The Gnostics and Walt Whitman

A sermon preached at Faith Episcopal Church on June 18, 2006

In December 1945, nearly 2 years before the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered, the Egyptian desert gave up a long held secret. What is now referred to as the Nag Hammadi Library is a collection of 52 texts from the early centuries of our faith. Those texts are a written witness to early Gnostic Christianity. The word Gnostic comes from the Greek word gnosis which means knowledge and describes a very different direction in Christian thought – a direction that was eventually deemed heretical. But as always, it’s good to remember that being branded a heretic sometimes simply means that you lost the argument.

The texts found at Nag Hammadi were written in the Coptic language, translations of even earlier Greek texts and include a collection of previously unknown Christian gospels, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of the Egyptians and the complete Gospel of Thomas. While the texts and their bindings were easily datable from between 350-400, dating the original texts is more of a challenge. Some of them will be quite early – some scholars date the Gospel of Thomas to around 140. For centuries, all that we knew about this early strand of Christian thought came from the writings of Iraneaus, the Bishop of Lyon in France in the 2^nd century. He wrote five volumes entitled The Destruction and Overthrow of Falsely So-called Knowledge. From that title, you might expect a fairly slanted presentation of Gnostic thought.

One good question about this archeological treasure is “why were they buried in the first place?” As the new religion was beginning to define itself, there was great diversity of thought and interpretation. Irenaeus and like minded churchmen looked at ideas that were different from their own and said “we are right and you are wrong.” Eventually, they also had the power to make it illegal to even be in possession of one of these texts. Many of them were burned and destroyed but someone in Upper Egypt decided to hide this collection and for 1600 years they rested safely in their clay vessel.

What was in these texts that Irenaeus found so appalling? A good Gnostic is one who understands him or herself to be a spark of the divine. The work of a Gnostic is to seek to know that spark within and by so doing, to come to know God. One Gnostic teacher said this “Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is within you who makes everything his own and says, “My God, my mind, my thoughts, my soul, my body, Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate…If you carefully investigate these matters you will find him in yourself.” This is the prime difference between Gnostic Christianity and orthodox Christianity according to Elaine Pagels who’s well known book The Gnostic Gospels came out in the early 80s. She said that Orthodox thought “insist(s) that a chasm separates humanity from its creator: God is wholly other. But some of the Gnostics who wrote these gospels contradict this: self-knowledge is knowledge of God, the self and the divine are identical.” This thinking is present in how they write about Jesus. The Gnostic Jesus speaks of illusion and enlightenment not of sin and repentance. Instead of coming to save us from sin, he comes as a guide who opens access to spiritual understanding. When the disciple attains enlightenment, Jesus no longer serves as his spiritual master: the two have become equal – even identical.” Some scholars see here an influence of Buddhist thought.

Gnostic thought was itself very diverse but there appears to have been some agreement around the understanding of the divine in “terms of a harmonious, dynamic relationship of opposites – a concept that may be akin to the Easter view of yin and yang but that remains alien to orthodox Judaism and Christianity. The implications here for the relationship between male and female in the divine and in the church are important – hence The DaVinci Code brouhaha. Ireneaus and his supporters who came to identify themselves as the guardians to the only “true faith” really weren’t interested in that!

It also has implications for the relationship between the body and the soul. As much as I appreciate much of the Gnostic teaching, their understanding of the physical vessel as something to be escaped in order to achieve enlightenment seems to me to fly in the face of their embrace of the harmony of opposites. Dualism is a helpful concept when both components are seen as necessary and life-giving to the other. Humanity is best expressed when male and female are equally valued. Humanity is best expressed when body and spirit are equally valued. The recently published Gospel of Judas portrays Judas as the only disciple to really get what Jesus is doing. His service to Jesus is to help him to escape the body that is so limiting.

The reading today from 2 Corinthians gives us this same kind of Gnostic, anti-body language. “While we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord;” “…we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.” I’m going stand with a very orthodox doctrine here to refute this – the doctrine of the Incarnation. We believe that God took on human form and if a human body was a suitable vessel for true divinity, then it can no longer be thought of as evil or needing to be transcended. That’s why I decided to put Paul’s language in dynamic tension with Walt Whitman, that wonderful poet of the incarnation. If we believe that body and soul are equally sacred it should call into question many of the ways that we harm our own bodies and those of others. Being a child of God is expressed in your soul and your body.

I sing the body electric,

The armies of those I love engirth me and I engrith them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?
And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?
And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?
And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?

I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough,

To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly
round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then?
I do no t ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea.

There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them,
and in the contact and odor of the, that please the soul well,
All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.

If we know Jesus as Emmanuel – God with us – the one who came to live this life in a human body, in loving community with us then our being in our own skin and being with one another is also holy. What joyous good news that is!

(My thanks to Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels, 1979, Vintage Books, Random House; and also to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.)