People know there is a way to have this spiritual development take place, but the Church is not helping us do it, because it’s talking about metaphorical events as if they were historical facts. The Pope is having a hard time now because nobody believes any of it. Who believes in the Virgin Birth? The Virgin Birth is metaphorical, and so is the Ascension. Sure, I can believe in the Ascension of Jesus, but I’ve turned the outer space into the inner space: he went into the place where heaven is: right inside. His Ascension represents the inward, mythological journey. And the Virgin Birth refers to the birth of the spiritual life in the human.
“…this birth befalls in the soul exactly as it does in eternity, neither more nor less, for it is the same birth: this birth befalls in the ground and essence of the soul.95
“God is in all things as being, as activity, as power. but he is procreative in the soul alone; for though every creature is a vestige of God, the soul is the natural image of God.… Such perfection as enters the soul, whether it be divine light, grace, or bliss, must needs enter the soul in this birth and no other wise. Do but foster this birth in thee and thou wilt experience all good and all comfort, all happiness, all being, and all truth. What comes to thee therein brings the true being and stability; and whatsoever thou mayest seek or grasp without it perishes, take it how thou wilt.”—M. Eckhart96
That font of life is the core of the individual, and within himself he will find it—if he can tear the coverings away.97
The idea that we will have a divine visitation by some friendly forms, benign forces from other planets who will come to our aid and save us, is a clear reflection of an outmoded understanding of the universe. Jung wrote that the modern myth of unidentified flying objects tells us something of humankind's visionary expectations. People are looking for visits from the outside world because they think our deliverance will come from there. But the space age reminds us that voyages into outer space turn us back to inner space. The Kingdom of God is within us, but we have this idea that the gods act from “out there.”
The Kingdom of the Father is not
going to come through expectation.
We bring it about in our own hearts.
The Kingdom is here.
One looks at the world
and sees the radiance.
The Easter revelation is right there.
We don’t have to wait
for something to happen.98
What has always been basic to Easter, or resurrection, is crucifixion. If you want resurrection, you must have crucifixion. Too many interpretations of the Crucifixion have failed to emphasize that relationship and emphasize instead the calamity of the event. If you emphasize the calamity, you look for someone to blame, which is why people have blamed the Jews. But crucifixion is not a calamity if it leads to new life. Through Christ’s crucifixion we were unshelled, which enabled us to be born to resurrection. That is not a calamity. So, we must take a fresh look at this event if its symbolism is to be sensed.
If we think of the Crucifixion only in historical terms, we lose the symbol’s immediate reference to ourselves. Jesus left his mortal body on the cross, the sign of earth, to go to the Father, with whom he was one. We, similarly, are to identify with the eternal life within us. The symbol also tells us of God’s willing acceptance of the cross, that is to say, of his participation in the trials and sorrows of human life in the world, so that he is here within us, not by way of a fall or mistake, but with rapture and joy. Thus the cross has dual sense: one, of our going to the divine; the other, of the coming of the divine to us. It is a true crossing.
In the Christian tradition, Christ’s crucifixion is a major problem: Why could the savior not have just come? Why did he have to be crucified?
Well, various theological explanations have come down to us, but I think an adequate and proper one can be found in Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians, where he writes in chapter 2 that Christ did not think that God-hood was something to be held to—which is to say, neither should you—but rather, yielding, he took the form of a servant even to death on the cross. This is joyful affirmation of the sufferings of the world. The imitation of Christ, then, is participating in the suffering and joys of the world, all the while seeing through them the radiance of the divine presence. That’s operating from the heart cakra, where the two triangles are joined together.
That’s what I see in the Crucifixion. Of all the explanations I’ve read, it is the only one that makes, what I would call, respectable sense. The others are all concerned with a wrathful god who has to be appeased by the sacrifice of his son. What do you do with a thing like that? It is a translation of the sacrifice into a very crude image. The idea of God being entity that has to be appeased is just too nasty a concretion.
Christ’s crucifixion,
his going to the Father, the spirit,
is not something
that should not have happened.
It must happen.
The hero’s death and resurrection
is a model for
the casting off of the old life
and moving into the new.
Not the animal world, not the plant world, not the miracle of the spheres, but man himself is now the crucial mystery. Man is that alien presence with whom the forces of egoism must come to terms, through whom the ego is to be crucified and resurrected, and in whose image society is to be reformed. Man, understood however not as “I” but as “Thou”: for the ideals and temporal institutions of no tribe, race, continent, social class, or century, can be the measure of the inexhaustible and multifariously wonderful divine existence that is the life in all of us.99
The central truth about Easter and Passover, which have the same roots, is that we’re all called out of the house of bondage, even as the Jews were called out of their bondage in Egypt. We are called out of bondage to our old traditions in the way in which the moon throws off its shadow to emerge anew, in the way life throws off the shadow of death. Easter is not Easter and Passover is not Passover, unless they release us even from the tradition that gives us these feasts.
Easter and Passover
make us experience in ourselves
a call out of bondage.
So experiencing them
doesn’t destroy
our religious traditions.
Understanding these symbols
in their transcendent spiritual sense
enables us to see our traditions freshly
and to possess them anew.
Easter and Passover are prime symbols of what we are faced with in the space age. We’re challenged both mystically and socially, because our ideas of the universe have been reordered by our experience in space. The consequence is that we can no longer hold onto the religious symbols that we formulated when we thought that the earth was the center of the universe.
The misunderstanding is reading
spiritual mythological symbols
as though they were references
to historical events.
The Kingdom of God is within us. Easter and Passover remind us that we have to let go in order to enter it. The space age demands that we change our ideas about ourselves, but we want to hold onto them. That’s why there is a resurgence of old-fashioned orthodoxy in so many areas at the present time. There are no horizons in space, and there can be no horizons in our own experience. We cannot hold onto ourselves and our in-groups as we once did. The space age makes that possible, but people reject this demand or don’t want to think about it. So they pull back into one true church or black power or the unions or the capitalist class.
Easter and Passover offer the perfect symbols, for they mean that we are called to new life. This new life is not very well defined, which is why we want to hold onto the past. The journey to this new life, a journey we all must make, cannot be made unless we let go of the past. The reality of living in space means that we are born anew; not born again to an old-time religion, but born to a new order of things: there are n
o horizons. That is the meaning of the space age. We are in a free fall into a future that is mysterious. It is very fluid, and this is disconcerting to many people. All you have to do is know how to use a parachute.
St. Augustine speaks of Christ’s going to the cross as a bridegroom to his bride. There is an affirmation here. In the Prado, there is a great painting by Titian of Simon of Cyrene as he willingly helps Jesus with the cross. The painting captures the free, human, voluntary participation we all must have in the Easter-Passover mystery. That is what we are all challenged to do. Self-preservation is only the second law of life. The first law is that you and the other are one.
IN Mark 13, Jesus says that the end of the world is going to come, and he describes it as a terrible crisis of fire and all kinds of other horrors. So, according to the teachings of the Catholic church, it’s going to be a concrete historical event. And in Mark 13:30, Jesus says, “Amen I say to you, this generation will not pass away till all these things have been accomplished.” But that generation did pass away, and the end of the world didn’t come, so it’s often called “the great nonevent.” It didn’t happen. So then the Catholic church said that when Jesus used the words “this generation,” what he meant was the generation of mankind, and so this event is yet going to happen.
In the Thomas Gospel, on the other hand, when the apostles ask, “When will the Kingdom come?” Jesus says, “The Kingdom will not come by expectation. They will not say ‘see here, see there.’ The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth, and men do not see it.”100 That’s Gnosticism.
Gnosticism is the Western
counterpart of Buddhism.
Thomas says, in other words, that there is a revelation possible to you right now. It is here. So, “to be happy with Him forever in heaven” means to reach that depth now. It’s a totally different slant.
If you read Christian mythology
in the Gnostic way,
it makes universal sense.
Yet because the Catholic church insists that the coming of the Kingdom of the Father is going to be a historical event, every now and then, especially every thousand years, people think the end of the world is coming. In the year 1000, for instance, it was thought the end of the world was going to come, so people with a lot of property gave their property to the church to gain merit. There are still cases in the French courts to get that property back. Now it’s time for the second millennium, so everyone is expecting annihilation. These expectations come automatically. There’s always a way to envision that the end is going to happen. I do not know what the situation will be in the year 3000, but if any of you happen to be around in a later incarnation, you can expect that there will be some kind of panic.
You see, Christianity was born in a panic time. In the centuries just before the Christian era, the Levant was in turmoil. The Hellenistic empire was breaking up, Rome was in its ascendancy, and the Jewish community was in a hell of a condition.
In 167 B.C., Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Seleucid emperor of Syria, installed a Greek altar on the Jewish altar in the temple court of Jerusalem. By establishing a Greek shrine in the Jewish temple compound, he hoped he would show that this religion was a variant of what all religions are about. No siree! Instead, Judas Maccabeus and his brothers killed the commissioner who was to establish the shrine. There was an uproar, the Maccabean revolt, which led to independent governance of the Jewish state for nearly a hundred years by a succession of Maccabean priest-kings.
In the age of the Maccabees the leaders in Jerusalem of the Hellenizing party were the Sadducees, among whom were priestly families claiming descent from the priestly patriarch Zadoc (Zadoc>Sadducee), and these were opposed chiefly by the Pharisees, or “Separatists,” who believed themselves to be of a stricter orthodoxy—though, in fact, they had combined the old Hebrew heritage of a Day of Yahweh to come with the idea of the world end of Zoroastrian eschatology.101
During that period there was continual internecine conflict, which intensified in 104 B.C., when the Jewish king Aristobulus claimed that he was, essentially, also the Messiah. This was heresy! Though he reigned only a year, his son, Alexander Jannaeus, spent the next thirty fighting a series of wars and suppressing all Jewish insurrections with his foreign troops.
And with [his] death, 76 B.C., the Pharisees came to power, and the internecine tide only ran the other way. New purges, fratricides, betrayals, liquidations, and miracles kept the kingdom in uproar until, after a decade of such madness, the Roman legion of Pompey was invited by one of two brothers who were then contending for the crown to assist him in his holy cause; and it was in this way that the city of God, Jerusalem, passed in the year 63 B.C. into the sphere of Rome.102
It was a fantastic period in Jewish history. With all this going on, at least one sect, the Essenes, thought that the end of the world was coming. So, they went out near Wady Qumrân, at the northwest corner of the Dead Sea, and built a monastery, where they rigorously trained to survive that ultimate moment when the Messiah would appear. We’ve learned about this Essene community from the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were discovered hidden in desert caves and rock crannies. These fantastic documents exhibit a very strong Zoroastrian influence. Even some of the vocabulary is Zoroastrian. One of the scrolls, for example, projects detailed plans for a forty-year apocalyptic war between “the Sons of Light” and “the Sons of Darkness.”
It is in this context, then, at precisely that time, the first century B.C., that St. John the Baptist was baptizing people only a few miles north of the Qumrân community. Now ritual bathing was a Qumrân rite, but John was not one of the Essenes, who wore white garments, for he wore the skins of animals and ate locusts and wild honey. The gospels recount that Jesus went out there, was baptized by John, and then went into the desert to have his own experience, known as “the Temptation in the Desert.” After forty days in the desert—imitating, in small, the Hebrew’s forty years—he returned and began to teach. And that’s where his story really begins.
It is not dissimilar from the story of the Buddha, who also goes out, studies with the principle teachers of the time, goes beyond them in his austerities, comes to illumination, and returns. Whether or not it happened to either of them is a question. The myth of a teacher who goes past all teachers is a standard motif.
What Jesus thought he was, we just don’t know. He didn’t write anything. He talked sometimes as though he thought he was the god of the Greek mys-teries who dies and is resurrected—dies to today and is resurrected to tomorrow—but he wrote, as it were, in sand. What little we do know about him, we’ve learned from the four gospels, and they are of different dates and actually differ considerably. For instance, if you look in your Bible, you will see that the Virgin Birth motif is found only in the gospel of Luke, a Greek. In Matthew and Mark, where the genealogy of Jesus is related in detail from David on down the royal line, it ends up, not with Mary, but with Joseph. Though we do not know the date of Jesus’ birth—we know nothing about it, in fact, except what we read in Luke—if he died, he probably died around 30 A.D. The gospels are funny things. They don’t agree. Unfortunately, four people wrote them, and they wrote differing accounts.
Luke seems to have traveled with Paul, and the earliest writings about Jesus are those of Paul, who never saw him. Paul, in fact, was in the crowd of Jewish zealots who killed the first Christian martyr, St. Stephen—which, by the way, is why Joyce calls his hero Stephen Dedalus. It was shortly after that event, on the road to Damascus, that Paul’s conversion took place: he had a vision, fell off his horse, and, so to speak, “founded Christianity.” It seems that Paul, a Jew who wrote elegant Greek, was torn between the monotheistic culture of Judaism and the non-dualistic Greek tradition. So, my notion of what happened to Paul is that he realized that the catastrophic killing of this young, inspired Jewish rabbi could be read as an enactment of the death and resurrection of the Greek mystery hero.
Now, monotheism is a concretization of God, a mystery that actuall
y transcends concretization, and the concretization of the mystery savior in Jesus is equivalent. So, God is concretized, the savior is concretized, the end of the world is concretized, and Christianity loses its metaphoric perspective. If you read the historical “facts” as metaphors, however, then you will discover in Christianity a marvelous array of psychologically valid symbols that are fundamentally okay until they’re concretized.
Concretization is alright for teaching little children, who don’t understand metaphor. Matters such as these, they tend to take concretely. What has to happen at a certain point in one’s development is that these child-hood concretizations have to be opened up. You can’t get rid of them, because symbols that are taken concretely are put right into you. They are internalized and can’t just be dismissed. They have to be reread. I know. Until I was twenty-five-years old I took Christianity concretely. And I must say I’m grateful for having been exposed to such rich symbolism.
Yet there’s also some great strength to be gained by giving up that religion, by going beyond it. I mean, if you really do. If you just “drop out,” that’s something else. But if you think it through—if you learn to read the symbols as metaphors instead of accepting them as the facts they’re purported to be—if you know, in other words, why you are out, then it can be a source of great strength. But when you do break out, you then have to set up your own sacred field.
A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living Page 13
