A Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, The Last Inkling, And The Evolution Of Consciousness

A Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, The Last Inkling, And The Evolution Of Consciousness

by Mark Vernon
A Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, The Last Inkling, And The Evolution Of Consciousness

A Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, The Last Inkling, And The Evolution Of Consciousness

by Mark Vernon

Paperback

$23.95 
  • SHIP THIS ITEM
    Qualifies for Free Shipping
    Usually ships within 1 week
  • PICK UP IN STORE
    Check Availability at Nearby Stores

Related collections and offers


Overview

Christianity is in crisis in the West. The Inkling friend of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, analysed why. He developed an account of our spiritual predicament that is radical and illuminating.

Barfield realized that the human experience of life shifts fundamentally over periods of cultural time. Our perception of nature, the cosmos and the divine changes dramatically across history.

Mark Vernon uses this startling insight to tell the inner story of 3000 years of Christianity, beginning from the earliest Biblical times. Drawing, too, on the latest scholarship and spiritual questions of our day, he presents a gripping account of how Christianity constellated a new perception of what it is to be human. For 1500 years, this sense of things informed many lives, though it fell into crisis with the Reformation, scientific revolution and Enlightenment.

But the story does not stop there. Barfield realised that there is meaning in the disenchantment and alienation experienced by many people today. It is part of a process that is remaking our sense of participation in the life of nature, the cosmos and the divine. It's a new stage in the evolution of human consciousness.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781789041941
Publisher: Collective Ink
Publication date: 07/24/2019
Pages: 232
Sales rank: 882,524
Product dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Mark Vernon is a writer, broadcaster, psychotherapist and former Anglican priest. He contributes regularly to programmes on the BBC, writes and reviews for the national press including the Guardian and the Church Times, as well as giving talks and leading workshops. Vernon works as a psychotherapist in private practice and has also worked at the Maudsley hospital in south London. He lives in London, UK.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Early Israelites

The secret history of Christianity has a long prehistory. It has two ancient strands – one Hebrew, one Greek – and we'll begin with the first. Take the earliest archaeological evidence that there was a tribe called Israel. It's immediately suggestive of how different their consciousness of themselves was from ours.

The evidence is an inscription written into the Merneptah Stele, a granite slab that was found in the ruins of ancient Thebes. Dating from the reign of a thirteenth-century BCE Egyptian pharaoh, it memorializes a confrontation. The conflict was between the great civilization of the Nile, which by then was already close to two millennia old, and a younger tribe of hill people who lived in northern Palestine. "Israel is laid waste and his seed is not," it reads.

Pharaoh's army had attacked Israel, presumably because it troubled the valuable trade routes that ran between Egypt and Mesopotamia. It's known from other sources that capture and removal was deployed by the Egyptians in the late centuries of the second millennium as a way of neutralizing trouble spots. The policy may well lie behind the stories of Moses and the exodus as well as the biblical "novella" that tells of the fortunes of Joseph, who was kidnaped and taken to the land of the black soil and sun (Genesis 37–50).

The Israelite hill people were followers of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the fathers of an ancient clan lineage. Back then, these names would have carried immense power. As a Bronze Age community, they would have felt them not as dead patriarchs but present realities. The names conveyed a felt rootedness to the land and a spirited belonging with their god. The Bible echoes this vitality when it points out that "Abraham" carries the meanings of "exalted ancestor" and "ancestor of a multitude" (Genesis 17:5).

Pharaoh's declaration of his victory over Israel was as much a boast or a warning as a report. Israel's seed clearly wasn't terminated. And in this seeming exaggeration, Egypt was engaged in a common feature of these times. Ancient people reveled in their triumphs, and they did so in a particular way: by amplifying the bloodshed.

The first Israelites did it, too. In line with the received wisdom, they saw their conquests as an outflow of divine justice. The accounts of slaughter were experienced as restoring a right relationship between gods and peoples, and they showed little or no concern for those who were slain. Justice then meant cosmic balance not personal rights. There was no conception of the individual who might have rights. It's another example of the experiential gap between then and now, and how ancient people's perception of life was dramatically dissimilar to our own. It means that nowadays it can be profoundly uncomfortable to read some sections of the Hebrew Bible.

The perception was linked to the way in which they shared their experience of life with the life of the land and of the deities who dwelt in the land, not least on sacred mountains. The divine saga was their saga; nature's life was their life; its story was theirs.

Take Psalm 125. In modern translation, it begins: "Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides forever. As the mountains surround Jerusalem, so the Lord surrounds his people, from this time on and for evermore." The psalmist turns to the mountains that encircle Jerusalem, and the holy Mount Zion in particular. In front of him, he sees the source of his strength. He is not celebrating an inner resilience, hidden within, and composing metaphors to assert it, as we might do today, but is instead straightforwardly assured by Judea's sacred geography. He doesn't have an inwardness that is separate. He identifies with his god, place and people. It is as if he sings: I am safe because I am in Judea, and in Judea is Jerusalem, and surrounding Jerusalem are the mountains where God dwells.

Alternatively, consider what may be the oldest biblical reference to Israel, found in the Song of Deborah (Judges 5). It's a victory hymn that comes from about the same time as the Merneptah Stele. It includes the memorable detail of Jael, the wife of Herber, using a mallet to drive a tent peg into the head of Sisera, an enemy commander (Judges 5:24–27). But alongside the violence comes an exuberant celebration of the god and land that the Israelites took to be on their side.

When they marched against their Canaanite foes, they felt that this god was marching with them: "Lord, when you went out from Seir," they sang (Judges 5:4, my italics). His presence was known to them not because they felt brave or just in their cause, as an embattled group might today, but because the earth trembled and the heavens opened, pouring forth life-giving water (Judges 5:5). The surrounding mountains, which is to say the nearby deities, fearfully acknowledged the advance, too. They "quaked before the Lord, the One of Sinai, before the Lord, the God of Israel" (Judges 5:4). And then, during the battle, the stars in heaven fought for Israel, as did the waters of the River Kishon. It disgorged a torrent that swept the enemy away (Judges 5:20–21).

Such experiences of divine entities fighting enemies in alliance with human warriors are common in stories from other ancient cultures that share this type of consciousness. In the Iliad, Homer describes Achilles's fight with the river-god, Scamander. The watery deity was on the side of the Trojans and repeatedly tried to kill the Greek hero from the waves. Or consider again how ancient Egypt celebrated its triumphs. Amongst the ancient inscriptions at Luxor are those that describe the famous battle of Kadesh, in which Ramesses II fought the Hittites. They, too, deploy "mythic history," as Jeremy Naydler calls it. For instance, they commemorate the battle taking place at night, which in practice probably didn't happen because ancient generals preferred the daylight, though the inscriptions are not a piece of clumsy misreporting. Rather, they're an attempt to express how human affairs are reflections of timeless encounters between gods, in this case the victory of the sun god Ra over the serpent-god, Apophis. Apophis is the enemy of the divine sun. Hence, at a mythical level, the battle of Kadesh took place before a new dawn, which is to say that, by the wisdom of the times, it is more correct to report that the conflict occurred at night.

This points to a further difference between then and now. You could say that if time is a unit of measurement for us, time was a playing field of heavenly conflicts and purposes for them. Instead of working out what had happened, they worked out what things meant. That depended upon insightful mythological explanations, not good evidential support. The story that was told was shaped by the prophetic discernment of outward signs, not the weighing up of hard facts. As is sometimes noted by biblical scholars, Israel's god is presented as a "lord of history" so that "whatever happened was ultimately Yahweh's doing," as Michael Coogan explains. The old tales are interpreted, therefore, as attempts to fathom what Yahweh was up to, and why. It was a natural and spontaneous way to gain understanding. Mythic history was not fanciful history but true history, as ancient peoples saw it.

* * *

What was remembered, and the way in which it was remembered, illustrates the type of awareness that people then had. If that's accepted then the concepts and judgments that shape our sense of things can be put to one side, and the ancient world can reemerge. It becomes possible to tune into an older form of consciousness, at least to some extent. The Old Testament can take on powers akin to those of poetry, dislodging the assumptions of our age to disclose an experience of god and place that's half forgotten. The epics and narratives have an inner life and can facilitate an expansion of our awareness of the divine, insofar as we can imaginatively refocus and connect with them.

It's why biblical stories and prophecies still feel enriching to read and study, though often simultaneously disorientating and troubling. They are powerfully evocative, opening upon not only the prehistory of Christianity but the prehistory of our minds. Jews know it when they recite the tale of the exodus not in a seminar but in the context of the Seder, accompanied by ritual blessings and special food. Christians know it when they hear a recitation in a dark cathedral, before sunrise, at the dawn service of Easter. The setting helps to recapture something of original participation.

* * *

The Bible preserves myths and memories that, read aright, can reignite. Take a single verse that has been dated back to the earliest oral traditions of the prehistoric period: "A wandering Aramean was my father" (Deuteronomy 26:5). It's known to be old because the name "Aram" was found in a non-biblical text from the eighteenth century BCE, implying that what is now the biblical verse could echo back to 2000 BCE or more. The phrase, "A wandering Aramean was my father" is, therefore, another fossil in words. It transmits something of the experience of semi-nomads from the Fertile Crescent. It is intimately connected to the story of Abraham leaving the city of Ur. The phrase could have become a kind of incantation, with the power to bond the Israelite tribesmen who lived under the name. I think it would have felt as if it had been given to them. Working from the outside in, they would have absorbed this experience of belonging into themselves. It could, thereby, forge a collective sense of the people's self.

A recognition of this type of pooled identity can make sense of the early traditions surrounding Moses, too. He was another figure whose living name grew and grew as knots of meaning were continually added to it. In a world of oral memory, his story gathered together and organized perhaps several tales of Egyptian enslavement, exodus and liberation. In the mentality of the era, the name came to carry enormous theological weight. It could convey what had happened as a sign of celestial victory, as well as memorializing the terrestrial suffering and struggle.

The method is embedded in another old pericope, now recorded at Exodus 15:20, the song of Miriam: "Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously: horse and rider he has thrown into the sea." It is one more fossil phrase, as if given out of divine time. With it, more insights into divine activity could be uncovered. It's not that the facts would become firmer, but that the implications richer. The Israelites, along with other ancient peoples, were embedded in such an experience of life. They had no perception of the this-worldly criteria that so intensely inform what we make of things now.

* * *

The early gods of Israel were also known through these multidimensional cross-currents of experience and event, which is why scholars today stress that there is not one religion or theology in the Bible, but a superposition of many. It couldn't be otherwise. The research shows that the deities who formed the lives of the first early Israelites were not singular or simply identified with Yahweh. Solomon's temple, for example, clearly contained altars to Baal, Asherah and others (2 Kings 23:4).

It was only subsequently that this became a scandal, when Yahweh was adopted as a favored protector-deity by the first kings of Israel and Judah, around 1000 BCE, and then, as ninth-century BCE prophets like Elijah and Elisha championed a "Yahweh-alone" movement. Before then, most people's experience of the divine was inherently plural and dispersed. Gods were encountered as diffuse presences associated with various mythologies, different times of the year, and assorted sacred places.

Some were felt day by day. They make an appearance in Genesis 31:19, in the form of the clan deities that Rachel steals from Laban the Aramean in a bid to gain the upper hand in a local dispute. These are the gods of the ancestors. They were attended to at the fire of the encampment, the natural focus for offerings and prayers, as is still half-caught in the intimate phrase "hearth and home."

Another set of deities were those associated with sacred locations, like Mount Zion. This category of gods known to the early Israelites included a number mentioned in the Bible, such as El, Baal, Asherah, Ishtar, and Yahweh. I think you can go so far as to say that a tribe of the time would have known they were in a different place not only by changes in the landscape and geography but by changes in the gods who manifested themselves as they traveled. It's another experience implicitly acknowledged in the Bible. "When the Most High [Elyon] apportioned the nations, when he divided humankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the numbers of the gods" (Deut 32:8). It may explain why the Israelites developed the practice, in their periods of wandering, of carrying a tabernacle. A portable altar was an innovative way of keeping one particular divine presence with them.

A few of the old gods stood out. "El," for example, means "high god." So, when Jacob had a vision of a ladder reaching between earth and heaven, at the top of which he saw "the Lord," he assumed that he had seen El (Genesis 28:13). In time honored fashion, he raised a stone to commemorate the revelation, remarking that the Lord is in this place, and therefore naming it, "House of God," Bet-El or Bethel (Genesis 28:18–19). Similarly, Baal can mean "master" or "lord," and Yahweh "the one who is" – a meaning that was to become overwhelmingly important from the eighth century BCE onwards. But before that perception developed, the many gods reigned and they formed a pantheon. "God [Elohim] has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment," says Psalm 82:1.

The importance of sacred places for this mode of consciousness is reflected in another way, in the significance the Bible gives to one particular place, Mount Horeb. Also called Mount Sinai, it is the location for what appear to be at least two theophany traditions. The first is that of Moses, featuring a bush on Mount Horeb that burned without being consumed (Exodus 3:2). The second is that of Elijah and the peak of Mount Horeb. There is no burning bush, but instead an experience "of sheer silence" (1 Kings 19:12). Stephen Geller argues that Horeb-Sinai was recognized as a place where deity dwelt. "Horeb is said to have 'burned with fire to the heart of heaven,'" he notes. The place spoke of God, so it was natural that Moses and Elijah were remembered as going there. At Horeb-Sinai, the people of Israel realized just how thoroughly their life was connected with this divine life.

There's a deeper insight, here, one that is crucial to the way consciousness was subsequently to evolve. Back then, there could be no monotheistic perception of God because it takes the focused mind of an individual to apprehend it and, as we've seen, people of such eras did not experience life as singular individuals. The experience of deity was inevitably scattered because that was how human beings experienced themselves. They lived in flows of divine activity that moved through them and moved them about. They were waves on a cosmic sea. I suspect this is the fundamental reason why the radical monotheism of Pharaoh Akhenaton, in the fourteenth century BCE, faded as quickly as it flared. No one knew quite what to make of the idea that there is only one God, which he called the Aten, including the visionary pharaoh himself. So, upon his death, beliefs reverted back to a nuanced form of pantheism.

* * *

Things began to change a little when, at the turn of the first millennium BCE, the Israelites sought another source of collective empowerment. It was one already deployed by the great civilizations that surrounded them: divine monarchs. The evidence suggests that two regions in Canaan formed into two kingdoms, Israel and Judah, probably under the relentless pressure of having to defend themselves from circling superstates like Egypt. Kings brought the gain of strengthening the tribes. The Bible remembers these two regions being temporarily united under the leadership of David and Solomon, before splintering again and being ruled over the next few centuries by a succession of northern and southern kings.

The new monarchs modeled themselves on the pattern of a covenantal relationship between the local high god, the king and the people. It was typical of Near Eastern nations. It's why David brought the ark of God to Jerusalem. It established a royal theology as the cornerstone of his power (2 Samuel 6:17). Solomon, likewise, built a high temple that became the cultic focus for the people of Judah, a place where their god indisputably dwelt and where the glory could be experienced. The kings were knitting together deity, land, city, monarch, glory and blessing, and thereby secured the people's devotion. As Robert Bellah describes it: "God's chosen king, in the temple, on the holy mount, in the sacred city, in the land that, by extension, can as a whole be called Zion." The kings of Zion promised that, as inhabitants of Zion, the people would know who they were. It's another form of collective identity, reinforced by the monarch.

(Continues…)


Excerpted from "A Secret History of Christianity"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Mark Vernon.
Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements x

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 The Early Israelites 10

Chapter 2 The Birth of the Bible 28

Chapter 3 The Ancient Greeks 46

Chapter 4 The Athenian Moses 64

Chapter 5 The Secret Kingdom 90

Chapter 6 Christ Consciousness 113

Chapter 7 Christianity's High Noon 134

Chapter 8 Reform and Science 149

Chapter 9 We Must Be Mystics 164

Notes 190

Further Reading 198

Index 199

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews