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(p. 16)
V.
The Manifoldness of the Sense of Scripture
The Bible contains, moreover (as will be found on reference to Cruden’s Concordance under the various forms of the words “wisdom,” “knowledge,” and “understanding”) numerous passages which, by insisting on the necessity of comprehending the secret sense of Scripture, imply at once the existence of such sense and the possibility of understanding it. And the same authority enumerates no less than five different ways in which Scripture should be interpreted, calling them the Grammatical, the Historical or Literal, the Allegorical or Figurative, the Analogical, and the Tropological or Moral. Even this, however, is not an exhaustive list, since it fails to include the really intuitional sense, and that which is the inmost and divine sense especially intended, and is the sense which constitutes the Gnosis, or body of doctrine of which the Christ is the fulfilment and personal demonstration. It is this doctrine which – lying buried deep for its safety sake in Scripture – is called by Jesus “the law and the prophets,” “Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” the “Mysteries of the kingdom of heaven,” the “knowledge” – Gnosis – of which Ecclesiasticism
(p. 17)
had taken away the key; and throughout the Bible, the “law” and “word of God.” It is the doctrine known from the remotest times to all initiates of divine mysteries – for not all mysteries are divine – as the Hermetic Gnosis, and declared by the Rabbins of the Kabala to have first been delivered by God to Adam in Paradise, and re-delivered to Moses on Sinai. It is the doctrine to rescue which from the “Egypt” of an Ecclesiasticism become wholly corrupt, and to transplant it into conditions favourable to its preservation and realisation, Moses led his people into the wilderness. It is the doctrine the restoration of which through the same faculty by which it has ever been, or can be, discerned, Scripture repeatedly declares will yet be the means of the world’s regeneration, describing the time and the conditions of such restoration as precisely those which now are. And it is the doctrine the recognition of the re-delivery of which in our own day, and the promulgation of which, constitute the reason for being and the mission of the Esoteric Christian Union.
Now, concerning the interior meaning and manifold sense of holy writ, the New Interpretation discourses as follows: –
All Scriptures which are the true Word of God have a dual interpretation, the intellectual and the intuitional, the apparent and the hidden.
For nothing can come forth from God save that which is fruitful.
As is the nature of God, so is the Word of God’s mouth.
The letter alone is barren; the spirit and the letter give life.
But that Scripture is the more excellent which is exceeding fruitful and brings forth abundant signification.
For God is able to say many things in one as the perfect ovary contains many seeds in its chalice.
(p. 18)
Therefore there are in the Scriptures of God’s Word certain writings which, as richly yielding trees, bear more abundantly than others in the self-same holy garden.
And one of the most excellent is the history of the generation of the heavens and the earth.
For therein is contained in order a genealogy, which has four heads, as a stream divided into four branches, a word exceeding rich.
And the first of these generations is that of the Gods.
The second is that of the kingdom of heaven.
The third is that of the visible world.
And the fourth is that of the Church of Christ. (1)
NOTES
(18:1) Clothed with the Sun, II, 3.
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