Passion of the Western Mind

by Tarnas, Richard

  The first side examined here found its primary articulation in the letters of Paul to the early Christian communities and in the Gospel according to John. The other three Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles often supported this view as well, however, and no one source encompassed this perspective in its entirety. The dominant insight expressed in this understanding was that in Christ the divine had entered the world, and that the redemption of humanity and nature was now already dawning. If the Judaic religion was a great yearning, Christianity was its glorious fulfillment. The Kingdom of Heaven had broken into the field of history and was now actively transforming it, progressively impelling humanity toward a new and previously inconceivable perfection. The life, death, and resurrection of Christ had attained the miracle of the ages, and the resulting emotion was therefore one of ecstatic joy and gratitude. The greatest battle had already been won. The cross was the sign of victory. Christ had liberated a mankind held captive by its own ignorance and error. Because the principle of divinity was already present in the world and working its wonders, the pivot of the spiritual quest was to acknowledge in faith the reality of that sublime fact and, in the light of this new faith, to participate directly in the divine unfolding. The coming Kingdom’s redemptive potency shone forth in the person of Christ, whose charismatic power brought all human beings together into a new community. Christ had introduced a new life into the world: He was himself that new life, the breath of the eternal. By means of Christ’s passion, a new creation had been given birth, now taking place within and through man. Its climax would be the establishment of a new heaven and a new earth, and the merging of finite time with eternity.

  The peculiar sense of cosmic joy and immense thanksgiving expressed in early Christianity seemed to derive from the belief that God, in a gratuitous overflow of love for his creation, had miraculously broken through the imprisonment of this world and poured forth his redeeming power into humanity. The divine essence had fully reentered into materiality and history, initiating their radical transformation. Because God himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, had become fully human—experiencing within himself all the suffering to which mortal flesh is heir, taking on the universal burden of human guilt, and overcoming within himself the moral errancy to which the free human will is subject—God had thereby ransomed mankind from its state of alienation from the divine. The meaning of Jesus’s life was not just that he had brought new teachings and spiritual insight to the world. Rather, by sacrificing his divine transcendence to a full immersion in the agonies of human life and death, within the definite historical conditions of a specific time and place—“suffered under Pontius Pilate”—Christ had forged a fundamentally new reality. Within this new historical aeon, a new human destiny could unfold in communion with divine wisdom and love. Christ’s death had seeded the world with God’s Spirit, whose continuing presence in mankind would bring about its divine transfiguration.

  In this view, the “repentance” Jesus called for was not so much a prerequisite as it was a consequence of the experience of the dawning Kingdom of Heaven. It was less a backward-moving and paralyzing regret for past sinfulness than a progressive embrace of the new order, which made one’s old life appear inauthentic and misdirected by comparison. It was a returning to the divine source from which flowed all innocence and new beginnings. The Christian experience of redemption was an inner transformation based on an awakening to what was already being born—within the individual and within the world. In the eyes of many early Christians, the time for rejoicing was already present.

  Nevertheless, as the second pole of the Christian vision made clear, this same revelation led to other, very different consequences, in which Christ’s redemptive action in an alienated world was perceived as part of a dramatic battle between good and evil whose outcome was by no means already accomplished, nor assured for all. As a counterbalance to the more positive, exultant, and unitive element in Christianity, much of the New Testament put emphasis not so much on an already realized redemptive transformation as on the demand for a taut watchfulness and heightened moral rectitude in expectation of Christ’s return, especially in consideration of the perils of the present corrupt world and the risks of eternal damnation. Such a view was expressed not only in the three Synoptic Gospels—the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke—but in Paul’s and John’s writings as well. Here was stressed how completely humanity’s final salvation awaited God’s external activity in the future, through an apocalyptic end of history and the Second Coming. The battle between Christ and Satan was still continuing, and the tremendous dangers and sufferings of the present time were lightened by faith in the historical Jesus, the risen Lord, and in his saving return—rather than by the confident Johannine sense of Christ’s already decisive victory over evil and death, God’s new immanence in the world, and the believer’s already present share in the eternal life of the glorified Christ. Hope in the Redeemer was paramount in both sides of the Christian polarity, but in this second understanding, the present suffered an imprisonment of spiritual darkness that made the redemptive hope more urgent, even desperate, and pressed the locus of redemption more exclusively into the future and into God’s external activity.

  This more fully anticipatory side of Christianity bore resemblance to certain dominant elements of Judaism, which thereby continued to structure the Christian vision. The experience of evil pervading man and nature, the deep alienation between human and divine, the sense of grimly waiting for a definitive sign of God’s redeeming presence in the world, the need for fastidious adherence to the Law, the attempt to preserve a pure and faithful minority against incursions from a hostile and contaminating environment, the expectation of an apocalyptic punishment—all these elements of the Judaic sensibility emerged anew in the Christian understanding. That tone of religious vision was, in turn, reinforced and given a new context by the continued delay of Christ’s Second Coming, and by the Church’s historical and theological evolution accompanying that delay.

  In its more extreme form, which was not uncharacteristic of the mainstream Christian tradition in the West after Augustine, this more dualistic understanding emphasized mankind’s inherent unworthiness and consequent inability to experience the potency of Christ’s redemption in this life, except in a proleptic manner through the Church. Reflecting and magnifying the Judaic conception of Adam’s fall and the resultant separation between God and man, the Christian Church inculcated a pronounced sense of sin and guilt, the danger or even likelihood of damnation, and consequently a need for strict observance of religious law and an institutionally defined justification of the soul before God. The exultant image of God as both an immanent and transcendent being mysteriously unifying man, nature, and spirit was here juxtaposed by the image of an entirely transcendent juridical authority separate from and even antagonistic toward man and nature. The stern and often ruthless God of the Old Testament, Yahweh, was now embodied in Christ the Judge, who damned the disobedient as readily as he redeemed the obedient. And the Church itself—here understood more as hierarchical institution than as mystical community of the faithful—took on that judicial role with considerable cultural authority. The unitive early Christian ideal of becoming one with the resurrected Christ and with the Christian community, and the Hellenic-inspired mystical philosophical union with the divine Logos, receded as explicit religious goals in favor of the more Judaic concept of strict obedience to the will of God—and, by extrapolation, obedience to the decisions of the Church hierarchy. Christ’s suffering and death were here often portrayed as further cause for human guilt, rather than as effecting the removal of that guilt. The crucifixion in its horrific aspect became the dominant image, rather than the resurrection or the two together. The relationship of guilty child to stern father, as in much of the Old Testament, largely overshadowed the happy reconciliation with the divine essence proclaimed in the other side of early Christianity.

  Yet the two poles of the Christian vision were not as unrelated a
s these distinctions might suggest, and the Church not only carried the meaning of both sides, it understood itself to be the resolution of that dichotomy. To comprehend how such apparently divergent messages could have been united in the same religion, we must attempt to grasp the process by which the Christian Church evolved, both in its self-conception and in history, and the pressure of those events, personalities, and movements which governed that evolution. Even that investigation, however, depends on first grasping, or at least glimpsing, the primitive Christian proclamation in something like its first-century form.

  Exultant Christianity

  In the New Testament, especially in certain passages of Paul’s letters and John’s Gospel, it was clear that the infinite schism between the human and divine had in some sense already been bridged. The guilt and pain of that separation (caused by Adam’s sin) had been overcome by the victory of Christ (the “second Adam”), and the believing Christian directly participated in the new union. That option, so to speak, was now at last open to humanity. Christ had sacrificed himself so that mortal man could attain immortal life: God united himself with man so that man could now unite himself with God. With Christ’s departure from the world, his Spirit had descended and was now immanent in humanity, effecting humanity’s spiritual transformation—indeed, its deification.

  The new Christian perception of God was different from the traditional Judaic image. Not only was Christ the Messiah foretold by the Hebrew prophets, fulfilling the Jewish religious mission in history. He was also the Son of God, one with God; and with his self-sacrifice, the righteous Yahweh of the Old Testament, who demanded justice and exacted vengeance, had become the loving Father of the New Testament, who bestowed grace and forgave all sins. Early Christians also affirmed the new immediacy and intimacy of God, who was further transfigured from the remote severity of Yahweh into the human Jesus Christ, and who now acted less as vengeful judge than as compassionate liberator.

  The coming of Christ was therefore a break from, as well as a fulfillment of, the Judaic tradition. (Hence the conscious distinction made by early Christians between the “Old” Testament and the “New”—with the latter’s declaration of the “new life,” the “new man,” the “new nature,” the “new way,” the “new heaven and the new earth.”) Christ’s confrontation with and triumph over death, suffering, and evil had made possible that triumph for all human beings, and allowed them to perceive their own tribulations in a greater context of rebirth. To die with Christ was to rise with him into the new life of the Kingdom. Christ was here understood as a point of perpetual newness, a boundless birth of divine light in the world and in the soul. His crucifixion represented the birth pangs of a new humanity and a new cosmos. A process of divine transfiguration had been initiated in both man and nature by Christ’s redemption, here seen as a cosmic event affecting the whole universe. Instead of condemnation of a sinful humanity in a fallen world, there was here a greater emphasis on God’s limitless grace, the Spirit’s presence, the Logos’s love of man and the world, sanctification, deification, and universal rebirth. On the evidence of their writings, it was as if many early Christians had experienced a sudden cosmic reprieve from certain death, a reversal of certain damnation, an unexpected gift of new life—indeed, not only new life, but eternal life. Under the impact of this miraculous revelation, they set out to spread the “good news” of humanity’s salvation.

  So fully was Christ’s redemption here viewed as an absolute and positive fulfillment of human history and of all human suffering that Adam’s original sin, the archetypal origin of human alienation and mortality, was paradoxically celebrated as “O felix culpa!” (“O blessed sin!”) in the Easter liturgy. The Fall—man’s primal error bringing the dark knowledge of good and evil, the moral perils of freedom, the experience of alienation and death—was here viewed not so much as an unmitigatedly heinous and tragic disaster, but as an early and, in retrospect, integral part of man’s existential development caused by his infantile lack of discerning awareness, his naive susceptibility to deception. In the misuse of his God-given freedom, choosing to love and elevate himself over God, man had ruined the perfection of creation and divorced himself from the divine unity. Yet it was just through a painfully acute consciousness of this sin that man could now experience the infinite joy of God’s forgiveness and embrace of his lost soul. Through Christ, the primal separation was being healed and the perfection of creation restored on a new and more comprehensive level. Human weakness thus became the occasion for God’s strength. Only from man’s sense of defeat and finitude could he open himself freely to God. And only by man’s fall could God’s inconceivable glory and love fully reveal itself by righting the unrightable. Even God’s apparent wrath could now be understood as a necessary element in his infinite benevolence, and human suffering seen as the necessary prelude to unbounded happiness.10

  For in Christ’s overcoming of death, in man’s recognition of his potential rebirth into the eternal, all temporal evil and suffering ceased to have ultimate significance except as a preparation for redemption. The negative element in the universe rather served to bring about, according to the logic of a divine mystery, the birth of a greater positive state of being which all Christian believers could enjoy. One could place absolute trust in the Almighty, abandoning all anxiety for the future to live with the simplicity of “the lilies of the field.” Just as the hidden seed was brought forth from winter’s cold shadow to flower into the warm light and life of spring, so even in the darkest hour was God’s mysterious wisdom working its exalted design. The whole drama from the Creation to the Second Coming could now be recognized as the sublime product of the divine plan, the unfolding of the Logos. Christ was both the beginning and the end of the Creation, “the Alpha and the Omega,” its original wisdom and its final consummation. What was hidden had become manifest. In Christ the meaning of the cosmos was fulfilled and revealed. All this was celebrated by early Christians in ecstatic metaphor: With Christ’s incarnation, the Logos had reentered the world and created a celestial song, tuning the discords of the universe into perfect harmony, sounding the joy of the cosmic wedding between heaven and earth, God and humanity.

  This primitive Christian proclamation of redemption was at once mystical, cosmic, and historical. On the one hand was the experience of fundamental interior transformation: To experience God’s dawning Kingdom was to be inwardly grasped by divinity, suffused by an inner light and love. Through Christ’s grace the old, separate and false self died to allow the birth of a new self, the true self at one with God. For Christ was the true self, the deepest core of the human personality. His birth in the human soul was not so much an external arrival as an emergence from within, an awakening to the real, an unanticipatedly radical irruption of divinity into the heart of human experience. Yet on the other hand, in association with this inner transfiguration, the entire world was being transformed and restored to its divine glory—not just as if by subjective illumination but in some essential ontological way that was historically and collectively significant.

  Here an unprecedented cosmic optimism was asserted. In its physicality and historicity, Christ’s resurrection held forth the promise that everything—all history both of individuals and of mankind, all striving, all mistakes and sins and imperfections, all materiality, the entire drama and reality of Earth—would somehow be swept up and perfected in a final victorious reunion with the infinite Godhead. All that was cruel and absurd would then be made meaningful in the full revelation of Christ, the hidden meaning of creation. Nothing would be left out. The world was not an evil imprisonment, not a dispensable illusion, but the bearer of God’s glory. History was not an endless cycle of deteriorating stages, but the matrix of humanity’s deification. Through God’s omnipotence, grim Fate itself was miraculously transmuted into benevolent Providence. Human anguish and despair could now find not just respite, but divine fulfillment. The Gates of Paradise, implacably closed at the Fall, had been reopened by Christ.
The infiniteness of God’s compassion and power would inevitably conquer, and thereby consummate, the entire universe.

  Many early Christians appear to have lived in a state of continuous astonishment at the miraculous historical redemption they believed had just taken place. The unification of the cosmos was now dawning, and the finality of the old dualisms—man and God, nature and spirit, time and eternity, life and death, self and other, Israel and the rest of mankind—had been overcome. While they eagerly anticipated Christ’s Second Coming, the Parousia (“Presence”), when he would return from the heavens in full glory before the entire world, their awareness was centered on the liberating fact that Christ had already initiated the redemptive process—a triumphant process in which they could directly participate. On this basis was constituted the overriding Christian attitude of hope. Through the Christian faithful’s continuing act of hope in God’s compassionate power and plan for humanity, the trials and terrors of the present could be transcended. Humanity could now look forward, in humble confidence, to a glorious future fulfillment which its own attitude of hope was in some way helping to realize.

  Of especial importance here was the belief that in Christ, God had become man—that the all-encompassing infinite Creator had fully become an individual human person in history. For this merging in Christ had brought humanness and divinity into a fundamentally new relationship, a redemptive unity in which the value of humanity itself was exalted. The language about the coming Christ used by Paul, John, and early Christian theologians such as Irenaeus seemed to suggest not only that Christ’s return was going to take place as an external event, a descent from heaven at some unspecified time in the future, but that it would also take the form of a progressive birth from within the natural and historical development of all human beings, who were being perfected in and through Christ. Here Christ was seen both as the heavenly bridegroom, who had impregnated humanity with the seed of divinity, and as the goal of human evolution, the realization of that seed’s promise. In his continuing and progressive incarnation into humanity and into the world, Christ would bring the creation to its fruition. The seed might be hidden now in the ground, but it was already at work, active, slowly growing, moving toward perfection in a glorious unfolding of the divine mystery. As Paul wrote in his Letter to the Romans, “the whole creation groaneth in travail” for the birth of this divine being, just as all Christians were pregnant with the Christ within—pregnant with a new self that would be born to a new and more authentic life in the full consciousness of God. Human history was an immense education into divinity, a leading forth of man’s being to God. Indeed, not only was man to be fulfilled in God, but God was to be fulfilled in man, achieving a self-revelation through his realization in human form. For God had chosen man as the vessel of his image, in which his divine essence could be most fully incarnate.