| Pilgrimage to Lindisfarne, 1972.
I did not know why I had picked Lindisfarne out of all the monastery schools of the Dark Ages, and I did not know what I would do when I got there, but I went on all the same. When, after traveling around the world for three months in 1972, I finally came to Holy Island off the coast of Northumbria in early autumn, I had only a few minutes to cross before the tide flooded the channel.[1] I was glad that I had followed my hunch not to stop on the way down from Edinburgh, for now I would have the whole afternoon on the island until the channel again opened at dusk. I crossed over quickly, parked the car, and began a slow ambulation in search of whatever was left, suspended in the ether of another era. I circled around the castle on the high rock, went down to the shore, paced in the enclosed garden, and came back to the ruin of the twelfth-century priory and the modern chapel. Nothing of the original seventh-century monastery remained; after the sacred power of the founding saints had gone, the profane power of the Vikings had come in like the tides. Since there was no other place in which to pause and meditate on the tides of history, I went into the modern chapel.
In all the sacred places I had visited in my journey around the world, I had constructed an imago: a spiral in a new planetary space in which all the religions of the past were circulating paths within a single hypersphere. And to match this uniqueness of space, I envisioned a uniqueness of our present moment in time, a kairos, in which it was appropriate to look back at all the religions of the past, and then move beyond them in the next turn of the spiral into a new post-religious and scientific planetary spirituality.
Once I had concluded my meditation, I had only to wait until the tide went out to return to Edinburgh. In the chapel I saw and bought a little pamphlet that told of the life of St. Aidan, the founder of Lindisfarne, and of St. Cuthbert, his greatest successor. One of the hagiographic fables seemed to connect the ethos of Lindisfarne with ancient esoteric traditions of the Essenes and the Judaism of the desert. According to several esoteric traditions--among them the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner as well as the kriya yoga of Paramahansa Yogananda-- John the Baptist was said to be the reincarnation of Elijah, and Jesus was said to be the reincarnation of Elijah's disciple, Elisha. When Elisha asks his departing master that a double part of his spirit descend upon him, he is asking for an acceleration of his spiritual evolution. Elijah cannot grant this to him, for it can only take place if Elisha himself can stand to receive such powers all at once. And so Elijah tells him that if he can so control his consciousness so as to be able to see all the planes of consciousness, the lokas, through which Elijah will ascend as he departs, then Elisha's inheritance of what the Zen Buddhists call the "mind to mind transmission" of his master will be achieved. Elisha does indeed see Elijah ascend to heaven "in a fiery chariot"; he picks up the mantle of Elijah and returns to the esoteric community on Mt. Carmel and all the followers recognize that Elisha now wears the power and mantle of Elijah. A similar kind of prophetic succession is expressed in the hagiography of Aidan and Cuthbert.
On the night of St. Aidan's death an athletic lad of 17, whose dust is now the prized possession of Durham Cathedral, where his name--Cuthbertus--is engraved on a great stone slab behind the high altar, was watching sheep in the Leader valley on the lower slopes of the Lammermoor hills. Awake while other shepherds were sleeping, he had a vision of angels bearing a great soul to paradise; and when a few days later news came of the death of the beloved Aidan, he took the vision as a call to the services of God.[2]
It would seem that something of the esoteric was transmitted through archaic Celtic Christianity; or, perhaps, it would be closer to the truth to say that in Ireland two streams met to create the river that sustained life in Western Europe in the Dark Ages. One was the ancient stream of esoteric thought that had been centered in Ireland since megalithic times; the other was the Christian monastic tradition which had its source in that other fountainhead of esoteric traditions, Egypt.[3] With Druid Ireland on one side, and syncretistic Egypt on the other, one can see that there have been times in the past, much like our own, in which one esoteric tradition comes into contact with another. The Sufis claim that their knowledge predates Islam and goes back to Egypt, but this claim to have a source of authority that does not derive from orthodox centers of priestly power can create trouble for mystics, Gnostics, or Nestorian heretics, as both Sufis and Celtic Christians discovered at different times.
Initiates of certain inner experiences can recognize in the imagery of another tradition different metaphoric systems for similar experiences. Fundamentalist zealots, who have not experienced these inner illuminations and transformations, are both full of fear and then rage that they have been excluded from some mystery, so they reify religious belief into textual literalisms and then use these as a license for persecution and murder of their rivals. An initiate of these inner experiences recognizes that whether it is the case of the Egyptian serpent rising out of the forehead, or the Indian snake of kundalini, or the Mexican serpent turning into a plumed Quetzal bird, or the winged snakes of the caduceus of the god Mercury, or the snake worship of the Druid priests that St. Patrick drove out of Ireland, that a single experience of illumination has been encoded in the imagery. What is common to them all is human physiology, with its energies, both physical and subtle. Of course, most scholars, especially those who have not experienced this physiologically based process of illumination, would object to such global theories of transcultural communication and see them as some form of Pynchonesque conspiracy network. But imagine that our civilization were to be wiped out and that scholars thousands of years from now were trying to reconstruct its activities. No archaeologist would be willing to accept the fact that pieces of things as different as Volkswagens, Cadillacs, and buses represented, not artifacts of isolated cultures, but parts of one industrial civilization that covered the face of the Earth. The specialists would split up the civilization into pieces and talk about how the Volkswagen I people conquered the Ford II people until both were replaced by an empire which moved troops around in large vehicles. Other experts would argue that no one could possibly have crossed the great oceans, and that the Volkswagen and Ford cultures could have had nothing to do with one another but were separate and independent technologies of isolated cultures.
Humans traveled in the past as they do now, carrying their culture with them in their heads. Pythagoras was not the first or last man to travel and bring the mysteries of the East to the West. Strange as it may seem, St. Cuthbert seemed to know the yoga of body heat and knew how to match the waves of inhalation and exhalation with mantras and waves of the sea. A spying monk recorded how he watched him descend the cliff while others were sleeping, cross the slippery rocks, enter the sea, and chant psalms while the waves lapped around him; and how on his return to shore two small creatures, otters or young seals, came and rubbed themselves upon his chilled feet.[4]
It is sad to think how little of the esoteric and initiatic has survived in modern Christianity, but given our Western history of the Albigensian Crusade, the Inquisition, and the witch trials, it is not surprising that those who know are not talking, and that those who talk do not know. Now seekers of illumination and enlightenment must go to Japan, Tibet, or India to find something as simple as a breathing technique for quieting the noisy inner dialogue of the mind so that the aspirant may enter states of consciousness deeper than egocentric prayers of God give-me-this and give-me-that. Americans have to go to the "New Religions" because our old religions of Catholic, Protestant, and Jew tend to give us the institutional culture of priests and not the experience of the divine.
Christianity once contained specific instructions on the cure of our malaise, but these instructions about techniques of inner consciousness opened doors that were not doors of the Church with its clergy and sacraments, so the doors to the mind were slammed shut in a campaign carried on over centuries of persecution to wipe out "heretics." No doubt, the Princes of the Church were able to terrorize monks and nuns with the examples of a few religious psychotics, and, perhaps, a few of these delusional heretics were truly evil; but if Christianity had kept its esoteric tradition alive, there would have been, as well as Popes and Cardinals, a few adepts who knew the inner geography of the soul sufficiently well enough to tell the spirit of the Lord from possession by the devil.
But it is now pointless to argue over whose fault it was that Christianity lost its way and became the religion about Christ and not of Christ. We have to accept the fact that we now live in a time when the esoteric traditions of Christianity are barely alive, found only occasionally in a few scattered individuals, and that the esoteric traditions that served to inspire Western science are fast dying off in our age of technological idolatry. The whole light of the civilization that came out of Christian Europe is flickering toward a new age of darkness. Now we live in a culture in which the Rosicrucian Enlightenment of Kepler, Boyle, and Newton has been reduced to a new electronic version of what Whitehead called scientific materialism. The Celtic Christianity of Columba, Aidan, and Cuthbert has been reduced to the soporific pieties of the clergy—be they Roman Catholic or Anglican. The esoteric is not a visible presence in Christianity any longer.
If you wish to go back to the point at which Christianity took the wrong turn, so that you can find the other road at the fork, you must go back to Lindisfarne to see the clash between the Celtic Christianity that identified itself as the Church of John and the Roman imperial Christianity that identified itself as the Church of Peter.
The clash had been developing during the episcopate of Finan, who succeeded Aidan at Lindisfarne; and it became unavoidable when Oswy in 655 slew Penda of Mercia, the last defender of heathenism, who had stood between the stream of Christianity coming down from Iona and the stream pressing northwards from Canterbury. Colman, the third bishop, inherited the dispute when Finan died in 661. King Oswy's sympathies were with the Celtic Church in which he had been brought up at Iona, but his queen and her chaplain followed the usages they had been familiar with in Kent. The confusion in the royal household was such that Easter was kept twice…The king's long reign (642-670) and religious zeal gave the Church the opportunity to become deeply rooted in his extensive kingdom; but which Church and which customs was he to support? Aware that the Easter divergence in 665 would be greater than usual, Oswy syummoned the Synod of Whitby in 663 or 664 at the monastery ruled by Hilda, pleading that all who served the one God should agree to observe one rule of life. Colman claimed that the Celtic traditions went back to St. John; but Wilfrid, a former disciple of Aidan, who had visited Rome and adopted Roman usages, laid emphasis on the folly of resisting the unique authority of St. Peter: "The only people who are stupid enough to disagree with the whole world are these Scots and their obstinate adherents the Picts and the Britons, who inhabit only a portion of these two islands in the remote ocean." The king had evidently already made up his mind, with a view to unity and peace in his own house, and with a smile he announced his decision in these words: "If Peter is the guardian of the gates of heaven, I shall not contradict him. I shall obey his commands in everything to the best of my ability: otherwise, when I come to the gates of heaven, he who holds the key may not be willing to open them.[5]
Two roads diverged at Lindisfarne; one went to Rome through Wilfrid, the other went to Iona through Colman. Aidan had come to Lindisfarne from Iona, and it was at Iona that Aidan's teacher, St. Columba, had created a center of esoteric Christianity. It is small wonder that after the failures of the Synod of Whitby, Colman and his monks left Lindisfarne and went back to remote Iona.
From contemporary sciences of ecology, we have learned that a rich biological diversity is a healthier way to maintain an ecosystem or a planet. Imperial modes of thinking, however, demand and command a monocrop that destroys wetlands with dams and turns prairies into single crop factories forcefully maintained by center-pivot irrigation, fertilizers, and pesticides. The industrial farm, the modern corporate university with its aluminum and glass business-containers, and the drive-in, parking lot super-churches of Dallas are all embodiments of this imperial mentality. One can only look back to the Synod of Whitby and speculate how much richer Western Christianity would have been if Rome and the Papacy had not triumphed, if Celtic, Roman, Greek, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopian, Maronite-Syriac, and Nestorian Christianities had all flourished and prospered. After all, there is no Pope for Buddhism, and Hinayana, Mahayana, Tibetan, Chan, Shin, and Japanese Zen Buddhisms have managed very nicely around the world without an imperial standardization. But the West chose the Roman model, and in taking on the form and thinking of empire, it was easier to move toward the politics of empire in the Albigensian Crusade and the permanent establishment of the Inquisition.
Since the esoteric has been often forcefully eliminated from Christianity, and had only survived in prophetic sects in which, unfortunately, the personality of the founder also became part of the message, I felt in the nineteen-seventies that the only way for a healthier diversity to re-establish itself was to back-propogate Christianity with living esoteric seeds from other traditions. Influenced by the Hindu-Christian syncretism of Yogananda, I thought that in a planetization of the esoteric, Yoga, Sufism, Tibetan Buddhism, Zen, and native American traditions could be brought into communion with a new form of post-religious Christian spirituality and Western science.
Both the Church and the university, as narrowly politicized institutions, were inseparable from the values and world view of the modern postindustrial corporation; their clergy and faculty lacked the imaginative capacity to effect the shift from the ecological crisis of our postindustrial global civilizaton to a new planetary culture with a more profound understanding of our biospheric condition. Education had been captured by industry, science had been taken over by a technological idolatry based upon a narrow linear reductionism, and religion had been taken hostage by mind-numbing rituals and emotionally infantilizing forms of worship. What was needed was a new kind of educational community in which the individual was empowered through meditation to connect the unique to the universal without the mediation of clerical ritual and collectivizing worship, and in which a more holistic science that recognized complexity could work toward the design of architectural forms that were more symbiotic with our new biospheric understanding of ecology. A new kind of educational association would need to be created in which the transformation of individual consciousness and the redesign of human settlements could be brought together in meta-industrial villages and more symbiotic cities--not to preserve the old in a monastic museum or pre-industrial commune, but to articulate an emergent evolution to carry us forward into a new historical landscape. Such was to be my project in returning from my pilgrimage to the historical Lindisfarne, quitting my professorship in Toronto, and working to establish the Lindisfarne Association in New York City in December of 1972. <!--[if !supportEndnotes]-->
[1] An earlier version of this essay was published in Passages about Earth: an Exploration of the New Planetary Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
[2] Henry Kelsey, St. Aidan and St. Cuthbert (Berwick on Tweed, no date), p. 23.
[3] See Maire and Liam De Paor, Early Christian Ireland (London: Thames & Hudson, 1958); also “Ireland and the East” in G. T. Stokes, Ireland and the Celtic Church (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1886), pp. 166-170.
[4] Kelsey, loc.cit.
[5] Ibid.
[Please note, the rest of the book manuscript, Thinking Together at the Edge of History: the Story of the Lindisfarne Association, is unpublished. I have deposited the complete manuscript among the collection of my papers in the Karl Kroch Library at Cornell University. These papers will be available to scholars at a date to be determined in the future.]
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