The Sage of Aquarius: A Centennial Study of the Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ. Robert M. Price

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СКАЧАТЬ if you hold and swallow down a curse

      it never will digest; lo, it

      will poison every atom of your soul.

      And if you sin against a son of man,

      you may be pardoned and your guilt be cleansed

      by acts of kindness and of love;

      Levi the evangelist seems to want to exonerate Christianity from Nietzsche’s accusations that it promotes a pathetically hypocritical slave morality in which a seemingly noble willingness to forgive merely masks one’s well-nursed ressentiment. “Oh I’ll forgive you all right, buddy! But when the Son of Man comes, he’s going to kick your butt!”

      Rather than the sentimental/radical assumption that the poor are the pious saints of Yahve, such as we find everywhere in the gospels, The Aquarian Gospel takes a more hard-nosed position. Poverty is no sure sign of piety.

      It is no sign that man is good

      and pure because he lives in want.

      The listless, shiftless vagabonds

      of earth are mostly poor and have to beg

      for bread. (62:18-19)

      On the other hand, such squinting at the poor certainly fits this gospel’s sense of karmic comeuppance. Would the casual observer not be justified in inferring that the indigent man has himself to blame, if not for being a lazy bum in this present life, then for doing something wrong in a previous life for which his present poverty is recompense?

      If Jesus’ (Levi’s) enthusiasm for the poor is a bit restrained, he displays in no uncertain terms the classic liberal conscience based on both the fallacy of the “limited good” and on survivor guilt. “How could I seek for pleasure for myself while others are in want?” (51:16). As to the “limited good,” it is the same belief that leads to the idealization of the poor. There being only so much of any good commodity to go around, the rich must have gained their goods by depriving the poor of theirs. While in ancient times this may have been true, it has long ago become a phantom and a fantasy, ever since Capitalism made it possible to expand the pie, no longer to have to cut thinner and thinner slices of it. As to survivor guilt, or “bleeding heart” liberalism, like that of Father Paneloux in Camus’s The Plague, it stems directly from our feeling of unworthiness to have avoided the arbitrary blows which struck those to either side of us. Why did we survive when so many others became glowing shadows at Hiroshima?⁷ Why are we prosperous when other nations are not? We must have exploited them. And so on. Purely as an exercise in ascetical pietism, we seek to atone for our success by renouncing it, or by feeling guilty for keeping it. We vow never to enjoy life till everyone can, oblivious of the fact that our misery, self-imposed, can never lift another out of his. We cannot get sick enough that it will heal another, poor enough that it will lift another out of poverty. It is really too bad that Jesus/Levi falls prey to this way of thinking, as it is the mirror image of the very same ressentiment that broods and seethes rather than acting. How so? Well, if the rich person feels guilty for being rich, he could renounce his wealth as Francis of Assisi did (though the real poor, those who did not choose it as a penance, would mock him as a fool). At least when the vaguely-imagined judgment struck all the rich and exalted all the poor, he would be guaranteed safety. But our hero lacks the guts to do that, just as Nietzsche’s Christian coward turns the other cheek only because he lacks the courage to hate and to strike back. Likewise, the conscience-stricken liberal is content to simmer with self-hatred while continuing guiltily to enjoy what he neurotically thinks he has no right to.

      In any ancient Jewish context such as an historical Jesus might be placed, the question of ethics could not have been raised without connection to the Torah of Moses. In the canonical gospels the issues of Torah-observance and Jewish customs come up constantly. We see a running battle between Jesus and the scribes over whether his followers are living in accord with the Torah. Some of these stories seem to reflect disputes among Jewish Christians who did mean to keep the Law but interpreted its stipulations differently from their critics. Others appear to stem from Hellenistic or Gentile churches which sought in Jesus license to ignore the mores of an alien (to them) culture, that of Judaism. It is hard to tell which opinion an historical Jesus might have espoused. But the issue was still alive in the age when the gospels were written. Things have changed completely by the time Levi Dowling wrote The Aquarian Gospel. Outside of the Seventh Day Adventist sect, no Protestants took the notion of Christians keeping Torah rules seriously enough to debate it. Most Protestant interpreters simply assumed that Jesus rejected and flouted the Torah, anticipating the Pauline polemic against it. For Jesus Aquarius, the Law of Moses, or any other, is a museum relic. “If one is full of love he does not need commands of any kind” (17:7). This saying is perhaps suggested by St. Augustine’s dictum, “Love God and do as you will.” But it goes farther than the pinched-faced saint could imagine, all the way to Rudolf Bultmann’s pneumatic antinomianism.⁸ Any fan of The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ would, a few decades later, have felt right at home in the pages of Joseph Fletcher’s Situation Ethics with its dictum, “Love only is always good.”⁹

      Such an ethic sits loose to legal formulations and is thus very far removed from Immanuel Kant’s deontological ethics, an ethics of duty and the keeping of moral absolutes. But there is a major element of Kant’s approach that finds a ringing echo in the pages of our Gospel according to Levi: acting for the sake of duty and not merely in accordance with it. “And when you sow, sow seeds of right, because it is the right, and not in the way of trade, expecting rich rewards” (100:12). In this Kant would rejoice. It mirrors his distinction between mere hypothetical imperatives (prudent considerations if one wants to achieve some goal) and truly moral categorical imperatives, obeyed despite any costs, simply for the sake of one’s duty, because a thing is right.

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