06 Allegory Becomes History

ALLEGORY BECOMES HISTORY

Much dramatism enters into the ancient sagacious efforts to portray the rejuvenating power of the Christ-spirit when it is awakened from its "dead" condition and takes its rightful leadership in the individual’s evolution. Death in person (or Hades, also personified) is depicted as standing thunderstruck as he notes the entry into his kingdom of the radiant Son of God. He has been hitherto the undisputed conqueror of all those who, struck down by his hand, have entered his underworld house to be his victims and his prey. He sees the Christ enter and expects to make him his victim also. But he finds his prospective new subject unconquerable; not only that, he finds his own power being vanquished by the power of light. Overcome with dismay, he sees the Redeemer snatch from his grasp the multitudes whom he had held bound. The legend is that the Christ empties Hades of its occupants. Thus he conquers death and hell, as the Easter anthem chant. At the appearance of Jesus in the lower world Death demands to know who this puissant challenger of his dominion may be. Whence has he this power to defy the monarch of the underworld, where all denizens are Death’s subjects. He is seized with dread and trembles as the radiance of Jesus’ glory sheds a brilliant light throughout the lower regions. Then he sees the graves of his dead opened and the dead come forth to follow the saviour as he leads them out into the full light of the upper world. Expressive indeed are the utterances which escape the lips of the Satanic monarch as he sees this radiant spirit "whom I am not able to grasp", dissolving the very doors and walls of his kingdom. Stricken with fear, he cries: "Who is this who extinguishes darkness with manifold splendor, nor permits me to rule over those who are mine, but draws souls given to me into Heaven? For this is the Christ who was crucified, by whom those who were below are brought on high, and those who were behind are set in front, when He rose from the dead, trod on Sheol, destroyed death by death and rising the third day, gave thanks to the Father." Death trembles, recoils and flees in terror at the approach of the Christ-light in his underworld dominions. Our author, MacCulloch, cites a scholar, von der Goltz, to uphold his theory that if the date assigned by the latter to Athanasius’ de Virginitate is correct, such passages taken from this apocryphal document may well be the source of similar dramatic scenarios in the Testament of Our Lord, another uncanonical work, and both possibly inspiring some of the Gospel symbolism relative to the release of souls from death and the resurrection theme in general. Von der Goltz is mentioned as having suggested that for all such material some ancient Egyptian tradition, whose provenance can not be traced to original source, is being drawn upon. This is introduced here with the idea of showing that now and again, in spite of an inveterate reluctance to trace Christian material back to ancient Pagan backgrounds, scholars at times are forced to see what is the obvious factuality in this pursuit: that a body of literary treasures, all showing evident grounds of common source and kindred relationship, must have come down to the time of early Christianity from some antique fund of general wisdom, expressed in documents whose content and message form a unity of both expression and meaning. More than a few scholars have seen no way to bring a semblance of order and harmony out of a tangled exegetical situation in dealing with the Gospels and the Apocryphal literature save to assume that these religious books were based on "a common document" antecedent to the production of the extant literature. Yet this, the only credible conclusion in view of many redoubtable considerations, is generally rated as a random guess and at once abandoned. Unquestionably it is the one sure rock of exegetical criticism on which Biblical scholarship can take a stand. And with Gerald Massey’s colossal array of the data of comparative religion to validate the thesis, von der Goltz must be right in surmising that some ancient Egyptian tradition has been drawn upon for this scenario of terror of the ruler of death. Massey indeed has traced all such links of connection between the Bible literature and antecedent Egyptian dramatism. Christianity will never regain its secure footing on a platform of inerrant truth until it follows Massey’s prodigious revelations of the Egyptian source of all its literary treasure.

Emanating from a common source in remote Egyptian wisdom, the primal origin of which must be far older in time and far nearer a truly divine provenance than orthodox Christianity has ever been willing to concede, the majestic formulations of some surpassing intelligence that presented high truth in the garb of myth, drama, allegory and the semanticism of nature were disseminated by the "grapevine" of esoteric secrecy among the Mystery Brotherhoods and such associations as, particularly the Essenes and the Gnostics in many nations, who copied and preserved the sacred books which carried the thesaurus of wisdom in cryptic forms and idioms. Indeed no one - except, alas, a mind distorted out of rationality by the force of pietistic indoctrination and an indefeasible prejudice - can carry on the pursuit of documentary study of ancient religious literature without arriving at this inescapable conclusion. Comparative religion study has failed to reach this verdict with any unanimity only because of the recalcitrant obduracy of Christian anti-Pagan biases. It is time the simple interests of truth are accorded their rightful primacy over less vital considerations.

Interesting sidelights - though all are integral elements of the ancient drama - are cast on the central theme of Christ’s descent to hell by the efforts to identify those long-moribund tenants of the underworld who were to be resurrected and freed by the visit of the Logos to their subterranean dungeons. On this, as on several other items in the representation, Christian writers of the early centuries are much at variance and often in destructive contradiction. Some assume that the divine potency melts down all the bars of hell and releases all earth’s previous dead en masse and empties and destroys hell in finality. Others are not so generous in granting an eventual salvation to all, as this would cheapen the value of salvation through the crucified Christ and weaken all claims as to the sole efficacy of the Christian path of redemption. If all the dead are to be saved, willy-nilly, what need of dying with Christ on his cross? Others limit the benison of release from hell to those who for a sufficient measure of repentance and turning from heathen error, of sincere yearning for the light, of inner purgation of sin and true piety, may have earned the right to receive the boon of the Savior’s liberating power. But there seems to have been rather general unanimity on the presumption that the coming of the divine liberator to the purlieus of the lower world would surely bring release and resurrection to the Patriarchs of the Old Dispensation, from Adam through Noah and the Israelite Fathers down to David at least. These had been God’s agents of the Adamic first birth of humanity, and, like Moses, had led the race of mankind over the preparatory stages toward spiritual unfoldment, but were not to bring the full unction of divine grace to the world, since only the Christ himself could achieve that consummation. But when in the fullness of time the Christ would come to visit the lower earth and release his saving power, then the time was fulfilled for the exaltation and apotheosization of the leaders of the fore-stage of human sanctification.

Yet this "liberal" concession to antecedent and non-Christian influence was not accorded without much reluctance, since ineluctably the early Christian mind was permeated with a hard repugnance against the Jews, on the general ground of the Jewish failure to acknowledge and welcome the man Jesus as the long-expected Messiah. There has always existed this great impasse between the two attitudes of Christian theology toward Judaism. On the one side the office of heralding and birthing the coming Messiah, as prophesied in the books of Jewish religion. Jesus came into a milieu that was prepared by the Jewish nation, this historical fact thus indicating God’s choice of this people for the great honor. The coming Christ was to be born of the Jesse-David line of Jewish kings. Hebraism is therefore the initial stage of Christianity itself. On the other side the Jewish adherence to strict formalism in religion prevented recognition and acceptance of the Christ when he came. Judaism rejected him as the fulfilment of its own prophetic heralding. It had therefore forfeited the right to receive the blessed unction of his deliverance of the dead when he visited the underworld. So that it was a considerable stretch of theological liberality for Christians to include even the Jewish Patriarchs in the category of those to be resurrected from Sheol and Gehenna. It was hardly to be supposed that the underworld visit of Jesus would free those who still stood in hostility to his message and his mission to the world. Yet on the wide theory that Jesus’ descent ad inferos would give all those souls who had lived and died under the Old Dispensation their chance to partake of the redemptive power which Christ was to release for the reign of the new Dispensation, opinion was broadly expressed that the mercy and favour of God would open the prison doors to all except perhaps the most perversely wicked and evil souls detained in the "lower parts of the earth". One version asserted that Christ liberated all the dead in Hades except Cain, Judas and Herod. It is given as the problematic view of the Gnostic Marcion that the Jews in Hades would be found as stiff-necked as they had been on earth. Others presumed that Christ’s descent was to raise all the dead.

One surely must conclude that allegorism and not history is being purveyed - and mistaken for history - in the stories extent in a number of the Apocryphal writings, to the effect that when Jesus opened the gates of hell the Patriarchs and holy men of old time emerged in body from their graves opened by the great earthquakes and even appeared and were seen in Jerusalem by people writing the accounts. When one reads enough of the literature foisted on the simple constituency of the early Church, dealing with wonders of faith, of healing, of miracle, one realizes how far the zeal of religious piety can override reason and subject the mind to the sweep of credulity. When allegories have been converted into historical events, all the resources of thaumaturgy must be called in to condition susceptible minds to their acceptance in defiance of logic.

Likewise the literal rendering of semantic constructions has made inevitable no end of confusion, since in the various dramatizations the authors used different terms in naming the graded states of consciousness through which man passes in his upward progress. Hell itself had many names, as Hades, Sheol, Gehenna (Gehinnom), Amenta, Tartarus, Avernus, Orcus, Tophet, the Tuat and others. Also heaven had a variety of synonymous designations, as the Elysian Fields, Olympus, Paradise, Eden, the Fields of Arru, Isles of the Blest, Beulah Land, Canaan, Jerusalem and more. Another term, apparently designating heaven introduced much confusion into the reading. This is the name given to the region into which the soul of Lazarus was carried after his death, - Abraham’s bosom. No Christian believer could think of this hallowed place as other than heaven or its equivalent in blessedness. But trouble arose when this localization appeared to be in conflict with the view that had become nearly universal in early Christian writing, that all souls at death (except only the Christian martyrs) descended to Hades! Residence in Hades, or a temporary and intermediate sojourn there, had not then assumed its eternal or indeed its condemnatory character at least in scholarly circles, as it did in later times. It was considered to be a region of temporary or transitional habitation for all souls following death, there to await the final separation of "the sheep and the goats" at the judgment. But if all souls went at death to Hades, where was this place of seraphic bliss called Abraham’s bosom (Luke 16:22)? Here symbolism found itself impaled on the horns of a dilemma. If all souls went to Hades, but the sanctified Lazarus landed in Abraham’s bosom, then Hades must not be the underground land of darkness and misery, but a quite delectable homeland. In fact it makes Hades heaven itself! The Christian apologists cudgelled their brains to extricate themselves from this logical trap in which they found themselves caught, and came up with the only "explanation" in sight: that Abraham’s bosom, though not the ultimate or highest heaven, was a pleasant section of Hades, a sort of special compartment of the dark underworld that was set aside as a fairly delightful abode where the souls of the righteous might find refreshment. In terms of metropolitan housing one is led to think of it as a penthouse apartment above the dark lower stories in hell’s tenements. Though all go down to Hades from the earth, each soul goes into that section of the underworld justly allotted to it by karmic equity - although this is not stated in MacCulloch’s volume.

It is evident on the face of it that the conception of Hades as we find it elaborated in the speculations of the early Fathers and Scriptural exegetists, is far from that simple idea of it which came to be current in popular thought in Christendom. It is not by any means unequivocally the "bad place" to which the wicked and the ungodly are despatched at death for eternal torture. All, the righteous and the wicked alike, had to abide in Hades till the time of the apocalypse. (The enlightened reader will hardly need to be reminded that the Greek phrase teleuten aion, which has been stupidly mistranslated "end of the world" is properly to be rendered "end of the cycle", or "end of the age".) Even that Edenic heaven, Abraham’s bosom, where Lazarus had been taken to be rewarded for earthly poverty with celestial riches, had to be included in its province. The very Christ himself, either by providential design or for some reason of cosmic purport, was called upon to descend into this nether earth.