The Cosmic Christ
One basic datum underlies every religion under the sun, the principle of Incarnation. The Word or Logos, God’s self-expression made manifest, has given the light of its divine spark to every mind/soul coming into the world. Christians call this the Christ or “Christ in us.” Other faiths have different names or modes of expression for this same inner reality.
—Tom Harpur97
In an earlier chapter, I spoke of my discovery that there are three distinct Jesus personalities. Since making that discovery I have come across a number of writers and scholars who also recognise three Jesuses (or three Christs, depending on the writer concerned). Not all of them are Christian. Deepak Chopra, a Hindu, speaks of Jesus the human, Jesus the Son of God, and the Third Jesus, the latter of whom embraces all humanity with a universal significance. Janet Farrar and Gavin Bone, Wiccan teachers, talk of Jesus the human, Jesus Christ (of the Church), and the Astral Christ, again the latter corresponding to that universal/cosmic notion of Christ. Within Christianity there are also advocates of these three distinct Jesus/Christ personas, especially from the more esoteric and mystical side of the Church. For example, when looking at some of the theological and spiritual writings of the so-called Independent Sacramental Movement, and in particular the Theosophically inclined Liberal Catholic Church, I discovered many clergy and teachers who advocate some sort of trinity of Christs. A well-known personality within the esoteric Christian tradition was Annie Besant, an early president of the Theosophical Society. Besant, in her book Esoteric Christianity, spoke of the three Christs. She called them the Historical Christ, the Mythic Christ, and the Mystic Christ. Part of her book was an attempt to separate them so that each aspect/persona could be seen and appreciated for what it represented. As she says:
What is needed … is to disentangle the different threads in the story of the Christ, and to lay them side by side—the thread of history, the thread of legend, the thread of mysticism.98
Notice how she happily refers to the second of her Christ personas (which roughly corresponds to what I’ve been calling the Church’s Christ) as “the thread of legend.”
Clearly, by using the terms Historical, Mythic, and Mystic for Christ, she agrees with the principle that there was a literal Jesus of history, a theologically constructed Jesus Christ of the Church, and a more cosmic (universal) Christ—a Christ beyond the Church’s confines. A clue that she means precisely this is detected when she says that Christ has “been called by other names and worshipped under other forms.”99
Another writer from the esoteric Christian tradition is Bishop Markus van Alphen from the Young Rite, a tradition within the Liberal Catholic Movement. In his paper Jesus Christ and His True Disciples he uses the same three titles I myself have tended to use: Jesus, Jesus Christ, and Christ. With reference to the last title, Christ, van Alphen says that it refers to that which is “indwelling within us” and later he seems to suggest that we might all, in our deepest selves, be a Christ: “Our way of looking at the human being is that each and every human is truly a monad, a spark of the divine from which it came. This life principle is a common factor held by all humans, nay, by everything in the universe and even the universe itself.”100
This universal spark of deity in all things is what we mean by the term the Cosmic Christ, and once we’ve looked at some of its more recent advocates it will become clear how profound a link it is between the two vastly different worlds of Christianity and Neopaganism. The Cosmic Christ is a beautiful bridge spanning the gulf between them.
“Christ” is a term borrowed from the Greek Pagan world. It is a rough translation of the Hebrew term messiah meaning “anointed by the Spirit of God.” Essentially that’s what Christ means—anointed by God. Over the last few decades, a handful of daring theologians and teachers within established Christian traditions (especially Roman Catholicism) have been advocating a recovery of what they see to be the long lost tradition of the Cosmic Christ. Pre-eminent among these is Dr. Matthew Fox (now an Episcopalian).
Indeed within his monumental work The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, Fox speaks of the need for a shift away from the “quest for the Historical Jesus” to the “quest for the Cosmic Christ.” He also suggests that, while the churches have lost sight of the Cosmic Christ, the native peoples (the indigenous Pagans of the various Aboriginal communities of the planet) never have. Using examples and quotations from just about every era of Christianity, as well as many from far outside the confines of the Church, Fox paints a picture of a living breathing cosmos, and a world under our feet that shimmers with the divine. A planet that hums with God’s presence and which feels the pain when she (the earth) is abused, neglected, raped, or fought over.
The problem is that the Cosmic Christ has been a most neglected area of theological study. As the great Jesuit spiritual master Teilhard de Chardin said, “This third nature of Christ (neither human nor divine, but cosmic) has not noticeably attracted the explicit attention of the faithful or of theologians.” But that’s not to say it was always thus, as Fox demonstrates with an array of pre-Enlightenment examples of Christian mystics and teachers. For example:
Without the Word of God no creature has meaning.
God’s Word is in all creation, visible and invisible.
The Word is living, being, spirit, all verdant greening,
all creativity.
This Word manifests in every creature.
Now this is how the spirit is in the flesh—the Word is
indivisible from God
—Hildegard of Bingen101
Of course, the most famous and beloved of all the saints (after the Blessed Virgin Mary) is St. Francis of Assisi, whom Fox sees as almost Pagan in his extravagant vision of divinely infused creation. Sadly, St. Francis has largely been denigrated to birdbath sentimentalism, but the real Francis was a true radical, a revolutionary who saw God’s presence in the most unexpected places. Within his famous Canticle of the Sun, he gives praise to the cosmos and the earth and her creatures but never mentions the name of Jesus once. In some churches today he’d be cast out as a non-Christian! However, though his poem had no mention of Jesus, it shimmered implicitly with the Cosmic Christ:
Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures, especially through my lord Brother Sun, who brings the day; and you give light through him. And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendor!
Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.
Be praised, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars; in the heavens you have made them, precious and beautiful.
Be praised, my Lord, through Brothers Wind and Air, and clouds and storms, and all the weather, through which you give your creatures sustenance.
Be praised, My Lord, through Sister Water; she is very useful, and humble, and precious, and pure.
Be praised, my Lord, through Brother Fire, through whom
you brighten the night. He is beautiful and cheerful, and powerful and strong.
Be praised, my Lord, through our sister Mother Earth, who feeds us and rules us, and produces various fruits with colored flowers and herbs.102
The medieval Christian mystic Fox most admires is Meister Eckhart, who applied Word of God (Logos) language to all people and even to animals. Meister Eckhart’s work had been buried among the medieval theologians for centuries, and Fox has been one of the major players in his excavation and re-presentation to the Christian world. Eckhart preached on the notion of the presence within us all of the “divine spark” that is God. He trained as a Dominican friar and, stemming from his affirmation of the divinity or god-spark in all human souls, taught that man could become God’s son just as Christ was. There was a subtle difference between Eckhart’s vision of the spiritual quest and the more orthodox of his day. Whereas some contemporary mystics looked outside themselves to achieve mystical union, Eckhart and his followers looked to the center of consciousness within every human heart.
Another priest who is currently lecturing (globally) on the theme of the Cosmic Christ is Fr. Richard Rohr. I had the privilege of hearing him recently when I was invited to perform my soulful magic at an event where he was speaking. Fr. Rohr has spoken and written many times on the Cosmic Christ. While still operating within a fully Catholic and Orthodox context, he beautifully presents a viewpoint on the Cosmic Christ that connects all spiritual paths and which would make much sense to the Pagan world. To Rohr the Cosmic Christ is the living Christ which includes within it all of creation. As he says, “it includes you and I and all of the material world … for whenever the material and the spiritual coexist you have the Christ.”103
Both Fox and Rohr see the fully human Jesus of history and the eternal Cosmic Christ as of equal importance, but they take us on a stage further than where the Jesus Quest scholarship ends; i.e., with a man who’s just a man. However, they do not simply give us the repackaged version of the literalized Jesus Christ of the Church. As Rohr says, “we made Jesus into the supreme being, and that’s theism.”104 The mystery of incarnation is the primary revelation of Christianity, which is the belief that the physical and the spiritual coexist. Panentheism is what Jesus and the Christ tradition point to, not theism (belief in a supreme being). God (at Christmas) has revealed that he’s already here. The Cosmic Christ is the incarnate spark of God hidden within all things. Says Rohr, “We’ve spent nearly two thousand years worshipping it in Jesus instead of discovering it in ourselves.”105
For Fox there is on the one hand the historical Jesus, and on the other the cosmic Christ. They are connected, of course, but the latter refers in an infinite way to what was finite in Jesus the human who embodied something of God. For Rohr Jesus is the microcosm and Christ is the macrocosm. There is a similarity with the Buddha. There was the historical person who lived a little over eighty years about 2,500 years ago in India. And there is the Living Buddha which is the spirit of the Buddha alive in everyone, the Buddha nature. In a lecture on this very subject, Fox picks up this theme beautifully and helps his audience to see that the Christ can come in many forms like, as we’ve seen, Old Testament wisdom and the Buddha nature or the Jewish notion of Tekamah, but one does not have to become a Buddhist or a Jew to gain from these insights. Once we are able to truly see the Buddha nature within a leaf or a human face or the stars above our head, we will also see the Cosmic Christ in those places.
Rohr goes to great pains to stress that this is not some twenty-first century New Age teaching out of New Mexico. He (like Fox) uses Church history and the Judeo-Christian scriptures themselves to prove the authenticity and orthodoxy of the notion of the Cosmic Christ. For example, the Cosmic Christ, God’s presence in all things, is clearly a Biblical tradition, the earliest hint of which appears in the very first book of the Bible, Genesis. In the first chapter of Genesis, humanity was created “in the image and likeness of God.”106
The next scriptural hint appears in proverbs and what we call the wisdom literature of the Old Testament. In the books of Proverbs and the apocryphal book of Wisdom, God’s pre-existent wisdom is personified by a feminine image of a woman calling out in the streets. The word used here for wisdom is the name Sophia.
I had a strange experience of synchronicity when researching this notion of the personification of wisdom. I was leading a retreat on my book The Gospel of Falling Down. There was an evening when I had to lead the nighttime prayers and choose a passage from the Judeo-Christian scriptures. I was reading a Richard Rohr book at that time, and, as it was with me in the chapel, I made use of it for a quote. Turning a few pages I came across a beautiful passage from the apocryphal book of Wisdom. As I was reading it I wondered which particular translation it was, and ended up introducing it by saying, “I don’t know where Rohr got this translation, maybe it was his own.” It sounded too incredible, too profound, too nature based to have been a regular Bible translation.
The next morning I was asked to select and read another passage and was given a big Bible. I sat there with it on my lap and noticed that it was the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), which wouldn’t normally include the apocrypha. I opened it, and amazingly, it fell open on the book of Wisdom (it did indeed have an apocrypha). On looking closer, it was indeed the chapter of the passage I’d read the night before. Even more incredibly, I noticed it was the same translation! Amazing, I thought, these words were profound. They spoke with beauty and elegance about the feminine personification of divine wisdom. There are only two books in the Bible where this is spoken of in this way—Proverbs and Wisdom. I wanted to take the Bible to my room so I could find some more quotes but didn’t because it belonged to the guy who’d loaned it me. So I looked on the book shelves for another Bible with the apocrypha. I saw a Jerusalem Bible (the Catholic Bible) and reached to grab it. When it was in my hands, I opened it and it fell open within the book of Proverbs, and I saw the big bold type heading facing up at me—The Personification of Wisdom. Incredible.
Because this book is by an ex-Christian vicar (still priest) writing primarily for Pagans, I’ve deliberately avoided lots of the Bible quotations as one finds in more standard Christian books. However, this is a case where I feel it would be both pleasantly surprising and hugely edifying to quote from a little of the Bible’s Wisdom literature. It is a beautiful, mystical, and wonderfully feminine portrayal of God’s essence in creation. The quote I used from Wisdom for those evening prayers was this:
Wisdom (Sophia) is radiant and unfading, and she is easily discerned by those who love her, and is found by those who seek her107 … she goes about seeking those worthy of her, and she graciously appears to them in their paths, and meets them in every single thought108 … There is in her a spirit that is intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, mobile, clear, unpolluted, distinct, invulnerable, loving the good, keen, irresistible, beneficent, humane, steadfast, sure, free from anxiety, all-powerful, overseeing all,
and penetrating through all spirits that are intelligent, pure,
and altogether subtle.
For wisdom is more mobile than any motion; because of her pureness she pervades and penetrates all things.
For she is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty109 … Although she is but one, she can do all things, and while remaining in herself, she renews all things; in every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God, and prophets.” 110
The passages in the book of Proverbs are equally (if not even more) astonishing, for here “Lady Wisdom” speaks of her own pre-existence, that she was the first creation of God, a divine force (goddess) through which all created things emanated:111
When he established the heavens I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the foundations of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.112
Many modern biblical scholars hold that the Wisdom literature notion of the personification of divine Wisdom was the inspiration behind the New Testament Logos language in the prologue to John’s Gospel, which also carries the theme of pre-existence. We will come to that in a moment.
The third hint of the Cosmic Christ in scripture is the apocalyptic term “the son of man,” a prototypal figure who sums up what’s happening everywhere else. It’s found in the Old Testament book of Daniel and other apocalyptic works. Jesus uses this term for himself. In fact, it is his most common term of self-description. In essence he’s saying, “I am the son of the human, the everyman, the archetypal human.” The son of man is a human title, but one which is representative. Jesus thus represents and includes all of humanity. What’s true for him is true for all of us, in fact for all things. The symbolic meaning of the resurrection stories means that Jesus’s identity is translated to everything else. Jesus becomes the Christ, he moves from the physical/historical to the non-physical/eternal.
Then we come to Saul of Tarsus, later called Paul, who becomes the man oft credited as the second founder of Christianity. One of Paul’s most frequently used phrases is “In Christ.” However, he never bothers with the historical Jesus. He hardly (if ever) quotes him at all. Why? Because he never met him. Paul’s conversion occurred when he had an experience of the outside-of-time-and-space Christ—the universal Christ. Paul’s Christ is cosmic, not historical. Many modern-day liberals write off Paul as a misogynistic control freak and dogmatist. In reality, he was a true mystic. Who but one in touch with the mystical Cosmic Christ could have written such a passage as this?
It is necessary to boast; nothing is to be gained by it, but I will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord. I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows. And I know that such a person—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat. On behalf of such a one I will boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses. But if I wish to boast, I will not be a fool, for I will be speaking the truth. But I refrain from it, so that no one may think better of me than what is seen in me or heard from me, even considering the exceptional character of the revelations. Therefore, to keep me from being too elated, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.
—Paul of Tarsus113
Perhaps the most bold and unquestionable reference to a “Cosmic” portrayal of Christ in the whole Bible comes with the fourth Gospel, John. John’s famous prologue—“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”114—identifies Jesus Christ as the eternal Word (the Logos) of God. So the author asserts that Christ was there at the very beginning of creation. It is believed that the author is adapting the doctrine of the Logos, God’s creative principle, from Philo, a first-century Hellenized (Greek-influenced) Jew. Philo’s term “Logos” was borrowed from Greek philosophy, and he used it in place of the Hebrew concept of the personification of Wisdom (Sophia). As John says, “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men [humankind]”115 so if we get it in him, we’ll get it in ourselves. Yes the Cosmic Christ is no new invention. It was there at the very beginning.
For Matthew Fox, authentic Christianity runs on two wings, like a big bird. One of them is the Historical Jesus and the other is the Cosmic Christ. And, as he says in a CD series, “if either one is not relished, you won’t have a healthy spirituality.”116 He goes on to mention the work of the Jesus Quest and sees the culmination of these two hundred years of scholarship as one of the wings. The other wing is the mystical tradition of the Cosmic Christ. He sees one of the great insights given us by the Jesus Quest as the discovery that only about fifteen percent of the words of Jesus in the New Testament actually came from him. The rest was made up by the community. But Fox does not see why this should be a problem. On the contrary, it should raise the question, “Where has all that creativity gone? People were so overwhelmed by the spirit Jesus released that they didn’t hesitate to put all these good words into the mouth of Jesus.”117 Fox asks why we’re not writing new gospels today and points out how the Celtic church did just that, constructing their own “I am” sayings and equating Jesus to images relevant within their worldview like “I am the wild boar fighting,” or “I am the salmon of wisdom.”
We clearly need the Cosmic Christ as well as the Historical Jesus because it makes sense of the 85 percent of New Testament quotes that were clearly not from Jesus. We can still read those texts as meaningful but not because they were literally the words of Jesus. Rather the in-dwelling Christ spirit unleashed creativity within the authors. They wrote holy myth. As I’ve suggested, however, this “holy myth” was then literalised in a way that other (Pagan) dying/rising god stories never were. We need the man Jesus who shook the religious and political world and we need the Christ which is non-historical, not bound by time or space but is in all things. But we need to see each of them for what they truly are.
Fox sees the literal meshing together of Jesus and Christ into one persona (Jesus Christ) as the death of the message. He values Quest scholarship because it helps us to recognise what is Jesus and what is Christ in scripture. 95 percent of John’s Gospel is not Jesus talking at all; it’s Christ. Jesus didn’t literally use terms like “I am the way, the truth, and the life”—they were the Christ’s words, so in a sense they are our words. Fox encourages his audiences to ask themselves how are they the way, how are they the light, how are they the door, etc. When we really get this, the whole thing opens up to a new level of relevance. In the other three Gospels we can see the same and not just with the so-called Jesus words but with the actual stories, too. For example, the Bethlehem scene is a Christ story, not a literal Jesus story. Some of the super-left-brain-dominated rational scholars may tell us to throw these stories out altogether because they are not true literally, but they’ve missed the point. We can’t throw these stories out because they are just too powerful on a mythic, archetypal level. The story of the one who is born into the human mess and poverty of the stable or animal cave is a universal story of hope for a broken humanity. The story of the one who is discovered by the lowly shepherds, who has homeless parents, and whose birth is first witnessed by an ox, an ass, and probably a rat or two is a mythic story that touches the soul deeply in a symbolic way.
Of course, the essence of both the Jesus story and the Christ myth is this: “There is no division/no separation between the divine and everything else. The Incarnation of God in Jesus is the symbol of what’s true, of what has always been true, for everything.”
Much of Rohr’s rhetoric is against what he calls the performance principle of most Christian religion—people trying to achieve some sort of goodness or holiness by good works or believing the right things. On the other hand the Cosmic Christ—the incarnate God in all things—shows us that earth and spirit are already totally interconnected, which includes all humans. As he boldly says, “We use that phrase now, the Cosmic Christ, to remind us that what we believe in includes everything.”118 And
The Christ comes again whenever you’re able to see the spiritual
and the material coexisting, in any moment in any event in
any person.119
Finally, perhaps his most radical statement on this notion is this:
You’re doing God and the gospel no favour to project all of this power onto Jesus, and therefore suck it out of the rest of the universe. That was not the meaning of salvation, and it’s got us into the state we’re into today where we hate the earth, we hate other races, we hate other religions, we even hate ourselves … Jesus is the blueprint of what God is doing everywhere all the time and we chose to worship the blueprint instead of seeing where the blueprint was pointing us. The Cosmic Christ is God hiding inside his creation. He always has done this and the Jesus event was a symbol/blueprint of this.120
One of the most inspiring metaphors I’ve ever heard for the relationship between Jesus and the Christ comes from the world of physics. The first chapter of John’s Gospel refers to Christ as the light within all beings. Light is a very prevalent symbol for divinity and in fact is one of the oldest universal images for God’s presence. Modern science has established that light does indeed penetrate all things. Light particles (photons) exist in every atom in the universe. On top of this, over the last few hundred years there has been a debate among physicists over whether light is a particle or a wave. To cut a very long story short, the consensus is that it has properties of both a wave and a particle. This was an amazing discovery, far outside the realm of how we normally perceive things to be. The difference between the behavior of particles and waves is similar to the difference
between billiard balls and oceans. Photons act as both a wave and a particle all the time.
Matthew Fox sees this as a marvellous creation-centred symbol for what’s going on in Christology. Jesus is the particle, the frozen incarnation of deity in time and space, and Christ is the wave, the limitless and timeless presence of deity in and through all things. But the wave—the Cosmic Christ—is also in Jesus and is also in each one of us.
We should not, therefore, bow down and worship the Christ spark in Jesus alone, but follow the historical Jesus through his journey into the Christ, for it is our journey too. The problem (for us, of course) is that part of Jesus’s journey was suffering and the carrying of his cross. It was also death, but a death that led to resurrection. This is the hinge in the story—the place where the historical Jesus gives birth to the mythic Christ. Rohr sees Jesus as morphing into Christ (at the resurrection), which is the journey he feels each of us should take. As Fr. Sean O’Laoire puts it, “I invite you to emulate what Jesus did in his movement from being Jesus the Carpenter of Nazareth to being the Christ. Every one of us is meant to go from who we are into carriers of Christ consciousness.”121