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“The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and died to give his work its final consecration, never had any existence. He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in an historical garb.” So wrote Albert Schweitzer in The Quest of the Historical Jesus, 1906.
“Whatever it was that people experience in Jesus has today come to be identified with medieval doctrines based on premodern assumptions that are no longer believable. That identification means that serious theological discussion seems to accomplish little more than to erect a division between the shouters and the disinterested. Jesus becomes the captive of the hysterically religious, the chronically fearful, the insecure and even the neurotic among us, or he becomes little more than a fading memory, the symbol of an age that is no more and a nostalgic reminder of our believing past. To me neither option is worth pursuing. Yet even understanding these things, I am still attracted to this Jesus and I will pursue him both relentlessly and passionately. I will not surrender the truth I believe I find in him either to those who seek to defend the indefensible or to those who want to be freed finally from premodern ideas that no longer make any sense.”
So wrote Bishop John Shelby Spong a handful of years ago.
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And more than a hundred years ago William Butler Yeats warned of ours and religion’s ugly fate at the Second Coming:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming, 1919.
What rough beast indeed is in Yeats’ mind?!
Falcons of truth soar beyond control of the old-world falconer.
Dogma, riddled with holes, begins falling apart.
The centre of timeworn myths cannot hold.
Mere anarchy threatens to be loosed upon us and history’s church,
And upon the church’s pretense of childlike innocence and spiritual progress.
Surely some new revelation is at hand. We cannot be left drowning without.
But from where will it come?
rom a failed falconer?
Not if indignant desert birds have anything to say about it.
From the Sphinx of a Biblical desert (ancient defender of hidden gods)?
Not unless darkness is to drop once again for another twenty centuries of stony sleep.
From ….?
What rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
In Yeats’ vision, revelations turn and turn in ever widening gyres, somewhat like a Big Bang would be if things turned back on themselves rather than forever flying apart.
A three-dimensional synthesis represented by the intersection of two cones.
One widening out toward the future while the other focuses to an end within.
Michael Robartes and the Dancer W. B. Yeats 1920 : W. B. Yeats : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive – pages 30-35
The mind has a movement that can be expressed mathematically.
An order of development peculiar to itself. Yeats (in Michael Robartes and the Dancer), speaking of the Judwalis: “A supreme religious act of their faith is to fix the attention on the mathematical form of this movement until the whole past and future of humanity, or of an individual man, shall be present to the intellect as if it were accomplished in a single moment. The intensity of the Beatific Vision when it comes depends upon the intensity of this realisation.”
Depends upon the intensity of the body in the midst of the mind/dream.
There are two profoundly basic questions, never far from the surface, which must be addressed before we get to answering where new revelation may be coming from:
First, how did this all come about?
Who or what created the whole thing? The Earth, stars, and everything.
The only two acceptable answers become one in the same at the start.
Everything’s always been here (although in different forms from eon to eon).
We’re simply enjoying (?) the present moment.
It will all change in time, as it has always changed in the past. It’s evolutionary.
Then how did our universe get its start?
Either God gave the universe the Big Bang, or something else did.
What else could have?
Dark matter, for one thing.
We can prove that there’s plenty of dark matter around, even though we can’t see it.
But we can’t prove it didn’t antedate the Big Bang.
It may even have caused it.
It certainly sped it on its way.
And it may cause it again, after things get cooled down.
Another Big Bang, like Yeats’ endless gyre within a gyre.
So … who or what created dark matter?
Nothing? (It’s always been here, as an integral part of Nature.)
Or God?
Does it really matter?
Only if the God we’re soon to talk about had anything to do with creating Nature.
Or has any control over it now. Which I submit it does not.
In my view our God, like us, has no meaningful control over the god of Nature.
A few trees, fish and animals here and there. Holes in the ozone.
We bother it, but we don’t control it, and we don’t worship it.
Nor should we, apart from standing more appropriately in awe of its Earth.
We should seek to understand Nature better.
And have more reverence for Earth and all life forms on it.
We should work with it.
Granted.
But not delude ourselves that we, or our God, can control it.
Which adds up to two gods: Ours, and Nature.
The second profoundly basic question is this:
Could there be, or would there be, morality on Earth without God?
If the answer is no, then that proves the existence of God, since we can show that morality and immorality exist.
If the answer is yes, where does morality come from?
The only sources that would make sense to me are feelings, and DNA.
We have inherited feelings and DNA from our ancestors.
“Amoral” humans simply died out in the Stone Age.
Not enough friends to give them protection. Or too many enemies.
The way birds and bears have learned to care for their young.
And dolphins have learned to save a drowning man.
Morality evolves, and is a byproduct of empathy.
It is easy to love your dog.
He guards your cave, gives you company, and loves you.
It is easy to treat him “morally.”
But what about another’s dog?
If you can sense, even just a bit, what that dog means to them, morality has its breath.
Do unto others what you would have them do unto you.
Why?
Actually, do unto others what is best for them.
Maybe they don’t care much for your kind of food when they’re hungry.
But why? Why do for fellow man?
Because you and they are members of the human race, that we’re all running together.
If not, you wouldn’t have read this far.
Okay?
But, as I said earlier, morality is evolving.
From where?
Here is where I find God.
From in here.
God is within.
The kingdom of heaven is within.
And what does that mean?
Let’s return for a moment to Yeats:
“The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight”
What is Spiritus Mundi?
AH! WHAT IS THIS SPIRITUS MUNDI?
This world soul?
The best way I have to understand the depth of Yeats’ meaning is to start with Carl Jung.
Jung believed, after years of searching within himself, that there exists on planet Earth a collective consciousness. An Over-Soul “within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other” (per Ralph Waldo Emerson).
According to Jung, collective consciousness (or the collective unconscious) can be accessed through dreams and intense meditation.
It contains threads which we can use to understand the past, and to bind together human experience.
If correct, the mind is the channel we all have to morality. To its evolution.
The mind is the channel we all have to morality and understanding.
And it may be as close as we can ever come to touching God.
If you have ever had the sensation in you that you’ve seen something new before, or have been someplace new before, that is when Yeats (and Jung) would suggest you’ve felt connection with the Over-Soul. With God. With Yeats’ “Spiritus Mundi.”
Another question:
Do we need an intermediary, like Jesus, to meet God within us?
Sadly, egregious inconsistencies in the Gospels’ account of Jesus give us pause.
For example, what was Jesus doing, proclaiming that life’s great commandments include loving one’s neighbor as oneself, loving one’s enemies, blessing them that refuse to listen to you, turning the other cheek, maintaining your patience to forgive sins of others seventy times seven times, never calling others by demeaning or hurtful names, becoming perfect, even as God is perfect, while at other times calling a non-Jew on the road to Tyre a “dog,” calling those who disagreed with him “vipers” and “blind fools,” driving merchants from the Temple with a whip, cursing those who refused to believe him as being children of the Devil, cursing the Pharisees, cursing to everlasting Hell those who refuse to feed the hungry, clothe the poor, nurse the ill, and visit prisoners in jail, cursing even entire cities (such as Bethsaida and Capernaum) for lack of faith, and destroying an innocent fig tree for not having fruit when he was hungry?
Why did Jesus do all those things?
And why did he instruct his disciples to arm themselves?
Or announce that his purpose in being here was to set sons against their fathers, daughters against their mothers, and servants against their masters?
“He that loves his parent or his child more than me is not worthy of me,” he said.
It’s a bit presumptuous, don’t you think? For any religion to brand a man “perfect.”
Somewhere along the line we have lost sight of it.
We are thought.
Thought and mind; body and passion; soul and action.
Singular beings, unique, separate, apart, and many times alone.
Coming together on an Earth created by god Nature,
destined to die, dissolve itself into dark matter, and be born again.
Our God is thought.
A composite of all thought. Forever plural.
God is contemplation and consciousness
Love at first sight
Curiosity
Ancient wisdom
Problem solving
Forgiveness
Discipline (in counterbalance to those of Nature’s harmful or addictive impulses)
An invitation to success
The love and patience to raise a child kindly through the most difficult of times
The will to heal
The duty to heal
The conscience to heal
The satisfaction of existence
A lifelong companion
And a peacemaker.
God speaks through the inner word.
Nature speaks through action.
Death speaks through memory.
Anyone with the mental and metaphysical powers to delve inside themselves has also the power to be in the presence of God, and to hold in hand the philosophy of the world. In the beginning the story was told by women in a cave.
Among the noteworthy since have been Albert Schweitzer, William Blake, Carl Jung, Immanuel Kant, and Søren Kierkegaard.