Christianity as creative myth

The perfection of individuality was achieved archetypally in the Person of Jesus Christ. But this has now degenerated into mere individualism—individual greed and ambitious power-seeking, which has brought war and poverty in a way that never existed in the pre-individual stage. But we cannot go back to the preindividual, even if we wished to. Individual consciousness, once it has been gained, can never be put aside.

So this third stage in human development has to proceed from the unconscious unity of the first stage and from the conscious individuality of the second. We need to recreate a new organic wholeness both within mankind and with the whole of nature. As Erich Gutkind wrote in The World Conquest, ‘Today something is beginning, as if the seed were losing itself in the bud. And if we wish to survive and not to suffocate, then today we must mount to an entirely new level, taking a step which is greater than the step from animal to man.” This can be achieved only by the free will of individuals working together, and this is the meaning of the Holy Spirit. It does not imply the giving up of individuality, indeed, as Gutkind wrote, it ‘cannot exist without the most strongly developed personality’, but it does require the abandonment of individualism.

Mitrinovi¢ in The New Age World Affairs, which he wrote in 1920-21, developed the notion of Sophia as the incarnation of the Holy Spirit into Universal Humanity. For, he wrote, ‘The appearance of Universal Man on the plane of history is only the anthropogenetic fulfilment of the centre and of the form of the Eternal Mystery. It is not the fulfilment of its periphery and content. Logos is the centre and the form. Sophia is the periphery and content. . . . Universal Humanity itself, the human ocean is the content of the Logos. Jesus is only the centre of the world. Humanity is his content.’® And he affirmed that the passage of humanity from individual consciousness to universal consciousness requires the incarnation not only of the Son of God, but also of Sophia, of Man as a Kingdom.

He compared this incarnation with the ancient Indian notion of Loka Samgraha, which can be called the Unity of Mankind, and he conceived it as an Organic or functional Order which he called Universal Humanity. He wrote ‘It is the very goal and meaning of human evolution that our race should become an individuated