Misc comments on Elaine Pagels works
If you bring forward 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.
attributed to
Jesus Christ
Gospel
According to Thomas, Nag Hammadi texts
Knock on yourself as upon a door and walk upon
yourself as 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.
Silvanus
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" the fish will arrive before
you....rather, the Kingdom is
inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come
to know
yourselves, then you will be known, and you will
realize that you are
the sons of the living Father. But if you will not
know yourselves,
then you will dwell in poverty and it is you who are
that poverty.
attributed to
Jesus Christ, Gospel of Thomas
His disciples said to him, "When will.... the new
world come? He said
to them, "What you look forward to has already
come, but you do not
recognize it..." His disciples said to him,
"When will the Kingdom
come?” and Jesus said
"It will not come by waiting for it. It will
not be a matter of saying "Here it is" or
"There it is" Rather, the
Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth,
and men do not see
it"
JC otra vez
"When you make the two one, and when you make the
inside the outside
and the outside the inside, and the above like the
below, and when you
make the male and the female one and the same, then
you will enter
(the Kingdom)
attributed to
JC
The lamp of the body is the mind.
JC Dialogue of
the Savior, Gnostic
Here exists an interesting area because a lot of
religious thought
goes into vilifying the mind and glorifying the heart,
while I would
maintain that the mind and heart cannot be separated.
To me it makes
no sense to turn off the mind and open the heart, why
are they
supposed to be mutually exclusive? Consciousness is
not in your heart, that is a metaphor, what is being spoken of as the heart is
in the same place the mind is. . Plato’s Reason is a metaphor for the same
thing as the heart, so it is really a semantic issue, different words getting
at the same concept. Plato’s and Greek ideas are plainly all through the Bible,
which didn’t come out of nowhere.
FCA
Pagels starts out with a basic division that all
people seem to make, between us and them. We as a race
have always had the tendency to villify
"them", the
"others" and to build ourselves up as being
in the
right. How else could our over-all common history have
provided the justifications for the gross maltreatment
of so many people over the millenia? Interesting that
serious adult issues have a common thread with
schoolyard level psychology
-why do e need a boogy man, someone to put down in
order to build ourselves up?
"And he called the people to him again, and said
to
them, "Hear me, all of you, and understand; there
is
nothing outside a man which by going into him can
defile him; but the things which come out of a man are
what defile him...for from within, from the human
heart, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft,
murder,...envy, pride, foolishness...All these evils
come from within"
p.22, Mark 7:14-23
From the Apocrypha (which is a collection of canonical
writings which were not included in the Old
Testament): "The story of the angel´s fall in
Jubilees, like that in the First Book of Enoch, gives
a moral warning: if even angels, when they sin, bring
God´s wrath and destruction upon themselves, how can
mere human beings expect to be spared? Jubilees
insists that every creature, whether human or angel,
Israelite or Gentile, shall be judged acording to
deeds, that is, ethically". p53
Romans. Whereas the religious struggle was
internecine. Employed in the unfolding drama was a
developing characterization of the "others"
as being
followers of evil and from this, grew the myths about
Satan and by extension, the whole cosmic war between
good and evil.
"The spirits of truth and falsehood struggle
within
the human heart....According to his share in truth and
right, thus a man hates lies; according to his share
in the lot of deceipt, thus he hates truth."
pp.60-61,
1 QS 4:12-14
We can see also that this stuff (in the former
paragraph)is not without precedent. Plato covered very
similar ground with his concept of the soul as being
made up of three parts, appetite, spirit (will) and
reason. The appetites and will interfere with and
prevent the attainment of the higher reason. This is
similar as well to the chakra system in Yoga, the
lower centers are very compelling, all the oral,
sexual and ego aspects, but we do not become fully
human until reaching the level of the heart. The
generalization is that people innately have recognized
what the shortcomings are and have struggled against
them for all of time, trying to get to the high road
but often getting sidetraked with the
"appetites" and
the "will".
Also here is a theme in Quakerism and elsewhere, that
it is more "spiritual" to be working from
the heart
rather than from the mind. Personally I reject this as
a false dichotomy, having intuitively felt this way
and also reinforced by Bob Brown at the Borderlinks
conference in Nogales, where he told me the mind and
heart cannot be separated.
The gospel of Mark sees the Jesus movement as God´s
"remnant within Israel". The Essenes saw
themselves in
the same way. The concept of Satan initially was
applied only within the Jewish community, to condemn
others who were not towing the right line. Satan
gradually grew and developed from an angel, to a
special messenger of God meant to provide challenges
to the faithful, to something larger and much more
ominous, a force working against God in a cosmic war
of good against evil. These changes were wraught by
the people themselves as they sought to characterize
eachother as being heretics and not on the side of
God.
Because to choose a moral identity rather than a
national or ethnic identity, (which had heretofore
been synonymous with religion), meant that the
Christians were standing against tradtion, against
family, against society and the nation. The known
bonds were being broken in favor of obeying a new
order, one more uiversal and inclusive.
So, you can see that with a notion of fate and
destiny, morals can be easily swept aside and barbaric
injustices perpetuated. If things are just the way
they are, how nice to be able to explain poverty and
slavery. That is their fate.
"What was revolutionary, however, was that
Christians
professed primary allegiance to God. Such allegiance
could divide one´s loyalties; it challenged each
believer to do something most pagans had never
considered doing- decide for oneself which family and
civic obligations to accept, and which to
reject...Such convictions did not arise from a sense
of the "rights of the individual," a
conception that
emerged only fifteen hundred years later with the
Enlightenment. Instead they are rooted in a sense of
being God´s people, enrolled by baptismm as
"citizens
in heaven," no longer subject merely to the
rulers of
this present age, the human authorites and the demonic
forces that often control them" p.147
This good guy, bad guy stuff is powerful medecine.
"According to Phillip, a gnostic, recognizing
evil
within oneself is necessarily an individual process:
no one can dictate to another what is good or evil;
instead, each one must strive to recognize his or her
own inner state, and so to identify acts that spring
from the "root of evil", which consists in
such
impulses as anger, lust, envy, pride and greed."
Here
we are back at those nagging appetites again!
Generally accepted by those who create morals, is that
one set of acts is prescribed and another proscribed.
One set of behaviors is good and another bad. Philip
suggests that we toss the lists of good and bad things
and instead see the apparent opposites, such as light
and dark, life and death, good and evil, as pairs of
interelated terms in which one implies the other. A
knowledge of good and evil, seen as opposites, going
back to eating from the tree of knowledge, cannot
provide any moral transformation because the manner of
thinking is stuck in a scheme which cannot be
transcended. For example, let´s take the theory of
evolution, the protagonists are heavily stuck in the
idea of competition and survival of the fittest, win
or lose, that´s it. However, the scheme can be
transcended by seeing winning and losing as
interdependent opposites, and what could emerge, then,
is an idea of the overall COOPERATION which certainly
is at work but is only lightly emphasized. In life,
maybe we are all in it together rather than every dog
for himself.
Phillip, being a gnostic, and thus advocating that
people can go beyond church strictures, to establish
direct knowledge of one´s own purposes here on earth,
uses a parable of feeding a "diet" of
appropriate food
to farm animals, pigs get slop, chickens get scratch,
etc. and the allegory transposes to morality, each
person getting a sprirtual diet appropriate to their
level of development. Celibacy was a big deal back
then, for Christians to demonstrate that they were
beyond the appetites of the flesh and closer to God.
Phillip says that this either/ or dichotomy is another
false choice based upon an unquestioned acceptance of
the ascendancy of polar opposites. The gnostic can be
free to reach the highest levels of spiritual
awareness and still be getting laid, it all depends
upon what their particular path is.
Then there comes the problem of reconciling the
freedom implied by gnosticism with the core tenant of
agape, or love for fellow men. The trick: how to
follow one´s own path without grieving anyone else?
"Blessed is the one who has not caused grief to
anyone." (Phillip) So then, each must decide
whether
the allegiance to their own path is worth the grief it
may cause others. It gets down to a seriously
relativistic premise. Now, contrast this type of
thinking against the mainline Christian stuff of
cosmic war between good and evil. If the flock does
not follow the shepard and goes astray, their choices
and actions result in permanent damnation.
Phillip: "recognizing evil within oneself is
necessarily an individual process: no one can dictate
to another what is good or evil, instead, one must
strive to recognize his or her own true inner state,
and so to identify acts that spring from the
"root of
evil", which consists in such impulses as anger,
lust,
envy, pride and greed." p.79 Recall Jesus saying
that
it is what comes out of man that defiles him, not that
which goes in. Thus, with gnosis, or knowledge, it is
critical to understand one´s own potential for evil.
The gnostic goal of all this moral work is to achieve
a transformation, not of merely being a Christian, but
of being a Christ. In this sense, it is possible to
draw parallels with other enlightenment seeking
religions. This is just so different from the
apsotolic succession stuff and the notion that only
through the hierarchy and through professional clergy,
can the truth be obtained.
"all things work together for the good."
Paul, in
Romans 8:28
The following quotes and
commentary are based upon
Elaine Pagels
Here are some quotes from a few books by Elaine
Pagels, author of Adam, Eve and the Serpent, The Gnostic Gospels and The Origin
of Satan. Elaine is very interesting and I am presenting this information here
not as any sort of true believer but only as a spark that represents the
over-all fire of interest, in general, in reaching more comprehensive levels of
understanding.
It is really interesting to see groups competing for
the orthodox, power, and controlling position back in the first two centuries.
From 0 - 200, the Gnostics and Christians in general were pretty cool by our
modern standards. They honored the feminine, sought equality and community but
that all started to change when Christianity became the state religion of the
Roman Empire. The Christians went from being the underdogs to the power brokers
and tribute takers. Previously they were on the side of the little guy and then
they became the caciques. As Lord Acton said: "absolute power corrupts
absolutely" and whereas before the Christians resented the Romans forcing
them to pay homage to their pagan idols, they didn't have a problem forcing
others to suck up the Christian dogma.
I find it very interesting that George Fox and the
early Quakers and Anabaptists, like the Mennonites, somehow managed to intuit
the core message of the earliest Christians and reiterate it 1600 years after
the fact, with little textual support. The Gnostic Gospels were found only in
1945 in Nag Hammadi, Egypt and these texts have shown what the non-mainstream
Christians were thinking before the Catholics purged all the information away
from us in a play for power and control. Can you believe that the guy who found
the texts, his mother burnt most of them in the stove the first night he
brought them back, to cook dinner and keep the house warm! What a tragedy! What
was lost of the original messages of Jesus to keep a gal warm on a cold
Egyptian night. What are the chances of finding another cache of info like that
lying around after 1800 or 2000 years?
If you bring forward 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.
attributed to
Jesus Christ
Gospel
According to Thomas, Nag Hammadi texts
Knock on yourself as upon a door and walk upon
yourself as 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.
Silvanus
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.
Gospel of
Truth, Nag Hammadi Gnostic gospel
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" the fish will arrive before
you....rather, the Kingdom is
inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come
to know
yourselves, then you will be known, and you will
realize that you are
the sons of the living Father. But if you will not
know yourselves,
then you will dwell in poverty and it is you who are
that poverty.
attributed to
Jesus Christ, Gospel of Thomas
His disciples said to him, "When will.... the new
world come? He said
to them, "What you look forward to has already
come, but you do not
recognize it..." His disciples said to him,
"When will the Kingdom
come?” and Jesus said
"It will not come by waiting for it. It will
not be a matter of saying "Here it is" or
"There it is" Rather, the
Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth,
and men do not see
it"
JC otra vez
"When you make the two one, and when you make the
inside the outside
and the outside the inside, and the above like the
below, and when you
make the male and the female one and the same, then
you will enter
(the Kingdom)
attributed to
JC
The "Kingdom", then, symbolizes a state of
transformed consciousness.
Perhaps the reason why older folks feel such a sense
of liberation of
being beyond the grips of sex, is that they get more
androgynous, more
whole, less caught in the mighty urge to reproduce
or at least take part in behavior that could result in
reproduction,
that they are able to actualize themselves beyond the
pressures and
desires of sex, sex, sex, lust, greed and power. This
also gets at
transcending the world of paired opposites which in
general, is pretty
omnipresent and heavy duty, hard for us to see outside
of.
FCA
...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.
The Gospel of
Phillip, Gnostic
The lamp of the body is the mind.
JC Dialogue of
the Savior, Gnostic
Here exists an interesting area because a lot of
religious thought
goes into vilifying the mind and glorifying the heart,
while I would
maintain that the mind and heart cannot be separated.
To me it makes
no sense to turn off the mind and open the heart, why
are they
supposed to be mutually exclusive? Consciousness is
not in your heart, that is a metaphor, what is being spoken of as the heart is
in the same place the mind is. . Plato’s Reason is a metaphor for the same
thing as the heart, so it is really a semantic issue, different words getting
at the same concept. Plato’s and Greek ideas are plainly all through the Bible,
which didn’t come out of nowhere.
FCA
Whoever comes to experience his own nature, human
nature, as itself,
the primary reality, will receive enlightenment.
Realizing the
essential Self, the divine within, the Gnostic laughed
in joy at being
released from external constraints to celebrate his
identification
with the divine being.
Elaine Pagels
The vision of
Christ that thou dost see
Is my vision's deepest enemy...
Thine is the friend of all mankind,
Mine speaks in parables to the blind:
Thine loves the same world that mine hates,
Thy Heaven doors are my Hell gates...
Both read the Bible day and night
But thou read'st black where I read white...
William Blake
The sons of God (angels) saw that the daughters of men
were fair, and
they took to wife such of them as they chose...There
were giants in
the earth in those days...when the sons of God came into
the daughters
of men, and they bore children to them, the mighty men
of renown.
Genesis 6:2-4
You are the devil's gateway..you are she who persuaded
him whom the
devil did not dare attack... Do you not know that
everyone of you is
an Eve?
Tertullian
(early orthodox Christian dude cutting on gals and
realizing that sex
is more addictive than heroin/ ie. the
passions of the flesh are all consuming, what he is
trying to prove is
that humanity is "fallen" because of what
transpired in the Garden of
Eden and that now we are all paying the price for that
original
transgression.)
...how often when I was living in the desolate, lonely
desert, parched
by the burning sun, how often I imagined myself among
the pleasures of
Rome! I used to sit alone, because my heart was filled
with
bitterness: my limbs stuck inside an ugly sackcloth,
my skin black as
an Ethiopian's...Day after day I cried and sighed, and
when against my
will, I fell asleep, my bare bones clashed against the
ground. I say
nothing about eating and drinking. Even when sick,
solitaries drink
only cold water, and a cooked meal is considered
excessive. And yet he
who, in fear of hell, had banished himself to this
prison, found
himself again and again surrounded by dancing girls!
My face grew pale
with hunger, yet in my cold body the passions of my
inner being
continued to glow. This human being was more dead than
alive: only his
burning lust continued to boil.
Jerome c. 390
AD (surrounded by imaginary dancing girls while living
the ascetic life sounds like your basic guy to
me...Jimmy Carter is
one honest dude, "I have lust in my heart".
He just said what people
feel anyway and they laughed him out of town.)
God made bodies, distinguished the sexes, made
genitalia, bestowed
affection through which bodies would be joined, gave
power to the
semen, and operates in the secret nature of the
semen-- and God made
nothing evil.
Julian c. 4th
century (Julian was countering the idea that in the
semen was the substance manifested for every
generation, of original
sin, that we cannot escape original sin and are
condemned to suffer
the consequences of "the Fall from grace",
Julian is my man, if the
creation is good, let's knock off all this guilt
mongering and
transparent playing for power and control over average
every day folk
who just want to have a little fun. It is easy to
control the masses
with a story about how their innate behavior will
result in their
eternal damnation if they do not go to church and
confess and do all
that the priests tell them. This is why I am going to
write a book
about how excessive looking in the mirror is a disease
and make $45
billion dollars. You pick something everybody does,
then postulate
that it is fundamentally
flawed, then rake in over the fear and
paranoia.)
I do not do what I will, but
I do the very thing I hate... So then it
is no longer that I do it,
but sin which dwells in me. For I know that
nothing good dwells in me,
that is, in my flesh. I can will what is
good but I cannot do it.
Romans 7:15-18 (from Paul: this could be one of the
perverted
Pauline texts, where
Augustine or some others got in there and
attributed nasty, untruthful
ideas to the Apostle Paul, in an effort
to prove that the Gnostics
were wrong and that the notion of free
will, good creation and
human power to know God on an individual
basis, was wrong and that
the orthodox, Catholic version of
Christianity was more
correct.)
Elaine Pagels´ book, The
Origin Of Satan. I find this
stuff seriously fascinating
because it represents to
me, an opening of the
premises and thus, an
opportunity to look at the
rules, which remain largely
unconscious.
Pagels starts out with a
basic division that all
people seem to make, between
us and them. We as a race
have always had the tendency
to villify "them", the
"others" and to
build ourselves up as being in the
right. How else could our
over-all common history have
provided the justifications
for the gross maltreatment
of so many people over the
millenia? Interesting that
serious adult issues have a
common thread with
schoolyard level psychology.
Here is a brief
recapitulation of the history of
Christianity: Year 0, Christ
born; years 30 - 33,
Jesus began to preach and
then was crucified.
Following we have internal
clashes within the Jewish
community, as to which sect
is bearing the true
covenant with God. In the
third century, Christianity
changes from a religion of
the underdog to the state
religion of the Roman
empire. Christianity spreads
though Europe, we arrive at
the Renaissance, the Age
of Enlightenment, the Age of
Discovery and the
Protestant Reformation.
Christianity is no longer a
unified whole. In the modern
period, denominations
seek to reconcile historical
doctrine with such things
as science and liberal
social and political movements.
"And he called the
people to him again, and said to
them, "Hear me, all of
you, and understand; there is
nothing outside a man which
by going into him can
defile him; but the things
which come out of a man are
what defile him...for from
within, from the human
heart, come evil thoughts,
sexual immorality, theft,
murder,...envy, pride,
foolishness...All these evils
come from within" p.22, Mark 7:14-23
Surely sexual indiscretions
cause pain and suffering
and as such, maybe they are
no good. It gets down to
what is more important, to
follow one´s own path, at
all costs, or to respect the
social deals we have cut
in terms of marriage? What
is the honorable path? I
think it is not so much that
we will rot in hell, but
that that much grief gets
caused. However, the older
notions of sexual immorality
are called into question
when we see that they also
entail condemning
homosexuals. To me it is not
just to condemn actions
which cause no harm to
others and that are consensual.
I also love to fool around
and would have to argue
that it is not immoral. How
can fun and play be
immoral?
From the Apocrypha (which is
a collection of canonical
writings which were not
included in the Old
Testament): "The story
of the angel´s fall in
Jubilees, like that in the
First Book of Enoch, gives
a moral warning: if even
angels, when they sin, bring
God´s wrath and destruction
upon themselves, how can
mere human beings expect to
be spared? Jubilees
insists that every creature,
whether human or angel,
Israelite or Gentile, shall
be judged according to
deeds, that is,
ethically". p53
A curious part of the fallen
angels story: they saw
that the daughters of men
were fair, wanted some of
that action, got it, bore
the offspring that were the
"giants in the
earth", AND, taught men mining, so that
they took up mettalurgy and
thus, brought about a
greater capacity for war and
strife.
"The Essenes agree with
Jubilees that being Jewish is
no longer enough to ensure
God´s blessing. They are
much more radical: the sins
of the people have
virtually cancelled God´s
covenant with Abraham, on
which Israel´s election
depends. Now, they insist,
whoever wants to belong to
the true Israel must join a
new covenant- the covenant
of their own congregation".
p.59
Jesus, along with the
Essenes, were rebels within the
Jewish milieu. The orthodox
were represented by the
Pharisees. It was a conflict
"within one house", in
which the various sects
competed for representing the
heart of Judaism. All of the
sects saw their primary
political struggle, as a
nation, to be against the
Romans. Whereas the
religious struggle was
internecine. Employed in the
unfolding drama was a
developing characterization
of the "others" as being
followers of evil and from
this, grew the myths about
Satan and by extension, the
whole cosmic war between
good and evil.
"The spirits of truth
and falsehood struggle within
the human heart....According
to his share in truth and
right, thus a man hates
lies; according to his share
in the lot of deceit, thus
he hates truth." pp.60-61,
1 QS 4:12-14
I love this "Q"
source. Certainly this must be the
inspiration for the
character "Q" in Star Trek. The
whole idea is appealing to
being privy to seriously
arcane and privileged
information. Oh, yeah, I got
that from the Q source.
We can see also that this stuff
(in the former
paragraph)is not without
precedent. Plato covered very
similar ground with his
concept of the soul as being
made up of three parts,
appetite, spirit (will) and
reason. The appetites and
will interfere with and
prevent the attainment of the
higher reason. This is
similar as well to the
chakra system in Yoga, the
lower centers are very
compelling, all the oral,
sexual and ego aspects, but
we do not become fully
human until reaching the
level of the heart. The
generalization is that
people innately have recognized
what the shortcomings are
and have struggled against
them for all of time, trying
to get to the high road
but often getting sidetraked
with the "appetites" and
the "will".
Also here is a theme in
Quakerism and elsewhere, that
it is more
"spiritual" to be working from the heart
rather than from the mind.
Personally I reject this as
a false dichotomy, having
intuitively felt this way
and also reinforced by Bob
Brown at the Borderlinks
conference in Nogales, where
he told me the mind and
heart cannot be separated.
"A young upstart group,
(Christians), whose membership
had rapidly and radically
changed, was asserting that
it was more authentic than
it´s parent group; and this
attitude of superiority and
exclusion was derived, in
part, from ideas and
attitudes already present in the
parent body." pp. 63-64
George Nickelsburg
The gospel of Mark sees the
Jesus movement as God´s
"remnant within
Israel". The Essenes saw themselves in
the same way. The concept of
Satan initially was
applied only within the
Jewish community, to condemn
others who were not towing
the right line. Satan
gradually grew and developed
from an angel, to a
special messenger of God
meant to provide challenges
to the faithful, to
something larger and much more
ominous, a force working
against God in a cosmic war
of good against evil. These
changes were wraught by
the people themselves as
they sought to characterize
eachother as being heretics
and not on the side of
God.
What is happening here is a
moral interpretation of
the law, an improvisation
upon the covenant of
Abraham, what becomes more
important to the Christians
and Essenes is not the
ritual and ethnic
identification, but the
moral identification. The
Christians not only
alienated the parent group but
also struck fear and disgust
into the pagan Romans.
Why? Because to choose a
moral identity rather than a
national or ethnic identity,
(which had heretofore
been synonymous with
religion), meant that the
Christians were standing
against tradtion, against
family, against society and
the nation. The known
bonds were being broken in
favor of obeying a new
order, one more uiversal and
inclusive. To
recapitulate the historical
currents: there was a
movement to reinterpret the
Torah morally and set
aside the ritual precepts
which defined Jewish life.
It is a movement from ethnic
identity towards moral
identity.
"Jesus said, "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.
p.68 NHC 2.45.29-33 QS
"Knock upon yourself as
upon a door, and walk upon
yourself as on a straight
road. For if you walk on
that road, it is impossible
for you to go
astray....Open the door for
yourself, that you may
know what is...What ever you
open for yourself, you
will open." p.73 NHC
7.106.30-35; 117.5-20 QS
These above two quotes are
from the Nag Hammadi
Gnostic Gospels and seem to
me, at least, to be of the
cooles variety possible.
These types of messages
really resonate with me.
"Much of the Mosaic (of
Moses) law was couched in
negative terms ("You
shall not...") Jesus reinterprets
it positively:
"Whatever you would have people do to
you, do the same to them;
for this is the law and the
prophets" p.82, Matthew
7:12
"for the first time the
fact that the devil is
Jesus´real antagonist comes
to the fore. This motif
will grow louder as the
"hour" of Jesus´ death
approaches, until the
passion is presented as a
struggle to the death
between Jesus and Satan." p102
Christians have demonized
Jews for 2000 years because
of the role played by the
court in turning Jesus over
to Pilate. Pagels goes into
serious detail and
political intrigue and shows
how the apostles
consciously tried to make
Pilate look good when in
fact he was a brutal
governor. The apostles put some
twists on what really went
down, so as to take Roman
heat off of the Christians.
This then, gets portrayed
as the word of God in the
Bible and the Jews pay the
price, 2000 years of
condemnation.
The metaphor of evil going
with darkness and truth
with light is much used by
the Quakers. However, the
Quakers appear to be
emphasizing the light part
without much talk about the
dark. Light doesn´t have
much punch unless contrasted
against the dark, and so,
this is an avenue I am
curious about. What Quaker
meanings apply to the
"light"? Are the Quakers
unconsciously operating out
of a cosmic war metaphor
by emphasizing the light?
The following illustrates
the pagan concept, as given
by Marcus Aurelius. In this
type of world, fate and
destiny are more core than
an almighty God directing
all. If all is spun off of
the wheels of Fate,
morality then becomes an
afterthought. What good does
it do to be moral when all
is predetermined? It is
interesting to contrast this
with the Christian stuff.
"the old gods have the
beauty and goodness of the sun,
the sea, the wind, the
mountains, great wild animals;
splenndid, powerful, and
dangerous realities that do
not come within the sphere
of morality; and are in no
way concerned about the human
race." p119
"Everything that
happens is as ordinary and
predictable as the sppring
rose or the summer fruit;
this is as true of disease,
death, slander, and
conspiracy as anything
else...So, then, if a person
has sensitivity and a deeper
insight into things that
happen in the universe,
virtually everything, even if
it be only a by-product of
something else, will
contribute pleasure, being
in it´s own way, a
harmonius part of the
whole...(p.127)...Whatever
happens to you, this for
you, came from destiny; and
the interweaving of causes
has woven into one fabric
your existence and this
event....All things are woven
into one another, and the
bond that unites them is
sacred; and hardly anything
is alien to any other. For
they are ordered in relation
to one another, and they
join together to order the
same universe. For there is
one universe, consisting of
all things; and one
essence, and one law, one
divine reason, and one
truth; and...also one
fulfillment of the living
creatures that have the same
origin, and share the
same nature." p.129,
Marcus Aurelius
"...And even if the
gods care nothing for human
concerns, my own nature is a
rational and political
one; I have a city, and I
have a country; as Marcus I
have Rome, and as a human
being I have the universe;
consequently; whatever
benefits these communities is
the only good I
recognize." p142, Marcus Aurelius
So, you can see that with a
notion of fate and
destiny, morals can be
easily swept aside and barbaric
injustices perpetuated. If
things are just the way
they are, how nice to be
able to explain poverty and
slavery. That is their fate.
"If one accepts that
all of nature, and everything in
the universe, operates
according to the will of God,
and that nothing works
contrary to his purposes, then
one must also accept that
the angels and daimones,
heroes- all things in the
universe- are subject to the
will of the one God who
rules over all." p.141, Celsus
Celsus was a pagan critic of
Christianity. It does
make good sense to ask why
you would have an all
mighty God yet still have
this other force constantly
nipping at his/her/it´s
heels. Here you could insert
the us against them theme
and see the whole Satan,
cosmic war thing as a
reflection of intolerance for
difference.
"What was
revolutionary, however, was that Christians
professed primary allegiance
to God. Such allegiance
could divide one´s
loyalties; it challenged each
believer to do something
most pagans had never
considered doing- decide for
oneself which family and
civic obligations to accept,
and which to
reject...Such convictions
did not arise from a sense
of the "rights of the
individual," a conception that
emerged only fifteen hundred
years later with the
Enlightenment. Instead they
are rooted in a sense of
being God´s people, enrolled
by baptismm as "citizens
in heaven," no longer
subject merely to the rulers of
this present age, the human
authorites and the demonic
forces that often control
them" p.147
Later, we encounter the most
intimate enemy, other
Christians whose choices and
doctrinal differences
pull out all the venom
possible to characterize the
others as heretics. Satan
really gets going here. It
is common to label the
heretics as "Pharisees and
scribes", those who are
on the wrong path headed away
from God. During the
Reformation, Martin Luther called
the Catholics Pharisees and
scribes. Here in Mexico,
the Yaqui Indians go through
a whole easter cycle, of
carnival, ash wednsday and
then 40 days of dancing
with costumes, some of whom
represent the Pharisees
and others, rperesentations
of putative virtue. At the
end, the fariseo masks are
burned, symbolizing the
casting away of sin. It all
culminmates with the
passion and the
crucifiction.
This good guy, bad guy stuff
is powerful medecine.
The Catholics held fast to
the apostolic succession as
the only true representation
of Jesus´teachings.
Meaning that they putatively
trace all the popes and
bishops back to the
apostles, thus claiming to have
the pure bloodlines of
Christianity. However, it can
be demonstrated beyond doubt
that the New Testament
has been altered
considerably by those later
generations of bishops and
much has been inserted that
reflects not any true intent
of Jesus, or of truth per
se, but of the political and
social considerations of
the times. The word heretic
actually means to question
and to choose in Greek. The
Catholics were wanting to
reinforce the New Testament
with notions of ultimate
truth, so as to battle the
gnostics and the pagans. In
this process, a lot of
additional and political
material was added to the
Bible, to provide twists of
meaning that later people
wanted to emphasize. Thus,
blind allegiance to
"the Word" is foolishness, if you
don´t know where the words
came from, and the words
have been altered,,,, well,
the literal
interpretations just plain
don´t float. As Eric Hoffer
said in The True Believer,
the truth of a document
lies not with it´s content,
but with it´s certainty.
The Catholics adapted from
the Roman army and
administrative structure
their own hierarchy and
organization, with dioces
and one central overseer,
the pope. Onward Christian
soldiers!
"According to Phillip,
a gnostic, recognizing evil
within oneself is
necessarily an individual process:
no one can dictate to
another what is good or evil;
instead, each one must
strive to recognize his or her
own inner state, and so to
identify acts that spring
from the "root of
evil", which consists in such
impulses as anger, lust,
envy, pride and greed." Here
we are back at those nagging
appetites again!
Philip is known from the
Gnostic Gospels, discovered
at Nag Hammadi, Egypt in
1948. Pagels has to other
books which are equally
good, The Gnostic Gospels, and
Adam, Eve and the Serpent.
Generally accepted by those
who create morals, is that
one set of acts is
prescribed and another proscribed.
One set of behaviors is good
and another bad. Philip
suggests that we toss the
lists of good and bad things
and instead see the apparent
opposites, such as light
and dark, life and death,
good and evil, as pairs of
interelated terms in which
one implies the other. A
knowledge of good and evil,
seen as opposites, going
back to eating from the tree
of knowledge, cannot
provide any moral
transformation because the manner of
thinking is stuck in a
scheme which cannot be
transcended. For example,
let´s take the theory of
evolution, the protagonists
are heavily stuck in the
idea of competition and
survival of the fittest, win
or lose, that´s it. However,
the scheme can be
transcended by seeing
winning and losing as
interdependent opposites,
and what could emerge, then,
is an idea of the overall
COOPERATION which certainly
is at work but is only
lightly emphasized. In life,
maybe we are all in it
together rather than every dog
for himself.
Phillip, being a gnostic,
and thus advocating that
people can go beyond church
strictures, to establish
direct knowledge of one´s
own purposes here on earth,
uses a parable of feeding a
"diet" of appropriate food
to farm animals, pigs get
slop, chickens get scratch,
etc. and the allegory
transposes to morality, each
person getting a sprirtual
diet appropriate to their
level of development.
Celibacy was a big deal back
then, for Christians to
demonstrate that they were
beyond the appetites of the
flesh and closer to God.
Phillip says that this
either/ or dichotomy is another
false choice based upon an
unquestioned acceptance of
the ascendancy of polar
opposites. The gnostic can be
free to reach the highest
levels of spiritual
awareness and still be
getting laid, it all depends
upon what their particular
path is.
Then there comes the problem
of reconciling the
freedom implied by
gnosticism with the core tenant of
agape, or love for fellow
men. The trick: how to
follow one´s own path
without grieving anyone else?
"Blessed is the one who
has not caused grief to
anyone." (Phillip) So
then, each must decide whether
the allegiance to their own
path is worth the grief it
may cause others. It gets
down to a seriously
relativistic premise. Now,
contrast this type of
thinking against the
mainline Christian stuff of
cosmic war between good and
evil. If the flock does
not follow the shepard and
goes astray, their choices
and actions result in
permanent damnation.
Phillip: "recognizing
evil within oneself is
necessarily an individual
process: no one can dictate
to another what is good or
evil, instead, one must
strive to recognize his or
her own true inner state,
and so to identify acts that
spring from the "root of
evil", which consists
in such impulses as anger, lust,
envy, pride and greed."
p.79 Recall Jesus saying that
it is what comes out of man
that defiles him, not that
which goes in. Thus, with
gnosis, or knowledge, it is
critical to understand one´s
own potential for evil.
The gnostic goal of all this
moral work is to achieve
a transformation, not of
merely being a Christian, but
of being a Christ. In this
sense, it is possible to
draw parallels with other
enlightenment seeking
religions. This is just so
different from the
apsotolic succession stuff
and the notion that only
through the hierarchy and
through professional clergy,
can the truth be obtained.
Pagels says that Christian
tradition has not replaced
one enemy with another, from
other Jews, to pagans to
other Christians, Mormons
and to Muslims, but the
religion has accumulated
them. The true believers who
participate in this cosmic
struggle and apocalyptic
war of good against evil,
especially the martyrs, they
just can´t lose. The stakes
of eternal victory are
certain. This type of
apocalyptic vision has
influenced secular thought
in terms of framing liberal
social and political
movements in terms of good and
evil. Going along with this
is our boy Satan, who
conveniently happens to be
on the side of those whith
whom we disagree.
"all things work
together for the good." Paul, in
Romans 8:28
So, here we have God and the
Holy Spirit directing
all, even the lower cosmic
forces. This was a core
message of Reverend Thompson
in Wichita Falls, after
having had hundreds of years
of experience with
slavery and discrimination,
and having his church
burnt down by arson, here is
a guy looking not to
hate, but to transcend it. I
had to admire Thompson
for continually looking in
this direction, even after
the brutal dragging death in
Texas occurred only some
hundred miles from us.
Pagels concludes the book by
pointing out that it is possible
to be on God´s side
without demonizing one´s
opponents. The high road
consists of praying for
reconciliation v.s. damnation.
here we have the pantheon of
like minded thinkers,
from St. Francis of Assisi
in the 15th century to
Ghandi, Martin Luther King
and the Dalai Lama in the
20th century. From the
profoundly human view that
"otherness" is
evil exists an alternative path,
reconciliation being divine.
This is all of particular
interest to me, for as a die
hard relativist I have been
struggling to know what is
right? What is good? How can
morals be constructed
which allow freedom of
difference yet do not end up in
massive violations of
other´s sensibilites. At what
point can a relativist draw
the line between the
merely different and the
immoral or wrong? If we take
Phillip´s outline of not
causing grief to any man,
then the most basic types of
grief would be violations
of one´s body and property.
If we take this as a
baseline morality, it is
possible then to frame the
global economic policies of
the United States, the
freedom of markets above
all, which causes serious
grief to a majortiy of the
world´s population, as
immoral. This is what the
Catholic bishop, Tom Gumbel
of Detroit calls structural
injustice, and that by
participating in the system,
we are sinning (or acting
immorally). However, from
the above material, it is
suggested that we need not
frame this all in terms of
cosmic war between good and
evil, it is just basically
immoral.
Interestingly, liberal
social movements have been
enjoined by Christian
religions and the metaphor of
good and evil, and the role
of satan, gets subtly
perpetuated in modern
contexts. If the good and evil
stuff rests upon an ultimate
condemnation rather than
a reconciliation, I see it
as being not of the highest
moral fibre. This seems to
be the ultimate message of
Pagels book.
I have had terrible trouble
with the Mexican computers
and this is the fifth time I
have had to retype this
whole essay. Hopefully this
time I can prevail and
have it sent.
true of disease, death, slander, and
conspiracy as
anything else...So, then, if
a person has sensitivity
and a deeper insight into
things that happen in the
universe, virtually
everything, even if it be only a
by-product of something
else, will contribute
pleasure, being in it´s own
way, a harmonius part of
the
whole...(p.127)...Whatever happens to you, this
for you, came from destiny;
and the interweaving of
causes has woven into one
fabric your existence and
this event....All things are
woven into one another,
and the bond that unites
them is sacred; and hardly
anything is alien to any
other. For they are ordered
in relation to one another,
and they join together to
order the same universe. For
there is one universe,
consisting of all things;
and one essence, and one
law, one divine reason, and
one truth; and...also one
fulfillment of the living
creatures
===
- Camarón que se duerme, se lo lleva la
corriente.
- Palo dado, ni Dios lo quita.
- "Los deseos del joven
muestran las virtudes futuras del hombre." Cicerón
- "Donde está la virtud
hay muchas trampas."
San Juan Crisóstomo
_________________________________________________________
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