Gnosis & Deep Christianity

In his Six Criticisms of the Gnostic Renascence, Jeremy Puma challenges us to focus on Gnosis; to live it and try to “quantify” it. My initial response was sort of a question when I wrote ‘I think it might be a tad idealistic to think that we can “quantify” the inexpressible. I’d be interested to see how that might be done.’

After I wrote that I started ruminating on it a bit, and realized that the best way to express Gnosis is to live it by example, through what Brother Jeremy termed “radical compassion.” Living Gnosis is I think most Christians and Gnostic Christians would agree, exemplified in the life and teachings of Jesus. The Christ-impulse is a burning inner-command to serve. It is literally to walk-the-walk, and most definitely not just talking-the talk. But there is more to Gnosis than that.

The English Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton wrote a few words that I think sum up living Gnosis very well: “The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.” Chesterton would have gagged and dropped dead on the floor before yielding any credence to Gnosticism, but his grasp of deep Christianity unwittingly hits the Gnostic mark.

Gnosis is a befuddled word in English because it has no direct translation. It is of course a Greek word, γνώσις, meaning knowledge – but a direct, experiential knowledge of the divine. There are many Gnostics who claim a thunderbolt, or the proverbial light bulb. That’s not how I would describe my own experience of the divine. Not at all. Looking back on it, I think it should better be described as the opening of a gate, which led to a road that was not peachy-rosy, but which is a daily learning and re-learning of myself in the moment.

Confusion, spiritual torment, physical breakdown…and then a momentous awareness of being is how I might depict walking through that gate. It’s like learning to walk with new legs, and re-learning it every day, in every moment. It’s a constant inner battle to think of myself thinking, and to remind myself that I am an expression among billions of other expressions of the divine. At the beginning, it seemed like I was very much alone on that road. Like many others, I was looking for a personal God that stood outside of myself. At rock-bottom, and after years of searching and yearning for the divine, Gnosis came through the realization and revelation of Wisdom. Not my wisdom, but Holy Sophia, the Wisdom of God.

There were no thunderbolts or choirs of heavenly angels. It is a life and an experience that stands quite separate from the motion of time, which is why one of the best ways to describe Gnosis is as the constant, cognitive existence. This is both cognitive and spiritual Being. Getting on the road did not require some external God-form speaking to me in the voice of wisdom. The voice of Wisdom came from within. It is the Being that gives everything else substance. In Gnosis, the material presence of objective ‘existence’ is subsidiary to Being, and in my development an equilibrium is congealing that recognizes both the physical and the metaphysical in my existence instead of living completely enveloped by the material existence and worshipping an abstraction of God.

Orthodox Christians are probably scratching their heads thinking “what the hell does this have to do with Jesus?” In the Gnostic Aprocryphon of John (Secret Book of John) we read: “In the same way the mother sent down her spirit. The image of herself. A model of the full higher realm, in order to prepare a place for the descent of the realms.” That is what has given us the “Divine Spark."

For us, the Incarnation of the Logos is an act of the ‘mad love’ for Sophia, part of whose starry Being is spread out like little flames in billions of human souls. The image of the perfect Son of Man in the Secret Book of John is androgynous because this symbolizes the union of the Syzygy of Christos-Sophia. There is an undeniably erotic edge to this ‘mad love’ that Dionysus the Areopagite was so fond of mentioning. But this eroticism is merely a way of describing the unbridled, radical, passionate urge that must be fulfilled. Spirit had to come into Matter. It is the ultimate form of insanity. The Bridegroom, the Logos, a pure Being of Light descends under the veil and into darkness to claim his Bride. As the Syzygy they unite to become the true image of divinity.

The Mystery of Gnosis cannot be truly called a “link” or a “connection” because it is Being itself. This is something that cannot be understood or rationalized in common language, but it appears in the form of allegories in the Gospel of Philip. Living in Gnosis makes us realize that the priorities of the world of forms are off-kilter. A textbook example of this false prioritization is the media hype about Jesus kissing Mary Magdalene on the mouth. Jesus was married? Jesus had a girlfriend? Oh my! But the most important part of this verse in Philip has nothing to do with the sex life of Jesus. Look at the context:

As for the Wisdom who is called "the barren," she is the mother of the angels. And the companion of the [...] Mary Magdalene. [...] loved her more than all the disciples, and used to kiss her often on her mouth. The rest of the disciples [...]. They said to him "Why do you love her more than all of us?" The Savior answered and said to them,"Why do I not love you like her? When a blind man and one who sees are both together in darkness, they are no different from one another. When the light comes, then he who sees will see the light, and he who is blind will remain in darkness."

Mary Magdalene is an example of one who lives in Gnosis, because she sees what she truly is. Gnostics will haggle and scrape about whether Mary is identified here as the representative of Sophia (Wisdom in the first sentence.) But it doesn’t really matter either way. She could be filled with the Spirit – but according to Jesus, we are all capable of being filled with the Spirit because that is the nature of our Being. In my view Sophia is Co-Redemptrix, and Mary could have been her physical body. (Which is rather naughtily portrayed in the picture of Jesus above - he is, after all, standing in the midst of a giant...ahem..vesica pisces.)

Consider another passage from Philip:

“If one goes down into the water and comes up without having received anything, and says ‘I am a Christian,’ he has borrowed the name at interest. But if he receives the Holy Spirit, he has the name as a gift. He who has received a gift does not have to give it back, but of him who has borrowed it at interest, payment is demanded. This is the way it happens to one when he experiences a mystery.”

In simple terms Jesus is saying: if you get it, you get it, but don’t say you get it without getting it because then you’re not only a schmuck, but you’re going to end up being a slave of death. Not because you’re unworthy, but because you don’t see “the gift”. You will have to go around again on the monkey track and hope that you don’t come back as a lawyer.

So if we want to articulate what Gnosis is, then we have to recognize that it is best understood as a verb and not a noun. It is the act of kindling which transforms the spark within all of us into the Sacred Flame.