In the millennia since the passio Christi, the Catholic Church had its way with Christian mysticism and gnosticism. Old masterpieces were destroyed, shrewd theologians disenfranchised and illuminating teachings suppressed. What remains in the modern day is, in my view, an array of worldly ‘Christian’ institutions—bottlenecked in their range of beliefs by the early dominance of Pauline theology—that fails at every turn to do justice to divinity. For much of my life, I found myself needing to reconcile this absence of convincing doctrine with my innate belief in a supreme intelligence. After my years of reading and searching, the resurfaced writings of the old gnostics and mystics provided me an answer—in their works, I found what I had been seeking. They provided a conduit through which I could relate the Christian concepts and figures with which I grew up with a greater universal truth. In my view, no religion may completely conquer absolute truth, given the opaqueness of the universe’s origins. Still, I have below compiled an eclectic personal theology from my own thoughts and those of history’s ‘mysto-gnostic’ thinkers, as I have termed them. The ideas are distilled from broader gnostic lore as well as from Neoplatonism and the mysticism present in several religions, both Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic. I am not the first to think or present these ideas, nor will I be the last. They are here not to convince you of them, as they remain deeply personal: a tale of the mystic path to divinity, told within the Christian framework in which I was raised.
The Soul Aglow: A Mysto-Gnostic Path to Heaven
The following ‘mysto-gnostic’ interpretation of Christianity will not necessitate blind belief in artificial doctrine. It is founded on a set of three ‘needed assumptions’ held deep within the soul, unable to be proven or disproven, and the path to which only exists in the inward mind.
- SHAPEDNESS—Being that something cannot come from nothing, this universe must have been knowingly shaped by an unknowable, imperceptible, monistic supreme power, ontologically prior to everything known and inhabiting a higher plane unfathomed by the human intellect: the transcendent Monad, or God.
- SOULEDNESS—The human consciousness contains something beyond kenoma, or the perceptible cosmos. It is souled—imbued with a divine spark, a shred of the divine intellect (pleroma) which also constitutes God and which thus exists on a higher plane.
- FLAWEDNESS—This universe and the human form are flawed, as demonstrated by such banes as entropy and cancer, and this flawedness implies that the whole faculties of God were not employed in creation.
Indeed, in grasping at what exists beyond this plane, assumptions are regrettable necessities. The human mind has no empirical path to determining with full scientific clarity what occurred before the genesis of the universe and what will follow. The only assumptions which are ever worthy of making are those where no sound path of logic yet exists, and the dark wilds of the cosmos’s origin are indeed pathless. Therefore, conclusions on the matter demand assumptions. The three on which this theology is founded have now been listed. The universe is shaped, humans are souled, and both are flawed.
One starts with the ‘fall of man’—if creation was flawed, yet required what we understand as divine power, the birth of humanity and of this sphere must not have been the true work of God’s whole. It must only have been born of a part of Him, a transitory, rebellious splinter of His infinite celestial intellect wielding divine power without divine omniscience: Lucifer or Yaldabaoth, the demiurgic creator and solution to the philosophical problem of evil. God, being omnipotent far beyond our grasp, would have the ability to unmake Lucifer at once were Lucifer beyond Himself; were Lucifer truly some separate, competing entity, as many theologies imply, then God, being all-powerful as He is understood and worshiped, could at once smite him. Lucifer, therefore, must be of Him. A restive shard must have been sundered from His intellect in the timeless time before time and manifested in shadow as a corrupt will—Lucifer—which then must have been the progenitor of this plane. The flawedness of the universe requires a flawed creator in turn, though in the use of divine resources. The intellect whence that demiurge came was perfect before his separation, perfect against his separation, and will be perfect when the separation is ended. The reasons for the separation can never be ascertained in this plane.
Human souls, being divine but inhabiting temporal bodies confined in an imperfect universe, are thus pinpricks of celestial light strewn throughout the inky blackness of the rebellious Lucifer. God, the universe having been separated from Him, does not affect it. Therefore, theosis—to reunite with His divine perfection—seems the most reasonable objective of human existence. Christians accept that among the rightmost souls to walk the earth was the Christ—the ‘anointed’—accounts of whom portray a man unperturbed by hate and steadfast in divine love. Indeed, piloting the soul in ways which would serve to lift up and cherish the fellow shards of divinity inhabiting flesh is the surest path to spiritual fulfillment, or gnosis. Thus the Christ, like a word spoken, was an expression of truly enlightened pleroma manifest in this plane, and the taking of the Eucharist in imitation of that word is one way of aligning human will with divine will. As in the words of Sebastian Franck in Golden Arch (1538), “God’s Word is embedded in human nature and is the original substance of our being . . . Man must seek, find and know God through an interrelation—he must find God in himself and himself in God.” Franck elaborates on the Eucharist in particular in Paradoxa (1534), writing that “We must eat His body, drink His blood until our nature is one with His Nature and our spirit one in will and purpose with His spirit”.
Scripture is, fundamentally, of man—written in temporal languages by temporal authors, it cannot be trusted to be an accurate reflection of the unending divine intelligence whose power was wielded in shaping this realm. Franck writes in The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil that “the Garden of Eden story is a mighty parable of the human soul. It is told as though it were an external happening, though it is really an internal affair”—the battle of man to reunite with the will of God despite the corruption of his form. Those stories that illustrate theology in scripture are not to be taken in literal fashion, but are rather metaphorical illustrations of the internal struggle. “To substitute Scripture for the self-revealing Spirit,” Franck contended, “is to put the dead letter in the place of the living Word.” Indeed, the scriptures are best taken as instructive allegories, and not believed for all of their supernatural elements; the Christ was not born of a virgin, and it would be inconsequential if he were, for he only became the Christ on account of his mastery of gnosis and not the worldly elements of his origin.
“He [Franck] argues that the diastasis between flesh and spirit makes any essential commingling between the two impossible. For this reason the outer word, including Scripture and all the teachings of the fathers, cannot mediate between God and the soul. At most these words ‘bear witness to’ the inner, invisible Word. The individual must forsake them and read the tables of his heart inscribed directly by the spirit of God.”
— Priscilla A. Hayden-Roy in “Hermeneutica gloriae vs. hermeneutica crucis: Sebastian Franck and Martin Luther on the Clarity of Scripture”, 1990.
If the objective of human existence is therefore to reunite our flesh-bound forms—cast of false light—with the pure light of God, then the only hell that man can know is to continue his separation from divinity. Damnation thus comes in the form of continual, unending resurrection, the souls of humans being cast into incarnate forms again and again, life apart from God the only torment. Through living in greatest purity—in love, fellowship, forgiveness, and the elimination of greed and cruelty: fundamentally good things which, though in conflict with our earthly forms, man innately recognizes as of moral perfection—reunification of the soul with God can be achieved. This can be won through the accumulation of spiritual knowledge and fulfillment earned in introspective prayer, virtue, and such imitations of the Christ as the taking of the Eucharist. There is no true hell as it is understood in most Christian canons; there is nothing, and there should not be anything, to frighten man into obedience. There is only the hope that each one of us should seek spiritual virtue.
In a lust for power and prestige, temporal churches have warped the philosophy of the Christ and the infinite God. Paganism has manifested in saints; icons have manifested in relics. The desire to achieve purity has been profaned by rituals and pageantry. To stand in gilded halls—all worldly—is not to draw any nearer to spiritual purity. Neither is it sacred to worship the sundered limbs of men who sought holiness, for looking anywhere but heavenward for sanctity is misdirection. One needs not stand in a church to draw nearer to God. The approach to God is made not in the world of man, but on the higher plane pierced by the immaterial consciousness inhabiting him.
Among the great theologians of the Reformation, the aforementioned thinker Sebastian Franck (c. 1499–c. 1542) drew near to these philosophies. He, as the Encyclopædia Britannica reads, “combined the humanist’s passion for freedom with the mystic’s devotion to a religion based on the inner illumination of the spirit. He believed the Bible was full of contradictions in which true and eternal messages could be unveiled only by the spirit, and he considered dogmatic controversy meaningless.” Franck’s rejection of an institutional church in favor of seeking divinity through the light of one’s soul is well in line with what is written here. His ideas were suppressed and penalized by the worldly Catholic Church, which stood to gain little from the end of the authority of man over God, the idea of which it had perpetuated for so long. Decried as ‘heresy’, ideas of the exclusively internal Christian struggle have largely lain dormant in the shadow of religious institutions. The modern emergence of institutional churches or, worse, ones claiming prophecy, has only been a further encumbrance on the philosophy of spiritual freedom from temporal authorities. Man can not, and never will, rule the path to God.
“Only a free, non-sectarian, party-less Christianity which is not bound by any of these things, but stands freely on God’s word, in the Spirit, and which may be seen and comprehended by faith and not with the eyes, is of God. Its piety is not confined to a sect, to time, place or law, to a person or to any other element. And since good and evil shall be together in one net or acre of this world until the end . . . I do not think much of any splinter group or sect. Everyone without question can be pious by himself, wherever he is . . .”
— Sebastian Franck in Paradoxa, 1534.
It is among humanity’s greatest shames that those who claim to be spiritual lights are, themselves, blind in the pursuit of the Spirit. Seeking authority and grandeur, they either deceive themselves or strive to deceive others of the righteousness of the temporal, of the correctness of the worldly. They have produced a Christendom which exalts subservience to churches over the inward path.
“Orthodox Christianity in the Western world today too greatly slights the mysticism and mystical principles which are fundamental to Christianity and which constituted the pristine Christianity of ancient times. In other words, too much thought is given to the literal meaning of words and the material interpretation of all of the principles involved in Christianity, which leaves almost a total neglect of the pure mysticism that makes possible a real understanding or spiritual comprehension of Christianity in its original form.”
— H. Spencer Lewis in The Mystical Life of Jesus, 1929.
What, then, does the theosis previously touted as the true path imply? As written above, the chronology of the supernatural world demonstrates a disconnection of that corrupt will which created this universe and the divine, perfect intellect whence it came. The corrupt demiurgic will, here called Lucifer but unable to be truly named by human tongues, sparked this universe from the primeval blackness billions of years past with prescient knowledge of the rise of humanity, or of the casting of divinity into mortal souls. Man is, as is the universe he inhabits, flawed. Humanity evolved imperfectly, and it inhabits a warped realm—abounding in evil—that is but a false, rudimentary imitation of the power of its original source. Genesis rightly identifies that the power of creation and the formation of the soul comes from God, but fails to clarify that the true origin of mankind was not from this pure, original power, but from Lucifer’s use of deception and imitation to create a flawed race from a perfect conception.
The goal of the human soul is thus to overcome the imperfections which assail it—to defy the corruptions of this universe—and return its spiritual state to more closely resemble the divine flawlessness of God. Within each human, there exists a deeply rooted and divinely imparted ability to recognize what these imperfections are. The idea of divinity and God is readily present within humans, and has manifested in every human culture in the form of the supernatural. It is linked to happiness and a dominant force—though often corrupted into perniciousness—in every era of history. However, no brittle doctrine would form the foundation of the ultimate divinity whence consciousness comes. If the notion of the divine is first witnessed within, then answers to the question of divinity can only be acquired by traveling further along the inward path of illumination—accumulating gnosis—and not by enforcing or following institutional interpretations of holiness in the material world.
Thus, the objective becomes to strive away from the wrongs identified by one’s inner divinity and toward rightness of mind and body. Ardent followers of the Christ might, maintaining that He is the utmost expression of divine purity on this plane, use His teachings as a lamp to light the inner path. The Eucharist may serve as a profound spiritual reminder of one’s divine goal. However, it is possible to walk the path (method) without temporal knowledge of the Christ; so long as one is engaged in the battle against inner vice, one is on the path toward reunion with the infinite divinity. Overcoming the innately recognized flaws which define the earthly form—tribalism, prejudice, hatred, greed—sets one on the path. To totally embrace those good values—forgiveness, love, pacifism—which stand in contrast with base vices is to walk it. Scripture, in its descriptions of the depths of evil, may guide readers to understanding the inner wickedness which must be overcome; however, the temporal nature of the scriptures necessitates inner cognition above all else as the true method of spiritual discovery. The ultimate truth is that the path to spiritual ascension is illuminated not by this false world, but by the divine light which exists in each human soul.
“God is an unutterable sigh, lying in the depths of the heart.”
— Sebastian Franck
At the end of the spiritual path is escape from mankind’s flawed universe and its return to the timeless, infinitely fulfilling, fathomlessly beautiful intellect of God with the souls of one’s fellows in beatific unity. At the passing of each body, the human soul—bodiless once more—is afforded the opportunity to rejoin the infinite stream of His mind, perhaps to be given a more perfect form or perhaps to rest among one’s fellows forever. If a soul’s incarnation has lived a life of warped morality, of giving in to evil and to wickedness, then that soul must be incompatible with the stream and cast back into the universe in a new body. Resurrection thus continues so long as life does, as souls are given chance after chance to return to their source. When a now pneumatic soul has at last drawn back to the purity of its divine source, it can then rejoin God and forever leave this warped universe to venture forth into the incomprehensible glory of what is next.
Apologiæ
This could be criticized as a ‘Christianity without the Christ’—one in which the Christ is a benevolent guide, not a final gatekeeper. However, it would not be in the interest of a divine super-intellect to predicate celestial goodness on familiarity with one physical manifestation of divinity. As prefaced, this theology is merely spiritualism with a belief that the approach to innately known morality is itself divine, and that in his unwavering devotion to that approach, Jesus Christ held gnosis and is worth taking after.
Scripture portrays the Christ as mandating faith in His divinity to attain holiness, but it is dubious whether He would have truly insisted this—His focus on good works and mercy seems inconsistent with a fixation on being a sole, material path of divinity. Thus, though it respects him with red letters, this theology treats Him as a largely secular character, emphasizing His good works and gnosis and viewing the statements claiming Him to be the only way to live divinely as an unwelcome insertion by later authors, the scriptures having been written generations after His death.
Other
It is intriguing to note that mystic elements have a tendency to emerge or present themselves in many religions. Buddhism’s attainment of pāramitā—perfection of the soul—through the honing of the spirit resembles, in some ways, the accumulation of gnosis. Sikhism teaches the pursuit of unification with Akal, the timeless divinity. The Islamic mystics or Sufis maintain the existence of fitrah, an innate recognition of the divine intellect, in the pursuit of irfan—Islamic gnosis. Rosicrucians feel the path to spiritual elevation rests in inward harmony with the currents of the natural world. Even in doctrines as new as the Latter-Day Saints’, traces can be found—their belief in exaltation, in which human souls ascend to take on the nature of God’s, smacks of the theosis outlined here. The preface stated my belief in no religion holding exclusive, absolute truth—perhaps the ‘mysto-gnosticism’ above is indeed only one reflection of a greater universal mystic truth, presented more broadly as a tale of human reunification with its remote source.
Beyond conventional religion, Neoplatonic philosophy strongly influenced the conclusions in this essay. English theologian Andrew Louth described Platonic thought on the matter as that “the soul is naturally divine and seeks to return to the divine realm. And it does this in the act of contemplation—theoria—of Being, Truth, Beauty, Goodness. This act of theoria is not simply consideration or understanding; it is union with, participation in, the true objects of true knowledge. . . . There then follows a process of detachment from false reality and attachment to true reality, a process of paideia, of education, or correction.”
The background for this page was found on another theological work on mercaba.org.
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