The Meaning of Incarnation

The divine word and wisdom was there with God
And it was what God was.
It was there with God from the beginning.
Everything came to be by means of it:
Nothing that exists came to be without its agency.
In it was life
And this life was the life of humanity.
Light was shining in darkness
And darkness did not master it.

By saying, "this life was the life of humanity" John connects God with the human, but also with human enlightenment. This continues in verse nine "Genuine light--the kind that provides light for everyone--was coming into the world". The astonishment comes in this line translated in the Revised Standard Version as "The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world". It is astonishing in its bold statement that this light enlightens everyone and that it is the very life of humanity. John further tells us that this Eternal light that is the source of everything and everyone became human and made itself at home among us.

As he continues, John makes it clear that this divine light which enlightens everyone was becoming visible to those who were living in darkness, the seemingly hidden was now manifest and visible in the man Jesus, visible to any who would see. And further, in this seeing, they could realize that they too were bearers of that divine light; that it was, in fact, their very essence. The early church, in its struggles to understand these realities, met with great problems. The greatest of these was an inability to grasp the full meaning of the transcendence and immanence of the Divine. The Jewish heritage had made clear that God was transcendent, so transcendent as to be wholly other than the human. Immanence was present only in occasions of revelation. In part this was a bulwark against the Great Mother religions of the ancient near east who seemed to find God immanent in virtually everything, but also a God who seemed to require a lot of propitiation in the form of sacrifice. To the great prophets it was clear that God was too utterly other to be present in or as worldly events and processes.

For the early church thus the ringing question to be answered was how could it be possible that God could be present in a human, much less in all humans. In forging its answer they came up with the notion that Jesus had to be an exception, a once and for all time exception, a man who was both God and man, fully God and fully man. This notion was then written into the creeds and confessions of the early church as its orthodoxy. Nevermind that the Gospel of St. John taught otherwise as did Jesus himself. Their insights were simply glossed over and remained so for hundreds of years. These insights again appeared only in the mystical tradition and when spoken in more than secret, resulted in persecution for heresy. This latter being exemplified in the trial of Meister Eckhart. In this manner the most central of Jesus teaching was proscribed. Today, now in the 21st century, this insight is not taught in mainline seminaries and churches that are still seemingly bound by the metaphysical limitations of the early church fathers and their Jewish heritage.

To grasp the immense truth made present by Jesus and taught as long ago as the Gospel of St. John, we need a better metaphysics; one that will allow full transcendence to God without precluding full immanence in the world and in the human. In the Jewish tradition this inability was connected to the conviction that humanity was fallen, eternally corrupt, a tradition carried on into Christianity. This fallen state required an intervention from the transcendent domain. Thus in trying to understand Jesus' nature, the early Church went beyond paradox into contradiction. This confusion is akin to the modern subject-object split in philosophy; the inability to rejoin mind and matter. Further, in the church's tradition came the problem of how to explain the redemption that it found in and through Jesus. Thus came the various theories of atonement including the nefarious ransom theory in which Jesus is the sacrifice God provided to satisfy the Devil, much as God had provided the lamb to take the place of Isaac in the story of Abraham.

The modern metaphysician and scholar of world religions, Frithjof Schuon, has dealt with this problem in his book Logic and Transcendence. In the chapter titled The Servant and Union he remarks, "Indeed the 'servant' (ego) as such can never cease to be the servant; consequently he can never become the 'Lord'. The 'servant-Lord' polarity is irreducible by the very nature, the nature of the servant or the creature being in a certain sense the sufficient reason for the Divine intervention under the aspect of 'Lord'. Man cannot become 'God'; the servant cannot change into the Lord, but there is something in the servant that is capable...of surpassing the axis 'servant-Lord' or subject-object and of realizing the absolute 'Self'. This Self is God insofar as he is independent of the servant-Lord axis and of every other polarity."² This surpassing of the servant-Lord axis is not possible to ego, but signifies that there is something in the human that is capable of union with the Divine, which, remarks Schuon, "is already potentially and even virtually Divine, namely the pure Intellect, withdrawn from the 'subject-object' . . .and which is no other than the Self."³

Schuon's term "the Self" requires some clarification. It is most easily grasped by reference to the archetypal theory of C.G. Jung. The brevity of this paper permits only a brief explanation of Jung's discovery. First of all, the word archetype itself is of ancient usage. Jung stumbled onto his idea after observing the similarity to ancient myth in the seemingly hallucinatory ramblings of a man in an insane asylum where Jung was doing his psychiatric residency. The man's ideas were similar to an ancient myth and Jung found that the man had no way to have learned it, thus it had to come from his unconscious. Further observation led Jung to the conclusion that there are certain patterns present in the psyche of everyone that give form or image to consciousness. These patterns, or at least some of them, seem to be eternal, not of temporal origin. (Cf. Plato's ideas in the mind of God.) Archetypes function in the psyche to shape the way we form and symbolize our experiences. They are of untold number, but some seem far more prominent than others, e.g., Mother, Father, Child, the demonic, the benevolent, reoccur continually throughout history and myth. Jung's investigations led him to the conclusion that the archetypes are like great currents in the ocean of the psyche, varying widely, yet having a discernable pattern. Every fingerprint can be discerned as a fingerprint (archetype), but also as unique (individual). He further discerned a central archetype, that he called the Self, which transcended all the others. In his biographical Memories, Dreams and Reflections he wrote that on psychological grounds he could not differentiate the Self from God. Thus in his psychology Jung found the imago dei, the image of God present in everyone as the center of psyche. It should be noted also that this insight of Jung's is not far from the Hindu Atman. Both the experience of Atman and of Self are described as experiences of transcendent unity; the realization in experience that one is not a mere individual, but is inseparably in union with all things and beings. Since God is the Ultimate Unity, this experience is also one of unity with God. This kind of experience in the mystic-contemplative tradition of all religions is recognized as the highest insight into human nature, recognition of our oneness with the Divine.

Ken Wilber in his monumental Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution, remarks "In philosophy a general distinction is made between the empirical ego which is the self insofar as it can be an object of awareness and introspection, and the Pure Ego or transcendental Ego (Kant, Fichte, Husserl), which is pure subjectivity (or the observing self) which can never be seen as an object of any sort. In this regard the pure Ego or pure Self is virtually identical with what the Hindus call Atman (or the pure Witness that itself is never witnessed--is never an object--but contains all object in itself).

"Furthermore," continues Wilber, "according to such philosophers as Fichte, this pure Ego is one with absolute Spirit, which is precisely the Hindu formula Atman = Brahman." This last rounds out the equivalence between Jung's discoveries regarding the Self and the Hindu insight of the nature of Atman. In both cases some kind of transcendent unity between the individual and the Divine are realized, but a unity in which it is not that the servant becomes Lord, or the ego becomes Atman or Self. Atman (Self) might thus be considered the pure observing Self, a transcendental Witness into which the ego self slips like a drop of water into the ocean. It is also Jung's insight that the Self functions to lead or lure the individual toward integration, wholeness, unity with the Divine.

In trying to understand the meaning of incarnation in the case of Jesus, it is clear that he responded fully to this leading and luring of the Self until his ego was transcendentally merged, dissolved into the Self, into the Divine. Questions such as "was Jesus born and did he live without sin?" fail to give credit to the full humanity of Jesus. To be the model for the perfect human, growth, development, having an ego and then yielding to the higher center, the Self, is the desired progression. It is as such that Jesus manifested the Christ-being, or better, became the Christ-being incarnate, i.e., realized Christ consciousness. His faithfulness to this Divine identity was completed in his refusal to avoid crucifixion.

In his description of Jesus' last discussions with his disciples, St. John indicates clearly that Jesus believed and taught that what was possible for him was also possible for his followers. His identity with the Divine was not unique, but modular, exemplary. Further, John has Jesus telling his disciples that "the Father will provide you with yet another advocate the authentic spirit, who will be with you forever. You recognize this spirit because it dwells in you and will remain in you." These teachings of John are all in the spirit of Jesus authentic words "Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find." Jesus has modeled the way of faithfulness, of authentic trust in the leading and luring of the Spirit; the same way is open to all who will seek after it, i.e. seek after union with God. Jesus was aware of his own Christ-consciousness, but also that such consciousness is the potential for everyone; it is a spiritual awareness and union with the All in All and is available to each and everyone of us. That is the meaning of incarnation.