SIXTEEN

DISPENSATIONS

It is one of those things you own without quite knowing where it came from.

It was taped up above my aunt’s desk, and when she died, it came into my possession with the rest of her belongings. But it is not really the sort of thing she would have bought. In fact I might have bought it myself when I was eleven or twelve and was immersed in such things.

But it is a fine old engraving, some three feet wide and one foot high. It is carefully printed in full color, and is hand-colored in places. The design probably goes back to the late nineteenth century. After I took it from my aunt’s house, I had it framed, and it now hangs in my office. It is entitled “A Chart on the Course of Time from Eternity to Eternity,” and it chronicles the past and future history of the world, starting on the left with “Eternity,” or more specifically, “The Eternal Father,” “The Eternal Son,” and “The Eternal Purpose,” and ending, at the right with a “New Heaven,” “New Earth,” and another “Eternity.” In the dead center is a large black cross, with a yellow label to the right saying, “The Gift of Eternal Life.”

Anyone familiar with theology will have no trouble identifying it. It is a diagram of the dispensationalist view of history expounded by the nineteenth-century English preacher John Nelson Darby,¹ printed by the Loizeaux Brothers of Neptune, New Jersey. An explanation of the chart by A. P. Booth, its creator, links the dispensations to the six days of creation: “Through six dispensations, God works to recover man from the moral ruin in which Adam’s fall has brought him.”²According to this schema, we are now in the fourth dispensation, “The Present Age and Church Period,” subdivided into seven stages linked with the seven churches named in Revelation 2–3. This dispensation will end with the Rapture as described in 1 Thessalonians 4:15–17.

Dispensationalism received a boost from C. I. Scofield’s Scofield Reference Bible, published in 1909. It became very popular, and updates were published in 1917 and 1967. Since then, dispensationalism has inspired bestsellers such as Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth and the Left Behind novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins.

Like practically all forms of apocalyptic, the dispensationalist mindset assumes the imminence of the End Times. I myself have difficulty believing in imminent apocalypse; I find it more plausible to accept the Course’s view that “just as the separation occurred over millions of years, the Last Judgment will extend over a similarly long period, and perhaps an even longer one” (T, 34). Even so, some elements of the dispensationalist perspective may be useful.

The most influential of all dispensationalist theories was devised by the Sicilian abbot Joachim of Fiore (ca. 1132–1202). Joachim was not a prophet, but, he said, he drew his visions for the future from “a revelation of the fullness of the Apocalypse and of the complete agreement of the Old and New Testaments perceived with clear understanding by the mind’s eye.”³ According to him, there were three overlapping status (“states”) or tempora (“times”) in history, corresponding to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit: “The first status [that of the Father] is reckoned from Adam to Christ, the second [that of the Son] from King Josiah to the present time, the third [that of the Holy Spirit] from Saint Benedict to the consummation of the age.”⁴

The Age of the Father was the age of the Old Testament, when the covenant with Israel was in force. The Age of the Son climaxed with the coming of Christ. The Age of the Holy Spirit would be the next and last, when “the mystical consciousness of God found in spiritual insight would be poured out fully and finally upon both Gentiles and converted Jews,” as scholar Bernard McGinn describes it.⁵

Although Joachim believed this new age was imminent, he did not set a date for it. After his death, his followers Albert of Stade and Gerardo di Borgo San Donnino pointed toward the year 1260.⁶ When 1260 came and went and all things continued as they were, the vogue for Joachim’s three ages evaporated. Nevertheless, his impact remains. He laid heavy stress on monasticism: as the quote above shows, he dated the beginning of the Age of the Holy Spirit with Benedict of Nursia, founder of Western monasticism in the sixth century. In his own day, Joachim foresaw the arising of two new monastic orders, one of preachers and one of hermits. It is easy to see foreshadowings of the coming of the Order of Preachers (the Dominicans) and the Franciscans in the thirteenth century. No doubt they were inspired in part by Joachim’s predictions.

Today Joachim is chiefly remembered as a curious chapter in the curious history of Western apocalyptic. But the concept of dispensations did not go away. In the eighteenth century, the coming of a new era was heralded by Emanuel Swedenborg. On the basis of his elaborate visions, Swedenborg claimed that the Last Judgment had taken place in 1757. But it obviously did not occur on the physical earth. Instead, he said that it was a kind of housecleaning of the realm of the spirits (in his system, an intermediate space between heaven and hell). For us on earth, it meant that spiritual truths would be unveiled that in the previous era had been stifled under literalism and dogma. Swedenborg related a vision in which he saw a temple over whose entrance was written “Nunc licet”—“now it is allowed”—allowed, that is, “to use our intellect to explore the mysteries of faith.”⁷

Swedenborg was the first visionary of the New Age, although he did not use this term. It only came into use in 1864, nearly ninety years after his death, when a minister named Warren Felt Evans published a book called The New Age and Its Messenger. In it he sketched out Swedenborg’s ideas and proclaimed “a New Age of the Church.”⁸

In the 150 years since then, a new age has been foreseen by any number of esoteric thinkers, including H. P. Blavatsky, C. G. Jung, and René Guénon. Some, like Blavatsky and Guénon, associated this new age with the end of the Kali Yuga, the age of darkness in Hindu cosmology.⁹ Others, like Jung, connected it with the Age of Aquarius—that is, the time when the sun at the vernal equinox rises with the constellation Aquarius rather than Pisces behind it.¹⁰

Joachim’s system resurfaced in a different form in the thought of the Russian esoteric philosopher Boris Mouravieff (1890–1966). Mouravieff, a Russian émigré who settled in Geneva, published a three-volume work entitled Gnosis: Study and Commentaries on the Esoteric Doctrine of Eastern Orthodoxy in the early 1960s.¹¹ Mouravieff’s ideas (which are often at variance with Orthodox dogma) are compelling and profound, but they are also intricate. There is only one aspect of his thought that I want to go into here.

Mouravieff does not mention Joachim, but he must have known of him.¹² Like Joachim with his three “times,” Mouravieff speaks of three “cycles”: of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He equates the Cycle of the Father with the Old Testament period, ending with the coming of Christ, and the Cycle of the Son with the period after Christ, and he says that the Cycle of the Holy Spirit is due to arrive in our own time. (Although he does not give specific dates, he no doubt believed this time was the immediate decades after his writing in the 1960s.)

Mouravieff does not portray this coming Cycle of the Holy Spirit as a divinely ordained certainty. He presents it as a possibility only, and he sees it as the collective crossing of a certain spiritual threshold by humanity, which may or may not happen. As Mouravieff puts it, this is the alternative that faces us: “Either to reach the Accomplishment or go down in a deluge of fire.”¹³ The “deluge of fire” alludes to 2 Peter 3:10: “But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with a fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.”

It is impossible to read Mouravieff’s description without thinking of nuclear holocaust, and that must have been what he had in mind: he was, after all, writing at the height of the Cold War, when the world came close at least once to such a fate.

Suppose that humanity does pass this threshold of “Accomplishment” and passes into the era of the Holy Spirit. What then? Mouravieff’s descriptions of this new era are elaborate and sometimes fanciful, covering areas from world government to beauty and women’s fashions. But the most important characteristic is that “in the new era, the Cycle of the Holy Spirit, all conditions will be arranged so as to help the exterior man to come more easily to esoteric work so that he can become the new man who is master of himself.”¹⁴

And what is the new man? Mouravieff writes, “Christ’s kingdom is opened to man with the second Birth, that of Individuality, when he has reached consciousness of his real ‘I’ and, through that, has come into contact with the Covenant of Love.”¹⁵

Like many esoteric systems, Mouravieff’s posits two main psychological centers in the human being. The first is what he calls the “Personality”^*15 and which we can identify with the street-level self. The second, the “real ‘I,’” is the true Self. The “new man,” the “man with the second Birth, that of Individuality,” has shifted his center of gravity from the Personality (where it is for the exterior man) to the “real ‘I,’” that is, the Self. One who has undergone the second birth has access to the Self, the true I, the Christ within, continually if not continuously. Mouravieff adds that unless humanity is governed by an elite consisting of such new men, the deluge of fire is a likely outcome.

Mouravieff’s vision hardly seems outmoded today, even if anxiety about nuclear holocaust has been surpassed by fears about environmental collapse and climate change (perhaps another kind of deluge of fire?). Nevertheless, I want to pick up two aspects of his concept of the Cycle of the Holy Spirit. The first is that this era could begin in our own time; the second, that this passage is not predestined but is in the hands of human determination.

Like Mouravieff, I think that the coming of this age is a possibility rather than a foregone conclusion. As I stressed in The Essential Nostradamus, I do not believe in prophecies of any kind, and this must mean that I am no prophet myself. I am about to sketch out possibilities, which may not come true. Most likely the human race will survive and muddle through regardless. Cataclysms may and will happen, but cataclysms have always happened, and humanity, while supplementing these misfortunes with wars and other acts of collective madness, shuffles along nonetheless.

Unfortunately, shuffling along is no longer enough. Obscurely we sense this. It is in many ways the result of the technological revolution. Before then, the human race was at the mercy of nature. Mortality rates were high, disease was rampant, and agricultural production was never so abundant that it could entirely forestall the chance of famine.

Today the relation between humanity and nature has flipped: now, it would appear, nature is at the mercy of humanity. This is such a radical upheaval that we have not absorbed the shock. Indeed we could trace the environmental crisis to this reversal and to the failure of human thinking to adapt to it. (In fairness to human thinking, this change is so great that it would have to take generations to come to terms with it.)

In any event, we have the means to put an end to practically all the great problems of human life. It would be easy enough to clean up the environment and provide a minimally decent living to the entire human race if the will were there. That leads to the crux of the situation. Is the human race able to change its course to the point where the all-too-human attributes of greed, aggression, and ignorance no longer stand in our way?

There is a vague but widespread belief that humanity is awakening and that a new period of enlightenment is about to dawn (if we manage to avoid any number of disasters in the meantime). At this point no one can say whether this is really happening. But I think it is safe to say, if not that the human race is waking up, at least that it is trying to wake up—probably for the first time.

Let me go further into the three ages of Joachim and Mouravieff in relation to the history of religion. To begin with, there is an impassible gulf between human memory as preserved in written form and memories preserved orally. The latter are not necessarily less true—human collective memory over the long term has proved more accurate than many have believed—but, to our minds at least, they are less credible, and they are usually less precise.

The chasm that separates these two phases lies around 3000 BC. This era marks the beginning of the dynastic age in Egypt and the cuneiform texts of Sumer. Before this, the picture is much less clear. Incidentally, traditional views of historical cycles also begin at this time. The Maya, for reasons that are impossible to discover, began the present era in 3114 BC. Hindu civilization tells us that the present age of the Kali Yuga began with the death of Krishna, avatar of Vishnu, in 3012 BC. The traditional Jewish date for the foundation of the world is 3761 BC. These dates do not coincide exactly, but they all point to a widespread view even in traditional cultures that there is a break, a gap, between the period before approximately 3000 BC and the age we are now in.¹⁶

So the first age about which we can say anything substantial starts around 3000 BC. As I pointed out, the religion of this era was centered on animal sacrifice. But as concepts of God became more universal, it became harder to believe that the divine could take any interest in the blood of lambs and bullocks, and people began to put less trust in animal sacrifice. This started during the Axial Age, famously described by Karl Jaspers as the period between the eighth and the third centuries BC. “In this age,” Jaspers writes, “were born the fundamental categories within which we still think today, and the beginnings of the world religions, by which human beings still live, were created.”¹⁷ Jaspers’s views have been criticized: present-day academics do not have his generation’s taste for panoramic generalizations.¹⁸ But something significant does appear to have happened in that period: humanity’s spiritual outlook was exalted and transformed by the Hebrew prophets, the Greek philosophers, the Upanishads, and figures ranging from Pythagoras to the Buddha to Lao-tzu and Confucius.

This era started to turn against animal sacrifice. Hosea, one of the first of the Old Testament prophets, writing in the eighth century BC, tells the Israelites on behalf of Yahweh, “For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings” (Hosea 6:6).¹⁹ No doubt the biblical authors meant their criticisms rhetorically: they are not criticizing animal sacrifice per se, but the hypocrisy of offering sacrifices in a state of moral baseness.²⁰ Nevertheless, their comments mark the beginning of a phase, which begins to see moral integrity as the supreme offering. “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise” (Psalm 50:17).

In the pagan world, animal sacrifice remained universal, but even here sentiment began to go against it, first among the philosophers. It is often said that Pythagoras, in the Greece of the sixth century BC, practiced vegetarianism and refrained from animal sacrifice, but the evidence is ambiguous. The historian Diogenes Laertius, writing probably in the second century AD, says that Pythagoras taught his followers not to offer animal sacrifice. But Diogenes goes on to say that Pythagoras sacrificed a hecatomb (of 100 oxen) to celebrate the discovery of his famous theorem. In any case, it is true that Pythagoreans centuries later abstained from both animal sacrifice and eating meat.²¹ In India at roughly the same time, the Upanishads extolled mystical insight rather than Vedic sacrifice as the summit of religious observation and human perfection.²²

In the fourth century BC, Plato’s Laws makes a point like those of the Hebrew prophets: “The wicked man is unclean of soul, whereas the good man is clean; and from him that is defiled no good man, nor god, can ever rightly receive gifts. Therefore all the great labor that impious men spend upon the gods is in vain.”²³ Again, moral integrity trumps sacrifice.

A major turning point came in AD 70, when the Romans sacked the Jerusalem Temple. Up to that time, Jewish religion was centered on the Temple and its endless animal sacrifices, but after the Temple was gone, sacrifice was no longer possible, and rabbinic Judaism, picking up the pieces, refocused the Jewish religion onto Torah study and observance.

Early Christian positions are not easy to tease out. It is likely that the Jerusalem church, led by James, the brother of Jesus, continued to assist at Temple offerings until its destruction. Paul believes that Christians should not assist at pagan sacrifices, but he leaves his Corinthian students free to decide whether they should eat meat sacrificed to idols. (If one reads 1 Corinthians 8 and 10 with some dispassion, it seems clear that his chief concern is to keep people from fighting over this issue.) But he argues against circumcision for Gentile believers: “For in Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision” (Galatians 5:6). He is saying that Gentile Christians do not need to observe the Mosaic Law. It would follow that he did not believe that they should offer sacrifices to the God of Israel either.

After the sack of the Temple, the issue was moot. All Jewish sacrificial worship had been centralized there, and now it was gone. Jews themselves could no longer offer animal sacrifices, and from the Christian point of view, pagan sacrifices were made either to nonexistent gods or to inferior ones. (Paul himself seems to veer back and forth about this point.) So Christians had no reason or opportunity to perform animal sacrifice.

At the same time, as we saw in chapter 11, Christianity was beginning to formulate its theology. It came to see Christ’s death as a sacrifice that united God and man unequivocally and for all time, so other sacrifices were no longer needed. This is one of the main points of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Christian sacrifice, in the form of the Eucharist, took the symbolic form of the offering of bread and wine. After Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire at the end of the fourth century, the pagan temples were closed, and their sacrifices ceased.

So far, we are seeing three major phases in the religious development of humanity (with huge overlaps):

1. Prehistory, before 3000 BC, with no written records. Here it is possible to say almost anything or nothing: the mute artifacts serve as Rorschach blots upon which theorists can project whatever they like. For our purposes it is best to say nothing.

2. The first phase of history, from 3000 BC to AD 500, the first epoch about which we can say anything concrete: religion focused on animal sacrifice. Let us correlate this to the Age of the Father, the God worshiped by the Hebrews in the first millennium BC.

3. The age of the great world religions. This period started with the beginning of the Axial Age around 700 BC. Animal sacrifice was supplanted by adherence to ethical precepts and to doctrine expounded in sacred texts. These religions for the most part traced their origins to a single founding figure—the Buddha, Christ, Muhammad—and, with rare exceptions, proclaimed themselves as the sole and exclusive access points to the realm of the divine. (If the founders did not make such claims, their followers did so on their behalf.) In a Western context, we could associate this period with the Age of the Son, because it is the period during which Christ has been worshiped. As Jaspers stressed, it is still with us today.

Today the Age of the Son seems to be fading. In the West, this process began with the Reformation. In one respect it revitalized Christianity, not only by creating new theologies but by forcing the ossified Catholic Church to reinvent itself. But this revitalization was temporary and incomplete. The Reformation led to the horrific wars of religions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, culminating in the Thirty Years’ War. By the time it ended in 1648, educated Europe was growing sick of its religions, both Catholic and Protestant. Perhaps the Enlightenment a century later was the result of this exasperation as much as or more than it was of scientific breakthroughs.

Now, in the early twenty-first century, Christianity no longer provides us with certainties. Its cosmogony bear little resemblance to those of science (in which we place much more trust), and the Deity as they picture him is connected with the universe hardly at all. Also, its hypocrisies and moral contradictions, denied for so long, are now shoved in its face.

The bankruptcy of Western religion stems in part from an imperfect universalism. The old age of animal sacrifice was not universalistic: people could barely conceive of the world beyond their localities. The world religions represented an advance: arising from a wider worldview, they asserted their universal validity. But to assert your own universal validity is to deny everyone else’s: hence the start of religious warfare. Some religions have tried to subsume their predecessors into a grander integration of faiths: this appears to have been the case with Baha’i, Sikhism, and no doubt early Islam. But in the end they too have had to take their place in the lengthening line of sects.

It has been said that one sign of the passing of an age is that the old gods are mocked.

Certainly this was true in classical antiquity. We can see it in the treatment of the gods in Greek Old Comedy and the satyr plays of the fifth century BC; in the satires of Lucian in the second century AD; and often in between, for example with the satire known as the Apolocyntosis of Claudius in the first century AD, attributed to Seneca the Younger. Apolocyntosis, meaning “pumpkinification” (as translated by Robert Graves), is a made-up word spoofing apotheosis—mocking the Roman Senate’s practice of decreeing divine honors for its deceased emperors, which Seneca believed Claudius did not deserve. Seneca aims plenty of jabs at the gods themselves: Janus, with his two faces, is described as “a brilliant fellow, with eyes on the back of his head.”²⁴

We see the same thing in the present. We can trace modern sarcasm toward religion at least as far back as Voltaire, but in popular culture it began in the mid-twentieth century, first with pokes at religious hypocrisy by comedian Lenny Bruce (“Did you hear that General Motors is holding a raffle? They’re giving away a 1958 Catholic church”) and in the TV program Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. The rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar came out in 1970; it could hardly have been staged twenty, even ten, years earlier. Since then we have had films such as Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Kevin Smith’s Dogma, in which singer Alanis Morrisette plays the Supreme Being. In the 1990s, singer Joan Osborne wondered if God was “just a slob like one of us.” In the visual arts, the most famous example is Piss Christ, the 1987 image by Andres Serrano, which shows a crucifix submerged in a glass tank containing the artist’s urine. A person coming to our era from a century ago would be incredulous to see such things, but we shrug them off, and even laugh ourselves. The old gods are mocked.

This leads us to the third age, the Age of the Holy Spirit. Jaspers obscurely foresaw such a transition: “Perhaps mankind will pass through . . . to a new axial age, still remote, invisible, and inconceivable, an axial age of authentic human upsurge.”²⁵