TRUE MESSIAHS AND FALSE MESSIAHS
There are,
it has long been acknowledged, two kinds of love. There is the personal love for another human
being, the love experienced by people who, as the expression goes, 'fall in
love', and as an alternative to this there is the impersonal love of a man for
his country or his people or mankind in general. The first kind of love is sensual, the second
kind spiritual. The first stems from the Diabolic, the second aspires towards the
Divine. Most people, during the slow
progress of humanity towards the twenty-first century, have preferred the
personal to the impersonal kind of love.
The former is more all-pervasive at a lower stage of evolution, the
latter only begins to gather momentum when evolution reaches a more advanced
stage, such as it is currently at in various parts of the world, and continues
to progress beyond that towards the most advanced stage of all - the Omega
Absolute, in the heavenly Beyond.
It has often been said that God is love,
but this is an inadequate statement.
Some people are inclined to interpret this love in a personal or
romantic way, and consequently come to imagine that 'being in love' with
another person is akin to the Godhead.
This is really quite untrue! For,
in reality, few states of mind could be further removed from the Supreme Being,
which would be free from sensuality and, hence, any degree of animal
passion. No, but neither is the other
interpretation of love quite satisfactory in defining God - assuming of course
that one is attempting to define God in an ultimate rather
than a merely relative sense ... as appertaining, for example, to Christ. For in equating God with impersonal love, and
thus with the impersonal love one may feel for other people, one is limiting
God to this feeling. One is in effect
saying that God is this state of mind which corresponds to impersonal love. But God is or would be far more than
that! For God, considered objectively,
would be the ultimate Spiritual Globe at the culmination of evolution, that is
to say, the ultimate manifestation of transcendent spirit. God would be an absolute corresponding to the
Supreme Being, to a condition of life in pure spirit surpassing all
hitherto-known degrees of Being, as the most supreme level of Being. But such a supreme level of Being would not correspond to an impersonal love for others,
since there would be nothing outside and beyond transcendent spirit for God the
Supreme to feel impersonal love towards.
Such a supreme condition would be completely absorbed in the bliss of
its eternal self, paying no attention whatsoever to the gradual collapse and
disintegration of stars, planets, moons, etc.
No, impersonal love, such as human beings
can experience towards one another, is not God and is a long way short of being
so in either sense, i.e. whether God is viewed in terms of an existence, a
large globe of pure spirit, or in terms, far more importantly, of a supreme
level of Being - the actual condition of such an existence. Impersonal love aspires towards the Divine
but should not be mistaken for it, else God will be
reduced in stature to the level of the most sublime human feelings. Unfortunately human feelings, even when
blessedly impersonal, are at least two life forms removed from the possibility
of transcendence, inferior, no doubt, to the noblest level of mind to which our
projected Supermen and Superbeings of the future
millennial stages of evolution will attain.
The highest impersonal feelings will stem from transcendental man, or
man of the ultimate human civilization, but such a man is still in the making
and nowhere fully manifest in the world, which, at present, is still some way
from being post-atomic.
To return to love. The impersonal variety is morally superior to
the personal; the man without friends may be the friend of humanity or, at any
rate, a significant proportion of humanity.
It could be argued that, for all his faults, Hitler was such a man, and
to the extent that he valued love of his people above love of any one person,
he was a better and higher type of man than the one incapable of living without
a personal love. It is perhaps
significant that he only married when his political destiny had run its course
and his dream of a Greater German Reich lay in ruins about him. Up until the last act, it was the German
people rather than Eva Braun that most mattered to him. Marriage was as much an admission of defeat
as of anything else.
But was Hitler a Messiah, the German
Messiah? No, I do not really believe
so! For, like
Mussolini, Hitler was essentially a politician, not a religious man, and, to my
way of thinking, being a Messiah is inseparable from religion or a religious
destiny. To be sure, there has
been much talk of twentieth-century statesmen as 'Messiahs', and even Stalin
was not beyond consideration to the effect that he may have been the Soviet
one! Yet such talk fails to convince one
of its justification, seeming but an example of the elevation of politicians to
a quasi-religious status in the wake of the collapse of traditional religious
values - the elevation of Marxism-Leninism to a quasi-religion being a case in
point. Thus in the twentieth century the
'Messiah' manifested himself as a politician and came not to lead men towards
God (conceived, in any ultimate sense, as the Holy Spirit), but to free his people
from bourgeois constraints and set them on the road to a Soviet Communist
future or, in Hitler's case, a National Socialist one.
No, I do not think one should take these
political Messiahs too seriously, in any ultimate sense. For just as the first Messiah, the Christ,
was a man of religion, whose Kingdom was 'not of this world', so must any
subsequent Messiah, corresponding to a Second Coming, essentially be a man of
religion who points humanity towards the goal of evolution on terms outreaching
those of Christ, and thereby confirms the justification for a Second Coming, a
second stage of Messiahship. No matter if he does not
come in the exact terms envisaged by the apostles of old, or if he is not quite
a Jew. The important thing is
that he should have a message which bears on religious evolution and shows
humanity what it will have to do if it wishes to draw closer to salvation in
any ultimate sense, as signified by transcendence and the concomitant
attainment of pure spirit to the heavenly Beyond. He doesn't have to be a miracle-worker or a
knight in shining armour. He must simply
possess a logic ... relating to evolutionary transformations in connection with
post-human life forms which, based on sound rational foundations, is
effectively irrefutable, and thus the key to salvation. Neither Hitler nor Stalin, nor even
Mussolini, possessed such a logic, which is why they were false messiahs -
politicians who sought to drag the essence of Messiahship
down to their activist, materialist level.
No good! The need for a Second
Coming remains as great as before. For
the spiritual direction of evolution hangs in the balance without his guidance,
and any number of impostors can step into the void to do their damnedest.
How, then, will the New Messiah, the
second world teacher after Christ (or Buddha or Mohammed or Zarathustra
or whoever), compare with the first one?
The answer to this - with due respect to Christians - must be ...
favourably. That is to say, he should
reflect a degree of evolutionary progress relative to the historical gap
between Christ and himself. If Christ
was a simple carpenter-turned-preacher who could neither read nor write but
taught peripatetically, through word of mouth, then he who corresponds to a
Second Coming must spread his teachings in a superior fashion to Christ -
namely, through the medium of the printed or recorded word. Evolution has gone forwards, so no
Christ-equivalent figure could reasonably be expected to conduct his evangelical
mission on the primitive terms of Christ in this day and age. A man who wandered about preaching the 'Good
News' from town to town ... would simply be an anachronism, subject to
allegations of crankiness. Nor need we
expect the New Messiah to come from a desert land, like Christ, since
evolutionary progress would seem to require that he who champions the Truth on
a higher and more advanced level than Christ must stem from a radically
different climate - one, by contrast, which is cold, wet, and windy. A man born into a hot land would not be in
the best of geographical positions to think transcendentally, since the
sensuous influence of the sun, compatible with pagan criteria, is so much more
prevalent in such a land ... that no true spiritual leadership could now arise
there. As evolution progresses from
pagan to transcendental stages, from alpha to omega via Christ, so it is
furthered, at each successive stage, by peoples appertaining to less sensual
climates.
Thus while the earliest civilizations
could only have arisen in hot lands, the ultimate civilization must stem from a
cold climate, which will be conducive towards a more spiritual attitude to
life. No second Messiah could originate
in a climate approximating to that which Christ knew. That is why the
If, then, the New Messiah, stemming from
cold, wet, Northern Europe, compares favourably with Christ, under what terms does
he remain Messianic? I have argued that
such a role is essentially a religious one, so there can be no question of the
Messiah being a political leader. Only
so long as he continues to write and offer the world, or a particular part of
it at this point in time, the irrefutable truths of his evolutionary teachings,
which outline the means by which Heaven may ultimately be attained to, will he
function as Messiah. As soon as this
task is accomplished, or he feels that he has taken the truth of evolutionary
progress as far as it can go, then he ceases to be Messiah. Should he subsequently become a politician or
an artist or a computer tutor, then he will be that and not a Messiah. The role of the second world teacher is only
valid so long as it is being actively fulfilled. There is no reason why it should last the
entire working duration of the man's life, since all or most of the essential
truths appertaining to a Messianic credibility can be committed to paper in a
few years. Christ himself was only a
Messiah for a comparatively short period of time. Prior to the inception of his mission, he was
a carpenter. He died, crucified by the
Romans, at thirty-three. Died to the
flesh in order to be reborn into the spirit as the 'Chosen One', destined to fill
the role of Saviour to millions of his followers - a man posthumously elevated,
by theological expedience, to the status of God. There is no reason why the New Messiah should
not die to the spirit and be reborn into the flesh in his own lifetime, that is
to say, die as a writer of the whole truth in order to be reborn as a
politician or tutor or artist or whatever.
There is no reason why, having terminated his religious vocation, he
should not embark upon a radically different course - assuming he were capable
of doing so!
In the beginning was the Word, and that
would also apply to the future beginnings of the transcendental civilization,
which would have to have received its direction and justification from the Word
of the New Messiah - he who corresponded, while he wrote, to a Second
Coming. There is no need to mystify this
man. For he does not
write to be set-up as God but, on the contrary, to instruct those who are
destined to profit from his teachings.
He knows himself and has proclaimed himself. But he also knows what he is not and what, on
a wider scale, the New Messiah is not.
Certainly not a politician, like Hitler or Stalin, and certainly not a
peripatetic preacher! Not a crank
either, though there are plenty of people who imagine that they correspond to a
Second Coming on terms which, because of their tendency towards the literal or
factual, could only be described as highly dubious! Such people are quite often Americans, which
isn't altogether surprising since, as a transitional civilization between
dualism and transcendentalism, America is the nearest thing, at present, to the
future transcendental civilization, and it is therefore natural - I might even
say 'logical' - that false messiahs (and I don't just mean Superman) should
emerge from a civilization bordering on the (hypothetical) ultimate one. But to the extent that they appertain, as
Americans, to transitional civilization, then they can never be the legitimate,
logical historical choice for the task of outlining any future civilization. Such a task must fall to a man who perceives
himself as being outside all mainstream civilizations of the contemporary West
- like, dare I say, myself.
