Like many Westerners, I was raised in a Christian environment. When I was perhaps seven or eight years old, my parents gave me a bible for Christmas , a youth version that I still have to this day. I quickly learned that my favorite part was the Apocalypse, or Revelation to John, the last book of the bible and one of the most difficult to understand. Initially, like many young boys, I was attracted to its violence and, well, apocalyptic themes; at the time I would sometimes watch preachers like Jack van Impe interpret current events in light of the text in Revelation, in a kind of rapid fire apophenia that would confuse a schizophrenic.
If you are familiar with the Book of Revelation, you can understand why it lends itself to applications its author would never have imagined. And it is, by itself, a very strange work; when Jesus first appears to John, he comes in the form of “a Lamb that seemed to have been slain,” with “seven horns and seven eyes,” the “seven spirits of God sent out into the whole world.” Now, the image of Jesus as the Paschal Lamb is strange enough, though it appears in some of the earliest Christian writings. At the Catholic Church where I attend RCIA classes, the altar is painted with a mosaic of a triumphant Lamb that symbolizes Christ’s presence through his Body, which is consecrated there by the priest and is also, mystically, the surrounding congregation and the broader Church. The Lamb rests on the Book of Life as described in the Book of Revelation, but the imagery of the Lamb begins with the earliest known writing of the New Testament, Paul’s First Letter to the Christians in Corinth. St. Paul evokes the Lamb while chastising the church in Corinth for tolerating “immorality of a kind not found even among pagans-a man living with his father’s wife.” The sacrifice of the Paschal Lamb, he reminds them, is a time for festive celebration, but not with the old yeast of malice and wickedness, but the new unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. This is the first reference to the Eucharist, which Paul describes in more detail later in the letter. What stands out to the modern, uninitiated reader is the strange imagery: Jesus is on the one hand a powerful being that is the primordial root of creation, and on the other hand a sacrificial lamb, a passive, vulnerable creature that reminds us at once of both animal and human sacrifice.
It gets stranger. In this essay I will examine the Body of Christ from a comparative and one might even say mystical perspective. Not as the body of Jesus of Nazareth, the man executed by way of crucifixion under circumstances that are still debated by historians, but as the Body of Christ as that has been defined in the orthodox Christian faith.
From Lamb to Logos
The lamb is an important and recognizable figure in Jewish texts and is among the first sacrifices described in Genesis. Both Abel and his brother Cain, the first children of Adam and Eve, offer sacrifices to God. Their sacrifices are rooted in their job descriptions: Abel, a herder of flocks, offers what is at least implied to be a lamb, while Cain, a tiller of the ground, brings an offering of “fruit of the ground.” God looks on Abel’s sacrifice with favor, but rejects the offering made by Cain, leading Cain to murder his brother. Later, when God demands that Abraham sacrifice Isaac, God at the last possible moment produces a lamb that can serve as an alternative offering, sparing Isaac’s life and ending the practice of human sacrifice. Later, when God fulfills his promise to the Israelites and delivers them out of Egypt, the paschal or Passover lamb is instituted as part of the feast of celebration and commemoration, foreshadowing the later role of the Eucharist instituted by Jesus in Last Supper, according to the gospels.
Logos, unlike lamb, is a concept without any clear Hebrew equivalent, imported into Jewish discourse as a result of Greek influence, a process known as Hellenization. The term appears in several classical works from well before the Gospel of John as well as works that followed, including Meditations, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius’ collection of reflections on spiritual matters and practical guidelines for daily living, what might be described as the world’s first self-help book. Aurelius was probably not familiar with the Christian use of that term in the Gospel of John, but he was influenced by Platonism and the Stoics, who believed that the logos was the anima mundi, the world’s animating principle or soul. It was also what made the world intelligible to human beings and was in some sense connected to the rational part of the human intellect.
Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish philosopher influenced by an allegorical reading of the bible as well as Greek philosophy, wrote about the logos in a way that anticipates or at least foreshadows the account of the logos that appears in the Gospel of John. According to Philo, the logos is a kind of shadow of God, even described as “the first-born son” or the “Son of God and Sophia,” the latter being another creation or emanation of God, a divine feminine principle that is more properly called, in English, “Wisdom.” Unlike the Stoics, Philo maintained a strict separation of nature and God, and so the logos was not properly either, but a mediator between nature and God that rendered both intelligible by the human being.
Philo’s ideas, which exist at the nexus of Greek and Jewish thought, were similar to other schools that were present in Alexandria at the time. Notably, the Platonists had already started the process of interpreting myths allegorically, a concept that Philo carried over to the Hebrew scriptures. This served to elevate seemingly absurd stories into parables or, at minimum, preserve their ethical teachings and cultural importance. It was also a way of insulating them from the onslaught of the historians and their penchant for noting discrepancies and casting doubt on cherished etiological narratives. In Alexandria, allegory prevailed.
In Philo, we see allegorical readings enthusiastically applied to the Hebrew texts. So it is with the story of Sodom, where the cities of the plain become figurative representations of the five outward senses of touch, taste, sight, smell and vision. This type of interpretation, while very common in Alexandria and especially with early Christian commentaries of Jewish and Christian scriptures, is considerably esoteric and dependent upon extrinsic evidence compared to the etiological interpretations that appear justified by the text itself. The binding of Isaac, for example, while susceptible to a number of interpretations based on considerations extrinsic to the text, is capable of being understood as an explanation for why lambs are offered in place of firstborn children, although all firstborn are consecrated to Yahweh according to the law. The reasons God has for testing the faith of Abraham are mysterious, but the replacement of Isaac with the ram finds parallels elsewhere in scripture. In Exodus 13, the firstborn of everything born to the Israelites, human or animal, is consecrated or set aside for Yahweh. Children so consecrated must be ransomed or redeemed, an apparent allusion to the binding of Isaac. A common reading of the binding, then, is as an etiological myth that explains then-existing cultic practices of the Israelites, as with the Exodus and the festival of Passover. A “just so” story that links the mythic narratives of the ancient Hebrews to their religious practices, then common.
Those religious practices were centered on blood sacrifice. Just as Easter became the most important Christian holiday, Passover was the most important Jewish holiday in antiquity. Jewish devotees of Yahweh were expected to make a pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem for the purpose of making sacrifices. The Temple was a permanent sanctuary that was an upgraded version of the mobile shrine described in the story of Moses and the later accounts in Hebrew scripture that predated the reigns of King David and King Solomon. This shrine, called the Tent of the Meeting or the Tabernacle, housed the Ark of the Covenant, a gold-plated wooden chest that contained the Ten Commandments, and it was believed to have been captured during the Babylonian destruction of Solomon’s Temple, along with other holy relics. It also served as God’s abode on Earth and among the Israelites.
Ultimately, the Temple was reconstructed and sacrifices resumed after the period of Babylonian exile ended. and later destroyed during the Jewish Wars, when Jerusalem was under Roman occupation. The second destruction of the Temple is a major theme within the New Testament, particularly in the gospels, which are believed to have been written after it was destroyed by Roman legions in 70 CE, about forty years after Jesus was executed. According to the gospel accounts, Jesus Christ was in some sense the new temple, or at least became the new temple following his death and resurrection.
Following his crucifixion, of course, Jesus’ followers began to claim that he was resurrected, although it is not clear whether they initially believed it was the resurrection of the body or something else. He revealed to them that, through baptism, the Holy Spirit would descend upon new converts and his body would serve as the new temple, where the new sacrifice could be celebrated. Within this temple, a feast of thanksgiving (eucharist being, literally, thanksgiving) would bind the Body of Christ together. Through the church, then, and the spiritual transformation brought on by baptism and the remission of sins, the movement known as Christianity became institutionalized. The Body of Christ remains on Earth in two important ways: As a mystical Body of Christ that serves as the Church, and as a mystical body (and blood) of Christ that unites the Church through the sacrament of the Eucharist.
At the time, Christianity’s claims seemed equally impossible, absurd or even immoral. And the Christians were divided into various sects themselves, a situation that would persist through most of the religion’s history. But even assuming that the above doctrines (resurrection, the temple, eucharist and baptism) were a minimum shared by all the historic branches, the interpretations varied wildly by sect, if not individual. If nothing else we know this from Paul’s letters, which confront tensions dividing communities of Christians he helped establish across the Mediterranean. Regardless, the shared minimum of what some scholars now call “proto-orthodoxy,” as evidenced by the writings of the church fathers, point to those elements as unifying the nascent Christian movement. And there are many strange, mystical implications that flow from those beliefs.
Apart from the survival after death, the followers of Jesus abandoned the existing models of devotions to deity that were part of traditional Jewish, Greco-Roman and Egyptian religious practice. They favored small gatherings instead, over a meal that had certain supernatural qualities. In the immediate wake of Jesus’ death, these gatherings might involve participants who believed that the Holy Spirit had endowed them with the gifts that are also claimed by modern Christian charismatics, such as speaking in tongues and even handling poisonous snakes. And through the Eucharist, they actually consumed their god, who had sacrificed himself for them, rather than his followers offering sacrifices up to him. In fact, Christians called for an end to the sacrifice of animals, whether they were from a Jewish or pagan background. This ban was not based on any ethical precept, but a concern that the “god of this aeon” had a dark army of malevolent powers and spirits behind him, sometimes called archons or rulers, as well as demons and the other dark forces behind the supernatural power of idols. Animal sacrifice was either a relic that had been surpassed by the arrival of Jesus Christ or it was committed in the service of dark powers. Possibly both.
In other words, the sacrifice of the animals at the temple was replaced by the reception of the Eucharist in Christ’s temple. The physical body and blood of Jesus were offered in place of the flesh and blood of animals, which were sometimes offered in lieu of firstborn children under the Mosaic covenant. Because that covenant had been fulfilled or supplanted by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the sacrifice demanded of humans became obedience to the new law instituted by Jesus during his public ministry. In order to eat the body and blood in the assembly of the Body of Christ, they needed to be worthy when they presented themselves during the offering. In a nod to the priest’s traditional, pre-Christian role of officiant during ritual sacrifice, the Church created a priesthood model where the priest oversaw the Eucharist and was responsible for helping ensure that the congregation was worthy of it.
Like the Second Temple that preceded it, however, the Body of Christ was also imbued with indicators of spiritual strength and holiness. It was also suggestive of a cosmological model as well, but this time the Body of Christ was both microcosm and macrocosm, as the cosmos itself was created through his role as Logos. And while the cultic activity at the Jewish temple kept the return of primordial chaos from overwhelming the world, the new activity was designed to slowly but surely change it by growing the Body, probably in anticipation of an imminent apocalyptic event.
It served as the temple in another sense: Christ as Logos generates all phenomena. As explained and interpreted by early Christian writings, the phenomenal world is constantly being generated out of the Body of Christ. The Incarnation was a restorative event that promised the ultimate defeat of the corrupting powers that had doomed humanity to old age, suffering and death; in sharing a human body and dying and resurrecting, Christ promised human followers that he would be able to transform them and help usher in a Kingdom of God that was opposed to the demonic kingdoms of this world, over which Satan and other dark forces held sway. Something had corrupted the world, either as a result of the primordial sins of Adam and Eve, brought about by a false “god of this aeon” or, in some forms of early Christianity, the result of a flawed creation by a false god, one that was sometimes identified as Yahweh himself.
According to the New Testament, Christians are able to overcome this because they share in Christ fully, including the Mind of Christ. One way of reading this is that Christ’s Mind, responsible for creating the cosmos and existing eternally, was during the creation of this world, of one mind with his flock. This suggests a deep relationship between the mind of humanity and the Mind of God, one that is, if not a partner in Creation, rationally capable of understanding the cosmos and even inferring the signature of the Mind of God. Still, reading it on the level of symbolism it is difficult to imagine that it never occurred to Christians that they not only on the road to becoming more like God, but that through Jesus Christ they had shared in the creation of the cosmos, and that it was modeled, in mystical way, on the human mind.
The Body Cosmic in Buddhism, Christianity and Beyond
In the West, Buddhism is divorced from its primary host societies and exists in a variety of settings that include several communities that are made up of exclusively convert and born-Buddhist practitioners. Because it is a universal religion, Buddhist missionaries are accustomed to adapting the teachings to local conditions. Just as Christian missionaries might emphasize Christ’s control over spirits to animists, proponents of Buddhism have delivered a modern, Western and sometimes even secular version of the religion, emphasizing the benefits of meditation, the existence of reincarnation or even the alleged absence of “dogma” in order to attract Western converts. Because Buddhist cosmology is inseparable from the supernatural, both have been downplayed and ignored when reaching out to Westerners.
But a close examination of Buddhism reveals striking similarities to Christianity. As with Jesus, Siddartha Gautama shared a royal lineage on his father’s side and his birth was foretold and associated with other miracles. He also became dissatisfied with life in something that resembled a gilded cage and left his family to understand the spiritual reasons that people were born, grew old and sick, and died. As he meditated and journeyed through other realms, he was tempted by a malevolent figure known as Mara, a being that shares much in common with the biblical figure of Satan tempting Jesus during his spiritual sojourn into the desert.
There are also sutras that describe a cosmic or primordial Buddha that serves as the ground of all things, generating or emanating the phenomenal world of the senses through his body. In some traditions, a Buddha whisks his devotees away to a Buddha field or “Pure Land” he created in order to practice the Dharma and achieve enlightenment or liberation on something like a fast track. While the Pure Lands are not the eternal abode of Nirvana, in practice they are a certain gateway to liberation much as Purgatory is a certain road to heaven. Additionally, the cults of the various Buddha’s and Bodhisattvas are also associated with spiritual attainments that resemble the charismatic gifts of Pentecostals, including telepathy, clairvoyance and other supernatural phenomena. Like Catholics, Buddhists have fast and feast days, pilgrimages and holidays centered on the Buddha and other important figures in the religion.
There are differences. Although there were early church fathers and now extinct Christian sects that taught the transmigration of human souls, orthodox Christianity today rejects reincarnation and teaches that there will be a resurrection of the body at the end of time. And because time has a beginning and end, Christianity also lacks the cosmic cycles of samsara, the Pali and Sanskrit word for “world” or “cosmos” used by Buddhists, Hindus and other practitioners of Indic religions to describe the billions or even trillions of years that constitute a single cycle of a “world system” being born, growing old and dying.
Buddhism is also far from monotheistic, but the gods within Buddhist cosmology are nowhere near as powerful as the Buddha. Unless they achieve enlightenment and become Buddhas, the gods are also destined to grow old, die and be reborn according to their actions or karma. According to the Buddha, the cycle of samsara is without discernable beginning or end, which makes Buddhism agnostic when it comes to the existence of a creator god. Even if samsara was created, however, the path to liberation from the cycle is not found in the power of any others, including gods, but through the dharmic path of the Buddha.
Finally, the Buddhist concept of Buddha nature hovers somewhere between the idea of the Image of God and the Cosmic Christ. In the Flower Ornament Sutra, the body of the Buddha Vairocana is the entirety of the cosmos. At the same time, the doctrine of interpenetration and other ideas about interconnectedness suggest that this means every atom dances with the bodies of every Buddha, and even more strangely, the reverse is also true: Buddhas dance within the bodies of every atom. As above, so below, and throughout the cosmos. This is also related to the Buddhist belief that every sentient being has Buddha nature, or the ability to become a Buddha.
The idea of a cosmic body or mind that reflects or emanates below is also found in Hinduism and other mystical schools, including the Gnostic Christian groups that were later condemned as heretical by proponents of what became Christian orthodoxy. There are also suggestions of its importance to early Christianity in New Testament and extrabiblical sources. Moreover, folk Christianity has always included supernatural beliefs labeled superstition that faced official indifference or even censure. This includes astrology, which is based on a related correspondence theory that holds events in the celestial heavens, then believed to be inhabited by God and other supernatural beings, impact events on earth below. And the New Testament is imbued with examples of typology, where people, places and events in the history of Israel’s history serve as models to explain the unfolding of events during the life of Christ and beyond.
Because the Cosmic Christ is inseparable from the idea of the Logos, however, it has not been suppressed despite its relationship to ideas that are unpopular from the traditionalist perspective today. In Christian theology, Jesus is only figuratively a lamb, but he is fully human and fully divine, and described as the Person of the Trinity through which God created the cosmos. A saying from the Gospel of Thomas states that Christ is present when you split wood or lift a rock, suggesting an omnipresence that encompasses the entirety of the natural world. If Christ is there bodily or spiritually, and we are with him, then in a sense we are there as well.
The Inner and Outer Divine
What the cosmic Buddhas and Christ point to is a conception of the divine that encompasses and pervades all of our phenomenal existence as it emanates or generates this reality. And at a deeper level, it suggests that the Mind that gives birth to the cosmos is related to our own minds, if not identical with them. At a fundamental level, the creative force that is responsible for phenomenal existence resembles the human mind, rendering the universe intelligible.
The intelligibility of the universe is a sensitive topic within philosophy of science. In 1960, Eugene Wigner published a paper titled "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences." Wigner, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, believed that there was no reason that mathematics should work as effectively as it does at explaining physical laws, from the effects of gravity to the movement of particles. There are a number of proposed explanations for this that do not invoke anything resembling the supernatural, but for Wigner the existence of the phenomenon itself was an inexplicable mystery without rational explanation. Today, physicists like Max Tegmark have suggested that this correspondence between mathematics and the natural world points to a universe with a mathematical structure. This may not be identical to the idea of correspondence in antiquity, but it shares certain fundamental features.
Similarly, the idea that consciousness is a state of matter, a theory or hypothesis referred to as panpsychism, shares a certain resonance with Buddhist and Christian mysticism. According to Nichiren, a Buddhist reformer and proponent of devotion to the Lotus Sutra, the interconnectedness of all matter, organic and inorganic, implies that all matter shares “Buddha nature” or the potential for awakening and liberation from samsara. Even for the Buddhist schools that do not extend buddha nature to inanimate or inorganic matter, buddha nature is found in all sentient lifeforms that cycle through samsara through the process of reincarnation. As with Christianity, there is an ethical component to awakening, but it also requires insight into the nature of reality. In Christian mysticism of the orthodox variety, this insight is replaced by trust in God and the sacraments, which involve God reaching out to a sinful humanity alienated from the Divine Presence in order to draw humans closer to God.
This process is connected to the intelligibility of the world and human consciousness as Iranaeus, the early church father and opponent of Gnosticism and other early Christian heresies, believed that knowledge of the world was, in essence, knowledge of Jesus as the Logos. God as a person speaks to humanity through Creation itself, and the mediating reality is the Son or Logos, one of the persons of the Holy Trinity. And although that creation was corrupted by the entry of sin into the cosmos, the Incarnation was a historic and cosmological event that “recapitulated” creation. This theory of atonement ultimately led the Eastern Orthodox Church to embrace the doctrine of theosis, or the belief that through purification of mind and body, humans will become more and more like God and exist in union with God.
The Body and Blood of the Cosmic Christ
Although raised Christian, my upbringing was Protestant, not Catholic or Orthodox. I was baptized and confirmed in the Methodist church, which was founded by Anglicans before forging its own Christian identity. So while it inherited the Catholic approach to Christianity that is imperfectly mirrored in Anglicanism, that did not include the Catholic reverence for the Eucharist. Indeed, we did not call it the Eucharist, it was simply “communion,” and if you asked the average parishioner why were were communing, and with whom, the response would include both God and the fellowship of other believers. While the United Methodist Church officially teaches that Christ is present in the communion bread and “wine” (the strictly teetotaling Methodists substitute grape juice for the Blood of Christ), this teaching is not emphasized as people are received into the church, nor does the church service center on communion.
While there are some Protestant Christians who retain belief in the real presence, the idea that Jesus Christ is truly present in the bread and wine (or grape juice) is only given nominal credence, if any, even in Protestant churches that have yet to dispense with traditional eucharistic theology. This is most evident in the lack of comparative respect and even worship given to the Eucharist. In Catholicism and Orthodoxy, the Eucharist is treated with the utmost sensitivity, and in Catholicism it is even worshiped as the actual body and blood of Jesus. Over the centuries, the Eucharist, the product of a daily ritual miracle, has also been associated with various other miracles: Of healing, military victory and so forth.
The Eucharist resembles manna, a mysterious food that is sent from heaven to satisfy the hunger and thirst of the Israelites as they wander the desert for forty years, between the time of the Exodus and the later conquest of Canaan by Joshua. Psalm 78 calls manna “heavenly grain” and “the bread of angels,” emphasizing its celestial origins. Subsequent Jewish traditions also associate it with mystical properties. In the Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, a third century interpretation of the Book of Exodus, it is written that God keeps the Israelites from the Holy Land for forty years because each person will take hold of their field or vineyard and ignore the torah, or law that was given by Moses and represented by the work we call the Torah today, the first five books of the Jewish scriptures. Instead, God keeps the Israelites wandering in the desert for forty years, sustaining them with manna, which not only gives them the ability to study the law full time, but also causes the law to be assimilated or absorbed into their bodies. According to the Jewish mystical text the Zohar, the manna descends from heaven through the Garden of Eden, emitting the fragrances of that paradise and enabling the faithful who ate it to internalize divine wisdom. Of course, it had the reverse effect on those who were faithless: Instead of making them wise, the consumption of manna drives them to a divinely induced foolishness.
The link between the Torah and the body has another mystical dimension in the Zohar. The primal, mystical shape of man has a correspondence to the mystical shape of the Godhead, and each positive and negative commandment of the torah is linked to an organ of the body. Keeping the law has the effect of drawing someone closer to the spiritual presence of God through God’s divine feminine emanation, the shekhinah. By aligning one’s body with the Torah, a person becomes a fitting dwelling place for the divine presence. Failure to keep the laws, or transgressing against the law, subjects a person to the transmigration of the soul, a doctrine of reincarnation that is specific to mystical Judaism.
In Islamic mysticism, the annihilation of the ego can bring a Muslim mystic into union with God. This process is achieved, preliminarily, through observance of the shariah, being Islamic law. As with Judaism, the process of achieving union with the Divine requires maintenance of an internal and external state of holiness. This is followed by a set of ritual practices that require prayer and meditation, and sometimes particular movements and breathing exercises. Most famously, Sufi whirling is a method of meditation favored by some Sufis that involves ritual movement, chanting and music. In the event that the union with God is achieved, these believers may become vessels for the Voice of God. Through the phenomenon of the shathiyāt, excited utterances that pass through the mouths of believers in a state of religious ecstasy, the Word of God is made manifest through the body of a human vessel.
As one might expect, these mystical practices resonate with the Eucharist as well. According to St Paul, anyone who is unworthy and eats the body and blood of Christ condemns himself, while those who are faithful inherit eternal life through it. As with keeping the law in mystical Islam and Judaism, serious transgressions against the moral law prevent a Christian believer from being an appropriate vessel for the Holy Spirit or for receipt of the Eucharist. To remedy this, sins must be confessed to a priest and a penance exacted.
Some of these mystical concepts suggest correspondence as well as a recursive relationship. Just as the kabbalists see a correspondence between the divine essence of the torah and the human body, manna acts as a bridge between the two. Similarly, the Eucharist acts as a bridge between the divine Logos and the human, in the form of that incarnate Logos and Lamb of God, Jesus Christ. Or more specifically, his body and blood, following the act of consecration in the mass. And at least in the case of the Christian Eucharist, the relationship is even linguistically mystifying: For the human body abides in God, as do all things, and all things are created through God, yet God is also consumed and absorbed by the human. Could it be said that, through the mystery of the Eucharist, all things also abide in the body and soul of the human believer?
As Above, So Below
The belief that our fate is tied up with the movement of the stars is ancient. Somewhere in the feather grass covered steppe of ancient Ukraine, the proto-Indo-Europeans worshiped the day sky god Dyeus, consort of an Earth goddess. He would be invoked in ceremonies to call down rain from the heavens, fertilizing the ground and giving rise to life. He was not alone: Looking high to the sky, the progenitors of Indo-European civilization paid tribute to a number of “Déiwōs” or deities, the name originally meaning shining or celestial ones, leaving little doubt as to what they believed the stars were, or where the gods were thought to dwell. Here on Earth, a mother goddess gave birth to life, serving as the alpha and omega of human life. Earth was our mother, and also our grave.
Echoes of this can be found in the Christian Nativity. Mary the Mother of God is a human female, though revered and in some traditions a model of Christian perfection. Her miraculous pregnancy defies the rule of the god of this aeon, and associated suffering and death, by the mystery of the Incarnation. At heart, the Incarnation of Jesus Christ is the method by wh
ich God has created a union of humanity and the divine, and created a pathway to escape death through the Resurrection. God was still conceived of as in some sense living beyond the earth in the sky, and it is no coincidence that three astrologers (the famous Three Magi of the Gospel of Matthew) follow a star that announces the birth of Christ and links his human fate to the heavens. As above, so below.
Astrology was also influenced by Greek cosmology, which held that a spherical Earth was the center of a series of concentric spheres that each held a different “planet,” which included the Moon and the Sun. The movement of these celestial bodies was mathematical and calculations could be used to predict future and past events, because the position of the celestial bodies at the time of significant events (i.e., births) would influence or even determine the outcome of a person’s life. In other words, there was a correspondence between celestial events and events on earth, including significant events at the level of the human individual. Of course, astrology became a problem for the Christian Church, which came to condemn astrology as a demonic activity. Initially, however, the problem was theological and practical: Christianity had a doctrine of free will that was contradicted by the fatalist implications of astrology, and astrology infused the world of antiquity and was intimately tied to the Greco-Roman religious milieu. Astrologers offered a model that competed with the church, as well as a service that people sought out and were willing to pay for.
This idea of correspondence or “cosmic sympathy” has never disappeared. Today, people consult their horoscopes in order to make decisions that range from the mundane to life altering. And belief in astrology is commands significant numbers in the United States. According to Pew research from 2018, nearly thirty percent of Americans believe in astrology. The only religious group with low rates of belief in astrology is American atheists, and despite their tendency to endorse scientific naturalism, three percent of American atheists report belief in astrology.
Modern science has abandoned any support for astrology, but there are similar theories that suggest a correspondence between the exterior world and human behavior that aim for the kind of predictive success astrologers claimed in antiquity. In order to explain human societies we do not often return to the etiological myths of scripture or other folklore, but there is a recurring interest in using ecological or evolutionary models to explain human social patterns. In effect, this creates a correspondence between what we regard as naturally occurring phenomena that lack human consciousness and the social institutions that we have erected using the power of human consciousness. Similarly, we find that recursion is a natural phenomena in terms of the structure of both organic and inorganic matter, with some even suggesting that recursive symmetry is simply how the universe itself is structured. In some cosmology models developed by theoretical physicists, this symmetry even extends into the equally theoretical multiverse.
What links these seemingly disparate concepts together is the relationship between the human body and models or beliefs about the world external to humans. The most famous religious example of this analogy is found in the Bhagavad Gita, part of the Hindu epic Mahābhārata. In a dialogue between Lord Krishna and Arjuna, a warrior contemplating his duty in battle, Krishna reveals that while every living being has a perishable and impermanent body, there is an eternal “Self” that animates it and cycles through the cosmic process of birth, aging, death and rebirth. This eternal Self is also Krishna, but as he demonstrates in the following chapters, Krishna also transcends the cosmos. In a famous theophany, he reveals that he contains the cosmos itself; Arjuna sees the entire universe enfolded into the body of the God of gods, its countless life forms gathered within him. Flames within his mouth illuminate the entirety of existence, and that radiance in turn consumes every life that briefly dances within the cosmos. The cosmic body of Krishna is reflected in the miniature in the body of man, which contains Krisha’s imperishable and eternal essence.
Time and Chance, Signs and Symbols
To speak of space is to speak of time, and so it is that the idea of correspondence has a parallel dimension that also deepens the meaning of history. In astrology this was associated with movement of celestial bodies and especially dates of birth, but it also appears in the earliest Jewish and Christian literature. In Genesis, God creates the world by separating the primordial waters above and below, reflecting the ancient Near East belief that the earth was a dome and the ocean was reflected by a parallel sea in the sky. As sin enters the world with Adam and Eve, and violence with Cain’s murder of Abel, the world begins a violent spiral that reaches a boiling point in the story of Noah. In a display of power and wrath, God unravels the firmament that separates the waters of the sky from the waters on earth. This unleashes a prolonged flood that wipes out everything except what Noah can save on his ark, and the earth is repopulated by Noah and his family.
This primeval history creates a correspondence between two events: Creation and the Flood. As sin generally and violence specifically begin to overtake the world, God directs a righteous man, Noah, to collect the male and female of every species and build an ark. The identification of the male and female of every species is similar to the creation story itself, where God creates living creatures but gives Adam the ability to name them. Similarly, the Ark of Noah and Noah’s covenant, the first in the bible, foreshadows the later Ark of the Covenant and the covenant between God and the Hebrews. It is also significant that Noah’s Ark, the Ark of the Covenant and the Temple of Solomon are all constructed following specific directives and instructions from God, and all are linked together as a microcosm of creation. Moreover, These stories, as well as the story of Abraham, all rhyme together and display intertextual relationships. And because these are chronological events, this suggests a correspondence between events in history as well.
This is reflected in Christian typology, a method of interpreting the Old Testament in light of the New. With the coming of the Messiah, the events described in Jewish scripture become signs and portents of Jesus Christ and the new covenant that extends beyond the Jewish people to encompass Gentiles. With the writings of St Paul, many of these signs are made explicit: As sin came in through Adam, so it has been atoned for in the new Adam, Jesus Christ. Similarly, the entire world is blessed through the line of Abraham because it leads, ultimately, to Christ Jesus.
Paul was nothing if not a trendsetter, and his method of interpretation prevailed in Christian tradition. In Exodus, the victory of the Israelites over Amalek is associated with Moses raising his hands. In Christian art from late antiquity and through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, this stance became associated with the crucifixion, an example of how God, working through history, supplied signs of the Crucifixion even before Israel became a great nation. In Jewish art from the same period, Moses is rarely depicted with his arms and hands raised, presumably to downplay the association of the Jewish patriarch with the Christian Incarnation. One group’s sign is another’s heresy, or even blasphemy.
The Mystical Dimension of Christianity
In this essay, I have attempted to point to how two simple ideas, Jesus as sacrifice and Jesus as logos, can lead to mystical and strange spiritual and religious concepts, ideas that are far from the simple profession of faith or acts of good work encouraged in the Church. These ideas also correspond to mystical beliefs and practices associated with other religions, many of them not linked historically to Christian faith and practice.
My point in writing this is not to suggest that any of this is true, nor to convince people to reconsider Christianity or any other religion. Rather, I believe that these points illustrate the hidden depth and mystery of religion that we have lost to the banality of ritual, surface-level practice. As the old religion of the West continues to die in its former centers, those of us who are heirs to this religious and cultural heritage can become convinced that our ancestral religion lacks depth, creativity or insight. As a result, we are encouraged to explore and experiment with religions that do not have any significant relationship to our heritage. And while I am not opposed to exploration and experimentation (indeed, everyone should explore spiritual and religious options), we do the past a disservice when we fail to recognize how strange and full of mystery and depth Christianity is. And how much it shares with other traditions, even if that is below the surface of everyday practice.
In the beginning was the Word [Logos]
And the Word was with God
And the Word was God
He was in the beginning with God
All things came to be through him
And without him nothing came to be.
What came to be through him was life
And this life was the light of the human race;
The light shines in the darkness,
And the darkness has not overcome it.
The Gospel According to John 1
He is the image of the invisible God,
The firstborn of all creation.
For in him were created all things in
Heaven and on earth
The visible and the invisible,
Whether thrones or dominions or
Principalities or powers;
All things were created through him
And for him.
He is before all things
And in him all things hold together.
Colossians 1
With deep wisdom and merit like a sea,
Buddhas manifest throughout the ten directions’ limitless lands,
Responding in accord with what beings ought to see.
Universally radiant, they turn the Dharma wheel.
Inconceivable, the ten directions’ seas of lands:
Through countless eons, the Buddhas purified them all.
In order to transform beings and bring them to maturity,
The Buddhas appear in each and every land.
Deep beyond conception: the realm of Buddhas.
They show all beings the way to enter.
Beings inclined to the small, who cling to existence
Fail to fathom the Buddhas’ awakening.
Those of pure faith and resolute minds
Always draw near to good mentors.
All Buddhas grant them the strength
To enter into the Thus Come Ones’ wisdom.
Those pure in mind, free from flattery and deceit,
Are joyful in nature, always delighting in compassion;
Those of broad outlook and deep faith
Rejoice to hear this Dharma.
Abiding in the vows of Universal Worthy Bodhisattva,
One cultivates the pure path of Bodhisattvas.
Contemplating how the Dharma Realm resembles space,
One understands the practice of the Buddhas.
All these Bodhisattvas gain wholesome benefit
From seeing the Buddhas’ spiritual penetrations.
Cultivators of other paths fail to understand;
Only those who practice like Universal Worthy can awaken.
Vast multitudes of beings, beyond any bounds,
Receive the mindful protection of the Thus Come Ones.
The turning of the Proper Dharma wheel reaches all.
Such is the power of Vairochana’s realm.
My body encompasses each and every land,
As well as the Buddhas dwelling therein.
Contemplate my every pore:
I’ll now show you the Buddhas’ realm.
Samantabhadra’s boundless conduct and vows,
I have already cultivated to perfection.
The vast, great body with its universal view of states
Is cultivated by all Buddhas, so listen well!
Wow, that was impressive! So too I loved your understanding of the Logos as flowing from Greek philosophy. And your dive into the mystic, allowing for insights to be gained across different faith traditions. As one moves beyond symbol to substance, there is so much richness to be gained. Thank you for sharing that! Nicely done!