After Pentecost

195:4.1The church, be­ing an ad­junct to so­ci­ety and the ally of pol­i­tics, was doomed to share in the in­tel­lec­tual and spir­i­tual de­cline of the so-called Eu­ro­pean “dark ages.” Dur­ing this time, re­li­gion be­came more and more monas­ti­cized, as­ceti­cized, and le­gal­ized. In a spir­i­tual sense, Chris­tian­ity was hi­ber­nat­ing. Through­out this pe­riod there ex­isted, along­side this slum­ber­ing and sec­u­lar­ized re­li­gion, a con­tin­u­ous stream of mys­ti­cism, a fan­tas­tic spir­i­tual ex­pe­ri­ence bor­der­ing on un­re­al­ity and phil­o­soph­i­cally akin to pan­the­ism.

195:4.2Dur­ing these dark and de­spair­ing cen­turies, re­li­gion be­came vir­tu­ally sec­ond­handed again. The in­di­vid­ual was al­most lost be­fore the over­shad­ow­ing au­thor­ity, tra­di­tion, and dic­ta­tion of the church. A new spir­i­tual men­ace arose in the cre­ation of a galaxy of “saints” who were as­sumed to have spe­cial in­flu­ence at the di­vine courts, and who, there­fore, if ef­fec­tively ap­pealed to, would be able to in­ter­cede in man’s be­half be­fore the Gods.

195:4.3But Chris­tian­ity was suf­fi­ciently so­cial­ized and pa­ganized that, while it was im­po­tent to stay the on­com­ing dark ages, it was the bet­ter pre­pared to sur­vive this long pe­riod of moral dark­ness and spir­i­tual stag­na­tion. And it did per­sist on through the long night of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion and was still func­tion­ing as a moral in­flu­ence in the world when the re­nais­sance dawned. The re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion of Chris­tian­ity, fol­low­ing the pass­ing of the dark ages, re­sulted in bring­ing into ex­is­tence nu­mer­ous sects of the Chris­tian teach­ings, be­liefs suited to spe­cial in­tel­lec­tual, emo­tional, and spir­i­tual types of hu­man per­son­al­ity. And many of these spe­cial Chris­tian groups, or re­li­gious fam­i­lies, still per­sist at the time of the mak­ing of this pre­sen­ta­tion.

195:4.4Chris­tian­ity ex­hibits a his­tory of hav­ing orig­i­nated out of the un­in­tended trans­for­ma­tion of the re­li­gion of Je­sus into a re­li­gion about Je­sus. It fur­ther pre­sents the his­tory of hav­ing ex­pe­ri­enced Hel­l­eniza­tion, pa­gani­za­tion, sec­u­lar­iza­tion, in­sti­tu­tion­al­iza­tion, in­tel­lec­tual de­te­ri­o­ra­tion, spir­i­tual deca­dence, moral hi­ber­na­tion, threat­ened ex­tinc­tion, later re­ju­ve­na­tion, frag­men­ta­tion, and more re­cent rel­a­tive re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion. Such a pedi­gree is in­dica­tive of in­her­ent vi­tal­ity and the pos­ses­sion of vast re­cu­per­a­tive re­sources. And this same Chris­tian­ity is now pres­ent in the civ­i­lized world of Oc­ci­den­tal peo­ples and stands face to face with a strug­gle for ex­is­tence which is even more omi­nous than those event­ful crises which have char­ac­ter­ized its past bat­tles for dom­i­nance.

195:4.5Re­li­gion is now con­fronted by the chal­lenge of a new age of sci­en­tific minds and ma­te­ri­al­is­tic ten­den­cies. In this gi­gan­tic strug­gle be­tween the sec­u­lar and the spir­i­tual, the re­li­gion of Je­sus will even­tu­ally tri­umph.