The website Aeon Byte is now starting to promote a recent interview they did with me, which will air over internet radio through the site on 5/30 and 5/31.
It certainly was a fun interview to do, because of the questions the host, Miguel Conner, came up with. He knows the broader background quite well, and this made it interesting, I think because my work is just a smidgeon outside of his "usual fare" - if there is such a thing, for he has a fairly wide range.
Given the topics his show/website covers, his vantage point naturally is gnosticism, and I think it is fairly well a given that A Course in Miracles represents a modern equivalent of gnostic thinking, and many of its students have previously been interested in Gnosis and Gnosticism.
As a critical note, I might add that in certain quarters the fact that Jesus used some terms that were widely used by the Gnostics, foolishly is thought to imply that he was a Gnostic. This is not the case. It is about as logical as saying that I must be a Frenchman because someone heard me speak French. The budding Church of Peter and Paul, which became Christianity, was in the habit of using the term Gnostics as almost the equivalent of heretics, for by that time the emphasis was already starting to shift towards formalizing their version of Jesus's teachings as a religion, as the world understands these things. In other words, for them, it was about the outside of the cup, not the inside, whereas Jesus taught (in the Pursah rendering: ("Why do you wash the outside of the cup? Don't you understand that the one who made the inside, is also the one who made the outside?" - Logion 89) So mainly the difference between what became the orthodox Christianity of Peter and Paul, and the "Gnostic groups" is about seeing the relevance of his teachings on an internal level, as an inner experience of learning the teachings of Jesus, versus the outer religious practice of what became Christianity, which focuses primarily on the outer level, on the words and the behavior. In short, Jesus was not a Gnostic in the narrow sense, but the Gnostics as a group did preserve certain aspects of his teachings which were ignored or actively repressed by the increasingly powerful group around Peter and Paul. Some schools, such as the school of Valentinus did come very close in their understanding to the way we now see his thought system in A Course in Miracles. I believe that it is this circumstance why many people who study the Course in this lifetime, have some form of past-life memories of being around at the time of Jesus, and very often in a gnostic context.
Showing posts with label Gnosticism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gnosticism. Show all posts
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Love Does Not Condemn
This is the book. The subtitle spells it out. In a way, if Ken Wapnick has a magnum opus, this is it. It is not for the faint of heart, but others will inhale this material, for it puts our entire Western spiritual/religious framework into a completely new perspective.
More than many other authors, Ken has the profound erudition in the Western intellectual tradition to understand the full scope of the intellectual context of the Course. For some, this may appear to be of passing interest only, but for many others this is very relevant indeed as our study of the Course deepens. Seen at an abstract level, the Course appears to be Advaita Vedanta for the West and with one very important twist, namely that the manifest world is not lent credence at all, as it does in Advaita by seeing it as a Divine play, but rather as a manifestation, a projection in physical form, of the "tiny mad idea" of the separation only. In other words, the world is only what the perceiver, who conceives of himself as separate from the all, perceives, and is a reflection of the erroneous thought process, that takes physical form only because of the separation thought itself, and has no external cause. This turns out to be crucial, as in a way this leaves even Advaita Vedanta with a compromise to dualistic thinking, granting some limited objectivity to the world of form - i.e. the world, although being seen as an illusion, and a silly play, is not our illusion, but is conceived in the mind of the godhead, etc. therefore my changing my mind is not enough. The Course is completely radical in seeing that the only source of the world is illusory itself, being only the tiny misthought, which it refers to as "the tiny mad idea," as if anything at all could be separate from God. And so our only problem is the healing of our own misperception, and what is needed is our willingness to find "another way" of looking at this world. And thus for A Course in Miracles, it's all in the mind, and therein lies the rub. With this little introduction, I want to simply highlight some of the exciting historical explorations in this book.
The terms for the subtitle were taken from a seventeenth century version of the Book of Common Prayer, which says the following: "From fornication, and all other deadly sin; and from all the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil, Good Lord, deliver us." And anybody who has been around the Jewish or Christian faiths, and their institutionalization of guilt, will immediately appreciate how central these concepts are. At least in the tradition of A Course in Miracles, it is clear how we are to be delivered of these evils, namely by relinquishing our investment in their reality, for as with all demons, they are brought to life and kept alive only by our faith in them, while Jesus teaches only forgiveness of our sins. The explorations of this book really deepen the message of the Course, by demonstrating how Jesus in its pages not only offers correction of certain Biblical passages and concepts, or our interpretation thereof, but how at a much deeper level, it deals with a number of themes peculiar to Western spirituality and religion, and resolves many issues where Western thought has been stuck at various times. And it is important to remember that very much in line with the thinking C.G. Jung expressed on this point, that if we were born in the West, it would probably be helpful to resolve our issues in the context of Western traditions, since we can only resolve the issues on the level where they occur. Jung meant his comments as a counterweight to the fashionable flight to Eastern spiritualities. The title of this book sets the tone immediately in line with the thought system of ACIM, in that it is a teaching of love, and non-judgment, non-condemnation, or, to put it positively, forgiveness. The dedication of the book is worth quoting as well:
Thus in the typical quaint language of that time this highlights a path of inner inquiry, in a spirit we also find in ACIM, expressed in the second century gnostic teacher Valentinus, whose teachings are known to us only in fairly fragmentary form, but bear close resemblance to the Course in some respects. Ken then balances this statements, which a quote from the Course, which explains the title of the book:
In Section IIa, the book develops the versions of the "creation myth" in Platonism, Christianity, and Gnosticism, showing strands both dualistic and non-dualistic thinking, demonstrating in depth how the more inward focused worlds of Gnostic and Platonic thought intermingled with emerging Christian thought. It is in the 9th chapter, about Jesus, that some of the formational themes in the development of early Christianity get an airing, in particular the principal difference between the Gnostic schools seeing the resurrection as an inner development, and something that preceded the crucifixion, versus the then emerging proto-Christian orthodoxy, which with Paul thinks of the resurrection mostly as a bodily event, which happens only after the crucifixion. It is very helpful for us to understand that these different positions were being widely debated in these early years. Another very important discussion is the one about Docetism, dealing with the question to what extent Jesus was or was not his body, or he only appeared in a body, which includes discussions of such gems as the Acts of John, where the apostles discuss the differences in their respective experiences of Jesus. Again, exploring all of these precedents would give us a deeper appreciation that the later positions of the Course have deep roots in a long tradition, and address issues that people have struggled with for the last 2000 years, even though for long periods of time certain "orthodox" notions appeared to limit the questioning and the debate. As we can understand with the benefit of hindsight, such periods of quiet meant not that all questions had been answered, just more or less effectively suppressed.
This section concludes with a chapter on "Practical Implications," showing how all these different strains of thinking under the broader umbrella of Christian thought, resulted in widely differing lifestyles, again modeling all of the differing attitudes which we may recognize in students of ACIM to different degrees, if they run off half-cocked with a partial understanding of the Course. To start, it is noteworthy how little currency some dominant points of Christian practice seem to get in Gnostic circles, or at least how different they are in their interpretation, this applies to baptism, anointing. The eucharist barely makes a showing. The theme of The Bridal Chamber as an expression of spiritual "marriage" shows up, which prefigures the notion which in the Course gets the name of the Holy Relationship. This part of the discussion is therefore really about religious rites and symbols, then follows a discussion of moral concepts and behaviors, all resulting from different ways of looking at the world and our position in it, and varying from deliberate libertinism to ascetism to moderation, and some of these are truly interesting, such as the Gnostic libertines who essentially reasoned that since the world was not real, it was their sacred duty to break all the moral norms and act out. Ascetism then is the opposite mistake, instead of acting out because the world is unreal, it reflects a resolve of fighting the world and its hold over us, which of course likewise makes the problem real. Finally there is also a tradition of moderation. Next, in a further exploration of Platonism, Plotinus is perhaps the most interesting, for he focuses on a contemplative life, not on doing good deeds so much as through contemplation to arrive at a position where one cannot help but do good deeds.
The last third of the book addresses the position of A Course in Miracles, providing in fact an integration of all of the strands that were left dangling in these various traditions into a very different and amazingly coherent viewpoint, making the Course an intricate cauda to Western philosophical and spiritual tradition. As addressed at the outset, for the Course it is essential to understand that it's all in the mind, and that the world merely is the stage of our physical experience, but only a projection from the mind, not an objective reality. Thus the idea of separation happens in the mind, and this also makes salvation even possible, for if we made a mistake, and the implication is we can correct it, and the Course's position is that we overcome our futility by realizing we did not commit a sin which is incapable of change, but made a mistake which can be fixed. And the fundamental nature of fixing it is in taking responsibility for having made it, even if we seem clueless about the hows and whys and wherefores. The method of the Course is to experientially put us in touch with the minds ability to change--change our mind, or metanoia in NT Greek--so that it teaches us not mere theory, but a path of experience which helps us reintegrate our real self, instead of the proverbial idol worship which is essentially the world of the ego. For the ego always chases something that is not me, some idol outside of me, and that keeps me completely engaged in the world, oblivious to the fact that I have a mind which is capable of change. The Course says about this: "The secret of salvation is but this, that I am doing this unto myself." (ACIM:T-27.VIII.10:1)
In the Epilogue the book finally summarizes the Course's integration of all these strands of Western spiritual tradition as follows:
More than many other authors, Ken has the profound erudition in the Western intellectual tradition to understand the full scope of the intellectual context of the Course. For some, this may appear to be of passing interest only, but for many others this is very relevant indeed as our study of the Course deepens. Seen at an abstract level, the Course appears to be Advaita Vedanta for the West and with one very important twist, namely that the manifest world is not lent credence at all, as it does in Advaita by seeing it as a Divine play, but rather as a manifestation, a projection in physical form, of the "tiny mad idea" of the separation only. In other words, the world is only what the perceiver, who conceives of himself as separate from the all, perceives, and is a reflection of the erroneous thought process, that takes physical form only because of the separation thought itself, and has no external cause. This turns out to be crucial, as in a way this leaves even Advaita Vedanta with a compromise to dualistic thinking, granting some limited objectivity to the world of form - i.e. the world, although being seen as an illusion, and a silly play, is not our illusion, but is conceived in the mind of the godhead, etc. therefore my changing my mind is not enough. The Course is completely radical in seeing that the only source of the world is illusory itself, being only the tiny misthought, which it refers to as "the tiny mad idea," as if anything at all could be separate from God. And so our only problem is the healing of our own misperception, and what is needed is our willingness to find "another way" of looking at this world. And thus for A Course in Miracles, it's all in the mind, and therein lies the rub. With this little introduction, I want to simply highlight some of the exciting historical explorations in this book.
The terms for the subtitle were taken from a seventeenth century version of the Book of Common Prayer, which says the following: "From fornication, and all other deadly sin; and from all the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil, Good Lord, deliver us." And anybody who has been around the Jewish or Christian faiths, and their institutionalization of guilt, will immediately appreciate how central these concepts are. At least in the tradition of A Course in Miracles, it is clear how we are to be delivered of these evils, namely by relinquishing our investment in their reality, for as with all demons, they are brought to life and kept alive only by our faith in them, while Jesus teaches only forgiveness of our sins. The explorations of this book really deepen the message of the Course, by demonstrating how Jesus in its pages not only offers correction of certain Biblical passages and concepts, or our interpretation thereof, but how at a much deeper level, it deals with a number of themes peculiar to Western spirituality and religion, and resolves many issues where Western thought has been stuck at various times. And it is important to remember that very much in line with the thinking C.G. Jung expressed on this point, that if we were born in the West, it would probably be helpful to resolve our issues in the context of Western traditions, since we can only resolve the issues on the level where they occur. Jung meant his comments as a counterweight to the fashionable flight to Eastern spiritualities. The title of this book sets the tone immediately in line with the thought system of ACIM, in that it is a teaching of love, and non-judgment, non-condemnation, or, to put it positively, forgiveness. The dedication of the book is worth quoting as well:
To all "Gnostics"--past, present, and to come--who seek to know God through understanding this world's purpose, striving to realize, in the words of the oft-qouted Valentinian formula, that "what liberates is the knowledge of who we were, what we became; where we were, whereinto we have been thrown; whereto we speed, wherefrom we are redeemed; what birth is and what rebirth" (Excerpta ex Theodoto)
Thus in the typical quaint language of that time this highlights a path of inner inquiry, in a spirit we also find in ACIM, expressed in the second century gnostic teacher Valentinus, whose teachings are known to us only in fairly fragmentary form, but bear close resemblance to the Course in some respects. Ken then balances this statements, which a quote from the Course, which explains the title of the book:
The body was not made by love. Yet love does not condemn it and can use it lovingly, respecting what the son of God has made and using it to save him from illusions.
(A Course in Miracles)
For the rest, while there is no way to truly do this book justice in any reasonable length post, I'll offer an overview of its content with a few hopefully helpful comments. Part I, The Introduction covers the necessary background in Gnosticism, the Platonic traditions, the Early Church, and the gradual development of the antagonism between the church and the gnostics in the second century CE. All of these things are really covered in amazing detail, and their chief importance is again to gain an appreciation of how deeply many of the themes of the Course are a precise counter point to patterns woven into the fabric of the Western tradition, and how the Course properly understood proposes a very sophisticated resolution of many long standing philosophic/religious questions, frequently breaking through all categories. Also interesting is the realization how much e.g. the second century Gnostic teacher Valentinus really prefigured the Course, among other things in the myth stemming from his school saying that Jesus was off on the side laughing under a tree during the crucifixion--emphasizing again the resurrection as a spiritual event, not to mention as something that preceded the crucifixion, as many Gnostics in fact believed. Thus Jesus would have known at the time of the Crucifixion that he was not his body, and that even this violence could not affect who he truly was. Therefore he would not have been the vicarous sacrificial offering to a cruel God the father, but rather a wisdom teacher, demonstrating what he taught by living it, namely that that he was not his body, but spirit. What is clear by the end of this introductory section is that by the end of the 2nd century the free intermingling of "gnostic" ideas within the general budding Christian tradition is ending, with a polarization of the Gnostics, emphasizing inner experience of truth, as the more unruly crowd, who begin to be expelled more and more from the now forming orthodoxy, with the Church emerging as the winner, by every available means including book destruction, etc. In this context the Gnostics became mostly convenient scapegoats, against which the Church could define the right belief (ortho-doxy).(A Course in Miracles)
In Section IIa, the book develops the versions of the "creation myth" in Platonism, Christianity, and Gnosticism, showing strands both dualistic and non-dualistic thinking, demonstrating in depth how the more inward focused worlds of Gnostic and Platonic thought intermingled with emerging Christian thought. It is in the 9th chapter, about Jesus, that some of the formational themes in the development of early Christianity get an airing, in particular the principal difference between the Gnostic schools seeing the resurrection as an inner development, and something that preceded the crucifixion, versus the then emerging proto-Christian orthodoxy, which with Paul thinks of the resurrection mostly as a bodily event, which happens only after the crucifixion. It is very helpful for us to understand that these different positions were being widely debated in these early years. Another very important discussion is the one about Docetism, dealing with the question to what extent Jesus was or was not his body, or he only appeared in a body, which includes discussions of such gems as the Acts of John, where the apostles discuss the differences in their respective experiences of Jesus. Again, exploring all of these precedents would give us a deeper appreciation that the later positions of the Course have deep roots in a long tradition, and address issues that people have struggled with for the last 2000 years, even though for long periods of time certain "orthodox" notions appeared to limit the questioning and the debate. As we can understand with the benefit of hindsight, such periods of quiet meant not that all questions had been answered, just more or less effectively suppressed.
This section concludes with a chapter on "Practical Implications," showing how all these different strains of thinking under the broader umbrella of Christian thought, resulted in widely differing lifestyles, again modeling all of the differing attitudes which we may recognize in students of ACIM to different degrees, if they run off half-cocked with a partial understanding of the Course. To start, it is noteworthy how little currency some dominant points of Christian practice seem to get in Gnostic circles, or at least how different they are in their interpretation, this applies to baptism, anointing. The eucharist barely makes a showing. The theme of The Bridal Chamber as an expression of spiritual "marriage" shows up, which prefigures the notion which in the Course gets the name of the Holy Relationship. This part of the discussion is therefore really about religious rites and symbols, then follows a discussion of moral concepts and behaviors, all resulting from different ways of looking at the world and our position in it, and varying from deliberate libertinism to ascetism to moderation, and some of these are truly interesting, such as the Gnostic libertines who essentially reasoned that since the world was not real, it was their sacred duty to break all the moral norms and act out. Ascetism then is the opposite mistake, instead of acting out because the world is unreal, it reflects a resolve of fighting the world and its hold over us, which of course likewise makes the problem real. Finally there is also a tradition of moderation. Next, in a further exploration of Platonism, Plotinus is perhaps the most interesting, for he focuses on a contemplative life, not on doing good deeds so much as through contemplation to arrive at a position where one cannot help but do good deeds.
The last third of the book addresses the position of A Course in Miracles, providing in fact an integration of all of the strands that were left dangling in these various traditions into a very different and amazingly coherent viewpoint, making the Course an intricate cauda to Western philosophical and spiritual tradition. As addressed at the outset, for the Course it is essential to understand that it's all in the mind, and that the world merely is the stage of our physical experience, but only a projection from the mind, not an objective reality. Thus the idea of separation happens in the mind, and this also makes salvation even possible, for if we made a mistake, and the implication is we can correct it, and the Course's position is that we overcome our futility by realizing we did not commit a sin which is incapable of change, but made a mistake which can be fixed. And the fundamental nature of fixing it is in taking responsibility for having made it, even if we seem clueless about the hows and whys and wherefores. The method of the Course is to experientially put us in touch with the minds ability to change--change our mind, or metanoia in NT Greek--so that it teaches us not mere theory, but a path of experience which helps us reintegrate our real self, instead of the proverbial idol worship which is essentially the world of the ego. For the ego always chases something that is not me, some idol outside of me, and that keeps me completely engaged in the world, oblivious to the fact that I have a mind which is capable of change. The Course says about this: "The secret of salvation is but this, that I am doing this unto myself." (ACIM:T-27.VIII.10:1)
In the Epilogue the book finally summarizes the Course's integration of all these strands of Western spiritual tradition as follows:
A Course in Miracles is such a rewrite of Christian theology (as suggested in a preceding quote from Helmut Koester, reflecting on the impact of Nag Hammadi), in the context of the Neoplatonic and Gnostic traditions, cleansed and expanded by the insights of twentieth century psychology. Thus the old wine of traditional Christianity has been reconstituted in new wineskins, its "old schemes" looked at freshly, and presented anew to eyes and ears receptive to the form of its message. Indeed, the Course can be thought of as the zenith of Western philosophical and religious thought, reconciling the paradox that has virtually imprisoned us in thought systems that reflected our conflicted experience in a world from which we could not truly escape. Holding the key that unlocks this prison door, the Course heals these conflicts of the past, freeing us to build upon its foundation a new beginning, turning the corner on a journey that will carry us ever closer to our God.
That paragraph alone would make it all worthwhile. And while some will not have the patience for this voluminous material, it is important to realize that indeed all these "strands" as I called them before, are somehow present in our spiritual DNA, and that indeed A Course in Miracles is an integration of it all, regardless of whether we are conscious of it or not. The Course certainly is intellectually very profound, but it does not demand that we become scholars of comparative religion, philosophy, psychology, let alone all three. The present book is a tour de force that manages to do all this, and for those of us who are so inclined, it offers endless exciting vistas into the deep structure of the Course's thought system and its roots in Western thought. We end up with a paranoramic, or maybe I should say symphonic, view of Western tradition, in which the Course now forms the cauda which picks up all of the loose ends, and brings it to a rousing conclusion. And finally of course it all ends in a whimper, when we do accept the atonement for ourselves, and realize that all of this was "much ado about nothing." Gratitude to Ken Wapnick as its author, and the pre-eminent teacher of the Course is certainly in order.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Gnosticism for the Rest of Us
It seems to be unavoidable. After writing that gnosticism was such a difficult category that it is almost pointless, and that both the detractors and the fans of the Thomas gospel have applied this label to it at times, which only obfuscates things and never helps, nevertheless I received consumer complaints asking: but what IS gnosticism? I resisted. I explained, the point of the post was that it's a useless category. To no avail. So hereby I will try my hand at providing a somewhat useful operating definition of gnosticism.
For one thing, in order to be fair, if you follow e.g. Bart Ehrman in his book Lost Chrsitianities, you would understand that in the years immediately post Jesus, and before Christianity began to congeal in the 4th century (Nicea, the canon, etc), during which time Christians began to aggressively wipe out everyone who disagreed with them and their literatures, there may have been as many as 25,000 varieties of "Christian" belief. The appearance of unity that was created by Nicea, was really only an appearance, not a fact. The same illusion of one Christian religion then was powerfully reinforced when it became the state religion of the Roman Empire, although it would not take too long before things started to fall apart again into the Roman and the Greek orthodox portion. And the rest we know. It is still a mess today.
One of the main lines of argument from the early centuries concerned the notions of can we know God directly, and the Greek word for "knowledge" is gnosis. This sort of knowledge is talked about in some text as clearly an inner knowing, not a discrete knowledge of facts. Generally the sects who employ this type of a concept were collectively described of gnostics. You could broadly call them: those who believe direct knowledge of God is possible. The other group, which became Christianity, and for which Paul was the main cheerleader, believed we were miserable sinners, or as he calls it adopted children, with Jesus being made into God's son exclusively, and very different from us, as a magical saviour who saves us vicariously, i.e. he stands in for us: he dies, we get saved. Since in the thinking of this group he does die, and we must wait till he comes back to save us, we now need something to tide us over, and handle our communications with God. This is the logic that leads to the idea of the Pope as God's representative on earth, he is the Vicar of Christ, until the latter comes back, and of course they secretly hope he never does, for then they're out of a job. More generally of course the priesthood is then the intermediary between God and us, and we don't get to have his phone number.
This is the basic distinction: gnostic say you can reach God directly, and Christians say you can't, you're a miserable sinner, etc. etcs. The more the Christians won, the more they put down the gnostics as heretics, and since they burned just about all of the gnostic literature, for a long time we knew very little about them, except for the famous bishop Irenaeus of Lyons at the end of the 2nd century, who described all the outrageous gnostic beliefs in his book Adversus Haereses. So in a lot of ways, Irenaeus became for a long time the pre-eminent source on gnosticism, since he described the teachings of many gnostic teachers in detail. So he did more to preserve it by trying to be so thorough and efficient in wiping them out. By now of course many documents have been found again.
Gnosticism has too many varieties to be useful as a category, for even the very word gnosis itself gets different interpretations in different sects, and this is the reason why the usefulness of the category is dubious. For one thing for some gnostics the term gnosis begins to mean some discrete secret knowledge which has to be passed down, very much in the sense of the kabbalistic tradition. This latter usage is a special meaning, and not the original meaning of the term as Yeshua tends to use it. To the early Christians the name "gnostic," certainly post Irenaeus, became an epithet. The Thomas gospel was found with a collection of clearly gnostic documents, and lo and behold there are a few sayings in the Thomas collection where Yeshua uses the word "know" in a way that is reminiscent of some gnostic usage. Therefore this now results in the term gnostic being applied to the Thomas sayings both by fans and by detractors, and I'm arguing for simplicity. My view is just listen to the sayings as they sound. Believe you me, Yeshua stood out from the crowd, and he was speaking in very direct straightforward language. Therefore to think that we are explaining his teachings by framing them in the concepts of some second stringers, does it a disservice. By applying the label, you rob the sayings of their direct impact.
In conclusion then, I come back to my original argument, the Thomas sayings are direct, and straightforward. We need to read them as if Jesus is speaking to us directly. Just imagine yourself hanging out with him in Palestine 2000 years ago. You're in the crowd, and you've written down these things you hear him say, and you come home, and you go Wow! I gotta think about that... but you go back for more and after a while you have this little notebook of sayings. That little notebook is the Thomas gospel. Trust me, we were there, you and me both.
For one thing, in order to be fair, if you follow e.g. Bart Ehrman in his book Lost Chrsitianities, you would understand that in the years immediately post Jesus, and before Christianity began to congeal in the 4th century (Nicea, the canon, etc), during which time Christians began to aggressively wipe out everyone who disagreed with them and their literatures, there may have been as many as 25,000 varieties of "Christian" belief. The appearance of unity that was created by Nicea, was really only an appearance, not a fact. The same illusion of one Christian religion then was powerfully reinforced when it became the state religion of the Roman Empire, although it would not take too long before things started to fall apart again into the Roman and the Greek orthodox portion. And the rest we know. It is still a mess today.
One of the main lines of argument from the early centuries concerned the notions of can we know God directly, and the Greek word for "knowledge" is gnosis. This sort of knowledge is talked about in some text as clearly an inner knowing, not a discrete knowledge of facts. Generally the sects who employ this type of a concept were collectively described of gnostics. You could broadly call them: those who believe direct knowledge of God is possible. The other group, which became Christianity, and for which Paul was the main cheerleader, believed we were miserable sinners, or as he calls it adopted children, with Jesus being made into God's son exclusively, and very different from us, as a magical saviour who saves us vicariously, i.e. he stands in for us: he dies, we get saved. Since in the thinking of this group he does die, and we must wait till he comes back to save us, we now need something to tide us over, and handle our communications with God. This is the logic that leads to the idea of the Pope as God's representative on earth, he is the Vicar of Christ, until the latter comes back, and of course they secretly hope he never does, for then they're out of a job. More generally of course the priesthood is then the intermediary between God and us, and we don't get to have his phone number.
This is the basic distinction: gnostic say you can reach God directly, and Christians say you can't, you're a miserable sinner, etc. etcs. The more the Christians won, the more they put down the gnostics as heretics, and since they burned just about all of the gnostic literature, for a long time we knew very little about them, except for the famous bishop Irenaeus of Lyons at the end of the 2nd century, who described all the outrageous gnostic beliefs in his book Adversus Haereses. So in a lot of ways, Irenaeus became for a long time the pre-eminent source on gnosticism, since he described the teachings of many gnostic teachers in detail. So he did more to preserve it by trying to be so thorough and efficient in wiping them out. By now of course many documents have been found again.
Gnosticism has too many varieties to be useful as a category, for even the very word gnosis itself gets different interpretations in different sects, and this is the reason why the usefulness of the category is dubious. For one thing for some gnostics the term gnosis begins to mean some discrete secret knowledge which has to be passed down, very much in the sense of the kabbalistic tradition. This latter usage is a special meaning, and not the original meaning of the term as Yeshua tends to use it. To the early Christians the name "gnostic," certainly post Irenaeus, became an epithet. The Thomas gospel was found with a collection of clearly gnostic documents, and lo and behold there are a few sayings in the Thomas collection where Yeshua uses the word "know" in a way that is reminiscent of some gnostic usage. Therefore this now results in the term gnostic being applied to the Thomas sayings both by fans and by detractors, and I'm arguing for simplicity. My view is just listen to the sayings as they sound. Believe you me, Yeshua stood out from the crowd, and he was speaking in very direct straightforward language. Therefore to think that we are explaining his teachings by framing them in the concepts of some second stringers, does it a disservice. By applying the label, you rob the sayings of their direct impact.
In conclusion then, I come back to my original argument, the Thomas sayings are direct, and straightforward. We need to read them as if Jesus is speaking to us directly. Just imagine yourself hanging out with him in Palestine 2000 years ago. You're in the crowd, and you've written down these things you hear him say, and you come home, and you go Wow! I gotta think about that... but you go back for more and after a while you have this little notebook of sayings. That little notebook is the Thomas gospel. Trust me, we were there, you and me both.
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Nonsensical Logic Isn't
The literature about the Thomas gospel, and therefore the conversations on the topic in general, seems to be full of alternative theories about Jesus and Thomas which make no sense to me at all, the most predominant one being the notion that by one definition or another the Thomas gospel would or should be considered a gnostic document, which it is not. Some helpful reflections could be found in a current book, Rethinking "Gnosticism": An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category.
The notion of gnosticism in and of itself remains fraught with problems, because it is really a nomenclature for a wide range of religious and spiritual traditions which flourished perhaps in the second and third centuries of the Common Era, but which has roots that reach back well before Jesus. By and large gnosticism was thrown out by the nascent church as heresy, which seemed to be fulminating against the gnostics and to all they could to wipe out the teachings. And to a large degree the best knowledge we have about some of the gnostics is because the church did such a good job of fighting them, very much in line with the psychological notions of the Course that opposition makes the error real. Bisshop Irenaeus in his Adversus Haereses dealt with them so effectively that in many cases his work remained the best source of information on many of the gnostic schools. Even in recent times the term has given rise to much confusion, when at one point Elaine Pagels proposed that Paul may have been a gnostic, which is preposterous, and in another case Miachael Allen Williams in his book correctly argues that the whole nomenclature should be abandoned, because it lumps too many dissimilar traditions together. In other words, the term causes more confusion than it breeds understanding. I'll say!
Pertaining to the Thomas Gospel, the first association with gnosticism was because the manuscripts we have are from the 2nd and 4th century of the Common Era, and some of the statements sound so alien to Christian writers, that they thought it must be a heretical document, and courtesy of Bishop Irenaeus, sure enough, it became a case of let's throw it on the heap of "gnosticism," just as well nobody really knows what the term means, and so it becomes an epithet, and it certainly does not mean Christian. So initially the "gnostic" epithet became the knee-jerk defense of Christianity against the authenticity of the Thomas gospel. By now the internal evidence is pretty convincing that this view was not warranted, and that instead the Thomas Gospel predated Paul and the canonical gospels. So now other arguments have to be found to get rid of its perceived authenticity since its rediscovery, and that's how the churches and writes with broadly Christian allegiance have tended to use the term in modern times.
Then there are those who seem to think broadly that since the early Christians did not like the gnostics, and the Thomas material is clearly different from the Christian tradition, therefore they should automatically assume that the Thomas gospel was gnostic, and this should now be seen as something positive. That makes no sense either. What is true is that a few things in the Thomas gospel are evocative of some concepts we know from gnosticism, and some ideas of the early Jesus are well preserved in later gnostic tradition, such as the "Be passersby," of Logion 42, and the notion in the Valentinian school of gnosticism that Jesus was laughing under a tree, and they really crucified somebody else. Even though it borders on a possible misunderstanding, it is certainly an ineresting way of expressing the notion that Jesus was not his body (ergo that we are not our bodies), and truly puts him in the oberver's seat, as a 'passerby.' But the fact that some of his teachings which were ignored by the Christian community, flourished in certain gnostic schools, does not per se make Jesus a gnostics, just as little as he was a Christian for similar reasons: it was invented later. This is true even if some gnostic type thinking was in evidence well before Jesus's time, as in the Wisdom traditions of Judaism, etc.
So this becomes a classic case where the label really has nothing to contribute to the conversation, and in reality becomes an impediment to understanding the Thomas sayings as they should be understood, and without making Jesus into anything that he isn't. So the label - gnostic - in both cases cited above is an obfuscation, and it sullies the very freshness of the Thomas gospel, which first and foremost really remains an invitation to read and hear the sayings of Jesus just like they sounded, and it only takes a little effort to adjust in our imagination to be with him then and there. And realizing how easy that is, makes it also much easier to understand how he is with us here and now.
The notion of gnosticism in and of itself remains fraught with problems, because it is really a nomenclature for a wide range of religious and spiritual traditions which flourished perhaps in the second and third centuries of the Common Era, but which has roots that reach back well before Jesus. By and large gnosticism was thrown out by the nascent church as heresy, which seemed to be fulminating against the gnostics and to all they could to wipe out the teachings. And to a large degree the best knowledge we have about some of the gnostics is because the church did such a good job of fighting them, very much in line with the psychological notions of the Course that opposition makes the error real. Bisshop Irenaeus in his Adversus Haereses dealt with them so effectively that in many cases his work remained the best source of information on many of the gnostic schools. Even in recent times the term has given rise to much confusion, when at one point Elaine Pagels proposed that Paul may have been a gnostic, which is preposterous, and in another case Miachael Allen Williams in his book correctly argues that the whole nomenclature should be abandoned, because it lumps too many dissimilar traditions together. In other words, the term causes more confusion than it breeds understanding. I'll say!
Pertaining to the Thomas Gospel, the first association with gnosticism was because the manuscripts we have are from the 2nd and 4th century of the Common Era, and some of the statements sound so alien to Christian writers, that they thought it must be a heretical document, and courtesy of Bishop Irenaeus, sure enough, it became a case of let's throw it on the heap of "gnosticism," just as well nobody really knows what the term means, and so it becomes an epithet, and it certainly does not mean Christian. So initially the "gnostic" epithet became the knee-jerk defense of Christianity against the authenticity of the Thomas gospel. By now the internal evidence is pretty convincing that this view was not warranted, and that instead the Thomas Gospel predated Paul and the canonical gospels. So now other arguments have to be found to get rid of its perceived authenticity since its rediscovery, and that's how the churches and writes with broadly Christian allegiance have tended to use the term in modern times.
Then there are those who seem to think broadly that since the early Christians did not like the gnostics, and the Thomas material is clearly different from the Christian tradition, therefore they should automatically assume that the Thomas gospel was gnostic, and this should now be seen as something positive. That makes no sense either. What is true is that a few things in the Thomas gospel are evocative of some concepts we know from gnosticism, and some ideas of the early Jesus are well preserved in later gnostic tradition, such as the "Be passersby," of Logion 42, and the notion in the Valentinian school of gnosticism that Jesus was laughing under a tree, and they really crucified somebody else. Even though it borders on a possible misunderstanding, it is certainly an ineresting way of expressing the notion that Jesus was not his body (ergo that we are not our bodies), and truly puts him in the oberver's seat, as a 'passerby.' But the fact that some of his teachings which were ignored by the Christian community, flourished in certain gnostic schools, does not per se make Jesus a gnostics, just as little as he was a Christian for similar reasons: it was invented later. This is true even if some gnostic type thinking was in evidence well before Jesus's time, as in the Wisdom traditions of Judaism, etc.
So this becomes a classic case where the label really has nothing to contribute to the conversation, and in reality becomes an impediment to understanding the Thomas sayings as they should be understood, and without making Jesus into anything that he isn't. So the label - gnostic - in both cases cited above is an obfuscation, and it sullies the very freshness of the Thomas gospel, which first and foremost really remains an invitation to read and hear the sayings of Jesus just like they sounded, and it only takes a little effort to adjust in our imagination to be with him then and there. And realizing how easy that is, makes it also much easier to understand how he is with us here and now.
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