Humility and Love

 Humility and love are considered two of the primary Christian virtues. They are present in other religions, of course, but not emphasised to the same degree. It is this insistence on humility and love that sometimes gets Christianity accused of being an effeminate religion that promotes a slave morality, a religion that makes men less manly.

But what if there was a deeper reason behind this? What if the emphasis on these two virtues was because Christianity was a religion intended for a masculine people with a strong sense of self? Then, far from being an effeminate religion, it would be a spiritual corrective, something that counterbalanced innate tendencies and raised the qualities of its destined group of people to a spiritual plane. Christianity is often claimed to be a universal religion but really for most of its existence it has been a European one. Even the near Easterners and North Africans of its early days had a strong European component in their makeup, and for the bulk of the last 2,000 years Christianity has been an almost exclusively European religion, lived and developed by people of European origin wherever they might be in the world.

Religions are not the same but most have similar recommendations for behaviour. None, though, stress humility and love as Christianity does, and certainly not the Judaic religion from which Christianity emerged. I believe that Christianity was always intended for the European people, and though these people adapted it for their purposes, the core of it was fundamental. Firstly, the focus on Christ the resurrected Son of God, and secondly, the essential teachings of humility and love. These were there partly because they are true, that goes without saying, but also because they could temper the warrior spirit of the Europeans and transform that into a spiritual energy. The blood stained sword of battle becomes St Michael's gleaming sword of light. St Michael may be an archangel but he is also a chieftain or war leader in the Indo-European style. Warriors become soldiers of God who battle against evil and we see this in various groups throughout the Middle Ages from the Templars onwards. Believers are not just monks who retire from the world. They are also active in the world to a degree you do not see with Hindus or Buddhists or even Muslims. However, their activity is under the aegis of God, and it is the religious focus on humility and love that transforms the fighting mentality of the pagan Europeans into that of a warrior for truth.

The Heliand is an epic poem from the 9th century written in Old Saxon. Heliand means saviour and the poem is a version of the Gospel story that presents Jesus in a form acceptable to the Northern European mind so he is something like a chieftain while his disciples are the band of warriors that surround and support him. For example, the unknown author used the word treuwa to describe faith. This word must be related to our word true and it means faithfulness rather than faith or loyalty rather than belief. So the poet is saying that you are saved by faithfulness to Jesus not simply by believing in him. This would appeal to the pagan mindset of the time much more and, to my way of thinking, is a better way of describing how spiritual transformation may be brought about. 

I mention this to show the type of person early Christianity had to deal with and, so to speak, bring to the table.  If Jesus had been presented as a soft pacifist who was captured and crucified by his enemies that would not be appealing, but show him as a king and warrior who voluntarily underwent torture and death to redeem his men and you make him worthy of being followed and, if necessary, of dying for. Once your leader is revealed as a valiant hero you are more open to his teachings of humility and love.

 The trouble now is that humility and love have been weaponised and used to undermine a more complete or properly developed spiritual consciousness. The victim becomes the hero and the hero the oppressor. Humility and love are certainly primary spiritual virtues but so are wisdom and strength, and the former must be seen in the context of the latter if you are to reach a true spiritual state of being. The soft virtues without the hard ones become spiritually corrosive.

Christ came as the revealer of divine love. He, the greatest of all, humbled himself, allowing himself to be killed on the cross, a shameful end. His teaching of humility and love is the key that opens the door to heaven. But that does not mean that we should focus on these to the exclusion of other qualities which are equally important. Besides, all real love derives from love of God which is love of truth so you cannot use supposed love to deny truth as often happens in these times. As for humility, that is only there to remove pride. It is not a matter of encouraging weakness but points out that true strength is in God.

Humility and love were enjoined on the Europeans not because of any defects they might have but to balance their positive qualities which were to do with a developed sense of the individual self. This is then lifted up to become a creative contributor to spiritual life. The European type is not interested in passive absorption into oneness but wants to be an active participant in the glories of creation, but for that to be his ego must be made clean. Hence humility and love.

Who Was St John?

 Christine Hartley (1897-1985) was a pupil of Dion Fortune and an important figure in the revival of the Western Mystery Tradition. In later life she even wrote a book with that title. There, nestled among stories of Merlin and Arthur and the Tuatha da Danaan and the Druids, there is a short chapter called St John the Kelt. When I first read this many years ago I felt that rush of recognition you experience when something you knew but don't know you knew breaks through into the realm of conscious thought. It made complete sense.

Christine Hartley gives some reasons for this, on the face of it, unlikely assertion, and while they are plausible they certainly don't prove that the beloved apostle really was a Celt. But that is besides the point for this is more an inner plane reality than something that is factually true in the outer world - which is not to say it is not outwardly true as well. She says that the original Celts came from the mountains around Ararat and Persia and migrated westwards, but that there may have been some who remained behind at various stages of the journey. I don't think this is currently accepted by modern scholars but the Celtic people were certainly travellers and there is no reason why some may not have ended up in the Holy Land. More to the point, she says that the Celt is a mystic who thinks symbolically. He is a poet and a dreamer. His spirituality is shot through with magic and mystery, and his view of the created world is that it still shines with God's glory if you look at it right. All of this is in St John. None of it is in the rest of the New Testament nor is it part of the Jewish religious temperament which is based on law and the hard reality of this world. 

St John's Gospel and the Book of Revelation stand apart from everything else in the Bible. Their spiritual approach is mystical in a way that makes other parts of the Bible seem prosaic and earthbound. They glisten with an inner light that is typically Celtic. The imagery of the Apocalypse, its expansive visionary quality and prophetic fire, might have partial roots in the Book of Daniel but, as Christine Hartley says, "Here is the poetry and imagery of the Kelt from the first word to the last - the whole of the great Vision lies before us in a glowing tapestry of Angels and Jewels and Riders upon Horses...so superbly described...that it is almost possible to catch a glimpse of the reality that lies behind them".

Nowhere in traditional Jewish writing is there a sense of the spiritual nature of God one finds in the opening words of St John's Gospel. This is unprecedented and separates him from the other Apostles who, for all their qualities, seem dull and heavy in comparison, unable to transcend the material nature of the world and see spirit in the pure form conveyed by St John. And then, as Christine Hartley points out,  John "invariably writes 'The Jews', as though they were to him foreigners" implying that he is, at the very least, from another background.

Then you have the traditional representation of St John. Obviously, the images we have of him and St Peter and Jesus himself were not drawn from nature, but they might have come from oral tradition and, if we accept that Christianity is a divinely inspired religion, we should have no difficulty in believing that these images could also have been inspirational in origin. Peter is always a burly, bearded, rather fierce man of passion and energy, practical and tough, and somewhat bullish. St John is almost the opposite. He is youthful, sensitive and often fair-haired. A dreamy, almost ethereal quality comes from his pictures as in this one from the 19th century. This is a Celtic poet.

If Christianity was destined to spread beyond the Jewish world, as we must assume it was, then it would make sense to have a non-Jew as one of Jesus's closest disciples, someone who would then write about him from the perspective of an outsider to the very insular Jewish world. This writing would appeal more to the imagination of the intended audience and help bring them on board with the new, what was intended to be, universal religion. Its internal content and unstated but inherent cultural signatures would resonate with them and help make Christianity a European religion not a Jewish one which was its destiny.

None of this can be proved as the world seeks proof but I maintain that on the level of myth and intuition it shines out with the clarity of real truth. St John was the primary medium through whom the Christian message was transmitted to the Indo-European people, and he was one of them. The Christ he revealed was the warrior king of Revelation, the Lord and Ruler of all Creation whose face shines with the glory of the sun, the incarnation of a solar God much more than the Old Testament Jehovah.

If You Do What is Right You Can Never Lose

Naive, sentimental, careless, self-hating, jaded, nihilistic, decadent, downright stupid, all these and more are words that can be used to describe the current state of the West which has signed its death warrant with its embrace of mass immigration. Certain sections of the populace are realising this and refusing to be cowed by the usual epithets of racism and fascism that are thrown around to shut down serious debate and reflection. There are even calls for deportations in England and the USA.

But what if there really were deportations on a mass scale which may seem unlikely at present but is theoretically possible? Where would the West be then? Would it have solved its problems? It might redress the overwhelming of the indigenous population by alien people with very different priorities and loyalties, something that is apparent as their numbers increase so removing any need to assimilate. However, without a serious spiritual revival the countries of the West would simply be back to where they were 30 or 40 years ago with all the spiritual sicknesses they had then. They might have saved themselves as ethnicities, and even from potential civil wars, but they would be still suffering from all the problems that brought them to where they currently are.The faults, both spiritual and intellectual, that caused their current plight would still be in place and their state would be little better.

Things have come to such a pass that no secular approach can put off the day of reckoning for the West. Intelligent political action would bring some benefits but cannot address a more deep-seated malaise. At the same time, it is certainly better to try to do something even if you think that will only scratch the surface of the problem. Defeatism is weakness by another name.

Nevertheless, the truth is civilisations run their course, and ours has. We still have choices though. We can go with the decay, be part of it, or we can see it and resist it even if we know this resistance may be too late because the rot is too deep. Even if that is the case there is still much to play for in spiritual terms. Outer circumstances will be what they are but fighting against them, even if that is only within your own soul, will bring results. In fact, for most people the focus should be inwards. The benefit of living at a time of spiritual collapse such as now is that by standing apart from it you fortify your soul. You develop your spiritual muscles by having to swim against the tide. In a Golden Age you are spiritual by default. In a Dark Age you must earn your spirituality but that means it is yours and cannot be lost.

However, watch that word spiritual. One of the problems of living in an age of materialism and atheism is that when people do turn to the spiritual they often turn to all kinds of false spiritualities, and now there are many. As alway, it is your motivation that matters. A pure heart and a love of truth will guide you to the right place. If you seek the spiritual for personal benefit, you will not be so guided and may end up down one of the many blind alleys that seem to promise enlightenment, wisdom and power but only offer shallow imitations of these things. 

Is it worth fighting when you know you are going to lose? Absolutely it is, because although you may not gain the outer victory, if you fight for truth you cannot lose. The victory will be in your own soul. Furthermore, resisting darkness creates a light of its own which light will shine out for others, inspiring them to fight and gain their own inner victories. The outer always passes but the inner remains. If you fight for truth, ultimate victory is assured.

The moral of this story is that ongoing decline is inevitable because of the nature of these times but that does not mean we should do nothing to try to arrest decline. It may be that we plant the seeds for eventual rebirth. 

Christ is Qualitatively Different to Every Other Spiritual Being

 It cannot be denied that every serious religion has produced its share of saintly men and women, and also that bad things have been done in the name of every religion. In both cases some more than others but still the point stands. Does this mean that every religion is equally valid and that they all come from God and have the same divine stamp of approval? That they simply represent different expressions of divine truth and are intended for different groupings of people?

My answer to this is a definite no. There is a hierarchy in religion as there is in everything else and top of the hierarchy is Christianity. That is because Christ is the one perfect divine revelation because he is indeed the Son of God and Saviour of Mankind.

Most religions probably have some kind of divine input and if they don't at the beginning then they become influenced by truth from on high as they develop and grow. I say most not all because some now passed and more localised are clearly demonic in origin. But of the great religions in the world which have spread significantly beyond their point of origin I would say all contain in part the presence of God. He can be seen, again in part, through the window of the religion.

However, this presence is always veiled except in the case of Christ where it is seen directly. This is because Christ was not a prophet or avatar or incarnated spiritual being of some kind sent from God, all of which are in some degree limited if not contaminated by appearing in the world of matter. Christ was the pure essence of God and there was no limitation or contamination in him. This is what without sin means. He was the naked truth of spirit shining directly, unimpeded by matter. And his teaching was twofold. First, there was the basic teaching which in many ways was not dissimilar to other spiritual teaching even if it was more direct and to the point. But then, and more importantly, there was his person. Christ taught through the medium of his person. He was (and is) the truth, and when he said no man comes to God except through him that is also the truth.

Now, Christ can appear in non-Christian religions through inhabiting with his spirit aspects of those religions, and this is why members of those religions can become saints if they follow the Christ-inhabited aspects of their religion. But, even so, this is not as direct an approach as through the image of Christ that has come down to us through scripture, tradition and art, all divinely inspired. But Christ also lives or can live in our hearts and anyone can meet him there if they open themselves up to his holy person. This then transforms the individual from the worldly material self to a spiritual being. Furthermore, it is the only thing that can do that.

Christ is qualitatively different to every other spiritual being because they partake of him but he only partakes of himself.