Alvin Boyd Kuhn

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all The Lost Light (1940), Who Is This King of Glory? (1944) and his lectures.

The drama of the soul

Kuhn teaches that the scriptures of the West are not history but drama: the story, told in symbols, of the soul's descent into matter and its return. Each human being is a spark of the divine mind, a fragment of God's own spirit, which has come down into a body of flesh to live there through many lives and to raise the animal nature it inhabits toward its own divinity. The figures of scripture are the parts of this one drama, and the stage is every person. His reading of the sky behind the stories is given in the branch Its authors of The sky in the scriptures; what follows is the inner drama he read in them.

The Christos within

The Christ of the Gospels, in his teaching, is the Christos, the divine essence of human nature, personified and set on the stage, and the gravest error of the Western world was to make this figure a man of history. Deep in every person lies a divine spark, a sun within, and that Christliness in us is, in his echo of Paul, the hope of our glory: the birth of Christ is the waking of the divine in a person, the crucifixion is the immortal soul on the cross of matter, and the resurrection is its rising within. The early Church, he holds, possessed this meaning, and in the third century, as Shadow of the Third Century argues, it was lost when the allegory was read as fact.

This earth is the underworld

His most distinctive claim is that the underworld of the old religions is this life. The Egyptian Amenta, the Greek Hades, the hell and the grave and the pit of scripture are names for incarnation in a body on this earth, which for the soul is a kind of death. So the dead of scripture are the living, souls buried in flesh, and to rise from the dead is to wake from the sleep of the senses. The three days in the tomb, told again and again in the Bible, are the soul's time in the body; Egypt, Babylon, Assyria and Sodom are not places but names for the soul's captivity in matter; and the Exodus is its deliverance from the house of its bondage.

Water and fire

The four elements, he teaches, are a key to the symbols. Earth and water stand for the body, which is mostly water, and air and fire for mind and spirit. So when Jesus tells Nicodemus that he must be born of water and of the spirit, he speaks of two births: one into the body and one into the life of the spirit. John baptises with water, and the greater one who follows with the Holy Spirit and with fire. The Red Sea that the Israelites must cross is, in one of his lectures, the blood of the body, which every son of God must pass through to reach the promised land; and the fish of early Christian symbol is the soul swimming in the waters of incarnation.

Out of Egypt

Kuhn drew his Egyptian parallels chiefly from Gerald Massey, and he holds that the Gospel story was written in Egypt thousands of years before the Christian era: that Horus is an Egyptian Jesus, who raised an Egyptian Lazarus at an Egyptian Bethany. No Egyptian text tells such a story; the parallel is Massey's construction from the names and the myths of Osiris. What remains of Kuhn's teaching when the parallels are set aside is his reading of the scriptures as the inner life of the reader.