Relearning Jesus

What I am about to say will sound entirely illogical, but one of the best things Christians can do for themselves and for others is to start over again and relearn Jesus. It stands to reason that modern experience and knowledge has greatly toppled over traditional facts about religion and morality that were always assumed to be truisms. It no longer makes sense to say that God is partial only to one particular race of people; most concepts of "sinfulness" seem unnecessary or silly by modern standards; and the historical evidence of an authentic human Jesus is scant. If anything, the primary evidence of Jesus's very existence, the Bible, is riddled with allusions to and borrowings from many other religions and practices that hail from the ancient Mediterranean. To say Christianity is unique is downright preposterous given what we know about these historical ties to previous rituals, myths, and philosophies.

Knowing this, the modern Christian has to finally rid themselves of blind, ignorant faith and accept the fact that almost 2,000 years of Christian apologetics is practically defunct in the present era. Reading material like Thomas Aquinas's mind boggling Summa Theologica no longer convinces us of God's existence with the same force it did for medieval thinkers. In a culture where we demand physical evidence of all things there is no overwhelming proof even for the existence of God's very Incarnation - something that should have left a very real physical imprint on the archaeological record.

It becomes clear that all may not be what it seems regarding the mythology of Christianity. In order to remain sensible beings we must at least quietly entertain the possibility that Christ never existed in the first place, which seemingly throws the entire religion into chaos and sets it on a path toward destruction. But this is not necessarily true.

In my personal approach to faith, I have tried to remain connected to its historical source. I have always wanted to know how early and medieval Christians experienced our shared religion. There is so much one can learn from the texts and documents from these periods, and I consider it a tremendous tragedy that many moderns neglect this aspect of Christianity's rich narrative, yet they still claim to know much about their religion. But the most crucial aspect of what I've learned from this kind of study is that allegory is everything. The traditional historical Christian mystic has no patience for the things of the temporal or material. For them everything in the Bible is primarily transcendental, and things that occur in the physical domain are simply illusive reflections of an allegorical reality original conceived in the spiritual realm. In other words, the events of every day life conceal messages and influences from various other powers. The same is true of all narratives and parables, and we know that Jesus speaks primarily in parables throughout the Bible.

The truth is, the narrative of Jesus's life does not have to have literally happened in order to be deeply relevant in the real world. Truly the Bible is considered to be the direct Word of God, and this has particular connotations. We can recall from the Gospel of St. John that, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. And the Word was God." John is referring to Christ, as the Christ is understood to be the Living Word, or the Word Made Flesh. Philo the Jew (20 B.C.  - 50 A.D.), one of the most influential Neo-Platonic philosophers of the entire period of Antiquity and perhaps the originator of the whole "Logos" concept in the first place, explained that the Logos or Word of God was the person through whom God crafted the Universe. Since God cannot directly come into contact with matter (as in the Platonic approach matter is strictly evil due to its density), He requires an intermediary in order to shape and affect it as according to His Will. (Of course, Word and Will are inextricably synonymous.) The Logos is therefore equivalent to God's "blueprint" for Creation, a kind of ideal design for the world as it should be. Matter being weak, heavy, and mutable is unable to sustain this level of perfection and therefore it allows for evil to exist. In other words, to patch these two points together, Christ has existed since the beginning of time prior to the creation of matter and is also the equivalent to the Bible itself. In this light, then, the Bible represents the "blueprint" for the ideal universe, not necessarily the real universe.

Therefore to say that the Bible depicts literal events as they occur in matter, in extension through space and time, is to miss the point. Theoretically the narrative of the Bible occurs simultaneously, not in extension. We can benefit from conceptualizing the timeline of Jesus's life as conflated with the timeline of the Jewish people as told in the Old Testament. And even more specific events within the two timelines can occur simultaneously, or be understood to be directly connected. The Annunciation takes place at the same time as the Visitation, the Presentation, and the Assumption. The Nativity of Christ occurs simultaneously with His Passion and Resurrection. The Exile of the Jewish people is in synch with the slaying of Goliath, etc.

Obviously this opens a difficult Pandora's Box, if you will. The Bible no longer seems to make sense. And yet, we must at least attempt to see how this is possible if only by recognizing that God is eternally present. God is an never-ending NOW, an eternal circle of all possible pasts, presents, and futures condensed into one pure Moment. To us, the Moment appears to happen in a linear or even cyclical fashion. The events of Christ's life are commemorated throughout the solar year; in doing so we achieve linear comprehension of the narrative as well as cyclical as the years endlessly repeat themselves. But in the eye of God all these events relate to one eternal present that never changes or fades, one that constitues what is supposedly God's ideal "blueprint" for the world.

As if this weren't confusing enough, what do we do when we remember that Christianity teaches us that Christ lives in each of us? That Christ is the literal center of our unique and individual lives, and that therefore we are all unified in some subtle and unexplainable way? This is to say that each individual contains at the center of their lives the same narrative structure as the entire contents of the Bible as told from the Creation of the World in Genesis to its Destruction by Fire in Apocalypse. But we all know instinctively that we don't all lead the exact same lives - the specific contexts of our individual lives pan out differently for each of us. And yet it is undeniably an aspect of Christian teaching that Christ, the Omniscient Logos, resides in each of our hearts. This is to say that over the course of one's life one experiences the same story as that told in the Life of Christ, since He, the universal blueprint, constitutes the center around which each of our lives revolves. The exact details of the way in which this story unfolds for each of us is different. The narrative is the same. This is only possible because the narrative itself does not actually occur within the confines of space and time. The narrative of Jesus Christ is an ideal allegorical representation of what it is to be human, to have the spirit wedded to the tabernacle of the body, for whom the spirit seems to suffer and undergo death out of love.

This further suggests that the Logos is not only the means by which a transcendant God manipulates the universe from afar, but is the tool or hand by which God directly interacts and lives in the world. Through the dense material of the body God's narrative plays out in space and time in an endless circle in as many different forms as He sees fit. No matter what corruption ever befalls the Son through death the original Godhead remains pure and unadulterated. The Source of Life is never tainted no matter what grossness may affect Him through interaction with matter. Knowing this we can affirm that in Christ we are One Body and One Blood; that we are all spotless at heart, and no torment may ever change or affect who we really are; and that God so loved the world that he sent His only Begotten One to redeem it from darkness. Matter in and of itself is useless. It is only through invigoration through the spirit of life that it becomes something of value. But the selfless contribution of Life to matter in order to endow that matter with Consciousness inevitably condemns that Life energy to die and seemingly change. But after the Passion Christ rises again and remains untainted. In dying Christ opens the gates of paradise; in opting for death the spirit blows open the doors of the earthly hell and brings down the fires of the ideal paradise. In Christ we know there is no east nor west, and in Christ we may therefore also say that Heaven and Hell are allowed to coexist to some extent. In Him and through His Death the great possibilities of the ideal world as represented by the Logos are allowed to be brought forth into the darkness of the material world.

The Allegory of the Seasons

My idea for this post probably first hit me last year around this time. I was walking around campus and it was snowing. I'd never really noticed exactly how beautiful snow can be, and how winter is such a sublime season (minus the shoveling and all that). After doing some thinking, it seemed so obvious how the hermetic formula of Tetragrammaton applies to the seasons.

Tetragrammaton is the ineffable name of God, otherwise known as LORD in the Torah, Yaweh, or Jehovah. It is the first four-letter word, consisting of the Hebrew characters Yod, Heh, Vau, and another Heh (we refer to the first Heh as "Heh primal," and the second as "Heh final"). It is considered to be the name that resounds throughout the manifested universe, and provides it with structure and law. Tetragrammaton and the number four are associated with the demiurge, from the Greek demiurgos. This aspect of God is the one responsible for maintaining the order of the universe - perhaps one could even liken it to the source of kosmos (order). A lot of things seem to come in fours, don't they? The four elements, the four Evangelists, four compass directions, and of course, the four seasons!

Also important to remember is that in the hermetic teachings, Tetragrammaton is a revolving formula by which psycho-spiritual/micro-macrocosmic integration occurs. The yod represents the Father, the original unbegotten, active, self-generating, fiery masculine principle. Heh primal is the Mother, or the element of water, which receives the seed of the Father and becomes pregnant with twins. These twins are the vau and heh final, the first one being a male, the second being female. The "princess" is therefore the lowest lifeform in this scheme, but remember that the formula "revolves." The princess marries her twin brother, and because she is of the same substance as her Mother, she replaces the Mother on her throne, and her husband becomes the new Father, and thereby sparks the cycle of creation all over again.

Now, there are people who may disagree with my attributions, but for me, these make the most sense when trying to pair the seasons with the letters/elements of Tetragrammaton. Spring is most obviously fire and the yod. Spring is primarily associated with Aries the ram, the cardinal sign of fire, who is definitively masculine. In fact, the cardinal signs of each element begin a certain season. Cardinal signs represent the initial onset of that element, as opposed to the life of the element as expressed by the fixed signs, and the waning of the element, as expressed by the mutable ones. (Therefore, Cancer is associated with summer, Libra with Autumn, and Capricorn with Winter.) Spring is the season of blooming, when life finally begins anew, after having suffered a not-so-finite death. Things that have died and suffered a non-cyclical death have been recycled into new forms and energies, thereby helping the diversity of life.

Summer is a bit tougher to figure out in all honesty, but I'll do my best to make it work. Perhaps it helps to remember the purpose of the sign of Cancer in the tarot - the Chariot. The Charioteer is the grail bearer, the grail ultimately being a vehicle for the blood of the sun - the primary point of singular consciousness which acts as the main motivation for all motion and energy. (Hence the meaning of the Chariot, in addition to the fact that its path connects Binah, the universal Holy Grail and throne of the Mother Goddess, to Geburah, the seat of all manifested energy and motion.) Is it no wonder then that the days seem to last forever in the summer? The sun is at the pinnacle of its glory, having been reborn in the springtime, and now infusing the earth with light and warmth. Also, it's amusing to think that the slowness of summer, between the long days and the heat, is connected to the Feminine being associated with salt, the alchemical element of slowness, inertia, immobility. (Remember, the hermetic Feminine is all about receptivity. These things are not necessarily negative qualities in and of themselves, but they are negative when taken to excess. They, like all things, must be balanced by their complement, in this case, the Masculine.)

Fall then is connected with air and the suit of swords. Swords tend to represent suffering and anguish, and let's face it - who isn't sad when summer's over??? But air is also associated with the letter vau, the Son, the Dying Man God formula and all that, the Messiah, the Christ, the True Sun, etc. Therefore, should it not make sense that autumn focuses on the "dying" of the sun, which in turn causes the vegetation to undergo putrefaction? In alchemy, putrefaction and sacrifice is associated with the rainbow, the "coat of many colors" of Jesus and Joseph. The leaves on the trees also go through a similar transformation, shifting gradually from their standard green to yellows, oranges, and reds. We know that this season marks a clear separation from the warmth and splendor of spring and summer, an attribute which is also associated with swords - separation from godhead.

Finally, Winter is the element of earth, that ever mysterious yet simple element. The lowest of the low, earth is equipped to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven, and in some ways, is the Kingdom of Heaven (this is a standard Kabbalistic doctrine). Earth is not remotely abstract, nor is it remotely intelligent, yet, it is still the throne of spirit, as it contains it within itself. The heh final with which it is associated though is of course also very similar to the heh primal, so much so that the heh final (the Daughter) is able to rise to the level of the heh primal (the Mother). In order to do this though, the Daughter must first attain Silence: perfect innocence and fertility, and knowledge of the Jungian Self/Kabbalistic Higher Self. Earth in its best form is therefore simple and humble, while also industrious and durable. During the winter, the earth is stripped of all its pretenses and is shown in its most barren form, or rather, we see it as barren, but this infertility actually bears the seeds for new life waiting to blossom in the spring. This "death" is required for newness and creation. The whiteness and silence of snow is enough to explain the purity and innocence inherent in the earth - perhaps it's even more profound to remember that snow is simply frozen water. The cold of winter also forces people indoors, where they have no choice but to contemplate. So next time you complain about winter, remember that it's pretty, and is an allegory staring you in the face. All that shoveling you have to do is similar to the amount of Work one has to do in order to bring the Great Work to completion. (The Great Work refers to the merging of the microcosm and the macrocosm, the integration of the separate selves with the whole self.)

(Picture: Allegory of the Four Seasons by Bartolomeo Manfredi)