Reading the Gospels as Interior Events
A seventeenth-century mystic named Angelus Silesius compressed this entire post into a couplet. Christ could be born in Bethlehem a thousand times, he wrote, and it would profit you nothing unless he were born in you. That is the whole method, stated with maximum nerve. The gospel events happened, and the allegorical readers never much argued the point. Their claim ran deeper, that the events also describe a sequence that unfolds inside any soul undergoing awakening, so that the familiar scenes, manger, river, desert, mountain, cross, and empty tomb, compose the central panel of the scripture-wide map this site has been walking. The Gospel of Philip says outright that these things are to be understood symbolically, and Meister Eckhart preached the same birth in the soul from inside the medieval church. Here is the sequence, scene by scene. ...