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(p. 23)

CAPÍTULO V

 

            BUT the Pantheism which constitutes the esoteric and real doctrine of the Bible is not that which ordinarily passes under that name. For it is definable in this wise: all things are God in virtue of their constituent principles; but all things are not God in the condition of God. This is to say that, while God is Being, Being is God only when in a state of perfection.

            The limitation is due to creation. Creation represents and occurs by means of the projection – mystically called the fall – of the divine substance into conditions and limitations, and, without such fall or projection, could not be. For creation, which is manifestation, involves and implies degrees and opposites and contrasts. And occurring necessarily in time and space, and being conditioned by these, it is necessarily gradual. And whereas these limitations of what in itself is absolutely good are the cause of “evil,” and arise through matter, matter is the cause of evil. But this is not to say that matter is itself evil. On the contrary, matter is the mode of manifestation of spirit, and spirit does not become evil by becoming manifest. The idea of a purely spiritual evil involves a contradiction of terms.

            In thus making spirit the one original being, and evil the result of the limitation of spirit, the Bible vindicates the logical superiority of its philosophy over that which, failing to discover a sufficiently comprehensive unity with which to begin the table of numbers, begins it with a duality by supposing two original self-subsistent principles which are in opposition to each other – one of good, and one of evil.

            Nevertheless, the original one of the Bible is a duality as well as a unity, but in a way that has escaped recognition alike by Orthodoxy and by its opponents, to the utter failure of both parties to comprehend the doctrine, at once supplementary and complementary, of the

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trinity. For this, too, like other ecclesiastical doctrines, represents, in its proper and intended sense, a necessary and self-evident truth. But while the doctrines, both of the unity and trinity of original being, have always found recognition, however unintelligently, the doctrine of the duality has been entirely suppressed or ignored. None the less is it of such supreme importance that without it neither the Bible nor Christianity, nor anything else in heaven or on earth, can be comprehended aright. And the wise of old, by whom it was originally discerned and formulated, looked forward to the world’s recognition of it as the commencement and cause of a new and better age than any that had preceded it; and, what vastly enhances its interest for us, they specified this precise epoch of ours as that wherein it would first find promulgation and recognition. Meanwhile, for its safekeeping until the human consciousness should be ripe and competent for its reception, they concealed it – according to mystical usage – beneath symbolical expressions, calling it, among others, the doctrine of the “Woman,” and the age of its recognition and practical adoption the “Woman’s Age.” This was, first, because, being the doctrine of substance, they recognised substance as the feminine principle of being; and, next, because only when man knows of what he consists will he so order his life as to enable him to realise his highest potentialities.

            Now, as has already been intimated, it is not the Bible, but Orthodoxy, that is responsible for the definition of creation as the making of something out of nothing. It is true that prior to creation there was no thing; but this is not to say there was nothing, and it could by no possibility be nothing. (1) For before the beginning of things there must be the potentiality of things. Things are not conceivable of as self-subsistent. Only the unlimited, unindividuated, and homogeneous can be also the eternal. And whatever fulfils this description is God. Hence, for the Bible, God is the potentiality of all that has been, that is, and that can be, and of God’s energy and substance all things

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consist. Or, as the Bible puts it, “In Him we live and move and have our being; and of His fulness we have all received.”

            Now, these two, energy and substance, are the two terms of the duality regarded by the Bible as subsisting in the unity of original being, and by virtue of which creation alone is possible. For the Bible recognises creation, which – be it always remembered – is manifestation, as occurring through generation – as when it speaks of “the generations of the heavens and of the earth,” or worlds spiritual and material. And generation is not of one, but of twain, the twain subsisting in the one, as the two sexes in one humanity. Energy and substance, moreover, are, by their nature, respectively of masculine and feminine potency; He is the “father,” and She is the “mother.” But in themselves they are unmanifest, no matter what the plane of activity concerned, the invisible or the visible, and can be known only through their mutual product, expression, or – to use the Bible term – their “Word” or “Son.” Through this alone it is that what in itself is unmanifest, and, therefore, unknowable and unknown, becomes manifest, knowable, and known; a truth enunciated in the saying ascribed to the typical Man Regenerate, or “born again of water and of the spirit” – that is, of substance and energy in their pure and, therefore, divine condition: “No man cometh to the Father but by me. He that hath seen me hath seen the Father also”; the term Father, or celestial energy, implying also the Mother, or celestial substance. And as this law holds good for every plane or sphere of being, unmanifest or manifest, it follows that every entity which is manifest is manifest through the evolution of its trinity. And these three – energy, substance, and their resultant expression, or phenomenon – are not three entities, but one entity. Such and so simple is the explanation of the doctrine which – representing a necessary and self-evident truth – the Church has exalted as an incomprehensible mystery, and the Agnostics – on the strength of the Church’s presentation of it – have rejected off-hand as a monstrous absurdity, without taking the trouble to look deeper.

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            It is true that the doctrine of the Trinity as thus formulated is not that insisted on by Orthodoxy and rejected by Agnosticism. But it differs from this only by reason of its representing a prior stage in thought. Bent on withholding, if not ignorant of, the doctrine of substance, Orthodoxy has merged the feminine principle of being in the masculine, and, calling the two combined the “Father,” has made this the first person, and the “Son” the second, and completed the Trinity by taking into it as third person the mode of Deity called the Holy Ghost or Spirit; this being the theological term for original being when passing from passivity into activity for the purpose of manifestation, whether in creation or redemption. By the Holy Ghost, then, is meant Deity dynamic, or in action, as distinguished from Deity static, or in repose; and that the procession of this “person” is said to be from the Father (really Father-Mother) through the Son (1) is because the latter represents the evolution of its trinity indispensable to the manifestation of any entity. And whereas creation occurs by self-segmentation, and this is the principle of generation, God is truly describable as the “Father-Mother Almighty of whose substance are the generations of the heavens and the earth,” or worlds spiritual and material. (2)

 

NOTES

 

(24:1) See Appendix, p. 79.

(26:1) The ecclesiastical student will recognise in this presentation of the Trinity the reconciliation of the difference between the Greek and Latin Churches – a difference which could not have arisen but for the suppression of the feminine element in Deity. Both are right in that which they affirm. The Churches have further ministered to unintelligibility by their omission to distinguish between the Trinities of the unmanifest and the manifest – an omission the result of which has been to identify the Christ who, as the “Son” in the Trinity within man, is called “our Lord,” with the Adonai, who, as the “Son” in the Trinity of the unmanifest, is called “the Lord,” of whom the Christ is the counterpart or correspondence. The doctrine involved in these matters, though recondite, is none the less absolutely logical and indefeasible, every step being as sure and necessary as that of a mathematical demonstration. And the only sense in which it is a “mystery” is that of its belonging to an interior or “mystical” region of thought and experience. – E.M.

(26:2) See further on this subject the letter, dated 11th October, 1891, of Edward Maitland, printed in the Appendix, p. 70.