Who is this
King of Glory?
A Critical Study of the
Christos-Messiah Tradition
"What profit hath not that fable of Christ
brought us!"
—Pope Leo X
Alvin Boyd Kuhn
Electronically typed and edited by
Juan Schoch for educational research purposes. I can be contacted at
pc93@bellsouth.net. I will be greatly indebted to the individual who can put me
in touch with the Estate of Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn and/or any of the following
works:
The Mighty Symbol of the Horizon,
Nature as Symbol, The Tree of Knowledge, The Rebellion of the Angels, The Ark
and the Deluge, The True Meaning of Genesis, The Law of the Two Truths, At
Sixes and Sevens, Adam Old and New, The Real and the Actual, Immortality: Yes -
But How?, The Mummy Speaks at Last, Symbolism of the Four Elements, Through
Science to Religion, Creation in Six Days?, Rudolph Steiner's "Mystery of
Golgotha", Krishnamurti and Theosophy, A. B. Kuhn's graduation address at
Chambersburg Academy "The Lyre of Orpheus", A. B. Kuhn's unpublished
autobiography, Great Pan Returns.
To
THE MANY
THOUSANDS OF STU-
DENTS WHO ARE EARNESTLY
STRIVING TO RESTORE THE ANCIENT
ESOTERIC INTERPRETATION OF THE SCRIP-
TURES OF THE WORLD THIS WORK
IS SINCERELY DEDI-
CATED
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ix
I. FAITH WEDS FOLLY 1
II. MYTH TRUER THAN HISTORY 14
III. TRUTH WEARS A MASK 48
IV. WISDOM HAUNTS THE COUNTRYSIDE 80
V. FANCY’S FABRIC TURNS INTO HISTORY
90
VI. CANONIZED ROMANTICISM 129
VII. THROES OF A BAD CONSCIENCE 169
VIII. SUBLIME MYTH MAKES GROTESQUE
HISTORY 181
IX. FAITH’S ODD WONDERLAND 226
X. COSMIC MAJESTY WITH LOCAL ITEMS
248
XI. STAGGERING
XII. THE SHOUT OF PAUL’S SILENCE 276
XIII. ROBBING PAUL TO PAY PETER 301
XIV. A QUEEN DETHRONED 312
XV. A STAR--AND LUNA 332
XVI. AN EPOCHAL DISCOVERY 372
XVII. TRUTH EXORCISES DEMONIAC
OBSESSIONS 388
XVIII. THE ANOINTING OF MAN 401
XIX. LOST CYCLES OF THE SUN 419
XX. TWELVE LAMPS OF DEITY 432
XXI. ORION AND HIS DOG 457
XXII. OUR DAY-STAR RISES 469
INDEX 487
INTRODUCTION
The pick that struck the Rosetta Stone in the loamy soil of the
ix
rises from the dead past to charge
its ungenerous offspring with faithlessness and deceit. And Christianity, as
Edward Carpenter so frankly asserts, must now acknowledge its parentage in a
pagan past or, failing to do so, must perish.
The entire Christian Bible, creation
legend, descent into and exodus from "Egypt," ark and flood allegory,
Israelite "history," Hebrew prophecy and poetry, Gospels, Epistles
and Revelation imagery, all are now proven to have been the transmission
of ancient Egypt’s scrolls and papyri into the hands of later generations which
knew neither their true origin nor their fathomless meaning. Long after
There can be no question of this
necessity on its part. Almost alone one significant item enforces it. From the
scrolls of papyri five thousand to ten thousand years old there comes stalking
forth to view the whole story of an Egyptian Jesus raising from the dead an
Egyptian Lazarus at an Egyptian Bethany, with two Egyptian Maries present, the
non-historical prototype of the incident related (only) in John’s Gospel. From
the walls of the temple of Luxor, carved there at a date at least 1700 years
B.C., there faces Christianity a group of four scenes that spell the
non-historicity of four episodes purveyed as history in the Gospel’s recital of
the Christ nativity: the angel’s pronouncement to the shepherds tending their
flocks by night in the fields; the annunciation of the angel to the virgin; the
adoration of the infant by three Magi; and the nativity scene itself.
x
adored a Christ who had raised the
dead and healed the lame, halt, blind, paralytic, leprous and all afflicted,
who had restored speech to the dumb, exorcized demons from the possessed,
dispersed his enemies with a word or look, wrestled with his Satan adversary,
overcome all temptation and performed the works of his heavenly Father to the
victorious end. Egypt had long known a Jesus, Iusa, who had been born amid
celestial portents of an immaculate parenthood, circumcised, baptized, tempted,
glorified on the mount, persecuted, arrested, tried, condemned, crucified,
buried, resurrected and elevated to heaven.
But
The ineptitude of scholarly acumen
in the face of the mountainous evidence supplied by the study of comparative
religion, especially since the recovery of Chaldean and Egyptian antiquities,
surpasses all belief and flouts all conscience. It has been exhibited on so
colossal a scale, with consequences of the direst nature, that the question
whether ignorance or deliberate chicanery engineered the total suppression of
truth that has glared its overwhelming obviousness in the face of studentship,
inevitably rises to the foreground of thought. It must be assumed that both
ignorance and disingenuousness combined to produce the catastrophic result. A
thousand big and little items of comparative religion, many of them sufficient
in their single weight to
xi
clinch decisive determinations fatal
to Christian claims, conspire to erect a positively impregnable fortress of
proof of Christian errancy. This mass of data has been blithely ignored,
brazenly flouted, or damned with slighting notice, by the ecclesiastical regime
which would lose its easy hold on the masses by honest recognition of the
truth.
The lesson of European Renaissance
history has not been assimilated in its full import. Christian Europe, groping
in early Medieval darkness for centuries following the violent extinction of
Platonic Academies and schools of esoteric philosophy and religion, regained a
portion of the lost light in the fourteenth century when re-established contact
with Greek literature brought to light the long-buried works of classic
Hellenic wisdom. This recouping of cultural status went far to illuminate the
night of Christian gloom. But it can be seen now that it did not go far or deep
enough to effect a complete restoration of the full glory of ancient
intellectual brilliance.
The primary truth of human culture
which is presented by all sage religions of antiquity is the fact that there
resides deeply embedded in the core of man’s constitution a nucleus of what,
for want of a better designation, must be called a divine spark or sun. The
glow of Christliness--a thing at once both chemically radio-active and
intellectual--in us is indeed the hope of our glory. Modern science, through
the work of Dr. George W. Crile, late head of the Cleveland Medical
laboratories, has rediscovered what the ancient sages were familiar with--the
radiant SUN in man. "Every man," proclaimed the ancients and the
Medieval "Fire Philosophers," "has a little SUN within his own
breast." This sun is the Christ in man, a nucleus of fiery divine
spirit-energy. All the Christs in antiquity were denominated "Sun-
xii
Gods." The names of nearly all
of them are the immediate words for the sun, or epithets appropriate to the
solar orb. "All things are the products of one primordial Fire,"
assert the Chaldean Oracles. Life nucleates glowing centers of this fire
throughout the universe in the radiant cells of its physical body, which are
the suns. Every creature that his life shares a portion of this pervasive fire,
which is the rock of its hope for evolution to its greater glory.
The rock of human culture thus being
established as a fiery power within man’s own breast, Christianity becomes
chargeable with the most opprobrious of all possible accusations. It can be
indicted for the crime of being the only religion that in large measure
destroyed the force of man’s inspiration and incentive to cultivate this divine
solar light within his own bosom. It did this by diverting the direction of its
followers’ effort from the inner self-culture of a purely subjective
consciousness to the worship of the Christ as embodied in one man in history.
Granted that there is a powerful and effective psychology in the adoration of
an ideal model of perfection, the main issue here involved can never be dodged.
No matter how emotionally, how fanatically the worshipper pours out adoration
to a person in objective life, the work of his own evolution is not
accomplished until he effectuates the ultimate divinization of the nuclear
potentiality of deific fire within his own self-controlled area of
consciousness.
The balanced forces of human uplift
would be thrown into immediate chaos if it were in the end possible for a man
to achieve his apotheosization vicariously, or in any other way than through
his own effort. By virtue of the fact that man was provided from the start with
the presence of a unit of divine fire within the heart of his conscious being,
he was adequately equipped to fight his own way to the goal of glory. The only
treason of which religious devotion could become capable was the setting up of
a fetish outside the life of consciousness, which would divert a single
iota of resolute will from the
xiii
culture of the resident deity.
Christianity is the only religion in the civilized world that has perpetuated
this treason. The point is inexorably established by logical thought as well as
demonstrated by the historical sequel. The matter is beyond debate. By so much
as the exaltation of a personal Jesus has beguiled human devotion away from the
inner direction in the individual’s task of perfecting his own innate divinity,
by precisely that much has the outer presentation weakened the strength of
mortal struggle to the light. It is psychological, but it is mathematically
measurable. The amount measured is the item that ends all argument. If the
worship of a Judean carpenter has taken any time and absorbed any psychic
effort that could have been expended in the culture of divine graciousness
within the heart of humanity, it has by so much held back the evolution of the
race.
Christianity has taught its
adherents, so to say, to play around the fringes of the cultural problem
instead of bearing with all their psychic force directly upon its heart. It has
hypnotized their devotional mentality under the spell of a promise of
vicariousness which is itself subtly conducive to the weakening of the native
nobility of man’s true selfhood. It has made of its millions--what Nietzsche so
thoroughly detested--groveling beggars, reveling in the turpitude of
sin-confession and praying for God to have mercy on their unworthiness. It has
made them wretches pleading piteously to be saved. How it has ever been assumed
that a God of good sense would enjoy seeing his creatures, whom he has himself
divinely endowed with a portion of his own Mind, writhing in worm-of-the-dust
sycophancy at his feet, is beyond rational understanding. It is naturally to be
presumed that he would take far greater delight in seeing them standing up in
the might of their incipient divinity and making a fight of it. The morbid cast
of mentation generated in millions of Christians over sixteen centuries by the
doctrinal falsification of the esoteric meaning of "sin" is perhaps
the most lamentable spectacle presented to the world in all time. That a
religion could so far lose touch with sober sanity as to expect that it could
exalt and edify man’s spirit by grinding it down into the dust is evidence at
once of its complete divagation from basic sound truth.
It is a grave question whether the
ecclesiastical system and movement known as Christianity has any right to its
name. So far from being the cult that brought in a true Christ-worship for the
first time
xiv
in "heathen" darkness, it
was indeed--after the third century--the one system that destroyed such a true
worship. Ancient cults bent all effort upon the cultivation of the god within
man. This is the nucleus of the only true Christianity. In its genuine sense
there has been no Christianity in the Occident since that fatal third century.
Historical Christianity has substituted a personal fetish for the real
Christos, the inner Fire of Love. No matter how appealing the figure
substituted, it never can do the work of actual soul culture. And history has
sealed this verdict. It is almost certainly true that in no quarter of human
life has history so obviously and glaringly demonstrated the want of mankind’s
reliance upon the god instinct in the heart of the nations as has been
evidenced by the horrifying spectacle of inhumanity and animal savagery put on
display by the so-called Christianized nations. Christianity has never led the fight
for culture. On the contrary, it has hung like a drag-wheel on the car of real
cultural and scientific advance for many centuries. It has struck at every
pioneer in the progress of true culture. Its highest practical aim has rather
been to maintain an average level of decency in traditional forms of social
life. Much incidental good of course has emerged from an effort to which
millions of good people, in more or less ignorance of historic truth, have
consecrated their life’s devotion. But never has it been the single aim and
objective of the Christian ecclesiastical system to ground the aspirational
life of its devotees upon the one-pointed quickening of the Christ within all
hearts.
A fairly considerable number of
books have been written to defend the thesis of the non-historicity of Jesus,
George Brandes’ Jesus a Myth being a typical example. All of them have
advanced data of weight and validity. But none of them has presented the real
argument in the case. This springs from the material now available from ancient
xv
background of esoteric religionism.
The allegation that the publication of the Gospels can not be explained or accounted
for unless a great Teacher had lived whose life inspired their writing, must
give way before the understanding that their appearance was due to the
breakdown of esotericism, or the violent popular incursion into the secrecy of
esoteric polity, and the dragging forth of the arcane books and the dramas of
the occult spiritual life from the Mystery holy of holies.
A noted present-day clergyman in New
York City, the eminent Dr. John Haynes Holmes, has declared in a printed
sermon--Christianity’s Debt to Judaism; Why Not Acknowledge It?--that
Christianity drew its Founder from the Jewish people, along with five-sixths of
its Bible, the Hebrew Old Testament, as well as everything that the character
Jesus has spoken in the New Testament. Practically every word uttered by the
Christ figure in the Gospels is to be found in the Mishna, the Gemara, the
Talmud and the Hagadoth of the Jews, he asserted. But what now must be the
astonishment of the eminent minister to be confronted with the mountainous
evidence that all the material of both Christian and Hebrew systems has
emanated from ancient
It is a sign of the aberration in
religious thinking now prevailing that the presentation of the case for the
non-historic Christ will run afoul of many persons of general probity who, even
when measurably convinced that the Jesus story is a fable, as Pope Leo X so
glibly asserted, will still adhere to the persuasion that it is better to
suppress the bald and revolutionary truth and prolong the "beautiful
illusion" of the Christ’s personal existence. The original perpetration
and now the perpetuation of blank falsehood concerning the fact of Jesus’
existence is argued to be morally justifiable, even highly good, on the ground
that it has wrought a prodigious psychological and moral beneficence. But this
is, at bottom, to argue that Christianity can be better promoted by a lie than
by the truth. We are adjured by the holy scriptures of that same faith that our
only freedom comes from knowing the truth. While the world is hoping and
planning to establish the better course of its life upon four fundamental
freedoms, it might
xvi
be well to remind ourselves that in
a democracy there is a fifth freedom upon which the salutary influences of the
four and all other freedoms are dependent and contingent, and that is the
freedom of all to be put in possession of the truth, to the farthest limit of
its availability. In minor situations it often appears both judicious and
beneficent to withhold the truth. But the justification is always secondary to
larger objectives and temporary. Every situation must ultimately be resolved by
a facing of the truth. Final issues ever demand that life be met on its own
terms. The extensive concealment of historical truth at once argues something
unlovely and sinister. A great world faith, soliciting the loyalty of millions,
could offer no surer evidence of its integrity than an unbroken record of
instant eagerness to examine and accept every sincere presentment of the truth.
This work is given forth with no other motive than to present the available
evidence beating upon an issue of transcendent importance. In the hurly-burly
of human affairs truth is not always welcome or pleasant. That is
understandable. But far more vital is the understanding that it must be faced.
Our attitude toward truth-seeking is one of the supreme tests of our worthiness
to take on the responsibilities and enjoy the liberties of a democracy.
Lest it be assumed that the author’s
implied charges of dishonesty in Christian leadership spring from a personal
animosity against Christianity, he takes the liberty to insert here a few
sentences taken from a brief article in The New York Times of present
date (Nov. 29, 1943) reported from a sermon of the Rev. Bernard Iddings Bell,
eminent Episcopalian clergyman, preached in St. Paul’s Chapel of Columbia
University on Nov. 28. By inference Dr. Bell charges the Church with
dishonesty, and nobody believes that he does it from "spleen." He
said that present-day civilization "needs above all things a restored
humility and a renewed honesty in two high places--the universities and the
churches." "From kindergarten to the Ph.D. degree," he added,
"our educators help their students to run away from ultimate decisions. .
. . The universities have become resorts for the pursuit of instrumental tricks
rather than of fundamental and immutable truth. And then our educators, having
abdicated from their ancient and honorable post as keepers of the sanctities of
truth, cry out in their pride their all-sufficient greatness.
"The churches, too . . . make
of themselves pious clubs, daring not
xvii
to rebuke the brazen multitudes for
fear of loss of membership and money; and having sunk to the low estate of men
pleasers, insist they hold the future of mankind in their proud hands."
The sun of man can not be too long
beclouded with the fogs of hypocrisy and bigotry. Its mighty power will dispel
them in due season. A new day of its shining arises with the accidental stroke
of a soldier’s pick on a slab of stone.
xviii
Chapter I
FAITH
WEDS FOLLY
To the conscientious student who
will give to the matter sufficient time and reflection it becomes a conviction
that the most devastating cultural calamity that has befallen the human race in
all its history was the degradation of the esoteric spiritual purport of
ancient scripture into a debased literal and historical sense, entailing
centuries of mental benightedness and spiritual thwarting, that took place at
about the third century of the Christian era. And in this catastrophic
conversion of cosmography, evolutionary pictography and racial history over
into alleged factual occurrence, the single feature most signally fruitful of
age-long fatuity was the transformation of the dramatic figure of the Christos,
or divine essence of man’s nature, over into a historical person. It is not too
much to say that the withering wind of this distorted doctrine spread its
blight upon all sane comprehension of the sublime message of ancient sacred
literature over all the sixteen centuries since that fatal epoch. Indeed the
truth of the situation warrants the statement that the injection of a living
man into the spiritual drama in the place of the personified divine Ego in man
has held the rational mind of the Western world in the grip of the most arrant
superstition to be found in the history of civilized humanity. This work will
amass the data to support the sharp asseveration that this was the central item
in the entire debacle of theological systematism which then ensued and which
must be rated as the most tragic catastrophe in world history. The causes that
led to the fatal transference of character from the dramatic personification of
an element in human consciousness into an alleged man of historical
entification will be the central theme of this essay. To what inadequate degree
the iniquitous consequences of the blunder can be seen and delineated, these
will be dealt with in the unfoldment. But the task involves little less than
the penetrating analysis of all ancient sacred writ, and the amassing of a vast
array of factual data and basic argument in support of the momentous
conclusions adduced in the sequel.
1
The power of tradition, and more
especially religious tradition indoctrinated in the childhood of many
generations, is so overwhelming that the effort of this work to clarify the
status of the great doctrine of divine Messiahship in ancient scripture will
almost certainly be received with the cry of blasphemy from the shocked
partisans of orthodoxy. All the obloquy that has been concentrated in the word
"Anti-Christ" will be flung upon the undertaking. For this reason it
is desirable to state at the outset that, on the contrary, the task is
motivated by the highest possible reverence for the Christ ideal as the core of
all religious culture. So far from being an attempt to devastate the benignant
efficacy of the role of the Christ in religious practique, it is expressly the
aim of the study to establish that efficacy upon its true psychological bases.
This purpose entails the revelation of the true in place of the false grounds
of the claim of the Christ ideal upon our reverence. Instead of being a vicious
attack upon the sanctified name and function of Christhood, it is directly an
effort to redeem that name and function from centuries of impious desecration
that should have been seen all along as the real grounds for horrified
indignation. When rightly viewed in relation to all the facts in the case, it
must be conceded that the justification for resentment at a real sacrilege
against the Sonship of God weighs heavily on the side of the book, and is not
on the side of the inevitable hue and cry of violent condemnation that will
greet it. In the face of this anticipated raucous chorus of vilification of the
book’s aim and intent there is hurled the forthright declaration that this is
an utterly sincere and consecrated attempt to rescue the sacred name of the
Christ from an ignominy already heaped upon it over long centuries. There is
abundant warrant for asserting the righteous character of the motive on the
ground of its aim to redeem the conception of Christhood from the incredible
error and falsification that have befouled it for ages. As Socrates and Plato
so thoroughly demonstrated by a masterly dialectic, the only source of evil in
connection with anything is the failure to grasp its true status and function
in a perfect balance between excess and deficiency. Nothing is good, say these
two profound thinkers, unless its basic raison d’être is clearly
apprehended and its use fulfilled in exactly balanced proportion. The record of
historical frightfulness that has emerged into actuality over many centuries
because of the unbelievable miscarriage of the first true conception of the
character and office of the
2
Messiah is overwhelming
justification of a sincere effort to remold the mistaken view to its original
truth and beauty. In final curt statement the high intent of this work is to
end the sway of an entirely false and stultifying idea of the nature of the
Christ and inaugurate the dominance of the only conception that truly honors
it. The thesis, then, is to demonstrate that the Christ was a grade of
distinctly divine consciousness that is coming gradually into rulership in
humanity, and being this, it was nothing else. It was not a man.
Just as the conception of the
Biblical Adam as man, generic, is a true envisagement of the meaning of
the term and yields intelligible significance in exegesis of ancient scripts,
but becomes both ridiculous and unintelligible when taken to mean "a man,"
so with the Christos. The conception of the Christ as man in his divine
genius, or the God in man, opens at once the whole of scripture to lucid
and consistent intelligibility. It is indeed the "key" to any true
grasp of the whole sense of that revered body of primeval literature. But the
instant the concept is shifted from man divine to a divine man in an
historical personage, dire confusion, entanglement in contradiction, ridiculous
inconsistency and the eeriest "historical" nonsense are thrust into
the structure. The concept of the Christos as the godly higher Self in man
meets the tangled riddle of the exegesis of the Bibles with complete
satisfaction of every intellectual demand, and no other concept does so. The
concept of Christ as a man immediately afflicts the entire exegetical
situation with hopeless sabotage. Used as the "key," it jams the lock
and opens nothing to the reasoning intelligence. But it does open something to
the unreasoning psychic and emotional aptitudes of less intelligent folk: the
hypnotic gullibility of religious piety and a pitiable slavery to religious
superstition. And the quantity of the tragedy wrought in the world by the
prevalence of these two psychological forces makes perhaps the most lugubrious
chapter in human history.
The concept of the Christ as "a
man," who ate, drank, slept, walked and spoke as any mortal, is beyond any
possibility of refutation the most fatuous ideation that ever found a place in
the effort to rationalize human religious experience. No less has it been at
the same time the most baneful influence in blocking the cultural enterprise of
grasping the central power and fullest unction of that experience. Here again
the truth of the situation runs in a direction exactly counter
3
to that commonly believed. Pious
orthodox opinion is wholly aligned to the idea that the historical Jesus is the
most positive assurance of the individual Christian’s salvation and the active
agent of its realization. This work ventures, doubtless for the first time in
religious discussion, to fly directly in the face of that presumption with the
claim that it is this very idea of the Christ as a historical person that has
stood as the most concrete obstacle in the way of that salvation! The whole
essay must be taken as the evidence advanced in support of that amazing
reversal of all accepted belief. The basis of this strong contention will be
the undeniable fact that the thesis of the historical Jesus has taken the mind
and aspiration of all devotees outside themselves to an alleged man of
4
trophe? Failure in religion’s
practical effort is certain to follow as long as a meaningless worship is paid
out to the divinity alleged to be embodied in one single historical savior,
while the principle of divine mind within the self is left totally
uncultivated. Granting some psychological virtue to the adoration of a
historical paragon, it is still admitted in all religious discussion that men
can be saved in the end only by their own righteousness. No world savior was ever
sent into the world to save men from the task of saving themselves. Ever
memorable and oft quoted are the lines of Angelus Silesius, Medieval mystic:
Though Christ a thousand times in
But not within thyself, thy soul
shall be forlorn;
The cross on
Unless within thyself it be set up
again.
If any actual vicarious atonement or
salvation were possible, the whole purpose for which souls from the celestial
empyrean migrate to earth to further their evolution would be thwarted. Each
soul must become the dynamo and citadel of its own strength, or there would be
inequity and chaos in the counsels of evolution. Life grants nothing to any
unit of being that it has not earned. To do so would be to introduce favoritism
and particularity into the universal economy. The importance of this argument
merits a fuller consideration, and additional treatment of it will enter the
study later on.
The enormous fatuity of the concept
of humanity’s Savior as a man must be examined in the light of a more
candid scrutiny than any to which it has heretofore been subjected. Indeed one
of the bases of quarrel with it is the very fact of its having been accepted
without either psychological or historical critique of a thoroughgoing kind.
The closer and more keenly one brings reason and data to bear upon the matter
the more clearly it is seen that the very vogue and sway of the idea has been
made possible only through the almost total default of the rational faculty and
its displacement by sheer unction of faith. It is perhaps the most notable
example and instance of the power of the psychological elements of mystical
pietism to override and paralyze the rational elements in religion. For at any
time in many centuries it needed only a half minute’s cool and steady facing of
the realities of the situation to bring to view in the sharpest of
5
outlines the utter irrationality of
the presupposition that the power able to redeem human weakness to godlike
status could be embodied and expressed, wielded and effectuated to its grand
purpose, in the person of a man. The sheer thought that the savior of
mankind from evolutionary undevelopment to perfection could be a man, or
a power, no matter how divine, lodged in the body of a man in history,
is such an anomaly, so out of line with all known natural process, that merely
to pose the idea to the mind and hold it steadfastly there in the light of all
its ancillary implications, is to see it for what it is--an utterly baseless
creation of distorted religious fantasy. Merely to face the thought that the
whole evolutionary advance of mankind across the gulf of undeveloped capacities
from animal through human to divine nature was alleged to be effectuated and
instrumentalized by the forces embodied in a single man at a given date in
history, is to see the notion in all the glaring baldness of its inherent
absurdity. The human mind can readily enough envisage as a modus consonant with
reality the elevation of humanity from brute to philosopher, from savagery to
Christhood, through the injection from without or the regeneration from within
of a light and power to change base selfishness to divine charity, and thus
redeem the race. But it can contemplate this process as operative only through
the sweep of an influence which pervades the mass of mankind, animating all
hearts and enlightening all minds, after the natural analogy of a little leaven
raising the whole lump. That is a methodology which the human mind can grasp
and accredit as harmonious with veritude. But that this vast regeneration of
the race should be implemented by and dependent upon the birth and existence of
a single historic individual, even through the inspiration of his resplendent
example, is a concept that grows more weird, crass and chimerical the longer it
is held in the focus of thought. It has in fact held its grip upon millions of
minds solely by virtue of the total dearth of intellectual candor and the
mental paralysis induced by rabid elements of emotional religiosity. It can not
for a moment bear the light of reason. It can live only in the dim twilight of
intellectual stultification wherein the clear outlines of the rational problem
can not be distinctly discerned.
There is indeed a natural revolt in
the character of all normal men and women against the thought of their
accepting salvation purchased for them by another, the more so if the price of
the ransom is for the
6
vicar pain and suffering. What
person of wholesome instincts wants to be saved by the sacrifice and oblation
of another free being? Who that has the slightest iota of moral integrity would
wish to live under the obligation of indebtedness for his evolutionary
redemption to the sacrifice of another? Mankind cherishes a natural sense of
the moral turpitude of taking what one has not won. It introduces whim into the
normal order wherein man looks confidently for the reign of law. It is
repugnant to man’s inherent sense of right. Vicarious salvation was one of the
items of theology that led Nietzsche to cry out his bitter denunciation of
Christianity as "slave morality." Not merely the superman, but any
man worthy of the name wants to face life and nature on their own terms and
with his own resources, and will hold in contempt the man or faith that accepts
the boon of salvation in the spirit of a craven. The purchase of man’s
redemption by the "shed blood of Christ," in the literal sense in
which it stands as a doctrine of Christianity, is indeed one of the heaviest
marks of Christianity’s doctrinal degradation. (Happily it can be made
rationally acceptable, as can all other doctrines, through a restoration of the
true esoteric significance.) The learned Celsus in the third century tells us
that Christianity appealed to and welcomed only the slaves of Roman tyranny,
men and women of the most abject position. It was held in the lowest contempt
by Pliny, Seneca, Tacitus, Suetonius and the more intelligent groups generally.
It was rejected by all who were genuine enough to despise the self-confessed
ignominy of letting a historical scapegoat bear the burden of achieving their
karmic immunity. The gross teaching of an ersatz salvation of man, the
race’s restoration to its lost
7
All this irrational thesis was held
for centuries in spite of the total dearth of any logical answer to the difficulties
involved in the practical problem as to how the divinity historically embodied
in one person could become and remain effectual for the evolutionary
divinization of all the other children of humanity. Jesus might be in himself a
mighty reservoir of divine essence, a veritable dynamo of godly unction. But
how it was to be made available for all other men, how transferred from him to
a distribution amongst all others, by what transmission wires or channels it
was to pass from him into the lives of those "believing on him," on
what conditions it was to be received by some and denied to others, or what
pleas, prayers, sacrifices or cajolery were necessary to draw it forth from
him,--all these elements of the practical or factual operation of Jesus’ saving
grace to deify all men have never had an answer. And they can never have a
rational answer. The groundplan and framework of Christian theology has ever
had an artificiality that has rendered it a weird and fantastic thing in all
conscientious effort at rationale. The spectacle of an omnipotent creator of
all the worlds setting a trap to catch his own creatures by tempting them to
sin, then condemning them to eternal misery in consequence of their inevitable
"fall," and afterwards negotiating with them to appease his wrath on
condition that his own Son, only begotten, consent to die in their stead, has
stood for sixteen centuries as the rock foundation of that religion which
shouts down all others with its vociferous claims to all-highest excellence
among the faiths of earth. Through the force of the wholly unaccountable
magnanimity of the man Christ in sacrificing himself to save a reprobate
humanity, the minds of the countless millions of Christian devotees over the
centuries since his "death" may have been, as the hymn sings,
Lost in wonder, love and praise.
But it is even more certain that
they have been hopelessly lost in total incomprehension. Forced to swallow it
by the overwhelming combination of ecclesiastical authority and unreasoning
faith, they have yet been nearly choked by its unpalatability.
It is probably the opinion of
millions of votaries of the atoning blood of Christ the man, that his saving
grace has been made accessible to them, distributed to them, by his
still-living active presence and his personal attention to their lives
individually. Granting the continued
8
existence of his individual
personality after these two thousand years on some "spiritual" plane
of being assumedly in touch with earthly affairs, there must be faced the infinitely
complex problem of explaining how the consciousness of one man is able to give
attention to the multitudinous details in the lives of millions of mortals at
every moment of every day without cessation; how he is able to read the
conscious content of innumerable minds and hearts with particularity and
accuracy and adopt appropriate measures of spiritual strategy to answer the
spoken and unbroken prayers of all these; how, in short, he is able to be a
very present help in trouble in millions of complex situations all the time,
and act in relation to all of them with impeccable accuracy and unfailing
justice. Blind zealotry blots out this problem from the uncritical minds of the
masses and priestcraft is warily content to let the dangerous dog lie asleep.
It is not made the subject of debate. But if occasionally a hint of the dilemma
is ventured, such a minor obstacle to piety is swept lightly aside with the
ever-handy reminder to such intellectual temerity that with God all things are
possible, and with the only-begotten Son of God no less. Surely the almighty
hand of Supreme Deity could manage a trifling difficulty of the sort, and at
any rate
God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform.
To minds submerged in the aura of
miracle and overborne by pious authority and sacerdotal glamor, all things in a
mysterious theology were made palatable. Jesus’ pronouncement that "thy
faith hath made thee whole" and his assurance that by faith we can move
mountains into the sea had paved the way for the triumphant march of religious
gullibility and the obscuration of reason. It is granted that we must have
faith where we do not yet have knowledge. What else can a dependent mortal
creature do but have faith in the beneficence of the universe? But a
universal Power that is itself an all-embracing intelligence would not ask its
creatures, who are destined to embody all degrees of that same intelligence, to
hold to any specific formulations of faith the substance of which contravenes
our reason and the regular courses of natural law. Our faith must rest upon and
be supported by the inviolability of law and not take its stand upon any
fantastic scheme that flouts what we do know and sets at odds all our reason-
9
ing faculties. With either flaming
zealotry or stolid indifference holding the critical faculty of the masses in
abeyance, and occasional outbreak of rational inquiry smitten down with
vengeful violence, the problem of how the man Jesus, dead ages ago, could still
be the divine guest in billions of human hearts all at once and all the time,
was held in leash.
Again, it is undoubtedly the thought
of hosts of minds adjusted to miraculous possibilities of many sorts that
Jesus’ still-potent spirit was detached from the limitations of his personality
or even his earthly mind and, continuing to float about in some form of a
ubiquitous presence like a permeating atmosphere, functions with a sort of
automatism like air rushing in, wherever there is a spiritual vacuum or
spiritual pressure. It is conceived that somehow that mind which St. Paul
adjures us to let "be in" us as it was also in Christ Jesus pervades
the world like a stratosphere and is there for us to register and lay hold of
after the fashion of tuning in spiritually with the proper wave-length. But how
the efficacy of such a vibrational force could be linked with and still
dependent upon the personal Jesus of history, is in no way apparent or
explainable. There is no necessary or factual connection. Divine consciousness
or grades or rates of it may indeed conceivably be about us, bathing us in the
universal aura of their supernal vibrations. But that any of them should have
derived their origin and their present presence and operation from a man in
history is again a matter that asks for our acceptance of a wholly irrational
theological dictum.
This general notion receives some
support from Jesus’ own assurance that when he left earth he would send the
Paraclete, the Comforter, who would guide us into all truth and be the
ever-solicitous monitor at our elbow. But all that this does is simply to
rename the ubiquitous influence. It transfers the generative power from the
personal Jesus to an impersonal principle. The new divine comforter must
distribute his consciousness over as much ground as the personal mind of the
risen Jesus would have to cover. Strangely enough one of the very phrases which
the Greek theologians of the ancient philosophical religion used to picture the
pervasive scope and functioning of a divine element in humanity was that
"the gods distribute divinity." But this was in reference to the
distribution of a seed fragment of God’s infinite and universal mind to every
creature according to its
10
rank in evolution. The presence of
potential divinity distributively in all levels of life is not a crotchety but
a quite reasonable and natural procedure. It is indeed one of the great
features in the early philosophies that gave form to basic Christianity. It is
readily conceivable that a type or degree of supernal mind or consciousness
does pervade the universe, an ethereal essence, so to say, of which evolving
entities such as man can partake through the development of a receptive
capacity in their own brain and nerve mechanism. To make God’s infinite
largesse available to man some such method of impartation on the one hand and
appropriation on the other must be conceived as provided by the Oversoul of the
world. But this is not the problem that is crucial to the tenability of the
idea of a historical Jesus carrying out the part assigned to him in theology.
He is there alleged to fulfill the function of saving millions of souls through
his individual agency both during his life and for thousands of years after his
death. If to substantiate the still operative power of Jesus Christ when he is
no longer living, recourse must be had to the hypostatization of his personal
mind as a universally pervasive cosmic atmosphere, the entire force of the
method of explanation goes to weaken still further the claim for his historic
personal existence and to strengthen that for his purely spiritual nature. It
is not conceivable that the mind of one personal human being could reach and
save billions of mortals. Therefore, to postulate a conceivable method by which
such a mind could administer salvation to myriads in all ages, that mind must
be released from any attachment to personality and characterized anew as a
cosmic mental emanation or diffusion of mental substance. This deduction from
the premises at once erases the personal Jesus from the picture of theology, if
not in his life, then certainly from the moment of his death. If to render his
mind operable for salvation its connection with his personality must be
severed, then its connection with any personality is seen to be a clearly
unnecessary, indeed impossible requirement. And this brings us face to face
with the final outcome of this argument, which is that that mind which was in
Christ Jesus would have existed, has existed and does exist, entirely
independently of the fact or the question of any man’s historical presence on
earth. For no more did Jesus originate that mind than does the radio mechanism
originate the sonata that it renders in your room. Any man can catch it, as
does the radio, from an omnipresent univer-
11
sal vibration, register it and give
it expression on this plane of being. The vibration-wave of the sonata is in
your room whether there is a radio present to reproduce it on the plane of your
senses or not. The Christ consciousness was present as a cosmic outflow of
divine thought energization, whether or not any man of requisite organic
sensitivity lived to become its tubes and amplifier. The best that can be done
for Jesus’ uniqueness in this purview is to assume that perhaps he was the
first man in history (if he lived) who was equal to making that register and
that expression. But such a claim is bizarre from the first instant. It would
have to rest on pure conjecture and assumption. And against it would be arrayed
a host of vital considerations, such as that research now discloses that all the
highest and truest sermons he allegedly preached to found a saving religion had
been uttered by sage men centuries before him. If his message was the first
release of the wisdom of supernal divine mind to humanity, it should have
towered in grandeur and beauty to immeasurable height above anything taught
antecedently. Organized ecclesiasticism has been bold enough for centuries to
flaunt this legend before its following. But the discovery of the Rosetta Stone
and the Behistun Rock has put an entirely new complexion on the study of
comparative religion, opening up whole vast areas of ancient literature from
which it is seen that Christianity itself drew the body of its material. The
disconcerting result of all this for the Christian position is that it definitely
refutes the claims as to Jesus’ founding the first true religion and, far to
the contrary, thrusts upon the apologists for these claims the difficult task
of defending this sole emissary of deity to earth against the charge of
wholesale literary plagiarism! If when he came to uplift humanity with a
shining spirituality never before dreamed of, the best he could do was to
repeat the sagas of early Greek, Chaldean, Persian, Hindu, Chinese and
especially Egyptian wisdom, on what does the claim for his supreme uniqueness
and matchless exaltation rest?
Then, of course, there is that other
predicament arising from the egregious claims of the Christian party, which,
had it ever been frankly faced by ecclesiasticism, would have left the
Occidental world in better situation. It is the matter of God’s leaving the
world prior to the year thirty-three or thereabouts without any chance to be
saved by appropriating the mind of Christ. That the mere opportunity for the
operation in humanity’s evolution of the saving principle of God’s
12
grace should have been held off until the birth of
a babe in
Late in time behold him come,
Offspring of the Virgin’s womb.
It is of course an absurd idea that
the road to human elevation was not opened until the man-Christ, Jesus, landed
on the planet at a late epoch in the race’s career. This is one of many twists
and quirks which Christian dogma has asked its votaries to accept, to the
dislocation of their rational mentality.
13
Chapter II
MYTH
TRUER THAN HISTORY
It would seem to remove the
discussion from the province of rational dialectic and throw it into the field
of abnormal and precarious psychic phenomenalism to introduce an argument that
has been frequently advanced by a number of people that is by no means
inconsiderable. It must, however, be given a place in the debate if only for
the reason that it arises from a special type of experience that appears to be
actual among a surprising number of people who are at any rate sincere in their
report and interpretation of it. It falls in a domain of psychology that has
for the most part been shunned by academic investigation, its phenomena being
commonly rated as abnormal, eccentric and unauthentic, categorized in fact as
mostly self-delusion or hallucination. It has lately received some open
countenance from scholastic authority and has been admitted to the field of
legitimate study under the name of parapsychology. It may be better recognized
under the designation of psychic phenomena. At any rate the phenomenon in
question has been presented by many persons in modern religious groups of
spiritistic character as a real experience of themselves or others testifying
to them, and such is the veridical and empirical nature of the occurrence that
for them it settles the entire debate categorically and summarily. The
arguments based on it sway the attitude of thousands on the theme of this work
and it therefore merits presentation and critique.
The point is advanced by mediums,
psychics, clairvoyants and sensitives, to the effect that they can testify
directly to the fact of Jesus’ historical existence because, forsooth, they
have seen him and talked with him, in inner vision! His personality is not a
matter of doubt or speculation, because he has appeared to them in his shining
form! They have seen him as
14
This phenomenal experience, commoner
than is generally supposed, must, however, be subjected to a critical scrutiny
that it apparently has not hitherto received. This is the more desirable
because these reports of the appearance of a radiant personage to the inner
sight of many people are both too voluminous and seem too sincerely founded to
be thrust aside with the cry of hallucination. As evidently veridical psychic
phenomena they prove an interesting theme in themselves. It seems to be
necessary to concede that visions of the sort are actually seen. The shining
apparition seems to these seers to be present in reality. Whatever it may truly
be and however to be explained, it is evidently actually seen. The point at
issue for our discussion is not the veritude of the experience or the veracity
of the psychics; but what the thing proves. The critique is not directed at the
fact, but at its interpretation. The position taken is that such apparitions
present no necessary or valid evidence for the existence of the Gospel Jesus in
The identity of the personage of
light in the radiant vision can not be other than a matter of presumption. Upon
asking any of those who have "seen Jesus" in their subjective world
how they have identified their spiritual visitant with the man of
Looking first at the latter, the
"varieties of religious experience" include a wide range of
phenomenalistic susceptibility. Old men have dreamed dreams and young men have
seen visions. Saints have had rapturous exaltations, seers have beheld
apocalypses and mystics have been wafted aloft in ecstasies. These experiences
have abounded in
15
great multiplicity, variety and
profusion--unless the record is one long train of fiction and falsity, delirium
and delusion. There is Joan d’Arc, there is Swedenborg, there is Madame Guyon
and a legion of others. Modern students of this side of psychology assert that
a thought is in reality a shaped figure in the mental ether; and assert that if
thousands of people hold the same picture of such a person as the Christ in
mind with great intensity and devotion for a continued period, the thought-form
will become reified, hypostatized or substantialized to the extent that it will
drift into the mental purview of psychic sensitives and be seen and mistaken
for a veridical appearance. Modern psychology might catalogue it as an entification
of the unconscious or subconscious object of much devotion. There are strange
and uncanny possibilities in nature’s bag of tricks. There are denizens in more
worlds than the solid physical. It seems evident that many people have seen a
personage of luminous tenuousness in their subjective world. But all proof is
wanting that their testimony as to the identity of the apparition has any
validity.
There is no field in which people
generally are more gullible than in that of religion. Nowhere else are the bars
of the critical judgment so quickly and completely let down for the entry of
superstition, the supernatural, miracle, magic and marvel. Indeed no Christly
claimant would be accredited unless he could do "mighty works" to awe
the multitudes. If he can not heal the sick and raise the dead he is no Christ.
But the impotence to which these tendencies reduce the reasoning faculty in
devotees is perhaps nowhere better seen than in the situation here portrayed.
These psychics testify unhesitatingly and with total conviction that the figure
of light they have seen is the still-living Jesus of Nazareth, without a
moment’s pause to reflect that no one can identify a figure seen now with
another person never seen at all! Identification can function only on the basis
of previous knowledge or acquaintance. No one can identify the figure seen in a
vision with the historical Jesus. The assumption that they can do so is
ridiculous. Logic rules it out. Their claim that the figure is that of Jesus is
based on pious assumption and can be nothing but sheer guess. The eyes can not
identify the appearance of a person unless the eyes have seen him before, or
his photograph or likeness. The figure seen matches the popularly conceived
appearance of Jesus, and Jesus is the only historical person they can think to
call it.
16
The claim that the apparition
resembles the pictures of Jesus in books and prints is the weakest item in the
"identification." In fact it reduces the entire claim to blank folly.
In spite of gratuitous assertions of the existence of portraits of the
Galilean, assuredly there has never been an authentic picture of the man, even
if he lived. How can the apparitional Jesus look like his portraits when there
were no portraits? If even in hallucination the visionary Jesus does resemble
the conventional portrayals, we may have before us here an interesting
psychological phenomenon. For the fact would seem to lend some support to the
"occult" theory that the general communal thought-picture of Jesus,
based on the customary portraits seen for centuries, has actually entified a
spiritual thought-formation of the man in the image of his published
likenesses. The allegation of pictorial resemblance is final proof of the
purely subjective character of the visions and their inadmissibility as
testimony in the case. What they give evidence of is some extraordinary
capacities of the human psyche, not remote past history. The proof of
connection between present subjective event in these cases and past objective
event is totally wanting. The phenomena manifest in this realm are far too
uncertain, undependable, even dangerous, for the practical uses of life. As a
final observation on the point, one is permitted to express a robust doubt
whether, if the living spiritual counterpart of some other ancient personage,
unknown and unpictured through the centuries, should present itself before the
inner gaze of these psychics, they would have any ability or means of
identifying the specter. Could they identify, say, Apollonius of Tyana?
There is, however, another
consideration that falls within the realm of psychology which has far more
direct pertinence to the great question. The inquiry faces the task of
evaluating the psychological influence and spiritual or cultural
serviceableness of the idea of the personal Jesus as against the conception
that makes "him" to be a high type of universal consciousness or
principle. The defense of the historical point of view invariably lays vast
store upon the claim that any vital religion, at any rate Christianity, could
never have generated effective psychological dynamism among millions of
followers if based only upon the characterization of the Christos as sheer
principle. It required the living Jesus to generate in the Christian movement
the driving power that it has become. Jesus must have lived, is the
argu-
17
ment, if only because such a life in
actuality was necessary to give the religion based on it just that vital
psychological reinforcement that it has manifested. He must have lived because
it can be shown that it was most eminently desirable, from a psychological
point of view, that he should have lived. The conception of Christ as principle
could never have developed enough dynamic force or fervor to have enabled
Christianity, so to say, to effectuate itself.
It must be stated that the outcome
of this phase of the argument can have no direct evidential bearing upon the
question of the historicity of the Christ. To prove that his existence was
highly desirable does not prove that it was a fact. But the point is given a
quite extraordinary importance in the debate, and this not without reason. It
strikes close to the central nerve of the whole Christian system. That system
bases its unique efficacy upon the claim that it alone of religions offers to
believers a living God. The only time God ever came to earth in person, he
outlined for humanity its true religion, the Christian. By many people this
point of the psychological power of the historical Christ is maneuvered into
the place of central importance in the whole discussion. They urge the claim
that the Christ was sent into personal embodiment for the express purpose of
providing mankind with one historical example of divine perfection, and assert
that the whole argument stands or falls with the question of the psychological
value of his example. Such an example was necessary to effectuate the religious
salvation of the world. Jesus must have lived because such an ensampler was a
psychological necessity. God had to send his Son in answer to this inherent
need. It would be unthinkable that such a need would not have been
providentially met. Therefore Jesus did live. The broad prevalence and strength
of this position calls for an exhaustive critique.
It can be conceded at the outset
that in the effort of a divine hierarchy of overlords to humanize and
eventually divinize an animal-born race, the advantage of the employment of a
living example would be evident. God or his hierarchical agents, archangels,
demi-gods, heroes, divine men, could not but be fully aware of the powerful
force and virtue of a concrete example of perfection set before the eyes of
mankind. It would both quicken and stabilize the general human inclination to
strive after the ideal. It would give solid and constructive form to that
aspiration by focusing its drive upon a spe-
18
cific set of ideal characteristics
embodied and manifested in the exemplar. It would thus prevent the waste of
infinite quantities of devotional force spent in direction toward ill-defined
goals. The great divine man would stand before the world and lure all men unto
him by the attractive power of his shining beauty. No other impartation of
inspiration from God to man could make its salutary influence so effectively
fruitful of constant good stimulus. A divine model of perfection would uplift
the world through the magnetically moving force of his example. The gods must
know that humanity is psychologically set and disposed to ape a paragon. The
dynamic moral power of an embodied ideal is ever great. This psychological
disposition well prepared the stage for the presentation to the world of its
ideal hero, the Christos.
The gods did know that man would
ape the divine paragon, and they did present the hero, the great sunlit figure
of Christos, in every religion of antiquity.
With the keenest incisiveness it
must be contended, as perhaps the prime spiritual motive of this study, that
the argument based on the psychological beneficence of a divine ensampler for
the human race falls out in favor of the non-historicity, and not, as almost
unanimously believed, of the historicity. This astounding assertion must be
vindicated against the general mass of contrary opinion.
If all other things were equal,
naturally the impressive force of an ideal of perfection embodied in a living
man would be conceded to be more effective for character in the lives of
devotees than would the same paragon depicted only in the figure of a drama. A
life lived on the same terms as our own would emotionally impress all mortals
more powerfully than would any fictional representation. But all other things
are not equal in the case of the Christ. There are elements in the theological
situation environing the figure of the Gospel Jesus that make the difference
between the two quite abysmal.
The first great divergence is in the
fact that theology has made of the historical divine man the only possible such
figure in the human record. Jesus is in the religion that exploited him the only-begotten
Son of God. He is the only embodiment of the Father’s glory and cosmic presence
ever manifested in human form. He is totally unique and lonely. No man can
match his perfection.
This fact of his solitary uniqueness
at once destroys whatever psy-
19
chological value his incarnation in
a man of flesh might otherwise have. It defeats the very purpose for which an
ensampler is designed--the effective working of the lure of his perfection
under the force of the assurance that by striving the aspirant may achieve
identity or equality with the ideal one. If it is published beforehand that the
worshipped Personage is the unattainable and forever unapproachable Ideal, the
springs of devotion and zeal are dried up at their very source. Why strive, why
aspire, why copy, if it is to be all in vain? The glistening paragon becomes
only a romantic ideal, the more radiant and bright-hued because of its eternal
remoteness and inaccessibility. It is placed there only for mortals to gaze and
gape at in awe and marvel. But it is rendered useless for the very thing
claimed as the strength of the argument from psychology, the inspirational
power of the life lived to be a moving example for us. The manipulators of the
psychological factors in the ecclesiastical enterprise, in straining to assure
the Christly figure of perennial reverence and worship of the romantic sort by
placing him on an inimitable level of perfection and uniqueness, unwittingly
sacrificed the very element in the psychological situation that it was most
ardently hoped to gain by the procedure. To keep him secure in his lofty place
of adoration they weakened the force of his ability to stimulate emulation. He
is the stainless One, incapable of sin; men are doomed sinners, who must in
craven fashion plead with him for salvation from innate degeneracy. Thus the
luminous picture of the mighty paragon has not worked out, and can not work
out, as a triumphant force designed to elevate character by the cogency of its
living reality. It has in fact operated directly to defeat that effect. It has
left men facing a hopeless effort and turning from resolute zeal for attainment
to sunken morbidity expressed in the conventional theological ideas of sin and
its dog, remorse. Before the Ideal the eyes of sinning man have been lowered to
the ground with sense of unworthiness and self-depreciation; they have not been
lifted up to face the revealed divinity as the possibility of man’s own
accomplishment. Before the figure of the man-Christ man has made himself
abject, groveling in unmanly beggarliness before the unbearable glory of the One
who stands clothed in unattainable majesty.
The psychological influence of this
only-begotten manifestation is further decisively emasculated by the
accompanying theological doc-
20
trine that this one epiphany of
God’s nature was not a man of our own earthly evolution, but came directly from
the hand of supreme Deity, a product of divine fiat from another world. Though
frequently emphasis is laid upon his community of nature with us, still he is
exotic, a transplantation from the empyrean. He did not need to go through the
long evolutionary gateway of our humanity, but was already a citizen of the
cosmos, a dweller with God before the worlds were, existent before Abraham was.
Though so high, he yet condescended, abased himself, to become for a generation
one among us, sharing our immature nature without yielding to its seductions.
He had not come up the long road of development from unicell or moneron to man,
but came down from the skies full-panoplied in cosmic resplendence, to lay for
the time being his glory mildly by, as the Christmas hymn has it. His coming
was not an act of common brotherhood of a creature kindred with us, but a
condescension and a gratuity, arbitrary in cosmic counsels and unrelated to
natural contingency. He was a pure gift from the Gods. The Father’s whim and
his own munificent spirit of self-sacrifice brought him here. The merit was
his; ours the unmerited benefit. So again the alleged great psychological
efficacy of his exemplary life is annulled by the strangeness and vast remoteness
of his nature from our own. He is no brother but a distant ambassador who
deigns to visit us for a season and labor with us, but can not abide with us
forever. He must in a moment return to the celestial palace, sending a
substitute to remind us of his one charming sojourn with us.
But the crux of the debate on the
psychological efficacy of a paragon is not reached until the matter is
approached from the side of the great question of the relative potency of two
forces, one operative from without the subject, the other from within. This
crucial point of discussion must be given thorough treatment. Though it is not
critical or decisive for the question of Christ historicity, it looms as
perhaps the most portentous phase of the entire survey. It is not too sweeping
an assertion to aver that the whole psychological beneficence of religion
stands or falls with the outcome of the discussion of the historicity of the
Messiah. It stands if the world savior be proven an element, a divine leaven,
within the soul and conscience of all humanity. It falls if he be reduced to
the futile stature of a man in history. For it is the contention of this study
that the moral effect
21
upon general humanity of being
taught to look for salvation to a savior in the person of a historical man is
inherently and inevitably degrading to the immanent divinity of man. Beyond
doubt this strong asseveration will be violently disputed. It will be contended
that it runs counter to every obvious envisagement in the situation.
Nevertheless it is urged here that these alleged obvious implications seem
obvious only in consequence of many centuries of inculcation of a false view
which has overridden and subjugated open minds, and that they would lose their
obviousness if they could be considered in the light of pure reason and apart
from ingrained habitudes of pious assumption. Had the opposite view been
sanctified by such age-long approbation it, rather than the first, would carry
the weight of obvious rectitude with it. For, of the two possibilities, surely
the method of human salvation that would instinctively at first sight commend
itself as the obviously more natural one would be that which places the agency
of universal salvation from evolutionary dereliction in a power lodged within
all men, as against an extraneous and uncertain influence somehow, but in
no understandable way, shed upon us under certain peculiar conditions by one
person in history. Obviousness is obviously with the method of a general
distribution of a divine spirit among all men to act as a leaven of
righteousness and self-transformation, and it is certainly less clearly with a
method that makes all men dependent upon the unaccountable self-immolation of
one only-begotten Son of God. The one is in consonance with man’s every normal
instinct of natural procedure; the other strains at blind faith to swallow its
artificially bizarre and fantastic features. The latter view, be it averred,
has only won its place in the acceptance of millions of purblind devotees
through the stultification of their reason by the ceaseless exploitation of the
forces of religious faith. The irrational flaunting of the Biblical text
"for with God all things are possible" has further tended to keep the
door open to the influx into less critical minds of every conceivable absurdity
in the theological field. The introduction of boundless irrationality in
doctrinism was initially made when in the third and fourth centuries the
esoteric interpretation of scripture yielded to the frightful debasement of exoteric
literalism. The whale’s swallowing of Jonah was no more difficult for piety
than the ecclesiastical swallowing of the Jonah allegory and all its brother
myths in their literal form. The tragedy of its successful accomplish-
22
ment--as far as it has been
successful--has lain in the necessary preliminary derationalization and
paralysis of millions of simple minds before the natural gagging and choking
could be overcome. Blind faith and the peculiar weakness of the human mind in
face of the alleged supernatural were the instruments of the tragic
intellectual dupery. The noble scriptures were intended to gain and hold the
perennial reverence of all intelligent minds; they were never designed to
enslave minds with the fatal fascination of a fetish.
Once the historical status was
assigned to the Christ principle the words, "look to Jesus, the author and
finisher of our faith," have exercised a damaging sway over countless
minds. To those who knew that Jesus, esoterically comprehended, was the
dramatic type-figure of the divinity within us, the words carried not fatality
but uplift and inspiration. The difference in the two cases clearly limns the
difference in the psychological character of the two influences. This work
advances the proposition that it is psychologically hazardous at any time for
people to place their divinity in a person or locale outside themselves. To do
so involves the inevitable repercussion on average minds that their salvation
is to be vicariously won. The disastrous consequence of this reaction must in
the end be the enervation and atrophy of spiritual effort and initiative on the
part of the individual to win his own redemption. The effect of the doctrine of
salvation through the intercession of the Son of God--a salvation which the
doctrine implies we had in no wise ourselves earned--could not be, as claimed,
an intensification of the personal effort at righteousness. The very words of
scripture were to the effect that man’s righteousness in the sight of God is as
filthy rags. Every presupposition of the doctrine as presented emphasized the
uselessness of effort and the casting of our burden upon Jesus’ shoulders.
"What a friend we have in Jesus!" has been sung in full-throated
unctuousness. His own invitation to the weary and heavy-laden to come unto him
and find rest has had an all-too-ready response in the literal sense. Taken
wrongly these words have gone far to impair the natural sturdiness of spiritual
character in millions. By a psychology that was hardly subtle, but simple and
direct, they militated to turn the conscientious resolution of the individual
away from the actual cultus of his own immanent deity in thought, word and
deed, while he pursued the chimera of vicarious salvation through pleading with
his personal Redeemer. He
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was told that the more abjectly he
confessed his own folly and failure, the more effective would be his plea in
the ears of the compassionate Savior of men. In looking to Jesus in a man of
flesh the devotee neglected the indwelling Jesus, and would inevitably do so in
the exact ratio of his ignorance and his gullibility.
This is a simple proposition and is
quite self-evident. It is the law of nature that an organism or a function not
used atrophies. Man has in a lifetime only a given quantity of psychic energy.
If he expends it in one direction, the possibility of expending it in another
is diminished by so much. The only Christos that is available for him is that
hidden divine love within him. If he wastes his soul-force in straining to
induce an exterior personage to intervene in his evolutionary effort on his
behalf, he loses by so much the fleeting opportunity to cultivate his
indwelling guest. It is necessary to put this with categorical cogency, because
it will be brushed aside as inconsequential. It is close to being the crux of
the entire problem under discussion. A man can not at one and the same time
serve two masters, the one within and the other without. Neither can he reap
the fruit of an ardent cultivation of his potential divinity while pouring out
all his psychic ardor upon the person of a Galilean peasant.
Not only will it be said that this
can be done, but it will be claimed in addition that the adoration of the
Judaean carpenter is itself the prime stimulus and incentive to the end of
one’s inner spiritual culture. This brings us back to the question of the
relative psychological power of a living or of a mythical and dramatic Christ.
The great cry of the proponents of the historicity is that the psychological
power of a living historical example must surely be greater and more beneficent
than that of a purely dramatic figure. History, it is urged, is real, whereas a
myth is fictional. This debate is of critical importance, because if the
Christos of the Bible was not a person of flesh, he becomes, as would be said,
nothing but a character of pure fiction. He is a myth. And many books have been
written to prove that he is only a myth. How, it will be asked in
vigorous spirit, can a mythical figure be presumed to exert as strong a psychological
force upon the world as a Jesus in real life? As hinted briefly before, the
unique strength of the position of Christianity is claimed to lie in this one
item of the reality of Jesus’ living demonstration or epiphany of God in
humanity. It holds up to its following the assurance of ultimate victory based
on the
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one divine fait accompli in
history. Jesus was a living example, and not a mere theological promise
unaccompanied by accomplishment. Jesus’ life is the one solid rock of veritude
upon which mortal man can build his hopes. What is a myth compared with this?
This is the argumentative situation
as viewed from the point of naïve exoteric simplicity. It is not, however, the
view revealed to deeper esoteric reflection. Esotericism understands something
about the myth that is quite unknown to the uninitiated general mind. The
ancient sages knew something concerning the myth that the modern mind has never
grasped. It can now be said with certitude that the whole genius of religious
and philosophical culture escaped the grasp of Occidental civilization as a
result of the third-century loss of this certain understanding of the nature
and utility of the myth. It is time, after centuries of stupid nescience, that
modern ignorance of a vital matter be enlightened. Enlightenment on this detail
may yet save religion and humanitarian culture, menaced dangerously by our
blind failure to concentrate upon the one cultus of a higher selfhood in man
that alone can redeem the world from immersion in the lower levels of
consciousness and motivation.
What was known of old, and must now
be proclaimed anew with clarion blast, is that the myth, as employed by ancient
illuminati in Biblical scripture, is not fiction, but the truest of all
history! So far from being fiction in the sense of a story that never happened
and is therefore false to fact, it is the only story that is completely and
wholly true! The myth is the only true narrative of the reality of human
experience. It is the only ultimately true history ever written. It is a
picture and portrayal of the only veridical history ever lived. All other
so-called history, the record of people’s acts and movements, buildings and
destructions, marchings and settlings, is less truly history than the myth! The
latter is the realest of history, as it is the account of the actual experience
of life in evolution. Real as history is, it is finally less true than
the myth. The myth is always and forever true; actual history is never more
than an imperfect approximation to the truth of life. Even as a perfectly
faithful record of what actually happened, book history is far from being true.
This is an admission so commonplace that every courtroom is on guard against
the testimony of witnesses because of the incapacity of the human senses in
making an impeccable record of event. No history book ever contained a
precisely
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true account of occurrence. No two historians ever wrote identical narratives of a war or a nati