A Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, The Last Inkling, And The Evolution Of Consciousness

Introduction

Christianity is declining because it has lost touch with its mystical core - the ‘secret sense of life’ that offers direct participation in God’s life rather than external rules or beliefs.

• Modern Christianity fails because it presents itself as limiting human options rather than expanding life, causing ‘spiritual but not religious’ people to avoid it entirely
  • Western churches are experiencing mass abandonment despite sustained efforts to reverse decline
  • The working assumption is that Christianity will ‘curtail your options, not expand your life’
  • Both evangelical and liberal approaches miss the point - one tries to ‘sell or prove’ while the other cuts back to conform to secular assumptions
• The ‘secret’ Christianity has lost is not hidden knowledge but a truth about direct divine participation that seems obscure only because it’s difficult to grasp experientially
  • The secret is ’that your life springs from God’s life and that this truth is yours to be discovered’
  • It can be known directly, ’not on the basis of someone else’s report, someone else’s authority’
  • This is ‘standard mystical theology’ following from the discernment that ‘God is not another being, like you and me, but is the ground of being itself’
• Owen Barfield’s theory of consciousness evolution explains Christianity’s spiritual predicament through three phases: original participation, withdrawal, and reciprocal participation
  • Barfield was the ’last Inkling’ who died in 1997, considered by C.S. Lewis and Tolkien to have the most penetrating ideas
  • Original participation involves little distinction between inside and outside, with ’the inner life of the cosmos is the inner life of the people’
  • Withdrawal of participation began in the first millennium BCE when humans developed individual consciousness
  • Reciprocal participation allows conscious reconnection with divine life while maintaining individuality
• Modern Western civilization entered another period of withdrawal about 500 years ago with the Enlightenment, leading to both scientific gains and spiritual crises including ’the death of God’
  • The Enlightenment embedded ’the mentality of modern science’ with Kant’s cry ‘Dare to know!’
  • This has led to ’the widespread sense that, in truth, we may be drifting through empty, meaningless space’
  • The challenge is how ’the latest withdrawal may actually be part of a divine process that can still be progressed’
• Barfield discovered consciousness evolution through philology, treating words as ‘fossils of consciousness’ that record how minds experienced life differently in previous periods
  • The Greek word ‘pneuma’ means both ‘wind’ and ‘spirit’, reflecting undifferentiated consciousness of original participation
  • John 3:8 ’the pneuma blows where it wishes’ becomes almost impossible to translate due to this lost unity
  • The Bible contains ‘consciousness fossils’ spanning over 1000 years of evolution, with the New Testament showing more introspection than the Old

The Early Israelites

The earliest Israelites lived in original participation, experiencing themselves as merged with the land, gods, and tribal identity until burial and literacy changes began developing individual consciousness.

• The Merneptah Stele from 13th century BCE provides the earliest archaeological evidence of Israel, revealing how ancient peoples experienced themselves as extensions of ancestral and divine forces rather than individuals
  • Egyptian pharaoh declared ‘Israel is laid waste and his seed is not’ after military confrontation
  • Names like ‘Abraham’ carried immense power as ‘present realities’ meaning ’exalted ancestor’ and ‘ancestor of a multitude’
  • Ancient peoples ‘reveled in their triumphs’ by ‘amplifying the bloodshed’ as expressions of cosmic justice rather than personal rights
• Early Israelite religious experience was inherently plural and place-based, with multiple gods associated with different locations before the ‘Yahweh-alone’ movement emerged in the 9th century BCE
  • Solomon’s temple ‘clearly contained altars to Baal, Asherah and others’ until later prophets like Elijah championed monotheism
  • Gods were ‘diffuse presences associated with various mythologies, different times of the year, and assorted sacred places’
  • Deuteronomy 32:8 states that ’the Most High apportioned the nations…according to the numbers of the gods’
• The establishment of divine monarchy around 1000 BCE began developing individual consciousness by creating subjects who could relate to a visible king, leading to the crucial realization that the real king might be Yahweh himself
  • Kings like David and Solomon established ‘a covenantal relationship between the local high god, the king and the people’
  • Psalm 45:6-7 addresses the king as ‘God’ while also noting ‘Therefore God, your God, has anointed you’
  • The inherent vulnerability of human kings led to perceiving ‘Yahweh himself’ as ’the deity on the eternal throne of heaven’
• The Assyrian crisis of the 8th century BCE catalyzed prophets like Isaiah, Amos, and Hosea to intuit that a new consciousness of God was emerging, though they couldn’t yet articulate what it meant
  • Tiglath-Pileser III’s neo-Assyrian empire adopted unprecedented policies of direct incorporation and deportation rather than vassalage
  • Isaiah’s temple vision revealed God’s ‘incomprehensible otherness’ with angels crying ‘Holy, holy, holy!’ - originally meaning ‘fearsome strangeness’
  • Amos declared he was ’no prophet, nor a prophet’s son, but…a herdsman’ who felt compelled to speak without understanding why
• King Hezekiah’s policies of centralizing worship and promoting literacy inadvertently accelerated the development of individual consciousness by severing clan connections and fostering private religious reading
  • Hezekiah’s abolition of rural clan cults led to single burials replacing ancestral tombs, implying ‘a person must set out on the afterlife alone’
  • Jerusalem’s population quadrupled as refugees from the northern kingdom were centralized and fed
  • Literacy rates reached ‘perhaps 20 percent of the population’ compared to ’less than one percent’ in ancient Egypt, enabling private scriptural reading

The Birth of the Bible

The emergence of written scriptures for private reading revolutionized religious practice by moving authority from priests to individual readers, culminating in the Deuteronomic reforms that made monotheism dependent on personal relationship with God.

• The spread of literacy created a fundamental shift from public ritual to private devotion, generating new forms of religious anxiety about interpretation while democratizing access to the divine
  • Jeremiah warned that ’the false pen of the scribes has made it into a lie’ and that scripture lovers might be ‘unwittingly rejecting Yahweh’
  • Ecclesiastes noted ‘Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh’
  • Hannah’s story of silent prayer where ‘her lips didn’t move’ disturbed priest Eli who accused her of drunkenness
• The fixing of biblical canon from the 5th century BCE addressed the problem of multiple textual versions while establishing the principle that sacred texts preserve revelation through their unchanging written form
  • The book of Isaiah combines ‘at least three different authors and periods’ - First, Deutero, and Trito-Isaiah
  • Canon formation ‘stops the glossing and redacting’ and reverses oral tradition by insisting ’not a jot or tittle must be altered’
  • Jan Assmann observed that canonical literature deepens ‘religious interest in transcendent reality not located in any particular place’
• The Josian Reform of 621 BCE represented the conscious realization that a new relationship with God was required, with the discovered ‘book of the law’ actually being the Deuteronomists’ inspired literary creation pointing toward monotheism
  • The ‘book of the law in the house of the Lord’ was likely ‘an early version of the book of Deuteronomy’ created by scribes who grasped ‘what was going on’
  • The Deuteronomists moved from henotheism to asking ‘Could Yahweh be God alone?’ requiring explanation of why Assyrians defeated Israel
  • Moses eclipsed Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as the central figure because unlike kings, his authority rested on being ‘a teacher and a prophet’
• The Deuteronomists’ radical iconoclasm represented the most unlikely religious injunction ever received, requiring complete withdrawal from nature-based participation to discover God within the human heart
  • The command to destroy all images was ’the unlikeliest religious injunction ever to have been received’ according to Barfield
  • Under original participation, ’to worship representations of these gods is…an expression of faithfulness, not faithlessness’
  • Iconoclasm forces God to be found ’not in the inner life of the cosmos, but in the inner life of the devotee’
• The Shema’s call to love God with all your heart, soul and might addressed to the individual established the foundation for monotheistic knowledge through personal relationship rather than collective ritual
  • Deuteronomy 6:4-5 uses singular ‘you’ in Hebrew, meaning ‘you [as an individual] must correspondingly love him as one does one’s beloved’
  • Stephen Geller notes this creates ‘a psychic bond that forms with an individual soul, one on one’
  • The burning bush revelation ‘I AM WHO I AM’ implies ‘a person who can say “I am” might share in the reality of God who is I AM’
• The Babylonian exile validated the Deuteronomists’ insight by proving that portable, internalized devotion could survive the destruction of temple and land, creating the foundation for diaspora Judaism
  • In 587 BCE Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Solomon’s temple and deported five thousand aristocracy, military and artisans
  • Most exiles chose not to return when Cyrus permitted it 80 years later, showing ’the people’s devotion could go with them because it was held within them’
  • Post-exilic texts describe Moses becoming ’equal in glory to the holy ones’ and even ’like God’ as divine-human consciousness developed

The Ancient Greeks

Greek civilization underwent a parallel awakening from original participation to individual consciousness, visible in their art, theater, and philosophy, culminating in the development of reciprocal participation through philosophical training.

• Greek art from the 7th-5th centuries BCE visibly demonstrates the transition from collective to individual consciousness, moving from geometric patterns to naturalistic representation of unique persons
  • Before the awakening, geometric style pottery showed ‘repetitive designs’ with human figures having ‘bull-like thighs, wasp-like waists, barrel-like chests’
  • From the 6th century, sculptors began ’experimenting for themselves’ making ‘knees look more realistic’ and putting ‘small turns into the corners of mouths’
  • The discovery of foreshortening around 500 BCE showed artists had developed ‘a point of view’ arising ‘from within’ rather than replicating standard images
• Homer’s characters reveal original participation consciousness through their fragmented experience of bodily functions and divine interventions, lacking any sense of unified selfhood
  • When characters reflect or feel, Homer describes ’the experience as isolated to specific parts of the body’ - ’limbs being full of strength’ or ‘speedy knees’
  • There was ’no word for a living body’ - the word ‘soma’ referred ‘only to corpses and remains’
  • Roberto Colasso notes that ‘Whenever their lives were set aflame…the Homeric heroes knew that a god was at work’
• Greek theater evolution from Aeschylus through Sophocles to Euripides tracks the emergence of individual psychology, conscience, and personal responsibility replacing collective fate
  • Aeschylus’s Oresteia depicts characters as ’noble or ignoble pawns’ embracing destiny with gods appearing ‘alongside the mortal characters’
  • Sophocles developed characters with ‘some sense of their inner lives’ making remarks like ‘Reason is God’s crowning gift to man’
  • Euripides became ‘a man of his times’ developing the notion of conscience where ‘clean hands are not the only issue. The heart must be clean, too’
• Pre-Socratic philosophers developed the unprecedented ability to step back from immediate experience and ask ‘why,’ creating the mental space between experience and reflection that defines human interiority
  • Anaximenes performed the first recorded experiment by blowing on his hand two ways and asking why one felt cool and the other warm
  • Pythagoras heard a blacksmith halving metal and noticed the octave interval, asking ‘why?’ about what countless others had heard
  • This created ‘a mental space between the experience and thinking about the experience’ enabling separation of ‘inner and outer; me and not me’
• Heraclitus articulated the Logos as a universal principle running through nature, prefiguring Christian understanding while maintaining that this cosmic fire exceeds human comprehension
  • He proposed that nature was governed ’not by a pantheon of gods…but rather by a universal principle that runs uniformly through the whole of nature’
  • Fragment: ‘Listening not to me but to the Logos, it is wise to agree that all things are one’
  • He warned ‘Of this account, which holds forever, men prove uncomprehending’ emphasizing the Logos’s transcendence
• Hellenistic philosophy schools developed ‘spiritual exercises’ focused on individual self-mastery and inner equanimity, democratizing access to philosophical wisdom beyond traditional civic structures
  • Pierre Hadot identified these as ‘practices of self-examination, self-awareness and self-expression’ aimed at ‘interior equanimity’
  • Epicurus taught taking ‘pleasure in small things’: ‘I am as happy as Zeus feasting on Mount Olympus, when all I have is a glass of water and a barley cake’
  • Marcus Aurelius advised ‘Dig within; for within you lies the fountain of good’ while Epictetus declared ‘You are a fragment of God’

The Athenian Moses

Socrates became the exemplar of the new consciousness by developing supreme care for the soul through his daemon’s guidance, demonstrating how individual interiority can become a receptacle for divine wisdom.

• Socrates’ daemon represented a revolutionary form of divine guidance that worked through individual conscience rather than external commands, requiring personal discernment and participation
  • His daemon was ‘something like a voice’ that ’turns me away from something I am about to do, but it never encourages me to do anything’
  • This ’negative way’ put ’the onus back on Socrates’ to ‘work at what might be revealed’
  • Unlike Homer’s characters who were ‘worked…like a puppet,’ Socrates became a ‘fellow-worker with divine grace’
• Plato’s concept of aporia - being at your wits’ end - became the foundation for philosophical training that could transform unknowing into a receptacle for eternal truths
  • Aporia means ‘without resource’ and when ’that can be achieved, the gap morphs into a receptacle’ for ‘receiving intimations of the eternal’
  • The Academy trained students to tolerate ’this state of unknowing’ so ’the gap of meaning’ could become ’the means of receiving’
  • Philosophy became ‘consciously to explore what might open up when the multiple facets of something are meditated upon’
• Plato’s philosophical vocabulary requires ‘unthinking’ modern meanings to recover the participatory consciousness where reason (logos) was experienced as ‘cosmic process’ and mind (nous) was receptive awareness
  • Barfield warns that modern readers can ‘read Plato and Aristotle through from end to end…without understanding a single sentence’
  • ‘Reason is quite inadequate to convey…the cosmic process which Plato must have felt to be taking place’
  • Nous was ‘a receptive capacity, a seat of awareness, as much associated with the heart as the head’
• Plato treated mathematics and astronomy not as data collection but as contemplative practices that could polish the mind to reflect eternal forms and harmonies
  • Numbers were important ‘because of the qualities they convey’ - contemplating ‘oneness’ was more important than using ‘1’ to measure
  • The Academy’s sign ‘Let no one ignorant of geometry enter’ meant anyone ignorant of harmonies ‘wouldn’t be able to appreciate what Plato and the academicians were up to’
  • Observing the heavens was ‘a supreme way of polishing minds’ because gazing at the night sky induces ‘stillness’ that is ‘a quality of infinity’
• Plato’s ‘proofs’ were actually ’explorations by analogy’ designed to awaken intuitive knowledge rather than establish logical conclusions, requiring imaginative participation from readers
  • In the Phaedo, Socrates explores whether ‘death may be no different’ from natural cycles ‘of cooling and heating, of separating and combining’
  • The goal was not logical proof but to help readers ‘feel that death could include a return to life’
  • Analogies are ‘indicative, not themselves what is being indicated’ - focusing on logical flaws misses the point like ’the Zen disciple who becomes preoccupied with the finger…pointing at the Moon’
• Alexander the Great’s conquest of Athens in 331 BCE spread Greek consciousness globally while intensifying the individualizing trend that led Hellenistic schools to focus on ‘spiritual exercises’ for personal transformation
  • The date ‘331 BCE is a seismic date’ when ‘Jerusalem passed into the orbit of Greek culture’
  • Whereas earlier philosophers assumed individual well-being was ‘intimately tied to the flourishing of the city-state,’ Hellenistic schools ’turned more exclusively inwards’
  • About 2,500 surviving names of ancient philosophers including 85 women show philosophy was ‘a significant social movement among the upper echelons’

The Secret Kingdom

Jesus reinterpreted apocalyptic expectations by teaching that the kingdom of God was already present within individuals, using parables designed to awaken rather than explain this inner transformation.

• Jesus modified widespread apocalyptic beliefs by teaching that divine intervention was not a future cosmic event but an ongoing inner transformation accessible to individuals now
  • Luke 17:21 records Jesus saying ’the kingdom of God is within you’ and Luke 11:20 ’the kingdom of God has come to you’
  • This ran against what ‘was clearly believed by the majority of Jesus’ first followers’ who expected literal cosmic intervention
  • Paul initially anticipated being ‘alive when he presumed Jesus would return’ with ’the dead in Christ’ rising ’to meet the Lord in the air’
• Historical evidence suggests Jesus was perceived as spiritually rather than politically dangerous, as shown by Pilate’s treatment of him compared to actual rebels like Barabbas
  • All four gospels contrast Jesus with ‘Barabbas, the rebel’ who was ‘imprisoned…along with all his murderous co-conspirators’
  • Jesus ‘was taken into custody alone’ with ‘disciples…left, free to flee’ suggesting Pilate saw no political threat
  • The temple incident must have been ‘symbolic’ and ‘could not have been dangerously riotous, else he would have been arrested and not released’
• Jesus’ parables functioned not as moral illustrations but as ‘aphorisms’ designed to ‘shake horizons’ and precipitate the consciousness shift needed to perceive the kingdom within
  • Mark 4:34 reports ‘He did not speak to them except in parables’ and they convey ’the secret or mystery of the kingdom’
  • The word ‘aphorism’ comes from Greek for ‘shaking horizons’ - they ’lodge in the mind’ until ‘mental horizons shift’
  • Jesus asked ‘Do you not understand this parable? Then how will you understand all parables?’ indicating they work by conversion, not explanation
• The parable of the unforgiving servant uses deliberately ridiculous numbers (’ten thousand talents’) to transcend rational interpretation and point toward the infinite value of life itself
  • ‘Ten thousand talents’ was ‘more than an average worker in the first century could have earned in hundreds of thousands of years’
  • The amount is ’too large to count’ suggesting Jesus ‘meant his hearers to be bamboozled’ and ‘stripped of any bearings’
  • Rather than debt forgiveness, the parable points to ’the infinite value of life’ that would make you ’not be bothered about what your brother or sister owes you’
• The parable of the laborers in the vineyard advocates spiritual ‘anarchy’ by suggesting divine order operates beyond human concepts of fairness, offering freedom from conventional social constraints
  • Workers paid the same ’no matter how many hours they’ve worked - and some have worked for one hour only’
  • The ‘shock reading’ suggests ‘First? Last? Who cares! There is a different kind of order at play’
  • Jesus concluded ‘For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light’ - which the author calls ‘one of the most important things he ever said’
• Gospel writers like Matthew often misunderstood Jesus’ spiritual message by converting parables into practical moral instructions for congregation management rather than consciousness transformation
  • Matthew ‘had one eye on the kingdom…but another on the congregation for whom he was writing’
  • Examples include rules about ’not taking each other to court’ and ’not using the traditional Jewish way of getting divorced’
  • These contradict Jesus’ attitude toward Law shown in ‘The Sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath’

Christ Consciousness

Jesus taught spiritual practices focused on interior transformation and virtue development, culminating in his death and resurrection as the ultimate demonstration of how dying to self reveals divine life within.

• Jesus emphasized private spiritual practices that could nurture direct intimacy with God, calling God ‘Father’ to capture the possibility of mutual divine relationship
  • All his recorded prayers except one are ’expressed in the first person singular’ and he taught ‘go into your room and shut the door’
  • The Lord’s Prayer begins ‘Our Father in heaven’ showing he ‘genuinely believed this is possible’
  • Paul confirmed this worked: ‘When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God’
• Jesus focused on virtue development rather than moral rule-following, understanding virtues as habits of mind that enable conscious participation in divine goodness
  • His extreme statements like ‘Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect’ are ’not literal’ but ‘droll remarks’ meant to ‘spark the imagination’
  • Humility becomes ‘a type of receptivity…putting yourself in the lowest place in order that…all of reality can flow into you’
  • Iris Murdoch defined love as ’the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real’
• True repentance (metanoia) means ‘revolution of awareness’ rather than guilt, involving the transformation of cold zones of the mind into sources of inner dynamism and spiritual vitality
  • Metanoia literally means ‘beyond mind’ - when Paul talked of ‘being transformed by the renewal of your mind’ he offered a ‘more accurate rendition’
  • William James described minds having ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ zones where conversion happens when ‘a cold zone ignites’
  • The calling of disciples shows people didn’t ‘reach a decision’ but ‘something clicked’ - consciousness could be shared
• Jesus’ followers recognized him as transparently divine not just because of his teaching and miracles, but because he embodied unmediated relationship with God that others could share
  • Some scholars conclude people ‘probably called Jesus “Lord” during his lifetime because…they felt his transcendent credentials were unmediated’
  • Paul modified the Shema to include Jesus: ‘For us there is one God - the Father…and one Lord, Jesus Christ’
  • The Philippians hymn calling Christ Jesus ‘in the form of God’ was ‘composed around 40 CE or before, just a handful of years after Jesus’ death’
• Jesus practiced the ‘messianic secret’ not for political reasons but because understanding his divinity requires personal awakening that can only come through individual ‘mental fight’ and consciousness development
  • He tells ‘agitated spirits…to keep quiet,’ healed people ’to go back to their lives,’ and ‘disciples to be wary of how they talk about him’
  • The Synoptic Gospels were ‘written to imitate the effect of meeting the historical Jesus so as to form, not merely inform, their readers’
  • Understanding Christ’s divinity is ‘only possible after a “mental fight”…an awakening of a receptive mind that is…a realization about yourself’
• Jesus’ death and resurrection demonstrate the ‘mystical fact’ that embracing complete humanity, including mortality, is the path to knowing divine life rather than escaping it
  • Jesus cries ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ because ‘Without such desolation there is no knowing the depths of God’
  • A.N. Whitehead noted that ‘scenes of solitariness’ are central to religion: ‘It belongs to the depth of the religious spirit to have felt forsaken, even by God’
  • Marion Milner saw the crucifixion as ‘dramatization of an inner process…not an escape from reality, but the only condition under which the inner reality could be perceived’

Christianity’s High Noon

Paul’s revolutionary insight that divine consciousness was available to all people, regardless of social status, created new forms of human community and individual freedom that transformed civilization while establishing the mystical core of Christian experience.

• Paul’s Damascus road experience followed the Stoic pattern of conversion through breakdown and reconstruction, leading him to recognize that the potential for union with God exists in everyone
  • Stoics described conversion arising from ‘a combination of abrupt change and steady assimilation’ beginning with ‘consciousness of our weakness’
  • Paul’s contemporary Seneca wrote ‘God is near you, he is with you, he is within you’ and ‘God comes into men’
  • Paul came to call spiritual life ‘dying every day’ as he was ‘shedding the old and putting on the new’
• Paul’s declaration that ’there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female’ represented an unprecedented revolution in human equality based on shared divine consciousness rather than social reform
  • This was ‘a revolution that even the prophets and philosophers had failed to envision’ based on ‘an inner movement; a realignment of soul’
  • Paul could advise slave Onesimus to return to his master because ’their spiritual mutuality might overwrite…their master-slave relationship’
  • Christianity ‘provided an ontological foundation for “the individual”’ by promising ‘humans have access to the deepest levels of reality from within themselves’
• Paul’s theology in Romans explains spiritual transformation as the struggle between deadly and life-giving forces within individuals, resolved not through effort but through dying to self-concern
  • Sin is described as ‘falling short’ - people experience ‘being locked in a perpetual struggle between what’s deadly and what’s life-giving’
  • Paul discovered freedom when ‘he ceased worrying about himself’ and ’let his failures be’ - ‘in dying to himself…he reliably opened to an inflow of the deathless’
  • This is ‘a secret conception of freedom’ as ’the liberty to realize what is truest in us’ rather than ’liberty from restraint’
• Early patristic writers consistently emphasized that Christ’s incarnation enabled human divinization, with multiple church fathers declaring that God became human so humans could become divine
  • Clement of Alexandria: ‘The Word of God became a man so that from a man you might learn how to become a god’
  • Athanasius: ‘The Son of God became man so that we might become God’
  • Leo the Great: ‘The descent of God to the human level was at the same time the ascent of man to the divine level’
• Christianity revolutionized civilization by introducing novel concepts of free will, kinship networks based on conversion rather than blood, and a new understanding of human psychology
  • Justin Martyr became ’the first thinker to use the concept of free will in our sense’ - ‘There really is such a thing as human agency’
  • Christianity’s ‘sharpest advantage was its inexhaustible ability to forge kinship-like networks among perfect strangers based on an ethic of sacrificial love’
  • By the fourth century, people ‘on the street could be heard discussing the unbegotten nature of the Son’ because theological questions affected everyone’s sense of freedom
• Medieval Christians experienced reality as thoroughly interpenetrated by divine life, seeing astrological connections, sacred relics, and natural phenomena as manifestations of God’s continuing creative activity
  • Medieval people knew ’that growing things are specially beholden to the moon, that gold and silver draw their virtue from sun and moon respectively’
  • Gothic cathedrals displayed ‘astrological charts and stars painted onto the ceiling and walls, mapping the invisible, celestial threads’
  • Relics were ‘material remains of those who had radiated divine energy’ and miracles were ’not…divine intervention that broke scientific laws but…a moment of God’s blessing’

Reform and Science

The Reformation marked another withdrawal of participation as Luther rejected inner experience in favor of scriptural authority alone, while simultaneously enabling the scientific revolution that further mechanized the understanding of nature and human consciousness.

• Martin Luther’s personal spiritual crisis led him to reject inner religious experience entirely, demanding that divine relationship be based solely on biblical authority rather than felt participation
  • Luther described himself as ‘a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience’ who found no relief in traditional spiritual practices
  • He developed ‘intense suspicion of any presumed divine intimacy’ and insisted only scripture could shine with ‘a spiritual light far clearer than the sun’
  • Unlike Erasmus who defended free will as enabling humans to be ‘fellow-worker with divine grace,’ Luther rejected free will entirely in ‘On the Enslaved Will’
• The printing press enabled Luther’s dominance while the via moderna’s literal approach to scripture replaced medieval allegorical interpretation, fundamentally altering how texts conveyed meaning
  • Between 1520-1530, Luther ‘composed 20 percent of all the treatises and sermons that were printed and disseminated across German lands’
  • Renaissance humanism’s via moderna stressed ‘returning to original texts’ with ‘clear and unambiguous meanings’ rather than ‘improvisational, allegorical exegesis’
  • Luther declared ‘It is the historical sense alone which supplies the true and sound doctrine’ while Calvin said ‘Allegory is idolatrous’
• Reformation iconoclasm destroyed medieval participatory consciousness by attacking images and inner life simultaneously, leading to violent destruction of art that had mediated between earthly and divine realms
  • Reformers ‘decapitated statues, nailed scriptures over holy pictures, and whitewashed the wall paintings that had spoken to the medieval pilgrim’
  • Images were converted ‘into moralizing signs’ that were ‘understood by reading a kind of key’ rather than through direct spiritual encounter
  • This ‘would shape the character of Lutheranism and of Protestantism itself for centuries to come’ through rejection of ‘meditative dimensions of faith’
• The Reformation’s positive legacy included religious freedom, historical consciousness, social mobility, and the elevation of all vocations as equally valuable before God
  • John Locke argued in ‘A Letter Concerning Toleration’ that ‘churches should be free associations, joined according to personal conscience’
  • Protestants became interested in dating scriptural events, leading to investigations like James Ussher’s calculation that creation occurred ‘on Saturday 22 October, 4004 BCE, at about 6pm’
  • Luther declared ‘The works of monks and priests…differ no whit…from the works of the rustic toiling in the field or the woman going about her household tasks’
• Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum transformed medieval contemplative scientia into mechanistic investigation, applying ’laws of nature’ and demanding that ’the business be done as if by machinery’
  • Medieval scientia had been ‘a virtue, a habit of mind’ aimed at enabling ’the human mind to mirror God’s mind’ rather than fact accumulation
  • Bacon argued humanity couldn’t rely on ‘discerning the intrinsic purposes of things’ but must use ‘rigorous logic’ working with ‘observable causes and their measurable effects’
  • The pocket watch introduced by Charles II in 1666 made ‘clocklike regularity of life…a mass experience’ convincing people of the mechanical vision
• Nineteenth-century scientism completed the withdrawal from participation by making science autonomous and reducing reality to inert matter, though leading scientists like Einstein and Heisenberg recognized its limitations
  • William Whewell coined ‘scientists’ and defined science as ‘what scientists do’ making it ‘autonomous, capable of assessing other claims to knowledge’
  • Richard Dawkins informed readers they are ’lumbering robot[s]’ while scientism became ’life-blind’ according to Mary Midgley
  • Werner Heisenberg argued ‘rigid materialism is obviously too narrow for an understanding of the essential parts of reality’ including ‘mind, soul, life, and God’

We Must Be Mystics

The path forward requires recovering the spiritual imagination that can bridge individual consciousness with divine participation, following poets and mystics who show how the human ‘I am’ can consciously share in God’s creative ‘I AM’.

• Modern withdrawal from participation may be a necessary stage enabling new forms of divine relationship, with atheism and scientism functioning as iconoclastic movements that clear space for authentic spiritual experience
  • Owen Barfield concluded ‘we’re passing through an inevitable, perhaps necessary phase of withdrawal and alienation’
  • Like previous iconoclastic movements, ‘atheism and scientism…are both linked to enhancements in the consciousness of being individual’
  • They have ‘facilitated a range of reforms that have deepened people’s sense of inner freedom, expressed in good things from social mobility to universal education’
• Imagination serves as the crucial faculty for recovering divine participation because it can step out of individual isolation while maintaining modern personhood, bridging subjective and objective reality
  • Ted Hughes called imagination ’the most essential piece of machinery we have if we are going to live the lives of human beings’
  • C.S. Lewis called the experience ‘joy’ while Wordsworth and Coleridge realized it offers ‘a form of participation that can enjoy the benefits of individuality’
  • Shakespeare portrayed imagination as ‘an intermediate zone’ between subjective and objective that can reveal ‘something of great constancy’
• True imagination differs from fantasy by actually participating in divine creativity, with Coleridge recognizing it as ‘a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’
  • Coleridge distinguished between fancy that ‘can only draw on what is already known to be the case’ and imagination that ‘makes something…novel and lasting’
  • His moonrise experience felt like ’the dim awaking of a forgotten or hidden Truth’ rather than just observing a natural phenomenon
  • John Stuart Mill found Wordsworth’s poetry offered ‘a Source of inward joy’ that could be ‘shared in by all human beings’ and cured his suicidal depression
• Owen Barfield’s personal conversion through poetry revealed that words have souls and can expand consciousness, leading to his theory that poetic language participates in the cosmic Logos
  • Barfield described feeling ’like an ingrowing toe-nail’ until poetry brought ‘a sudden and rapid increase in the intensity’ of experience
  • He realized ’there was some magic in it’ that ‘reacted on and expanded the meanings of the individual words concerned’
  • His discovery led to understanding that ‘What was first spoken by God may eventually be re-spoken by man’ when the human imagination aligns with divine creativity
• William Blake achieved the fullest understanding of imagination as identical with incarnation, declaring ‘The human imagination is the Divine Body of the Lord Jesus’ and practicing this through his art and life
  • Blake was ‘categorical’ that ‘Incarnation and imagination are identical, one seamless action’
  • He prayed ‘Annihilate the Selfhood in me’ to ‘open the Eternal Worlds’ because ‘As a man is, so he sees’
  • His printing method using acid-etching ‘cleansed the doors of perception’ making the essential ‘standing out, as it truly is, Infinite’
• The imaginative path requires embracing childlike wonder and playfulness while dying to egoic self-concern, allowing the individual ‘I am’ to consciously participate in divine creativity without losing personhood
  • Thomas Traherne recalled infant consciousness: ‘The streets were mine, the temple was mine…all treasures and the possessors of them’ before being ‘corrupted’ by education
  • Jesus said ’the kingdom of God must be received as if by a little child’ meaning ‘seeing the world with fresh eyes’
  • Alan Watts noted that divine activity ‘proceeds…from the sheer joy of one who is himself the fulness of Being’ rather than goal-seeking effort