Maitland E. - The Esoteric Christ

Of the many distinctive characteristics of our epoch the most notable, whether for its intrinsic nature or its prospective issues, is indisputably, the decadence of the orthodox presentation of the religion to which Christendom owes its name. But while the fact of such decadence is unquestioned and unquestionable, its significance is variously estimated, and the theories propounded concerning it differ radically from each other.

These theories are, broadly, three in number, and – like the points of an equilateral triangle – are as far removed from each other as they can possibly be. Their respective partisans are the three orders represented by the terms orthodox, materialist, and mystic.

According to the first of these, the party of orthodoxy, the decadence of their system is due not to any defect either in the system itself, or in their presentation or administration of it; nor to the possible arrival of the human mind at a stage in its evolution at which old methods require to be exchanged for new ones; but to the natural perversity of man, which, for some inscrutable reason, has been permitted to make such manifestation of itself. Having no explanation to offer other than this, the party of orthodoxy is unprepared with any remedy for the evil beyond an increased fervour of denunciation, and such enhancement of scenic and other sensuous effects in respect of ritual as may serve to attract through the senses where it fails to win through the mind and heart. It has, moreover, adopted a less emphatic tone in the enunciation of the doctrines least acceptable to the generality.

According to the second theory, that of the materialists, the decadence in question is that, not merely of the existing, or of any particular religion or form of religion, but of Religion itself; and the cause is the decline of the religious instinct through the spread of their own system of thought – or, rather, of no-thought, their criterion being, not the mind, but the senses – which has of late obtained so strong a hold upon the world as to encourage them to look with confidence to its universal acceptance at no distant date.

The holders of the third and remaining theory – the mystics, or partisans of religious esotericism – recognise, indeed, a serious and widespread decline of the religious instinct – or, as they prefer to designate it, the spiritual consciousness; but they regard it neither as destined to become permanent or general, nor as the cause of the decadence of orthodoxy. Rather do they regard it as but a temporary obscuration of an 229attribute which, being indefeasible in human nature, cannot by any means suffer extinction save with human nature itself, whatever be the degree or duration of its eclipse. And in virtue of their recognition of the correspondence between the worlds physical and spiritual, they believe that the very depth of the present obscuration of the spiritual consciousness is a token of the approach of a new dawn and birth of spiritual light, the result of which will be its restoration on a scale and in a degree surpassing any hitherto known. And they rest this view not alone on analogy, but also on experience, and this the experience of the two worlds, the visible and the invisible, the phenomenal – a term which includes the historical – and the intuitional. For, as by means of his experience of the former, the mystic is able to recognise precisely such alternations of spiritual obscuration and illumination as that which he now anticipates, as having actually occurred in the past; so by means of his experience of the latter he is able to recognise the cause of such alternations as inhering in the nature itself of existence, and as bound, therefore, to find expression in existence. The faculty in question – which differentiates the mystic from the materialist, enabling him to get at the back of phenomena and thereby to explain phenomena – is that which has already been designated the spiritual consciousness – the consciousness, that is, of the essentially spiritual nature alike of man and of his environment. It implies the discernment – not necessarily at all of spirits but – of Spirit, and therein of Principles.^[1] And whereas the possession of it implies spiritual maturity, and the lack of it spiritual immaturity, the mystic ascribes the inability of the materialist to share his expectations of a coming spiritual revival or to recognise it when come, to his spiritual immaturity. He is so young in respect of this – the essential – part of his nature as not yet to have witnessed an entire revolution of the spiritual year; or, at least, not yet to have grasped the import of the phenomenon. And hence it comes that when he sees the sun of the spiritual consciousness of the race declining towards its Nadir on the approach of a spiritual winter solstice, he jumps to the conclusion that it will continue to descend to total extinction, leaving the material consciousness in undisturbed possession.

But more than this. So far from ascribing the decadence of orthodoxy to the prevalence of materialism in the world, the mystic is disposed to reverse this order, and to ascribe it to the prevalence of materialism in orthodoxy itself, and to hold orthodoxy responsible for its prevalence in the world, and therein for its own decadence and the decline of the spiritual consciousness.

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For materialism is but the systematic recognition and formulation of materiality, meaning by this term, as applied to religion, that tendency to and preference for the things of sense as against the things of the spirit, which leads to the substitution, as the objects of prime concern, of persons, events and things belonging to the material plane, for the principles, processes and states, purely spiritual, intended to be denoted by them.

Such is the materiality which, for the mystic, constitutes the especial and fatal vice of the orthodox presentation of Christianity; and leads him to ascribe its decadence, not to causes extraneous to itself and operating upon it from without, but to a cause inhering in itself, and operating from within it upon the world. This is to say that, admitting the world to have declined from a level previously attained of spirituality, it is the church that fell first and in and by its fall has dragged the world down with it.

The terms Church and World, it must be understood, are used here in their ecclesiastical sense to denote the inner and outer, or official and lay, elements of one and the same organisation; not in their scriptural and mystic sense to denote entities violently contrasted and essentially antagonistic to each other.

Regarded from this point of view, the modern revolt against orthodoxy discloses itself as due – at least at the outset – not to the world’s inveterate materiality, but to its essential spirituality; it represents a recoil from a system of religion which for its materiality, was inadequate for the world’s spiritual needs. That, when thus cut adrift from such means of grace as the current religion afforded, without being possessed of sufficient spirituality to stand alone, the world should lose what of spirituality it had, and subside into the void of utter negation, was natural and inevitable. But the very fact that the revolt against orthodoxy was a revolt, not against religion, but against materiality in religion, constitutes a protest by the world in favour both of religion and of spirituality; and it also gives confirmation to the belief that the world, so far from being at heart materialist, will welcome a really spiritual religion whenever a religion shall be forthcoming which it can recognise as such.

Now it is precisely such a religion that the mystic proposes under the designation of the Esoteric Christ. It is a Christianity divested of the material element which has been its bane, and restored to its proper, because its original, conception, as demonstrable alike from the text of Scripture and from the facts of the spiritual consciousness. It is in no wise a new Gospel that is thus proposed, but simply a new interpretation of the one eternal Gospel, and this after the manner of its original inspirers and formulators: namely, by restoring to the terms of its expression the sense which they were intended to bear. For herein the mystic recognises the prime sin of its official guardians and exponents. They have made no attempt to ascertain either the system of thought which underlay and controlled the expression of Scripture or the special sense of the terms 231employed. Nor have they sought to view it from the standpoint from which it was written; the standpoint, namely, of the spiritual consciousness, and consequently of the Understanding as applied to the things of the Soul. To say which is to say – what is most indubitably true – that Scripture was written by mystics for mystics, and from a mystical standpoint; but has been interpreted by materialists, for materialists, and from a materialistic standpoint. And being, from this standpoint, and thus interpreted, altogether unintelligible, the appeal on its behalf has been made, not to the understanding, but to tradition and authority, themselves arbitrary and unverifiable; with the result of establishing a divorce between faith and reason, doctrine and experience, and so putting asunder those whom God has indefeasibly joined together, to the confusion and destruction of both faith and reason. Thus has it been from the beginning. Christianity left the hands of its originators to fall first into hands incompetent for its appreciation, and next into hands bent on its utilisation as an instrument of sacerdotal aggrandisement rather than of true evangelisation; first, the fathers, and next the priests. Of the former, it is true, many – notably those of the second century – affirmed the existence of an esoteric signification differing widely from the apparent one; but none of them had the love or the courage wherewith to discern and proclaim it, and hence the teaching of Paul, whose mission it had been to complement and supplement the exoteric Jesus by the esoteric Christ – the “Christ Within”, the vehicle of its manifestation by the principle manifested, remained fruitless; while the sacerdotal symbology in which he veiled its expression was eagerly appropriated to the service of the very system it was designed to supersede, the system vicarious and sacrificial. And so far from ecclesiastical erudition being able to fill the gap thus made in knowledge, it has rigidly excluded from its curriculum the only literature in which the suppressed doctrine survives – that known as Hermetic and Kabbalistic – and, renouncing the very idea of insight, has confined itself to the learning which consists in knowing what other men have said, who, themselves, did not know, not having the witness in themselves. When it is added that the doctrine of the Esoteric Christ, as at length it has become possible and permissible to formulate it, both represents the restoration of the understanding as the basis and criterion of faith, and constitutes a system of thought and rule of life founded in the nature of existence, absolutely satisfactory to head and heart, mind and moral conscience, and such as, by its observance, to enable man to turn his existence to the utmost account in the long run, by making of himself the best that he has it in him to become – all has been said that is absolutely necessary to be said before entering on the proposed exposition of it.

II. RIVAL CHRISTS.

But although not necessary to the subject itself, there are some 232further remarks which present themselves as conducive to the better appreciation of the subject. For, as they are aware who have kept in touch with the religio-philosophical thought of the day, so far from that thought having resulted in the total rejection of the Christ-idea, the Esoteric Christ is not the only one proposed for the world’s acceptance in lieu of the orthodox Christ, but there are now at least three Christs in the field, each professing to be the true representative of that idea, and claiming the suffrages of the human soul, as against the one hitherto in possession, the Christ of the churches.^[2] Calling this the Orthodox Christ, we will distinguish the other two as the negative or Agnostic, and the positive or Esoteric Christ; the second being that of a school which, halting midway between orthodoxy and materialism, but in no wise inclining to mysticism, finds itself alike unable to accept the Orthodox Christ and to dispense altogether with the idea of Christ. The third is the mystic or Esoteric Christ already indicated as the Pauline Christ. A brief definition of the first two will serve the double purpose of exhibiting their standpoints in respect both of each other and of the third, and of clearing the way for the exposition of this last.

First the Orthodox Christ. Representing a form of belief which – not being also a system of thought – is unrelated to the mind and therefore unthinkable; and having, moreover, no correspondence in individual human experience, – the Christ of orthodoxy neither makes appeal to, nor can find recognition from those who – like the world of our day – rightly reject as superstition whatever is, by its nature, incapable of being reconciled with reason. This is the Christ insisted on by priests, whose appeal on its behalf is to authority and therein to tradition, either as transcending or as contravening reason.

Being thus, the Orthodox Christ is, and from its first inception has been, for genuine and coherent thinkers, an impossible and, thereby, a doomed Christ, at best a provisional Christ; and the allegation of the mystics is that he is the product solely of the sacerdotal perversion of the terms employed – partly in the gospels but chiefly by Paul – to denote the genesis, nature and functions of the Esoteric and true Christ.

It is further held and insisted by the same school that the substitution of the sacerdotal for the mystical presentation, has been fraught with consequences the most disastrous that can be conceived, both to the spiritual welfare and temporal happiness of mankind, the following being the reasons: –

(1). By removing the typical exponent of the Christ-idea from the category of the human, instead of exhibiting him as the culmination of the human, it has deprived man of the knowledge of his own divine potentialities, and withheld him from seeking the realisation of them which is his due.

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(2). By substituting as the means of salvation the sacrifice of another for the regeneration of the individual himself, it has exhibited salvation as consisting in exemption from the consequences of sin, instead of in superiority to the liability to sin.

(3). By representing the Deity as satisfied by the suffering of the innocent for the guilty, it destroyed man’s conception of God as a Being perfectly just; and, so far from providing him with a Saviour, really deprived him of his Saviour: for the reason that to take away his suffering for sin, is to take away his means of redemption from sin.

(4). By holding out an eternity of torment as the inevitable lot of all who are not saved by Christ, and salvation as dependent upon the will of a Being altogether arbitrary, capricious, and devoid of the sentiments of mercy and justice as humanly comprehended, it has deposed God in favour of a fiend as the controller of the universe; made not love but terror the motive of conduct; and reduced millions upon millions of human beings to unutterable despair, to the destruction of all joy here and all hope hereafter.

Such and so tremendous is the interest which the world has in the discovery of a way of salvation other than that proposed by orthodoxy. That universal madness and suicide have not been the result of such a doctrine is accountable for only on the supposition that there is in the heart of man that which gives the lie to it, by compelling him to believe in the goodness of God in spite of all that the churches have done to persuade him of the contrary. So much better is man than the creeds which have been thrust upon him in place of the truth!

The Agnostic or negative Christ is so-called because, while proposed for acceptance by the school indicated, it represents the negation of all the distinctive and positive attributes implied in the term Christ, for which cause it is really no Christ at all, but only – like its devisers and proposers themselves – an agnostic, but of more than average quality as to character, conduct and principles; devoted, indeed, to the bettering of men’s external conditions, but impotent to better men interiorly and in themselves; a Christ that represents amiable intentions and beneficent activities, but no glimmering of knowledge concerning the kingdom within or the mysteries thereof, and what is implied by initiation therein. He is but man physiological and phenomenal; a perfect specimen it may be of this: but he is of the body; his mental horizon is limited to the body; and his influence perishes with the body. He is no redeemer from bodily limitations, from sin and from death, no reconciler with God. He is in no way the man spiritual and substantial, “eternal in the heavens” of the “kingdom within” man. And his disciples plainly indicate his limitations and their own by entitling him the “Citizen Christ”.

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III. THE ESOTERIC CHRIST. (1) His Nature and Generation.

Now, to speak of the man spiritual and substantial is to speak of the Esoteric Christ, and therein of that mystery which has been at once the “mystery of the ages”, the “mystery of godliness” and – to use another expression of Paul’s – the Theosophy or “wisdom of God” (σοφία θεου I. Cor. ii., 7). For it is to speak of that supreme secret, which from before the beginning of history has been the most jealously guarded treasure of colleges innumerable of sacred mysteries, being by their initiates at one and the same time revealed, concealed and perpetuated in symbol, allegory, legend and myth, embodied in sacred scriptures and religious systems, represented in the forms of obelisk, pyramid, sphinx and temple, and depicted upon the face both of earth and of sky. For while they mapped out whole lands in accordance with it, they wrote it also on the stars. Thus, as the pyramid is a Bible constructed of stone, so is the planisphere of the Zodiac a Bible constructed of constellations, having for their common theme the genesis, nativity, history and glorification of that which has ever been for mystics the Esoteric and true Christ; namely, the human Ego redeemed, perfected and made divine, by the process in all ages called Regeneration, or the New Birth from matter to spirit; and this is a process which, while they held it essential to salvation, they also held it to be within man’s power to facilitate and ensure, by means of due co-operation with the spirit within him.

The system of thought represented by this term Regeneration, was equally removed from the two other systems which alone have ever maintained a place in the world. These are the systems sacerdotal and materialistic, each of which has been its bitter foe. It differs from sacerdotalism in that while this posits a foreign and extraneous personality as the agent of salvation, and the priest as the indispensable intermediary; esotericism or mysticism insists upon a change of interior condition to be wrought within the man by forces inhering in himself. This was the fundamental doctrine of that system of thought which, under the name of the Gnosis, constituted the basis and controlled the expression of all the sacred mysteries, scriptures and religions of antiquity; the system which, after having “gone down into Egypt” from the East to make for itself a new departure in the rising world of the West – attaining its fullest formula416tion in the Hermetic Scriptures – was saved by the transplantation anew which we know as the flight of Moses from Egypt. It is the system, therefore, their failure to observe which brought upon Israel prophetic denunciation and national disaster: the system, the confession of his ignorance of which by Nicodemus elicited from Jesus the exclamation, “Art thou a Master of Israel and knowest not these things!” and the withholdment and suppression of which by its official guardians and exponents, brought upon them the bitter reproach of Jesus, “Ye have taken away the key of knowledge” (the Gnosis, τῆς γνώσεως), “Ye have not entered in yourselves, and those who would have entered ye have hindered.” And it is, lastly, the system by the observance of which Christ becomes Christ.

According to the Hermetic formulation of this Gnosis, man has within himself the seed of his own regeneration, and the power to effectuate it.^[3] As this is the seed of which the Esoteric Christ is the matured and perfected product, it is necessary here to consider its nature, and therein to take up the challenge of Isaiah, “Who shall declare his generation?” The question involved is nothing less than the stupendous one of the nature of the constituents of being, whether divine or human. It is in dealing with this question that the differences will most clearly appear between the systems under exposition and that known as materialism, to the complete exposure and discomfiture of the latter, and therein of the dominant philosophy of the day.

Now the materialistic hypothesis is that which, while rightly denying miracle as ordinarily understood, and insisting on orderly evolution as the universal method of nature, proceeds to posit unliving, unconscious, unintelligent matter as the sole, original, eternal, self-subsistent entity, and then, by a stupendous miracle, utterly subversive of the idea of evolution, orderly or otherwise, derives therefrom a universe teeming with life, consciousness and intelligence. Meanwhile the propounders of this hypothesis fail utterly to perceive that in thus endowing matter with the power to transcend itself, so far from getting rid of the God-idea they actually enhance and exaggerate it, seeing that even Deity has never been credited with the power of self-transcension.

Now with regard to the science of the day this, for the mystic, is indubitably true. When that science pronounced the word “Evolution” as the key to the method of nature, it set its foot upon the track of the Esoteric Christ. But upon this Christ it turned its back, thereby hopelessly cutting itself off from its proper goal – the interpretation of Man – when, following the fallen because materialistic sacerdocies, it set up afresh on its own account the “Abomination of Desolation in the holy place” of God and the Soul, by making matter and appearance all, to the exclusion 417of substance and reality, For, thus doing, it ignored the crowning stage of evolution, namely involution, and the higher possibilities therein implied. For inasmuch as evolution is the manifestation of that which is inherent, and not merely of that which is apparent, it is only by involution that evolution can be completed and the potentialities of Substance realised.

But even this indictment does not exhaust the list of the philosophic sins of the science of the day. For, on its hypothesis, evolution itself is impossible. It has already been pointed out that in order to produce the results claimed for evolution, matter must rise above and transcend itself. But science has left out of the account any power whereby matter could be made to do this. Such being the logical incoherence of the science in vogue, it is no cause for wonder that its votaries should show themselves so heedless of congruity as, while believing in evolution and admitting their total ignorance of the nature both of the force and of the substance by and in which evolution occurs, to presume to assign limits to evolution!

Now, it is precisely with the nature of the force and the substance by and in which evolution occurs, that this exposition is concerned, seeing that as man’s potentialities necessarily depend upon the character of his constituent principles, the Esoteric Christ as the highest realisation of those potentialities, must be similarly dependent.

For the Esoteric Christ is not, like the orthodox Christ, a being abnormal and inscrutable, summoned into existence by an arbitrary fiat to meet a special or unforeseen emergency, and as regards his nature and function unamenable to any process of human thought and void of correspondence in human experience. He is, on the contrary, the product of a process and represents a principle, each universal and indefeasible, being inherent in the very nature of being, and bound, therefore, under due conditions, to find realisation and manifestation. Wherefore that which is involved in him is not a religion only, it is also a science, a philosophy and a morality. It is a science because it represents exact knowledge, based upon experience – the experience of the soul. It is a philosophy because it deals systematically with causes and reasons and powers and laws, which are those of Being in itself. It is a morality because it appoints as rules of conduct eternal principles instead of personal preferences and expediencies, and appeals always to the highest motive. And it is a religion because it refers science, philosophy, and morality, and man himself alike to God as their common source, subject and end.

The current restriction of the term “science” to things physical and sensible, is wholly arbitrary and unwarrantable. There is a science of things moral and spiritual as well as of things material, a science of Man himself, as well as of his external conditions; and man possesses the faculties requisite for its elaboration and formulation. Physical science but betters man’s conditions to leave man himself unbettered. And so far from 418its assumption being true, that man is the result of his conditions, the contrary is the fact; his conditions are the result of himself; his exterior of his interior state.

The contention of the materialist that man cannot have positive, exact, scientific knowledge of God, the soul and immortality, is true of man as materialist, but it is not true of man as man. This is because such knowledges appertain to a plane in man’s nature of which the materialist has yet to evolve the consciousness. All that he is in a position to affirm respecting them is that he himself does not know – himself and his kind. To deny the possibility of such knowledge on the ground of his own ignorance and incapacity, is to make himself the measure of humanity, and non-experience instead of experience the basis of conclusion. He is entitled to point out any flaw, should he find one, in the reasoning of the mystic – for logic is the same for all planes – but he is not entitled to question his facts. In regard to the relation of the mind and the senses the two parties coincide. Each of them alike corrects the senses by the mind when they agree that the earth is not the stationary centre of a daily revolving universe, notwithstanding the concurrent testimony of the two senses, sight and feeling, uncontradicted by any other. For we see the heavens revolve every twenty-four hours, and feel the earth motionless beneath us.

But here they part company. The materialist, having developed the consciousness only of the phenomenal, takes that which appears for that which is, and accordingly rests in the belief that the material is the all, finding neither in the universe nor in himself any substantial being.^[4] The mystic, on the contrary, who has developed the consciousness of the substantial as well as of the phenomenal, of the real as well as of the apparent, complements and corrects the conclusions of the mind by the perceptions of the soul, just as the materialist corrects the senses by the mind; and he knows accordingly that that which appears is not that which is, but is the instrument only of its manifestation. And in virtue of his ability to discern the substantial content within and beyond the phenomenal vehicle, he knows the true and real being, or Ego, alike of himself and of the universe. And by means of this Ego he obtains the experiences which are the basis of its conclusions. Now it is with this Ego, its nature, genesis and elaboration that this exposition is primarily concerned; and only secondarily with the man in and through whom it finds manifestation.

IV. (2) His Substance.

Now between the orthodox and the esoteric definitions of the Christ are these two points in common, one, that Christ is the manifestation of God in man; the other, that the man concerned is a particular kind of 419man. But when orthodoxy proceeds to restrict such manifestation to a particular individual man, and to give it a physical and physiological application, the other parts company with orthodoxy, on the ground that, as regards the former point, any particular instance is but the exemplification of a principle which, being inherent, is of universal application; and, as regards the latter point, that the Christ is, by his nature, a being spiritual and substantial, not physical and phenomenal; and that he is this whether incarnate or discarnate. This is because the physical body, needful though it be as the vehicle of his manifestation in the flesh, is no part of the Christ-nature and consequently no part of the Christ. Hence he “can lay it down and take it up again” without ceasing meanwhile to be Christ; because, as Christ, he is constituted not of matter but of substance – the potential essence of matter – and is thereby of spiritual nature. For that which is essential is spiritual, and being spiritual, is spirit.

Now Spirit, whether considered as Energy or as Substance – for it subsists under both modes – is not only conscious but is consciousness, in the essential, as distinguished from the radical, sense of the term. Wherefore to posit Spirit as the substance of being, is to posit consciousness as the condition of being, and to identify non-consciousness with non-being. The esoteric doctrine does this, and thereby directly reverses the materialistic hypothesis, with the result of solving the problem of existence in both of its departments, Creation and Redemption. For it exhibits these as equally resulting from the nature and method of Spirit, and also as complementary to each other. And this, too, in such wise that the comprehension of the one involves that of the other. So that only when we understand creation do we understand redemption, and only when we understand redemption do we understand creation. Understanding these, we understand God and man.

For to say that Spirit is the Substance of being, or is, itself, Being, is to say that Deity is that Substance and that Being. For “God is Spirit”. Not a spirit; to use the indefinite article would be to individualise God, making Him one of many spirits; whereas God is universal. He is Spirit, not a spirit. He is Being, not a being. He is God, not a god. Without Him is no being; and His only possible antithesis is not-being.

The readiness with which people style themselves “Atheists” now-a-days, is due no less to hastiness of expression than to superficiality of thought. What they really mean – when their meaning is analysed – is that they disbelieve in the orthodox or some other presentation of God. But they do not, therefore, disbelieve in God. To believe in anything at all is, in such measure, to believe in God, defining God as the essential being of all that is, and of whom, therefore, all things are manifestations, after their kind. To make the limitations of any such manifestation a pretext for imputing limitations to its substanding reality, is equivalent to disbelieving in mathematics on account of one’s own failure in the 420application of mathematics, as by the inability to solve some mathematical problem. Whereas mathematics is necessarily infallible and perfect. And so with God. The failure to recognise the perfection of God is a failure only of perception in oneself. And inasmuch as mathematics is an element in and an aspect of God – being inherent in Being – and, so far as it goes, is God and God is Mathematics – a belief in the perfection of Mathematics is really a belief in the perfection of God; and this both considered as Mathematics and in all other respects; since that which is absolute in one of its aspects must be absolute in all and as a whole. However defective any manifestation in Nature may appear, we have to consider, first, that inasmuch as manifestation is of time and place, no manifestation can adequately represent the infinite and eternal reality; and, next, that, seen from its true standpoint, that which from our standpoint appears defective, may be found perfect. The Mystic extends to God, as the Whole of Being, the same absolute reliance which the mathematician does in that department or aspect of God or Being, which is denoted by the term mathematics; and he would no more think of impugning the perfection of the divine order when he found himself baffled by some inscrutable providence, than the mathematician would think of impugning the perfection of mathematical science when he found himself baffled by some insoluble problem. Such confidence is, for the Mystic, “Faith”.

But while all things are God by reason of their being constituted of the Force and Substance which are God, or otherwise representing principles in God, all things are not in the condition of God. This is the qualification, the omission of which has led to the stultification of Pantheism, otherwise a true doctrine. The right statement is that, while all things are God as to constituents, all things are not God as to condition.

The cause of this last is Creation. For Creation represents, and is the result of, the projection by the Divine Will of the divine Substance into conditions and limitations, which, being limitations of God, are limitations of good; and being limitations of Spirit, are limitations of consciousness, and, therein, of Being, which, according as they increase and prevail – graduate off into the not-God, not-consciousness, not-being.

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IV. THE ESOTERIC CHRIST. (2) His Substance. (Continued.)

Let us, for illustration, institute an analogy by substituting for the terms Consciousness, Spirit, and God, their noblest and most appropriate analogue in the physical universe, namely, Light, and supposing this to be the sole, original, self-subsistent, positive being, the substance of all that is. Let us think of it as subsisting primarily in absolute plenitude, but unmanifest, as invisible light, and homogeneous, but becoming manifest, and for that purpose evolving from itself a substantial medium whereby to radiate and differentiate of itself into the manifold spheres, modes, conditions, and specialisations requisite to form a world exteriorly cognisable; a result which is readily conceivable of as attainable though differentiations of polarisation occurring in this medium. And let us further suppose the world thus made of light, to be peopled with beings similarly constituted, who, by virtue of their representing an evolution from the inorganic to the organic, are possessed of faculties wherewith to cognise themselves and the substance of which they are constituted.

Let us suppose, moreover – what also is easily conceivable – that although light is in itself one and uniform and perfect in lustre and hue, being absolutely colourless and pure, yet when thus submitted to conditions, it appears under manifold hues and degrees of brightness, and is capable of shading away and even of disappearing altogether, and giving place to utter darkness – a darkness which, as the negation of light, would in the case supposed be the negation of being, and consequently the extinction of the entity concerned. Nor would the possibility of an event so terrible necessarily imply defect, either in the substance or in the constitution of the existence in view. For it is conceivable of as occurring through the incorrigible wilfulness of the subject-individual, in cherishing a preference for darkness to light and therein for non-being to being. Rather would the absence of such a possibility of self-extinction involve a limitation fatal to the perfection of a world designed to manifest the infinite.

To continue our analogy. In a world thus constituted the grade of any individual would necessarily depend upon his readiness and ability to 471appropriate and to assimilate himself to the substance of his being in its purest and highest modes, this being the best evidence he can give of his respect and affection for his source and sustenance. And it is no far-fetched conception to suppose that according as he strove to develop himself and others in the same direction, by aspiring ever towards more and higher light, he might find himself gradually but surely reconstituted, and a new selfhood built up in him, of modes becoming ever finer and more tenuous of the substance of his existence, compared with which his former and original self, which had been constituted of its lower and coarser modes, seemed to him altogether gross and unworthy, so that he should be eager to shed it as having become a clog upon him. And this process of sublimation may fairly be conceived of as continuing until he has become altogether sublimed, and is one in condition, as well as in substance, with the whole of which he is now an individuate part, his capacity for power and intelligence enhanced in proportion to the exceeding tenuity of their vehicle, and having in himself the power of light eternal.

Nor need we – to complete our analogy – think of the seeker in so arduous a quest – the seeker, that is, after the perfect light – as left to his unaided knowledge and exertions. For, call the substance of existence what we may – Light, Consciousness, Spirit, or God – taking care only that it be some name which implies its sufficiency to account for all the phenomena of existence – that substance, being original and self-subsistent, is necessarily divine: and divinity is necessarily indefeasible. From which it follows that there must inhere, even in the lowest modes to which, for creative purposes, it has been projected, a capacity of reversion to its original divine condition, which capacity, from being latent while in the inorganic state, becomes a positive tendency, when, through the agency of life, it attains the organic state. It is conceivable that from this tendency, let us say at once, of Matter to revert to Spirit – or, to speak with exactitude, of Substance to revert from its artificial, material and molecular, to its original, spiritual and non-molecular condition – there arises, first, the evolution whereby is Creation, or the elaboration of the world physical and physiological; and next, the Involution whereby is Redemption, or the elaboration of the world spiritual and substantial.^[5]

Let this but be so, and so far from man being left to pursue unaided an uphill course, in seeking to become reconstituted of the higher elements of his system, he has the aid and support of those elements themselves, because by virtue of the quality of their inherency they tend in the same direction. Wherefore all that he has to do, after once his will is set in the upward way, is to heed the impulses which flow to him from them in the voice of his own intuitions, and detaching more and more his affections from 472the outer and lower which may yet seek to detain him, throw their weight also on the ascending side. The law which governs ascent and descent in the natural world is what it is only because it is the law of the spiritual world – the law, this is, of gravitation. Man’s spiritual level is according to his spiritual density, and it lies within the power of his own will to determine the degree of this.

Now, this reversion of Substance from the material to the spiritual condition, and the generation thereby of the man spiritual and substantial within the man physical and phenomenal, represents the arrest of the centrifugal and outgoing force of the human system – which, if continued unchecked, would be dissipated and lost in space – and its return as the centripetal and ingathering force towards its centre in completion of the entity concerned, as a system, and therein its redemption and perpetuation. But these forces, or rather modes of force – for as there is but one substance, so also is there but one force, since “He that worketh is One” – are as masculine and feminine to each other, being respectively as will and love. From this it follows that there is a twofold reason why the man spiritual and substantial is said – as he is said – to be “the son of the woman”. He is constituted of the feminine element of existence, namely, substance, and his elaboration occurs through the operation of the feminine mode of force, the centripetal or love mode. Now, as already said, the man spiritual and substantial who is thus engendered is the Esoteric Christ.

V. (3) His Nativity.

The analogy which has just been elaborated at so great length is, for the mystic, no mere analogy, but literal truth. We are beings made of light, inhabiting a world of the same material, and only through our own defect of perception is there any darkness in ourselves or in the world. This defect of perception, moreover, is not of material or of structure, but of condition; for it comes of our being depolarised from our proper centre. And that by which we are, and alone can be, redeemed from this condition is the operation within us of the principle of which the product is the new interior selfhood just described, a selfhood all luminous and all percipient, that which mystically is called the Christ within. Only by this interior operation, and not by aught occurring without, nor by proxy and vicariously, can such result be attained.

In this new and interior selfhood, from Chaos we become Kosmos; and whereas before we were blind, now we see. Or, to apply another formula for the same process, told as of the universe, the Spirit of God – the Divine Energy within us – has moved upon the face of the waters of God – the Divine Substance within us, the substance of our own souls; God speaks – that is, finds expression – and thenceforth there is light; and we are no more darkness and a void. And under the co-operation of the 473“Seven Spirits of God” the elaboration of the new selfhood proceeds to its consummation in the man made wholly in the image of God; each “day” in the week of his creation representing the work of one of these divine potencies.

Or, to take another Scripture rendering of the same supreme process of regeneration – this time told as of the race. The whole earth of the human nature in us is corrupt and it is high time that the rule of the flesh be destroyed to make way for the rule of the Spirit, of darkness for that of light. Wherefore the Divine Energy moves upon the face of the waters of man's soul, and the result is light. For forthwith the earth in us is covered with a flood of intuition, the soul’s own restored perceptions and recollections of the essential divinity of humanity. And upon this flood, as in an ark – his own Kosmic system – man, with all the principles, at once fourfold and seven-fold, of human nature, with the animals – types of his qualities and affections, high and low – are upborne to the summit of Ararat, the summit, that is, of spiritual attainment – a new man, being “regenerate of Water and of the Spirit”; while everything merely fleshly in him is overwhelmed and drowned.

Or, as in get another Scripture rendering of the same process – this time told as of a special individual but no less applicable to the general, and valuable only so far as it is applicable to the general, seeing that the particular is of account only as illustrative of the universal – the Divine Energy under its name of Holy Ghost – by which is denoted Deity active as distinguished from Deity passive – overshadows, or moves upon the face of the waters of, the Soul of the Man destined to serve as the finished type of Man regenerate. Which Soul, as an individuated portion of the Divine Substance or “Sea” of Space, is called first, Maria; and next, Virgin, because purified from all taint of materiality, and restored therefore to its original condition. And of these two, as Father and Mother, is engendered the new interior selfhood, the Christ Jesus within, at once Son of God and Son of Man. While the man without, in whom such process occurs, is, in virtue of his being the vehicle of the Christ and of its manifestation to the world, called a Christ.

And, as if expressly in order to preclude all possibility of doubt or misapprehension – though unavailingly, for materialising “priests bore rule” in the Church “and the people loved to have it so” – the doctrine of the esoteric nature and universal applicability of the process of the Christ, was enunciated by the typical subject himself of it, in terms which, while not dramatic like the story of his own nativity, are yet symbolical, but nevertheless unmistakable in their meaning. For the declaration of Jesus to Nicodemus, “Ye must be born again of Water and the Spirit”, is no other than a declaration of the necessity to every man, as the condition of salvation, to be reborn as he himself is said to have been born; Virgin Mary and Holy Ghost being identical terms with pure Substance and 474divine Spirit, and implying the man's own soul and spirit restored to their original divine condition. And regeneration is, no less than generation, a vital process. The difference is of plane only.

The precise point in the man’s evolution at which this new birth takes place, and the manner of it, are describable in this wise. That “Man is alive only so far as he feels”, is true of each kingdom of his nature, body, mind and soul. Hence only when the perceptive point of his consciousness, or “one life”, has moved into any of these kingdoms, is he “born” and alive in respect of such kingdom. The impulse which moves this point is the Will, his Spirit or “Father”. Passing on from the body to the mind, from being man physical and physiological merely, it makes him also man mental and intellectual. Passing inward and upward into the soul, it makes him from being these only, man spiritual also and substantial, and therein consubstantial with divinity, and as this man in him is Christ, it is of this operation of the Spirit in the soul, that Christ is begotten in the Man, in due time to be born, or manifest in and to him, which interior birth is the Nativity of Christ. All of which processes, though expressed in terms physiological, are purely spiritual and refer to the inner. It is for the man in whom the Christ is thus born and manifested, in due time to manifest him to the world, which he does by means of his life in the world.

VI. (4) His Divinity.

We come to a doctrine which serves, perhaps, more than any other to afford a crucial proof at once of the corruption of religious truth by orthodoxy, and of the limitation of thought by the free-thinkers, so-called, who have taken upon themselves not only to denounce orthodoxy, but to renounce all that orthodoxy claims to represent. Granted that according to the orthodox definition the doctrine is an absurdity, and worse even than an absurdity, a blasphemy, and that the original fault lay with the sacerdotalists, it was none the less incumbent on those who claimed to represent free thought and the revolt against orthodoxy to have made every endeavour to ascertain what precisely is the truth which sacerdotalism has suppressed by perverting it to its own ends; and this if only for the reason that an error is never confuted until it is explained.^[6] Whereas, so far from doing this, the Agnostics have slavishly accepted the orthodox definitions, and, on the strength of the obvious falsehood of this, have pronounced against the 475doctrine itself. And they have done this in face of the no less obvious probability that just as sacerdotalism had compassed the crucifixion of the person of Christ, so would it compass the crucifixion of the doctrine of Christ. Instead, therefore, of turning their backs with contempt upon the sacerdotal phalanx, they should have faced it, and, piercing its lines, have penetrated to the heart of its position, and only when they had mastered its secret have presumed to judge it. Doing this with a thought really free, and strong and courageous as thought can alone be when impelled by the perfect love that casts out not only fear but prejudice, they would have found that so far from the doctrine of the divinity of Jesus Christ being either what orthodoxy has made it, or Agnosticism has supposed it – a “barrier to the expansion and progress of the human mind”^[7] – it is founded indefeasibly in the nature of existence, is recognisable as self-evident and necessary, and represents the annihilation of all barriers whatsoever to man's expansion and progress. For thus rectified and transformed, it exhibits itself as the doctrine, not of the exclusive divinity of any one man, but of the potential divinity of humanity at large.

This is because in all cases, and not merely in some one special, unique and exceptional instance – for there are no such instances, the divine order being above all things orderly – the man substantial who is begotten within the man phenomenal, of the operation of the spirit in the soul, is, in virtue of their divinity, himself divine, and, being divine, is God. For spirit and soul, or energy and substance, in their original because pure, and pure because restored to their original, condition, are God, and having these two for his Father-Mother, he – their resultant or “Son” – is also God. And inasmuch as he represents and is the man himself reconstituted of the divine constituents of his system, restored to their divine condition, and thereby regenerated, he represents and is at once the realization of the man's own divine potentialities, and is an individuation of God, and is God. For, as God is pure spirit, so is pure spirit God. And it is not the less God because individuated as in the human soul; or because, when thus individuated, that soul is invested with a human body.

This, then, is the whole doctrine, simple, intelligent and self-evident, of divine Incarnation. Wherever, whenever, and in such degree as there is a pure soul and spirit in a human body, there is God incarnate. And that the spiritual individuality thus constituted is said to be, and is, in a special sense, the Son of God, is because his relationship with God is not mediate, through matter, and therein indirect and remote, but is immediate and direct, owing to his being the product of the divine essence itself, in its divine, because original, pure condition.

Now that which orthodoxy has done is to mistake the physical vehicle of the Christ, the exterior and fleshly selfhood of the man Jesus, for the spiritual content of that vehicle, its interior and substantial selfhood, or 476Christ-Jesus within; and to apply to the former the description intended for and true only of the latter.

The attainment of this condition by the man in respect of his essential constituents, is at once the cause and the consequence of the unity and divinity of the Will which pervades his system. In him, one will, and that the divine Will, attracts and rules the whole man. And whereas there can be but one divine Will in the universe, and wherever that Will is, there is God, the aspirant to Christhood receives at the hands of his initiator – himself a passed master of the Higher Alchemy – this admonition: –

“The Will of God is the alchemic crucible . . . Cast thyself into the Will of God, and thou shalt become as God. For thou art God, if thy will be the divine Will.”

Only when the lower self with its will has been crucified to the death is this unification accomplished. The veil of the temple of the exterior selfhood is then rent from top to bottom, and the man passes within the holy of holies of his own regenerate selfhood, to be evermore “one with the Father”.

To deny the divinity of this, the Esoteric Christ Jesus, and the possibility of divine incarnation as thus defined, is, then, to deny at once to original Being the power of self-individuation, and to derived being the possibility of purity in soul and spirit. It is, moreover, to set at nought the indefeasible definition of evolution as the manifestation of inherency, by placing an arbitrary limit to the process, and thereby withholding it from its due fulfilment in the realization of Divinity. Doing this, Agnosticism combines with Orthodoxy to interpose an impassable barrier between God and man, between – that is – man and his own highest. For such a barrier is interposed equally by the doctrine, which instead of making Christ the highest human, relegates him to a category other than the human; and by the doctrine which denies his divinity altogether.

It remains to be seen whether, now that the true definition has been given, Agnosticism will continue to hold out against the doctrine.

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(5) His Immaculate Mother and place in the Trinity.

The restoration thus effected of Christ to his true place as the spiritual Selfhood of Man regenerate, involves, as will have been seen, the like restoration of his Virgin “Mother” to her true place as the soul of such man, and of his “Father”, the Holy Ghost, to his true place as the energising Spirit of such soul. Of the orthodox presentation which has degraded the Virgin Mary from the spiritual plane to be, in conjunction with the Holy Ghost, the physical mother of the human vehicle of Christ, and Christ himself to be the vehicle instead of its spiritual content – of this presentation the least that can be said, is that it involves a confusion of planes so gross as to throw the gravest doubts either upon the competency or upon the good faith of those who are responsible for it. Whatever the explanation, the effect of such falsification of the import of the mystic “Man” and “Woman” of Scripture, has been to pervert a truth purely spiritual into an idolatrous superstition, by substituting as the objects of prime concern, persons for principles, things for processes, events for states, types for realities. By means of it the way of redemption has been fatally obscured, and the system which it was the express object of Jesus to overthrow – the system vicarious, materialistic, in a word, sacerdotal – reinforced and perpetuated.

In view of the rectification now made, the stupendous fabric of superstition reared upon the confusion of planes just exposed, and represented by the term “Mariolatry”, dissolves into its component parts, while the terms employed in its construction, relieved of their false gloss, resume their original, true, and altogether reasonable sense. “Mother, Spouse and Daughter of God”, “Ever Virgin”, “Conceived without Sin”, “Queen of Heaven”, “Star of the Sea” – are all strictly applicable to that which in original Being is called Substance or the “Waters”, and in derived being is called Soul, and is the feminine principle of being, purely spiritual in its nature, and having no relation to the physical or physiological. Being such she is worthy of all worship, since that alone is true religion which consists in the culture of the Soul: and only through the culture of the Soul does she become qualified to be the “mother of God” in man. Conceived without sin herself in that, as pure soul, she is constituted not of matter but of divinity, she in her turn conceives and brings forth without ceasing to be 71 virgin, because neither in herself, in her spouse, nor her offspring, is there any taint of materiality, and that which alone defiles the soul is materiality.

Not that it has always been so with her. In the initial stage of her evolution, as Eve, she yielded to the seductions of the sense-nature to which she found herself allied; partook of the forbidden fruit, and losing her purity, became “mother” of man degenerate. But now, through the suffering entailed by experiences undergone, she has regained her original purity, and – become virgin as to matter – is fitted to be mother of man regenerate. But, be it specially noted, in all this there is no question of, no allusion to things physiological or even historical. It is of the Soul – not of a Soul – that we are speaking; and the man of whom the soul is the mother, is not the man physical but the man spiritual – the character; that of which the man physical is the vehicle, and which finds expression through him; that which, in the case of the man regenerate, becomes substantialised as a divine personality, constituting him at once man and God.

That in her recovered state of purity she has but one son, is for the same reason that he is called the only begotten son of God. The offspring of pure spirit and pure soul is always the regenerate selfhood. And no individual soul can produce more than one such son, since the man and his soul are one. But be such souls and such sons many as they may, the former is always Virgin Mary and the latter is always Christ-Jesus, being so-called in the day of their initiation. For it is the mystical title of the man spiritual, not the name of the man physical; and it denotes the order of those who, from being sons of man only, become by regeneration sons of God. Of this order the historical Jesus is an instance and a type.

We have already exposed one striking instance of confusion of planes in the formulation of Christian doctrine, and the disastrous effect thereof. We have now to expose another instance of the same. It relates to the Trinity, and the position of the regenerated Selfhood and his Mother in regard to it, the right understanding of which is essential to the comprehension of the Christ.

According to the orthodox presentation, Christ is the incarnation of the second person in the Trinity of the Godhead of original unmanifest Being. This is the “Son”, the first person being called the Father, and the third the Holy Ghost. Seeing that the terms “Father” and “Son” involve the idea of spouse and mother, and that the masculine involves the idea of the feminine, as thus presented the statement is obviously incomplete.

It is incomplete and also incorrect; but the esoteric definition supplements, complements and corrects it. For it carries back the conception of which the orthodox doctrine is the expression, to an earlier stage in thought, where the whole mystery reveals itself as follows:

Every unity, invisible or visible, spiritual or material, necessarily comprises the duality we have termed Force, or Energy, and Substance. They are respectively that which operates and that which is operated upon 72 or in; that which makes visible and that which is made visible. They are by their nature, respectively, of positive and negative, or masculine and feminine potency; and personified, they are as He and She. And while they are one in repose, in activity they are twain.

But for them to become manifest or visible, they must evolve a third element, their resultant, or product of their mutual interaction; this alone it is which is manifest or visible: and according to the plane of activity, is called their expression, word, manifestation or manifestor. Calling them Father and Mother, this is their Son (strictly, their son-daughter, as partaking the nature of both parents). And while in the “lower triangle” of the visible world the three are force, substance and phenomenon; in the “ upper triangle” of the world of pure Spirit, or original Being, they are spirit, substance, and manifestor, a further process being necessary for manifestation. Only, through the evolution of its trinity can any entity become manifest, and the three are not three entities but one entity.

Thus defined the doctrine of the trinity appears as representing an essential condition of Being, without which it can neither be nor become manifest. And no unity can either subsist or exist, can either be in itself or become apparent, which is not also a duality and a trinity. There can be no energy without substance, no substance without energy, no energy and substance without their resultant expression; and no resultant expression without energy and substance. From which it follows that in some mode, the trinity of Father, Mother and Son is inherent in all being.

This is the idea underlying and implicit not only in the ecclesiastical and orthodox trinity, but in the whole system of thought which controls the sacred religions and scriptures of antiquity, Christianity included. In using the terms Father and Son, orthodoxy implies also spouse and mother – implies, that is, the feminine element of substance. But instead of expressing her it merges her in the Father, and – treating as a unity the duality thus constituted – makes this the First Person, puts the Son in the second place, and completes the triad by taking into the Godhead that principle which, proceeding from the Father-Mother through the Son, represents Deity emerging from passivity into activity. This, the third person of the orthodox trinity, the Holy Spirit or Ghost, is – like the Son – also of dual potency, comprising both Father and Mother, and it is of his energy and substance that all things consist, the substance being, by force of the divine will, projected into conditions and limitations and made exteriorly cognisable as matter. As the lower triangle of existence, the universe is the manifestation of the upper triangle of pure Being, and serves as a mirror to reflect the attributes and qualities of the divine original, and is, according to its plane, the image and counterpart of God. While, in virtue of its consisting of the “three persons” which are respectively as father, mother, and son – force, substance and phenomenon, and being itself a unity, the universe also is a trinity in unity. And whereas its energy and substance 73 are divine, being those of God, although not in the condition of God, the inherency of the universe is divine, is divinity. From which it comes that evolution, as the manifestation of inherency, is accomplished only by the realisation and manifestation of divinity.

This, however, involves the production of yet another entity, also a trinity, and comprising the three aspects, energy, substance, and expression, or Father, Mother and Son. But not as represented in the unity of man physical. Inherency being divine, it is not realised by the evolution of man physical. The goal is attained only in that which is divine in condition as well as in form, that which is not only in the image of God, but is God, by reason of its substance being in the condition of God. True, it is in man that evolution reaches this its climax; but not in man physical, only in man spiritual. The regenerated human selfhood is at once the unity and the trinity in which these conditions are fulfilled, its “three persons” energy, substance (or soul), and expression (or word), or Father, Mother and Son, being respectively the Holy Ghost, Virgin Mary, and Christ-Jesus (within). Such is the trinity of the divine Humanity whereby Evolution is accomplished and creation redeemed and crowned. And whereas in the trinity of the Unmanifest, the Son is called Adonai^[8] the Lord, so in the trinity of the manifest, his counterpart and correspondent is called our Lord.

Now, in representing the return of creation to God, and the culmination of evolution, this state – Christ – is attained by ascent from below and not by descent from above. Wherefore, in placing Christ originally in the trinity of the Unmanifest, and identifying him with the Son, Adonai, in that trinity, orthodoxy has failed to distinguish between the two trinities, that of God in manifestation and that of God in God’s self, and has in consequence confounded them. This becomes further evident when it is considered that the “Father” of the Christ is not “God the Father” at all, not, that is, the “First Person” of the Godhead of original being in its state of passivity and prior to manifestation: but God as Holy Ghost, and after procession through the Son, Adonai, into activity, and when operative in the human soul, having worked up thereto through creation from the “lower parts of the earth” to which as the divine energy and substance he had previously descended for the double purpose of creation and redemption, and therein for the “generation of the Christ”.

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Of this withdrawal of Christ from his true place in the Trinity of the Manifest, and his identification with the corresponding “Person,” Adonai, in the Trinity of the Unmanifest, the consequences to religion and humanity have been disastrous in the extreme. For by presenting the incarnation as occurring through abnormal devolution from above and without, instead of by normal evolution from below and within – thereby making Christ a being extraneous to man, and of a nature other than man’s, instead of the perfected self-hood of man – orthodoxy has inverted the true conception and import at once of creation and redemption, with the result of placing an impassable barrier between man and God, and defrauding man of the divine potentialities which are his inalienable birthright.

This is not to say that the creed itself is in error. As the creed of a Church of the manifest, the creed is a creed of the manifest. Hence it deals only with the kingdom within man, and recites the principles, processes and states in the spiritual history of man become by regeneration Son of God, or Christ. But this kingdom and this Christ orthodoxy has ignored, and has referred the symbol defining them to the Unmanifest, therein suppressing the real subject of the creed, the esoteric Christ and his kingdom within. By their adoption of, and persistence in this course, the representatives of orthodoxy give proof positive that in respect of their comprehension of the one essential doctrine of salvation, that of Regeneration, they have not advanced a step beyond him whose confession of ignorance of this very doctrine elicited from the typical man regenerate himself the exclamation, “Art thou a Master of Israel and knowest not these things!”

The same confusion of planes which has led to the identification of the Christ in the trinity in man, with the Adonai in the trinity of the Godhead, has led to the identification of the Virgin Mary in man with the corresponding element in original being, the Sophia or divine Wisdom, this being the name of the feminine element, substance, in the Godhead. For it is not only “in Wisdom”, but of Wisdom, that “all things are made”. The effect of this mistake has been to conceal from man the knowledge of his divine potentialities in respect of the soul as well as of the 189 spirit, whereas it is his own soul who alone is “mother of God” in him. Since that which the divine substance, or Sophia, in original unindividuate Being is to the divine Spirit or energy of that Being, the soul, or Virgin Maria, in derived individuate being, is to the divine Spirit or Energy of that being, at once “Mother, Spouse and Daughter of God”.

The new statement is very explicit in all that relates to the derivation and nature of the soul considered as substance, directly affirming her – under her classic name, Psyche – to be “in and before the ether” or astral fluid, and therefore of uncreated substance. It is true that Paul employs the same term to denote the animal soul, anima bruta, as distinguished from the anima divina, and has thus given rise to some confusion. And it is true also that some of the Greeks used it indifferently to denote either or both of these. But they never restricted it, as does Paul, to the lower principle, and for the most part, especially when personified as Psyche, they used it to denote the higher. But even when using Psyche for the anima bruta, Paul never meant to imply that this was the Soul who, whether as Eve or as Mary, is Man’s original “Mother” and true soul. To conceive of the soul as consisting originally of the astral, would be to exclude the idea and even the possibility of the soul’s fall from the celestial to the material, seeing that the astral itself, in being created and not original substance, represents a “fall”, and is really but a sort of tenuous matter, admixture with which is every whit as defiling to the soul as matter in its denser modes. The doctrines of the “Immaculate Conception” and of the “Assumption of the Blessed Virgin”, imply and involve the divinity of the Soul’s substance; and it is only by her regaining her proper divine condition, though the elimination of every particle of the impurity acquired by her descent into materiality, that she becomes entitled to the epithet “Virgin”, and fitted for her final assumption into “the heavenly chamber wherein the king of kings sits on his starry throne”; an event which is fitly celebrated by the Church at the season when the constellation Virgo, ascending to the zenith, is lost to view in the sun’s rays. For, being of celestial nature, the grave – that is the physical and astral consciousness – cannot retain her; and it is because the consciousness of the saint is gathered up into her, his soul, and she into his spirit her spouse, that death has no terrors for him. The body is to him but a phenomenal capsule, the loss of which is like the shedding of a garment worn out and become superfluous. It has become an encumbrance of which he is well rid, and he knows it to be so.

Concerning the identity of the substance at once of God and the soul, the recovered Gnosis thus expresses itself, and in such way as to account for the genesis of Genesis.

“In the beginning, the potentialities of all things were in Elohim.

“And Elohim was twain, the Spirit and the Water – that is, the heavenly Deep.

190 “Now the spirit of Elohim is original life, and the heavenly Waters are space and dimension.

“He is the line and She is the circle.

“And without them is void and darkness.

“Now the Divine twain were from the beginning contained in the bosom of the One who was before the beginning.

“Even God the nameless, invisible, unfathomable, unspeakable, motionless.

“From whom proceeded the heavens – that is, the duality, spirit and deep; and the earth – that is, spiritually, the beyond.

“Now the beyond was without form and void, and darkness covered the face of it.

“But the heavenly waters were covered by the Spirit of God. . . .

“Now the divine Substance is the great deep: that is, the first protoplasma.

“She encircles and embraces all things, and of Her are dimension and form and appearance.

“Her veil is the astral fluid; She is the Soul of individuals, and the receptacle of the Divine nucleus.

“Now the Divine Substance is not matter; but She is matter in its potential essence.

“She is the manifestation of personality, enclosing the Divine nucleus.

“Spirit alone is diffuse, and the naked flame is liable to fuse with other flames.

“But the flame which is enclosed in substance has become an indiffusible personality.”^[9]^[10]

(6) His Secret and Method.

The term “Christ” is of manifold significance, implying alike a principle, a process, a state, an office and a person; under which last aspect it is also manifold, being exoteric and esoteric, or historical and mystical; and microcosmic and macrocosmic, or individual and universal.

As principle, Christ denotes that property or quality in virtue of which the substance of existence tends, under individuation, to revert to its original pure condition, by relinquishing its artificial or “created” state as matter, for its normal and divine state as spirit. As this tendency finds its expression and satisfaction in and through evolution, a definition of it, to be sufficient, must recognize these three things: – 1. The divinity of inherency. 2. Evolution as the process of the manifestation of such inherency. 3. 191 The personal Christ as the crown of evolution; and this alike in his four aspects, the exoteric and the esoteric, the microscosmic and macrocosmic.

As process “Christ” denotes that which, in the language of the Higher – or esoteric – Alchemy, is called “The Great Work, the Redemption of Spirit from Matter”. The subject of this process is the Will. Its method – the “Secret and Method of Christ” – consists in inward purification. And that from which such purification is requisite is the condition implied by the theological expression “original sin”. The first step to its comprehension, therefore, is the understanding of this expression.

According to the received definition, “Original sin is the fault and corruption of the nature of every man that naturally is engendered of Adam, whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh lusteth always contrary to the spirit, and therefore in every person born into the world, it deserveth God’s wrath and ” indignation.

All that this definition needs to enable it to be recognized as representing an indefeasible truth, is the right understanding of the term “Adam”. Following the esoteric method, and for persons reading principles, we at once recognize as intended by “Adam” that part of man’s nature which, being the first to be elaborated, constitutes the first stage in his evolution as man, and being his outer and superficial part, constitutes the external self-hood only. It is not the body; the mystical scriptures deal not with things physical, and the body, for them, is in no sense the man, but only the material vehicle and phenomenal capsule of the man. “Adam” is the bodily, or sense, nature; and the limitations which constitute original sin are those which arise from his derivation through and constitution of the lower modes of consciousness into which substance has been projected in order to serve as the raw material of creation. As an assemblage of consciousnesses gathered from every plane of existence into which Original Being has differentiated of Itself, man comprises consciousnesses mechanical, chemical, electrical, and so forth, and elements ethereal, gaseous, elemental, mineral, vegetable, and animal, each of which possesses a nature and will of its own; and only by his reconciliation of their conflicting wills, their combination into a unity, polarisation to a superior plane, and the identification of their wills with a central will, is it that he becomes an orderly kosmos and indissoluble personality. Meanwhile, and prior to this consummation, his state is one of bondage, anarchy, conflict and rebellion; of bondage to the impulses he is unable to control; of anarchy through the diversity of his various wills; of conflict between and with his own lower elements, and of rebellion against the supreme will. So that the poles of the cells of his system incline in divers directions, and the binding power which is its life is liable to be dissolved and destroyed. Such is the condition which, theologically, is said to “deserve God’s wrath and indignation”, meaning that it contains in itself the elements of its own destruction,

192 Were this description of him an exhaustive one, not merely would he be deserving of such a doom, he would fail to have any being at all as an individual entity. For there has yet to be taken into account that principle of his nature in virtue of which he has any such being. This is the “Eve” in him, his soul who, as a portion of the divine substance segregated and individuated indeed, but uncreate, retains her original nature and is competent for his redemption, which she accomplishes by means of his re-creation or regeneration. But not all at once or in the immediate present. For not only is the process itself a prolonged one, but she herself has much to do, to suffer and to become, before she is fitted even to commence it. True, she ensures meanwhile his continuance as an individual, and this irrespectively of his physical life. But, necessary as is this office, it does not exhaust her function in respect of him, but is subordinate and preparatory only to this. Her function in regard to him, on the spiritual as on the social plane, may be expressed in the injunction, “Woman, redeem your animal”! Wherefore she perpetuates him in order to build him up from man physical only and perishable, into man spiritual and eternal. And for this she must, like him, undergo trials and experiences and be “made perfect through suffering”. And alike by the man and his soul must the “garden” be forfeited for the “holy city” to be attained; the “desert” traversed for the promised land to be reached. This is to say, the state of innocence that comes of ignorance must be exchanged for that of the virtue that comes of knowledge, which, itself, must be the product of experience. Only by sharing her Adam’s limitations can she become to him the efficient helpmate she is destined to be. All that happens to them is educational.

Not that she knows this, or even her own true nature, at the outset. For by the fact of her descent into material generation she has drunk of the “waters of Lethe”, and lost the intuition of her nature and source. Not by virtue of what she knows, but by virtue of what she is and does, must she, the soul, prove her divinity. Hence it comes that she no sooner finds herself allied to the sense-nature than – oblivious of her own – she succumbs to its seductions, mistakes the apparent for the real, and renouncing the divine will of her proper spouse, the Spirit, for that of her external self-hood, the “Man” or Adam – incurs his liability to extinction, together with his need of redemption by the identical process of purification and at-one-ment.

Her endeavours to save him are the means of her own salvation. The prompting influences are of two kinds. Her own “divine discontent” with the condition of mere materiality in which she finds herself – a condition foreign to her nature – this, supposing her to have retained, in whatever measure, the consciousness thereof. And the movings of the divine life which is properly hers, the life, or pure spirit that is, who is the “Father” of the Christ within, she herself being his “Mother”. When once this 193 divine generation has been effected within the man, the accomplishment of his regeneration becomes a question only of time. For owing to the strength of the older and lower will, the process is for a long time fitful and intermittent, and the infant Christ, or innocence within him, is in perpetual danger of massacre at the hands of the Herod within him. But when once the saving germ has taken firm root and the process is securely established, it never lets him go, but insists on attaining its full fruition. In token whereof it is said by the Exoteric Christ, speaking for the Esoteric Christ, “Of those whom Thou gavest me, I have lost none”. And whereas the saving impulse has its origination from within, and is due to the working of the same principle, it is further said of the Esoteric Christ, “We love him because he first loved us”. But though a principle, this Christ is none the less a person. For he is of celestial nature, and “in the celestial all things are persons”, because God, in and of whom they consist, is in the real, as distinguished from the radical sense of the term – that in which it denotes essential consciousness – a person.

As “the child is the ‘father’ of the man”, so is the man partially regenerate the “father” of the man wholly regenerate. Hence the Christ is the “son” of David, the type of the former; but by spiritual, not physical, descent. For besides his bodily ancestry man has the ancestry of his past spiritual selves and states. The former appertains to the apparent, the latter to the real self. The former gives him his features and characteristics, which are accidental and of the outer, and the latter gives him his expression and character, which are essential and of the inner. While only partially regenerate the man is said to be “under grace”. He cannot “sin mortally”, cannot, that is, fall away wholly; for be his shortcomings what they may, his heart is right with God. Hence he is said to be a man after God’s own heart, and does not cease to be so because sometimes worsted in the fight with his animal will, which proves too strong for the will of the spirit in him. The soul, strong beyond the ordinary, as the soul must be that is destined in some future life to become the mother of the manifested Christ, must be educated by experiences of adequate severity, and for that purpose be associated, perhaps many times, with a body possessed of a will corresponding in strength and of a perverse nature, in order to provide the discipline and ordeals requisite to fit her for her lofty destiny. They who, dwelling exclusively in the outer, recognise appearances only, judge outward judgment and accordingly make the lapses of a soul thus conditioned the subject of scoffing, seeing nothing of the severity of the ordeal or the heroism exhibited in the conflict. But to be able to understand phenomena, as they alone can be understood, by getting behind phenomena, and judging from the standpoint of the spirit, is to know that such falls are but the prelude and means to a rise which will take the subject thereof to a level transcending any yet attained by him: and that, as the tree in the forest, the deeper he has struck his roots into earth, the higher he will rise towards heaven, 194 Therefore it is that the soul must be not only Eve but Magdalen before she can be Virgin Mary; and her son be not only Adam but David before he can be Christ Jesus.

While the secret and method of Christ consist in inward purification, such purification is, itself, but a means to the supreme end. This end is represented by the term polarisation, which in this relation means the readjustment of all the particles of consciousness in the system in such wise as to allow of a continuous current and perfect circulation of its very finest essences, their convergence into a focus and fusion into a unity in the innermost and radiant point, where – kindling into flame – they become united with the divine fire itself, making the man “one with God”. This is the state called by mystics “the one life”.

The condition essential to such realisation, or “vision” of Divinity, is represented as a threefold cord, of which the strands are purity of life, purity of heart and purity of doctrine. These are called the “three degrees of the heavens” within man. The various steps of the process are described as the twelve gates of the holy city, or regeneration, through which a man must enter to be entitled to the tree of life. The process is wholly centripetal, representing the return of the perceptive point of the consciousness, which is the man, from the outer to the inner, by following the intuition. But in order to be trustworthy the intuition must be allied to and exercised in a pure spirit, one which recognises no end but the highest. Hence in the blessing pronounced on Judah, the “tribe” that produces the Christ, the significance of the expression “binding his foal unto the vine, and his ass’s colt unto the choice vine”. The intuition is symbolised by the ass – that in man which, as with Balaam, sees the angel and receives, as a rule, the ass’s portion – and the choice vine to which it must be firmly tethered denotes a spirit perfectly pure, or it will be landed in superstition as surely as the intellect divorced from the intuition is landed in materialism. Riding on an “ass” thus bound, the “king” makes triumphant entry into the holy city of his regenerate selfhood.

Similarly with the “twelve apostles”, who symbolise the degrees of his regeneration. The members these are of the spiritual microcosm; and

“All are bidden to the banquet of the marriage of the Son of God.

“But if there chance to be even one among them which has not on a wedding garment,

“Such a one is a traitor, and the microcosm is found divided against itself.

“And that it may be wholly regenerate, it is necessary that Judas be cast out.”

This accomplished, then again there are twelve, and the Christ, perfected, ascends to his kingdom. For then he no longer has need to say, “Not my will but Thine”; for he has no will of his own, but “the Son is as the Father”.

To express our conclusion in terms of the Higher Alchemy already named:

195

“The Will of God is the alchemic crucible, and the dross which is cast therein is matter.

“And the dross shall become pure gold, seven times refined; even perfect spirit.

“It shall leave nothing behind it; but shall be transformed into the Divine image.

“For it is not a new substance: but its alchemic polarity is changed, and it is converted.

“But except it were gold in its true nature, it could not be resumed into the aspect of gold.

“And except matter were spirit, it could not revert to spirit.

“To make gold the alchemist must have gold.

“But he knows that to be gold which others take to be dross.

“Cast thyself into the Will of God, and thou shalt become as God.

“For thou art God, if thy will be the Divine Will.

“This is the great secret: it is the mystery of redemption.”^[11]

And being this, it is the secret and method of Christ.

Edward Maitland.

Footnotes

↑ The distinction here drawn is of supreme importance. The faculty of perceiving “spirits” – as the phantoms of the dead are called – is a natural faculty, common to savage and civilised, where not destroyed by artificial modes of living, and implying no spiritual unfoldment whatever. It is for this reason that modern “spiritualism” does not necessarily involve spirituality, any more than an acquaintance with men and women involves a knowledge of Humanity. The distinction is that between persons and principles.
↑ No account is taken here of any personal claimants to the office, basing their pretensions on the possession of certain occult powers. For even these are not wanting in the present day. They serve, nevertheless, by fulfilling prophecy to vindicate it. See Matthew xxiv., 5, 24, etc.
↑ This is the “precious jewel” said by Shakespeare to be worn by the toad in its forehead, the toad being an alchemic expression for Matter.
↑ The word Substance is used throughout to denote that which sub-stands and appears in the phenomenal.
↑ The assumption of the materialists that the quantity of matter in the universe is invariable, is here set aside as wholly gratuitous, being founded on the assumption no less gratuitous that there is no Divine Will, of which matter is the product and to which it is subject. For the mystic all force is, ultimately, Will-Force.
↑ “We shall abolish the priests by explaining them,” was the proud boast of a redoubtable leader of the school, John Morley. Many years have elapsed since its utterance, and in not one jot or tittle has it been fulfilled. The Agnostics have heaped unmeasured ridicule and abuse upon dogma, but have not explained it. Nor can they, consistently with their profession of ignorance and inability to know, ever expect to explain it. Since in order to explain, it is necessary first to know; and in order to know, it is necessary first to have an organon of knowledge; and Agnosticism disclaims both knowledge and organon. To be consistent they should refrain from denial no less than from affirmation; since denial is but affirmation of the contrary. And of affirmation in this sense they are profuse.
↑ The Noble Path, by F. J. Gould, being No. V. of “Stepping Stones to Agnosticism”
↑ Adonai is the Hebrew equivalent of and substitute for the unpronounceable Jehovah.
↑ Clothed with the Sun, Part II.
↑ A portion, that is, of the universal consciousness, or personality, segregated from the parent mass, and individuated as a distinct person. The word “person” has a twofold significance. For while, in its radical or etymological sense it denotes the exterior form, in its esoteric sense it denotes essential consciousness. It is in the latter sense only that it is applicable to Original Being. Only in the sense not involving limitation can Deity be rightly termed “personal”. For “God has no limitations”.
↑ Clothed with the Sun, II., ix.

[v8-p229-n1-1] The distinction here drawn is of supreme importance. The faculty of perceiving “spirits” – as the phantoms of the dead are called – is a natural faculty, common to savage and civilised, where not destroyed by artificial modes of living, and implying no spiritual unfoldment whatever. It is for this reason that modern “spiritualism” does not necessarily involve spirituality, any more than an acquaintance with men and women involves a knowledge of Humanity. The distinction is that between persons and principles.

[v8-p232-n1-2] No account is taken here of any personal claimants to the office, basing their pretensions on the possession of certain occult powers. For even these are not wanting in the present day. They serve, nevertheless, by fulfilling prophecy to vindicate it. See Matthew xxiv., 5, 24, etc.

[v8-p416-n1-3] This is the “precious jewel” said by Shakespeare to be worn by the toad in its forehead, the toad being an alchemic expression for Matter.

[v8-p418-n1-4] The word Substance is used throughout to denote that which sub-stands and appears in the phenomenal.

[v8-p471-n1-5] The assumption of the materialists that the quantity of matter in the universe is invariable, is here set aside as wholly gratuitous, being founded on the assumption no less gratuitous that there is no Divine Will, of which matter is the product and to which it is subject. For the mystic all force is, ultimately, Will-Force.

[v8-p474-n1-6] “We shall abolish the priests by explaining them,” was the proud boast of a redoubtable leader of the school, John Morley. Many years have elapsed since its utterance, and in not one jot or tittle has it been fulfilled. The Agnostics have heaped unmeasured ridicule and abuse upon dogma, but have not explained it. Nor can they, consistently with their profession of ignorance and inability to know, ever expect to explain it. Since in order to explain, it is necessary first to know; and in order to know, it is necessary first to have an organon of knowledge; and Agnosticism disclaims both knowledge and organon. To be consistent they should refrain from denial no less than from affirmation; since denial is but affirmation of the contrary. And of affirmation in this sense they are profuse.

[v8-p475-n1-7] The Noble Path, by F. J. Gould, being No. V. of “Stepping Stones to Agnosticism”

[8] Adonai is the Hebrew equivalent of and substitute for the unpronounceable Jehovah.

[9] Clothed with the Sun, Part II.

[10] A portion, that is, of the universal consciousness, or personality, segregated from the parent mass, and individuated as a distinct person. The word “person” has a twofold significance. For while, in its radical or etymological sense it denotes the exterior form, in its esoteric sense it denotes essential consciousness. It is in the latter sense only that it is applicable to Original Being. Only in the sense not involving limitation can Deity be rightly termed “personal”. For “God has no limitations”.

[11] Clothed with the Sun, II., ix.

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