How bout this one Jane? No allegories.
The debate is one that could hold the fate of our world in the balance. It would be difficult to adduce
a general theosophical concept more fateful for the world (or the Occidental half of it) than the idea
that man must discount his own powers, indeed surrender them abjectly, and look for his salvation to
a power exterior to his own proper endowment, and not integral with that endowment, in all the
crises in his history. The question whether man is the architect of his own destiny under universal
cosmic law, or must turn to an outside power to plead for his salvation, is ultimately the most crucial
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psychological determinant in the realm of his conscious being. It represents the difference between
his acting in the first case resolutely on the highest knowledge and wisdom available to him, and in
the second instance, defaulting in any action and cowering in craven spirit at the feet of the
postulated saving power, begging for a blessedness he frankly confesses he does not merit.
The eminent psychologist Jung has now elucidated the disastrous psychological determent of holding
the Messiah-Savior concept as presented by the religionists. It is the simplest of logical theses, that
by as much as the human focuses his interest, his faith, his yearnings, his cries of distress upon a
power extraneous to himself, by precisely so much does he commit to atrophy a power that all true
religion has predicated as innately potential within himself. And it is as mathematically as precise in its
operation as it is logically sound in theory. In proportion as you use a crutch you will lose a muscle.
Probably in the end the division of ancient religion into the two categories of exoteric milk for babes
in wisdom and esoteric meat for stronger minds, was fundamentally one that made religion a matter
of the science of personal development of the individual's own inner spiritual capabilities; or made it
a cultus of powers localized in gods or deific powers external to man's own nature. The capable and
the instructed were taken into the mysteries of the spiritual kingdom within; the less capable were
taught "in parables", that is, regaled with stories that could be apprehended for initial benefit in their
bald literal form, so framed as to carry obvious moral lessons. When Christianity made its appeal to
the mass of the ignorant populace, it purveyed this sort of teaching, which shortly it permitted to be
taken and canonized as the truth of the Gospels. Hence the religion of exoteric teaching that in
popular conception reduces always to factual untruth, came to dominate the Christian world, the
esoteric sense being sequestered with the few philosophers in their secret studios.
Therefore the question of the historicity of Jesus is for the West the most vital and critical one in the
field of religious philosophy. It needs no abstruse psychological dissertation to establish the point that
the fateful issues of history now as always hinges upon whether human groups are moved to resolute
and forthright action on the knowledge that their problems must be met and solved by the best
initiative they are capable of, or whether, though Sons of God in their own right, they can stand inert
and helpless, while crying to their supernal deity to save them the trouble of saving themselves.
The cultus of an external divinity binds man's hands tight in the pleading attitude of prayer. This form
of religious expression certifies man's surrender of his divine potential to an outside power. A digest
of the whole argument can be put forth in the sharp and graphic statement that the issues of history
depend upon the human choice in religion between our acting upon our own initiative in dependence
upon our own powers, and our running in prayer to an overlord of life localized somewhere in the
cosmos. The running to God with all our problems in prayer, as Jung says, keeps the potential
divinity within ourselves in the weakness of its childhood. By ignoring it we leave it unexercised and
undeveloped; we give it no chance to exert its fledgeling energies and thereby grow.
It is true to the last degree of verity that mankind will never rise to the status of conscious lordship
over its destiny until it turns from the worship of gods exterior to itself and cultivates the deific forces
all too latent within its own nature. Shocking as it is going to be to the pious, but psychologically true
past debate, it must be stated that it is precisely this
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hypostatized figure of the historical Jesus that stands between man and his own divinity, and blocks
the path of each human to his God. For while he fills all their vision and receives the full meed of their
devotion, they, as Jung says, neglect to make real the divine power needing attention and cultivation
within themselves. Not until "he" is removed out of the way will Western man come at last to the
realization that whatever salvation is available to him will be that released by the birth of the Sun of
Righteousness, rising with healing in his wings, from out the depths of his own combined human and
divine natures.
An errant religious bent that turned the heart and mind of the West to seek sanctification from a
power localized outside the human individual, gave rise to the cult of miracle, evinced strongly in
most religions, but excessively in Christianity. Not the power at work in the natural order, but a
power able and disposed to manifest supernatural phenomena became the focus of religious unction.
It was along this path that religion proceeded from the grounds of a sound and efficacious spiritual
science to the overweening eccentricities of a pseudo-magic. In this diversion from true line it
transferred the seat of spiritual culture from the inner courts of the human nature and endowment to
the outer thrones of a power always dubiously localized. The most succinct form in which this
disastrous transfer can be expressed is to say that it caused man to look for "miracle" outside himself
and not within himself. From the limited purview of the human it is no overworking of poetic or
mystical propensity to aver that life is all miracle. The mortal who does not find ground of eternal and
ever-deepening wonder at the stupendous magnitude, order and majesty of nature and the cosmos,
is lacking in all the rudiments for any culture. There is no end of marvel as well outside man's little
sphere of personal being as in the depths of his own selfhood. Both should elicit his adoring
reverence.
But it is ever the miracle within the human soul that religion, as distinct from secular human physical
science, must cultivate and place in living control of life, if human life is to be harmoniously related to
the world, to the body, to the orderly course of evolutionary progress. There is not observable any
power in the world of physical nature, such as it is asserted the ancient uncivilized tribes of the forest
and the sea isles personalized djinns, kobolds, salamanders, pixies, gnomes, dragons, elves and
nature sprites, wood nymphs, dryads, oreads and Pan-Gods, that in any direct way co-act with or
effect the conscious ordering of the individual human life. The final initiative and the responsible
authority in the shaping of our life reside deep within, proceeding from an inner core of
consciousness.
Even the most unbending Fundamentalist orthodoxy must see that its basic concept of sin, through
which man forfeited his right to any divine consideration and made his salvation dependent only on
cosmic "mercy", is itself disqualified dialectically if it is asserted at the same time that the power that
alone can save man is a power outside and beyond his own range of control. For sin is not sin if it is
not perpetrated in violation of conscious control and responsibility. And responsibility can be
charged only against an agency that is in conscious control of the order and process infringed. The
error and illegitimacy of the sin theology reside in the fact that it at one and the same time charges the
human (and from the very first moment of his creation) with the responsibility of obedience to divine
law and amenability to the penalties of its violation, yet refuses to commit into his hands the crucial
and final power to save himself from sin. In the same breath it asserts that man will be punished for
sin, but that the saving power is not in his hands, but in God's. Christian theology has ever held this
anomalous, this self-conflicting doctrinism, which indeed makes indigestible hash of all its vaunted
message
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of salvation. Out of one corner of its mouth it threatens its devotees with the horrendous penalties of
sin; yet from the other corner it protests that no power within themselves can save them from sin,
that they are in fact doomed to sin, and must cast themselves on the mercy of a power immeasurably
beyond their reach, in the hope that their pleadings may chance to be favorably countenanced by an
arbitrary and, from the record of his dealings with his people in the Old Testament, a whimsical,
capricious, jealous and vengeful Deity. |
