IN A 1948 ESSAY, PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN PRESENTED his “fundamental vision” of our expanding universe in which “material arrangements” are becoming increasingly complex, consciousness is reaching ever higher levels, and Christian mysticism is the “perfect energy” for driving evolution forward. (See “My Fundamental Vision” in Toward the Future, 1975, especially the discussion of mysticism, pp. 199-206.)
Teilhard (1881-1955) was a Jesuit priest, a paleontologist, and a philosophical theologian. So, it’s not at all remarkable that he felt Christian mysticism to be superior to other forms of mysticism. Yet, Teilhard’s dismissal of Eastern mysticism, and his parochial insistence on seeing Christ as the universal image for the goal of evolution, feel at least a little off the mark. Both of these positions, really just two side of the same attitude, are not only superficial and biased, but also psychologically shallow.
Psychologically, “Christ” is an archetypal personification, an image of the collective unconscious. (Although Teilhard didn’t use Jungian language, he did intuit this psychological truth about Christ.) As an archetypal image, Christ is universal. The word, however is not. It is inescapably identified with the Christian religion.
What would happen in the English-speaking world, were we to translate the Greek word “Christ” into English and refer to the archetypal personification as “the Anointed One”?
For one thing, we would realize that “Christ” is not the “last name” of Jesus. In fact, it has always been an honorific title given to Jesus by his followers. In the Greek text of the Christian Testament it always appears with a definite article: the Christ, the anointed one.
The biblical use of “the Christ” is more than just an honorific, however. It is also a symbolic image used to tell us something about the universal and eternal attributes his followers felt were incarnated in Jesus. Everywhere, kings and emperors were anointed. In ancient Israel, prophets were too. In the Gospel of John, for Paul and other early Christian authors, Christ was with God in the beginning, that is pre-existent and eternal.
When his followers saw Jesus as the Anointed One, they not only elevated him to prophetic status, but also offered a critique of the ruling domination system. By claiming that Jesus (a powerless peasant) embodied what a true ruler looked like and how one acted, they turned the status quo upside down: Jesus is Lord (Augustus is not). When we call Jesus the Anointed One, rather than Christ, both the universal and political implications of the archetypal image become more apparent to us.
Another benefit of using the Anointed One instead of Christ is that the translation avoids the baggage of a parochial over-identification with Christianity. While we Christians recognize Jesus as an incarnation of the Anointed One, others will be able to recognize incarnations or manifestations of the Anointed One in their traditions as well. This sort of universal application is what one expects from an archetypal image of the collective unconscious. Rather than implying that the rest of humanity should become Christian, it invites each of us, and all of us, to transcend our ego-bound, cultural identifications in favor of the more truly and universally human.
Calling Laozi, Gautama Buddha, Mohamed, or even Ramakrishna “Christs” feels both odd and inappropriate. Calling them “Anointed Ones,” however, somehow feels right. And while each of us will shy away from thinking of ourselves as “Christs,” we should recognize that each of us is, or can become, an “Anointed One” — if only for now through the symbolic rites and rituals that point us toward our potential, toward our future.
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