Shaken Creeds The Virgin Birth Doctrine By Jocelyn Rhys

PART II CHAPTER V

SPIRITUAL VIRGIN BIRTHS-GNOSTIC DOCTRINES

The Virgin Birth story can be traced along another line of evolution besides that, already considered, of the pagan stories about their men-gods. Among its ancestors it numbered Gnosticism.

According to the mystic theosophy of the Gnostics, the abstractions which they regarded as spiritual beings- emanations in the first or subsequent generation from the Supreme-were grouped together in pairs ("syzygies"), of which one partner was looked upon as male, the other as female.

The Virgin Birth, in Gnostic doctrine, took place when Sophia (Wisdom), desirous of emulating the "alone-begetting" Supreme, gave birth, without the connivance of her syzygy partner, to a mystic spiritual being.

This mystic spiritual being, pre-existing in a far-off heaven, was the "aeon" Jesus. The syzygy, partner and spouse, of Sophia was Christos, another spiritual being but-owing to the conceit and ambition of Sophia-not the father of-Jesus.

That, according to some of the Gnostics, is the Virgin Birth story. Whether it existed in that form in pre-Gospel Christian days cannot, in our present state of knowledge, be definitely decided. So many Gnostic books were destroyed by the triumphant Catholics, when Catholic Christianity became the State-established religion of the Roman empire, that our knowledge of Gnosticism is too scanty for us to determine with certainty whether this form of their theosophical doctrine was evolved from the Gospel birth story, or the latter evolved from the theosophical doctrine.

But the latter is the more probable, and at any rate both sets of ideas seem to have influenced each other and been roughly combined in the final doctrine. Moreover, even if the names of the aeons, Jesus and Christ, were post-Gospel, the idea of the alone-begetting virgin Sophie was certainly pre-Gospel.

When materialists related that the Logos ("The Word") "was made flesh," they took one of the abstractions which Gnostics had already personified as a divine spiritual being, and further transformed it into a material human being. The process by which this was done is briefly but clearly shown in the first fourteen verses of the Gospel according to St. John. In this Gospel there is, as we have noticed before, no Virgin Birth story. Jesus is "The Word" mysteriously "made flesh."

In Hellenistic Egypt, the centre of Gnosticism, there was another pre-Christian cult which introduced a virgin into its rites.

This maiden, or virgin, was Kore, who was said to have given birth to the "alone-begotten," Dusares. In celebrating this virgin's rites at Alexandria, and also at Petra in Arabia, her worshippers-so the orthodox Christian bishop, Epiphanius, informs us-used to carry up from an underground crypt a naked wooden image marked with crosses of gold. This image they carried round the temple with great rejoicings, and then returned to its vault, thus celebrating the mystic resurrection or regeneration of the celestial aeon.

This "Virgin of the World" (Kore Kosmou) was, according to the Egyptian theosophists, a female divinity -the alone-begotten of the Supreme God-who, in obedience to his command, brought forth everything which is upon the earth or above the earth or under the earth. She was, in fact, Nature, who had been barren until by the word of God she conceived all that is in heaven above, on the earth itself, and in the waters below. She seems eventually to have been identified with the goddess Isis.

Thus in Egypt the virgin mother idea was familiar both in mysticism and ritual as well as in the more material mythologies. To the initiates the idea symbolized a spiritual process, but by the general body of worshippers the idea was always, or gradually became, materialized.

In the more primitive and spiritual theosophy of some Gnostic systems Jesus and Christ were clearly distinguished.

Christ was said to have been born from the "First Woman"-the Holy Spirit of their Trinity. Sophia was born from her left side, Christ from her right side. Thus Christ, or the Christ Spirit-for we are now still dealing with celestial and spiritual beings, and not with persons of flesh and blood-had existed from almost the beginning of all time, and was not identical with "The Son." The relationship of Christ to the Trinity of these Ggnostics can best be shown by a genealogical tree, as follows:-

With this Trinity we cannot deal more fully now. At present it suffices to note that this doctrine differs from the other and later Gnostic doctrine-that of the descent of Sophia, in the form of a dove, upon the head of the man Jesus, causing the latter to be filled with the Christ Spirit, and thus become "The Christ." According to yet another Gnostic doctrine, both Sophia and Christos descended into Jesus at the time of his baptism. In some versions of this latter story, Christos, "before the descent of Jesus through the seven planes or spheres," himself descends and prepares the Virgin Mary to receive him.

Doubtless (so far as Gnostic Christians, if not indeed so far as all Christians, were concerned) it was on some such lines as these that the later story of the Virgin Birth was evolved out of the earlier story of the descent of the Christ Spirit to inspire the grown-up prophet, Jesus, at his baptism.

According to another, uncanonical, account of the Incarnation, the pre-existing Lord Christ, who had hitherto lived in the seventh heaven with the saints of God, the Holy Spirit, and "The Most High the Father of my Lord," was commanded by the latter to descend to the world, and to take upon himself the appearance of "the angels of the firmament," so that none should recognize him. In accordance with these commands, Christ descended through the six heavens. In the sixth he was recognized and worshipped, but in the lower five he took the form of the angels who respectively inhabited each, and thus passed through unknown. The story goes on to relate that the Virgin Mary was found by Joseph to be with child. We are not told how she became with child, but only that Joseph, after the "angel of the Spirit" had appeared to him, married her and said nothing to anybody. Two months after his marriage, when he and his wife were alone, Mary suddenly "looked with her eyes and saw a small babe, and she was astonied. And after she had been astonished, her womb was found as formerly before she had conceived."

The neighbours, it appears, were also astonished; not only because Mary had borne a child only two months after marriage, but because no midwife had attended her, nor had any cries of pain been heard. The child, however, suckles the breast of his mother like an ordinary child, and no one knows of his miraculous origins Neither is that miraculous origin suspected by any one while he lives on earth or when he is crucified.

Now, this account of the Incarnation seems to supply the link between the Gnostic idea of a spiritual being who appears upon earth only as a phantasm, and the Gospel description of a human child begotten by the Holy Spirit of God.

The child in this account is not really born of Mary, but is only a visionary child who appears to her, and who acts as her child. The conception is imaginary and the child is imaginary, but Joseph and Mary are introduced into the Gnostic story, and in this way the Gnostic and the Gospel stories are roughly combined, or the Gnostic story grows into the Gospel story.

Thus the growth of the doctrine might possibly have proceeded on some such lines as the following:-

First, the Gnostic conception of a pre-existing being- an aeon-who comes to earth in the temporarily assumed shape of a man.

Secondly, a man, born in the ordinary way, who is differentiated from other men by the descent into him of the Holy Spirit-at first identified with the above spiritual being-at his baptism.

Thirdly, the differentiation is supposed to have taken place while he is yet in the womb of his mother; and,

Fourthly, he is actually conceived by the Spirit who is now identified with God.

All these ideas are to be found implicitly in various passages of the Gospels, and explicitly in other writings of the same period.

The growth from the first to the last could be very gradual, though the first and the last are such entirely different and uncombinable conceptions. In the process of evolution a purely spiritual conception becomes a grossly materialistic idea. The oriental sage invented the one; the oriental savage accepted the other.

The Gospel stories, whatever their variations in detail, were identical in their main feature, and that main feature-the virgin birth of a divine being-was familiar to all men.

The Gnostic doctrines, on the other hand, were not only too refined and too vague to interest the uneducated general public, but were also too numerous. Each Gnostic sect seems to have had its own variation. In the Apocryphal "Gospel to the Hebrews" (which was almost certainly older than any of our Canonical Gospels) Jesus speaks of "my mother, the Holy Spirit"; an expression which can be interpreted only by Gnostic doctrine.

In the "Pistis Sophia," a recently recovered Gnostic work, Mary, the mother of Jesus, is described as relating how a stranger visited the child Jesus, how they embraced, and how the two-Jesus and the stranger-coalesced into one body and "became one." It was thus that Jesus, according to some of these very early Gnostic Christians, became the Christ by the blending of his human body with the spiritual body of the Good Spirit (or Logos).

We have already noticed the doctrine of the Gnostics that the Christ Spirit entered into Jesus when it descended in the form of a dove at his baptism.

The Cerinthians, one of the earliest Gnostic sects, if not the very earliest, of whom we have any knowledge, also held this doctrine.

The Basilideans, another numerically very important Gnostic Christian sect, held a similar doctrine.

The Manichaeans, a much later and only semi-Christian sect, evidently inherited this part of their doctrines from one of these Gnostic sects, as they believed that Jesus descended from heaven in the form of a man about thirty years of age. His body was illusory, as he was, in reality, a purely spiritual being; and in the same way the dove (Holy Spirit) which descended upon him, or rather into him, at his baptism, was also an illusion. Manes, the founder of this sect, described the Virgin Birth story as a fable which had grown up around the imaginary figure of this pre-existing spirit Jesus, and drew attention to the fact that no first-hand witness gave evidence of its occurrence.

A dove was the symbol of Sophia, and Sophia was frequently spoken of as "the Holy Dove."

From the doctrine that Jesus had received the Holy Spirit at his baptism is easily evolved the doctrine that he was conceived by the Holy Spirit before birth; and legends about that conception would, in those days and in that part of the world, soon arise when once the doctrine was formulated. There was, as we have already seen, no lack of examples to draw upon when speculating about the manner of this conception.

The Ebionites, too, who were-though not at first Gnostics-the earliest or one of the earliest of all the Christian sects, regarded Jesus as a man, born in the ordinary way, who became an inspired prophet at his baptism.

It was perhaps these Ebionites who eventually founded the so-called Petrine or gospel form of Christianity, against which Paul seems always to be in opposition. These Ebionites were probably eventually absorbed into Gnosticism, and, as Gnostics, suppressed when the Catholic Church was placed in power by Constantine.

Other Gnostic sects taught yet other doctrines about the divinity of Jesus.

Some, like the so-called Carpocratians, elaborated a theory, based upon the re-incarnation doctrine in which Hindus and Buddhists still believe, that Jesus was born in the ordinary course of nature from Joseph and Mary, but was possessed of a soul which had, in former lives, attained to exceptional virtue, and so been enabled to remember all that it had seen when last re-absorbed into the Universal Mind (the Ineffable Father). Other souls, they said, had attained to similar virtue, and thus obtained for their possessors the power of performing miracles.

Some of the Gnostics taught that every man would become a "Christ"-one anointed with the "ineffable christ"-if only he could part with his physical nature and retain his spiritual nature. Others besides Jesus- though they were few and far between-had, so they taught, become Christs, reborn or risen from the thrall of dead matter.

Valentinus, the second-century Gnostic, writing to a friend, says that "it was by his unremitting self-denial in all things that Jesus attained to God-ship . . . . ," and goes on to give details, which sound very strange and rather coarse to our modern ears, of his methods of subjugating the flesh.

This conception is, in slightly altered terms, expressed by the Indian mystics, and is the basic idea for the most rigid forms of asceticism, designed to starve the physical nature to death.

By "Yoga," a course of austerities and subjective contemplation, men, they say, may become "Yogi," spiritual beings denuded of their physical natures. For thousands of years this doctrine has been taught in India, and first-century Gnostics believed and taught something almost identical with it. It has, of course, been often pushed to unwarrantable and foolish extremes, and become a superstition and an obsession; but it is based on a fact which is hardly disputable-namely, that man attains to the highest spiritual standard only by renouncing the pomps and vanities of the world, and by forgetting, in his search for knowledge and wisdom, all love of self. That truth seems a better thing to teach men than the doctrine that a man could only become "god-like" by a miracle which distinguished him from other men. That idea seems more worthy of study than metaphysical subtleties about methods of Divine conceptions The endeavour for self-improvement by self-sacrifice is a nobler thing than the belief that benefits are to be attained through the materialization of the spiritual.

The idea of God begetting a son was not always materialistic. Philo and philosophers of his school spoke of Wisdom (Sophia) receiving the seed of God, and thence bringing forth her only and well-begotten son, the Logos. This was a poetical or metaphorical conception of the creation of an abstract virtue. It was only by grosser minds that the "son" came to be considered as a person and the process as physical.

It is only by force of habit that modern Christians can still accept the grossly material myth instead of the poetical conception from which it originally sprang; and among those Christians who, desiring a more rational basis for their beliefs, have studied the origin of this doctrine, but very few, if any, can be found who still believe in it. This fact will be discussed more fully in a later chapter. Meanwhile we have yet to consider some of the minor details of the two conflicting accounts given in our Bibles of this stupendous miracle.

Next: CHAPTER VI DETAILS OF THE TWO GOSPEL STORIES