What kind of a Christian?

That's a really tough question. I guess I am "supposed" to be a Christian of the Trintarian variety. To a degree I am though sometimes I feel as if I hold to this as an objective categorization to keep it separate from the "other" variations of the Christian, defined more by what it is not than by what it is, the apophaticism of the mystics.

I do see how it developed and the need for it. Something was necessary to give a cohesive structure to the Church in order for it to survive as it has for 2,000 years. Given what we have in the Bible - Father, Son, Spirit - and their workings throughout the New Testament writings, it is sensible that the Trinitarian doctrine developed. It is not, as many claim, illogical, as it was logic that built the Trinitarian edifice. There is a limit to this logic, however, and there does come a point where logic is baffled because we recognize the limits of words and language to convey the deeper things of religious experience. This also is not illogical. All religious traditions agree that while words are necessary to take us "there" a point comes where words fail.

But there are times when I view Jesus as universal soul, the "celestial self" of whom Henry Corbin writes, the fravarti, the Daena we will meet on the road to the Cinvat Bridge. This vision is found in Manichaeism, Sufism and Pure Land Buddhism. But it is not foreign to Christianity. In Corbin's view, Jesus was viewed by some (e.g. in the Shepherd of Hermas) as an Angel along the same lines. And the more I understand the idea of the Imam in Shi'ite Islam the more it makes sense. There can be no doubt that there are parallel lines of "seeing" between this vision of Islam and the Christ who is "angelic" in this sense.

So which Jesus?

Then there is the cultural Jesus, the "substitute Jesus" of the cult of celebrity, whether musicians, movie stars, pro athletes, talk show hosts or any other "famous" person in whom we place our trust and allegiance, only to cruficy them when they fail. Why else are the tabloids so popular? It's because we want to know the dirt they do. We prop them up, support their lifestyles so that we can, in a sense, fund them the lives we wish to live, watch them as voyeurs, safely from a distance, and then thrive when they fall.

There is the Islamic Jesus, the Buddhist Jesus, the Jewish Jesus, the Jesus Seminar Jesus, the macho Jesus, the feminist Jesus, even the atheist Jesus. Lots of Jesuses out there. Which Jesus?

Isn't it quite possible that all these views of Jesus actually embrace him? Perhaps Jesus has become nothing more than a collective projection of an innate goodness onto a "figure" named Jesus, whose roots are found in the New Testament but who has become the repository of the collective human consciousness. Perhaps the "New Age" Jesus is in full effect.

I think any vision of Jesus will always develop and change over time. After all, this is theology plain and simple. There is really no theology proper in Islam. Theology implies an independent interpretation and, as such, has been controversial in Islamic history. Judaism also does not place great emphasis on theology. Theology, in these two faiths, are basically the equivalent of what is believed. But there are, in general, no disputations about the "nature" of God.

Theology really developed in answer to the question Jesus poses: "Who do you say that I am?" It is this, when analyzed through independent reason and the adoption of Greek philosophical methods and terms to a Christian paradigm, that drove Christian theology. So while every avenue of who Jesus was/is has been, throughout the great debates in Church history, analyzed and discussed and argued about, there is still a challenge on the individual level to wrestle with this question.

It is this wrestling, and a more independent streak in the post-Enlightenment world, that has led to all the divisions within Christendom and has given rise to the post-denominational world of the Church today. Add to this the Jesus of culture or of other religions and the mystery of who he really was/is increases.

As a Christian to not wrestle with this question requires blind allegiance to a teacher or pastor or blind allegiance to ignorance (i.e. fear). As a thinking Christian, wrestling with this question, while potentially dangerous, can be liberating. This does not mean leaving Christianity or abandoning Jesus or somehow failing God.

No, this means that you, as an individual, take responsibility for finding the answer on your own. Any visionary, anyone who has had an experience with the "risen Christ" has done so when he ventured beyond the confines of familiarity and contentment and journeyed out beyond into the realms of darkness where the soul is on its own, where the soul can find a true and genuine faith.

This is the realm where the "mystic" or the "visionary" who comes back with a tale to tell and a desire to help others. But this is also the realm in which, if not careful, the self-declared mystic and visionary comes back and leads eager and gullible souls to hell (think Jim Jones).

Self-definition is tough. I hate labels and categories. Labels and categories serve as a reference point, a leaping off point, but in the end they too need abandoned. Even the name of Jesus can become a hindrance as we creat an idol out of the imagery we attach to the name.

I am reminded, as is often the case, of the Dao De Jing:

"The Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao.

The name that can be named, is not the eternal name." DDJ, 1, Feng translation

Yet the question remains: "Who do you say that I am?"

Henry Corbin and Docetism

Trying to further elaborate on the post on Henry Corbin's discussion on Angelology, he delves further into the gnostic idea and its trajectory. As should be pretty clear, Corbin's writings have had a tremendous impact on me. In terms of comparative religion, he puts to shame the superficiality of many so-called comparative religious studies and gets to a genuine "core", the real crux of where relgions meet, not in doctrine and dogma, which are areas where divisions have been drawn, but in those fringe areas where religions truly intersect and interweave.

The Christ of the Acts of Peter and John has been called Docetic. Corbin notes, however, that Docetism is not a set doctrine but a "tendency" (63). He points out that the Christology of the Qur'an is Docetic as is the Imamology particular to Shi'ite Gnosis and that the "Buddhology" of Mahayana Buddhism is Docetic as well. In terms of a Christian Docetism this is in contrast to the hypostatic union which was "a material fact that entered into history" and became an "external and objective datum" 62). In other words, this is not your "orthodox" variety of Christianity.

This Docetic Christology does not view Christ as a "phantasm" or a spook or a ghost but as a "real apparition" which is "proportionate to the theophanic dimension of the soul, that is, its aptitude for being shown a divine Figure". The soul, therefore, is thus not a witness to an external event but "the medium in which the event takes place" (62).

Peculiar to Ebionite Christianity is the idea of the True Prophet or Prophet of Truth, not the God incarnate or God-man of what would become "orthodox" Christianity.

"Running through the ages since the beginning of the world, he hastens toward the place of his repose".

All that matters to the Ebionites is whether or not Jesus is this Prophet. The first Adam was the first epiphanic Form of the True Prophet, what Corbin calls the Christus aeternus, i.e. Adam-Christos. The True Prophet, having in him the breath of the divine nature, cannot sin. In Ebionism, the True Prophet appeared to Moses and Abraham and in Adam and Jesus the True Prophet was present.

In Jesus, then, the True Prophet finds his "final repose." He is not messianic Lord because his death effects redemption; according to Corbin it is because a community was "waiting for the Epiphany of the...Angelos Christos, the return of him who dispenses Knowledge that delivers and who will thereby establish a supraterrestrial kingdom...of Angels." (71) He is an Illuminator, not a Redeemer.

Now if Adam, the initial Prophet, could not sin, what of the "fall" of man? Providing a unique spin of Satan/Iblis, Adam's "fall" was not sin but of divulging the secret of the end of the Cycle of history, the knowledge of the Last Imam of the Cycle, the Resurrector (Qa'im) and the Resurrection. But this may only be divulged in symbols proportionate to the spiritual adept's "degree of dignity and capacity." (84)

This is where Corbin gets into the meat of his essay. He discusses the hadd, the limit, of each spiritual adept. It is the degree of consciousness, the mode of knowledge proportionate to the mode of being realized by the adept. The next higher hadd is, then, the Lord - that is to say, the Self - of its own mahdud ("limited"), the Self of what which it limits, that whose horizon it is." (85)

Our spiritual journey, in this scheme, is a journey through levels, or horizons or, as Corbin calls them, Angels. Each adept must rely upon his imam who is responsible for leading him up to the next level which thus becomes his hadd and the adept too is responsible for leading the one below him up to his former hadd. Each ascent of degrees, or horizon, is called a qiyamat, a "resurrection." So Adam, as True Prophet, is the repository of all souls, each individual soul on its journey toward the Qiyamat al-Qiyamat, or Grand Resurrection. In Shi'ite Islam this is the advent of the Qa'im, the last Imam. This, according to this schema, is the consummation of all religion.

So where does this leave us besides bewildered? Though this is a weak summation of what is truly a dense distilation of comparative religion in Corbin's work, it is leading somewhere.

Several concepts as generally understood in Christianity are tweaked:

1) Docetism is presented in a different form that is stereotypically understood as mere "appearance" or "phantasm"

2) Jesus is not an incarnate God; he is the repository of the True Prophet and is thus, at least according to Ebionite Christianity, messianic in the sense of bringer of Knowledge

3) Each spiritual adept (i.e. all of us) is where he/she us based on the adept's "horizon" or ability to see

4) The Qiyamat al-Qiyamat (Grand Resurrection) is when the Qa'im (the Final Imam), akin to the parousia of traditional Christianity, will appear to "recapitulte" all souls and religion, the Epiphanic Cycle of this Gnostic vision will be complete.

This connects to another of my favorite writers, Vladimir Lossky and his writings on Eastern Orthodox Theology. The connection between Christianity's "eastern" coloring and its influence on Islam is unmistakable. What is surprising is that in a work as "orthodox" as Lossky's there seems to be a connection, no matter how slight, with Corbin's vision of the Christianity almost lost to the paradise of archetypes.

Henry Corbin and Angelology

In Henry Corbin's densely packed book on the trajectory of "gnosticism" from Zoroastrianism through Christianity to its final "resting" place of Shi'ism he discusses the theophanic vision, as I've posted elsewhere quoting the Acts of Peter and Acts of John.

This stuff is heady and my summation is not as clean as I'd like but it's a start. Corbin's stuff is the densest thing I've ever read. But the work is worth it for those nuggets, when they come, make it all worth while.

Here's what he has to say about the theophanic vision:

"There is actual perception of an object, of a concrete person: the figure and the features are sharply defined; this person presents all the "appearances" of a sensuous object, and yet it is not given to the perception of the sense organs. This perception is essentially an event of the soul, taking place in the soul and for the soul. As such its reality is essentially individuated for and with each soul; what the soul really sees, it is in each case alone in seeing." (Henry Corbin, Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis, 60).

And here is the key to this entire essay in the book:

"The field of its vision, its horizon, is in every case defined by the capacity, the dimension of its own being: Talem eum vidi qualem capere potui" (60-61)

Quoting Origen's discussion of the Transfiguration he notes that Jesus appeared in the form in which he was normally seen but also in his transfigured form "he appeared to each one according as each man was worthy."

The core of Corbin's book is in essence the transformation of such a "gnosis" in Islamic, specifically Ismaili, soil. Having traced its origins in Zoroastrianism, Corbin goes on to discuss the connection between Zoroastrianism, Christianity (specifically Ebionite Christianity) and Islam (specifically Shi'ite and, more speficially, Ismaili Shi'ite) in a mindbending trip. Corbin has "no wish to debate the question of historical filiation...nor to determine the 'influences'" which, he says, "reads causality into things" (31). The connection between them is not doctrinal: it is a common angelology.

By angel he is not talking about the winged variety or the Touched By An Angel variety or any of those other media caricatures. For Corbin the "angel" is the "celestial Idea" of all human beings. Writing on Ibn Arabi, he says:

"...that which a human being regains in the mystical experience, is the "celestial pole" of his being, which is to say his "person" whereby and as which, the Divine Being from the very beginning in the origin of origins in the world of Mystery, manifested himself to himself, and made himself known to it in this Form [its own form, the form it was given to assume] which is equally the Form in which he knew himself in it. It is the Idea, or rather the "Angel" of his person whose present self is no more than the terrestrial pole."

And again:

"I am your own Daênâ", -which means: I am, in person, the faith that you professed and that which inspired it in you, she for whom you have answered and she who guided you, she who comforted you and she who now judges you, for I am, in person, the Image proposed to you from the birth of your being and the Image which finally you have yourself wished for ("I was beautiful, you have made me still more beautiful").

These paragraphs draw out the distinctions behind Corbin's aversion to traditional Christianity and its teaching of the singular event of the Incarnation of Christ. Rather than a universal, singular Christ, this Angel of which Corbin speaks is personal, unique to each soul, and is the Image to which the soul longs to unite.

He further breaks down this angelology. Rather than being a "metaphorical luxury" the Angel's significance is twofold, theophanic and soteriological ("salvific"). It can be thought about in several ways. There are angels who have remained in the celestial world, the intermediary between heaven and earth, and other angels who have fallen to Earth. The angels in the celestial world (the pleroma) are "angels in actu" and the angels who are on earth are the "angels in potentia".

Another way of looking at it is that this division may refer to a single being, an unus ambo. The Spirit is the person or Angel who has remained in heaven, the "celestial twin", while the soul is his companion who has fallen to Earth, to whose help he comes and with whom he will be reunited if he issues victorious from the cosmic battle between good and evil. (103)

The human lot is thus, quoting Nasir Khusraw, a transitory status, the "horizon" of which Corbin speaks. Man is a "not-yet": an angel (or demon) in potentia awaiting reunion with his celestial twin, the angel in actu.

Heady? Yeah. And I can't do it justice. But there is a certain logic to it that is quite appealing. Rather than a heavenly Jesus to whom we turn, we all have inherent in us this "Idea" of perfection, this idea of the "Divine" and it is this "Idea" that Corbin terms the Angel with whom we seek union or re-union. It has been placed in us from the very beginning; it is this that guides us and it is to this we seek to return.

Corbin's main thrust is this:

"Man is called, by right of his origin and if he consents, to an angelomorphosis, his acceptance of which precisely regulates his aptitude for theophanic visions." (64)

It is this angelomorphosis (Corbin invents mroe than a few terms in this work) that is the key. Ismailian Gnosis, according to Corbin, in a sense saves a Christianity, specifically of the Ebionite variety, that had long ago been lost to the "paradise of archetypes" (65).