Spencer Heath Archive

Item 762

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath about Paul Heyl’s Philosophy of a Scientific Man.

May 9, 1956

He seemed to fall short in his first alternative, in that he failed to realize that his new Divinity, the Cosmic Soul, was not a static, unchanging God but a dynamic Divinity, ever emerging into higher manifestations of its own creative capacity. Had he so conceived it, he might not have felt constrained to go on to the unchanging Nirvana. For unending change, taking place through unend­ing time, is no less definitive than an unchanging Deity or the unchanging granite or marble into which His image is wrought.

Had he seen the Cosmic Soul as unending change throughout unending time, he would have seen then in harmony both its dynamic and its finalistic character, and might not have been driven to Nirvana, with its finalism but without dynamism. It is an eternal process or proceeding and not an eternal entity, which is the theological definition of the Christian Holy Ghost.

You know how Davenport fell for Steinerism, which was an offshoot from Theosophy out of Buddhistic Hinduism. The same way, Paul Heyl fell for Buddhism, with its Nirvana, all coming from the same source. I can’t help thinking that Heyl had a little tincture of anti-Semitism in him, when he prefers the Aryan Nirvana to the Semitic monotheism of Allah and Jehovah, with their conception of a divine kingdom beginning in this world and going on to worlds without end. Had he understood the Christian philosophy more profoundly, even than Christians do, he would not have referred to the Christian Trinity and their saints as lingering vestiges of Aryan polytheism. He finds monotheism only /in/ those two Semitic sources, Jehovah and Allah. But he finds polytheism throughout the whole Aryan range, from the Indic through the Persian Zoroastrianism, with its God of Light and God of Darkness, through the Aryan Greek and Roman with their gods of every light and shade, and extending clear to the hero-gods of Norse and Icelandic mythology.

That makes monotheism the exceptional theology, a single, Semitic source in Palestine and Arabia, an island, as it were, in the midst of a whole Aryan world of polytheistic theology. I never thought of that before. Perhaps the Semites were, after all, the Chosen People of the One God. When it comes to the Chinese and the Japanese, they seem much like the archaic Romans. They had rather apotheosized ancestors than fully metamorphosed gods. The Chinese until the present century seemed to worship their ancestors rather than any distant gods, while the Japanese imputed divinity to their emperor as their collective ancestry. Their emperor was supposed to represent all their ancestors. They hadn’t matured their ancestor worship into polytheism. I don’t think either Allah or Jehovah was ever regarded as an ancestor. It certainly is clear that the early Romans made gods out of their ancestors, just as the Chinese do today, in the present century.