Been perusing the gnostic blogosphere…. and found Zac’s blog Alchemical Braindamage, Kudos to Jesse and The Revd.Max.
I am not part of the conspiracy vibe, but the perspectives which Tim, Revd.Max,Jeremy &co has given on soem of the old spins really inspired me. Someday I will commit literature and all these weird and strange things will be floating there somewhere in my subconscious mind..
Wishing everyone a good holiday…
I found Arizona’s blog Alchemizade through Jeremy at fantastic planet, and felt like I had struck something like gold. As can be seen from some of my posts I have read quite a few books on Sufism, especially Henry Corbin‘s work on Ishraqism, Ibn al-Arabi , Najmoddin Kobra and Ismailian Gnosis – anyways, as quite a few of my readers know, I am bound to feel affinity to the illuminated poet and mystic, Jelaluddin Rumi – and to see such a passionate and direct reactions on his poetry and prose really moves me. I hope I will have time enough to read through Arizona’s Opus – and take the opportunity to welcome Arizona’s blog Alchemizade to my blogroll.
Soon quite a lot of people will get on the “Judas” bandwagon, as has happened to Mary Magdalene earlier on. This is only a hunch, of course, but things have a tendency to mature over time.
Anyways, I stumbled upon this entry on the Coptic Gnostic Gospel of Judas at the textcritical theological site www.tertullian.org (sic!) whose other contents should interest serious students of the history of Christianity and the developement of Dogma, anyways. What appears to be unique in that site is that the editor has preserved the english translations presented on Antiquities dealer Michael Van Rijn’s website which appeared to be offline at the time.
It now seems like he’s back on, and offered the 5th of June an article on the find from The Independent, featuring an interview with himself.
Michael Van Rijn – to the general public, was the whistleblower concerning the “hostage situation” for the Gospel of Judas – an hitherto unknown organization presenting itself as the guardians of poor countries cultural heritage, announced to the Academical community that they had goods which they wished to share, for a fee. A fee which were several millions of US Dollars and which would only buy a restricted access to the manuscript(s) in question. Lots of details got lost when he apparently pulled much of the materials and detailed allegations concerning the find.
Van Rijn makes the following assertion in the Dutch newspaper
on April the 15th (source the www.tertullian.org feature on the Gospel of Judas):
“The owner of the text, who only wants to make money from it, has carefully timed the publicity surrounding what is called the Gospel of Judas. That is the opinion of Prof. Hans van Oort, who specialises in Gnosticism, Manichaeism, Nag Hammadi and Augustine. He called a press conference on his own initiative, to counter “all the nonsense” being written at the moment about the Gospel of Judas; for example that the Vatican has an interest in the document’s not being published. Van Oort is attached to the Faculty of Theology of the University of Utrecht and is Professor of Christianity and Gnosticism at the Radboud University.”
Also:”Van Oort does not rule out that it involves the missing codex from the Nag Hammadi codices. What he does rule out is that Judas himself wrote it. “There is no reason whatsoever to assume that he did this. Nothing points to that.”
Which is of course, nothing but extraordinary. There has been quite a few hands on the Nag Hammadi find and every single one of these asserts that the missing codex had been used as fuel to boil tea.
Think about the repercussions of someone squirreling away a perfectably readable and authentic document from an UNESCO funded joint operation to secure the documents for the world, and for the Coptic Museum in Cairo, Egypt!
Predictably, this “new” discovery has already caused some dust to whirl.. the Patriarchate of Moscow, for the Russian Orthodox Church found it earlier in this month necessary to let publish a press release on the official position of the Patriarch concerning the new archeological discovery. There he said that while the find might cast new light on historical matters (which I think he intends to mean new light concerning the heretical movement which produced the text in question, which is correct, we should expect), it has absolutely no value or relevance on the teachings and history of the Orthodox Church as well. That isn’t remarkable, such a quick reaction, however, is less common – it is usually the privilege of conservative scholars in the philological department and ask-me-a-question theologians by the dozen. Everyone thinks the Gospel of Judas is the product of the gnostic group which Ireneaus deigned to call the Cainites in his Adversus Haereses. It gives the manuscript in question a convenient category for the time being, which is good, I guess – and it also serves as a possible contrast to the already discovered and diagnosed Gnostic scriptures from Nag Hammadi.
What follows in the feature I cited earlier on, is an English translation of no less than nine fragments from the 62-page manuscript in Coptic.
The first is a version of the Gospel story of Jesus’ being tempted by Satan in the desert. Here Jesus is called Allogenes, the Stranger – and Satan is called Saklas, the “fool”. A brief comment on this: apart from Saturninus calling the leader of the archons (fallen angels), and chief demiurge, Satanael (later used by the Bogomils for the same) – there are no Gnostic scriptures which directly asserts that Satan and the Demiurge is identical. What is evident is that the author of the scripture does not side with Satan in the desert, which puts a question mark behind the allegation that the sect that produced the manuscript themselves were antinomians to the degree of turning the Old Testament hierarchy upside down. The 9 fragments does not mention one of the OT villains, so we have nothing to build a theory on its “Cainite” origin, apart from the positive role of Judas Iscarioth, who is described as being faithful to Jesus, in delivering him to the authorities.
I leave you with the link, I hope the web-editor keeps it up, since it appears to be the most comprehensive archive of the texts.
This is a brief little quotation from Paul Sedir (Yves Leloup), a mystic who for a while was oriented towards the Eglise Gnostique of Jules Doinel (he was one of the three young men, Tau Jules (Doinel) saw in a vision as those assigned to be his future presbyters; the other two were Lucien Mauchel (Chamuel/Tau Bardesane)and Gerard Anaclet Encausse (Papus/Tau Vincent). There are stories about Sedir to the effect that he never lost opportunity to speak with and teach new souls about the spiritual life and the great necessity for a turning around of our lives especially in this day and age, that he walked many miles during a strike in Paris to lecture for one single person, that he followed his conscience and inner intuition on basically every choice he made. Also, he left behind both the Martinist Order and the Eglise Gnostique in order to be consistent with his own spiritual path – a choice apparently his former confreres respected him for.
This is Sedir’s remark on the trends during the early 20th century, to rewrite, redirect and reconstruct basically the entire Gospel in order for it to fit with their Masonic,Spiritualist or Theosophical preconceptions of the Christ;
“Jesus was never an Essene; all that Jacolliot and Notovitch tell about travels and initiations in India is part of their fantasy; Jezeus Christna are impossible words in Sanskrit. Christ did not, as claimed in the Talmud, steal the Tetragram from the Temple in Jerusalem; He never needed lessons or training. In Egypt, when he was three years old, he made what we call miracles by
setting free enchained souls. He was a man, yes; but that man – perfect – contained the whole
of divine Light.”
Kudos to Elias Ibrahim for letting me know, it is from a collection of writings by Sedir only recently translated to English.
This is a post to follow up the past two posts on the discovery and publication (by Easter 2006) of the Coptic Gnostic writing The Gospel of Judas.
As I mentioned earlier, the question of the authorship is far from conclusive. Ireneaus identified the primary scripture used by the Cainites to be “The Gospel of Judas”, therefore the scholars might feel it is to be expected that the new gospel will reveal more about the Cainites than what Ireneaus told us in his Adversus Haereses.
In the already introduced summary, courtesy of Klaus Schilling at RadikalKritik, a site dedicated to the radical scholarship of among others, Herman A. Detering – Detering makes these observations viz. the actual authorship of the newly discovered text:
“The Gospel according to Jude explains the term itself: Satan is rebuked because the believer is not of the generation of Satan (i.e. the real world), but from a different race. The scene reminds of the temptation in the desert in the synoptics. Satan is also called Saclas (idiot), a term often found in gnostic literature for the demiurge, the god of the Tanakh : NHC II:1, III:2, XII:3, all deemed generally as Sethian writings. While this hints towards Sethianic authorship, it must be understood that the names of the sects and the distinction from others has usually been mentioned only, and even created by, later polemicists. They were hardly self-denomminations. Further progress in the publication of the manuscript is still to be awaited.”
Thus we find themes and specific names already discovered to be generic within the literature discovered at the Nag Hammadi find and identified by a joint scholarship (see Birger A.Pearson(ed):The Rediscovery of Gnosticism, Bd.1 The Sethian Gnostics, and John D.Turner:Gnosticism and Platonism, or even Alaistar B.Logan:Gnostic Truth and Christian Heresy.) as Sethian Gnostic. The role of Jesus in Sethian Gnosticism is of a specific, often considered to be the last – manifestation of the Saviour whose prototype is a heavenly being or Aeon who are generically called Geradamas, Pigeradamas, Adamas or even Seth. What is also typical of the Sethian Gnostic presentation of the Christian Christ (rather than Messiah) or Platonic Logos is that it, unlike most Judeo-Christian groups of the late antiquity, take explicit exception to all Jewish or Hebrew prefigurations of the Messiah itself. Therefore the “Cainite” doctrine associated by Henri-Charles Puech as familiar or similar to the Marcionite doctrine of the descent of Jesus in order to restore, redeem or save the fallen figures of the Old Testament. Akin also is a negative evaluation of a great part of the “Judeo-Christian” pantheon of angelic hierachies – to wit, an unknown angelic host corresponds to or is directly and intimately linked to a hitherto esoteric, unknown and unrevealed (underground, incognito) human family, whose close filiation is explained, in the Sethian myths – as the result of a union of the interior, hidden Adam with the interior,hidden Eve, in a Sanctuary (evocative of the Bridal Chamber) elevated above and outside of the Cosmic Order. As such, all morals and commandments are only accorded to be accessible to these elect individuals, the members of the Sethian or perhaps Cainite gnostic group – in an indirect and to the worldly, secular order of people, including the religious – way, directly through their filiation and sharing of consciousness with the higher and “invisible” hierarchy of celestial beings. That particular heresy may well sound like the Corinthian one that Paul writes against, at the very least on the surface.
Judas Iscarioth is not even mentioned in the Nag Hammadi gnostic materials. It is quite clear that the only Jude or Judas we hear about in the Nag Hammadi library scriptures is Didymos Judas Thomas, known to the world at large as Thomas the Apostle or even Thomas the doubter.It may well be that quite early in the developement of the different initatory schools of the Egyptian Gnostics a dissension over values and emphasis caused some of those most resilient from persecution among fellow Christians, caused the “Judas” symphatisers to be isolated from the rest of the movement.
Charles W. Hedrick wrote earlier in the Bible Review (“The 34 Gospels: Diversity and Division Among the Earliest Christians”):
In sum, in addition to the four canonical gospels, we have four complete noncanonicals, seven fragmentary, four known from quotations and two hypothetically recovered for a total of 21 gospels from the first two centuries, and we know that others existed in the early period. I am confident more of them will be found. For example, I have seen photos of several pages from a Coptic text entitled “The Gospel of Judas” that recently surfaced on the antiquities market.
Ireneaus on the Cainites and the Gospel of Judas(the Roberts-Donaldson translation)Book1, Chapter31:
“1. Others again declare that Cain derived his being from the Power above, and acknowledge that Esau, Korah, the Sodomites, and all such persons, are related to themselves. On this account, they add, they have been assailed by the Creator, yet no one of them has suffered injury. For Sophia was in the habit of carrying off that which belonged to her from them to herself. They declare that Judas the traitor was thoroughly acquainted with these things, and that he alone, knowing the truth as no others did, accomplished the mystery of the betrayal; by him all things, both earthly and heavenly, were thus thrown into confusion. They produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas.”
“2. I have also made a collection of their writings in which they advocate the abolition of the doings of Hystera.Moreover, they call this Hystera the creator of heaven and earth. They also hold, like Carpocrates, that men cannot be saved until they have gone through all kinds of experience. An angel, they maintain, attends them in every one of their sinful and abominable actions, and urges them to venture on audacity and incur pollution. Whatever may be the nature of the action, they declare that they do it in the name of the angel, saying, “O thou angel, I use thy work; O thou power, I accomplish thy operation !” And they maintain that this is “perfect knowledge,” without shrinking to rush into such actions as it is not lawful even to name.”
This sounds like, to this Gnostic, really tedious work, repeating every action mechanically along the spectrum, just to rule out the possibility, perhaps, that one omits to do an action in a certain lifespan only to be forced to perform it in another. But it might well be that Ireneaus got it exactly wrong – to take an example, Ireneaus could not understand the Sabbatarian mysticism of Sabbatai Zevi or his disciple Yakhov Leib Frank with its transgressing against the commandments in order to fulfill the Law, revealing the true and most valuable tablet of all, of all laws – the human heart whereupon is written the fateful commandment, in a single sentence, by the hand of God itself. Tricking the mechanical hierarchies of cultural conditioning, while an art developed painstakingly throughout several centuries, were only known to a few real geniuses, and I do intend to say in addition that it was not accesible to all initiated into any system, myth or direction of the Christian Gnoses either, at that time – and could not then be explicated or discussed in a language known to Ireneaus. I mean – look at the impending mess of the myriad popular writers on Gnosticism, they know not the head or tail of it, nor that it even has any. I maintain that all this business with wombs, with idiot-fool-godlings, angels and so forth – while left for obvious reasons in the hands of philologian experts, historians and archeological technician geniuses, are not that very accessible to any mainstream, neither secular nor religious. I also maintain this: that it will end being what it is, and end up also, in addition, not being observed or registered in our minds as an actual phenomenon of thought and idea – if we for some reason elect to not bother with anything problematic, or incomprehensible, to our sensibilities.
Therefore, of course, I am among those who will sit up and listen and make notes from the discovery of a possible only exstant relic of the Cainite heretics.. or Sethians for that matter.
I forgot to mention that it is Ireneaus of Lyonswho identifies the Gospel according to Judas as the product of the Cainite heretics.
The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913,no less) has this to contribute about the Cainite heresy:
They regarded all characters held up to retrobation in the Old Testament as worthy of veneration, as having suffered at the hands of the cruel God of the Jews; hence Cain, as the first man cursed by Hysteraa, the Demiurg, claimed their special admiration.
The author of the article also makes a point of mentioning that Hippolytus thought them of so little consequence and threat that he only mentions them.
Which is well and good, only that there are entire books missing from the only copy, a 14th century Greek transcription – of his Philosophumena,discovered at the middle of the 19th century. One may well argue, as one would, that the extant Summary would cast light on which heresies his missing books addressed; had it not been for that the aforementioned summary also are curiously fragmentary. With regards to the Naassenes, who nevertheless get an unaccountable large space in the Fifth Book, Mark L.Gaffney, in his The Gnostic Secrets of the Naassenes (I will review that particular book later, time permitting.) makes a lot out of this curious correlation between missing portions of the Summary and the books which those portions would cover, perhaps too much, given we are in no position to know anything about the contents of the missing parts of Hippolytus Philosophumena before a complete manuscript lands in our hands.
Nevermind all that. I messed up the prior post by not giving the cognitive link between the Cainites and the Gospel of Judas and explicating what all that Jazz was about.I should hope that has been cleared up now. An additional commentary viz. the name of the heretical sect and the “offspring” of the elder son of Adam, Cain – the conspiracy buffs of the far-further-furthest right wing oriented Christian fundamentalist kind have cherished the fact that an important character in Masonic lore is Tubal-Cain, i.e. he has an ancient semittic name which makes reference, at least superifically, to the Patriarch of the “wrong kind”. If we look at the various answers these conspiracists, you will find they are always barking up some genealogical tree which has a racial and etnic connotation attached. Perhaps more than anything, Hesse’s use of the concept of “Mark of Cain” upon certain human beings, whose destinies appears to be attached to be forever the travelling stranger, points towards the problematic of this very seed. Some Gnostic systems divided Humanity into three; A Hylic (material) or Sarkic(fleshly) humanity; a Psychic (soul’ish) humanity and a Pneumatic (spiritual) race – all these were usually associated with the three “sons” of the first nuclear family: Cain the elder, Abel the middle and Seth the youngest. There are many ways of reading and understanding this tripartition and apparently the three are sometimes viewed as present as potentionalities within each individual human being. Doubtless, with our “psychological sophistication”, being “Contemporaries” – modern Gnostics have a proclivity towards viewing humanity as such as unitary, while the characteristics of the true spiritual man are the product of some exertion, developement and divine assistance. My comment here is that the Nomadic peoples, since the “triumph” of agrarian civilization while forever travelling “strangers” to city-dwellers and rural peasants (or Pagans if you must) alike, with their usual lifestyle and means of sustaining themselves more properly correspond to the first martyr of the Old Testament, Abel – not Cain. The kingless (because each is accounted a King when they have become “men”, women and men alike), ummovable, individuated and never-fading “race of Man” – the Pneumatics, the offspring of Seth, forever the Stranger, Allogenes, however, is the Gnostics.
In a English language summary of the German scholar Herman D. Detering on the Gospel of Judas , courtesy of Klaus Schilling at RadikalKritik –
Detering observes that through the Patristic sources there are scant to go on with regards what the Gospel of Judas used by the Cainites
contained.The scripture is only named and called spurious by Ireneaus.
Henry-Charles Puech apparently viewed Ireneaus report on the Cainities as associated to the particular soteriology of Marcion of Sinope – wherein some Patristic sources on Marcion asserts that according to his heresy – Jesus descended into Hell explicitly to save the “villains” of the Old Testament, a flipside of the early Christian redaction of the Pseudepigraphic Ascension of Isaiah where the prophet is given a vision of the future death and descent into hell of the Saviour, in order to save the Old Testament heroes, who were damned to hell for not acknowledging the Messiah before his coming(sic!).
In the newly discovered Gospel of Judas, first chapter, a great deal is made out of the amount the priests pay Judas for the delivery of his teacher, and also that the priests think Judas is a true disciple of Jesus and fear he will deceive him. It also appears as if this is what Judas wants to do, i.e. not tell the truth to the priests, but he is encouraged to go continue his task by a vision of Jesus himself, whom he addresses as Allogenes.Since the first translated fragments of the manuscript in question deals with events before the crucifixion, we are left hanging with regards to the salvific ministry of Jesus, perhaps, to the villains of the Old Testament. The insinuation puts me in mind of the “universal salvation” brought by Jesus according to the Gospel of Philip – he came, from the beginning of time, to redeem and save, not only the good, but the evil with the good. And that, apparently, the Apokatastasis Panton, is the greatest stumbling block of all – anathema to the Hebrews and foolishness to the Greeks.
Hermann Detering’s current work “Judas und das Judasevangelium” available in German on http://www.radikalkritik.de/judev.pdf
Re: The discovery and subsequent translation of -a- Gospel of Judas (Iscarioth).
The I-News Wire recently released a press release about the find of a hithero unknown Gospel of Judas in Coptic, in Basel, Switzerland.
It is the first official “word” on the status of the Gospel of Judas whose rumoured find in Egypt and covert witholding from public and scholarly notice have circulated over the internet the last few years.
According to the churchfather Ireneaus of Lyons a specific group among the ancient Gnostics venerated the person of Judas of Iscarioth, along with Cain, Nimrod,Esau, Koram and a score of such persons who in the Old Testament were the enemies of the friends of God; Prophets, Patriarchs and Kings. These Gnostics, if they were, were nicknamed Cainites and appears to have held a very strong antinomian ethic which basically made it a virtue to transgress against the Commandments, no transgression evaluated baser than another.
These Cainites, in my view, could very well have been the group of Christians who according to the polemic of the 4th century Coptic Gnostic text Pistis Sophia were accused of performing Masses wherein female menses and male sperm were mixed with Barley and ingested in the name and to the glory of Esau and Koram. The resentment and revision of myth found in the system of Menander, a supposed disciple of Simon Magus, along with a certain Saturninus or Satornil – wherein the God of Israel are specifically referred to as a fallen angel, has found a ritual expression, perhaps, in the breaking of the commandment, by partaking of the impure with the pure(sic!), and invoking the name of enemies and villains of one’s own cultural and religious history and mythos.
The Cainites were also known to celebrate their functions called by them Agape, as did the early Judeo-Christian groups in Palestine in the nude, while holding all property, including women (…) in common. A very controversial bit this, but the Cainites have been subject to, and prototype, for many accusations past and contemporary. These views and practices have not found a passive audience, they are indeed subject to much polemic, also among Gnostics proper, as was seen in the inclusion of a specific condemnation ascribed to the Saviour himself in the 4th century text
Pistis Sophia and obliquely in the Books of Ieou.
To wit, a very great divide existed between the Gnostic groups represented by the first-hand accounts we have from the Chenoboskion (Nag Hammadi) find, as well as the Codex Berlin, Codex Bruce, Codex Askew and so forth. What these shared where at the very least a redaction with a very strong ascetic or encratic orientation – and these Cainites, or others like the Phibiontes (named after “dirt”, according to Epiphanius of Salamis these had so uncouth habits about their persons that ordinary pagan citizens in their townships refused to have anything to do with them..a very Tantric-sounding group, if for anything but association with taboo-restricted areas in their respective cultures), contrary to the general confused image of the Gnostics en generis – there are no actual cult of Cain, apart from Ireneaus and Epiphanius report on the rural “Cainites”, in Gnostic literature which has found its way to us. Neither are Judas of Iscarioth counted in the canon of Apostolic age saints among any known Gnostic group. With the exception, of course, of these Cainites. Both the Cainites and the legend of their veneration of both Cain and Judas of Iscarioth has featured prominently among themes chosen by modern authors who have written with reference to the ancient Gnostics – one should mention Swiss author Hermann Hesse, who in his novel Demian lets his protagonist, a certain Max Demian, teach his friend Emil Sinclaire, the hero of the story, about the famed “Mark of Cain” and its soteriological and existencial implications – this type of person is always a stranger, in any company, an enigma, someone shunned by the good people of any town. This situation is replayed in Count de Lautramont’s Maldoror, in the work of Lawrence Durrell, who puts the “Ophite” ritual of the serpent “blessing the sacraments” in the post-world war 1 Egyptian colony of more or less decadent British, Belgian and French intellectual functionaries of the Colonizing powers.The same with certain other French poets of the Romantic area. Above all, to persons with a liberal, libertarian and perhaps even libertine sentiments and orientation, feel at home with the briefly described heretics with the strongest controversiality with conventional Christendom,or Judaism for that matter. But little has been heard from them.None of the Nag Hammadi texts hint at the practices, or even the attitudes, of these ancient antinomians, the closest we come are the 17th century Antinomians with a prophetic penchant in Cromwellian Great Britain, or Utopian experiments in the wilderness of America, such as the Oneida Creek Community lead by the visionary and somewhat ambigious character John Henry Noyes.
Now, the first page translated into English from what appears to be an authentic Coptic codex containing the Gospel of Judas(Iscarioth – not Judas Didymos Thomas) make use of the very name, in Coptic – Allogenes,predictably as the name for Jesus.
The first fragment translated by Charles W.Heidrick (No less) appears to speak about the humiliation of Jesus, which is more or less a taboo in itself – to the ancient Gnostic Christian groups we know of that is – and a more desperate invocation of aid from God than we are used to. I will look closer into this later.. so this is the first of several posts on this press release.
Briefly Reviewing Arthur Versluis’ Wisdoms Book:The Sophia Anthology.
The last two decades has seen the emergence of a wide array of literature discussing the ancient veneration for the Divine Feminine.
As a contemporary Gnostic oriented towards the every-day enigma of our modernity, I sure hope it is not just another trend – but that it will remain a literary and philosophical stimulation upon the imagination and consciousness of our age throughout many decades still.I am not prone to make prophecies and even avoid putting my stamp of approval on rather sober prognostifications for the future, but I have a hunch, call it an intuition, perhaps even an educated guess – that the potentional of Sophia is yet to be mined completely in this post-modern age.
At the intersection between our own modernity – with its beginnings, so far as a move from a terra-centric,flat earth,”vertical” hierarchical consciousness through the midwifery of the european renaissance, towards the anthropocentric (sic!),humanistic,”planar” orientation in the “enlightenment” and onwards – and the antiquity, we find evidence, literary at most, sometimes barely accessible – of a continued undercurrent, an awareness among the very few of the workings of an invisible Grace which fills all things with meaning, even the meaningless. She assumed many names and these names fulfilled many roles and had many implications and consequences on that which is outside and inside the minds of us individual human beings. If we for a moment pause from our projections – we find the sapientia with its methods,crafts,approaches and ratios alive and kicking in the cryptical writings of the Alchemists. There is a measure which is difficult to grasp but easy to see applied everywhere, in the Hebrew Kabbalah. There is an appreciation, a sensitivity towards the mechanisms of emotional and intellectual stimulus and the consequence of withdrawal among the Sufis. Added to which is all the influences from the East which has no doubt contributed to the birth of a “New West”. Most important of all these, for reasons I hope has come clear through my series on the Fravartis – for a Gnostic, a reoriented voyager, is Our Lady Sophia.
Wisdom. A synonym has been applied to it:Wit. Pentecost is called Whitsunday, and this refers directly to Wisdom. An image emerges from this conjunction in Christian vocabulary: The Pentecost may be asserted to be the collective reception of the sense, the sensitivity and affiliation with Wisdom just as much as it can be considered the occasion of a descent of the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, the Comforter of post-incarnation Christianity. As Versluis explains in the introduction to his Anthology of Sophianic writings from the 17th to 20th century within the Christian tradition of Theosophia, Sophia or Wisdom, is not exclusive to said tradition but enters center stage for a specific reason. The reason for this, in my view – is that Christian lore suggests the event of a rupture which makes acquiantance of things divine and godly a personal responsibility.
Take for instance the event alluded to by the synoptic evangelists when they state that the Temple veil tore upon the terminal exhalation of Jesus. The exact location interior, of the crucifixion, Golgatha, the crucified one, and the three last words is subject to introvert contemplation in generations of Christian mystics and esoterics and many will come, even though Christianity crystallizes itself in different forms and expressions in this our day and age. A possible “reading” of this act of violence on the part of revealing grace – can be found in the Gospel of Philip, unearthed to the world in the August 1945 find of the Nag Hammadi Library
:
The mysteries of truth are revealed, though in type and image. The bridal chamber, however, remains hidden. It is the Holy in the Holy. The veil at first concealed how God controlled the creation, but when the veil is rent and the things inside are revealed, this house will be left desolate, or rather will be destroyed. And the whole (inferior) godhead will flee from here, but not into the holies of the holies, for it will not be able to mix with the unmixed light and the flawless fullness, but will be under the wings of the cross and under its arms.”
The connotations to the rending of the veil and the destruction or desoplation of the place has precisely to do with the Temple. In actual historical course, the Temple was left desolate at the onslaught of the Roman occupiers as a means to break the back of the once-proud people they had oppressed throughout many centuries. In theological course, the selfsame has happened repeatedly throughout the stories of the prophets and friends of God. The two stories merge together around the theme of Shekinah, and of Wisdom – in the Western mystical tradition, especially those of a judeo-christian orientation.
When Jacob Boehme enters the stage, so to speak, the location of the Temple or Sanctuary of Spiritual Reality has moved into mankind: it is to be found in the interior of living human beings. Not only did the Protestant reformation and its precursors, among which one can assuredly count the Albigensian Church – contribute to shatter, or at the least disturb, the assumed role of a human, mortal organisation with its own legislature and architechture, almost becoming identical to the organization of the Temple at the time of Jesus: it provided with a renewed interest in the Wisdom traditions of ancient Judaism.The first text in Versluis collection is not participant with the “modern” revival of Sophianity or the Ancient Wisdom, but one of its foundation documents: The Book of Wisdom. Wherein the ancient king (Solomon)’s voice is heard to speak about the finding and winning of the heart of Wisdom:
“Wisdom shines brightly and fades not; she is quickly discerned by those who lo ve her, and those who seek her find her. She is quick to make herself known to those desiring knowledge of her; he who rises early in search of her will find her seated at his door.”
Near all the Theosophers (I intend no likeness of Madame Blavatsky’s at all, think 17th century and who ennobled the term so that it became attractive for the Madame and her successors to apply to themselves)
agrees with the truth of this discovery – once resolved to seek a deeper acquiantance with being, one of careful attention and compassionate yet stern love, with the flow of the Holy Spirit, they discovered that it was She who moved them towards such new and troubling values. Valuables so precious they no longer could serve as legal tender in a world grown corrupt from uniformly not paying attention. Arthur Versluis has written an engaging survey of the impact and importance of these anonymous (at times to almost all, not only the world at large – such as Robert Ayshford and Anne Bathurst) where he remarks on the apparent disinterest of the feminists and controversialists who have adopted Sophia as one of the many names for their monolithic Goddess – in the more recent and immediate expressions of the Sophian tradition; the Christian Theosophia of the 16th to early 20th century; spanning from Jacob Boehme to Nicolai Berdyaev, from Protestant mysticism to passionate, yet mystagogic Eastern Orthodox philosophy;,
“..as we look closely at these books, we discover something rather surprising; they have absolutely no references whatever to the actual Sophianic tradition as represented in this book. How could this be? How could numerous books emerge on the figure of Sophia, even on Sophia as the future of spirituality, yet there appears not an inkling of the preexistent theosophic tradition of Boehme, Gichtel, Pordage or Leade?”
Arthur Versluis:Wisdom’s Book:The Sophia Anthology, Paragon Press,Minnesota,2000. pp18, introduction.
One reason is that the Sophia found in the Theosophia is not a personal projection of conventional worship; another may well be that the orientation of the theosophers, male as well as female, went beyond simple gender politics as their tendency might be – Sophia is depicted in prose,poetry and art as equally male, but above all, in either manifestation to the recipients, the visionaries, the voyagers and contemplatives (which all depend on own interior disposition, ability – and discipline)-Virginal. I have actually found reference to the romantic,renaissance and theosophic Sophia in other literary contexts and found there that the reason is even more focused: The Sophia of the Theosophers, while entering man rather than the remains of a geo-political architecture such as the Temple of Jerusalem, a romantic depiction of the original as it was from the very beginning;
populate a Christian cosmology prior either to its destruction or to its reversal; they assert the same about the Sophia of the Gnostics and therefore, if there is any help, their Sophia can only be the anonymous and anemic replica of something far more ancient, from the elder cultures of the West, or wholly from the East. Yet, even Daena signifies something radically different and completely inacessible to the propagandic consciousness of these latter-day radicals.
I feel Arthur Versluis are doing in this anthology the noble favour to the Christian Theosophical tradition and its Sophianity, as did Henry Corbin with his anthology with commentaries Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth for the Ismailian and Mazdaean Gnoses.
I recommend it thoroughly. You will find excerpts from the works of Jacob Boehme, Thomas Bromley, John Pordage,Johann Georg Gichtel,Gottfried Arnold, Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, Franz von Baader and many others who are not as of yet fully represented in English translation.
