Shadow of the Third Century

A Revaluation of Christianity

Alvin Boyd Kuhn

• Publisher: Papamoa Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781789123449
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Shadow of the Third Century: A Revaluation of Christianity, first published in 1949, begins with the assertions that a true history of Christianity has never before been written and that the roots of the Christian religion lie in earlier religions and philosophies of the ancient world.The author, Alvin Boyd Kuhn, asserts that Christianity as we know it took the form it did due to a degeneration of knowledge rather than to an energization produced by a new release of light and truth into the world. In the ancient world, knowledge was commonly passed down by esoteric traditions, its inner meaning known only to the initiated. The Gospels, according to Kuhn, should therefore be understood as symbolic narratives rather than as history. Sacred scriptures are always written in a language of myth and symbol, and the Christian religion threw away and lost their true meaning when it mistranslated this language into alleged history instead of reading it as spiritual allegory. This literalism necessarily led to a religion antagonistic toward philosophy. Moreover, it produced a religion that failed to recognize its continuity with, and debt to, earlier esoteric schools. As evidence of this, Kuhn finds that many of the gospel stories and sayings have parallels in earlier works, in particular those of Egypt and Greece. The transformation of Jesus' followers into Pauline Christians drew on these sources. Moreover, the misunderstanding of true Christianity led to the excesses of misguided asceticism. Overall, the book seeks to serve as a "clarion call to the modern world to return to the primitive Christianity which the founder of Christian theology, Augustine, proclaimed had been the true religion of all humanity."With its many citations from earlier works, Shadow of the Third Century also serves as a bibliographic introduction to alternative histories of Christianity.

CHAPTER I—PRIMEVAL CHRISTIANITY

Voltaire once remarked that it might be a very fine thing if Europe some time decided to try Christianity. He was intimating, of course, that there had never been a serious undertaking anywhere in the Christian world to put into practice the Christly code of ethics as set forth in the Sermon on the Mount. He was assuming that Europe knew well enough what Christianity was, but lacked the moral strength to put its cardinal principles to work.

It is suggested here that the philosopher would have made a far more pertinent observation if he had said that it might be well if Europe at some time really learned what true Christianity was. This essay ventures to go beyond Voltaire and make the assertion that not only had Europe never tried Christianity, but that it never had it. Not only had the Occidental world never tried living its professed and dominating religion of Christianity, but never at any time in its historical period had it even possessed the true religion to which the name of Christianity had been attached. Failure of Christendom to put its nominally accepted religious systematism into living operation in its centuries of historical life was not mainly due to its want of moral stamina, but stemmed, as this work will assert, from the simple fact that it did not have the Christianity that should have gone with the name. Cutting many a Gordian knot of entangled debate and likewise cutting a straight path through a jungle of theological presuppositions, this work will begin with the bald bold declaration that the Western world of Europe and America has never held true Christianity in its possession, has never had knowledge of it.

“There is no such thing as a religion called ‘Christianity’—there never has been such a religion. There is and always has been the Church.”—Hilaire Belloc, The Great Heresies, p. 246.

If these assertions embody substantial truth, the obvious inference must be that the West, while under the illusion that it possessed and even implemented Christianity, in reality possessed something else that was believed to be Christianity, but was not. Its highly vaunted religion bore the name of Christianity, but strictly was at no time real Christianity. That grandiose system which it presented and promulgated under the name of Christianity was at best but a feeble, nay even a wretched caricature of the real structure that the name connoted. What is now to be expressed for the first time in all the history of religious disputation is that this assumed corpus of cultural influence was at no time truly Christian at all. It carried the name and it enacted the presumptive role which the name prefigured. But it was not Christianity. It was something else. What that other thing was it will be the burden of this work to announce clearly and unequivocally.

The prime purpose of the essay, it must be uncompromisingly asserted, is therefore to redeem Christianity from the onus of every kind and degree and weight of obloquy, disfavor, rejection, neglect, scorn, hatred, misrepresentation and denunciation to which it has been subjected by virtue of its mishandling by the parties that so falsely caricatured it in posing as its advocates, champions and sainted heads. The aim is to so restate the true character and message of Christianity that such a virulent denunciation as that leveled at it by the German philosopher Nietzsche will be totally disarmed of its force and pertinence and rendered innocuous by being shown to be utterly wide of the mark of truth. If the object in view is measurably achieved, the result will be the exoneration of Christianity from the entire mass of opprobrium loaded upon it by the irreligious, the atheists, freethinkers, secularists, the profane of every ilk. The objective, admittedly ambitious and daring, is to rehabilitate Christianity in its pristine virtue and splendor and thus to vindicate it against the violence of attack and volume of discredit which it suffered through the ignorant zealotry of those proclaiming themselves its friends, as well as from the frontal hostility of those openly declaring themselves its defamers. The high design is to restate the system that alone has just claim to the name of Christianity and to demonstrate by contrast its superiority and magnificence as over against that hetero-Christianity which by one of the most amazing demarches of all history, came to masquerade in its vestments and under its name. It is desired to establish the extraordinary fact that the system of proclaimed faith and dogma, ceremonial and government, historically known as Christianity never has been real Christianity at all. If the project is measurably successful the very desirable object will have been attained of showing that the volume of attack that has been at times heavy and damaging has fallen out of bounds, since it was never leveled against true Christianity but hit hard against a pseudo-Christianity that for the most part richly merited the obloquy thus poured upon it. The blows of attack fell upon the masquerading system which, while it was never Christianity, yet stood disguised as such and therefore in line to receive the brunt of many assaults of hostile forces.

The gist of what will constitute the introductory datum is to be found expressed with wholly unexpected frankness and conclusiveness in a statement of the sainted Augustine, who has often been given the title of “Founder of Christian Theology.” This citation from his writings virtually could stand as the “golden text” of our work, as it is a concise epitome and summary of the central theme. Its reproduction in this connection and at this juncture of world affairs could well become the solvent of most of the tragic misunderstandings responsible for the present world confusion. It will stand in the present work as the firing of the opening gun in a battle that will be waged from now on to unseat from its throne of power in the domain of mass consciousness that weird and fantastic delusion of literalized and historicized Scriptural myths which has steeped the minds of untold millions in doltish superstition over so many centuries under the name of Christianity. It is by no means an indulgence in extravagant fancy to assert that it is world-shaking in its implications. Here it is:

“That which is known as the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist; from the very beginning of the human race until the time when Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion, which already existed, began to be called Christianity.”—Retractt. I, xiii.

This astonishing declaration was made in the early fourth century of our era. It can be asserted with little chance of refutation that if this affirmation of the pious Augustine had not sunk out of sight, but had been kept in open view through the period of Western history, the whole course of that history would have been vastly altered for the better. It is only too likely the case that the obvious implications of the passage were of such a nature that its open exploitation was designedly frowned upon by the ecclesiastical authorities in every age. It held the kernel of a great truth the common knowledge of which would have been a stumbling-block in the way of the perpetuation of priestly power over the general Christian mind. It would have provoked inquiry and disarmed the ecclesiastical prestige of much of its power.

For what is it that the Christian saint actually says? It stands as hardly less than a point-blank repudiation of all the chief asseverations on which the structure of Christian tradition rests. Every child born to Christian parents in eighteen centuries has been indoctrinated with the unqualified belief that Christianity was a completely new, and the first true, religion in world history; that it was vouchsafed to the world from God himself and brought to earth by the sole divine emissary ever commissioned to convey God’s truth to mankind; that it flashed out amid the lingering murks of Pagan darkness as the first ray of true light to illumine the pathway of evolution for the safe treading of human feet. All previous religion was the superstitious product of primitive childishness of mind. Christianity was the first piercing of the long night of black heathenism by that benignant gift of God.

Augustine shatters this illusion and this jealously preserved phantom of blind credulity. From remotest antiquity, he asserts, there has always existed in the world the true religion. It illuminated the intellects of the most ancient Sages, Prophets, Priests and Kings. It built the foundation for every national religion, whose tenets consisted of reformulations of its ubiquitous ageless principles of knowledge and wisdom. It went under a variety of designations: Hermeticism in ancient Egypt; Orphism in early Greece; Zoroastrianism in Persia; Brahmanism in India; Taoism in China; Shintoism in Japan and China. In no matter what garbled and perverted form, even tribal religionism fostered it. Mystery cultism dramatized and ritualized it in many lands. Social usages, all the round of annual festivals, chimney-corner tale and castle ballad, countryside legend and folklore carried it down the stream of time. Always it existed among men; never was it not present in the world. Hardly ever apprehended at its real value, its representations badly misconceived, its import warped and travestied at every turn in popular practice, it yet existed and came down to Augustine’s day. He who had been reared early in the cult of Mani, with all its arcana of esoteric explication of cosmogony, anthropology and theocracy; he who later sat at the feet of Plotinus and from him transmitted to the new faith that took the name of Christianity, which he was later to espouse with such ardor of soul, its mighty doctrine of the Trinity—Plotinus’ three fundamental hypostases, the One, the Oversoul and the World Soul—this man was not hesitant in saying that he and his brethren in the new movement were only giving a new impetus to this age-old system of arcane truth, and for the first time called it—after the new Greek term provided by Hellenism for the central element of all true religion, the Christos—Christianity. It was as if he said: this sublime religion has existed in the world from the beginning; it has borne many names and been exploited in varied forms. But it is our merit that we at last have given it the highest name it ever bore, Christianity, the religion of the Christos, the divine principle in all men.

So thought the devout saint in the fourth century. True was his statement—in part. For alas! and again alas! the newly promulgated religion into which he had gravitated, that had indeed drawn every single item of its theology and its ritual, of its symbols and its festivals, from that antique code, had already, even as he wrote, so far lost or perverted every facet of that ancient light that it stood as a grotesque caricature, indeed even a flat inversion, of the resplendent system of archaic truth. In fact the movement which he was helping to start on its course, and which he called the “true” religion, “already” existent, was farther from being a continuation of that extolled earlier heritage than almost any other reformulation of it known to history, the direst and most tragic corruption of it in all the ages. Indeed, had he really possessed the full and profound rudiments of that earlier lore, he would have been keenly aware that the new development he was so unctuously leading, so far from being a straight perpetuation of that great tradition, was almost its total negation and obliteration. He would have known that, instead of being a new presentation and revivification of that venerable wisdom-lore, the cult of his espousal was even then the surety of its death. Before he himself passed off the scene, in the late fourth century, the religion of his fervent love had already devastated the structure and prostituted the venerated message of that antecedent cultus, leaving it a meaningless jargon of inscrutable creeds, empty formularies, uncomprehended rituals and Scriptural books, over which it was doomed to wrangle in witless futility but fierce venom of theological disputation for two full centuries and to settle finally into a truce without peace that has lingered on in silent but smoldering hatred of parties ever since.

Had the great saint who fled to God on the rebound from his youthful excesses of passions of the flesh, ever fully opened his eyes to the significance of what he was promulgating with such hot passion of his soul, he would not have failed to see that the new wave of religionism had little right to the august Hellenic name which it had laid hold on, and which it had already degraded. He might have known that his new cult, so far from republishing and reanimating that ancient tradition of sacred philosophy, was destined to smother and virtually extinguish that very fire of living truth, which half in discernment and half in blindness he so sweepingly claimed to be the content and corpus of the new faith that Constantine had secured from further persecution. Instead of re-enlivening this true Christianity of the past, hoary with the veneration of ages of wise men, to continue its mighty service of beneficence to later times, the movement that seized upon the holy name of Christianity actually brought that benignant service to an end. Instead of lifting the world out of heathen darkness into the light, this rabid movement put out the great light that had so long shone and plunged the Occident into Cimmerian darkness. And in that darkness it still lingers and gropes its uncertain way after eighteen hundred years.

For with the hatred of books, learning and philosophy already in full swing, the fell hostility of the new popular evangelism to anything savoring of culture and erudition had already swept out the arcane literature, and its frenzied course had not stopped until it had sent up in flames the most precious collection of books in the world at any time—the great Alexandrian library. Nay, even beyond that its furious besom swept on to the obliteration of all past heritage in the final act of closing out the last of the great Platonic Academies in the Hellenic world. And with this gesture of insolent triumph in the desolation of golden truth it could not itself comprehend, it extinguished the last candle-flicker of a luminous torch of wisdom-knowledge that had been kept steadily and brightly burning in brotherhoods of cultured students for the guidance of the race from most archaic times.

After Justinian’s order to close up the last Platonic school in the sixth century came the Dark Ages. And this period of benightedness, be it observed, extended precisely over the area covered by the spread of this spurious faith, and continued to throw its pall of ignorance and gloom upon this part of the world during the time of its dominance. Carrying its own darkness with it as it went, it yet has had the incredible effrontery to call itself the light of the world, and to charge other cultures with generating the forces of darkness. The antecedent religions which it supplanted in northern Europe in the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries, the Celtic, the Druidic, the Teutonic and Norse, all in turn suffered the extinction of the ancient gleam of true philosophy which these nations and civilizations still cherished, when the devastating hand of fanatical pietism closed upon and crushed them. When the lurid persuasions of frenzied ignorance imagine themselves to be the benignant light, all true light must hide itself till the black fury has swept past. For never can darkness comprehend the light. And still the shadows linger and the West still gropes in worse than half-darkness to find its pathway to blessedness.

A thousand volumes stand on library shelves bearing the titles of histories of primitive Christianity, the origins of Christianity, the formative influences in the Christian movement and the general narrative of the rise and growth to world power of this “Christian” religion. But this work will advance the thesis that flouts nearly every word in all those books in its direct asseveration that neither the history of Christianity as Augustine envisaged it nor that of the Christian movement has ever yet been written. Histories stand on the shelves, but nowhere yet has the true history appeared. It has virtually never been known; it is still buried in the wrack and debris of the past. There parades in its stead the library of tomes purporting to be that history, but they miss the mark of truth by many a league. Every volume of it is based on a mass of unfounded assumption, weirdly travestied misstatements of old truth and uncouth perversion of exalted wisdom. It is an incredible mélange of misconception and misrepresentation, adding up in the end virtually to outright falsehood. Every history of Christianity has missed the real truth of its subject, and the field is thus open for this work to present as much of that truth as it is possible to crowd into the space of a single volume. All salvation from world ills of the present awaits the first writing of this true history of Christianity. It should mark a distinct epoch in world annals. It is enough of penance and karmic retribution for half the world to have had to pay the huge penalty of nearly two thousand years of injurious ignorance, with its long train of deleterious consequences, for having been denied the true knowledge of the influences that so misshaped its life over many centuries. And not until this incubus of wretched error and arrant superstition is lifted off the common mind of the great West will there be the possibility of an advance to freer life on a higher level.

Every attempt to write Christian history hitherto has been doomed to miscarriage from the start by its being based on presuppositions and acceptances not a single one of which could be certified as veridical truth, but all of which in the total amounted to a nearly complete tangle of falsehood. It has been constructed and still rests on an insecure and untenable platform of fiction, fantasy and falsity. So blunt and challenging a statement could not be made unless the all-sufficient data were at hand to support it. This corroboration will be furnished in the body of the work. That it has not been discerned, evaluated at its supreme worth and assembled before is the most damaging evidence to the stultifying force of fifteen centuries of Christian influence, and the heinous attestation of the blindness of general religious research.

Every historian of Christianity has approached his task with mind firmly set to rationalize a host of traditional conceptions which he had never had the acumen to see were themselves but the fictionalized formulations of the very movement that he essayed to delineate. His objective vision was from the start beclouded and wrongly focused on its theme through being conditioned by the very aberrations of view which the movement he set out to historicize had afflicted him with and thus vitiated his effort to envisage it correctly. He lacked the insight to correct these basic maladjustments of view before using them as lenses through which to get the properly focused picture. In short he used the glass of a badly distorted perspective supplied to him by the very movement which had created such an instrument for the conscious purpose of preventing its true picture from being seen. The rules and standards by which he presumed to judge and appraise—and applaud—Christianity were those narrow presuppositions, claims, assertions and predilections, not to say prejudices and jealousies, which were generated within the sphere of motivations which produced Christianity itself, and which wholly lacked the balance and true perspective to afford the historian the proper criterion of appraisal. The norms and standards of Christian criticism, when applied to a comparative evaluation of this system with others, have ever been found narrow, insular, in short disastrously bigoted and sectarian. It has remained for three centuries of nearly futile Christian missionary effort—itself motivated by an egregious sense of superiority—and the late acceleration of world communication, bringing distant peoples in closer touch and thus breaking down old barriers of misunderstanding, to open the eyes of discerning Christians to the provincial insufficiency of their traditional belief in Christianity’s unique status of excellence and to reveal the short-sightedness of their norms of judgment.

The time is therefore ripe for the rectification of all the misjudgement that has gone into the inditing of the rows of books on Christian history. How could that history be fair, true and honest when its very bases, its fundamental theses, were weakened by error and mired in misconceptions? There is actually sufficient ground to warrant the statement that every thesis upon which the conventional historian rested his judgments and his interpretations was false and erroneous. Hardly any argument advanced for the glory of Christianity could stand on material true as fact. Perhaps no other religion has ever come so near to being based wholly on fiction, fancy and lurid imagination. Allan Upward goes so far in one of his books as to assert that Christianity has the unique and unenviable distinction of being founded completely on a web of f...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• DEDICATION
• PREFACE
• THE PATH TO THE GATE
• CHAPTER I-PRIMEVAL CHRISTIANITY
• CHAPTER II-THE SHADOW OF THE SPHINX
• CHAPTER III-WHEN VISION FAILED
• CHAPTER IV-THE VEILED LIGHT
• CHAPTER V-WISDOM IN A MYSTERY
• CHAPTER VI-MILK FOR BABES
• CHAPTER VII-NIGHTFALL
• CHAPTER VIII-HATRED OF PHILOSOPHY
• CHAPTER IX-FROM RELIGION TO PHILOSOPHY
• CHAPTER X-TO FAITH ADD KNOWLEDGE
• CHAPTER XI-THE GREAT EBB-TIDE
• CHAPTER XII-CRUMBS FROM THE TABLE OF THE GODS
• CHAPTER XIII-WISDOM IS MUTE
• CHAPTER XIV-THE MYTH-GHOSTS WALK ABROAD
• CHAPTER XV-PAUL KNOWS NOT JESUS
• CHAPTER XVI-GREAT PAN IS DEAD
• CHAPTER XVII-THE REAL GHOST OF HISTORY
• CHAPTER XVIII-HIGHER CRITICISM
• CHAPTER XIX-THEN IS OUR FAITH VAIN
• CHAPTER XX-DEMENTIA IN EXCELSIS
• CHAPTER XXI-PRAYER AND HEALING
• CHAPTER XXII-THE NIGHT IS LONG
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER