THE BIRTHDAY OF THE GODS
If we chant at Easter the unfolding of the portals everlasting,it can be only to refer to our own opening the doors of sense to the entry of spirit. If we acclaim the Christ's triumph over decay, it can mean only that a potency of Christly consciousness within our own natures will not perish with our flesh, but will live on in higher vehicles, returning to earth many times to build up their perfection.
If we sing of the Savior's taking captivity captive, it is that we can develop this more dynamic power of godliness and with it subdue and govern the carnal nature that held us captive, stepping out into freedom as the fiery power of spirit melts down the chains that bound us.
If we commemorate the Lord's bursting the gates of hell and flinging wide the bolted bars to release the captives that sat in darkness, it is that we shall in ecstasy abandon the last body of our earthly incarnation and soar to freedom. When nature bursts out of her winter's "death" and arrays herself in new and glistening garments, it is the sign that we, too, shall burst out of our underworld confinement and come forth clothed with light. But only by lifting the reference of all its imagery from ostensible ancient history and making it the drama of our own experience will the great festival be able to exercise its exalting efficacy upon our spirit. After all St. Paul is grandly right: if Christ be not risen, then is our faith vain.
For if Christ be not risen in us, risen out of the pettiness, the sordidness, the ignorance, rapacity, greed and the fell instincts of our brute nature, to breathe in the pure air of graciousness, godliness and love, then indeed is our faith in the resurrection vain and empty. If he be not risen in us, then truly enough we have no part in the resurrection.
Without this transformation in our own natures, we keep the Christ still bound in his cerements of "death" in the only tomb in which he ever lay "dead"--our mortal body.
The Judean myth is a supremely beautiful emblemism of the miracle of the resurrection. But if we for a moment permit it to lure us into the belief that another man's alleged conquest of death in the long past in any degree relieves us of the evolutionary task of achieving our own resurrection, the myth becomes the source of a tragic psychological calamity for us. For to the extent to which we look to a man, or a miracle, or any power outside ourselves, to that extent we will let the sleeping divinity within us lie unawakened. Our great psychologist Jung has set this forth with the courage of a crusader for truth. Never has the logical purport of the twenty-first verse of the inspiring fifteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians, called the chapter of the resurrection, been grasped in its pregnant message for all theology. "For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead." On the historical thesis of interpretation the implication of the first clause of this declaration is that man generic brought Jesus to his death.
That is to say, it rests on the presupposition that mankind killed Jesus, physically. This is of course absurd, and rules out the possibility of such an egregious interpretation, which, however,the historical thesis demands. The verse, as likewise many others, simply does not supply the premises for the historical rendering.In the seventh chapter of his Epistle to the Romans St.Paul also states that sin rose up and killed him and that he had died. Yet he was sitting up alive when he wrote the verses! Nothing has ever been so blind as the theology that has looked at these texts for centuries, yet failed to see that the "death" referred to had never a thing to do with bodily demise!
It carried the Greek philosophical connotation of the relative "death," that is, the inertness, torpidity, the unawakened latency of the soul, when in incarnation it lay buried down under the heavy stifling vibrations of the earthly animal nature of the body in which it had been implanted. In the light of this elucidation provided by Greek philosophy the baffling mystery of Paul's language in the letter to the Romans stands revealed in full clarity. There are two "men" in our constitution, the first or natural man, first Adam, of the earth, earthly; and the second or spiritual man, the new Adam (Christ), born not of water (the physical body, which is seven-eights water) but of air (spiritus) and fire, as says John the Baptist.
St. Paul sets forth succinctly the relation of these two natures, when (in 4th Galatians) he says, "he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the spirit." "So also is it now," he reminds us. The lower sensual "man" in us brings the divine soul to its "death" in the body. When soul enters body, states Paul, sin, which was powerless when soul was yet in heaven, springs to life and "kills" it. So we have at last the glowing meaning of the apostle's vivid statement that by man came death, "man" here standing clearly for the first Adam, the human animal, earthly, sensual devilish. For this is the unregenerate carnal animal, product of the purely biological evolution, that overwhelms the infant god when he steps into the habitation of the flesh and smothers him to "death" under the incubus of the animal nature. But now emerges the thrilling second part of the verse, the sequel to the first clause, the mighty truth that again a blind theology has stubbornly refused to see.
If by animal humanity came the "death" of divine soul, by the same
element in man's make-up will come also the resurrection! One finds the illuminating analogy that supports this conclusoin in that universal textbook of answers to all riddles, the world of nature. The seed goes into the earth and the earth brings it to its "death." But it is that same earth that in the turn of the cycle, at the spring season, will bring that "dead" seed to its resurrection, its germination. Says Jesus in the Gospels, "Unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." And again St. Paul clinches the interpretation in saying, "For as in [the first] Adam all die, even so in Christ [the last Adam] shall all be made alive."
All spirit gives its life, goes to its "death"; to uplift the physical creation below its level. It pours out its lifeblood of divine potential so that lower orders may have more abundant life. But for its sacrificial effort, its divine oblation, it is wondrously repaid by matter with the baptism of a new birth through its roots in matter's essence.
The ineffable tragedy of Western religious history lies in this
unconscionable blunder of Christian theology in traducing surpassing
spiritual allegory into ostensible personal history, in mistaking the
central figure in the universal Mystery drama for a man of flesh in that history. When may it be realized that the actual divine power that was personified in drama and ritual by a human actor, can be resurrected from its torpor under the sluggish nature of the body and,thus lifted up, can, as its personification says, draw all men up with it? And when, too, will it be realized that the alleged personal man whom a hallucinated theology has mistakenly substituted for the spiritual actuality he only represented in the play, never could in the remotest degree be the means of effecting universal salvation?
Once the depressing psychological blanket of two thousand years of mentality stupefied by the mirage of a personal man-God as the agent of human redemption from animality to godliness is lifted from off the consciousness of the Western world, then may be generated in all hearts the wondrous transforming power of the Easter message. It is probably much truer as fact than as poetic figurism to say that the heavy gravestone that the Christ-in-man still has the task of rolling away from the mouth of his "tomb" of bodily flesh to consummate his
resurrection, is in large measure this very pall of ignorance that keeps that stone sealed all the tighter. For it is religion itself, its vision of truth beclouded by the mists of ghastly caricatures of the meaning of its own Scriptures, that has helped to seal the stone of ignorance that shuts us in the cave of mortal "death". It is as much as anything else the common acceptation of the Easter legend as objective history that has operated to keep the Christ still darkly imprisoned in his tomb.
In the finale, we can then reiterate St. Paul's admonition to Timothy to shun the vain and profane babblings of such as Hymenaeus and Philetus, who greatly err in declaring the resurrection already past and thus weaken the potential of all men for the resurrection still to come. |
