Hortus Conclusus

More Light:

In all great religious systems ever given by the enlightened to the world there can be found traces of spiritual light. However, it is not my intention here to examine all religions for their witness to the spirit, for one would have to fill volumes to give proper consideration to only the most important religious teachings and the lives of those believers who follow them.

 Let us restrict ourselves here to Christianity which, – seen by many as the only truth, by far more only respected, or even hated and attacked, – represents for people in the western hemisphere undeniably the most important form of religion.

I can already hear the question: which form of Christianity do I mean? – and the faithful adherents of the more ancient system, – for instance the Greek Orthodox or the Roman Catholic, – are just as likely to see only their own views as ‘correct’ as those whose faith is based on one of the many more recent perceptions, see in the more ancient forms of faith and their ways of expression mere ‘foolish superstition’. The hatred between Christian and Christian based on contrary views is a far more vehement enemy of Christianity than all the corrosive criticism made by those virtuosi mocking its teachings!

 Indescribable calamity has come upon individuals and peoples through conflict over devout opinions; the calamity has still not ended which is brought about every day in the name of Christian beliefs in more restricted circles. Yet what superficial critics may charge to Christianity has nothing to do with this form of religion in itself.

 It is the product of human narrow-mindedness, human bias and opinion, it flows from the misguided human need for power: – the craving to dominate others even to the last most secret depths of their minds and – last but not least – the forgivable delusion that one ‘possesses’ alone the ‘truth’ and must force it upon others even against their will in order to ‘save their souls’.

I do not wish to speak here of these false paths found in Christian relegious life and of the common behaviour found on these wrong tracks.

 What could be said here is very familiar; even the craziest error will always find its cunning defenders who in their way are filled with supposedly ‘genuine’ religious fervour.

 Christianity is still much too young on this earth for it to be able to be recognised in its divine profundity; those who believe it has ‘outlived’ itself and was led into absurdity through the sins of its ‘churches’ are very wrong, for they are only looking upon the type of influence it has had so far and do not know that a time will come when most of what is today called ‘Christianity’ will be looked upon with shame in one’s heart, in the same way as the mature man looks upon the brutal stupidities and arrogant assumptions of his youth.

Let these words not be misinterpreted!

 I am very far from maintaining that so far nothing of true Christianity has been found in the world, – but I cannot also omit to point out that the genuine fruit of Christianity for the vast majority who called and call themselves ‘Christians’ unto the present day is still stuck inside many shells of varying degrees of hardness, and that the delightful sweetness of thisinnermost kernel has not yet been tasted, even though at times one has been able to collect a little of its juicy ripeness through cracks in the shell.

 One still does not know, and one often does not want to know, that this inner kernel of Christianity is the essential reality of the spirit, and that all the ‘shells’ must first be recognised as inherently inessential before one can free the divine mystery of Christianity from them and look upon it in its purity, – before one can build a tabernacle for this innermost essence where it can present itself eternally for reverence by mankind to forms of reverence which are worthy of it. –

It may seem familiar and beneficial for those of a faithful disposition to call to mind the first beginnings of Christianity, – but in doing so one forgets that the seed is something other than the bud, and the bud is something other than the plant that has ripened into its complete form, and that this in turn is something other than the flower, and the flower something other than the ripened fruit.

 Whoever wanted to cut back a plant which was growing so that it would never surpass the pure simplicity of the bud in its form would certainly never be seen as a good gardener.

  Christianity is to the current day still comparable with a plant in the state of development, and it is not the task of its followers to cut away every growth on the stem, even if it appears too luxuriant, but to allow the plant to grow freely, to allow it to develop its world of forms and not to resist any form which may take its shape from the root’s powers, albeit by acquisition of the juices of the given soil.

 Here ‘efforts to purify’ are not called for as the plant, to stay with the metaphor, cannot nourish itself from itself; it must assimilate ‘foreign’ materials, it must absorb into itself juices which were originally alien to it in order to transform them within itself. –

The forms which too luxuriantly run riot around the roots will wither of their own accord when their task of protecting the sprouting growth has been fulfilled, and new forms come about which will make us completely forget the loss of the first protective leaves, because they too, designated as an essential part of the plant, will manifest all the lasting characteristic features of its particular kind.

There has been, with the best of intentions, too much ‘pruning’ of the plant of Christianity; the knife is constantly being used so that it is understandable that the plant has been stunted in its natural growth.

 One could almost call it a miracle that the plant is still alive despite all this crude treatment! –

 One should not repeatedly tamper with the very marrow of its life. Instead one should rather rejoice in all its older and newer shoots and put its growth into the hands of the eternal gardener who knows what benefits it, and very soon we shall see all the harmful shoots disappear and the vital buds develop into sublime beauty.

May I be excused for speaking in various images; but whoever has the will to understand me will easily unravel from these images the message I have to give, and I do not have the task of offending faithful souls in one way or another.

I am not addressing any of the existing forms of Christian belief and see in each one divine spiritual powers at work, though restricted by well-meaning religious  doctrines based on narrow-minded bias, restricted by too much anxious concern about having to give up what has become dear, or having to acknowledge what has apparently been overcome as not contemptible in its way.

Let it not be forgotten that every originally valid truth agrees with many different forms of expression!

 Let one become at last fully conscious of what is the original essentiality in Christianity and with reverential respect leave every particular shape of its activities to the human diversity of its followers!

 The eagle’s habitat is different from the nightingale’s, yet every being alive on earth breathes the same life-giving air that surrounds the earth’s orb. As manifold too are the needs of the human soul, although everywhere it needs the divine light of the spirit if it is to flourish and live.

In Christianity, in the way it has developed until today, historically conditioned but always nourished from one eternal spiritual source, there are, despite all the aforementioned ‘human, all too human’ imperfections, – indeed, all earlier abominations, – the most profound spiritual forces at work. The extraordinary status given to this form of religion by its faithful adherents is based completely on real facts, even though the manifestations of Christianity until now have not yet allowed the justification for this special status to be recognised.

 Ancient teachings of wisdom, rooted in the very depths of eternity, are concealed within its doctrines, – only rarely recognised in their full significance by very few, but not yet even darkly suspected by the vast majority of its followers.

 So much seems to the spiritual desert of our age to be a fossilisation of ancient ‘pagan’ superstition which was once absorbed into Christian teaching by illuminated men of knowledge glowing in the light of the spirit, only to be cut out again as apparently ‘alien’ by later puritanism.

 Sublime initiates of ancient mysteries aware of the reality of the eternal, once, in their wise and overwhelming insight, constructed the temple of this teaching, – and however pure and simple-hearted the intention of those who came later, who took offence at the forms of this temple, they came nowhere near to equalling the cosmic knowledge of those who once had created the foundation and elevation of this temple building.

 With the best of intentions, and essentially quite justified in their criticism by much that happened, these latecomers sinned against the building without suspecting it. History shows all too clearly that essential stones of the construction were removed so that it is scarcely possible any longer to halt the steady disintegration of the walls.

 Only a renewed profound penetration into the eternal mysteries for which Christianity is called upon to provide a living expression, can put an end to this fateful interruption to its development, can create reciprocal understanding and tolerance, and can awaken its individual forms of confession to reciprocal enrichment and renewal.

Contradictory forms of perception may continue to exist peacefully as long as they are necessary, and let one not presume to be a judge where supreme spiritual guidance alone is capable of uniting what is contradictory in its age.

 The true helpers in the current plights of Christianity are primarily those German messengers of the spirit whom one thinks one knows as the ‘medieval mystics’: – the true ‘theosophists’ in the
 Pauline sense of the word, – those who in truth are knowledgeable about the spirit, like Eckehard, Tauler, the anonymous Frankfurt master of the Teutonic Knights to whom we owe the existence of the ‘Book on the Perfect Life’ and the ‘Theologia deutsch’, the canon Thomas à Kempis who gave his fellow believers the ‘Imitation of Christ’ and – for those to whom his cosmic visions are not too grand and oppressive, the seer of Görlitz, Jakob Böhme. – Although he is primarily a poet, Angelus Silesius must not be left out in this context.

Alarge sphere of influence is opening up, however, to a more modern theology without which purposeful help the harm caused can scarcely be healed.

 First and foremost it is important to unravel the knot of dogmatic confusion which has arisen through the religious-historical, thus purely temporal, equating of the Master of Nazareth with the self-expression of the eternal First Light, – the Logos.

 Here a true re-formation, a genuine cleansing of concepts is urgently needed. –

 The depiction of the self-expression of God, of the Logos, of the eternal ‘Word that is with God and is God’, and the quite separate depiction of the spiritual-human potentiality encountering us in the Master of the Gospels – giving all this such a theological basis that every more ancient dogma is not thereby cancelled but transfigured in the truest 

sense, – this act still waits for the brave man who dares to carry it out, for the knowledgeable man who is capable of daring to carry it out, and the blessing which would blossom from this act would be immeasurable.

The original and ancient teaching of wisdom, whose messenger I am obliged to be in our age, contradicts in no sense at all the eternal essential core of Christianity, however contradictory much that is found in this teaching I represent may seem to be on a first superficial observation.

 To those who have understood the source of this teaching, the very thought that a contradiction could exist here must appear absurd.

 Yet it is not my task to be the trustee of some religious system of mankind, even if it is the sublime edifice of teaching that is Christianity.

 I have only to demonstrate the exalted and eternal values to which each of the great spiritually impregnated religious systems on earth give witness.

 This does not exclude me, – as one who was born to Christian parents from an ancient German lineage and ancestry and one who was brought up within Christianity – knowing that all my forefathers were once secured within this faith, – from setting myself the duty to make my own contribution to a genuine deepening of the Christian view of life, from the perspective of the insight into inner being which is possible to me.

 Already there are more than a few, including quite a number of pastors in both main Christian confessions, for whom my teachings offer guidance in their seeking and wandering through the miraculous world of Christian teaching. I have no reason to doubt that more and more men and women of good will are able to make their own the things I have often got to say in a different form, translated into ‘Christian’ language, thereby giving completely reliable support to their own beliefs.

There is absolutely no need, indeed it would be highly damaging, to want to found new Christian or any other form of spiritual communities.

 We have already got more than enough churches and conventicles!

 Let anyone, however, who is firmly established in any of these churches and who believes himself convinced that the Christian form of religious community speaks to his heart more than others, try in his own way through his own life and his own deepened knowledge and faith to serve the revelation of the eternal divine-spiritual essence at the core of Christianity.

 But let him seek as well to understand others and educate himself to reverence for their spiritual conduct which seeks to approach the essential core of Christianity in forms different to his own.

 And let him be far removed from that Pharisaic self-righteousness which thinks it cannot give any better expression to its reverence for Christian teaching than to meet those who seek after truth in a non-Christian form with incomprehension or even with hatred!

 In the remote areas of central Asia men live even now with whom no European, apart from the one speaking here, can compare himself, even formally, with respect to the true insight into what constitutes the essence of Christianity, and for whom, nevertheless, nothing is further from their minds than to join a religious group with a ‘Christian’ orientation.

 “Many shall come from the east and the west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven.”

 Is it still necessary to say that only ridiculous pride can presume to believe that the intentions of the divine spirit with respect to the future of Christianity can be pertly determined ?! –

 Everywhere “the lord of the harvest has sent forth his labourers into his vineyard,” and each fruit-bringing vine will be found by them and most carefully nurtured.

 The same spiritual sun will allow the fruit of all vines to ripen, at a time determined by the spirit!