New Lectures on the Ancient Wisdom--No I
PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY
IN THE BIBLE
by
ALVIN BOYD KUHN, Ph. D.
PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY IN THE BIBLE
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The Christian Bible presents to the reflective mind one of the most
astounding phenomena of modern life. Though neglected and even repudiated
by a large segment of modern thinking, and evidencing few signs of a
controlling influence on current modes of life, it yet occupies a place of
dominance that can only be realized when its position and authority are
challenged. More than that, it exercises through the subtle power of
tradition and child-indoctrination a totally unbelievable thraldom over the
common mind which can only be compared to a type of hypnotic obsession. The
force and sweep of the subtle acceptance is not dreamed of by the person
who has not become consciously emancipated from it and can view it
objectively, or from the outside. Few people have been able to dissociate
themselves sufficiently from their indoctrined prepossession in this regard
to objectify this phenomenon of the psychological life of the day. Only a
trained and freed mind can stand out from under its own inherited habitudes
of thought and feeling and subject them to rational and dispassionate
criticism. Few can rationally appraise mass sentiments. This is the
function of the philosopher and thinker. For the most part, people accept
as authoritative the mass conceptions amidst which they grow up, and regard
their general vogue as the seal and surety of their rightness.
In such fashion the Bible has been accepted as the great unique work of
divine authority, and, with the force of sanctified allegiance back of it
for generations, it now wields a perfectly unrealized power over the common
mind. Even those who have outwardly rejected it are unwittingly influenced
by it in ways they little dream of; for society has been insidiously
impregnated with the germs of a thousand ideas, springing from the vast
number of phrases, texts and incidents which have taken unshakable rootage
in the mass consciousness. In the area of Christendom the book is still
regarded as the supreme moral and spiritual guide of the race. And from
time to time one reads the oft-broadcast declaration from eminent divines
that what the world needs most of all as a salve for its ills, is more
consecrated study of the Bible.
We have pondered this assertion deeply and sought what truth there may be
in it. It is one of those equivocal statements that are true without
meaning much after all. The answer might be "yes" and "no." We would say
"yes," but with tremendous qualifications and reservations. We can agree
that more study of spiritual things is decidedly a need of our time. But we
face a strange situation here, which does not seem to have been discerned
by the advocates of Bible study. To
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begin with, there never has been a book that has been studied so
assiduously and zealously as this. No book has received such devotion and
reverence. No other has been preached on so often and so fervently. It has
been organically dissected and analyzed without end. Thousands of volumes
of exegesis have been written upon it. Yet we are told we need to study it
more. And a prominent writer has, with general approbation, dubbed it The
Book Nobody Knows, and its central hero, The Man Nobody Knows. If this is
the outcome of past study on an enormous scale, what profit to study it
further? The outcome of centuries of consecrated effort to glean its
message is held up as a nullity!
On our part, we stand ready to make the bold assertion that it is yet a
sealed book. Few, if any, know that it does contain a message that would
save the race from disaster. Few, if any, know that it is one of the books
of a grand past wisdom. And perhaps no one now living knows thoroughly what
is hidden in its pages. Our verdict, then, is that it is futile to give it
more study of the kind that it has received heretofore. If it lacks study
it is because thousands have labored to get its meaning and have failed.
The effort has bred disappointment and resentment against its
incomprehensibility. What the modern age needs with regard to the Bible is
not more study but some comprehension; not more waste of futile wrestling
with riddles, but a few grains of understanding. In brief, what is needed
is a knowledge of the background out of which it grew, and in reference to
which alone it can be grasped.
Failure of modern effort to read the deep message of the Book is due to the
fact that modern scholars stupidly and stubbornly refuse to see that
ancient scriptural writing was esoteric or hidden as to its meaning, and
allegorical and symbolical as to its method. The ancients did not use
newspaper directness. On the contrary they put up their secret wisdom,
vouchsafed to them by the great Sages, in the form of allegories and myths,
which were to be taken as fiction in their outward dress, but as the
cinematograph of profoundest truth and knowledge in inward sense. By a
combination of symbols, nature signs and allegories, often woven into a
background of real history, they sought to portray the deepest types of
spiritual experience and an intellectual grip on reality. The Bible has
been crassly taken for literal truth about living personages on the stage
of mortal history. It has been rendered literally and historically. This is
the most egregious blunder, the most grandiose error, in all human
history,--this mistaking of spiritual allegorism for literal human
narrative. We are in position to make the unqualified declaration for the
first time in the modern age that there is not one iota of history, in the
ordinary acceptation of that term, in the Bible from beginning to end. Some
portions of Jewish history are utilized as the base and frame of spiritual
myths. The several Judges, Patriarchs and Kings are made to stand for the
central figure of the Christos. Geographical names and
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historical persons are mentioned but only as characters in the mystic or
religious drama. According to Eusebius, one of the three chief formulators
of Roman Christian theology, the Gospels of the New Testament are
themselves nothing but old dramatic books of the Essenes in pre-Christian
days. The earliest and greatest of the framers of Christian theology,
Philo, Clement and Origen, expressly declared it was impossible and an
impiety to assert that the logos of God could take the flesh of a human
personality. New research makes it positively clear that the Old Testament
narratives are in their entirety rewritings of old Egyptian material,
distorted and obscured as it passed through later Hebrew hands. And
Egyptian scripture was never historical. It was spiritual symbology, pure
and unalloyed. The weirdest phenomenon of history transpired when later
ignorance took the Egyptian constructions and converted them into absurd
literal narrative. And the thinking of the whole world of the civilized
West has thus been based on history that never occurred, and the Christian
Church has been founded on a set of miracles that were never performed. The
only miracle envisaged in ancient theology was the transformation of human
character by the indwelling god, and this spiritual miracle was poetized,
dramatized and allegorized in a hundred forms of outward representation,
all of which was absurdly taken for personal history later.
This conversion of spiritual into biographical history has made
Christianity the instrument of the grossest degradation of sublime ancient
truth to which it has ever been subject. That is to say, that all Christian
doctrines present the ancient wisdom in a more literal and hence cruder
form of meaning than had ever been done before in national religions. In
the nailing of a personal Jesus on a wooden cross Christianity reduced the
glorious drama of the spiritual life to its grossest and most repellant
form.
It is the business of enlightened Theosophy to lift this weight of crass
literal dogmatism from off the modern imagination and conscience at
whatever cost. The human soul is itself bound on the cross of gross
superstition so long as these crude notions dominate the conscious and
subconscious thought of modern man. The light of the true spiritual Gnosis
of olden times must be cast into the dark nooks and corners of modern
thinking, and disperse the mists of such errant and arrant doctrinism.
It is our declaration, based on years of the most assiduous research, that
it is impossible to understand the allegories of the Bible without a
knowledge of ancient methods of sacred writing, and of the ancient
philosophies. Our work in this field has been rewarded by a number of the
most signal discoveries which are basic for further grasp of the material.
(1) The composers of ancient scriptures were poets, allegorists,
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dramatists and mythicists. They never wrote literally. They were in the
line of generations of sages and seers who had developed the art of
spiritual representation to a point of the utmost ingenuity and complexity,
completely shrouding the intended real meaning under veils of symbolism,
which have utterly misled modern scholars who could not pierce the outer
veil to read the truth hidden underneath. Hence the works can not be read
without the keys to the myths and reference to the symbols used. The
ancients themselves testify plentifully that the scriptures are allegories.
Origen regards the whole Bible as a set of allegories. But the most
astonishing declaration to this effect is St. Paul's own statement in
Galatians that the whole story of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar is "an
allegory."
(2) The ancients were also esotericists, writing only of the inner life and
for intiated pupils. They wrote of inner things under an outer veil. They
wrote of the Greater Mysteries which were never given out to the multitude,
but taught in secret to disciplined students. Spiritual truth was not
published in modern fashion. Whatever was written, was veiled under glyph
and symbol. Mostly it was taught by oral tradition.
(3) Then the ancients were "uranographers." The "uranograph" was a chart of
heaven. By this is meant a map outlined by the early sages charting the
spiritual constitution and physiology of man, the psychic centers, areas of
spiritual force, and all "after the pattern of things in the heavens." Man,
the microcosm, is a replica of the heavenly man and the universe. From the
history of man written thus in the constellation of the skies, the early
religious formulators transferred the record to earth and distributed the
various phenomena and localities over the national maps in accordance with
the heavenly chart! All nations tried to frame their own history and
geography after the pattern of things in the heavenly mount. Mainly the
Egyptians and after them the Jews made this transfer almost completely.
According to this chart each nation was given an upper and lower section,
had a river flowing from the upper down to the lower, had a lake or sea, a
central city representing the Holy City, and a score of parallel features
found in every case. There was first a division into seven nomes or
districts, later into twelve. Each nation thus strove to have its history
interpreted as a fulfilment of the sacred allegory; and its national
history, thus diverted into the form of the celestial myth, was made into
the national epic. And finally came the claim on the part of several,
notably the Jews, that since their history fulfilled the outlines of the
sacred story, they were proven to be the "chosen people" of God. There is
not a scrap of evidence anywhere to identify the Israelites as the
historical Hebrews or Jews. The latter simply appropriated the distinction
to themselves and fitted their history into the sacred scheme. As proof
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of this it is offered that a monument in Egypt contained hundreds of
Palestinian place names, afterward localized in the Holy Land of Judea,
before the "historical" Exodus from Egypt. Hence the modern discovery of a
town in Palestine bearing the name of a place mentioned in the Bible does
not offer a single whit of proof that the Bible is history. It only proves
that the religious formulators of the national epic had given to a certain
place a name already found on the uranograph or spiritual chart, much as
European explorers gave sacred names such as Salem, Providence, New Haven,
Canaan, Newark, Corpus Christi and Santa Fe to new towns when they came to
America. Jerusalem, Egypt, Sodom and others are therefore only spiritual
names transferred to the map from the celestial chart.
(4) Lastly it was our discovery that all religious writings deal with but
one central fact, the incarnation of man, or the descent and resurrection
of the soul. It is graphically outlined in the Prodigal Son allegory. It is
the whole story of religion. The old books deal with nothing beyond this
story and its involvements. It is itself the key to all philosophy and
religion. All meanings proceed from this one fact and return thither. In
the light of this one fact all complicated meanings can be reduced to clear
significance. It unravels the infinite complexities of the symbology that
have confounded the learned scholars and theologians. That man is a god
dwelling in an animal form is the central and cardinal fact of all
religion.
It is well to note a few situations in the Bible which preclude any sane
mind taking it for literal truth. How the literalist "swallows" them we
know not.
First, the story of the flood. Forty (or four hundred) days' rain would not
raise the ocean an inch, as all rain is first drawn off the ocean and only
runs back into it at the constant level. And how could millions of species
of every living thing be collected, cared for and housed in the "ark" by a
single man and his family. It would take an army many years to gather a
minute portion of all creatures. Then how could they be kept in living
conditions, fed, and tended on board for months?
And how did the children of the first pair, Adam and Eve, go off and marry
the women of another nation, as recorded in Genesis? And in the genealogy
of Jesus as of David's line, the link with David is broken at his father
Joseph, who was not his father after all. Jesus is of David's line, yet is
denied parentage from David's descendant. Then we have the anomaly of
Joshua's commanding the sun and moon to stand still at Ascalon. The sun is
not moving (relative to the earth) to begin with. It is already and always
still. And the matter of the star of Bethlehem coming and standing "over
the place where the young child lay." A star small enough to point out a
small stable in Beth-
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lehem is a thing impossible in astronomy. And stars never stand. They rush
on with unbelievable speed. And finally how was it humanly possible for the
events of Maundy Thursday of Passion Week to have occurred in the space of
a single night? The last supper at sundown, the long siege in the garden of
Gethsemane, the arrest, the mockery, then three separate judicial trials
before three distinct courts in the dead of night (!), then the carrying of
the cross up the hill, the long agony of the crucifixion, the earthquake,
the rent veil, the opened graves, and the burial,--all in the hours of a
single night! It is incredible as human history. Like the Abraham story, it
is an allegory. Paul himself never mentions it as real history, albeit he
lived at the time.
These and a hundred other irrationalities make it sheer folly to uphold the
literal historicity of the Bible. Yet the major theses of Christianity
stand on this weak ground. There is therefore nothing surprising in the
fact that the history of the Church has been a tale of warfare,
controversy, schism, blind faith and frightful cruelty, and that it is
repudiated by about sixty per cent of the populations among which it is
strongest, and is rather loosely held by its own adherents.
We are prepared to support the statement, then, that the Bible, sadly
misinterpreted by its most loyal devotees, is in reality a collection of
ancient works that embody in veiled figures the fundamentals of the genuine
old wisdom of the hierophants. One might say indeed, that it is a
repository of the great Mystery teaching of early times. In fact it is an
assemblage of material comprising the substance of Hermeticism, Gnosticism,
Kabalism, Chaldean astrology, Greek Orphism and Hindu Wisdom, drawn mostly
from ancient Egypt. It would not inaptly be described as a book of Platonic
Theosophy. For Plato summed up most of the elements of these systems. To an
orthodox churchman it would doubtless seem to belittle the Book to say that
it contains nothing but the Platonic philosophy. But this is only because
the churchman knows nothing of the grandeur and rank of the Platonic
wisdom. It is enough to say that it could not be a great book if it did not
embody Plato's philosophy. For this was truly "of the gods," and perhaps
the most luminous presentation of spiritual knowledge ever to be vouchsafed
to the human intellect. Fortunate is Christianity that its Bible is heavily
charged with the elements of the great Divine Wisdom of past ages.
It is a practical impossibility, however, to expound even the crudest
outline of Plato's teaching in such a lecture. We must be content with a
few statements dealing with the emanation of living streams of being and
intelligence from the first fount of all things. Plato represents life as
unfolding from within itself at the beginning of a new period of
manifestation, and proceeding outward or downward from a summit of pure
spirit into ever-denser forms of creation. The One Life pours forth its
power and essence in streams, called "rivers of
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vivification", "from on high as far as to the last of things," bringing all
forms of life into existence and ensouling all forms with more or less of
its own mighty being. At each step of the way out, or down, this life takes
embodiment in coarser forms of cosmic matter, thus giving birth to the
greater and lesser gods of various ranks. For the gods are embodiments of
the several grades and forms of nature's life, power and intelligence. The
whole creation forms a chain of beings reaching from the lowest mineral
crystals to the highest God. Somewhere in this chain stands man, and Plato
tells us where it is. Humanity occupies a place of great strategic
importance in the hierarchy, standing precisely at the point of junction
between the highest animal and the truly human kingdom. Man is the creature
that is fashioned to bridge the gap between the animal and the divine
order. Hence his nature is compounded of the two elements, the animal and
the godlike, in one organism, making it possible for the higher to "lift
up" or humanize the lower. In his Timaeus Plato gives us the remarkable
speech of the Demiurgus (Creative Logos) to the "junior gods," who were the
divine beings commissioned by the Lords of Karma to come to earth and be
the gods embodied in an animal race that had no chance of reaching the next
level of evolution without such tutelage. In it the Demiurgus enjoins the
deities to come to earth and "unite mortal with immortal natures,"
promising them that they would "never be dissolved," if they held fast to
their oath of purity and the covenant which they made with their Overlord.
This is the covenant in the Old Testament which the Lord tells the Children
of Israel (who were these junior gods, never the earthly Hebrews!) that
they have broken times without number. For the gods, once incarnated, fell
under the cloud of oblivion (drank the waters of Lethe), lost their divine
memory and went "the way of all flesh" into carnality and beastliness. (See
scores of passages in the Old Testament books).
But after rebellion they finally came to earth, incarnated in mortal bodies
of flesh and thus linked a divine principle of intelligence with a body and
a sensual animal nature. And this fact is the basis of all religion. Man is
a god and a beast in one organism. Rather he is a god tabernacling in the
flesh of an animal. Daniel (Chaps. 3 and 5) tells the King, who represents
the divine soul, that he shall come to live with the animals and be given
the mind of an animal. Ezekiel (32:4) says that the Lord "will fill the
beasts of the whole earth with thee." A hundred texts from the old books
confirm this statement of the linking of the two diverse natures in one
organism. And this great basic fact is the heart of Theosophy.
Reincarnation and Karma are ancillary to it.
We have, then, in Greek philosophy the "descent of the soul" or the advent
of the gods. This is equated in the old Christian tradition by the legend
of "the fall of the angels," the fall of Lucifer. It is
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outlined in full by the Prodigal Son allegory, and hinted at in many other
places. The story of Abraham is a glyph of it, for he, like the Prodigal
Son, left his home and kindred, left his native land, and journeyed to a
far country that the Eternal promised to show him, where he would dwell
among savage beasts and eat of the grass of the earth. (See Genesis 12.)
Paul says "we are a colony of heaven." We, these junior gods, are
collectively that second Adam, who, Paul says, "is the Lord from Heaven,"
following the animal man who, he says, "is of the earth, earthy."
There were twelve legions of these angel hosts, and this, indicated clearly
by Plato, is evidenced in the New Testament, where at the feeding of the
five thousand there were gathered up "twelve baskets of fragments"; and
again in the scene in the Garden of Gethsemane, where, when Jesus is seized
by the deputation of soldiers sent out to arrest him, he says to them, in
effect: "Don't you know that I could call upon my father and he would sent
to my aid instantly twelve legions of angels?" These are the mysterious
"ten lost tribes of Israel" (two having failed in their effort), who in two
divisions of five legions each, called the Suras or "willing (obedient)
ones" and the Asuras or "unwilling ones," undertook the commission of the
higher Lords and projected their powers in the direction of earth. These
two groups are unquestionably the five wise and the five foolish virgins
(one of their Sanskrit names, Kumaras, means "virgin youths") of the
Biblical allegory; also they are the elder and the younger brother of the
Prodigal Son myth. The Suras made the attempt, but, we are told, did not
descend far enough, and their effort proved abortive. The Asuras, seeing
this miscarriage, became recalcitrant, rebelled and refused, until at last
they were forced to incarnate. The Suras obeyed but failed; the Asuras
refused but finally complied, and took lodgment in our bodies, uniting the
two natures.
The Greeks have all this depicted in their great fable of Prometheus
stealing the heavenly fire--which, be it known, is divine intelligence, not
the physical flame we cook our suppers with!--from the gods and bringing it
to man for his behoof. It was what the Theosophists call Manas, the spark
of thinking intelligence which made "man" a manasic being, or capable of
abstract thought. We, then, are angels from heaven, and higher than the
angels we shall be. For Paul, in two passages, avers that "we are to manage
angels, let alone mundane things," and adds that "God hath made man for a
little while (see Moffatt translation) lower than the angels and hath
crowned him with glory and honor." Another ancient scripture says that
"angels from their seats envy him" (man). For his experience in incarnation
will advance his station beyond that of those spirits who have not been
tried in the fires of earth and refined to purest gold.
The Nicene creed of the Church itself, describing the Second Logos
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of the Trinity, avers that it "came down from heaven, was incarnate . . .
and was made man," for us and for our salvation. John declares that no man
shall ascend into heaven save he that first came down from heaven. Jesus
said he "beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven." Satan is Lucifer, and
we came down in the character of the bright and morning star, Lucifer,
bright effluence of deity. The Chinese have a great saying that the "stars
ceased shining in heaven and fell on earth where they became men."
The Neo-Platonic philosopher, Plotinus, has a remarkable passage in which
he makes it clear why the soul or god in man was under the necessity of
taking incarnation in an animal body. As I regard this passage as the
clearest statement of the philosophy of incarnation ever given, I take the
liberty of quoting it:
"Thus although the soul have a divine nature, though she originate in the
intelligible world, she enters into a body. Being of the lower divine, she
descends here below by a voluntary inclination, for the purpose of
developing her power and to adorn what is below her. If she flee promptly
from here below, she does not need to regret having become acquainted with
evil and knowing the nature of vice, nor having had the opportunity of
manifesting her faculties. . . . Indeed the faculties of the soul would be
useless if they slumbered continuously in incorporeal being without ever
becoming actualized. The soul herself would be ignorant of what she
possesses if her faculties did not manifest by procession, for everywhere
it is the actualization that manifests the potentiality. Otherwise the
latter would be completely hidden and obscured; |
