In Search of the Miraculous

'God have mercy! God have mercy! God have mercy!' You know yourselves that this

can give no result whatever.

"Generally speaking we know very little about Christianity and the form of

Christian worship; we know nothing at all of the history and origin of a number of

things. For instance, the church, the temple in which gather the faithful and in which

services are carried out according to special rites; where was this taken from? Many

people do not think about this at all. Many people think that the outward form of

worship, the rites, the singing of canticles, and so on, were invented by the fathers of

the church. Others think that this outward form has been taken partly from pagan

religions and partly from the Hebrews. But all of it is untrue. The question of the

origin of the Christian church, that is, of the Christian temple, is much more

interesting than we think. To begin with, the church and worship in the form which

they took in the first centuries of Christianity could not have been borrowed from

paganism because there was nothing like it either in the Greek or Roman cults or in

Judaism. The Jewish synagogue, the Jewish temple, Greek and Roman temples of

various gods, were something quite different from the Christian church which made

its appearance in the first and second centuries. The Christian church is—a school

concerning which people have forgotten that it is a school. Imagine a school where

the teachers give lectures and perform explanatory demonstrations without knowing

that these are lectures and demonstrations; and where the pupils or simply the people

who come to the school take these lectures and demonstrations for ceremonies, or

rites, or 'sacraments,' i.e., magic. This would approximate to the Christian church of

our times.

"The Christian church, the Christian form of worship, was not invented by the

fathers of the church. It was all taken in a ready-made form from Egypt, only not from

the Egypt that we know but from one which we do not know. This Egypt was in the

same place as the other but it existed much earlier. Only small bits of it survived in

historical times, and these bits have been preserved in secret and so well that we do

not even know where they have been preserved.

"It will seem strange to many people when I say that this prehistoric Egypt was

Christian many thousands of years before the birth of Christ, that is to say, that its

religion was composed of the same principles and ideas that constitute true

Christianity. Special schools existed in this prehistoric Egypt which were called

'schools of repetition.' In these schools a public repetition was given on definite days, and in some schools perhaps even every day, of the entire course in a condensed form

of the sciences that could be learned at these schools. Sometimes this repetition lasted

a week or a month. Thanks to these repetitions people who had

passed through this course did not lose their connection with the school and retained

in their memory all they had learned. Sometimes they came from very far away simply

in order to listen to the repetition and went away feeling their connection with the

school. There were special days of the year when the repetitions were particularly

complete, when they were carried out with particular solemnity—and these days

themselves possessed a symbolical meaning.

"These 'schools of repetition' were taken as a model for Christian churches—the

form of worship in Christian churches almost entirely represents the course of

repetition of the science dealing with the universe and man. Individual prayers,

hymns, responses, all had their own meaning in this repetition as well as holidays and

all religious symbols, though their meaning has been forgotten long ago."

Continuing, G. quoted some very interesting examples of the explanations of

various parts of orthodox liturgy. Unfortunately no notes were made at the time and I

will not undertake to reconstruct them from memory.

The idea was that, beginning with the first words, the liturgy so to speak goes

through the process of creation, recording all its stages and transitions. What

particularly astonished me in G.'s explanations was the extent to which so much has

been preserved in its pure form and how little we understand of all this. His

explanations differed very greatly from the usual theological and even from mystical

interpretations. And the principal difference was that he did away with a great many

allegories. I mean to say that it became obvious from his explanations that we take

many things for allegories in which there is no allegory whatever and which ought to

be understood much more simply and psychologically. What he said before about the

Last Supper serves as a good example of this.

"Every ceremony or rite has a value if it is performed without alteration," he said.

"A ceremony is a book in which a great deal is written. Anyone who understands can

read it. One rite often contains more than a hundred books."