Chapter Thirteen



Jesus As A
Teacher Within the Perennial Tradition

"Now before he was taken by the lawless Jews . . . he gathered all of us together and said: Before I am delivered up unto them let us sing an hymn to the Father, and so go forth to that which lieth before us. He bade us therefore make as it were a ring, holding one another's hands, and himself standing in the midst he said:

"I am the Word who did play and dance all things.

Now answer to my dancing.

Understand by dancing what I do.

Answer Amen unto me. He began, then, to sing an hymn and to say:

      "Glory be to thee, father.

      "And we, going about in a ring, answered him: Amen.

      "Thus, my beloved, having danced with us the Lord went forth. And we as men gone astray or dazed with sleep fled this way and that. I, then, when I saw him suffer, did not even abide by his suffering, but fled unto the Mount of Olives, weeping at that which had befallen. And when he was crucified on the Friday, at the sixth hour of the day, darkness came upon all the earth. And my Lord standing in the midst of the cave and enlightening it, said: John, unto the multitude below in Jerusalem I am being crucified and pierced with lances and reeds, and gall and vinegar is given me to drink. But unto thee I speak and what I speak hear thou. I put it into thy mind to come up into this mountain, that thou mightest hear those things which it behoveth a disciple to learn from his teacher and a man from his God.

      "And having thus spoken, he showed me a cross of light fixed (set up), and about the cross a great multitude, not having one form: and in it (the cross) was one form and one likeness. And the Lord himself I beheld above the cross, not having any shape, but only a voice: and a voice not such as was familiar to us, but one sweet and kind and truly of God, saying unto me: John, it is needful that one should hear these things from me, for I have need of one that will hear. This cross of light is sometimes called the word by me for your sakes, sometimes mind, sometimes Jesus, sometimes Christ, sometimes door, sometimes a way, sometimes bread, sometimes seed, sometimes resurrection, sometimes Son, sometimes Father, sometimes Spirit, sometimes life, sometimes truth, sometimes faith, sometimes grace.

            "But this is not the cross of wood which thou wilt see when thou goest down hence: neither am I he that is on the cross, whom now thou seest not, but only hearest his voice. I was reckoned to be that which I am not, not being what I was unto many others; but they will call me something else which is vile and not worthy of me.  . . .

"Thou hearest that I suffered, yet did I not suffer; that I suffered not, yet did I suffer; that I was pierced, yet I was not smitten; hanged, and I was not hanged; that blood flowed from me, and it flowed not; and, in a word, what they say of me, that befell me not, but what they say not, that did I suffer. "

     In the opening portion of this passage we see Jesus leading his disciples in a kind of ring dance, a practice which was used by a number of later Perennialist teachers, including Rumi. Jesus speaking and his disciples responding appears to be a kind of ritualized antiphony which in conjunction with the circular dancing may have induced an altered state of consciousness in the participants.

     In the last portion of the passage, what Jesus appears to be saying to John is: "I've been teaching you and the others for many months that the real essence of a person is not the body but the spirit. So don't be concerned about what they are now doing to my body. I am speaking to you in my spirit. My spirit cannot be crucified or pierced."

     That Jesus worked within the Perennialist tradition can be deduced from the canonical New Testament itself.

     "There was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews:
The same came to Jesus by night, and said unto him, Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God: for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him.
Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God."




"Now of the process of re-birth there is and always has been a definite and exact science, the knowledge of which has been the property of the smallest of minorities and, for adequate reasons, has not been suffered to be promulgated to the multitude, although individuals who earnestly sought for it never failed in discovering it. The Mystery-schools of antiquity, at least before the days of their degeneracy, possessed and administered it; it was the raison d'etre of their existence, as was well known to the public of the time, any member of whom, prepared to abandon secular life and apply himself to the higher vocation, could seek admission therein. The Christianity of the first two centuries took over the doctrine and the science, confirmed and expanded as they became by the advent of Christ, but eventually lost them and put in their place the ecclesiastical machinery and dogmatic theology which have ruled throughout the subsequent centuries of European history, with the result that popular Christianity has for long known nothing of them. With the enjoinder of the assured necessity for regeneration proclaimed by the Master of their faith it and its theologians and pastors are well familiar. But can it be said that 'Ye must be born again' means for them more than a vague, mysterious, metaphoric counsel of perfection capable of being satisfied by living the ordinary natural life as far as possible in accordance with the standard of conduct indicated in the Gospels? Are the words accorded more than a value for ethical purposes, to the total neglect of the possibility of their literal practical fulfilment?" Walter Leslie Wilmhurst, Introduction to M. A. Atwood, Hermetic Philosophy and Alchemy





The Triumph of Pseudo-Christianity
     If you watch a TV history of Christianity or read a Protestant or Roman Catholic account of the early church, Christianity's becoming the official religion of the Roman state during Constantine's reign is considered a great victory. The only measure of success for these moderns is whether or not a tradition triumphed over all its competitors. Never mind what distorting of the original message had taken place. If a particular religion came out on top, it's to be considered the best.

On the contrary, the formal religion that became known as the Holy Roman Church was and is nothing but a vast repository of false teachings and practices. At the present time, what is called Christianity, in all its Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant guises, is a horrible deformity of Jesus's original teachings.



"The Emperor Constantine who, having become a convert to Christianity, soon made his new faith the official religion of the Roman Empire, which he ruled from ancient Byzantium, renamed Constantinople. And so, at about 320 A.D. the Church not only came to glorious power but was given a clearly God-sent opportunity to revenge itself on the descendants of those who had persecuted it for almost three hundred years. Unleashing a reign of terror on those pagans who stubbornly refused the new faith, Constantine and the Church waded deep in blood and apparently enjoyed the experience, for the lions enjoyed pagans as much as they had Christians and the crosses now carried different victims."

Donovan Joyce. The Jesus Scroll

     Whereas the people Jesus befriended were the poor and outcast of society, the bureaucratized "church" began to direct its attentions to the wealthy and politically powerful. Already by the end of the first century C.E., Christians in Rome included members of the Emperor's household. As Clement, Marcion, and Origen made clear, the essence of Jesus's teaching was the esoteric initiation of a select number into the mysteries of the "new being." Within a hundred years Jesus's original teachings had been perverted into an ecclesiastical power system: the "triumph" of pseudo-Christianity.

"Christianity, which had been the religion of a community of equal brothers, without hierarchy or bureaucracy, became 'the Church,' the reflected image of the absolute monarchy of the Roman Empire."

Erich Fromm. "The Dogma of Christ



"Developing in the crowded poverty of the cities of Asia minor, Christian doctrine found its first adherents among craftsmen and laborers, many of them slaves. Its revolutionary affirmation of human rights found practical implementation in the organization of the oppressed. Jesus lived at a period of intense social ferment throughout the Roman empire. There were gilds [sic] of workers in many places. Even on the sea of Galilee, fishermen and boatmen were members of a secret religious-economic association. The great revolt of slaves led by Spartacus conquered most of southern Italy and threatened Rome in the century before Christ. "The persecution of the Christians was regarded as a social necessity by the rulers of Rome; the spread of the doctrine nourished dangerous discontents and provided new and effective channels of organization for the lower classes. Pliny the Younger, who was governor of Bithynia in the early years of the second century, wrote to the emperor concerning the troublesome activity of Christians in forming collegia or gilds, and he told of torturing two maidservants in order to get information about these associations. "As Christianity developed, it gained adherents among well-to-do craftsmen and merchants, especially in the cities of the eastern Mediterranean; economic interest made it imperative for these classes to oppose the corrupt and oppressive power of the empire. In joining the Christian movement, they could restrain its more radical tendencies, and utilize its organized strength as a defense against imperial restrictions. The disintegration of the imperial system forced Constantine to abandon Rome and move his capital to Byzantium in order to control the eastern area of trade. At the same time, he had to adopt Christianity, as the best means of maintaining his authority over the urban centers which were the key to the economic existence of the empire. "The adoption of Christianity as a state religion required a fundamental change in its class character and ideology. But this was not an easy task. It could not be accomplished without a violent conflict between the patrician class which ruled the empire and the majority who took Christianity literally as a gospel of equality and brotherhood. By the time of Augustine, the conflict had reached a stage of crisis, which threatened to disrupt the empire." John Howard Lawson, (1950). The Hidden Heritage




The New Being
     One of the most profound interpretations of Jesus's teachings is found in Maurice Nicoll's The New Man. As we peruse Nicoll's ideas about Jesus's teachings, it becomes evident that they are in the same vein as those of Origen, Marcion, Valentinus, and a number of other Perennialist teachers.



     "All sacred writings contain an outer and an inner meaning. Behind the literal words lies another range of meaning, another form of knowledge. According to an old-age tradition, Man once was in touch with this inner knowledge and inner meaning. There are many stories in the Old Testament which convey another knowledge, a meaning quite different from the literal sense of the words.  . . . And in the Gospels the parable is used in a similar way."

     Nicoll views sacred writing, including the New Testament, as conveying a higher meaning than the literal words contain. This esoteric truth must be seen by a person with his inner organs of cognition. Cast in ordinary words and images, the higher, concealed, inner, or esoteric meanings can only be discerned by the higher understanding. A person's literal understanding of Jesus's teachings is insufficient for grasping the higher, esoteric, secret meanings.

     "Higher knowledge, higher meaning, if it falls on the ordinary level of understanding, will either seem nonsense, or it will be wrongly understood.  . . . Higher meaning can only be given to those who are close to grasping it rightly. This is one reason why all sacred writings--that is, writings that are designed to convey more than the literal sense of the words must be concealed, as it were, by an outer wrapping. It is not a question of misleading people but a question of preventing this higher meaning from falling in the wrong place, on lower meaning, and thereby having its finer significance destroyed. People sometimes imagine they can understand anything, once they are told it. But this is quite wrong. The development of the understanding, the seeing of differences, is a long process."

"Knowledge is a function of being. When there is a change in the being of the knower, there is a corresponding change in the nature and amount of knowing. For example, the being of a child is transformed by growth and education into that of a man; among the results of this transformation is a revolutionary change in the way of knowing and the amount and character of the things known." Aldous Huxley. (1944). The Perennial Philosophy

     Jesus's teachings convey higher knowledge through the use of parables or stories. The ordinary meaning of the parable encourages a person to consider if there is a higher meaning and to see if he can discern what this is. The ordinary meaning works on the mind to lift it to a higher level of comprehension. Jesus's stories are transforming instruments which prepare a person's mind to understand higher meaning.

"The Gospels speak mainly of a possible inner evolution called 're-birth.' This is their central idea. . .  The Gospels teach that a man living on this earth is capable of undergoing a definite inner evolution if he comes in contact with definite teaching on this subject."

      Humankind is capable of a definite inner evolution through which its understanding expands.



"The Gospels are from beginning to end all about this possible self-evolution. They are psychological documents. They are about the psychology of this possible inner development--that is, about what a man must think, feel, and do in order to reach a new level of understanding."

     A part of this teaching about rebirth to a new being is the idea that man internally is a seed capable of a definite growth--if he dies to being a seed. Thus, as we are we are incomplete. Jesus's esoteric teaching says that man is capable of a second birth. However, this re-birth or second birth belongs to the inner aspect of man, not to man as he seems to be in himself, a materialistic body living on earth.

"The esoteric teaching about knowledge and being refers to the fact that knowledge cannot be understood unless there is a corresponding development of being. A man may know a great deal and understand nothing because his being is not equal to his knowledge."

      To experience rebirth means to evolve to a higher level of understanding. This can only be achieved by new knowledge, gnosis, and by practicing this new understanding. The gnosis or knowledge which gives man this possibility of evolving is sometimes called Truth and at other times called the Word. It is not ordinary truth or knowledge; it is knowledge about this further evolutionary step which man can take.

      "In the esoteric schools of which we can see traces in ancient literature, many very severe disciplines existed before a candidate was allowed to receive esoteric knowledge. He might have to serve in a most menial position for years, subject to insults that were a test on the side of being. If he passed these tests successfully and developed in himself strength and patience he was allowed to receive some knowledge. But if he broke, if he pitied himself, if he complained, if he was weak in his being, if he lied, if he behaved maliciously, if he took advantage of others, if he was resentful, if he thought he was better than other people, he received no knowledge."


The Esoteric Interpretation of Paul's Writings
     We can best understand how the New Testament--including Paul's writings--were interpreted by Esoteric Christians through studying the outstanding book by Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Paul. In this book, Pagels references the various interpretations of Paul's writings by distinct groups of esoteric Christians.


"The Valentinians claim that most Christians make the mistake of reading the scriptures only literally. They themselves, through their initiation into gnosis, learn to read his letters (as they read all the scriptures) on the symbolic level, as they say Paul intended. Only this pneumatic reading yields 'the truth' instead of its mere outward 'image.'"

     Esoteric Christians believed that Paul, throughout his letters, ⁴ was referring to two very different kinds of Christians:


• Exoteric Christians
  • referred to as:
    • psychichos: Greek for earthling or as the King James translates it: natural man
    • Jews (used as a symbolic word)
  • seek "salvation" by "works" "according to the law"
  • accept only what they see with their own eyes, needing "works of power" to believe
  • have access to and understand only the exoteric meaning of spiritual writings
  
  
• Esoteric Christians
  • referred to as:
    • pneumaticos: Greek for spiritual persons
    • Gentiles (used as a symbolic word)
  • seek knowledge (gnosis) and wisdom (sophia) through the spirit
  • understand through spiritual discernment the wisdom which to earthlings seems foolish
  • have access to and understand the esoteric meaning of spiritual writings

     It was particularly in such passages as the second chapter of I Corinthians that Esoteric Christians felt sure Paul acknowledged and authorized the secret wisdom tradition which they had received from him through such emissaries as Theodas.



I Corinthians 2:6-8: "We do speak wisdom (sophia) among the initiates (teleioi), but not the wisdom of this age or of the archons of this age, who are passing away. But we speak the hidden wisdom of God in a mystery, which God ordained before the aions for our glory. None of the archons of this age knew this: had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory."

I Corinthians 2:14-16: "For the earthling (ho psychichos) does not receive the things of the spirit of God: they are foolishness to him, and he cannot know them, because they are spiritually (pneumatically) discerned. The spiritual (ho pneumatikos) on the other hand discerns all things, but himself is discerned by no one. For who has known the mind of the Lord, and who may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ."

     In such passages, esoteric Christians believed that Paul was speaking of the secret mystery tradition which only he among all the apostles knew and transmitted. Whereas Paul preached a simplified message of "Christ crucified" to the earthlings--the exoteric Christians--among the initiates he taught the higher wisdom, the hidden gnosis of re-birth. Higher spiritual truth cannot be fully communicated by means of written documents, so Paul only referred to it and then sent such emissaries as Theodas and Timothy to initiate them into the secret rites leading to actual regeneration--death and rebirth through a spiritual baptism.

     What we receive from esoteric teachings within the Perennial Tradition depends entirely upon what we have made of ourselves.



"A divinity approaches you. It is either everything or nothing. Nothing, if you meet it in the frame of mind with which you confront everyday matters. Everything, if you are prepared, and attuned to the meeting. What the Divinity is in itself is a matter which does not affect you; the important point for you is whether it leaves you as it found you or makes another man of you. But this depends entirely on yourself. You must have been prepared by a special education, by a development of the inmost forces of your personality for the work of kindling and releasing what a divinity is able to kindle and release in you. What is brought to you depends on the reception you give to it." Rudolph Steiner. Christianity as Mystical Fact



     Some of the New Testament is a record of spiritual experiences which are reproducible in our lives. It is our responsibility to determine what is genuine and what is counterfeit in the New Testament, just as we must discriminate in regard to all teachings. Some parts of the New Testament are dogmas added by later sectarians to support their personal prejudices. For example, many references to Jesus's actions as fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies were added by persons trying to prove that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah. As we examine the New Testament discerningly we discover elements which do not ring true, certain supposed "miracles" and mythological events that cast Jesus in an unfavorable light.

     Even so, there are genuine components of the New Testament which comprise spiritual experiences which we should reproduce in our lives. This is especially true of the central teaching of the New Testament: rebirth into a higher consciousness.


The Ancient Teaching
     It is terribly difficult for us to grasp the meaning of Jesus's teaching about the new being. Our natural tendency is to construe it as a metaphor, not an actual inner experience of death and new life. We have explored the dimensions of this death experience in the chapter on Illumination.

      This rebirth teaching is as old as humankind. It is the first teaching of Hermes Trismegistus.



Tat, the son of Trismegistus, asks his father to teach him about rebirth, claiming that he has learned to see through the illusions of the world and is now ready for the final initiation. Trismegistus tells Tat that rebirth is through acquisition of higher wisdom, the seed of the True Good, which must be sown in him by the Will of God. The reborn person "will be god, the son of God, all in all, composed of all the Powers."

Trismegistus tells Tat that he himself has had the rebirth experience. With growing excitement, Tat implores him to pass it on to him. "Who is the activator in the work of regeneration?" he asks, and the reply is, "The Son of God, a man like other men, by the will of God." Tat asks what truth is, and he is told that it is "that . . . which can only be apprehended by itself, the unalterable Good, the Incorporeal." It cannot be perceived by the senses and can only be known by the effects of its power and energy, which demands that a person must be capable of understanding rebirth in God. "Am I not capable of this, O Father?" cries Tat, and the answer is that he must draw it to himself and it will come; wish it and it will be produced; arrest the activity of the bodily senses and the divinity will be born in him; purify himself from the "irrational punishments of matter." When his rebirth experience is completed, Trismegistus leads Tat out of the "tent" (translated tabernaculum by Ficino) under which he had been and which was constituted by the circle of the zodiac. The powers sing in Tat the Hymn of Regeneration.




     Unmistakably, the Hermetic writings constitute an ancient embodiment of the Perennial Tradition which pre-dates Plato. As we saw in Chapter 11, Plato saw philosophy (philosophia) as the actual achievement of a higher state of consciousness, gained through self-discipline and mystical contemplation. According to Plato, philosophia is the actual practice of learning to leave the body and live in the soul, the spiritual body.

     Those who followed the genuine teaching of Jesus--as distinct from those who created a new, state-supported ecclesiastical tyranny--understood Jesus as one of a long line of savants who initiated chosen disciples into the mystery of a mystical rebirth of the soul into a Higher Consciousness along the same lines as had Plato. The Perennialist teachers in the period following Jesus understood his true teaching and did not see him as a deity.

      The orthodox Christian, of course, sees this view of Jesus as the height of error, or even heresy.



"The author's intention is to show, by means of what is here called 'mystical knowledge', how the source of Christianity prepared its own ground in the Mysteries of pre-Christian times. In this pre-Christian mysticism we find the soil in which Christianity throve as a germ of quite independent nature. This point of view makes it possible to understand Christianity in its own independent being, even though its evolution is traced from pre-Christian mysticism. If this point of view be overlooked, it is easy to misunderstand that independent character, and to think that Christianity was merely a further development of what already existed in pre-Christian mysticism. Many people of the present day have fallen into this error, comparing the content of Christianity with pre-Christian conceptions, and then thinking that Christian ideas were only a continuation of the former." Rudolph Steiner, Christianity as Mystical Fact, 1914



     If we follow Steiner's argument in the book cited, we discover that in fact he does not in any way show that this conception of Christianity as "a further development of what already existed in pre-Christian mysticism" is incorrect. Steiner merely asserts that "the nature of the divine and its relation is given by revealed [Christian] theology, which is not accessible to man's own researches and is, as the substance of faith, superior to all knowledge."

     The underlying essence of Jesus' teaching was precisely what Hermes and Plato had taught. Many of the genuine followers of Jesus' teachings, such as Clement of Alexandria and Origen, were profoundly influenced by Plato's mystical concepts. It would be correct to say that they were as much Platonists as Christians.

     When the Christian faith became a secularized, sacerdotal autocracy supporting the depraved Roman emperor Constantine, the hierarchy of priests and potentates of the Church found it necessary to concoct a system of dogmas which would separate Christian theology from Platonism.

     So, three hundred and twelve bishops were ordered by Emperor Constantine to work out a creed that would put a stop to the increasingly troublesome theological bickering. The emperor himself, dressed in a purple gown and with a silver diadem, opened the council. The Council of Nicea in 325 C.E. made it clear that Christianity was to be definitely distinguished from the pagan Platonic heresy. Jesus Christ was of the same substance as God and only Christ could bring about humankind's salvation.

     It is instructive to see the distinctions between the two systems of thought as outlined by a contemporary orthodox Christian:

Platonism: "Man, it says, lives in a transient world of sensible phenomena and of conjecture, or opinion, based on it. But his soul belongs to a higher, truer world which is eternal and immutable. To regain its kinship with that world the soul must purify itself from this world; it must seek to die to this world, to live now the life it hopes it may lead after death. This purification has two sides: moral and intellectual. Moral purification will restore to the soul transcendence over the body; the body will cease to disturb its endeavours after contemplation. Intellectual purification, or dialectic, trains the soul in abstract thought; it weans the soul from dependence on the world of sense and accustoms it to the more austere, but also more real because eternal, world of the Forms or Ideas. When the soul has sufficiently purified itself it may - suddenly and without warning - attain contemplation, theoria, of the highest of the Forms, the Beautiful or the Good, for which it has longed. In this gratuitous act of theoria the whole world of ultimate reality is seen as a single whole, and the meaning even of sensible reality becomes clear. This sudden ultimate act of theoria is experienced as ecstasy: the soul seems to transcend itself, to be rapt out of itself At the same time, this ecstasy is a sort of home-coming. The soul becomes what it truly is in its deepest self; its kinship with ultimate reality becomes something experienced."

Christianity: "But, for Christianity, man is a creature; he is not ultimately God's kin, but created out of nothing by God and only sustained in being by dependence on His will. There is an ontological gulf between God and his creation, a real difference of being. Only in Christ, in whom divine and human natures are united, do we find One who is of one substance with the Father. . .

"Christianity, on the other hand, speaks of the Incarnation of God, of his descent into the world that he might give to man the possibility of a communion with God that is not open to him by nature."

Andrew Louth. (1981), The Origins of the Christian
Mystical Tradition

Orthodox Christianity Devolves Into A Tyranny
     In our review above of those early thinkers who understood the true essence of Jesus's teachings--Paul, Marcion, Valentinus, and Origen--we discovered that in fact the Perennialist view of Jesus and his teachings was common among them. Jesus was seen as a master within a continuing tradition of personal regeneration which had been embodied earlier in the Hermetic and Platonic writings.

     Within a few centuries, we find that Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant theologians have turned away from Jesus's teachings of the rebirth of the soul to a degraded conception of religion as mere faith in the dogmas of the Church.

      With such a man as Augustine, we experience the tragedy of a brilliant mind that gained an insight into the true essence of the Perennial Tradition--and Jesus's specific embodiment of that tradition--but which degenerated into self-deceiving zealotry in regard to the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church.

      Here was a person who experienced actual mystical union with Higher Consciousness in his early life but wound up as a bigot recommending that anyone not believing in the true Roman Catholic faith be tortured and killed. This hideous aspect of the murderous zealot faces us within all organized religions.

     It is disappointing to see otherwise brilliant contemporary thinkers such as Max Muller, Rudolph Steiner, and Paul Elmer More--to mention only a few--discourse intelligently on the mystical aspects of Plato and then fall into the abyss of sanctimonious ecclesiasticism.



"When delivering these [Gifford] lectures [in 1893], I confess that what I feared far more than the taunts of those who, like Henry VII, call themselves the defenders of the faith, were the suspicions of those who might doubt my perfect fairness and impartiality in defending Christianity by showing how, if only properly understood, it is infinitely superior to all other religions."

Max Muller, Theosophy or Psychological Religion





"That which man previously had sought to attain through the Mysteries was now replaced by the belief that Christ had lived on earth, and that the faithful belonged to him.

"Henceforward, part of what was formerly only to be gained through mystical methods, could be replaced, in the Christian community, by the conviction that the divine had been manifested in the Word present amongst them. . .

"The Mysteries handed down traditionally the means of arriving at truth; the Christian community itself propagates the truth."

Rudolph Steiner, Christianity as Mystical Fact, 1914





"The real change comes with Clement of Alexandria, whose life-work in the Christian field was much like that of Philo in the Jewish, an effort to enrich religion with the spoils of Platonic Idealism while still maintaining that revelation had brought a higher kind of wisdom to mankind. . . .

"In Christianity the perception of truth has become secondary to and dependent upon theological and mythological dogma, whereas to the pagan it was primary and free."

"What if the Christian scheme, by its very hardness and unreasonableness, should throw open the door to a divine attribute of mercy to which the human heart can cling as it can never quite cling to the inexorable God of Plato's philosophy? . . .

"In the end it may turn out that the Christian dogma, or myth if you prefer, lends to the idea of Providence a depth of meaning which is in the highest degree divine, yet which reason of itself cannot fathom."


Paul Elmer More The Religion of Plato, 1921

     What a pity that thinkers such as Augustine and these three modern scholars can attain great heights in understanding the Hermetic and Platonic embodiments of the Perennial Tradition yet feel the necessity to fall back upon a dogmatic adherence to orthodox Christianity which runs completely counter to the Higher Wisdom.

     A corrupt and self-serving power-system calling itself Christianity has lost all knowledge of Jesus's secret Perennialist teachings. However, the hidden, inner teachings of Jesus are still available to persons who go through the discipline of rediscovering the source, as mystics throughout the centuries have proved in their lives and writings.


__________

¹ Adolf von Harnack, Marcion: the Gospel of the Alien God,
pp. 4, 5

² Ibid., p. 8

³ Ibid., p. 22

⁴ Esoteric Christians, such as the Valentinians, cite as authentically Pauline only the following writings: Romans, I and I Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Phillipians, Colossians, I Thessalonians, and Hebrews