THE HISTORICAL CHRIST.
We have already spoken, in the first chapter, on the identities existing
in all the religions of the world, and we have seen that out of a study
of these identities in beliefs, symbolisms, rites, ceremonies,
histories, and commemorative festivals, has arisen a modern school which
relates the whole of these to a common source in human ignorance, and in
a primitive explanation of natural phenomena. From these identities have
been drawn weapons for the stabbing of each religion in turn, and the
most effective attacks on Christianity and on the historical existence
of its Founder have been armed from this source. On entering now on the
study of the life of the Christ, of the rites of Christianity, its
sacraments, its doctrines, it would be fatal to ignore the facts
marshalled by Comparative Mythologists. Rightly understood, they may be
made serviceable instead of mischievous. We have seen that the Apostles
and their successors dealt very freely with the Old Testament as having
an allegorical and mystic sense far more important than the historical,
though by no means negating it, and that they did not scruple to teach
the instructed believer that some of the stories that were apparently
historical were really purely allegorical. Nowhere, perhaps, is it more
necessary to understand this than when we are studying the story of
Jesus, surnamed the Christ, for when we do not disentangle the
intertwisted threads, and see where symbols have been taken as events,
allegories as histories, we lose most of the instructiveness of the
narrative and much of its rarest beauty. We cannot too much insist on
the fact that Christianity gains, it does not lose, when knowledge is
added to faith and virtue, according to the apostolic injunction.[158]
Men fear that Christianity will be weakened when reason studies it, and
that it is "dangerous" to admit that events thought to be historical
have the deeper significance of the mythical or mystical meaning. It is,
on the contrary, strengthened, and the student finds, with joy, that the
pearl of great price shines with a purer, clearer lustre when the
coating of ignorance is removed and its many colours are seen.
There are two schools of thought at the present time, bitterly opposed
to each other, who dispute over the story of the great Hebrew Teacher.
According to one school there is nothing at all in the accounts of His
life save myths and legends--myths and legends that were given as
explanations of certain natural phenomena, survivals of a pictorial way
of teaching certain facts of nature, of impressing on the minds of the
uneducated certain grand classifications of natural events that were
important in themselves, and that lent themselves to moral instruction.
Those who endorse this view form a well-defined school to which belong
many men of high education and strong intelligence, and round them
gather crowds of the less instructed, who emphasise with crude
vehemence the more destructive elements in their pronouncements. This
school is opposed by that of the believers in orthodox Christianity, who
declare that the whole story of Jesus is history, unadulterated by
legend or myth. They maintain that this history is nothing more than the
history of the life of a man born some nineteen centuries ago in
Palestine, who passed through all the experiences set down in the
Gospels, and they deny that the story has any significance beyond that
of a divine and human life. These two schools stand in direct
antagonism, one asserting that everything is legend, the other declaring
that everything is history. Between them lie many phases of opinion
generally labelled "freethinking," which regard the life-story as partly
legendary and partly historical, but offer no definite and rational
method of interpretation, no adequate explanation of the complex whole.
And we also find, within the limits of the Christian Church, a large and
ever-increasing number of faithful and devout Christians of refined
intelligence, men and women who are earnest in their faith and
religious in their aspirations, but who see in the Gospel story more
than the history of a single divine Man. They allege--defending their
position from the received Scriptures--that the story of the Christ has
a deeper and more significant meaning than lies on the surface; while
they maintain the historical character of Jesus, they at the same time
declare that THE CHRIST is more than the man Jesus, and has a mystical
meaning. In support of this contention they point to such phrases as
that used by S. Paul: "My little children, of whom I travail in birth
again again until Christ be formed in you";[159] here S. Paul obviously
cannot refer to a historical Jesus, but to some forthputting from the
human soul which is to him the shaping of Christ therein. Again the same
teacher declares that though he had known Christ after the flesh yet
from henceforth he would know him thus no more;[160] obviously implying
that while he recognised the Christ of the flesh--Jesus--there was a
higher view to which he had attained which threw into the shade the
historical Christ. This is the view which many are seeking in our own
days, and--faced by the facts of Comparative Religion, puzzled by the
contradictions of the Gospels, confused by problems they cannot solve so
long as they are tied down to the mere surface meanings of their
Scripture--they cry despairingly that the letter killeth while the
spirit giveth life, and seek to trace some deep and wide significance in
a story which is as old as the religions of the world, and has always
served as the very centre and life of every religion in which it has
reappeared. These struggling thinkers, too unrelated and indefinite to
be spoken of as forming a school, seem to stretch out a hand on one side
to those who think that all is legend, asking them to accept a
historical basis; on the other side they say to their fellow Christians
that there is a growing danger lest, in clinging to a literal and unique
meaning, which cannot be defended before the increasing knowledge of the
day, the spiritual meaning should be entirely lost. There is a danger of
losing "the story of the Christ," with that thought of the Christ which
has been the support and inspiration of millions of noble lives in East
and West, though the Christ be called by other names and worshipped
under other forms; a danger lest the pearl of great price should escape
from our hold, and man be left the poorer for evermore.
What is needed, in order that this danger may be averted, is to
disentangle the different threads in the story of the Christ, and to lay
them side by side--the thread of history, the thread of legend, the
thread of mysticism. These have been intertwined into a single strand,
to the great loss of the thoughtful, and in disentangling them we shall
find that the story becomes more, not less, valuable as knowledge is
added to it, and that here, as in all that is basically of the truth,
the brighter the light thrown upon it the greater the beauty that is
revealed.
We will study first the historical Christ; secondly, the mythic Christ;
thirdly, the mystic Christ. And we shall find that elements drawn from
all these make up the Jesus Christ of the Churches. They all enter into
the composition of the grandiose and pathetic Figure which dominates the
thoughts and the emotions of Christendom, the Man of Sorrows, the
Saviour, the Lover and Lord of Men.
THE HISTORICAL CHRIST, OR JESUS THE HEALER AND TEACHER.
The thread of the life-story of Jesus is one which may be disentangled
from those with which it is intertwined without any great difficulty. We
may fairly here aid our study by reference to those records of the past
which experts can reverify for themselves, and from which certain
details regarding the Hebrew Teacher have been given to the world by H.
P. Blavatsky and by others who are experts in occult investigation. Now
in the minds of many there is apt to arise a challenge when this word
"expert" is used in connection with occultism. Yet it only means a
person who by special study, by special training, has accumulated a
special kind of knowledge, and has developed powers that enable him to
give an opinion founded on his own individual knowledge of the subject
with which he is dealing. Just as we speak of Huxley as an expert in
biology, as we speak of a Senior Wrangler as an expert in mathematics,
or of Lyell as an expert in geology, so we may fairly call a man an
expert in occultism who has first mastered intellectually certain
fundamental theories of the constitution of man and the universe, and
secondly has developed within himself the powers that are latent in
everyone--and are capable of being developed by those who give
themselves to appropriate studies--capacities which enable him to
examine for himself the more obscure processes of nature. As a man may
be born with a mathematical faculty, and by training that faculty year
after year may immensely increase his mathematical capacity, so may a
man be born with certain faculties within him, faculties belonging to
the Soul, which he can develop by training and by discipline. When,
having developed those faculties, he applies them to the study of the
invisible world, such a man becomes an expert in Occult Science, and
such a man can at his will reverify the records to which I have
referred. Such reverification is as much out of the reach of the
ordinary person as a mathematical book written in the symbols of the
higher mathematics is out of the reach of those who are untrained in
mathematical science. There is nothing exclusive in the knowledge save
as every science is exclusive; those who are born with a faculty, and
train the faculty, can master its appropriate science, while those who
start in life without any faculty, or those who do not develop it if
they have it, must be content to remain in ignorance. These are the
rules everywhere of the obtaining of knowledge, in Occultism as in every
other science.
The occult records partly endorse the story told in the Gospels, and
partly do not endorse it; they show us the life, and thus enable us to
disentangle it from the myths which are intertwined therewith.
The child whose Jewish name has been turned into that of Jesus was born
in Palestine B.C. 105, during the consulate of Publius Rutilius Rufus
and Gnaeus Mallius Maximus. His parents were well-born though poor, and
he was educated in a knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures. His fervent
devotion and a gravity beyond his years led his parents to dedicate him
to the religious and ascetic life, and soon after a visit to Jerusalem,
in which the extraordinary intelligence and eagerness for knowledge of
the youth were shown in his seeking of the doctors in the Temple, he was
sent to be trained in an Essene community in the southern Judaean desert.
When he had reached the age of nineteen he went on to the Essene
monastery near Mount Serbal, a monastery which was much visited by
learned men travelling from Persia and India to Egypt, and where a
magnificent library of occult works--many of them Indian of the
Trans-Himalayan regions--had been established. From this seat of mystic
learning he proceeded later to Egypt. He had been fully instructed in
the secret teachings which were the real fount of life among the
Essenes, and was initiated in Egypt as a disciple of that one sublime
Lodge from which every great religion has its Founder. For Egypt has
remained one of the world-centres of the true Mysteries, whereof all
semi-public Mysteries are the faint and far-off reflections. The
Mysteries spoken of in history as Egyptian were the shadows of the true
things "in the Mount," and there the young Hebrew received the solemn
consecration which prepared him for the Royal Priesthood he was later to
attain. So superhumanly pure and so full of devotion was he, that in his
gracious manhood he stood out pre-eminently from the severe and somewhat
fanatical ascetics among whom he had been trained, shedding on the stern
Jews around him the fragrance of a gentle and tender wisdom, as a
rose-tree strangely planted in a desert would shed its sweetness on the
barrenness around. The fair and stately grace of his white purity was
round him as a radiant moonlit halo, and his words, though few, were
ever sweet and loving, winning even the most harsh to a temporary
gentleness, and the most rigid to a passing softness. Thus he lived
through nine-and-twenty years of mortal life, growing from grace to
grace.
This superhuman purity and devotion fitted the man Jesus, the disciple,
to become the temple of a loftier Power, of a mighty, indwelling
Presence. The time had come for one of those Divine manifestations which
from age to age are made for the helping of humanity, when a new impulse
is needed to quicken the spiritual evolution of mankind, when a new
civilisation is about to dawn. The world of the West was then in the
womb of time, ready for the birth, and the Teutonic sub-race was to
catch the sceptre of empire falling from the failing hands of Rome. Ere
it started on its journey a World-Saviour must appear, to stand in
blessing beside the cradle of the infant Hercules.
A mighty "Son of God" was to take flesh upon earth, a supreme Teacher,
"full of grace and truth"--[161] One in whom the Divine Wisdom abode in
fullest measure, who was verily "the Word" incarnate, Light and Life in
outpouring richness, a very Fountain of the Waters of Life. Lord of
Compassion and of Wisdom--such was His name--and from His dwelling in
the Secret Places He came forth into the world of men.
For Him was needed an earthly tabernacle, a human form, the body of a
man, and who so fit to yield his body in glad and willing service to One
before whom Angels and men bow down in lowliest reverence, as this
Hebrew of the Hebrews, this purest and noblest of "the Perfect," whose
spotless body and stainless mind offered the best that humanity could
bring? The man Jesus yielded himself a willing sacrifice, "offered
himself without spot" to the Lord of Love, who took unto Himself that
pure form as tabernacle, and dwelt therein for three years of mortal
life.
This epoch is marked in the traditions embodied in the Gospels as that
of the Baptism of Jesus, when the Spirit was seen "descending from
heaven like a dove, and it abode upon Him,"[162] and a celestial voice
proclaimed Him as the beloved Son, to whom men should give ear. Truly
was He the beloved Son in whom the Father was well-pleased,[163] and
from that time forward "Jesus began to preach,"[164] and was that
wondrous mystery, "God manifest in the flesh"[165]--not unique in that
He was God, for: "Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are Gods? If
he called them Gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture
cannot be broken; say ye of Him, whom the Father hath sanctified and
sent into the world, Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of
God?"[166] Truly all men are Gods, in respect to the Spirit within them,
but not in all is the Godhead manifested, as in that well-beloved Son of
the Most High.
To that manifested Presence the name of "the Christ" may rightly be
given, and it was He who lived and moved in the form of the man Jesus
over the hills and plains of Palestine, teaching, healing diseases, and
gathering round Him as disciples a few of the more advanced souls. The
rare charm of His royal love, outpouring from Him as rays from a sun,
drew round Him the suffering, the weary, and the oppressed, and the
subtly tender magic of His gentle wisdom purified, ennobled, and
sweetened the lives that came into contact with His own. By parable and
luminous imagery He taught the uninstructed crowds who pressed around
Him, and, using the powers of the free Spirit, He healed many a disease
by word or touch, reinforcing the magnetic energies belonging to His
pure body with the compelling force of His inner life. Rejected by His
Essene brethren among whom He first laboured--whose arguments against
His purposed life of loving labour are summarised in the story of the
temptation--because he carried to the people the spiritual wisdom that
they regarded as their proudest and most secret treasure, and because
His all-embracing love drew within its circle the outcast and the
degraded--ever loving in the lowest as in the highest the Divine
Self--He saw gathering round Him all too quickly the dark clouds of
hatred and suspicion. The teachers and rulers of His nation soon came to
eye Him with jealousy and anger; His spirituality was a constant
reproach to their materialism, His power a constant, though silent,
exposure of their weakness. Three years had scarcely passed since His
baptism when the gathering storm outbroke, and the human body of Jesus
paid the penalty for enshrining the glorious Presence of a Teacher more
than man.
The little band of chosen disciples whom He had selected as repositories
of His teachings were thus deprived of their Master's physical presence
ere they had assimilated His instructions, but they were souls of high
and advanced type, ready to learn the Wisdom, and fit to hand it on to
lesser men. Most receptive of all was that "disciple whom Jesus loved,"
young, eager, and fervid, profoundly devoted to his Master, and sharing
His spirit of all-embracing love. He represented, through the century
that followed the physical departure of the Christ, the spirit of mystic
devotion that sought the exstasis, the vision of and the union with the
Divine, while the later great Apostle, S. Paul, represented the wisdom
side of the Mysteries.
The Master did not forget His promise to come to them after the world
had lost sight of Him,[167] and for something over fifty years He
visited them in His subtle spiritual body, continuing the teachings He
had begun while with them, and training them in a knowledge of occult
truths. They lived together, for the most part, in a retired spot on the
outskirts of Judaea, attracting no attention among the many apparently
similar communities of the time, studying the profound truths He taught
them and acquiring "the gifts of the Spirit."
These inner instructions, commenced during His physical life among them
and carried on after He had left the body, formed the basis of the
"Mysteries of Jesus," which we have seen in early Church History, and
gave the inner life which was the nucleus round which gathered the
heterogeneous materials which formed ecclesiastical Christianity.
In the remarkable fragment called the _Pistis Sophia_, we have a
document of the greatest interest bearing on the hidden teaching,
written by the famous Valentinus. In this it is said that during the
eleven years immediately after His death Jesus instructed His disciples
so far as "the regions of the first statutes only, and up to the regions
of the first mystery, the mystery within the veil."[168] They had not so
far learned the distribution of the angelic orders, of part whereof
Ignatius speaks.[169] Then Jesus, being "in the Mount" with His
disciples, and having received His mystic Vesture, the knowledge of all
the regions and the Words of Power which unlocked them, taught His
disciples further, promising: "I will perfect you in every perfection,
from the mysteries of the interior to the mysteries of the exterior: I
will fill you with the Spirit, so that ye shall be called spiritual,
perfect in all perfections."[170] And He taught them of Sophia, the
Wisdom, and of her fall into matter in her attempt to rise unto the
Highest, and of her cries to the Light in which she had trusted, and of
the sending of Jesus to redeem her from chaos, and of her crowning with
His light, and leading forth from bondage. And He told them further of
the highest Mystery the ineffable, the simplest and clearest of all,
though the highest, to be known by him alone who utterly renounced the
world;[171] by that knowledge men became Christs for such "men are
myself, and I am these men," for Christ is that highest Mystery.[172]
Knowing that, men are "transformed into pure light and are brought into
the light."[173] And He performed for them the great ceremony of
Initiation, the baptism "which leadeth to the region of truth and into
the region of light," and bade them celebrate it for others who were
worthy: "But hide ye this mystery, give it not unto every man, but unto
him [only] who shall do all things which I have said unto you in my
commandments."[174]
Thereafter, being fully instructed, the apostles went forth to preach,
ever aided by their Master.
Moreover these same disciples and their earliest colleagues wrote down
from memory all the public sayings and parables of the Master that they
had heard, and collected with great eagerness any reports they could
find, writing down these also, and circulating them all among those who
gradually attached themselves to their small community. Various
collections were made, any member writing down what he himself
remembered, and adding selections from the accounts of others. The inner
teachings, given by the Christ to His chosen ones, were not written
down, but were taught orally to those deemed worthy to receive them, to
students who formed small communities for leading a retired life, and
remained in touch with the central body.
The historical Christ, then, is a glorious Being belonging to the great
spiritual hierarchy that guides the spiritual evolution of humanity, who
used for some three years the human body of the disciple Jesus; who
spent the last of these three years in public teaching throughout Judaea
and Samaria; who was a healer of diseases and performed other remarkable
occult works; who gathered round Him a small band of disciples whom He
instructed in the deeper truths of the spiritual life; who drew men to
Him by the singular love and tenderness and the rich wisdom that
breathed from His Person; and who was finally put to death for
blasphemy, for teaching the inherent Divinity of Himself and of all men.
He came to give a new impulse of spiritual life to the world; to
re-issue the inner teachings affecting spiritual life; to mark out again
the narrow ancient way; to proclaim the existence of the "Kingdom of
Heaven," of the Initiation which admits to that knowledge of God which
is eternal life; and to admit a few to that Kingdom who should be able
to teach others. Round this glorious Figure gathered the myths which
united Him to the long array of His predecessors, the myths telling in
allegory the story of all such lives, as they symbolise the work of the
Logos in the Kosmos and the higher evolution of the individual human
soul.
But it must not be supposed that the work of the Christ for His
followers was over after He had established the Mysteries, or was
confined to rare appearances therein. That Mighty One who had used the
body of Jesus as His vehicle, and whose guardian care extends over the
whole spiritual evolution of the fifth race of humanity, gave into the
strong hands of the holy disciple who had surrendered to Him his body
the care of the infant Church. Perfecting his human evolution, Jesus
became one of the Masters of Wisdom, and took Christianity under His
special charge, ever seeking to guide it to the right lines, to protect,
to guard and nourish it. He was the Hierophant in the Christian
Mysteries, the direct Teacher of the Initiates. His the inspiration that
kept alight the Gnosis in the Church, until the superincumbent mass of
ignorance became so great that even His breath could not fan the flame
sufficiently to prevent its extinguishment. His the patient labour which
strengthened soul after soul to endure through the darkness, and cherish
within itself the spark of mystic longing, the thirst to find the Hidden
God. His the steady inpouring of truth into every brain ready to
receive it, so that hand stretched out to hand across the centuries and
passed on the torch of knowledge, which thus was never extinguished. His
the Form which stood beside the rack and in the flames of the burning
pile, cheering His confessors and His martyrs, soothing the anguish of
their pains, and filling their hearts with His peace. His the impulse
which spoke in the thunder of Savonarola, which guided the calm wisdom
of Erasmus, which inspired the deep ethics of the God-intoxicated
Spinoza. His the energy which impelled Roger Bacon, Galileo, and
Paracelsus in their searchings into nature. His the beauty that allured
Fra Angelica and Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, that inspired the genius
of Michelangelo, that shone before the eyes of Murillo, and that gave
the power that raised the marvels of the world, the Duomo of Milan, the
San Marco of Venice, the Cathedral of Florence. His the melody that
breathed in the masses of Mozart, the sonatas of Beethoven, the
oratorios of Handel, the fugues of Bach, the austere splendour of
Brahms. His the Presence that cheered the solitary mystics, the hunted
occultists, the patient seekers after truth. By persuasion and by
menace, by the eloquence of a S. Francis and by the gibes of a Voltaire,
by the sweet submission of a Thomas a Kempis, and the rough virility of
a Luther, He sought to instruct and awaken, to win into holiness or to
scourge from evil. Through the long centuries He has striven and
laboured, and, with all the mighty burden of the Churches to carry, He
has never left uncared for or unsolaced one human heart that cried to
Him for help. And now He is striving to turn to the benefit of
Christendom part of the great flood of the Wisdom poured out for the
refreshing of the world, and He is seeking through the Churches for some
who have ears to hear the Wisdom, and who will answer to His appeal for
messengers to carry it to His flock: "Here am I; send me."