Christianity as creative myth

gives a vision of the possible future attainment of humanity which could be universally accepted and acted upon. Mitrinovi¢ expressed it thus in the New Britain World Affairs ,"The over-soul of Adam has become single and has attained personal existence in the Christ-Mystery; the highest dignity and the most central truth-attainment by our race was attained by it. Humanity has known its own truth and the truth of all existence, the world of nature included, the material world included.”

If the gospels and the Christ-Mystery are understood in this way, it becomes necessary to give up the superstitious idea of a transcendent God as a Being, conceived anthropomorphically and yet beyond all human understanding. For if Jesus Christ could say, ‘I am in the Father and the Father in me’ (St. John 14.11), then God was wholly in his consciousness and was not a Being outside him. And this is made explicitly clear in Christ’s conversation with the woman of Samaria (St. John 4.20-23), when he said to her, ‘the time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. . . . God is Spirit: and they that worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.’ The translators of the Bible have written, ‘God is a Spirit’, but this must be wrong, first because the Greek work pneuma (nvevpax) occurs twice in the same sentence and should have the same meaning on both occasions; secondly, because the contrast which Jesus is making is not between worship of a material idol and that of an immaterial Spirit. The God whom the Jews worshipped in Jerusalem was already an immaterial Being. The contrast is between worship of a Being outside Man and the spirit within Man.

Mitrinovié expressed this in the New Britain World Affairs, ‘Christ is the principle of humanity. Christ is the dignity and courage of knowing that God is Spirit; now Spirit altogether is immateriality and innerness; also human innerness; mere human innerness . . . God is in awareness. In human awareness the whole of existence is present. There is no transcendental existence.’ It was for this reason that Mitrinovié described Christianity as ‘the principle and the oracle of ripeness and of the coming of age of the human race’ because in it ‘Divinity is cognised as spiritual, inward, immaterial; but also individuated’4—that is, within the consciousness of an individual person. And he applied this denial