Religio Occulta in the New Age

What is the nature of religious occultism?

 

Is it possible to see the success of Religio Occulta as growing directly from what has been considered the major points of Enlightenment and Modernism?

Let us look at four major expressions of this possibility:

1. St Paul detected the nature of conscience and expressed it in his Letter to the Romans: It is part of our human nature as God’s creatures that we can distinguish between good and evil, truth and lies. This is an expression of our being created in the image of God as expressions of God’s logos.

In the new occultism not conscience but consciousness is at the center. Conscience operates with quality, such as good or bad, true or false. Consciousness operates with quantity: Growth in consciousness, higher consciousness, broader consciousness.

2. The classical theologians in 325 when they defined the codes of Classical Christianity in Nicea created the term persona, which had until then meant a mask at the stage, with an in-built megaphone in order to make the actor heard by his public. In the theological usage it came to mean an acting subject, which represent someone. Personal came to mean “on behalf of”. A juridicial person acts on behalf of some authority.

In the present usage “individual” has come to identify personal. An individuum is taken to mean the same as a person, which of course is meaningless. Individual means simply “undivided”, and stands for the basic unit, not related to anything and therefore in fact the opposite of personal.

3. The Christian theologians created in the Medieval period the term answer/response in order to express the reality of mankind confronted with Christ’s coming to judge the living and the dead. In Christ’s parousia, in his apocalyptic presence all mankind has to be answerable to Christ and has to be able to respond to Christ’s searching questions. That is the meaning.

It is thus part and parcel of answer/response and consequently of responsibility that it has in it the element of accountability! One has to be answerable to someone, who is in authority.

In the modern usage responsibility has become a misnomer without the element of accountability. It has developed into a cliché without content: In short responsibility without accountability is nothing but sentimentality.

4. The heart of the matter in Christian theology is Truth, not just truths. Theology stands or falls with its ability to point to and confess the Truth as such. That is the crux of the Christian faith, and obviously that creates counter-moves and reactions.

 

The modern alternative to Truth is found in the search for values. While Truth either is true or not, values are relatively valuable, more or less valuable. It is an interesting fact, that value up till 1830 was a purely financial term, an economic and political term. Only via liberalism this term was spread out and the modern usage was established, speaking about cultural and religious values.

 

Enlightenment as the basis for Occultism

It is rather obvious that this change from the Christian terms: conscience, person, responsibility, and truth to the modernistic terms: consciousness, individual, responsibility without accountability, and values represent a real change in the religious outlook of mankind, also of “Christian kind”.

When that change is established, the next step is easy: from enlightenment to occultism. Religio Occulta catches fire on the well arranged pyres of the enlightenment! What a contradiction in terms, analogous to the change of meaning the term LUCIFER carries!