At its beginning, Christianity was platonic or unifying, to say monistic, but this doesn’t mean that Jesus and his disciples or the pioneers of the Gospel of the time had studied these philosophies within the concepts of Plato or Plotinus. In fact, every man who overcomes a certain barrier on the pilgrimage of his inner evolution toward God and to the spiritual world, even if he completely ignores the Platonic or Neoplatonic world, spontaneously leaves the terrain of intellectualist dualism and drives himself deeper into the marvelous universe of spiritual unification. It is that dualism, representing a lower degree of spiritual experience, is incompatible with the higher degree on this pilgrimage, which necessarily culminates in complete unification, since integral truth is unifying, while half-truth is separating, dualistic or pluralistic.
One is the essence; many are the appearances. One is the total Truth, many are partial truths, or even untruths.
Francis of Assisi, one of the most Christlike men the world knows, is regarded by the inexperienced as a “pantheist Christian” - why? Because he spoke to plants, insects, birds, fish, wolves, the sun, the moon, and the stars, calling them his brothers and sisters, sons and daughters of the Father of heaven; shortly before his death, he added to his magnificent poem, known as the “Canticle of the Sun”, another verse inviting “Sister Death” to sing praises to God as well. It is that this seer of supreme Reality, superior to all dogmas and all human theologies, saw God intuitively in all things, and saw all things in God - not as a poetic fiction, but as an objective reality. For him it was not a gentle sentimental reverie, as with certain poets, but it was a true worship in spirit and in truth that Francis of Assisi rendered to God on the altars of divinity erected in the midst of nature.
It is said that the idea of monism destroys the horror of sin, but if so, the great mystic of Assisi must have been one of the greatest sinners, since in him intellectualist dualism had ended in the most complete spiritual unification. True Christian and evangelical monism are the only factor that has the ability to inspire man with a deep and lasting aversion to evil, to the point of making him free from sin.
Augustine of Hippo, who tried so hard to exchange his subconscious and normal Platonism for a conscious and artificial Aristotelianism, never attempted to falsify his naturally Christian soul; in badly guarded moments the cry of his divine unity breaks out from the depths of his spiritual Self, temporarily suffocated by the dualism of his theology. Above all in his magnificent “Soliloquies”, where the great genius dares to be himself, he again naively becomes the disciple of the Gospel. One day when he asks God, “Where were you when I was living in my sins”, and the divine voice answered him, “I was in the midst of your soul” to which the ecclesiastical theologian, not the evangelical Christian, cries out strangely, “How could you, Lord, infinite Holiness, be within me, the greatest sinner in the world?” And the same voice inside answers: “I was always present within you, but you were always absent from me.”
In the end of his life, Augustine summed up all his religious experiences in this very brief and immense prayer: “Deus, noverim te ut noverim me!” (May I know you, my God, so that you may know me!). In due course, he also reverses the sentence, praying: May I know myself, that I may know you, Lord! For this naturally Christian soul knew that, knowing the truth about God, he knew the truth about the Self, and vice versa, since God is the true spiritual essence of the Self. Just as Francis of Assisi saw the divine essence in all plants, insects, birds, animals and man, Augustine also intimately knew that God is the deep essence of man, that the kingdom of God is within man; when man ignores this kingdom of God within him, he is a sinner; when man discovers God and takes it as a guide and norm of life, man is a saint; is reborn by the spirit, divested himself of the “Adamic man” and dressed himself as a “Christlike man”, becoming a “new creature in Jesus.”
When man overcomes his present dualistic-theological period, he will be evangelically unifying again, and much more intensely than were the Christians of the time of the catacombs, because the painful experiences of so many centuries of theological-intellectual dualism will close the way to relapse into intellectual Satanism, firmly grounded in spiritual Christianity.
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