A PROPOSAL CONCERNING

MARTINIST THEODICY
Bishop Lewis Keizer, M.Div., Ph.D.; S::I::IV, M:.E:.C:.

Martyrdom, guilt, sin, and fallen humanity are paradigms that contemporary spiritual women and
men have outgrown. These institutions of religion have become spiritually regressive. If the
initiatic impulse with which Martinism has been entrusted is to survive into the next century as a
vital force, Martinist adepts must take authority to reinterpret the aspects of Martinist teaching
that conserve these inappropriate medievalisms. Let us look at the problem of Martinist
Theodicy and our understanding of the origin and nature of evil.

In adapting the Elus Cohen teachings to Freemasonry, Willermoz composed initiatory lectures
on the problems of human sin and evil. Unfortunately, he took as his model certain Jewish
Kabbalistic teachings that agree in essence with Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox doctrines of
the Fall of Man and Original Sin. For example, in his lecture for the Degree of Grand Professed
Knights, he refers many times to the primal “Crime” of humanity against God, which is to be
understood as the root cause for human alienation from Godhead and Spiritual Beings.

However, the doctrines of the Fall of Man and Original Sin are grossly distorted ways of
understanding the true relationship of Godhead and humanity. They promote the dualistic,
diphysite, and anti-gnostical view that mankind is “created” by God out of profane materials as a
kind of Pinocchio doll that will be given “real” life if, and when, he proves himself worthy.

To the contrary, the Godhead emanates Cosmos or the All in an eternal Present (rather than in a
remote primordial age) through extension of the Divine Image out of Non-Being into Being
through the AIN SOPH AUR, to use the Christian Cabalistic reference. This archetypal Imago
Dei in its totality has been called Cosmos (Plato), Primal  (Hermes Trismegistus),
Adam Kadmon and Microprosopus (Kabbalah), Kalachakra and Mahamudra (Tibetan Highest
Yoga Tantra), -Melchizedek, the Cosmic Archetypal Human, and the Pleroma of the
Aeons (Gnostic). Its “residence mandala” is the primal universe of Atziluth, and by emanation
in syzygies or yab-yum deities all beings, from the tiniest elementary “particles” to the greatest
organisms of spiritual Hierarchy, are brought forth in all four worlds.

All that exists is sacred, divine, and of God as an aspect of the Divine Image. There is no
dualism, no “dead” matter. There is only God. As the Master Jesus said in the Gospel of
Thomas, “The Malkuth of God is spread out upon the Earth, yet mankind doesn’t see it.”

Mankind, however, is unlike all other emanated beings, for each human being synthesizes the
entire Imago Dei as a microcosm of the Grand Macrocosm. In that fact lies the entire theory and
practice of the Master Elus Cohen and all other global, planetary, Melchizedekian, and
Bodhisattvan priesthoods. Reintegration, attunement, and redemptive theurgical operations done
selflessly for the benefit of all beings can be discovered and exercised only by fully developed
and spiritually mature human beings. Like all gnosis, this cannot be taught; it must be learned.
As the ancient Delphic and Pythagorean philosophers, including Plato, admonished, Gnothi
Seauton, “Know for Thyself.”
I submit to you that the medieval categories of “sin” and “guilt” have no part in Martinist
doctrine, other than to declare that they are part of the Grand Illusion of spiritual childhood and
the suffering we endure as part of growing. Their doctrines do not produce positive
psychological or spiritual results for contemporary humanity. They have become part of the
“problem,” not part of the “solution,” for humanity.

I submit that we should amend our understanding of the Fall of Man and Angels. Neither
Mankind nor the Angelic Beings fell from grace in some remote, primal past. As a matter of
fact, Shaitan or Satan was biblically portrayed as a Son of God in the Royal Court as late as 400
B.C.E. in the Book of Job. In the few centuries following, the idea of a “Fall” became current in
Jewish intertestamental scripture. Clearly, the “Fall” marked a period in the psychological
history of human consciousness--not in the primal spiritual genesis of the Cosmos--and can be
dated to about 300 B.C.!

Jesus “saw” Satan falling onto the Earth like a shooting star, according to the writer of Luke’s
Gospel. But scholars agree that this is not a logion of the Master Jesus; it is redaction and
interpretation by the writer, who appeals to folk doctrine current in first-century Christian
communities. Yeshua never offered teachings concerning the Fall of Man and Angels. He taught
only concerning the liberation of humanity from ignorance, suffering, and spiritual darkness.

When asked, “Why was this man born blind; was it for his own sin, or for that of his parents?”
Jesus refused to admit either of the implications--that one’s sufferings are caused by personal sin
in a previous lifetime, or that they are caused by corporate sins of the parents. Each alternative
was a form of the “Original Sin” doctrine, and had its analogies in the Deuteronomic Theodicy,
which maintained that God punished the wicked and rewarded the just in this lifetime. This led
to the conclusion that if one is wealthy, God loves him, but if one is sick or poor, God is
punishing him!

This Deuteronomic Theodicy was resoundingly challenged by the philosophical debates

represented in the Book of Job, which like certain other ancient literature was a format for
revolutionizing obsolete theodicy and seems to have been serially composed in a wisdom school
over the period of several generations. Job first of all admitted that the righteous do suffer
unjustly. God permits this to happen so that people can have the opportunity to spiritually grow
and mature through non-attachment and the bearing of collective sacrificial suffering.

It seems that our religious institutions of sainthood and martyrdom, then, came into being during
the same Hellenistic period that produced our mythologies concerning the Fall of Mankind.
They are psychologically dependent one upon the other. They have been employed to support
each other in the obsolete medieval synthesis that I propose we now have the courage to change.

Again, why is the man born blind? Jesus said, “So that the glory of God can be made manifest in
healing him.” In other words, the cause of the man’s blindness is rooted not in the past, but in
the future! He is not born blind specifically because of some simple karmic cause in the past--
indeed, past causality branches into an infinity of interwoven currents that no human mind could
comprehend. Rather, the man’s blindness exists because it serves to invoke healing and
reintegration. It is like the question that evokes an answer, or the problem that demands a
solution.

Spiritually, we are all “men born blind,” are we not? But our concern is not to discover why we
are in this condition, any more than we should ask why the baby is born naked and incapable of
speech.

The man is born blind for the same reason that we are all born helpless, traumatized, and totally
dependent upon the nurture of others. We are all manifestations of transmigrating monads on a
long journey of synthesis from the most simple to the most complex of beingness. We are all
Pinocchios trying to become “real boys.” But unlike Pinocchio, we don’t need a Blue Fairy with
a magic wand to make us “real.” We simply need to awaken and evoke that which we already
are and possess deep in the hearts of our sacred reality and divine beingness.

In other words, the challenges of Theodicy show us that mankind is a work-in-progress, a slowly
growing and spiritually maturing divine child. “Sin” and “guilt” are attributes of ontological
childhood that are best understood in the simple and practical terms of human childhood and
child-raising, rather than crime detection and punishment! Mythologies of the Fall and doctrines
of Original Sin no longer illuminate us. By the same token, medieval ideas of sainthood and
martyrdom no longer illuminate what is sacred in humanity--as Blavatsky so emphatically tried
to show.

I propose that we agree to reinterpret the Martinist teachings concerning Theodicy to make them
consistent with philosophical monism, equality of the sexes, the divinity of humanity, and the
deepest insights of Eastern and Western thought concerning sin, guilt, and spiritual evolution.
We should search deeply into our European Hermetic, Gnostic, Jewish Kabbalistic, and Christian
Cabalistic traditions for better approaches to Theodicy, and that we supplement this with the
great insights of Tibetan Buddhism and Vedanta. Finally, all of this should be subject to a
comparison with the historical Teachings of the Master Jesus as preserved in canonical and non-
canonical early Christian writings.

In all this, we shall be reintegrating the Martinist impulse into a higher and more effective
octave.