CHAPTER V

WISDOM IN A MYSTERY

The next task is to establish the fact that the allegorical method was in practically universal vogue throughout the ancient days and that the first and most rational thinkers in the Christian movement were entirely committed to the representation and interpretation of spiritual and Scriptural truth through the medium of allegory. The ancient sages composed the Scriptures as allegories; and the highest Christian intelligence accepted and expounded them as such. Gibbon asserts that both Origen and Augustine were among the allegorists. He could have added Pantaenus and Clement, indeed the whole Alexandrian school.

Guignebert's work of splendid scholarship, Christianity Past and Present, will yield much material in later sections. On p. 148 he states that entrance into the early Church was complicated through the tendency to elaborate the ritual which develops as soon as a religion begins to be systematically propagated by a true clerical class. "We must take into account," he says, "the fear of the unsound brother who might misuse the Mystery if he were admitted to it without due formalities. Precautions are accordingly taken to avoid this profanation."

But after showing that the Mystery registered so much importance, he commits the inconsistency of saying that the arcanum of the Mysteries amounted to little or nothing. Why then should even the ignorant Christians have taken so much precaution to avoid its profanation? But it is true enough that the Mystery importance dwindled along with its meaning as the wave of ignorance flooded rapidly over the early movement.

From the Orpheus of G. R. S. Mead we draw a statement that fixes the fact of the wide prevalence of the esoteric method in religion, with its adjuncts of training in the interpretation of the myths, symbols and allegories (p. 24):

"The perfection of the highest virtue and the opening of the real spiritual senses constituted the highest degree of the Mysteries; another and most

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important part of the discipline was the training in the interpretation of myth, symbol and allegory, the letters of the mystical language in which the secrets of nature and the soul were written, so plainly for the initiated, so obscurely for the general; without these instructions the mythical recitals and legends were unintelligible."

We have quoted Sir Gilbert Murray as saying that Greek religion was bound in with "a romantic, trivial and yet very edifying mythology." No one can miss the fact that Greek religion was deeply grounded in mythology. But once more must be registered the pitiable confession of modern savants that the Greek myths have been too much for them. Be it said with the utmost positiveness that those marvelous myths are the products, not of infantile groping, but of consummate dramatic genius, and the mind that holds them to be trivial has simply never been awakened to the hidden purport of these constructions, to see the wonderworld of glowing beauty therein. This negative note from Murray is all the more difficult to comprehend because in another passage he speaks of "the widespread and almost incredible error of treating Homer as primitive." Why this gap in rating between the myths and Homer? The Iliad and the Odyssey can fairly be claimed to belong to the myths, or to the mythic period and instinct. And surely he did not rate these greatest of epics as trivial.

What Higgins has found out about the Homeric poems is worth noting (The Anacalypsis, p. 542):

"The poems of Homer I consider to have been originally sacred Asiatic songs or poems, adopted by the Greeks, and that for perhaps many generations they were unwritten [A school history says that they were held in the memory of the Greeks for five hundred years before being written down.]; and as they related to the cyclic mythos, they would in the principal part suit every cycle. . . . They were like the plays of Aeschylus, each an epic, but all combining to form the history of the cycles to those who were initiated. . . ."

Returning to Macchioro's fine work From Orpheus to Paul, there is found an assertion of the plain fact which must be hammered home to the intelligence of modern scoffers at the status and influence of the ancient Mysteries. It shows that these brotherhoods and the disciplines they enforced stood at the peak of culture in the ancient world. To have reached the highest degrees was the certification of the topmost refinement and spiritual unfoldment. Says he (p. 203):

"Nothing was more usual or honorable for a man of the cultured class in Hellenic times than to become acquainted with the Mysteries. In the Hel-

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lenistic Age religion as well as literature showed the deep influence of the Mysteries."

And he shows how this stream of refinement would have touched the mind of St. Paul:

"Nothing is more reasonable than to think that a cultured man like Paul, born in a great center of culture, gifted with a peculiar intellectual grasp and a vivid curiosity about religious experience, should feel attracted to Orphism."

It will be refreshing, as a new baptism in the waters of truth long neglected, ignored, repressed, for the world of modern Christianism to face the fine truth about these Mysteries, penned, not by a hostile mind, but by one of the most highly accredited of Christian historians, the English scholar, von Mosheim. In his great two-volume work on the History of the Christian Religion covering the first three and a quarter centuries, he writes of the Pagan Mysteries (Vol. I, p. 18):

"None was admitted to behold or partake in the celebration of these Mysteries but those who had approved themselves worthy of such distinction by their fidelity and perseverance in the practice of a long and severe course of initiatory forms. The votaries were enjoined, under the peril of immediate death, to observe the most profound secrecy as to everything that passed: and this sufficiently accounts for the difficulty that we find in obtaining any information respecting the nature of those recluse practices and for the discordant and contradictory opinions concerning them that are to be met with in the writings of various authors, ancient as well as modern."

Here is the rebuke to many a quibbling snarl of Christian scholarship at the Pagan Mysteries. He continues by assuming, in the dearth of positive record, that perhaps "in these brotherhoods some things were done in the highest degree repugnant to virtue, modesty and every fine feeling"; but

"it is probable that in those of a more refined cast, some advance was made in bringing religion back to the test of reason, by inquiring into and exposing the origin and absurdity of the popular superstitions and worship. There might, therefore, be some foundation for the promise usually held forth to those who were about to be initiated, that they would be put in possession of the means of rendering this life happy, and also for the expectation opened to them of entering upon an improved state of existence hereafter. However this might be, it is certain that the highest veneration was entertained by the people of every country for what was termed the Mysteries; and the Christians, perceiving this, were induced to make their religion conform in many respects to this part of the heathen model,

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hoping that it might thereby the more readily obtain a favorable reception with those whom it was their object and their hope to convert."

These lines have stood in print in a highly respected and accredited work by a Christian protagonist for a century or more of the modern age, but in open defiance of their forthright and truthful assertion as to the high character and reputable status of the ancient Mystery Brotherhoods, Christian writers have gone on in a dismal drone of reprobation and denunciation of these institutions in book after book. It is all too evidently but part and parcel of that inveterate disposition to besmirch with one taint or another everything Pagan or pre-Christian, a disposition which, the more it is encountered in reading Christian literature, the more clearly it is seen in its true light as at base a sheer disease of the Christian mind. When the spokesman for a religion that by its own claim inculcates love and charity, plus forbearance of one's enemies, must endlessly vent the spleen of sheer jealousy over every laudable thing connected with a rival, till even a rival's clear virtues must be made to appear as sins, one has before the eye the certain marks of what is named bigotry and pusillanimity.

It is doubtful if even the cautiously laudatory statement of von Mosheim is quite true and just in every particular. He, too, must not lose the chance to throw in, almost as an "aside," his animadversion that charges the Mystery cults with gross immorality. This is not the time or place to take up the controversy over the comparative immoral character of Pagan versus Christian rites and conduct. But it is little short of certain that, as in the case of the rituals in Buddhistic and Hindu ceremonies which employed phallic emblems and sex symbolism with high and pure mystical significance, certain items and appurtenances of the Mystery ritualism have been grossly misconceived and misconstrued. The actions of unworthy participants can debase the purest ceremonial. No brief need be held for the stainless "purity" of the Mystery cults. With a fair court to hear all the evidence--a privilege which has hardly ever been accorded the case--it is beyond doubt that the Mysteries of the Pagan religion would not suffer by comparison with the moral tone of Christian behavior both in the early days and since. Indeed a decision of Omniscient Judgment would almost certainly give the Mysteries a whit the better in the verdict. This statement must not be taken as a snap-throw of biased conjecture; it is only too well grounded on a mass of data of Christian history lying close at hand, which there is no room to present here.

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Since, then, the Mysteries propagated the science of spiritual development and incorporated all the motions of the mystical experience of the soul's attunement to divine nature in myths, allegories, symbols and dramatic representations, the Mysteries can be considered to have been the originating source and propagators of the mythical science. It is clearly evident, as has been seen by a few of the more astute of the Christian scholars, that the sacred writings, done in myth and allegory, were just the ultimate transcription of the oral ritual forms and locutions from memory to paper. This at once accounts for the mythical and allegorical character of all this ancient literature; and it thus solves a problem which has taxed the brains of generations of scholars to the breaking point. More than a few writers have seen and stated that the body of the myths was a literary deposit from the rituals of the ancient festival celebrations. The myths came to be produced and finally precipitated into writing as a kind of gloss on the dramatizations in the mystic rites. Space forbids our citing the authorities that would corroborate this pronouncement.

Thus it happened that the early literary productions of nearly all races fall into the mythical form, as Higgins has so strongly asserted. Therefore it is not surprising to hear another writer on ancient things, Zenaide A. Ragozin, in his The Story of Chaldea (299) say:

"A race that has no national epos is one devoid of great memories, incapable of high culture and political development; and no such has taken a place among the leading races of the world. All those that have occupied such a place at any time of the world's history have had their Mythic and Heroic Ages, brimful of wonders and fanciful creations."

And he supplements this with the fine observation that (p. 297)

"Thus in the tradition of every ancient nation there is a vast and misty tract of time . . . between the unpierceable gloom of an eternal past and the broad daylight of remembered, recorded history. There all is shadowy, gigantic, superhuman. There gods move down yet visible, shrouded in a golden cloud of mystery and awe; there by their side loom other shapes as dim, but more familiar, human yet more than human--the Heroes, Fathers of Races, founders of nations, the companions, the beloved of gods and goddesses, nay, their own children, mortals themselves, yet doing deeds of daring and might such as only the immortals could inspire and favor, the connecting link between these and ordinary humanity--as that gloaming, uncertain, shifting but not altogether unreal streak of time is the borderland between Heaven and Earth; the very hotbed of myth, fiction and romance."

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This marginal area between heaven and earth for the mortal race is comparable to the childhood period of humanity, before methodical plodding written record of happenings is kept, and when of course the imagination glows with the idealistic coloring which suffuses the consciousness in childhood. But that which the period has handed on as written record of its life need not be "a vast and misty tract of time" to intelligent interpretation of its myths and is so only because of the arrant stolidity of the modern mind, which closes itself off from all possible chance to read the myths aright.

Lundy, in his Monumental Christianity (p. 178) comes to grips with this question of the status and meaning of the myths in very cogent manner:

"If the mythos has no spiritual meaning, then all religion becomes mere idolatry, or the worship of material things. But we have seen the symbols of Oriental Pagan religions which indicate a supreme Power and Intelligence above matter; and also how early Christianity abhorred idolatry. Apollo, as a mythical type and the Good Shepherd as a reality, then, must mean something more than mere material light and guidance."

If Higgins is correct in saying that mythology has corrupted all history, it will be necessary to give more heed to the statement made by Allan Upward in his book Divine Mystery (p. 215), where he says:

"On the surface the Israelite legend is an attempt to find in the national history an illustration of Zoroastrian theology."

This broad statement would demand a small volume to substantiate it in its essential truth. But it is an item of the lost understanding attested by a mountain of data from many sources. Not only did the Hebrew people attempt to structuralize their past history to fit the model dramatizations of the theological systemology, but many another nation did the same thing. No work of ancient study so clearly and convincingly sets forth this operation as The Anacalypsis of Godfrey Higgins, cited herein. To this end the formulators of the religion of every nation worked to redact their objective history and their national geography into the form and nomenclature of the models provided by the mythos, and, most strangely of all, the astrological mythos. Place names and historical events were contorted into the nomenology and type-graphs of spiritual experience in the mythos, first placed on the constellations of the heavens and later transferred to earth and interwoven into the geography and history of one nation after an-

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other. The Anacalypsis presents over eight hundred pages in substantiation of this general assertion.

Gerald Massey indeed states that "the chart of Judea looks like a copy of the scenery in Amenta, the Egyptian 'underworld' or place of dead souls, actually our earth itself as it would be if the land had been originally mapped out by the immigrants from Egypt. Amenta and the Aarru-Paradise, with its heaven on the summit of the mount, have been repeated at innumerable sacred places in the world." Massey is emphatic in claiming the astrological origin of indeed all religion. Says he (The Logia of the Lord, p. 4):

"Astrologically, every religious drama the world over may be traced to and located in the zodiacal signs of the Sun."

And trenchantly he carries this to the Gospels, as to which he says:

"The truth is, that the earliest Gospels are farthest removed from supposed human history. That came last, and only when the spiritual Christ of the Gnosis had been rendered concrete in the density of Christian ignorance!"

That the sacred Scriptures of the ancient day were in that time taken allegorically and not historically is well attested by one fact alone of nearly decisive weight. In speaking of the Essenes and the Pagan Sibyls, Higgins (Anac., 576) says:

"Almost every particular in the life of Christ as detailed in the Gospels is to be found in the Sibyls, so that it can scarcely be doubted that the Sibyls were copied from the Gospel history, or the Gospel history from them. It is also very certain that there was an Erythraean Sibyl before the time of Christ."

This intimates that the copying must have been done when the Gospels were being put in written form. The Sibyls were undoubtedly first; previous does not copy later.

The Encyclopædia Britannica (Article "Jews") says that "the varied traditions up to this stage cannot be regarded as objective history." Yet it goes on to say that these narrations cannot be treated from any modern standpoint as fiction. If a thing is neither history nor fiction, what, one must ask, can it be? To this pertinent query only esotericism holds the answer. Nowhere else can it be found. The only literary production that is neither history nor fiction is allegory, myth. It is truth that is not, or not yet, historicized. It is truth in the ideal, the abstract, the eternal possibility of actualization.

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Pliny, referring to the Essenes, remarks:

"The Essenes had already existed several thousand years and one of the best ascertained facts concerning this sect is that they possessed secret holy writings of their own, which they guarded with special care."

Again the Encyclopædia Britannica, in its article "Midrash," says that

"the tendency to reshape history for the edification of later generations was no novelty when Chronicles was written (about the fourth century B.C.). Pragmatic historiography is exemplified in the earliest continuous sources."

Midrash was just this tendency to see romantic sense in the narrative in the old written tradition, the article emphasizes.

"The rigid line between fact and fiction in religious literature which readers often wish to draw, cannot be consistently justified, and in studying old Oriental religious narratives, it is necessary to realize that the teaching was regarded as more essential than the method of presenting it. 'Midrash,' which may be called useless for historical investigation, may be appreciated for the light it throws upon forms of thought. Historical criticism does not touch the reality of the ideas, and since they may be as worthy of study as the apparent facts they clothe, they thus indirectly contribute to history. In any case, while the true historical kernel of the Midrashic narrative will always be a matter of dispute, the teaching to which it is applied stands on an independent footing, as also does the application of that teaching to other ages."

This discussion in the Encyclopædia is a truth that needs constant reemphasis among moderns. It cannot be taken otherwise than that the article is trying with a bit of circumlocution to say that the Midrashic literature of the Jews is spiritual allegory masked in the guise of Hebrew history. Useless for historical investigation--and this should be driven home to all students--it still conveys a profound message that concerns and illumines all history. But it is silly to say that the teaching was regarded as more essential than the method of presenting it. Where, except perhaps in poetry, is this not the case? It makes a flourish over a point where no point is in question. Yet the observations made are of great moment, because their important findings have been made crucially significant by their neglect and flouting.

Among those who have joined in the chorus of flouting the allegorical method is a figure no less eminent than Canon Farrar, who in his Lives of the Fathers (p. 384) says:

"But when we clearly scan the somewhat vague and mysterious references of Clement, his 'tradition' seems to be ultimately nothing more than

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the application to Scripture of that allegorical method which he received from Pantaenus, as Pantaenus had probably learned it from the writings of Philo, and as Philo and his teachers had borrowed it from the Stoic method of interpreting Homer. So far as we may judge from Clement himself, the method was absolutely valueless. It did not even furnish any criterion by which he could draw a deep line of distinction between the Scriptures and Apocryphal writings; and when he came to apply it practically, the results to which it led him were untenable and even absurd. Clement's Gnostic was supposed to be able to interpret Scripture in a higher and more 'spiritual' way than the ordinary believer. The Scriptures were the common possession of all Christians, but the illuminati of orthodox Gnosticism were supposed to read in them meanings undiscernible to the vulgar eye. In point of fact the allegorical evolution of so-called 'spiritual' interpretation was so far from being a valuable method, that it became the favorite camping ground of all heretics, and the least assailable bulwark of their manifold aberrations."

This lengthy passage is introduced because it so frankly presents the element to be dealt with in this section and because it furnishes perhaps the most glaring example of that horrific stupidity that caused generation after generation of Christian scholarship to gaze upon the body of ancient allegorical depiction of truth and never once register a single ray of comprehension of what mighty value lay en masse before them. Every single assertion of Farrar's misses the point by miles and becomes a downright untruth. The result of the handling of allegory by Clement and even the more learned Origen were admittedly not what they might have been in more competent hands. Nevertheless the allegories of the Bible (and allegories they are, from Adam and the tree and serpent to Jonah and the big fish) were only "untenable and absurd" because even Clement lacked the technical skill properly to bring out the abstruse cryptic sense. The "interpretation" of allegory by rash champions and expositors has often been little short of horrendous in its miscarriage of true sense. More must be said about this presently.

To show that in Christian understanding of the origins of their own religion there is by no means certified knowledge of vital points, it will be well to follow Farrar's arraignment of Clement's allegorism with another eminent Christian historian's view of the more famous and more widely discussed allegories of Clement's very distinguished pupil and successor, the great and learned Origen. "Origen's allegories" have ever been a thorn in the flesh of orthodox exegesis and theological history, for his deep learning commands the respect, while it at the same time baffles the exegetical ingenuity of all the theologians.

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The situation has left them non-plussed and defeated. Reluctance to condemn perhaps the greatest originator of Biblical analysis restrains them from too severe opprobrium on his work. So the tack is always to praise cautiously and with reservation, or to censure mildly and with commendatory side remarks--to straddle the issue and save Christian "face." But on the whole, while it still falls far short of seeing and registering the truth of the matter, von Mosheim's treatise on Origen's allegories is far fairer than most others. In his great history he writes (Vol. II, p. 167):

"Certainly he would have had no enemies if he had merely affirmed what no one then called in question, that in addition to the sense which the words of Scripture convey, another sense latent in the things described is to be diligently sought for. This will be manifest if we consider who were the men that inveighed so bitterly against Origen's allegories after he was dead: I refer to Eustatius, Epiphanius, Jerome, Augustine and many others. All these were themselves allegorists, if I may use that term; and would undoubtedly have condemned any man as a great errorist who would have dared to impugn the arcane sense of Scripture, or to censure the deriving both doctrines and precepts and the knowledge of future events, from the narratives and laws contained in the Bible. There must therefore have been something new and unusual in Origen's exegetics, which appeared to them pernicious and very dangerous. Otherwise they would have regarded his system of interpretation as beautiful and perfectly correct."

It is thrilling to have the historian thus set the stage for the revelation of this extra something that Origen insisted on in Bible reading, but which the orthodox Fathers could, or dared, not accept. And well can we understand now why they dared not go along with their too deeply and occultly discerning fellow-exegetist! To accept and endorse his mode of interpreting Holy Writ would have written the death warrant of their world-conquering Christianism! For his method would have read out all the "history" in the Scriptures and read in nothing but the "spiritual" sense. So, says Mosheim (Vol. II, p. 168):

"The first and chief was that he pronounced a great part of the sacred books to be void of meaning if taken literally, and that only the things indicated by the words were the signs and emblems of higher objects . . . he turned much of the sacred history into moral fables, and no small part of the divine precepts into mere allegories."

What a picture this presents! Here was the most intelligent of all those "Fathers" of the Christian faith standing for what he knew to be the true character and high spiritual purport of the arcane Scrip-

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tures that his Church had taken up from ancient Pagan sources and had adopted and put forth as the literary vehicles of their sacred tenets. From his teaching at the hands of Clement, who received it from Pantaenus and he, in common with all the Alexandrian school, from the chief ancient purveyor of it all, Philo Judaeus, he was fully conversant with the secret tradition of literary esotericism that pervaded all the ancient world, in the light of which the Scriptures were to be translated never according to the letter of the words, but in a mystical spiritual relevance, by which a far profounder and entirely sublime anthropologico-cosmic meaning could be caught by a mind instructed in the proper manner of detecting such underlying significations. Origen, let it be repeated, well and surely knew this. And, in the spirit of one truly Christian, that is, seeking to develop all aspects of the science of the cultivation of the Christ-in-man, he aimed to strengthen the growing movement with which he had allied himself with the true and only profitable, indeed only possible, distinctive method of deriving spiritual light and sustenance from the selected Scriptures of his Church.

And not only did Origen know this semi-secret methodology in Biblical science, but there is no doubt that the other intelligent leaders of the movement were as well acquainted with it as he. There are many proofs of this, the foremost being that most of his associates followed him, including Ambrose and even Jerome, until the latter was, so to say, jerked up short in his tendency to do so by the embittered outcries of the ignorant majority leadership who had by now been completely dominated by the wholly literal and historical thesis of interpretation. Naturally, not too many followed Origen, at any rate not enough to give his method any general acceptance. The esoteric method tends ever to be a prized possession of a limited few. But all those in the tradition of esotericism understood and accredited Origen's style of approach to Bible meaning.

It was a, nay the, critical epoch for Christianity. It stood at the cross roads. If it could have risen to the high point of appreciation and acceptance of "Origen's allegories," the fate of Christendom, of the world, would have been determined for all time to work out to a more elevated culture than the one historically extant. For the decision would have enabled it to meet every contingency of future history with a vastly greater power of discriminating intelligence than it ever to this day has commanded in the ranks of either its laity of its clerical hierarchy. But alas, the acumen needed to see the sound bases and

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the actual rightness of Origen's position had already been extinguished; and he was left as the last true Christian exegetist, bleating plaintively in the wilderness of plebeian ignorance, hoping that his voice might still be heard by enough to hold the inner citadel of a spiritual understanding of the sacred books of soul science. But again alas, he was doomed to disappointment; and with the suppression of his voice and his influence, the last hope of saving true Christianity from a swift and final descent into the mires and quicksands of an impossible and ruinous literalism and historization of its holy Scriptures was swept away. Origen went down into repudiation and rejection among his own brethren, so that he was hardly dead until it was a foremost accusation brought against others of the Fathers, such as Jerome, that they had let Origen's teachings, and predominantly his "allegories," influence their beliefs and teachings. And within three hundred years of his death the Second Council of Constantinople anathematized him and threatened with a curse and excommunication any one found owning or reading his writings. His great work of comparative texts, the Hexapla, was destroyed. Origen held out to the new movement the chance to redeem itself from its early tendency to reject the esoteric doctrine in favor of bare historical literalism. But once more alas, the insight to descry the true advantage and justness of this course had been blinded by pietistic zeal and sheer ignorance, and the chance to save Christianity for truth and sanity was gone for at least sixteen hundred years.

Paul's message and contribution tended to restore the religion to true position; and a little later Dionysus the Areopagite strove to reintroduce the deeper spiritual modes of apprehension. And several centuries later another outstanding figure arose in a bleak epoch of Christian history to redeem the movement from its smothering by literalism, in the person of Scotus Erigena. Both wished to irradiate Christianity with the restored light of Platonic philosophy. In their cases and some others the light of true meaning of theology flared out in a limited circle of esoteric cultists, but of course never reached the masses with any effective impact. A blanket of intellectual stolidity settled down over the world of Christendom with the defeat of Origen and there it has lain ever since. Not only has the priesthood done nothing to lift it, but indeed it had designedly cultivated and perpetuated it. And we have the odd but tragic spectacle of Origen's own Church, in the person of such a learned scholar as von Mosheim, not to say many others, holding up to ridicule the authoritative claim of a

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man like Origen that their Scriptures held a higher and more mystical meaning than would be apparent to the mind of a lout or a simpleton.

Origen was striving to uphold the method of interpretation by which they could glorify their own Scriptures with a meaning far more edifying than the simple literal narrative. Christianity stood at the parting roads of its destiny, the one with the signboard marked "To Literal Degradation," "To Darkness," "To Bigotry," "To Persecution" and "To Murder"; the other "To Spiritual Insight," "To Refined Culture," "To Humanitarianism" and "To Intelligent Understanding"; and it chose fatally the one to the left. Christianity rejected the true spiritual meaning of the Scriptures, even when offered to it by its most learned Father. But man singly or collectively must pay for his choices ignorantly or intelligently made. And for sixteen hundred years this religion has been meeting the evil consequences of that choice against Origen. A religion which has never ceased to claim that it is the highest spiritual system in world history definitely rejected the higher spiritual in favor of a ludicrous and debasing literal interpretation of ancient books of supernal wisdom. And five-sixths of all its theological effort ever since has as a consequence had to be devoted to the impossible hopeless task of reconciling the crudities and inconsistencies of a literal historical rendering of books that were clearly only allegorical, with the demands of fact, of logic and of common sense.

This is the appropriate place at which to register a vigorous protest against the use by Christian writers of one single little word which they have so sedulously let creep into their denunciations of the allegorical method. Times without number one finds them declaring the method ineligible and a failure for the reason that it reduced the text to "mere" allegory. Or they aver that it left the Bible "nothing but" allegory, or "only" allegory. To one who has enlightened his mind with the understanding of the full dynamic power of allegory and the knowledge of its absolutely indispensable utility in bringing out the one true and exalted meaning of the Scriptures, to the displacement of the tawdry outcome of the literal-historical rendering, the word "mere" as a fit adjectival companion of "allegory" becomes the spur to a quite justifiable exasperation. Not only does it reflect all too clearly the crass ignorance that has dealt so unjustly with the most elevated mode of human edification, flouting the everlasting appeal of poetry and symbolism, but it testifies also in a most repugnant way to the cheap trickery, of a false insinuation to damn a noble thing with a slimy slur. It deserves the sharpest reprobation.

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For it casts on allegory a totally untrue and unmerited slander. One has no more right to speak of allegory as "mere" allegory than to speak of poetry as "mere" poetry, or beauty as "mere" beauty or a picture as a "mere" picture. After all a thing is entitled to the right to be called whatever it is without slur or stigma. Either a thing is what it is or it is something else. The writers' resort to calling the esoteric Bible meaning "mere" allegory is their disingenuous way of advertising their contention that it is not allegory at all, but real history. Many, with Origen, have claimed with strong foundation that it is not history at all, but allegory. So the "mere" must go in to discredit the claim. It has no right there whatever. Either the Bible is allegory or it is not. And if, as is indeed the case, it is allegory, or was originally so, then allegory it is and not "mere" allegory. To besmirch allegory with the "only" or the "mere" is to discredit a noble thing, the transcendently utilitarian thing allegory truly is. Had real knowledge of the grandeur of allegory continued in the Christian Church, its spokesmen could have kept saying for centuries that the Bible is a work of beauteous and splendid allegory, and thus saved themselves the chagrin and opprobrium that must now descend upon them when it is recognized at last that those Scriptures, now so falsely misread as factual history, are in solid truth the sublimest of allegories and a hundredfold more illuminating as such.

The way is cleared, then, to meet and refute another claim of the Church apologists that has been put forward again and again to excuse their failure to discern the true serviceableness of Origen's allegories. One writer after another has vented the allegation that Origen's method, while perhaps attaining some measure of success in the most spiritual illumination of Bible texts, in the main ran out in an extravaganza of untenable, strained, unnatural and often clearly ridiculous meanings. To these critics it seemed no doubt honestly conclusive that the allegorical method swept away all solid substance and reality from the text and left only a thin gossamer tissue of metaphor and mystic faith. It swept away, too, the one central keystone of the whole Christian edifice, the historical reality of Jesus, although Origen does not seem to have carried his thesis so far as to reject, except possibly by implacable logical inference, the actual existence of Jesus, or to reduce him, as Smith, Drews, Robertson, Dupuis and the Tübingen school in Germany undertook to do, to the status of a mythical personification.

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When Origen had done his best to lift the Scriptures into the lofty atmosphere of a spiritual sense, that atmosphere proved to the critics and to the laity then and since to be of too rare and thin a substance to support the strength of robust piety and whole-hearted devotion. It seemed to release the meaning, not on the solid ground of earthly reality, but in the misty clouds and shimmering vapors of "mere" sentimentality and dreamy unreality. It dissolved the Christian rock of Holy Writ into the atomic dust of mere metaphor. In revulsion from the unsubstantial and hollow Pagan mythicism and the shadowy sense of symbols, the new Christian faith, that was to carry the hopes and pietistic yearnings of the lowly masses, was destined by the necessities of the case to throw out in grand impatience these glittering appendages that culture professed to toy with, and demand the stanch realism of a historical factuality to stand upon and abide by. And so it was--indeed.

Hence the time is ripe to utter the words that will put in its true light for the first time the reason why, even when advocated, supported and with his best endeavor utilized by the most learned of the Church Fathers, Origen, the true key to the Scriptures totally failed to win recognition and adoption by the Christian movement. Others have essayed to render the Scriptures according to the allegorical method and with the keys it provides. Let it be acknowledged here frankly that the method has never, so far as the present writer is aware, achieved a measure of success that at all proved its merit or its possibilities. It is here and now asserted that this failure does not prove the inadequacy or the potentiality of the method, but does prove the incompetence of those endeavoring to employ it! This explanation has never been offered before, and the whole Christian academic world will shout to controvert it. Nevertheless the assertion now has solid grounds of evidence to stand upon that it lacked in all the centuries until the present.

It has to be admitted, also, in the light of a far more perfect insight into the subtleties and profound intimations of the marvelous ancient language of symbolism, that Origen, while sufficiently astute in catching some portion of the true spiritual sense of the old tomes of wisdom, still was far from qualifying as an adept and sure interpreter in this field. It is clear enough that if the redactor is not equipped with a practically perfect knowledge of this great symbolic and analogical science, his effort is bound to run out in gross misreading amid some partially true rendition. This, it is now seen, is the case with

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Clement and Origen. Much chaff remained clinging to the golden wheat of their sifting. He did not succeed by more than a meager percentage. He was on the right track, but stumbled along and did not ever reach the final goal of full esoteric meaning. It is true, as the orthodox charge, that if the claims of the allegorical method rest on Origen's real accomplishment in this province--or that of many others since--the method would lack vindication. But present studentship, building upon the great results of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1796, the consequent translation of the religious literature of old Egypt, the epochal analyses of this revealing material by Massey and Higgins, and the revival of the genuine theosophic philosophies of the Orphic and Hermetic, the Pythagorean, Platonic and Neoplatonic systems of arcane wisdom, promises soon the cultivation of an interpretive competence that will redeem the holy Scriptures from their absurd sense as objective histories to the full glory of their ineffable transcendence of meaning as spiritual allegories. With the perfection of this new-found but age-old science of symbolism, veritably a new era in religion is dawning for the world. The wisdom sorely needed to solve distressing world problems awaits the consummation of adeptship in this mightiest of sciences.

The inveterate recalcitrancy of the orthodox scholastic mind to the obvious realities underlying and making necessary the allegorical method of interpretation is difficult to understand. Farrar in his Lives of the Fathers (Vol. II, 443) says that the key to Origen's allegorical method of interpretation was not the right one, and the text was entirely contorted from its original sense; but it took the world one thousand years more to learn the true principles of exegesis! Farrar has not deigned to tell us when these true principles of exegesis were regained, who recaptured them and how religious books have been reilluminated by the new flood of light that their application would release. In spite of the freedom to indulge in "higher criticism," the method of exegesis is still the literal-historical one, although one notices that orthodox interpreters of Scripture, at places where the context renders what Warschauer calls the "plain meaning" obviously absurd, are forced to declare it to be allegory. They have no hesitation in declaring the text material to be allegorical when it suits their purpose and no other resort is possible. This is manifestly disingenuous.

Likewise Fisher's reference to the Greek myths in another place is too intriguing to be passed by. He says it is natural to ask how the Greeks could ever have given credence to the myths, some of which

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attributed gross immorality to the gods, while continuing to venerate these unprincipled deities! How could men adore, as just and good beings to whom they imputed deeds of treachery, lust and cruelty? He suggests that men could have supposed the gods to be privileged to indulge licentious whims in a realm of divine freedom above the laws that bound lowly humans. He is even generous enough to think that it was "not an impure fancy chiefly, but circumstances attending the growth of mythology in the form in which it was cast by the poets had led to the creation of these offensive stories." But we in turn find it natural to ask Fisher how he can now give credence to a fairly long list of equally offensive stories exhibiting treachery, lust and cruelty, not to say gross sexuality, printed in his own Biblical Old Testament. Is it too much to expect that men like Fisher can ever be brought to understand that no intelligent Greek ever "believed" those myths? They had sense enough to know that the myths were not made to be believed; belief was not asked. What was asked was understanding; grasp of a subtle recondite and splendid meaning obscurely hinted at in the form and structure of the fabrication. None but the grossly ignorant and stupid in Greece could ever have "believed" those myths; and it is not spleen but simple truth to assert now that only the ignorant and unimaginative really "believe" the narratives assembled in the Old Testament. But, tragically enough, there came a time when high intelligence in Greece failed and all but the few philosophers and initiates in the Mysteries did "believe" those stories. And it is the purpose of this book to show that this blight of intelligence swept on until it deadened the minds of Hebrews and Christians to the point where they came to "believe" the myths that composed their own Scriptures. And with that came the Dark Ages.

Referring to Apollinaris, Farrar states that "this teacher seems to have confirmed Jerome in the allegorical method of explaining Scripture."

In a work on Philo (p. 33) the author, Norman Bentwich, says that the Jews also studied philosophy and began to talk in its technical catchwords; then to reinterpret their Scriptures according to the ideas of philosophy. This will be done by any group that holds long enough to the pursuit of philosophy of the ancient world to begin to see that the true and correct, at any rate meaningful, interpretation of Scripture can be made with no other keys. Bentwich follows this on the next page with a fine analysis of the ancient situation that made esotericism an indispensable usage. Nowadays, he says, the Bible is

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the holy book of so much of the civilized world that it is somewhat difficult for us to form a proper conception of what it was to the civilized world before the Christian era. We have to imagine a state of culture in which it was only the book of books of one small nation, while to others it was at best a curious record of ancient times, just as the code of Hammurabi or the Egyptian Book of Life is to us. The Alexandrian Jews were the first to popularize its teachings, to bring Jewish religion into line with that of the Greek world. It was to this end that they founded a particular form of Midrash--the allegorical interpretation, which is largely a distinctive product of the Alexandrian Age. The Palestinian rabbis of the time were on the one hand developing by dialectic discussion the oral tradition into a vast system of religious ritual and legal jurisprudence; on the other, weaving around the law, by way of adornment to it, a variegated fabric of philosophy, fable, allegory and legends. Simultaneously the Alexandrian preachers--they were never quite the same as the rabbis--were emphasizing for the outer world as well as for their own people, the spiritual side of the religion, elaborating a theology that should satisfy the reason, and seeking to establish the harmony of Greek philosophy with Jewish monotheism and the Mosaic legislation. Allegorical interpretation is based upon the supposition or fiction that the author who is interpreted intended something "other" (allo) than what is expressed. It is the method used to read thought into a text which its words do not literally bear by attaching to each phrase some deeper, usually some philosophical meaning. It enables the interpreter to bring writings of antiquity into touch with the culture of his own or any age; the gates of allegory are never closed, and they open upon a path which stretches without a break through the centuries.

This picture drawn by Bentwich has the merit of being accurately delineated. Again and again in the course of history groups of students and thinkers, breaking through the prison bars of heavy orthodoxy to discover the delight of reveling in the intoxicating wisdom embodied in the arcane philosophy of the past, have formed centers to cultivate and republish the golden knowledge of old. The schools of Pythagoras and Plato were such centers. But the one that shone brightly for a long period was that which flourished at Alexandria. Here intelligence was keen enough and learning profound enough to hold the level of study and understanding at a high pitch. Here, then, was the birthplace of much of the arcane literature that strove to perpetuate and transmit the esoteric wisdom in its allegorical dress. Here were the great broth-

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erhoods of mystic cultism, with their academies and libraries. Here the pursuit of a wisdom that knew no bounds of national character, but was truly catholic and ecumenical, served as a bond to unite Jew and Greek, Arabian and Chaldean in the fraternity of a truly unifying depth of understanding. It was a center where in the interests of a knowledge that transcended all earthly demarcations all men of deep penetration could find a brotherhood of the spirit. But for the infusion into it of elements of philosophical lore emanating from Alexandria, the young Christian movement would not have survived the third century. Fisher lends corroboration to this general assertion when he says, "It was at Alexandria, under the peculiar influences that belonged to that great meeting-place of the nations, that Jewish thought underwent the most serious modifications." Of those modifications Christianity was shortly to receive the effect. Here Philo formulated his system, which in Fisher's words,

"was an amalgamation of Greek philosophy with the Old Testament theology, a combination of Plato and Moses, the tenets of which he considered to be in many points identical. The Greek Sages, he held, were borrowers from the Hebrew teaching. This interpretation he effected by the flexible method of allegory, his theory being that an occult sense, open and discerning, underlies the literal and historical meaning of the Scriptures and is to be accepted with it."

Pantaenus, Clement and Origen labored and perfected their product in this same Alexandria; is there need to ask why they strove to engraft onto the budding Christian movement the branch of learning that would insure to this movement at least the deeper and saner interpretation of the holy Scriptures?

Massey brings to our attention a point of keen discernment in this connection: he notes Origen's observation that if the Law of Moses had contained nothing which was to be understood as having a secret meaning, the prophet would not have said, "Open thou mine eyes and I will behold wondrous things out of thy laws" (Psalms, 119:18), whereas he knew that there was a veil of ignorance lying upon the heart of those who read and do not understand the figurative meanings. And he tells Celsus that the Egyptians veiled their knowledge of things in fable and allegory.

"The learned may penetrate into the significance of all Oriental mysteries, but the vulgar can only see the exterior symbol. It is allowed by all who have any knowledge of the Scriptures that everything is conveyed enigmatically."

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In the Pistis Sophia, the Egypto-Gnostic Gospel, Jesus is represented as asking: "Do you seek after these mysteries? No mystery is more excellent than the seven vowels, for they bring your soul into the Light of Lights. Nothing, therefore, is more excellent than the mysteries which ye seek after, saving only the mystery of the seven vowels and their forty-nine Powers and the number thereof."

Perhaps this excerpt from a document that was wholly one of allegorical fabrication will well serve to illustrate the exasperation and impatience with which the orthodox exegetists react to the ancient method of esoteric writing. This would be a sample of what the theologians claim runs out into empty nonsense. What can the seven vowels and the number forty-nine hold in the way of meaning comparable to the concrete personality and the living love and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, they ask. Away with this abracadabra of letters and numbers and give us the solid verity of the Gospels! How can the harlequin prestidigitation of magic numbers save our immortal souls? Away with your Pagan mummery!

Aside from the facts that the number seven is the basic number of the constitution of the solar system and human life, as well as an absolutely essential key to the meaning of the Christian and other Scriptures, there is no answer to this impatient query of the theologians.

The most modern of eminent Egyptologists, the American William H. Breasted, in his History of Egypt, says of the Egyptian beliefs (p. 60) that they were

"fused into a complex of tangled myths . . . neither did the theologizing priesthoods ever reduce this mass of belief into a coherent systematism, although, had they done so, ancient secrecy would have kept the evidences of it largely out of sight. This is a point, incidentally, which modern investigators seem to leave entirely out of account in their search for archaic survivals.

Even today the status of the most enlightened study of ancient Egyptian religion and its lore is so muddled that it is well described by what Herder is driven in a kind of baffled irritation to write about it:

"If there is a province of literature which is a mire, and where a host of learned men were all deeply sunk into the mud, it is here."

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The noted British Egyptologist, E. A. W. Budge, not to mention others, has given expression again and again to the same baffled irritation. The truth is that barring Massey, whom they have shelved into oblivion, modern scholars are miles away from discerning even the rudimentary bases of what those ancient seers and sages in Egypt were writing about. And this spells disaster for all human culture, since it is in that "mire and mud" of old Egypt's depth of wisdom that all the keys to the interpretation and understanding of the Christian religion and its still sealed Bible lie as yet undiscovered.

The Alexandrian school was, so to say, on the trail of this recondite treasure hidden under the sands of Egypt, and there must have been the general legend that ancient Egypt had been the fountainhead of a surpassing wisdom, though the stream might have disappeared again into the sands; for it seems that every noted thinker of the Hellenic world was drawn to visit Egypt with the thought of gaining there the fundamentals of a supernal knowledge. The debt owed to Philo Judaeus, born almost at the very year of the beginning of the Christian era, for his work in developing the principles of the Egyptian system into a code of elucidation of the mass of Scriptural material then extant, is immense. Philo's work proves that the basic principia for a harmonization of seemingly widely diverse currents of religious expression are present and available in this desperately baffling meadow of old Egypt's lore. Norman Bentwich, previously quoted, has so well expressed this (Philo, p. 40):

"To effect the true harmony between the literal and the allegorical sense of the Torah, between the spiritual and legal sides of Judaism, between the Greek philosophy and revealed religion--that was the great work of Philo Judaeus."

In following the path cut through the tangle of ancient cryptic allegorism, symbolism and dramatization by Philo, world culture might have saved itself from plunging into a mud and mire infinitely worse than any allegedly prevailing in ancient Egypt, into which the popular movement of Christianity gave it the final push. But alas, not even the great talent of an Origen was sufficiently sharpened to carve out the statue form of radiant beauty all overlaid with the accretions of ignorant misconception.

Far on down the run of the ages, some eleven centuries later, Europe was to feel some thrill of the inward delight of the human mind when stirred by the wind of the spirit, as thought is moved by the magic

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power of symbols and allegory to vision and understanding. For suddenly there flashed into the deadened soul of Europe the light and glory of the Italian Renaissance of the fourteenth century. In that irradiation of the ancient glow old Egypt had a rebirth, destined to be short-lived and to miscarry, but still a rebirth. Though it sank again to dimness in two centuries, it was glorious while it lasted, and did perpetuate its liberating influence in instigating the Reformation which came a little later.

Obtuse to the essential values of real culture, the modern age has never properly assessed the force, the significance or the spirit of the Renaissance. If it had ever caught the power and meaning of the wave of intelligence that was wafted over the soul of the Italian world of the fourteenth century, it has lost it again. Culture can be won and lost again. Its rise to realization in the vision of one people or one age does not automatically guarantee its permanence. Like its greatest natural analogue, light, it flashes forth to brightness and dies away again. Like all things of the spirit, it bloweth where it listeth, and one can not be sure whence it cometh or whither it goeth.

But one can be sure that the Italian Renaissance came from the revival of ancient classical literature and that it went on to give the shackled soul of Europe its first pure breath of intellectual freedom it had drawn since the suffocating mantle of ecclesiastical tyranny had settled down upon it ten centuries earlier. It opened the door for stifled human beings to step out again into the pure free air of mental liberty. And with that release from captivity the European mind began its modern adventure into the realms of true science, the knowledge of truth that liberates from all bondage.

Such was the power to awaken the dormant human soul latent in classical literature of ancient peoples! And what was the dynamo and transmission vehicle of that power? Nothing less than symbol and allegory! The Christian Church smothered allegory when it denounced Origen in the fifth century; the Renaissance more than vindicated "Origen's allegories." It revealed what that Church might have done for true human culture had it exploited the germ of truth and power implicit in the system of Biblical interpretation he propounded.

Although perhaps not catching the full sweep of the significance of the spirit of the Renaissance, the author of the history of that epochal denouement, John Addington Symonds, has clearly recaptured and adequately depicted the part played in it by the esoteric dynamism of myth and symbol. What he says on this theme should be burned

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into the consciousness of all educators. From his The Renaissance in Italy (p. 54) we take the following:

"The culture of the classics had to be reappropriated before the movement of the modern mind could begin: before nations could start upon a new career of progress, the chasm between the old and the new world had to be bridged over."

Then Symonds launches into a keen analysis of the particular habitude or posture of the mind demanded of the human being for the apprehension of true cultural elements, which exhibits more discernment of the basic factors required than any we have seen. For its worth in this connection it calls for entire reprinting (p. 67):

"The meagreness of medieval learning was, however, a less severe obstacle to culture than the habit of mind, partly engendered by Christianity, and partly idiosyncratic to the new races, which prevented students from appreciating the true spirit of the classics. While Mysticism and allegory ruled supreme, the clearly defined humanity of the Greeks and Romans could not fail to be misapprehended."

"Poems like Virgil's Fourth Eclogue were prized for what the author had not meant when he was writing them; while his real interests were utterly neglected. Against this mental misconception, this original obliquity of vision, this radical lie in the intellect, the restorers of learning had to fight at least as energetically as against brute ignorance and dulness. It was not enough to multiply books and to discuss codices; they had to teach men how to read them, to explain their inspiration, to defend them against prejudice, to protect them from false methods of interpretation. To purge the mind of fancy and fable, to prove that poetry apart from its supposed prophetic meaning was for its own sake, and that the history of the antique nations, in spite of Paganism, could be used for profit and instruction, was the first step to be taken by these pioneers of modern culture. They had, in short, to create a new mental sensibility by establishing the truth that pure literature directly contributes to the dignity and happiness of human beings. The achievement of this revolution in thought was the great performance of the Italians of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries."

It may not be realized at this moment; but another revolution in Western thought of exactly the same kind and through the same pathway must be consummated at the present epoch if civilization is to be saved. All over again scholars must be taught how to read the classics, how to purge the mind of fancy and fable or, better, how to read ancient fancy and fable so as to force them to yield the bright gold of eternal truth. All over again must be cultivated, if not created all afresh, a "new mental sensibility," so that the mind may be able to divest itself of the consequences of the traditional false methods of

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interpretation of the written treasures of wisdom and free itself from conventional trammels to be able to eat the fruit off the forbidden tree of knowledge.

If a new faculty was needed for medieval scholars to read the classics and catch their inner message, a still higher potential of human genius is demanded now if at last the full and emancipating purport of the whole body of ancient arcane wisdom is to be recovered and utilized for dispelling the fogs of lingering religious superstition and ushering in the brighter day of rational salvation.

Speaking of the labor of the Renaissance scholars over the new-found Greek and Latin manuscripts, Symonds writes (p. 52):

"Through their activity in the field of scholarship the proper starting-point was given to the modern intellect. The revelation of what men were and what they wrought under the influence of their faiths and their impulses in distant ages with a different ideal for their aim, not only widened the narrow horizon of the Middle Ages, but it also restored self-confidence to the reason of humanity. Research and criticism began to take the place of scholastic speculation. Positive knowledge was substituted for the intuitive guesses of idealists and dreamers.

"But how was this effected? By long and toilsome study, by the accumulation of MSS, by the acquisition of dead languages, by the solitary labor of grammarians, by the lectures of itinerant professors, by the scribe, by the printing press, by the self-devotion of magnificent Italy to erudition."

"By long and toilsome study," "by devotion to erudition," "by the acquisition of dead languages"; these footprints of the Renaissance mark the road that must be trodden again if humanity is to mount once more up the slopes of Pelion and Parnassus toward the summit of Olympus. In short Christendom, for its salvation from decadence, must revive the dead language of ancient symbolism and devote itself to the toilsome study--thrilling, however, if the lost keys are recovered from Egypt--of classical erudition and the thorough reindoctrination of its mind with the mighty wisdom of ancient philosophy.

Poetry, Symonds says, is instruction conveyed by allegory and fiction. Theology itself, he most discerningly glimpses, is a form of poetry; even the Holy Ghost may be called a Poet, inasmuch as he used the vehicle of symbol in the fashion of the prophets and the Revelation of St. John. The poet wraps up his meanings in delightful fictions--and the mental lout takes these for real. Though the common herd despises the poet as a liar, he is, in truth, a prophet uttering his dark speech in parables. How foolish, then, are the enemies of poetry, sophistical

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dialectitions and avaricious jurists, who have never trodden the Phoebean hill because it does not glitter with gold!

"Far worse is the condition of those monks and hypocrites who accuse the divine art of immorality and grossness, instead of reading between the lines and seeking the sense conveyed to the understanding under veils of allegory." (p. 96)

He alludes to Boccaccio's work as containing "a full exposition of the allegorizing theories with which humanism started."

"While we regard this change from creative to acquisitive literature, we must bear in mind that these scholars who ought to have been poets accomplished nothing less than the civilization, or, to use their own phrase, the humanization of the modern world." (p. 55)

What can be more significant than this next paragraph (p. 112)?:

"The study of Greek implied the birth of criticism, comparison, research. Systems based on ignorance and superstition were destined to give way before it. The study of Greek opened philosophical horizons far beyond the dream-world of the churchmen and the monks; it stimulated the germs of science, suggested new astronomical hypotheses and indirectly led to the discovery of America. The study of Greek resuscitated a sense of the beautiful in art and literature. It subjected the creeds of Christianity, the language of the Gospels, the doctrines of St. Paul to analysis, and commenced a new era for Biblical inquiry . . . we are justified in regarding the point of contact between the Greek teacher Chrysolaras and his Florentine pupils as one of the most momentous crises in the history of civilization . . . since the reawakening faith in human reason, the reawakening belief in the dignity of man's desire for beauty, the liberated audacity and passion of the Renaissance received through Greek studies their strongest and most vital impulse."

No words could be more thrillingly significant for modern man than those of Symonds, for we are made by fate to be witnesses at this moment of another denouement perhaps even more significant than the fact of a group of Florentines taking their first lessons in the Greek language from Chrysolaras. For the modern world of study has just had its first lessons in an even richer language than that of Greece, one destined to open out a wider and more fruitful field of knowledge questing than that of Greece, magnificent as that was. The Renaissance, like the Reformation, could go only a few steps along the road to full illumination without the primeval light of old Egypt's sun of intellect. Even the glorious lamp of Greek philosophy has not yielded, and can not yield, its full radiance until it is refilled with the oil of ancient Egyptian sapiency.

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We can not forego the pleasure of sharing with the reader Symond's vision of the new era that the Renaissance opened for Europe (p. 13):

"Petrarch opens a new era. He is not satisfied with the body of medieval beliefs and intellectual conceptions. Antiquity represents a more fascinating ideal to his spirit. . . . The Revival of Learning, begun by Petrarch, was no mere renewal of interest in the classical literature. It was the emancipation of reason in a race of men, intolerant of control, ready to criticize accepted canons of conduct, enthusiastic in admiration of antique liberty, freshly awakened to the sense of beauty and anxious above all things to secure for themselves free scope in spheres outside the region of authority. Men so vigorous and independent felt the joy of exploration. There was no problem they feared to face, no formula they were not eager to recast according to their new convictions.

"Meanwhile what gave its deep importance to the classical revival was the emancipation of the reason consequent upon the discovery that the best gifts of the spirit had been enjoyed by the nations of antiquity. An ideal of existence distinct from that imposed upon the Middle Ages by the Church was revealed in all its secular attractiveness. Fresh value was given to the desires and aims, enjoyments and activities of man, considered as a noble member of the universal life, and not as a diseased excrescence on the world he helped to spoil. Instead of the cloistered service of the Imitatio Christi, that conception of the union, through knowledge, with God manifested in his works and in the soul of man, which forms the indestructible religion of science and the reason, was always generated. The intellect, after lying spell-bound during a long night, when thoughts were as dreams and movement as somnambulism, resumed its activity, interrogated nature and enjoyed the pleasures of unimpeded energy. Without ceasing to be Christians . . . the men of the Revival dared once again to exercise their thought as boldly as the Greeks and Romans had done before them. . . . The touch upon them of the classical spirit was like the finger of a deity giving life to the dead."

Florence, he says, "borrowed her light from Athens, as the moon shines with rays reflected from the sun. The Revival was the silver age of that golden age of Greece."

Movements of true advance in human history are sometimes lured ahead by the attractiveness of higher light and beauty; sometimes they are pushed, as it were, from behind by the repulsion of ugliness and baseness. Was there any of the latter motive in causing the Renaissance? Symonds presents a picture of conditions that would seem to answer affirmatively:

"Christianity, especially in Italy, where the spectacle of the Holy See inspired disgust, had been prostituted to the vilest service by the Church. Faith was associated with folly, superstition, ignorance, intolerance and

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cruelty. The manners of the clergy were in flagrant discord with the Gospels, and Antichrist found fitter incarnation in Roderigo Borgia than in Nero. The corruption of the Church and the political degeneracy of the commonwealths had quite as much to do with it as the return of heathen standards. Nor could the Renaissance have been the great world-historical era it truly was, if such demoralization had been a part and parcel of its essence. Crimes and vice are not the hotbed of arts and literature; lustful priests and cruel despots were not necessary to the painting of Raphael or the poetry of Ariosto."

If the statement of Symonds that the best gifts of the spirit had been enjoyed by the nations of antiquity is true, half of our ground hypothesis for the message of this work is fully substantiated by eminent authority, and half of all the claims of the Christian religion are nullified.

The thrill of sensing again that joyous exuberant outburst of the human spirit from the restraints of a strangling Church is so keen that one would fain linger with it. But it only remains to ask what killed it. Again Symonds has the answer (446):

"What remained of humanism among the Italians assumed a different form, adapted to the new rule of the Spaniards, and the new attitude of the Church. To the age of the humanists succeeded the age of the Inquisition and the Jesuits."

"There was not enough time for students to absorb antiquity and pass beyond it, before the mortmain of the Church and the Spaniard was laid upon the fairest provinces of thought." "The infamy of having rendered science and philosophy abortive in Italy, when its early show of blossom was so promising, falls upon the Popes and princes of the last half of the sixteenth century." (p. 396.)

The shadow of that third century is long. The same stultifying force that had withered the bloom of ancient Greek philosophy was at hand to exhale the same blighting breath of dark bigotry upon the new spring growth of arcane wisdom in the fourteenth century. It is no less stealthily active at the present epoch to fetter the wings of free thought.

As Symonds has told us how iniquity oozed from every pore of the ecclesiastical system when the dark forces of pietism snuffed out the tender growth of enlightenment in the later period, so Farrar tells us how iniquity likewise ran rampant when the same forces killed philosophy at the earlier time (Lives of the Fathers, Vol. II, 674):

"The story of the iniquities with which Chrysostom had to grapple . . . is one of the saddest and most deplorable among the many sad and deplorable narratives which deface the ecclesiastical history of the fourth

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century. It exhibits the prevalence among bishops and clergy of an almost inconceivable amount of greed, worldliness and disorder."

Chrysostom took spirited action against these abuses within the fold of Christ and got himself roundly hated for it. Such was the corruption among even the Bishops that Ammonius had his ear cut off to disqualify himself from being appointed a bishop. He was called by the Greek name parotes because of the severed ear.

Synesius, Bishop of Ptolemais, "but of doubtful orthodoxy," because he was a great Kabalist, wrote: "The people will always mock at things easy to be misunderstood; it must needs have impostures." "A spirit," he said, "that loves wisdom and contemplates truth close at hand, is forced to disguise it, to induce the multitude to accept it. Fictions are necessary to the people, and the Truth becomes deadly to those who are not strong enough to contemplate it in all its brilliance."

"If the sacerdotal laws allowed the reservation of judgments to the allegory of words, I would accept the proposed dignity on condition that I might be a philosopher at home, and abroad a narrator of apologues and parables. . . . In fact what can there be in common between the vile multitude and sublime wisdom? The truth must be kept secret, and the masses need a teaching proportioned to their imperfect reasoning."

What history reveals in all too concrete realism of the havoc and devastation wrought by the policy of giving out to the "vile multitude" the "apologues and parables,"--what this same Synesius elsewhere calls "the fables of our religion"--without teaching them that these constructions were but the fictitious vestments of truth only to be brought to living reality within the confines of the human consciousness, and not to be taken as the narrations of historical events, is the most appalling of all real stories. In world annals it should be called The Story of the Great Deception.

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CHAPTER VI

MILK FOR BABES

It would seem as if the subject of esotericism could be dismissed at this point. As a matter of fact it has by no means been adequately dealt with in its vital connection with the catastrophic deterioration of Christianity into Christianism. The whole chance to understand the development of Christianity lies in a complete grasp of the fundamental relation of esotericism to culture in general. As Christianity was the world's most signal and massive movement away from esotericism to the wide dissemination of a popular faith, all the elements of true comprehension of the course it took are deeply buried from sight. Into the depths and intricacies of this situation the probing for historical truth must be made.

Esotericism, as has been seen, is an ineluctable necessity and a perfectly natural condition inherent in the evolution of human genius, based on the inevitable differences of capability and attainment subsisting between highly and less highly evolved mortals. It is an earned privilege of those who have developed high capabilities and opened knowing faculties, to acquire wisdom and enjoy its satisfactions and boons. These blessings are not the hap of those who have not yet paid the price to possess them. Even this simple rationalization has been made a matter of unacceptability by the quirks of Christian erraticism, for it became almost a basic conviction of the early fanatical devotees of the cult that the rudest and crudest members of society were equally entitled to the largesse of divine favor and the gift of intelligence to understand the mysteries of faith with the studious and the philosophical. Indeed it became a pious legend that the height of blessedness was in proportion to the depth of ignorance. The Gospels appeared to exalt the lowly to the disparagement of the wise and cultured. To tear down the mighty from their seats and exalt them of low degree became a kind of shibboleth of the new movement. An ignoramus with God in his heart could excel the philosopher. But it was a

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mistaken presumption and it led to disaster. The obvious differences in intelligence quotient can not be ignored. Dearly has the world paid for Christianity's exaltation of ignorance in those formative days.

Christianity made a momentous choice in its second and third centuries, and that choice was to throw in its lot with the lowest and meanest ranks of society in the world of the day, as against the elite and the intelligentsia, against instruction, philosophy and the cultus of higher learning. Its history is a long and horrifying record of the results of that choice. All Occidental event since then has been a dark shadow bearing the shape of the structure of unwisdom that prompted and executed that choice. Not only did it deliberately make that choice, but it has endorsed and sanctified it, indeed gloried in it, ever since. Christianity, its proponents said, is so much the nobler religion just because it ministers to the humble, the simple and the unlearned, while the esoteric cults of the Pagans reached only the few intellectuals. This claim, and its implications, must now be the theme of many pages.

No better place to begin could be found than in a passage from Chrysostom (Homily III on I Cor., 1:10). He glories in the ignorance of the twelve Apostles, so often lauded as plain "fishermen," and the more glorious for it.

"Rather, let us charge the Apostles with want of learning; for this same charge is praise. And when they say that the apostles were rude, let us follow up the remark and say that they were also untaught and unlettered and poor and vile and stupid and obscure. It is not slander on the Apostles to say so, but it is even a glory that, being such, they should have outshone the whole world."

Facing the sobering fact that almost certainly these twelve personages were simply dramatic-allegoric personifications of the twelve signs of the zodiac, themselves being symbols of the twelve powers of divinity to be unfolded as the adjuncts and essences of the Christ nature itself, as many great sages declare them to be, and that they were never living men at all; but assuming their factual existence for the sake of argument, we may agree with him of the "Golden Mouth" (the meaning of "Chrysostom") that the twelve were ignorant simple fishermen. But we are not so ready to agree with him that "they outshone the whole world." This is a fine sample of what an early Christian, in the exuberance of his hypnotized faith, could bring himself to imagine and assert.

It chances that there comes to hand at this moment a passage from no less a responsible historian than Guignebert, who, in his fine history

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of Christianity, has this to say in almost direct contradiction to the rhapsodic exudations of Chrysostom's golden, but fanciful eloquence about the twelve haloed fishermen. Dealing with the legends about the work of the Apostles in different countries, he writes (p. 61):

"But it is to be feared that not one of them is true, and, in fact, apart from the early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles (which we possess only in the form of a second-hand adaptation of the first edition), there exists no information really worthy of credence about the life and work of the immediate Apostles of Jesus . . . their immediate and direct influence upon the history of Christianity is practically negligible."

Other writers comment on the odd fact that following the commissioning of the twelve disciples and then the seventy by Jesus to go forth and evangelize the whole world, either they met with no success worthy of record, or no record of it was made; in either case the score marks another total miscalculation of a practical move and its expected results to be tallied against the reputed omniscience of the Cosmic Logos in the person of the Nazarene. So far as history knows, the great command of the Son of God to eighty-two men to go into all the world and preach a gospel that, unknown to them, was already a common esoteric possession of all nations and already prescribed in sacred books the world over, was entirely a futile gesture, making at no time enough impact on the life of the times to win a single notice from any historian. Yet every pious Christian has in his imagination pictured these doughty and sanctified missionaries as valiant pioneers of the first true world faith, haranguing multitudes on hills and lakesides and swaying them to conversion by thousands. Incidentally there are scholars, not a few, within the pale of orthodox Christianity, who regard even the Acts of the Apostles as a spurious work.

We have the word of such a fine historian as Guignebert that the disciples "were, it must be remembered, Jews in mean circumstances and without "culture." And Guignebert considers how extremely unlikely it would be for any one born and reared a Jew, even an ignorant fisherman, to regard it as less than actual blasphemy against the Deity to conceive of the Divine Infinite, "which he dared not name lest he should seem to be putting restrictions upon it, as being enclosed within the narrow confines of a human body." If Jewish reverence for the majesty of Deity was so great that it was regarded as gross impiety to utter the ineffable name of Yahweh, how unthinkable would it have been for one to believe that this Cosmic Deity would come to earth in the humble flesh of a mortal creature! Guignebert suggests that had

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any one come and told the twelve that Jesus was an incarnation of God, at first they would have failed to catch his meaning; then they would have cried out against it with horror. But, he says, they could have made sense of what Paul told them concerning Jesus, i.e., that he had been a celestial man and even the incarnation of the Spirit, the Pneuma of God. Yet, one has to wonder, what would such fisherman know about the Pneuma of God? What were they likely to know about the literary method of allegory, myth and drama?

In committing itself wholly to the religionizing of the untutored masses, Christianity inevitably and irretrievably aligned itself with the interests of ignorant pietism and sheer faith as against those of intelligence and philosophical reflection. As said, the gap between these two nodes of human consciousness, or two worlds of conscious dimension, is of immense width and yawning impassability. The choice pledged the movement to concentrate all its force upon the glorification of pure religious "faith" as against bookish intelligence or study and its fruits in understanding. If stress on the intellect and its findings was to be reduced to the vanishing point, then all emphasis had to be increased proportionately on sheer pietism and the emotional elements. Fervor would come to be the badge of sanctified membership in the body of Christ. Zeal carried to fantastic and fanatic lengths would be the character-mark of the early Apostolic and evangelical Christianism. And such is what history records.

So at one fell swoop Christianity sank down to make itself at home on the level of the lowest class of the Roman Empire. At one stroke it set its destiny by an alliance with the undergrades of humanity. For a time indeed, while still motivated by much respect for the Pagan policies and principles, it made a sincere effort to retain in its message a distinction between the esoteric teachings for the wiser and an exoteric form of parabolic instruction for the less capable. An enlightening view of this effort is gained from what Fisher tells us in his work already cited (p. 360):

"Among the Jews, in the later period of their history, prior to the birth of Christ, many pseudonymous works were composed. This was true mostly of the Alexandrians, but not of them exclusively. . . . At first and often this was a literary device, no deceit being intended. It early led, however, to intentional fraud. The same practice passed into those Christian circles where Judaism and Judaizing influences were potent. A distinction was made between esoteric and exoteric doctrine, between what the enlightened

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may hold, and what it was expedient to impart to the people--a distinction which had its prime source in the Alexandrian philosophy. Under the cover of this false ethical principle, writings were fabricated like the Sibylline oracles and the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies. But pious frauds of this nature were possible only where there was a defective sense of obligation to truth. They are utterly repugnant to a sound Christian feeling; nor is there ground for supposing that in the ancient Church, generally speaking, they were regarded otherwise than as at present. Speaking of one of these fabricated books, Acta Pauli et Theclae, Tertullian says that 'in Asia the Presbyter who composed that writing, as if he were augmenting Paul's name from his own store, after being convicted and confessing that he had done it from love of Paul, was removed from office.' This act is indicative of the judgment that would be formed of such an imposture by Christians generally at that time."

History has found it can not be so lenient in its judgment on the vast body of "pious frauds" perpetuated by the early Christians as Fisher is here. If the presbyter fabricated an Acts of Paul and Thecla for the love of Paul, likewise the Inquisitors murdered Protestants later for the love of Christ. This should illustrate for us--and we need this illustration--what "love" can do when not instructed by intelligence.

Fisher's statement gives us the first evidence introduced here that the religious movement which was so soon to scorn all esotericism itself started out with the institution of distinction between the milk for babes and the meat for strong men. This singular fact is so generally unknown that testimony to support it must be presented.

We have the strong direct statement of Origen himself that the Mysteries were perpetuated in the Christian Church as they had been in the Pagan societies. In his Contra Celsum (Bk. lcvii) he says:

"But that there should be certain doctrines not made known to the multitude, which are revealed after the exoteric ones have been taught, is not a peculiarity of Christian alone, but also of philosophic systems, in which certain truths are exoteric and others esoteric."

The point to be noted is that an exoteric-esoteric differentiation was a peculiarity of Christian practice, according to Origen.

Now let us listen to the exhortations of St. Cyril of Jerusalem in his Fourth Catechetical Lecture, in which he speaks of the esoteric doctrine thus:

"To hear the Gospel is indeed permitted to all; but the glory of the Gospel is set apart for Christ's genuine disciples only. The Lord spake in parables to those who would not hear; but privately explained these par-

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ables and similitudes [i.e., analogies and nature symbols] to his disciples. The fulness of the glory belongs to those who are already illuminated; the blindness is that of unbelievers. These Mysteries the Church communicates to him who is going out of the class of catechumens. Nor is it customary to reveal them to the heathen; for we do not tell to any heathen the secret Mysteries concerning the Father, and the Son and the Holy Ghost. Neither do we openly and plainly speak of them among the catechumens, but only in a covert and secret manner, so that the faithful who know them may not be injured."

One can be pardoned a smile of gracious indulgence to an overweening presumption on the part of the sainted Cyril when he says that they, the Christians, do not communicate the mystery of the great doctrine of the Trinity to a heathen, if one happens to be aware that it was from a "heathen" philosopher himself that the Church drew its doctrine of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost! It was imparted by the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus to Augustine, his pupil, being based on his "three fundamental hypostases."

And St. Basil the Great, in speaking of certain rites of the Church appertaining to baptism and the Eucharist, which he claims were received by tradition from the Apostles, says expressly that they were guarded in reverent silence and dignity from all intrusion of the profane and uninitiated, so that they would not fall into contempt. (De Spiritu Sancto, C 27, pp. 311-12, Lepsiae, 1854.)

There must be entered in this chronicle the gist of the statements made by Clement of Alexandria in his Stromata (Bks. I, c. 12; IV, c. 22; V, cc. 9, 10; VII, c. 17). Here he speaks of the necessity of hiding in a mystery the wisdom which the Son of God had brought; of the hindrances which there were in his day to his writing about his wisdom, lest he should cast pearls before swine; of the reason why the Christian mysteries were celebrated at night, like the Pagan ones, because then the soul, released from the dominion of the senses, turns in upon itself and has a truer intelligence of the mystery of God hid for ages under allegory and prophecy, but as now revealed by Jesus Christ, and which St. Paul would only speak of among such as are perfect, giving milk to babes and meat to men of understanding; and of those mysteries as entered upon through the tradition of the Lord, i.e., by means of Baptism and Divine Illumination.

From many authorities it is demonstrated that there were three general classes of Christians, graded according to their proven development, in the primitive Church, viz. the Catechumens, the Competentes

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and the Illuminati, or Mystae, or the Faithful. The names indicate the order of rank. It can not escape observation for its great significance that the name Mystae given to those considered "illumined," was taken directly from the designation of the initiated in the Orphic and Eleusinian Mysteries of the Pagans.

What Clement says receives confirmation from a statement in Lundy's Monumental Christianity (p. 82) which is very germane:

"But for all this there was something mysterious about the Eucharist as related to the Incarnation and Resurrection of Christ, and his union with the Church, which could only be appreciated by the highest exercise of faith, and therefore none but the faithful were admitted to the high privilege of its participation. No explanation of it is given by the Fathers; no explanation appears on the monuments. It still remains where the Lord left it, a profound mystery, like the union of soul and body, spirit and matter, God and man, Christ and Church."

If there are those who linger under the impression that the sacramental offices of the Christian fellowship were from the start and ever since open to every humble member of the laity, here is the evidence that the truth was otherwise. And it is part of the voluminous and authoritative body of evidence that the religion began in the full spirit and practice of esoteric understanding. The influences that led to the discontinuance of the practice are those same that brought in the entire deterioration of the original spiritual power of the movement.

In Massey's brochure on Paul the Gnostic Opponent of Peter (3), there is a statement eminently worthy of reproduction:

"At the same time, as Irenaeus tells us, the Gnostics, of whom Marcion was one, charged the Apostles with hypocrisy, because they 'framed their doctrine according to the capacity of their hearers, fabling blind things for the blind according to their blindness; for the dull according to their dulness; for those in error according to their errors.'"

At first sight this passage would seem to reverse the sides or positions of the contending parties in the controversy. Here it is the Gnostics, who certainly stood for the method of true esotericism, this being indeed almost the foundation of their system, who charge the non-esoteric apostolic Christians with dividing the word according to the capacity of those to whom it is preached--in other words, practicing esotericism. But the wording of Irenaeus' passages makes it clear that it was not a genuine esoteric technique that the Gnostics were accusing the Christians of practicing, but a disingenuous one, as it were, delib-

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erately departing from the truth to give simple minds something concrete instead of a mystery to be grasped spiritually. This is exactly what Celsus and other cultured critics of early Christianity record of the practices of the Church: the leaders and instructors imparted to their catechumens and ignorant laity every sort of plausible or miraculous concoction of fancy to explain the mysteries of the faith, when they found their protogées sitting in stolid incomprehension of an attempted elucidation of trinitarian, eucharistic, or other aspects of the imparted theology. A little later, and practically ever since, it is clear that those who essayed the role of instructors or expositors, were as dark about the inner meaning of those dogmas as their pupils. When the blind attempt to lead the blind, the ditch by the side of the theological road will have many visitors or inmates.

Perhaps not too much blame is to be attached to a resort to fabrication in the face of solid incapacity for the appreciation of subtler aspects of spiritual experience or cosmology. It is the fact of such fabrication that needs recording simply for the truth itself. Its elucidation can come afterwards. It is the common temptation confronting priesthood, indeed all higher instruction anywhere in the cultural field, when low capability is to be enlightened, to find simplification in some sort of "easier explanation." But the fact is, the tendency was carried on to such a degree of recklessness that Celsus exclaims at one place that even nursemaids would blush to be caught telling such lurid falsehoods and fairy tales to their infantile charges. The rule that apparently governed the degree of arrant profligacy with which the treasures of truth were thus thrown around was: the duller the catechumens, the more weird and fantastic the "explanation." One does not need to look beyond the present epoch to find the similar procedure in things religious. It is a common phenomenon of all times. Christians should be the last people to snarl at esotericism, for their early leaders used the method, and in ways that were considered decidedly advantageous to the interests of the faith.

But what can be more revealing and more authoritative, because written in secret and in confidence, than the statement in a letter written by Saint Gregory Nazianzen to his friend and confidant, St. Jerome, in which he said:

"Nothing can impose better on a people than verbiage; the less they understand the more they admire. . . . Our fathers and doctors have often said, not what they thought, but that to which circumstance and necessity forced them."

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The sainted Bishop's own words relieve us of the necessity of charging the hierarchy of early Christianity with deliberately forging fabrications designed to impose on the gullibility and ready credulity of their simple followers. This item of historical fact, however, should be remembered when one reads of the eternal boasts of Christianity that its consummate merit and glory was that it gave truth to the humble and lowly. This work is aimed to show that the sort of "truth" it imparted to the ignorant, instead of blessing them, bound them in the chains of a tenfold deeper dungeon of ignorance and superstition.

There is a hint in the Clementine Homilies, a work that brings to light some of the salient features in the opposition of the Petrine party to Paul. Peter's faction held Paul almost as a Gnostic and hence a heretical enemy of the true evangelistic faith. They even accused Paul of having been converted by a false Christ, i.e., the mystic Christ of his Damascus vision and not the man Jesus. So far did this obsession creep into their minds that they even ventured to suggest that he was the Antichrist, the arch enemy of the Crucified, and that he would be the author of some great heresy expected to arise in the future. Peter is said, therefore, to have declared that Christ instructed his disciples not to publish the one true and genuine Gospel for the present, because the false teacher must arise who would publicly proclaim the false gospel of the Antichrist, that was the Christ of the Gnostics. The true Gospel was confessedly "held in reserve to be secretly transmitted for the rectification of future heresies." Massey says they knew well enough what had to come if Paul's preaching, proclaimed in his Epistles, were widely broadcast. It was Paul whom they had reason to fear. Justin Martyr never once mentions this real founder of Christianity, never once refers to the writings of Paul. Strangest of all things is that the book of Acts, which is mainly a history of Paul, should contain no account of his martyrdom or death in Rome. Paul's writings seem to have been withheld for a whole century after his death. There is intimated here a holding back of "the true Gospel" from the world at large. It shows the prevalence of the esoteric motive in early Christianity.

Even in connection with the Gospels themselves there is evidence of the operation of the esoteric principle early in the life of the new faith. It is found in such an item of data as that which comes directly from Jerome himself, the translator of the Vulgate into Latin. Writing to the Bishops Chromatius and Heliodorus, he complains that

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"a difficult work is enjoined, since this translation has been commanded me by your Felicities, which St. Matthew himself, the apostle and evangelist, did not wish to be openly written. For if it had not been secret, he (Matthew) would not have added to the evangel that which he gave forth was his; but he made up this book sealed up in the Hebrew characters, which he put forth in such a way that the book, written in Hebrew letters, and by the hand of himself, might be possessed by the men most religious, who also, in the course of time received it from those who preceded them. But this very book they never gave to any one to be transcribed, and its text was related, some one way and some another." (St. Jerome, V. 445; Sod, the Son of the Man, p. 44.)

What is this but the expression of reluctance on the part of a student of esoteric things to give out to the public literature hitherto always held inviolably esoteric? There is more than a hint here, too, that such Gospels as Matthew's had not been recently written, but had been handed down from generation to generation of men cherishing these writings as secret manuals of truth not to be given to the multitude.

Lundy records that the secret discipline of the primitive Church seems to have formulated two or three classes of catechumens, in different stages of advancement and fitness for admission into the Christian assembly. Origen thus testifies, he says:

"The Christians having previously, as far as possible, tested the souls of those who wish to become their hearers, and having previously instructed them in private, when, before entering the community, they appear to have sufficiently evidenced their desire towards a virtuous life, introduce them then, and not before, privately forming one class of those who are beginners and are receiving admission, but who have not yet obtained the mark of complete purification; and another class of those who have manifested to the best of their ability their intention to desire no other things than are approved by Christians; and among these there are certain persons appointed to make inquiries regarding the lives and behavior of those who join them, in order that they may prevent those who commit infamous acts from coming into their public assemblies, while those of a different character they received with their whole heart, in order that they may daily make them better. And this is their method of procedure, both with those who are sinners and especially with those who lead dissolute lives, whom they exclude from their community." (Bk. III, c. 51, Origen.)

And Lundy goes on to say that in Tertullian's day, somewhat later than Origen's, "the heretics," meaning the general run of Pagan and semi-Christian sectaries,

"made no such distinction between a catechumen and a believer; for he says, 'They all have access alike, they hear alike, they pray alike--even heathens, if any such happen to come among them. That which is holy they

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will cast to the dogs, and their pearls--only false ones--they will fling to the swine. Simplicity they will have to consist in the overthrowing of discipline, attention to which on our part they call finery.'" (Tertullian: Praes. Adv. Haer., c. 41.)

There is hardly a greater anomaly in history than to find Christians accusing Pagans of disregarding, while they held fast to, the program of esoteric systematism, for by and large it was the Pagans who held to it and the Christians who disregarded it. It could have been a time and a particular group in which the rigid distinctions holding generally in Pagan esoteric practice had been relaxed, while the Christians were still working in the tradition of careful gradation.

Then Lundy points us to a document called The Apostolic Constitutions, in which is laid down the catalogue of doctrinal items in which the catechumens were to be instructed. A glance at this list reveals at once that the instruction imparted to these candidates ran deeply in the channels of what would have to be called the esoteric studies in theology, including such mysteries as those of the knowledge of the unbegotten God, his only-begotten Son, and the Holy Ghost; the order of creation, the course of Providence and the dispensations of God's laws; the divine motive in world creation and why man was appointed to be a citizen therein; anthropology, the nature and constitution of man; God's punishment of the wicked with water and fire; his glorification of the saints in every generation; then the doctrine of the Lord's incarnation, passion, resurrection and ascension.

But then, says Lundy, there was reserve as to imparting even to the catechumens all the mysteries of the Christian faith. In other words, there was an esoteric and an exoteric doctrine. Origen thus states it in his reply to Celsus as to the Disciplana Arcani:

"Since he frequently calls the Christian doctrine a secret system, we must confute him on this point also, since almost the entire world is better acquainted with what Christians preach than with the favorite opinions of philosophers. For who is ignorant of the statement that Jesus was born of a virgin, that he was crucified, and that his resurrection is an article of faith, and that a general judgment is announced to come, in which the wicked are to be punished according to their deserts and the righteous to be duly rewarded? And yet the mystery of the Resurrection, not being understood, is made a subject of ridicule among unbelievers. In these circumstances, to speak of Christian doctrine as a secret system is altogether absurd."

Here is Tertullian taunting the Pagans with their flagrant violation of the esoteric practice and boasting of the Christian adherence to it.

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And here is a greater than Tertullian, the most learned Origen, shouting that it is absurd to regard the Christian system as a secret one. This is pretty direct contradiction. Doubtless Origen meant to say that a system which freely taught its deepest knowledge to any qualified student, and that prepared the less intelligent for such qualification, could not be charged with being a secret cult. But the same claim could just as legitimately be made by the Pagan side. Origen had already said that esotericism was by no means a "peculiarity" of Christianity alone, but was a practice of the other spiritual cults of the time. Our effort here is to show that Christianity did in the early days of its existence continue the "heathen" practice of esoteric instruction, but failed to perpetuate it in all too short a time.

In a sentence a bit farther on, Origen clarifies his position somewhat. He says:

"Moreover, all the mysteries that are celebrated everywhere throughout Greece and barbarous countries, although held in secret, have no discredit thrown upon them, so that it is in vain that he [Celsus] endeavors to calumniate the secret doctrine of Christianity, seeing he does not correctly understand its nature. (Contra Celsum, Bk. I, c.7.)

Here is the great Patristic defending the very thing that a thousand Christian protagonists have reprobated and deprecated as a practice in the Mystery Brotherhoods and the religion of the Pagans. This could be the reason why the Christian historians are so loath to admit the fact that their religion began with the same attempt to distinguish between grades of intelligence in their following and to impart to the more capable what it was deemed injudicious and impolitic to cast broadly out to the rabble. There can eventuate only good from bringing the Christian system to book on this flagrant item of its inconsistency and logical insincerity. Surely the one and only true religion will not wish to compound and perpetuate an obvious subterfuge.

Much reliance can be placed on von Mosheim's studied conclusions, at least on their sincerity. He says (History of the Christian Religion, I, 19, note) that the Christians adopted, in common with the Pagan nations, the plan of dividing their sacred offices into two classes; one public, to which every person was freely admitted, the other secret or mysterious, from which all the unprofessed were excluded. The initiated were those who had been baptized; the unprofessed, the catechumens. The mode of preparatory examination also bore a strong resemblance, in many respects, to the course of initiatory forms observed by the heathen nations in regard to their mysteries.

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"In a word, many forms and ceremonies, to pass over other things of the Christian worship, were evidently copied from these secret rites of paganism; and we have only to lament that what was thus done with unquestionably the best of intentions, should in some respects have been attended with an evil result."

Without end the vociferators of Christianity's all-supreme excellence have ignored or made light of the reverence paid generally by the ancient world to the esoteric polity. This is disingenuous from the historical standpoint, since every historian knows that Christianity started out to practice and perpetuate the esoteric order of religious impartation. When it is known that the young movement so soon dropped the more cautious and secret handling of what was held to be recondite precious truth and, so to say, flung wide open the doors to all and sundry to enter the most sacred holy of holies of mystical knowledge without furnishing credentials of mental competence or spiritual qualification, the apologist for the faith is confronted with the task of excusing the change and mitigating its challenging implications as best he may. What is needed, however, is that it be explained and honestly accounted for. The difficulty of doing this without making damaging admissions which convict the early Church of being swayed by the forces of ignorance, has so far deterred the writers from a frank facing of the true situation. Within little more than a century after Origen had charged the esoteric Pagans with admitting indiscriminately the low and ignorant as well as the high and intelligent into their associations, and boasting of the Christian practice of careful segregation of its devotees into graded classes, it was the Christian Church that took the fatal plunge irrevocably into that very practice and has held to it unremittingly ever since. Indeed the fact has become one of the very proudest boasts of the Church, which heralds abroad at all times its vast humanitarian beneficence in ministering to all grades of human intelligence, without let or bar to the meanest.

One more excerpt from Higgins' wonderful old Anacalypsis rightfully belongs here to help round out the picture (p. 647):

"It can not be doubted that all the explanations pretended to be made of the esoteric religion by Jerome and the early Fathers are mere fables to deceive the vulgar. How absurd to suppose that when these men who were at the head of the religion were admitting that there was a secret religion for the initiated only, they would explain it to all the world! Their explanations to the vulgar are suitable to the vulgar, and were meant merely to stop their inquiries."

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Here indeed is stern confrontation of a proud and boastful religion with the long suppressed and unwelcome truth. Higgins' strong charge can be shouted down with loud denials, but it can hardly be proven incorrect. The Fathers' own admissions hold it up as true. In this passage Higgins states in a few words the whole prime case of the Christian religion, its rise and spread and--failure. It is all condensed in his charge that while the Fathers confessed--and for close to two hundred years upheld--the existence of an inner profundity of meaning and a high range of mystical experience that could only legitimately be imparted to initiates and genuinely tested and accredited competents, they were at the same time spreading the forms of these inner teachings abroad to the general populace and in the process reducing the rich and sumptuous feast of wisdom to such hash and porridge as the ignorant masses could find in some way digestible. Thus came Christianism, which was the wreckage of Christianity.

What this meant in concrete result for "the vulgar" can be seen only too clearly in a statement out of Gibbon's great Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (p. 502):

"The most extravagant legends, as they conduced to the honor of the Church, were apprehended by the credulous multitude, countenanced by the power of the clergy and attested by the suspicious evidence of ecclesiastical history."

The Church may with good reason applaud the axiomatic expression that it is necessary to make human life appear thrillingly romantic. For it itself managed the introduction of any amount of romantic wonder-lore into the actual history of the faith, indeed converted a mass of romantic legend into actual "history." It is presumably a function and prerogative of religion to infuse into the drab texture of ordinary life the more seductive hues of romantic allure; but it is expected to be achieved through the channels of a revelation of the actual wonder of life in its overt factuality--the mission of philosophy--and not by the sheer fabrication of fictitious stories.

More than one writer comments on the demoralizing effect of the presentation of the comedies, the mimes and the mythological scenarios, even the pictures and statues which, failing entirely to carry to the low populace their purer and higher esoteric connotations, "they had," says Fisher (The Beginnings of Christianity, p. 212), "the most corrupting effect upon the morals of women and of youth."

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Von Mosheim's summary survey of the situation can be appreciated (History, I, 371):

"It is not, therefore, Origen who ought to be termed the parent of allegories amongst the Christians, but Philo . . . many of the Jews, and in particular the Pharisees and Essenes, had indulged much in allegories before the time of Philo [then obviously even Philo was not the prime "parent" of this device], but of this there can be no doubt, that the praefects of the Alexandrian school caught the idea of interpreting Scripture upon philosophical principles, or of eliciting philosophical maxims from the sacred writings by means of allegory, and that by them it was gradually propagated amongst the Christians at large. It is also equally certain that by the writings and example of Philo the fondness for allegories was vastly augmented and confirmed throughout the whole Christian world: and it moreover appears that it was he who first inspired the Christians with that degree of temerity which led them, not infrequently, to violate the faith of history and wilfully to close their eyes against the obvious and proper sense of terms and words . . . particular instances of it, however, may be shown from Origen and others who took him for their guide and who manifestly considered a great part both of the Old and New Testaments as not exhibiting a representation of things that really occurred, but merely the images of moral actions."

Here is strong confirmation at Christian hands of what this thesis consistently claims, that allegory, along with the rites, symbols, doctrines and all other appurtenances of Christian religionism were derivatives from a remote past. The origin of practically every feature of the Christian religion is buried in the far distant beginnings of civilization and culture. All claims that Christianity was a new and entirely unique religious expression in the day of its rise are sheer mental moonshine.

Von Mosheim clinches the claim of an earlier source of the use of allegory in a further passage from (p. 379) his first volume:

"Philo without doubt imitated the Egyptians; Clement as unquestionably followed the example of Philo; and Origen trod closely in the footsteps of both. The more recent Christian teachers, for the most part, formed themselves upon the model of this latter Father. The secret discipline of Philo consisted in the application of philosophical principles to religion and the sacred writings; nor was that of Clement ever thought to differ from it, except by those who had not sufficiently informed themselves upon the subject."

In another paragraph von Mosheim makes the categorical statement that "the Jews copied after the Egyptians (as is placed out of all question by the Essenes and the Therapeutae)." This is of great importance, as there has been an ingrained and persistent tendency on the part of

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Christian writers to doubt, when not actually denying, that the Jews drew their religious fundamentals from the Egyptians. This is the pivotal datum that must be faced today.

In the larger view it is to be seen that allegorism, as an intellectual or psychological device based on intrinsic modes of inculcating an apprehension of recondite truth, occult knowledge and exalted mystical states, was an instrument employed for the preservation and impartation of such verities by the Masters of Wisdom, the seers and sages who parented early cultures, from the remotest antiquity. Its usage by the elder Tanaim and Targumists of the early Jewish systematism, learned from the Egyptians, as von Mosheim affirms, and its adoption and exploitation by Philo and then by Clement and Origen, were only incidents in the long history of its ancient dominance in the field of religious literature and oral instruction. Catastrophe, wreckage loss and insane fanaticism unrolled from the sad fact that it ended with Origen! How desperately awry of the truth must that school of belief be that has ever since heralded this most tragic of losses as its great glory and the salvation of truth! The failure to continue and perfect Origen's allegories has let loose upon Western humanity the crowning dementia of all history.

The clear grasp of all this facilitates our charting of the causes of the great gulf that quickly widened between the first real Christians, the Gnostics, and the party that usurped the place of orthodoxy a little later. Says G. R. S. Mead in his valuable work, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (p. 189):

"The difference between Gnostic exegesis and that of the subsequent orthodox, is that the former tried to discover the soul-processes in the myths and parables of Scripture, whereas the orthodox regarded a theological and dogmatic interpretation as alone legitimate."

Rather Mead should have said that the orthodox clung only to the straight literal and historical sense of Biblical narration.

Philo was indeed a pillar of strength in his day and later for the support of intrinsic esotericism, and Christianity is deeply indebted to him for what little it preserved of a more abstruse spiritual inwardness of meaning. But it is folly to ignore the solid substance of the power of the allegorical method that had already built up the mighty edifice of Greek and Egypto-Greek, not to say also Persian, Chaldean and Jewish mythological religion for centuries antecedent to Philo. Philo was surely not the originator of the usage, but one of the many who, in

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periods of material darkness, again have rediscovered this recondite and cryptic key to the hidden meaning of the otherwise "dark sayings" of Scriptures that were never written to be perused like a modern book. Ancient sages used the allegorical method in a way that militated against the literal wording of Scripture so as seemingly "to violate the faith of history, and wilfully to close their eyes to the obvious and proper sense of terms and words," which is to say that they followed the allegorical usage to its only possible end, namely the discernment of a spiritual instead of a literal and objectively historical rendering. Surely one does not violate the faith of history if one stands on the allegorical meaning of what is obviously allegory, refusing to be gulled into taking it for history. But with sore distress to all mentality one does violate the faith both of history and of truth when one reads allegory and calls it history. And millions have perpetrated this violation of truth, history and sanity alike, when they assert, for instance, that such a thing as the Lazarus restoration was a historical fact and that Jonah lived three days and nights in the belly of a great fish, or that forty days of rain elevated all the oceans to the highest mountain tops.

Even in a modern History of Philosophy (B. A. G. Fuller, p. 269), one finds such an item as the following, which corroborates all that is here contended for:

"Not only Plato and the Neo-Pythagoreans, but the earlier thinkers, contemporary Stoics and even Skeptics, had all in their several ways guessed at the truth of which in its fulness the Scriptures were the chosen repository. Philosophers and prophets alike were all setting forth in different allegorical forms the same essential ideas. . . . God is so high and so removed that he cannot be comprehended, but must reveal himself indirectly through myth and allegory to the finite human mind."

In his Christ in the Gospels (p. 1) Burton Scott Easton has brought out how disastrously even a mild influence like "an apologetic motive" has warped the truth of history. He says that the attempt to mingle apologetic motives with historical material in the research is to destroy both apologetics and history. Hesitancy in this regard has been unfortunately common in what is called "reverent Gospel criticism," and the results have been nothing less than calamitous. It has carried with it in many minds the conviction that Christian reverence can be preserved only at the cost of intellectual integrity, and so has led to a suspicion--more widespread than one likes to realize--that if the Gospels are outside the circle of history, but in that of allegory, then the

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meanings are flung outside the pale of history altogether. In the modern world, Easton proceeds, from the assertion that the Gospels are sacrosanct entities it is only a step to the assertion that Jesus is a myth. Our responsibility, he concludes, consequently is unspeakably serious.

This is introduced to exhibit by a comparative showing how immeasurably more important and catastrophic it can be when, in addition to impugning the sheer historicity of the Gospels by lifting them up into a spiritual atmosphere rarefied by sacrosanctity, one comes to know of a surety that they are not to be read as history at all.

When we consider this in the light of a pronouncement from a modern exponent of the new-old science of Semantics, we can see how fearfully devastating can be the failure to distinguish between history and allegory. Miss Langer says (Philosophy in a New Key, p. 149) that it is characteristic of poetic images and figures that their allegorical nature is not recognized. Only a mind which can distinguish both a literal and a figurative formulation of an idea can differentiate the figure from its meaning. This is exceedingly cogent and true. This incapacity is the one eternal root of idolatry, which is only the taking an image in its literal factual sense and failing to catch its sublime "poetic" reference.

Nothing is more thrilling than the dawn of a new conception, she says, implying that new and dynamic conceptions break upon the mind from this very recognition of a mystic or poetically romantic sense in the image and likeness of the literal idea. And she follows this with the luminous observation that the symbols that embody basic ideas of life and death, or humanity and the universe, are naturally sacred. But naive thinking does not distinguish between the symbol and its import. It fails to see the import adumbrated by the symbol. Therefore naive thinking never divines the sacredness of symbols, although it actually worships the symbol itself. It pays a mistaken homage to the symbol, making it primal and final instead of only secondary and suggestive. And with Miss Langer's statement, combined with John Dewey's asseveration that the discovery of the use of symbols was the most important single event in human history, the case is now established on adamantine bases that Christianity's rejection of the ancient structure of myth, allegory, symbol and typology was the one root cause of the dire deterioration of human intelligence from the light of ancient divine philosophy to the horrid shadows of the Dark Ages. Christianity tore itself completely loose from the anchorage of the mind in the sage arcane philosophies of the great Masters of Wisdom,

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which were truly the Light of the World, and committed its lot, its guidance and its destiny to--naive thinking. And, as naive thinking overwhelmingly predominates at all times, it thus won the masses of the West, but, having won them, it had lost the light to guide them. It gave them the lamp, but without the oil and the flame, or the flash of intellectual fire to kindle the flame. The light that was in it was darkness and how great that darkness was this work will endeavor to depict.

Miss Langer quotes M. W. Urban who in his Language and Reality writes the discerning statement that it is a false presupposition that whatever can be expressed symbolically can be better expressed literally. This holds nothing less than the promise of a new charter of exalted conception, as well as a merited rebuke to cultural myopia. For conceptions and experiences in a higher area of consciousness often lie far beyond the reach of language. The resources of poetry, heavily drawing on symbol and imagery, must be called upon to give proper feeling tone and mystical color to the soul's intimations at these levels. And Urban proceeds to the explication of a principle of understanding that marks an epochal discernment in human insight in saying that when all is said and done, it remains true that poetry is covert metaphysics, and it is only when its implications, critically interpreted and adequately expressed, become part of philosophy, that a culturally dynamic view of the world can be achieved. This is the dawn of a new intelligence. Poetry is covert metaphysics because the strength of poetry is nature symbology, and in turn nature is cosmic Mind reified concretely in the universe. The poet who reads the message of nature's preachment interprets God's thoughts to human intelligence and those thoughts constitute the Logos or rational philosophy of Being.

How this recognition would affect, for instance, all Scriptural interpretation is shown in the case of such a statement as that made by Fisher (The Beginnings of Christianity, 421):

"The accounts in Luke unquestionably formed a part of his [Jesus'] Gospel from its first composition, and were drawn from a written and that a Christian-Jewish source."

Then he adds that these beautiful events recorded by Luke "would be unintelligible regarded as unconscious poesy." Here is precisely the point at which all Biblical exegesis, the whole science of Scriptural interpretation, has stumbled off the path of true competence. The immense fact and factor in the situation is that the beautiful allegories

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and poetic constructions in the Bible, along with the great myths of ancient peoples, certainly are not intelligible in the way all orthodox exegesis has persisted in taking them, namely as history. Therefore their intelligibility must be located in some other realm, and that realm is the province of allegory and poetry. All conventional exegesis has wrecked their intelligibility by insisting it be made in the wrong world of thought. They are to be interpreted in the world of thought and imagination, and even with mathematical exactitude, not in the world of event. Dewey's assertion that the discovery of the use of symbols is the most significant event in the life of the race does not receive its final importance until the science of symbolic interpretation is developed to perfection. Our true reading of the Scriptures still awaits this consummation. Philo, Clement, Origen labored at the task when Christianity began; Freud, Jung and the psychoanalysts are toiling at it now from the side of the subjective consciousness; semantics is working into it. Ancient Egypt apparently understood it in all its scientific adequacy! That ancient insight, lost already when Christianity was forming, must be recovered. The cultural salvation of the race awaits it.

It is to be noted that Fisher speaks of Luke's beautiful poetic legends as "unconscious poesy." This again shows failure of modern vision of truth. The myths and allegories, so far from being unconscious poetry, were the most masterful creations of supremely conscious dramatic representation of truth ever produced by the genius of man, i.e., man risen to godhood. The modern mind still deludes itself in thinking that the great ancient Scriptures were the products of primitive child-humanity. No true evaluation or reading of them is possible until this delusion is ended by the sharp recognition that they were the designed creations of the near-divine genius of enlightened maturity in the evolutionary scale. They were the perfected products of man matured, designed to be the evolutionary guides to man immatured.

It is certain that Christianity started in the tradition of esotericism. Says Frederick D. Kershner, in his Pioneers of Christian Thought (p. 69), speaking of the Christians"

"They produced literature that was highly symbolic and which revealed its inner meaning only to the initiated."

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He says that Revelation "puzzles the unenlightened and gives rise to all sorts of fantastic interpretations." But he is building on a false assumption of the brilliance of early Christian mentality when he adds that "no doubt the early Christians, who understood the symbolic language, read the book with enthusiasm and drew great comfort from its pages." Neither then nor since has any Christian writer penned an elucidation of the mystic symbology of the book of Revelation that can be regarded as anything but a pitiable travesty of its meaning.

Miss Langer has given us some most vital statements on the myth that should be broadcast. Divinities, she says, are born from ritual, but theologies spring from the myth. The myth-making instinct does not belong to the lower phases of mental view, but comes with the dawn of philosophical thought. (This is an important corroboration of our thesis.) The myth is a fabrication out of subjective symbols, not out of observed folk-ways. A single higher conception, she says, can be a marvelous leaven in the heavy amorphous mass of human thought. What, then, we ask, could accrue to human uplift if the entire luminous structure of the master-wisdom of ancient sages were rebuilt for the world in all its radiant beauty?

The origin of myth is dynamic, she writes, but its purpose is philosophical. This again is a vital discernment. And she reaches the heights of clear vision in saying that our metaphysical symbols must spring from reality. We have asserted that the poet, the philosopher, the religious mystic has one kingdom to which he can resort at all times to find the concrete images of eternal truth, the kingdom of nature. There every object, form and phenomenon mirrors an image of noumenal reality, an archetypal idea, a phase of creative reality. The Egyptians, we have claimed, were adepts in the deepest knowledge of truth. We wondered if they had been close to nature or lovers of nature. At last we found Breasted saying: "The Egyptian was passionately fond of nature and of outdoor life." The missing link in culture was found.

Preface
Chapters 1-2
Chapters 3-4
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