We can also detect a significant interest in non-Christian faiths and a sense of being accountable for what to make of them, an anxiety not unlike that of Schleiermacher1 and other Liberal Protestant theologians who, in their own way, were occupied with the same challenge Levi Dowling struggled with. Like Schleiermacher, Dowling can no longer simply take Christian distinctiveness for granted; he must give the other faiths a fair shake with an open mind and heart. The clearest signal that Dowling thinks we must learn from other faiths is that he depicts his Jesus learning from them. But Dowling, unlike most of his readers in our day, was no New Age syncretist. He does come quite close to identifying Jesus Christ and Gautama Buddha as co-avatars, but Dowling’s Jesus remains, as for Schleiermacher and for Paul Tillich2 , the final rule of judgment for all religions as well as Christianity. At the same time, as I read him, Dowling is motivated in this consideration by something older than the theologies of Schleiermacher and the Neo-Orthodox Tillich. Dowling is, once again, a religious rationalist of the old school, and the gospel he has his Jesus expound is the universally valid religion of the Enlightenment, a generally Kantian “religion within the limits of reason alone.” Natural religionists3 of the eighteenth century, like the Deists, held that God had created the human brain in all places and times with insight sufficient to discern right and wrong, and that only the gratuitous embellishments of self-worshipping priestcraft had obscured that moral clarity, and largely by elevating competing and ill-founded dogmas as more important than the morality all agreed on. From that poison seed spouted sectarian strife and religious warfare. Fully in accord with this commonsense stripping-down, Dowling’s Jesus torpedoes establishment Christianity, subverting its doctrines, but also condemns similar sins when committed by Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists, and others whom he encounters on his Asian tour. Pointedly unlike Notovitch’s wandering Jesus, the Jesus of the Aquarian Gospel sought less to drink from the fountain of the Asian faiths than to purify their tainted springs. His mission was more to teach than to learn.
Giving the Aquarian Gospel Its Due
My goal is to highlight the intricate use of gospel and other biblical materials by Levi Dowling, employing the methods of the classical Higher Criticism, specifically form and redaction criticism. These tools are appropriate because, as we shall have abundant occasion to see, the evangelist Levi has very, very often rewritten the Bible. After all, it is a new version of the Jesus story he means to tell, not that of some new savior altogether, so there is going to be a great deal of overlap. At the same time, however, Dowling’s book is supposed to be a new revelation in its own right; thus it has to have something to say. And the surest way to accomplish this goal, the telling of new truth through an old story, is to rewrite that old story to make it into a new one. And the present volume is a modest attempt to think Levi Dowling’s thoughts after him, to trace his editorial, theological hand as he composes, alters, and reinscribes. This is just the way we study, say, the Gospel of Matthew, detecting through careful comparisons how and why he changed his base document, the Gospel of Mark. Having the source before us, it is not too difficult to ferret out the reasons for the changes. That is true of The Aquarian Gospel and its major sources, which are the four canonical gospels plus Nicholas Notovitch’s fiction (offered to the public as fact), The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ in which the savior traveled the length and breadth of Asia before embarking on his Galilean and Jerusalem ministries.
I feel sure that by now it will be apparent to every reader that in no way do I propose to write an expose of Levi Dowling’s latter-day gospel. No, not for a moment. While I accord the text no particular authority beyond being fascinating and offering some gems worth pondering, I respect it and seek here to expound it with the methods scholars have used to illuminate the fine print of the Bible. I can think of no higher respect to pay to the text.
Chapter One: The Aquarian Theology
Christology in the Aquarian Age
A gospel is by definition a statement of some sort concerning Jesus Christ, or, as the title of this one specifies, “Jesus the Christ,” implying that Jesus is one thing, Christ another. Jesus the Christ would mean, and be, Jesus the Anointed One. Jesus who bears a peculiar dignity and responsibility. The New Testament Christians heaped titles upon him, calling him not only the Christ, but also the Son of God, Son of Man, Lord, Savior, Logos, even God. Any such title, together with its implications, creates a Christology, a doctrine or an understanding of Jesus. And in this chapter I want to reconstruct the Aquarian understanding of Jesus as the Christ. Levi’s text does not spell it out in a systematic way, but there are a number of pretty explicit statements that enable us to fill out a colorful picture. It is important first to grasp that the theology of Levi Dowling is derived from, or at least closely parallels, that of the New Thought movement which began as one of several “mind over matter” movements in the nineteenth century, born from the same womb as Christian Science, the brainchild of Phineas Parker Quimby and Mary Baker Eddy. It gave rise to religious organizations including the Unity School of Christianity and the Church of Religious Science.
At the base of all these variations was a common “Panentheistic” theology. This philosophy, one major step removed from Pantheism, posits that all is God, and one with God. Unlike Monism (non-dualism), for both Pantheism and Panentheism the infinite variety of things, objects, and people in the world are all quite real, and by no means illusions, unlike the verdict rendered by Monists, for whom all apparent diversity is illusory and serves only to mask the Divine from our unenlightened eyes. No, for Pantheists and Panentheists, all things are real, but their reality is that of God. All things are not masks obscuring God but rather faces revealing him. The trick is to recognize God in all those manifestations. The difference between Pantheism (such as that of the ancient Stoics or of Spinoza) and Panentheists (such as Kabbalists, Qualified Nondualist [Visistadvaita Vedanta] Hindus, and today’s Process theologians) is that, for the former, there simply is no personal deity. The Godhead is infinite and beyond definition. It cannot exist over against other realities, for there can be none. For the latter, it is not difficult to imagine that one of the many forms into which the divine essence has poured Itself is that of a personal deity over and above the world. Panentheists tend to think of God as the soul of the world and the world as the body of God.
The New Thought movement seems to teeter between Pantheism and Panentheism, and occasionally even toward Monism. This last is when they borrow an element from Christian Science, trying be healed of disease by reminding themselves that they are really God, and God cannot be sick. That surely implies that illness symptoms are illusions incompatible with divinity. Again, often New Thought people lean in the direction of Pantheism, speaking of the cosmos as a system of spiritual and natural laws, a kind of Logos-structure, that one may manipulate in one’s favor. This one may do by realizing and asserting one’s own divine nature. From there on in, whether or not one is a Panentheist depends largely on whether one wishes to retain personalistic prayer and worship, keeping one foot in traditional orthodox Theism. One need not condemn all this as inconsistent. It would be better to say it is a case of a living reality (New Thought spirituality) that is too large and lively to be neatly deposited into a single box. Life is larger than the categories in which we would prefer to capture it.
As Levi Dowling depicts him, Jesus was a paradigm case of the God-man unity that exists, at least latently, in every human being. The difference between Jesus and the run of mankind is that he awakened to his divine character and began to draw upon the power to which it entitled him. The self-imposed limitations of unbelief and of low, worldly expectations stifle any expression of the inherent divinity in the rest of us. What Jesus was, we all can be, will be.
The Christological framework here is essentially that of Friedrich Schleiermacher, the father of Liberal theology, who insisted that, to have been truly incarnate, truly human, Jesus must have possessed and exercised divinity in a manner entirely compatible with his genuine humanity. Thus he cannot