The Gnostic Gospels (24 page)

 … God created humanity; [but now human beings] create God. That is the way it is in the world—human beings make gods, and worship their creation. It would be appropriate for the gods to worship human beings!
¹⁰

The gnostic Valentinus taught that humanity itself manifests the divine life and divine revelation. The church, he says, consists of that portion of humanity that recognizes and celebrates its divine origin.
¹¹
But Valentinus did not use the term in its contemporary sense, to refer to the human race taken collectively. Instead, he and his followers thought of
Anthropos
(here translated “humanity”) as the underlying nature of that collective entity, the archetype, or spiritual essence, of human being. In this sense, some of Valentinus’ followers, “those … considered more skillful”
¹²
than the rest, agreed with the teacher Colorbasus, who said that when God revealed himself, He revealed himself in the form of
Anthropos.
Still others, Irenaeus reports, maintained that

the primal father of the whole, the primal beginning, and the primal incomprehensible, is called
Anthropos …
and that this is the great and abstruse mystery, namely, that the power which is above all others, and contains all others in its embrace, is called
Anthropos
.
¹³

For this reason, these gnostics explained, the Savior called himself “Son of Man” (that is, Son of
Anthropos
).
¹⁴
The Sethian gnostics, who called the creator Ialdabaoth (a name apparently-derived from mystical Judaism but which here indicates his inferior status), said that for this reason, when the creator,

Ialdabaoth, becoming arrogant in spirit, boasted himself over all those who were below him, and explained, “I am father, and God, and above me there is no one,” his mother, hearing him speak thus, cried out against him: “Do not lie, Ialdabaoth; for the father of all, the primal
Anthropos
, is above you; and so is
Anthropos
, the son of
Anthropos
.
¹⁵

In the words of another Valentinian, since human beings created the whole language of religious expression, so, in effect, humanity created the divine world: “…  and this [
Anthropos
] is really he who is God over all.”

Many gnostics, then, would have agreed in principle with Ludwig Feuerbach, the nineteenth-century psychologist, that “theology is really anthropology” (the term derives, of course, from
anthropos
, and means “study of humanity”). For gnostics, exploring the
psyche
became explicitly what it is for many people today implicitly—a religious quest. Some who seek their own interior direction, like the radical gnostics, reject religious institutions as a hindrance to their progress. Others, like the Valentinians, willingly participate in them, although they regard the church more as an instrument of their own self-discovery than as the necessary “ark of salvation.”

Besides defining God in opposite ways, gnostic and orthodox Christians diagnosed the human condition very differently. The orthodox followed traditional Jewish teaching that what separates humanity from God, besides the essential dissimilarity, is human sin. The New Testament term for sin,
hamartia
, comes from the sport of archery; literally, it means “missing the mark.”
New Testament sources teach that we suffer distress, mental and physical, because we fail to achieve the moral goal toward which we aim: “all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God.”
¹⁶
So, according to the gospel of Mark, when Jesus came to reconcile God and humanity, he announced: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel.”
¹⁷
Mark announces that Jesus alone could offer healing and forgiveness of sins; only those who receive his message in faith experience deliverance. The gospel of John expresses the desperate situation of humanity apart from the Savior:

For God sent the Son into the world … that the world might be saved through him. He who believes in him is not condemned; he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.
¹⁸

Many gnostics, on the contrary, insisted that ignorance, not sin, is what involves a person in suffering. The gnostic movement shared certain affinities with contemporary methods of exploring the self through psychotherapeutic techniques. Both gnosticism and psychotherapy value, above all, knowledge—the self-knowledge which is insight. They agree that, lacking this, a person experiences the sense of being driven by impulses he does not understand. Valentinus expressed this in a myth. He tells how the world originated when Wisdom, the Mother of all beings, brought it forth out of her own suffering. The four elements that Greek philosophers said constituted the world—earth, air, fire, and water—are concrete forms of her experiences:

Thus the earth arose from her confusion, water from her terror; air from the consolidation of her grief; while fire … was inherent in all these elements … as ignorance lay concealed in these three sufferings.
¹⁹

Thus the world was born out of suffering. (The Greek word
pathos
, here translated “suffering,” also connotes being the passive recipient, not the initiator, of one’s experience.) Valentinus
or one of his followers tells a different version of the myth in the
Gospel of Truth
:

 … Ignorance … brought about anguish and terror. And the anguish grew solid like a fog, so that no one was able to see. For this reason error is powerful …
²⁰

Most people live, then, in oblivion—or, in contemporary terms, in unconsciousness. Remaining unaware of their own selves, they have “no root.”
²¹
The
Gospel of Truth
describes such existence as a nightmare. Those who live in it experience “terror and confusion and instability and doubt and division,” being caught in “many illusions.”
²²
So, according to the passage scholars call the “nightmare parable,” they lived

as if they were sunk in sleep and found themselves in disturbing dreams. Either (there is) a place to which they are fleeing, or, without strength, they come (from) having chased after others, or they are involved in striking blows, or they are receiving blows themselves, or they have fallen from high places, or they take off into the air though they do not even have wings. Again, sometimes (it is as) if people were murdering them, though there is no one even pursuing them, or they themselves are killing their neighbors, for they have been stained with their blood. When those who are going through all these things wake up, they see nothing, they who were in the midst of these disturbances, for they are nothing. Such is the way of those who have cast ignorance aside as sleep, leaving [its works] behind like a dream in the night.… This is the way everyone has acted, as though asleep at the time when he was ignorant. And this is the way he has come to knowledge, as if he had awakened.
²³

Whoever remains ignorant, a “creature of oblivion,”
²⁴
cannot experience fulfillment. Gnostics said that such a person “dwells in deficiency” (the opposite of fulfillment). For deficiency consists of ignorance:

 … As with someone’s ignorance, when he comes to have knowledge, his ignorance vanishes by itself; as the darkness vanishes when light appears, so also the deficiency vanishes in the fulfillment.
²⁵

Self-ignorance is also a form of self-destruction. According to the
Dialogue of the Savior
, whoever does not understand the elements of the universe, and of himself, is bound for annihilation:

 … If one does not [understand] how the fire came to be, he will burn in it, because he does not know his root. If one does not first understand the water, he does not know anything.… If one does not understand how the wind that blows came to be, he will run with it. If one does not understand how the body that he wears came to be, he will perish with it.… Whoever does not understand how he came will not understand how he will go …
²⁶

How—or where—is one to seek self-knowledge? Many gnostics share with psychotherapy a second major premise: both agree—against orthodox Christianity—that the psyche bears
within itself
the potential for liberation or destruction. Few psychiatrists would disagree with the saying attributed to Jesus in the
Gospel of Thomas
:

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
²⁷

Such insight comes gradually, through effort: “Recognize what is before your eyes, and what is hidden will be revealed to you.”
²⁸
Such gnostics acknowledged that pursuing
gnosis
engages each person in a solitary, difficult process, as one struggles against internal resistance. They characterized this resistance to
gnosis
as the desire to sleep or to be drunk—that is, to remain unconscious. So Jesus (who elsewhere says “I am the knowledge of the truth”)
²⁹
declares that when he came into the world

I found them all drunk; I found none of them thirsty. And my soul became afflicted for the sons of men, because they are blind in their hearts and do not have sight; for empty they came into this world, and empty they seek to leave this world. But for the moment they are drunk.
³⁰

The teacher Silvanus, whose
Teachings
³¹
were discovered at Nag Hammadi, encourages his followers to resist unconsciousness:

 … end the sleep which weighs heavy upon you. Depart from the oblivion which fills you with darkness … Why do you pursue the darkness, though the light is available for you? … Wisdom calls you, yet you desire foolishness.… a foolish man … goes the ways of the desire of every passion. He swims in the desires of life and has foundered.… he is like a ship which the wind tosses to and fro, and like a loose horse which has no rider. For this (one) needed the rider, which is reason.… before everything else … know yourself …
³²

The
Gospel of Thomas
also warns that self-discovery involves inner turmoil:

Jesus said, “Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over all things.”
³³

What is the source of the “light” discovered within? Like Freud, who professed to follow the “light of reason,” most gnostic sources agreed that “the lamp of the body is the mind”
³⁴
(a saying which the
Dialogue of the Savior
attributes to Jesus). Silvanus, the teacher, says:

 … Bring in your guide and your teacher. The mind is the guide, but reason is the teacher.… Live according to your mind … Acquire strength, for the mind is strong … Enlighten your mind … Light the lamp within you.
³⁵

To do this, Silvanus continues,

Knock on yourself as upon a door and walk upon yourself as on a straight road. For if you walk on the road, it is impossible for you to go astray.… Open the door for yourself that you may know what is … Whatever you will open for yourself, you will open.
³⁶

The
Gospel of Truth
expresses the same thought:

 … If one has knowledge, he receives what is his own, and draws it to himself … Whoever is to have knowledge in this way knows where he comes from, and where he is going.
³⁷

The
Gospel of Truth
also expresses this in metaphor: each person must receive “his own name”—not, of course, one’s ordinary name, but one’s true identity. Those who are “the sons of interior knowledge”
³⁸
gain the power to speak their own names. The gnostic teacher addresses them:

 … Say, then, from the heart that you are the perfect day, and in you dwells the light that does not fail.… For you are the understanding that is drawn forth.… Be concerned with yourselves; do not be concerned with other things which you have rejected from yourselves.
³⁹

So, according to the
Gospel of Thomas
, Jesus ridiculed those who thought of the “Kingdom of God” in literal terms, as if it were a specific place: “If those who lead you say to you, ‘Look, the Kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds will arrive there before you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ ” then, he says, the fish will arrive before you. Instead, it is a state of self-discovery: