The Gnostic Gospels (25 page)

“…  Rather, the Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will realize that you are the sons of the living Father. But if you will not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty, and it is you who
are
that poverty.”
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But the disciples, mistaking that “Kingdom” for a future event, persisted in their questioning:

His disciples said to him, “When will … the new world come?” He said to them, “What you look forward to has already come, but you do not recognize it.” … His disciples said to him, “When will the Kingdom come?” (Jesus said,) “It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying ‘Here it is’ or ‘There it is.’ Rather, the Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.”
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That “Kingdom,” then, symbolizes a state of transformed consciousness:

Jesus saw infants being suckled. He said to his disciples, “These infants being suckled are like those who enter the Kingdom.” They said to him, “Shall we, then, as children, enter the Kingdom?” Jesus said to them, “When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same … then you will enter [the Kingdom].”
⁴²

Yet what the “living Jesus” of Thomas rejects as naïve—the idea that the Kingdom of God is an actual event expected in history—is the notion of the Kingdom that the synoptic gospels of the New Testament most often attribute to Jesus as his teaching. According to Matthew, Luke, and Mark, Jesus proclaimed the coming Kingdom of God, when captives shall gain their freedom, when the diseased shall recover, the oppressed shall be released, and harmony shall prevail over the whole world. Mark says that the disciples expected the Kingdom to come as a cataclysmic event in their own lifetime, since Jesus had said that some of them would live to see “the kingdom of God come with power.”
⁴³
Before his arrest, Mark says, Jesus warned that although “the end is not yet,”
⁴⁴
they must expect it at any time. All three gospels insist that the Kingdom will come in the near future (though they also contain many passages indicating that it is here already). Luke makes Jesus say explicitly “the kingdom of God is within you.”
⁴⁵
Some gnostic Christians, extending that type of interpretation, expected human liberation to occur not through actual events in history, but through internal transformation.

For similar reasons, gnostic Christians criticized orthodox
views of Jesus that identified him as one external to the disciples, and superior to them. For, according to Mark, when the disciples came to recognize who Jesus was, they thought of him as their appointed King:

And Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do men say that I am?” And they told him, “John the Baptist; and others say, Elijah; and others one of the prophets.” And he asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Christ.”
⁴⁶

Matthew adds to this that Jesus blessed Peter for the accuracy of his recognition, and declared immediately that the church shall be founded upon Peter, and upon his recognition of Jesus as the Messiah. One of the earliest of all Christian confessions states simply, “Jesus is Lord!” But
Thomas
tells the story differently:

Jesus said to his disciples, “Compare me to someone and tell me whom I am like.” Simon Peter said to him, “You are like a righteous angel.” Matthew said to him, “You are like a wise philosopher.” Thomas said to him, “Master, my mouth is wholly incapable of saying whom you are like.” Jesus said, “I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become drunk from the bubbling stream which I have measured out.”
⁴⁸

Here Jesus does not deny his role as Messiah or as teacher, at least in relation to Peter and Matthew. But here they—and their answers—represent an inferior level of understanding. Thomas, who recognizes that he cannot assign any specific role to Jesus, transcends, at this moment of recognition, the relation of student to master. He becomes himself like the “living Jesus,” who declares, “Whoever will drink from my mouth will become as I am, and I myself will become that person, and the things that are hidden will be revealed to him.”
⁴⁹

Gnostic sources often do depict Jesus answering questions, taking the role of teacher, revealer, and spiritual master. But here, too, the gnostic model stands close to the psychotherapeutic
one. Both acknowledge the need for guidance, but only as a provisional measure. The purpose of accepting authority is to learn to outgrow it. When one becomes mature, one no longer needs any external authority. The one who formerly took the place of a disciple comes to recognize himself as Jesus’ “twin brother.” Who, then, is Jesus the teacher?
Thomas the Contender
identifies him simply as “the knowledge of the truth.”
⁵⁰
According to the
Gospel of Thomas
, Jesus refused to validate the experience that the disciples must discover for themselves:

They said to him, “Tell us who you are so that we may believe in you.” He said to them, “You read the face of the sky and of the earth, but you have not recognized the one who is before you, and you do not know how to read this moment.”
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And when, in frustration, they asked him, “Who are you, that you should say these things to us?” Jesus, instead of answering, criticized their question: “You do not realize who I am from what I say to you.”
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We noted already that, according to
Thomas
, when the disciples asked Jesus to show them where he was so that they might reach that place as well, he refused, directing them instead to themselves, to discover the resources hidden within. The same theme occurs in the
Dialogue of the Savior.
As Jesus talks with his three chosen disciples, Matthew asks him to show him the “place of life,” which is, he says, the “pure light.” Jesus answers, “Every one [of you] who has known himself has seen it.”
⁵³
Here again, he deflects the question, pointing the disciple instead toward his own self-discovery. When the disciples, expecting him to reveal secrets to them, ask Jesus, “Who is the one who seeks, [and who is the one who] reveals?”
⁵⁴
he answers that the one who seeks the truth—the disciple—is also the one who reveals it. Since Matthew persists in asking him questions, Jesus says that he does not know the answer himself, “nor have I heard about it, except from you.”
⁵⁵

The disciple who comes to know himself can discover, then, what even Jesus cannot teach. The
Testimony of Truth
says
that the gnostic becomes a “disciple of his [own] mind,”
⁵⁶
discovering that his own mind “is the father of the truth.”
⁵⁷
He learns what he needs to know by himself in meditative silence. Consequently, he considers himself equal to everyone, maintaining his own independence of anyone else’s authority: “And he is patient with everyone; he makes himself equal to everyone, and he also separates himself from them.”
⁵⁸
Silvanus, too, regards “your mind” as “a guiding principle.” Whoever follows the direction of his own mind need not accept anyone else’s advice:

Have a great number of friends, but not counselors.… But if you do acquire [a friend], do not entrust yourself to him. Entrust yourself to God alone as father and as friend.
⁵⁹

Finally, those gnostics who conceived of
gnosis
as a subjective, immediate experience, concerned themselves above all with the internal significance of events. Here again they diverged from orthodox tradition, which maintained that human destiny depends upon the events of “salvation history”—the history of Israel, especially the prophets’ predictions of Christ and then his actual coming, his life, and his death and resurrection. All of the New Testament gospels, whatever their differences, concern themselves with Jesus as a historical person. And all of them rely on the prophets’ predictions to prove the validity of the Christian message. Matthew, for example, continually repeats the refrain, “This was done to fulfill what was spoken by the prophets.”
⁶⁰
Justin, too, attempting to persuade the emperor of the truth of Christianity, points as proof toward the fulfillment of prophecy: “And this indeed you can see for yourselves, and be convinced of by fact.”
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But according to the
Gospel of Thomas
, Jesus dismisses as irrelevant the prophets’ predictions:

His disciples said to him, “Twenty-four prophets spoke in Israel, and all of them spoke in you.” He said to them, “You have ignored the one living in your presence, and have spoken (only) of the dead.”
⁶²

Such gnostic Christians saw actual events as secondary to their perceived meaning.

For this reason, this type of gnosticism shares with psychotherapy a fascination with the nonliteral significance of language, as both attempt to understand the internal quality of experience. The psychoanalyst C. C. Jung has interpreted Valentinus’ creation myth as a description of the psychological processes. Valentinus tells how all things originate from “the depth,” the “abyss”
⁶³
—in psychoanalytic terms, from the unconscious. From that “depth” emerge Mind and Truth, and from them, in turn, the Word (Logos) and Life. And it was the word that brought humanity into being. Jung read this as a mythical account of the origin of human consciousness.

A psychoanalyst might find significance as well in the continuation of this myth, as Valentinus tells how Wisdom, youngest daughter of the primal Couple, was seized by a passion to know the Father which she interpreted as love. Her attempts to know him would have led her to self-destruction had she not encountered a power called The Limit, “a power which supports all things and preserves them,”
⁶⁴
which freed her of emotional turmoil and restored her to her original place.

A follower of Valentinus, the author of the
Gospel of Philip
, explores the relationship of experiential truth to verbal description. He says that “truth brought names into existence in the world because it is not possible to teach it without names.”
⁶⁵
But truth must be clothed in symbols: “Truth did not come into the world naked, but it came in types and images. One will not receive truth in any other way.”
⁶⁶
This gnostic teacher criticizes those who mistake religious language for a literal language, professing faith in God, in Christ, in the resurrection or the church, as if these were all “things” external to themselves. For, he explains, in ordinary speech, each word refers to a specific, external phenomenon; a person “sees the sun without being a sun, and he sees the sky and the earth and everything else, but he is not these things.”
⁶⁷
Religious language,
on the other hand, is a language of internal transformation; whoever perceives divine reality “becomes what he sees”:

 … You saw the spirit, you became spirit. You saw Christ, you became Christ. You saw [the Father, you] shall become Father.… you see yourself, and what you see you shall [become].
⁶⁸

Whoever achieves
gnosis
becomes “no longer a Christian, but a Christ.”
⁶⁹

We can see, then, that such gnosticism was more than a protest movement against orthodox Christianity. Gnosticism also included a religious perspective that implicitly opposed the development of the kind of institution that became the early catholic church. Those who expected to “become Christ” themselves were not likely to recognize the institutional structures of the church—its bishop, priest, creed, canon, or ritual—as bearing ultimate authority.

This religious perspective differentiates gnosticism not only from orthodoxy, but also, for all the similarities, from psychotherapy, for most members of the psychotherapeutic profession follow Freud in refusing to attribute real existence to the figments of imagination. They do not regard their attempt to discover what is within the psyche as equivalent to discovering the secrets of the universe. But many gnostics, like many artists, search for interior self-knowledge as the key to understanding universal truths—“who we are, where we came from, where we go.” According to the
Book of Thomas the Contender
, “whoever has not known himself has known nothing, but he who has known himself has at the same time already achieved knowledge about the depths of all things.”
⁷⁰

This conviction—that whoever explores human experience simultaneously discovers divine reality—is one of the elements that marks gnosticism as a distinctly religious movement. Simon Magus, Hippolytus reports, claimed that each human being is a dwelling place, “and that in him dwells an infinite power … the root of the universe.”
⁷¹
But since that infinite power exists in
two modes, one actual, the other potential, so this infinite power “exists in a latent condition in everyone,” but “potentially, not actually.”
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