Christianity as creative myth

family, mother, father and child. They come into being in succession, first by the marriage of the mother and father, and then by the birth of a child, who proceeds from the mother and father as the Holy Spirit does from the Father and Son. Simultaneously they all three together make up the family.

Having shown how the notion triunity applies in our daily life and experience, let us now turn to the significance of this mythology for human life generally and for the human future. We have considered the significance of the Christ-principle for human life. We must now consider the meaning and significance of the Holy Spirit. Vladimir Solovyov relates this to the mythology of Sophia, the Wisdom of God. This is fully described in his Lectures on Godmanhood and more briefly in Ellen Mayne’s Foundation Lecture on Solovyov. He interprets Sophia as the principle of humanity, as the ideal or perfected humanity, existing from eternity but needing to be realised in time in the same way as the Word exists from eternity but had to be incarnated in time as the Christ.

The development of humanity can be described in terms of the succession of the Trinity. First there was humanity as a collective, governed by instinct and in harmony with the whole of nature. One might call this the tribal state in which there was indeed a feeling of togetherness, but not self-conscious and wholly nonindividuated. This could be described as the era of God the Father. The second stage, that of individuality and self-consciousness, was properly ushered in by Jesus Christ and developed in Christendom and in the whole of European civilisation. This was the age of God the Son.

The third stage, that of the Holy Spirit, needs to proceed from the first and the second; not to supersede them but to realise them both fully as well as being itself a wholly new stage of development. In the first stage there was an unconscious unity both of mankind and between Man and Nature, portrayed in the myths of Paradise and the Golden Age. This does not have to mean that there was no fighting or killing, but that the organicity of the whole was not disrupted. In the second stage, after the so-called Fall of Man, came the beginning of individual consciousness which disrupted Man’s perfect concordance with the wholeness of nature. It brought, however, the possibility of individual freewill.

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