The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction (14 page)

GNOSTIC MINISTRY

Perhaps the most striking thing about the present-day vogue for ancient Gnosticism is the desire to enter into it as a form of spiritual life. For many, Gnosticism is no more merely a subject of idle curiosity or armchair study. People are realizing that the Nag Hammadi texts are not a shelf of ancient science fiction novels but rather the scriptures of a once-living religion. These books preserved and fostered the vibrant faith of real human beings. And they can again. One sees liturgies, prayer books, services, and sermons based on these texts. There is the beginning of a new Gnostic ministry, such as must have gone on in the ancient Manichaean congregations.

But our inherited stereotypes of Gnosticism make “Gnostic ministry” sound like an oxymoron. Doesn’t “ministry” imply a compassionate outreaching to the least of one’s brothers and sisters? And doesn’t Gnosticism, on the other hand, imply an elite self-sufficiency, a contemptuous indifference toward the unenlightened? Mustn’t a Gnostic, convinced of his or her own possession of godlike knowledge, look upon the masses of sheep without a shepherd and turn away in disgust?

That is how various anti-Gnostic passages and interpolations in the New Testament see it, but they are in the business of theological mudslinging. Paul is made to say, “
Gnosis
puffs up, but loves builds up” (1 Cor. 8:1b). “God has chosen the simpletons to confound the wise” (1 Cor. 1:27). The Church has always inculcated unthinking obedience among its bond slaves. But, in fact, the antithesis between knowledge and love is a false one.
Gnosis
is itself a form of love, as Plato knew. In
The Symposium
, he shows that emotional love is the earthly reflection of the cognitive Eros by which the mind loves the truth or seeks to become one with it by knowing, just as in the Hebrew Bible “to know” often means “to have sexual intimacy with.”

Historically, were the Gnostics abusive, arrogant despisers or elitists? Of course not. Marcion and Mani both found ways of incorporating the “weaker brethren” into the life of the church, just as Jesus and the Buddha had. And Valentinus said that, just as the Christ had appeared to reveal to the Gnostics their immortal divinity, so had the human Jesus died as an atonement for the merely “natural” men and women, who lacked divine nature but might yet be saved by “Plan B.”

Gnosticism was like Mahayana Buddhism, a wide and capacious raft, accommodating very many more than an elite few. In many other ways, the Gnostic initiate was twin to the Bodhisattva. Like his Buddhist counterpart, he disdained his own private bliss in order to reach down a hand to the mass of weaker brethren who had not and could not make the spiritual ascent on their own. Indeed it was because the Gnostic, like the Bodhisattva, had passed beyond all selfish worldly need and preference that he could embrace all with equal compassion. He had no more enemies. To love one’s enemies was to love oneself.

Like Thomas, the Gnostic might hesitate to vouchsafe his higher knowledge to the curious orthodox around him, but he knew that if he did, and they turned on him and stoned him, it was his own fault: He could have known better than to throw holy things before those who could not be expected to do other than turn on him and tear him to pieces.

WHO WOULD BELIEVE OUR REPORT?

In
The Da Vinci Code
,
The Body of God
, and other such books, we are told that some secret fraternity of Rosicrucians or Masons or Templars or Cathars carefully kept mum about their world-shattering secret. Why would they have done that? It is not that they feared they would destroy the beliefs of most people if they revealed their secret truth, for most people would never believe it. No, they understood that very well, and they knew they would be persecuted for blasphemy if people found out what they believed.

Occasionally Brown; Baigent, Lincoln, and Leigh; and others imply that the Templars blackmailed the pope or that the Priory of Sion may yet blow things wide open by revealing their secrets to the media, but in the real world there is no danger of this. If someone called a news conference and announced they had the bones of Jesus and the certificate to prove it, they would be taken about as seriously as the wildhaired spokeswoman for the Raelian flying saucer sect when she announced her group had successfully cloned a human infant.

WHERE THE ELITE MEET

The Gnostic must forgive her enemies, and love them, precisely because they know not what they do. But did the ancient Gnostic adepts really see it in so compassionate a manner? What about their hermetically sealed categories of the “spiritual” ones, the “natural” ones, and the “carnal” ones? Isn’t that to write people off? No, it is not. The seeming exclusivity is a rhetorical tool. It also occurs in the Parable of the Sower (Mark 4:3-20). The various soils are already what they are. By the soils’ natures as rocky, bird-picked, thorn-infested, and fertile, the fate of the seeds is already set. If the gospel seed should land on thorny soil, it will and must be choked out. But then what’s the point of telling the parable? Scrooge was right: “Why show me these things, if I am past all hope?”

It is just like Rudolf Bultmann’s interpretation of the Gnostic “good shepherd” discourse in John chapter 10.
⁸
Those who
do
not hear the shepherd’s voice calling them
cannot
hear it, since they
already
don’t belong to the special flock (John 10:26). It appears to be a foregone fate, a deterministic dualism. But Bultmann sees that this is really a “dualism of decision.” One must
decide whether
one hears the shepherd’s call, whether one believes the word, and therefore belongs in the flock. In exactly this manner, one must
strive
to
become
good fruitful soil, to root out the thorns and stones, so that one may bear sixty or a hundred fold. And even so, one must decide whether one qualifies as a pneumatic (“spiritual one”) or a psychic (“soulish one”) or a carnal one. No one else can determine which you are. And you do not so much
discover
it as
decide
it.

And so the mission, the ministry, of the Gnostic is to guide the carnal and the natural ones to the plateau of pneumatic, Gnostic existence. It is the Gnostic’s task to be a living lesson, teaching what the pious will never say:
that the spiritual quest and the intellectual quest are one
. The Gnostic must demonstrate that knowledge, too, builds up, because knowledge is love. To make clear that the one who thinks he knows but does not love does not yet know as he thinks to know (1 Cor. 8:2). The Gnostic says not, “This multitude that knoweth not the law is accursed” (John 7:49), but rather, “Father forgive them, they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).

The Gnostic minister tries to have in himself or herself the mind that was in Christ Jesus who, though he was in the form of God, esteemed not equality with God a thing to be stubbornly clutched but condescended to the level of the mass. The charter of Gnostic ministry to the weaker brethren is the saying of Jesus, “Let the greatest among you be your servant.” To know oneself the greatest is no conceit if it sends one into the service of all.

MY GOD IS FEAR

The weaker brethren are those superstitiously bound to the commandments of mere mortals or of the Demiurge. They fear that greater knowledge and freedom would mean nihilism and amorality. We read that, during the Civil War, on some Southern plantations slaves fought fiercely against their own liberators! Why? Because they were afraid to shoulder the burden of freedom.

The Gnostic is brother (or sister) to the weak, the superstitious, the legalistic, but he is the
stronger
brother. And he knows it is on the whole better to be strong than to be weak! She knows that there should come a day when one ceases nursing and becomes acclimated to solid food. Meat, not milk. The Gnostic minister must be like the patient nursemaid mentioned in 1 Thessalonians 2:6-8, attentive to when the baby teeth are ready to be replaced by adult incisors. One doesn’t force-feed adult food and drink to the infant. Some years ago, the news carried a horror tale of a father who told his very young son to “Be a man!” and drink a bottle of Scotch. He did, and he died. But the Gnostic does not make the same mistake. One waits till the weaker brother himself becomes impatient with Mother Church’s steady diet of pabulum. When a believer begins to see for himself the holes in the fabric of traditional religion, then he has knocked on the door. And the Gnostic’s job is to open it, to indicate, yard by yard, the long path within. And this is one very positive result of the popularity of
The Da Vinci Code
: It has smoked out many people who, reading it, discovered that they were ready for something beyond what their churches had always spoon-fed them.

THE LONELY ROAD

The Gnostic mission, then, is not to catechize, not to indoctrinate. This voyage to
gnosis
is a quest the initiate must make for herself. No one can take her there. No one can give a free ride to the destination. At most one can prompt and prod forward.

Since the whole point of Gnosticism is that the truth is within, the ministerial role in spiritual guidance must be that of a Socratic midwife. Like a Zen master, one raises questions; one does not manipulate another into parroting one’s own answers. What would be the point of that? Nor is there any point in trying to hide the fact that the road is a bumpy one through unfamiliar landscapes and fear-haunted woods. Remember, the one who decides to seek must expect to find something utterly unexpected, something that troubles and dismays because it threatens to undo every comforting illusion of the past. At such a time the Gnostic must simply be a faithful companion, not giving false comfort, saying, “Peace, peace!” when there is no peace—not yet, anyway. “Jesus said, ‘Let him who seeks, not cease seeking until he finds, and when he finds, he will be troubled, and when he has been troubled, he will marvel; only then will he achieve mastery, and then let him rest’” (Gospel of Thomas, saying 2).

Do not the weaker brethren fear the meat of
gnosis
because they know it means leaving forever the nursery of comforting orthodoxy? They know the heretic is an outcast, and they fear to be alone. The Gnostic friend’s support is affirmation, his patient friendship is a living reminder that there is a “goodly fellowship” of the heretics. If one ends up abandoning the “house of the Lord” for a “den of thieves,” at least there’s honor among thieves! For that is what Gnostics are—thieves. Their patron is Prometheus, the glorious Titan who dared steal fire from the very gods themselves. And he acted not for himself alone but for the masses of humanity who hitherto huddled in the darkness of ignorant superstition. There is a great need for experts like Professor Teabing to share what they know when the time is ripe, with individuals who are ripe to learn it. But it would sure help if the Teabings of the world had their facts straight first.

NOTES

1
See Hans Jonas, epilogue to
The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity
, rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1963); and E. R. Dodds,
Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety: Some Aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1970).

2
H. Wheeler Robinson,
The Religious Ideas of the Old Testament
, 2nd ed. (London: Duckworth, 1956), pp. 75-76.

3
T. E. D. Klein, “Nadelman’s God,” in Klein,
Dark Gods
(New York: Bantam Books, 1986), p. 209.

4
Walter Schmithals,
Gnosticism in Corinth
, trans. John E. Steely (New York: Abingdon, 1971).

5
Walter Bauer,
Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity
, ed. Robert A. Kraft and Gerhard Krodel, trans. Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971).

6
Elaine Pagels,
The Gnostic Gospels
(New York: Random House, 1979); Karen L. King,
The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle
(Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge, 2003); David M. Scholer, “Why Such Current Interest in the Ancient Gnostic ‘Heresy’?”
Faith and Thought
1, no. 2 (Summer 1983): 22-26; Robert A. Segal, ed.,
The Allure of Gnosticism: The Gnostic Experience in Jungian Psychology and Contemporary Culture
(Chicago: Open Court, 1995).

7
H. P. Lovecraft, “Alienation,”
Fungi from Yuggoth
(West War-wick, RI: Necronomicom Press, 1990), XXXII.

8
Rudolf Bultmann,
The Gospel of John: A Commentary
, trans. G. R. Beasley-Murray, R. W. Hoare, and J. K. Riches (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971), pp. 374-75.