The message of Christ Jesus begins to enter, at this dawn of the 21st century, in the mature age of its Christlike form, after having gone through a long period of childhood and adolescence of theological Christianity.
What Jesus said, during the period of the pagan barbarism of the Roman Empire and the Jewish ritualism of Israel's synagogue, was not duly considered by that spiritually childish humanity. Only one or another intuitive spirit has attained the grandeur of comprehending the message aimed at spiritually adult humanity.
It is of the highest metaphysics and has not yet been comprehended. For this reason, the spiritual masters decided to present the cosmic metaphysics of the Gospel in the form of a theological pedagogy, aiming to moralize spiritually ignorant man. God, Christ, man, life after death... everything was divulged in childish terms, “milk for children”, as Paul of Tarsus would say.
Above all, the ideology of redemption or salvation appeared in the form of children's pedagogy: Satan, the anti-God, made man fall into sin, and Christ, the Son of God, came to free man from the power of the anti-God. Man's perdition came from external circumstances or alien factors; consequently, redemption must also come from this way.
It so happens that during these more than 20 centuries, there have always been spiritual geniuses who anticipated future centuries and glimpsed the divine soul of Christ's message.
Lately, more and more men are emerging who, beyond theological Christianity, glimpse the spiritual Christlike form. More and more happens the yearning for a direct experience of God rather than a simple belief in doctrines about God.
This intuition is that of a reduced spiritual elite compared to the mass of those who cannot overcome the traditional belief, for this elite of Christendom knows that redemption is self-redemption; it is Christ-redemption, which is redemption by the inner Christ who is present in every human being.
According to the Gospel, this self-redemption consists of awakening the consciousness of Christ and living following this experience.
Ecclesiastical theologies even today profess one or another form of redemption by external factors when the Gospel of Christ only knows self-redemption. One sector of Christianity teaches redemption through sacred objects and formulas, which are still reminiscent of the ancient “mysteries” of the Roman empire, whose centres were Delphi, Eleusis, the Temples of Isis and Osiris, the Orphics, the Pythagoreans, etc. It was a general belief in paganism that certain esoteric rites conferred purity and sanctity to a man when administered by reputable persons.
Another sector of Christendom, contaminated by the synagogue's ideology, opted for redemption by blood, like that of the “scapegoat” who was humanized in the person of Jesus. In clergy theology, a bloodthirsty God, offended by man's sins, demanded as a reconciliation payment the blood of an innocent being, whether animal or a sinless man; in any case, always a redemption by external factors.
From the beginning, certain words of Jesus were interpreted in this sense: of sacramental redemption, or redemption by blood, even though Christ Jesus himself proclaimed only self-redemption, that is, purification and sanctification of man by the spirit of God who in him inhabits.
Ultimately, all clerical theologies from all sectors of life admit redemption by the blood of others. They differ only as to how this blood is applied to man; for some, this application is made through sacramental objects; for others, it is made by an act of faith or belief in the blood of others.
Thomas Aquinas, considered the greatest Christian theologian, wrote that a single drop of Jesus' blood would redeem humanity from all crimes. Fortunately, at the end of his life, the famous theologian recanted, saying that everything he had written was “straw”, meaning useless writings!
All these difficult interpretations revolve around the age-old problem of human nature: what is man?
In the 4th and 5th centuries of the Christian Era, two theologians, Augustine the African and Pelagius, the British monk who lived in Rome, engaged in a violent mental duel over how redemption took place: Pelagius defended redemption by the power of human free will, while Augustine advocated redemption by the power of divine grace; God saves man, man can only be lost by himself, but he cannot be saved by himself.
All these difficult interpretations revolve around the age-old problem of human nature: what is man?
In the 4th and 5th centuries of the Christian Era, two theologians, Augustine the African and Pelagius, the British monk who lived in Rome, engaged in a violent mental duel over how redemption took place: Pelagius defended redemption by the power of human free will, while Augustine advocated redemption by the power of divine grace; God saves man, man can only be lost by himself, but he cannot be saved by himself.
Possibly, all this controversy between the two Christian theologians, which marked an epoch and motivated extensive discussions and Councils, was based on a misunderstanding or ignorance about the nature of man. If Pelagius understood redemption by the human ego, Augustine could not accept that redemption. But if Pelagius understood the essential and divine Self as redeemer, he agreed with the thinking of the African philosopher. Unfortunately, the two never clearly defined themselves what they meant by "man". The child, as a rule, obeys the instructions of others; the autonomy of his free will guide only the adult man. In other words, the spiritually infantile man can only give credit to redemption by external factors, while the spiritually mature man comprehends an autonomous self-redemption.
The man with a certain degree of mental reason admits both the man-sinner and the man-redeemer, for he knows the bipolarity of human nature.
The parable of the talents is a dazzling apotheosis of the possibility of man's self-redemption. The first two servants - the one with the five and the one with the two talents - created their own values by their free will and are called “good and faithful servants”, who entered “the joy of their master”; they rationalized their potential, redeeming themselves. However, the third servant, though self-redeeming, was not self-redeemed and is called a “bad and lazy servant.”
In the parable of the vine, “...if you abide in me, and my words abide in you, you will ask for what you want, and it will be granted”, appears the inner Christ as the redeemer of the man who made conscious this divine Self and lived in accordance with it.
The “first and greatest of all the commandments”, redemption and sanctification of man, is attributed to the mystical conscience revealed in ethical experience; and in these “two commandments” consist all the “law and the prophets”, in the redemption or realization of the integral man. Jesus does not mention in any word a sacramental redemption or redemption by his blood as if it were an elixir of redemption, and that it could spiritualize the soul; for him, all redemption is a self-redemption through divine experience and human experience, through the mystique of vertical love for the Father (first commandment) revealed by the ethics of horizontal love for the Father's children (second commandment).
At the beginning of the 4th century, Christian theologies were born. And, as almost 90% of primitive Christianity was made up of barbarian peoples and slaves of the Roman Empire, the spiritual leaders were forced to adapt the great truths of the message of Christ Jesus to the mentality of these beginners in things of the spirit. Since then, the word “Father” has been taken fundamentally in the hominal sense, albeit highly sublimated. And from this concept of God as a person came the idea of man's redemption by external factors.
In this comparison, one can comprehend the image of clerical theology of this redemption: God felt offended by sinful man. The debtor was insolvent, unable to pay his debt to the divine creditor. Then the only man without debt appeared and wrote a cheque favouring the debtor humanity. The redemption price was his blood, offered to a God who only accepted reconciliation through this practice. The blood of the “scapegoat” of Israel's synagogue was then replaced by the blood of the one sinless man. Since the cheque for the blood of Jesus is of infinite value, all the sins of humankind are paid for by it. Every man can endorse this cheque for himself and thus free himself from his debt to God.
The way to endorse this cheque differs from theology to theology: for some, this endorsement is done through sacraments; for others, it is by an act of faith. Anyway, it is redemption by external factors because the debt-payer is not the man himself but an alien factor.
In a way, this practice can be considered the purchase of indulgences framed by the Congregation of Indulgences, created by Pope Clement VIII during the Middle Ages.
This theory of redemption by ecclesiastical theologians suffers from several untenable assumptions:
1)- Admit that God can be offended – when being offended supposes the petty mentality of the ego; the more spiritually elevated a being is, the less offended he feels. Men, like Mahatma Gandhi, have gone so far as to ignore any offence.
2)- This probable impossibility of self-redemption supposes that man is entirely evil, which no philosophy or psychology admits since man is a sinner only in his human ego but redeemer in his divine Self.
3)- It is absurd to suppose that man, endowed with free will, can be redeemed by a factor alien to himself, which would be the total denial of man's spiritual autonomy.
Every achievement, redemption or salvation, essentially consists of Prayer and Renunciation, which are the two wings on which the soul rises and frees itself with God.
“Pray always, and never cease to pray” - “Whoever does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple”.
Permanent prayer is the same as cosmo-meditation, Christ-consciousness, or living in cosmic consciousness, without which full realization is impossible.
When Christ Jesus affirms about renunciation, he does not aim at renouncing objective goods, essential to survival and comfort, but rather subjective good, of what goes on in the spirit or thought or the result of personal perceptions, that is, the ego, which is the greatest enemy of the essential and divine Self.
Anyone who has not renounced his personal ego cannot renounce impersonal objects. Even if he renounced them, it would not be a perfect renunciation; it would be a forced and painful one, which is not a guaranteed renunciation. Perfect renunciation is only one that is done with joy and spontaneity. The renunciation of impersonal objects is only possible in the renunciation of the personal ego. Those who have renounced their subjective ego find no difficulty relinquishing objective goods.
No comments:
Post a Comment