BECAUSE WE ARE NOT A RACE OF ANGELS
TOM HARPUR
in conversation with
ALEXANDER BLAIR‑EWART
Tom Harpur has had a rich background that includes both the
academic‑Rhodes Scholar, Professor of New Testament and
Greek ‑ and the practical‑parish priest, global journalist,
newspaper editor, TV broadcaster and author.
He is a host on Vision TV and a regular columnist on ethical
and religious affairs with the Sunday Star in Toronto.
Among the many books he has authored are:
Harpur's Heaven and Hell (1983),
For Christ's Sake (1986), Life After Death (1991),
God Help Us (1992), and The Uncommon Touch (1994).
ALEXANDER BLAIR‑ EWART: Just to help our discussion, let's say
that
the "Logos" is this Presence that our presence stands in, our humanness, our
awareness when we are most wholly ourselves, present, real, and alive. This
Presence spontaneously arises when I want to connect with [gestures towards
Tom] here, and I want to be met by who is here, with the acknowledgment that
there is a spiritual being, a human being here. And this Presence, the Logos,
opens me constantly to this quality of "we" awareness. So there is this all
pervasive Presence, which is Eternity itself. It has taken different forms,
various shapes, and has been given many names and images by different
cultures. And in contemporary culture, people are looking around in this huge
supermarket of spiritual possibilities to try to find this Logos. From a
Christian point of view, do you see the new age movement as being a valuable
opening into a reawakening of this awareness of the Logos, or the Christ, as
it is called in the West, or is it that if they simply concentrated on
Christianity as we know it, they would get there anyway?
T0M HARPUR : I view the new age movement for the most part positively, which
makes me rather a pariah among many theologians, particularly those in the
conservative mode who see it as demonic. If you read right‑wing,
fundamentalist, Catholic publications right now ‑ and that's a growth
Industry, too ‑ the new age movement in all its manifestations is one of the
signs of the Antichrist. And, of course, so is the new environmental movement,
the feminist movement, almost anything you can look at that's happening around
us. Global thinking, in terms of any kind of world federalism ‑ that also is
Antichrist. But I think you're right, that the new age movement is certainly a
symptom of our hunger for the Logos, for meaning or spirit, a profound witness
to the vacuum that exists because of the dry dust of traditional orthodox
Christianity. I just don't think it's cutting it. It is with some people, but
if you look at the world picture, I don't think traditional orthodox
Christianity is cutting it. It has played itself out and I think, personally,
that it was a distortion to begin with.
ABE : In actuality, then, how do these two things, the new age
movement and traditional Christianity, connect?
TOM H : One of the things I try to stress whenever I can is
that we need to, at the very minimum, learn from the new age movement: one,
that the spiritual hunger is there and the search is there; and two, that many
of the things which are speaking meaningfully to people in the new age
movement are in fact within the tradition from which we come, whether it's
meditation or mystical experience. It is all there, but we haven't drawn on
it, with some exceptions, as you say, with Creation Spirituality and Matthew
Fox, where you have a creative thing that's alive with possibilities. But by
and large there is this hunkering down on the part of mainstream Christianity
in the face of this new manifestation, this threat as it's perceived. And so I
don't know yet whether or not to be optimistic that this lesson or this
message is going to be learned or heard by "traditional Christianity."
ABE : There's this human and divine Presence that embraces all
that is, and what it calls for is unity amongst human beings and a conscious
relationship with everything that is. This awareness doesn't say we can't use
the tree, it just says, "See that it is a tree, that it's something that
lives, and your relationship with it should be based on that."
TOM H : Well it participates in the Logos or is an expression
of the Logos. For me it's an enfleshment, and I think for Matthew Fox, also,
it's an incarnation, if you like, of the Logos. So is every living creature,
and so is every human being. And I agree with you that this is what
constitutes our fundamental humanity. When I said earlier that orthodoxy was a
distortion, I was thinking about my little book For Christ's Sake and
other books like it that are trying to get to the biblical basis and see what
it was that Jesus discovered, and who was he anyway? Because I think the
instinct of the Johannine author of the Fourth Gospel or whatever later editor
put the prologue on there about the Logos, was right, that the historical
Jesus to begin with discovered this Presence, that it was within Him, that
God, the Kingdom of
Heaven,
or the Logos was within Him. And so fully possessed
was He by it or so open to
it ‑ there are other ways of describing it, too ‑ but the whole Lucan idea of
the way in which Jesus was totally filled with the Holy Spirit of God for the
first time as a human being, totally possessed by It that to me is where His
divinity lies. People talk about the divinity in Jesus. But I wouldn't want to
talk about His divinity without talking about ours, too. Not in a Shirley
MacLaine sense, but it's just that while we haven't participated as fully or
opened ourselves as much to the Logos as Jesus did, we can be Christ's in that
way, or we can be another Jesus, if you like.
ABE : What is the metaphysic of the Antichrist?
TOM H : Metaphysic of the Antichrist?
ABE : Yes. What is the metaphysic of the Antichrist? Is there
some way to arrive at some clear apprehension of the metaphysics of the
Antichrist? There ought to be some way, instead of merely being able to fling
this epithet at people, to get at some kind of clarity about what the
Antichrist is, so that we'll know whether or not someone deserves the title.
TOM H : I am, according to my critics. [laughter] But I
think it is the attempt to come up with a metaphysical explanation that ends
up with something like a personal devil. So I don't think that's a helpful
direction in which to go. I'm not sure I'm interested in speculation about
that.
ABE : Let me see if I can encourage you to do it, because I
think it's important. Okay, so we have this whole new age movement in all its
many forms. All of these people in one way or another are concerned about the
human quality of their existence and how they are relating to other people,
where they are and whether or not they should be where they are, and so on. I
mean, there's conscience operating there. So, would Antichrist be something
like the conscienceless activities that we see in the degradation of the
planet, in the proliferation of nuclear weapons or chemical warfare?
TOM H : I think it's anything that denies the fundamentally
human, the fully human. Then, of course, you can ask, What is the fully human?
and we're back at the Logos again. Wherever there is substance, as Jung would
say, there is shadow. So, if there is such a thing as the Logos, then there
would have to be the not‑Logos, or even stronger than that, the anti‑Logos.
So, if I were pressed, I would say it would be anything that denies the face
of the human in us.
ABE : Now, here's the question. Does such a fragmented entity actually have
any power, ultimately? Is it something to be feared?
TOM H : I think it's to be taken very seriously. I wouldn't say feared,
because I think the perfect love is supposed to cast out fear, and the
knowledge that you can really love, which is the knowledge that the Logos
brings, properly understood it seems to me, is where the ultimate control
lies, that it is meant to cast out fear. So fear is too strong a word, but to
be shunned, to be avoided, to be fought at times, yes.
ABE : In traditional Christian thinking, which you've already
defined as a kind of distortion, there is this fear of the new age movement,
all of these millenarianists declaring, “These are the end times.” So, the
appearance of the new age movement? “It's the Antichrist. It's proof positive
that Jesus is coming and we should be happy about that.” Would there be some
way to dialogue our way to the point where new age people realize that
actually they're involved in the search for the same thing that Christians
are, and have some of the Christians a little less worried about it?
T0M H : Yes, that's what I'm saying. If we could be a lot more
open, instead of putting up the barriers and calling names, and share more
with each other as part of our interfaith dialogue, then I think it would be
productive for both sides. Parts of my book on healing, for example, in some
sense could be written off as new age. But it is really grounded in something
which belongs to the Old Testament, as we wrongly call it, and the New
Testament, and which is deep in the Christian tradition. So, in the dialogue
we might be made more aware of what it is we really have. We might also help
some of the seekers out there be a little more encouraged to look again, those
who have either written Christianity off, stereotyped it, or seen it as the
enemy. Have you read The Celestine Prophecy?
A B E : Yes, I guess everyone has.
TOM H : It sees the church as the enemy. It's the church that
wants to suppress "the manuscript" because of the insights therein. And then
you read a lot of books on reincarnation and they will tell you the church
deliberately repressed or suppressed any teachings about reincarnation, even
to the point of butchering the New Testament to get rid of them. A lot of very
poor scholarship at work there and some paranoia. They on their side tend to
look at the church with a certain amount of hostility. So dialogue, yes, and
an openness on both sides.
ABE : I actually wonder, what is the difference between sin,
redemption, and grace and karma, reincarnation, and enlightenment? I guess in
the one case you can be forgiven and in the other case you have to take your
lumps, no matter what.
TOM H : I think in both cases you take your lumps. You can be
forgiven, but if you've been an alcoholic parent, the consequences of that go
on and on.
ABE: I deeply suspect that very few people in the West are able
to actually think the thought karma, reincarnation, enlightenment, and so what
they do is replace these three words with sin, redemption, and grace.
T0M H : That could well be. I think the average holy man from
India is totally shocked at what passes for the doctrines which are supposed
to come fro Eastern mysticism. In other words, it's like Chinese food; it's
been change to meet the market here. So I agree. They're talking about similar
realities, but in a different way, and at a fundamentally different level, it
seems.
ABE: Is Christianity going to survive the encounter with the
late twentieth century, with the new age movement on one side‑which is
definitely here to stay ‑ and technology on the other? You see, we hear so
much on one hand about the church going through a revolution. On the other
hand, there are all these establishment right ‑ wingers who are going to hang
on until the bitter end. So, is Christianity, in that form, finished and is
that possibly good? I mean, if we say it's a distortion in the first place,
maybe that way of being Christian has to die away in order for a re‑enlivening
of the whole thing to take place.
TOM H : That's a very important point, and I think it's moot. I
mean, one would have to be a prophet to see it clearly, but I think it's
moribund in many ways. I talked to a very brilliant Nicaraguan liberation
theologian the other day, and he was saying that the Curia in
Rome
and the establishment, as such is really unknowingly setting about the total
dismantling of Catholicism as we know it. And it may well be that in the plan
of God the churches have to die so that something fresh might be reborn. There
will always be vestigial groups hanging on, and as I sometimes say in my
column, they will come under the Ministry of Culture, get grants for quaint
activities and things like that. So that's not beyond the bounds of
possibility. If that happens, so be it. I mean, then something new and better
can be born. I guess the reason I keep writing and speaking about these issues
is that while I see the death of the churches as a possibility, and maybe even
as a good thing, I still try to fan the embers and flames of renewal and of
rebirth, wherever I see them, because there is so much there that is good. And
the potential to absorb and to change is there if it's allowed to happen. It
depends very much on the leadership. But I'm not inspired by the leadership I
see in Canada at the moment in any of the churches.
ABE : So here we are, we have this historically Christian culture with its
overlay of technology and new ageism, and it's like Beckett's play
Waiting
for Godot.
There's no announcing voice anywhere that any of us would actually harken to.
There's no prophet in this wilderness. What is it that people need to see
happen for us to cut through all of the theological nonsense, old and new, and
actually be present? What are we waiting for?
TOM H : We're waiting for the reality to break through, and unfortunately the
vases in which it is meant to be contained or the conduits through which it is
meant to pour are blocking it. There's a certain human craving for someone to
tell us that "this is the way," I suppose. I would be fearful, personally, if
somebody arose who was a totally luminous kind of figure and everybody went,
"That's what we were waiting for." That might be the Antichrist. [laughter]
ABE : Obviously the only way the Antichrist (if there is such
a creature) can “get us” is if we're not doing it ourselves, and we're not
sure ‑ is that messiah real or not? Obviously the only way for us to have any
kind of ground of certainty ‑ and I don't mean intellectual ground ‑ is to
actually stop waiting and decide that the messianic age can begin now, here,
this afternoon, in this beautiful room.
TOM H : Well, perhaps it is beginning here.
ABE : And what are we looking for? Miracles? Are we still
shouting out, "Give us a sign!"? Some people are saying, "Well, the new age
movement is a sign," and others are saying, "Oh no, it's the wrong sign. No,
over there, Rabbi Schneerson or one of his disciples in New York or Israel is
maybe the messiah. There's a sign over there. Let's look at that." I mean, are
we actually unbelievers? Are we the children of Israel saying, "Show us a
sign. Show us a sign," when we don't really need one?
TOM H: But the sign is within you already.
ABE: Yes indeed it is.
TOM H: It's within everyone. And so I think it's a mistake to
go running hither and thither after Matthew Fox or the
Vineyard
Church, or whatever.
ABE: Does it actually, then, turn out that all of us, for
whatever reason fear of the Antichrist? ‑have a heavy investment in this not
being a numinous time, and that that's why it isn't?
T0M H: Yes, I think you could put it that way. But I think it's an unconscious
heavy investment. And the hierarchies of the church are very obvious examples.
But it doesn't stop there, obviously, because the laity in the main are
totally apathetic, as well. There are small groups like the Coalition of
Concerned Catholics, but in spite of what happened in Newfoundland with the
scandals and everything,* maybe you get a few hundred concerned Catholics. The
rest of them simply want to continue going to Mass and don't want anybody
rocking the boat. They don't care whether the priest is living a double life
or whatever. If it's drawn to their attention, they won't like it, but they're
not going to start something. They don't care if the Pope is unreasonable or
stupid. They have a vested interest at an unconscious level in keeping the
status quo, as we do politically in other ways.
ABE: So, what is it then, that stops all of us from crossing this line which
is always now? What stops us from crossing this line from waiting to Being?
What is this actually? Is it lack of faith?
TOM H: Yes, if by faith you mean trust, as opposed to an assent to X number of
propositions. Part of the discovery of Jesus of this Presence of which we
speak, it seems to me, was the discovery that It was within. I think that His
consciousness changed, and part of the change of consciousness was this
awareness that entering into the Kingdom, or accepting one's being and
incarnation of the Logos, having God within you, could not be earned. It was
simply a matter of trust. And that's why He uses the analogy of the little
child. It's a trust in the universe, if you like, a trust in yourself
understood in terms of the Logos being the higher self, or however you want to
name it. It is an act of trust, and it's almost too simple. I think that St.
Paul maybe in a twisted way was saying, too, that that's what he really found,
after being a Pharisee of Pharisees and trying so hard, and suddenly
realizing, "God, I can relax." This is the point of Rome, it seems to me,
however else you interpret it, that he just suddenly realized he could let go
and relax and he was in Christ or Christ was in him. He likes both metaphors.
We're too sophisticated, or we think we are, and it's too easy, too obvious.
And so all of those things go into the reason why we don't grasp it.
ABE: What I see all over the new age movement is the "seeker,"
and the "seeker" is the Christian, and the Christian is the "seeker." The new
age movement is largely an unconsciously Christian movement. The seeker or the
pilgrim, this person who is looking for God, the Presence or the Logos, is
filled with a certain kind of attitude, a cultural need, something that has
developed throughout the history of the West. The seeker wants to arrive
somewhere. As you said with Paul, there's something in us that wants to say,
"Ah, now I'm here." But if you look over the whole geography of the Newage,
Christian, native, Buddhist landscape, the seekers can't land anywhere. And
then the restless seeker has to move on to the next thing, restlessly looking
all over the place. Could it be that the very seeker is our problem? I mean,
is that what Paul realized, that he didn't have to carry this brilliant
Talmudic initiation all his life?
TOM H: He didn't abandon it. It was there and it was like Jung's mud in the
alchem. It's the mud that eventually the gold comes out of. I think that for
Paul it shed light backwards and forwards for him in the experience, so that
all that he had done wasn't wasted. This is why he is so thoroughly Jewish.
The scholarship of the last forty or fifty years has discovered again the
Jewishness of Jesus, the Jewishness of Paul. What happened, though, what
transformed his way of looking at all of that, was that he no longer had to
strive to make it with God. All of that before was seen as a means to an end,
the end being somehow to get right with God, to be forgiven, to feel at peace,
reconciled, whatever. And he glimpsed that it was a gift of Grace, that he was
never ever going to make it that way, no matter what he did, that it was
already given to him. The prodigal son discovers his father is waiting. It's
nothing the prodigal son has done. He's done all the wrong things, but the
Grace is there, the father is on the road to meet him. When Paul realized that
it was God actually out there running to meet him, if only he could see it,
his goal suddenly shifted. He was no longer a seeker in the sense of the
ultimate, but more in terms of: how does this live itself out, how can I be
more nearly the man God wants me to be? It's a struggle.
A B E: Now, what is he actually fighting with?
TOM H: He's fighting with his shadow, using Jungian terms. He's
fighting with his self, his id, with his lower nature, because he says, “Oh
wretched man that I am, the body of this death.” He wasn't antibody at that
point, I don't think. He simply decided "'I'm conscious of an unlived part of
my life, which is the shadow." And there is a constant struggle and warfare
over that. He said we have this "treasure in earthen vessels," which is a
rather nice metaphor.
ABE: Two thousand years later, here we are, here's Paul sitting
in the armchair. What are we fighting with here? What would we have to fight
to be here as the living Logos? And we've already touched on it in the
conversation. If you, using the word as a verb, presenced in that way, you are
going to take terrible risks. I might persecute you for that for instance. I
might say, "What do you think you're doing. Its very inappropriate of you.
Don't be present in that way. That's not expected behavior." All of these
reactions. We go to the therapist and fight the id, the shadow, the complex,
the neurosis. But it's not actually what we're dealing with in the Logos space
between us.
TOM H: Well it's there whether we like it or not.
ABE: It's there, yes. Is it possible for us to objectify what
it is here that is keeping the Logos separated? Because that's what it comes
to for society, for the church, for everything. What is this barrier?
TOM H: It is the shadow side of our humanity. It is a fact that
we don't want to be totally open with one another. I mean, we do and we don't.
We want it as long as it doesn't involve this, that, and the other. You know
what I mean? So it's a guarded openness. We have to, it seems to me, accept
our humanity. For me, it is very important to get the humanity of Jesus
whereas the churches have gone off the deep end, making Him a god up there
somewhere. Part of our acceptance of our humanity is obvious stuff but it's
very important. We cannot be pure spiritual beings, not yet, not now.
ABE: Why not yet? Why not now?
TOM H: Because we are incarnate. The Logos has become
incarnate. It's enfleshed, and part of this enfleshment means, it seems to me,
that pure spirituality, total, utter, is not only impossible, it's a dangerous
illusion right now. I think there's a real danger of people becoming
hyperspiritual, disconnected from their bodies from their shadow from all that
is this composite thing called a human being.
ABE: I agree with you about hyperspirituality. But on the other
hand, what I'm trying to look at is the entry into the "living here," of being
more present as a physical being, more present as a psychological, mental,
emotional being and so on. If as a conscious being I, experience myself as the
Logos and as a man enfleshed, then why am I fearing to manifest my love for
the Logos in the way in which I am present in the world?
T0M H: First of all, who's to say it isn't happening? I think
it is happening.
ABE: Of course it's always potentially happening.
TOM H: And part of what we need to do is just to recognize that
and not get too fine tuned about it. But we're afraid of being misunderstood.
Everybody has their image, their persona in place. People get fed up or
whatever, but they don't go very far with the expression of their feelings.
You can get hurt very quickly.
ABE: We have an infinite capacity to hurt each other.
T0M H: Yes. And we're not all at the same stage.
ABE: I suspect that somewhere a small group or community of
people will actually decide to cross that line with each other in absolute
trust of the Logos, probably very hard‑headed, capable people, too, who will
respark the community of living spiritual beings. We call this the Body of
Christ in the West. And it can actually ignite at any moment. But it seems
that we spend so much time contemplating, as you say, these lofty metaphysical
nuances that we forget that what we're talking about is simply a quality of
Presence.
T0M H: I don't have any problem with that. I say amen to that.
That would be a step forward in consciousness, and I think it's actually
happening. I do believe that. I get letters all the time from people and I am
very struck by the number of people who don't sound to me to be kooks, who are
having or have had in recent times an experience of what I would call "cosmic
consciousness,‑ or of awareness of the Logos, if you like, and of feeling this
sense of the unity with all. In particular, over the last five or six years ‑
and I've been twenty‑five years in mass media in this field. There are things
happening out there, in spite of the church's rigidities, and in spite of the
idiocies of some aspects of the new age.
ABE: Every moment, this living, breathing Presence, it's always
new, and my trouble is that I can easily become too old, too knowledgeable
about it to meet it. That in every moment I have to erase everything I think I
know about all of this in order to become living Presence. So that the minute
we have a formalized Christianity, or new ageism, which is becoming
formalized, too......
TOM H: The rituals creep in right away.
ABE: Yes. So, there is this moment of new age something in the
air, and then it, too, is gone. And the problem is transmission. We. don't
have a culture now that transmits this living Presence. That's the question
for the church, for society. How can we engender a culture, a community of men
and women, where the "Logos" is what makes itself present as opposed to all
the other things that we drag around?
TOM H: Before you get the culture you have to have a massive
transformation of consciousness. It has to be more than just a little cell
here and a little cell there because we're talking now about something
massive, something global. People throw out the term “quantum leap of
consciousness.” I think I see signs of it happening. Who knows what kind of
culture would give you that spontaneity, that immediacy, that ability to shed
the crap and the commercialism and all the messages from the information
highway? God, what a highway! And to be really present with one another,
Martin Buber's I‑Thou, that kind of immediacy. I think that's only going to
come in small cells.
ABE: I don't so much mean culture in that formalistic sense. But, look, here I
am, I'm late twentieth‑century man or woman, I'm dying of alienation, I'm ill
inside, I'm living in pain, and all I want to do, actually, is fall asleep
into the TV or into being a celebrity or something like that. My life is
totally empty because there is nothing real in it and my soul is dying. So my
need is urgent. And if we are the people who are presumably seriously involved
in these issues, I mean, are we just existing on faith, or does the moment of
action come?
TOM H I think each one of us begins where we are, first with
ourselves. And then, if you're a communicator, you do it, obviously, in that
way. You see, I really believe that if that person with no soul who you were
describing, with a dead soul or an alienated soul, really has the hunger to
the degree to which you put it, then something will happen. What alarms me is
when there's the absence of that longing. And I'm heartened by the new age
movement because it shows that there are many people who have this longing.
Now, whether it's sufficient for them or not, or whether they'll be palmed off
with something that's less than bread, with pseudo, ersatz spirituality...
A B E: So, what do you see happening with all of this? What has
to happen before there's a sufficient transformation between people for a new
culture to begin? You pointed out earlier that you think in a way it's already
happening.
TOM H: Yes, I do. There is a horrible word which I don't like
- Networking ‑ but it is going on. I mean, that's one good thing about the
Internet and the other forms of it which are not electronic. Again, I
mentioned people talking about mystical experiences or cosmic consciousness.
The people one hears from nowadays who are really tuned in, say, to the
environmental movement at a deep spiritual level, well, they've never heard of
Matthew Fox, and so on. I'm very encouraged by that. And I don't believe in
the idea of the critical mass, that you get a hundred meditators together and
then something clicks. But there is some truth in the idea that once a
sufficient number of people begin to have this hunger met or partly I met,
entering into the new experience of the Logos, or however you want to express
it, that connections will be made and are being made. I think that has to
happen, obviously, on a much greater scale than it is now before the direction
in which we're moving is going to significantly change. But around all these
issues, whether it's nuclear arsenals, poverty, or whatever, there's a rising
awareness, it seems to me, that it's not just a logistical problem, but a
spiritual problem, a problem of consciousness, and a heightening of that
consciousness. It seems to me that either that's going to happen or we will
have total disaster. It sounds gloomy, but on my off days I really do believe
that those who go around blithely thinking that technology is going to solve
all our problems are really crazy, or that the nuclear peril is now behind us
and we can forget about that because the Cold War's over. Nevertheless, there
is this rising and it is global. Whether it's sufficiently massive is up for
grabs. But I am optimistic at the moment in that something ... well, it's
obviously the activity of God. I believe that everything is in the hands of
God.
ABE: The way in which we're speaking of this god, Him/It,
He/She in its name of “Logos,” carries the implication that Logos is something
unchanging, that everything changes within or around the Logos, but the Logos
itself doesn't change. Is it possible that something has happened within the
Logos in the last few centuries, which is actually responsible for this
changed world that we're now living in? And that our difficulty is that we
have to learn something completely new, which is how to relate to the Logos in
this new relationship mood in the way that it is here now? We keep looking for
the Logos of the Bible, for instance. But what if it isn't there anymore.?
Nobody in the Bible could have imagined the world we are now in, not even
begun. And yet here we are, we're in it. So, is it somehow that our deepest
assumptions about the issues of Christianity and the Logos and culture need to
be completely reexamined?
TOM H: Well, we certainly need to do that. I don't think,
however, it follows necessarily that the Logos has changed. But I think there
needs to be a fundamental re‑envisioning. And yet, if God is the kind of god
who communicates, which is partly what the Logos is about, a communicating
god, then God communicates today or He didn't communicate then. So, what is
God saying to me now in this moment, in this instance? It's very hard for
anyone to say, “Okay, let's start from scratch.” And I don't think you can,
entirely. But I think that attitude is what we have to have. Personally, when
I go back to the New Testament, I want to try to get beyond the words and the
whole thing to what is the reality that is being talked about here? If you
boil it right down, what is going on here? And how would that speak afresh
today? How can I encounter that today in my life, know it as a reality? The
people in church who sit with such dead faces, is that what they really want?
Maybe they don't want to hear about Moses and the historical Jesus so much as
they want to encounter God right now, here. And they're not getting it. They
want the bread that we were talking about.
ABE: So you feel the Logos doesn't change.
TOM H: No, I don't think so. I am quite aware of process
theology, and there are some attractive things about it.
ABE : No, I'm not talking on that level. I'm not trying to
discuss new theological theories. But just in the sense of, look, this thing,
this indescribable, ineffable, it's living, it's conditionless, it's moving.
It's actually the source of all life. It's alive.
TOM H: That's right.
ABE: You fall out of it into your ordinary consciousness and
then you wake up again. And each moment is completely new. As it says in the
scripture, "Behold, I make all things new." But why does it make all things
new? Because It itself is constantly new. It's living, moving, changing.
TO M H: Just like the light streaming in the window here is not
the light that was streaming in when we started the conversation. So the Logos
is always new and yet unchanged. It's unchanging, but the manifestation, the
perception or consciousness, is constantly shifting.
ABE: You can never doubt that it is the Logos. So, in that
sense it is unchanging. Yet it's living, and it's the font and source of
everything that lives and changes. So it is present as me or you or him. It is
a principle, an uncontainable, ineffable, eternal Presence. It is also an
individual being. Let's say, it's you. Let's say that here you are, you're
Jesus. Now, it seems to me the big problem in religion is that we have
difficulty squaring how this absolute principle, if you like, is an absolute
principle on one hand, but it's also a man. It can be any man. So we keep
getting fixated on the anthropomorphic, the individual.
TOM H: I wouldn't make the sort of one‑to‑one equation that
you're making, that is to say, "You are the Logos sitting there, and I am the
Logos sitting here." I prefer the idea that we all share in humanity. So you
are humanity sitting there, you embody humanity, and you and I embody the
Logos. We are an expression of the Logos. But I would never make the
statement, "I am the Logos," or, "The Logos is me." The Logos is expressing
itself through me and my being is an expression of that. And no, it's not just
a principle, as the Stoics sometimes suggest, but it is actually a living
presence; it is personal.
ABE: So you hold that traditional view, then, of original sin and the
fallenness of man.
TOM H: How do you leap from that to original sin?
ABE: Well, you suggest that you, Tom Harpur, wearing blue
jeans, that you're not the Logos, that you're only some sort of container for
It. You're a vehicle and It is embodied in you as humanity. But It isn't you.
Why isn't It you? What is it about all the rest of you that puts it outside
the Logos?
TOM H: If It were I and I were It/Him/Her, then we wouldn't
have any problem because we would be five billion angels, not human beings,
living on the earth, and we wouldn't have this problem of how to know the
Logos. It's Plato's idea that the ideal form expresses itself in the
particular, and the particular is not the pure idea. So we share in the Logos.
The Logos is that in us which is of God. And ultimately, I suppose, since all
things come from God, all of us is from God. I'm saying that we are enfleshed,
and that is not the opposite of the Logos, but it's not to be identified with
It either. So, you end up with pantheism, don't you, if you pursue your tack?
Ultimately everything is the Logos. Everything is divine, everything is God.
And I take a step back from pantheism. Panentheism, yes, but not pantheism.
ABE: If you experience and then postulate the essential unity
of all that is, ultimately how can anything be outside it?
T0M H: I don't think it is outside. And that's the subtle
difference between saying pantheism and Panentheism. All things are ultimately
held together by the Logos. But I wouldn't be conscious; neither would St.
Paul have been, of this interior moral struggle, if he or I could make this
bald statement that Tom Harpur is the Logos.
ABE: In the manifestation we definitely have a "this/that." You
know, there's this and then there's that. And we're very happy about this
because there couldn't be any individuals if there wasn't the this/that. Now,
you can take the next step and say there is a this/that because this is a
fallen world and we're sinful creatures, and that the only way to get back to
the Presence, the Logos, is to beg for forgiveness. But the minute you have
the acknowledgement of the this/that as fallenness, you can build original sin
on it. In the West we've taken the this/that as proof of error. The fact that
we're here in the flesh, it's error. So we have developed a theology that does
not allow us to realize that this is the Logos sitting right here.
TOM H: The whole business of original sin and the doctrine of
the Fall is highly problematic and not a very good attempt to get at the
problems and questions of evil ‑ why we aren't a race of angels, and so on. I
think they did the best they could at the time. I don't think it's a very
happy, very adequate theory, but I'm not sure that I have one that's superior
to put in its place. Better minds than mine have struggled with it and been
unsuccessful. But the idea that the taint of sin has been passed down to us
through procreation from an archetypal Adam, from some golden age, and that
we've fallen from that, I think, is simply a religious myth which has limited
value and has led to a great deal of confusion.
ABE: So are we perhaps more closely identified with the Logos
than one would traditionally think?
TOM H: I'm now saying the opposite of what I was saying before,
but I mean, while I wouldn't want to say that I am the Logos sitting here, I
don't really go too far with the totally depraved, wretched,
impossible‑to‑do‑any-good view which has come out of the doctrine of the
Fall. You know, in Calvinism and in Fundamentalism you are a totally depraved
sinner and unless you're washed in the blood of the Lamb you can do no good
thing. Well, I've met atheists working in the house of the dying in Calcutta
who were doing good things. I don't personally believe that the this/thatness
of the world is a direct result of, or necessarily implies, a cosmic fall. I
believe very much in the whole evolutionary theory of modern science, and that
there was a golden age, if you like, in the sense of the mind of God. I think
we're being pulled from in front towards what God has in mind for us.
And that there hasn't been some catastrophic event prior to which we were pure
beings of spirit and now are pure creatures of clay. So there is that of God
in us. There is also that which denies God, or which would put itself in
opposition to God, and that is a result, I suppose, of the gift of human
freedom.
Copyright © A.
Blair-Ewart 1995-2003.
www.TomHarpur.com
