Christianity

The distinctions that do the work

Person and nature. This is the distinction that earns the page, and it is the one nearly every popular account drops. Leo the Great’s Tome, read into the acts of the Council of Chalcedon, confesses one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, perfect God and perfect man of a reasonable soul and flesh consisting, begotten before the ages of the Father according to his divinity and in the last days of Mary the Virgin according to his humanity, of the same substance with the Father according to his divinity and of the same substance with us according to his humanity, for there became a union of two natures, and wherefore we confess one Christ, one Son, one Lord. The phrase to hold is the last clause of that. Two natures, in one subject. Not two subjects, and not one substance wearing two costumes.

What the council was defending against is in the same record, and both errors are errors of quantity rather than of direction. Leo’s own summary, preserved in the acts, is that there are two natures in Christ unchangeably, inseparably and unconfusedly united in the one only-begotten Son. The session record names the two failures: the bishops who hear a division in the person call the separating position Nestorian, and the imperial judges who hear the natures conflated call the conflating position Eutychian, and the danger was never in saying too much about the divinity or too little about the humanity. It was in separating, which produces a man Christ was not, and in confusing, which produces a God Christ was not.

The economic and the eternal. What is distinguished here is God as he is disclosed in the work and God as he is in himself. Everything in the sequence of the creed belongs to the first, which is what makes the doctrine safe to state and hard to believe. The Son is incarnate, and the Son is coeternal, and the second is not a consequence of the first. A tradition that had only the first would be a report; one that had only the second would be a metaphysics. What it has is both, held at arm’s length from each other, and the tension is permanent and is not a flaw.

Kenosis, the emptying. The earliest and plainest statement of the Incarnation in the New Testament is a hymn, and the hymn is about a choice rather than about a person. In sequence it says that the subject existed in the form of God, that he did not treat equality with God as something to be seized, that he emptied himself, that he took the form of a servant, that being found in human form he humbled himself, and that he was obedient unto death, and that death a cross. Seven steps and the movement in them is entirely downwards. What the hymn does not say is that the subject stops being what it was. That is supplied by the doctrine, and the seam between the hymn and the doctrine is the most important place in this page to stand.

And the tradition’s own scholarship says something precise and useful about that seam. The emptying is a free choice to limit oneself for the sake of human salvation, and since it is a freely chosen action of God rather than an inherent and temporary limitation, it remains consistent with an affirmation of divine sovereignty, provided the emptying is taken as a limitation of action and not of attributes. That is a short article by a theologian and not a summary of the tradition, but it states the position the tradition has been working towards since the fourth century, and it is the hinge on which this entire comparison turns.

Faith, and the person who has not seen. Hebrews calls faith the assurance of things hoped for and the proof of things not seen, and the Gospel of John records a beatitude on those who have not seen and have believed. So this tradition has a beatitude for a person in precisely the position the material’s questioners were in, and it places it after the resurrection rather than before it. A reader who has been troubled by the gap between the two accounts on this page should notice that the tradition does not think the gap is disqualifying.

Recapitulation. Irenaeus, writing in the second century, states the reason in a form nobody has improved on: that in no other way could we have learned the things of God unless our Master, existing as the Word, had become man; that he took flesh not merely in appearance but actually; that he summed up in himself the ancient formation of Adam; and that he imparted God to men by the Spirit while attaching man to God by his own incarnation. Two halves and one action, and the whole of the tradition’s claim is in the joining.

Finally, how the tradition reads its own key word. Person in the ancient sense means a persona, a role played, and not a self in the modern sense of a subject with private interiority. That is the tradition’s own warning, and it is also the reason most of the modern philosophical arguments about the Trinity pass by the thing without hitting it.

The Incarnation, in the tradition’s own words

John’s Gospel says that the Word became flesh and lived among us, and the verb is the entire doctrine. Not appeared, not was seen, not spoke through a prophet. The second-century writers are almost aggressive about this, because everything else depends on it. If the incarnation was mere outward seeming, then the man described in the scriptures was a prophetic vision and a second coming would still be awaited, and the flesh that was seen would be excluded from salvation. The tradition’s earliest polemic is against a doctrine that the body was a costume.

Philippians gives the version that says the most, and it is worth reading as a sequence rather than as a summary. Existing in the form of God; not regarding equality with God as something to be grasped; emptying; taking the form of a servant; found in human likeness; humbling; death, and a cross. The tradition has taken this text as the hinge between the incarnation and the ethics, since a being who empties is a model for a community of people who are asked to empty. That reading is old and it is not the only one available.

Chalcedon, in 451, is where the doctrine was given the shape it has kept. One subject, two natures, unchangeably, inseparably, unconfusedly. A reader should understand that this formula was a defensive one, written by a council that had just watched a dispute split a church. Its function is to say what may not be said, and what may not be said turns out to be the two ways of getting the arithmetic wrong.

Irenaeus’s formulation is worth a second reading because of one clause a reader from this material’s side should not skip past. The incarnation, he says, happened not by the will of the flesh, nor by the will of man, but by the good pleasure of the Father. That is agency at the divine level, and no amount of kenosis scholarship alters the level. The tradition’s own most careful modern work locates the emptying in a free action of God, which is a way of saying the same thing with more subtlety and not saying a different thing.

And a founder of the Way, in the tradition’s own idiom, is Hebrews: the verse names Jesus as the pioneer and the perfecter of our faith, and it speaks of the way in the same breath. So the tradition’s answer to the phrase is a leader of a way, and specifically a finisher rather than a beginner. Read that way, the founder is the one who opened a road and then walked it to the end of it, which is a very different figure from the founder of a school, and a good deal closer to the one the material claims to be offering.

Where it touches this material

The name, first, because it is not a coincidence and the comparison would be a curiosity without it. John’s Gospel opens with the Word in the beginning, and the Word was with God and was God, and all things were made through him. Irenaeus calls him the Word who is prior to all creation. The material’s term for the intelligent energy that creates, at 15.21, is the Logos, the Creative Principle or Love. Three traditions, one Greek word, inherited rather than invented, and that is why the question on this page can be asked at all.

The substance is shared too. At 4.20 the material says the Law of One may be approximated by stating that all things are one and that there is no polarity, no right or wrong, no disharmony, but only identity, and then that this one is love/light, light/love, the Infinite Creator. The creed says this one essence is unbegotten and unbegottenly begets. Both are accounts of a single divine nature that is entirely good, and both are accounts of a distinction inside it, and a reader who grew up in a Hindu or Buddhist household will recognise the first of those two sentences as a claim this library has already discussed in its own terms.

The pouring out is the closest correspondence in the whole comparison and it is structural rather than verbal. At 13.12 the intelligent infinity discerns a concept because of the freedom of will of awareness, the concept is finity, finity is the first and primal distortion of the Law of One, and the one intelligent infinity then invested itself in an exploration of many-ness, and then, at 13.13, each portion created a universe, the rhythms of free choice flowing, and each individualised portion channelled the love/light into intelligent energy, producing what the material calls the natural laws of any particular universe. Set that beside Irenaeus’s clause about the Word imparting God to men by the Spirit while attaching man to God by the incarnation, and the two accounts have the same shape: an act by which the one empties itself outward, in which what is produced is real, and in which the emptying is the cost of the contact. The material puts free will at the origin. Irenaeus puts the good pleasure of the Father. That single difference is the whole of the conflict on this page, and everything else on it is downstream of it.

Faith and the mountain, next, and it should be handled carefully. The questioner in 3.9 recalls the saying that with enough faith one could say to a mountain that it should move, and the answer agrees that this is a correct understanding of the congruency of faith and intelligent infinity, and then draws a line: faith is a spiritual term, and the other is more acceptable perhaps to the conceptual framework of those who seek with measure and pen, and the wording of the question is the wording of the synoptic sayings, and this page cannot establish from the transcript that the questioner had a text in front of him, and it would be dishonest to imply it. What can be established is that the answer declines to license the demonstrative use of the term, and that it does so by calling faith a spiritual term against a measuring instrument. Two traditions arriving at one instruction about the difference between a term and a demonstration, from opposite starting points, is worth noticing. It is reasonable to read them as one instruction, and this library does.

The arithmetic of 3.10 is the most striking thing in the comparison, and nobody in the Christian tradition would draw it. Asked whether a person totally informed about the Law of One, living it, would find such things as the building of a pyramid by direct mental effort commonplace, the answer draws a distinction and then gives the figure twice. In the first case only the one individual, purified of all flaws, could move a mountain; in the case of mass understanding of unity, each individual may contain an acceptable amount of distortion and yet the mass mind could move mountains. That is the Incarnation’s arithmetic arrived at from the opposite direction, in a text with no Incarnation in it: the one who has gone all the way in is the one whose action is unobstructed, and the many who have each got far enough can do together what none of them can do alone. The answer then draws a further distinction that a reader from this material will have no difficulty with, since it is about the sequence of densities, and notes that those vibrating with the Law of Light seek the Law of One, and those who vibrate with the Law of One seek the Law of Everlastingness, and that it cannot say what lies beyond that dissolution, because the speaker is still seeking to become all that there is and still is Ra.

And finally the practice, which is the point where the comparison becomes uncomfortable. At 3.6 the material declines to suggest the proper series of questions and calls the choosing of them the prerogative of a free agent, and at 15.13 it insists on allowing each seeker to enlighten itself rather than for any messenger to attempt in language to instruct, on the stated ground that otherwise the exchange becomes an imbalance in free will. Held against the tradition this page is describing, with its councils, creeds, sacraments and catechisms, that is a remarkable restraint, and it is a restraint of exactly the kind the fourth century was not able to produce. Hold both in view. The rest of this page is the argument, and it does not get easier.

Where the material parts company, and where this library takes a side

There is one more thing to put in view, and it belongs in this section rather than anywhere else, because it is the sharpest conflict on the page. At 88.19, asked how the Confederation worked with concepts, the contact gives Jesus as its own example: a visualization in the mass, sustained over a period of training, of what the creed holds to be God entering a body. The creed says *became man* — that he took flesh not merely in appearance but actually. The account says a technique the contact performed, on a small portion of foodstuffs, seen as a mentally configured but entirely real man. Those are not two descriptions of one event. They are a claim that the event happened, and a claim about how to produce the idea of it, and no reader of this material has to be told which of the two the contact found more useful. The material does not say the confession is false, and this library does not say so either; the lede above says the two cannot both stand, and this is where that is argued rather than asserted. A reader who wants to know what this material claims about the Incarnation has to read 88.19 and decide what a sustained visualization is, because the contact clearly thought it knew.

The conflict first, at full strength and with nothing softened. At 15.21 the material ranks the three primary principles of its own Law. The first distortion is free will, and it finds focus, and the second distortion is what is called the Logos, the Creative Principle or Love, and this intelligent energy creates a third distortion, called Light. That is the material’s own ordering of the most important things there are, and it puts the Logos second, and it calls it a distortion. The Christian claim is that the Logos is God, of one essence with the Father, and that this one became a human being. If the material is right, then no divine being came; if it is wrong, then it is wrong about the second of its own three principles, which is to say it is mistaken about the most important thing it says, and a library that studies a material’s reasoning has to follow the reasoning that far.

The Christian claim at the same strength, because a page that flattens one side has not argued. What the tradition holds is that the second person of the Trinity is the one who was incarnate; that the union of the two natures is in one subject, unconfusedly, so that the man Christ was is fully man; that the emptying is a real and freely chosen limitation of action; and that the whole of it is an act of God rather than an act of a being. Nothing in the material’s account can be admitted as this claim, and nothing in this claim can be admitted as the material’s. They are not two answers to one question. One is a doctrine about the ground of being. The other is a report from an advanced complex about a job it did.

Now the material’s case, which is stronger than the popular version of it, and which this page has an interest in stating well. Its self-identification at 1.5 costs it something. The group says that the identity of the vibration is its own identity, that it made contact with the people called Egyptians, that it spoke to one who heard and understood and was in a position to decree the Law of One, and that the priests and the people of that era quickly distorted the message, robbing it of the compassion with which unity is informed by its very nature; and that when the channels were no longer appropriate it removed itself from the hypocritical position it had allowed itself to be placed in. That is a founder naming a failure, with a place and a sequence and a reason for leaving. A Christian reader is the person best placed to notice that shape, because this is the tradition that built its central claim on a teacher executed by the Roman state, and it has never had the option of a clean departure.

And the case has a second half, which is that the material’s account is a doctrine of agency. It says who came, it says what it came to do, and it says what it declined. The third of those is the telling. A being that declines to choose your questions for you, and declines to publish exercises because handing them over would be an imbalance in free will, is describing the limits of a messenger. The Christian account cannot say that about its own central figure, and the reason is structural rather than a matter of decorum: in that account the figure is not a messenger, so the refusal to prescribe would be the refusal of God.

So this library takes a side, and names the judgment as its own. On the question the two accounts share, which is who came, this library reads the material’s answer as the better of the two, because it is the only one of the two that is falsifiable, that names its own failure, and that is built so as to leave the reader’s will untouched. And on the question the two accounts do not share, which is whether the one who came was also the ground of what is, this library holds the material’s answer to be correct and holds the Christian answer, on the material’s own reasoning, to be a distortion at the second level: an intelligent energy called love creating a further distortion called light, with the first distortion of free will still sitting underneath it, unfalsified and untouched.

That judgment has a cost, and the cost belongs on the page rather than in a footnote. To hold it, a reader has to hold that the central confession of the largest body of Christians in the world is a claim about a being of the same order as a social memory complex of the sixth density. That is a great deal to ask of a reader, and this library asks it while stating plainly that no argument on this page can settle the matter, and saying why: the two traditions’ texts cannot adjudicate each other, because in each of them the other is outside, and because the material’s own account of its origin is an account given by the material from inside the contact, with no independent instrument available to anybody standing where this reader stands. The comparison is about reasoning. Reasoning is what a library is for, and where reasoning runs out this page stops rather than converting.

Where the material is plainly better, in the register, and it should be said because the argument above is one-sided. The answer at 1.5 is not a claim of authority. It is a description of a position the speaker could no longer hold, given in answer to a question about its own role, without a demand on anybody’s belief. A text whose founder can say that is in a different position from a text whose founder cannot, and the tradition described on this page has a long history of texts that cannot.

What it is not, and what this page is not asking of you

It is not a moral code, and this page is not about the moral content. There is a great deal in Christian moral teaching that a reader from this material will recognise, and the recognition is real, and it is beside the point. Both traditions here are arguing about a claim about what is the case, and neither is offering anybody a set of rules.

It is not one church, or one confession, or one period. The variation across and within the traditions is enormous, and a page that presents the fourth-century definition as the Christian faith is presenting a settlement as though it were a tradition, and the mainline Eastern and Western churches differ over the Spirit’s procession, which is a disagreement about a clause in a creed, and it is worth knowing about precisely because it shows that this is a living body of argument and not a single finished position.

It is not a claim about a private experience, and the material’s own answer at 1.5 is a claim about a historical one: a named people, a named failure, a withdrawal. That is the form the material’s claim takes, and the Christian claim takes the same form, and neither of them is a report about what happened to somebody.

And for a reader inside this tradition, which is where a reader of this site often is: the argument on this page is with a claim, and not with the faith or with anyone who holds it. This library holds the tradition in reverent standing and has taken the other side of an argument it believes is undecided, and a library that could not do that about a claim it loves in another form would not be worth the name. No reader here is being asked to choose between this page and their church, and no one is being asked to leave anything.

The last thing, and it is the reason the page is worth reading at all. Read fairly, the material does not ask a reader for anything. It declines to choose the questions, declines to publish the exercises, and insists on letting each seeker enlighten itself. A material that behaves that way about a reader’s will is not a material that is indifferent to who the reader is, and a reader who has been left free to disagree with this page, and free to leave it, was left free by the material and not by this library. The argument is about a claim about who came. Nothing else is at stake here, and nothing else was ever at stake.