Theosis

“ Theogenes. I am afraid the matter is much worse with me, than it is with Eusebius. For tho’ this doctrine, seems to have got all my heart, as it is a doctrine; yet I am continually thrown out of it in practice, and find myself as much under the power of my old tempers and passions, as I was before I was so full of this doctrine.
Theophilus. You are to know, my friends, that every kind of virtue and goodness, may be brought into us, by two different ways. They may be taught us outwardly by men, by rules and precepts; and they may be inwardly wrought in us. ”

“ Both anatomy and theology define man as both physical and mental, and place mind at the mercy of matter for every function, formation, and manifestation. Anatomy takes up man at all points materially. It loses Spirit, drops the true tone, and accepts the discord. Anatomy and theology reject the divine Principle which produces harmonious man, and deal — the one wholly, the other primarily — with matter, calling that man which is not the counterpart, but the counterfeit, of God's man. ”

“ But if a philosophical sect is a leaning toward dogmas, or, according to some, a leaning to a number of dogmas which have consistency with one another and with phenomena, tending to a right life; and dogma is a logical conception; and conception is a state and assent of the mind: not merely sceptics, but every one who dogmatizes is accustomed in certain things to suspend his judgment, either through want of strength of mind, or want of clearness in the things, or equal force in the reasons. ”

“ Theosophy has for its leading tenet the absolute unity in essence and correlation of all life, whether visible, invisible, material, intellectual, spiritual, and this affords at once a clue to the consideration of the present subject; for, according to the view which the individual thinker takes of the powers and relations of the mind itself will be his view of the duties and responsibilities which these powers and relations involve; in other words, Ethics or moral philosophy must be based upon metaphysics. ”

“ We have honestly endeavoured to construct a Theodicy, or to vindicate the divine glory as manifested in the constitution and government of the moral world. We have endeavoured to reconcile the great fundamental doctrines of God and man with each other, as well as with the eternal principles of truth. It has likewise been our earnest aim, to evince the harmony of the divine attributes among themselves, as well as their agreement with the condition of the universe. ”

“ The ancient doctrine is far nobler than the Christian religious one or that of the purely scientific school. The religious gives a theory which conflicts with reason and fact, while science can give for the facts which it observes no reason which is in any way noble or elevating. Theosophy alone, inclusive of all systems and every experience, gives the key, the plan, the doctrine, the truth. ”

“ If we assume the creation of protoplasm or the creation of the world to have been analogous to any of the phenomena of our experience, in which we find only certain constant results of the forces resident in matter, then certainly we have no precedent for asserting the necessity of divine creation; and if we assume the creation to have been essentially different from any of the phenomena of our experience, then certainly we have no data upon which to base any theory whatever concerning it. ”

“ In short they attributed to it all the characteristics of reason and intelligence, so that in spite of their argument that the active principle was no less material than the passive, that it was the element of fire or vapor or both, it was inevitable that in practice their philosophy should ultimately tend toward a dualism and that the ancient conflict of matter and mind, of body and soul, should have its place in their teaching. ”

“ A vague, fanciful first cause of physical phenomena, a general idea, abstracted out of all content, so as to leave no meaning for the human mind—whatever the imagination might make of it—a mechanical, magnetic force, to which all motion might conveniently be referred; a deified principle of order—and these held in conjunction with the popular polytheism, and impregnated with the national pantheistic conceptions—was all that Greek philosophy could offer to the higher religious aspirations of the educated man. ”

“ In Stoicism, there was the theory of the one Law or Logos expressing itself in an infinite variety of material forms: in Platonism, there was the theory of the one God, shaping matter according to an infinite variety of patterns. In the one, the processes of nature were the operations of active forces, containing in themselves the law of the forms in which they exhibit themselves, self-developing seeds, each of them a portion of the one Logos which runs through the whole. ”

“ General Theory.—Theosophy is thus differentiated at once from all philosophic systems which attempt to rise from an analysis of phenomena to a knowledge, more or less adequate, of the existence and nature of God. In all such systems, God is the terminus ad quem, a direct knowledge of whom is not claimed, but who is, as it were, the hypothesis adopted, with varying degrees of certainty in different thinkers, for the explanation of the facts before them. ”

“ For the dogma of the Trinity in Unity as a basis of mathematics, the dogma of the resurrection of the body as a basis of medicine, the dogma of infallibility as a basis of psychology, the dogma of the immaculate conception as a basis of genetic science, the dogma of the staying of the sun as a basis of astronomy, the dogma of the creation of the earth, animals, and plants [82] as a basis of geology and phylogenesis—these or any other dogma, at pleasure, from any other church will make all other doctrine quite superfluous. ”

“ Gregory of Nyssa taught the true doctrine, which modern science has now universally accepted. He taught that the rational soul is created by Almighty God and infused into the embryo at the very moment of conception. ”

“ Again, regarding the foundations of biology, a theoretical orthodoxy grows less possible, less definable, less conceivable (even as a hope) the more knowledge advances. Once ‘mechanism’ and ‘vitalism’ were mutually contradictory theories regarding the ultimate constitution of living bodies. ”

“ A thoughtful Theosophist cannot but wonder sometimes how it is that Theosophy, though unquestionably representing the most advanced theory of existence and the most complete statement of the highest wisdom at present available, yet does not seem to appeal at all to many of the most eminent leaders of the world's thought and progress, whether it be along the lines of science, art, literature, philosophy or religion. ”

“ The science of nature, then, or rather observation, as contained in the gnostic tradition according to the rule of the truth, depends on the discussion concerning cosmogony, ascending thence to the department of theology. Whence, then, we shall begin our account of what is handed down, with the creation as related by the prophets, introducing also the tenets of the heterodox, and endeavouring as far as we can to confute them. But it shall be written if God will, and as He inspires; and now we must proceed to what we proposed, and complete the discourse on ethics. ”

“ Let no one, therefore, suspect me of a doubt as to the sincerity of theologians who proclaim that the sphere of science is limited to the processes of the physical world, and may be frankly accepted in all that it teaches respecting such processes, without in the least involving the moral world, or in any way affecting the truths respecting that moral world which theology derives from a source independent of experience. ”

“ The Stoics, more particularly, thought of Nature or the Universe as a living organism, of which the material world was the body, and of which the Deity or the Universal Reason was the pervading, animating, and governing soul; and natural law was the rule of conduct laid down by this Universal Reason for the direction of mankind. ”

“ In our analysis of man’s nature we have so far considered only the perishable elements which make up the lower man, and have arrived at the fourth principle or plane—that of desire—without having touched upon the question of Mind. But even so far as we have gone it must be evident that there is a wide difference between the ordinary ideas about Mind and those found in Theosophy. ”

“ Wholly hypothetical, inductive reasoning reckons creation as its own creator, seeks cause in effect, and from atom and dust draws its conclusions of Deity and man, law and gospel, leaving science at the beck of material phenomena, or leaving it out of the question. To begin with the divine noumenon, Mind, and to end with the phenomenon, matter, is minus divine logic and plus human hypothesis, with its effects, sin, disease, and death. ”

“ This absolute reign of theistic theory dominating human life through the above-described therapeutic ideas was followed by an epoch in which theism was forced to divide its authority with a powerful rival—namely, the physico-mechanical theory of life. The struggle between both these systems was ushered in, for the Hellenic as well as for the Occidental world of civilization, by the appearance of Ionian philosophy. ”

“ However, adopting for the sake of argument this gigantic assumption, let us suppose that God laid down these arbitrary rules for His own guidance in creation, and let us see to what it leads. If, as is assumed, the Deity formed a certain number of ideal types, and determined that on no account should He allow any part of one type to appear in any part of another, surely we should expect that within the limits of the same type the same typical structures should always be present. ”

“ In these systems the Absolute, or God, is defined as the One, Being, the Being in all existence, the absolute Substance, the Essence which is necessary not through an Other, but in-and-for-itself, the Causa Sui, the cause of itself, and consequently its own effect, that is, the mediation which cancels itself. ”

“ This is an unanswerable objection to Empedocles and his followers who made all bodies to be combinations, in differing proportions, of the elements—for whether the Vital Principle be harmony or a combination of particles, there must, as combinations are various, (since that which forms bone is not that which forms flesh,) be several principles in each member of the body ”

“ Hence, to describe these two spheres with clearness and precision, and to determine the precise point at which they come into contact without intersecting each other, is still a desideratum in the science of theology. We shall endeavour to define the human power and the divine sovereignty, and to exhibit the harmony subsisting between them, in such a manner as to supply, in some small degree at least, this great desideratum which has so long been the reproach of the most sublime of all the sciences. ”

“ Whether we look at the physical causes by which the early Greek philosophers endeavored to explain the phenomena of the universe, or at one of Plato's conceptions of a designing and volitional agency in the formation of the Kosmos, or to another of his conceptions, the sovereignty of universal ideas or metaphysical abstractions, we are everywhere confronted with the necessity for assigning an origin to the physical causes, or to the universal ideas ”

“ A theistic theological belief may agree with physics and anatomy that reason and will are properly classified as mind, located in the brain; also, that the functions of these faculties depend on conditions of matter, or brain, for their proper exercise. But reason and will are human; God is divine. ”

“ As the mind certifies to itself its own existence by the most direct and the highest kind of proof, so it certifies to itself the powers with which it is endowed; and this brings me to the anatomical examination of the structure of the mind. I shall not make this analysis a very minute one, but shall confine it to those distinct elementary powers which are constituted by systems, as the powers of the bodily organism are constituted by systems distinguishable by the functions which they perform. ”

“ Section V. The construction of a Theodicy, not an attempt to solve mysteries, but to dissipate absurdities. As we have merely undertaken to refute the atheist, and vindicate the glory of the divine perfections, so it would be a grievous mistake to suppose, that we are about to pry into the holy mysteries of religion. No sound mind is ever perplexed by the contemplation of mysteries. ”

“ It is now only needful to say that modern anatomy and physiology afford aids to sound deductions in natural theology in reference to the structure of the human body as an animal organism, and all the functions of its different organs, which immeasurably transcend all that was known or assumed among the early Greeks, or in the time of Plato and Aristotle, or in the time of Galen. ”

“ Some of the speculations of Greek philosophers adverted to in a previous chapter may serve to show us what comes of the omission to conceive of power as abstracted from substance or its properties. The philosophy which first attained to this conception led the way to that conception of an Infinite Being, without whose existence and attributes all speculation upon the phenomena of nature leads to nothing. A belief in his existence and attributes must undoubtedly be attained by an examination of his works, if we set aside the teachings of revealed religion. ”