In the first three centuries of Christianity of the catacombs, there were no interpretations of Christianity, for every Christian directly experienced and lived this reality. For them, the invasion of the spiritual world into the material world was an objective reality, as they subjectively lived this fact in all its plenitude.
By the beginning of the fourth century, however, this experience of God had cooled to such an extent that a scholastic-theological theory about this great reality became necessary, that is, the same as a fire painted on a canvas, rather than a real fire. And this artificial fire of theology replaces the fire, the lighting, the enlightenment of the authentic Gospel of Jesus, and the Christian world was forced to believe in the reality of this unreal fire on the theological canvas, under penalty of being excommunicated from the church. To enhance the illusion of artificial fire as being real, all the resources of politics, militarism, sociology, psychology, external ritualism, and brute force were invoked, such as the crusades, inquisitions, excommunications, etc. However, the artificial fire of theology did not turn into the real fire of the Gospel. The “heretics”, excommunicated, began to excommunicate those who excommunicated them, and with that, the evangelical cosmos turned into ecclesiastical chaos!
With Constantine the Great, this pseudo-converted emperor, all practices, ritualism, dogmas, precepts emerged in the gospel of the clergy, which ended up becoming a kind of dictatorship over the bodies and souls of devotees, which continues to this day, at least as a dictatorship of souls, since the governments of modern Christian states have denied ecclesiastical theologians the tyranny of bodies.
Already in the 16th century, an attempt at a democratic interpretation of Christianity appears: each individual has the right to know for himself, thanks to his inalienable human rights, what is God, the Christ, eternal life, without the need to question the infallible pontiff of a hierarchical church. But the ecclesiastical democracy of Protestantism ended in religious anarchy because very few men were spiritually mature to find God by themselves and in themselves. What they found was the Lucifer of the ego rather than the Spirit of God because they missed the heart of divine revelation but stopped at the periphery of the intellectual interpretation of the Bible. The theological interpretation of the texts of the Bible prevailed over the mystical experience. And so, the attempt at the democratic interpretation of Christianity failed, as the dictatorial interpretation had failed.
Then appear the eschatological ascetics, who by the way have always existed, that is, people who give themselves to spiritual practices, leading a contemplative life with mortification of the senses, foreseeing the end of the world, and who tried to interpret Christianity as a radical denial of life and the world; the farther away from the world, the closer to God, and vice versa. They tried to transform the world of God into a world without God, or into a God without a world, into a distant, naked and solitary spiritual retreat, where the disillusioned man of the world could fall in love and intoxicate with God, in mystical solitude and perpetual ecstasy.
Others, tired of failures, decided to give up all theological elucubrations and settle for a purely ethical-social Christianity, horizontal, fragmented, superficial, so why investigate the origin of springs, when one can drink their waters at any point in the course? For these, it is enough that the man be good, just, correct, honest, charitable, affable, a friend of all, to be a perfect and integral Christian. The superficiality of humanitarian ethics triumphed over the depth of divine mysticism.
However, the thirstiest souls did not soften within themselves the longing for the mysterious, the nostalgia for the Infinite, the silent clamour of their naturally Christian soul. Souls dissatisfied with the waters derived from everyday ethics climbed the eternal mountains to find out where the source of these waters is located, from which rocks sprang, pure, uncontaminated. And many of these Pathfinders of the Infinite never returned to the plains of the finite; intoxicated by the divine spring, they forgot all human rivers. Others, however, continued to drink from the more or less turbid waters of the rivers of ethics, inexperienced of the water’s pure source.
When, therefore, will the cosmic man appear on Earth? The integral man, the Christlike man, who dispenses the interpretation of Christianity for he experiences it and lives it in all its plenitude and sublimity?
It so happens that this man has already made himself present; he is with us every day until the end of time, full of grace and truth.
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