In the early twenty first century, we find ourselves looking back at the Messiah, in the reverse direction. After the Captivity, the Jews expected a king, someone sent by God, in the times to come, as a sign, and as a saviour. We, by contrast, when we look at Jesus, must hope, that he has already sent the saviour, and for assurance that Jesus was the Messiah. The king has already been, and gone, but I ask God, can you ensure that he was the actual sign and saviour? The question is legitimate, and was asked by St John the Baptist himself, when Christ had already begun his mission (Matt. 11: 2 ff.)
My relationship to God and Christ, where I ask that God will reassure me, that Christ, a man from Galilea, was what his followers and biographers said he was, is conveniently called faith. There is a two-fold emotional and rational approach to Christ, which is what faith is. It is twofold in this way: first, it is necessary to think that God sent Jesus to earth and to combine our ideas and knowledge about him; and second, it is necessary to have confidence that God only did this once, in the form of Jesus of Nazareth.
It is not self-evidently true that Jesus was the Son of the creator of the world. As we saw in the first study of Matthew, Chapters 1 to 7, Matthew was interested in trying to convince the Jews that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah they were all waiting for, and who had been prophesied, toward whom their history had been heading, because it was not and still is not incontrovertible. So, some effort and passion and trust will always be necessary; however, faith in Christ is not just to have faith in an idea. Matthew seems to have thought, that faith is also an approach to the whole of existence itself; faith changes the way the world works and the way we live. In short, it can make miracles happen; and that having faith in something improbable is what makes a Christian, and what makes Christian life different from the lives of pagans. The events which happen to a Christian, and the way he sees existence, is different because of the intensity or firmness of his belief.
Matthew says in two places, in the chapters I am studying today, that Christ could not perform healing miracles, or that miracles could not take place, because of a shortage of faith in the people he was dealing with. First, when he returned to his home village, the people who were familiar with him since his childhood there, doubted that he was the Son of God (Matt. 13: 58), and he was unable to heal them of their illnesses; and in the most striking instance of what faith is claimed to be able to do, we find Peter, afraid of the storm on the sea of Galilea, which rages around his boat, and who sees Christ walking toward the boat across the water; on his own initiative, in an indication of his belief in miracles, Peter sets out to walk on the waves himself, and almost succeeds, but begins to sink and to go under. Christ remarks: “You of little faith, why do you doubt?” (14: 31).
It is therefore necessary to have faith that the story told by Matthew is true; and at a higher level, to believe that Christ is the Son of God, because otherwise, the world remains exactly as it was, and miracles are not possible. But these types of faith are basically the same thing: you have to believe that Christ is the Messiah.
As I have elsewhere said, when reading the later philosophy of David Hume, and his empiricist attitude toward our knowledge of the world, it is not unusual for people, that is to say, everyone from living almost entirely in a state of unjustified faith; Hume held, that it is necessary to have belief in the world itself, if we are to have any knowledge of it, and live in it. When we know that something is true, that knowledge is accompanied by a sort of feeling of conviction, a feeling of familiarity and confidence, but not by absolute certainty. We have a stronger feeling of faith in true statements, than we do about false ones, and this is the only reason we can say we know anything. This is to say, that what we believe in, is what the world is. And reciprocally, what the world is, is what we believe it to be. When I say that the earth is roughly spherical, rather than flat, then I mean, that I have a feeling of assent and belief that it is spherical, and much less assent and faith, in the statement that it is flat.
Likewise, I do not believe that men can walk on water, for empirical reasons drawn from my past experiences. And, yet, if I were a Christian, I would be obliged to believe, that Christ walked on water in this instance, as told by Matthew. Again, I do not believe this is possible for men. However, there is a distinction which makes all the difference here, between this: Men cannot walk on water, and this: Peter can walk on water.
The distinction I am drawing attention to, is the difference between what men in general can do, and what a single individual man can do at a particular time. The activity of faith is personal, and private, and takes place between God and the individual; it is unique and not generic. Christ does not say to all twelve of the disciples: come here, and walk on the waters, you men. It is only one of them that he says this to; and the difference between one and all is incalculable. It is a moment which only Peter and Christ were witness to. And, to my mind, it is not impossible that under these conditions, miracles can or do happen.
Something against nature, so to speak, can happen, in individual instances, to a single individual, where faith is applied. It’s not necessary for me to remind you, that Hume has said, that faith makes the world what it is for us. Because it is apparent to anyone that this is so. The world is no objectively something out there, separate from me, with an iron logic, about which I am totally sure. Being alive, is not a case of being presented with that kind of immutable and trustworthy giant environment. The world is much more intimate and strange than that, for the individual who lives ‘in’ it. And I suppose that, if someone had faith that it is possible for God to make a man to walk on water, then in the right circumstances, that man can do so. Belief in Christ changes the world’s nature, it interferes in the laws governing existence.
I have less than any interest in that brand of thinking or writing, which is very popular among secular and religious writing, where we are told to improve our lives, by having faith; or, to improve our lives by having more belief in ourselves; there is a self-help industry, I am given to understand; and there are industry leaders, and so on, who lecture the reader about how to improve himself, for practical reasons. I’m not interested in that in the least. There is a market, made up of people who want to improve themselves. That is not what I intend to exploit. Beginning on the road toward being a man without sin, to becoming a Son of God as it were, is certainly a road of improvement; but it’s not something desirable for itself, and I couldn’t sell it. There are easier ways of feeling happy, after all, and this is not some pathway to happiness and success among other objectives and other people, as that industry understands them.
In this essay, we will remind ourselves about what is, that is found in the second quarter of Matthew’s gospel account of Christ’s life. It has several episodes, and events with which we are already familiar. I will then go on to look at the way of encouraging faith, which is clearly so important to the Christ with whom Matthew is concerned. Specifically, I am concerned with purifying the mind, and gathering the self together, so that it is ready for understanding what it means, to have faith.
I personally have always tried to take a dispassionate and non-committed attitude toward knowledge and truth. Faith has attracted me as little as any other movement of the heart. Passion is apt to disrupt the mind, and emotions are not something one needs, when studying philosophy, or history. And I have, and still do, approach Christianity and the Gospels of Christ, in the same way: dispassionately, cautiously, considering many things, while carefully coming to any conclusions, before believing in anything.
To believe in Christ is, to make a change to the world’s nature; and I don’t want to alter the nature of my world on the basis of foolish trust. A believer is Jesus must believe in the possibility of miracles, and that God is a personal God who continues to watch this world from afar; who came to earth in the form and character of a man. Somebody who believes these things, believes that he lives in a different kind of world, than somebody who does not believe them.
If I understand what faith is, in its most extreme form, then it is an entirely private matter. It involves a man getting involved in the possibility of miracles, for instance, when, by and large, and truly, and by definition, they are impossible. They are impossible for men in general, but possible in the private circumstances of a single instance. Faith can be held in common, among a Church, and a congregation, or a nation; but extreme faith, which so to speak moves mountains, is only possible between God and an individual. To me, if many people witness a miracle, or more than one, then I am less inclined to consent, that it actually happened. There is a story told, about a very pious and holy saint, who was praying alongside a nun somewhere in Russia; the woman noticed that an angel could be seen praying alongside them, but the saint dismissed her comment, saying that it was not important.
People do not share a life experience, except metaphorically speaking; when a married couple more or less live every moment in common, they still demonstrably, have done so as separate people, and have never been able to truly share anything. It is never the case that there is ever more than one life. Miracles take place between one man and God; naturally, since, there is not really such a thing as a union of two or more people. ‘Society’ or even ‘the Church’ is only metaphorically a real thing at all. These are things which only exist because people consent to them, but not as actual things. And Christ has said as much, about the law and the customs of the Church: they are never as important as a single man: man was not made for the Sabbath; the Sabbath was made for man; likewise, the Church was made for a man, and men were not made for the Church. And having had this conversation with the Pharisees in the synagogue, Christ healed the man with the withered hand, because the rules governing the Sabbath, can be set aside for a moment, in order to save one who is lost.
Faith in Christ is faith in the exception, faith in what is outside nature; is itself against nature, because Christ himself was not nature, and therefore, when we find anyone believing in Christ, we find what is miraculous. It is therefore natural that one should first of all become more self, refine and purify oneself, before seeing faith grow. I mean, one should become more self, and more outside nature and outside the world, before attempting, or while attempting, the leap of faith.
I have shown in my work on Hume, recently, that what seems to distinguish an atheist from a Christian, is that the atheist denies that he has a self. This is natural, for, having a self is what Christianity is largely about, or is at least, a precondition of faith in Christ. In the later part of this essay, I want to make an effort, to show how to grasp the self, and to set it in its proper place outside the world, and to show exercises which can make us aware of our self, as a consciousness. Consciousness is prior to any world, since it is a precondition of world. And, consciousness is the self.
It is in this way that faith can shape a world’s nature, at the individual level. For, when consciousness becomes aware of itself, it is also aware that it is a precondition of the world happening at all; that the self must first believe in facts in the world, or not; it must or can chose to enter any world, or deny it. And, it can choose freely to have faith in God, or not. World, earth, man, and so on, as the later Heidegger used to say, come within the clearing of Being, and are things which take place after the clearing of Being has happened. And the clearing of Being is what I would call consciousness. I appreciate I might seem to be giving new explanations and new descriptions of who we are, what Christianity is; my descriptions are not in the Gospel, not in Matthew’s gospel at any rate. But I do not think I stray at all far from the spirit of the gospel, and on the contrary, I am to elucidate things, and not to change anything.
I have said elsewhere, that because Being or the prior emergence of anything in the world, depends on consciousness, then I do infer, that a greater consciousness is at work across all Being, as the creator.
And, the first request of a Christian, is, for God to tell us and to make it so, that we have not been fooled about Jesus. We don’t say, as the Jews did: send us a messiah. We say, We are Christians, please make it so, that Christ was the messiah. And this is the reasoned and careful method of approaching faith.
Kierkegaard for one reason or another, for several reasons, in many books, said that Faith is a matter of passion, and of making a daring leap beyond the human constraints. I do not take the same approach. I think that one can reason one’s way toward faith, and can perform everyday exercises of self and conscious purification, which build faith up, and make it inevitable. If there is one aspect in which Kierkegaard and I differ, and I certainly do not claim any advance on him, we differ because I also give a practical and empirically verifiable method for growing in faith.
Let’s have a look at St Matthew’s Gospel, chapters 8 to 14, and then return to this discussion about faith and self, gathering, exercise, and conscious awareness of Being. --
After the Sermon on the Mount, Christ came down from the mountain, and healed someone of leprosy; he then told the man he healed, to obey the law of Moses, present himself to a priest, and give the proper gifts to the synagogue (in Leviticus 14: 3 ff). He then made his way to Capernaum on the extreme north shore of the sea of Galilea.
There follows the exchange with the Roman centurion, who shows more faith in Christ than anyone else in Israel, when the soldier says, that he believes that Christ needs only to give the order that his child be healed, and the child would be healed. The disciples make their way to Peter’s house, but a crowd gathers, asking for release from demons, or what we would call mental illnesses. Matthew is careful to point out, as he does several times in this section, that the prophets and the psalms had predicted these things.
Because the crowd is so large, Christ cannot get any rest at Peter’s house, and he makes his way to a boat on the sea of Galilea, complaining the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head. The sea becomes stormy while Jesus sleeps, and the disciples approach him, saying that they are afraid. This kind of event happens again later, and Christ’s word to them is the same: “You have so little faith in me.” When he orders the sea and the wind to be calm, nature obeys his command. They cross the sea by night, and come to Gennesaret, which is slightly southwest of Capernaum. There, he drives the demons from other madmen, into a herd of swine.
The ninth chapter is a sequence of healings. Leaving Gennesaret, they arrive in Christ’s own town. Here the incident of the paralytic occurs, in which the man is healed, but the healing of his body is not Christ’s primary intention. In their exchange, he says to the man: “Your sins are forgiven.” This overheard by some scribes, who do not believe that sins can be forgiven by Christ’s order. When they say this among themselves, Christ, either by some subtle and supernatural knowledge, or by guessing what they are thinking, confronts them and asks them, why they have evil thoughts in their hearts. And, as proof that his words about forgiveness are backed up with power, he says something even more improbable, namely, he orders the man to get up and walk. At this point, Christ and Matthew, who is claimed to be the author of this book, meet one another, and Christ tells him: “Follow me.”
Matthew is a tax collector of the kind working for the Roman authorities, which is considered to be a traitorous occupation; but that evening, many tax collectors and other outlaw types, meet with Jesus. The Pharisees, taking any opportunity to insult him, ask Christ why he associates with publicans and other sinners, and he replies by explaining that a doctor has nothing to do with the healthy, but only with the sick.
Another question of the same type is clarified in the same place, when the disciples of John the Baptist approach him, and ask him why his followers do not fast, as they themselves do. He tells them that they will have time to fast when he has been taken from them, but that while the bridegroom is at the party, everyone should celebrate. The new wine should be put into new wine skins.
The story, told elsewhere, of the maiden who is dying or dead is told here; Christ claims that she is merely sleeping, while the maiden’s family doubt this and scoff at his words. And as elsewhere, while he is going to rouse her, he is interrupted by the woman with constant blood flow. When he raises the young woman from the dead, his fame increases throughout the area. Straight after this, two blind men approach him, whom he cures; but he asks them not to increase his fame, but to be careful not to tell anyone what he has done for them. This must have been a feature of his life, since it appears to me to be psychologically true, that Christ was afraid of the authorities finding out too early, or feeling impelled to capture him before he was ready for his trial, on account of his growing fame.
Chapter ten concerns instructions to the apostles about how to work on his behalf, so that he can be left in peace for a while. The twelve disciples are listed here, and he prepares them to be sent out to spread the message, and to heal on his behalf. The message they are given to speak is: “The kingdom of heaven is at hand.” The whole chapter is a set of rules for how to speak to non-believers, but he asks his men to restrict themselves to the people of Israel, or Jews of the north. He is careful to instruct them what to do if they are captured by the authorities, saying that they should not worry about what they will say at that time, because the Holy Spirit will give them the words they need. And that they will not be rewarded in the kingdom of heaven, unless they persevere to the end, and stay faithful to the Holy Spirit.
“Do not be afraid of those who can kill the body, because they cannot kill the soul; but you should be afraid much more of him, who can bury your soul and your body in Gehenna.” That is, God. It seems to me, that it must gradually become clear, that Christ speaks of his Father in heaven, and that the kingdom is also the kingdom of the heavenly, or world which is not this world. “Do not judge that I have come to bring peace to the earth: I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. I came to separate a man from his father, a son from his mother,” (10: 34-5) and so on.
We have seen Christ teaching men how to be perfect; and we understand that sin is what people do or what they are, when they are not perfect. That perfection is in interiority, and the humility of power only over oneself. That’s the message of the Sermon, as I explained in my essay on the Sermon. And so it is right, that we see Christ healing and making people more able to be perfect and therefore sinless; and that, his principle work on earth as he went around the land, was to heal people, and make them less sinful. But does the message which the apostles must spread align with this forgiveness and cure of failure: that the kingdom of heaven is in the world where God is. It is the next world, and is the opposite of this one.
I would take the opportunity to point out, that the kingdom of heaven is also explained in detail in the chapters following, and that the kingdom appears to me, to take root in particular people, and therefore, in this life. And, that what the message of the Sermon means, is that one prepares for the life of the kingdom, by being interior and at peace. While, it is important to qualify this, while following the law of Moses and the prophets.
When he had finished teaching his disciples about how to work on his behalf, two followers of John the Baptist approach him again, for the second time; the previous time they had asked why he did not fast, as they did. This time, they ask him whether he really is the promised messiah. They will approach him a third time, after their master has been killed, in chapter 13. When he has told them that he is the promised Messiah, and that John should not worry, he speaks with his disciples, and gives a lesson on the nature of the kingdom. He says that John is the greatest of the prophets, but that he has been thrown in prison, and that this is typically what happens to prophets and to the men of the kingdom.
I think there are several ways in which you can understand the saying ‘the kingdom of heaven is taken by violence’, which Christ then uses. In this context, he means to say that, the greatest of prophets, and all the previous prophets, were treated badly by the Jews and by the world in general. The kingdom is treated with violence in the world. This is because, he implies, the world is not the kingdom of heaven, and that they are antagonistic. And that is why, as above, Christ brings a sword to the world, not peace. John has been punished and put in Herod’s prison, because that is how the world treats the kingdom. So, ‘heaven is taken by violence’. When we find this saying in other works, such as the monks of Athos, they frequently refer to this saying, to mean: If you want to enter heaven and to take it, then be prepared for hard work and to break in to it, with violent efforts.
That the truth of life is outside it, is the reason why he now rages against the land and the people. “Woe to you Corozain, who to you Bethsaida… Capernaum”, because you neglected the kingdom of the other world. Sodom and Gomorrah will have an easier judgement before God, than these self-righteous but ignorant places.
He then shows how to nurture the kingdom of heaven in this life, and refers to those who seem to know about the kingdom already: “It has pleased you, Father, to show these things to the smallest, to children, and to hide them from the wise” (11: 27). You will only know the will of the Father, and the Kingdom of heaven, through Jesus, such as he is. And those who are capable of knowing him, are those who are heavy laden, who are overcome with work, because they already know the cruelty and hardship of this world; they will come to be made whole again. “I am humble of heart, and you will find peace in your soul” (29). “My yoke is gentle, and my burden is light” (30).
Interiority, the other world, humility, low station in this world; these are the features which allow entry into the kingdom of heaven, and prepare men for it. How shall it be possible to encourage interiority, selfhood, isolation, and imposed humiliation, and an interest in your future life, and to prevent yourself falling down into imperfection and too much involvement in the world? I will have a look at this later.
The moment when the Pharisees determine to kill Jesus, a plan which we know they did carry out, is the occasion of the group of disciples wandering through a field of wheat, picking some grains and eating them as they go. The Pharisees, already hostile to Christ, try to catch him out by saying that on the Sabbath, no work should be done, not even picking grains to feed yourself. Christ argues the point that David worked on the sabbath. And that the sabbath is made for the Son of man. When we say man, we mean the individual men, or the single individual. For there is no such person as ‘man’.
Christ makes it worse for himself, by then entering the synagogue where those he had been arguing with were to be found. “Would a man who had lost a sheep, or whose sheep was in trouble, not help him out, even if it was on the sabbath?” A man with a withered hand approached Christ, and he healed him, with that lesson in mind. “However, when the Pharisees went out, they met so as to make plans against him, discussing how they could have him killed” (12: 14).
Immediately after this, Christ makes another healing, but asks the sufferer not to make a fuss about what has happened. I suppose he is now putting off the inevitable, and wants to avoid his trial and death, by not arousing the anger of the Pharisees until the right time. Matthew says that he wanted those he had healed to remain quiet, so that the prophecy of Isaiah could be fulfilled:
“Behold my servant, whom I have chosen;
My beloved, in whom my soul is well pleased:
I will put my spirit upon him,
And he shall show judgement to the Gentiles.
He shall not strive, nor cry;
Neither shall any man hear his voice in the streets”
(Matt. 12: 18-21; citing Isaiah 42: 1-2)
Later, they accuse him of casting out demons, by the power of demons, which Christ disputes. He claims, on the contrary, that when he casts them out, he does so in order that the kingdom of heaven can replace the demons inside the individual (12: 28). He makes an attack on the priestly caste, and calls them vipers, as St John used to do; and threatens them with punishment and judgement in the next world. They ask him for a sign, to prove he is what he says he is, and he, very grandly, throws their demand for a sign back at them:
“A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a sign: and a sign is not given to them, except the sign of Jonah the prophet. As Jonah was in the belly of the whale three days and nights, so will the Son of man be in the heart of the earth three days and nights.” (39-40).
Making his situation more precarious still, and to drive home the otherworldly and individualistic nature of his message, Christ’s mother and brothers arrive, while he is dealing with a crowd, asking to speak with him. “While he was talking to the crowd, behold his mother and his brothers came forward, asking to speak to him. But he said to them, responding: ‘Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?’ And extending his hand toward his disciples, said: ‘Behold my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father, who is in heaven, he is my brother, my sister, my mother.’” (12: 49-50).
The thirteenth chapter gives several parables about the kingdom of heaven; including a parable about parables. And the fourteenth chapter, the last with which I am concerned here, is an episodic chapter telling us what happened to John the Baptist, and how he was killed in prison, after Salome danced; how Christ fed the 5,000 with a miracles of bread and fishes; and how later that day, Christ went into a mountain around Gennesaret while his disciples took to a boat and slept; how he walked on the water to get to them, and how Peter tried but failed to do so.
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There is no question, that the kingdom of heaven, as described in the parables of the thirteenth chapter, describe a reign of God beyond time; and that the kingdom of heaven is something planted as a seed in some people, and something which other people do not receive.
What I take from this, is not the conventional or Protestant conclusion, that some people are bad, and some are good, and that the distinction is preordained. Rather, as is natural, and consonant with other injunctions not to judge others, that we should notice that it is a matter of the individual hoping and working to become one of the good, and not one of the bad. The fact that there is a group of losers and a group of winners, should not make a man feel resigned to his fate, and believe in predetermination. Rather, each man for himself, has a choice between two outcomes. And, rather than inspiring us to judge others, the parable should focus the individual mind onto his future, and make the individual aware that he can fail.
Christ could have said: you will have eternal life. But he said: you have to work hard to have eternal life. It is clear from the parables, that Christ considered himself to be the one spreading the seeds of the kingdom, and that usually, they fell on dead ground.
He goes to some length, in Matthew’s account, to describe what the kingdom is, in these parables. The kingdom is a small seed of mustard which grows into a great tree full of living things; it is a leaven which makes bread grow overnight in the oven; it is the seed for wheat which is in danger of being strangled by weeds, which the devil sows among them. It is, in short, a state of mind and heart; I would say that it is the condition of a man who has stepped out of the world, and found the small still centre of consciousness, which belongs both to the world and to eternity; which is humble, withdrawn, and unique. It is the ground from which great things can flourish, because it is the open space where grace and the Holy Spirit can speak to a man.
I can appreciate the claim, that I am too much interested in the single individual, and not interested in enough in the Church. But I leave my remarks on the Church for another time. The gospels do not mention the Church, of course, since it did not then exist; but when he gave his disciples instructions for how to do his work, he did not tell them how to set up an organisation. He gave them instructions for how to deal with existing organisations, which would be hostile, and his specific instructions were how to find individuals who were able to hear or to see the message.
The message is not about this life, it is about the other one. And, the message, in so far as it has any application in this life, is aimed entirely at individuals, who will either be saved or not. Any man should be looking after his own self, before or rather than, looking at anyone else.
I do think, that in our time, some kind of exercise or wakeup call, is necessary, in order to bring back a person to his self. And this is what my concluding remarks will focus on. It is only between the individual and God, that faith can take place; and it’s only when a man has a self, that he can chose to save himself. For reasons of time and space in this essay, I will try to be brief and schematic about something which I take very seriously, and which could lay claim to being the heart of my message, and the heart of my approach to Christianity. Namely, what I would call self-gathering, or what they usually call meditation.
The parables of the kingdom indicate that the individual who receives the news which Christ brings, will receive the seed, and grow. I think that this means, that he will grow in this life as well as the next. I also think, that the Christian monastic tradition, especially in its ascetical arm, demonstrates what I mean. By practicing the meditation and the self-gathering and self-analysis, which that tradition encourages, then faith increases, by a ladder-wise process. There is no need for a leap into the unknown.
Further, all the parts of what you might call a puzzle, which have to be put together into a final picture of reality, seem to cohere, whether the parts are from St Matthew, St Paul, from the practice of self-gathering, or from the instructions of the Orthodox Church and its cycle of worship and teaching.
In the first place, we have to believe in God, as a personal presence. As the British tradition has it, we don’t believe in a personal God, and the reason for this is, we don’t believe in our own self, either. Hume, for instance, wanted to be famous, and wanted to appeal to other people, he wanted a kind of undying renown. That is to say, he believed in himself in some skewed way, and he wanted eternal life. His heart told him that there is eternal life, and that he had a selfhood of some kind; but his everyday consciousness would not let go of its delusions so much, as to allow him to simply accept: I need eternal life, and I need to care for the self, my self. His eternity was to be eternal fame as the philosopher; and while he accepted that other people exist and knew him, he denied that he himself had any presence.
I set out from the same position, and allow myself to disappointed in my ambitions, and to submit to bare existence, by sitting alone, with eyes closed, and to watch merely my breathing, and to let my thoughts and passions rise and fall on their own, irrespective of me, because I am pure consciousness. Thoughts and passions don’t really belong to us, since, like man, world, and fate, they come from the outside of consciousness, and fill it up. While I sit, demons that were in me, that motivated me, depart. My thoughts grow still, and my soul becomes concentrated. This act of deep humility, and defeat in the face of the world, the smallness of the person I become when I allow all my possessions and characteristics to leave me, while I retreat, is the act which I would ask men, such as Hume was, or of his spirit, to submit to. I also think that this is what the Christ of the Gospels asked his followers to do, in his Sermon on the Mount.
This is what those parables point to. It might take ten years, or a lifetime, and constant struggle to become only moderately familiar with such humility, but so what. I think that, once we have located our consciousness, and begun to develop a self, as the seed of something; once we dissociate from the space outside our body, or personality, our fate, we see that we are in control of the world, if only in this tiny and unassuming way: that for the time of self-gathering, we are the very centre of the entire world in total: for there is nothing but our awareness reflecting on itself.
Whether there are visions, talks with God, closeness with God, happiness, does not concern me here. What goes on in that withdrawn silence is another man’s business. However, I do suggest, that outside time, where one moment is the same as the next, because there is no distinction between one moment of self-gathering and another, fifty years in the past or future; and when a man has no body of which he is aware; then time and space have been overcome, and consciousness has to that extent already entered into eternity, and touched on the kingdom of heaven in this life. I suppose this could be denied, and it could be said, that you don’t find anything there: you’ve just hypnotised yourself; or, you’ve stripped away all of your characteristics leaving nothing whatsoever. However, I think that where there is nothing in this way, the other world, the kingdom of heaven, finds a place.
The great failure, the great sin which can descend on a soul in this condition, is pride, or any objective of any kind. I mean, if a man prays, self-gathers, with any intention whatsoever, then he is not doing the prayer. He is doing some kind of self-willed and arrogant activity, if he has any aim, other than to be open to the kingdom, and even that aim is an impediment and a source of pride. So, it is entirely right that Christ said: my yoke is easy, and my burden is light, to people who were heavy laden, and who had worked themselves nearly to death: they are the kinds of people who are ready to submit, and have no other hope of any kind, and who want to give up on this world entirely; they might see the next, without any ulterior motive.
I fail too often in my essays hitherto, to describe the failures, and the hamartia, the sin which accompanies my own efforts. Sin has been said by Kierkegaard to be the bad relation of a man to his eternal self. Through his eternal self, he stands before God; and he should stand before God in order to reconcile himself with his true nature, his eternal nature. I must tell the reader, I have mostly failed to self-gather, to concentrate my attention only on the mind itself. But in life, and in meditation, sin prevails in many ways. Failure is the rule.
Secondly, a final point, it said, that in this state of self-gathering, of purification of the mind to its bare and most powerful state, of concentration, our feelings and passions are purified and given direction, by nature of the act of becoming still. We are concentrated and made into a real self, and this leads to a reformed self for life in the world. That is, the man who can meditate, having stopped for instance, hoping for literary eternity, which he might pursue unscrupulously and selfishly, carrying out evils along the way to his destination; when he has realised that it is an actual eternal life that he wants, and an eternal soul, that man might give up his journey of devastation and ambition. Or, a man who is aware that he is a self, that he has freedom, is also responsible for himself; and therefore, has more respect for other people. Since, how can a man who does not believe that he is a coherent person or a self, respect anyone else?
If there is any sense in the word ‘repentance’, or ‘metanoia’, then the act of withdrawing from the world, and passively allowing the old self to do its worst, and then to depart from us, in a shower of voices and anger attacking the submissively quiet meditating self, would be it. The act of self-gathering is repentance in itself.
But my deeper point, relating to the other world, is this: that a self who is waiting for God, who recognises his own personality, and his mind; he has evidence or grounds for believing that God has a personality, too; he can understand, that God would want to show us His personality, and would want to become a man among us, to show the way, and to heal.
God would be a man in some point of history; and it would be unwise to think, that any man in any point of history, could be resurrected after three days of death. That would be stupid. It is reasonable to simply believe St Matthew’s account, simply because we have been told to do so. But if we already accept, that God has a self, that God gives that self in some way to us, and that he would want to be born; then to say that a man was born who was also God, and that he was resurrected after three days of death in this world: to think like this is not unreasonable. It seems to me to be necessary.
And the final thing for now, the man who meditates, is in a condition to receive the promptings of the Holy Spirit; his waiting in silence, and observation, is the most perfect time at which God would approach him form the other world, and give what they call grace, healing, and spiritual guidance. Which is what the mystics have always maintained, is the case. We cannot call down God to us and his grace, by ‘self-gathering’, but we can wait for it, and be more aware, when it does happen.
It important to state, so that we are none of us speaking as naïve fools, that the character of Christ and the temporal unfolding of his story, has been put together by a particular writer or author, namely Matthew. Relative to other biographies of the same era, such as those of Suetonius or Plutarch, it feels to me like an attempt to put into words objectively, what happened. And it is written in the style of a historical biography.
Where a historian like Xenophon took part in historical episodes, and wrote their history afterwards, it was not typical for the writer to elaborate a great deal about the specific part that he played in the events. Xenophon took part in the Persian expedition, and Thucydides in the Pelopenoesian War, but they do not make a meal of this, and they do not make personal private arguments, to tell us how they viewed things, in contrast to the views of other men. Facts alone are their business.
Matthew does mention himself, in the third person, and only once; this objectivity is not uncommon in historical writing, and Julius Caesar did the same. Men of those days, did not express their feelings about any matter of historical fact; and we do not find any expressions of opinion or feeling in any of the Gospels. Matthew also writes as if he were giving an actual presentation of the facts, like any other historian. I say this, when I now come to try to reconcile the extremely discordant note, which Christ strikes, when dealing with his own family. Matthew simply describes what Christ said and did, and makes no comment. It is therefore left to us, to feel the emotional or spiritual effects, and to work out for ourselves, what they mean.
In Matthew, in the chapters I am considering, Christ comes across members of his close and extended family three times. First (12: 46 ff.), his mother and brothers find Jesus, where he is carrying out his mission, just after he has had the bitter exchange with the priests about breaking the Sabbath rules, and they have consulted about how to have him judicially put to death. At such a time, the father and mother, who ought to be honoured, according to the Mosaic law, arrive, and try to make an intervention. Of course, Joseph, his father, does not arrive; because it might be supposed that Joseph, being much older than Mary, and by all the evidence, when he married Mary, had already been married, and had fathered several children, would probably no longer be alive. But his mother, now presumably aged around fifty years of age, is still alive and wants to speak with her son. It is suggested elsewhere, that she, with the sons of Joseph, wants to shield him from trouble, and to convince him to come home.
“While he was talking to the crowd, behold his mother and his brothers came forward, asking to speak to him. But he said to them, responding: ‘Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?’ And extending his hand toward his disciples, said: ‘Behold my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father, who is in heaven, he is my brother, my sister, my mother’” (12: 49-50).
This gesture does not do away with the injunction of the Mosaic law, to honour your mother and father. Rather, as it was with the Sermon, it perfects the Mosaic law, by putting a capstone of interiority to it. That is, a man absolutely must honour his parents. But, Christ uses words and gestures to demonstrate inner isolation, eternity of self, and the activity of the other world, in this one: in the eternal self, there is no father and mother at all.
I would say, that being the Son of God means, to be devoted to the eternal self; and that Christ is the eternal self, temporarily and uniquely, in his person alone, in the condition of the man who meditates in purity and self-gathering, while also dealing with the matters of this world. I would say, that in his case alone, and in no other case, can a man say: I have no natural mother and father, because the man of the kingdom of heaven does not have a father and mother. God is his only relative. Everyone else, in order to be the Son of God, must do so only in respect to his withdrawing into himself, and cultivating his eternal consciousness. But Christ made this state of purity something physical, and is a physical human embodiment of what, for everyone else, must remain purely inward.
In a similar breaking of law, but only once, and only in his case, because he was demonstrating the spiritual otherworldly character of the Son of God, he said: “Let the dead bury the dead”, which is an otherwise outrageous thing to say, in any other circumstance. But the circumstances were unusual: this was the time of the bridegroom being at the wedding feast; it is the exception which was intended to prove to humans in a language they could understand, how to become the Son of God, by giving up any interest in the body, when in a state of spiritual activity with the kingdom of heaven.
What is happening in this breaking of the law is, that the king and the kingdom is displaying, outwardly, what is always and necessarily always of the inside life of the self, and the other world. Christ is the kingdom in action; it is composed of sons of God, as he says. The sons of God are his brothers and sisters, his mother. The question is, how can one become a son of God, in the kingdom? And the answer, it seems to me, is not by renouncing your parents and taking up some likeminded friends. Rather, it is to renounce everything, the entire world, and then to cultivate the consciousness and self which precede that world, and stand outside it in principle. And I have said, that this is achieved in self-gathering, in labours of prayer, and not by some kind of social revolution, where the dead lie unburied, and men offend their parents.
For the sake of completeness, here are the other references which Matthew makes to Jesus’ family. First, the description of the circumstances of John the Baptist’s execution (14: 1), which Herod Agrippa did not want to carry out, but which his wife had forced him to do, because, as Matthew explains, John had denounced their marriage as being against the law. John is a cousin of Christ’s, but Matthew does not indicate that Jesus was moved by the news of the death.
The final event is takes place when Jesus is back in his own town; it is after his mother had come looking for him. The people of the town, who remember him, cannot believe that he could be anything more than the boy and the young man who they once knew (13: 54 ff.).
“And coming into his homeland, he taught them in their synagogues, so that they were surprised, and said: Where did he get this wisdom, and this power? Isn’t he the son of the carpenter? Isn’t his mother called Mary, and his brothers, James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas? And his sisters, don’t they live here? So where does all of this wisdom and power come from? And they were offended by him. However, Jesus said to them: A prophet is not without honour, except in his own country, and in his own house. And he did not make any display of power there, because of their lack of belief” (13: 54-58).
I suppose that there can be no better indication, that the power of God in any life, in the world, and the kingdom of heaven, being the Son of God, is a matter of mind, of faith, and a change, or metanoia, of the soul, rather than any physical, legal, or even any moral change, in the person. It is a matter of a change and a building up, of the self alone.
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