Chapter IV

THE HISTORICAL CHEIST

We have already spoken, in the first chap-
ter, on the identities existing in all the relig-
ions of the world, and we have seen that out
of a study of these identities in beliefs, sym-
bolisms, rites, ceremonies, histories, and com-
memorative festivals, has arisen a modern
school which relates the whole of these to
a common source in human ignorance, and
in a primitive explanation of natural
phenomena. From these identities have
been drawn weapons for the stabbing of each
religion in turn, and the most effective
attacks on Christianity and on the historical
existence of its Founder have been armed
from this source. On entering now on the
study of the life of the Christ, of the rites of
Christianity, its sacraments, its doctrines,
it would be fatal to ignore the facts
marshalled by Comparative Mythologists.
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Rightly understood, they may be made serv-
iceable instead of mischievous. We have
seen that the Apostles and their successors
dealt very freely with the Old Testament as
having an allegorical and mystic sense far
more important than the historical, though
by no means negating it, and that they did
not scruple to teach the instructed believer
that some of the stories that were apparent-
ly historical were really purely allegorical.
Nowhere, perhaps, is it more necessary to
understand this than when we are studying
the story of Jesus, surnamed the Christ, for
when we do not disentangle the intertwisted
threads, and see where symbols have been
taken as events, allegories as histories, we
lose most of the instructiveness of the nar-
rative and much of its rarest beauty. We
cannot too much insist on the fact that
Christianity gains, it does not lose, when
knowledge is added to faith and virtue, ac-
cording to the apostolic injunction.1 Men
fear that Christianity will be weakened
when reason studies it, and that it is " dan-
gerous " to admit that events thought to be

1 II. S. Peter i. 5.
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The Historical Christ

historical have the deeper significance of the
mythical or mystical meaning. It is, on the
contrary, strengthened, and the student
finds, with joy, that the pearl of great price
shines with a purer, clearer lustre when the
coating of ignorance is removed and its
many colours are seen.

There are two schools of thought at the
present time, bitterly opposed to each other,
who dispute over the story of the great
Hebrew Teacher. According to one school
there is nothing at all in the accounts of His
life save myths and legends — myths and
legends that were given as explanations of
certain natural phenomena, survivals of a
pictorial way of teaching certain facts of
nature, of impressing on the minds of the
uneducated certain grand classifications of
natural events that were important in them-
selves, and that lent themselves to moral
instruction. Those who endorse this view
form a well-defined school to which belong
many men of high education and strong
intelligence, and round them gather crowds
of the less instructed, who emphasise with
crude vehemence the more destructive ele-
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ments in their pronouncements. This school
is opposed by that of the believers in ortho-
dox Christianity, who declare that the whole
story of Jesus is history, unadulterated by
legend or myth. They maintain that this
history is nothing more than the history of
the life of a man born some nineteen cen-
turies ago in Palestine, who passed through
all the experiences set down in the Gospels,
and they deny that the story has any signifi-
cance beyond that of a divine and human
life. These two schools stand in direct an-
tagonism, one asserting that everything is
legend, the other declaring that everything
is history. Between them lie many phases
of opinion generally labelled " freethinking,"
which regard the life-story as partly legend-
ary and partly historical, but offer no defin-
ite and rational method of interpretation, no
adequate explanation of the complex whole.
And we also find, within the limits of the
Christian Church, a large and ever-increas-
ing number of faithful and devout Chris-
tians of refined intelligence, men and women
who are earnest in their faith and religious
in their aspirations, but who see in the Gos-

The Historical Christ

pel story more than the history of a single
divine Man. They allege — defending their
position from the received Scriptures — that
the story of the Christ has a deeper and
more significant meaning than lies on the
surface; while they maintain the historical
character of Jesus, they at the same time
declare that The Christ is more than the
man Jesus, and has a mystical meaning.
In support of this contention they point to
such phrases as that used by S. Paul: "My
little children, of whom I travail in birth
again until Christ be formed in you;"1
here S. Paul obviously cannot refer to a
historical Jesus, but to some forthputting
from the human soul which is to him
the shaping of Christ therein. Again the
same teacher declares that though he had
known Christ after the flesh yet from hence-
forth he would know him thus no more ; 2
obviously implying that while he recognised
the Christ of the flesh — Jesus — there was a
higher view to which he had attained which
threw into the shade the historical Christ.
This is the view which many are seeking in

^al. iv. 19. 2 II. Cor. v. 16.

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our own days, and — faced by the facts of
Comparative Religion, puzzled by the con-
tradictions of the Gospels, confused by prob-
lems they cannot solve so long as they are
tied down to the mere surface meanings of
their Scripture — they cry despairingly that
the letter killeth while the spirit giveth life,
and seek to trace some deep and wide signifi-
cance in a story which is as old as the re-
ligions of the world, and has always served
as the very centre and life of every religion
in which it has reappeared. These strug-
gling thinkers, too unrelated and indefinite
to be spoken of as forming a school, seem to
stretch out a hand on one side to those who
think that all is legend, asking them to ac-
cept a historical basis ; on the other side they
say to their fellow Christians that there is a
growing danger lest, in clinging to a literal
and unique meaning, which cannot be de-
fended before the increasing knowledge of
the day, the spiritual meaning should be
entirely lost. There is a danger of losing
"the story of the Christ," with that thought
of the Christ which has been the support
and inspiration of millions of noble lives in

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The Historical Christ

East and West, though the Christ be called
by other names and worshipped under other
forms; a danger lest the pearl of great price
should escape from our hold, and man be
left the poorer for evermore.

What is needed, in order that this danger
may be averted, is to disentangle the differ-
ent threads in the story of the Christ, and to
lay them side by side — the thread of history,
the thread of legend, the thread of mysti-
cism. These have been intertwined into a
single strand, to the great loss of the
thoughtful, and in distentangling them we
shall find that the story becomes more, not
less, valuable as knowledge is added to it,
and that here, as in all that is basically of
the truth, the brighter the light thrown
upon it the greater the beauty that is re-
vealed.

We will study first the historical Christ ;
secondly, the mythic Christ; thirdly, the
mystic Christ. And we shall find that ele-
ments drawn from all these make up the
Jesus Christ of the Churches. They all en-
ter into the composition of the grandiose

and pathetic Figure which dominates the
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Esoteric Christianity

thoughts and the emotions of Christendom,
the Man of Sorrows, the Saviour, the Lover
and Lord of Men.

The Historical Christ
or Jesus the Healer and Teacher

The thread of the life-story of Jesus is one
which may be disentangled from those with
which it is intertwined without any great
difficulty. We may fairly here aid our
study by reference to those records of the
past which experts can re verify for them-
selves, and from which certain details re-
garding the Hebrew Teacher have been
given to the world by H. P. Blavatsky and
by others who are experts in occult investi-
gation . Now in the minds of many there is apt
to arise a challenge when this word "expert "
is used in connection with occultism.
Yet it only means a person who by special
study, by special training, has accumulated
a special kind of knowledge, and has devel-
oped powers that enable him to give an
opinion founded on his own individual

knowledge of the subject with which he is

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The Historical Christ

dealing. Just as we speak of Huxley as an
expert in biology, as we speak of a Senior
Wrangler as . an expert in mathematics, or
of Lyell as an expert in geology, so we may
fairly call a man an expert in occultism who
has first mastered intellectually certain
fundamental theories of the constitution of
man and the universe, and secondly has de-
veloped within himself the powers that are
latent in everyone — and are capable of being
developed by those who give themselves to
appropriate studies- — capacities which enable
him to examine for himself the more obscure
processes of nature. As a man may be born
with a mathematical faculty, and by train-
ing that faculty year after year may im-
mensely increase his mathematical capacity,
so may a man be born with certain faculties
within him, faculties belonging to the Soul,
which he can develop by training and by
discipline. When, having developed those
faculties, he applies them to the study of the
invisible world, such a man becomes an
expert in Occult Science, and such a man
can at his will reverify the records to which
I have referred. Such reverification is as

i 97

Esoteric Christianity

much out of the reach of the ordinary per-
son as a mathematical book written in the
symbols of the higher mathematics is out
of the reach of those who are untrained in
mathematical science. There is nothing
exclusive in the knowledge save as every
science is exclusive; those who are born
with a faculty, and train the faculty, can
master its appropriate science, while those
who start life without any faculty, or those
who do not develop it if they have it, must
be content to remain in ignorance. These
are the rules everywhere of the obtaining of
knowledge, in Occultism as in every other
science.

The occult records partly endorse the story
told in the Gospels, and partly do not endorse
it; they show us the life, and thus enable
us to disentangle it from the myths which
are intertwined therewith.

The child whose Jewish name has been
turned into that of Jesus was born in Pales-
tine, B.C. 105, during the consulate of Pub-
lius Rutilius Eufus and Gnaeus Mallius
Maxim us. His parents were well-born
though poor, and he was educated in a

128

The Historical Christ

knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures. His
fervent devotion and a gravity beyond his
years led his parents to dedicate him to the
religious and ascetic life, and soon after a
visit to Jerusalem, in which the extraordi-
nary intelligence and eagerness for know-
ledge of the youth were shown in his seeking
of the doctors in the Temple, he was sent to
be trained in an Essene community in the
southern Judaean desert. When he had
reached the age of nineteen he went on to
the Essene monastery near Mount Serbal, a
monastery which was much visited by learn-
ed men travelling from Persia and India
to Egypt, and where a magnificent library
of occult works — many of them Indian of
the Trans-Himalayan regions — had been
established. From this seat of mystic learn-
ing he proceeded later to Egypt. He had
been fully instructed in the secret teachings
which were the real fount of life among the
Essenes, and was initiated in Egypt as a dis-
ciple of that one sublime Lodge from which
every great religion has its Founder. For
Egypt has remained one of the world-
centres of the true Mysteries, whereof all
9 129

Esoteric Christianity

semi-public Mysteries are the faint and far-
off reflections. The Mysteries spoken of in
history as Egyptian were the shadows of the
true things "in the Mount," and there the
young Hebrew deceived the solemn con-
secration which prepared him for the Royal
Priesthood he was later to attain. So super-
humanly pure and so full of devotion was
he, that in his gracious manhood he stood
out pre-eminently from the severe and some-
what fanatical ascetics among whom he had
been trained, shedding on the stern Jews
around him the fragrance of a gentle and
tender wisdom, as a rose-tree strangely
planted in a desert would shed its sweetness
on the barrenness around. The fair and
stately grace of his white purity was round
him as a radiant moonlit halo, and his
words, though few, were ever sweet and
loving, winning even the most harsh to a
temporary gentleness, and the most rigid to
a passing softness. Thus he lived through
nine-and-twenty years of mortal life, grow-
ing from grace to grace.

This superhuman purity and devotion
fitted the man Jesus, the disciple, to become

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The Historical Christ

the temple of a loftier Power, of a mighty,
indwelling Presence. The time had come
for one of those Divine manifestations
which from age to age are made for the
helping of humanity, when a new impulse
is needed to quicken the spiritual evolution
of mankind, when a newr civilisation is
about to dawn. The world of the West was
then in the womb of time, ready for the
birth, and the Teutonic sub-race was to
catch the sceptre of empire falling from the
failing hands of Rome. Ere it started on
its journey a World-Saviour must appear,
to stand in blessing beside the cradle of the
infant Hercules.

A mighty "Son of God 55 was to take flesh
upon earth, a supreme Teacher, "full of
grace and truth " 1— One in whom the Di-
vine Wisdom abode in fullest measure, who
was verily "the Word55 incarnate, Light
and Life in outpouring richness, a very
Fountain of the Waters of Life. Lord of
Compassion and of Wisdom — such was His
name — and from His dwelling in the Secret
Places He came forth into the world of men.

1 S. John i. 14
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Esoteric Christianity

For Him was needed an earthly tabern-
acle, a human form, the body of a man,
and who so fit to yield his body in glad and
willing service to One before whom Angels
and men krw down in lowliest reverence, as
this Hebrew of the Hebrews, this purest and
noblest of "the Perfect," whose spotless
body and stainless mind offered the best that
humanity could bring? The man Jesus
yielded himself a willing sacrifice, "offered
himself without spot " to the Lord of Love,
who took unto Himself that pure form as
tabernacle, and dwelt therein for three years
of mortal life.

This epoch is marked in the traditions em-
bodied in the Gospels as that of the Baptism
of Jesus, when the Spirit was seen "de-
scending from heaven like a dove, and it
abode upon Him,"1 and a celestial voice
proclaimed Him as the beloved Son, to
whom men should give ear. Truly was He
the beloved Son in whom the Father was
well-pleased,2 and from that time forward
"Jesus began to preach,"3 and was that

1 S. John i. 32. 9 S. Matt. iii. 17.

*IMd.y iv. 17.
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The Historical Christ

wondrous mystery, "God manifest in the
flesh"1 — not unique in that He was God,
for: "Is it not written in your law, I said,
Ye are Gods? If he called them Gods, unto
whom the word of God came, and the script-
ure cannot be broken; say ye of Him,
whom the Father hath sanctified and sent
into the world, Thou blasphemest; because
I said, I am the Son of God?"2 Truly
all men are Gods, in respect to the Spirit
within them, but not in all is the Godhead
manifested, as in that well-beloved Son
of the Most High.

To that manifested Presence the name of
"the Christ" may rightly be given, and it
was He who lived and moved in the form
of the man Jesus over the hills and plains
of Palestine, teaching, healing diseases, and
gathering round Him as disciples a few of
the more advanced souls. The rare charm
of His royal love, outpouring from Him as
rays from a sun, drew round Him the suf-
fering, the weary, and the oppressed, and
the subtly tender magic of His gentle wis-
dom purified, ennobled, and sweetened the

1 1. Tim. iii. 16. 2 S. John x. 34-36.

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Esoteric Christianity

lives that came into contact with His own.
By parable and luminous imagery He taught
the uninstructed crowds who pressed around
Him, and, using the powers of the free
Spirit, He healed many a disease by word or
touch, re -in forcing the magnetic energies
belonging to His pure body with the compel-
ling force of His inner life. Rejected by
His Essene brethren among whom He first
laboured — whose arguments against His
purposed life of loving labour are summari-
sed in the story of the temptation — because
he carried to the people the spiritual wisdom
that they regarded as their proudest and
most secret treasure, and because His all-
embracing love drew within its circle the
outcast and the degraded — ever loving in
the lowest as in the highest the Divine Self
— He saw gathering round Him all too
quickly the dark clouds of hatred and sus-
picion. The teachers and rulers of His
nation soon came to eye Him with jealousy
and anger; His spirituality was a constant
reproach to their materialism, His power
a constant, though silent, exposure of their
weaknesSe Three years had scarcely passed

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The Historical Christ

since His baptism when the gathering storm
outbroke, and the human body of Jesus paid
the penalty for enshrining the glorious
Presence of a Teacher more than man.

The little band of chosen disciples whom
He had selected as repositories of His teach-
ings were thus deprived of their Master's
physical presence ere they had assimilated
His instructions, but they were souls of high
and advanced type, ready to learn the Wis-
dom, and fit to hand it on to lesser men.
Most receptive of all was that " disciple
whom Jesus loved," young, eager, and ferv-
id, profoundly devoted to his Master, and
sharing His spirit of all-embracing love.
He represented, through the century that
followed the physical departure of the
Christ, the spirit of mystic devotion that
sought the exstasis, the vision of and the
union with the Divine, while the later great
Apostle, S. Paul, represented the wisdom
side of the Mysteries.

The Master did not forget His promise to
come to them after the world had lost sight
of Him,1 and for something over fifty years

1 S. John xiv. 18, 19.
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Esoteric Christianity-

He visited them in His subtle spiritual body,
continuing the teachings He had begun
while with them, and training them in
a knowledge of occult truths. They lived
together, for the most part? in a retired
spot on the outskirts of Judaaa, attracting
no attention among the many apparently
similar communities of the time, studying
the profound truths He taught them and
acquiring "the gifts of the Spirit "

These inner instructions, commenced
during His physical life among them and
carried on after He had left the body,
formed the basis of the " Mysteries of Jesus,"
which we have seen in early Church His-
tory, and gave the inner life which was the
nucleus round which gathered the hetrogen-
eous materials which formed ecclesiastical
Christianity.

In the remarkable fragment called the
Pistis Sophia^ we have a document of the
greatest interest bearing on the hidden
teaching, written by the famous Valentinus.
In this it is said that during the eleven
years immediately after His death Jesus in-
structed His disciples so far as "the regions

136

The Historical Christ

of the first statutes only, and up to the
regions of the first mystery, the mystery
within the veil."1 They had not so far
learned the distribution of the angelic
orders, of part whereof Ignatius speaks.2
Then Jesus, being "in the Mount5' with His
disciples, and having received His mystic
Vesture, the knowledge of all the regions
and the Words of Power which unlocked
them, taught His disciples further, promis-
ing: ££I will perfect you in every perfection,
from the mysteries of the interior to the
mysteries of the exterior : I will fill you with
the Spirit, so that ye shall be called spirit-
ual, perfect in all perfections." 3 And He
taught them of Sophia, the Wisdom, and of
her fall into matter in her attempt to rise
unto the Highest, and of her cries to the
Light in which she had trusted, and of the
sending of Jesus to redeem her from chaos,
and of her crowning with His light, and
leading forth from bondage. And He told
them further of the highest Mystery the
ineffable, the simplest and clearest of all,

1 Valentinus. Trans, by G. R. S. Mead. Pistis Sophia,
bk. i., 1. * Ante, v. n. *IMd.,W.

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though the highest, to be known by him
alone who utterly renounced the world ; 1 by
that knowledge men became Christs, for
such " men are myself, and I am these
men," for Christ is that highest Mystery.2
Knowing that, men are "transformed into
pure light and are brought into the light."3
And He performed for them the great cere-
mony of Initiation, the baptism " which
leadeth to the region of truth and into the
region of light,9' and bade them celebrate it
for others who were worthy: "But hide ye
this mystery, give it not unto every man,
but unto him [only] who shall do all things
which I have said unto you in my com-
mandments."4

Thereafter, being fully instructed, the
apostles went forth to preach, ever aided by
their Master.

Moreover these same disciples and their
earliest colleagues wrote down from memory
all the public sayings and parables of the
Master that they had heard, and collected
with great eagerness any reports they could

1 Ibid., bk. ii., 218.
3 IMd., 357.

138

^Ibid., 230.
4 Ibid., 377.

The Historical Christ

find, writing down these also, and circulat-
ing them all among those who gradually at-
tached themselves to their small community.
Various collections were made, any member
writing down what he himself remembered,
and adding selections from the accounts of
others. The inner teachings, given by the
Christ to His chosen ones, were not written
down, but were taught orally to those
deemed worthy to receive them, to students
who formed small communities for leading
a retired life, and remained in touch with
the central body.

The historical Christ, then, is a glorious
Being belonging to the great spiritual hier-
archy that guides the spiritual evolution of
humanity, who used for some three years
the human body of the disciple Jesus; who
spent the last of these three years in public
teaching throughout Judaea and Samaria;
who was a healer of diseases and performed
other remarkable occult works; who gath-
ered round Him a small band of disciples
whom He instructed in the deeper truths of
the spiritual life; who drew men to Him by
the singular love and tenderness and the

139

Esoteric Christianity

rich wisdom that breathed from His Per-
son ; and who was finally put to death for
blasphemy, for teaching the inherent Divin-
ity of Himself and of all men. He came to
give a new impulse of spiritual life to the
world ; to re-issue the inner teachings affect-
ing spiritual life; to mark out again the
Barrow ancient way ; to proclaim the exist-
ence of the " Kingdom of Heaven," of the
Initiation which admits to that knowledge
of God which is eternal life ; and to admit a
few to that Kingdom who should be able to
teach others. Bound this glorious Figure
gathered the myths which united Him to
the long array of His predecessors, the
myths telling in allegory the story of all
such lives, as they symbolise the work of the
Logos in the Kosmos and the higher evolu-
tion of the individual human soul.

But it must not be supposed that the work
of the Christ for His followers was over
after He had established the Mysteries, or was
confined to rare appearances therein. That
Mighty One who had used the body of Jesus
as His vehicle, and whose guardian care ex-
tends over the whole spiritual evolution of

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The Historical Christ

the fifth race of humanity, gave into the
strong hands of the holy disciple who had
surrendered to Him his body the care of the
infant Church. Perfecting his human evo-
lution, Jesus became one of the Masters of
Wisdom, and took Christianity under His
special charge, ever seeking to guide it to
the right lines, to protect, to guard and
nourish it. He was the Hierophant in the
Christian Mysteries, the direct Teacher of
the Initiates. His the inspiration that kept
alight the Gnosis in the Church, until the
superincumbent mass of ignorance became
so great that even His breath could not fan
the flame sufficiently to prevent its extin-
guishment. His the patient labour which
strengthened soul after soul to endure
through the darkness, and cherish within
itself the spark of mystic longing, the thirst
to find the Hidden God. His the steady
inpouring of truth into every brain ready to
receive it, so that hand stretched out to
hand across the centuries and passed on the
torch of knowledge, which thus was never
extinguished. His the Form which stood

beside the rack and in the flames of the burn-
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Esoteric Christianity

ing pile, cheering His confessors and His
martyrs, soothing the anguish of their
pains, and filling their hearts with His peace.
His the impulse which spoke in the thunder
of Savonarola, which guided the calm wis-
dom of Erasmus, which inspired the deep
ethics of the God-intoxicated Spinoza. His
the energy which impelled Roger Bacon,
Galileo, and Paracelsus in their searchings
into nature. His the beauty that allured
Fra Angelica and Raphael and Leonardo da
Vinci, that inspired the genius of Michel-
angelo, that shone before the eyes of Murillo,
and that gave the power that raised the
marvels of the world, the Duomo of Milan,
the San Marco of Venice, the Cathedral of
Florence. His the melody that breathed in the
masses of Mozart, the sonatas of Beethoven,
the oratorios of Handel, the fugues of Bach,
the austere splendour of Brahms. His the
Presence that cheered the solitary mystics,
the hunted occultists, the patient seekers
after truth. By persuasion and by menace,
by the eloquence of a S. Francis and by
the gibes of a Voltaire, by the sweet sub-
mission of a Thomas a Kempis, and the

142

The Historical Christ

rough virility of a Luther, He sought to
instruct and awaken, to win into holiness
or to scourge from evil. Through the long
centuries He has striven and laboured, and,
with all the mighty burden of the Churches
to carry, He has never left uncared for or
unsolaced one human heart that crie3 to
Him for help. And now He is striving to
turn to the benefit of Christendom part of
the great flood of the Wisdom poured out
for the refreshing of the world, and He is
seeking through the Churches for some who
have ears to hear the Wisdom, and who will
answer to His appeal for messengers to carry
it to His flock: "Here am I; send me."

143