Bridging the gap
between the two was the principle of conscious mind called Manas. It could span
the gap between “quickening spirit” and inert matter; because it stood
between them and possessed affinities with both of them, which they lacked with
each other. It could touch soul above and flesh beneath and pass the lofty
motivations of the one across the gulf to the beneficiary below. Modern
religious conception faces the absurd situation of envisaging man as obviously
physical and animal by virtue of his body, and as obviously intellectual and
spiritual through his soul, but with the ancient hierarchical grades of
intermediacy torn out of the gap between the two. Early Christian revolt against
esotericism threw down the ladder of linkage between man below and his soul
above, and now has no resources to diagram the steps of his possible communion
with his Emanuel. The gap left vacant had perforce to be filled in by theology
with the single figure of the historical Jesus as mediator between man and his
God. A historical personage was called in to implement a function that was
originally assigned to one of the principles of man’s own constitution. This
was one of those consequences which the little blunder of mistaking myth for
history entailed for succeeding ages.
On the strength of the new data furnished by modern
science, present thought must orient its attitude toward basic problems, since
it must view life as the play of causal forces in consciousness more sub-
40
limated and potent than any of the energies so far
discerned in matter. It will then be in position to take counsel again with the
primeval divine revelation. It will be able to predicate again the human soul
and the divine spirit in man. In the ultimate it has been its failure to posit
the independent Atmic entity in our life that has blocked its every excursion
toward a vital religious philosophy. It has made philosophy the dead speculation
it now is and religion both a chimerical and a fruitless enterprise. When
theology wisely guided the effort to relate the lower man to the god within, it
was the central pursuit in the life of the world and stood at the apex of
dignity and importance. But the loss of vital premises of understanding blinded
following ages to the value of spiritual culture, and theology and philosophy
now go abegging for recognition, bereft of their former kingly renown. And now
their continued abeyance threatens civilization itself. No age calls so
piteously for the certain knowledge of the science of the soul; since to soul
alone can be attached the anchor for all shifting human values. Without the
scientific grounding of an inner principle in man which is itself a portion of
Eternal Durability, and which will carry the values built up in life to endless
perpetuity, human philosophy must forever lack stability and prime utility.
Such a carrier and preserver of values was the Atmic
spark, described by Heraclitus as “a portion of cosmic Fire, imprisoned in a
body of earth and water.” It was on earth to trace its line of progress
through the ranges of the elements and the kingdoms, harvesting its varied
experiences at the end of each cycle. It was described by Greek philosophy as
“more ancient than the body,” because it had run the cycle of incarnations
in many bodies, donning and doffing them as garments of contact with lower
worlds, so that it might treasure up the powers of all life garnered in
experience in every form of it. The mutual relation of soul to body in each of
its incarnate periods is the nub of the ancient philosophy, and the core of all
Biblical meaning. As the Egyptian Book of the Dead most majestically phrases it,
the soul, projecting itself into one physical embodiment after another,
“steppeth onward through eternity.” No more solid foundation for salutary
philosophy can be laid than this rock of knowledge, and civilization will
flounder in perilous misadventure until this datum of intellectual certitude is
restored to common thought.
The practical service of philosophy is the proper
direction of effort.
41
Its function is to furnish guiding intellectual light.
Religion is the consecration of purpose to attain the goal indicated as blessed.
But knowledge is the only guarantee of right effort. Misunderstanding leads the
feet into morasses and quicksands. An errant philosophy is the poison of human
endeavor at its source. Modern psychology loudly asserts that failure of the
mind to know the answers to life’s riddles breaks down its integrity and racks
even the body. Philosophy, reduced now to tedious and jejune speculation, is
that very bread of life for which we starve. It was once a body of positive
truth. To it the mind could anchor. Only intelligence can save motivation from
rank exuberance of eccentricity. Despoiled of the early truth, later ages have
been in the position of a person trying to think without true premises. It is
the function of science and philosophy to furnish the mind true premises. As
Gerald Massey says, thinking is in essence a process of “thinging,” since
thoughts must rest on the nature of things. And things are themselves God’s
thoughts in material form.
The one grand premise for constructive thinking is that
man is a god functioning in the body of a human animal, and that this situation
is typical of all other existent life, and a key to the comprehension of all.
Religion is that field of effort in which man strives to relate a divine
element, transcending immeasurably his own natural powers, to a lower self in
which it is tenanted. In this comparative sense, its true function is and always
will be to deal with those three elements which it has so shockingly abused and
misapplied, the supernatural, the miraculous and the magical. In any absolute
sense, to be sure, these terms are misnomers and can become misleading. But
relative to the viewpoint of the merely natural man, the work of the god in his
nature is transcendent and is indeed fittingly termed supernatural. For it is
the province of religion to transfigure the natural life of man with the
irradiance of cosmic romance, magical potency and unearthly splendor. It is
designed to refashion the natural man into the likeness of a glorious spiritual
being, the cosmical man of the heavens. To lower orders of life the capabilities
of beings of a superior kingdom of life are justifiably designated as
supernatural. Our brain power is supernatural to the dog.
Even now Socrates’ “daimon” (daemon), that hovering
presence which guided and warned him constantly throughout his life, is being
entified as the “unconscious” mentor of present psychology. The res-
42
toration to Western thought of the divine monitorial
guardianship of the individual will instigate the mightiest reformation in the
history of Occidental religion. It will enforce a drastic alteration in
theological dogma. For it will demand a discarding of the conventional form of
the God idea and a return to that of learned antiquity.
It flouts current belief most flagrantly to assert that
the Christian movement represented a descent from high pagan levels of knowledge
and spiritual insight. Not a churchman but harbors the smug assurance that
Christianity arose like a stately phoenix out of the ashes of a decadent
paganism, to save a benighted world from sinking into a morass of degradation
horrendous to contemplate. But current notions, however sanctified by pious
belief, must yield before the influx of positive facts and the light of a proper
interpretation of revered scriptures. This only means, however, that
Christianity must cast off a heavy incrustation of exoteric literalism and
reassert its own primal majestic message. No student conversant with the history
of early Christianity will for a moment maintain that medieval or modern
presentations of theology are identical with those held at the start. One of the
most influential and admittedly the most learned of the Church Fathers, whose
scholarship had been powerfully instrumental in formulating the early creedology,
was excommunicated as a heretic within three hundred years after his death by a
Church that had so quickly lost the light of its original inspiration.
“Origen, the pupil of St. Clement of Alexandria, and
the best informed and most learned of the Church Fathers, who held the doctrine
of rebirth and karma to be Christian, and against whom, 299 years after he was
dead, excommunication was decreed by the exoteric Church on account of his
beliefs, has said: ‘But that there should be certain doctrines not made known
to the multitude, which are revealed after the exoteric ones have been taught,
is not a peculiarity of Christianity alone, but also of philosophical systems in
which certain truths are exoteric and others esoteric.’”1
Both Origen’s statement and his posthumous discrediting
at the hands of the Church Council make it clear that Christianity had been
radically transmogrified within a few hundred years after its inception. And
every individual or sect in the centuries following the third that endeavored to
revive the pristine purity of the original formulations was acrimoniously
hounded and persecuted. Paulinism itself, which
43
represents perhaps the clearest stream of high spiritual
teaching, was hard put to escape being torn out of the context of scripture or
defeated in ecclesiastical controversy.
The issue must be faced and determined now if religion is
to live and exalt the race. The crux of the entire problem is the conception of
deity in a form perennially available for man in the heart of his own nature.
This conception is the core of all religious theory, and loss of it has been the
cause of doubt, confusion and despair. Light and truth long lost are once more
at hand to illumine minds now groping in darkness. False notions of deity have
nearly cost mankind the loss of its birthright of knowledge.
The boast of Christianity and Judaism is that they alone
have presented to mankind its purest concept of deity in the form of the One
God—Monotheism. The claim is by no means true as fact. They may more correctly
be said to have been the first to present the One God without the ancient train
of the subordinate gods. They boast of having abolished the magnified evils of
polytheism. But to the ancient sages the task of handling the Supreme God
without his pantheon of lesser divinities was much the same as trying to deal
physiologically with a man without consideration of his arms, feet, head and
several organs. The gods of primeval religion were the active manifest powers,
faculties, organs of God himself. Nature was his body, elemental forces the
agents of his operative economy, universal mind his thinking faculty and
ultimate beneficence his spiritual heart. The ancient systems of wisdom thought
it not blasphemy to delineate the organic structure of deity to explain to human
grasp the cause and nature of the world. Reverence was not withheld from even
the lowest instrumentalization of Godhood. And God organically apprehended was
to be better adored than God as an abstract “nonity.”
But some strange quirk of philosophical revulsion against
the function and nature of matter militated later to cause theologians to deem
it a blasphemy to give God a body, parts and divisions. The mind could only be
saved from defiling his purity by keeping him an empty abstraction. Unknowable
and Absolute, he was to be kept ineffable. He was not to be dragged into the
purlieus of mortal description, degraded into the semblance of a creation of
man’s low thought.
But the astute Greeks kept the one without foregoing the
other. They reverenced the One as beyond the reach of thought, yet portrayed
44
his emanations in the field of manifestation. And they
ranked themselves as his sons. They deemed it not dishonoring to deity to
recognize his being in all things. They saw him in nature, and not as abstracted
from nature. And they studied nature as the living garment of God’s immanence.
Therefore, though the monotheistic concept has a place in
man’s thought problem, it is nevertheless to be appraised in its final utility
to religion as practically valueless. The human mind cannot think without the
concept of First Cause, and God must stand in the thought problem to fill this
need. It has this dialectic utility. But it must ever remain a contentless
abstraction. As such it turns out that the chalice of divinity that the Church
proffered to benighted nations as the supreme boon of religion, was well-nigh an
empty cup. And engrossing the mass mind with a philosophical concept that is
unassimilable and must forever remain meaningless, ecclesiasticism perpetrated
the far worse crime of condemning to desuetude that more realistic conception of
resident deity which alone is fraught with pregnant power to apotheosize human
life. Holding out a supreme Ineffability to its followers, it withheld from them
at the same time the knowledge of that deity that is lodged immediately within
their own selfhood. Giving them a God who is utterly inaccessible, it blocked
their approach to the god who was “closer than breathing, nearer than hands
and feet.”
This is of surpassing importance. It is revolutionary. It
is devastating to prevalent orthodoxies. It shocks traditional piety to hear
that the concept of the One Supreme can never be of great practical utility to
man. But apart from its offices in generating in us perpetual wonder and awe,
our dealing with it ends when we have placed it in the thought problem where the
mind demands the postulate of First Cause. Beyond that it has little service to
render us. Give it form, substance, content, description, we cannot, without
destroying its necessary being. Whatever good will flow from our knowing that
the Unknowable is back of all phenomena is ours. We can hardly love or worship
what we cannot know. The boundary of our reach is wonder and speculation. Our
attempts to worship it are the fluttering of a moth about the light we dare not
look at. Ancient religion was suspected of having left the monotheistic God out
of its picture. It did not leave it out, but it had the discretion to leave it
alone! The sage theologists reverenced it by a becoming silence! Communion has
never been established be-
45
tween man and an Absolute God in the cosmic heavens. But
the pagan world provided a contact with a god dwelling immediately within the
human breast. No reaching after the moon of the Absolute diverted conscious
purpose from actual touch with the god who stood at one’s elbow. The seers of
old held it a sacrilege for mortals to worship any power outside themselves. And
this implied no spirit of vaunting humanism or affront to deity. It was just the
recognition of deity at the point where it was accessible. The real heresy and
apostasy, the gross heathenism, is to miss deity where it is to be had in the
blind effort to seek it where it is not available.
Deity for man is at home, not afield in distant skies.
The kingdom of heaven and the hope of glory are within. They lurk within the
unfathomed depths of consciousness. Divinity lies buried under the heavier
motions of the sensual nature and the incessant scurrying of the superficial
mind. It is the still small voice, drowned out mostly by the raucous clamor of
fleshly, material and mental interests. It is a pure, mild Presence, awaiting
the day when the outer man will give more heed to its quiet speech. The Supreme
God is not available; but within the quietude of his own being every man may
find a fragment of that same God, made personal in his own individuality. This
is the burden of the lost wisdom of antiquity. Other than potentially, God in
his wholeness is not present with man; but he has not left man without that
measure of his grace that man can utilize. He has projected into our nature a
portion, a ray, of his own life. He has apportioned amongst all his creatures
that measure of his ineffable power which each is capable of receiving. Yet
potentially he has lodged the whole of himself in every man, for the nucleus of
his divinity that he has implanted in every creature is a seed of the whole of
his being. In man the divine seed is the Christos, the son of the Almighty
Father. It is no negative statement, but the glorious affirmation of all
attainment, to assert that this germ of divinity within the heart is all of God
that man can possibly absorb in the present cycle. The cosmic God is hardly an
object of worship by humanity; but that segmented portion of infinite Being that
is tabernacled within the flesh of mortals—that is the actual divinity
assigned to receive the attention and homage of mankind, and sacrificially to be
eaten.
The indwelling god is himself being brought to birth
within the womb of humanity. Each individual is gestating a divinity within the
46
deeps of his own nature. Christianity has fervently
exhorted us to look into the empyrean to find the unapproachable God. All the
while the infant deity slumbers unheeded within the heart. Christianity has
largely nullified the force of St. Paul’s almost frantic cry to us: “Know ye
not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is within you?”
The seers of old distinguished between the Unknowable God
of the thought theorem and the actual Presence in the human constitution by
denominating the former “God” and the latter “the god.” Intermediate
deities were called variously “the Gods” and “the gods.” The object of
most constant attention in philosophy was “the god,” the personal daemon of
the individual. On the plane of all practical living value, it was useless to
look to higher evolutionary forms of deific expression unless and until that was
brought from infancy to maturity of function, since its qualities had to be
assimilated into human nature before anything higher could be received. It can
be stated as a matter beyond controversy that the vital concern of ancient
religion was with the god lodged within the human psyche. If man missed contact
with deity there, he missed it utterly.
Christianity euhemerized the pagan conception of the
germinal deity in us in the historical Jesus. But this has left the rest of
mortals unsanctified. The personalized Christ cuts the commonalty of mankind off
from its divinity. An “only-begotten son of God,” made to carry all the
values and meanings in his human person, robs mankind at large of its
birthright. The mistranslation of the Greek “monogenes” as
“only-begotten” was an error fraught with the most terrific consequences for
Christendom. It properly means “born of the one parent alone” (the Father,
Spirit), in contradistinction to the idea of being born of the union of Father
and Mother, or spirit and matter. It was a reference in ancient theogony to the
descent of the Logos (the cosmic counterpart of the Christos in man) from the
spiritual side of God’s nature alone, as distinct from its progenation from
the union of spirit with matter. The doctrine was primordial in the Egyptian
conception of the god Kheper or Khepera, symboled by the scarab, which, the
Egyptians asserted, produced its young through the male or father alone. If
Jesus was the sole epiphany of deity on earth, then the promises of our
universal sonship are made nugatory. We are assured again and again that we are
all sons of God and sons of the Highest. Christianity not only thrust upon the
man Jesus the divinity that was appor-
47
tioned amongst us all, but also, in its confusion and
ignorance, forced upon his mortal person the function, power and office of the
Cosmic Logos, which in the carefully graded system of the hierarchies could not
conceivably have been embodied in the constitution of a mere man on earth. How
could the mighty power that organized and ensouled galaxies of solar systems be
confined within the tiny limits of a physical brain and nervous system? The
great Christian Fathers, Clement of Alexandria and Origen (and others) expressly
repudiated the possibility of the Logos taking flesh in one person of merely
human stature. Such a limitation blasphemed Deity.
What has not been recognized is that the solitary
exaltation of the man Jesus has inevitably demeaned humanity. His lonely
apotheosization has disinherited us. And the general revolt of the
intellectualism of this age against the resultant debasement of human nature to
the level of the worm of the dust through Augustinian and Calvinistic
impositions should stoutly attest the falsity of the orthodox characterization.
The mythical as opposed to the historical interpretation
of the Gospels has been presented with some clarity by such men as Dupuis, Drews,
Robertson, Smith, Renan, Strauss, Massey, Higgins, Mead and others. The
historical view of Jesus’ life is stubbornly maintained in spite of the
evidence adduced by Comparative Religion and Mythology, which points with steady
directness to the fact that the events of the Gospel narrative are matched with
surprising fidelity by the antecedent careers of such world saviors as Dionysus,
Osiris, Sabazius, Tammuz, Adonis, Atys, Orpheus, Mithras, Zoroaster, Krishna,
Bala-Rama, Vyasa, Buddha, Hercules, Sargon, Serapis, Horus, Marduk, Izdubar,
Witoba, Apollonius of Tyana, Yehoshua ben Pandira, and even Plato and
Pythagoras. It is also held in the face of the consideration that the body of
the material used in the ceremonial dramas performed by the hierophants in the
early Mystery Religions for 1200 years B.C. constitute by and large the series
of events narrated as the personal biography of the Galilean. It is worth
impressing on all minds that the legend of the historicity of the Gospels is
only to be held by ignoring the solid weight of such—and vastly
more—significant testimony. Instead of permitting its adherents to move in the
freedom of a spiritual interpretation, the ecclesiastical power is holding them
rigidly to a doctrinal meaning that is badly vitiated by literalism. In exalting
Jesus in unique magnificence, it lets the divinity in every man’s heart lie
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fallow. The deity that needs exaltation is that which is
struggling within the breasts of the sons of earth. Theological dogmatism fails
utterly to see the ultimate Pyrrhic nature of its victory. Jesus’ enthronement
is the disinheritance of common man. Taught to look outside ourselves for the
source of power and grace, we ignore the real presence within us that pleads for
closer recognition. The historical Jesus blocks the way to the spiritual Christ
in the chamber of the heart.
All Christian history would have been markedly different
had not the historical Jesus been interpolated into the spiritual drama. By this
diversion the aims of a true spiritual culture were sentimentally turned outward
to the worship of an extraneous but romantic impersonation. The consecrated
devotion of hundreds of millions of souls in Christendom for centuries, instead
of being focused upon the effort to nurse to life a Christly spirit within the
collective body of Western humanity, has been dissipated in almost total
fruitlessness upon the figure of an historicized myth. The present demoralized
state of civilization in countries most thoroughly saturated with Christian
doctrinism confirms the sorry truth of this statement. And the earlier Christian
history lends further corroboration in its record of bickering, heretical
persecution, violent warfare and ghastly crucifixions that sicken the heart. And
all this was perpetrated in the name of the personal Jesus! It could hardly have
been done in the name of the spiritual Christos.
If it be advanced in rebuttal that the example of the
historical Jesus has stood as a loadstone and beacon to inspire and attract the
hearts of millions of devotees, and that the contemplation of his excellency
will work a miracle of uplift in the believers’ nature, this but proves the
efficacy of psychology and not a fact of history. Ecclesiastical propaganda has
more than once produced psychological hysteria, as witness the Crusades and the
Inquisition. And religious hysteria has ever produced its marvels—stigmata,
speaking in tongues and healings. Every religious psychologization has run into
phenomena and sums its lists of “demonstrations.” It is folly to question
the psychological power of an example such as the pictured Jesus. Humans are
almost helpless in their tendency to ape some paragon. It was precisely because
mankind needed to be inspired to idealism that the formulators of the dramas in
the Mystery Rituals introduced the Messiah, the Sun-God, the Christos as the
central character of the piece. But he was there as ensampler and by no means as
substitute or scape-goat. Much as man-
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kind needs to be confronted by the constant presence of a
model of its own destined perfection, it needs far more the invincible knowledge
that divinity is its own inner possession.
To hold his place in mass reverence, Jesus had to be made
matchless, incomparable, unapproachable. No man dared stand beside him. But
overpowering splendour only twits and chides mediocrity. It reminds us of our
littleness. It leaves us gazing blankly, hopelessly. The higher the elevation of
Jesus, the vaster the gulf fixed between the ideal and the adorer. It clips the
wings of aspiration. The setting up of a figure of perfection outside is in part
psychologically hazardous. To approach him, to match his purity, is to reduce
his stature. He must be kept beyond compare, the ever-receding ideal.
Ancient psychology of religion worked on a different
principle. The motive to zeal was an ever-present possibility of attainment.
Numbers of the sages were men who had gained the sunlit summit. They thought it
not robbery to be equal with the god, for he was sent to call them into the
mount of fellowship.
To sense poignantly the degradation to which literal
caricature of spiritual knowledge has reduced theology, one needs but to point
to the picture of millions of votaries gazing into the physical heavens to find
God, where Laplace said that no telescope had ever located him, and searching
the map of Judea to localize the Christos, whose dwelling can be only in the
heart and conscience. And the Prince of Peace still awaits to be crowned the
King of Glory.
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