CHAPTER III

WHEN VISION FAILED

The gist of the story here to be unfolded is the narrative of a great and catastrophic failure of vision at a most critical point in world history. The major thesis of the presentation is that Christianity emerged to existence and grew to power as the outcome of a dire blight that fell upon the mental and spiritual life of the mid-Eastern world in the centuries immediately preceding its upspringing. The theme to be developed is that Christianity took the form it did in consequence of a decay and degeneration of enlightening knowledge, and not at all from the dynamic energization engendered by a new release of light and truth unknown before. Forces that are held in restraint or die of atrophy when the hot glow of new enlightenment drives to noble activities, emerge to dominate the course of action when the high impulses and motivations sink into desuetude and the counsels of sage understanding fail to guide the conduct of men and nations. In the view to be elaborated here Christianity was the consequence of such a relapse from former high uplift and such an emergence of less noble expressions of the human psyche.

In very brief form of statement the position to be taken and defended is that Christianity was the outcome of a defection of human interest away from the splendid Greek philosophy of the Periclean or Platonic period. This pronouncement will unquestionably be met with the same adverse reaction as that which actuated Tertullian in the early fourth century to cry out in substance: Philosophy! What has philosophy to do with the Gospels and the resurrection? What has Plato to do with Jesus of Nazareth? But it is this blindness of Tertullian that most piquantly dramatizes for us today exactly the main clue in the proper historical analysis of the genesis and character development of Christianity. Failure of intellectual insight, crass myopia both mental and mystical, was the factor that prevented Christian leaders from seeing that relation of kinship between Homer, Plato, Proclus on the one

hand and the Christian movement on the other and that therefore set the stage for sixteen hundred years of benighted religionism. The answer that is designated here to be flung back in the teeth of Tertullian is that, most unfortunately for the world ever since, Greek philosophy had all too little to do with the Gospels and Jesus of Nazareth and that the Dark Ages were the result of that failure of connection between the two things. The undertaking here will be aimed to restore that fatal break of connection which became the cause of the most lamentable calamity to afflict mankind in the historical period. The book itself will constitute the ringing answer to Tertullian's challenge which has lacked a spokesman for all the intervening period. When the true story of how and why the loftiest wisdom the world has ever known, Greek Platonism generally speaking, had in the minds of Christian zealots like Tertullian nothing to do with the Christian upsurge has at last been fully told, a new light of understanding will be thrown over the field of history of the last two thousand years. The African Bishop's indignant question has never had its competent answer, and it is the purpose of this work to give it.

Yet, oddly enough, history itself has given a decisive answer, although, like so much that history speaks to us, it has not been caught or recognized. Tertullian's own Church came up with the answer when in the early Middle Ages it turned back to found its whole theological structure on this same Greek philosophy that the Bishop of Carthage had so violently repudiated. For about two centuries the Church developed its theology upon the principles discovered in Plato's Timaeus and later for some eight centuries it built still greater strength into its system through incorporating the elements of Aristotle's Metaphysics. In the centuries of its most intellectual activity the system of Christian ecclesiasticism itself proclaimed what Pagan philosophy had had to do with the Gospels and with Christianity. And thus by its own record and action the Christian Church advertised to the world its disbelief in its own original claims, since it exactly reversed its former position by turning to those very philosophies it had so viciously declaimed against at the time of its inception. It turned to Pagan literature to find authoritative support for the alleged preachments of its heaven-sent Christ. Now as history records them, the Church's own acts shout so loudly that the world can not hear what it says. Had a true Christianity that could have boasted of its affinity with Greek philosophy prevailed in and from the third century, this institution

would not have been thrown into the ungainly and ridiculous position of both condemning Pagan philosophy out of one corner of its mouth and using it as authority for its own doctrines out of the other.

It was strictly because Christianity early lost its intellectual link with antecedent systematic thought and its own primal motivations that it drifted off its true course of search for the light and was in so short a space disastrously involved in the shoals and quicksands of a degeneration so profound that after sixteen centuries the Western world still finds itself enmired in the bogs of absurd and impotent theologism. So bizarre, so irrational and so irrelevant to the normal life of the world has Christian theology indeed become that to all practical intents and purposes the Church that fought for centuries over its metaphysical abstrusities has at last dropped it out of its program! Sociological and humanitarian themes are the subjects of Sabbath sermons in most pulpits; theological doctrines are kept almost completely in the background. What seemed worth tearing each other limb from limb for in the fourth century is not even deemed worth a Sunday sermon now. The fourth-century controversies settled nothing then, and the great subjects of conflict are still so hazy, indefinite and vaporous that pragmatic sense has counseled leaving the dogmas and creedal statements untouched.

When ignorance comes to the front, it is its most characteristic trait to parade itself as knowing more than the wise. This phenomenon is manifested so voluminously in the run of events that crowded fast in Christian history after the movement had been given security, gained state control, grown arrogant and--pushed out all its philosophers. The poor but pious devotees, finding themselves sitting in the offices of elders, deacons, priests and bishops, began to regard their faith as wondrously superior to all the cults that Roman policies of tolerance and indifference had permitted to flourish in the Empire. Their exuberant confidence is found reflected even in their modern historian, Canon Farrar, who in his Lives of the Father (Vol. II, p. 503) writes to make the usual fulsome claim of the superiority over, in this case, Manichaeism:

"The Manichaeans freely used the name of Christ, but it was with them the mere adoption of a symbolic phrase. Their Christ was not the Christ of the Gospels. He was to them the spirit of the sun, the light-spirit from the pure light-element of God; not 'very man,' but only clothed with a corporeal semblance. Christ on the cross meant to them nothing but an emblem of the sufferings of every soul which strives to become free."

Perhaps no passage could be found in a random search that would better illustrate the change that is here claimed to have occurred in the early Christian movement. A chapter could hardly do justice to what a full analysis of the passage and its implications would bring out. In a word, then, it has to be asserted that a Church which in a short run of years had so far drifted from a basis of true apprehension as to condemn as outlandishly pagan a cult still seeking to identify the Christ as a divine light-principle within the heart of every mortal, and as to declare it to be a poor and crippled doctrine which made the Christ on the cross an "emblem of the suffering of every soul which strives to become free," had in this very stand proclaimed itself sunk into a veritable morass of heathenism deplorable beyond measure. The passage cited from Farrar irrefutably proclaims the cult whose belief it expresses as being more pagan than the Pagan system it inveighs against, since it is assuredly more pagan to deny that the Christ spirit of light from God did become "very man" in its incarnation in all men, than, as with the Manichaeans, to assert that most majestic concept. The hybrid Christianity of the after-period out-pagans the Pagans at every turn.

Further food for reflection is found in the continuation of Canon Farrar's discussion, when he goes on to assert that Augustine, in failing to "regard the Old Testament as a progressive but incomplete and imperfect revelation," missed the true conception of this basis of exegesis, and strengthens his assertion by saying that Augustine "was less strong as an expositor than as a dogmatist," an observation which could be well supported in reference to all the Christian Fathers and leaders with the exception of Clement and Origin and the Theodore presently to be mentioned. Farrar continues:

"The historic method of viewing revelation, though distinctly intimated in the magnificent proem of the Epistle of the Hebrews and in other incidental utterances of the greatest Apostles, remained enveloped and only partially understood by the Church, from the time that the narrowed Western theologians succeeded in crushing Theodore of Mopsuestia and the school of Antioch down to the day of Nicholas of Lyra, who died in 1340."

What Farrar intimates here is that a broader view of the "historic method of viewing revelation" which prevailed at an earlier time in the Christian movement, was soon supplanted by a "narrowed" view held by Western exegetists. It will be a part of the task here contemplated to refute even this assumed broader view of historic revelation

as far as it is based on Farrar's--and most other Christian writers'--understanding of it in what they take to be the exemplifications of it in the Old and New Testaments. But at any rate we have the Canon's expressed declaration that an earlier broad view was replaced by a later narrow one, thus admitting the chief thesis advanced and defended herein.

And then the eminent churchman, writing less than a hundred years ago, climaxes his paragraph with a sentence which could well stand as the digest of our first two chapters and a brief compendium of the whole study. Says he (Vol. II, 508):

"The triumph of Latin theology was the death of rational exegesis."

So true is this extraordinary pronouncement that had its pregnant implications been discerned and fully considered as a gauge of weighing conclusions in historical study over the centuries since the early day, both Christian history and world history would have moved forward on a higher level of spiritual culture than was unfortunately the actual case. But the involvements of the Canon's true statement are too radically sweeping, too challenging for the truth of it to be openly accepted and taken to heart. It says something too luridly glaring for common knowledge. It explodes too much dynamite in the face of all who would have to confront its challenge. It is far too damaging an admission.

For what does it say? Nothing short of the fact that when the Christian movement passed from the Eastern Mediterranean lands of its genesis and was captured by the churchly authority in the more westerly Roman domain, it suffered a "sea change" which left it completely transformed into something far other than what it was at the outset. The actualities and concomitants of this transfer have never been rationally or realistically envisaged.

The fall of true Christianity came with and through this transposition of its sponsorship and custodianship. When the new fervor of religionism was transported from East to West, it passed from the guardianship and fostering care of a race and a civilization that was still bathed in the genial afterglow of the brightest light of philosophy that had radiated abroad to the world from human genius, and came under the blighting influence of another culture that in the main lacked capacity for spiritual enlightenment, the while it manifested in high degree the talent for world organization. This factual item is needed to explain the grounds for Christianity's remarkable tem-

poral success and its sweeping career of acceptance in the history of the West. Given the most exalted spiritual character by its provenance from the milieu of lofty Greek philosophy, it was taken up by the race gifted in extraordinary measure with the power of empire building and by it structuralized into a firm organic body of such coherence that it conquered the Western world. Had it remained in Syrio-Judaic environment, it would have shared the fate of Manichaeism, Neoplatonism, Mithraism, Docetism, Gnosticism and the Zoroastrian faith: that is, it would have been carried on to become a cult of the inner spirit among limited segments of the population in the Hellenic world, and later been swallowed up, along with the cults of esotericism named, by the all-conquering sweep of Mohammed's fanatical dervishes.

It escaped this fate by enlisting the more Western populations who, with their instinct for world domination, welded it into the organic structure of the Roman world empire, so that it stood as a solid embodiment of power even when the political frame of that structure was dismantled by the Northern hordes. No such measure of perpetuation and salvation could have been provided for it in the East. There it might have remained, along with Neoplatonism and Alexandrian syncretism, a cult of the esoteric philosophers. But it would never have set its leaders on the thrones of world political power nor caused humbled emperors of great nations to stand barefooted in the snow all night to receive the Pontiff's apologies in the morning.

But the transfer to the West and the gain in world power thus achieved, so far from crowing the religion with the glory of victory and spiritual transcendence, became on the contrary the march to a defeat so utter and catastrophic as to have reduced it for centuries to a hollow mockery of truth and a beguiling hallucination of the Western world. For in passing from the hands of the Hellenic peoples with their genius for philosophy into the hands of the Romans who lacked that same genius, but who could organize it for world conquest, it, so to say, gained the whole world but lost its own soul.

The precious soul it lost was what Farrar calls "rational exegesis," but was in fact much more than that. It was the entire sense to interpret the ancient heritage of religious philosophy and its Scriptures spiritually, mystically, in a manner, in short, which is the characteristic that Eastern Christianity has ever displayed to distinguish it from Western Christianity and mark it as infinitely superior thereto.

At a further point it will be debated whether it would have been for

the better historically if the Christian movement had remained in the East and retained its high character as a spirito-mystical cultus for philosophers and religious intellectuals than to have followed the course it did, to become a religion of shallow and banal exotericism turning every hieroglyph of spiritual and metaphysical significance into ribald literalism and historic absurdity. The point to be placed on record here is that by the transfer from a philosophically gifted race to a worldly-minded one, it gained dominance in the world at the expense of its true message of intrinsic uplift and illumination for mankind, which at the time the Roman race was intellectually incapable of assimilating and digesting. It would never have been a Hellenic theologian who would have cried out in bitter exasperation: What have Homer and Platonic philosophy to do with the Gospels and Jesus? Amazingly it was Paul who made a complete turning of the tables on the Western Tertullian. Reared in the intellectually stimulating Hellenic atmosphere of mystico-spiritual philosophy, he practically demonstrated in fifteen Epistles in the New Testament canon that it was the Gospels that have little to do with a true religion of Christos, with true Christianity! For no intelligent theologian has ever claimed that Paul's lofty spiritual Christianity was in any way whatever the product of the evangelism that the Gospels represent as developing into Christianity. Paul's Christianity has nothing to do with the Christianity that is assumedly based on the Gospel history. Proof of this is to be found in the historic fact that the promulgators of the Gospel evangelism both openly and covertly arrayed themselves in opposition to Paul and his Christianity. When Paul journeyed to Jerusalem to meet for the first time the members of the Apostolic group there, he would not have been received by them at all if it had not been for the intercession of Barnabas. The controversy between the factions and the theologies of Paul and Peter is well known. It is only by virtue of some internal predicament not historically clarified that Paul's writings did not come under the ban and stigma of "heresy" which fell with the force of a scourge upon the Gnostics, Ophites, Docetists, Ebionites and other esoteric Christian groups, who, incidentally, almost without exception purveyed a brand of Christianity more legitimately entitled to the name than did "orthodox" Christianity itself. Leading theologians of the Church, when constrained by the force of the factual data and their own counsels of sincerity, have with more or less hesitation and reluctance admitted that Paul's Christianity stemmed from sources of spiritual interest other than the movement allegedly historicized in

the Gospels. The great Apostle obviously did not carry the banner of the Nazarene's evangelical crusade, but promoted the Egypto-Hellenic system of spirituality with such glowing power that it was found desirable to incorporate his letters in the canon along with the body of literature that carried the sweep of the pietistic surge of Gospel Christianity. And, to summarize a mass of quotable material, many theologians have asserted that but for Paul's contribution to evangelical and Apostolic Christianity of his volume of Graeco-Alexandrian Platonism and rational mysticism of the philosophic schools, the movement inspired ostensibly by Jesus the Avatar would have died out before the end of the first century. It was Paul's writings that redeemed it from its first status among cultured people of "an execrable superstition" and a rating of ignorant fanaticism generally.

Yet this factor that saved it from ignominy and oblivion is still harshly decried by most "orthodox" spokesmen! So far has unschooled pietism carried mortals away from balance and rationality.

Farrar was right, and more tragically right than he dreamed! The triumph of Latin theology was the death of rational exegesis. More than that, it came close to being the death, as it certainly led to the dearth, of rationality itself. Its effects soaring far beyond mere exegesis, it was the death of the highest moral and spiritual upreach that this globe has ever known; the death of philosophy, with its piercing insight into the nature and structure of man's life in the cosmos, his origin, his evolution, his destiny in glory; the death of reason in the counsels of religion; the death, by surrender, of the human critical intelligence to the narcotizing power of "faith"; the death of wisdom, knowledge, understanding, killed by the ravaging plague of fanatical zealotry unknown before in world history. In short the triumph of Latin theology was the death of true Christianity itself. It was the birth of a fatuous and fatal Christianism, which has ever since hounded, persecuted and with savage ferocity exterminated every individual or group that strove to revive the lost Christianity.

Furthermore the triumph of Latin theology brought to birth and growth in the mind and heart of Western man elements of fiendish savagery which had found expression in no other religion anywhere and which have scarred with disfigurement the face of Occidental history. The triumph of Latin theology warped the minds of its devotees into such a state of irrationality that they could find ample excuse for any barbarity deemed necessary to uphold and extend it. It provided the justification for brutal inhumanity. If this should not take rank as

one of the direst calamities in world life, it would be hard to think of one more monstrous.

The connection of theological cause with murderous result is direct and immediate. It was the Latin theology that crushed Gnosticism in the Church, and what this has meant for Western history can best be seen if we scan a passage from Kershner's work, Pioneers of Christian Thought (p. 87). It must be remembered that Marcion was one of the greatest of the Christian Gnostics. Kershner is speaking of him:

"If his teaching had prevailed there would have been no autos-da-fe, no Inquisition and no burning of heretics by either Catholics or Protestants. It was the triumph of the imperialistic God of Tertullian and Augustine which led to the most of the later horrors in the history of the Church. The idea that the Deity could do anything which he himself regarded as unjust or cruel seemed unthinkable to Marcion, but this was not the case with his opponents. . . . It was the common belief of the period, at least in orthodox circles, that the joys of Paradise would be enhanced by the possibility of witnessing the torments of the damned. Augustine has a great deal to say about this somewhat gruesome topic . . . but neither Augustine nor Tertullian represented anything unusual from the orthodox point of view. A God who could condemn little children to the unending flames of perdition simply because some of their remote ancestors disobeyed his commands represents an ethical ideal which was later to write history in the torture chambers of Torquemada, the flames which consumed the bodies of Huss and Servetus and which broke Jean Calas on the wheel only two centuries ago. Marcion's theology at the worst would never have permitted such things as these . . . his moral sense was sound and the world might have been better off if his heresy had prevailed."

It is the instinct of intelligence to view with charity the unfortunate aberrations of moral conduct and motive in human life, but indeed a charitable attitude toward this chapter of historical manifestation is difficult to maintain. Even an attempt to place it in a somewhat more favorable light ends in sorry satire, as Kershner adds (p. 103):

"The Spanish Inquisition arose primarily because a tender-hearted monk wanted to save the wicked from eternal torture of perdition by tormenting them a little in this world to the end that they might abjure their heresies and be saved."

If the monk's heart was so fiercely consumed by the love of Christ and his fellowmen that he could bear, perhaps with holy joy, to see their limbs torn from their bodies and their writhing in flames because he held a certain set of intellectual propositions to be true and they held a contrary set to be true, then we have at last isolated for unmistakable

examination the cause of human cruelty, or the inhumanity of man to man that has made so much of the history of the race a red glare of lurid fiendishness. When holy men turn to murder and glut their pious souls in a revel of it, the fault must lie in their minds. Socrates and Plato arrived finally at this conclusion at the end of their dialectical quest of a lifetime; Voltaire saw it when he declared that men's hearts are bitter because their minds are dark. This work will urge that the only salvation of humanity in its present or any future juncture is to cultivate philosophy instead of religion; and here, silhouetted for us against the wall of history in clearest outline, is the justification of that view. If it is true, as Voltaire shouted to us, that men will continue to commit atrocities as long as they continue to believe absurdities, then it is of primary concern for this race of thinking creatures to make the utmost effort to determine what is absurd and what is sanely true. This at last brings us to the final point of determination between good and evil, the location of which is to be found in the pursuits of philosophy. It is the theme of our volume that in the third century the Christian religion or its exponents turned from sense to absurdity and therefore, by Voltaire's prescription, committed atrocities. Argument may dispute this terse summation, but history attests its truth.

Mankind on the whole has learned distressingly little from history. The history of Christianity in the Hellenic world in brilliant contrast to its history in the Roman world should have fixed in the human mind a lesson and a truth that would have set the race on the royal road to a high humanism, if not spiritual culture, far in advance of any progress it has made since Plato's day. Put summarily, it is seen that Greece, which cultivated philosophy and exalted Christianity to the level of a lofty philosophical system, imbuing it with the light of a nearly divine genius for rational conception, rendered it an instrument, on the whole, of refined culture and general beneficence. The Roman West, however, which flouted philosophy and for the rational cultus substituted the violence of faith and religious fervor, converted that same Christianity--if indeed it could be considered the same--into an instrument of appalling devastation, virtually dehumanizing its hallucinated adherents. Here on the blackboard of history stands outlined the vividly limned scenario of perhaps the most important lesson mankind has to learn. It points straight to the moral that in philosophy, and not in religion, or at any rate not in a religion rendered desolate of philosophical enlightenment by rabid emotionalism, is to be found the golden secret of the culture that will indeed save humanity from

the Egyptian bondage under the dominance of its rampant animal nature. With the advantage now of a fifteen hundred years' retrospect, it is possible to understand why the closing of the last of the Platonic Academies in the Hellenic world was immediately followed by the plunge of the West into the long night of the Dark Ages. The tidal sweep of irrational religionism over Europe reduced to the dimmest glimmer the brilliant lamp of Greek rational philosophy, which had flamed out so gloriously but a few centuries before. In this epochal instance the replacement of a rationally cultivated religion with one that with rank crudity of mind flaunted its hatred of philosophy before the world presaged the Avernal descent of the West into a Plutonian underworld of lower human motives and passions from which the light of its upper world of diviner persuasions was shut out.

The vast extent of the gulf existent between the heights of philosophical rationalism and the depths of unintelligent religionism can be most realistically sensed when one reads a passage from Plutarch's Morals (Vol. I, p. 13) and then thinks of the early Christian contempt for books and study. He writes:

"But learning alone of all things in our possession is immortal and divine."

And then he adds, speaking of the education of the child (Ibid., p. 17):

"Yet I would have him give philosophy the preeminence of them all . . . whence it follows that we ought to make philosophy the chief of all our learning. . . . There is but one remedy for the distempers and diseases of the mind and that is philosophy. For by the advice and assistance thereof it is that we come to understand what is honest and what dishonest, what is just and what unjust; in a word, what we are to seek and what to avoid."

For consummate wisdom this passage from Plutarch stands unexcelled. The cultural salvation or exaltation of the human race will lag until the day when the religious elements so strong in consciousness are brought under control and ordered in harmony with the principles of understanding structuralized by philosophy. There is not room here for a dissertation on psychological science, although it properly belongs to the context at this point. But modern psychology is close to demonstrating that the grasp of a sound philosophy is a prime requisite for the retention of sanity. Indeed it has already done so. Like man's body, his mind can only maintain its health when nourished with proper

food and enough of it. Infinitely more delectable than the pleasure of feeding the body is the joy of feeding the mind. Plutarch's asseveration that there is no remedy for the distempers and diseases of the mind but philosophy should come at this exigency in world life as the answer to all those problems which so critically confront the province of education today. Philosophy is the science of meaning, and there is no escape from the recognition that what life means to a mortal is what it will be to him. The sudden rise today of the science of semantics is a good sign of better things, for it centers value again on meaning. The soul for whom the multitudinous events of life have little or no meaning is a lost soul. It has not found itself and knows not wherefore it exists. Its range is limited to sense and feeling and it is as a rudderless barque tossed helplessly about on the sea of events. It can steer no course and is a pitiable victim of life instead of being its king. That is the reason the god powers incubating in man are called the King.

It is cheering to note that at least one modern philosopher and one psychologist have caught hold of the great truth of Plutarch's statement. William E. Hocking, Harvard philosopher, has written (Science and the Idea of God, p. 42) that "there is no cure for mental disease without consulting the total meaning of the world." And a splendid elaboration of the theme is presented in Chandler Bennitt's fine work, The Real Use of the Unconscious. It is desirable to adduce this datum and to array strong authority behind it because it will shortly become the corner stone, as it were, of the central argument of the whole work. The Christian faith has drilled into the consciousness of thousands of millions of Western humans that only belief in the existence and personal ministrations of a man born one day into a mortal body will free humanity from bondage to low animal instincts. Tragedy has befallen those same billions because Christianity did not reckon with the ultimate truth of what Hocking adds: "It is only the meaningful that sets us free."

The great Christian exegetist Harnack mentions the fact that Christianity never exerted any appreciable influence on Neoplatonism. If Christianity was the great new light of the world, it is an entirely justifiable question why these profound thinkers and men of superior wisdom did not recognize its real claims. The significant answer doubtless is that it so utterly lacked all appeal to the intellectual interests of a philosopher that it brought nothing into his world worth his attention.

Since such great issues for human happiness depend on this relation of philosophy to religion, some further elaboration of the theme will not be amiss. Spinoza justly ranks as perhaps one of the three greatest philosophers; he came to close grips with the problem and arrived at conclusions extremely germane to our discussion. The highest virtue, he says, is for a man to act according to his nature, but that is to act only in terms of adequate ideas. If man's nature--aside of course from his animal part--is to be intelligent, then the supreme virtue is to act according to reason. True virtue then rests on true understanding. (This is precisely the conclusion reached by Socrates and Plato.) And the endeavor to understand is the promise and the basis of arrival at high virtue. This in the end is equivalent to man's innate instinct and desire for self-preservation, as his developing intelligence is the supreme necessity as well as instrument of his ability to prolong his existence.

Virtue is to act according to the laws of one's own nature; knowledge of those laws then is a first condition of right action. This knowledge is gained by acting and noting the consequences. If one is to act best, all the difficulties of knowing the truth must be faced. (This is the last truth humans like to accept, for inertia eternally prompts the desire to acquire truth by the least effort.) And what he brings out in another observation should stand as a signal of caution to those who plunge into religious emotionalism: the force of the emotions is not determined by the accuracy of the idea which arouses them, but by the vivacity with which we imagine it! This is of mighty import in the study of religious psychology, for the force of emotion has ever been assumed to prove the philosophical rightness of the idea that stimulated it. The sad realization that faces us here is that we can be emotionally aroused by totally false ideas. World history bears sorrowful attestation of this fact. Part of the task here is to show beyond cavil that Christianity itself swept to power through the force of emotions that were engendered not by true philosophical conceptions but by wretchedly erroneous ones.

The actual practice of ethics, declares Spinoza, is in a balancing of the emotions. What factor is present or available to determine the true balancing? Obviously only the faculty provided by God for this very purpose, the reason, which in turn must be based on intelligence or knowledge. To know the modifications of the mind in the emotions involves a profound knowledge of the nature of things. The emotions which make for true good are understood only as the nature of the mind itself is understood, and mind is determined by the nature of the

intelligible universe of which it is a part. This is why the ancients insisted that religion had for its prime and highest aim a "knowledge of the gods," for these "gods," be it understood at last, were the graded modifications, as Spinoza would call them, of God's total and universal intellectual being or Mind. To know anything the mind of man must know God, concludes the philosopher, because, man's mind being a fragment of the Mind of God, to know one's own mind is to know God, or that portion of him.

It is therefore extremely important in life to perfect as much as we can the intellect or reason. In this alone does the supreme happiness or blessedness of man consist. For blessedness is nothing else but the intrinsic satisfaction of mind which arises in degree and power and intensity in exact proportion as the fragment mind of the individual encompasses its union with the cosmic Mind of God. Wherefore the ultimate aim of man is to be guided by reason, the faculty by which he is brought to conceive adequately both himself and all things which can come within the scope of his intelligence. Inasmuch, then, as the intellect "is the better part of us," it is certain that if we wish to seek what is truly profitable to us, we should try above all things to perfect it as far as we can. Our highest good indeed should consist in intellectual perfection. Then comes that final summation of his magnificent dialectic which got for Spinoza the well-won title of "the God-intoxicated philosopher": since man is perfect or the reverse in proportion to the nature and perfection of the object which he loves above all others, he is necessarily most perfect and participates most completely in the highest blessedness who loves above all else the intellectual knowledge of God, the most perfect being, and delights keenly in it. This echoes the ancient Psalmist's rhapsody on the blessedness of "delight in the law of the Lord."

Spinoza's clear delineation enables us to set forth in vivid consciousness the defective foundations and faulty structure of the Christian system. To be a true religion, ministering to the highest good of humanity, a system must basically and centrally cultivate man's philosophical genius. But this was the very element that Christianity abominated. The assiduous cultivation of the intellect in order that the Ego may know the thrill of bringing to actual consciousness in itself the glorious might and majesty of the divine Thought, was the thing it hated and abolished. The seizure of some sort of overpowering emotional afflatus drove the people in the cult to the point of despising death and the lion's rending claw; but it was not the joy of the ex-

panding power of the rational mind. That swelling sense of godhood in man could never drive its rhapsodies to endure, much less to gloat over, the infliction of pain and torture upon others. It would inspire compassion and tolerance, pity and help, toward those so blunt and blind as not to be able to awaken the superior faculties by which the blessedness is won.

Nearly all Christian writers including the ablest have committed themselves to the stand that Christianity won a great triumph and saved itself from early decay by its rejection of Gnosticism and its mystico-theosophic programs. If Kershner's prognosis is true, as is indeed likely, then the ostracizing of Marcion's Gnostic systemology brought victory at the price of the horrific Inquisition and the blood of more Protestant martyrs in a single nation, the Netherlands, than the whole number of Christian victims in the Roman persecutions. If to die by unholy decree of barbaric ruthlessness for one's faith--the Christian faith--is close to celestial blessedness, why are not the hundreds of thousands of Dutch Protestants, French Huguenots, the Albigenses and Waldensians haloed with as much sentimental glorification as those Christians whom Nero burned and Galerius tortured? It is a fair question. But it will never have an honest answer. The rigid ecclesiastical system will perhaps never discern truly or acknowledge openly the ruinous price it has had to pay for its rejection of Gnosticism, which came close also to costing it the loss of Paul's redeeming contribution. Kershner is right: had Marcion's Gospel been held to, there could not have been a Spanish Inquisition.

By its repudiation and ejection of all philosophical components it both then and later has had to suffer the humiliation of admitting that it had so impoverished itself on the intellectual side that it had to come begging for the enlightening help which Greek intellectualism could supply to it to escape haunting oblivion. Again and again concrete history has turned with grim irony but poetic justice to administer condign and humbling retribution to the cult that sanctified ignorance and strangled the divinest instinct in man, the delight in knowledge, the joy of intellectual understanding.

In his The Beginnings of Christianity (p. 160) George P. Fisher says significantly that it was the natural sequence of the stagnation of philosophical speculation after the productive period was over, and of the mutual conflict of the various systems that Greece developed schools of skepticism and cynicism. And it is out of skepticism and cynicism, or just the vacuum of philosophical nescience, that there arises a fell

religionism of pietistic fervor, irrational belief and sheer faith. To fill this abyss many resorted to the highly dialectical rationalism of Neoplatonism, Fisher says, calling it a form of mysticism which, while it afforded a refuge to the believing, yet perplexed the minds of shallower capacity. Naturally this most exalted system of rational philosophy perhaps ever expounded proved too recondite for all but a very few.

Some particular manifestations developing from the suppression of philosophy in early Christianity are noticed by Fisher. The play of forces in the two systems of Stoic philosophy and Christianity brings out some sparkling contrasts. We can account, he says, for the "elevated philanthropic expressions of men like Seneca," the Roman Stoic philosopher, and for the broader spirit of Stoic lawyers, by a "providential development within the elements of heathenism itself." Not often are such flowers laid on the grave of heathenism. So even heathenism held hidden springs of spiritual power that Christian pride likes to claim for its system alone. But Fisher is hard put to account for the remarkable fortitude, serenity and general imperturbability that was one of the most magnificent characteristics of the Stoic ethical life. So, to give Christianity the argumentative victory he has to pronounce this supreme attainment of the Stoics a subtle form of selfishness. The Stoic composure in the face of the hard blows and the rugged ways of life is only an affected indifference which gains subjective tranquillity by ignoring moral values. But in the Christian system "there is no repression of natural emotions." History well and voluminously certifies to the correctness of the latter observation, for there never was philosophical stability enough in Christian practice to check the common sweep and sway of the most elementary passions. But it is well to note the play of narrow jealous churlishness accorded to virtue by Christian apologists when displayed by any group or cult outside its own pale, in Fisher's invidious ruse of saying that when a Stoic philosopher gains inner peace and poise it is only a selfish disregard of moral obligations, but when a Christian wins an interior calm it is the very benediction of heaven pouring down upon his upturned soul.

Instructive it is, too, to note what Fisher says regarding the Stoic aim to establish a durable kingdom of peace and fraternity on the foundations of a people practicing philosophic discipline by cultivation of Stoic fortitude and control. Such a community as Zeno and Seneca dreamed of did not and could not arise, says Fisher, until the kingdom of Christ was established on earth. Then these "obscure aspirations

and grand but impossible visions" became a reality! Does Fisher ask us to understand that the advent of the personal Christ in the first century established the "kingdom of Christ" in human society, and that there has been the reign of Utopia since that epoch? If so, one has to ask him where it is. Only lately nations long dominated, or shall it be said long sanctified by the influence of this "kingdom of Christ" in the form of the faith assumedly founded by the Christ himself, came close to exterminating each other in savage ferocity. And this was the result of the Christian virtue of not repressing natural emotions, in this case those of greed for power and the afflated insanity of military prowess. If the Christian Utopia has become a reality over these two thousand years of historical record, it is little wonder that men have given up on Utopian dreams.

Fisher says that Stoicism aimed to find the sources of strength and peace within the individual himself. But even this bouquet thrown to Paganism is somewhat wilted by the doubt whether this virtue does not let Christ down by managing to get on to fortitude without imploring his help and giving him the credit.

Again the laurels of disputation have to be placed on Christianity's brow in discussing the Stoic virtue of self-purification. The Stoic philosopher gains it by way of the selfish and unsocial path of mystical contemplation, hugging its raptures all to himself, while the Christian pursues it by the daily practice among his fellows of all the virtues. By what right, it must be asked, does Fisher decide for us that the Stoic does not carry the products of his lofty contemplation into his daily practice? His implication that he does not is entirely an unfair assumption. Surely he who meditates on high virtues is the one most likely to practice them. The sad fact is, also, that the record shows how lamentable the Christian population in those early times did not practice the common virtues.

Next to be expressly noticed is Fisher's statement (p. 185) that in Cicero's time and in the century that followed, faith in the immortality of the soul was mostly confined to men imbued with the Platonic influence. This, the greatest boon and blessed assurance to brace man in his mortal struggle, was the possession mostly of men under the high influence of the Platonic philosophy.

What then must be thought of the thinking processes of the man who wrote this, when only five pages ahead of it he asks: What were the actual resources of philosophy? What power had it to assuage grief and to qualify the soul for the exigencies of life and to deliver it from

the fear of death? The philosophical heathen had no source of consolation in bereavement! The philosophy that postulated the immortality of the soul left the mind cold and comfortless! He cites that in some of Cicero's letters there is nowhere the slightest reference to God or to a future life. From all of this we are to conclude that when a Pagan holds a philosophy of the soul's continuity of life and posits the existence of God, it is a cold abstraction and utterly futile, but when a Christian holds the same principles in his abounding faith they irradiate him with celestial beatitude. For what else can be made of such sophistication and casuistry?

Excuse for introducing such matters of seemingly picayune controversy is offered in the design of this work to demonstrate pragmatically that the errors and falsities inwoven in the Christian system have reduced the human mind in the West to many manifestations of imbecility and dementia. It is a legitimate procedure, then, to put on display by such animadversions the prostitution of even the scholarly mind of Christian apologists to forms and modes of disingenuousness and chicanery. A large portion of almost every theological writer's work is made up of such jugglery of the processes of logic and misrepresentation of facts to give victory to biased views.

But Fisher gives us some data about the status of philosophy in the Roman period that carry their own significance. He writes (p. 186):

"In the second century, along with the revival of ancient religion and the restoration of political order, philosophy played a more important part as an educator among the Romans than it had ever done before. There had been not only a popular dislike of philosophers, but also a strong prejudice against any absorbing devotion to philosophical study. . . . For political reasons partly, from a sense of the dangerous tendency of philosophical thinking, philosophers had been repeatedly banished from Rome in the course of the second century; but after the death of Domitian philosophy not only gained toleration, but often received an effective personal patronage from the Emperors. There was still a popular antipathy from the supposed uselessness of studies and discussions of this nature and from the Pharisaical character of many who were devoted to them."

The human instruments of great power over the life of imperial populations which must be regulated and dominated have always had reason to fear philosophy. It tends to kindle such enlightenment among its students as makes them rebellious against the repressive measures of tyranny and the regimentation of mass conduct at a base level. Emerson has told us that when a thinker is let loose traditional insti-

tutions and vested interests tremble. So Rome had banished its philosophers. This was in the second century, he says, just when the emotional surge of the new Christian faith was gaining initial force. The populace continued to have philosophy; but it is safe surmise that when men of deeper discernment began to see a new danger arising, greater than any presented by philosophy, from the menace to the state inhering in the wild fanaticism of the Christian rabble and their complete non-conformity with traditional religious customs, they deemed it a point of wisdom to disseminate the precepts of philosophy which would strengthen the general loyalty of the citizenship toward the state and discourage disobedience. Both benevolent governors and tyrants have found it judicious, as saving militia and police, to utilize religion as a sedative and narcotic to lull popular grievance to quietude and innocuousness. But when, as in this case, religion itself grows fractious and threatening, there must be a resort to violence--and this measure was seen in the persecutions--or to the gentler persuasions found in philosophy. Thoughtful and instructed minds have always regarded philosophy, or at any rate a profounder studentship, as an antidote to fanatical religionism. Today it is the cry that sounder education must be employed and vastly extended to insure democracy against the ills arising from inadequate instruction and incompetent thinking. It must have been much the same discernment that induced the leaders in Roman life in the second century to bring back the banished philosophers and give intelligence its chance to cure the crazy religious distemper manifesting so dangerously. This was almost certainly the motivation behind the sudden and glorious outburst of ancient sagacity under the name and form of Neoplatonism, engineered by Ammonius Saccas, Numenius, Plotinus and their associates. For it came in the second century. But the sorrowful destiny of the world brought it about that this time religionism won its most decisive battle against philosophy, the rueful outcome being fifteen hundred years of Dark Ages, from which there has not yet been emergence.

Further insight into the strange workings of scholarly minds obsessed with the Christian persuasions is had in another excerpt from Fisher's book (p. 189), where he says that when we look back upon the ancient philosophy in its entire course we find in it nothing nearer to Christianity than the saying of Plato that man is to resemble God. It is not often in religious polemics that an outright denial of the factual truth of a statement has to be made, but it has to be done in this case. Fisher's declaration is glaringly, outrageously untrue to fact. The

amazing truth is that Platonism and ancient philosophy in general, on its esoteric side, of course, is infinitely nearer to true Christianity than historical Christendom ever has been. Scholars like Massey, Higgins, Mead and others and the researches of men like Dr. Ray Knight and Wendell Harris in England have found every single formulation in doctrine, creed, rite and symbol of the Christian system to be a derivative of former Pagan institutes. Not only were all these antecedent constructions near to the nature of Christianity; they were that true Christianity itself. This is what Augustine and Eusebius told us. Fisher is completely turned around in his view: it is Christianism that is not near to the real Christianity. Pagan philosophy was near to Christianity in every facet, for it is the source of all Christianity.

Then Fisher observes that on the path of speculation the Pagan conceptions of God are hopelessly defective and discordant. He asks how in this case the soul is to break the fetters of evil and attain to its ideal. This question, he insinuates, can not be met by Pagan philosophy, but Christianity meets it through the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Through Christ--the living man--the divine ideal is brought near to humanity in all his purity and love, and not merely to a coterie of scholars, but to the humble and ignorant. (Even this form of statement carries the tacit implication that the purity and love of divine Christhood had been brought to at least a coterie of Pagan philosophers, which is just what is asserted here.)

A later treatment will meet the challenge of this specious argument advanced here by Fisher and again and again by nearly all other Christian protagonists. It must be passed over at this place with the sententious remark that by the time low Christian mentality had converted the body of arcane wisdom, its rites, symbols and allegories, into a form "simple" enough for the concrete apprehension of their interior import by the uneducated rank and file of the "humble and ignorant," they had made such hash of it that it has ever since been totally incomprehensible and unintelligible to any one, but to the untutored masses most of all. It is a profound discernment never yet clearly enough perceived, that when the high abstruse conceptions and recognitions which tax the genius of an Aristotle or a Spinoza to formulate clearly to the understanding even of the most capable minds are converted by adroit maneuver into a form assumedly readily comprehensible to untrained simple minds, the value has long disappeared. This strange claim is true, because to make it intelligible to naiveté of mind it has to be brought entirely from the realm of abstract meta-

physical conception down into the world of concrete things, in other words, vicariously represented by a physical symbol. And then ensues the tragedy that the naive mind takes the symbol for the reality, since its power to see beyond the symbol to a metaphysical reality is feeble. So that to simplify it is to falsify it for the simple-minded. That is the process, which for the discerning and competent, ends in intensified cognition of meaning, but for the unintelligent ends in actual falsehood. For the symbol is not the reality. It is a helpful tool for those trained to use it; it is the cult of falsity to the ignorant.

By the time the Pagan doctrine of the birth of Christhood in man had been put forth for lowly mental grasp as the birth of a baby on December 25, year one, it was no longer true, but fatally misleading. By the time the crucifixion of divine mind power on the cross of existence in the fleshly body had been concretized and historicized as the agony of a quivering body of human flesh on a wooden cross, it was no longer true. By the time the dismemberment of the unit power of Christhood, with the giving of a portion to each human for his divine transfiguration from within had been made "comprehensible" as the actual breaking of a loaf of bread into fragments, it was not true. By the time the descent of the Monad from the Logos of divine intellection into the water of the human body had been "clarified" and "simplified" to poor mental capacity as the baptism of a man in the Jordan River, it was a delusion and a snare to uncritical thought. Instead of enlightening him it would hallucinate him, because his ability to lift it from the concrete to the spiritual sense was non-existent. And by the time the incarnation doctrine had been "made plain" as the descent of God's radiant being into the physical corpus of one man, so that simple minds could see it, it was an outright mockery of truth.

The entire claim of Christian partisanship is that this religion alone made the entire body of recondite doctrine clear and simple to the humble and ignorant, by presenting to mankind God's revelation of the whole of his nature in the living character of Jesus. But this is precisely the low form in which a doctrine of infinite reach and complexity had to be revamped in order to win the interest, because it could thus reach the physical senses, of people incapable of abstract conception, who were the ones Christianity chose to arouse to emotional extravagance, disdaining the philosophers. But true esoteric vision sees that this is to risk the almost certain danger of wrecking the whole system for just those lowly ones it is designed to enlighten. It risks turning truth into untruth because undisciplined mentality can

not lift the symbol or the personification back to the metaphysical world where alone its truth is liberating. Crude conception ends by taking the concrete images for the factual substance of truth.

The glyphs, symbols and personifications used by ancient sagacity to structuralize for human thought the realities of the noumenal world are like the specie and legal tender issued by a government for general representation of value among the people. In and of themselves they are worth little or nothing. Their true value inheres in the fact only that the government has real gold in its secret coffers to guarantee their worth in current usage. A limited number of the holders of a valueless currency may, with determination and persistence, redeem them for their intrinsic value in the treasury. So it is with esoteric truth. Its real value is hidden away from the multitude in the secret vaults of mystical consciousness, really in a higher dimension of consciousness, generally inaccessible to the common man. The myths and allegories, rituals and dramas, are issued to the people at large to represent the golden meaning lying in the mystery treasure chests of mystic realization. They have not that golden treasure in themselves, but are token money, carrying the promise of full payment of face value to any one who will carry them back to the capital and demand the golden truth itself. They are false and fictitious money, not meant, however, to deceive and cheat, but to promise true gold to him who will redeem them. So long as faith in their representative and redemptive value remains firm, they serve well the purposes of real money. The possibility of tragedy and crash comes when the people en masse forget that it is fictitious token money and that its only safety and stability are assured by the continued existence of that gold in the treasury of the spiritual king of consciousness. With that certitude pervading the common thought of the masses, the beneficent circulation of the false coinage of myth and symbol can be continued.

But the floodgates of disaster are quickly opened when the ecclesiastical government issues an unlimited quantity of worthless specie in the shape of creeds, formulas, symbols and rituals, with no accompanying promise or assurance that they are intellectually and mystically redeemable in the upper philosophical treasure house of the Church. And spiritual poverty has stalked through the homes, the streets, the temples and the schools of Christendom because the governing Church has issued for seventeen centuries a fictitious currency of dogma and Scripture that it could not, and still can not redeem in true value. Pagan wisdom employed myth and symbol to enrich its students and

devotees; Christian blindness has used them to perpetuate the poverty of its followers. As Milton wrote:

"The hungry sheep look up and are not fed."

The Christian Church gave out a fictitious mythology and the people can not redeem it.

This analysis limns with the greatest possible fidelity the process which led Christianity on the downward path to exoteric miscarriage. It must be seen as the very truth that it was the one thing that Christianity eternally boasts of--its making high truth simple for the simple--that involved it in the darkness of the Middle Ages.

Some little realization of what a ferment began to brew among the common masses when the effort was made to mitigate religious extravagances by the sobering reflections of philosophy is gained, if one reads what the great Christian historian, Dean Milman, has to say in his History of Christianity anent this subject (p. 291):

"The nature of the Deity, the state of the soul after death, the equality of mankind in the sight of Deity; even questions which are beyond the verge of the human intellect; the origin of evil; the conversion of the physical and moral world, had become general topics; they were, for the first time, the primary truths of a popular religion, and naturally could not withdraw themselves from alliance with popular passions. These passions, as Christianity increased in power and influence, came into more active operation; as they seized persons of different temperaments, instead of being themselves subdued to Christian gentleness, they inflamed Christianity, as it appeared to the world, into a new and more indomitable principle of strife and animosity. Mankind, even within the sphere of Christianity, retrograded to the sterner Jewish character; in its spirit, as well as in its language the Old Testament began to dominate over the Gospel of Christ."

This is a well-told story of what happens when a religion ventures on the hazardous undertaking of purveying supernal truth and the revelation of the inner light of reason and knowledge to "the humble and ignorant." Dean Milman dramatizes it for us as it happened in early Christianity. What is more banal and dispiriting than to listen to efforts of the "common people" to give expression to their crude ideas of what the virgin birth, the immaculate conception, vicarious atonement, forgiveness of sins, the Christ's death on the cross for the salvation of man, the miracles, the flood, the Jonah-whale allegory, the star of Bethlehem, the crossing of the Red Sea (now the Reed Sea in modern Bibles!), or any of the Biblical constructs mean to them? To

hear the common run of popular intelligence set forth its crude conceptions of these high verities in still cruder language is an affliction to any emancipated mind. Its revelation of lamentable misunderstanding and bizarre notions is nothing less than painful. Nothing is truer than Milman's statement that the preachment of an unphilosophical Christianity generated popular passions, with no balance wheel of philosophical knowledge to hold them in restraint; and that these passions seized upon the multitude and "inflamed Christianity," making it a bundle of mistaken principles which turned sincere people, misled by error, into a group of fanatics breeding animosity.

Milman rightly says that under this influence "Christianity retrograded," and whether to explicitly Jewish modes of character it matters not. The important fact is that it retrograded; and it suffered this fate when the rabble laid desecrating hands on the esoteric philosophy and rested not till it had reduced every noble principle of that exalted union of intellectual and mystical experience to a crude literalism, in order that the most stupid might hug to his heart the concrete illusion, the physical shadow of metaphysical realities.

When the movement had sunk to the lowest point among the ignorant multitude, it became impossible to instruct the following of the Church in the nature of the Christ as a spiritual love in the heart and piercing intelligence in the mind. The desperate situation called for a desperate expedient; the strategy of ignorant priestcraft saw its advantages, the crass stupidity of the vulgar whom the Church had gathered under her wing promised its sweeping success. Demons must have exulted in hellish glee while angels wept: for the crafty resort was to the strategy of giving the people the Christ as a man. People impervious to lofty ideas and conceptions can not be led to worship such tenuous things; a man at least could engage their imagination and hold their superstitious loyalties. So the Christ became Jesus.

When the bewildered human of no enlightened instruction can discover no rock of salvation within the dark alleys and unclean streets of his own interior consciousness, he will be cheered--and deluded--by the assurance given to him in his childhood on impressive authority that there once was a man in history to whom he can resort when in mental and moral defeat. Such an inculcation, emanating from an institution haloed with the prestige of ages, made impressive by the embellishments of gilded beauty of temple, music and ceremony, is well calculated to sweep the ignorant world of average people. This is the victory that Christianity won. It is only the philosopher, who can

free himself from its hypnotizing seductions without at the same time throwing overhead in violent resentment--as does the atheist--the prime and priceless metaphysical values that are travestied to nonsense by gross literalization, who is likely to escape from a life-long obscuration of his rational mind.

One of the prominent items of analysis in this study is the downright assertion that Christianity registered a movement of degeneracy from something truer and higher than itself in the beginning. Since this bold assertion will be neither gladly received nor accepted at all if left to rest upon the single authority of the author's pen, the support and agreement of noted Christian authorities much be arrayed behind it. Hear, then, what no less a noted and accredited spokesman for Christianity than Dean Milman says to this same effect (p. 288):

"Yet the admission of Christianity, not merely as a controlling power . . . but as the animating principle of barbarous warfare, argues at once the commanding influence which it had obtained over the human mind as well as its degeneracy from its pure and spiritual origin."

Barbarism, he says, had absorbed into its own life the Christian passions, yet remained barbaric, not becoming Christian. It thus employed Christian motives for barbaric ends. This was the fountainhead of the military Christianity of the Middle Ages, a modification of the pure religion of the Gospel, directly opposed to its genuine principles, yet apparently indispensable to the social progress of European man, as through it the Roman Empire and the barbarous nations of the North were destined to blend together in the vast European system before they could arrive at a higher civilization and a purer Christianity. Christianity has ever shown a ready disposition to compromise with dominant barbaric forces, or to temporize in devious ways with unmanageable influences, so as best to stabilize its continuing regnancy over the popular mind or further its prospects. It has more often and more consistently followed the lead of social and secular movements than led them with the superior light of a spiritual beacon.

CHAPTER IV

THE VEILED LIGHT

The causes of the translation of Christianity into the baneful Christianism can not be expounded without a brief survey of the religious field in the ancient day. That world was motivated and dominated by elements of human psychology in the domain of what is known as religion which are so different from those prevailing in later days and at present that failure to take them into account will vitiate every attempt to write the true history of the rise of Christianity. It is the incapacity of modern exegetists to apprehend and give due value to these elements that has rendered both false and worthless nearly all the histories of early Christianity. We have never had the truth about Christianity because it can not be written unless these true keys to competent understanding are utilized. It is impossible here to cover this ground with any promise of completeness. It must suffice to unfold the predominant features of the picture, the one, at any rate, which will most radically correct traditional error and guide conception to true goals by true formulas.

That chief trait of antiquity, the neglect of which has so weakened universal Christian exposition, is what might be expressed by the one word--esotericism. For modern Christian investigators it seems ever difficult, even with scores of writers expatiating on the subject, to give proper credit to the significance of the universal prevalence in the ancient world of a method of expressing religious truth which is critical at every point for apprehending what was written or spoken. And even where the principal is admitted to have been employed, there still is manifest a disposition to minimize or ignore its influence in the task of interpretation. Writers shy away from it as deftly as they can or shun it outright.

But there will be no profit in the study of ancient religious tomes, they simply will not yield their meaning, until their construction on a basis determined by esoteric principles is given full consideration in

the rendering. Esotericism imposed a peculiar methodology upon the writing of all religious books, and to attempt to interpret them without reference to the specifications of this methodology is to insure gross failure. So habitual is it in the modern age for the discoverer of new or precious truth to blare it from the housetops of publicity that it seems quite impossible to believe that an age existed in which truth, new or old, was sedulously disguised and concealed from the world at large. What is called democracy today will find it an egregious aberration of human conception to hold that all truth is not equally the right and privilege of all people.

But ancient sapiency envisaged the matter from a different angle. Profound knowledge, the essential ground for wisdom and enlightenment and the power that goes with their possession, it was held, was only for those who could win it by individual merit, who could demonstrate the capacity for it and the moral quality to refrain from misuse of it. Invidious as this may sound in plebeian ears, it was only for a special class. That class, however, was not one marked and distinguished by any exterior or adventitious circumstances, such as wealth, physical power or social position. It was a class distinguished by its ability to fulfil the terms and conditions on which alone life can bestow any of its bounties, namely the essential moral and spiritual qualifications by virtue of which a truly higher culture can be attained by mortals. Intellectual capacity, spiritual culture are after all not privileges to be handed out to all in a nation like the vote or pensions. They are the happy possession of him alone who qualifies with the requisite development of the capability to experience and express them. Until such necessary credentials are furnished it is both fatuous and dangerous for those who may dispense religious influence to impart it indiscriminately to the masses.

Such at all events was the ancient attitude toward spiritual and mystical religion. Supernal wisdom, high truth, the arcana of knowledge, were not to be thrown out recklessly to the untutored, the stolid masses. Such treasures were to be held in secret brotherhoods, to be imparted only to those undergoing test and discipline. The privilege of being entrusted with the extraordinary mysteries of the knowing adepts was granted to those who had undergone the experience of initiation, the word meaning "beginning," since their exalted status was considered the beginning of man's divinization. High knowledge was therefore the possession of a class which formed a true aristocracy of culture and learning based on intrinsic internal and not mere ex-

ternal qualifications of fitness. This class was generally discerning enough to know that true culture and mystical uplift can not be imparted gratuitously to the "vulgar," for they will be certain to misconceive wretchedly and misapply disastrously the vital secrets. No class, group or individual was excluded from opportunity; but measures were taken to safeguard a thesaurus of dynamic truth against vitiation and misuse.

The chief of these measures was the cryptic form and method of inditing the sacred tomes of ancient lore. Here an ingenuity was resorted to that has confounded and egregiously, even ludicrously, misled all Christian research and effort at exegesis down the centuries to this very day. Truth was inwrought into the inner structure of a variety of modes of representation, such as myth, allegory, drama, parable, fable, number graph and finally astrological pictograph. The method had the multiple advantage that it offered truth in actual verity, but in such form that it would be missed by the unqualified and possibly apprehended by those worthy to handle it. Likewise it presented it in forms calculated to impress it indelibly upon the memory, for the books containing it were written with a view to its very desirable preservation against total loss or extinction. All folk-lore had the primary design of perpetuating, especially by impression upon the sensitive and retentive memory of the childhood of each successive generation, the outward types and structures of inner truth. Even if uncomprehended in one age, the norms and forms covertly expressing the inner essence of verity would be carried forward in outer memory, until in the end their inwardness of meaning might be realized. Such are the Greek and Egyptian myths, the Chaldean astrologies, the legends, folk-Maerchen, the body of traditions of wise things that have floated down from earliest days, to the interior meaning of which the world, after too many centuries of stupid blindness, is beginning at last to awaken its torpid understanding.

It was the adoption of these measures of crypticism for the high purposes just expounded that led to the mystifying of the ignorant and supposedly learned alike, and finally to the consummation of the most sweeping catastrophe to culture and world sanity known to earthly history. It opened the pathway to the transformation of Christianity into the errant Christianism. Designed to safeguard wisdom from the vulgar who would outrage it, while imparting it by subtle indirection to the worthy, it ended by missing its goal in both these directions. For there came an age when the stable conditions under which this

program could continue to be carried forward with normal success were abrogated by extraordinary developments. Unprecedented circumstances arose to plunge the even operation of the factors involved into a violent welter of forces which ultimately found expression in the upgrowth and prolonged sway of the new religion of Christianism. It is a breath-taking story of the direct cultural debacle and world tragedy. Christianity, soon degenerating into Christianism, came as the result of the breach in the walls of the esoteric policy made by a ferment of ignorant zealotry and misguided religionism. Previously impervious to violation from this side, influences conspired in the first centuries of the Christian rise to traverse its beneficent possibilities and subvert its operation to ruinous outcome.

A combination of weakness within its own structure and violent assault from without overwhelmed its inherent natural strength and violated its true sacredness by traducing its structural integrity to nonsense. Almost for the first time in the life of the world, the secret sanctities of its wisdom were invaded by barbarian crudity and its treasures of sacred science were wantonly torn out from the sanctum of arcane holiness and exposed recklessly to the degrading embrace of the vulgar populace. Christianity came as the outcome of a miscarriage of wisdom due to the intellectual desecration by the religiously crazed multitude of the subtleties of the esoteric method in Scriptural composition. Through misapprehension of cryptic language the entire meaning of the Bibles was warped out of all semblance to true intent and distorted into a system of the veriest falsehood ever to find lodgment in human thought. And this falsehood, being conjoined with and itself engendering one of the most devastating outbursts of fanatical pietism in the annals of history, swept the Western half of the globe with the awful besom of its blind fury for sixteen centuries.

From causes generated in the very beginning of the change that broke down the inviolability of the esoteric regime in religion, it has become the inveterate policy of orthodox Christianism to inveigh against all esotericism. Since Christianism was itself bred by a revolt of uncomprehending religionism against esoteric restriction, inevitably the perennial attitude of that cult has been one of continued disfavor. It is necessary, therefore, if the discussion here is to reveal new elements of historic causality, that a full and comprehensive analysis of the counter claims in this question be undertaken, with a view to arriving at a more just and balanced evaluation of the mooted theme than has been the case hitherto.

The ancient Sages, proficient in religious philosophy and with lofty wisdom, regarded esoteric secrecy in religion as a prime fundamentum for the true culture of the spirit-soul of man. Christian proponents have countered this position with general claims of its inadequacy and iniquity. Can a profounder inquiry or broader survey determine on which side lies the truth in the controversy? It is asserted here that the Pagan contention is the correct one because it is in harmony with every aspect of a more competent understanding of the psychological, spiritual and anthropological issues involved; and the essay will be made to uphold that assertion.

It should need no assemblage of arguments to validate the general claim that the highest wisdom, the most profound motivations of culture and virtue, the most delicate sensibilities of beauty and goodness, the deepest intimations of abstract intellectual intuition can not be communicated to brutish men or absorbed and appropriated by them even when put in the simplest form before them. No envisagement of the potentialities of cultural education can fail to take into account the vast abysses of difference in receptive capacity between the demonstrably capable and potentially educable, and those hopelessly doltish and imbecile. Between the bright and the stupid there are, of course, infinite grades of capability and stolidity. A system of education aiming at general discipline of all levels seeks to adapt the training to the varying potentials of each grade. Modern educators are largely unaware that the religious instruction of the schools of arcane wisdom of early times was closely graded in relation to the differentiated strata of intelligence and moral character. Long periods of probation were imposed on the learners and further courses of tutelage and testing were laid down for fulfilment before admission to the highest degrees of instruction was opened. At any rate it is indisputably known that the ancient hierophants of the Mystery Schools divided their body of teaching into at least two broad segmentations. They had their Greater and their Lesser Mysteries.

Never has this distinction been handled in Christian history with the attention it deserves and the perspicacity and candor needed to canvass it rightly. It has been slurred over, disdained as unimportant and altogether slighted. It too patently suggests that the Christians were working in the systemology of the Pagans or copying their procedures to be given its rightful emphasis in the Christian purview. Its discontinuance in the new faith after some two centuries is looked upon as another advance away from heathen error to Christian rightness.

The truth of the matter is far other than this easy explication. It was indeed an advance away from Paganism, but one not moving from error to right. It was both a part and an evidence of the disastrous turn from living Christianity to a degenerate Christianism. In breaking down all distinction between truth for the cognoscenti and simple religion for the multitude, Christianity took one of the most fatal steps in its march to depravity. It meant, in short, that it was no longer going to hold itself as a system of high truth that could fulfil the demands of philosophic minds for rational religion, but that it had decided to let philosophy go and use faith alone as its appeal to the unenlightened. It intimates what has not been known to be the sad truth that the new cult early decided to abandon any attempt to move with the intelligentsia and to make its bid to the rank and file of the downtrodden masses groaning under the yoke of Rome. Little did it realize how truly, in another sense, this move would, centuries later, subject it in unwitting but none the less thorough bondage to another tyranny centered in Rome.

Indeed it has been the boast of Christianity that it provided a religious provender to nourish the masses of lowly humanity, whereas Paganism had offered a hyper-mystical and profoundly rationalistic philosophy that must necessarily be limited in its service to the minority segment of the studious and the learned. Christianity therefore provided spiritual food for mankind at large, while Paganism reached a mere fringe of the population, the intelligentsia, leaving the host of "common people" spiritually unnourished. This is claimed as the outstanding merit, even the glory, of Christianity.

But this is a point that is not proved by the mere stating. It is a glory, no doubt, to supply to the ruder stages of human development a regimen of religious faith and elementary indoctrination that will serve the interests both of the masses and the general welfare. But it is surely nothing glorious to have fed these simpler folk with an incredible diet of fables, fancies, fictions and falsities that in the end subverted their divine potential of reason under a mass of irrational beliefs that enslaved them to fanatic bigotries and incredible superstitions for generations. The tragic truth about Christianity's purveying the food of simple truth to the humble masses, and enriching the down-trodden multitude with a precious faith is the historic fact that it fed these masses not on truth simplified, but truth contorted into horrendous untruth. What was fed them turned out to be downright

falsehood. The lamentable weakness of most exoteric teaching is in the fact that it comes out as gross error, the dead ghost of truth.

If one holds to the historical tradition, it is apparent that even the Christ used the esoteric method in his spiritual instruction. A passage from Joseph Warschauer's The Historical Life of Christ (p. 88) runs:

"The disciples would not have asked him why he taught in parables, because they knew quite well; the parable is a concrete way of teaching, eminently suitable for simple folk, who formed the bulk of our Lord's audiences, and easily comprehended by them; they liked parables precisely as children like stories and are best reconciled to moral lessons when they are in story form."

Warschauer speaks of the esoteric methodology in Scriptural writing as

"a product of the same tendency which in Judaism was unable to read any Old Testament passage in its plain meaning, but allegorized even the most obvious statement."

This brief sentence is worth a moment's analysis. It is ill-conceived and illogically expressed. His words "plain meaning" are quite ambiguous, unless they are taken to say that narrative of stories in the Old Testament carried a purely physical literal sense and no other. If Jephthah took an oath to sacrifice the first person he saw after his return and this happened to be his daughter, well then, that is what happened, is what we must assume that "plain meaning" means. But if it be supposable that the original writer of that story designedly framed it to express a great spiritual or cosmic fact, then its "plain meaning" is not to be found in its having happened on given days. If Jesus fell into the literary spirit and technique of his times and used allegory and parable, why is it not entirely legitimate to assume that much if not most of previous Scriptural writing and teaching was done according to the same method and pattern? Warschauer does not stop to ask why the Jewish exegetists were so enslaved to a "tendency" to see everything as allegory. And here is the crux of the discussion. It was more than a tendency; it was universal practice, the established method of the sages and prophets.

Galilean peasants may have liked to listen to children's stories from the Nazarene, but

"A later generation arose which looked for hidden meanings and thought these picture stories of Jesus, with their homeliness and raciness, specially

full of hinted secrets; why, then, these people asked, should he have communicated his teachings in the shape of such dark riddles?"

And it is one of the facts of most tragic moment for all humanity that all Christian theological scholarship since those days of Judean history has been stumped with this same question. This work is dedicated to the task of giving that question competent answer.

Warschauer adds an instructive sequel to this situation. This "later generation" he speaks of was not satisfied with lakeside parables, but wanted more "history" about Jesus. Let the Christian world of today take note how they went about getting it! Says Warschauer:

"Within the following thirty years, however, the desire arose, as it could hardly fail to do, for fuller knowledge of the Lord's origin; and, the want being once felt among the faithful, imagination set to work to fill the gap."

The situation with which this problem is concerned is not merely one that touches the early days of Christian development; it is the ubiquitous problem of culture in humanity at all times. Can high truth ever be safely given, or really given at all, to the masses? The answer is contingent; it depends upon the state of development of those masses. If their level of intelligence is fairly high, a commensurable degree of understanding can be imparted to them. If it runs low, only a little can be absorbed. Obviously one must rest with the assertion that a mind can assimilate only that measure of apprehension which its developed capability potentially qualifies it to take in. To offer it higher ranges, demanding more expanded powers, is to waste effort.

The vindication of the esoteric method is integrally bound up with the whole problem of culture in the human race at any time. Much apologetic is summoned to the justification of the modes and procedures that brought Christianity forth in its formative days. They are presented as "special" conditions. But the conditions prevalent then can hardly be claimed to have been in any pronounced way different from those which affect the progress or state of culture in any civilized age or nation. Always and inexorably the agencies and gauges that set the marks of true culture, or conversely defeat it, are at bottom the intelligence quotient or cultural capability of the age or the folk concerned. Perhaps one age differs little from another, except in the ratio of intelligence in the cultured minority to the ignorance of the masses. The latter element, sadly enough, remains all too deplorably constant; the state of the age's culture fluctuates with the brilliance or decay of sound intelligence in the cultured minority. The comparative

dominance of minority influence, or its submersion by reason of its own default of superior attainment or its suppression by the outer tyranny either of the masses or of despots, is perhaps the basic criterion of the relative status of culture in any age. But in all ages there is the inevitable yawning gap between the stolid mental inertia of the masses and the alert mercurial genius of the emancipated and the spiritually adventurous, those who "face the morning."

Perhaps no citation could more bluntly state the case for this analysis than the passage from Sallustius on the Myths.

"They also represent the activities of the Gods. For one may call the world a myth, in which bodies and things are visible, but souls and minds are hidden. Besides, to wish to teach the whole truth about the Gods to all produces contempt in the foolish, because they cannot understand, and lack of zeal in the good; whereas to conceal the truth by myths prevents the contempt of the foolish, and compels the good to practice philosophy."

What the ancient philosopher is setting forth here is that all objective things, the world and all things in it, physically objectified to the senses, are the phenomenal images of noumenal concepts, all things visible being the concrete reproduction, and therefore the actual material presentation of the ideas of a cosmic consciousness that framed them in thought. Such being the case, the grandest and noblest, the most transcendent activity of intellect is to discern the frame and content of the original cosmic Mind. The art or science of such an activity for the human mind was, as is obvious at a glance, an enterprise that fell within the capability of only the most cultivated intellects. It lies quite beyond the reach of "average" humanity. It was a heavy task even for the most capable among the philosophers. The knowledge of the basic principles constituted the true esotericism, whose prime claims to the title of science consisted in just this development or consciousness of the relation between the seen things of the objective creation and the noumenal principle that generated them in the high counsels of divine Thought.

It is not hard, therefore, to grasp the essential dialectic of the necessity for esotericism, and for the use of the myth and allegory as its indispensable tools. The most stirring truths within the scope of human apperception come not through the power of pure intellect alone. To be sure, they are an intellectual product, or they would not be registered in consciousness at all. Yet they arise from the mind afflated, as it were, by an access of rich coefficient of mystical vividness and with touches of sensibility of nearly ineffable moving power and beauty. The

clear mental picture generates exalted feeling beyond the power of language to express. The only way in which mind can attempt to embody the concept so as to give it the dynamism to awaken in another mind these overtones of mystic afflatus is to structuralize it in the form of myth or allegory. The essential utility of the myth inheres in the fact that it copies and preserves in a dramatic formulation the precise frame of the mental concept which is its apprehensible subject matter. The inspection of the myth will always revive the representation of the idea; and the dramatic form of its rehearsing furnishes the added stimulus to receptive minds to experience as much as possible the mystic feeling reactions that are latent in the suggestive power of the concept. In plainer statement, the myth or allegory clearly reformulates the central idea, and its dramatization--rather than its staid expression in mere words--subtly supplies the incitements to the mystical ebullition of feeling elements that is the sublime accompaniment of the clear mental vision of liberating truth.

Gerald Massey, in his The Natural Genesis (p. 134), announces the great revelation that mythos equals Logos, and he hits the mark of fundamental truth about this mystery of ancient science when he writes:

"The essential character of a true myth consists in its being no longer intelligible by a reference to the spoken language."

It calls upon the suggestive power of a visual construction to strike the soul with more dynamic force than can be generated by mere words.

It takes no sharp analytic discernment to see that such exercise of cultural proficiency or genius is not the habitude nor the capability of the mass mind. True culture then must subsist necessarily at the level of capability which manifests the susceptibility to both the more delicate and more profound modes of spiritual consciousness. It must be able to apprehend esoteric modes of representing truth. The intellectual incapacity of the multitude makes esotericism inevitably the method both of preservation and of secret communication of high truth, wisdom, mystic beauty among those who can appreciate it, utilize it for the forwarding of evolution and treasure it safe from the hands of uncomprehending boorishness that would defile it.

It is thus at last clearly revealed that there were two prime motives behind the esoteric method: first, to preserve truth in the world; second, to safeguard it against vitiation.

Another modern scholar of great eminence in the field of ancient religion, Sir Gilbert Murray, comes forward with a sagacious statement on the myth, or rather its kindred device, allegory. In his celebrated work on The Five Stages of the Greek Religion he writes (p. 199):

"I have tried to sketch in outline the main forms of belief to which Hellenistic philosophy moved or drifted. Let me dwell for a few pages more upon the characteristic method by which it reached them. It may be summed up in one word--allegory. It is applied to Homer, to the religious traditions, to the ritual, to the whole world."

Then he adds:

"Allegory is not the frigid thing it seems to us. . . . The Hellenistic age did not wantonly invent the theory of allegory. Allegory may make the emotions sensitive. . . ."

It would be a happy circumstance if the citation from Murray could end here, for what he says so far is markedly true. His phrase, "make the emotions sensitive," confirms what has been said here to the effect that the myth or allegory impresses the idea it pictures upon consciousness with enhanced force because it envelops it in an aura of mystical sensibility, springing from the power of drama. A myth is an abstract conception dramatized. It concretizes an abstraction to the inner eye of thought, giving it a new and more vivid power to stir the feelings. He who can dramatize abstract truth is the leader of man to his divinity.

But--the great British scholar disappoints confidence in his perspicacity when he concludes the uncompleted sentence above with the utterly mistaken assertion that allegory, while making the emotions sensitive, "certainly weakens the understanding." Sad comment on this maladversion is that, medieval and modern ignorance being what they are, Murray's statement is only too lamentably true. The myth or allegory has weakened--rather has failed to enlighten and strengthen--the understanding. But, along with all others, the scholar ascribes this failure to the nature and function of the allegory. In sharp contravention of this it must be asserted here that this is quite wrong. Default is not in the allegory; it is in the ignorance and blindness that for centuries have shut off the esoteric sense of ancient Scripture from academic perception. Sterility of imagination and poverty of conceptual insight in orthodox circles have kept the scholarly eye from viewing the allegories with the penetrating rays of rational understanding. The myths still stand in all their ancient majesty of near-divine illustrious-

ness. Modern eyes still gaze upon them and still find them dull and opaque. All that is needed is a new lens of higher power to bring out their wondrous beauty and by this achievement to reintegrate Christianity.

A monumental work packed with challenging data is Godfrey Higgins' The Anacalypsis. The sane views presented therein should not be missed (p. 446):

"When all the curious circumstances have been considered, an unprejudiced person will, I think, be obliged to admit that the ancient epic poems are oriental allegories, all allusive to the same mythos, and that many of those works which we have been accustomed to call histories are but allegorized representations of mythologies on the secret doctrines of which I am in pursuit, and which have been endeavored to be concealed and perpetuated for the use of the elect, the initiated, under the veil of history--to which, as the first object was the doctrine or mythos, the history in each case was sacrificed or made subservient."

It is best to let Higgins go on with the story (p. 622):

"And I contend that it is philosophical to hold in suspicion all such histories, and unphilosophical to receive them without suspicion. . . . The mythos has corrupted all history. Who can doubt that the Argonautic expedition is a recurring mythos? . . . As Virgil has told us, new Argonauts would arise from time to time."

Comment that might be added here is that, while it is but too sadly true that the mythos has corrupted all history, as Higgins puts it, he doubtless would have agreed that it was only the abject failure of the human mind in the mass to comprehend what might be called the mystos behind the mythos that led to the vitiation of the true purport of ancient "history."

Indeed it is a question whether the ancients, at least until the writing of Herodotus, had any conception of history as it is held in view today. So we subjoin another most pregnant citation from Higgins, which, coming from this conscientious seeker after truth, should bear with great weight upon the counsels of modern scholarship (p. 616):

"After giving the subject all the consideration in my power and a diligent examination of ancient documents for many years, I have become quite convinced that almost all the ancient histories were written for the sole purpose of recording a mythos, which it was desired to transmit to posterity--but yet to conceal from all but the initiated. The traditions of the countries were made subservient to this purpose, without any suspicion of fraud; and we only give them the appearance of fraud when we confound them with history. This is the case with all early histories. They

were all anciently composed; or, if written, they were written in verse for the sake of correct retention by the memory and set to music for the same reason. They were all the same nature as the Iliad and the Aeneid. The most ancient of the ancients had nothing of the nature of real histories. Real history was not the object of their writing, any more than of Virgil's or Milton's. Herodotus was the inventor of history."

These words should be framed in gold on the walls of every library and classroom. They are reprinted here because they ring out the truth so long smothered by indoctrinated folly. The real mystery is history itself, and the mythos is the only true key to it. When we throw away the myth-key we can not read the history!

When a man who spent his substance and his life in honest research has at last come to conclusions such as these, they deserve recording (p. 366):

"How can any one consider this striking circumstance and not see that almost all ancient history and epic poetry are mythological,--the secret doctrine of the priests disguised in parables, in a thousand forms? Mr. Faber, Mr. Bryant and Nimrod have proved this past doubt. . . . Our priests have taken the emblems for the reality. The lower orders of our priests are as much the dupes as their votaries. The high-priests are wiser. Our priests will be very angry and deny all this. In all nations, in all times there has been a secret religion; in all nations and in all times the fact has been denied."

Higgins here says in words what this work will say in total effect. Another trenchant passage runs as follows (p. 386):

"No doubt every division of the universal religion had its secret and sacred writings as well as the Jews, only they were never made public and they were lost. Those of the Jews were made public by Ptolemy. The Athenians had a sacred book called The Testament, to which they believed the safety of the Republic was attached." (Spinette on Hierog., 123.)

Higgins expresses surprise that there could be any person of intelligence who would not see that

"almost every part of Genesis is enigmatical or a parable. The system of concealment and of teaching by parable is the most marked characteristic of the religion. I suspect that there is not a sentence in Genesis which is not consistent with good sense if its true meaning could be discovered. I feel little doubt that such a passage as that of God wounding Jacob in the thigh, and his failing in his endeavor to kill Moses at an inn, are wholly misunderstood. . . . The Genesis was considered by most if not all of the ancient Jewish philosophers and Christian Fathers as an allegory. For persons using their understanding, to receive it in a literal sense was impos-

sible; and when we find modern Christians so receiving it, we only find a proof that with the mass of mankind reason has nothing to do with religion, and that the power of education is so great as in most cases to render the understanding useless."

Two things need accentuation in this passage: the Bible would make mighty and sublime sense if its true meaning could be discovered; and, in the main, reason has nothing to do with religion. Both these theses will receive elaborate consideration farther on.

General corroboration of Higgins' radical position is not wanting in other writers. There is a categorically direct statement in a fine analytic work of an eminent authority on the Orphic Religion, Prof. Vittorio D. Macchioro, formerly of the University of Naples. His work is entitled From Orpheus to Paul, and is a discerning survey of the influences that this essay is undertaking to delineate more fully. His insight into the nature and design of the myths is exceptionally clear. He writes (p. 218):

"But there is no denying that only by means of myth does our experience become concrete and communicable. . . . Myth, therefore, is necessary for religious history . . . it cannot be dispensed with, since the divine, the mysterious, the ineffable cannot be expressed except by imagination, that is, by myth."

He follows this with the very pertinent observation, so necessary in enabling the mind to preserve its aplomb in its judgment on the myths, that "hence it is not the myth which is of consequence, but the idea it serves to express." The steadying and sanifying force of this notation is found in its pertinence to the inevitable tendency of scholars unfamiliar with the ancient habitudes of expression to swing away in disgust from the myth when they fail to pierce through its outer veil to its intelligible message for reflection, and reject it as valueless in toto. He is aiming to halt the wholly catastrophic sweep of the scholarly belief that because the myth, per se, is ignorantly concluded to be childish nonsense, it is to be thrown out on the rubbish heap of "ancient superstition."

He aims to stress the true manner of approaching the myths, which is to expect nothing but sheer fiction in the form and matter of the story itself, but to penetrate through its factitious disguise to catch the form of splendid verity which the features of the story are designed by subtle indirection to portray. The catastrophe which befell the world as the result of the loss of the acumen necessary to read the esoteric sense of the ancient myths is attributable largely to the sheer impotence

of genius on the part of scholars of the later time to realize that the ancients really did not "believe" their myths. The sapient original formulators of these constructions never could have dreamed that an age would come so steeped in mental lethargy that it would suppose the great myths were to be taken as narrative of veridical happenings, that they would be thought to have been written as "true stories." Concocting these great dramatic depictions, an ancient sage might well have jocosely remarked: "I hope no one will ever think we believed these stories!" What did transpire in the course of history, was, mirabile dictu, that in default of the ability to interpret the myths in their interior primary meaning, they have stood for all these centuries as insoluble riddles, baffling and perplexing the brains of all scholars who do not like to think that men of the mental stature of Plato and Plutarch actually "believed" them, but who still do not see how they fitted into a picture that is all over tinted with the aura of the profoundest intellectual genius. The boasted modern world of scholarship is still at a loss to know how to throw away the myth as a narrative while yet holding on to it as a legitimate and truly scientific mode of inciting the human spirit to its most edifying apperceptions of sublime verity. This task is still one of the mightiest of the cultural problems challenging the modern world, which must handle it capably before it can claim to be on a level with the ancient conceptive genius.

Perhaps it might be said that to general modern conception meaning-value disappears in the myth; whereas to ancient usage the true essence of meaning-value is preserved in the myth, there for any mind discerning enough to catch it. It is true, of course, that when the esoteric underlying purport is not apprehended, and the story stands in its naked form, opaque to interior view, all meaning disappears, or rather simply does not appear. To the modern the myth remains a crude and crass formulation just because he can not supply a glass of adequate spirit-ray vision which would enable him to see it as objectively transparent, but inwardly meaningful.

Then Prof. Macchioro follows along to a practical conclusion of his well-conceived elucidation, in observing that

"the only way to deliver Christianity from this imposition is to transform theology into mythology, that is, to cease to consider it from a religious viewpoint as a sort of knowledge and to view it in the light of the history of religion as a complex of symbols by means of which man realizes his faith."

In the train of this thoroughly sound suggestion he pronounces a great and sweeping truth, which will fall with the shock of a completely outlandish assertion upon orthodox minds, that

"there is really no essential difference between theology and mythology; their content is the same. They differ in that theology involves faith and implies truth, whereas mythology makes neither religious nor philosophical presumptions. The reduction, then, of all theology to mythology is tantamount to delivering oneself from all religious presumption and to inquiring into the origin and history of theology in the light of philology."

He might have better concluded: "in the light of universal truth detached from religious influences"; although he is correct in attributing to philology a central influence in the evolution of general philosophical science.

He is driven by the convincing force of his keen discernment to the magnificent position where he views precisely what this work designs to present as one of its chief conclusions, viz. that

"from this reduction of theology to mythology rises what seems to some a great danger, to others a great hope, the hope for a possible reintegration of Christianity. The history of Christianity has been a long process of disintegration. From the Apostolic Age down it has shown a dispersive tendency, a tendency to divide, dissolve into churches, sects and heresies. This centrifugal tendency is remarkable in a religion which had its center in a person and ought therefore to present the greatest unity. The whole sad history of Christian disintegration takes its rise from the theory of the cognitive function of theology.

"But with the reduction of theology to mythology the reintegration of Christianity becomes possible. The dogma-concept may be replaced by the dogma-symbol, which permits harmony in difference. Hence the great importance of every inquiry into the mythological origins of theology. . . ."

When another will speak our piece for us, as Macchioro here so eloquently does, it is desirable to give him the floor. The first pages of this volume announced that a leading motive inspiring this work is the "reintegration of Christianity," and this eminent authority in an important field of religion points the way to this reintegration in precisely the same direction as is here advocated. Doctrinal theology--who can deny it?--has brought about endless schism, sectarian hatreds and vain wastage of strength. To replace its hazards with the luminous essence of meaning of the symbol and the myth, which can generate in each individual as much of the light of eternal truth as he is capable of cognizing in any case, thus permitting each one to abstract from every doctrine whatever it can mean for him, without contradicting

what it means to another, this, as Macchioro so well affirms, would be to end Christian disunity and conduce to what is at this writing the insistent cry of an alarmed Christian leadership--namely Christian brotherhood. This is plainly indicated for any one who is conversant with the truth of historical Christianity. Yet, as will here be demonstrated, even this logical consummation will remain an impossibility until the intelligence and genius needed for the reinterpretation of the language of myth and symbol is once more awakened.

Nothing is more obvious to the honest investigator than that the way for Christianity to return from division to unity is to return to the unity all religions had in the remote period of the Golden Age. If no one else ever assembled the proof of this, Godfrey Higgins did. His wonderful Anacalypsis should be required reading in every Seminary.

"Proof that what the Eclectic philosopher Ammonius Saccas said was true abounds, viz. that one universal and very refined system originally pervaded the whole world; which only required to be divested of meretricious ornaments, or the corruptions with which the craft of priests, or the infirmities of men, had loaded it in different countries, to be everywhere found; that in fact in the Christian and Gentile systems there was fundamentally no difference." (Anac., p. 477.)

"But one thing is clear--the Mythos of the Hindoos, the Mythos of the Jews and the Mythos of the Greeks are all at the bottom the same; and what are called their early histories are not the histories of man, but are contrivances under the appearance of histories to perpetuate doctrines, or perhaps the history of certain religious opinions, in a manner understood by those only who had a key to the enigma. Of this we shall see many additional proofs hereafter."

Higgins affirms that this universal refined system (Augustine's true religion) needed only to be divested of its figurative ornaments to be clearly apprehended. He says it was put up in cryptic form, but that those who had the key could read it. What is needed, then, is obviously the recovery of the lost key. The Rosetta Stone made this possible and the possibility is now being reopened. As Macchioro says, it is the return to myth and symbol, competently handled.

That the return to myth and allegory will have to be fought for against denial and opposition is evident from what many Christian writers have put forth on this subject. One such statement is at hand and can be inserted here as an example of hundreds more.

"And the universal prevalence of sacrifice among the heathen nations seems to imply that sacrifice was in some way a natural expression of man's

sense of his relation to God. The hypothesis of a primitive revelation, the remains of which lingered among all the peoples of the world, and which expressed itself through sacrifice, is precarious. It certainly can not be proved; and to explain sacrifice by it must leave the origin of that institution involved in the same and hypothetical condition." (A. B. Davidson, The Theology of the Old Testament, page. 312)

The universal prevalence of just one feature, such as sacrifice, might not of course "prove" a universal primitive revelation, though it in itself is a strong hint. But there are other evidences without number that do point to it. The remains of a primeval religion, found to be identical all over the world when carefully and with the proper keys compared, attest the original unity of religions. This blindness and imperviousness to a great idea on the part of modern scholars must be broken through if the truth is to be recognized. It is critical for the future of mankind.

Dean Milman's allusion to the matter in much the same spirit should not be passed by. He is speaking of the term, Logos or Word.

"By the Targumists, the earliest Jewish commentators on the Scriptures, this term had already been applied to the Messiah; nor is it necessary to observe the manner in which it has been sanctified by its introduction into the Christian scheme. From this remarkable uniformity of conception and coincidence of language has sometimes been assumed a common tradition, generally disseminated throughout the race of man. I should be content with receiving it as the general acquiescence of the human mind, in the necessity of some mediation between the pure spiritual nature of the Deity and the intellectual and moral being of man, to which the sublimest and simplest, and, therefore, the most natural development, was the revelation of God in Christ." (History of Christianity, p. 46.)

Evidence of the inadequacy of this dodging is found readily enough in the certain fact that all the "remarkable uniformity of conception and coincidence of language" was a phenomenon in the world long before God had made a revelation of himself through Jesus of Nazareth, and therefore must be explained on other grounds.

In Milman's great History of Christianity (p. 28) there is found a very striking passage which admits the most of what is asserted here regarding the myths, and adds strength to the contention that the one indispensable feature of the myths that is the nub of the entire debate over them is that they be thoroughly comprehended. It goes without saying that an allegory is of no utility for enlightenment unless that which it allegorizes can be grasped in full. All the rage of savants against the myth must be seen as directed against a thing they do not

understand. The aversion and hostility will vanish away the moment clear apprehension reveals the wondrous light buried under the bushel of dramatic stratagems. Milman prefaces his pronouncement with the statement that the nearer a people approach to barbarism, as in the childhood of the race, the more earthly are their conceptions of deity, and the moral aspect of the divine nature as conceived by man seems gradually to develop with the progressive unfoldment of the human mind. This deepening conception of moral and spiritual values, he says, is a prerogative of the higher classes; "the vulgar are left to their stocks and stones," their animals and reptiles. In republican Greece the intellectual aristocracy of the philosophers, blessed with superior and interior insights, rarely dared to let their greater understanding be known, "but concealed their more extended views behind a prudential veil, as a secret or esoteric doctrine" and disarmed suspicion by studious conformity with all the national rites and ceremonies. Much of the entire motivating principle of all esoteric polity is hinted at here.

But Milman then adds the significant declaration that "yet nothing was needed but to give a higher and more extensive sense to those types and shadows of universal wisdom" to make them instruments, not of intellectual mystery and bafflement, but of luminous cognitions. For he says that this clearer impenetration of the myths would have been

"an improvement which the tendency of the age manifestly required and which the Jews themselves, especially the Alexandrian school, had already attempted by allegorizing the whole annals of their people and extracting a profound moral meaning from all the circumstances of their extraordinary history."

And no one can possibly conceive how remarkably this extraction of ethical and spiritual meaning from their Old Testament "history" altered the entire meaning of this people's cherished literature who has not read the Zohar and other haggadic books of the Jews.

From Milman's history we cull another passage revealing again the ubiquitous use of the mythicizing principle in ancient religions. Speaking about the Alexandrian syncretism he says (p. 48):

"The poetic age of Greece had long passed away before the two nations [Greece and Egypt] came into contact; and the same rationalizing tendency of the times led the Greek to reduce his religion, the Jew the history, of his nation, to a lofty moral allegory."

One is impelled to ask why, then, are not Greek religion and Hebrew history read as "lofty moral allegory" and not as veridical factuality?

Can it never be comprehended that at least in the case of the Hebrew "history" in the Old Testament, the narrative was a lofty moral allegory, highly illuminating as such and ludicrously asinine as reputed veridical history? Failure of later ages to read both Greek mythological religion and Jewish history as lofty spiritual apologue can be put down as one of the most directly causative factors in the general stultification of world sanity that has bred the unending run of calamitous events in Occidental history over two millennia.

In lieu of an allegorical rendering of Scriptures we are asked to read them in their "plain meaning," as Warschauer put it. The astonishing fact--which the literalists ever overlook--is that millions have read the Scriptures in their "plain meaning" and thrown their Bibles down in disgust and bafflement. The "plain meaning" of Holy Writ is so far from being "plain" or yielding its "meaning" that there never has been agreement on what the meaning is and in simple truth the meaning is still unknown. As an instance of what is meant by our statement, there are the two verses, fifth and sixth, of the twelfth chapter of Judges in the Old Testament, in which the judges in Israel were ordered by God to put to the sword on one day forty-two thousand Ephraimites because they could not pronounce the word "shibboleth," but instead said "sibboleth." The literalist would assure us that the meaning is that, like the battle of Gettysburg or Hastings, it happened. But the final meaning of this as an event would be that God and man have both done idiotic things. And it is calamitous to implant such an idea in human heads. Even as an event it has no "meaning." But magnificent meaning comes to view if it is taken as allegory, meaning which it is not calamitous to implant in mortal minds.

Julian, the nephew of Constantine, whose ungracious task it was to try to resuscitate a dying philosophical world, and who met the arrow of death for his pains, clearly saw that

"The ancient myths are the only ways in which the human mind grasps and represents to itself a true religion too high and too pure to be envisaged except in the images they present, or to be approached except symbolically through the sacraments and ceremonies they prescribe."

In his book Christ in the Gospels, Burton Scott Easton says (p. 1) that

"from the very first, however, there was probably some tendency to treat the parables allegorically and to search for recondite meanings; a tendency that rapidly grew to impossible dimensions; we already find Mark treating

the parables as puzzles and setting forth the appalling theory that Jesus used them to conceal truth, in order to keep the Jews from being converted."

Apart from the dialectical question that arises on the perusal of this passage as to what other possible function a parable can be conceived to exercise than to represent a truth allegorically, it is pertinent to remark that had Easton been familiar with the innermost motivation of the ancient mythological method, he would not have rated as an impossible over-development of allegorical tendency that which was the essential raison d'etre of the method itself. If it ran into impossible dimensions, that was because it ran into ignorance in its handling, as it always has done sooner or later. For it was precisely to keep undeveloped groups from getting precious truth into their hands when they could not get it into their heads. Easton says that "Mark is not held up as a model of historical precision. . . . Mark's story already contains palpable allegorical elements." Likewise he asserts that the "naive character of John's historical writing is still more clearly seen in the subsequent scene." (John 6:22-26.)

Many of the second and third century Christian rites, he says, "have long defied explanation." (Where is Warschauer's "plain meaning" then?) "No one knows why oil was poured into the baptismal water or why a candle or a staff of olive wood was dipped into it." Here surely is allegory, not only in printed words, but enacted in dramatic reality. And the default of Christianity is seen in this admission that no one after two thousand years of Christian dominance knows why oil was poured on the baptismal water and the symbolism of the candle in religion, when every initiate in the Pagan societies knew a book of such things thoroughly.

And well this author sees the dilemma in which Christianity finds itself through its usage of many forms which it even now cannot explain. For he writes (p. 76):

"We have not only to explain the appearance of certain ceremonies in Christianity; we have to explain their almost universal acceptance."

The modern philosopher-educator John Dewey, in his The Quest for Certainty (p. 15), says in discussing Aristotle's contribution to the history of thought:

"This core of truth in effect, was embroidered with myths for the benefit of the masses, for reasons of expediency, the preservation of social institutions. The negative work of philosophy was then to strip away these

imaginative accretions. From the standpoint of popular belief this was its chief work, and it was a destructive one. The masses only felt that their religion was attacked. But the enduring contribution was positive."

What Dewey means by stripping away the imaginative accretions from Greek religion is not clear. If Aristotle stripped away the Greek myths he did it by fully explicating them in straightforward fashion. What the popular religionists resented, as Dewey intimates, was that Aristotle elucidated their hidden purport in such a way as to rob them of their literal reference, for this is the reaction that an allegorical rendering of Scriptures always produces from the populace.

But in this deduction of Dewey's lurks a discernment of verity in man's world of being that is among the most fundamental visions of truth that mortal mind can catch. The philosopher expounds this more explicitly in the next passage (p. 16):

"Logic provided the patterns to which ultimately real objects had to conform, while physical science was possible in the degree in which the natural world . . . exhibited exemplification of ultimate immutable rational objects."

This principle of understanding puts the proper foundation under the whole edifice of the mind's effort to structuralize truth on the basis of his living contact with the objective reality of the world. Man can known only as life teaches him, and he is taught only by his experience with the world. If his contact with life and the world gave him no true conceptions of enduring and dependable verity, then the real world would not educate him in truth, but would misteach him in the end. Life would betray him. And we have Wordsworth's assurance that

"Nature never did betray the heart that loved her."

So we have G. R. G. Mure, in his work on Aristotle, saying (p. 171, note) that "reason apart from its object has no character." Dewey continues the discussion by saying that Greek thought never made a sharp separation between the rational perfect realm and the natural world. Greek thinking accepted the senses, the body and nature with natural piety and found in nature a hierarchy of creations leading degree by degree to the divine. The soul was the realized actuality of the body, as reason was the transcendent realization of the ideal forms contained in the soul. The senses included within themselves forms which needed only to be stripped of their material accretions to be true stepping-stones to higher knowledge.

It needs to be proclaimed as with a trumpet that this wholly salutary truth of the great Greek philosophy was one of the items of priceless knowledge that was corrupted into the frightful conception of the sinful character of the world and the body, in that sweep of Christian ignorance which devastated the whole area of natural human delight in sensuous existence to the infinitely tragic wreckage of millions of lives.

Dewey, commenting on Spinoza's ideas, says that Nature is naturally, i.e., rationally knowable and that knowledge of it is such a perfect good that when it enlightens the human mind, all lesser and otherwise disturbing objects of distraction and passion fall away or are easily subordinated to control.

The further expansion of this theme, so deeply inwrought with the causes of Christian decadence, is demanded if only by the stubborn rejection by modern thinkers of the ancient method of analogy. For it was the discreet use of this device that enabled ancient Egyptian and Greek thought to hold itself in such sane and constant touch with reality.

So, then, says Mure, in his Aristotle (p. 230):

"The eye for an effective metaphor is in fact a mark of genius and unteachable. And in devoting most space to illustrating that form of metaphor which depends upon analogy,--as when old age is described as 'Life's sunset'--he means perhaps to mark the manifestation within the poet's imaginative world of that hierarchic order of analogous stages which pervades the whole Aristotelian universe. The last and least important element in tragedy is spectacle."

Matching what the ancient sages declared was the last and least important thing in their spiritual Scriptures,--history.

This again stresses the great truth to which general modern thought is almost totally a stranger, that poetry, philosophy, conceptual realization of meaning are more important than the record of man's actual doings. Current thought feels itself secure only on the ground of historical fact; it is ever uncertain and insecure when dealing with poetry and philosophy. It does not trust them; they are too thin ice and may let the skater crash through. The paradoxical fact is that history is the least secure ground to stand upon and is constantly letting all skaters down into bogs and quicksands. The thing that proves this is history itself. Hegel saw this clearly enough. A clever version of this sad fact has been put in the statement that the only thing we have learned from history is that we have learned nothing from history. This is of course

hyperbole, but still largely true. It has taken the race thousands of years to formulate a few of the most rudimentary lessons of history into ordained norms of future behavior. Ignorance eternally blunders ahead without heeding the garnered wisdom of the ages, for if it did it would not be ignorance. Mighty is the utterance, then, of the great Aristotle (De Poetica):

"Hence poetry is something more philosophical and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars."

Mure corroborates what has been advanced herein earlier that "the Romans lacked any metaphysical genius." He adds that "the rebirth of Aristotelianism in Europe determined the whole course of Medieval and modern culture." Few will quibble over this statement; and if true it places beyond debate the ground-claim of this work, that it was the displacing of Greek rationalism out of the early Christian movement that led to the debacle of the Dark Ages.

Then John Dewey (The Quest for Certainty, p. 133) states most luminously the case for the principle on which the greatest of the ancient sages based their fathomless wisdom, the principle of the uniformity of truth in all the worlds, at all the levels. A living expression of truth at any level was at once a replica of the same truth at any other grade. Modern science has not yet recovered this priceless item of ancient sagacity. If it had, it would not go on scorning "analogy." This truth validates analogy. Empirical investigation can only confirm sensually what analogy teaches ideally. If analogy was loyally cultivated, the mind could know beforehand what investigation and discovery will bring to light. Says Dewey:

"The meaning which one even has is translatable into the meanings which others possess. Ideas of objects, formulated in terms of the relations which events bear to one another, having common measures, institute broad smooth highways by means of which we can travel from the thought of one part of nature to that of any other. In ideal at least, we can travel from any meaning--or relation--found anywhere in nature to the meaning to be expected anywhere else."

This is grandly stated and if it were given its full sweep of influence in the realm of thought, would go far toward inaugurating another Renaissance in intelligence.

Then comes a passage from Dewey's pen which for momentous truth is worthy, as Carlyle phrased it, of being "written on all walls,"

certainly those of all libraries, seminaries and halls of culture (Ibid., p. 151):

"A solution was found when symbols came into existence." "The invention or discovery of symbols is doubtless by far the greatest single event in the history of man. Without them no intellectual advance is possible; with them, there is no limit set to intellectual development except inherent stupidity."

Inherent stupidity is still and always man's most frightful danger; but with such a gleam of intelligence alight in the mind of even one modern thinker, the torches of all others might be enkindled to burn with a new flood of light. Alas! It is so far from being seen and applied that one of the main contentions of this work, the asseveration that the sacred Scriptures are written in a language of myth and symbol, and that the Christian religion threw away and lost the very soul of their meaning when it mistranslated this language into alleged history instead of reading it as spiritual allegory, will be disputed raucously even when all the mountain of evidence is piled up before the eye.

Perhaps nothing could be more fitting than to place by the side of Dewey's epochal statement one from Spinoza which falls little short of it in vital import for human knowledge. It is significantly corroborative of the relation between nature and the minds of the sentient creatures that grow up in her lap. Says the great author of the Ethics:

"To her fair works did nature link

The human soul that through me ran;

And much it grieved my heart to think

What man had made of man."

Christianity, wretchedly directed away from its first connections with high arcane philosophy, was the influence that tore man out of his intelligent kinship with Nature and set him, in weird aberration of religious zealotry, over against Nature and Nature over against him, in a fictitious hostility that drove him to such unnatural extravagances of conduct as to have blighted all possibility of happiness for ages.

A. B. Davidson, in his work The Theology of the Old Testament (p. 514), has a quite discerning statement to the effect that the acquirement of a familiarity with the Scriptures is not easy; that it takes the labor of a lifetime; for the reason that the Bible is a literary work written in the language of life and feeling, and not in that of the schools, whether of philosophy, theology or science. One has, he says, to extend all his sensibilities and bring himself en rapport with its varied genial, subtle, enraptured human-divine presentations, making the necessary deductions from a hyperbole, calculating the moral value of a metaphor, if one is to feel the sentiments expressed. But two positions, he concludes, are to be firmly maintained:

"First, that Scripture has a meaning and a view of its own on most moral and religious questions; and not more than one view really . . . and, second, that the meaning of Scripture is capable of being ascertained from Scripture alone, and ought not to be controlled from anything without."

All of which is a somewhat indirect way of affirming what is contended for here, that the Scriptures are basically esoteric. But of great value is Davidson's claim that the Bible has but one single meaning. For no idea is more generally prevalent than that one can go to Scripture and find it sustaining any one of many diverse and even opposing theorizations. It is commonly averred that it is possible to find support for almost any thesis of interpretation in the language of the text. This is a good occasion, therefore, to put forth the definite assertion that when the Scriptures are read with the true esoteric keys to their cryptic signification, they mean one thing only, and that definitely, consistently and incontestably.

In his The Beginnings of Christianity, George P. Fisher (p. 253), speaking of Philo's amalgamation of the Greek and the Mosaic systems in his profound syncretism, says that the Jewish philosopher effected this quite harmonious unification of two great systems commonly considered quite divergent, by the "flexible" method of allegory, the interpretation being that of an occult sense which underlies the literal wording.

It will be well, however, to counterblast an observation which Fisher makes in reference to "the mythical theory," which to him as to nearly all other orthodox writers, is such a prickly thorn in the theological side. He says (p. 464) that "the mythical theory is wrecked upon a variety of difficulties which it cannot evade or surmount." Wreckage has come, but it was not, as he assumes, inevitable. Alluding to the

growth of the myths and legends that obviously had to be called in to provide an explanation for the admittedly purely-poetic and decorative part of the Gospel narrative,--adduced by so many Christian apologists--he says that

"there was no time for a cycle of myths of this sort to arise before the date of the earliest written Gospels. The circumstances, especially the presence of the Apostles, the recognized guides of the Church, would render it impossible."

And more to the same effect. A full refutation of this utterly unfounded view will be produced in the course of this work. In the briefest form of rebuttal now, it is to be said that it shows blindness on the part of this writer to assume that the cycle of legends had only a few years in which to develop to general knowledge and value. What a sound study of comparative religion brings to light now is that these same legends, a vast cycle of them, were no sudden development in any age, but were of immemorial antiquity. The birth of any Messiah would have been lavishly embellished with these legends. Categorically, the "mythical theory" is not wrecked upon a variety of difficulties, for these vanish in a scheme of utter and splendid intelligibility when the mind brings to the task acumen enough to pierce their diaphanous veil to the light shining behind it.

From our own Emerson comes the sententious observation that "a good symbol is a missionary to convince thousands."

A modern writer of keen discernment is Thomas L. Masson, who in a work he calls Ascensions says (p. 194):

"There are many things beyond the power of words to convey, which can only be indicated by symbols which are understood by the few and reinterpreted for wider circles."

Warrant for citing this excerpt is found in the notation it contains to the effect that it is the business and function of the few at the summit of the intellectual coterie who can grasp recondite esoteric significance, to exercise their best ability to pass on to the next grade below them in intelligence as lucid a rendering of the deeper import as possible. In turn this group must do its best to convey the subtle meanings to the rank next below it, and that in turn to the one below, and so on down to the lowest. It is in this transmission that the inner sense is lost, being supplanted sooner or later by a more easily apprehensible literal one, thus making false "history" out of true allegory.

Proclus in his majestic volumes On the Theology of Plato (Vol. I, p. 57) writes:

"Socrates, therefore, . . . narrating the types and laws of divine fables, which afford this apparent meaning and the inward concealed scope, which regards as its end the beautiful and natural in the fictions about the Gods. . . ."

Here there is an open declaration that the myths about the Gods are fictions, but that they hold an "inward concealed scope" of meaning. Another modern, the eminent psychologist, C. G. Jung, in his Modern Man in Search of a Soul (p. 189), says:

"It is therefore to be expected of the poet that he will resort to mythology in order to give his experience its most fitting expression. The primordial experience is the source of his creativeness; it cannot be fathomed and therefore requires mythological imagery to give it form. In itself it offers no words or images, for it is a vision seen as 'in a glass darkly.' It is merely a deep presentiment that strives to find expression. . . . Since the particular expression can never exhaust the possibilities of the vision, but falls far short of it in richness of content, the poet must have at his disposal a huge store of materials if he is to communicate even a few of his intimations. What is more, he must resort to an imagery that is difficult to handle and full of contradictions in order to express the weird paradoxicality of his vision."

It is significant for moderns that this sharp discernment can be brought to the support of our thesis from perhaps the most eminent exponent of the great new science known as psychoanalysis.

The association of mythology, symbolism and natural imagery with poetry has long been an integral item of studied culture. It is inexorably based on that oft-stated but never completely realized parallelism between the logoic structure of intellect and that of the world, the order and harmony of the inner conscious process being matched by that of the outer material universe. In short, man's and God's thinking can and should correspond, and will do so when man's thought arrives at rational perfection. God's thought being manifested in the formations of the living outer world, man's ratiocinative processes must reflect the logicality of natural events in the objective sequence. The interrelationship of details in the outer will be matched by the similar unimpeachable concatenation in the intellect. Hence when in his stage of inadequacy man's logical effort fails to bring him to complete clarity of insight, he may look out to the phenomena deploying their meaning everywhere in the natural world and haply light upon some link of

connection that will supply a missing element in the thought problem. If nature is a living key to all truth, man must pick up that key which he has disdained since ancient days.

All this was understood by Aristotle, so that he could affirm that poetry is ever truer than history. For it presents, in its imagery an natural analogies, paradigms of eternal truth, whereas history is a hodge-podge of approximations of struggling but still imperfect beings, trying to harmonize their lives and deeds with aims that seldom envisage these paradigms with any true discernment whatever.

The Harvard Santayana, in a work on Plato and the Spiritual Life, has a most penetrating analysis of the psychological basis and necessity for esotericism in religious writing. After making the clarifying observation that the distinctive object of spirit "is not pure Being in its infinity, but finite being in its purity,"--an extremely pointed and important delineation--he goes on to say that the elevations of consciousness attained in high moments of vivid clairvoyance, when the spirit has seemed to be united and identical with the Supreme Being, can never be adequately reported across the bridge from those high mounts to the cognitive mind. "Words cannot render what has been seen, nor would it be lawful, perhaps, to reveal it." This is entirely the same sense as that in which Paul in II Corinthians tells of the man he knew who was caught up into the third heaven "and there did witness such marvelous things that it is not lawful that a man should speak of them." And the Church that Paul founded has fought the claims of esotericism down the ages!

Santayana's fuller elucidation of this experience must not be omitted (Ibid., p. 76):

"The saint pulls his ladder up with him into his private heaven; and the community of the faithful, on whose sturdy dogmatic shoulders he has climbed, must not be deprived of the means of following his example. Hence any dissolving culmination of the religious life must be kept a secret, a mystery to be divulged only to the few whom the knowledge of it can no longer scandalize or discourage. Besides this prudence and this consideration for the weaker brethren there is a decisive reason for silence: the revelation has been essentially a revelation of the illusion inherent in all language, in all experience, in all existence. It can not be communicated save by being repeated. . . . Silence is therefore imperative, if the mystic has any conscience."

This is to affirm that when the whole gods of enraptured mystic perception of divine states come, the half gods of stodgy traditional formal dogmatisms go, and that, ventures Santayana, would not be

good for the cause of established religion. It is likely that Paul's regarding it unlawful to spill out the wine of spiritual intoxication was due to his deep sense of its sheer incommunicability to any one not having experienced the like. Scores of hints in his Epistles intimate his recognition of the ineluctable necessity for esotericism. He speaks several times of the mystery of knowledge and of divine revelations in the secret place of inner illumination, as if he had been conversant with such elevations more than once. Plotinus' comment on his having been four times lifted beyond the boundaries of our common consciousness into a world of enchantment amid spiritual and cosmic realities is well known. The testimony of saints, mystics and contemplatives is voluminous. Even ordinary life testifies to sudden upliftings in which the veil is rent and consciousness rides the steeds of a higher dimensional freedom into realms of gloriously expanded being, where magic is the natural.

Whenever at any rate the seer, descending from the mount of vision with the glory of his ecstatic uplift still glowing on his features, attempts to communicate his experience to another on the common level, his only chance at possible success lies in his resort to allegory and symbol. We have been accustomed to the assertion of this from the side of philosophy, religion and poetry. How immensely significant it is, then, to hear it in our modern day also from the side of physical science! Sir James Jeans, in his work The World Around Us (p. 318), comes forward with this amazing declaration:

"When we try to discuss the ultimate structure of the atom we are driven to speak in terms of similes, metaphors and parables."

This comes near to saying that even the concrete world, in its ultimate impingement on consciousness, dissolves into mystical states and modes of being, and any communicable method of portrayal of it must resort to the basic intimations that spring spontaneously to man from his contacts with the living world.

Higgins (The Anacalypsis, p. 480) adds heavy weight to the motives for esoteric secrecy when he says that the custodians of mystery teaching desired to retain in their own hands the keys of knowledge. He avers that they instituted a solemn fast to commemorate the day on which they believed the LXX translation was finished, this as a penance for their great national sin in having permitted it to be translated by Ptolemy and therefore made public. Higgins says that "this is the

last proof which we possess, and a decisive proof it is, of sacred writings concealed, and also of their forced exposure."

This final statement is indeed "proof" of the main thesis here advanced. If the full truth could be known, it is next to a certainty that the open publication of the sacred books of the ancient sages and semi-divine hierophants of a genuinely esoteric secret wisdom, was never contemplated by the creators of the arcane myths and allegories. The Holy Scriptures were not originally designed to be given out to the world. This came rather by mischance. Their ultimate publication is to be attributed to developments that came through influences beyond their control; it escaped their jealous guardianship. This work ventures to discuss whether from this fortuitous circumstance more evil has not come than good.

It has been declared on esoteric authority emanating allegedly from the spiritual hierarchy of the world, that the near-divine custodians of the true teaching never permitted any but the most superficial of the esoteric doctrines to see actual print, the method of instruction and transmission of the inner and higher wisdom being the oral one.

Yet is seems clearly apparent that there is enough, even though in direct, mystic intimation, allegorical disguise and mythic form in those great documents of Greece, Egypt, Chaldea and India to support the belief that the books of the great wisdom were at last given to the outer world. It is the contention of this dissertation that it was the wider dissemination of the arcane literature that gave form and character to the Christian movement.

Preface
Chapters 1-2
Chapters 5-6
Chapters 7-8
Chapters 9-10
Chapters 11-12
Chapters 13-14
Chapters 15-16
Chapters 17-18
Chapters 19-20
Chapters 21-22
Index