Stan here is chapter of Kuhn's book that will probably clear up some of your questions. As concerns the constitution of man, ancient
philosophy teaches that he is a compound, ultimately to consist of seven elements in a synthesis, but manifesting now four in actual expression (with three latent), and, for purposes of religious symbolism described as composed of two quite distinct natures, physical and spiritual. His humanity is a blending of these two, and stands midway between them, bridging the gulf of impassability between them and furnishing the possibility of a final amalgamation of the two. This consummative event is what religion has always described as the Atonement, or in the East yoga or union. Nature constructed her universes, and eventually man, on the pattern according to which she evolved the octave in music. Like the successive notes in a gamut of seven tones she sounds forth her creative energies, or "Word" (Logos) of seven vowels, each one of which organizes matter into a kingdom or plane, and the seventh of which effects a synthesis or unification of the whole. This synthetic sound forms in turn one note in a larger gamut, the eternal symphony of nature. Four tones of the cosmic harmony that man will express in his organic response have been sounded, and four organic formulations of being have
come to manifestation in his nature. He has a physical self, an
emotional self, a mental self and an inchoate spiritual self. But for
the readier ends of general religious typology the sage of the past
resorted to a further simplified classification, grouping the physical
and the emotional together as the "lower" man, and the mental and
spiritual as the "higher" man. The former constituted the personality,
or outer mask through which the latter, the true individual, "sounded"
forth his nature. (Person is from the Latin "per," through, and
"sonare," to sound.) So we shall have to treat man as the operative
compound of two distinct natures or beings, a physico-sensual self, and
an intellectual-spiritual self, the first acting as the outer body or
vehicle of the latter, giving it manifestation in the world of
substance, a local habitation and a name.
Out of the involvements and necessities of the interrelation of these
two selves in man religion took its rise. At bottom it is the reciprocal
relation subsisting between his animal-human nature, on the one side,
and his indwelling divine nature, on the other. In the body of flesh
resides a god, a fragment of immortal deity. In full truth religion is
the outgrowth of the relation between man and God. But the whole
disfigurement of history for sixteen hundred years has arisen out of the
miscarriage of the proper original sense of this phrase. For instead of referring to the relation between man, a creature on earth, and God
(capitalized) as the supreme life force in the cosmic spheres, a Being
external to man, it had reference only to the relation between the two
distinct elements in man's own constitution, the lower "man" and the
higher "god." The "god" in man is not the Supreme God of theology, but,
as understood of old, a fragment of His selfhood. The wise Greeks
preserved the true signification by writing the word "god" with the
small letter, and also kept intact the limitation of meaning by
prefixing to it always the definite article "the." Religion was the
relation between man and "the god" within him. "Christ in you, the hope
of glory," it was described by St. Paul. And Paul emphasizes this locale
of the god when he fairly shouts at our ignorance. "Know ye not your own
selves, how that Jesus Christ is within you?" And no less succinctly
does he state the case when he says, "The first man is of the earth,
earthy; the second is the Lord from heaven." Jesus himself enunciates
the truth in his remarkable declaration to his disciples--as types of
the human counterpart--"Ye are from below, I am from above." "The spirit
of God that dwelleth in you" and worketh the transfiguration and
redemption of the carnal animal nature, is the only connotation of the
term God concerned in the ultimate definition of religion. God's in his
heaven, true enough: but with Him there, on His own high plane, man can
have no relation. This may appear the veriest blasphemy to the
religionist. Yet it is not only the bald truth, but the essence of the
sanity that would have characterized religion, had not an outrageous
over-reaching of meaning stultified man's entire effort to grasp the
basal truth. Not God, in His wholeness, but that fragment of His nature
which was energic in man's constitution, properly named "the god," is
the only redeemer and savior, Christ or Messiah, contemplated in ancient
scripture. In order that humanity might not, indeed could not, miss
contact with deity, God incorporated a portion of his own fiery spirit
in the innermost being of every person, and that is the Emanuel, or "god
with us," of the Bible. "I shall make a tabernacle with them," declares
the Eternal, "and I shall dwell with them; I shall be their God (god)
and they shall be my people." Says Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher,
enunciating the Orphic Theosophy, "Man is a portion of cosmic fire,
imprisoned in a body of earth and water." A measure of God's own spirit,
symboled always among the ancients by "fire," was "cribbed, cabined and
confined" in a vehicle of earthly elements and sensory capacity. The
body is itself seven-eighths water and one-eighth earthy material!
Nature and positive fact thus support Greek philosophy and mythological
symbolism.
Sir Alfred Russell Wallace, co-originator with Darwin of the theory of
evolution, has clearly evidenced that there is not to be found in the
life history of the highest animal races on earth a body of experience
which can account for the development of the mind in man. This fact is
infinitely more significant for religion than has been observed. More
glaringly obvious even than the absence of intermediate forms between
animal and man is the "missing link" in the sequence of conscious mental
development. The animal had no historical experience that evolved in him
the mental faculty. Whence then came the Promethean fire, the gift of
mind, to the races of animate beings on earth?
Not only is this query the real crux of the whole evolutionary problem,
but it is equally the basic factor in the meaning of all religion. In
its solution "science" has disdained the proffer of the anthropological
knowledge of past ages, recorded for it during all the centuries in the
recondite bibles of antiquity. The ancient illuminati knew by what law
or methodology of nature the principle of mind appeared upon the world
scene, to crown animal evolution with the genius of manhood. Because
scripture, rendered ridiculous by its own mis-interpreters, was scorned,
science was deprived of the chance to profit by the registered wisdom of
those who once knew the origin of mind. For every sacred volume of the
past declared repeatedly that the gift of mind "came down from above."
The germ of thought power was not evolved out of the experience on earth
of the highest mindless creatures, there being no evidence of such
experience. It was introduced in what would appear to science an
arbitrary and anomalous fashion, "from above." We have seen that Jesus
announced his own origin as "from above." Paul describes the second or
spiritual man as "the Lord from heaven." Again Jesus declared, "I came
forth from the Father and am come into the earth." The Christian creed
itself describes the Son of God as he "who for us men and for our
salvation, came down from heaven . . . and was made man"! (And still the
Christian Church does not realize that this is a declaration as to the
anthropological origin of the spiritual element in all humanity, but
thinks it a reference to the advent of an individual man!) Jesus again
emphasizes that "except a man be born from above, he cannot see the
kingdom of God." And Paul adds that "the wisdom from above is first
pure, then peaceable, gentle and easy to be entreated, . . ." Scriptural
support for the advent of a new principle introduced from above could be
elaborated at great length. In Greek philosophy it was set forth under
the term, "the descent of the soul." Says Plotinus, the great Neo-
Platonist: "Thus the soul, although she has a divine origin (or being),
yet she enters into a body. Being the lower divine, she descends here
below by a voluntary inclination, for the purpose of developing her
powers and to adorn what is below her," i.e., to spiritualize and
beautify the animal nature.
Heretofore science has ignored these theological statements as the weird
extravaganza of the religious mind reveling in mystical whimsy.
Never has it dreamed that they were the facts of a true anthropology,
treasured in secret in olden times, but translated into absurdity by
ecclesiastical mishandling. Science could not know that they were the
description of the working of one of nature's fundamental archai or
laws, one indeed which sustains the whole order of organic being in its
linked interrelationship. It is the law that binds the whole register of
manifest life to the throne of God, and each link in the chain to the
ones below and above it. It is a law of nature that has remained
entirely esoteric in religion and utterly unknown in science. It is the
key to the entire evolutionary enigma, the answer to the great unsolved
"mind and body" problem in psychology and biology, the kernel of all
religion. And what is this crucial law?
It is the modus by which the living energies on one plane of life are
related to those on the planes above and below it. As Greek philosophy
expressed it, the energic essence of any one plane or kingdom served as
body to that of the plane above it, but as soul to that of the plane
below. Higher energies, by which is meant those of more rapid vibratory
pitch or shorter wave length, use lower forces to give them body and
instrumental form. On the other hand, lower forces look to higher ones
for their ensouling principle. This involves the necessity of a natural
linkage of the energies of two neighboring planes in one organism, the
lower supplying the matter for vehicle, the upper furnishing the dynamic
animation. The lower served as body for the upper, which functioned as
central consciousness.
It was necessary, therefore, that two of nature's vocal tones, two of
her rays of energy, her expression on two levels, should be linked
together functionally. Indeed the very continuity of living process in
nature, the advancement of evolution itself, was achieved by the
utilization of this linkage. For, in order that the life on any plane
might enter upon its next succeeding round or cycle of its own growth,
the law obliged it to project its vibratory power into the matter or
soil of the kingdom below it. There it hibernated until the springtime
of the next cyclical energy caused it to germinate anew and begin its
next period of life and growth. This was equivalent to a planting of its
seed in the soil of the kingdom below it in the scale, and this is the
natural base of the religious significance of the parable of the sower, which is immensely more fruitful for theological interpretation than has
been realized hitherto. Orthodox blindness has never sensed that John
was stating this biological law when he declared: "Unless a grain of
corn fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it
bringeth forth much fruit." And Paul iterates the idea when he says:
"Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die." It 0stands in Platonic Theosophy as the great law of incubation, which for spirit or soul involves incorporation in the flesh of a creature whose body pertains to the life of the elementary kingdom immediately beneath it in the gamut. It is thus the great central religious doctrine of the incarnation! Spirit must incubate or incarnate in flesh and matter, else it will remain static or stagnant in the evolutionary ongoing.
How far theology has drifted away from ancient basic moorings can be
vividly seen when we contemplate this doctrine of the incarnation. In
orthodox exegesis it is rated merely as one among many doctrines. It has
been sadly reduced in scope and importance because it has been taken to refer only to the birth of the man Jesus into the body of a human
infant. Had ancient philosophy not been extinguished, theology would
have preserved the knowledge that the incarnation is the one sole and
inclusive fact in all religion. It--and its implications--is the one
single fact with which all religion deals. Religion is concerned with
nothing beside the incarnation. The linking of soul to body, which gives
man his life on earth, is the one entire theme of theology. Scriptural
meaning, which has been bandied about between heaven and earth, earth
and hell, is not truly anchored until it is tied definitely to the life
of man here in the body. All bibles are talking about man's life, the
result of soul's tenancy of body. What miscarriage of primal wisdom,
both ludicrous and grievous, has ensued in consequence of the loss of
this datum, there is not time to detail here. But with the restoration
of this knowledge, as by a flash of light there will come again to
darkened minds the true significance of every other doctrine. The birth,the baptism, the temptation, the crucifixion, the trial, the bloody sweat, the transfiguration, the resurrection, the ascension, the purgation, the judgment, the death on the cross of matter, the divine sacrifice,--every phase of spiritual symbolism will once again take on vivid meaning when seen as ancient poetic typology of the incarnation of divine principle in the flesh.
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