Spencer Heath Archive

Item 373

Taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath in which MacCallum asked Heath to start over so that what he was saying could be taped. To be published as an essay in Economics and the Spiritual Life of Free Men.

April 29, 1956.

 

This is the same as item 657, which is where the original is.

 

CHRIST AS POET

     I began by saying that it is interesting to see Christ in that light, as a poet with a vision of the future for mankind on this earth. Yes, he has been referred to variously as a poet, but not in the specific significance of a heart full of sympathy and love and a mind with a vision of future life on this earth. Like Shelley, for example. And you asked, did Shelley have a vision of the future? He did indeed, most eminently, especially in his long poem, “Queen Mab.”

     Then you said — or you should have said — Shakespeare is commonly regarded as the supreme poet. Yes, and he was supreme, in his own way — the supreme expositor and illustrator, and reflector, of human nature and of human life as he knew it in his day, and with unmatched powers of imagery and beauty of expression. But from beginning to end, there is in Shakespeare no great suggestion that human life in his day was essentially any different from what it was in the beginning. Life was a matter more of being than of becoming, and, for all he tells us, the life of man in this world would remain always as he so completely and so beautifully mirrored it.

     Jesus Christ was a poet of the opposite extreme. He saw life not merely in being, but — and more significantly — in becoming. He saw not only the depths of darkness in men’s hearts and minds, but more vividly, the power and glory that was potential in their lives. He was no scientist, no rationalist, but his intuitive powers were little, if any, less than divine. Beauty was his watchword, and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit his guiding star. He sensed and felt, and, with an intuition deeper than rationality, he knew and described in general terms, supported by beautiful imagery, the glory that, of a certainty, was in the future of a re-born and thereby redeemed mankind. He knew, peradventure of a doubt, and declared that his word could never pass away.

     And what was this rebirth out of “the world” and into the kingdom of heaven where all men would be as ideal brothers are? On the metaphysical side, this meant that men’s personal natures would be personally purged and redeemed through change of heart and outlook upon God and man, and a future metaphysical glory become assured to the immortal soul beyond this world and through all worlds. And this was the secret of his great personal power, his filling human nature with a sense of its own spiritual potentialities, its own dignity and divinity, it own kinship with God.

     But this was not all. Christ came into this world to redeem it, to proclaim a heavenly kingdom potential in the hearts and minds of men despite the ravages of the dominant and destructive powers. His first great temptation was worldly power. And this he repudiated, with scorn of the tempter. Throughout the Gospels he refers to the political powers, whether of Senate or of Sanhedrin — the tax-taking and war-making powers — as the powers and kingdoms of “the world.” The kingdom that he visioned was not of this world in the sense of worldly power, but in the sense of creative power, which he knew would eventually prevail above and beyond the destructive powers of “the world.” And He knew the key to that kingdom as it was, then and always, in the midst of men calling them to repentance and a change of ways and making all men as brothers, of whatever race or creed or clime.

     This simple key to the kingdom he called the Golden Rule, as opposed to the iron rule of the political powers dominant in the world. He did not forbid evil. He was not a prohibitor. He was a commander of the spirit. He commanded that men should enter into the free, contractual relationship in which alone could all men far and wide do unto others in the same manner, that is, non-politically, as they would have others do unto them. His divine intuition included a sensing of property as the instrument of equality through the contractual relationship — that only through the administration of property, and especially large property, could any man become the servant of many or of all. He laid the groundwork for a conception of the administration of property as the instrument and subject matter of free contract, for the practice of the Golden Rule unto the salvation — and not the salvation alone but the exaltation — of mankind.

     These things he could not describe in detail. Had he done so, his hearers could not have comprehended him. Nor is it easy for them today. He could only tell it in the poetic imagery of his parables, in almost every one of which there is a man of property as the head and central figure — but never a political man of property, never any glorification of the man of property by violent or unjust means. Instances could be multiplied — the owner of the vineyard, the master of the sheepfold with his porter at the gate  /Indication in the transcription that more examples were to be supplied here/. All these were, in his imagery, heralds of the coming kingdom in which men would be free from the dominance of the powers of “the world,” a condition in which there would be only one kind of equality, freedom, the equality of equal jurisdiction over one’s person and over one’s property, justly gained. In this freedom, and in the practice of this freedom through the contractual process, men would become vastly unequal in their possessions, yet the greatest in the kingdom would be those who were in fact — though not in pretense — the servants of all.

     This is the redeeming character of the golden rule, the way out from injustice, tyranny, taxation, and war into the heavenly kingdom promised and potential in the divine nature of man from the foundation of the world.

     To Jesus, God was the father, and not the step-father, of men. He was no respecter of persons so only they were doers of the word. Nor did He discriminate between the life of man in this world and the life of man in worlds to come; He was as much the creator of this world as of any other. And as visioned by the prophets of old, His commands were simple. /Notation to insert Old Testament passage here./ Yet simplest of all was His command through Jesus Christ that we love one another through serving one another, a love which would be enduring, and thus real, only through being equal and reciprocal.

     Other religions have taught against sin. They have been prohibitive. They taught men how to avoid punishment, how to stave off the wages of sin, which is death. But the dreamer, the poet, the prophet, Jesus Christ, saw that the spiritual power of men consists in the good that they do, and not the evil that they shun. He therefore proclaimed the greatest law of all time, that we love one another through serving one another, and thereby enter into our spiritual, our creative, our divine estate, that we may have life and life more abundantly in all its implications, including ever lengthening days.