We have a lot to learn about how to act as a community from very ancient sources. Not just the quotes from the Bible or other sacred texts, but from the advanced societies of Egypt and Greece, who along with Judea, gave birth not only to Christianity – orthodox and gnostic – but to many of the concepts and institutions which we hold near and dear.
These three cultures were of course very different from each other. The blending of the social lines of authority and power, religion, sex, education, etc., have all been intertwined in some very confusing ways over the past 2,000 years. All of this has set the stage for the creation of a false struggle: the individual versus the community, and therefore the State. In ancient Greece, this power struggle would have been ridiculed, and rightly so. The basis of our word for communion and community is communio in Latin, and kinonia in Greek. It is striking that the heart of the Gnostic and Christian religion is the celebration of the Eucharist – communion, and as such I believe that the Greek conception of kinonia represents some important clues to finding and establishing successful politics and a fulfilling society.
Under the Greek system, particularly that of Athens, the participation of a citizen with the other citizens in the provision of needs and the constant perfection of the “truths of life” was the basis for what we would call human rights and dignity. The communal effort that treats not only the abstract rights of individuals, but embraces each citizen as more than the sum total of her parts. Far from perfect, but still an organic harmony evolved which involved civic love and care for others as the moral imperative. There was no distinction between social, religious and moral laws.
Many Gnostic Christians are interested in the logic of Greek philosophers. Christianity itself is heavily influenced by centuries of Greek thinkers from Heraclitus to Plato and Aristotle. As the Greek Orthodox Professor Christos Yannaras wrote:
From Heraclitus to the neo-Platonists, the knowledge of truth was verified as an event of communion: “everything that we share, we know to be true; what we have that is peculiar to us, we know to be false” (Heraclitus, Frag. Diels-Kranz I, p.148, 29-30). Knowledge is proved true, only when it is verified by common experience —only when by its announcement we share with others, understand and are understood, are in tune with the common experiential certitude. (1)
There is an important lesson in this fragment from Heraclitus for all of us who engage in community building, whether it is in the realm of public service, parish work, or advocacy. What Heraclitus wrote is equally true of our own experiences – yes, even spiritual experiences. While no one may know the depths of our soul as we do, the beauty and reunification of ourselves into the broader Mind of Gnosis necessarily involves sharing and articulating our experiences with others. What we may be seeing in our spiritual lives may be distorted by our particular or peculiar vantage. That doesn’t mean that what you are experiencing isn’t real, it just means that you might only be seeing it from one end of the prism. In my own case I greatly value the positions and thoughts of others because they help me to see things in a broader and more inclusive way.
After more than a thousand years of Christian political thought, which only partially continued these Classical Greek values, Western Civilization spit out a new era in human relations. Combining the totalizing nature of Judeo-Christian theology (i.e., the pastoral or “shepherd-sheep relationship”) and the essentially communitarian Greco-Roman ideals of citizenship with raison d’état and nationalism. This mixture proved to be perilous not only for giving birth to the totalizing State, but also for its cousin, our individualistic liberalism. Much has been written about the failure of communism, but the jury is still out on our system, and Nature herself may be the final judge, jury and executioner on that score.
The so-called triumph of political and economic liberalism I think is overblown at best. At worst it is a simplistic notion that totally fails to grasp the consequences of the profound alienation of the human person from her own society, economy and ecology, and most tragic of all, from herself. We face grave shifts in the ecological, economic and political landscapes – mark my words. We don’t have a choice as to whether things are going to change or not. We only have a choice to elect what we are going to do to make that change befit human dignity.
But the beginnings of knowledge, the very roots of Greek social and philosophical advancements, arrived on the shores of the Ionian and Aegean seas from the “Black Land” of Egypt. So too, the European Enlightenment is the product of the rebirth - the Renaissance - of Hermetic/Alchemical and Classical scholarship. In so many ways Egypt’s great legacy lives on, albeit obscured from contemporary appreciation by condescending scholarship.
The Pyramid Code is a very interesting series of documentaries on ancient Egyptian technology which may help us to envision a better society. The five episodes detail recent research on the pyramid complexes and ancient temples in Egypt, taking on issues such as matriarchal consciousness, ancient knowledge and sophisticated technology. The series is based on research conducted during 23 visits to Egypt by Dr. Carmen Boulter of the Graduate Division of Educational Research at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. The first premise is that Egyptian civilization is far older than we have been taught by traditional Egyptology, and that many of the techniques which may have been employed were for the benefit of all people. Using aquifers and shafts under the pyramids, Dr. Boulter’s theory posits that harmonic healing techniques and subtle electricity were distributed for common use, much as Nikola Tesla tried to do in 19th century New York. Mechanical resonance does work, but it does not make a profit for investors if the electricity is freely available to the surrounding public. If these theories prove to be true, here we have a good example of how communitarian values need to be resurrected using advanced, ecologically friendly technologies.
I was privileged enough to have been able to visit the pyramids at Giza and Saqqara, the Egyptian Museum, the Valley of the Kings, Queens and Nobles, as well as the temples of Karnak and Luxor on a family vacation in 1984. Having seen the interior of the pyramids, I agree with the theory that they were not primarily built as tombs. I have also walked around the Great Sphinx, whose water-worn bottom is very obviously older and larger than its current head. I have seen the ancient riverbed where the Nile once flowed around the Giza complex.
These clues to an older and more practical purpose for the pyramids resonate with other arguments concerning the social nature of the ancient Egyptians. If any society was communitarian it was Egypt, and this is reflected in its egalitarian approach to law, property ownership and inheritance for women. This is not to say that ancient Egypt was heaven on earth – far from it. There were rigid social classes, but then again they did invent beer, so I see that as a draw. But I believe that there is a great deal which academic Egyptology refuses to consider – a common history that may give us imaginative adaptations to our own social, economic and cultural problems, as well as clarifying the Egyptian roots of the original Christian religion. Let’s face it, academia in 1944 would have scoffed at the notion that there were detailed and competing Gnostic sects whose literature was about to be found by a shepherd boy at Nag Hammadi.
Hermetic and therefore Johannite and Rosicrucian teachings have long held that the ideals of serving humanity, Trinitarian Theology, virgin birth, etc. are all allusions to the Egyptian beginnings of the teachings of Christ. This heritage predates the Nag Hammadi texts by at least 300 years. Now, after the Enlightenment and an epoch of material science, the time is ripe for human spiritual and scientific relations to surpass mere tolerance, and embrace one another. The separation of Church and State is well and good, but to move forward we need to recognize that spirituality is the mother of our innate dignity, and the midwife of our actions on the social concerns of our time. Neither in the deserts of Egypt, nor in the cold of New England can human existence or individual liberty be sustained outside of the interdependent community in which we live, love, and work.
Unlike laissez-faire ideas of society which assert that our responsibilities are a matter of “personal freedom”, the great civilizations which gave us ways to understand and articulate everything from Gnosis to democracy clearly recognized that responsibilities are anchored in community.
If “freedom” is about not paying taxes or being “free” to neglect my responsibilities and all the while claim my “unalienable rights”, does it address the metaphysical value of the human being from the perspective of these ancient cradles of our beliefs and traditions? Better yet, does that kind of “freedom” correspond to the value we place as Gnostic Christians on the indwelling Divine?
Notes:
(1.) Christos Yannaras, The Inhuman Character of Human Rights, Domos, Athens 1998
