Christianity as creative myth

this consciousness that he was in complete accord not only with his own unconscious but with the whole unconscious Power or Reality of the Universe, so that he could say, ‘I and my Father are one’ (St. John 10.30). As the Athanasian Creed expresses it, ‘although he be God and Man, yet he is not two, but one Christ; One; not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh; but by taking of the Manhood into God’.

The Christian faith is that this man Jesus lived, and was or became the Christ. The power of this myth is the same whether it is affirmed that a man by his own self-discipline acquired Christconsciousness or whether he prepared himself to receive a cosmic Spirit in the place of his own personality. It is so strong that even if Jesus never existed and the whole story is a constructed work of art based on the solar myth, it remains as a vision of what is attainable by mankind, for in that case the intensity and universality of consciousness of the person who conceived it could hardly have been much less than that of the central figure which it portrayed.

The supreme affirmation of Vedanta is that ‘Atman’—the central principle of Man—‘is Brahman’—the creative Power in the Universe; not that Atman is part of or partakes in Brahman, but that it is wholly identical with it. But this is only the expression of a universal principle. Jesus Christ affirmed personally for himself that, ‘I and the Father are one’. And St. John tells us that this divine consciousness is at the centre of every human being, though it is not recognised. “That was the true light which lights every man that comes into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him and the world knew him not.’ But of those that recognise this divine consciousness he wrote that, ‘to them he gave power to become the Sons of God, being born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God’. It is in this sense that at the moment of baptism in Jordan, when the Spirit descended upon Jesus, God the Father had begotten his Son in him.

The very notion that a man could have lived to whom the whole of reality was present in his consciousness for three whole years and who during this time spoke and acted in complete consonance with his own unconscious and with the unconscious power in the Universe, which we may mythically call Providence,

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