Roberto Pla

MAN

TEMPLE OF THE LIVING GOD

A HIDDEN EXEGESIS OF CHRIST´S RELIGION BASED ON THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS

© Roberto Pla Sales 1990

© Editorial Sirio S.A. 1990

© Editorial Sirio S.A. 2018 (Revised Spanish edition)

Translation from Spanish: Peter Burnett

For more information about the author and/or the Gospel of Thomas see : www.robertopla.com or

www.gospelofthomas-interpretation.com

FOREWORD TO THE ENGLISH EDITION

The main focus of this book is on the universal indwelling Christ, of whom both the New and the Old Testaments speak; the sayings of the Gospel of Thomas being the milestones for the commentaries.

The author’s deep and deeply felt understanding often conveys a sense of his wonder at the amazing richness and beauty of the message. Given the importance of the book for a renewed understanding of the Christian message, I thought that it should be made available to English-speaking readers. It was then that I met Peter Burnett, who promptly expressed his willingness to translate it.

Given the scriptural knowledge required and the sometimes complex style of the text, rich in metaphors, the translation was a challenge for Peter, as it tested not only his mastery of the craft, but also all the personal qualities needed to persevere in the task despite the difficulties.

It is exciting to contemplate the result of the effort made and the quality achieved. Thank you very much Peter. Let us now trust that the book will reach wherever it is needed and come into the hands of those who can make the best use of it.

JAVIER LANTERO

September 2021

GETTING LOST IN TRANSLATION. TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD

I have not the slightest doubt about the central message of Roberto Pla’s Man, Temple of the Living God, and that is why I was willing to take up the challenge of translating it into English. The task was humbling. It proved to be far more demanding than any work I have ever undertaken.

Even for one well-versed in the subject matter, Pla’s text calls for slow, careful analytical reading and thorough understanding of each sentence, each passage, before going on to the next. The translator should come up to the exacting standards of a scholarly reader; yet the only advantage I could offer was that of ignorance-a fresh perception, largely untainted by common prejudices or ecclesiastical accretions. Consequently, I would from time to time find myself facing what seemed to be an impassable obstacle. Without Javier Lantero’s learning and his patient counsel, without the long hours we devoted to the study of a difficult text (like the commentary on Logion 15), without his skillful editing, the job would have been impossible. He is in effect my co-translator.

We kept coming up against the same problem: even after long struggles to understand an obscure passage, even after gaining some understanding, how to express what had been understood? It is plain that Pla faced the same intrinsic difficulty and was well aware of it. Here, we are often touching on the limits of language. The ineffable.

A further difficulty: the book is Pla’s crowning glory, written in old age. Yet it is plain that he wrote alone, without the help of an editor. Hence the need to check all references and clarify some passages. Time-consuming labor, worthy of so ambitious a work.

This may go some way to explaining certain peculiarities in Pla’s style, but not, I think, the strangest one of all, when he mixes metaphors, stuffing the imagery from three, four, even five parables into a single sentence. While this may simply confuse the reader, that very confusion can on occasion have an unexpected effect, when mental friction sparks off insight into the deeper meaning behind the parables! Baroque koans…

Here, the writer shows his mastery of the art of paradox, that of a musician skilled in harmony and counterpoint, that of a scholar deeply versed in Sanskrit and the Advaita (non-dual) philosophy of Sankara, likewise in the livening and omnipresent employment of paradox by Jewish and early Christian scribes, before this river of life ran into the sands of univocal church dogma and the Deity transcendent came to upstage and eclipse the immanent Presence.

Pla’s purpose is to provide the reader with the keys he discovered and he uses these directly, throwing open doors and shuttered windows to air, light and the revelation of Gospel prospects long hidden.

It would have been possible for me to speak of all this in dry, impersonal terms. Possible, but inappropriate. The content is too essential, it is too intimate. Yet, I don’t have it in me to let myself be carried away on a flood of words like Pla. My expression’s earthbound, I can only dream of effortless soaring… and turn the poetry of Saint John of the Cross…

Reader, please be patient, then, when my version fails to convey the full meaning of the original text, making it harder for you to access the depths of Pla’s exposition[1].

What I cannot stress enough is the paramount value of the book’s hard-to-chew message, for me, for Christians, for all men.

Christ is no mere exemplar; he shows us, not what we should be or aspire to be, but the perfection we intrinsically are.

PETER BURNETT

September 2021

1 Readers are invited to bring any errors to our attention (see e-mail addresses on p.4). In particular, we have been unable to trace a few of the author’s citations.

PURPOSE OF THE AUTHOR

Our one and only real purpose in writing this work has been to awaken love for the whole Christ, and when we speak of the whole Christ, we are referring both to the Christ who died for mankind in Jerusalem more than two thousand years ago, love for whom has been encouraged by manifest exegesis since the beginning of the Christian era, and at the same time, to the Christ preexisting and eternal. Although both are one and the same being, if we speak of the whole Christ, we cannot disregard the inseparable Christ who, from the beginning, has lain forgotten, unknown, crucified within every man, and who is only waiting to reveal his immortal, divine presence, invoked by love and faith.

Then the true beatitude of his resurrection will arise in every man. (Pag.38)[2]*

The purpose of this work is to awaken in some men awareness that the canonical New Testament texts express a dual hermeneutic, and exegesis makes it possible, once one has assimilated a first reading, which we shall call manifest, to undertake a second reading, one that will be more difficult to apprehend, in order to find through it a new meaning which the Christian hagiographers called hidden, or secret. (Pag.28)*

2 * Texts selected by the editor. For a biographical note on the author see page 795 and www.robertopla.com

IN COMMEMORATION

Every life has its moments of bliss, moments that urge us to a renewal of our consciousness. In my own case one of those precious moments was when I met Roberto Pla; another came on reading his work Man, Temple of the Living God. Until that moment I had found the Gospels enigmatic, nor could ecclesiastical explanations either calm or fulfil my thirst for understanding. Something similar, but doubtless more intense, happened to Roberto, who one day confessed to me that reading the gospels as a young man had reduced him to tears, despairing of his inability to grasp what they really meant.

Finally, thanks not only to his erudition but to a deep inner realization, light dawned in him, revealing the secrets in the text of the canonical gospels. Roberto Pla took as his guide the Gospel of Thomas, a text whose commentary is the subject of this book, in which he clarifies in parallel the parables and sayings of Jesus to be found in the four biblical gospels.

I myself and the many friends in whose company I have over the years read and discussed Man, Temple of the Living God, have found that the truth expressed therein resonates in every single one of us, impelling us to new awareness. Roberto himself expressed this very well in a letter he sent me on 24 October 1989, following the publication of his book:

“…My purpose is, as you know, to provide many Christians with the ways and means of attaining direct transformation, as explained for the West by Jesus of Nazareth, ways that depend on the inner seed that is sown in every man. From the 3rd and 4th centuries onwards this truth was disregarded and it seems necessary now, after twenty centuries, to return to its pure meaning. Oriental cultures have always known and many have practiced the search for one’s essence, as the realization of Atman, as identification with the universal Buddha Mind, or as non-action and knowing the eternal Tao; but in this part of the world where we have been born, men are culturally deprived of the textual guide that is needed to point out the way that must be taken if we are in the end to manifest the indwelling Christ, as the decisively important task of our lives, and it seems necessary to explain that this textual guide does exist, in the form of the Gospels that we all know, if we learn to read them as they are.

I know all too well that this aim to bring renewal has in several ways and on several occasions proven to be beyond the reach of my spirit and the limitations imposed by my weakness, and I have only been able to reveal most imperfectly the beautiful truth of the Christian kerygma. So when you tell me that there have been times when the view set forth in the hidden exegesis has made for an inner change in you, there could for me be no greater reward, for I think that others too may have an inner transformation and, what is more, that once this seed of yours has grown and become well established, you will be able to transmit to others a good deal of this treasure of transformation to unity that the Spirit implanted in you…”

It only remains to me to express my gratitude to Roberto Pla, a friend and master who never died nor indeed could he ever die for, as he himself said, “In no way can I believe it possible that the glory of the great masters who have passed through this world could be brought low by death, by non-being, something I see as inconceivable in regard to the eternal Being”.

ESPERANZA BORÚS

Christmas 2016

A BOOK WITH TRANSFORMATIVE POWER

I see this book as exceptional because its inward reading is able to renew and complete our understanding of the entire Christian message. Such is the scope and consistency of this reading that it makes for a tremendously original book; in my view, a unique one.

From the moment I discovered it some ten years ago, the book has been my constant companion, and every encounter with it leaves me marveling, both at the vibrant truth of the knowledge it conveys, and at the beauty, pregnant with life experience, of its writing. Both these aspects come together to form a rich fusion. They make for a text with the power to move. To transform.

The book contains few citations from sources other than the Bible, but these form a rich basis that firmly supports the entire, exceedingly interesting construction of interpretation. It was without question in order to promote the profound assimilation necessary for the knowledge imparted to become transformative that Pla developed a literary style that is at times complex and/or repetitive, a style that imparts far more than mere information.

The book can stand on its own as a guide for Christians; but for this guidance to be effective, it is necessary to become deeply immersed in its contents, and that this process be accompanied by the necessary purification of the psyche (baptism by water) and knowledge (baptism by fire). I have found that every single reading brings new understanding, while the author’s profound and lively faith enables us to become one with the message imparted.

In his Prologue, Saint John tells us that The Word was the true light that enlightens all men. Roberto Pla shows us that (although the allusion is frequently concealed) the Jewish tradition and the Christian message refer constantly to that essence which is the very basis of our being and which is called the inner Christ, the Son, the Word, or the Messiah; as well as often being alluded to as the seed, the treasure, the cornerstone, among many other designations. To realize the Union of our soul (psyche) with this essence and to manifest it in our lives: that is the Good News taught to us by Jesus and brought close to us by his paradigmatic life and ever-indwelling spirit.

Pla shows us that the realization to which we are called involves a process of knowledge, one that is described in the Gospels, one that depends above all on the faith that enables us to acknowledge the Word, the seed, within ourselves and on a constant vigil, a discerning attentiveness to the light and to the contents of consciousness. This vigilance is itself the good soil in which the seed can be transformed into the abundant harvest of being who we are in ever greater fullness.

Christianity’s current lack of vigor as a source of inspiration for a great number of searchers is surely connected with how difficult it can be to find inner resonance with the literal or manifest reading of the Gospels and the Bible. Traditionally, the tendency has been to cling to an external reading, neglecting the fact that a great proportion of the texts are allegorical and their real meaning is to be found only when they are understood as being directed towards men’s inner being. As Pla shows us, this dual intent in regard to meaning (the manifest and the hidden) is integral to the tradition of the biblical scribes. The reading to be found in this book is known as the hidden or inner interpretation; hence its capacity to complete the meaning of biblical texts in general and, in particular, to deepen our understanding of many aspects of Jesus Christ’s vital message.

JAVIER LANTERO

Christmas 2016

TO THE HAPPY FEW WHO HAVE NOT SEEN AND YET BELIEVE

FOREWORD

Do not say, “I am a child”.

Go now to those to whom I send you

and say whatever I command you.

Jeremiah 1:7

I

1. There are two aspects to Christ or, better expressed, two roots from which to depart in a Christological investigation: the manifest, which studies Jesus in his double human and divine nature, made manifest in the world and made one in Christ Jesus, and the hidden, which seeks to apprehend the pre-existing, eternal Christ, in his quality as the Son of Man, of whom all the scriptures speak.[3]

Manifest Christology has been practiced and studied by many ever since the beginning of the Christian era, and it is thanks to this Christology that, to the extent that it has attained its exegetic objectives, Christians know and love Jesus of Nazareth, who was born of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem of Judea and, after proclaiming and teaching the Good News, was crucified on Golgotha and, after three days, rose from the dead and ascended to the Father.

However, the Christological research which is to be found in a purely introductory form in this book, and which corresponds to the aspect of Christ not immediately accessible, to the hidden, pre-existing Christ of whom the scriptures speak, has been practiced only marginally.

That is why this exploration of such vast and almost untrodden spaces claims to provide only the basic initial signposting that will be needed if investigation of what lies concealed, which is so necessary if the whole Christ is to be revealed, is to make progress in times to come.

Certainly, a project like this cannot and never will be conclusive, and must remain open to the discoveries to be made by more thorough and more concrete future investigations.

What is now offered is a series of initial suggestions for this type of exegesis of the New Testament which, at the present stage, aims only to apply the methodology in its objective, i.e. its indirect sense, as will be seen.

The most convenient way of setting forth this method would have been to concentrate studies in the form of a series of short monographic papers, for subsequent development. The fact is, however, that the Christian kerygma consists of a concatenation of such inextricably interrelated passages that it is impossible to cast a new light on any one of these without automatically affecting our understanding of the others in a seemingly incongruent manner.

What turned out to be absolutely necessary was to effect a general, if oversimplified, survey of the entire Gospel teaching. As usually happens in such cases, the sheer extent of the terrain to be covered was in itself an obstacle, making it impossible to pause and pay due attention to the multiform features of the relief in every particular landscape.

2. It needs pointing out that application of the “hidden” method of biblical exegesis cannot be nor could it ever claim to be a discovery, since it is, in its approach to interpretation of the Bible, at least as old as the book itself.

The Gospel proclaimed and taught by Jesus was narrated, after the Savior’s ascension to the Father, by a few beings who, being transformed into pure servants of the Word[4] and contemplators of his Glory,[5] desired that Christ’s teachings should be made known to many.

In order to explain the whole Christ, in his dual aspect, the New Testament hagiographers practiced a hermeneutic method in which both meanings, that of the manifest Christological sphere and that of the hidden one, were accorded equal value, without either of the two meanings losing its own genuine character.

The two types of exegesis practiced by these early Christians in order to come to their interpretations of the Old Testament served to configure in them the mentality necessary for the New Testament hagiographers to develop the hermeneutics they needed, interpretations whereby early Christianity was able to harmonize understanding of the biblical text with the revelations made by Jesus.

It is true that in the art of producing a text capable of expressing two meanings without any diminution of the authenticity of either, and without any risk of a clash between them, the early Christian scribes proved worthy successors to the Jewish Sôfêrim, the sages on whose heritage the Christian hagiographers drew.

As is well known, the inspired authors of the Bible were past masters at conferring a plural meaning on many scriptural passages, and an old rabbi put it well: “Just as a hammer causes a mass of sparks to fly, so each scripture expresses a multitude of meanings”.[6]

This mentality resulted in the application to texts of a dual hermeneutic, thanks to which the total meaning of the New Testament consists of readings endowed with a dual meaning, both manifest and hidden, and only by practicing this dual interpretation can the whole Christ be revealed: Christ manifest, whom current Christology knows and explains, and the hidden Christ concerning whom we wish to set forth a number of initial bases for exegesis.

3. It is not easy to prove whether the starting point of the early Christians’ dual hermeneutic was the order of study said to have been practiced at Qumran.[7] The aim of that study was knowledge of those hidden things that were to be revealed only progressively to those who received the teachings of the sect. According to the Qumran texts, the scriptures are expressed in the form of commandments that may be classified as manifest and hidden, the manifest commandments being those that had already been revealed, while the hidden ones were to be the object of study and accessible only to the chosen ones who received the teaching.

It is not the intention of the study we now propose to go into the origins of the early Christian dual hermeneutic, because such a historical and cultural study would precisely be manifest, meaning that it would be a distraction, diverting attention towards secondary areas of knowledge, while neglecting the pure revelation of hidden knowledge which the text proposes.

The only thing we can fittingly affirm is that the doctrine of commandments developed at Qumran does to a large extent correspond to the dual hermeneutic which we hold to have been practiced by the first Christian hagiographers and which we are now studying.

In the New Testament texts, the manifest order consists of those expressions that are understood in a first, straightforward reading, since the value of their wise and moral content is self-evident, and the demands that arise from them call essentially for compliance. On the other hand, expressions that fall within the hidden order can be got at only through a by no means easy reinterpretation; one that enables the reader to discover therein knowledge of such density as to endow them with transformative power.

In its context, knowledge of a hidden order lies under the manifest layer of meaning, and must be discovered by means of a direct investigation, that is to say, a study in which the investigator identifies with the thing investigated so intensively, becoming so much at one with it, that knower and known lose separate meaning and become unified in pure knowing.

When this method of direct revelation is applied to investigation of the hidden Christ, indwelling, eternal, it becomes possible to trace the investigation back to the essence of the object under study. Like the seed in Saint Mark’s Gospel, which grows without the sower knowing how, this essence simply reveals itself.[8]

All this is set forth in an important text in the Enoch cycle: “From the beginning that Son of Man was hidden, and the Most High kept him in the presence of his power, and revealed him only to the chosen.”[9]

3 John 5:39

4 Luke 1:2

5 John 1:14; Luke 9:29-31

6 Sanhedrin, 34a). Cfr. A. del Agua Pérez: El método midrásico, p. 54, Valencia, 1985.

7 Cfr. D. Patte: Early Jewish hermeneutic in Palestine, 1975 (see 1QS 8:15-16).

8 Mark 4:27

9 1 Enoch 62:7

II

1. The “hidden” method can be applied only once the searcher has taken due account of the fact that the Christian hagiographers practiced a dual hermeneutic in which the two aspects, the manifest and the hidden, were set forth simultaneously in the same text.

This prior knowledge makes for the arising of an awareness which, once present, enables the searcher to discover in every text already familiar in terms of the manifest order, a new, hitherto unsuspected reading, one that opens up a new interpretation in keeping with the hidden order.

At this point, it must be made clear that, just as manifest Christology is not limited only to the study of Christ’s being and his person, but covers his work of salvation, that is to say, soteriological Christology, so it is possible, for analytical purposes, to distinguish in the hidden Christology two methodological stages without this in any way affecting Christ’s indivisible unity.

By putting into practice the first of these two stages, which we could entitle indirect reinterpretation, it should be possible for the scholar to effect by spontaneous natural selection a reinterpretation of each text. This will be a fresh reading, unconditioned by the interpretations produced by manifest exegesis over the course of many centuries, which come between the text and the true knowledge expressed in its hidden aspect.

As one progresses with this indirect reinterpretation, it becomes possible to acquire the formal habit required to discover the hidden expression lying behind the superficial manifest layer of the text. Studying these expressions endowed with hidden meaning, one comes to acquire indirect knowledge of the whole Christ; and this in turn, although indirect, has the effect of considerably enriching knowledge of the dual aspect of the scriptures. It thus becomes possible gradually to contemplate an image of Christ more complete than that provided by manifest Christology.

What we are saying about Christology applies to all the methods of New Testament exegesis following the manifest approach: to the philological method, to the history of forms, to the history of scriptural composition and to the Midrashic-Derashic method (Tr. complex Jewish systems of scriptural study) the ultimate approach to exegesis.

As every researcher well knows, a method is no more than a technical working tool, and its application will remain void and useless for as long as its content is not informed with meaning by material grounded in knowledge. There can be no doubt, then, that neither the history of a term, nor formal classification, nor the compositional process followed by the text, nor knowledge of Derashic procedures, nor the history of the relation of rabbinic sources with the New Testament, will on its own suffice when it comes to deciphering the complete meaning of a text, but only for confirming or disproving prior hypotheses.

That is why one not infrequently comes across works of exegesis that are beautifully and brilliantly worked out according to a given method or series of methods, yet whose meaning amounts to the no more than a fish biting its tail, because the method in question and the technical means it employs produce no interpretations, only procedures for confirming the previously existing state of knowledge or ignorance.

That said, prior knowledge that the New Testament texts were composed in accordance with a dual hermeneutic is necessarily useful when it comes to deciphering their whole meaning. All these texts speak in parallel in a manifest way and in another hidden one, and once one has discovered this, the first of these two ways is perfected, since both must complete one another when it comes to the absolute meaning, in an ultimate synthesis intended by the hagiographer.

2. As an example of the general direction of the thesis we mean to outline in this work, and bearing in mind that this comes only under the first stage, that of indirect reinterpretation, we can attempt to decipher the simultaneously revealed double Christology, manifest and hidden, by means of the dual hermeneutic employed by the evangelist in a significant phrase from the fourth Gospel: The Word was made flesh. He lived among us.[10]

According to the manifest order, this text must be interpreted to mean that the invisible only Son was revealed to the world as Jesus of Nazareth, the visible Christ. That would be the traditional exegesis in terms of manifest Christology.

If, however, the text is further interpreted following the hidden order, which considers the aspect of the eternal Christ, it must be understood that the Word, as the invisible Son of Man, was from the beginning revealed at different times and in different places to the chosen ones anointed by the Spirit of God.

The Word was, in effect, sown in every man at birth,[11] and that is what the text means in the hidden order when it affirms that it dwelt among us. The sown Word is the Son of Man, hidden, not known to most men’s consciousness, until one day revealed to the chosen one, thus accomplishing the evangelical sentence that there is nothing hidden but it must be disclosed.[12]

That is the exegesis of the Gospel text that lies hidden within the manifest layer of meaning, both coexisting in parallel, without any friction, because there is no intersection or contradiction between the two exegetic lines.

It must be pointed out that acceptance of the two exegetic aspects calls for the same degree of faith, although the nature of each will be distinct: the Word, eternal and indivisible, is the absolute essence of Christ, and can also be revealed as the essence of every man, the Son of Man, invisible and eternal.

3. The Gospel provides abundant testimony to the hidden Christological interpretation, and it may be helpful at this stage to call on a number of these passages as primary witnesses to this.

Saint Luke’s Gospel tells that Jesus the Nazarene, the risen and thus purely eternal, preexisting Christ, met with two disciples who were going to Emmaus and, starting with Moses… he explained to them the passages throughout the scriptures that were about himself.[13]

Unquestionably, Jesus was on that occasion referring to the hidden Christ, made manifest in Moses and in various prophets who followed. According to the hidden exegesis, Jesus Christ claimed that revelation for himself on all those occasions, not without first calling two unbelieving disciples foolish, and slow of heart.[14]

The Gospel affirmation that Abraham rejoiced to see my day [the Day of the Son of Man]; he saw it and was glad is to be interpreted according to the same hidden order.[15]

What this meant in Saint John’s Gospel is not that Abraham foresaw the Messianic birth of Christ Jesus who was many years later to proclaim the Good News in the land of Judaea -this being the manifest interpretation, which is somewhat weak here-but that from the Day when the Lord announced to Abraham the birth of the promised son, the hidden Christ who is born in the purified soul as a revelation from above, the Patriarch lived in the presence of God. That Day was for him, and would remain so thenceforth and forever, the Day of the Son of Man, the Christ, hidden until then and now revealed to him.[16]

Likewise, the son of the promise made to David, the fruit of his loins, was in effect, by manifest descent through his lineage, Jesus, the Christ, at once manifest and hidden; but Jesus takes care to ensure that the Good News he brings places on record that the one born from above, the hidden Christ, the eternal, pre-existing Son of Man, seated on the right hand of the Father, is called by David, not son, but Lord.[17]

By means of this clarification, Jesus confirms his presence in David, his essential identity with the anointed one, as he had confirmed his presence in Abraham and before the time of Abraham: Before Abraham was, I Am.[18]

Doubtless, both before Abraham and at the time of David, the Word had already been made flesh and had dwelt among us.

The Gospel also states that Isaiah saw his [Christ’s] glory and his words referred to him.[19] For manifest exegesis, this affirmation means that Isaiah anticipated the Messiah prophetically, clairvoyantly foreseeing the future birth of Jesus at Bethlehem, together with many other contemporaneous events. Hidden exegesis sees in this prophetic son described by Isaiah, not only a prefiguration of the Messiah manifest in Jesus, but the reality of the hidden Christ, the Eternal, the Son of Man, ever one and the same, who reveals himself to the chosen as one born again in the spirit.

What Isaiah describes through the birth of the son is the sign from God[20] born to a young virgin, the son whom the prophet calls Immanuel, God with us. With him is announced the great experience, the higher religious revelation in the life of the chosen one. Nevertheless, from the manifest viewpoint, Isaiah’s Immanuel serves in Saint Matthew’s Gospel as a Christological derash when the evangelist refers back to Isaiah.[21]

As a manifest sign, Matthew’s derash is to be understood as a model promise fulfillment concerning a sacred event announced in the Old Testament, but from the hidden angle, it serves as a justification for the New Testament scribe. The birth of the promised Christ the Lord, God with us, which was so difficult for many to believe, found its well documented antecedent and accomplishment in the words of the prophet.

Using very precise wording, the fourth evangelist says, not that Isaiah saw the Son, but that he saw his glory. However, whenever the evangelists speak of the coming of the Son of Man, they describe his arrival with great power and glory. Mark even adds that he will gather [unite in one] his chosen.[22]

And how could the Son of Man be seen except as glory? In the theophany of the Transfiguration, when Moses and Elijah appear in glory with Jesus, that Glory is described by the evangelists as brilliant as lightning by Luke, dazzlingly white by Mark and Matthew, in an attempt to distinguish the Being from his clothing, the light from his splendor: His face shone like the sun and his clothes became as white as the light.[23]

The presence of Moses and Elijah in the high mountain, inseparable in glory from Jesus, in glory that can admit of no separation into differentiated, individual tabernacles[24] bears witness to the oneness of the Son of Man in the pure nakedness of being Glory, being the garment of light covering the Father.[25]

Likewise the prophets Ezekiel and Daniel revealed the Son of Man, on the Day of their theophany; revealed their true being, the naked essence of the mortal human condition. On that Day, both saw the Glory they describe in their respective writings as looking like fire[26] and a stream of fire.[27]

It must be understood that the only Son, the garment of light covering the Father, is the Son of Man, the Word sown in every man who comes into this world, and dwells hidden within us.[28] When revealed to a chosen one, to a purified virginal soul, he is discovered as the eternal, preexisting Christ, he to whom all scriptures bear witness, for Christ is always, from the beginning, one and the same. And this is the mystery that must be revealed, the work that each must fulfill, for man’s consummation consists of being completely one.[29]

When the Gospel says that the Word became flesh and lived among us, we shall have found the doorway to eternal bliss, if we are ready to hear this in the hidden order. According to the text, we are all holders of the Son of Man, although many are not even aware of having received him; but he is very close to us, as the eternal guest in our mortal temple of clay.

That is what the Psalter says, using other words than the Gospel to bear witness of the Son of Man, for the psalmist also spoke of him: For those who fear him, his saving help is near, and the glory will then live in our country.[30]

10 John 1:14

11 Mark 4:14; Jam.1:18, 21; John 1:9

12 Mark 4:22

13 Luke 24:27

14 Luke 24:25

15 John 8:56

16 Gen. 17:1-2; 16-17

17 Ps. 110:1; Matt. 22:41-45

18 John 8:58

19 John 12:41; Isai. 7:14

20 Isai. 7:11

21 Matt. 1:23 (Tr. Derash here: a scriptural reference designed by the Matthew scribe to confer legitimacy on the account for the Jewish reader.)

22 Mark 13:26-27

23 Matt. 17:2

24 Luke 9:33

25 Ps. 104:2

26 Ezek. 1:27

27 Dan. 7:10

28 Mark 4:14

29 John 17:23

30 Ps.85:10

III

1. The purpose of this work is to awaken in some men awareness that the canonical New Testament texts express a dual hermeneutic, and exegesis makes it possible, once one has assimilated a first reading, which we shall call manifest, to undertake a second reading, one that will be more difficult to apprehend, in order to find through it a new meaning which the Christian hagiographers called hidden, or secret.

The practice of the dual hermeneutic demanded of the early Christian scribes previous interpretation of the Old Testament, that is, knowledge of the procedures and scriptures traditionally practiced by the Jewish Sôfêrim. Their purpose was to apply to the great revelations made by Jesus the plural structures of the Bible. It thus appears probable that, as some present-day researchers have pointed out, there should have formed several different schools of early Christian scribes.[31]

Thus, it is sometimes possible to distinguish between New Testament texts the expressive forms peculiar to the Palestinian school of Matthew, which closely resemble the methods used by the Qumran community; the Talmudic-Midrashic school of John, in Ephesus; the peculiar composition of Luke, influenced by Paul’s modus operandi, and above all, the general hermeneutic provided with surprising agility by Mark’s composition.

The hidden line of Christian hermeneutic refers essentially to Christ, not only because it explains how the preexisting hidden Christ underlies Christ manifest, but how Christ, the only Son, is the reality, the hidden treasure, One with the Father, whom everyone who loves God and seeks after him will need to manifest as their means to salvation.

When Matthew compiles the teachings of Jesus about the works of compassion that make a man just, alms, prayer and fasting, he never fails to point out in every single case that the Father, who is in that secret place…sees all that is done in secret.[32] When Matthew says is in that secret place, he may mean more than what everyday awareness might suggest, that our Father is present in man’s essence, in his true Being, somewhere not even recognized by consciousness, and thus hidden, unknown.

The Epistle to the Colossians states that the mystery of God is the living, eternal Christ, for Christ himself is the First Mystery, in whom all the jewels of wisdom and knowledge are hidden.[33]

This is endorsed by Enoch when he expects that The Son of Man…will reveal all the treasures of that which is concealed.[34] In truth, the treasures, the pearl, the stone that the builders rejected, all these are simply metaphors for that eternal Christ who is our true Being, of which we are all so unaware and who must be made manifest, as explained in the hidden aspect of the scriptures.

Mark, in what sounds like a cry bringing hope to all men searching after God, reminds us that there is nothing hidden but it must be disclosed; nothing kept secret, but to be brought to light.[35]

In the fourth Gospel, it is possible to study that incisive question put by Judas, the brother of James, overcome by humility and unable to recognize the merits that disciples might possess, that the hidden Christ should become manifest in them: Lord, what is this all about? Do you intend to show yourself to us and not to the world?[36]

In all these texts, produced by different schools, there is, as explained by the early Christians’ dual hermeneutic, a perfectly clear superposition of Christ manifest and hidden, and the latter manifests only to those who love and seek the eternal Christ. The pattern that emerges from all this is that the hidden Christ will in the end become manifest, for this is the sum of Jesus’ teachings which it is now up to every man to realize in himself.

This is explained very clearly in John’s first Epistle: My dear people, we are already the children of God but what we are to be in the future has not yet been revealed; all we know is, that when it is revealed, we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he really is.[37]

2. The first stage that spells out the methodology for drawing closer to the hidden Christ sets out from recognition and moves on to searching in accordance with the dual hermeneutic that reveals what lies hidden. This stage, we have entitled indirect reinterpretation. The intention is to show up the existence of an underlying seam in the scriptures, one which reveals that the canonical texts mention and to a large extent throw light on the Christ, preexisting, eternal.

Once one has undertaken an indirect, external, intellectual study of the hidden way, it becomes necessary to move on resolutely to the second methodological stage, which we have called that of direct revelation.

When we speak of direct revelation, we would like to explain that in this analysis to which we have accorded so much attention in our writing, and of which we are in this Foreword providing only an outline for purposes of orientation, the object of the search seems to be within us, so that, as we approach it, subject and object, knower and known, begin to blur in our consciousness, becoming only vaguely distinct from one another, until they crystallize in the reality of being one and the same.

Perhaps the clearest explanation for this is to be found in the text of Paul’s speech to the Athenians on the Areopagus, as told by Luke in the Acts of the Apostles. Paul claimed on that occasion to speak of the Unknown God mentioned by the Athenians in the inscription on an altar. He argued that this God, unknown because hidden, was revealed in the living Christ, preexisting, eternal, in the true Lord who does not make his home in shrines made by human hands.[38]

The temple in which the true, the living God dwells in every man is the body (the psycho-physical flesh), as it was written.[39] That temple was not made with men’s hands and its unknown sacred guest is the living God, both immanent and transcendent, who is to be sought after and may be encountered, following the path of direct revelation.

Completing his important speech about the unknown God, Paul adds that God, when he made the world, delimited very clearly where he might be sought so that men might seek the deity, and by feeling their way towards him, succeed in finding him. Yet in fact he is not far from any of us, since it is in him that we live, and move, and exist.

This text of Paul’s, selected by Luke, is the most concrete statement, not only concerning the inner presence of the living Christ, hidden, unknown, in man; but also, concerning the existence of a way to search for his direct revelation.

When Paul says that God “is not far”, this accords with the purest hidden orthodoxy and the kerygma of Jesus, in which he affirms that the Kingdom of God is near. Paul is not expressing this in terms of nearness in time, as has been understood by many who, following only the manifest exegesis, hoped, as some indeed still hope, for the immediate coming of the Kingdom. Paul is without question speaking of proximity in space, or even better, as we understand it, of cognitive intimacy, according to the hidden interpretation.

When, moreover, he proclaims that it is in him that we live, and move, and exist, two different levels of knowledge of Being remain implicit: a current of manifest superficial consciousness, what we think we are, and a true Being, still and profound, hidden by the waters when they rush turbulently over it. This current is like consciousness sliding through time and engendering existence and movement that cover the mystery of God and Christ preexisting, the Son of Man, in whom are hidden all the treasures.

The essential and disregarded ground of consciousness is the unknown God who can only be revealed directly, that is, through an act of inner searching that must involve the whole man. This is a great search that represents the main part of the Gospel; or better expressed, it is the Gospel. Jesus describes the disposition needed for this search as a metanoia, a conversion in which the mind turns in upon itself.

This conversion or luminous reflexion is necessary, as is, starting from there, a broad purification, a complete inner cleansing, so that the waters (of thought) calm their turbulence, revealing in pure transparency the changeless ground that is the living God.

Lastly, to obtain the full manifestation of what lies hidden, which will be qualified as resurrection, the Gospel proposes insistently a patient, unbroken vigilance, a state of ceaseless watchfulness, so that the presence, once discovered, may become stabilized in the renewed consciousness, universal, one, born of the spirit.

The first step, the fundamental one, in this inner search, is to perceive the presence of the spirit of God, the Shechinah described by the Jewish Sôfêrim. This presence, whose birth or bursting into our consciousness usually makes its first appearance as a vague intuition-a wind of which Jesus says you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going-will spring up on its own if only it is contemplated with love and diligent devotion.

Little by little, this mysterious flowering, born not of a woman’s womb but of the spirit, will come to show itself as the Glory of the Presence (the Iqar Shechinah) which many ancient prophets beheld, even became; and Jesus claims that their testimony in the Scriptures bears witness to himself, as the Son of Man.

Clearly, the first precondition for such a revelation to take place must be faith, a faith that, once born, grows gradually stronger all on its own. Faith, that faith, grows and becomes established thanks to the watchful, attentive eye of knowledge, which is far more reliable and effective than our physical eyes.

Of this faith, which is firm conviction of Being, Jesus spoke when he said: If you do not believe that I am He, you will die in your sins.[40]

31 We intend to remain faithful to our intention not to provide footnotes that do not apply specifically to the Bible, but with regard to the purely historical issue of early Christian schools, it will be correct to cite a number of researchers who have studied the matter with some success: R.le Déaut, K.Stendahl, Ch. Perrot, A. del Agua, W. Heit Müller, W. Bousset, A. Frididsen, C.H. Dodd, L. Alonso Schokel, M. Resé and H.J. Schoeps.

32 Matt. 6:2-6

33 Col.2:3 These are the hidden treasures of wisdom and knowledge

34 1 Enoch 46:2-3

35 Mark 4:22

36 John 14:22

37 1 John 3:2

38 For all this passage, see Acts 17:22-28.

39 John 1:9 This is the Word, the true light that enlightens everyone coming into the world. As regards the body being this temple, see John 2:19-21. This could be not only the body but the whole man.

40 John 8:24

IV

1. The Gospel according to Judas-Thomas,[41] whose words the anonymous scribe qualifies as hidden, is the text taken as the organizing principle and guide for this work.

Our purpose is, as we have already explained, to show that all the texts that make up the present canon of the New Testament express a dual hermeneutic, in which the manifest meaning and the hidden one appear in a delicate but exemplary balance, rarely broken.

The first of these two meanings is, of course, that to which manifest theology has hitherto given preference in its own studies and explanations, without this meaning that there have not during all this time been a fair number of isolated attempts-never organic or systematized and never taken into proper account-to teach certain aspects of hidden early Christian thought.

Our claim here is to have attempted to open up a pathway to this aspect of Christian thought, and this path must, although still rough and rudimentary in regard to external, indirect research, be broadly comprehensive; it must be like the unfolding of a general map which future generations of researchers will have to complete, deepening knowledge of many of the problems raised therein.

The Gospel of Thomas has been used for the purpose of this general unfolding, since it is a blueprint providentially well-suited to the task. As is well known, this gospel is one of the fifty-three treatises found in 1946 in the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi, some hundred kilometers to the north of Luxor, near to the ancient hermitage of Chenoboskion. Not without a certain undue hastiness, the entire library of Nag Hammadi was initially classified as Gnostic; subsequently, however, with the gradual publication of a number of works from the collection, it proved impossible to ascribe the entire diverse body of writings to any single current of Christian thought.

In regard to the Gospel of Thomas, the Coptic text of the manuscript, conserved today in the Coptic Museum in Old Cairo, was established by a group of five researchers, known today as the Brill Group, after the publisher of the translation made by these professors in 1959.[42]

The translators only explained that the treatise-a collection of logia or sayings of Jesus, which they themselves differentiated and numbered 1 to 114-are a translation or adaptation into Sahidic Coptic of a work the original text of which must have been written in Greek around the year 140, on the basis of even older sources.[43]

Professor Philippe de Suarez, a Frenchman, presented in 1975 a direct translation from the Coptic texts, together with a parallel arrangement of the text into numbered verses, which permits of a scrupulous textual verification.[44]

De Suarez draws attention to the attraction exercised on him by the archaic character of the examples to be found in the Gospel of Thomas. The sayings of Jesus appear in this text stripped of certain ornamental forms and seem to be even older than the composition generally present in the synoptic texts.

2. Is the Gospel of Thomas Gnostic? According to the classification proposed by those attending the International Colloquium on the Origins of Gnosticism, held in Messina in 1966, for the purpose of differentiating the terms gnosis and Gnosticism, it should be pointed out that not even one of the sayings of Jesus to be found in the Gospel of Thomas provides any serious reason for affirming that this treatise should be classified as being Gnostic.

Characteristic of the Christian or Judeo-Christian sects that flourished, especially in the 2nd century and are usually known as Gnostic are formulations in which the universe is explained in terms of a complex mythical symbology full of Aeons, Ranks, Proboloi, Archons, Leiturgoi and many other major personifications that have been sparsely studied and whose real meaning is difficult to establish.

Although the Gnostic mythifications are not too far removed from the manifest Christian myth, the latter has other forms of expression, which are correspondingly manifest, since we hear of angels and archangels, cherubim and seraphim, thrones, dominions, principalities and powers, etc... Christian-Gnostic correlations frequently make an appearance when they are elucidated and demythified, but call for a certain study of doctrine, a lengthy and by no means easy work of exegesis.

On the contrary, gnosis, to the content of which the Gospel of Thomas must decidedly be assigned, does not imply heretical thinking in relation to Christianity when it is explained according to the dual hermeneutic. Gnosis presupposes structurally the formulation of a science whereby it is possible to attain knowledge of God, of the absolute immanent-transcendent Being. In an even more restrictive sense, it could be said that “gnosis is pure knowledge, knowledge of God”.[45]

3. The most important thing about the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas is that openly, decidedly, they set out to explain the Christian kerygma solely in terms of its hidden aspect, as though unaware of the manifest aspect, that is to say, without presupposing the dual hermeneutic which with such a delicate balance sustains the New Testament texts of the Canon.

This does not mean that the Gospel of Thomas does not make use of a metaphoric level of meaning; on the contrary, metaphor as the usual mode of expression enables it to express its precepts by means of improbable, even absurd assertions, since the figures of speech used are almost invariably contradictory.

As will be seen, paradox is the specific form of expression of the Gospel of Thomas, and it is this surprisingly suggestive logic that compels one to meditate until one finds the reality that lies behind each metaphorical image.

That is why, in the sayings of Jesus, as presented by the Gospel of Thomas, one is frequently confronted with the figure and the reality; yet there is never a dual reality, as in the canonical New Testament scriptures, but a purely linear exposition, while remaining always in the body of hidden interpretation.

It is not for nothing that the Gospel of Thomas proclaims from its very first words in the Incipit that the text consists of the hidden words spoken by Jesus. The title, the Living One, applied to him later in the text, clearly reveals that the central personage, the author of these sayings, is Christ, the eternal, preexisting, ever living, in his human temple, not made with men’s hands, or outside it, but always the hidden universal Christ, whose testimony appears throughout the scriptures.

4. A few last words. Every work of biblical exegesis, and this is one, is normally a work of applied exegesis. This is to be understood in the old, traditional sense that every researcher sets out to add the grain of his own research to the cumulative study process built up by his predecessors, in which, in a way, he dresses up and seeks protection. Pursuant to this, every work of research and study finds to a large extent a module for evaluation in the intellectual baggage that each and everyone subscribes to, and is assessed directly on the basis of the bibliographical notes adduced.

This is the usual technical procedure to which we are accustomed; however, in the present work the situation is obviously different for a number of reasons, the first being the sparseness of the material that can be adduced for the purposes of this text from ancient texts posterior to the Bible and the rare discoveries of researchers who have preceded us.

It is not difficult to understand that it will be difficult to protect a work like this one by means of a weight of bibliographical sources. Once one has discarded as inadequate the Gnostic bibliography that has become suggestive ever since the appearance of the Nag Hammadi library, very little material remains available for the purpose of studying paths of knowledge other than those provided by the Bible itself. Moreover, the Gnostic texts use modes of expression entailing a complex symbology, interpretation of which would call for an effort perhaps greater than our present intention to enter into the hidden aspect of the canonical texts of the New Testament.

The purpose of these pages is, moreover, not so much the indirect reinterpretation of the hidden aspect, for which the references applying to our study can provide crutches, as sharing with the readers of this book the means for attaining a direct revelation of the hidden Christ. It goes without saying that, in order to arrive at that deep, transformational meditation, no one has any serious need of bibliographical support or of anything other than their own knowledge and practice.

Consequently, the only method we have felt free to follow has been pure exegesis, meaning, that which consists of direct confrontation with the Bible, without any travelling companion other than one’s own copy to clarify and explain it. With this method, validity is conferred-however involuntarily-on the old Rabbinic affirmation that the Bible is self-explanatory. Nevertheless, the logical approach of the method may nowadays be regarded as old or antiquated.

Another reason for almost systematically sidelining all testimony that does not come directly from the Bible is grounded in practical considerations. This work is in a sense written for the few (who may be many) and this, we are well aware, raises a serious difficulty. What we mean is that it was written for those, we know not how few or how many, who seek no more wisdom than that which consists in coming to know God, and this can sometimes clash with the wisdom of the wise, where the latter are not seeking such knowledge of God above all else. What is more, in approaching this knowledge of God, cultural accumulation typically proves to be a hindrance, while weighing oneself down with unnecessary bibliographical material proves quite unnecessary.[46]

Our one and only real purpose in writing this work has been to awaken love for the whole Christ, and when we speak of the whole Christ, we are referring both to the Christ who died for mankind in Jerusalem more than two thousand years ago, love for whom has been encouraged by manifest exegesis since the beginning of the Christian era, and at the same time, to the Christ preexisting and eternal. Although both are one and the same being, if we speak of the whole Christ, we cannot disregard the inseparable Christ who, from the beginning, has lain forgotten, unknown, crucified within every man, and who is only waiting to reveal his immortal, divine presence, invoked by love and faith.

Then the true beatitude of his resurrection will arise in every man.

41 The Gospel of Thomas (hereinafter GT)

42 The names of these five professors are: A. Guillaumont, H. Ch. Puech, G. Gispel, W. Till and Yassah Abd Al Massih

43 In the course of our study and commentary, we found a number of errors in this differentiation, which in some instances did not prove faithful to the text. This could affect the numbering. Despite this, we have respected that established by the translators.

44 L’Evangile selon Thomas, Philippe de Suarez. Editions Métanoia, Marsanne, 26200 Montélimar. To this French translation must be added the eighty logia of GT included in the Synopse des quatre évangiles, with parallels to extra-canonical texts, 2 vol., edited by P. Benoît and M.E. Boismard, Les Editions du Cerf, 1965/1972.

45 In this sense the Messina proposal to define the term gnosis is erroneous, as though formulated by a group of intellectuals unfamiliar with the true gnosis. They describe it as knowledge of the divine mysteries reserved for an elite, and try to describe it in terms of the myth they see in it. They fail to realize that anyone who attains knowledge of God is ipso facto a chosen one, a knower.

46 What would satisfy the author of this book would be if readers were to tackle it without any immediate support other than the Bible, kept close at hand for checking the many citations. (N.B The biblical texts and citations used correspond to the Jerusalem Bible in almost all cases.)

MAN, TEMPLE OF THE LIVING GOD

I have been telling you all this

in metaphors. The hour is coming

when I shall no longer speak

to you in metaphors, but

tell you about the Father

in plain words.

John 16:25

When you make the two One, you will become the Son of Man.

GT log. 106

INCIPIT

These are the hidden words which the Living Jesus spoke

and Didymos Judas-Thomas recorded.

Explanation by parable[47].

When he says “the Living Jesus”, the anonymous scribe indicates that these words were spoken by Jesus, drawing on his higher consciousness, his mind transcending the habitual consciousness expressed through the Sanctuary of the body.[48]

This leads us to suppose that the words spoken by the Living Jesus were not words in human language, but ideas indivisible and undivided.

These words uttered by the Living Jesus needed to be interpreted in parable if men were to have a thread that would enable them to apprehend their meaning, it was not enough simply to write them down. According to the words of the logion, the apostle Thomas undertook this special transcription, revealing his hidden condition of didymos (the twin) by showing the other name of his duality, Judas.

It is said in the fourth Gospel that for a while Thomas did not attain the blessing of believing without seeing,[49] and this is attributed to his dense consciousness, still not free from the one who ate bread with me and raised his heel against me.[50] This means that Thomas had not yet banished the Adversary, identified with Judas, as Jesus had done when he said: What you are going to do, do quickly.[51]

This is one of the great myste ries revealed by the teaching of Jesus, to which it will be necessary to return in order to clarify it in these commentaries. [Editor’s note: See in particular the commentary on logion 71.]

For the time being, it will suffice to call to witness a hymn which an early Christian author claims that the apostle Thomas sang in prison (in the prison of his own duality).

On a sudden, when I received it,

the garment [of light] seemed to me to become a mirror of myself.

I saw it all in all,

And I too received all in it,

for we were two in distinction and yet gain one in one likeness.[52]

Commentary

1. If the text states that its words are “hidden”, it is because the true interpretation does not offer itself to our understanding or allow itself to be readily seen or felt. The words which Judas Thomas recorded refer to God’s mystery, that of the living Christ “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge”.[53] That is why the words spoken therein are said to be hidden. But the keys of knowledge were purloined many centuries ago[54] and neither those who took them nor their heirs have ever returned them. This considerably increases the difficulties of correctly understanding the words transcribed.

Nevertheless, regardless of the historical responsibility of those who took them, what is now needed is an attempt to restore to the doors of knowledge keys that could enable this generation of mankind to enter into the true mystery of God, Christ, who is ultimately the mystery of every man.

This purpose is a culmination of hope, the project of a lifetime, in itself valid for fulfilling man’s sense of his own existence, for our entire life, our entire consciousness, has to be and to remain committed to it, in order to be engendered anew through the imperishable seed[55] of pure consciousness.

We are called upon by the hidden words which Judas Thomas transcribed in those early Christian days, to undertake this mystery quest, one that means entering inquisitively into the Inner Sanctum, a pilgrimage that Christ Jesus himself opened for us in paradigm, as a new and living way.[56] And if we speak of “hidden words”, this has here a double meaning. The first act of hiding the Word arises from our own consciousness, buried under the dead works[57] of conditioning, time and decay, misinterpretations and ignorance, all of which hinder free, straightforward contemplation of the Living God of whom every man is the Temple, and in whom we live and have our being, for he is Life itself, of whom it is written: I will live in them and walk among them.[58]

As for the second act of hiding, that comes of the difficulties peculiar to the way of searching one’s innermost being that must be taken if one is to discover the mystery of God; in other words, to realize or be resurrected to consciousness of the Light and Life that we in essence are, and so to be called children of the Living God,[59] sparks from the same hearth.

2. The way that consists of awakening what lies hidden was clearly acknowledged by Jesus himself when he raised the question of whether the Messiah was the son of David or his Lord.[60] The manifest way was surely that of the son whom God swore an oath that he would give David: One of the sons of your body I will set on your throne.[61] However, Jesus Christ did not draw on his Messianic claim as son, since it was already plain that he was for the purposes of history the son of the lineage according to the flesh[62]; but as David’s Lord, of whom the Psalm proclaims: The Lord [God] says to my lord.[63] The son from David’s body that God swore he would give was not, as the people hoped, a son of the flesh who would sit on a worldly throne, but one born from above, the fruit of a spiritual regeneration, as a precondition for entry into the Kingdom of God.[64] Such a one, born of the Spirit-not born of woman[65]-is, in the words of Jesus, the Son of God in man. The Son of Man, meaning, the Lord, the Christ, the Son, whom God seats at his right hand.

That the Son of God, born of the Spirit, should also be the heir, the son of the lineage of David, is merely a fact that can be identified as the fulfillment of the promise made to David, a fulfillment hoped for by the Jewish people in Jesus’ day, in accordance with their tradition.

Nevertheless, for many later Christians, descent from David is an irrelevant detail, a mere historical fact. That is why, when Jesus claims, after a fashion, that he is the Lord to whom the psalm alludes, he is aiming far higher. He admits that the blood of David’s line is his earthly body; but what counts for him is to place on record that he is the Lord, the Christ, fully assumed and made manifest by his consciousness of being Jesus Christ. At the same time, it is for him important to explain that he, the Lord, is the son of God, the hidden Christ, preexisting and one with the Father from the beginning.

Subsequently, in his teachings, what Jesus set out to show is that the hidden way consists in this: in reviving in ourselves the Living God who has been waiting since all eternity. And he warns us that he is not far from us, for in him we live, and move, and exist.[66] If we do not know this, it is because he is the hidden Christ, yet it is written: We are all his children.

Only after this resurrection in the Spirit, which is within everyone’s reach, shall we cease to be whited sepulchers,[67] the dead who bury their dead.

Birth from on high, the coming within us of the hidden Son of Man, will then be manifest fact.

47 The words by parable are used because they are indicative only of the problems raised by the Incipit.

48 It is to this bodily temple that he was referring when he prophesied that he would raise it in three days (John 2:19-21)

49 John 20:29

50 Ps. 41:10; John 13:18

51 John 13:27

52 From the Hymn of the Pearl, which the Apostle Thomas sang in prison.

53 Col. 2:3

54 Luke 11:52

55 1 Peter 1:23

56 Heb. 10:20

57 Heb. 9:14

58 Ezek. 37:27; 2 Cor. 6:16; Lev. 26:11

59 Rom. 9:26

60 Matt 22:41-46; Mark 12:35-37; Luke 20:41-44

61 Ps. 132:11

62 Matt. 1:16

63 Ps. 110:1; Matt.22:42-45

64 John 3:3-5

65 Matt.11:11

66 Acts 17:27-28

67 Matt. 23:27

LOGION 1

And he said:

“Whoever discovers the interpretation

of these sayings will not taste death”.

COMMENTARY

The idea expressed in this logion is the very essence of the Christian message and it occurs on many occasions in canonical New Testament texts, with slight variations that confer on it a great variety of shades of meaning. We shall be referring to these texts for the purposes of this commentary.

Without question, the process announced consists in all cases of a transfer or mutation of consciousness that gradually renews it until it attains perfect knowledge, or epignosis.[68] With this slow day-by-day transformation, the attachments with which consciousness identifies-commonly and generically called the tendencies of the flesh[69]-are cast aside. Beneath them lies pure consciousness, unbeknownst to itself, as though buried or dead.

The whole set of these attachments is what in the language of Saint Paul is called the old man with his deeds,[70] which consist of everything in man that is mortal and has a beginning and an end. When one discards these outer coverings, what remains, naked, in the sight of pure consciousness, is the Spirit, the essence of the new man, he who has through this process passed from death to life, for the Spirit, which the new man knows, since it is he himself, has or is eternal Life.

All these things we are saying are not only known to religion but suspected by many. However, what the logion affirms is that there is an interpretation, a science which, once found, culminates in that mutation[71] of consciousness which amounts to passing from death to life[72] and being thereafter, alive from the dead.[73]

This is, of course, not the manifest but the hidden way, meaning, that still not made manifest to many, because its purpose is realization-the manifestation-of the Living Christ who dwells in the inner sanctum of every one of us, hidden because of our ignorance, and of whom Paul says: But if Christ is in you…[74]

Christ always dwells in us, and this dwelling is to be understood very literally,[75] because he-or what his name really means-is our pure, unavoidable essence, from which we are certainly separated only by the thick veil of our ignorance.

To discover the interpretation, in the sense intended by the logion, means the opening up in our pacified, enquiring mind of interstices of silence that make it possible for us to perceive the Light of the Living God.

Initially, this light can only be dim when it reaches our consciousness, but little by little the bread prepared for man so that one may eat it and not die,[76] laboriously kneaded with our tireless questing after the eternity announced to us, will prove to be the only food that can open us up to perfect Knowledge, and with that, to the clarifying intellection of the sparks of true Light.

The first step towards knowledge resulting from this process of purgative interiorization consists of the arising of an unsuspected capacity for spontaneous intuition of the pure essence that inhabits us and is the substratum above which our active and transitory perception arises.

This intuition of Being is a perception without any possible parallel in the intellectual and sensitive sphere of each one of us, revealing itself in its very act of thinking, as certainty of our own essence. This certainty or intuition of Being is referred to as faith in the language of Jesus: faith that the universal and Living Christ, at once immanent and transcendent, is the only essence that we are. Eternal life and limited and mortal life are the two poles between which this recognition oscillates. That is why Jesus says: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live.”[77] And he also says the converse: “You will die in your sins unless you believe that I am he”.[78]

New Testament thought turns around this choice of identification with all mortal attachments, or on the contrary, with eternal and independent permanence as pure consciousness in the living Christ. It draws a median line between the two spheres of belief and unbelief, and whether or not one has perceived the intuition of Being, of self. It is written that: I tell you most solemnly, the hour will come-in fact it is here already-when the [living] dead will hear the voice of the Son of God,[79] and be brought back to life.[80]

In truth, only those who attend to the Word, first awaiting it, then knowing it intuitively, seeking it and loving it, will in the end perceive it, encounter it and keep it. Since it is the Light of Knowledge that comes from the Son, they will never taste death.[81] They have eternal life and do not come under judgment, but have passed from death to life.[82]

They can no longer die, for they are the same as the angels, and being children of the resurrection they are sons of God.[83]

The New Testament confirmation is conclusive: I tell you solemnly, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power.[84]

It is of these that we are now speaking.

68 Col. 3:10. Saint Paul’s expressions refer to this, in which he encourages us to divest ourselves of the old man and put on the new (cfr. 2 Cor. 4:6; Eph. 4:22-24)

69 Rom. 8:6

70 Col. 3:9-10

71 1 Cor. 12:10 et seq. Saint Paul expresses the greatest respect for what he calls the gift of interpreting tongues.

72 1 John 3:14

73 Rom. 6:13

74 Rom. 8:10

75 Rom. 8:11

76 John 6:50

77 John 11:25

78 John 8:24. I am (êhyeh àser êhyeh = I am that I am) is the name with which the God of his fathers reveals himself to Moses (Ex. 3:14) (the everlasting God). This is equal to Knowledge, as namer and named are one and the same thing. In claiming this name, I AM for himself, Christ confirms what he is, the absolute Being, meaning, the only Being, excluding any other. There is no option here to suggest any kind of dualism after this statement. Christ is Being and, as such, he is the essential Being in every living being, since he is the Life real and eternal, whose rays seem to live all the more, although their life be limited and dependent on Christ. Moses found in Mount Horeb intuition of Being, that is, of Christ.

79 John 5:25

80 Rom. 6:13

81 John 8:52

82 John 5:24

83 Luke 20:36

84 Mark 9:1, Luke 9:27. Meaning, they will see the Kingdom of God and will not die because they will be in eternal Life.

LOGION 2

Jesus said:

“Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find.

When they find, they will be awestruck.

When they are awestruck, they will become amazed,

and will reign over the All.”

COMMENTARY

Behind its innocuous appearance, interpretation of this logion, if we look into the matter carefully, is by no means trouble-free. It amounts to a call to search deeply into Christ, along lines parallel to those recommended by Saint Paul Let your thoughts be on heavenly things, not on the things that are on the earth.[85] But the search in question here is assuredly in keeping with the inner way proposed by Judas Thomas, that of the Son present in man, the one born from on high, the one who can and must be found. What is explained here is that the search must be conducted with unflagging perseverance, it must be like an unbroken flow; when this flux of energy is upheld and sustained by absolute truth and surrender, it is certain that the intuition of the eternal inner Being will emerge in the end, as the first step towards the meeting.

It is true that Search, and you will find is an affirmation that is to be found throughout the Gospel as a broad promise; and this includes the concrete case ask, and it will be given to you.[86] These all form the basis of a very open and generalized theory about the efficacy of prayer. Nevertheless, when one makes a close study of the passages that proclaim this belief, it becomes clearly apparent that the abundant response that is promised does not refer to earthly things, but to the kingdom of the Father and his righteousness. Other things, it is written, will not be given on their own, but will be given as well.[87]

The true spiritual meaning of the search and the request, as well as of the finding and response promised in this logion, both in the short version of Judas Thomas and in the more extensive ones to be found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, is confirmed when the latter adds in conclusion to what has just been expounded How much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.[88]

Without question, the phrase with which the saying ends in Saint Luke’s Gospel situates the search and the response now under discussion in the context of the inner revelation of the Son of Man, since he and nothing else is the means of both the searching and the finding. But it is the Holy Spirit, as Paraclete, interceding between man’s consciousness and the Son and testifying on the Son’s behalf, that must accord such a revelation.[89]

In the fourth Gospel references to the Paraclete are abundant at a particularly intense moment in the story. Jesus announces to his disciples that he will be with them only a little longer and they, faced with the loneliness that awaits them once the master has gone, ask more and more anxious questions: Lord, we do not know where you are going, so how can we know the way? Lord, [first] let us see the Father.[90]

The long passage known as The Farewells opens with these questions. In it Jesus, before his imminent death, makes his last recommendations,[91] the fundamental point on which all of these turn being the Holy Spirit as Paraclete, in other words, the intermediary transmitting to mankind the wisdom of the Son and the Father, through the outpouring of his charismas: knowledge, the gift of tongues, interpretation,[92] etc. The Paraclete is described here as the Spirit of Truth [who] will lead you to the complete truth[93] and it is he who gives substance to the meeting or, better, to the first signs heralding a firm, sure non-mortal encounter with the Son born from on high.

The Gospel scribe plays on the double meaning that involves referring at one and the same time to the Son, the Christ manifest, as the descendant of David through the line of the flesh, the historical figure of Jesus, the living universal Christ and the Son, the hidden, universal Christ whom David rightly called his Lord; and he who dwells in every man, in every temple of flesh, the Living Christ still not totally manifest. But no-was we have already made clear-in accordance with the meaning of the Gospel of Judas Thomas, we shall be concerning ourselves only with the hidden, universal aspect of Christ, which has historically been gravely undervalued, and not with Christ manifest, described profusely and in minute detail by Christian culture.

Seen in terms of the hidden aspect, the action of the Spirit as Paraclete is explained by John at the beginning of his Gospel: The Spirit [pneuma = wind] blows wherever it pleases; you hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.[94] In reality, it may be said of this blowing or inspiration of pneuma, which comes from the Spirit of Truth, transcending time, without any visible past or future, beyond our imagining, that the world neither sees it nor knows it. This ignorance is typical of those who do not possess intuition of Being, consciousness of the Son. But a man who has undergone purification by means of a perseverant and sometimes lengthy immersion of the psyche-metanoia or turning in on oneself-represented in the Gospel by the baptismal bath in water,[95] and has completed the preliminary necessary work, will have been transformed into one clean of heart, ready to begin seeing and knowing the truth which the Spirit blows to him. Nor is it surprising that this should happen, for the Spirit is with you, he is in you.[96]

Jesus says that the Paraclete will teach you everything and remind you of all I have said to you[97] and that he will guide you into all the truth.[98] Moreover, since he proceeds from the Father, he will testify on behalf of the Son,[99] and this means that the knowledge coming from him will lead man’s consciousness from its present burial under the tendencies of dead works to the resplendent and immortal light of Christ which, shining on the pneumatic man converted into a Son of God, will enable him to say with Isaiah: The spirit of the Lord has been given to me, for he has anointed me.[100]

Anointment with holy oil means, in relation to man’s spiritual realization, the activation of the descent into consciousness of the wisdom of the Son, identical to the tongues of fire which, according to the Acts of the Apostles, descended upon the latter when they met to celebrate Pentecost.[101]

Jesus had asked them to keep the Promise of the Father, then he had said to them: John baptized with water but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.[102] And when Pentecost day came around… suddenly they heard what sounded like a powerful wind from heaven, the noise of which filled the entire house in which they were sitting. And something appeared to them that seemed like tongues of fire; these separated and came to rest on the head of each of them. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak foreign languages as the spirit gave them the gift of speech.[103]

What is truly admirable in this account is not only the importance of what is told, but the talent shown by the writer in expressing conjointly the manifest meaning and the secret one. The double meaning which certain words in the New Testament can take on has been employed so as to express under a cloak of mystery and the miraculous that paramount event in the process of spiritual realization, namely the gradual descent of knowledge into the waiting, awakened consciousness, of the higher perception, duly prepared by purification of the psyche and baptism with water. Words like heaven, wind, house, fire or tongues prove here to be exceptionally equivocal and are to be taken only in their directly spiritual sense if one wishes to extract the true teaching from them.

Heaven is to be understood as what is high; not, of course, in the physical sense relating to place, but as a reference to the purest and most elevated consciousness, that of the Son of Man. Wind also means spirit and breath, and it is in this last sense of spiritual breath or of the perception of wisdom that the inspiration or sudden apparition of a powerful wind [that] filled the whole house is to be understood. As for the house, this is like saying that beneath the roof, in the tabernacle, in the home, lies one’s inner consciousness, as in the phrase of the centurion: Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof.[104] The word fire has, since Old Testament times, often been interchangeable with wisdom, or the Holy Spirit, especially in the case of the second baptism with which we are now dealing. Lastly, by the term tongues (Greek glossai in the text) many have wanted to understand-and Saint Luke’s account lends itself to this ambiguity-a reference either to the tongues of fire or to the tongues or native languages of those to whom the Apostles spoke. The tongues of fire are to be interpreted as intuitions descending from divine wisdom. As set out in the text, they are certainly to be understood not as of fire, but like fire, since they do not refer fully and directly to the Son of Man, but point out and predict his complete reality. What it says is that each disciple of Jesus, inspired (by the fire, wisdom) began to speak in his own tongue, that is, in accordance with the language, ray or portion of wisdom to which he had individually had access and which, accordingly, the Spirit that is with [and is] in you[105] moved him to express. That virtue usually coincide-and here lies the deep secret of spiritual mastery-with the language (of wisdom) that the interlocutor can understand and inwardly develop at every moment.

The Gospel expression of the coming of the Holy Spirit as Paraclete, thanks to whose rain of fire the searcher is filled with knowledge to the point of attaining the consciousness of one born from on high, describes the finding-the encounter-to which logion 2 of the Gospel of Thomas refers; and this is the great promise, as Saint Luke reminds us.[106]

The logion uses two different words to describe the two gradual states of consciousness through which it is supposed that one must pass in order to complete this process: When they find [the one they seek] they will be troubled, awestruck. When they are awestruck, they will become amazed.[107]

It should be noted that the troubled state (Greek exiótemi) usually entails a marked decrease in the functions of the intellect, sometimes accompanied by what seems to be their total annihilation, a description that coincides to a large extent with that of ecstasy, or aporia, the state of which some Christian mystics like Saint John of the Cross speak, saying “Y quédeme no sabiendo, toda ciencia trascendiendo”. (For I remained uncom-prehending, all knowledge transcending.)[108]

This alienation, or inner rapture of consciousness, is produced by a potent inner event that dominates attention so utterly that it grabs the senses and suspends them. Consciousness then remains entranced, an effect of the high encounter provoked by the rain of fire which floods the soul with light and knowledge, revealing a world hitherto unsuspected.

The logion adds that the seeker, once awestruck, will become amazed. These words are probably an attempt to describe the attainment of very close access to the Lord, as when an angel appeared to Moses in the flame of a burning bush. The flame (knowledge) is the tongue of fire and the angel, the vision or set of visions that arise from it. As Exodus puts it and Saint Luke recalls: Moses was amazed (Greek ethaúmasen) by what he saw. As he went nearer to look at it the voice of the Lord was heard: I Am the God of your ancestors.[109]

Thus, he who finds, says the end of the logion, will rule over all. The author of Papyrus Oxyrhynchus, section 654 and Clement of Alexandria, who drink from the same source, add a further ending: and having reigned will rest.[110] Those who reign are, in Saint Paul’s words, those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness [and] exercise dominion in [eternal] life through the one man, Jesus Christ[111] Those who have believed in the Christ within and have realized him in themselves, surrendering to him all their being, since they have attained the knowledge that only He is; those who have sought him incessantly and have met him in the end, those who have believed, enter that rest.[112]

85 Col. 3:2

86 Matt. 7:7 et seq.; Luke 11:9 et seq.

87 Matt.6:33

88 Luke 11:13

89 John 15:26

90 John 13:33, 14:5-8

91 John 13:33-36, 15:26-27

92 1 Cor. 12:4-11

93 John 16:13

94 John 3:8

95 Water meaning psyche is a recurrent feature of the NT revelation.

96 John 14:16-17; 1 Cor. 3:16

97 John 14:26

98 John 16:13

99 John 15:26

100 Isai. 61:1; Luke 4:18

101 Acts 2:1

102 Acts 1:5

103 Acts 2:1-4

104 Luke 7:6

105 John 14:17

106 Luke 24:49

107 In the text of Papyrus Oxyrhynchus (P.Oxyr), section 654, nº 1, as in the fragment of Clement of Alexandria Strom. V, only the state of being troubled is mentioned. Nevertheless, in his citation from the Gospel of the Hebrews, in Strom. II, 9:45, Clem. Alex. the only reference is to the state of amazement.

108 St. John of the Cross: Coplas hechas sobre un éxtasis de harta contemplación (Nine Verses made upon an Ecstasy of high Contemplation)

109 Acts 7:30-32; Ex. 3:15

110 Clem. Alex. Strom V.

111 Rom 5:17

112 Heb. 4:1-11

LOGION 3

Jesus said:

“If your leaders say to you ‘Behold, the Kingdom is in the sky!’

then the birds will be there before you are.

If they tell you that the Kingdom is in the sea,

then the fish will be there before you are.

Rather, the Kingdom is within you, and it is outside of you.

When you understand yourselves, you will be understood.

And you will understand that you are Sons of the living Father.

If you do not know yourselves,

then you exist in poverty and you are that poverty.”

COMMENTARY

The idea or, otherwise expressed, the main revelation contained in this logion 3 is that the Kingdom-of Heaven, of God, of the Father-is within and outside us. It is within us because it is the as yet unknown essence of our very selves, our pure awareness, the dwelling, or Holy Hill, the Lord’s tent.[113] It is outside, because it is the essence or pure consciousness of the Living, who are the living because within them lives the Lord who is Life. To affirm the Kingdom’s being within all of us, the logion explains that the Kingdom is not in heaven, the dwelling place of the birds, nor in the sea, in whose waters the fish dwell.[114] This plainly means that the Kingdom cannot have any objective place, for there is no place, no limited point in space where it resides, either in the world of there, the higher (physical or psychic one), or in the world of here (the earthly, hylic one), simply because the Kingdom belongs to a world peculiar to the unborn Father and Son.

This is what the evangelist Luke affirms when, referring to the coming or the decisive inner, individual revelation of the Kingdom of God, he says that this is not coming with things that can be observed. Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within (entós) you.[115] This confirms not only its consonance with the spirit of man but the natural invisibility of the Kingdom.

But the Kingdom of God, of the Father, is often referred to in the New Testament as the Kingdom of Heaven. The term Heaven is used-so we are told-out of reverence, in order to avoid excessive use of the word God[116]; moreover, this seems to correspond to the Jewish concern to substitute a metaphoric expression for the Name of God.[117] Nevertheless, although the word heaven is mitigated here by being used metaphorically, it does make for the attribution to the Kingdom of a confused sense of place, whereas Saint Luke describes it as being decidedly within us.

This arises, for instance, in that passage in which both John the Baptist and Jesus announce the Good News and the beginning of Christ’s ministry with the same words: Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is close at hand.[118] These words seem to have been interpreted traditionally as announcing the imminent drawing near in time and space of the manifest Coming of the Son of Man.[119] But this last, the Parousia or Presence of the Lord in his Day, coming like a thief in the night,[120] meaning the sacred coming of Christ, the Son, as a deep inner revelation,[121] is in no way the beginning of the Good News but its very culmination.

At this point Jesus and John the Baptist speak of the essential preliminary knowledge or starting point for the spiritual realization of every one of their hearers: The Kingdom of God is close at hand.[122] (It would also have been possible to say the Kingdom of Heaven, to be understood as a more or less direct substitute for the words God the Father or The Most High, in other words as representing an inner state or supreme presence.) In saying that God and his Kingdom are near, Christ is speaking of God immanent, the one and only God who is within us, in an absolute proximity that it remains for us to discover. Logion 3 states that the Kingdom is within and outside; for God is present in the innermost heart of every man as Christ, he who is, one and the same, an undying flame of pure awareness, the source of eternal Life and true knowledge.

In the version of the evangelist Mark, the first call to arms by Jesus Christ appears to be very complete and fulfils the entire program of evangelization, including the Master’s catechism: The time has come, and the kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent, and believe the Good News.[123]

The time has come: the time has come for the world, for man, to seek and to find the true Kingdom of God; the time in which the Good News will be spread.

The Kingdom of God is close, in absolute proximity, within you. The Son of God, he who is, the essence, eternal Life, the Living One, free from all the tendencies or accretions sticking to your consciousness, the tendencies that turn you into whited sepulchers, the dead burying their dead.

Repent: this is the religious work it is now up to you to complete. Turn inward, turn to your thoughts, turn to your conditioning. Discover yourselves for what you are: the dead returning to Life.[124] Know yourselves. Reveal the Son in yourselves.[125] This is a difficult task, one that calls on you to immerse yourselves in the waters of your psyche; to baptize yourselves in your dead works. Look and see all that is dead within you, then return to life forever in Christ: Now he is God, not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all men are in fact alive.[126] Thus you will come, first, to discover and later to realize in union that Christ within you, he who is, is the Resurrection and the Life.

Believe in the Good News: the Kingdom of the Father is spread over the earth and men do not see it.[127] The reason for this is that their hearts are not clean. But now, by purifying the waters of your awareness, by continuous repentance, by metanoia, you will leave the dark night in which you live, because you will have come to acknowledge God, or rather, now He will have acknowledged you,[128] and to know him is to know the Light, perfect Knowledge. From now on, your eyes will remain open to faith; you will know that He is, and you will believe firmly in the Good News.

As Saint Paul put it, Now we are seeing a dim reflection in a mirror; but then we shall be seeing face to face. The knowledge that I have now is imperfect; but then I shall know as fully as I am known.[129]

113 O Lord, who may abide in your tent? Who may dwell on your holy hill? (Ps.15)

114 In a parallel version, P. Oxyr. 654, no. 2 says, not sea but earth, in an attempt to contrast even more sharply the two mediums (the high and the low, there and here) in which the Kingdom is not to be found.

115 Cfr. Luke 17:21

116 Cfr. Floyd V. Filson, art. Note on Matt. 4:17.

117 Cfr. Jerusalem Bible – note on Matt. 3:2b

118 Matt. 3:2, 4:17; Mark 1:15

119 Matt. 24:29-31; Mark 13:24-32; Luke 21:25-27

120 1 Thess. 5:2; 2 Pet. 3:10

121 Gal.2:16; 4:19

122 In all these cases the Greek text says éngiken, meaning near, next to, close to.

123 Mark 1:15

124 Rom. 6:13

125 Gal.1:16; John 3:36; 1 John 5:12

126 Luke 20:38.

127 Gs.Th. logion 113.

128 Gal. 4:9

129 1 Cor. 13:12

LOGION 4

Jesus said:

“The man old in days will not hesitate to ask a small child

seven days old about the place of life, and he will live.

For many who are first will become last,

and they will become one and the same.”

COMMENTARY

The Gospel of Judas Thomas seems devoted to the inner Christ. Here, it aims to explain the birth of this Christly consciousness and what we could call its infancy, its first steps. According to the account in Saint John’s Gospel, Jesus enters on the revelation of this great mystery when he receives the prominent Jew Nicodemus, who comes to him by night.[130] When the text says by night this is by no means some more or less trivial detail, for that would be unthinkable in the work of a narrator as strict as John; but rather that the man is coming before the rabbi in a state of need, empty of knowledge.

Ultimately, the authority for this figurative expression, much used by the biblical scribes, was the first author of Genesis, when he adds that after God said Let there be light-this light being his Word-God called light “day”, and darkness he called “night”.[131] Jesus embarks on his great teaching of the mysteries by affirming that it is possible-not figuratively but naturally-to be born a second time, to be regenerated within, to be born from above. Only thus will it be possible to contemplate (to see) and to become part of (to enter) the Kingdom of God. What Jesus says is that the Kingdom of God, meaning the Living Christ, is within us[132] and may be revealed to pure consciousness. For this to happen, it is necessary to undergo two serious and sometimes lengthy stages: first, purification, through constant immersion, meaning conversion (metanoia), in baptismal waters that wash away the tendencies of the psyche, and then-once these waters have begun to free us of the dark night of the soul-through the continual rain of tongues of fire shed by the Holy Spirit, as Paraclete, who transmits as knowledge of God the wisdom of the Son of Man, the inner Christ. That is why Jesus says we must be born of water and spirit.

The typical reaction to the telling of this mystery is that of persons who do not believe in the Good News; and this, the evangelist puts into the mouth of Nicodemus: Can a grown man go back into his mother’s womb and be born again? But Jesus is not speaking here of those born of woman, but of birth in the Spirit, as he explains elsewhere: The least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater[133] than those. When it comes to the extremely subtle way in which this birth from above is perceived by consciousness, Jesus expresses this in terms of the movements of the wind: The wind blows wherever it pleases; you hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. That is how it is with all who are born of the Spirit.[134]

There can be no doubt but that this revelation of the mystery was known and taught in Israel in former times, at least in restricted circles. If this were not so, Jesus’ words to Nicodemus: You, a teacher in Israel, and you do not know these things[135] would make no sense. But once this wisdom tradition had been lost, it would not be easy for men like Nicodemus to accept the word of those who speak of what they know. Jesus, here, is not speaking only for himself, he is saying what he and his Father know: that the gifts of the Spirit entail man’s transformation into a son of God, with eternal Life. All those who have realized this revelation, made manifest in them, share it with Jesus, and it is they he is addressing when he says: when all is made new… you who have followed me.[136]

In the logion, the expression a man old in days plainly does not refer only to an adult but rather to one who has grown mature in his spiritual development and is ready, through his transparency of heart, to breathe in the first intuitions of Being and with them to receive awareness of the Living Christ. Such a one will need to grow little by little in faith, until he attains absolute certainty of Christ’s presence within him. Thus, this birth from above can become a stable, lasting reality, for what is born of the Spirit is spirit.[137]

This means that everyone can fulfill the great Promise made to this entire generation, a promise once made to David: One of the sons of your body I will set on your throne.[138]

The logion says old in days, and Days here speaks of the knowledge that has developed in him; for, as in Genesis, Day means Light. Thus, too, he will not hesitate to ask a small child seven Days old.[139] This persistent questioning is no different from the inquisitive inward probing, the metanoia set forth by Jesus in proclaiming the content of the Good News. Through lengthy immersion in the psyche in order to scrutinize and dissipate its contents and through the flames of knowledge-the tongues of fire which the Paraclete plants in our consciousness-the wisdom of the Son, made pure light, penetrates the soul and transforms it.

Being spirit, the child born from above will have free entry into the Kingdom of God. Jesus says: Unless you change and become like little children you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.[140] This means, not exactly becoming children, but childlike in spirit, as though newborn through water and the Spirit. That is why he adds: Anyone who does not welcome the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.[141]

The reference to a seven-day old child (seven times the light of the spirit) corresponds to one of those figurative forms traditionally used by the Jewish people as a poetic screen concealing the secret of the mysteries contained in certain real meanings behind symbolic numbers. New Testament writings are also subject to this influence. Thus, the figures twelve and seven, in highly varied interpretations or keys, represent, respectively, perfect-or greater-Knowledge (epignosis), and imperfect, or lesser knowledge. The first of these-epignosis-is proper to the higher teachings of Jesus Christ, and enables him to create the institution of the Twelve, as the patriarch Jacob was to do with the founding of the twelve tribes who stand before God’s throne. In keeping with this, Jesus offers his disciples knowledge of all the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven.[142] Nevertheless, according to the Acts of the Apostles, the disciples were given only the institution of the Seven (deacons),[143] and this expresses the real measure of their stature in terms of knowledge of God. This figure, which has a certain aura of secrecy, is to be understood as representing the twelve-or seven-baskets of broken pieces of bread (bread of Life, knowledge of the Kingdom) collected after the multiplication of loaves. The concern of the text to stress, shortly afterwards, that the remaining baskets were twelve (or seven) shows that the main import of the Gospel account lies in the nature and abundance of the mysteries of the Kingdom of God revealed by Christ,[144] plainly contrasting with the defective leaven of the doctrine set forth by the Pharisees and Sadducees.

The knowledge imparted by birth from above, the spiritual guest of the mature man cited by the logion, reaches only the imperfect level of the seven day old disciple. Nevertheless, this man who seeks to know his true place in life can by this process attain the eternal Life proper to the inner Christ. Thus, the last to arrive, the born from above, the sacrificial lambs, unknown to all until consciousness awakens and reveals them, will be the first in the Kingdom of God, for it is written that: the stone that the builders rejected became the keystone.[145]

In that case, the consciousness of man in Christ, gradually transformed by knowledge, will have been transformed into the consciousness of the Son of Man, and both, once unified, will be one and the same.

130 John 3 tells of this interview.

131 Gen. 1:5

132 Luke 17:21

133 Matt. 11:11

134 John 3:8

135 John 3:10

136 Matt. 19:28

137 John 3:6

138 Ps. 132:11

139 Logion 4

140 Matt. 18:3

141 Mark 10:15; Luke 18:17. The disciples of Jesus are, as disciples, children when it comes to the Kingdom of God. Cfr. besides the passages cited: Matt. 11:25; Luke 10:21; Matt. 18:4-5; 18:10; 19:14

142 Matt. 13:10-11

143 Acts 6:3 et seq

144 Mark 8:14-21

145 Ps.118:22; Isai. 28:16; Zech. 3:9; Matt. 21:42 ss; 1 Pet. 2:4-8; Eph. 2:20; 1 Cor. 3:11; Acts 4:11.

LOGION 5

Jesus said:

“Recognize what is before your face,

and what is hidden from you will be revealed to you.

For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed.”

(The Greek logion adds: “or buried that will not be resurrected.”)[146]

COMMENTARY

The knowledge which the logion shows one must acquire is that which comes of contemplating the face of God which is before our own face. But as the fourth Gospel states that No one has ever seen God. It is the only Son, who is nearest to the Father’s heart, who has made him known[147] infers that all this must be explained. But since it deals with a topic that can become accessible only at the end of the spiritual quest, the explanation given here can be only an indirect marginal note.

What lies hidden is-as we have already said-the inner Christ, the pneumatic anthropos created by God in the image of himself[148] on the sixth day, that is, before heaven and earth were completed with all their array.[149] If Jesus insists on making us understand that we are the living dead, it is because the genuine eternal man-he who is-he who, like Christ, is not of this world because he is from above,[150] is still buried alive, as the one real victim of our living death.

When Jesus says time and again that there is nothing hidden but it must be disclosed,[151] he means to transmit a message of hope to all those who seek to raise within themselves the Son of Man, in a true resurrection of Life that lies buried. Then you will know that I am He.[152] What Jesus is explaining is that the raising of the son of anthropos in ourselves, whereby what is hidden becomes manifest, presupposes for each and every one of us the nontransferable accomplishment of the special work for which we have been called, as well as confirming that this work of raising is not only possible but necessary. That is why Jesus says: The Son of Man must be lifted up.[153]

The lifting up or elevation until resurrection in the consciousness of the light of the inner Son of Man that we are attains its final stage in the pure contemplation of the face that is before our own. But it is the Son of Man, resuscitated by knowledge, who completes this contemplation, and not the man from below with whom our earthly consciousness has mistakenly confused its identity. In an admirable passage from Exodus, this sentence is spoken by YHWH: You cannot see my face, for man cannot see me and live.[154] The meaning of these words is that the expression my face means pure Being in itself, free from any aggregate of clothing, the latter being very specifically referred to in this context as my glory.[155]

The glory of the Lord is, so it is written, the light that is before his face,[156] to which the psalmist refers when he sings Show us the light of your face turned toward us. In the Greek version and in the Vulgate, this text is translated as The Light of your face is sealed in us,[157] (Variant in the Douai-Rheims bible: The light of thy countenance O Lord, is signed upon us). This seal is none other than the image of God’s face imprinted, through the action of that light, in pneumatic, spiritual man, created by God in the image of himself.[158]

Otherwise expressed, man bears the imprint in his spirit, his essence, of the face of God, because the pneumatic man is (is made in) God’s image. Inspired, or drawn on, by the weak, distant splendor of that image, the man from below, the Adam of the psyche, ends up by seeking God’s face.[159] As Saint Paul puts it, Now we are seeing a dim reflection in a mirror… The knowledge that I have now is imperfect.[160] What the apostle means to attain is a contemplation face to face, meaning, from the image of the face that is ours as pneumatic man to the original face of I AM, of God. Such contemplation is possible only once the mystery-imbued process that leads to birth in water and in Spirit has been completed. That rebirth is the baptismal seal that manifestly converts man in Christ into a son of light, the light of Life.[161]

To contemplate the countenance face to face is it essential to know perfectly, and this is beyond the reach of the man from below, since such perfect Knowledge cannot be attempted without first undergoing the death of the psyche, as it is written: Anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it.[162] All this means that only by traversing this passion and death in Christ is it possible to raise the light of the just man to the level of pure awareness. That is why it is written that the upright shall behold his face,[163] and also: As for me, I shall behold your face in righteousness; when I awake [when I return from contemplation] I shall be satisfied, beholding your likeness.[164]

The likeness is your face, you yourself individually as a son of light, a faithful reflection of that image, and the logion urges you to contemplate your face, to know the inexpressible that stands before you: I Am who I Am,[165] the Being, the one and only Being, excluding any other and in whose uncontainable light all that is hidden is revealed. Jesus Christ, one with the Father, said I am He, and all, dumbstruck, moved back and fell to the ground.[166]

146 P. Oxyr. 654:4

147 John 1:18

148 Gen. 1:27

149 Gen. 2:1

150 John 8:23 What was created in the Days before God took his rest and when the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them, is not of this world.

151 Matt.10:26; Mark 4:22; Luke 8:17.

152 John 8:28. Saying I am He, Jesus claims for himself, as the universal Christ, the name revealed to Moses (Ex. 3:14), and in so doing, he confirms himself as the only Being endowed with absolute, and therefore eternal, reality (see our note 11:1). Hence the extreme importance of increasing faith in the Son of anthropos, or the eternal Christ within us, until we become one with him. Jesus’ statements to this effect, as recorded by John in his Gospel, are numerous (cfr. John 6:35; 8:23; 8:24; 8:28; 8:58; 13:19 & 18:6). Parallel study of the seven logia here cited, in which Jesus makes this claim, and the facts which he affirms therein are of great importance

153 John 3:14

154 Ex. 33:20

155 Ex. 33:18-23

156 Ps. 4:7

157 Ps. 4:7 See note on Jerusalem Bible

158 Gen. 1:26

159 This is repeated in many psalms: Your face, LORD, do I seek. (27:8); seek his presence continually (105:4); Such is the company of those who seek him, who seek the face of the God of Jacob. (24:6) etc.

160 1 Cor. 13:12

161 John 8:12; 1 Thess. 5:5

162 The same idea in Matt.10:39; Mark 8:34-35; Luke 9:23-24; John 12:25.

163 Ps. 11:7

164 Ps. 17:15

165 Ex. 3:14

166 John 18:6

LOGION 6

His disciples questioned Him and said to Him:

“Do you want us to fast? How shall we pray?

Shall we give alms? What diet shall we observe?”

Jesus said:

“Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate,

for all things are plain in the sight of Heaven.

For nothing hidden will not become manifest,

and nothing covered will remain without being uncovered.”

COMMENTARY

The logion aims here to cover in a single answer four separate matters dealt with by Jesus: alms, fasting, prayer and dietary rules, and these allow us to approach them in terms of different levels of understanding. The first of these, we may call manifest, defining this as expressing a moral meaning, while the second consists of a more or less figurative reference to a quite specific inner mode of knowing.

Christian exegesis has preferred to study such matters in terms of the first level of understanding, which we have described as “moral” and which, consequently, has basically to do with behavior, yet has never completely covered the second far more recondite level, which we may call the hidden one, for the latter has almost always been kept under the cloak of the manifest.

It is in this respect interesting that the Gospel of Judas-Thomas should have handled the two approaches to these questions in two separate logia, as the classification we have already adopted will enable us to study each in isolation in the course of our attempt at interpretation. The level that we call hidden is dealt with in logion 14, while the logion with which we are now dealing is plainly concerned only with the moral, manifest interpretation which, as is well known, has for centuries been much studied by traditional Christian exegesis.

The golden rule preached by the gospel in this respect may be briefly summed up as a hymn to authenticity, to inner truth, in other words, behavior utterly exempt from hypocritical or lying overtones.[167]

It should be borne in mind that the evangelist Matthew includes in the passages that cover these matters the phrase your Father who is in secret… This repeated affirmation, referring almost invariably to an indefinable whereabouts is universally valid in respect of the essential nature of the Father, just as when Saint Luke says:

…nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among [within] you.[168]

167 The main texts concerning alms, prayer and fasting in terms of the manifest of moral level of understanding are: Matt. 6:1-6 and 16-18.

168 Luke 17:21.

LOGION 7

Jesus said:

“Blessed is the lion that a man eats and the lion becomes man.

And cursed is the man that a lion eats, and the lion becomes a man.”

COMMENTARY

When figurative language is used, it is plain enough that what is said represents, not a reality but a figure of speech or, in other words, something which, if interpreted frontally, will make no sense at all, as its purpose is to serve as a way of expressing something else. That is the case with this logion, which some will take to be about an old and more or less superstitious belief, while others will see it as an idea that cannot be understood all that easily because it is expressed metaphorically. That said, the logion describes a fact of a certain significance in the context of the Bible, nor is the figurative language used here far removed from that to be found in well-known texts, even if the figures of speech are here employed more directly and autonomously.

Basically, what the logion says, translated into more straightforward language, is that when a man allows himself to be dominated (eaten up) by the enemies of the soul, the man of the psyche-the soul-comes out of it indelibly stained, defiled, while the lion, which personifies the enemies of the soul in the form of a beast that tears its prey to pieces, negates or obscures the life of the spirit, man’s luminous soul, and, by degrading its level of consciousness, the lion may be said to eat the man up until nothing human is left of him.

Many are the examples, especially among Old Testament texts, that can be adduced, not only in defense of this interpretation of the logion but as proof that this represents biblical thinking in general.

Take Psalm 35. This is a lengthy individual entreaty, a type of prayer that is quite frequently to be found in the Psalter, in which the supplicant begs the Lord to free him of those who are persecuting his soul. There is a plain similarity between the terms used in this prayer of lamentation and those to be found in the figurative style of the logion. Here are a few verses: Tell my soul, ‘I am your salvation’ (verse 3), [for] those who are out to kill me (verse 4) dug a pit for me (verse 7). O Lord […] rescue my soul from their onslaughts, my dear life from these lions’ (verse 17). Do not let them say, ‘Now we have got him down!’.[169] (Verse 25)

Something very similar is expressed in Psalm 57, but this time the enemies in question are clearly of a moral or psychological order. The supplicant’s soul is delivered up to be devoured by these lions (or forces): I lie surrounded by lions greedy for human prey (verse 4) […] They laid a net where I was walking when I was bowed with care (verse 6).[170]

The same again in Psalm 22: Save me from the lion’s mouth![171] The fact that the foes in question are not just physical but mental and moral is confirmed by the Apostle Paul, who draws on this psalm in a moment of moral satisfaction: So I was rescued from the lion’s mouth. The Lord will rescue me from all evil attempts on me.[172] Other psalms could be cited, for the Psalter is full of instances of this metaphor.[173]

Nor should one be surprised by the metaphorical use of the verb to eat up/to devour in the logion, for the Gospels frequently make use of figures of speech in relation to meals, food, hunger, fasting, etc., and there are, as is well-known, many conclusive scriptural instances of this literary device. By devouring the man in our logion, the lion, as the enemy of the soul, deprives him of the light of spiritual knowledge, defiling and obscuring his soul and rendering it opaque to the light of Christ. Thus a man can be dragged so far down that he is transformed into a lion, meaning, a purely animal being. Conversely, but making the same metaphorical use of the meal or food, Jesus Christ raises it to the level of wisdom itself: I am the bread of Life. He who comes to me will never be hungry.[174]

Many Old Testament texts contrast the knowledge which wisdom instils with ignorance of the living God, illustrating the perennial duality of light and darkness in man through the metaphor of the hatred which the lion, the enemy of the soul, harbors for the Living God or the Messiah. Sometimes this extends to other beasts, like the bear.[175] The author of Lamentations describes this opposition well: [The enemy] has forced me to sit in darkness with the dead of long ago. For me he has been a lurking bear, a lion on the watch.[176] The young David, too, speaks of the enmity of the lion (and the bear) when he says to King Saul: Your servant has killed both lion and bear, and this uncircumcised Philistine [Goliath] shall be like one of them, for he has dared to insult the armies of the living God.[177]

However, the most decisive testimony as to the metaphorical meaning of lions as the personification of the enemy forces that impel the soul towards impiety, the path hostile to God, is to be found in the account of Daniel in the lions’ den (the pit or tomb of the Psalter): He is the living God, he endures forever, his sovereignty will never be destroyed and his kingship never end. He saves, sets free, and works signs and wonders in the heavens and on earth; he has saved Daniel from the power of the lions.[178]

The living God, the God of Daniel, is none other than the Son of Man, who lives and dwells in him and in every man, and in whose light no lion of this kind could ever wound a man’s soul.

Nevertheless, the biblical lions are, in this account, the foes of the Messiah, the promised Son, whom the anointed King David honored as his Lord and not as his son; and, being the Lord’s foes, God means to turn them into his footstool: Sit at my right hand and I will make your enemies a footstool for you.[179]

Such are the lions, the soul’s enemies, devoid of knowledge, through whose action men are drawn away from the living God, the Living Christ, whose temple they are and in whom they have their being, to the point at which any man can fall into such degradation that he becomes, like them, a lion with fangs that devour.

169 Ps. 35:25. As will be seen further on, the pit dug by the lions for the supplicant’s soul is like the lions’ den into which Daniel is cast-fruitlessly-at the instigation of his enemies.

170 Ps. 57:4-6

171 Ps. 22:22

172 2 Tim. 4:17-18

173 Ps. 3:8; 7:3; 10:9; 17:12, 58:7.

174 John 6:35

175 Lam. 3:6

176 Lam. 3:10

177 1 Sam. 17:36

178 Dan. 6:26-28

179 Ps. 110:1-2

LOGION 8

And he said:

“The man is like a wise[180] fisherman who cast his net into the sea

and drew it up from the sea full of small fish.

Among them the wise fisherman found a fine large fish.

He threw all the small fish back into the sea

and chose the large fish without difficulty.

Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.”

COMMENTARY

The parable of the net that appears in this logion is included by Saint Matthew with certain variations in a passage usually known as The Purpose of the Parables, in which the evangelist sets forth seven such stories, together with a number of substantial explanations concerning parables and their specific significance.[181] Of these seven parables, four-the parables of the weeds among the wheat, the treasure, the pearl and the net[182]-have a parallel or common meaning, while the other three-those of the sower, the mustard seed and the yeast[183]-impart knowledge of the Kingdom. However, of all these parables, the first that needs to be heard is that of the sower, since it treats of the great mystery of the Kingdom, which, so it explains, consists in acknowledging and cultivating the Word that has been sown until it bears fruit. As Mark explains, once this parable has been understood, one will understand all the others.[184]

Jesus’ reason for speaking in parables, in other words, using an expressive form which, with its folds into which one must penetrate[185] is accessible only to those who have some previous knowledge of the Kingdom, is to be found in a psalm to which both Matthew and Mark keep referring: I will open my mouth in a parable; I will proclaim what has been hidden since the foundation of the world.[186]

That which was hidden and which Jesus means to make manifest, even in parable, is, without a doubt, the Word which is, as it is written, the light of all people,[187] the word sown in them[188] by God. King David, the anointed one, bore witness to this manifestation of what is hidden when he acknowledged and proclaimed the Word, sown as the fruit of his loins, as his Lord, the Living Christ. The first spark of knowledge of what lies hidden may be described as the very first intuition of Being, the very first contact, perhaps only a breath, with that pearl, the true treasure that animates man, the revelation of the mystery of the Kingdom. Once known, this will prove the basis for sure seeing and hearing, and for the understanding that arises from a pure heart directed towards salvation and Life.[189]

Addressing those who, once awakened to their eternal inner light, are beginning to take possession of it like newborn infants, it is written,[190] for anyone who has will be given more, and he will have more than enough; but from anyone who has not, even what he has will be taken away.[191] It must be explained that this is not in any way some hard, merciless passing of judgment in the spiritual realm; it simply records a fact in the human process of realization. He who establishes himself in the treasure, however lightly, will, because of the first intuition that he is in essence the Being, have sown in himself the seed of knowledge of the Kingdom. This knowledge, he will from that moment on receive in abundance, because once this seed has germinated in his consciousness it will grow on its own. Hence, that fine sentence recorded by Mark: This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man throws seed on the land. Night and day, while he sleeps, when he is awake, the seed is sprouting and growing; how, he does not know.[192] However, he who has nothing, who has perceived nothing, not even a first vague dawning of his inner light in the fog, so that he thought “there’s nothing there but grass,” and even if he did descry an ear of wheat, the treasure, the wheat will not yet have germinated properly; and so it will remain hidden, and when harvest time comes, there will be nothing to show in his consciousness but chaff for threshing.

John the Baptist expresses this same idea very clearly in an essential passage, when proclaiming the Kingdom of God as a voice preparing the way for the coming of the Lord: His winnowing fan is in his hand; he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn; but the chaff he will burn in a fire that will never go out. [193] This text does not seem to have been understood correctly by those who have not yet received the intuition of the inner treasure, the Being they are. Thus, they do not realize that it is not possible for any man to be born without the seed, because the seed is the essential, pneumatic man. What many understand from John the Baptist’s energetic proclamation is that some men are grain and some men are chaff, an absolute and immature classification that presents men before the judgment seat divided into the good and the evil. Yet what the fan winnows is the chaff that remains on the threshing floor once the grain has been broken and the wheat separated from the chaff. What must be understood is that this chaff is never important in itself, it is just the residue for burning, just the outer covering of the grain.

It is important that this should be perfectly clear: what the Baptist was trying to describe is not a world consisting of chaff (bad men) and wheat (good men). What he meant is that every man is a grain of wheat with a covering of chaff. Consequently, he is inviting everyone exposed to the splendor of the Good News to undertake this difficult and sometimes lengthy journey, the first steps of which are marked by a conversion (metanoia). At the end of this process, the chaff is recognized as chaff and the wheat as wheat. That is the outcome of conversion-a quite different matter from identifying the chaff with the grain. Once the winnowing fan has begun to do its work, the only destiny of the chaff is the fire of Gehenna; this, in its real sense, for the action of the fire is akin to the work of time, which consumes permanently all that can in no way be purified because it is a mere outer covering. Once a man has undergone the double action of baptism by water and by the Spirit, he has gained discernment; and now he knows that the winnowed chaff was never in any way the Self. Thus, his consciousness, awakened by the knowledge instilled by the descent of tongues of fire, will unhesitatingly cut to the root all trees that have borne no fruit, seeing full well that this wood to be cast in the fire has nothing to do with his heart.

As for the wheat, this will always represent the chosen, the inhabitants of that Kingdom that lies both within and outside of ourselves, and of which John the evangelist says enigmatically that no one has gone up to heaven except the one who came down from heaven [into us], the Son of Man who is in heaven.[194]

180 Others translate this as sensible, meaning the same thing. “Wise” or prudent refers to the one possessing this cardinal virtue which consists in the ability to discern good from evil and to act accordingly.

181 Matt. 13:1-52

182 Matt.13:24-30, 44-45, 47-50

183 Matt.13:18-23, 31-33; Mark 4:13-20, Luke 8:11-15

184 Mark 4:13

185 Ecclu 39:1-3.

186 Ps. 78:2; Matt.13:35; Mark 4:33-34

187 John 1:4.

188 Mark 4:15.

189 Matt.13:14-16.

190 Ps. 8:3. Out of the mouths of babes and infants, you have founded a bulwark.

191 Matt. 13:12; Mark 14:25

192 Mark 4:26-27

193 Matt. 3:12

194 John 3:13.

LOGION 9

Jesus said:

“Behold, a sower went out, took a handful of seeds,

and scattered them.

Some fell on the road, and the birds came and gathered them.

Others fell on rock, and they did not take root in the soil,

and they did not produce ears of grain.

Others fell among thorns, and they choked the seeds,

and worms devoured them.

And others fell on good soil, and it brought forth a good crop, yielding sixty per measure and one hundred and twenty per measure.”

COMMENTARY

In its brief synthesis, the parable of the sower represents a complete and transparent expression of the Gospel message, fully justifying the recommendation recorded by Mark: Do you not understand this parable? Then how will you understand any of the parables?[195] Endorsing the special exegetic relevance of this tale, the three synoptic evangelists all transmitted not only the parable but the accompanying explanation. If, however, one is to strip a parable down to the naked truth typically hidden in its folds, meaning, to see and hear in full all there is to be perceived and understood in it,[196] it will not be enough to know only the explanation of the parable provided by the evangelists. It will be necessary to go beyond this and to become one with the Twelve or, in other words, with the members of that institution, in order to pierce the mystery of the Kingdom of God.[197] And this is because our complete perceiving and understanding do not depend solely on the sharpness of our intellect, but above all on the clearness of our consciousness, if it is to receive in its tranquil waters the fruit of the seed sown within.

The seed, as was mentioned, is the Word of God,[198] which, as John affirms in his Prologue, is the true Light, that enlightens all men.[199] This is what the sower sowed handfuls of in men’s hearts[200]; meaning, in every man and, furthermore, that every man is, in his pure essence, the true undying Light. That is why it is written that he came to his own domain[201] and that the Word was made flesh and lived among [in]us.[202] And there he resides and shines in the dark[203] of the heart that does not know it, waiting to be received by the purified consciousness.

This doctrine, which may be expressed as the knowledge that man is in essence a son of the infinite Being, a sunray from the universal and eternal consciousness we call God, a spark from his hearth, may always have been hidden among the mysteries of the people of Israel. That would be the only possible explanation for the oracular and parable precautions in which this Revelation is wrapped in both the Old Testament and the New. When it is announced in the Psalms that what has been hidden since the foundation of the world will be proclaimed,[204] that proclamation issues from the corner of the mouth, in parables, so that-it is explained-all those who cannot or must not understand the mystery hear and hear again, but do not understand; see and see again, but do not perceive.[205]

It seems that this primordial doctrine of knowledge has always been kept hidden under two different and probably related covers: hidden, because it could be heard only by men having access to the mysteries, and hidden, because men whose consciousness is opaque, those turned only towards outward things, cannot perceive the true light that they are as temples of the God within, remaining fixated on their outer clothing. In order to make that first discovery of the Word, the seed within, there must first be a subtle movement of consciousness towards the immaterial regions in which that seed is to be found; this necessarily involves a progressive devaluing of the visible. It will then become easy willingly to let go of terrestrial possessions, the outer clothing, the husk that covers the grain, regardless of whether the coverings in question are material or mental. This is what Matthew is attempting to describe by means of the parable of the treasure and that of the pearl, which he includes in his piece o the purpose of the parables. Likewise, the parable of the net in the Gospel of Judas-Thomas. In every one of these three-the treasure, the pearl and the good big fish-the purpose is to show the true value of the Word, the sown seed, as the only thing in man that is real and lasting. Whoever discovers this treasure, this pearl, this good fish, will have no difficulty in letting go of the spurious riches[206] in which the true Life is enveloped.

As regards the degrees of perception which the evangelists describe as to hear, since this is about hearing or failing to hear the Word within, the parable uses a clearly defined casuistry, one that shows deep knowledge of the heart of man, with its classification of four types of men. The first of those studied by the parable are the most alienated from the Word, since they are by the roadside of the inner Christ, who said I am the Way.[207] Although the Word was sown in their hearts, these men do not understand it or believe in it nor can they receive it. A fog of skepticism moves them not to accept that they are depositaries of the Word. Their consciousness of who they are is too superficial and ignorant to be able to accept the faith that Jesus Christ calls for when he says: I am the light of the world.[208] If you do not believe that I am He, you will die in your sins.[209]

The second type of man studied by the parable consists of those whose nature is always inconstant when it comes to taking care of roots. These may be happy to hear that they bear the Word within themselves and that they are indeed the Word itself. For a while, they believe. Then they forget or leave off their searching, for they do not love so intensely that they keep searching unceasingly until they find.

The third type consists of those who foolishly think that the Word can grow and develop within them while their consciousness remains attached to the enjoyment of outward things. What occurs here is that this class of riches, especially when attention is dedicated to developing and taking care of them as though they were the true treasure, is incompatible with the Word and ends up stifling it without its having borne fruit.

The parables of the weeds and the net, in Matthew’s version, apply to those types of men who, in their lives, prove incapable of taking care of the seed sown in them in such a way as to ensure that it bears fruit. The weeds symbolize all that outer clothing, those riches that stick to the good seed. Likewise, those fish that Matthew calls bad do not-as those with simplistic or immature views have imagined-represent men in whom the seed that they themselves are has failed to bear fruit, seed which is said to be the Truth and the Life,[210] but the many thistles, the lure of riches and the worries of this world[211] which live at the expense of the grain and the good fish. When the end comes-the harvest, the end of worldly things, because the world above, the Kingdom of the Word, is eternal and infinite-all will be sorted by the winnowing fan, as proclaimed by John the Baptist, and only the clean seed, the pure Word, will be gathered into the granary, while the weeds and bad fish, namely the false personality, erroneously adhered to, the outer husk of the grain, will be cast into the fire, burnt and reduced to ashes, subjected to the destructive action of time like all that is mortal.

This is why Matthew adds, in a final clarification of his discourse on parables, that every scribe who becomes a disciple of the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out from his storeroom things both new and old.[212] If both the old and the new, in the man’s ark (in his house, in himself), are present in the parables, in the field with the treasure and the other fields, in the pearl of great value and the other pearls, the wheat and the weeds, the good fish and the bad, what remains to be burnt in the end will never be the man of the spirit, the new man, the new self that has been created in God’s way.[213] Rather, it will be the parasitic attachments to consciousness caused by ignorance and deprived of Life and Truth because they are not part of the true seed. This is what Saint Paul had in mind when he said: You have stripped off your old behavior with your old self, and you have put on a new self.[214]

There is in Saint John’s account of Jesus’ interview with Nicodemus-on which we have already commented[215]-a description of the wonderful emergence of this fruit after the double passage through baptism by water and in the spirit.[216] It is very likely that many of those who come to read these lines will not believe that such a birth from above, a purely spiritual event, is possible, either in themselves or in others. This would simply confirm the hypothesis set forth in the parable of the sower, that the word was sown in many who were by the roadside. This should be borne in mind in mitigation of their attitude, for, being by the side of the road, they still have no notion of the way. In justification of our own view, it will be necessary to refer to the passage in Saint John’s Gospel in which Jesus defends his own testimony: we speak only about what we know and witness only to what we have seen.[217] This testimonial should make us think of many people, especially all those who think that they believe in Jesus’ words yet do not regard such a birth from above as possible.

Although it was probably kept wrapped in the secret that pertains to mysteries, the details of birth or regeneration in the Spirit must have been well known to the masters of ancient Israel, as is borne out by their writings in the Old Testament. All these writings were discovered by ecclesiastical followers of Jesus Christ and duly interpreted as pointing to the coming of the Messiah. And they certainly are prophetic if one attends only to the manifest aspect of Jesus as the Christ; but it is important also to enter into the hidden aspect, in which Jesus claims before the Pharisees to be David’s Lord.[218] What this means is that Christ, the Messiah, can be and is born in every human being who makes himself good soil, in which the seed sown in him can bear fruit as the grain of Life. And for what other purpose could such seed be sown? The fruit is God with us, and its purpose, to manifest the Son in men, by means of birth from above in the Spirit. This at least is what Isaiah must have heard and understood when in what is known as the Book of Immanuel he wrote those Messianic verses firmly expressing certainty: For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.[219]

It is this class of children that Christ has in mind when he quotes the psalm in which the innocent children are first referred to: By the mouths of children, babes in arms, you have made sure of praise.[220] In the hidden interpretation given by the evangelists of the fruit in the parable of the sower, this child two years old or under[221] yields the smallest measure of fruit, thirty-fold, about a third of the amount recorded by Luke for the one who listens to the Word.[222] All this relates to the parable of the yeast[223] and also to the parable of the bushel basket included by Mark,[224] since this last one transmits up to a point the final meaning of the yields in man from the divine seed.

These numerical calculations were probably used to veil certain natural structures of man’s spiritual development which many in their time surely thought should not be fully revealed. Perhaps they may have been right. In the New Testament context, this hiding of the mysteries does nevertheless seem to have been relatively limited, by comparison with the tighter secrecy maintained by Old Testament oracles.

As for the measures to be found in the parable of the sower, there is a relation between these and the yeast, a potent aid to exegesis, since it reveals that it takes three measures fully to raise the flour of the sower’s Word. This full measure, the whole, is represented by the hundredfold increase-the figure of the third and last measure-according to the multiple of a hundred which Luke’s filter let through in regard to unity. In the measures given by the logion of Judas Thomas in his tale of the sower, the one hundred unit is replaced by the figure one hundred and twenty, which sounds more mysterious but is less secret, because one hundred and twenty is an indirect way of potentiating twelve, in parallel with the seventy times seven proposed by Jesus for the figure seven.[225] As we have already mentioned,[226] the figure twelve symbolizes epignosis or perfect Knowledge. Lastly, the sixty-fold measure represents a median value for disciples with the gift of imperfect knowledge, a lesser degree, proper to the mystery institution of the seven, represented figuratively by the seven-year old or seven-day old child.

To sum up, thirty-fold represents the Word present in the man who has just discovered the fruit of the seed of eternity, newborn in his heart, where it had been sown. As Isaiah explained, this fruit is to be received as Wonder-Counselor, Mighty-God, Eternal-Father, Prince-of-Peace.[227] The fragility of this newborn one is explained by the weak degree to which his intense light is initially perceived by a consciousness that had until recently been walking in the dark. As the Prophet says, the people that walked in darkness has seen a great light.[228] There seems to be no other explanation for the allegory of the persecution of the innocents, which is easy to understand if we take Herod and the Pharaoh of Moses’ childhood as figures representing the enemy of the spirit.

The sixty-fold measure represents the man whose consciousness heeds the Word. What is then heard falling on the good earth is the rain of fire of the Spirit, those flames or tongues that are transformed into knowledge of things from above. This is the effusion of the charismas of the Spirit, which Saint Paul called faith, knowledge, the gift of tongues, interpretation, prophecy, etc.,[229] all of which doubtless group together those receiving them in a spiritual institution of the Seven, as sharers of imperfect knowledge.

As for the third measure, representing the whole, it has already been pointed out that this exemplifies the one who has attained epignosis, perfect Knowledge. Possession by Jesus Christ of this Knowledge, which represents the highest Mystery of the Kingdom, and served to found and sustain the institution of the Twelve, is described in veiled terms by Saint Luke in that passage in which he refers to Jesus when he was twelve years old. On that occasion, no one could find Jesus during the three days he spent in the Temple, among the masters. When they at last find him, he exclaimed Did you not know that I must be busy with my Father’s affairs?[230] With this magnificent answer, Jesus gave for the first time the supreme lesson of the oneness of Father and Son, which he was later to confirm: The Father and I are one.[231]

The parables of the mustard seed[232] and of the seed that grows on its own, only included by Mark,[233] reveal some of the ways in which this seed of the Spirit may act. The first describes its unforeseeable and abundant growth, then, as the stone of which the Psalmist speaks, rejected by all, yet which becomes the keystone,[234] while the second of these parables explains that, once one has discovered as a point of faith that the grain has been sown in the soil of one’s self, its fruit will grow all on its own. A pale image of this is the expansive power of sunlight that enters the home simply on opening a door or windows, having no need for any carrier. The power of the seed is rooted in faith alone.

As Saint Mark puts it: Take notice of what you are hearing. The measure you measure out is the amount you will be given.[235] And Saint Luke adds: a full measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over, will be poured into your lap; because the amount you measure out is the amount you will be given back.[236]

195 Mark 4:13

196 Mark 4:12

197 Mark 4:11

198 Luke 8:11

199 John 1:9

200 Matt. 13:19

201 John 1:11

202 John 1:14

203 John 1:5

204 Ps. 78:2; Matt.13:35; Mark 4:33-34

205 Isai. 6:9-10

206 In the language of the New Testament, riches and poverty symbolize the possession or absence of attributes. Thus, Blessed are the poor in spirit, (Matt.5:3), which concerns those who have realized the purity of consciousness of the man of the spirit. This symbolism is used in the Old Testament too, when the Sons of Adam (men of the psyche) are called rich while, conversely, the sons of man (men of the spirit) are called poor.

207 John 14:6

208 John 8:12

209 John 8:24

210 John 14:6

211 Matt. 13:22

212 Matt. 13:52

213 Eph. 4:24

214 Col. 3:9-10

215 Commentary on logion 4

216 John chapter 3.

217 John 3:11

218 Matt. 22:45

219 Isai. 9:5

220 Ps.8:3; Matt. 21:16

221 Matt. 2:16

222 Matt. 13:23; Luke 8:8.

223 Matt. 13:33; Luke 13:21

224 Mark 4:24-25; Luke 6:38; Matt. 7:2

225 Matt. 18:22

226 See Commentary on logion 4

227 Isai. 9:6

228 Isai. 9:1-2

229 1 Cor. 12:8-11

230 Luke 2:49

231 John 10:30

232 Matt.13:31-32; Mark 4:30-32; Luke 13:18-19.

233 Mark 4:26-29

234 Ps. 118:22

235 Mark 4:24

236 Luke 6:38

LOGION 10

Jesus said:

“I have cast fire upon the world, and behold,

I am watching over it until it blazes.”

COMMENTARY

The fire of which Jesus speaks is the fire of the knowledge of God. That God is known as fire has already been said: For see how the Lord comes in fire.[237] When, early in the Bible story, YHVH made his covenant with Abraham, in the first theophany described in Genesis, his presence is already recorded thus: When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, there appeared a smoking furnace and a firebrand that went between the halves.[238]

Bearing the knowledge of God, this fire is to be identified, too, with the Spirit of Truth, the Advocate, bringer of consolation of whom Jesus says that he lived among us and is in us. What this means is that this fire, this Spirit, is in us -in every man that is born, and from birth-yet, the fire of knowledge can be received in the consciousness only once it is ready, or has readied itself, to know it.[239] Then the Spirit melts into man like a tongue of fire, in a birth from above through baptism by fire. This fire may be described as a firebrand, for it seems to emerge from thick darkness, as in Genesis; or as a stream of fire, in the words of Daniel, when he speaks of his theophany.

This fire is to be found in all accounts of divine manifestation, for it describes figuratively the first knowledge of God. This knowledge is not, however, that of identification with God, typically expressed as a cloud through which a voice is heard. The apostles must have known this cloud during the transfiguration of Jesus, when it is said to have come and covered them with shadow,[240] meaning that they identified with it.

The fire and the cloud are, in Exodus, the two guiding signs that accompanied the Israelites when they came out from Egypt and spent forty years in the desert, with YHVH leading before them by day in the form of a pillar of cloud and by night in the form of a pillar of fire.[241]

In the dense allegorical language of the ancient scriptures, this means that man who lives in God’s darkness-by night-can awaken to his God thanks to the light spread by the splendor of the fire that dwells in him, that fire being knowledge and the spirit of truth which ever accompany and illumine whoever seeks it, seeing that light as his sole treasure. Later, for the one who lives by Day, comes the cloud into which he must enter, taking shelter in its shade. The fire and the cloud are indeed the protagonists of the way to knowledge and unity, and they represent God in every process of theophany; but the fire of the knowledge of God is the herald that goes before him. That is why the psalmist proclaims that a fire precedes him as he goes,[242] adding that God makes fiery flames his servants.[243] In Moses’ first theophany on Mount Sinai, the mountain was entirely wrapped in smoke, because the Lord had descended on it in the form of fire.[244]

That fire signifies knowledge is clearly expressed when Moses first addresses Israel. At their meeting with God, the people, gathered at the foot of the mountain while it burned, heard the sound of his words, speaking from the midst of the fire. Initially, the covenant consisted for them in putting into practice the Ten Sayings written on the tables of stone; but to Moses, on the top of the mountain, in the cloud, it was granted not only to hear the voice but something more.[245]

The Lord’s voice, the psalmist proclaims, sharpens lightning shafts[246] to smite his foes who, as we already know, are those whom the scriptures call the enemies of the soul. That is why the fire that Jesus casts on the world devours such enemies[247] and why it is said that the Lord your God is a consuming fire.[248]

Isaiah, too, sings of that fire: The land is set aflame by the wrath of the YHVH Sabaoth.[249] In this passage, the land means the hylic, the chaff to be devoured by fire, to complete the process of purification; in contrast with the celestial, the grain, the pneumatic man thus freed from all besetting impurities. The prophet Zephaniah expresses something similar: On the day of the anger of the Lord, in the fire of his jealousy, all the earth will be consumed.[250] What all this means in the final analysis is the culmination of the process that began with baptism, and ends when all remaining impurities are consumed by fire. As for the man who is as pure as the grain stripped of chaff, Isaiah proclaims that God will guarantee his safety: should you walk through fire, you will not be scorched.[251]

The biblical authors show they understand perfectly well that if the devouring action of the fire of knowledge is to correspond to a function wholly turned towards the Lord, it is essential that it should be grounded in purity. Indeed, the knowledge that flows from the Advocate who dwells in us is no ordinary knowledge, but one that results from an attentive, unceasing search for the Word sown in us, until we find it. And the Word invariably provides pure knowledge, forged with pure motivation into a pure act. The biblical scribes express this requirement as having the quality and consistency of salted fire. Hence, in Leviticus: You must salt every oblation that you offer.[252] This demand agrees with the observations transmitted by the evangelists, not only Matthew, with his You are the salt of the earth,[253] but Mark with his somewhat enigmatic phrase: For everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is a good thing, but if salt has become insipid, how can you season it again? Have salt in yourselves.[254] It is as though he were saying: knowledge purifies, but if it is to be effective and fulfill its function of drawing one closer to God, this salt must be within you.

Once one has understood the kind of fire Jesus has come to cast on the world, there can be nothing surprising about his plan to watch over the world until it is completely ablaze. In the synoptic text included by Luke,[255] he expressed the wish that the fire were already kindled, completing the idea with a passage that can surely be understood only in terms of the hidden interpretation: There is a baptism I must still receive, and how great is my distress until it is over.[256]

If it is clearly understood that Christ is the Son of Man who dwells hidden (unmanifest) in every man, it is not difficult to accept this passage. What Jesus wants is a universal baptism in which he is necessarily the only one baptized: the fire comes from the Father, from his wisdom, and as the only Son, he receives and transmits it as the knowledge of that wisdom to the consciousness of every man who makes himself worthy of such baptism. Thus, on receiving this flame of the knowledge of God in the form of tongues of fire, every man is baptized in Christ. These are solemn acts in which Christ is always and definitively at once the officiant and the oblation.

That is why, until this baptism, the only sign reserved for this generation, has been carried out-and we are in it-the hidden Jesus will not become fully manifest. So he will be under straitened circumstances, like the grain which, because of men’s ignorance, has still not been freed from that chaff which does not want to be winnowed and consumed in the fire that burns forever.

237 Isai. 66:15

238 Gen. 15:17

239 John 14:17

240 Luke 9:34

241 Ex. 13:21; Ps. 78:14; Ex.40:38; Isai. 4:5

242 Ps. 97:3

243 Ps. 104:4

244 Ex. 3:2, 19:18

245 Deut.4:10-14, 34:10; Num. 12:8

246 Ps. 29:7

247 This is the meaning of the condemnation of Aaron’s sons (Lev.10:2)

248 Deut. 4:24; Isai. 29:6

249 Isai. 9:18

250 Zeph. 1:18

251 Isai. 43:2

252 Lev. 2:13

253 Matt. 5:13

254 Mark 9:49-50

255 Luke 12:49-50

256 Loc. Cit. Doubts have been expressed about how to translate the Greek word synéjomai, here rendered as “distress”.

LOGION 11

Jesus said:

“This heaven will pass away, and the one above it will pass away.

The dead are not alive, and the living will not die.

During the days when you ate what is dead, you made it come alive.

When you are in the light, what will you do?

On the day when you were one, you became two.

But when you become two, what will you do?”

COMMENTARY

The scriptures bear clear witness to the ephemeral nature of heaven and earth. The three synoptic evangelists all include a passage in which Jesus says heaven and earth will pass away,[257] and at an earlier time the prophet Isaiah had expressed this in one of his poetic flights, using language not lacking in precision: The heavens will vanish like smoke, the earth will wear out like a garment.[258] The sky is a metaphor for the subtle world: clouds, seen objectively; contents of the mind, seen subjectively; both conditioned to vanish like smoke. As for earth, it is man’s and the world’s outer clothing, their skin, the inexorable victim of time’s wear and tear. This fact of passing away is the very condition of every created thing. As is known, God’s creative activity was employed only in this: in the firmament, the dome called heaven (on the second day), in the earth (on the third day), and in all that filled both creations.[259]

The apostle Peter explains that the present sky and earth are destined for fire. He is certainly referring to the fire of knowledge that Jesus came to cast on the world (i.e. on the heavens and earth of which the world is made) and to the devouring action of the fire of divine inspiration: The day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then with a roar the sky will vanish, the elements will catch fire and fall apart, the earth and all that it contains will be burned up.[260]

The final outcome of this purifying holocaust brought by the fire of Jesus Christ will-as the Book of Revelations puts it in a chapter showing last things-be that the heavens (the subtle world, that of the psyche, from the subjective viewpoint) and the earth (the material, hylic world) vanish, leaving no trace.[261] This will open up the space for the coming of a new heaven and a new earth,[262] in which the fruit promised by God from the seed sown in every man will yield its full measure. That is why the Book of Revelations adds that this new heaven and earth will be the home of God among mortals. He will make his home among them, it says, clearly evoking God-with-us, the Immanuel of the Book of Isaiah.[263] Isaiah anticipates this and confirms the strictly subjective condition of the New Jerusalem when he hands down the Word: The new heavens and the new earth I shall make, will endure before me-it is YHVH who speaks.[264]

When the scriptures speak of heaven and earth, this does not always imply an objective reference. In many instances, the words are intended to signify a sphere of existence suggested by the terms heaven and earth, which could in a sense be regarded as emblematic of the entirety of two spheres of existence: heaven, for the intermediate sphere, and earth for the lower one. The word light has the same emblematic value, for the Light that was before the sun existed was not created but pronounced, and so is unborn; in the beginning the Word was with God and was God.[265] The Light, as such, is the higher sphere of existence and corresponds to the absolute, pure Being, to the fullness of wisdom. It is therefore the highest of the three levels of consciousness whereby the scriptures classify the entire universe. Taken together, these constitute a vertical world view in which man is seen as a triadic conjunction of spirit, soul and body[266] in correspondence with a universe formed of the elements fire, water and earth and in conformity with three spheres of existence: Light, heaven and earth (spiritual, subtle/psychic, and material). Now, it may be understood that the ephemeral heaven to which the logion refers is not only the objective sky, in other words, it is not only the atmosphere we breathe within the limits of the firmament, not only the space enclosing the horizon we contemplate, not only the air in which birds fly, but also the celestial sphere of existence which, in every man, corresponds to the dwelling place of his subtle, spiritual life.

Thus, just as fire is the element that corresponds to the spiritual world, so water is the element in which the life of the soul is lived. That is why those waters which, according to the account of the Deluge, were unleashed on the earth for forty days and forty nights, are a universal symbol of baptism.[267] The waters below, those that fall from the lower level of the firmament, fulfill a purifying function like that of the waters of Jordan in which the Baptist immersed those who came to him. Both cleanse the thoughts that arise in the hearts of men.[268]

There are two possible interpretations of the phrase in the logion that reads …and the one above it will pass. The first of these indicates that everything pertaining to the celestial world is mortal, like the psychic Adam made of the world’s dust; as mortal as the hylic Adam who clothes and protects the other.

The second way of reading the phrase takes into account the words of Genesis, saying that, when God made the firmament -the vault of heaven-it divided the waters above the vault from the waters under the vault.[269] This explains why God called the firmament-the vault-the heavens, plural, and not heaven, for they were two, that of the waters below and that of the waters above. In the Bible, the heaven above is called the highest heaven or the heaven of heavens.[270]

As for the firmament itself, the sea of bronze that supports the celestial vault functions not only as the objective boundary of the two heavens (with water from the clouds in the lower one and with no need for any clouds in that above) but, subjectively, as a limit to man’s psychic consciousness, an insurmountable wall that prevents terrestrial mankind from enjoying an open, limitless view of the world. Metaphorically: the heavens above you will be brass.[271]

Traditionally, burnished bronze was used for mirrors in antiquity. The prophet Ezekiel testifies to its brilliance: glittering like polished brass.[272] Or, in the words of Job: heaven […] that mirror of cast metal.[273] Describing the vault of heaven as a mirror is a way of referring to how its brightness-a pale reflection of the Light overflowing from the higher sphere-offers man, purified by the waters of baptism, a few sparks of the wisdom of the Being. Hence, it is written that the learned will shine as brightly as the vault of heaven.[274] And that is why Saint Paul, who must have looked upward intensely every single day, exclamed: Now we are seeing a dim reflection in a mirror.[275]

What the logion expresses with certainty is that not only is the heaven ephemeral but so is the heaven of heavens. Hence, in the inner revelation of the Son of Man, who is eternal, it is written that he will come on the clouds of heaven,[276] an expression which means that this contemplation or revelation will not be possible unless one has first passed through the mist or cloud of enigma on which rides the pure light of the Son of Man. Moreover, this affirms that the dwelling of the Son of Man is exalted above the cloud of the heaven of heavens,[277] in the sphere of Being, where Life is eternal, not passing.

The terms dying and living, to be dead or to be Living, are commonly used in the New Testament and often in all probability in the Old Testament with a hidden meaning, in what could be called a spiritual sense, one that is quite the opposite of the usual point of view. Fortunately, this hidden meaning attributed to living-the Living-as having eternal life; and to dying or being dead, as being limited to temporal, mortal, life, has been well understood in manifest terms, and this spares us from any need to engage in exegetic work on it.

The Son of Man, the man of the spirit, is ever alive, Living, for he shares in eternal life issuing from the Father. Hence, whoever hears the Word and keeps it will receive the fruit of eternal Life and will not taste death.[278] In keeping with this, there will be a complete transformation of consciousness (through identification with that which is eternal in oneself). That is why Jesus says: If anyone believes in me, even though he dies he will live, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. […].[279] He has passed from death to life.[280]

On the other hand, the dead are those who do not hear the Word, those who do not pay heed to the voice of the Son of God. Of them it is said that they live in a land of deep shadow.[281] And those who are left with the sole task of burying their dead[282] are themselves to be regarded as dead. This bears witness to the fact that the physical/hylic Adam lives only to die.

Only the Good News sends forth its devoutly yearned for invitation: all that must die in the heart of man can be purified by the transforming action of the waters of baptism, those from the clouds of the heaven below; then, later, through an alchemical purging, it can be utterly consumed by the fire of knowledge. This is known as devouring that which is dead. What remains after this difficult and necessary realization is a flame of living Light, consciousness reborn, transformed into the Living. This is the higher fruit of conversion. It is what is known as being in the light.

The last test in the logion is very important. What will you do when, having become two, you are in the light? There is an answer: When you make the two into One, you will become a Son of Man.[283] This decisive act of transfiguration of consciousness is well described by Jesus in the Gospel. We shall in due course concem ourselves with bringing that testimony to these pages.

257 Matt.5:18, 24:35; Mark 13:31; Luke 16:17, 21:33

258 Isai. 51:6 (also Job 14:12 until the heavens are no more)

259 Gen. 1:1, 6-10; 2:1

260 2 Pet. 3:7-10

261 Rev. 20:11

262 Rev. 21:1

263 Rev. 21:3

264 Isai. 66:22

265 John 1:1

266 1 Thes.5:23

267 Gen. 7:12

268 Gen. 6:5-6

269 Gen. 1:6-7

270 Deut. 10:14; 1 Kings 8:27; Neh. 9:6

271 Deut. 28:23

272 Ezek. 1:7

273 Job 37:18

274 Dan. 12:3

275 1 Cor. 13:12

276 Matt. 24:30, 26:64; Dan 7:13; Mark 13:26; Luke 21:27

277 Heb. 7:26

278 Matt. 16:28; John 5:24, 8:51

279 John 11:25-26

280 John 5:24

281 Isai. 9:1; Luke 1:79

282 Matt. 8:22; Luke 9:60

283 Logion 106

LOGION 12

The disciples said to Jesus:

“We know that you will leave us; who will then be great among us?” Jesus said to them:

“As matters now stand with you, you will go to Jacob (James) the Just:

what comes under heaven and earth is his concern.”

[For his sake heaven and earth came into being][284]

COMMENTARY

According to the Gospel, the topic of greatness was raised by the mother of the sons of Zebedee when she asked a favor for her two sons, the apostles James and John. What they wanted was to be absolutely close to Christ, for that is the meaning of the passionate request that they sit at the right and the left hand of Jesus, meaning, united with him.

Jesus then warns the two sons of thunder that those who would attain the Kingdom cannot avoid the transit of the Passion-in Isaiah’s words the bitter chalice of stupor[285]. He even confirms that you shall drink my cup,[286] since they show themselves ready, for the sake of the Kingdom, to taste that hard trial consisting of first death then resurrection, in accordance with the expression transmitted by the evangelist John: unless a wheat grain falls on the ground and dies, it remains only a single grain; but if it dies, it yields a rich harvest.[287]

This cup cannot be had for the asking. It is granted by the will of the Father to those who are ready for it. The cup confers greatness, but not when sought after with a view to being the first; only to serve, and to give one’s life as a ransom for many.[288]

That is what the complete Passion entails; and without a doubt, only this Passion can be called greatness, demanding as it does the keeping and teaching of the commandments.[289] As Luke says when referring to the greatness of the Baptist: He will […] turn […] the disobedient back to the wisdom that the virtuous have, preparing for the Lord a people fit for him.[290]

It will be understood that the path to greatness means undergoing the Passion of the Just, on behalf of those who are still unjust. That is why Peter says Christ himself, innocent though he was, […] died for the guilty. In the body he was put to death, in the spirit he was raised to life.[291]

According to the Psalmist, God takes the side of the virtuous.[292] That is why the Living Jesus, the Risen Jesus who appeared to the disciples on Mount Tabor in Galilee, asks them to follow the path of the righteous. If the Living Jesus identifies this path with Saint James, it is because the Apostle had vowed not to eat bread from the moment when he drank from the Lord’s cup until he saw him resurrected from the dead.

This explains why, in the Gospel according to the Hebrews, it is said that, after the Lord had appeared, he asked to be brought food and bread, took a little bread, blessed it, broke it and gave it to James the Just, saying to him: “Brother, eat your bread, for the Son of Man has risen from the dead”.[293]

With his promise, James was following the example of Jesus who, on the occasion of his Passover meal, had said: I tell you, I shall not eat it again [this Passover] until it is fulfilled in the Kingdom of God.[294]

The accomplishment of the Passover consists of the consummation whereby the Paschal meal and the cup from which the lover of God eats and drinks on the Way[295] are transformed, beyond the veil of appearances, into the bread and the chalice[296] that come from the Kingdom of God.

Hence James’ vow and his well-deserved reputation for righteousness, since the bread from heaven and earth, the two worlds of psyche and the flesh, has come to serve as men’s Way to the Kingdom; but only the bread that offers the Son of Man, risen from the dead-and with it the chalice from which all should drink-only this is the bread of life and of justice.

It may therefore be said that every way that culminates in human beings attaining greatness concerns heaven and earth. This is what heaven and earth were made for: that, making his way through them, man should grow great, not only in the will and capacity for righteousness, but to turn the disobedient back to the wisdom that the virtuous have[297] through the bitter act of drinking to the dregs the chalice of stupor.[298]

284 For this difficult text, Pla used the version translated by Philippe de Suarez, without this implying any rejection of the Brill text, for both have the same meaning.

285 Isai. 51:17

286 Matt. 20:23

287 John 12:24

288 Matt. 20:20-28; Mark 10:41-45

289 Matt. 5:19

290 Luke 1:17; also Acts 8:10, where mention is made of the power of God that is called Great (Mega-lé). In Aramaic, this means Revealing.

291 1 Pet. 3:18

292 Ps. 14:5

293 We owe this information to Saint Jerome, who assures us that he translated this gospel, subsequently so inexplicably lost, from Greek into Latin. (Hieron. De viris ill. 2: PL 23, 641B-643ª). See A. de Santos, Los Evangelios apócrifos, p.41, BAC. Madrid.) Some scholars are of the view that this logion refers to Saint James the Lesser, the Lord’s brother. Whatever the case, when Jesus calls a man who eats bread with him “brother”, that confirms the man in question as a brother, not in blood but in the spirit, as he himself had said that his mother and his brothers were those who did the will of God (cfr. Mark 3:35). Moreover, the matter of identifying the James in question is one of concern to history, not religion. For the purposes of the hidden exegesis, what counts is the reference to the Just.

294 Luke 22:16

295 Luke 22:15-18

296 Luke 22:19-20

297 Luke 1:17

298 Isai. 51:17

LOGION 13

Jesus said to his disciples:

“Make comparisons and tell me what I am like.”

Simon Peter said to him:

“You are like a righteous angel.”

Matthew said to him:

“You are like a wise philosopher.”

Thomas said to him:

“Master, my mouth is completely unable to say what you are like.”

Jesus said:

“I am not your master. You have drunk from the bubbling spring that I have poured out and become intoxicated.”

And he took him, and withdrew, and spoke three words to him.

When Thomas returned to his companions, they asked him:

“What did Jesus say to you?”

Thomas said to them:

“If I tell you one of the words he told me, you will pick up stones and hurl them at me. A fire will come out of the stones and burn you up.”

COMMENTARY

In terms of the hidden interpretation, the question about Christ is identical to the question about Being. What is one’s essence? What is in man like a flame from one and the same fire? On the occasion narrated in this logion, the disciples Simon Peter and Matthew showed by their inadequate answers that they had not reached the point of asking themselves about the pure, naked Being. In calling Jesus a righteous angel or a wise philosopher, it is clear that they had gone no further towards imagining the Being-that-I-am than to see the matter in terms of an entity conditioned by qualifiers and notions of separation, however elevated.

That said, Thomas’ answer leaves us in no doubt that he had succeeded in freeing his consciousness of Being of all constricting apparel, recognizing himself as the pure grain free from all chaff. To attain that tremendous discovery, decisive for spiritual realization, which consists of perceiving Being with nothing added, Thomas had to apprehend directly and assimilate the Glory of wisdom that Jesus shares with the Father, so that, as the Gospel puts it, they may be one in us, as you [the Father] are in me and I am in you.[299]

This is surely the mystery of the unity of Being. Thomas reveals in his discreet silence that he has discovered this mystery, just as Saint Paul shows that he too has realized it when he says: Through him [through Christ] both of us have in the one Spirit our way to come to the Father.[300]

As Jesus then proclaims, Thomas has already drunk, to the point of spiritual intoxication, from the very fount of unity that Jesus teaches. Of this fountain, Jesus says that it is bubbling-boiling-for the water flowing from it is none other than the fire of knowledge that burns up utterly every last vestige of separation, leaving the perfection of Being in pure nakedness. That is why Jesus, knowing that Thomas and he are in essence completely one[301] will not now permit him to call him master, for in unity he is Thomas’ very self. Here, Jesus’ purpose is to strip away the last veil obscuring Thomas’ consciousness until, wonderstruck, his lips can assent to and express the immense truth that has taken possession of him. It should not be too difficult to infer those three words Jesus said to him at the end, in the privacy of his room, since they must tend to confirm his Christly consciousness: “You are Christ” (for Christ is all of us in essence). With these words the true content of Jesus’ prayer is accomplished in Thomas: Holy Father, keep those you have given me true to your name, so that they may be one like us.[302]

The logion ends with a reference to stones in terms of their hidden meaning, for it must be understood that the stone within everyone stands, metaphorically, for the Being. It is the heir[303] in the parable of the vineyard, rejected by the murderous tenants/builders, the keystone of every human construction. These are the stones which Jesus said would cry out[304]-and they are indeed forever crying out from the solitude of the Son of Man-, forgotten by every psychic Adam who fails to recognize as his very essence he who comes in the name of the Lord.[305]

Thomas has understood perfectly that every stone stands for the Word, the seed sown at birth in every man, the essential man, a seed that will germinate, grow and begin to yield fruit only from the moment when the psychic Adam acknowledges its presence. That is why Thomas says that, if he were to pass on even a single word of what has been revealed to him-the Word-as just confirmed by Jesus, fire, the fire of knowledge, would burst forth from that keystone of every man, and consume him. Thus he explains consummation, perfect realization.

This brings to a close the interpretation of the logion of Judas-Thomas. However, a complete study of the pericope calls for examination of the parallel logion, as found in the synoptic Gospels[306].

In this logion, Jesus asks: Who do people say the Son of Man is?[307] This mode of questioning has hidden import, for in asking about the impersonal Son of Man, Jesus is referring directly to the Christ, the Son, the essential Being who (at least for many) remains hidden under the dense layers of the visible man, to whom the Son of Man gives life. For the Son of Man to be known, it is-as has already been made clear-a prerequisite that men should first have turned inward, guided by the light of knowledge. Jesus then goes on to probe further with his questioning: But who do you say that I am? The question still refers to Jesus as the Son of Man and Simon Peter shows that he is well aware of this when he proclaims in his profession of faith: you are the Christ, the Son of the living God.[308]

What this logion means in terms of the hidden aspect of Jesus Christ is that Simon Peter is confessing faith in Jesus, in the Christ who, as the Son of God in man, lives in every man as the Word, the seed of eternity sown in us.

Faith in this seed, in Christ, triggers a radical transfiguration, to the point of making those who believe into children of God. Hence the statement in which Jesus announces the accomplishment of the Good News: Yes, it is my Father’s will that whoever sees the Son[309] and believes in him shall have eternal life.[310] All those who awaken to this faith in him attain contemplation of the Son. This is so, throughout the history of human generation, understood in terms of the hidden meaning claimed by Jesus when he called himself David’s Lord, through the spiritual seed, as well as his son.

Jesus’ reply to Simon Peter’s profession of faith shows up its true hidden meaning. This bespeaks an inner revelation of the Son of Man, one that can never be due to perception of a flesh-and-blood sensory order, but only to the rain of the fire of knowledge sent in tongues of flame by the will of the Father. Nothing but this rain can awaken the intuition of Being, which must inevitably lead to that birth from above of which the Gospel of Saint John says: No one has gone up to heaven except the one who came down from heaven, the Son of Man.[311]

Jesus knows that this inner awakening will soon lead to Simon Peter’s being endowed with eternal bliss and, using a widespread Semitic expression that calls a man the son of what he has accomplished or is about to accomplish, he calls him son of Jonah. He thus announces in few words that Simon Peter is now ready to receive the sign of the prophet Jonah, the only one reserved for this human generation.[312] This sign is none other than that of the Son of Man, meaning, the certainty and glory of God that arise from conversion into the Son of Man.[313] Luke bears sure witness to this when he says: For just as Jonah became a sign to the Ninevites, so will the Son of Man be to this generation.[314]

The long parable which tells in rich metaphor of the sign received by the prophet Jonah on his conversion into a Son of Man bears witness to more than the antiquity of this sign which was, according to the tradition of the Jewish people, given by God, for Jesus took it very explicitly as a sign concerning himself,[315] and as a sign from the Father for all generations.[316] The three days and three nights-an indefinite temporal dimension, yet complete in itself-spent by Jonah in the belly of the whale express figuratively the burial of the Son of Man in the heart of every psycho-physical Adam.[317] Likewise, the Passion of Jesus, the Son of Man-his death and resurrection-is not only real, living history; it exemplifies the Passion that concerns every man in spirit, each in his own way: the death and resurrection of the Son of Man within him.

The one true sign in regard to eternal life-and its pledge-is brought to man by the Son of Man who is its essence; but this sign is revealed only once faith in the Son of Man has awoken. If, on the contrary, it is invoked as a proof for the senses, in order to confute the lack of faith of flesh and blood, the invocation will be fruitless, for in such cases no sign shall be given to this generation.[318]

299 John 17:22

300 Eph. 2:18

301 John 17:23

302 John 17:11

303 Matt. 21:38-42

304 Luke 19:40

305 Luke 19:38; Ps. 118:26

306 Matt. 16:13 et seq.; Mark 8:27-30; Luke 9:18-21

307 This is the formulation in St. Matthew’s Gospel

308 Mark: You are the Messiah [or the Christ]. Luke: The Christ [or the Messiah of God]. John: the Holy One of God [or the Christ, the Son of the living God]. Every answer is addressed to Jesus as the Son of God, not the son of the Nazareth carpenter.

309 To see the Son is to discern and recognize Him hidden in man.

310 John 6:40

311 John 3:13

312 Matthew places this forewarning concerning the sign of Jonah at the beginning of the chapter that tells of Peter’s profession of faith, which facilitates the narration of the two logia (Matt. 16:17)

313 Logion 106.

314 Luke 11:30. We do not know the true name of Simon Peter’s natural father, nor is this of interest to the Gospel, which does not record it. If the evangelist John calls Simon son of John,(John 1:42), it is to show his earlier affiliation with John the Baptist and when, on the shores of the Sea of Tiberias, he calls him three times Simon, son of John, it is to announce to him the baptism of glory he is about to receive, (John 21:15-17). Moreover, Jonah (Heb. Yónah = dove) and John (Heb. Yóhánáh) are distinct, unrelated names.

315 Matt. 12:38-40

316 The term generation surely means for Jesus and the evangelists, both here and elsewhere, the entire history of humanity.

317 Matt. 12:40

318 Mark 8:12; Matt. 16:4

LOGION 14

Jesus said to them:

“If you fast you will bring sin upon yourselves,

and if you pray you will be condemned,

and if you give to charity you will harm your spirits.

When you go into any region and walk through the land, and people receive you, eat what they serve you

and heal the sick among them.

What goes into your mouth will not defile you,

but what comes out of your mouth will defile you.”

COMMENTARY

Logion 6 refers to the practices of the righteous[319] in their manifest sense, dealing with whether these practices are to be performed in the presence of others or in secret. In this logion, however, the Gospel of Judas-Thomas sets out to explain the three essential practices that make a man one of the just in terms of their hidden meaning.

According to the synoptic Gospels, the last fast practiced by Jesus took place when, after his double and simultaneous baptism by water and the spirit in preparation for preaching the Good News, he was led by the Spirit into the desert. Before Jesus, the Prophet Moses had undergone the trial, or temptation in the desert, in what Isaiah called the parched places of the soul. He too underwent his quarantine, his forty days and forty nights, this being the time needed for him to complete the unavoidable process of purification.[320] Throughout the duration of this purgation in the wilderness-and Jesus went through this in order to fulfill his paradigmatic, exemplary task-the soul remains subject to humiliation and to hunger and thirst, expressing the inner dryness of which a number of mystics have spoken after passing that way.[321]

Assuredly, the hunger and thirst that arise after prolonged fasting in such a desert of the soul are the hunger and thirst for righteousness endured, according to the evangelist Matthew, by those blessed ones who shall be satisfied.[322] The prophet Isaiah speaks of these when he exclaims: and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water whose waters never run dry.[323]

In terms of the hidden language of the Gospel, fasting is plainly to be understood as the voluntary or imposed privation of spiritual food for the soul-the bread of life and living water. That is why the evangelists were not indulging in an unnecessary or obvious observation when they said of Jesus: he fasted for forty days and forty nights, after which he was very hungry.[324] The hunger and thirsting spoken of here are a yearning for the food of wisdom subtly distilled by the Spirit. Jesus needed this sustenance to increase in wisdom, in stature, and in favor with God and men,[325] and there is nothing superfluous about noting that, once he had passed through the dry places of the soul and, through humility, known the beautiful nothingness of all things mortal, he felt hungry; meaning that he needed to receive the food that would enliven his spirit. From that moment on Jesus never again needed to fast or to be obliged to go without food. On one occasion told of in St. John’s Gospel, the disciples were urging him, “Rabbi, do have something to eat.” But he said, “I have food to eat that you do not know about… My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work.”[326]

This and nothing else is the hidden meaning of fasting and food in the Gospel. Jesus explains it very clearly when, before the multiplication of the loaves and in the presence of those followers on whom he was later to bestow the seven mysteries of imperfect knowledge, he said to the apostles: I feel sorry for all these people; they have been with me for three days now and have nothing to eat.[327] Christ possesses wisdom which he shares with the Father, and dispenses it as knowledge to those who believe in him and follow him, in the form of the bread of life.

Our intention here is to clarify Christ’s special characteristic of granting knowledge by considering the so-called “question about fasting”.[328] The disciples of John the Baptist fast because, so Jesus declares, Of all the children born of women a greater than John the Baptist has never been seen,[329] and yet he is not qualified to distribute the bread of life. Nevertheless, Jesus’ disciples need not fast. Until the bridegroom-the perfect Master living in their midst-is taken from them, they remain as guests at the Messianic feast. To sustain them, they receive unfailing spiritual food; yet wisdom has been proved right by her actions.[330] Certainly, Jesus was born of woman, but as the Christ, he who comes from heaven […] the Father loves him and gives him the spirit without reserve.[331] That is why Jesus says in this logion that those who fast, if they are his disciples, bring sin upon themselves, for they do not know how to receive the food which the Son gives without reserve.

As for prayer, the logion points out that the true prayer of Jesus’ disciples is a prayer in spirit that fixes attention on Being and not on its gifts. Consequently, prayer is ordained in compliance with the will of the Father, that his name be hallowed through knowledge and through what knowing means: that the love of the Father is in us through the Son.[332]

The Son is always in us since he is the Word sown in us as seed, and this is the Kingdom of the Father; but to yield fruit it is necessary to believe in the Word as sown. That is what the work consists of: that we believe in the Word in order that we may be one in the Son, as the son is in the Father and the Father in the Son.[333]

To believe in the Word that is in us is to make straight the paths of the Lord,[334] so as to let every valley [in us] be filled in, every mountain and hill be laid low, let every cliff become a plain, and the ridges a valley.[335] Thus the Kingdom arises in us, borne by tongues of fire that instill the wisdom of the Son: the bread of Life, food for our Days.

This prayer with the spirit is what Peter practiced when, according to the Acts of the Apostles,[336] he went up on the rooftop-the highest place within himself[337]-to pray. He felt hungry and was looking forward to his meal. This caused him to fall into a trance, meaning, a going-beyond, an excessus mentis (thus attaining the blessing promised to those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.) And it was for him as though the heavens were opened. Breaking through the hard firmament of burnished bronze-the separation from the spiritual waters above-the Kingdom entered into him in answer to his prayer.

It is not only through Peter that we know of this praying with the spirit. Paul speaks of it in his first epistle to the Corinthians,[338] who had the gift of tongues but were praying with such excess that the knowledge transmitted by the tongues of fire of the spirit was not reaching the ecstatic mind. Thus, the bronze of their firmament remained unbroken, damming up the waters of higher knowledge, so that their confusion was not made clear. Baptism cannot yet have purified their minds enough.

Baptism completely fulfilled: such is the prayer that Jesus asks of his disciples in the logion. Therein lies his warning to them. Once one knows that the clean naked grain is within, ready for safekeeping in the eternal granary, there will be no more fear of the wind blowing the chaff. To discover the grain as grain and the chaff as chaff, thus-as we have already made clear-is the work of the Father accomplished; and thus, too, is the chaff willingly, quite naturally, consigned to the unending and consuming fire kindled by time.

As for alms, the strictly spiritual meaning applied by the logion puts a distance between it and the three practices of justice. The purpose of Jesus’ recommendation: sell your possessions and give alms[339] is not to glorify the practice of almsgiving, but to stress the decisive value of not possessing, not being anything, until one attains total indigence through self-denial. Alms are nothing but an indication of the relative degree of non-attachment, but there will be no complete negation for as long as some possession remains to be offered as charity. What Jesus is asking his followers is that they complete the difficult transference of consciousness whereby the latter comes to cast off the ephemeral husk of clay and intellect we imagine ourselves to be, leaving the pure nakedness of pneumatic man -the Son of Man-which we really are.

It is in this nothingness or shedding from our consciousness all added outer clothing that Jesus sees perfection. That is why Jesus contrasts purification-reduction to essentials-with the cleanliness imposed by the Pharisee on his fountain and his cup, speaking thus: Give alms from what you have,[340] for it is in such giving, in giving up being what one thinks one is, that Jesus sees purification or the way of perfection. Jesus goes so far as to demand nothingness (real humility) when he says: anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it.[341] Being rich (in spirit, in the things of the mind, in material things) the giver of charity harms his spirit, in that there is still something he has not left off being. This is what distinguishes him from the pure nakedness of the poor in spirit for whom the Gospel prophesies decisively that they shall be blessed, through the merit of having shed every possession that does not pertain to the Kingdom of God.[342]

Following his clarifications about the three practices of justice, Jesus insists in his teaching on a number of instructions to his disciples, designed to guide them towards the missionary action he hopes they will undertake, as workers in the great harvest that the Good News will bring in. Every one of the synoptic Gospels passes on these missionary instructions, to which the logion refers briefly, in a somewhat primitive form.[343] Taken in their manifest sense, there is no apparent difficulty in interpreting this broad pericope, yet exegesis does reveal a hidden meaning in some of those verses.

The land (logion), town (Matthew) or house (Mark and Luke) into which the disciples will have to enter in order to carry out their work of preaching has, in this context, one and the same metaphorical sense, that of an intimate, personal space, as expressed by Paul when he says: Christ was faithful as a son, and as the master in the house.[344] While, however, we ourselves (every single one of us) are the house in which the Son dwells, it may be said that the countryside-those fields, that ground the earthly fruit of which Cain brought as his oblation, which proved not to be pleasing in the eyes of the Lord[345]- represents, on the contrary, a way for gentiles, a universal metaphor for those Adams of psyche and clay for whom the time has not yet come to accept the message of the Good News.

What Jesus is saying is that the one truly destined to receive the Gospel is always the pneumatic man of whom Ezekiel speaks, in his parable of the lost sheep.[346] This sheep dwells in his own house, his sheepfold. There he waits, as passive as a seed, buried in its divine sacrifice, until one day, thanks to the impulse given by the Good News announced by Christ, that seed awakens. Then the Adam of clay arises from his earthbound dream, and believes.

Through the influence of this new-found, true faith, the seed sown in the beginning may attain the resurrection and the Life, recovering what it has in truth always been. The Good Shepherd[347] comes forth and pastures his flock.[348] Both these things are, in essence, the same light.

Thus Israel was born from the strength of Jacob, the father of the Twelve. So goes the scripture. Thereafter, Israel became the eternal inhabitant dwelling in his sheepfold, amidst the sheep, both lost and not lost. Like a seed in the ground, a presence in every man of every race, these are the long awaited lost sheep to be rescued without fail through the Good News that proclaims: the Kingdom of God is very near to you.[349] Very near to you, indeed already within you, for it is you who are in essence the lost sheep, although you neither know this nor believe in it. That is why you need to be told: Look into yourselves! Wake up! Break out from your long dream of clay and dust!

In truth what needs to be pointed out time and again is that Israel, Christ (the Messiah), the sheep, even the gate of the sheepfold, all these in essence mean one and the same thing. For the Light of knowledge is One, and its only limits are the highly misleading ones attributed by ignorance. If the Jewish people had not lost much of the wisdom handed down by their forefathers, and the non-Jewish people had not rejected spirituality, no one would have failed to realize that when Jesus spoke in his Gospel of the lost sheep of the house of Israel,[350] he was speaking of all the sheep in the world, grazing lost, forgotten: a light shining in the darkness within every man who comes into this world.[351]

The preaching of the Good News was taught by Jesus as an action of extreme urgency to heal those suffering from the disease of ignorance, and that is why he said the harvest is rich.[352] For Jesus, being the wisdom of God, bathing in the Light of knowledge, the sick meant all those sufferers hungering and thirsting after an awakening, and that is why he gave to his disciples both present and future-to all those ready to hearken to this perfect knowledge, or the mystery of the Twelve-the double mission, which can be summed up in a single one, of preaching the Kingdom of God using words similar to these: the Kingdom of God is in you, it is so near that if you were only to cast a little light on your not-knowing, you would know that you yourselves are that Kingdom.

This task of curing all those who lie sick of not knowing, all those who do not know where to find the lost sheep that lie locked up in themselves, is the very basis of the work of the laborers bringing the Good News. This is why they are told: Eat what is set before you;[353] bearing in mind that, here, eating means taking the disease of ignorance and treating it by means of knowledge. As will be readily understood, this is a food that leaves no stains; for when knowledge appears, not- knowing ceases to be.

That said, there can be no doubt but that the laborer-and these are his wages-will remain affected (positively or negatively) by all that issues forth from him on such occasions. That, at least, is the promise, repeated by all the synoptic Gospels, and not only by this logion: Do not worry about how to speak or what to say; because, when the time comes, the Holy Spirit will teach you what you must say.[354] Luke then adds: I myself shall give you an eloquence and a wisdom.[355]

319 Matt. 6:1

320 Deut. 9:9

321 Deut. 8:3

322 Matt. 5:6

323 Isai. 58:11

324 Matt. 4:2; Luke 4:2

325 Luke 2:52

326 John 4:30-34

327 Mark 8:2-3

328 Matt.9:14-15; Mark 2:18-20; Luke 5:33-35

329 Matt.11:11; Luke 7:28

330 Matt. 11:19

331 John 3:31-35

332 John 17:26

333 John 17:20-21

334 Matt. 3:3

335 Isai. 40:3-4

336 Acts 10:9-10

337 The roof is how the text expresses this

338 1 Cor. 14:14-16 et seq.

339 Luke 12:33

340 Luke 11.41 (also Give for alms all that you possess)

341 Matt. 10:39; 16:24-25

342 Luke 6:20; Matt. 5:3

343 Matt.10:5-16; Mark 6:8-11; Luke 9:2-5; Luke 10:4-13

344 Heb. 3:6

345 Gen. 4:3-5

346 Matt. 10:6

347 John 10:11

348 Ezek. 34:30-31

349 Luke 10:9

350 Matt. 10:6

351 John 1:5, 9

352 Matt. 9:37

353 Luke 10:8

354 Matt. 10:19-20; Mark 13:11; Luke 12:11-12

355 Luke 21:15

LOGION 15

Jesus said:

“When you see one who was not born of woman,

fall on your faces and worship him.

That one is your Father.”

COMMENTARY

Those not born of woman, those of whom Jesus said that the least of them is greater than the greatest of those born of woman,[356] these are the children of the promise, these are the children of God.[357] The psalm confirms this when the Lord says to the fruit of David’s loins: you are my son, today I have become your father.[358]

Invariably, given their condition as the fruit of a male’s loins, these sons who have come from God become Lord over the sons of Adam, in whom they grow as the fruit from the seed sown by God, until they fully attain the state of a new man, a celestial second man, coming after the first man, the old, earthly man.[359]

The man from heaven comes second only in terms of his order of appearance when seen from earth; but seen from above, as the Son of Man made on the sixth day of creation, he is the first, having preceded the Adam of the Garden of Eden both in time and in closeness to God. This may explain why the Son of Man, coming from above, is called the image of the unseen God and the first-born of all creation.[360]

All this is explained very clearly by Paul when he sets forth what is, according to his understanding, God’s plan for man’s salvation. Those who are called are all those who love him, and we can all love him, for we were all predestined to reproduce the image of his Son. This Son is the pneumatic man or Son of Man who, as the Lamb of God, is made flesh[361] in every man who comes into this world. Every man is thus the complete threefold man who, clothed with and identifying with the flesh, knows the manifest Christ through his earthly means of perception and understanding.

A new, second, creation (or regeneration) then takes place, due to God’s inspiring intervention on behalf of those who love him. These men are called, and grace is granted them to be in Christ [en-Christed] through the transformation of the old into the new. This transfiguration of consciousness enables the new man to know Christ both as the world knows him and through the spirit. Those who come thus to know Christ are also known by God, having been chosen to become true images of his Son at every level of their being.[362]

For he who is known by God, his face (the face of the chosen one, the known one) and the Son are one and the same thing, while the reproduced image is merely a limited light on the clothing of the Adam of clay and straw.

The true image is hidden, yet shows itself in signs, becoming manifest through the doubly deepening action of baptism by water and the spirit. It is, when all is said and done, this action that makes it possible for the Son to be seen; in the sense, of course, of seeing the Son, hitherto hidden from our consciousness, with the discerning eyes of knowledge. This is explained in Saint John’s gospel as being God’s intention: Yes, it is my Father’s will that whoever sees the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life.[363]

The metanoesis ordained by Jesus as the first stage in assimilation of the aims laid down in the Good News involves, essentially, attentive contemplation of all inner events, the final realization being to recognize the image or face of the first creation.

This final realization is accomplished when the Son is seen, following an unbroken vigil, watching and praying like a living flame in ardent adoration. This act corresponds to the forgetting or negation of oneself-the “old man”-which Jesus lays down as the condition for following him. This negation is to be understood as breaking through one’s own borders, which are annihilated by knowledge or by love, thus gaining access to a universality that surely represents the very essence of the Son of Man. That is why Jesus said unless a wheat grain falls on the ground and dies, it remains only a single grain; but if it dies, it yields a rich harvest.[364]

The fruit is a whole in itself, and it is the death and subsequent resurrection of the grain that invest God’s plan with its full meaning. The unity of the Son and the Father[365], for only at the level of the latter can one speak of the All, is spoken of explicitly by Jesus, especially in certain passages from the Gospel of Saint John: whoever sees me sees the one who sent me[366]; to have seen me is to see the Father.[367] Logion 15 explains this directly. Paul too says it, using other words: The spirit himself and our spirit bear united witness.[368]

It is the breaking of borders, the one way to self-negation, that opens the gates of the sheepfold for the sheep, and makes for the flooding of the many waters by the Father. It has already been made clear that the Good Shepherd, the sheep and the gate of the sheepfold are one and the same thing; now, however, what Jesus asks is that each one of those who have been called, once transformed into one of the chosen, should complete the annihilation of his or her border and accede to the oneness of knowledge, which is, according to epignosis, death and resurrection.

Jesus explains the mystery of unity very well in that exceptionally intense ecstasy, the Priestly Prayer handed down to us by Saint John the Evangelist: May they all be one. Father, may they be one in us, as you are in me and I am in you […] that they may be one as we are one. With me in them and you in me, may they be […] completely one.[369]

The mystery announced by Christ places death under the sign of unity, confirming the logion which states that one must lose one’s life to gain Life. This is the death that must be tasted, drunk-in the oracular words of Isaiah-from the chalice of stupor you have drained to the dregs.[370]

When death comes to Jesus, death both real and paradigmatic, it is among other things this sense of unity that confers its deepest meaning, three times confirmed, on the bitterness of the cup drunk docilely by the master, that the will of the Father be done.[371]

Unexpectedly, Saint John the Evangelist places the following prophecy, perhaps intended allegorically, in the mouth of Caiaphas, that year’s High Priest. Jesus-he says-was to die […] to gather together in unity the scattered children of God.[372]

But only once death and resurrection had been accomplished could the Father be contemplated. When Jesus saw Mary of Magdala weeping by the sepulcher, he confirmed his last great passage-that of every man-the passage that culminates in direct contemplation of the Father: Go and find the brothers [the children of God] and tell them: I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.[373]

356 Matt. 11:11; Luke 7:28

357 Rom. 9:8

358 Ps.2:7

359 1 Cor. 15:47

360 Col. 1:15. The death of the firstborn related in Ex.12:29-30 is, up to a point, a metaphor for the beheading or death of this class of children from on high. This is also the allegorical meaning given to the right of primogeniture accorded to Jacob, despite being the despised junior of Esau, the real firstborn.

361 John 1:14

362 Rom. 8:27-29; 2 Cor. 5:16-17

363 John 6:40

364 John 12:24

365 John 10:30

366 John 12:45

367 John 14:9

368 Rom. 8:16

369 John 17:21, 23

370 Isai. 51:17

371 Matt. 26:39-44

372 John 11:52

373 John 20:17

LOGION 16

Jesus said:

“Perhaps people think that I have come to cast peace upon the world. They do not know that I have come to cast conflicts upon the earth: fire, sword, war. For there will be five in a house:

there will be three against two and two against three,

father against son and son against father,

and they will stand alone.”[374]

COMMENTARY

Using parallel terms and incorporating a number of further points, this logion is to be found in the canonical Gospels and in the book of the prophet Micah.[375] In terms of the manifest meaning, Jesus seems to be speaking of the difficulties to which knowledge of the Good News can give rise within a family of five. However, closer study reveals that the intra-family division or warfare in question, with its surprising mention of the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law, could never have had anything to do with the purpose of Jesus’ coming. Such an interpretation is unquestionably erroneous and more than puerile, and is therefore to be discarded.[376]

In terms of the hidden meaning, it will be noted that the five inhabitants of the household correspond to the number that Micah cited in the Old Testament, as does the identical breakdown in the family, so that this has nothing to do with the Jesus of the New Testament but relates to the hidden, eternal Christ, the Lord of every man since the beginning of time. The narrative seems to correspond to an analytical description of the whole man and of the process that takes place within him as a result of the sowing of the Word, this man being the home or the single common dwelling place of a consciousness.

The logion speaks of three agents of division: fire, the sword, and war. As to the nature of this fire, it is none other than the spiritual knowledge that Jesus is spreading over the earth as a second baptism, as shown in the commentary on logion 10.[377] War is simply the conflagration confronting the different forms of consciousness that are part of the fivefold make-up of the whole man. As for the sword, this is the only active agent of dissolution mentioned by Matthew, a factor that gives prominence to its active importance as well as to its antiquity, since to trace its meaning back to its origin, one must look to Genesis and to the flame of a flashing sword placed by God to guard the way to the Tree of Life.[378]

This biblical sword is no ordinary one, but a flaming and flashing one, as erect and as sharp as any sword-the living flame in which many mystics come to be consumed-as mentioned by the prophet Zechariah who, in passing, partly explains its function when he proclaims the oracle of YHVH: Awake, sword, against my shepherd, and against the man who is my companion.[379]

The sword is, of course, as Zechariah says, a two-edged weapon that could injure the shepherd. After singing psalms with his disciples, Jesus reminds them of this on his way to the agony on the Mount of Olives.[380] Jesus’ Passion is about to begin, that supreme act, transforming the tree of the cross of death into the way to the victory of the Tree of Life. But, before this step can be taken, the shepherd must needs be wounded by the blade of the flashing sword, for that is why God had in the beginning placed it to stand guard over the gates of Paradise.

The Letter to the Hebrews compares this sword of the Spirit with the Word of God,[381] and describes it as cutting like any double-edged sword but more finely. It can slip through the place where the soul is divided from the spirit, or joints from the marrow; it can judge the secret emotions and thoughts.[382]

As can be inferred from the precautions surrounding the rare figurative texts in which the matter is mentioned, this text touches on one of the best-guarded secrets kept by the Jewish people and by early Christians. That said, there is reason to be thankful that Matthew did not omit the sword from his version of the logion, since it is the most powerful divisive element in man’s fivefold make-up. The Word of God, with its penetrating blade, fulfills a function that must invariably precede any crossing of the threshold of Paradise. The Word penetrates like an inner revelation, cutting along the divide between spirit and soul, thus defining the two higher inhabitants of the household, one of whom is the chosen one, and the other, the one who has been called. This pair are the son and the daughter in the text, or the Spouses in the mystic’s long night when, on the soul’s border, the bride seeks her Beloved but does not find him,[383] longing and suffering from not knowing why he is absent or where she can find him.

The soul, the daughter, is the voice that speaks day and night to man’s consciousness, until it seems to become identified with the man himself; the spirit, the son of God, coming from above, is indeed the eternal essence, is indeed the true man in all his nakedness, and yet, for most mortals, he remains utterly unknown. It has been said that the Son always seeks the light, or always dwells in it, since the light is his very substance; while the soul is always drawn towards the call of justice. These two ways are parallel and so cannot meet until the Word of God has been received and welcomed with such love that it is able like a flaming sword to penetrate to the very joints and bone marrow that persist in the soul. When this takes place-and the sword manifests as a living, burning blade-it makes a decisive division within the soul: on the one hand, that of the son, there remains what in the soul loves justice, already refined as silver is refined.[384] On the other, well rooted in consciousness despite their mortality are the feelings and thoughts that come from the heart and the flesh, clothing the soul like a fine garment of desire. All souls are predestined to undergo this in accordance with God’s plan. Hence old Simeon’s prophecy concerning Mary as the soul of all beings, when he said to her: And a sword will pierce your own soul too.[385]

The dividing of the soul means the grain is placed on one side and the chaff on the other; but since consciousness is not aware that the chaff is chaff, only that it receives feelings and thoughts, it tends to identify totally with these and cannot see them as mere chaff. This identification is so strong, so very intense that it manages to change all the straw into a bastard sister whom it confuses with its very identity, taking her for that identity.

Bear in mind that this idea of two sisters or women living together in the same soul, like the waters of the psyche above and below in the shared subjective firmament, is a metaphor frequently to be found in the New Testament. This includes the two women milling together at the same mill, one of whom will, on the Day the Lord chooses, be taken, drawn to justice, ready to accept the Son and thus to become a child of God according to the scriptures,[386] while the other will be left behind, representing the chaff that has been winnowed and will now be burned.[387]

Clearly, both sisters have in common their confrontation with their mother, who has from the beginning sustained the soul’s bodily, material demands; but one daughter draws away from her mother when the need for justice grows within her. On the other hand, the bastard sister, whom the logion calls the daughter-in-law, has only one thing in mind: to rob the mother who, for her, is the mother-in-law, of all the temporal and natural goods in her possession. She takes these goods for real treasures and that provokes her envy.

There remains the fifth person in the house, the father. It will be remembered that the son, the Word, is the true light. It is written that the Word came to his own domain and his own people did not accept him.[388] Hence, the confrontation of the son with all that is unwilling to receive the light, represented by the earthly father, the temporal essence of worldliness. In the house, consciousness receives messages from the son, messages that are sparks of light; but these sparks are death to the temporal plans of this usurper of a father. There is, however, a tendency for consciousness to misconstrue these plans as being predestined, for they closely match temporal responses to all the soul’s inclinations, taking a form that looks as though it were divinely ordained.

This, then, is a first review of the ancient division of three against two that Jesus spread on earth. On the one hand, the daughter-in-law, the mother-in-law and the father, representing in the household everything that is transient, so that, being subject to death, a man’s enemies will be those of his own household.[389] On the other, the son and the daughter, henceforth united and, in the end, made one at the wedding feast of the eternal Life of Light.

374 Monaxos: one, alone, solitary

375 Matt. 10:34-36; Luke 12:51-53; Micah 7:6

376 It is the ties that unite the spiritual family that count in Jesus’ legacy (see Matt. 12:48; Mark 3:35; Luke 8:21). But this does not mean that Jesus is deliberately sowing discord in the family of the flesh. Nor can Micah’s prophecy refer to any such divisive activity on the part of Jesus.

377 Luke does not mention fire in his parallel logion, but shows that he is aware of it as a cause of division when he situates the logion as a continuation of its real direct antecedent which reads I have come to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were blazing already! (Luke 12:49)

378 Gen. 3:24

379 Zech. 13:7

380 Matt. 26:31

381 Eph. 6:17

382 Heb. 4:12

383 Song 3:1

384 Zech. 13:9

385 Luke 2:35

386 John 1:12

387 Matt. 24:41; Luke 17:35

388 John 1:11

389 Matt. 10:36

LOGION 17

Jesus said:

“I will give you what no eye has seen and no ear has heard

and no hand has touched and what has never risen

in the mind of man.”

[Saint Paul, repeating this logion, ends it with the words:

“all that God has prepared for those who love him.”][390]

COMMENTARY

The logion uses no metaphor to describe the invisibility of hidden reality. The eyes that see not, the ears that hear not, the hands that do not touch, these are the manifest sense organs, which are certainly not equipped to receive God’s resplendent glory.

For this glory to be perceptible to the consciousness, the heart must first have been bathed in a baptism of faith that means believing in the Son of Man as the eternal essence, a faith that must have found its full measure, when the consciousness is wholly identified with the Son of Man.

Jesus explains the principle that underlies this way: Have I not told you that if you believe you will see the glory of God?[391] This is the faith the disciples gained, hence his words: Happy the eyes that see what you see.[392] The eyes that saw had been opened by faith in the Son of Man; no longer physical eyes but other, deeper, hidden eyes made of the same invisible glory that surrounds the Son of Man. According to the synoptic Gospels, many prophets did not attain this faith that opens the inner eyes, and thus Jesus added that many […] wanted to see what you see, and never saw it; to hear what you hear, and never heard it.[393] Paul writes that this glory, to receive which the inner eyes of the believer are opened, was prepared by God for those who love him, and here the apostle’s words coincide with those of the synoptic Gospels: and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.[394]

There is a sacred order that favors seeing and hearing with the hidden eyes and ears. It proceeds from the cloud to the power and the glory, and from these, to the Son of Man. Nor should the appearance of this order be overlooked, for it sets out three consecutive steps towards inner realization. First, the cloud which, as we have seen, is the dense cloud on the mountain in which Moses, precursor to many, awaited his theophany on Mount Sinai.[395] Some time before that, the cloud had been described as the great guiding light, the pillar of cloud that God placed in the firmament to dominate the Day, during the crossing of the desert.[396]

What we are now being told is that, for those who love Him and who believe because they love, the cloud was prepared by God as no mere cloud but as glory and power manifest, amidst abundant light. This, the cloud, is but a superficial covering that enables the eyes to grow accustomed to its sparks. Once, however, the fog has been overcome, resplendent glory is revealed to whoever has been able to bear with it. In many texts, glory is described as being identical to wisdom. Paul speaks thus: The hidden mystery of God […] is the wisdom that God predestined to be for our glory before the ages began[397].[398]

God’s wisdom is the glory of Light of the Son of Man, man in his veriest essence, man in spirit. That wisdom is radiant and inaccessible, and yet it is written that by those who love her she is readily seen.[399] Such seeing cannot, however, be attained by means of striving that is not spiritual, yet it will be found without any seeking by whoever identifies with the Son of Man to the point of becoming one with him.[400] This is the accomplishment of what Jesus asked for in his prayer to the Father: I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, so that they may always see the glory you have given me.[401]

390 1 Cor. 2:9

391 John 11:40

392 Luke 10:23

393 Matt.13:17; Luke 10:24

394 Matt. 24:30; Mark 13:26; Luke 21:27; Dan.7:13

395 Ex.19:16

396 Ex.13:21-22

397 He means timeless, before time existed.

398 1 Cor. 2:7

399 Wisd. 6:12

400 Phil. 3:8-10

401 John 17:24

LOGION 18

The disciples said to Jesus:

“Tell us how our end will be?”

Jesus said:

“Have you then discovered the beginning

that now you are asking about the end?

For where the beginning is, there will be the end.

Blessed is he who takes his stand at the beginning.

He will know the end, and he will not taste death.”

COMMENTARY

To the pneumatic man, the beginning and the end are one and the same, for both consist in being the living Christ, the Son of Man, of whom it is written: I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.[402]

When man fails to recognize himself as man en-Christed, he cannot know his end. That is the case with those who ask about the end. Such a question represents a vain attempt to get at the future, as though the end were to be sought after in time. What this logion explains is that the beginning and the end do not befall men as in temporal life. They are the man, being none other than the unknown inner Christ, buried yet living in every man. What counts, in these terms, is to discover and resuscitate this beginning that simply is and always has been, and in so doing to reveal the end, which is likewise eternal, having been constituted from the beginning.

The truth that beginning and end are identical extends to Christ’s assertion concerning the first and the last; but this other order is identical in Christ, while differing outside him. It is the very fact of being en-Christed that in every instance makes for identity, and consequently, for priority, while the fact of being outside Christ is what makes for distinctness. This explains Christ’s well-known phrase: the last will be first and the first will be last.[403] This text is prompted in the Gospel by Peter’s[404] words on behalf of those who are leaving everything in order to follow Jesus. What about us? he asks, and Jesus then assures the Twelve who have followed him in regeneration, in other words, all those who have been reborn through baptism by water and the spirit[405], that in accordance with their status as the Son of Man, they will sit on his throne of glory and will inherit eternal life.[406] Summing up the whole of this pericope, there then follows the phrase about the order of priority of the first and the last. Doubtless, the evangelist Matthew felt that the purpose of this expression called for further explanation; hence the parable that follows immediately after it, that of the laborers in the vineyard, based on the meaning of the saying, which it confirms by repeating it at its close.[407]

Taken in its manifest sense of priority in time, the parable raises serious problems of interpretation. No justification is given for those first called (whether this is taken to mean the Jews who have since Abraham been beneficiaries of the Covenant, as suggested by ecclesiastics, or the early Christians from Gospel times, because of their proximity to Jesus’ days on earth) being the last to obtain their reward in the Kingdom of God. Nor does it make sense that the sinners or pagans converted in the most recent centuries-those of the eleventh hour, the next to last of this broad generation-should collect their reward, their entry into the kingdom, before today’s converted sinners and pagans (those hired this morning) according to an order of priority that is the opposite of the antiquity of their time in this world. The truth is that all this suggests a waiting room, a concept as ingenuous as it is meaningless. Consequently, it seems reasonable to discount any literal interpretation of the sentence in terms of time. The order of priority of the first who shall be last and the last who shall be first does not even permit of some kind of timeless interregnum that could help staunch the thirst for justice of those awaiting their turn to receive the wages already earned by their labors.

If, however, the sentence is studied in terms of its hidden interpretation, it will be classified according to a double meaning; and, although this does entail an application in time, it is grounded in a very peculiar qualitative distinction made by the Gospel, the peculiarity being the fact that the distinction is itself the essence of the message. Expressed in more concrete terms, this distinction was explained by Saint Paul in a well known, although not always well studied, saying: The first man, Adam […] became a living soul; but the last Adam has become a life-giving spirit.[408]

When the apostle speaks of the first man, he is speaking of men as they are born, those Adams composed of clay and breath, the latter being seen as the individual soul with which each Adam identifies. The clay, on the other hand, is the body on which the soul depends and which it uses to know the visible world. These Adams with their living souls are the first in terms of the saying, for thus man comes into the world. It is for them that the Good News is intended, as an instrument of salvation, designed to teach them that at their very center, unbeknown to almost every one of them, dwells a sacred guest of divine origin, a spirit whose sanctuary is the soul and the body, each in its natural sphere. In truth, this radiant guest is a ray of light from God, a Son of the Father who shares with him his inherited share of wisdom and eternal Life. As his nature is expansive, the spirit unceasingly transmits to the breath that is the soul its inherent qualities of intelligence and Life. It is not that the soul takes possession of these two qualities, rather, it enjoys them on loan thanks to its nearness to the Son. The apostle makes this subtle distinction quite clear when he says that the first man is a living soul; while the last is a Life-giving spirit.

What Jesus is saying here-hence the great scope of his message-is that every first man is not irredeemably condemned to be last in the Father’s vineyard, but has the means to gain access to his inheritance of Life and wisdom, and to the power and the glory of the spirit. To attain this, the essential thing is to believe with all one’s strength in the amazing truth that Christ is, within every man, a supreme voice awaiting resurrection.

With this faith, and aided by works that flourish freely, fed and irrigated by faith, it is possible for the man in the living soul to realize his spiritual being in Christ. This can be gained only after a lengthy pilgrimage that would be impossible for the first man, if God had not made it possible through the spirit.[409] The evangelist Mark explains this very well in the parable of the seed that grows on its own. When that seed is cast on the ground-and that is precisely the first intuition of Being-of its own accord, the land produces, first the shoot, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. [410]

This is how the Son of Man comes to be discovered. First, he comes as a newborn child within (the fruit of the loins for which David longed), then he develops in various measures[411] until attainment of the full manifestation in Christ. By virtue of this manifestation, the first man, who was due to be among the last to be paid for his day’s work, will, once reborn in water and the spirit, be counted among the last, and will, as a Life-giving spirit, be among the first to receive his wages. Only thus will it be possible for the last to be first and the first, last.

As for the meaning of the various hours at which the laborers in the vineyard began their work, this is doubtless contained in the many folds of the parable. The first men were all taken on in the first hour, at daybreak, without any distinction being made among them; but in relation to all the others, called the last, the tale tells, as in the parable of the sower, of various measures of closeness to the Kingdom, according to how early or late was the hour of their calling.

What, however, is most essential in the parable’s illustration of the logion is the fact that the beginning and the end are one. The Adams of the living soul are called the first because they are indeed the first to be known (born) in the world; but seen from the perspective of eternal Life, the Son of Man, made in God’s image on the sixth day of Creation, before the machinery of time had been set in motion, is the Beginning that must be known. This Beginning consists of the whole assembly of the last, those who are known (born again) in the world; and as they know the end they will not taste death.

The author of the Book of Revelation is correct when he writes Here is the message of the first and the last, who was dead and has come to life again.[412] He is right too when he tells the Adams of the living soul who have not yet found (reborn within them) the Son of Man living in them: Happy are those who will have washed their robes clean, so that they will have the right to feed on the tree of life.[413]

402 Rev. 22:13

403 Luke 13:30; Matt.19:30, 20:16; Mark 10:31. The three synoptic Gospels pass down the phrase, and Matthew does so twice, but Luke’s expression is more correct. Mark 9:35 gives a very similar sentence, but one with a different meaning that should not be confused with the others, as it refers to the value of humility.

404 In Matt.19:27-30 and Mark 10:28-31. In Luke 13:28, the sentence expresses a negative meaning, one of reprobation. The text to which we shall be referring throughout the study of this pericope will be Matt. 19:27-30 and 20:1-16.

405 John 3:5. The one born through baptism by water and the Spirit (and its tongues of fire) is the Son of Man, the pneumatic man.

406 Matt. 19:27-28

407 Matt. 20:16. The text of the parable opens with a similar it is in effect (Omoía gar estin) that leaves no doubt as to the parable’s character as a continuation of the text that precedes it.

408 1 Cor. 15:45

409 Matt. 19:26

410 Mark 4:28

411 Those set forth by the hidden meaning of the parable of the sower (Matt. 13:1-9; Mark 4:19; Luke 8:4-8)

412 Rev. 2:8

413 Rev. 22:14

LOGION 19

Jesus said:

“Blessed is he who was before he came into being.

If you become My disciples and listen to My words,

these stones will serve you.

For there are five trees in Paradise for you.

Summer and winter they do not change and their leaves do not fall.

Whoever knows them will not taste death.”

COMMENTARY

Blessedness is the state of he who discovers his real -eternal-being, and succeeds in becoming One with that being. Speaking of this one, the Son of Man, he who was reputed to be the greatest among those born of woman said: He who comes after me ranks before me, because he existed before me[414]. Through this recognition in the text any disciple of Jesus can manage to understand that he already was before his birth or-which comes to the same thing-that the pneumatic man, in Christ, is unborn, changeless, and for him there never was nor ever will be any possibility of death.

As for those stones that become servants, it is said that whoever once completes his baptismal metanoia, that of the Spirit’s purifying fire, receives daily and hourly the bread of God, as alluded to in the Gospel passage concerning Jesus in the wilderness: If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to turn into loaves.[415]

None of this is hard to understand superficially, through one’s intellect; however, even within that kind of understanding, a difficulty arises when the logion states that every man has five trees in Paradise, which must be known (i.e. experienced) if one is to attain eternal life.

It is certain that the scribes who handed down the Good News chose to set forth their truths in the difficult folds of parables, so that the true fruit of those truths can be got at only by means of an intensive labor of exegesis. What we have here brings to mind the Gospel of Saint Mark where the blind man at Bethsaida is cured by Jesus laying his hands on him twice in succession, the first time, until the man who had been blind up to that moment could see men as trees that are walking about, and the second time, so that he could see everything plainly and distinctly[416].

Now, since it is impossible to imagine that Jesus could not have obtained a perfect cure by laying his hands on the man once, it must be deduced that the evangelist intended it to be read between the lines that there is a form of blindness-the common condition of many men who say they can see-and there are two ways of seeing when one raises one’s eyes, the one imperfect, seeing men as trees that are walking, and the other perfect, which Mark does not describe in his account, but which suggests an eternal principle; one that could be referred to metaphorically as a perennial tree in Paradise. Jesus surely had a similar reference to the eternal principle in mind when he explained that these little ones (referring, as we already know, to those born from above) had angels continually in the presence of the Father.[417]

The trees of Paradise may be many. Genesis explains that when God planted the garden of Eden, he caused every kind of tree, enticing to look at, to spring up from the soil. But the book names only two of these trees, which are, it says, situated in the midst of the garden: the Tree of (eternal) Life, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which has attracted so much attention from biblical exegetes[418]. Certainly the Old Testament gives the number and significance of other trees that were planted by the Lord God in Eden and some of these have attained great renown, like that cedar of which Ezekiel sang that no cedar equaled it in the garden of God,[419] or the terebinths of integrity, planted by YHVH to glorify him,[420] even the aloes planted by YHVH according to the author of the book of Numbers.[421] It is also said, outside the canon, but there is no difficulty in accepting this, that afterwards (after the planting of all these trees), there sprang up in Paradise the olive that purifies kings and the high priests of justice.[422]

That said, the most complete information about the trees of Paradise is to be found in the Book (or rather, the Books) of Enoch, that patriarch of whom Genesis says that he walked with God.[423] The Enoch cycle shows so many points of contact with the New Testament that it has been stated that a great number of the Jewish roots of that testament’s theology originate therein.[424] The first Book of Enoch, entitled the book of Watchers, tells of two journeys, in the second of which Enoch goes to Paradise. The traveler describes the trees he finds there, five of which stand out. Two of these are the Trees of Life and of Knowledge (which Enoch calls Wisdom) both of which are well known from Genesis.[425] It is not easy to identify the other three perennial trees. In the text, the scene of some of the places in Enoch’s journey is called “The land of aromas”, and indeed the odor that emanates from each tree is the only firm clue to recognizing it, scent being a subtle source more suited to intuitive perception than to the serene reflections of reason. In any case, the source provided by odors is not to be neglected, for according to the apostle, God… makes us, in Christ, partners in his triumph, and through us is spreading the knowledge of himself, like a sweet smell.[426]

Enoch declares: I saw there the trees of unction,[427] special receptacles of the smell of incense and myrrh.[428] Anointment is the first step on every man’s messianic path towards the recognition of what he was before he came into being. The oil sprinkled on the head symbolizes the descent of God’s wisdom, called upon to change man’s heart. This is the perfume of the Spirit descending and, little by little, invading, then taking hold on mortal man, the old man, making him its vehicle, until the point at which it transforms his psychic personality. In the language of the Old Testament, this is known as changing his heart or giving him a different heart.[429]

According to the scripture, after Samuel had spilled the horn full of oil on Saul’s head, he said to him: Then the spirit of YHVH will seize on you, and you will go into an ecstasy […] and be changed into another man.[430] The same thing is said to have happened when David was anointed: …The spirit of YHVH seized on David,[431] and in the Psalter this was seen as though YHVH had made a horn sprout (i.e. a strong progeny) for David. Hence his prophecy I will trim a lamp for my anointed.[432]

We have already commented on this new man, this new shoot that begins to develop after receiving the fruit of the olive, citing Jesus’ lengthy conversation with Nicodemus when, according to the Gospel of Saint John, he upbraided the magistrate for his ignorance of things the knowledge of which was normal and correct for a master of Israel, then said to him …Unless a man is born through water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.[433] In so saying, Jesus affirmed that there exists a spiritual birth, a second birth which is not of the flesh but comes after the baptism of metanoia, purification by water (of the psyche), followed by receiving tongues of salted fire (knowledge for the pure in heart) bestowed by the Spirit of consolation (the Paraclete). Here, it will be seen that the union or sprinkling of oil is an Old Testament manner of expressing the results of the double baptism, since both lead up to the first theophany, commonly known as an epiphany.

All this was well known to Jesus, the anointed one, since, in parallel with the historical fact of his birth in Bethlehem, which has been so thoroughly studied by the Church, the evangelists Matthew and Luke proved, in their capacity as scribes, to be past masters of the art of narrating the signs and marks of Jesus’ birth in the spirit in terms of the hidden aspect, so that, although told in figurative terms, Jesus should not lack a Gospel account of the amazing moment that was his birth from above.[434] There are many clues in the account of Jesus’ birth that betray the scribe’s awareness of the idea of birth in the spirit according to the hidden aspect. We shall be dealing with this later on, but what matters now is to study the signs that identify the narration of the Epiphany with Enoch’s tree of unction, which can be known only through the odor of knowledge that God diffuses.[435] It will indeed be the odor of incense and myrrh that will be epitomized in the contents of the coffers born by the magi and wise men from the East.

Through his share in the glory of the Father,[436] the newborn is endowed with spiritual royalty through the gift of wisdom (gold), as the psalm explains in anticipation of the golden halo which people have always seen behind their saints: You have…put a crown of pure gold on his head.[437] Gold was in the first coffer brought by the magi; the other two coffers held the two very aromas which Enoch found and told of when reporting on the Tree of Unction: incense, symbolizing the prayers of the saints,[438] reveals the divine condition of the newborn, since in it are deposited prayers, while myrrh, whose fragrance is peculiar to the Beloved, the Christ, brings to mind the numinous words of the Song of Songs: his lips are lilies, distilling pure myrrh.[439] Myrrh, the odor of which is exhaled by all Enoch’s trees, heralds the Passion. It is a gift, a perfume that the Son of Man receives from his Father and shares with him, for therein lies his strength. Yet he takes it more in his quality as the mystic Spouse who looks upon his beloved, the soul, distilling that strength for her, since it is ultimately to the soul that the demands of the Passion are firmly directed.

Another tree that Enoch saw during the course of his travels was that of the knowledge of good and evil. This is one of those trees that is easy to recognize since it is to be found in Genesis, even if the knowledge in question appears in a very disfigured form in the opinions of theologians. Enoch is in agreement with them when it comes to calling this the tree of wisdom, from which, he says, they eat and know great wisdom. Here, he deviates from Genesis since, as is well known, in the scripture eating this food of knowledge is regarded as a transgression on the part of our first father and mother; and this can only be explained once it has been understood that to enter into wisdom is to enter the gate through which it is given to man-by undergoing his own Passion-to become One with the Father, in accordance with God’s comment: See, the man has become like one of us, with his knowledge of good and evil.[440] Enoch’s text adds that the fruit of this tree of wisdom is like bunches of grapes on a vine, very beautiful; and the smell of this tree spreads and penetrates afar.[441]

The identification of the vine with the tree whose fruit is wisdom is most enlightening, since it explains the hidden aspect of the frequent images in the Gospels of the vine and its fruit. As the true vine,[442] the Son of Man shares in the wisdom of the Father (the gold contained in one of the three coffers offered by the magi acknowledges this heritage), and imparts it as knowledge to every vine shoot, to every scion, so that it may, once purified, give fruit, so long as it remains united with the vine. It is, thus, akin to the oil for anointment from Enoch’s first tree, now transformed by wisdom into the fruit and must of the vine.

The third tree that Enoch saw amidst the inexhaustible waters of the valleys of Paradise, he describes thus: And I saw a beautiful tree, and its fragrance was like that of the mastic. [443] The mastic tree is mentioned only once in the Old Testament, in the book of Daniel, in connection with the story of Susannah. It was of a mastic tree that one of the two wicked old men spoke when giving false witness. Daniel reminded him that the Lord had said you must not put the innocent and the just to death.[444] To the two wicked elders Daniel prophesied that the angel of God awaited them with a sword and will slash you in half (on the one side, the grain, on the other, the chaff to be burned), each half being an elder divided up in the splitting of the soul, with all the grain on the right and the chaff on the left,[445] like the good and bad robbers crucified on either side of Christ.

Regardless of the variations in the legend, it will not be difficult for those who follow Jesus to recognize in this third tree that Enoch saw, the wood of death prepared for the crucifixion. In Enoch’s tree there was no more odor than that of the ointment of mastic prepared as a balsam from the resin oozing from the mastic tree. It is this absence of odor that Mark is showing up when he tells of the crucifixion of Jesus, saying: They offered him wine mixed with myrrh, but he refused it.[446] Nevertheless, if we attend to Enoch, when he tells of the valleys of inexhaustible waters above which stood the mastic, the tree of the crucifixion, he says: And by the banks of these valleys I saw fragrant[447] and this cinnamon, the biblical cinnamon, is described in Ecclesiasticus as that exhaled by wisdom.[448]

Continuing his journey through the land of odors, Enoch says: I saw another mountain, and on it were aloe trees, and those trees were full of a fruit, which is like an almond, and is hard.[449] It is not difficult to see these as the aloes planted by YHVH,[450] with whose oil of gladness, the psalmist sings that God covers his anointed, so that myrrh and aloes waft from his robes.[451]

The evangelist John mentions this aroma and covering as proper to the sepulcher. Nicodemus came as well… and he brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes. He and Joseph of Arimathea took the body of Jesus and wrapped it with the spices in linen cloths before laying it in the new tomb.[452]

The first tree (the fifth one) was that shown to Enoch on a mountain of fire that blazed day and night, like the flame of a flashing sword, to guard the way to the tree of life;[453] and this can and must be identified as the Tree of Life, but also as the tree of the resurrection, for Jesus said: I am the resurrection. If anyone believes in me, even though he dies, he will live.[454] What Jesus showed thus is that the Resurrection and the Life are one and the same thing, two products of the same fragrance. Enoch says: And there was… a tree such as which I have never smelled, and none of them, or any others, were like it. It smells more fragrant than any fragrance, and its leaves and its flowers and its wood never wither. He then adds: from its fruit, life will be given to the chosen; towards the north, it will be planted, in a Holy place, by the house of the Lord, the Eternal King[455].

This is echoed by the author of the Book of Revelation: On either side of the river were the trees of life. [456] Likewise, the prophet Ezekiel, who perhaps knew and recognized the five trees of Paradise, added: And their fruit will be good to eat [Resurrection] and the leaves medicinal [Life].[457]

414 John 1:15

415 Matt. 4:1-4; Mark 1:12-13; Luke 4:3; Deut. 8:3

416 Mark 8:22-26

417 Matt. 18:10

418 Gen. 2:9

419 Ezek. 31:8

420 Isai. 61:3. Besides, the Zohar (II:114) notes that there is a superior tree which is called the Cedar of Lebanon.

421 Num. 24:6

422 La Unción del Verbo, Estudios Valentinianos, Vol.III, pag.295 et seq.

423 For all citations from Enoch Book I (Ethiopian and Greek) we have referred to the excellent version of F. Corriente and A. Piñero (published by Cristiandad: Apocrifos del A. T. IV, Madrid, 1984. Although the texts that go to make up the Enoch cycle were written at different dates, the critics agree to date them between the 1st century BC and the 1st century AD.

424 Op. cit. Introduction. VII. Influence of later literature, pp. 31-35.

425 Five trees are also mentioned in a work of Gnostic character, attributed to Valentine, the Pistis Sophia, but these do not seem to be the same trees as those in the logion, since they concern the five sources of light or angelic varieties that were cast down from heaven and fell to earth. A pale reflection of these angelic trees from the Fall is to be found in the episode in Genesis that speaks of the relations established between the sons of God and the daughters of Adam. (Gen. 6:1).

426 2 Cor. 2:14

427 Translators are divided between the Tree of Unction and that of Judgment. The Greek (criseos) is the same in both cases.

428 Enoch 29:2. The tree of unction is the olive, from which fine oil is extracted, which was sprinkled on the head. (Ps. 133:2) To this oil were added aromatic substances like incense and myrrh.

429 1 Sam. 10:9; Jer. 32:39

430 1 Sam. 10:6

431 1 Sam. 16:13

432 Ps.132:17

433 John 3:5

434 Moreover, it seems that the three synoptic Gospels intended to transmit a version that tells from above of this birth, recounting how, after Jesus’ baptism, a voice spoke from heaven, This is my Son, the Beloved; my favor rests on him. (Matt. 3:17)

435 2 Cor. 2:14

436 John 16:14

437 Ps.21:4

438 Rev. 8:3-4

439 Song 5:13

440 Gen. 3:21

441 Enoch 32:4

442 John 15:1-7

443 Enoch 30:2

444 Dan. 13:53

445 Mark 15:27

446 Mark 15:23

447 Enoch 30:3

448 Ecclu 24:1, 24:15

449 Enoch 31:2 The Hebrew word for almond is sequel which means ‘the vigilant one’.

450 Num. 24:6

451 Ps. 45:9

452 John 19:39-40

453 Gen. 3:24

454 John 11:25-26

455 Enoch 24:4, 25:5

456 Rev. 22:1-2

457 Ezek 47:12

LOGION 20

The disciples said to Jesus:

“Tell us what the Kingdom of Heaven is like.”

He said to them:

“It is like a mustard seed, the smallest of all seeds.

But when it falls on tilled soil,

it produces a great plant and becomes a shelter

for the birds of the sky.”

COMMENTARY

The parable of the mustard seed sets out in the Gospel a brief comparative image that enables readers to identify as faithfully as possible a number of concrete details about the Kingdom of God.[458] However, owing to the very simplicity of its exposition, this parable gives rise to the same difficulty as many other passages in the New Testament: few see the need to subject to further examination judgments that are accepted unthinkingly under the influence of millennia of tradition. Nevertheless, experience shows that in the telling of the Gospel there is not one single saying that is easy to interpret in terms of its ultimate deep truth; so much so, that that anyone who claims Gospel texts are easy to understand can fairly be said to speak out of such deep ignorance that he is blind to his own blindness.

The number of figures of speech and subtle nuances used by the Gospel scribes seems so endless that one can but recommend unceasing perseverance in the task of analysis if one is to avoid incomplete or even erroneous interpretations.

In keeping with its comparative intent, the parable clearly confirms the resemblance to and fecundity of the growth of the mustard seed with the seed of the Kingdom of God sown in man, when both fall on tilled ground; but so intense is the expressive power of the images used, from the simple seed to the great branches full of birds, that the reader risks losing sight of the fact that the description is concerned, not with the ordinary mustard tree and its worldly representation, but with the Kingdom of God.

In order to head off this habitual deviation, we need to undertake a strict and systematic comparison between the three points into which the parable breaks down:[459]

1P: The mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds.

1K: Pneumatic man, heaven born, is unknown to the consciousness of the first man, the “Adam, the living soul”, as explained by Paul.[460]

The seed’s comparison is with the spiritual man, the eternal one, who is, as Jesus puts it the stone that the builders rejected.[461]

2P: When it falls on tilled ground, this seed produces a great branch.

2K: Cultivation of the seed means believing in the Son of Man, as the true seed sown within us. We must transform the image of the terrestrial man with which we are burdened into that of the celestial man. In the end, the stone that was rejected proves to be the keystone.

3P: The tree becomes a shelter (a nest) for the birds of the air.

3K: This passage must be understood according to its true meaning, that of birds of the Kingdom of God, rejecting the recurrent interpretation as birds of our earthly sky.

This home to all manner of birds which, according to the parable, will dwell in the shade of the great branch has traditionally been interpreted on the basis of the prophecies of Ezekiel and Daniel,[462] signifying the restoration of the manifest aspect of the Messianic era inaugurated by Jesus. According to this interpretation, the birds of the sky represent all the converted pagan and gentile peoples, together with their spiritual descendants who have heard the Good News.

There would be no possible objection to this interpretation, were it not for the fact that the mind of the exegete remains stuck with the tree and the branch, while Jesus’ purpose in this parable was not to explain the tree in terms of historical events on earth, but to enable us clearly to perceive and understand the Kingdom of God through the metaphor of the tree.

In truth, the birds of the Kingdom of Heaven are not the birds of the sky; nor do the Adams of the living soul, superficially grouped together, belong in the heaven that will not pass away, for that is destined solely to the Adams of the life-giving spirit, the second, heaven-born man, gathered together as true celestial birds in one single nest, meaning that they have been made perfectly One[463] on the great bough of the Kingdom of God.

458 Mark 4:30-32; Luke 13:18-19. The evangelist Matthew (Matt. 13:31-32) is the only one to use the metaphor “the Kingdom of Heaven” in connection with this logion.

459 P here means Parable and K, the Kingdom of God, the two spheres for comparison of the terms of the logion.

460 This name, and others that follow, are taken from St. Paul’s text at 1Cor.15:45-49.

461 Mark 12:10; Luke 20:17; Ps. 118:22; Matt. 21:42; Ps. 118:2

462 Ezek. 17:23; Dan. 4:9

463 John 17:23

LOGION 21

Maryam said to Jesus:

“Who are your disciples like?”

He said:

“They are like small children who have settled in a field

that does not belong to them.

When the owners of the field come, they will say: ’Leave us our field!’

They take off their clothes in their presence in order to leave their field and return it to them.

That is why I say:

If the master of the house knows that the thief is coming,

he will be on the alert before the thief comes, and will not let him break into the house of his Kingdom to make off with his goods.

As for you, be on your guard against the world, gird up your loins with great strength, lest the robbers find a way to get to you;

for then they will find the necessaries on which you are counting.

Let one who is wide awake be in the midst of you!

When the fruit was ripe, he came swiftly, sickle in hand, and picked it.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear!”

COMMENTARY

Various metaphors come together in this logion, and to get at their direct meaning, they must be interpreted one by one. The logion’s complete content is not, however, very difficult to understand once one has properly trained one’s ears to hear.

The expression small children[464] is used to describe metaphorically the degree of true knowledge attained by the disciples at the precise time of the logion. Through an act of faith, the inner revelation of the Son of Man has taken place: the true, exceptional religious awakening reputed as a second birth, birth from above, from above, so called because of the total transformation to the divine that arises in man´s consciousness. This birth was still a very recent event in the lives of the disciples, so that they were still very untutored in the ways in which the Kingdom is governed and were therefore accounted to be innocents, an easy prey for the kings of this world, like those under two years old who represent the smallest thirty-fold measure of the fruit according to the hundredfold scale set forth in the parable of the sower.[465]

The field of which the logion speaks is the Kingdom of God, of which the children have not yet taken firm, stable possession, as their lack of maturity still leaves them exposed to the fluctuations of their psyche. That is why it is said that the disciples are naked, for neither they have yet been clothed with the power from on high,[466] nor armed to appear in the light,[467] nor are they like the armies of heaven, dressed in linen of dazzling white[468] so that this mortal nature can put on immortality,[469] leaving off all fear of death-unlike the young disciple described by Saint Mark, who had nothing on but a linen cloth. They caught hold of him, but he left the cloth in their hands and ran away naked.[470]

It is, nevertheless, written that the Day of the Lord is going to come like a thief in the night[471]. The author of the Book of Revelation reminds us of this in terms that run parallel to those in the logion: I shall come like a thief. Happy is the man who has stayed awake and has not taken off his clothes so that he does not go out naked and expose his shame.[472] All this has been made clearly manifest, so that the master of every house, every inhabitant of God’s sanctuary (i.e. every consciousness, every soul) knows that the thief, who is none other than the Son of Man, will surely come to take possession of his Kingdom once and for all. In life, in death, this is the final destination of every human being. The coming of the Son of Man like a thief in the night means that he may arrive in the dark night of the soul, just as Day always comes, dispelling the night that robs the soul of its illumination. In that darkness, it is all too easy not to recognize who or what is coming.

The attitude that Jesus invariably recommends to those who await this coming (parousia) is to watch, and this calls for a permanent, unfailing state of alertness, constantly armed to appear in the light. Nor should it be forgotten that this state of alertness means the inner contemplation that follows on from the conversion (metanoia) called for by Jesus when he set out on preaching the Good News; a conversion that is the indispensable basis for any religious life. Only through such sustained conversion, only through such constant watchfulness, will it be possible not to be stripped of one’s clothes and run naked from the field when the thief comes.

The exclamation with which Jesus closes the logion expresses the Master’s concern that all men should encounter and realize the Son of Man through an inner wildfire spread by the flame of a flashing sword. Jesus commends this lighted torch to the prudent, wide awake man that dwells within us. May he forever stand guard, alert, on watch-says Jesus-at the very center of our psyche! He is the fruit to be picked when ripe; he is both the fruit and the laborer who comes, sickle in hand, to pick it.

Truly, the time for sowing is one and the time for harvesting, another; yet one and the same is he who does the planting and he who does the watering,[473] one, the vinedresser and the true vine[474] that sustains the ripe fruit for the Day of the Lord’s coming.

464 They are specifically described as small children in the Coptic text translated by A. Guillaumont, H.C. Puech, etc.

465 See the commentaries on logia 4 and 9, which provide indications for the study of this meaning.

466 Luke 24:49

467 Rom. 13:12

468 Rev. 19:14

469 1 Cor. 15:53

470 Mark 14:51-52

471 1 Thes. 5:2; 2 Pet.3:10

472 Rev. 16:15

473 1 Cor. 3:8

474 John 15:1

LOGION 22

Jesus saw some babies nursing. He said to his disciples:

“These nursing babies are like those who enter the Kingdom.”

They said to him:

“Shall we then enter the Kingdom as babies?”

Jesus said to them:

“When you make the two into One,

and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner

and the upper like the lower,

and when you make male and female into a single one,

so that the male will not be male nor the female be female,

when you make eyes in place of an eye,

a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot,

an image in place of an image, then you will enter the Kingdom.”

COMMENTARY

The nursing babies in whom Jesus takes such pleasure are those followers of his, newborn from above, whose measure of knowledge in the parable of the sower is the smallest to yield the fruit of access to the Kingdom. They are but neophytes in his temple, yet they are already among those who sing the praises of the Son of Man, and Jesus identifies them with the children of the psalm: By the mouths of children, babes in arms, you set your stronghold firm against your foes.[475]

It is then, according to the logion, that the disciples ask whether this condition of being twice born is in itself sufficient to enter the Kingdom. This question leads the master to speak to them of the state of union implied, that of complete unity, as the Father and the Son are one[476], this being the sole condition for entry to the Kingdom.

Among the stages in progress towards oneness, intuition through faith and the birth of the new, eternal, man constitute the key that opens the door to the sheepfold, but it will grant access to the Kingdom only through the realization as deep, living truth that the shepherd, the sheep, the gateway and even the sheepfold itself are all one and the same. This is what Paul meant when he adopted the classic simile of the unity of the members of the body. This simile must, according to the apostle, be understood correctly, meaning, not as the harmonized sum of several separate consciousnesses, which would be indicative only of a very superficial unity, but as the universality of the one and only consciousness in Christ, rays of the same sun.[477] This oneness is attained when one accedes to the knowledge revealed and made firmly real in the man in Christ that, while there may be many living souls brought into harmony among themselves through the influence of reason, there exists in truth only one life-giving spirit, one Son of Man,[478] free of form and thus limitless, absolute.

The man twice born, regenerated from above has in fact engendered two; but this has nothing to do with the familiar duality of the psyche. Certainly, consciousness appears to be dual, to the extent that ethical postulates or aspirations of any kind will always involve friction with instinctual urges. All of this, together with the theological split between the two paths of good and evil, relates of course to the serpent in Eden, hanging onto one’s heel to hold one back from entering the Kingdom; yet the two engendered by birth from above has nothing to do with the pair of opposites. What we are concerned with here is a new and singular arising that filters through the interstices of our thoughts when these flow slowly and calmly. It is that pneuma whose voice can be heard, like the voice of the wind, when it blows without it being possible to know where it is coming from or where it is going. This, Jesus explains when he closes his statement with the words: That is how it is with all who are born of the Spirit.[479]

In terms of the hidden interpretation, this is the true practical meaning of the first steps of whoever has engendered two. Thanks to these two, he comes to be a man like a reed swaying in the breeze[480] in the fine and fitting metaphor coined by Jesus to describe how consciousness, voided awhile of itself, is then impelled harmoniously by the Spirit, which will put a belt round you and take you where you would rather not go.[481]

However, what the logion is setting out to describe in a first, fleeting perception of the entry into the Kingdom is not the coming into being of the fruit that engendered the two and which corresponds to the same measure as the babes- in-arms, but the shift towards unity, accessible only once the fruit has ripened. Through this culminating transfiguration, limited self-awareness falls away, for pneuma ceaselessly sways the now hollow reed and fills it with its light. This is how, in the end, the two is made one, this is the meaning of being in the light.[482] It is this unity making the two into One that brings about the transformation into the Son of Man in plenitude,[483] and unquestionably enables entry into the Kingdom.

The other terms of the oneness that the logion mentions in some detail depend on the accomplishment of the first requirement: when the two has been made one. In its action on the reed, the breeze makes no distinction between what is within and what is without. This is quite distinct from psychic man’s way of differentiating Being from no-being, I from not-I at the very outset, thus making it impossible to perceive the oneness of Being. Yet the Son of Man knows no such distinctions. That is why he says I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me drink.[484]

Nor does the breeze make any distinction between above and below. Below is the first man, Adam, a living soul, described for centuries as the mystic bride who attains union when she consummates her marriage with the Bridegroom who, in his universality, is the Life-giving Spirit, the last Adam.[485] With this wedding, male and female are said to become one, so that there is no longer a discrete male or female, but the Son of Man resuscitated to total Life.

The last verses of the logion are not hard to understand: the eye, the hand, the foot, even the image or the whole body cease to exist as separate entities once they have all been absorbed into one single Spirit.[486] Thus, as the Gospel of Saint John puts it, [all] are pruned already, by means of the word[487] and know and exercise their unified function as members of the glorious universal body of Christ.

All this Jesus expresses through the great parable of the vine. The Son of Man is the true vine from which springs every fruit-bearing branch. Now, just as a branch cannot bear fruit all by itself but must remain part of the vine,[488] so the eye, the hand, the foot and the image are not to be seen as particular members of one and the same branch, but in their fullness as the whole vine.

The Son of Man is ever the true vine and so, in order that this oneness might be understood by many, Jesus’ purpose on earth was that revealed by the High Priest, to gather together in unity the scattered children of God[489]

475 Ps. 8:3; Matt. 21:16

476 John 17:23

477 1 Cor. 12:12 et seq.

478 1 Cor 15:45

479 John 3:8

480 Matt. 11:7

481 John 21:18

482 Logion 11

483 Logion 106

484 Matt. 25:35

485 1 Cor. 15:45

486 1 Cor. 12:12 et seq. Clearly Paul’s saying and the end of the logion come from the same source.

487 John 15:3

488 John 15:4

489 John 11:52

LOGION 23

Jesus said:

“I shall choose you, one from a thousand and two from ten thousand, and they will stand as a single one.”[490]

COMMENTARY

The thousand and the myriad, one thousand and ten thousand, are numbers regularly used in the language of the New Testament to express indefinite quantities of a certain magnitude. In the text, the figure one thousand means many and the figure ten thousand means very many.491

What Jesus is saying in this brief logion is that few are the men of this generation to whom it is given to transform the two into one, stably, permanently, both attaining and maintaining unity. These are the unified men, those made one, chosen by Jesus because they have transformed into the Son of Man and are already in the Kingdom. They are those who believed in and received the Word. As John affirms in his gospel, [the Word] gave power to become children of God.[492]

Moreover, the logion affirms that even where the unified beings chosen are two, they will continue to be only one, for the two are completely one.[493] These chosen ones have made the upper like the lower and the outer like the inner.[494]

Between those two made one, there will be no difference. Rather, there will be unity, affirmed in the oneness of the Son of Man, whom both have become.

490 Translator’s note: comment concerns only the Spanish text.

491 Acts 21:20 …how many thousands of Jews have now become believers (Jude 1:14). The Lord will come with his saints in their tens of thousands.

492 John 1:9-12

493 John 17:23

494 Logion 22

LOGION 24

His disciples said:

“Show us the place where you are. We must seek it.”

He said to them:

“He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

There is light within a man of light and he shines on the whole world.

If he does not shine, there is darkness.”

COMMENTARY

The question about the place where the Son of Man is to be found corresponds to an essential attitude of Jesus’ disciples, for every true disciple is a seeker after the hidden inner Messiah. A parallel question-“Rabbi, where do you live?”-is asked in Saint John’s Gospel when Andrew and another of the Baptist’s disciples become disciples of Jesus.[495] As the evangelist notes, they are called at around the tenth hour. In his answer Jesus does not name the place where the Son of Man lives but points to an active and genuine way of finding that dwelling place: Come and see.

It is the same with the logion. Faced with the disciples’ question, Jesus does not name the place where he is but shows how to get there: come into yourselves and you will see. The Son of Man is a man of light that dwells within you. This perception can only be gained by means of an untransferable and inexpressible intuition, yet the light shines on the whole world; and if it does not shine, there is darkness: If then, the light inside you is darkness, what darkness that will be![496]

Note that this explanation is preceded by a warning often repeated in the Gospel: He who has ears to hear, let him hear. This tells us that, folded into the answer, we may find half-revealed a deep truth, a whole truth, that had hitherto been wholly a part of the hidden heritage.

Jesus never leaves off proclaiming that he, as the Son of Man, is the light of the world, and many are the sayings in the Gospel that include this affirmation. Thus, I, the light, have come into the world so that whoever believes in me need not stay in the dark any more.[497] In proclaiming this, he emphasizes that the Son of Man not only has the privilege of being light, but that his light spreads everywhere, shining on all those who believe in the inner light of the Son of Man. Jesus explains this over and over, for the very basis of his Good News consists in teaching that, like him and, given the universal nature of the Son of Man, every man shares this privilege of being light, even if few believe it. That is why he says You are the light of the world,[498] and Let your light shine in the sight of men.[499] The apostle, being a good follower of Jesus, confirms his word in regard to this capital doctrine: You are all sons of light and sons of the day.[500]

As for what that light is, apart from simply being light, the Son of Man: of that we know little, and perhaps little can be known before we ourselves have come to be transformed into light; that being the final accomplishment of the sign asked of this generation. Paul tells of the relation between light and knowledge: God, he proclaims, has said Let there be light shining out of darkness, who has shone in our minds to radiate the light of the knowledge of God’s glory.[501] By “minds” he means here the center, the very core of our Being, an indefinable place at the heart of every man, whence that light blazes. Once recognized, the illumination it gives is the knowledge of God’s wisdom. John says something similar in his first epistle, through a very peculiar expression he uses there, one that, moreover, confirms the unifying work of the light in its quality as God’s all-enfolding mantle: if we live our lives in the light, as he [God] is in the light, we are in union with one another.[502]

The evangelist Luke tells how Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, is filled with the Holy Spirit and, in the fine Benedictus, prophesies that, our God will in his tender mercy give his people (the human community) knowledge of salvation, and from on high will bring the rising Sun to visit us.[503] The momentous coming of this Light had also been prophesied by Isaiah, for it is a light eternal, unborn, and proper to all times: The people that walked in darkness has seen a great light.[504] It is not that the light does not come to the world in every man, for as Jesus, the Son of Man, proclaims: As long as I am in the world I am the light of the world,[505] but rather that, where a man does not believe in the light, the light that is in him and in every man of the generation will not manifest, and there will be only darkness.[506] That is why, in the Benedictus, the mercy of our God means that the ways of the Lord can be made straight for the knowledge borne from on high by the rising Sun, the true light that is always brought by one born from above.

Bear in mind that this rising Sun, this Light from on high, is none other than the Anatolé, the light-bearing star according to the mystical tradition of the Jewish people. We are told that Anatolé is one of the titles of the Messiah,[507] and it takes no great effort of the imagination to identify that Anatolé with the star in the sky which, according to the account of the Epiphany in the Gospel according to St. Matthew, went before the mysterious Magi coming from the East and halted over the place where the child was.[508]

The child-this we have already studied-is none other, in terms of the hidden aspect of birth in the spirit (which in no way affects the well-known parallel account of Jesus’ manifest nativity) than recent fruit: awareness of the inner man of light. This star, Anatolé, is the light-bringing star that comes to stand above the child like a shining crown, fulfilling the messianic promise of the psalm: you have put a crown of pure gold on his head.[509] It is the star that reveals to the disciples, and to the Magi who have followed it from afar in a more or less metaphorical sky, the sure place where the Son of Man is to be found.

All this is what the full meaning of the logion shows us: it is necessary to believe that there is light within every man, a pneumatic man of light endowed with the knowledge of God and eternal Life. He is, as John expresses it, the Word, the true light that enlightens all men.[510] Nor is there any need to explain where that light dwells, for it will burst into fullness and manifest when a man awakens to faith in his inner seed. Jesus says: while you still have the light, believe in the light, and you will become sons of light.[511]

495 John 1:38-39. Close to the eleventh hour, precisely the time when the last workers in the parable were called to the vineyard, those who would then be accounted the first. (Matt. 20:1-16)

496 Matt. 6:22-23

497 John 12:46

498 Matt. 5:14

499 Matt. 5:16

500 1 Thes 5:5

501 2 Cor. 4-6

502 1 John 1:7

503 Luke 1:77-78

504 Isai. 9:1

505 John 9:5

506 Matt.6:22-23

507 Luke 1:78

508 Matt. 2:9

509 Ps. 21:3

510 John 1:9

511 John 12:36

LOGION 25

Jesus said:

“Love your brother like your soul,

guard him like the pupil of your eye.”

COMMENTARY

All the related logia in the canonical gospels[512] hark back to the words with which Jesus crowned the Great Commendement: You must love your neighbor as yourself.[513] That said, the variation introduced into the logion amounts to a major change since, unlike yourself, the word soul (psyche in the text) does not reveal identity, merely proximity. Between these two expressions there is clearly a decisive difference, yet one so subtle that it is easily passed over. This is because of the changes undergone by the Greek word psyche. First transplanted when the ancient Hebrew was translated into Greek, its original meaning had to be painfully adapted to house the Hebrew terms nefesh (breath) and léb (heart).[514] Later, when the New Testament gospels were adapted to the Greek, it is certain that the inspired authors of these texts had to struggle to make the word psyche yield the most adequate possible rendering of what Jesus will have said in Hebrew and Aramaic.

To these inevitable obscurities, arising from the antiquity of some of the versions that had to be used for terms that did not exactly coincide, must be added the intrinsic difficulty that the notion of the soul entails by its very nature since, as everyone can see for themselves, the soul is extraordinarily resistant to all attempts at rational study and analysis; this, despite the fact that human understanding is certainly one of the soul’s attributes.

The Naassenes, those learned Jewish early Christians of whom Hippolytus of Rome tells, were well aware of this difficulty. This author writes that they were well versed in the various mutations of the soul, which they studied in a text, now lost, called the Gospel according to the Egyptians. Hippolytus records a saying of the Naassenes: “The soul is very difficult to discover, and hard to understand, for it does not remain in the same shape or the same form, or in one passive condition, so that one might speak of its character, or comprehend its essence.”[515] The Naassenes thus warned of two peculiar factors relating to the soul, namely, that it has no essence and is versatile in form, nor is this view to be taken lightly if one is to make any progress in the study of the soul.

The basic meaning of the Hebrew word nefesh, most widely rendered in the Septuagint by the word soul (Greek psyche) is breath (that of a creature) or breeze (e.g. a breath of air): God’s breath of life which, according to Genesis, He breathed the breath of life into the nostrils of man shaped from the soil of the ground (of Paradise).[516] It was thus that the human Being made, or created by God in the image of himself,[517] meaning the human Being of Light, spiritual, immortal, made on the sixth day, was endowed with form-meaning that it was shaped from something other than purely itself (with the hylic dust or the denser celestial dew of Paradise). This form received the breath of life blown into its nostrils by YHVH like a downpour of blessings[518],all resulting in the psychic Adam-with each man already individualized in terms of form-a living human being.

There were, according to the account in Genesis 2:7, two distinct tasks involved in the creation of man by YHVH: first, endowing the essential man with form (using hylic dust) so that the limitless divine light would be circumscribed and individualized as a drop of Light; and secondly, blowing into this form or psychic soma the breath of life issuing forth from himself, from the very substance of YHVH.

In Antiquity, the Rabbis were much concerned with the nature of the cosmic dust from which Adam was fashioned. Its mystery lay in its sidereal nature, its fluidity and invisibility. A virgin dust, unworked, on which no rain had fallen, of the same essence as the field of stars.[519] Irenaeus says that Adam must have been formed from something light and clear, a kind of psychic soma.[520] Irenaeus also finds an explanation that satisfies him concerning the need for water (= psyche = nefesh).

The soil from the ground was not clay but arid, dry dust, since it had not been rained on.[521] Thus, just as bread cannot be obtained from flour without water to bind it so Adam could not be made from dust alone without the Creator watering it with his higher rain.[522]

Being made from such special dust, Adam’s body could be neither visible nor carnal. Irenaeus meant that YHVH made Adam from a fluid invisible psychic substance (of immaterial flesh)[523], while the Naassenes, whose views it is interesting to know in this context, taught that the matter used was something light, clear and spiritual in nature (not material).[524] According to this, nefesh thus receives the covering of a body made up of a hylic substrate of invisible sublunary essence, compatible with life in Paradise, thus entering the sometimes multiform category of psychic soma, as mentioned by Saint Paul when, in his first Epistle to the Corinthians he speaks of a spiritual body, meaning a body of psychic material covering the essential man, who is thus a drop of individualized light.[525]

The Zohar describes the existence of such a body, psychic in nature, explaining that in the Garden of Eden the Just dwell as spirits arrayed in resplendent clothing that resembles the appearance of their bodies in this world.[526] As for the other apparel, bodily and material, we shall not be dealing with that in the commentary on this particular logion, which concerns the soul. Nor has the time yet come for any broad thinking about the function of the material body in the study of the whole man in the Gospel. However, for the sake of clear exposition, it will be useful to set forth here, as many ancient authors did, the appearance of the visible fleshly body with a covering of what Genesis describes as clothes made out of skins by YHVH for the man and woman to wear when expelled from the Garden of Eden.[527] Job appears to be referring to this episode when he says: Did you not clothe me in skin and flesh?[528]

The complete man is appareled in two bodies: a natural or all-enclosing hylic body and the spiritual body that clothes the soul and circumscribes-delimits and individualizes-the Being: This is the drop of Light, also known as the Son of Man. According to the Ophites cited by Irenaeus, Adam and Eve had light, shining, almost spiritual bodies but, owing to the Fall, these became heavy, dark and material.[529] As for the Zohar, it comments that God did effectively clothe Adam and Eve in soft clothing, clothes made out of skins, as it is written; but before that they had worn clothes of light [Or].[530] Saint Paul surely had first-hand knowledge of these, at least from the day when, as it is told, he was drawn up into the third heaven.[531] That is why it was very clear to him that there is a natural, corruptible body and, at the same time, an incorruptible spiritual body. The first is the image of the earthly man, and the second is the one that inherits incorruptibility and represents the image of the celestial man, immortal and beyond corruption.[532]

Add to that the living quality incorporated into the spiritual Being by God’s breath. This is a contingency subject to time, proper to the intermediate region, the psychic sphere, as well as being valid for the physical earthly region. However, this quality proves unnecessary in the sphere of the spirit, that of man in himself, since the higher Light and the Life eternal are coexistent and both transcend time, which governs the dynamic of the living, in regard to both life and death.

The breath or breeze called nefesh in the scriptures is really life, the quality of life, and that is the most objective meaning of the concept of nefesh. This does not, however, exhaust the action of nefesh, since its activity manifests especially as a force of individuation that is instinctive in nature and tied up with desire, greed, fear, hunger, and all the organically interrelated phenomena affecting the body endowed with the psyche. In this sense nefesh may justifiably be said to be the soul, but only to the extent that it is movement; movement that, in passing, raises responses-most of them turbulent-within the psyche. In the scriptures, the action of nefesh is typically represented as stormy waters, which fits in with the biblical equivalence water = soul.[533] These waters come up to the neck and result in drowning when their action is very intense, interrupting the free movement of the breath (nefesh) and destroying the life of the body;[534] but, whatever the case, nefesh has an unquestionably objective meaning, in that there is no way in which nefesh can be identified with Being. So, it is logical to say nefesh [Life-the soul] is in me still,[535] or He [God] holds in his power the soul [nefesh] of every living thing, and the breath of each man’s body.[536]

A quick check will reveal that there are no instances in the scriptures where a reference to the soul (nefesh) is not endowed with a manifestly objective meaning in relation to Being which, because of this, always appears to be the subject of its own soul. It cannot be otherwise, since the very words my soul, your soul determine that the real subject is the possessor of the soul (nefesh), man in himself being its sole essence, that essence of which, as noted by the Naassenes, the soul is devoid. This objective condition of the soul (nefesh) is especially in evidence in the Old Testament verse that announces the first commandment, the Law’s greatest according to the writer of Deuteronomy: You shall love YHVH your God with all your heart, with all your soul [nefesh], with all your strength.[537] There is no need here to enter into the distinctions between the three forms or potencies of love named by the holy scribe, which may perhaps sound tautological and not very clearly defined, but which call for total, limitless love.[538] Nevertheless, in speaking of various distinct aspects, both physical and relating to the psyche, as well as affirming the total interrelation of mind and body, he is showing up the objective range of the concept of soul in both Testaments. The one whom the holy scribe is commanding is not a-soul-that-loves but a total Being who is putting all the resources of his heart, his soul, his intelligence, his mind and even his physical strength into love for God. All this demonstrates that the theological concept that reduces man to a binary combination of body and soul is quite inadequate and unjustifiable, and that Paul is right when he explains that the totality of a human being consists of spirit, soul and body.[539] That said, the first of these, the spirit, is the great unknown for man’s natural psychic awareness. The spirit, the drop of Light, is the essence that the soul lacks.

The second peculiarity of the soul according to the Naassenes is its shape- shifting, and this accords with the text transmitted by Hippolytus in which he affirms that the soul “does not remain in the same shape or the same form, or in one passive condition, so that one might speak of its character, or comprehend its essence”.[540] Jewish psychology established semantic distinctions for the purpose of describing mental phenomena, which are classified as belonging to different areas. These distinctions relate to a human consciousness that is temporal in nature and ever-changing, from which these phenomena arise (and in this connection we can, like the early Christian Naassenes, call it the soul). There is, however, no assumption of the existence of a stable image, whether eternal or mortal, or of a personal soul; nothing in any way resembling the version expressed by later ecclesiastical Christianity.

A study of mental phenomena grounded in descriptive material in the Old Testament permits a distinction between three basic areas expressing affective states:

1. Nefesh, which is to be regarded as instinctive activity connected with animal and physical life, including the passions;

2. Rûach, consciousness as a dual reflexive power able to take a stand on the battlefield of good and evil. It makes a distinction between giving way to the impulses dictated by nefesh and the sensitive conscious activity that appears to come from leb (the heart). Rûach is a mental force which in many passages of scripture (especially in Ezekiel) appears to offer the possibility of interpretation as a fixed organ in the life of the psyche.

3. Neshâmâh, the higher impulse of the psyche through which one tries to harmonize one’s breathing with that of God. With Neshâmâh there is a transfer from the individual to the universal.

These three fields of mental phenomena are classified as distinct forms of expression within man, yet if we seek the origin of these forces, the basic non- figurative meaning of the three expressions will seem familiar because they will then appear as three degrees of one and the same force of divine origin, limitless and universal in its manifestation. Nefesh is the breath of life; rûach, wind, breath; and Neshâmâh, respiration, breathing.

The first biblical mention of rûach is in Gen. 1:2:

There was darkness over the deep, with a divine wind (rûach’elohim) sweeping over the waters [the region of the psyche].[541] This passage shows up clearly enough that rûach outside man is a force or divine hurricane supra-psychic in nature that eddies and sweeps over the waters of the psyche. Yet its condition is also pre-psychic, for its action in man can be studied as consciousness and it can even come to be seen as a more or less fixed organ of the life of the mind. For this reason it is necessary to make a distinction between the dual aspects of rûach, one of which allows it to be seen as a cosmological agent, outside of man, while in other contexts it is the source of consciousness in the mind of man. It is important to point out that these two interpretations are not contradictory but complementary.

When the Seventy translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek, they had no difficulty in rendering rûach by pneuma (spirit). Yet, in spite of some very explicit texts of Saint Paul and a certain ecclesiastical opposition, with Christianity’s new conception a few centuries later, the word pneuma acquired a dense figurative meaning, not only as the Spirit of God but also as a man’s individual spirit, in other words, as the essential man.

The basic meaning of any one of the three expressions for the life of the mind, according to Jewish psychology, always means something that is in movement, whether as the breath of life (nefesh), the wind (rûach) or respiration (Neshâmâh). The action of nefesh is that of an impulse of animal life, and so it corresponds to the hylic, terrestrial and psychosomatic foundations of the breath of life; but the dual, reflexive force of consciousness which man receives as a cosmic wind (rûach) is liable to undergo higher changes that link it to Neshâmâh. Either that, or to suffer a deterioration that will connect it with the lower psychic things proper to nefesh, to the point of becoming metaphorically flesh, as in this passage from Genesis: My spirit must not forever be disgraced in man, for he is but flesh.[542] On other occasions, the rûach received by man bears the stamp of its destructive power: On them YHVH has poured out a spirit of giddiness;[543] On you YHVH has poured a spirit of lethargy.[544]

As regards Neshâmâh, also translated as pneuma in the Greek text, this is the most subtle respiration or breathing in the psychic scale, the cosmic perception that links consciousness with the higher divine world. As is said in the Book of Proverbs, man’s spirit [Neshâmâh] is the lamp of YHVH-searching his deepest self.[545] The very last verse of the Psalter proclaims: Let everything that breathes [has Neshâmâh] praise YHVH.[546]

In a most important passage, the author of the Zohar studies a text of Isaiah: At night my soul [nefesh] longs for you and my spirit [rûach] within me seeks you out in the morning [day=light].[547] Nefesh and rûach are not two separate degrees [of the soul] but a single degree having two aspects. There is a third, higher, aspect whose role is to dominate these two: it is called Neshâmâh. When Neshâmâh enters into the other two they unite with it[548] and from then on Neshâmâh predominates in this man. Such a man is called holy, perfect, totally dedicated to God.

The author of the Zohar terminates his explanation of the three levels of psychic expression in man with a very beautiful and enlightening image: Nefesh is the lowest prompting to which the body adjusts; it is like the dark light of the lowest part of a lamp’s flame, it stays close to the wick and exists only through it. Once fully lit, this light is transformed into a throne for the white light (rûach) above it. When both are fully lit, the white light is transformed into a throne for a light [Neshâmâh] that cannot be completely discerned, for it is somewhat unknowable [the surrounding light, spreading through space] standing out above the white light. It then forms a complete light.[549]

This account is fairly significant, but another kind of explanation could be attempted in order to clarify exhaustively the question of the mind’s versatility. Psychic man inherits the capacity to perceive a wind (rûach) that meets the laws governing rationality and free will. These offer him a choice between opting for the hylic-material or for harmony with the Universal. When a man leads a hylic life, with his attention caught up with the world of the instincts, narrowly individualized, selfish, with a load of impurities, the mental contents are concentrated in nefesh. The entire man then appears to be nothing but nefesh, the dense breath of animal life, moved by its vital force. If on the contrary, the psychic wind (rûach) is tending to become one with the absolute Being, which implies the previous abandonment of the urges of the instinctive ego in favor of purification of lifestyle, the psychic contents will in the end be grafted onto the olive tree that represents faith and incorruptibility, and will share the olive tree’s girth and solidity. This is attained through respiration in harmony with the universe, meaning a regular rhythm of existence (which is Neshâmâh), always assisted by God’s breathing (Neshâmâh too) ceaselessly merging into one’s own. Moreover, all those psychic contents too dense to rise to Neshâmâh sink into nefesh and, at the time of death, change into useless residues that burn and are scattered just like chaff blown around by the wind.[550]

It is, in short, on this doctrine that the mysterious tradition of the remnant of Israel, handed down by the prophets, depends. Zechariah explains this very well: And it will happen throughout this territory [the celestial Jerusalem] -it is YHVH who speaks-that two-thirds in it [rûach and nefesh]will be cut off (be killed) and the remaining third [Neshâmâh] will be left.[551] Neshâmâh is certainly that third of the psychic make-up of which YHVH says, according to the oracle: I will lead that third into the fire, and refine them as silver is refined, test them as gold is tested.[552] Such is the mysterious remnant of the flock of Israel,[553] the rest of Zion, of whom Isaiah prophesied that they would remain in the celestial Jerusalem, they shall be called holy and would be numbered as the living [with eternal life].[554] In a short poem, usually subtitled Oracle of the return from exile,[555] Isaiah hands down two more items of information: once more there will be poured on us the spirit [Neshâmâh] from above.[556] This shows that the higher respiration (Neshâmâh) does not consist only of sublimated contents of the psyche (rûach) but that it is also fed by spiritual rain (breath, respiration of divine origin, the Spirit of God) which, like the Paraclete announced by Jesus descends on the consciousness of the man who loves God to enlighten him.

The second item of information from Isaiah’s oracle is singularly important since in its last verse it not only confirms the function that corresponds to every one of these three mind currents according to the psychology of Israel, but also somewhat clarifies its metaphorical style, thus helping considerably to unravel data about how the early Christians adapted this conception of the Jewish people when incorporating it-soul, spirit-into their language. Isaiah says: happy to sow wherever water [psyche] springs [Neshâmâh] and to let the ox [rûach] and donkey [nefesh] roam free.[557]

Isaiah also uses the symbolism of the ox and the donkey in his first chapter, in which the two animals form a psychological trio with Israel whose name blessed by YHVH is the image of the messianic victory in the spiritual struggle. Later on, apocryphal Christian literature was to adopt this item of Jewish iconography, only substituting Jesus, the firstborn Child, for Israel. Thus it appears in the pseudo-gospel of Matthew, in terms tacitly accepted by the Church: [she] placed the child in a stall, and the ox and the donkey adored him. Then was fulfilled what was said by Isaiah the prophet, saying: the ox knows its master and the donkey its master’s crib.[558] With the poetic precision for which proto-Isaiah is so well known, the ox that knows its master corresponds to rûach, set in the middle of man’s consciousness, and the donkey that knows its master’s crib means the animal life force, greedily concerned with feeding, proper to nefesh. In the new Christian psychology, Jesus represents the eternal life of the spirit (or of Neshâmâh, once passed through the fire-that of knowledge-and tested as gold is tested, as announced by Zechariah).[559] The ox (rûach) and the donkey (nefesh) are in the Nativity scene the iconographic representation of the dual soul prostrate in adoration before the Son of Man. Placed in the two lower corners, right and left, of the base of the psychological triangle, the soul appears to be split; on the right hand are heaped all the contents that go to make up the grain of salvation, the attainment of union with the divine Son as a sign of his saving works; while on the left is heaped that classic Gospel symbol, the chaff which, like all that is subject to time, is destined only for death once the threshing is over.

The deep mystery of the excision of the soul-a mystery we have already begun to look into elsewhere-is borne out at the decisive moment in the Gospel as the coming of the Son of Man to our consciousness, the individual parousia, which may be understood both as referring to the supreme moment of death and to that even more supreme event, the inner birth of man in Christ. The Gospel covers this event in many places but especially when it says: Then of two men in the fields, one is taken, one left; of two women at the millstone grinding, one is taken, one left.[560]

According to what Eusebius of Caesarea tells us about the Gospel according to the Hebrews, now lost: Jesus explained about the excision of souls, as we had cause to verify in a place in the Gospel that is spread among the Jews in the Hebrew language, where it says: “I must choose for myself those who please me, and these my Father gives me in Heaven.”[561]

Those who please Christ are doubtless the psychic contents of rûach, once purified, to be converted into grain and consequently made one with the Son of Man, as a graft enlarges an olive tree. In truth, every clean content of the psyche, being unitive and universal, and every experiential sign of immortality that appears in rûach is like the sheep that was lost and is saved among ninety-nine more.

Through Saint John’s Gospel we know how Jesus claims his exclusive dignity as the Good Shepherd, and how he explains that among all those who come before him, those who try to climb into the sheepfold without entering by the true narrow gateway-which is the same thing as he-are robbers and footpads. These are the two names sometimes given metaphorically to rûach and nefesh, the two lower thirds of the soul which are always hirelings, meaning that they are motivated by selfish aims, insufficient to lead their sheep (or the contents of their psyche) victoriously to the sheepfold of eternal life.

It is important to bear in mind that this condition of thieves or bandits often arises in the New Testament texts, sometimes in surprising contexts, as when they say: the Day of the Lord is going to come like a thief in the night.[562] Jesus uses this expression, speaking of himself: Am I a brigand, that you had to set out with swords and clubs?[563] Or, citing the prophecy: He let himself be taken for a criminal.[564]

It should surprise no one that the three crosses raised on Golgotha for Jesus and for the two thieves should, for the evangelists, have been a symbol of the three thirds of the psyche of the man of flesh, with the same triangular arrangement as in the scene of the crib with the Child, the ox and the donkey. As Luke tells, those accompanying Jesus were also leading out two other criminals to be executed.[565] Of these two criminals, the one named Dismas (although he is not named by the canonical evangelists) corresponds symbolically to the good thief, redeemable for eternal life like the remaining contents of the psyche in rûach. It is to him that Jesus made the great promise from the cross that he would bring him that very day to Paradise. The other crucified robber, to the left, was an irredeemable robber. Both criminals, the thief on the right and the bandit to Christ’s left, in the same positions as the ox in the Nativity scene (fecund) and the donkey (irredeemable), to the right and the left of the Child, are figures of all the criminals who approach the sheepfold before the Good Shepherd, intending to steal the sheep.[566]

But the true protagonist of Calvary, Jesus, is at the top of the mountain. His body is visible (manifest). At the moment of dying he gave up his spirit (pneuma)[567] or yielded up [exhaled] his spirit.[568] Spirit? These are expressions that do not fit into the binary composition of man-body and soul-that Christian psychology has defended since the time of Irenaeus. This also applies to Saint Paul’s ternary configuration for the complete man: body, soul and spirit, because in this pure Christian concept of the early church the spirit is the Being, the self and, that being the case, the gospel expression on which we are now commenting would make no sense: he yielded up himself, he exhaled himself.

Fortunately, the Gospel according to Saint Luke, with its messianic evocation of Psalm 31 literally obliges one to rejoin the Jewish tradition, and transmits the key to the interpretation of the text. Pneuma is here, in accordance with the usual practice of the Greek Septuagint, the normal translation of Neshâmâh (breath, respiration) as the sublimation of rûach, that is to say, the third of the psyche which, together with the psychic contents purified like silver and thus ascending from rûach, constitute the mysterious remnant which, according to Zechariah, is called to dwell in the heavenly Jerusalem.

Neshâmâh is the special booty that the Son of Man took with him after his life on earth. That is why, at the moment of that hard passage, he said to the Father: Into your hands I commit my spirit.[569]

512 Matt. 22:39; Mark 12:33; Luke 10:27.

513 Lev. 19:18.

514 Of the seven hundred and fifty-four cases in which the word nefesh occurs in the Old Testament, some six hundred and eighty are translated by psyche, or soul. Elsewhere, renderings include life, breath, strength, etc. On sixty-two occasions, the Septuagint Bible uses psyche to translate a word other than nefesh, generally, in the case of léb, by the world heart. (Cfr. C. Westerman, Dic. Teológico del A.T.II, pp. 102 ss.)

515 Cfr. Hipol. Rom. Philosoph. V, 7, 8 (en Orígenes: PG 16, 3130 B) (trad. A. de Santos: Ev. Apócrif. p. 61. BAC, Madrid, 1954).

516 Gen. 2:7 (using the version in the New Jerusalem Bible).

517 Gen. 1:27 (using the version in the New Jerusalem Bible).

518 Ps. 68:10

519 Saint Augustine. De civit. Dei. XIII, 24, 67.

520 Iren. III, 17, 2; IV, 39, 2. Antrop.

521 Gen. 2:5

522 Iren. III, 17, 2; IV, 39, 2. Antrop.

523 Iren. I, 55.

524 Iren. V, 15, 4.

525 1 Cor. 15:44

526 Zohar: Prólogo, p. 24. (version edited by L. Dujovne, Ed. Sigal, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1977).

527 Gen. 3:21

528 Job 10:11

529 Iren. I:30:9 (Ophites). The verb to return used here suggests that in this case the Ophites meant to refer to the visible, carnal body, a natural phenomenon of falling into generation and material, that could have taken place in prehistoric times.

530 Zohar II:118

531 2 Cor. 12:2

532 1 Cor. 15:42, 44, 50, 54

533 Ps. 124:4-5

534 There are many instances in the Old Testament when the physical body, whether that of an animal (nefesh behêmah) or that of a man (nefesh adam) turns into a cadaver, an empty, lifeless form when nefesh leaves and no longer moves it.

535 2 Sam. 1:9

536 Job 12:10

537 Deut. 6:5

538 Each after his own fashion, the synoptic evangelists differ from the three potencies of love as enunciated by the author of Deuteronomy: Matt.22:37: heart-soul-mind; Mark 12:32: heart-strength-intelligence; Luke 10:19: heart-soul-strength-intelligence.

539 1 Thes. 5:23

540 See note 4.

541 We are taking the corrected version used in the New Jerusalem Bible, which adopts the basic meaning wind and not the traditional Christian spirit (Greek pneuma) which is identical but has a very different semantic resonance.

542 Gen. 6:3

543 Isai. 19:14

544 Isai. 29:10

545 Prov. 20:27

546 Ps. 150:5-6

547 Isai. 26:9

548 This is the unification so often mentioned in the Gospel of Thomas.

549 Zohar 13, 241-2-3

550 Ps. 1:4

551 Zech. 13:8

552 Zech. 13:9

553 Jer. 23:3

554 Isai. 4:3

555 Isaiah foresees the return of the exiles. (Isai.11:10). From the spiritual point of view, the return to the Celestial Jerusalem, after life on earth.

556 Isai. 32:15. Cfr. aliento (Neshâmâh) in L. Alonso Schokel. J.L. Sicre Diaz: Profetas I, p.238, Ed. Cristiandad, Madrid 1980.

557 Isai. 32:20

558 Pseudo-Matthew 47.14,1. Isai. 1:3. There is also a citation from a text attributed to the prophet Habakkuk: In the midst of two animals you will be known.

559 Zech. 13:9

560 Matt. 24:40-41

561 Eusebius of Caesarea: Theoph. siriaca IV, 12. Cited in A. de Santos: Ev. apócrif., p. 40, 12, BAC, Madrid,1954.

562 1 Thes. 5:2; 2 Pet. 3:10; Rev. 3:3

563 Mark 14:48; Luke 22:52

564 Luke 22:37; Isai. 53:12.

565 Luke 23:32

566 John 10:8

567 John 19:30

568 Matt. 27:50. Exhaling: a reminder of breath, respiration (Neshâmâh)

569 Luke 23:46; Ps.31:6

LOGION 26

Jesus said:

“You see the mote in your brother’s eye,

but you do not see the beam in your own eye.

When you cast the beam out of your own eye,

then you will see clearly to cast the mote from your brother’s eye.”

COMMENTARY

There are several readings of this logion but one of the most important derives from another logion that states: The lamp of the body is the eye.[570] With the lamp and the eye, the Gospel enters into a play on meanings, contrasting the material light which the eye perceives with the light of knowledge that shines in every man, since it comes from the spirit which, as John says, is with you, is in you.[571]

Of the two kinds of blindness, that of the eye and that of knowledge, the first is manifest, while it is difficult to recognize the second on one’s own. Those who do not perceive the light that comes from within tend to be incredulous and to deny the persistent shining of that light. Either that or they are sure that their minds are enlightened, yet their own light cannot break through the barriers around their hearts. To the first of these, Jesus says: If then, the light inside you is darkened, what darkness that will be![572] The others he warns: Since you say you can see, your guilt remains.[573] This is, in sum, the judgment that arises self-evidently from the light of the world,[574] the light that is the light of men and shines in darkness.[575] Through it, those without sight come to see and many of those who thought they could see discover that they are blind.[576]

What is more, the obstacle in one’s own eye renders it impossible to distinguish anything, and that is the mystery of the light: it is one and the same in all places. That is why it is said that, once the beam has been cast out of your own eye, it becomes possible to see the mote in another’s eye; but only then, for otherwise it would be the blind leading the blind and, as Matthew says: if one blind person leads another, both will fall into a pit.[577]

570 Matt. 6:22; Luke 11:34

571 John 14:17

572 Matt. 6:23

573 John 9:41

574 John 8:12

575 John 1:4-5

576 John 9:39

577 Matt. 15:14

LOGION 27

Jesus said:

“If you do not fast from the world, you will not find the kingdom.

If you do not observe the Sabbath as Sabbath,

you will not see the Father.”

COMMENTARY

It is essential, before all else, to clarify the true terms of the choice between the world and the Kingdom of God in accordance with the real meaning of the language used in the Good News. It may in principle seem, if one has not gone deeply enough into the question, that the Gospel sees the world and the Kingdom as two irreconcilable opposites and that is why this logion proposes fasting from the world, meaning that one should either totally or as much as possible deprive oneself of this world, if one wants to find the Kingdom.

This somewhat over-simplified way of understanding the Gospel doctrine about the relation with God has for centuries given rise to the belief among many followers of the Christian message who, in hermitages and monasteries as well as in private practice, have striven, with great conviction and within the limits of their strength to fast or at least to cut down their ration of worldly sustenance, in order thus to open their consciousness to the spiritual antithesis of the world, the Kingdom.

It is true that this rather escapist approach to the pursuit of holiness, as though it were some kind of completely external or other-worldly content, has fallen out of common use, so that today the heirs to those primitive cenobites tend for the most part to think that the old choice is best made by caring for one’s neighbor and his worldly concerns, guided by a strict evangelical sense of brotherly solidarity.

Both forms of religiosity, reclusion away from the world or actively engaging with it are unquestionably the perfectly respectable expression of an impulse towards purification, yet the first of these forms consisted basically of magnifying the idea or, in other words, strengthening the image in one´s mind of a cosmic yet somewhat extraterrestrial God. As for the second form, it is based on the very profane intention to sanctify the merely outward, physical image of the true man, all this backed by the idea of a God reduced to the level of a mundane sociological epiphenomenon, as though God lived by the way of this world.[578]

The fact is that the image of God will always be erroneous, for the simple reason that it is an image, and God is not imaginable. In his condition as pure essence, God the Father, as set forth by Jesus in the Gospel, does not fall within the limits of human understanding, for understanding is a movement towards knowledge proper to the world’s temporal nature and is thus of no use whatever for the purpose of representing the pre-existing Father, of whom it was said: Before the mountains were born, before the earth and the world came to birth, from eternity to eternity you are God.[579]

When in the Gospel according to Saint Matthew Jesus explains the meaning of the parable of the sower and the seed, he says that the field is the world; the good seed is the subjects of the Kingdom.[580] The truth is that, regardless of good or bad outcomes, which depend on the degree of acceptance and expression realized by each consciousness, the seed is always the Son of Man, and he is at the same time always both seed and sower, for the Son of Man is ultimately the only possible reality yielding eternal life, the only life-giving spirit.[581]

This spirit is, in effect, the one and only source of life for all the rest, since it gives life to all that is knowable in the world, meaning the world itself. Behind its natural appearance, all the visible things we see are no more than straw-chaff-endowed with life by the invisible breath of the spirit of God; meaning that it possesses no life of its own, however distinguished and convincing that chaff may seem to be in the imagination of certain religious minds.

Hence, when one fails reliably to distinguish the seed, one will always run the risk of confusing the chaff endowed with life-which is by its very nature destined for the fire-with a true son of the Kingdom. The chaff is of this world but the Kingdom is not of this world; that is why the chaff is visible, while one has to discover the grain under its husk of chaff, for it is not manifest but hidden and its arising in our consciousness can only result from a subtle perception, one that is not easily acquired.

All this is explained in the fourth Gospel, which is largely given over to making the distinction between the world and the light of the world. The light is the Word, the Son, for Jesus in his quality as the Christ said: I am the light of the world,[582] and he could rightly say of the world for, as John confirms in his Prologue: he [the Word] was in the world that had its being through him, and the world did not know him.[583]

The testimony of the Gospel is conclusive: the light (the Word) is in the world (although the world does not know it); but this needs to be well understood. Those who withdraw from the world in order to meet with the light forget that the light is in the world. It may be that they are in reality men of little faith and do not believe that the light is in the world; it may even be that in their heart they prefer darkness to light;[584] they are of the world and so they do not know the light.

On the other hand, we find those who have learnt in their studies that the light is in the world and, before distinguishing between both things, the world and the light, they devote themselves to the world, in the vain belief that all that is in it is light. In so doing, they are surely forgetting that being in the world and of the world are two things that differ in their content while being identical in their form. Jesus meant to say this to his disciples when he spoke to them in the Treasury of the temple, saying You are of this world, I am not of this world.[585] What he no doubt meant was that there are two ways of being in the world, one of which entails being of the world, the other, not. The first consists of being in the world and contaminated by it[586]-those were the disciples-while the second is a pure way of being, as Jesus says the light itself is: having overcome the world.[587]

The question that then arises is this: is it possible to contemplate the light of the world in such a way that the world will be loved for the light there is in it? That is what is meant by being in the world but not of it. This calls for an uncontaminated view of the world, for when that exists the world will always reveal the light-the Son of Man-who has always been and always will be present. This is a higher view, a trained one, for: A man can walk in the daytime without stumbling because he has the light of this world to see by.[588]

The logion closes with an explanation that, in order to see the Father (who is invisible) it is necessary to observe the Sabbath as Sabbath.[589] What that means is that every day is to be lived in its glorious plenitude as the Lord’s Day. When all days are the Lord’s Day it is because every day is a consummate revelation of the light and the world; and the world and the light are then, and only then, one and the same. Jesus says: If anyone loves me he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we shall come to him and make a home with him.[590]

The prophecy in Saint Luke’s Gospel will then be fulfilled: The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.[591]

578 Eph. 2:2

579 Ps. 90:2

580 Matt. 13:37-38

581 1 Cor. 15:45

582 John 8:12

583 John 1:10

584 John 3:19

585 John 8:23

586 Jam. 1:27

587 John 12:46

588 John 11:9

589 The Coptic text says literally to sabbathize, i.e. to treat the Sabbath as Sabbath.

590 John 14:23

591 Luke 17:20-21

LOGION 28

Jesus said:

“I took my stand in the midst of the world,

and I appeared to them in flesh.

I found them all drunk yet none of them thirsty.

My soul ached for the human children

because they are blind in their hearts and do not see.

They came into the world empty

and seek to depart from the world empty.

But now they are drunk.

When they shake off their wine, they will repent.”[592]

COMMENTARY

The text of the logion sets out by placing side by side the two aspects of Christ Jesus, the hidden and the manifest. As the hidden Son of Man, Christ took his stand and, being eternal, not transient, will forever take it in the midst of the world, in the immutable reality of being the unknown essence, the true pure self of every man. As the manifest Son of Man, Jesus Christ revealed himself in the flesh, in order thus to teach us all his Gospel.

The drunkenness mentioned here has two interpretations in the scriptures, one positive, one negative. In the first, it appears as a manifestation of joy and spiritual plenitude, but in this logion it must be understood in its negative sense of inability to keep watch for the possible arrival of the Day of the Lord. This state of imprudence in regard to the religious life is seen in the New Testament as a lack of sobriety.

The two meanings of the expression drunk, both positive and negative, relating both to wine and to blood, occur frequently in the scriptures. We shall be looking into these two images here, without, however, claiming that this will be an exhaustive study.[593] Our intention is to begin to understand the full meaning of some oft-repeated figures of biblical speech. We shall, however, only be trying to clarify the hidden meaning of such metaphors, without this interpretation in any way affecting the manifest reading of the terms, which have been studied for centuries in both the ecclesiastical and the Jewish tradition.

The most famous example of the positive spiritual interpretation of drunkenness, both in terms of its antiquity and its transcendental quality, is that of Noah. As the scripture puts it, Noah was the first to plant the vine. He drank some of the wine, and while he was drunk he uncovered himself inside his tent.[594] There can be no difficulty in associating Noah’s vine-which is not different but the same-with that of which Jesus spoke in Saint John’s Gospel: I am the true vine, and my father is the vinedresser.[595]

From the hidden perspective, in which Jesus Christ is-and was from when time began-the Son of Man (the divine son, the essential spirit of every man) one can well understand the beauty and depth of that immense emblematic symbol, the true vine. We men, the members of the human race, we with our clothing of flesh, look upon ourselves as independent offspring, presumptuous shoots of Noah’s vine. But the true, the hidden, invisible vine is ever the Son of Man, whose shoots could never bear fruit without remaining on the vine that gives them life and which alone sustains their very existence. If men will disdainfully insist that they are independent, it is because they perceive only the manifest shoot and not the free shared essence that they really are, the true vine, hidden in the oneness of the Son.

By virtue of this symbolic figure the wine, the pure transparent fruit of the vine is, in the language of the Bible, the manifest representation of that unique, hidden sap which circulates as the essential reality of every human vine: the immortal Life of the Son of Man. Hence, to drink this messianic wine is seen as the means to attain knowledge of unity. Consequently, drunkenness is understood in its (positive) hidden sense as the state of higher vision that enables the beholder to see beyond the sterile outer shoots and to behold the naked essence.

This is the messianic wine overflowing from the cup that is mentioned in the Book of Lamentations, in a passage parallel to that of the drunkenness of Noah: Rejoice, exult, daughter of Edom! To you in turn the cup will pass. It will make you drunk and you will show your nakedness![596]

From the first scriptures onwards, the deep meaning of the messianic wine commonly encompassed blood. Blood is, by extension, the messianic wine, shared by all, that flows in the hidden veins of every man. Deutero-Isaiah links the two terms wine and blood: They shall get as drunk on their own blood as on new wine.[597]

The symbol of blood as the blood of unity is very ancient. Cain, in his condition as a shoot of the hidden vine in which all vine shoots have their being was marked by YHVH to protect him from the shedding of blood when he left for his life of wandering far from his brother’s home.[598]

One example of the use in the Gospel of the symbol of blood as the sap or the link of unity and knowledge is the passage concerning the curing of the woman who was said to have suffered for twelve years from a hemorrhage. That woman knew that her bleeding would cease if she were only to touch the fringe of Jesus’ cloak. The cloak is the covering of the Son of Man, and to enter into contact with that outer covering is to initiate the realization of unity. The surprising knowledge of that woman-that soul-is hinted at in the language of the Gospel through the reference to her twelve years of suffering. In hidden terms, this bears witness to her perfect knowledge of the mysteries of the Kingdom of God.[599]

Through his hidden inheritance as the True Vine-hidden, although manifestly proclaimed in the fourth Gospel-it falls to Jesus alone to perform the saving work of transforming water into wine; and, behind and beyond the trappings of a familiar traditional tale, John in his Gospel explains what took place during the wedding at Cana.[600]

It is significant that the Evangelist should have situated this during the very first week of Jesus’ ministry, a week which, apart from the calling of John and the first disciples, included three episodes crucial to the spiritual unfolding of the Good News: the wedding at Cana, the cleansing of the Temple and the interview with Nicodemus. These three episodes must be studied as stages in the cycle of baptism with which the neophyte enters into his life in Christ. These episodes focus on a perspective very different from that taken by the synoptic Gospels, all the while uniting with them in an identical proclamation of the Kingdom of Heaven.

According to the Gospel account, Jesus is urged by his mother, after the natural wine has run out, to incorporate the messianic wine arising from his spiritual life. There can be no doubt whatever but that the wine in question is indeed the messianic wine, for the evangelist would never have stooped to presenting Jesus as a miraculous purveyor of common wine for the profane enjoyment of guests at a banquet. It so happens, however, that the timing of the mystic wedding coincides with that of the first inner manifestation of the hidden Son. This is the hour of asking a small child seven days old,[601] the moment to begin gradually the conversion of the water-the psychic baptismal contents-into the wine of the spirit, so that the new man in Christ may grow in the consciousness until he attains unity within the True Vine.

The messianic wedding marks the time for setting out to earn-not without sweat and toil-the bread of life, the manna which the spirit rains gently on the soul in love with God. With each descent of spiritual food Christ always grows in the soul or, even better expressed, the soul surrenders and melts into the spirit. Yet this consummation is not the work of a day but of an entire lifetime. That explains why Jesus begins the conversion (metanoia) while warning his mother that his time had not yet come: the time for becoming drunk on the messianic wine. The thing is to set out on the work of conversion so as to have some wine to pour into the cup. Warning of the travails that await the mystic bride (the soul) Jesus obliquely invokes the ancient curse of Genesis, arising out of the enmity between the lineage of the serpent (knowledge) and the reflexive, or feminine, lineage of self-reflexion.

Jesus asks “Woman, why turn to me?” In so doing, he seems to be turning his attention back to the second chapter of Genesis in which the man refers to the woman YHVH God has just formed from his rib, saying This is to be called woman.[602] It is important to note that the man called the woman “Eve”, thus manifesting that he, Adam, not only recognized her as woman but also as mother since, according to the text, he called his wife Eve, because she was the mother of all those who live.[603] Thus, when the Evangelist notes that his mother said to Jesus they have no wine, the remark comes, not from Mary, Jesus’ manifest physical mother, but from Eve, the mother of all those who live, the universal mother of all psychic life, in other words, the mother of reflexive thought with all that this implies in terms of the feminine aspect of the psyche which becomes one body in the psyche,[604] since thought, thinking, and the reflection of thought, male and fe- male, come together to make up the complete psychic human being, the whole psyche, meaning, Adam, the living soul.

There were six stone water jars standing in the hall where the wedding was held-a metaphor for what we would today call the mind-and, as though they were depositaries of memory-they could contain all the material collected by the enlivened soul, already prepared for the process of purification. The Evangelist explains that these were indeed meant for ritual ablutions and their capacity, two or three measures each, reminds one of the parable of the yeast,[605] in which three measures of flour leaven the yeast that is the Kingdom of Heaven. The synoptic Gospels speak of the spiritual value of this parable for the purpose of explaining the parable of the sower.[606]

This episode marks the beginning of Jesus’ miraculous works. Its meaning is the same as that of the baptism in the Jordan, of which the synoptic Gospels tell. The water jars filled to the brim-meaning, a full measure, that of epignosis, perfect knowledge-show that the soul (= water = rûach) sated, indeed submerged in psychic contents, is suffering the hunger and thirst for justice that will be rewarded with bliss. It is in these baptismal waters that conversion (metanoia) will take place, so that all the contents of the psyche fit to be saved through purification will be transformed into spirit (wine = Neshâmâh), to be given up before ascending to the Father. In Saint John’s account, the action of the Father is symbolized by the steward[607] presiding over the mystical wedding, who approves and reveals the existence of the new wine.

We did, however, say that the drunkenness of which Jesus speaks in this logion is of the negative sort. Saint Paul explains very clearly the ambivalence of drunkenness in the language of the scriptures, citing a verse from The Proverbs[608] he goes on to say: Do not drug yourselves with wine, be filled with the Spirit.[609]

It will be understood from the logion that Jesus calls those who are drunk, without drinking the blood or new wine, without touching the fruit of the True Vine, are beset by a spirit of giddiness,[610] staggering and reeling like drunkards.[611] Drunks like this have no thirst for justice, nor do they feel any concern for converting to find the eternal life of the man of the spirit, or to deserve to be counted in the Book of the Just; these feel no inclination to get themselves drunk with blood [positive][612], as do those who attain spiritual plenitude.

The logion reminds these men who are blind in their hearts and who live an aimless kind of life, intellectually in the dark,[613] their hearts coarsened with debauchery and drunkenness and the cares of life.[614] For these, that Day will be a trap into which they will fall suddenly.

That is why the Good News invites us to shake off the wine of emptiness[615] and be calm but vigilant.[616] Then the water within will turn into new wine, the sign of baptism in the Spirit. Paul unceasingly recommends this attitude of watchfulness, discovering the true meaning of each drop of water, every single content of the psyche, in order to purify it and transform it into spirit, this being what metanoia really means. Paul says: we should not go on sleeping, as everyone else does, but stay wide awake and sober.[617]

592 Coptic text: metanoien.

593 This is a very wide-ranging topic, one whose study would at the very least call for a complete essay. We may return to it when commenting on other logia but for the time being we shall only be dealing with the basics of these images.

594 Gen. 9:20-21

595 John 15:1

596 Lam. 4:21

597 Isai. 49:26

598 Gen. 4:15

599 Luke 8:43-47. It is worth pointing out here that the evangelist prefaces his account of the calling of the Twelve and the mission entrusted to them with a miraculous healing and resurrection by Jesus: raising the daughter of the Jairus, the synagogue official, who was twelve years old, and healing the woman who had been losing blood for twelve years.

600 John 2:1-11

601 Logion 4

602 Gen. 2:23

603 Gen. 3:20 Eve’s name, Havah (or Chavah) is explained by the root of Hayah, “to live” (note by B. de J.) Havah means life in Hebrew. (Tr.)

604 Gen. 2:23

605 Matt. 13:33

606 Matt. 13:18-23; Mark 4:13-20; Luke 8:11-15

607 In Greek architriclinus, the one who presides over a banquet; in this case, that of the messianic banquet, celebrating the nuptials of the spouse and the bride, the celestial spirit and soul.

608 Prov. 23:20; 23:31

609 Eph. 5:18

610 Isai. 19:14

611 Ps. 107:26-27

612 Ezek. 39:19

613 Eph. 4:17

614 Luke 21:34-35

615 Isai. 5:1-13

616 1 Pet. 5:8

617 1 Thes. 5-6

LOGION 29

Jesus said:

“If the flesh came into being because of spirit,[618] it is a marvel,

but if spirit came into being because of body, it is a marvel of marvels.

Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell

in this poverty.”

COMMENTARY

The wealth and poverty of which the logion speaks are not concerned with material earthly goods. They are to do with claiming (or not claiming) ownership, as an inadequate extension of oneself, over all those things that are the mere outer clothing of Being, but not Being itself, which is pure, naked, the Son of Man.

In the language of the scriptures, wealth is many times mentioned in this hidden religious sense as all that is superfluous to the spirit, while poverty refers on the contrary to the man whose consciousness has, by generously divesting itself of all that is not strictly his self, attained absolute humility, annihilation, identification with nothing, so that nothing remains but the pure pneumatic man.

This humility, this poverty, the Gospel message describes in its highest sense as the discovery of one’s true self, since the very basis of Jesus’ work consists above all in giving us the means to raise our consciousness from that of Adam, the living soul, to which it is shackled, although adorned with riches, until we attain the poor, naked consciousness of the last, glorified Adam, he of the life-giving spirit.[619]

In keeping with the meaning of Saint Paul’s expressions, the first natural, earthly man is, in effect, rich, while the second, spiritual, celestial man is the poor man whom the Gospel proclaimed it would free from captivity.

The hidden meaning of wealth and poverty is expressly stated in several passages from the Old Testament, yet a renewed explanation as to why one should attain poverty was doubtless very necessary for men’s hearts and understanding in the new Gospel proclaimed by one who said he had not come to abolish the Law but to complete it.[620] This meaning was very clearly intended by the psalmist: Hear this, all nations, pay attention all who live on earth, sons of Adam [psychic, natural man], sons of man,[spiritual, celestial man], rich and poor alike![621]

This hidden meaning is also to be found in the announcement by the prophet Isaiah which Jesus made his own when he read it in the synagogue at Nazareth. This is a most important passage, not only because it serves as a link between the two Testaments, but because it sums up the very purpose of the Gospel: The spirit of the Lord has been given to me, for he has anointed me. He has sent me to bring the good news to the poor.[622]

There can be no doubt but that the meaning to be accorded to “poor” in the words of the prophet, as claimed by Jesus, is the hidden one. After all, if that were not so, who could say that Jesus’ purpose was to announce the Gospel only to those lacking in material goods? Seen from a higher standpoint, the gravest predicament is that of the rich, who need to pay the utmost attention to the Good News, since they risk encountering serious difficulties in entering the Kingdom.[623]

Jesus spoke to the rich young man[624] of the treasure he would find in heaven if only he could renounce all identification with his rich consciousness as Adam, the living soul, and consent to becoming poor in spirit; for the spirit-the Son of Man-is, as Jesus pointed out in his talk with Nicodemus, the one who came down from heaven and, consequently, the one for whom is reserved the glory of being lifted up to heaven.[625] Matthew, too, proclaims this: How happy are the poor in spirit, theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.[626]

As well as questing after justice, the term poor implies the realization of humility to the point of annihilation, to the point of being nothing, being like nothing.[627] Matthew uses the term poor in spirit in order to make it quite clear that he is referring to pure poverty, nakedness, which is only possible in the consciousness of pneumatic man. It is the spirit that guarantees perfect poverty, for it is written: The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.[628] Moreover, the Gospel’s use of the expression poor in spirit confirms absolute non-identification as the basis of holy poverty. This has not to do with material wealth or poverty; it is exclusively concerned with the life of the spirit. If material poverty is recommended elsewhere in the Gospel, this is because of its moral and social implications for a society that is often in dire need of a fairer distribution of material things, but also because renouncing such things lightens the load of one’s cares and makes for an easier progress towards our goal, the ultimate Adam, life-giving spirit. This makes us realize that it is to the innumerable individuals who hold the spirit, the wind of God, captive in their consciousness that Jesus preached the Good News, to convert them, that they might become poor in spirit, and to gather together in unity the scattered children of God[629].

However, the logion begins with utterings of amazement at the various relationships between the life-giving spirit and the living flesh-whose life has been received on loan. There is indeed an ascending scale of wonders. It is wondrous that the flesh of mortal life should have its origin in the spirit of eternal life, and it is a wonder among wonders that the spirit of eternal life can be found through mortal flesh; yet the true wonder arises when we contemplate the fact that all this empty wealth of mortal psychic and bodily life has been superimposed on immortal life, to the point of becoming a covering that conceals from our consciousness the pure, life-giving poor spirit.

This logion may seem redolent of flesh-spirit dualism but, owing to the ephemeral nature of what has been endowed with life, that is not the case. The logion corresponds to the thought expressed by Saint John: It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh has nothing to offer.[630] That is undeniable. When wealth is consigned to the fire and the wheat [i.e. the poor] is gathered into the barn,[631] the day will dawn when liberty will be proclaimed to captives.[632] Then will be established the unity announced by Isaiah and proclaimed by Jesus.

618 Text: pneuma

619 1 Cor. 15:45

620 Matt. 5:17

621 Ps. 49:2-3

622 Luke 4:18; Isai. 61:1

623 Matt. 19:23-24

624 Matt. 19:16-22

625 John 3:13

626 Matt. 5:3

627 Gal. 6:3

628 Matt. 8:20

629 John 11:52

630 John 6:63

631 Matt. 3:12

632 Isai. 61:1. Luke 4:18. This is said again using other words in Luke 7:22: The dead are raised to life, the Good News is proclaimed to the poor.

LOGION 30

Jesus said:

“Where there are three gods, they are gods.

Where there are two or one, I am with him.”

COMMENTARY

There are a number of synoptic texts very similar although not identical to this,[633] but exegesis here depends on the fact that the logion raises the beings it mentions to the rank of gods. Before undertaking such interpretation, it will in any case be necessary to clarify what is meant here by the word gods.

Faced with accusations of blasphemy, Jesus drew on a text in the Psalter in order to repel these: I said, you are gods.[634] This expression provides a conclusive argument because it is, according to the Psalm, an affirmation that comes from God, and if those to whom the Word was addressed are called gods by the Word, how much more will Jesus, who is himself the Word, have authority to claim in justice his fidelity to God.

Some have qualified the argument in the Gospel as a fortiori. But it is important to understand clearly the meaning of the psalm since it is clear that what matters for the Evangelist is neither the Feast of Dedication in Jerusalem nor the terms of the Jews’ accusation against Jesus or his defense, since all of this looks more like a pretext for mentioning Psalm 82 for the relationship alluded to therein-one that merits study- between the gods who are judges in the divine assembly, all of them sons of the Most High, and the Son of God: for, as Jesus explained to his disciples, it is he (the son of God) that [God] has appointed supreme judge.[635]

The traditional understanding has been that God is, in the psalm, addressing as gods a number of earthly judges who behaved iniquitously in their judgments; but this is not the interpretation suggested by the Gospel. Jesus confirms decisively-adding that scripture cannot be rejected-their condition of gods, meaning celestial beings or angels, and not earthly judges metaphorically called gods. He speaks of those who, established as sons of the Most High are privy to the Word of God and are, consequently, perfectly one with him, the Word, being drops of the true light.

It is well known that, depending on the context, the word elohim refers to gods or angels, apart from having other significant meanings.[636] It is often applied figuratively to judges, who are called gods by virtue of their magisterial role, since judgment is God’s.[637] For various reasons, biblical exegesis has tended to see in the god-judges of Psalm 82, not the angels of the divine assembly, as argued by Jesus in the Gospel, but earthly judges sentenced by God. It goes without saying that this is not what the psalm expresses directly, since there we find gods or angels in the role of judges or divine governors in the celestial assembly sentenced by God to fall from their spiritual rank as sons of the Most High to a new collective status as princes sent into the world; meaning, as principles or the preeminent essence present in mortal men. The psalm says but all the same, you shall die like other men; as one man, princes, you shall fall.[638] In his reply to his accusers Jesus vouches for himself as having a shared mission with the angel-judges, confessing that he, as the Son of God, is the one whom the Father has consecrated and sent into the world. [639]

Seen from this standpoint, the mythical fall of the gods in the sentence[640] is none other than the descent and mixing of the man created on the sixth day by Elohim God with the form fashioned from cosmic dust by YHVH God who breathed life (nefesh = soul) into him from His own substance. The higher principle of the newly formed creation was in effect the man of light created by Elohim, that is, by the Son of Man, whose dissemination in myriad drops of light produced the angels of the sentence, the sons of the Most High of whom the Letter to the Hebrews speaks, referring to the entire human race, for some people have entertained angels without knowing it.[641]

Seen from the worldly viewpoint, this mythical bond which some of the texts of primitive Judeo-Christian sects mention under the allegorical title of the loves of Elohim and Eden, is to be found in Genesis, chapter 6.[642] This passage is regarded by many as an historical episode that is hard to interpret, but it is to be hoped that its meaning will now emerge more clearly. This chapter states that the sons of God (those angels who were multiplied, yet whose light makes them as one, the pneumatic man, the male) married the daughters of men. From this marriage in Genesis doubtless sprang the lineage of Seth (itself descended from Cain and marked by the unredeemed justice of Abel the Just) meaning, the members of this human race who live in ignorance of the angel guest, poor in spirit, whom they are lodging within themselves and whose temple they thus are.

After the marriage of the gods, YHVH warned everyone that my spirit [rûach, Neshâmâh] must not forever be disgraced in man, for he is but flesh.[643] He then set the days-those necessary to attain epignosis, complete knowledge, at one hundred and twenty years, in other words, fulfilling the perfect measure.

Concerning the presence of the angel of judgment, the spirit or son of God who is the higher principle, the prince of every man, there is abundant testimony in the scriptures. One example is the parable of the lost drachma told by Luke: every consciousness that turns to the light of its superior principle, angel or spirit, makes for rejoicing among the angels of God.[644] Saint Matthew’s Gospel says that the angels in heaven of those who have become like little children are continually in the presence of my Father in heaven.[645]

The spirit, the essential man, is called an angel in many places in the Bible. Questioned by the Sadducees about problems of matrimonial casuistry raised by the resurrection, Jesus replies that those raised again are like the angels in heaven.[646] In the corresponding passage in Saint Luke’s Gospel Jesus’ answer is even more categorical, since to Matthew’s like angels he adds that the resurrected are sons of God. This term is frequently used to refer to the angels in the scriptures: Pay tribute to YHVH, you sons of God.[647]

As for the dignity of sitting as judges-governors-in the divine assembly, corresponding to angels, sons of God, as in Psalm 82, Jesus does not forget this. When Peter asks him on behalf of all the disciples what reward will fall to those who follow Jesus, he assures him all those who follow him in regeneration (to the point of attaining birth from above through water and the spirit) that when all is made new and the Son of Man sits on his throne of glory, you will yourselves sit on twelve thrones to judge the twelve tribes of Israel.[648] As was said in God’s plan, this will be the day when the sons of God come to attend on Him.[649]

The logion is right when it affirms that, where there are three gods, they are gods, since, as the Apostle said, there certainly seem to be ‘gods’ and ‘lords’ in plenty-still for us there is one God.[650] Nevertheless, where there are two (gods) or one means that if they are two, Adam, the living soul and Adam, the life-giving spirit (the god created by Elohim and the god fashioned by YHVH) I am with him.

Jesus says this because he knows that the Son of Man is the light in the individual drops of light. This is one of the gods. We already know that other god is the soul endowed with life, the rûach which, after the harsh purification of the threshing floor will deposit its fruit, transformed into the wheat of the spirit, as the remaining third (Neshâmâh). This is the good thief whom the Son of Man will, after his death, take with him to Paradise, once he has faithfully fulfilled the entire work commended to him by the Father when he consecrated him and sent him into the world.[651]

633 P. Oxyr. 1: V reads […] where there is one alone, I am with him (cfr. A. de Santos: Los evangelios apócrifos, p. 96. Reconstrucción de Hamack, BAC, Madrid 1965). Ephr. Syr.: Evangelius concordantis expositio p. 165 offers another text: Where there is one alone, I am with him too… and where there are two, I shall be also. The closest concordance in the canonical Gospels is to be found in Matt. 18:20.

634 John 10:34; Ps. 82:6

635 John 5:27

636 Ps. 138:1 reads In the presence of the angels, I pray for you, (as translated in the Greek text and in the Vulgate) while other versions read “gods”. Sir. renders this as kings and Targ. as judges. Cfr. also Ps. 8:6; 29:1; 45:7; 58:2; 89:7.

637 But in Ps. 82:1 the word elohim does not mean judges (Cfr. 1. H. Schmidt. art. elohim, Dios; Dice. teol. manual del A. T. 1 col. 247, E. Cristiandad, Madrid)

638 Ps. 82:7

639 John 10:36

640 A possible hypothesis is that verses 2 and 5 of the psalm represent a charge sheet [summons] and a form of thinking with hindsight common among the prophets in relation to human behavior, while verses 3 and 4 reproduce the terms of the mission of salvation vested in the angelic judges after they had fallen and been turned into princes, i.e. after transformation into the higher immortal principle of every complete man.

641 Heb. 13:2

642 Gen. 6:1-4

643 Gen. 6:3. This reminds one of Malachi, when he says Did he not create a single being that has flesh and the breath of life? (Mal. 2:15)

644 Luke 15:8-10

645 Matt. 18:10

646 Matt. 22:30

647 Luke 20:36; Ps. 29:1; 89:7; Deut. 32:8.

648 The figure twelve means perfection, in the thrones is plenitude, the tribes of Israel means the entire human race.

649 Job 1:6

650 1 Cor. 8:5-6

651 John 10:36

LOGION 31

Jesus said:

“No prophet is accepted in his own village;

no physician heals those who know him.”[652]

COMMENTARY

Jesus never called himself a prophet, nor did he accept to be called one, for the Son of Man is far more than a prophet. This, he made very clear to his disciples when he called them happy… for many prophets and kings wanted to see what you see [the Son of Man] and never saw, to hear what you hear, and never heard.[653]

A prophet’s task is to announce future events and to call on men to awaken their conscience. A prophet bears and interprets messages as a divine oracle of judgment or salvation. Isaiah expresses this when he writes Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying: ‘Whom shall I send? Who will be our messenger?’ I answered, ‘Here I am, send me’.[654]

Isaiah interpreted the message and transmitted it to the people whose heart was gross. The divine command was to soften their hearing, to open their eyes and so to convert hearts that they might be cured. Such was the prophet’s task, to be a messenger, and if Jesus brings that oracle to the Gospel, it is in order to confirm in the sight of all that in his disciples-once their heart has been converted into the Son of Man-the prophecy has been fulfilled: happy, their eyes and their ears, now they know the mysteries of the Kingdom as explained by Jesus in parables: for anyone who has [who has converted to the Son of Man and has encountered him within himself] will be given more, and he will have more than enough. But from anyone who has not [who has not made the seed bear fruit in his heart], even what he has [the seed of the Word sown in him] will be taken away.[655]

Once the radical difference between Jesus (as the divine Son hidden in the heart of every man) and any of the prophets has been clarified, it should not be very difficult to understand the logion. Seen in terms of its manifest meaning, it must be admitted that it is by no means certain that no prophet had been received and honored in his village or in his country. From the days of Samuel, the prophet of the Lord who instituted the kingdom,[656] to those of Zechariah, many prophets were welcomed and given a hearing by their own people.

Jesus’ intention is neither to confirm nor to deny the affirmation in the proverb, least of all to complain that his teachings were not listened to. All that would be too immature. What he is explaining through the proverb is that a prophet’s task is to hearken to the voice of the Lord and to transmit it to the people; but that does not correspond to being received by the people, let alone being the people itself. That, however, is the work of the Son of Man when he is received, meaning, recognized and cultivated in the heart of his people (this people is the term used by the Lord in his message to Isaiah).[657] Then he is esteemed, honored in his inner spiritual fatherland. When that happens, the Son of Man is truly a physician who cures those who know him, those who have recognized him in themselves.

The evangelist Luke, after masking this passage in the proverb by placing it in the different context of Jesus’ preaching in Nazareth, opens the door to the hidden meaning of the logion when he explains: He [Jesus as the Son of Man] said to them: No doubt you will quote me the saying “physician, heal yourself”. Here is not the prophetic act of preaching, as happened in Capharnaum,[658] but the work of salvation (healing), in the heart of man, from within himself, within his true fatherland. It is not for a prophet-physician to cure those who know him, but to the Son of Man it falls to cure all those who have known him.

652 Matt.13:57; Mark 6:4; Luke 4:24; John 4:44

653 Luke 10:23-24; Matt. 13:16-17; 1 Pet. 1:10-12

654 Isai. 6:8

655 Matt. 13:10-17

656 Wisdom of Sirach 46:13

657 Isai. 61:10-11

658 Luke 4:23; 31-37

LOGION 32

Jesus said:

“A city built on a high mountain and fortified cannot fall,

nor can it be hidden.”

COMMENTARY

The city in question must, without question, be the celestial Jerusalem prophesied by Ezekiel and recognized by the author of the Apocalypse.[659] This is the Holy City, the dwelling place of all the drops of light, the pneumatic man symbolized in the Gospel by the grains of wheat, after the ears that yielded them have been well purified and winnowed on the threshing floor of men’s lives.

If it is said that this city is fortified, it is because the Temple Mount on which stands the fortress of Zion[660] that dominates the city and presides over it, is the House of God.[661] In it there springs the source of the light that shines in all the drops. And if it is said that the city cannot fall or be hidden, that is because it is endowed with eternal Life, and also because light, like wisdom, has been proved right by her actions.[662]

All this, Jesus explains in his Gospel, making it personal when he affirms You are the light of the world.[663] With these words, he means to say to all those who heard him and were to hear him down the centuries, that in his very essence every man has a guest of light whom he must discover. Jesus reveals that he saw the Holy City coming down from heaven, as the author of the Book of Revelation was to see it,[664] as though heaven were (as it is) housed in the heart of man.

When Jesus adds that a city built on a high mountain cannot be hidden,[665] he mentions two further distinct reasons: through its exceptional brilliance, the light of the city will remain hidden from no one who zealously and perseveringly seeks it; while every man must, in his capacity as depositary of the holy light, turn inwardly-in metanoia-towards his own lamp hidden under a tub, uncovering it and placing it on the lamp-stand where it shines for everyone in the house (verse 15) in addition to lighting himself.

659 Ezek. 40:2, Rev. 21:1. There are many biblical references to the City of God, but Ezekiel and the Book of Revelation make it easy to combine its recognition in both the Old and New Testaments.

660 2 Sam. 5:7

661 Isai. 2:2, The mountain of the Temple of YHVH shall tower above the mountains.

662 Matt. 11:19

663 Matt. 5:14

664 Rev. 21:2, 10.

665 Matt. 5:14-16

LOGION 33

Jesus said:

“What you will hear with your ear, with the other ear,

proclaim it from your rooftops.

For no one lights a lamp and puts it under a bushel,

nor does he put it in a hidden place.

Rather, he puts it on a lamp-stand,

so that everyone who comes in and goes out will see its light.”

COMMENTARY

With your ear and with the other ear is a way of showing that there are levels of hearing and of understanding what we hear, and that if we are to understand the hidden meaning of one of Jesus’ logia, we must hear not only with our bodily ear but with the ear of understanding, which is more subtle and inward. Many of these sayings need surely to be heard at least seven times, or, even better, seventy times seven, if we want to perceive the higher meaning that they contain. This demands of us something that is by no means easy to come by, that we attain the extreme degree of subtle perception, at the very highest level of ourselves, which the logion calls your rooftops.[666]

This multiplicity of levels of understanding is illustrated by the example of a lamp’s light which must shine forth. The lamp is, by a subjective analogy, the old man, meaning, the outer coverings of Being, those with which we tend erroneously to identify throughout our lives, while the light is the life-giving spirit, the pure, naked Self, that great unknown for our psychic consciousness. Thus, when Jesus says you are the light of the world, our initial understanding will represent this only as a metaphor, one that tells us we have the gift to transmit to others through our example, if it is good, a few parcels of moral behavior and knowledge. There is, however, another real meaning, one hidden from many, one that can be discovered only little by little, as we dig down deeper, layer by layer. Ultimately, the light is revealed to be the very essence of every man, the Word, the true light that enlightens all men.[667]

This subtle understanding that can only be gained by assiduous reflexion is what the logion calls hearing, first, with one ear, then, with the other; and what will be heard in the end must be so elevated that it can be proclaimed from our rooftops, beyond the limits of ordinary understanding. The outcome of this work is, in truth, something like a ceaseless transcription towards the spirit. Such is the spiritual quality of the Gospel texts that we can never interrupt this work of transformation into spirit, if we mean truly to understand them.

Jesus points out the need to accomplish this transformation when he proclaims: what I say to you in the dark, tell in the daylight .[668] In truth, Jesus’ darkness is never dark but twilit through a mass of openings that let in the light. Thanks to this, whoever loves knowledge enough to be all ears-those of the body, those of understanding-will be able to raise the metaphor he first perceives to his very rooftop, thence to proclaim to all those who come in and go out, our traveling companions on this hard journey, the higher reality of the spirit, until they see their own light.

666 Matt. 10:27

667 John 1:9

668 Matt. 10:27

LOGION 34

Jesus said:

“If a blind man leads a blind man,

they will both fall into a pit.”

COMMENTARY

Light is in the Gospel both the Christ manifest and the hidden, indwelling Christ. Jesus, the Christ, said this very clearly: I am the light of the world.[669] In contrast, it is said of those who do not follow or acknowledge Christ that they walk in darkness, having no light, and so they are called blind.

These expressions spring from the higher meaning of light and not from some metaphorical use of language for, when in the beginning God said Let there be light, none could interpret this as being the light of a heavenly body, since the Sun had not yet been created; only the Word, which was with God in the beginning, in which was life, and that light was the light of men. All this has already been said, not metaphorically but in truth, and it is only later, on contemplating the beauty of the sun’s splendor, that man came to use a metaphor and call that splendor light, being a lesser, reflected manifestation of the measureless beauty of the true light.

For various reasons that amount to lack of faith in the Son of Man as the essence of what we are, many are deprived of the health-bringing inner action of the true light, and are blind in the sense used in the Gospel. Jesus called the Pharisees blind when they were scandalized on hearing his doctrine, in which he criticized their conditioning, grounded in poorly understood traditions that obstructed the clarifying action of the Word. Such conditioning takes root in the mind all the more strongly for lack of discrimination. What Jesus said is that it was not a plant planted by his heavenly Father-as much to say, not the real pure being of each one of us-and that is why he assured them that this plant, the darnel that does not let us see the wheat, would be pulled up by the roots.[670]

The worst of this plant that is not from the Father is that, not only does it prevent us from seeing reality, it gets in the way of attempts to find the light. Its effect is to promote the erroneous view that the soil’s one and only usefulness consists in growing darnel. That is why Jesus speaks of two aspects of the judgment for which he has come into this world: so that those without sight may see, which calls for passive purification, through baptism by the fire of the Spirit that is in us, while this justice must be preceded by another, whereby those with sight turn blind.[671] This first judgment, this first purification, is that of baptism by water. It entails the active dissolution, through their constant conversion-metanoia-of all forms of conditioning, which prevent the light from shining over the soul.

This explains why the episode with the blind man at Bethsaida who needed to be cured twice can now be easily studied.[672] The first time was to leave off seeing, meaning, to see only like one who is spiritually blind and thinks he knows he’s seeing trees when he’s seeing men; and the second time, to see perfectly, that is, to see the real, invisible, man, the Son of Man,[673] who can be perceived only with the eyes of the Spirit.

Saul had to undergo this same double healing. In the course of his persecution of the Lord, he was traveling on the road to Damascus. Suddenly, a light came from heaven all around him. At first, this left him blind, so that even with his eyes wide open he could see nothing at all.[674] Later, he was cured of his blindness when Ananias, sent by the Lord, laid his hands on him, and immediately it was as though scales fell from Saul’s eyes and he could see again.[675]

In contrast, only a single cure, that of the Spirit, was needed by those two blind men who, according to Matthew, followed Jesus as he went on his way, shouting “take pity on us, Son of David”.[676] They had recognized Jesus as Messiah all on their own, without having seen him, so their eyes were already free of the world’s blindness and ready to be opened to the light of the Spirit.[677]

Likewise, the healing of the man blind from birth, told by the Evangelist John at considerable length and with a wealth of highly specific and symbolic detail.[678]

Here, instead of the direct touch or contact with the Word, which is usually to be found in the synoptic Gospel accounts that describe the healing of blindness, we have the paste made by Jesus from his spittle and dust from the ground. The meaning of this unction with mud is not too hard to discern, for Jesus himself helped make it clear when he explained the healing he was about to carry out.

Being the Word, Christ is sent into the world, and into every man. Being sent, he can say: As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.[679] Here, it is as though he were saying that the shining of the light, its power to spread, is identical to the secretion of spittle produced by uttering the Word. Both lead to the first perception of spiritual salvation. That spittle can act on the blind man only when mixed with dust from the ground of the world in which the work on that blind man is taking place.

The healing paste made by Jesus (through no one’s having sinned, only so that the works of God-hitherto hidden-might be displayed in him[680]) proves to be for the blind man the dawning of the light of the world, the inner awakening that gives rise to the first intuition of the true Being. Only, as it is told, this is no more than the first part of the healing, that whereby those with sight turn blind.

To accomplish the second judgment proclaimed by the Gospel, so that those without sight may see,[681] Jesus says to the blind man “Go and wash in the Pool of Siloam”.[682] Here, the soul bathes in the pure waters of the messenger who has been sent (Heb. Siloam, meaning “sent”), the Messiah. Here, the blind man who dips in his waters (pure waters = purified soul) begins to receive the light, the fire of the Spirit, until he attains perfect health.

Here, the Gospel shows that the man who has effected this healing immersion can never answer the earthly question Where is he? Where is the messenger?[683] Siloam is pure, formless, spirit, nor is there any point in seeking a representation of it. Jesus said it and it had to be repeated so that all those who seek God in their heart could bear in mind that the spirit [pneuma] blows wherever it pleases, you hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.[684]

Nevertheless, for those eyes just opened there always comes the blissful hour of understanding and fully realizing Jesus’ exclamation: you may believe that I am He.[685] In the life of the Spirit every blind man has opened his eyes to the light, loves the light and holds the light; likewise, every blind man who receives the secretion of the Word from the messenger, and immerses himself in it, loves the Word and holds the Word, as it is written: and we [the Word and the Father] shall come to him and make our home with him.[686] That is why, in Saint John’s account, the man who has just found his sight and does not know where the messenger is, can perfectly well say, as Jesus asks of him: I am He.[687] And this he can say gladly and with certainty, because it is his very Being that is speaking; the Word and the Father have come to make their home with him.

In truth, a blind man who in the Gospel comes suddenly to see is always one born of the Spirit, one who is already purified and who, distinguishing the wheat from the chaff, is well aware that when he says I am, he is alluding to the naked grain and leaving aside the chaff. That is where he differs from those blind men who say they “we see”; those men are absolutely blind. As Jesus puts it, their blindness remains.[688]

669 John 8:12

670 Matt. 15:13

671 John 9:39

672 Logion 19, the commentary contains a first interpretation of the two cures given the blind man at Bethsaida.

673 Mark 8:22-26

674 Acts 9:8

675 Acts 9:18

676 Matt. 9:27-31

677 Matthew seems to be repeating the same cure when he situates the account of the two blind men in Jericho (Matt. 20:29-34) and this is doubtless the same event as that related by Mark and Luke (Mark 10:46-52; Luke 18:35-43) although in the latter two cases there are not two blind men but one, whom Mark calls Bartimaeus, the son of Timaeus.

678 John 9:1 et seq.

679 John 9:4-5

680 John 9:3

681 John 9:39

682 John 9:7

683 John 9:12

684 John 3:8

685 John 13:19

686 John 14:23

687 John 9:9

688 John 9:41. The text says guilt, meaning sin, fault, or absence of justice, but here it means blindness.

LOGION 35

Jesus said:

“It is not possible for anyone to enter the house

of a strong man and take it by force

unless he binds the owner’s hands;

then he can ransack his house.”

COMMENTARY

Before all else, we need to know who Jesus is calling the strong man. In the passage in the canonical Gospels that corresponds to this logion, the Pharisees are accusing Jesus of casting out devils through Beelzebul, Prince of devils, and Jesus reasons in his defense that this would be to imagine Beelzebul’s kingdom as divided against itself, so that it could not stand. Moreover, to suppose that Jesus was performing this healing work possessed by an unclean spirit is to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit.[689]

In general, the Christian tradition seems to have thought that when Jesus spoke of binding the strong man of the house, he was referring to Beelzebul, the prince of devils, or better, Baal Zebub, one of whose attributes is that of master of the house,[690] this being the name the people of Canaan gave to their idol, and it is pathetic to imagine Jesus being as immature as those scribes and Pharisees who attributed demoniac powers to a statue of a non-existent god, a figment of the Canaanite imagination.

Far from such superstitious views, Jesus is showing that, if one is to effect a cure for disorders of the psyche, in other words, to heal the soul of a negative immaterial influence or, as the Gospel puts it, to remove an unclean spirit that has come to dominate it, it is first of all necessary to utterly disarm the adversary, not by involving some other unclean spirit, but through the Spirit of God, whose health-bringing action extends not only to this visible world but to the other, invisible one.[691]

It is the work of the Holy Spirit to cure the soul of harmful adventitious mental contents, for the soul is the house of the Spirit, one of its mansions, as it is written: Didn’t you realize that you were God’s temple?[692]

As for the strong man, he represents the whole set of those passions that invade, and sometimes come to dominate the soul under the influence of worldly ambitions, to the point of changing Baal Zebul into the veritable master of the house. Faced with this fearful adversary, the first thing to be done is to bind the strong man through the violent, energetic use of virtue and of prayer, so that the Spirit of God can gently take possession of the house that is his own and overthrow or dissolve all the structures built on the sand by any strong one.

In the Bible, this active cleansing of the house by means of violent action is mentioned in a text from the Gospel of Saint Matthew: The kingdom of heaven has been subjected to violence, and the violent are taking it by storm.[693] Moreover, the evangelist gives substance to the terms of this active purification, citing a passage from the prophets: my house will be called a house of prayer, but you are turning it into a robbers’ den.[694] This text, assembled by the four canonical evangelists from two fragments by Isaiah and Jeremiah, is cited on the occasion of that memorable episode in the Gospel known as the Cleansing of the Temple. The most extensive version of this is to be found in Saint John’s account,[695] and we shall be dealing with this now because in its hidden meaning it supplements and rounds off the lesson to be drawn from the study of the logion on which we are now commenting.

Understood in terms of its hidden meaning, the Cleansing of the Temple concerns the cleaning and elimination of all the mind’s impure adhesions, but these sparks are death to the temporal plans of this usurper of a father. There is, however, a tendency for consciousness to misinterpret these plans as being predestined, for they closely match temporal responses to all the soul’s inclinations, taking a form that looks as though it were divinely ordained. This interpretation calls for recognition of a figurative identity according to which the body is seen as the temple, a fairly frequent feature of the language of the Bible. There are many passages in which this identity is to be found, and these completely endorse the present hidden interpretation. The most conclusive affirmation is to be found a little earlier in Saint John’s account of the cleansing of the Temple: But he was speaking of the sanctuary that was his body.[696]

It goes without saying that, when he spoke of the sanctuary, Jesus was not referring only to his own body, to be resuscitated as the spiritual temple from which flow rivers of living water, since the Apostle had thus identified all human bodies explicitly and on many occasions. It is, after all, starting here, in the body of every one of us, that there is the most specific need to purify the Temple. Your body, you know, is the temple of the Holy Spirit, says Paul.[697]

Doubtless, in identifying the body with the temple, both Jesus and the Apostle are referring to a psychic body/mind, as it is a commonplace of Christ’s doctrine that purification concerns, not what enters one’s (material) mouth but the impurities that issue forth from the mouth of the soul.[698] It can, moreover, be affirmed that when Paul speaks of the natural body in explaining to the Corinthians how the resurrection takes place, he is speaking of both the body of flesh and the psyche (nefesh).[699]

It is precisely in the run-up to the First Easter, the first step in the spiritual ascent, that the evangelist John places the scenes of the cleansing of the Temple. It is in these same passages that the synoptic Gospels show how Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan took place, and it is in the same baptismal sense that his cleansing of the Temple is to be understood. This baptism by immersion in water (=psyche) is internalized in John’s account, which thus invests the event with its pristine sense as metanoia, conversion within the temple of the self, so as to scrutinize it attentively and to bring about, even by means of that psychic violence-mistakenly called holy wrath by those who view this from the manifest standpoint-the cleansing necessary to bind the strong adversary who has taken up lodgings in psychic contents that do not belong to him.

The whip that Jesus is said to have used when cleansing this inner temple exemplifies the tense, tenacious violence that is called for before the Kingdom can be gained. Such is the price of bliss, which can be attained only after suffering hunger and thirst for justice to the limits of what can be borne. From what is expressed in this account, it may be inferred that those thoughts that arise and survive unbound, free from the work of conversion, tending to interfere with the perception of the light in the Sanctuary, are merchants who have set up business in the soul, making my Father’s house into a market, far removed from the innocence of sheep and the harmlessness of doves.[700]

It is for certain that earthbound men tend to see daily life as a ceaseless round of merchants and money-changers setting up their stalls in the temple in order to pursue their own supposed profit. Nevertheless, if the Kingdom is to be gained, it will first be necessary to rid the House of the Father of the strong man, expelling any strong man who has taken root in the heart of man. The Gospel tells us that only through internalized violence, through energy, will it be possible to attain the degree of humility and generous self-denial that perfection demands. Only thus, as in the cleansing of the Sanctuary of the living God which we are,[701] can the mystery of nakedness in spirit announced by John the Baptist be attained: He must grow greater. I must grow smaller.[702]

Without a doubt, the expulsion of those merchants and money changers who had infested the Sanctuary like so many unclean spirits must be accompanied by the simultaneous growth of the Son of Man, the Temple’s one true master. Here, the evangelist reminds us of the words with which the Psalter proclaims the necessary decrease which must herald that growth: Zeal for your house will devour me.[703]

689 Matt. 12:22-28; Mark 3:22-30; Luke 11:14-22

690 Cf.r. Lesêtre: Enciclopedia de la Biblia, art. Beelzebub, vol. I, col. 986.

691 Matt. 12:32

692 1 Cor. 3:16

693 Matt. 11:12

694 Matt. 21:13; Isai. 56:7; Jer. 7:11

695 Matt. 21:12-13; Mark 11:15-17; Luke 19:45-46; John 2:13-17

696 John 2:21

697 1 Cor.6:19. The apostle seems to be remembering Jesus’ statement The Spirit is with you, he is in you. (John 14:17)

698 Matt. 15:11

699 1 Cor. 15:39-44

700 Matt. 10:16, in which Jesus gives his disciples a number of recommendations along these lines.

701 2 Cor. 6:16

702 John 3:30

703 John 2:17

LOGION 36-37[704]

(36) Jesus said:

“Do not be concerned from morning until evening and

from evening until morning about what you will wear.”

(37) His disciples said:

“When will you appear to us, and when shall we behold you?”

Jesus said:

“When you strip naked without being ashamed

and take your clothes and put them under your feet

like very small children and trample them,

then you will see the Son of the Living One

and you will not be afraid.”

COMMENTARY

In the language of the Bible, clothing and nakedness often serve as metaphors for psychic realities far removed from their literal meaning. This mode of expression is well known and many turns of speech regarding apparel have been readily accepted by traditional exegesis in their metaphorical sense, where clothing can signify whatever is superimposed or added onto the thing in question, regardless of whether the context is spiritual or concerns the psyche or material things.

That is the case with this logion. In the synoptic version of Matthew and Luke[705] it unquestionably has the direct meaning of clothing to cover the body, as confirmed by the passage: Surely the body means more than clothing.[706] Even here, however, a reading of the complete text shows that both clothing and food are to be taken figuratively, and carry a far deeper meaning. What counts is to seek the Kingdom, and all else is just additional, representing concerns that pertain to the worldly life of Gentiles, meaning, men not suited to the demands of an essentially religious life.

In the text of the logion of Judas-Thomas, the metaphorical meaning seems to be even more marked than in the corresponding passages in the canonical Gospels, given the obvious difficulty of someone being concerned from morning to night and from night to morning, in other words all day without a break, with what to wear. There is, nevertheless, no question but that the soul, in its ignorance of the essential spirit that sustains its Life, does tend to depend solely on the superfluous, the petty, ephemeral glories with which it mistakenly identifies.

This sense of something added which one needs to get rid of if one is to attain the Kingdom is commonly accorded to clothing in the Gospel, although the metaphor may at times entail, not the clothing but its transformation as a manifestation of true power. Thus, in the account of the Transfiguration, it is said of Jesus that his clothes became dazzlingly white;[707] thus, too, when the risen Christ tells his disciples to stay in the city then, until you are clothed with the power from on high.[708]

Expressions concerning covering are much employed by Saint Paul, although by no means only by him, and there are many examples of this in the apostle’s letters. It must, however, be pointed out that in every instance the deep meaning of covering is the casting off to the point of nakedness of every layer of clothing, every mistaken addition to reality in itself, pure being. The apostle uses various different forms in regard to covering but all have the same parallel meaning, whether he is speaking of putting on imperishability,[709] arming ourselves and appearing in the light,[710] or of the New Self-the new man-which is attained through the transfiguring act of abandoning the clothing of the old self-the old man-and progressing to true knowledge.[711]

The New Self’s clothing in Christ[712] is the only apparel, if this perfect spiritual nakedness may be so described, that may be retained by the man destined for his throne in the Kingdom.

So it is that the disciples respond to Jesus’ recommendation not to care about what to wear, since clothing is only inessential, with a question that relates to what is essential, this being the only serious concern of those disciples who are true worshippers who worship the Father in spirit and truth.[713] When will the inner Christ be revealed in us? When shall we discover the hidden Christ in ourselves?

Jesus’ reply explains in few words what the disciple must accomplish:

When you strip naked without being ashamed[714]. This is a periphrasis used in the language of the Bible, referring directly to the sex; but it can also just mean nakedness, since this is the result of abandoning or doing away with clothing (cloak, tunic, veil) and thus uncovering or manifesting something hitherto hidden. In the text of the logion this expression is to be understood as the equivalent of a revelation, an apparition that may be identified as a theophany, a divine manifestation.

Herein lies the hidden meaning of the tale of the drunkenness of Noah in Genesis[715] in which it is told that while he was drunk he uncovered himself inside his tent[716], whereupon his son Ham saw that his father’s nakedness was uncovered[717]. It is told that, in the end, Shem and Japhet took a cloak and they both put it over their shoulders, and walking backwards, they covered their father’s nakedness; they kept their faces turned away and did not see their father’s nakedness [pudenda].[718]

It is not too difficult to understand this unusual passage as telling of Noah’s theophany, when, after becoming drunk on the wine of knowledge, that from the Lord’s vine, he revealed, or better, discovered inside himself (inside his tent) the eternal hidden pre-existing Christ, endowed with endless Life, who manifests as I AM.

The nakedness of Noah (his virilia) was then covered by his sons, who, however, turned their faces away, for in the sacred marriage of man with God, that which IS manifests under cover of a cloud of glory.[719]

The expression to put your clothes under your feet, even to trample them, as very small children do, fits in with the figurative style employed by the Gospel scribes, whether canonical or not, to explain how the consciousness of man newly born from above[720] must abandon every residual connection, every psychosomatic contingency, for such added things amount, in every man of this world, to a heap of inessentials to be cast aside by the pure pneumatic man. Man’s consciousness must in the end be strictly circumscribed by the sphere of true being, being in itself. The truth of man consists in this, in being free; meaning, freed from all that is other than pure essence. What remains after the conclusion of that work of true decanting-a decanting that cannot be obtained without hard travails, humility, abnegation, suffering, joy and love-is the Son of Man, the Life-giving spirit, the Son of the Living God. With the contemplation of the Son all searching comes to an end.

Turning one’s face away from pure nakedness, once attained, is the expression of an old scriptural symbol in which humility (self-effacement) and forgetfulness of the work accomplished are the supreme virtues that govern the life of a victor in the quest for spiritual realization. Here, the sober, evangelical attitude consists of keeping one’s clothes, despite their already having been recognized and repudiated as mere inessentials. The author of the Book of Revelation praises this self-effacing, reserved and prudent attitude. I shall come like a thief. Happy is the man who has stayed awake and not taken off his clothes so that he does not go out naked and expose his shame.[721]

704 The 114 logia into which the Gospel of Judas-Thomas is currently divided were differentiated and numbered by the translators H. Ch. Puech, G. Quispel, A. Guillaumont, W.C. Till and Yassah ’Abd al Masih, who regarded Jesus’ recommendation and his reply to his disciples as separate logia, which they numbered 36 and 37 respectively. The hidden significance of the recommendation and the manifest meaning of the question will doubtless have been the cause of this misidentification. Although we are now keeping to the separate numbering, we are according them a single commentary, since this in our view constitutes a single logion.

705 Matt. 6:25; Luke 12:22; P. Oxyr. 655:1-8

706 Matt. 6:25; Luke 12:23

707 Mark 9:3

708 Luke 24:49

709 1 Cor.15:53

710 Rom. 13:12

711 Eph. 4:24, Col. 3:10. Translator’s note: the English version of the Jerusalem Bible speaks of “the old self” and “the new self”, while the Spanish is closer to the more familiar “old man” and “new man” of older translations.

712 Gal. 3:27

713 John 4:23-24

714 The Hebrew word glh may be translated by its general meaning, to reveal, and we are told that it always refers to revealing something that is hidden, bringing it out into the open (Cfr.Jenni, Hp. 202 s). In the form gal it has a parallel meaning, to open one’s eyes (Num. 22:31, Ps. 119:18); to have recognized, to reveal, to discover (Jer. 49:10), to bring to the light (Job 12:22), but the main usage refers to stripping naked. This is the case in this group of passages (Gen.9:21); also to show one’s heart (Prov.18:2), to give a revelation (1 Sam. 9:15, Isai. 22:14), even to appear, to show oneself (Gen. 35:7), this last in the sense of theophany (cfr. C. Westermann Dic. Teol. Manual del A. T. art. Glh. Descubrir, Sec. 4c, columna 601).

715 In regard to the meaning of Noah’s drunkenness from drinking wine from the vine of which the Father is the vine-dresser, (John 15:1), an initial explanation is to be found in the commentary on logion 28.

716 Gen. 9:21. [Pla’s comments in this footnote do not concern the English text.]

717 The Vulgate adds shameful.

718 The Vulgate uses the term “virilia”.(Gen.9:22-23)

719 Ex.13:21-22, 40:34-38

720 John 3:3

721 Rev. 16:15

LOGION 38

Jesus said:

“Many times you have desired to hear these words,

these that I am speaking to you,

and you have no one else from whom to hear them.

There will be days when you will seek me

and you will not find me.”

COMMENTARY

In this logion, Jesus alludes to the Christ both manifest and hidden. As Christ manifest, the disciples were able to see him for a while and to hear his word; but from the time of his death, from that day when the bridegroom was snatched away from them,[722] whoever wanted to hear the Word would have to seek the hidden Christ within, as had many prophets and just men who desired to see and hear.[723]

It is indeed, as Jesus explains in his Gospel, the hidden Christ that both the disciples[724] and the Pharisees who wished to question Jesus[725] would look for without finding him, since Jesus, the Christ manifest, told everyone: Where I am going, you cannot come. The interpretation of these words is not without difficulties. Jesus knew that he must die and announced it to his disciples: I shall remain with you for only a short time now; then I shall go back to the one who sent me.[726]

Later, after being raised gloriously on the cross, he ascends to the heavenly Father who sent him. As he said to Mary of Magdala: I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.[727] Jesus then ascends to the Father who is in Heaven, and before doing so he warns […] you cannot come.

It may, consequently, be said that Christ undergoes two ascensions: first, from the earth to the cross, and ultimately, to the Father. Saint John treats of both on separate occasions. Jesus refers constantly to our need to lift up the Son of Man, affirming that this elevation is an irreplaceable step towards attaining faith, while faith itself is in turn indispensable if one is to be saved. This is why he always adds in different ways: […] then you will know that I am He. [728]

Ecclesiastical exegesis, in its meticulous study of the manifest aspect of Christ, has traditionally understood the raising of Jesus on the cross and his ascension to the glory of the Father[729] as two decisive factors for salvation, in that those who beheld Christ raised on the cross[730] believed in Jesus as the only Son of God.[731] Raised on the cross and glorified, Jesus appears in the eyes of all as the Savior of the world.[732]

Such are, probably, the terms of exegesis based on the manifest aspect; the same scriptural texts can, however, be studied in terms of the hidden, inner Christ, and this casts a different, parallel, beam of light on them. This, we shall endeavor to explain, for the sake of those who could ground their salvation and nourish their faith if only they could use the keys of knowledge to open the gates of light.

This hidden, gnosis-seeking, aspect will be found where, in the Gospel, the people, those who believe in the hidden, and thus eternal, Christ, the true light that enlightens all men, [733] coeternal with man’s essential Being, put this question to Jesus: The Law has taught us that the Christ will remain for ever. How can you say “The Son of Man must be lifted up?”[734] In his reply, Jesus once again combines the light of the hidden Christ, which lightens inwardly and makes it possible to walk in the light, once discovered, with the light of Christ manifest, a light that will, for them, be darkness, with the death of Christ; until the resurrection.[735]

This joining of both sources of light is part of the Gospel. In the beautiful and significant chapter from Saint John’s Gospel that tells of the interview with Nicodemus, Jesus affirms: no one has gone up to heaven except the one who came down from heaven, the Son of Man.[736] This explains why Jesus said to all those listening to him, whether or not believers or disciples: Where I am going, you cannot come, for it is not given to the first man, Adam the living soul, to ascend to heaven, but to the one born from above, the Son of Man, the last Adam, the life-giving spirit.[737]

Jesus said it: […]Unless a man is born from above, he cannot see the Kingdom of God .[738] It must be pointed out here that where the scripture speaks of ascending or descending, lifting up, raising, etc., this is invariably, in terms of the hidden aspect, a metaphorical play on words implying either an immersion (another adverbial metaphor) in matter, or distinction from it. This is to be borne well in mind, since if it were not so, the lifting up of the Son of Man or his ascension to the Father, the two actions involving a displacement with which we are dealing here, would have a purely physical meaning, proper to the manifest interpretation. If one is to perceive beneath the superficial expression the inner meaning of the hidden aspect, one must take great care to avoid the traps traditionally laid by words, for words are never more than symbols of what they refer to.

If, Jesus explains, the Son of Man who descended from heaven is to be able again to ascend to heaven, the Son of Man must first be lifted up. This lifting up is, he affirms, necessary for belief in this inner, essential, Son of Man, so that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.[739] As for the terms used to describe how this immensely important lifting up can take place, these are surprising, for the Gospel says: as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert.[740]

Regarding the lifting up of the life-giving spirit, the scriptural comparison between Moses’ serpent and the Son of Man, is of the greatest importance. Go to the Old Testament text: Make a fiery serpent and put it on a standard. If anyone is bitten and looks at it, he shall live.[741] The bronze serpent, or fiery serpent (Heb. Saraf) and its exceptional power to give true, eternal, life to all who look at it once raised on a standard (the cross) is doubtless a figurative way, enveloped in mystery, of narrating the lifting up of the Son of Man.[742] Announcing his glorification through death, Jesus says: And when I am lifted up from the earth, I shall draw all men to myself.[743] These words are to be understood as the consciousness of Adam, the life-giving spirit, casting off the principles of the world still attaching to him, and thus discovering the hitherto unknown Son of Man, in a once-and-for-all awakening to the light, like dead men brought back to life.[744]

The bite of the earthly serpent as a preparation for the eternal life of whoever looked upon the Son of Man lifted up on the tree has as mythical a connotation in the scriptures as the acquisition of knowledge by our first forebears in Eden through the mediation of the serpent in the tree. The Son of Man, newborn to inner contemplation, is raised on the standard of the cross, perhaps at the height of the eyes that, for once, gaze there, lifted up, looking upon him, contemplating him, long, fixedly, lovingly, until one day the beholder is subtly transpierced, and then the two is converted into one, as it is written: with me in them and you in me, may they be completely one.[745]

Thus is accomplished the oracle of YHVH of which Zechariah speaks, forming the spirit of man within him,[746] that to which the Gospel of Saint John alludes through hidden symbolism, when Jesus’ side is manifestly pierced by the soldier’s lance: They will look on the one whom they have pierced.[747] The unchanging stare of the fiery serpent gives flow to the fire of knowledge, for it is written that God is a consuming fire,[748] a fire that spares the grain and burns the chaff.

In the theophany on Mount Sinai, God permitted Moses and Aaron to ascend the mountain, but the priests and the people, their souls perhaps loaded with straw, could not pass beyond the bounds of this mountain of the spirit, or, as they said, we shall die.[749] To pass beyond the fiery serpent and come to the place where the Son of Man is, the chaff must first die. It cannot ascend, that is given only to the one born from above.

722 Matt. 9:15; Mark 2:20; Luke 5:35

723 Matt. 13:17, Luke 10:24

724 John 7:34, 13:3

725 John 8:21. In this episode, the Pharisees represent those from below, the men of this world, those who do not believe that the only true being in every man is the essential hidden Christ. To them Jesus says If you do not believe that I am He, you will die in your sins.

726 John 7:33

727 John 20:17

728 John 8:28. When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He.

729 John 12:32

730 John 19:37

731 John 3:18

732 John 12:32

733 John 1:9

734 John 12:34

735 John 12:35-36

736 John 3:13

737 In this hidden sense it is not valid to say that the Ascension is reserved for Jesus, given his celestial origin, but for the spirit, the essential dweller in every consciousness, given its own celestial origin. If this were not so, ascension to heaven would be barred to all save Jesus.

738 John 3:3

739 John 3:15

740 John 3:14

741 Num. 21:8

742 There can be no getting away from a connection between the fiery serpent (or fire-breathing dragon) raised by Moses on a standard during his exodus through the desert and the ureus, or fiery serpent crowning the head of the Pharaohs. This was placed on their forehead like a standard or a figurehead mask on the prow of a ship. According to A. Champdor, this figure symbolized the vital fluid, the breath of life, a life-giving concentration of energy also capable of killing (cfr. J. Chevalier. Dic. de los símbolos. Art. Ureus. Barcelona 1986.)

743 John 12:32

744 Rom. 6:13

745 John 17:23

746 Zech. 12:1

747 Zech. 12:10; John 19:37

748 Deut. 4:24

749 Ex.19:24, 20:19

LOGION 39

Jesus said:

“The Pharisees and the scribes have taken the keys of Knowledge

and hidden them. They themselves have not entered,

nor have they allowed to enter those who wish to.

You, however, be as shrewd[750] as serpents and as innocent as doves.”

COMMENTARY

This logion, repeated in parallel by Matthew, Luke and P. Oxyr, is of the greatest importance.[751] Jesus is saying that there is a science for attaining the Kingdom of God. If it is to be practiced effectively, that science demands certain prior knowledge, which Jesus calls keys. These will doubtless have been received by the wise men of antiquity, meaning that they will have studied and developed them, before handing them down, surely not without imposing the requisite seal demanded by the Mysteries of the Kingdom.[752] However, Jesus accuses the Jewish guardians of the Law of having failed to use the keys they had received to the science of God, keys they should have shown to those who wished to enter, instead of which they had so hidden them that they could no longer be found.[753] As a result, the masters of Israel who were Jesus’ contemporaries not only did not know how to enter the Kingdom but, as a result of their ignorance in regard to this science, they prevented those who had the necessary qualities and wished to do so from entering. Deprived of the requisite knowledge, their struggles to enter were doomed to failure.

Thus, when proclaiming the Good News, Jesus found himself obliged to inaugurate all over again the science of the Kingdom, to give his people knowledge of salvation, through the forgiveness of their sins.[754]

Clearly, the keys to the divine science were reserved by Jesus for those disciples whom he brought together in the institution of the Twelve (Mysteries) as he explicitly stated: The mysteries of the Kingdom of God are revealed to you.[755]

Simon Peter was the first disciple to whom Jesus handed (showed, manifested) the keys of the Kingdom. According to the Gospel account this took place when the disciple identified him as the Christ, the Son of the living God.[756] This identification was a great demonstration of Simon Peter’s spiritual realization, and Christ saw in it that Simon’s soul now stood at the gateway to bliss, the gateway through which all those who are ready to receive the sign of Jonah[757] will make their entry. Jesus then explained that this revelation came from no being of flesh and blood, but from the Father; meaning that, because of the limitations of flesh (the body) and blood (the soul) [758] men were not ready to attain the intuition of the Son of Man, whether manifest or hidden.

The revelation that prepares consciousness to receive the first light of the presence of the Son of Man can come only from the Father, and that, in effect, only once the soul has become so subtle, so pure, so clean, that the Word of God descends naturally through the various layers until it attains consciousness in a spark of knowledge. This is why it is written: No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son, and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.[759]

From the time of his revelation, Simon Peter became a little one, a child newborn from above. In Jesus’ speech, the little one, the child always means the pneumatic man born in the consciousness of Adam, the living soul., This is a vast and mysterious event in consciousness: the birth of the spiritual and complete man, the True Being, whose gentle dominion of absolute understanding remains indescribable, as Jesus himself says in the Gospel of Saint John: The wind blows wherever it pleases; you hear its sound but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.[760] It can indeed be said, in an attempt to describe this with our feeble consciousness that, whatever name you give it, the one newborn from above appears as a voice that speaks where there is no one speaking; a messenger who comes without form or substance; the ultimate deep seed of the Being who has opened himself up to Life.

To all this we must add that the congregation or assembly of the children constitutes, in the unity of its members appointed on the sixth day, the community or church of Christ, since all are one in Christ, whether he be hidden or manifest. The members of this community of the spirit are born once their consciousness has intuited its essential existence, as must have happened with Simon Peter; or they may even be non natus, when they remain buried, hidden beneath the dense strata of the psychic consciousness, waiting to be allowed to be born, to manifest in consciousness. Be that as it may, these are always the stone first rejected by the builders, as happens with most of humanity, then recognized with absolute certainty as the keystone.[761]

In memory of the revelation that transformed Simon into a born member of Christ’s spiritual community, Jesus changed Simon’s name to Peter (Cephas), that he might henceforth be known as the keystone.[762] The unborn members of that ecclesia of those called suffer temporal death, remaining buried in their whited sepulcher[763] of ignorance; yet the gates of the house of the dead[764] cannot prevail against them, for their one and only nature is to be angels (gods, judges of divine origin) endowed with eternal life; and this they regain when they are born into purified consciousness.

The consciousness of the man who has been born from above rises through the whole man like a stairway-like that stairway in Jacob’s dream, with its foot on the ground and its top touching the heavens.[765] Up and down this stairway move the angels, messengers of perfect knowledge, bringing the soul the keys to the science of God, that the earthborn fruit may be tasted in heaven as wholly as the heaven-born on earth. All this is set out in the science that Christ proclaimed through Peter, with the power to condemn (to bind) or absolve (unbind) according to the judgment of perfection, in the assembly of the gods.

It was not the hidden successors of Peter but the manifest ones who took on the task of ensuring that the people should receive the basics of the knowledge of salvation explained by Jesus Christ; yet these successors lacked the requirement of being children. Thus, of the keys to science handed to Peter, the keys to the gates of the City of God, only those to the manifest aspect of Christ have been used. Yet the men of Christian humanity need all their paths to give rise to the formation of the Spirit within and the need is pressing to begin to clarify a divine science that makes possible the revelation of the Son of Man as a child, newborn from above, following in the footsteps of Peter’s revelation: You, my own flesh and blood, you are the Christ, the Son of the living God.[766]

Now, perhaps, is the time of Peter’s hidden successors, the time of the children in God’s Kingdom. Every one of these, however small, has received the keys which will enable him to lay the foundations of the science that leads to the gates of the Holy City, all of them know well how to use these keys, for Jesus expressed this very clearly: Be as prudent (shrewd) as serpents and as simple (pure)as doves.[767]

Prudence entails the virtue of discerning between good and evil, and that amounts to possession of the science which the fruit of that tree in Genesis implanted in our forefathers in Eden, once they had tasted of it at the instigation of the serpent. It is told that YHVH God then exclaimed: See, the man has become like one of us.[768] If, then, Jesus said, according to the logion, be shrewd, it is because the Spirit of God,[769] which reaches even the depths of God, can be attained only if the sieve of discernment is made up of layer upon layer of filters, each finer than the last, until consciousness ceases to perceive semblances of itself and comes to know only the ineffable reality whose sole expression is to be found in the voice or divine Name revealed to Moses during his first theophany on Mount Horeb: I am who I am.[770]

Simplicity, purity, these are unquestionably the qualities required if the action of the sieve is, in the pure transparency of Being, to leave no residue but the clean grain. The evangelist Matthew expressed this in the sixth Beatitude: Happy the pure in heart. They shall see God.[771]

This then will be the science of the little children: possessing the keys of knowledge, they must build the road to the gates through which their successors will enter. May there be no regrets, no complaints about them, as there were for the Jewish masters of the Law, who had made off with the keys they had received. To see God, as the Apostle put it, is the sign that one has come to acknowledge God or, rather, that he has acknowledged us.[772] And this is for sure, since, in the absolute Being, to know and to be known are one and the same knowing, the outcome of the same science: the science of God.

750 Gr. Phronimos. “Prudent” in the Spanish version of the Jerusalem Bible. “Cunning” in the English one (Matt. 10:16)

751 Matt. 23:13; Luke 11:52; P.Oxyr. 655:2b

752 Rom. 16:25. According to the revelation of the mystery kept secret.

753 Such was the case in Jesus’ time with birth in the spirit, or regeneration, of which Nicodemus, a master in Israel, did not seem to have any knowledge, as pointed out by Jesus (John 3:10).

754 Luke 1:77. This work corresponded to John the Baptist, as stated in the Benedictus, to prepare the way for him.

755 Matt. 13:11, Luke 8:10

756 Matt.16:16

757 Matt. 12:39-40. Like the Son of Man, Jonah was imprisoned and then released (returned to life). For this to take place, the essential prerequisite is that the (hidden) Son of Man should be discovered, as Peter discovered him.

758 Gen.9:4. You must not eat flesh with life, that is to say blood, in it. In the language of the Bible, blood often means “soul” (nefesh).

759 Matt. 11:27

760 John 3:8

761 Matt. 21:42; Ps. 118:22-23

762 With this name-changing, Jesus drew on the Semitic tradition that was used to change the name Abram to Abraham, and Jacob, to Israel. Abram’s renaming was by divine intervention, as was far later to occur with David, when he was promised an heir of his own flesh and blood (Gen.15:4) and that he would be Abraham, the father of a multitude (Gen. 17:5). As for Jacob, he received the name Israel from the Angel of YHVH, because he had fought with God and prevailed.(Gen 32:29).

763 “Tomb”, or “whited sepulcher”, these mean the same thing here, unlike those dead within to whom Jesus refers in Matt. 23:27.

764 Hades (Gr.) or Sheol (Heb.)

765 Gen. 28:12.

766 Matt. 16:16. The heir of Abram’s own flesh and blood (Gen. 15:4) is, like David’s own son (Ps. 132:11) the one born from above, the child in the Kingdom of God (Luke 7:28), not born of woman but the fruit of a male, since he comes not from Psyche, the Spouse, but from pneuma (Eros), Bridegroom.

767 Matt. 10:16; logion 39

768 Gen. 3:22

769 1 Cor. 2:11

770 Ex.3:14. The Septuagint translators rendered this subtly: I am the Being / I am the One who IS, the only truly existing one, the only true reality. The words I AM / I am. He often repeated by Jesus in Saint John’s Gospel, have the same meaning.

771 Matt. 5:8

772 Gal. 4:9

LOGION 40

Jesus said:

“A grapevine has been planted outside of the Father.

Since it is not strong, it will be pulled up by the root and destroyed.”

COMMENTARY

The vine, as we already know from the scriptures, is the Son of Man, and the one who plants the vine-stocks is the Father;[773] but the stock is the trunk of the vine, and if we say trunk, it is to differentiate it, in terms of the Gospel metaphor, from those shoots that grow from the vine, those long, fine, knotted shoots from which grow the leaves and clusters of grapes, the fruit.

This means that the Son of Man was planted by the Father, or rather, in the Father, since, as Jesus says in his great prayer to the Father, we are one,[774] and if all the stocks that go to make up the vine are the Son of Man, he in turn could not be all without at the same time being each, just as the same light emanates from every lamp that is lit from the one and only great lamp.

This is the great parable of the vine, which explains the hidden aspect of the mystery of the Son of Man, who is Jesus Christ but is also the ultimate, essential man, the heaven-born man in himself. If the apostle calls this man whom consciousness knows not, because he is concealed within it, Adam, the life-giving spirit,[775] this is because that spirit is the Son of Man who not only has life, but gives life.

The life-endowed vine-shoot is used in the scriptures as an allegory for what we call the first man-meaning, the one whom consciousness usually identifies and whom we are referring to when we say I. The apostle called this first man, condemned to be last, Adam, the living soul, meaning by this that he does not have and give life, but is living because he receives and enjoys temporal life in usufruct. The vine-shoot is the one of which Jesus says that it was not planted by his heavenly Father,[776] and this he says in justice and in all truth, for it is nothing but a shoot that springs not from the root but directly from the trunk; and that trunk is, as we have already said, an individual light emanating from the total light of the Son of Man.

The dual choice open to the vine-shoot, according to the metaphor of the vine told in Saint John’s account, is fairly obvious and easy to understand, as it refers to the free dual choice given every man in his capacity as a living soul. The shoot can remain united to the stock, intelligently supported by its oneness with the trunk, which represents the pneumatic man from whom it draws sustenance, and with the rest of the vine-stocks, which always signify the Son of Man; in that case, it is said that this shoot will bear much fruit. But the shoot could also try to separate from the vine, when in its blindness it thinks that it was planted outside the Father.

As for the drama of that adventitious vine-shoot, there are many biblical texts of reproof, like that of Jeremiah: Yet I had planted you, a choice vine, a shoot of soundest stock. How is it you have become a degenerate plant, you bastard vine?[777] Or, as the author of Deuteronomy puts it, their grapes are poisonous grapes, their clusters are envenomed.[778]

The first symptom of the weakness of the separated vine-shoot is when its grapes turn sour. This takes place despite all the hopes placed in it, since what was hoped for, the very cause of its existence, was that it should attain knowledge of union, sinking its identity into the trunk and its sap, into the spirit that is its essence. Jesus said […]so that they may be one like us.[779]

773 John 15:1. I am the True Vine, and my Father is the vine-dresser.

774 John 17:22

775 1 Cor.15:45-47

776 Matt. 15:13

777 Jer. 2:21

778 Deut. 32:32

779 John 17:11

LOGION 41

Jesus said:

“Whoever has something in his hand will receive more,

and whoever has nothing,

even the little he has will be taken from him.”

COMMENTARY

Employing the paradoxical form of expression peculiar to primitive Christianity, this logion is yet another reference to the essential mystery of the Gospel revelation, that of the living Christ hidden within, and it is precisely because its content is so essential that this same logion appears in the synoptic Gospels no less than five times, the intentions behind it varying, yet congruent.[780]

Understood literally, the logion highlights the unethical and unreasonable action of taking from a has-not and giving to one who has; a reasonable explanation can only be found if we look into the implications here of the verb to have. As Saint John says in his first Epistle, anyone who has the Son has life.[781] The Son is always the Son of Man, the hidden living Christ; or, to cite the terms of many Gospel parables, the Word, the good seed, the perfect measure, the lamp that must not be kept hidden, the hidden treasure or the pearl of great value.[782]

According to the hidden aspect of Christian anthropology, the spiritual man, the second Adam, the life-giving spirit, is the full owner of that precious jewel, the talent, the one and only pound, the denarius on which is printed the legend of God and His image; for the pneumatic man was made in God’s image on the sixth day.

In every earthly man, in every man complete in spirit, soul and body, this image of God is the essence, the spirit, of which it may be said figuratively that it begins its descent from above with the ineffable marriage of the psychic Adam-the souls, the daughters of men-whom it endows with life and, thanks to whose nuptials, he receives in usufruct the grace which the spirit possesses in full.

In the Gospel parables the psychic man is always represented by the servant who receives the pound, the denarii or talents, according to his capacity.[783] In truth, every psychic man receives the single pound, the single talent at birth, and this is the money or celestial treasure with which he is endowed, deposited at the deepest point in his consciousness, to be very gradually, laboriously awoken, until he is imprinted with the image stamped on the coin that is none other than the Son of Man, the essential Being, every man’s true Self.

It is thus that the consciousness of psychic man comes gradually to recognize his true Being, the spirit, following a difficult process of transfiguration. Until then, until the sacred wedding’s consummation, the Son of Man remains for most of humanity the hidden guest, the great unknown, and every step towards the awakening of consciousness to the light of the Son from above is referred to by the evangelists in terms of having, for instance, in the words of John the Baptist: Anyone who believes in the Son has eternal life.[784]

The first reference to this logion in the Gospel according to Saint Matthew is to be found when Jesus justifies his decision to speak in parables, which he does between the momentous parable of the sower and its explanation.[785] According to this account, what is sown in the heart-the essence of every man-is the Word which, once heard and understood, yields fruit in due measure. Since, however, the fruit of the Word consists in having eternal life, there can be no doubt but that he who has the Word in his hand-to use the terms of the logion in the Gospel of Thomas-will have eternity and more than enough blessings; while he who has not will, because of his lack of fruit, remain locked into the ephemeral mortal nature of psychic man and will end up in nothingness and death.

This schema is repeated in the Gospel according to Saint Matthew where the logion appears at the end of the parable of the talents.[786] The talents surely give the measure of the knowledge of the Word on the part of psychic man.[787] Whether it is called a talent or a pound,[788] this unit represents the minimum natural treasure-yet universal because it is infinite-which, as we have already said, each psychic man has from birth in the shadowy depths of his consciousness. This is his inalienable essence, his very self, his true being.

The number of talents with which one is to be entrusted depends on the capacity or virtue of each when it comes to believing in the sown Word and bringing it to fruition. Bliss, joy in the Lord, this is the eternal culmination of that use. As for the single talent, what is asked of each psychic man is that he should not keep it hidden but make it manifest in his own consciousness. The Word is the secret that must be discovered, the being to be brought forth from the undergrowth of thought, the lamp that must not be left under a tub but raised on a lamp-stand so that its light may shine and its knowledge be communicated.

The outcome, the judgment that comes of keeping the radiance of the Word concealed in a hole is subtly described by Matthew in the parable of the dishonest steward.[789] When such a psychic man totally ignores his spiritual essence, there arises in the end a total split between the spiritual and the psyche, and this separation determines the future of both. Faced with the absence of any spiritual irrigation of the sterile fields of the psyche, the sacred marriage is dissolved and the spouses separate. Of this it is said that the Word cuts like any double-edged sword, but more finely. It can slip through the place where the soul is divided from the spirit.[790]

The third reference to the logion is given by the evangelist Mark in the parable of the measure.[791] The measures to which Mark refers are, without a doubt, those of the fruit obtained from the Word, and this means that what comes from the psyche will not be measured according to the same standards of judgment as apply when judging one’s neighbor but according to the measure of one’s own spiritual stature. It is the fruitful recognition of the Word that brings abundant grain to the ears of corn; the rest is just so much straw for the sickle or the wind. As Jesus says in his discourse on the work of the Son: …and his words find no home in you, for you do not believe in the one he has sent.[792] The last two references to the logion are to be found in the third Gospel.

The first of these, Luke places after the explanation of the parable of the sower, when relating the parable of the lamp.[793] Its placing is therefore highly appropriate: The Word, like the lamp, must not remain hidden, but must be shown if one is to receive the rain of light. This is a severe warning to humankind which is urged to make haste to discover and get to know the Word, that light of life, which is man’s true Being. Saint Luke’s telling of the logion is surprising and includes a variation that merits comment. It does not read, as elsewhere, even the little he has will be taken away from him, but even what he thinks he has will be taken away.[794] The text thus implies that the possessions of the psyche are excess baggage and that the one and only true reality is the Word, the Being of every one of us; all the rest is nothing but appearances, which the psychic man who is ignorant of the Word thinks he has, as though it were absolutely real. In this, he is utterly mistaken.

Luke’s last reference to the logion is to be found in the parable of the pounds, being the culmination or moral of that parable.[795] The first Christians seem to have seen in this above all what it had in common with Saint Matthew’s parable of the talents, while nowadays more importance is often attributed to the differences that seem to separate the two. In any case, the single pound which the man who is to be made king lends in his absence to each of his ten servants is no different in meaning from the single talent given to the third servant by the master of the household in Matthew’s account. Like the talent in the first Gospel, the pound here symbolizes the Word, which the third servant kept wrapped in a piece of linen, because he was afraid.[796]

The act of keeping the pound-the Word, the Living Christ, wrapped up in a linen cloth, like the bandages or shroud used for wrapping the dead is far more expressive than the hole in the ground dug by the possessor of the buried talent; but it shows how difficult it is to maintain firm belief-to the point of disinterring it from one’s tomb of oblivion and ignorance-in something as decisive as our being, in essence, the Word, Christ; and to believe in this as something eternally living and real.

The parable ends with a passage that is hard to understand, probably destined for the seven (?) remaining servants who were unable to accept the kingship of the only one that could have saved them.[797] The enemies to whom the parable refers are, of course, not what the Living Christ has, the Word, whose non-acceptance was a consequence of ignorance, but what the psychic man thought he had, which was only straw for the wind. As for what truly is, the eternal Being, the Word, it is worth remembering what Jesus said to Zacchaeus when he entered his house (his inner being): …the Son of Man has come to seek out what was lost.[798]

What the hidden Son of Man always comes to seek out and save are all those psychic contents which, once they have turned to the Word through an act of transcendent metanoia are refined as silver is refined, tested as gold is tested.[799]

780 The logion is to be found in Matt. 13:12, 25:29; Mark 4:25 and Luke 8:18, 19:26 in quite different contexts but with a parallel meaning. In GT it appears in logion 70 and here.

781 1 John 5:12

782 Matt. 13:37, 13:45-46; Mark 4:21-24

783 The talents entrusted to the servants are five, two and one respectively, according to the parable in St. Matthew’s Gospel (Matt.25:14-30). The first two amounts (five and two) are proportionate to the measures of the harvest of the Word in the parable of the sower (Matt. 13:23).

784 John 3:36

785 Matt. 13:10-12, 18-23

786 Matt. 25:14-30

787 Cfr. Strom. I. 1:4, 1s., in which Clement of Alexandria speaks of the talents entrusted by the master to his servants as symbolizing the Word.

788 The latter, according to the third Gospel, as we shall see.

789 Matt. 24:45-51

790 Heb. 4:12

791 Mark 4:24-25

792 John 5:38

793 Luke 8:16-18

794 Cfr. Jerusalem Bible variants: … even what he thinks he has will be taken away.

795 Luke 19:11-27

796 There is a certain strange negligence in Luke’s account; either that, or it has been mutilated, since in the beginning it speaks of ten servants who receive one pound each, after which only three are mentioned, while the seven remaining ones count as enemies who are condemned in the end.

797 No servant, no psychic man is lacking at birth in the pound that symbolizes his very being; no one can deny his being, for that means denying the denier.

798 Luke 19:10

799 Zech. 13:9

LOGION 42-43[800]

(42) Jesus said:

“Be passers-by.[801]”

(43) His disciples said to him:

“Who are You, that You should say these things to us?”

Jesus said to them:

“You do not realize who I am from what I say to you,

but you have become like the Jews,

for they (either) love the tree and hate its fruit

or love the fruit and hate the tree.”

COMMENTARY

With his exhortation to be passers-by, in other words, strictly circumstantial dwellers in the world, Jesus seems to be awakening in his listeners awareness of the elusive nature of the spirit, the Being, of every one of us. There is no lack of such counsel in the canonical Gospels. Playing on the double meaning of the word pneuma (spirit-wind)[802] Jesus says of John the Baptist: What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed swaying in the breeze?[803] The body is assuredly seen here as the outer husk, a hollow reed penetrated by the life-giving spirit that quickens soul and body. Of these two principles brought together in earthly man, the body is the only sojourner to have a modicum of stability, while the spirit, although eternal, does no more than pass through the reed, thus accomplishing its role as a transient in this world.

What Jesus is calling for when he says “be passers-by” is awareness of the identity between consciousness and the eternal, infinite spirit, whose nature resembles that of a sphere the center of which is everywhere, or nowhere, depending on how one interprets it; so that it has no home of its own in our world. That was what Jesus meant when he told the scribe who wanted to follow in his footsteps, the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.[804] In similar vein, he told Nicodemus during his memorable conversation with the Jewish magistrate, as recounted in Saint John’s Gospel: The wind [spirit] blows wherever it pleases; you hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.[805]

What Jesus is clearly insisting on is not only the transitory nature of life in this world but, even more so, the need to direct one’s consciousness towards the eternal life of the spirit.[806] At this point, prompted by the idea of attaining that elusive eternity of the spirit that Jesus’ words had made them anxious to discover, the disciples questioned him yet again about Being. What they asked certainly concerned Being as the Son of Man, the living Christ, hidden, yet made obliquely manifest through the words of Jesus. That is why they asked: Who are You, that you should say these things to us?

At the place in the canonical Gospels that corresponds to this logion, Saint John tells of the same question, put to Jesus by the Jews: Who are you?[807] Earlier on, Jesus had roundly declared: You are from below; I am from above.[808] Clearly, this distinction has nothing to do with place. Its meaning is entirely qualitative. As is well known, in the language of the Gospels, the term below refers to the material world, including the body, as well as to all the passions and affections or a transitory, hence mortal, nature that belong to the intermediate realm, that of the psyche. This bonded consciousness, caught up in attachments to the world, accounts for the whole of the man from below. When, however, thanks to knowledge and virtue, consciousness is freed from every attachment, every overlay, as pure, unalloyed spirit, like the wind that blows through the one born from above, there you have the man from above.

It was speaking as a man from above-a complete stranger in the eyes of any man from below-that Jesus made the great affirmation in Saint John’s Gospel: If you do not believe that I am He.[809] And it is precisely that I am He, clearly, firmly, deeply not understood, that may be said to constitute sin, the very characteristic of the mortal man from below, absolutely unable to understand the essential nature of the world above… It is precisely this I am He that gives rise to the question: Who are you? However, this question is not about the qualities or characteristics of Being, it is about Being in itself, the very being of Being.

As is well known, with the words I Am (He) that Jesus deliberately repeats, in different contexts, four times in Saint John’s Gospel[810] he is reiterating the name of God revealed to Moses,[811] thus stressing that the Being of Jesus as the Living Christ, as God’s Being, is the only real, true Being. The I am who I am of the Old Testament, much misunderstood by religious dualism, affirms not only the absolute Being of God but the real, true Being of God, excluding, not any other God, but any affirmation of Being outside God.[812] When Jesus affirms with his I Am He his real, true being as the Son of Man, he is at the same time affirming, by exclusion, the absolute unreality of all that is given life, meaning, endowed with Life on loan from the true, the absolute Life of what is. This is the absolute, the true spirit of man-pneumatic man-a drop of the Son’s light, the absolute unity of Father and Son in a single real, true Being, as faithfully expressed in the Gospel: The Father and I are one,[813] or: You must believe me when I say I am in the Father and the Father is in me.[814]

The reply in this logion is at once a reproach while, at the same time, spelling out again the great lesson of the gnoseological way shown by Jesus Christ: From what I say to you [from my fruit], do you not know who I am? What man has before his eyes, the visible, is always the fruit, good or bad; the product, and never the thing in itself. That, the essence, is invisible, nor can it be apprehended by the senses; it must be discovered laboriously, advancing with the help of what can be intuited by the senses. This, and only this, is the deductive course that must be followed, in accordance with the abundant examples provided by the Gospel, which may be summed up in the great saying: The tree can be told by its fruit.[815]

Putting into practice the requisite deductive process, the Gospel calls, without question, for a repeated, persistent shifting from the visible to the invisible, and that is why Jesus warns us of the need to be passers-by, not wasting our time contemplating one of the worlds to the exclusion of the other. That is the error into which many fell in Jesus’ day, those represented in the Gospel logion by the words the Jews.[816] Those who set their ideal sights on the invisible, as signified by the tree in Jesus’ phrase, thought that they hated the fruit, while those who set their attention exclusively on visible reality-the fruit-denied the essence, the tree. Jesus’ warning is surely valid for all times.

The reply given by Jesus in the fourth Gospel raises a number of difficulties for translation, and many versions have been essayed. Fortunately, most of these are not contradictory;[817] all, however, insist on the need to start out from the words of Jesus-the fruit-in order to isolate and understand the real, absolute Being that is its spiritual essence-the tree. Jesus says: In the first place, what I am telling you,[818] and this may be taken as an affirmation that, when addressing his audience, he is doing so as a visible being, the fruit, not the tree. But this manifest Jesus-the fruit of the tree-can say of his true self, the tree, the invisible essence, only the words I Am; for Being cannot be apprehended; it can be known only through clues, indications, not through any characteristics, for these are not Being itself, merely attributes ascribed to it.

It is through these clues that every consciousness can, given grace, attain the intuition of Being, and realize its universality. Consequently, Jesus is speaking of the Father, who could say I am who I am, and whose Word the Son of Man is.

The modus operandi proposed by Jesus in the Gospel for attaining the intuition of Being calls imperatively for raising the Son of Man:

Then you will know that I Am He.[819]

800 With all due respect to the translators’ numbering of the Coptic text, we are of the view that Jesus’ advice and the text that follows on plates 20/26 constitute a single logion.

801 Gr. Parágein

802 Heb. rûach

803 Matt. 11:7; Luke 7:24

804 Matt. 8:20; Luke 9:58

805 John 3:8

806 This idea is beautifully expressed in the saying found in a carving in south Delhi and attributed to the Grand Mogul Akbar the Just: Jesus, peace be upon him, said: “The world is a bridge; pass over it and do not establish your dwelling there”. This we owe to the French translator of GT, Ph. de Suarez, who pointed out the relation between logion 42 and the above text, discovered early in the 20th century, these words having been attributed to Jesus by many Muslim authors, including Al-Ghazali (1059-1111) (cfr. De Suarez: L’évangile selon Thomas, p.279, Metanoia 1974).

807 John 8:25

808 John 8:23 et seq.

809 John 8:24

810 John 8:24: If you do not believe that I Am He… John 8:27: …then you will know that I Am He. John 8:58: …before Abraham ever was, I Am. And one last time in 13:19: …so that when it does happen you may believe that I Am He.

811 Ex. 3:14

812 Perhaps the soundest interpretation of the Hebrew text is that preferred by the Septuagint: “I am He who is” or “I am what is”.

813 John 10:30

814 John 14:11

815 Matt. 7:16-18, 12:33; Luke 6:43-45

816 For the early Christians, opposition to their view was symbolized by the Jews, so often mentioned in the canonical Gospels. In this, the new Christians were merely following a long-established custom of the Jewish people, symbolically identifying those opposed to them as the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Persians, the Philistines, etc.

817 The trilingual New Testament jointly edited by J.M. Bover and J. O’Callaghan (BAC, Madrid, 1977) lists in explanatory note eleven distinct translations drawn up by eleven separate institutions (Op. cit. p.531).

818 John 8:25. This is a translation of the version proposed, not without misgivings, by B. de J.

819 We have already spoken of the raising of the Son of Man in connection with logion 38, but it will be necessary to return to this in order to study its greatest meaning, that of anastasis, resurrection.

LOGION 44

Jesus said:

“Whoever blasphemes against the Father will be forgiven,

and whoever blasphemes against the Son will be forgiven,

but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit

will not be forgiven either on earth or in heaven.”

COMMENTARY

To understand this logion, one needs a sound grasp of the hidden meaning of sin and pardon and of the Spirit’s work of salvation, irrigating man’s heart with what Saint John’s Gospel[820] calls fountains of living water and Isaiah, waters in the wilderness, rivers in the wild.[821]

The three names of the threefold relation which the logion sets out in their proper order of precedence share, in essence, a single nature in Unity.[822] So it is at first surprising to read that blasphemy, the sin against the Father and the Son, will be forgiven, while that against the Holy Spirit will not. Man receives the Spirit of God through the breath of the Son;[823] it is God, or rather, the finger of God,[824] to cite Saint Luke, that enables man to gain God’s Kingdom, and it is hard to understand why sin against the finger should be worse than against the hand or the breath.

This paradoxical logion calls for clarification, but the first step towards that must involve understanding sin through a fresh reading of the Gospel that takes full account of its hidden aspect.

Since God is justice and the law, he is the measure of right and wrong. Therefore, the purpose behind the purely religious conception to be found in the Gospel[825] is not so much directly to avoid committing sin and thus avoid transgressing the sacred boundaries, however important that may be, as to try to reveal in every man his own measure. Every man uses a measure, a standard whereby he measures others, the world, himself, and is consequently measured thereby. When this measure is wrong, meaning that it is not in keeping with God’s sacred standard, man is necessarily a sinner, one who exceeds the limits set by justice, one who has turned his back on God; but the proper standard, the real one, is always the sacred standard, the true measure of justice.

The essential purpose of proclaiming the Gospel is to straighten the ways of the Lord[826] in man, so that the Lord above, as the hidden Christ within, may be born in every man and thus reveal in each the true, exact measure of himself. The discovery of the sacred measure that opposes injustice and sin, launches the transformation of man thus regenerated, turning him towards justice and God. This explains why Jesus said: John came to you walking in justice.[827]

Moving beyond what had been the traditional view of sin which saw sinners as gentiles, ignorant of God’s commandments and not practicing the consecrated rituals and ceremonies, Jesus extends sin’s scope[828] to everyone not born from above.[829] This explains how, on a certain occasion, he was able to say, without finding anyone to contradict him, let him who is without sin cast the first stone.[830] In this deeper, more elevated, sense of sin, that sees in every man who has not received the second baptism that comes from the Spirit a dearth of justice, Jesus coincides with the scriptures. Paul reminds us of this in the course of his exhortation to the Romans: There is not a good man left, no, not one.[831]

The unjust, the sinners, will not inherit the Kingdom of God[832] and since this affliction is what the Gospel claims it has come to put an end to, Jesus keeps company with sinners and explains to everyone: I did not come to call the virtuous, but sinners.[833] In truth, Christ’s inner call rings out for everyone, yet some are irremediably sick and cannot hear the breath blown by the Spirit. Those blessed sinners who hunger and thirst after justice are assured of hearing him better,[834] because they have glimpsed through the thick bars of their ignorance of God the faint shining of faith and knowledge that reveals their measure to their consciousness, so that they become aware of the pneumatic man that every one of us in reality is. This is what Jesus means when he explains in the Gospel to an improvised audience of Jews that really represents all men: If you do not believe that I am He, you will die in your sins,[835] or, as the apostle concludes, for whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.[836]

Countering sin, the Gospel proclaims pardon, which in its deepest sense is freedom, just as sin is slavery. When Jesus’ sets forth the Good News in Nazareth at the start of his ministry, he openly announces that he has come to proclaim liberty to captives,[837] meaning freedom from the law of sin and death for all those who are far from the life in Christ Jesus.[838] The first to proclaim this liberation from sin was in fact John the Baptist, when he saw Jesus-I am He-approaching: Behold the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world.[839]

John the Baptist’s evangelical way to free captives was to proclaim the baptism of conversion (metanoia, turning towards God) for the forgiveness of sins.[840] This first baptism or immersion in water-meaning, the soul, as we have already pointed out-is in itself a conversion of the mind, one that implies a persistent, repeated inward contemplation that is inherently a cleansing of consciousness. In his epistle, Saint James sums up this work of purification with a simple expression: confess your sins to one another;[841] but the outcome of this lengthy, perseverant immersion in one’s consciousness, scrutinizing its contents and behavior until it is clear and clean enough to permit the transparent contemplation of one’s self-of I Am-is shown in the lovely Benedictus when Zacharias, filled with the Holy Spirit, expresses it as it unquestionably is: knowledge of salvation.[842]

That said, to attain the inner birth of the Son of Man, the one born from above, baptism by water will not suffice; it must, in the tongues of flame of knowledge, lead to baptism or immersion in the Spirit, which descends on consciousness to the point of being perceived by it, for it is said that what is born of the Spirit is spirit.[843]

It is the Spirit, which comes from God and reaches the depths of all things, that descends into man’s innermost consciousness, the depths of a man that can only be known by his own spirit.[844] Thus speaks the apostle, affirming that it is the Spirit that reveals to us the hidden wisdom of God … that God predestined to be for our glory before the ages began. And Paul concludes with a fragment from a psalm by Isaiah, whereby he tries to show us something of the glory prepared for us by God: the things that no eye has seen and no ear has heard, things beyond the mind of man, all that God has prepared for those who love him.[845]

In the long, profound passage known as the farewells, Jesus announces to those who love him, in preparation for his coming death, that in his absence the Spirit of Truth will be with you forever, because he is with you, he is in you.[846] He did not say that it will enter to dwell in them, because the Spirit was already in them and this they knew; but they would receive him as the Consoler, so that their eyes might see the Spirit of Truth, their ears hear him and their heart find the glory prepared for them before the ages began. The apostle provides an important fact about this when he tells: Your body, you know, is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you since you received him from God. You are not your own property.[847]

The herald is always faith, the potent certainty that I am that which is, the faith we must have if we are not to die in our sins. Then to the soul’s darkness come the first glimmerings of God’s hidden wisdom, borne to us by the Spirit as Consoler.[848] These first signs of the Spirit’s coming may manifest in many ways: like waters gushing from an inexhaustible spring, like a gentle rain of bliss, like the distant roar of raging seas, or the wind’s whistling through the reeds; step by step, the soul discovers her eternal bridegroom, her true Being, predestined for her since before time began. With this wedding the soul is flooded with the sweet smell of life that leads to life;[849] and then, the sacred, inexplicable act of transfiguration. The outer clothing of sin falls away, and with it the false measure of ignorance and death. What remains of the innermost soul, the new clothing, is the fact of Being, the truth of I AM, identity with the spirit, with the Son of Man, with the eternal Christ, hitherto the hidden guest.

Saint Luke tells in The Acts of the Apostles of the beginnings, the first intimations, of this outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost, in an episode rich in symbolism.[850] This burning rain of wisdom and bliss is assuredly the re-stamping with the seal of the Spirit that God gave us, placing it in our hearts as a sign of his promise, a foretaste of his Glory.[851]

John writes in his Gospel of this foretaste at Pentecost, prepared for whoever, filled with firm conviction, contemplates with loving faith the manifestation of his own I AM. His account may be less spectacular than Luke’s, yet perhaps it goes deeper. In it he tells how, when the risen Jesus appeared to his disciples, he breathed on them and said: Receive the Holy Spirit.[852] This did not mean that the Spirit had not been dwelling in them for all eternity; rather, it opened their eyes and ears so that they might receive it in their souls and find the glory in their hearts. This was the breath of God that dispels sin and reveals the perfect measure of every one of us; the breath sent to Jesus by the Father as he now sent it in all those who believed in their I AM. Thus was accomplished the Law according to which he who receives the breath must manifest it, just as a lamp is not placed under a tub but raised onto a lampstand, its purpose being to manifest what is hidden.[853]

The requirement to manifest the aroma of the Spirit, once received, is no less prescribed by the Law than the lamp of which the Gospels speak. When the lamp shines forth its light, it is to reveal to each the measure of himself, corresponding precisely to that of the just man and thus freeing him from sin.

We are not speaking here of consecutive actions but of a single one, in the same way as drinking water assuages thirst, even if that was not the purpose sought. He who receives the renewed breath of the Spirit (not that first received as a portent of Glory) in his innermost being, finds himself in the Spirit and is left free from sin. The freedom thus obtained is the remission of sins, the freeing of the captive.[854] By the Law of the lamp on the lampstand the man newly freed is, through the Son’s authority, made an envoy who may in turn breathe the Spirit onto all those who believe, including those who have not seen.[855]

This act of breathing or anointment by the Spirit and the remission of sins are one and the same thing, as is clearly borne out by the Gospel when Jesus says to those on whom he has just breathed: For those whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven.[856] He did not say they will be forgiven but they are forgiven; once freed the captive is free. To know one’s own precise measure is to know the true measure, to know justice.

Nevertheless, whoever, owing to the weakness of his faith, does not receive the breath of the Holy Spirit remains a sinner, whose sins will be held against him until he attains faith that the Spirit dwells in him. This disbelief is what the logion calls blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. The effect of that sin is, for as long as it continues, that of not finding freedom or a pardon either in this world or in that of the Spirit.

820 John 7:38

821 Isai. 43:20

822 This same Trinitarian allusion remains implicit in the synoptic Gospels. Matthew and Mark speak of sin and blasphemy, while Luke, as in the logion, mentions only blasphemy (Matt. 12:31-32; Mark 3:28-30; Luke 12:10-12).

823 John 20:22

824 Luke 11:20

825 The Greek word most used by the evangelists to express this religious sense of sin is hamartiano, and this does not always coincide with misdemeanors against human law (Gr. adikia).

826 Matt. 3:3

827 Matt. 21:32

828 Gr. hamartolos

829 Conversely, John in his first epistle says: No one who has been begotten by God sins. (1 John 3:9)

830 John 8:7

831 Rom. 3:10; Ps.14:1-3

832 1 Cor. 6:10

833 Mark 2:17

834 Matt. 5:6

835 John 8:24

836 Rom. 14:23 (Text here from the NRSV)

837 Luke 4:18; Isai. 61:1-2 (Gr. aphesis)

838 Rom. 8:1-2

839 John 1:29

840 Mark 1:4

841 Jam. 5:16

842 Luke 1:77

843 John 3:6-8

844 1 Cor. 2:11

845 1 Cor. 2:7-9. Paul uses the same word spirit for the Holy Spirit, the breath of God that Christ sends to all those who believe in him, and the life-giving spirit, the last Adam, born from above (1 Cor. 15:45). This ambiguity or absence of any distinction may perplex many; yet, if the spirit is essence, who could distinguish the air that fills space from the breath he exhales when breathing?

846 John 14:17

847 1 Cor. 6:19-20

848 John 8:24, 14:26, 16:13; Rom.8:26-27

849 2 Cor. 2:16

850 Acts 2:1-13

851 Eph. 1:13

852 John 20:22

853 Mark 4:21-22

854 Rom. 8:2

855 John 20:29

856 John 20:23

LOGION 45

Jesus said:

“Grapes are not harvested from thorn trees,

nor are figs gathered from thistles.

They yield no fruit.

A good man brings forth good from his treasure.

A bad man brings forth evil things

from the corrupt treasure in his heart

and says evil things.

From the abundance of the heart.”

COMMENTARY

The treasure, the good treasure, is the Spirit of God, who is with you, he is in you[857]-as we already know-in man’s innermost being. Like the sweet smell of life that leads to life, the Spirit anoints those who believe in the Son of Man with the subtle and eternal rain of wisdom and bliss. That is why, in parable, Matthew likens that treasure to the Kingdom of Heaven.[858] Some, however, accumulate in their hardened heart[859] an evil treasure consisting of corrupt things; and from that heart, so says the Gospel, come evil intentions.[860]

Thus, the logion contrasts the good produced by the good treasure with the evil that comes forth from the corrupt one. The good is the Word and the evil consists of those impure words that issue from a hardened heart and render a man impure even before he has uttered them. That is why Jesus says: What goes into the mouth does not make a man unclean; it is what comes out of the mouth that makes him unclean.[861]

From the Word come forth words never learned by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit.[862] Jesus explains on a number of occasions the origin of his own words, saying that he whom God has sent-on whom he has breathed, whom he has anointed-speaks God’s own words. God gives him the Spirit without reserve;[863] he then adds in deeply consoling terms that a child of God listens to the words of God.[864]

The words that come from God, those from the Spirit, are not ephemeral like human words but, being founded in true wisdom, they bear within themselves the meaning of their own eternity. This, Jesus states most explicitly: Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.[865]

But… what are these words that will outlast heaven and earth and which the good man takes as his good treasure? In his Second Epistle to the Corinthians, the Apostle says that, when he was caught up into Paradise, he heard things which must not and cannot be put into human language.[866] Doubtless, these words that are heard without a break in the silence are none other than the perfect model contained within the Word: […] true messages from God [867] that descend from the pure divine root like a form or mold for the transitory words expressed by human wisdom.

There can be no question but that Jesus took the model for his words from a place or an essence far transcending heaven, even the “third heaven” of which Paul speaks. That is why he pronounced this essential phrase: The words I say to you I do not speak as from myself: it is the Father, living in me, who is doing this work.[868] From this it is to be understood that Jesus’ message of eternal life[869] springs from the Father without any possibility arising of duality between Father and Son. This unity is confirmed in many passages and has never been a matter for discussion, yet on one occasion he said: To have seen me is to have seen the Father, and to testify to the primordial importance of this confession of unity, the Evangelist added, without anyone having asked him: He spoke these words in the Treasury.[870]

In truth, Jesus’ words are always drawn from the treasure, not one hidden in a field, as in Saint Matthew’s parable,[871] but in the bosom of the Father, in the Holy of Holies of the temple where no word is an ephemeral expression as in the terrestrial sphere, but an act of creation, a work of divine status. That is why Jesus says: The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life;[872] or that decisive expression: He who rejects me and refuses my words has his judge already: the word itself that I have spoken will be his judge on the last day.[873]

Jesus refers time and again, not to man’s transient words, but to those drawn from the treasure, which are the work of life, or of death. Thus, after explaining that there is a good treasure and a bad treasure, Saint Matthew adds in his Gospel: it is by your words you will be acquitted, and by your words condemned.[874]

857 John 14:17

858 Matt. 13:44

859 Our logion places the evil treasure, and only the evil treasure, in the heart. The canonical gospels differ among themselves in the relevant synoptic passages; Matthew situates neither of the two treasures in the heart, while Luke places both in the heart (Matt. 12:35; Luke 6:45).

860 Matt. 15:19

861 Matt. 15:11

862 1 Cor. 2:12-13

863 John 3:34

864 John 8:47

865 Matt. 24:35; Mark 13:31; Luke 21:33

866 2 Cor. 12:4

867 Rev. 19:9

868 John 14:10

869 John 6:68

870 John 8:20

871 Matt. 13:44

872 John 6:63

873 John 12:48

874 Matt. 12:37

LOGION 46

Jesus said:

“From Adam to John the Baptist,

among those born of women,

none is greater than John,

for his eyes are not broken.

But I have said that whoever among you becomes a child

will know the Kingdom and become greater than John.”

COMMENTARY

John the Baptist

1. John the Baptist is unquestionably an historical figure, one well documented elsewhere than in the New Testament; however, the authors of the Gospels, being highly skilled in hermeneutics, succeeded in explaining in parallel both the manifest life of the Baptist and the hidden aspect of that life, drawing on deep features of his psychic significance.

Thus, we find in the Gospel two different and complementary approaches to the figure of the Baptist, both of which should be taken into account if one is to gain a rounded view of the Forerunner according to the Gospel.

What a new, unconditioned, reading offers in regard to John the Baptist is the prototype of the universal psychic man, the archetype of the common man, one whose integrity of consciousness is rooted in two principles of which he is aware: body and soul. John is, then, a superior exemplar of the first Adam, the living soul.

According to God’s plan, which is revealed progressively throughout the Gospel account, the task of the Baptist, the very prototype of man born of woman, is, from his mental island, his inner desert, to trace the path that consciousness must follow if it is to be enabled to knock at the gates of the Kingdom.

What awaits psychic man beyond those gates, once opened, is the man born from above, the second man who differs from the first in that his consciousness has not been transferred to a hitherto unknown indwelling presence, the spirit, the life-giving spirit. Of this man who is the second to make his appearance in the ordering of the world, Jesus says in a parable that he is the last who shall be first.

The condition of the celestial man may be attained only by means of sustained inner purification, leading gradually but steadily, through the daily dying away of all erroneous aggregates and attachments, to the identification of consciousness renewed, reborn, with the eternal spiritual man, whose Gospel prototype in the Kingdom is the Son of Man, the Christ concealed within.

This is why the Good News must necessarily begin with the Baptist, as each of the Evangelists duly does. In accordance with his nature as a superior psychic man, one already close to its gates, the Baptist sets out to proclaim the Kingdom. As described in the synoptic Gospels, this is attained by means of a baptism of conversion, an immersion of the psyche to purify the contents of the soul.

Only once these waters have become clear and untroubled does it become possible to contemplate the Kingdom, shining like a treasure in their immeasurable depths; and yet, very close, within us. The text of John’s proclamation comes from Isaiah: A voice cries in the wilderness [in your dry inner solitude]: prepare a way for the Lord, make his paths straight.[875]

2. The author of the fourth Gospel refers in his Prologue to a number of basic characteristics that are needed if one is to understand the meaning of the universal psychic man represented by the Baptist. According to this source, the psychic man is not light (as every man knows when he tries to penetrate his own mind) but comes as a witness to speak for the light.[876] Thanks to the testimony provided by reason, logical thinking and, in the last resort, intuition, every man can, after persistently submerging his mind in the water of purification, acquire the faith he needs to believe in his own light. This faith cannot be created by will, it arises freely once the waters become transparent enough to enable the eyes of knowledge to perceive the inner light of the Kingdom, and to bear witness to the treasure within.

In his quality as the first man, psychic man must always advance as a forerunner, opening up the ways of the hidden Lord to consciousness, yet unaware of him. But the second man, the one who comes after him, must, once the transformation of consciousness has taken place, take precedence over him, for this is the eternal man, as Jesus puts it: Before Abraham was, I am.[877] In the first chapter of his Gospel, Saint Luke offers many details concerning the birth of both John and Jesus, not failing to note that the annunciation to Mary took place in the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy.[878] As the Church will have understood when drawing up its liturgical calendar, this measure of time means, in terms of hidden exegesis, not only half a year but the turning point of the summer solstice assigned to John the Baptist, from which point onwards the daylight begins to diminish, while with the winter solstice and the gradual return of daylight, it is said that the Sun advances to the North-and this was the Night chosen for the Night of Jesus’ Nativity. There is nothing casual about the astronomical significance of these holy days, and John’s affirmation, duly recorded in the Gospel, confirms this: He must grow greater, I must grow smaller.[879]

The Gospel is not devoid of a certain solar symbolism in some of its structuring, as is borne out by the title, Sun of Justice, applied to Christ on the liturgical feasts of Christmas and the Epiphany. This, however, is a messianic title, one that implies the previous coming-restoration and assumption-of Elijah, the Baptist’s forerunner and twin; a title drawn from Malachi, when he says: But for you… the sun of righteousness will shine out with healing in its rays.[880]

Yet the sense of the solar symbol employed by the hermeneutics of the Evangelists is not limited to astronomy but should be seen above all as an expression of religious anthropology.

In the passage from Saint John’s Gospel usually known as The Witness of John[881], the Evangelist recounts the decisive moment when John the Baptist, in his quality as the prototype of the living soul, attains the conviction of his own Being, of the absolute Being, the I AM. John is practicing baptism by water-immersion in the contents of the psyche-and discovers the eternal Christ coming after him, in the depths of himself, the unknown depths of his own consciousness; this is the treasure he does not know, just as none of those who ask him know of it within themselves, even though this treasure stands in their midst.[882]

Those who questioned him asked John if he was the Christ, if he was Elijah, or if he was “the prophet”.[883] In every one of the three cases, the Gospel text states very subtly: And he confessed, and denied not; but confessed, I am not the Christ.[884] This should be understood as meaning that the Baptist declared not being, but did not deny being, since he did not yet know the true nature of his being, he could not confess that, and yet he could deny all that he was not. Nevertheless, when he is brought to say what he thinks of himself, he firmly and unfailingly opts for the nostalgic text of Isaiah: I am a voice that cries in the wilderness.[885]

Yet on the next day (remember that day means light according to Genesis)[886] he saw Jesus coming towards him and said: Behold the lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world![887]

What the Baptist saw coming is the inner Christ, torn away from the land of the living (the eternal); they gave him a grave with the wicked, a tomb with the rich.[888] This means for the soul in search of the blessed conviction of Being, a first brief glimpse in the flight-both message and presence-of a dove descending from the hidden inner firmament, open for the first time to more than the waters of the soul.

This brings to a conclusion the first witness of John the Baptist, following baptism by water and immediately preceding baptism in the Spirit. John indeed announces that he is already prepared for the onset of the rain of the fire of knowledge; a secret, unknown inner voice, the same voice that sent him to baptize by water, revealed this mystery to him: The man on whom you see the Spirit come down and rest is the one who is going to baptize with the Holy Spirit.[889]

He who baptizes by the Holy Spirit, with tongues of fire that bear down upon psychic man, once he has been well cleansed by baptism by water, is of course Christ, the Son of Man. To be even more precise, baptism by fire comes from the Spirit, the breath of God, sent by Christ to man once purified; but between the beginning of the Pentecostal rain and the assumption of man the living soul into man the life-giving spirit, there is a transitional period of variable length, a purifying quarantine in the desert of the psyche, during which the assimilation of true knowledge must take place.

During this sometimes very lengthy period, the consciousness of psychic man must remain dumb, in silence with itself, in order to be able to perceive in its plenitude the language and the meaning of the true sound that penetrates thanks to the action of the higher fire. For the time being, it is not the whole Christ who rises to man’s consciousness but that passing breeze with nowhere to rest its head, for it is written that you cannot tell where it comes or where it is going. Yet you hear its voice that always bears the holy message of the Kingdom.

Those who receive this breath already belong to the Kingdom, they already are in the Kingdom, for they are the little ones of the Spirit in each of the three measures of fruitfulness cited by the parable; yet, as regards their consciousness on its way to the Kingdom, they still have, at home in their psyche, a voice crying out, the voice of one born of woman. They have not yet become, through the consummation of their assumption into the Son, true knowers of the Kingdom, born from above. And yet Jesus says that each of these little ones is higher than John, he being a psychic man.

3. It is important to note that Jesus and John only met, according to the testimony of the evangelists Matthew and Mark, at the moment of Jesus’ baptism. As we have already found, this event is the first occasion on which the waters of John’s psyche opened and the Chosen One became present in his consciousness.[890] John’s statement can only be understood in terms of this hidden exegesis: I did not know him myself, and yet it was to reveal him that I came baptizing with water.[891]

The fourth Gospel says nothing about Jesus being baptized in water, save that John saw the Spirit descend and hover above him (above the Chosen One of God), after which he said it is he who is going to baptize with the Holy Spirit.

The third Gospel records that Jesus received baptism, without explaining whether by water or by the Spirit; but the descent of the Holy Spirit above him and the proclamation of the beloved Son correspond, not to the process of the first baptism, but to that of the second one. The voice from heaven is speaking to Jesus: You are my son; and not to any other (John), as in the Gospel according to Saint Matthew: This is my Son, the Beloved. There can, according to Luke, be no doubt that John was not present at Jesus’ baptism, and this fits in with the fact that the evangelist has just reported that John had been imprisoned.[892]

Only Mark and Matthew report[893] Jesus’ baptism by water, one that went beyond John’s means because of the descent of the Spirit of God and the proclamation of the beloved Son, all of which pertain to the second baptism.

In Matthew’s account, the baptism by water takes place after an argument between John and Jesus; an argument that is settled when Jesus affirms: It is fitting that we should, in this way, do all that righteousness demands.[894] This righteousness (justice) probably consists in the accomplishment of the complete plan of the Good News, yet it does not coincide with the pure meaning of the hidden exegesis.[895] Perhaps all this relates to the question raised by Jesus, according to Mark and Luke; a question that remained unanswered: John’s baptism, where did it come from? Heaven or man?[896]

In Mark and Matthew’s synoptic account of the baptism, there is a natural confluence from opposite directions between the assumption from the water (of the soul) and the descent of the Spirit. Both movements correspond to a simultaneous process that accords with the explanations to be found in the hidden exegesis. Arising from the water represents the consummation of the work of purifying the soul. Only then, in the new transparency of the water made clear, does it become possible to contemplate the light from the higher region. Matthew and Mark explain this, saying: And lo, the heavens [the highest reaches of the soul] opened.

What then descends from that light in the highest region of the Spirit is none other than the rain of knowledge that comes in tongues of baptizing fire; and if the evangelists say that this rain came in the form of a dove, they are employing a metaphor to refer to the presence, settling in the soul from that moment on. Otherwise expressed, this is the light of the Son of Man, now forever present above consciousness, which remains henceforth in contemplation of it.

This must be made quite clear: when the soul receives the rain of knowledge sent to it by the Spirit, it focuses all its attention on it for the deliberate purpose of understanding the message borne by that subtle rainfall.

The constant falling of that rain, absorbed by the soul, thus impelled towards gradual integration with the Spirit, is called in the language of the Bible, the presence. This ends up becoming an imperative process within the soul, a lasting feature. Unbroken contemplation of the presence, the awakening of awareness that God is ever present in all doing or thinking, is the only instrument available to the soul for increasing the powers of the sacred, to the point of directly realizing in the end the coming of the Son of Man.

In the Rabbinical tradition, the presence was given the name shekinah and is described as being as related to the Spirit (of God) as the dove, its heir in the New Testament, is to the (Holy) Spirit.

Saint Luke expresses with great precision the action that corresponds to the Spirit and to the dove (shekinah = presence) in the angel’s prophecy to Mary (here explained in terms of the hidden exegesis as the maiden-the soul-purified): The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will cover you with its shadow.[897]

The shadow is the same as the theophanic cloud of God’s glory; it is a filter for the light which, little by little, when contemplation becomes settled, insistent, patient, perseverant and loving, becomes pervasive, so that everything that comes between the light and the soul ceases utterly. Once the shadow projected by the cloud has vanished, all that had been two (soul and spirit, darkness and light) ceases to be.

The dove brings the message of the light and makes it present; with its overspreading wings, it projects the shadow; when it stops and stays above the soul, as John saw it according to the fourth Gospel, it initiates the process of unification that corresponds to the fruits of the presence. When at last the dove rises, it leaves no trace of its feet in the air. Then, in accordance with Jesus’ wish, the duality assumed by the many is resolved into the real unity of the few. This is the fulfilment of the mystery for which Jesus gave his life. That is why everyone is recommended in the Gospel to be as simple [unified] as doves.

4. The Gospel account of John’s imprisonment belongs figuratively to the hidden exegesis which teaches the union of soul and spirit through the sacred wedding. The cessation of mental images or culmination of the cleansing of the contents of the psyche, and the consequent paralysis of the activity proper to psychic man: these are the meanings behind John’s prison.

In the Gospel account, this prison is the sign or signal for the start of Jesus’ spiritual teaching. This hidden precondition can be discerned in the synoptic Gospels. Luke shifts suddenly from John’s imprisonment to describing the baptism-one that presupposes water-of a whole people, without so much as a mention of John, after which he tells of the descent of the Spirit on Jesus.

Matthew says: Hearing that John had been arrested, he went back to Galilee.[898] It was there that Jesus saw that the time had come for him to embark on the fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy: The people that lived in darkness has seen a great light.[899] Mark, for his part, reports that John had been arrested in the same paragraph as we find Jesus saying the time is fulfilled.[900]

It is indeed very difficult not to draw a link between John’s imprisonment and the beginning of the preaching of the Gospel. On the contrary, the connection between both facts becomes quite clear when one considers what Luke subsequently records Jesus as saying: Until the time of John it was the law and the prophets; since then the kingdom of God has been preached, and by violence everyone is getting in.[901] In view of his archetypal function as the higher psychic man, John’s task is to raise the people and lead them to the gates of the Kingdom; but the explanation for his proclaiming of the Good News is that this was the work of the Spirit, inspired by the breath of Christ, for every such breath spreads the anointment that brings freedom. John’s imprisonment at the commencement of the days of the Kingdom signals his victory, the triumph of the soul, for it shows that the difficult and imperative decrease has been consummated.

Decrease, or the act of burning all the chaff or riches of the psyche, is the life task assigned to John. From that point onwards until the arrival of the first flights of the Spirit, an interregnum follows for the higher psychic man, when he can force his way through the gates of the Kingdom. This is what Matthew has to say: Since John the Baptist came, up to this present time, the kingdom of heaven has been subjected to violence, and the violent are taking it by storm.[902]

5. According to John’s account, Jesus’ first two disciples, from whom a nucleus of followers was soon to grow, came to him from the Baptist.[903] This is a process that had to take place according to the hidden order of succession. The Baptist means immersion of the soul in water and Jesus, the higher baptism of the Spirit,[904] which can be conferred only upon conclusion of the cleansing of the psyche.

A number of sharp disagreements highlight the difference in level between the disciples, such as the discussion about fasting which Jesus settled using the parable of the bridegroom.[905] When the man invested by the Spirit is like a reed shaken in the wind (the spirit) he has the bridegroom’s consolation and need not fast at the Messianic banquet. But John’s disciples-John’s sons-can busy themselves only with preparing the banqueting hall, in the absence not only of the bridegroom but of the breath sent by him.

All of this is made sufficiently clear in John’s important final witness in the fourth Gospel. Employing the mystical example of the bridegroom that Jesus also uses, the Baptist points to his earthly nature, that of a man born of woman, and hence to his psychosomatic condition. John is the very archetype of the psychic man, and the proof of this lies in the fact that he still goes on baptizing, even though he has gone up to the source, where the waters begin,[906] where the secrets of the origin of the soul may be deciphered.

If we compare this last testimonial with the first one, it becomes clear that John has undergone a transformation. He no longer appears as that psychic man, unable to say anything about himself other than Isaiah’s lament: I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness. The words of John’s last witness are conclusive. Now John is the friend of the eternal bridegroom, so close that he hears the bridegroom’s voice and his joy is complete. Now he knows for sure that the bridegroom, the eternal, must grow greater, and the bridegroom’s friend, the earthly one, must grow smaller. The solar myth reappears, to be fulfilled in its mystical higher sense. John the Baptist has gained firm acceptance of the witness that comes from heaven, the Son, and knows that anyone who believes in the Son has eternal life.[907]

To complete this process of the soul as explained by the Gospel, the only thing that remains to be accomplished is the death of the psyche, the transfer of its consciousness to the one born from above as the fruit of a male’s loins. This will be the prologue to his true assumption in the Son. The other death, that of the body, so well told by Mark, is the tribute that what is mortal must pay to death, a joyful tribute if the psyche has progressed towards accomplishing its act of transferring consciousness to the Son of Man.

Jesus speaks on a number of occasions of this tasting death when one sees the Son of Man enter his Kingdom. For the one who has died a little every day there will be no death, only cessation; death, but without its sting.

II. ELIJAH

6. Announcing the birth of the Baptist, as recounted by Saint Luke, the Angel proclaims that: With the spirit and power of Elijah he will go before him [the Lord].[908]

As is well known, this text sees in the person of John the Baptist the return of Elijah, taken up into heaven, as told in the Second Book of Kings. The prophet’s return was foretold by Malachi, and in John’s days it had become an important item of Jewish eschatology.[909] But what does it mean in the Old Testament when it says that Elijah was taken up into heaven by a whirlwind? According to the story, when Elijah had come to the Jordan accompanied by Elisha, Elijah took his cloak, rolled it up and struck the water; and the water divided to left and right, and the two of them crossed over dry-shod… A chariot of fire appeared and horses of fire, coming between the two of them: and Elijah went up to heaven in the whirlwind. After this, Elisha took Elijah’s cloak and struck the water, which again divided, so that he returned across the river as he had come.[910]

As can be seen from this account of the assumption, or better, the vanishing of Elijah in a fiery whirlwind, two elements are present, water and fire, and it is not too difficult to descry here the effects of a double baptism, John’s baptism by water and that of the Spirit, the latter, with its tongues of Pentecostal fire, being well told later by Luke the Evangelist. There can be no doubt that the ancient Jewish scribes were fully cognizant with the mysterious significance of the birth from above and once again here we find how justified Jesus was when he said to Nicodemus: Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?[911]

The waters of the Jordan that part to left and right so that Elijah and Elisha can pass are of course the waters of the soul, once again those above and beneath the firmament, according to Genesis, which, once disciplined by purification, enable consciousness to pass freely to contemplate heaven, or rather, the higher region of the light.

As for the chariot of fire and horses of fire, this is a way of representing the action of God’s power (the Spirit) which arrives like an impetuous downpour of knowledge, as though it were God’s army. Here we have the baptism of the Spirit which Elisha’s eyes were not yet open enough to contemplate, meaning, the baptismal anointment he could not receive.

Elijah had said to Elisha: If you see me while I am being taken from you, it shall be as you ask;[912] but he lost sight of Elijah-he was unable to follow him in his inner awakening-and could retain only his cloak, the lower part of Elijah’s soul, his superficial covering. Thanks to this cloak, Elisha could return across the waters and persuade those prophets who saw him do so as they awaited him on the far side that Elijah’s spirit lived on in Elisha. The spirit (rûach) but not his power (the Spirit of God), since his eyes had failed to see this.

7. Following the death of John the Baptist, of whom it had been prophesied that he would go before the Lord with the spirit and power of Elijah, the synoptic Gospels noted the arising of three strange rumors about Jesus which some were putting about.[913] It is Luke who best gives concrete form to these conjectures: Some people were saying that Jesus was John, risen from the dead, others that Elijah had reappeared, still others that one of the ancient prophets had come back to life.[914]

The disciples then repeated this gossip in their master’s presence, in the passage known as Peter’s profession of faith. Such is the extreme importance of this profession of faith that it captures all our attention while overshadowing the significance of Jesus’ first question and that of the answers given by the disciples, with the exception of Peter.

Jesus asked: Who do people say that the Son of Man is?[915] There can be no doubt but that Jesus was asking about the ultimate Being (Being as Being) and not about the names given to the Being. That was why no one answered: You are Jesus, Joseph’s son, as was said of him when he preached in the synagogue in Nazareth.[916]

Unable to penetrate the essential Being, Being in itself, that is, in the Son of Man, in the Christ, the Son of God, the Lord’s anointed, as Peter put it in his reply, the disciples attempt to explain what the Being could be. In so doing, they take three directions which, so they say, correspond to people’s opinions, i.e. the views of those who are unable to fathom the pure, absolute I AM of Jesus. The three opinions they set forth-those recorded by Luke-are, of course, not rejected by Jesus. You are: John, risen from the dead; Elijah, he who must come; an ancient prophet come back to life.[917] There is reason to wonder whether such opinions did not express a rather vague belief in metensomatosis (i.e. various successive mutations in the soma) quite widespread in Jesus’ day. What is for certain is that the disciples mention an idea in which they do not believe yet do not regard as totally absurd, that the soul of John the Baptist, who had died recently, had transmigrated, finding incarnation in the Jesus they had before their eyes. For his part, the master remained unsurprised by the talk passed on by his disciples, subsequently reported in the synoptic Gospels without it being regarded as necessary to add any comment on the matter.[918]

8. It is important to point out that all these questions and answers constitute a preparation for a key episode to take place on a high mountain, the name of which is not given, the point being that it does not matter on what mountain the Transfiguration took place, but to understand that this is the Gospel’s way of indicating that an event of high spiritual significance took place at a level of consciousness close to the glory of the Father.

This level is signified by the blinding whiteness of the protagonists’ apparel. Matthew makes this plain when describing Jesus’ transfiguration: His face shone like the sun and his clothes became as white as light. The manner in which this is expressed effectively prevents the misunderstanding that could arise in some minds that this blinding whiteness is only that of the clothes, in other word, the features of the Being, and not the Being, the I AM, Jesus himself.

According to the explanation of the evangelists, it should be understood that the eyes of the three disciples who accompanied Jesus and contemplated that rare manifestation of glory, then no doubt becoming the only source of the account, were not natural eyes, since these natural eyes saw no one but Jesus alone, when they raised them. That glorious light must have been invisible to natural eyes; nevertheless, with their inner eyes, those of knowledge, the disciples stayed awake, although heavy with sleep (without the absolutely wide-awake consciousness of the region of the spirit) and could see Moses and Elijah. What they saw, according to the account, was the glory or Light, although there can be no doubt that they knew through inner knowledge and without anyone having told them that the glory they beheld was the real Being of Moses and Elijah.

Thus, of the three personages whom the people supposed Jesus to be, as mentioned by the disciples in the passage containing Peter’s profession of faith, two were in effect present, judging by that narrative of the Transfiguration, and were party to Jesus’ glory: Moses, for it was indeed him, the ancient prophet mentioned, and Elijah, who had in fact returned, as Jesus was subsequently to confirm, without being recognized.

There is no need to remark the absence of John the Baptist, since what manifested on that high mountain as the spirit and the power (the glory) of Elijah, was, without there being any difference, the spirit and power of John the Baptist. This “being the same” is what the Angel of the Lord announced when the Baptist was to be born, for these were not two glories but a single one which, in the course of the centuries, had manifested twice in men’s eyes: first, in the person of the prophet Elijah and later, in Jesus’ day, in the person of John the Baptist.

According to Luke, the only evangelist to provide this information, Moses and Elijah appeared in glory (with Jesus) and they were speaking of his passing which he was to accomplish in Jerusalem.[919] The oneness of the glory of Jesus, Moses and Elijah (John the Baptist) was to appear so absolute, so undifferentiated, that Peter suggested making three separate tents or glories to house each of the three male figures. But these words he uttered, according to the account, without knowing what he said,[920] for the glory of the Son of Man never varies.

The Son of Man is always one, because he is total, universal [in time, in space]. That is why Jesus says in the fourth Gospel, your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day;[921]he saw it and was glad. Likewise, Isaiah saw his glory [the glory of the Son of Man] and spoke of him.[922] This is also explained by the Lord’s promise to Moses that he would raise from among each of his brothers (the sons of God?) a prophet like him, that is, one who would arouse in each the glory of the Son of Man through his resurrection from the dead.[923]

Malachi said: Know that I am going to send Elijah the prophet before my day comes.[924] The day of the Lord (of YHVH) is, according to the hidden exegesis, the day on which the Son of Man is raised, meaning, reborn, resuscitated in consciousness; and that signifies resurrection from the dead.[925]

This, Jesus confirms when he says that those who believe in he who sent him pass from death to life, for before that they were dead, living dead.

The scene of the Transfiguration is an act that illustrates the coming of the Kingdom that can be attained by those who attain realization before dying.[926]

It was the need to work on oneself inwardly in order to produce this anticipated resurrection that caused the disciples to raise the question, following what had taken place on the high mountain: Why do the scribes say then that Elijah has to come first?[927] Or else, which comes down to the same thing, does not the assumption of Elijah have to take place before the resurrection of the Son of Man? Jesus’ answer is firm and, without question, very much sub rosa: True, Elijah is to come to see that everything is once more as it should be;[928]however, I tell you that Elijah has come already, and they did not recognize him.[929]

9. The foretold restoration of Elijah and the assumption of John (one and the same thing) were accomplished in the deep secrecy of the soul and consisted in being a glory that shared in the glory of the Son of Man, as described in the Transfiguration.

This assumption can take place only after the culmination of the cycle of baptism in the Spirit. However it may be expressed, assumption is the consummation of a sacred wedding in which the soul, in the fulness of its bliss,[930] bursts the barriers of the psyche, breaking out from its circumscribed firmament, whereupon the grain, the spirit, free of chaff, yields the fruit of freedom,[931] one sole home, one sole glory, in the Son and in the Father, both being one and the same.[932]

As for the eyes of John the Baptist (Elijah) which our logion reprieves and saves from destruction, this is surely because these are eyes that, from the visible world, open onto the invisible and bear witness to the light. That is the task assigned to them. Thanks to this witness, man the living soul intuits the light that shines forth from the life-giving spirit; this, it sees coming as the Lamb that takes away the sins of the world, after which it succeeds in growing smaller and becoming one with the Son of Man, in the same single, indivisible glory, without setting up any separate tent.

Who could distinguish two sunrays, once united? As the Essenes of Qumran put it, my eyes have contemplated in the eternal Being some of his marvellous mysteries.[933]

875 Matt. 3:3; Mark 1:2; Luke 3:4; John 1:23; Isai 40:3

876 John 1:7-8

877 John 8:58

878 Luke 1:26

879 John 3:30

880 Mal. 3:20. Justice (righteousness) here means triumphal (victorious) restoration.

881 John 1:19-34

882 John 1:26-27

883 Moses is the archetypal prophet. To him, YHVH said: “Your God will raise up for you a prophet like myself, from among yourselves, from your own brothers; to him you must listen. “ (Deut. 18:15). The Jews awaited the Messiah as a new Moses. Nevertheless, the promise made to Moses and later to David gave notice of an inner fruit, the one born from above, the Son of Man.

884 John 1:20 (text taken here from KJV, which corresponds more closely to Pla’s original citation).

885 John 1:23; Isai. 40:3

886 Gen. 1:5. The Evangelists often permit themselves the license of calling the light of knowledge Day, a metaphor authorized by the original scribe of Genesis. In this case the reply that follows is to be understood as being the outcome of a perception, an inner light. This it indeed is, for the Baptist’s exclamation consecrates the tremendous instant when the psychic consciousness perceives that its true Being, its I AM, is the Son of Man, the eternal Christ, although individualized as a drop of light.

887 John 1:29

888 Isai. 53:8-9. In commentaries on other logia, we have dealt extensively with the biblical meaning of the wicked and the rich, those men weighed down with straw in whom dwells the eternal [grain], the Son of Man, waiting like a sacrificial lamb.

889 John 1:33. This is the explanation according to the hidden, inner interpretation of the eternal Christ, whose breath sends the Spirit, the fire, to consciousness.

890 John 1:34. The Chosen One of God is the term used by many early Christians for the spirit of man, the Son of Man, created on the sixth day.

891 John 1:31. Given the close relationship between Elizabeth and Mary as evidenced by the Visitation, it cannot be accepted in its manifest sense that John did not know Jesus; but the fourth Gospel is, in this respect, following the hidden interpretation. (Luke 1:39-44)

892 Luke 3:20-22

893 Mark 1:9-11; Matt. 3:13-17

894 Matt. 3:15

895 The very fact that this was heard by other witnesses proves not only the position taken by Luke and John, but also that taken according to Saint Jerome by the so-called Gospel of the Hebrews, when Jesus says: What sins have I committed that I should go and be baptized? (Hieron, Contra Pelag. III, 2; PL 23, 597 B 59, 8A. Taken directly from Ev. Apoc. by A. de Santos Otero, BAC, Madrid, 1959, p.45).

896 Matt. 21:25

897 Luke 1:35. The power of the Most High is above Mary, the virginal soul, and at the same time, above the one to be born, for Jesus says, in fulfilment of the prophecy voiced in Isai. 61:1, The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he anointed me (Luke 4:18-19).

898 Matt. 4:12. John’s imprisonment was doubtless the awaited signal for beginning Jesus’ preaching ministry. In terms of the manifest exegesis, logic suggests that Jesus would have gone to the citadel of Machaerus to negotiate with Herod the possibility of releasing the man who had just baptized him with water.

899 Matt. 4:16; Isai. 9:2

900 Mark 1:14-15

901 Luke 16:16

902 Matt. 11:12

903 John 1:35 et seq.

904 John 4:2 states that not Jesus but his disciples baptized with water.

905 Matt. 9:14-15; Mark 2:18; Luke 5:33-35

906 John 3:23. The text speaks of Aenon, which means in the sources.

907 John 3:36

908 Luke 1:17

909 Mal. 4:5

910 2 Kings 2:1-14

911 John 3:10

912 2 Kings 2:10

913 Matt. 14:1-2; Mark 6:14-16; Luke 9:7-9

914 Luke 9:7-9. The old prophet in question then turned out to be Moses.

915 Matt. 16:13-14; Mark 8:27; Luke 9:18-19. We shall take Matthew’s wording, as it is more expressive than the text provided by Mark and Luke: Who do men say that I am?

916 Luke 4:22

917 Matthew mentions Jeremiah as such a prophet, while Mark and Luke mention no one.

918 In the Pistis Sofia, a treatise attributed to the Gnostic Valentinus, but which seems to have been written in the 3rd century, it is explained amidst Gnostic mists that John the Baptist was conceived by his mother Elizabeth through the force (spirit) of Yao the Good, with the soul of the prophet Elijah and the soma of the person called John the Baptist. (Yao is the son of Yaldabaoth—Saturn, a surname given YHVH as a representative of the intermediate or arcontic region, that is, the region of the soul; if, however, he was given the title The Good, it is because the third or highest part of the soul corresponds to him). It will be recalled that in the Bible account of the rapture of Elijah, Elisha is said to have requested a double portion of Elijah’s spirit, without obtaining it. Once again, we find confusion between the word spirit (pneuma), adopted by the Septuagint translators to render rûach and neshâmâh, which are, in effect, the two higher thirds of the psychic compound belonging to the intermediate region that we now call the soul.

Elisha was unable to obtain these two parts of Elijah’s soul and got only his cloak, the lower part of the soul, nefesh. Nevertheless, such was the power of nefesh that he was able to use it to pass over the waters and thus deceive the community’s prophets, who believed that he had been endowed with Elijah’s spirit (cfr. 2 Kings 2:15). In an attempt to make the terminology of the Valentinian account compatible with that of the Bible, we could say that, according to the word of the angel of the Lord recorded by Saint Luke, Elijah’s spirit corresponds to the soul of Elijah (rûach and neshâmâh), Yao’s strength and Elijah’s power, which corresponds to the Spirit of God, and the spirit. It is significant that, both in the Pistis Sophia and in the third Gospel, inclusion of this item implies acceptance of metensomatosis, repetition of the cycle of mutations in the soma (reincarnations) until attainment of the highest heaven.

Nevertheless, metensomatosis does not provide an adequate explanation for the main feature of John the Baptist in the New Testament, as the forerunner of the Son of Man, not only in terms of Jewish eschatology, but in that of the hidden Christian anthropology. Pistis Sophia thus perhaps alludes to something more advanced, without straying from its usual symbolic language, namely, the assumption and restoration of Elijah-John in the Son of Man. According to the Valentinian author, the mystical union of the higher region of Elohim with the intermediate region of Yaldabaoth (YHVH), meaning, the celestial world of the Bridegroom with the psychic one of the bride, is described in Ps. 85:11-12: Loyalty reaches up from earth and Righteousness leans down from heaven (cfr. Pistis Sophia. There is a translation into Spanish by J. Daniel Teran Fierro, Madrid, 1982, pp.40-50 and 125 to 127. There is also another very incomplete translation by E.G. Blanco. Ev. Apoc. Vol. III, Lib. Bergua, Madrid).

919 Luke 9:30-31. Does this imply that the glory of Moses and Elijah, shared with Jesus, in absolute unity with him, the Passion and death of the manifest Christ? (For the account of the Transfiguration, see Matt. 17:1-8; Mark 9:2-8; Luke 9:28-36)

920 Or else the evangelists put this request in Peter’s mouth so that it should be quite clear that no three separate, independent tents or beams of glory were there, but one only, in absolute unity.

921 John 8:56

922 John 12:41 (cfr. KJV wording, closer to Pla’s).

923 Deut. 18:18

924 Mal. 3:23

925 Gr. anastasis, rising, resurrection.

926 Luke 9:27

927 Matt. 17:10; Mark 9:11

928 Matt. 17:11. Restoration-seeing that everything is once more as it should be- corresponds to the Gr. Apokatastasis, returning something to its correct state or status. This is, in regard to rising or resurrection, equivalent to assumption (Gr. Analepsis); but with a stronger sense of restoring justice.

929 Matt. 17:12

930 John 12:23

931 John 12:24

932 John 14:23-30

933 Cfr. J.Steinmann: Saint Jean-Baptiste (Manuel de Discipline des Essènes de Qumran, Ed. du Seuil, Paris 1959, p. 40.

LOGION 47

Jesus said:

“A person cannot mount two horses or bend two bows,

and a servant cannot serve two masters,

or he will honor one and offend the other.

No one who drinks old wine suddenly wants to drink new wine.

New wine is not poured into old wineskins or they may break,

and old wine is not poured into a new wineskin or it may spoil.

An old patch is not sewn onto a new garment or it may tear.”[934]

COMMENTARY

What the logion means to say above all with this miscellany of Jesus’ sayings is that whoever thinks he can serve two masters-God and the world-is behaving like the one in the parable of the sower and the seed of whom it is said that the Word was sown among thistles. Such a person’s attention will always be fragmentary, intermittent, inevitably switching between the old and the new and thus revealing the natural incompatibility between both categories. As the parable says, when one wants to hearken to the voice of the Word and to the seduction of riches, the Word will inevitably end up choked and will yield no fruit.[935]

The thistles of the parable are simply those riches or attachments to the world with which men mistakenly identify, especially one type of man, the third and higher of the orphans of the fruit of whom the tale tells. The soil on which the Word was sown is not bad and true knowledge could grow there; but worldly occurrences and the desire to protect the wealth both mental and material with which the ego identifies as though they were an extension of itself are a source of distraction that prevents consciousness from stably sustaining awareness of God’s presence-the Word-and here again, for lack of sufficient watering, the seed dries up.

Perhaps the most complete expression of this thought that is so peculiar to the Gospel is to be found in that passage cited by Matthew and Luke which corresponds to some extent to our logion: No one can be the slave of two masters: he will either hate the first and love the second, or treat the first with respect and the second with scorn. You cannot be the slave both of God and of money.[936]

According to Matthew, the two masters who cannot be served at the same time correspond to the two treasures;[937] the earthly one is the treasure of injustice, unstable and ephemeral; the heavenly one, the true treasure, is the inner pearl of the man in Christ who, anointed by the breath of the Spirit, reveals the unique-and accessible-riches bestowed by justice.

Luke explains all of this in a parable that should properly be called that of the steward of injustice.[938] Because no attention has been paid to the important hidden aspect of this tale, it has not been accorded much exegetic attention down the ages. Perhaps it should now be looked into.

Unlike many parables, the master here is not a representative of the Kingdom of Heaven. Nor is he an Adam, the life-giving spirit, one of the blessed poor in spirit, but an Adam, living soul, meaning, a rich man (one rich in the psyche) far removed from that meekness or holy humility that open the way to the Kingdom of God.

The steward to that earthly personage should be seen as representing the figure of reflexive (prudent) thinking, meaning that luminous reflexion of which certain ancient authors speak. According to Genesis, it was this reflexion, represented by Eve, that drew Adam from his deep sleep,[939] a sleep like that of animal life (immersed in nefesh) and transformed him into one on a constant quest, often despite himself, for those paths of good and evil which, according to the Gospel, lead to perdition or to Life.[940] The latter, Life, is the home promised to mankind, thanks to the knowledge obtained through the true meaning of the fruit of the tree, when the right way is found and followed and it becomes possible to transform into reality what YHVH had affirmed in the Garden of Eden: See, the man has become like one of us.[941]

The parable, verses 1-4

According to the tale, the steward was accused (or accused himself) of being wasteful with the master’s property-the life of seductive riches-and was then ordered to draw up an account of his stewardship because he was steward no longer. Understanding that he must do something to find himself an eternal home, he says to himself that he cannot dig [i.e. delve into the knowledge of God] nor can he ask for help[942] [practice prayer] for he would be too ashamed.

Verses 5-8

The steward decided to pardon his master’s debtors[943] to the greatest extent possible, and this decision was deemed an act of prudence[944] on the part of the steward of injustice.[945] This praise was deserved, for prudence is a cardinal virtue, one that consists of discerning between good and evil in order to follow the one and flee the other. As the master said, prudence is a quality of the children of this world. That said, the children of the light, namely the children of he who said I am the light of the world[946]need not practice the virtue of prudence, for in the Kingdom of Life where they have their dwelling no one any longer needs to know the fruit of any tree in Eden to find eternal life.[947]

Verses 9-10

Jesus comments on the tale and provides the practical teaching to be drawn from the parable. He says: Make friends [act prudently] using the riches of injustice, so that when these riches fail you [in the world of light] you will be received in everlasting habitations. Be not unjust, be trustworthy in small things [in this world] for this is a sign that you are faithful and just in great matters [in heaven].

Verses 11-12

If you could not be trusted in dealing with the riches of injustice [earthly treasures] who will entrust you with true riches? [celestial treasures] And if you could not be trusted with what is not yours [riches accumulated through their power of seduction and falsely incorporated into the self] who will give you what is your very own? [the true riches that lie hidden in the treasure of the light, which dwells within you, for that is what you are].

The man who can be trusted in little things, in this fleeting world, is in truth not serving two masters, he rides only one horse and bends only one bow, even while making use of the only thing available to the man rich in injustice, the psychic child of Adam; but if he acts with prudence, this rich man will see the gradual dissolution of those riches of injustice with which attachment and ignorance caused him to array himself. Thus, he will attain pure nakedness in spirit, the quality of the poor child of man. Freed then from choking thistles, he will live aware of the constant presence in his consciousness of the sole true treasure, that which leads one to dwell in an eternal home. Hence the psalmist’s general proclamation, when his mouth utters wisdom without making distinctions: Hear this, all nations, pay attention all who live on earth, sons of Adam [the rich], ordinary people [the poor], rich and poor alike![948]

Wisdom is when the rich man forgives debts in accordance with the Lord’s prayer, without paying any attention to the poverty that befalls him. Such is the true form of prayer and of asking, for whoever seeks the eternal home will find it, and whoever seeks poverty in spirit, with generosity, it is as though he asked it of the Holy Spirit that is within us, for the Spirit is the true treasure which our Father in Heaven never denies anyone.[949]

934 The synoptic citations of this logion are to be found in the canonical gospels, sometimes with variants. (Matt. 6:24, 9:16-17; Mark 2:21-22; Luke 5:36-39, 16:13)

935 Matt.13:22; Mark 4:18; Luke 8:14.

936 Matt. 6:24, Luke 16:13. The Spanish text here speaks of riches (riquezas), cfr. Nacar Colunga. BAC, Madrid. The Jerusalem Bible and others translate this by Money or money with a lower-case m (Gr. and Lat. mammona, from the god or terrestrial demon of riches, Mammon). That said, riches should not be understood in the Gospel as representing only material or economic goods; it includes all those contents, whether material or pertaining to the psyche, to which the seduced consciousness becomes so fast and so indiscriminately attached as to identify totally with them. A man who has thus identified with riches will ideally succeed in creating for himself outer wrappings that are nothing but distinguishing features of Being-a psychological ego for the world’s purposes-and these are then mistakenly interpreted as being the essence, Being itself, i.e. the pure, uncontaminated spirit.

937 Matt. 6:19-22

938 This parable is usually known as that of the dishonest (or unjust) steward (Luke 16:1-13).

939 Gen 2:21

940 Matt. 6:13-14

941 Gen. 3:22

942 Gr. epatein. This interpretation seems better suited to the meaning of the tale than to beg, as in the Jerusalem Bible.

943 This decision on the steward’s part seems to accord with the prayer recommended by Jesus: for we ourselves forgive each one who is in debt to us. (Luke 11:4).

944 Gr. phronimos. Given the context, the term prudence is far more appropriate than the secondary and derogatory term astuteness.

945 Of injustice (Gr. tes adikias). The Jerusalem Bible and others use the expression “the dishonest steward”, but we do not regard it as appropriate here to turn the genitive case into an adjective. Injustice is to be found neither in the steward nor in the riches themselves but in the very nature of the world to which those riches belong. The steward is not dishonest. Rather, as we shall see, he makes prudent use of the wealth of injustice, in other words, of this world. (Luke 16:8)

946 John 8:12

947 Gen. 3:22

948 Ps. 49:2-3

949 Luke 11:13

LOGION 48

Jesus said:

“If two make peace with each other in one house,

they will say to the mountain, ‘Move from here!’ and it will move.”[950]

COMMENTARY

The two inhabitants of one household whose good relations give rise to such a remarkable effect are the psychic man and the pneumatic man who dwell together in every human being.

The logion goes to the heart of the religious anthropology contained in the Christian message, how man’s consciousness, grounded only in the many movements of the psyche, must rid itself of its habit of living with its back to its very essence and set out to discover in itself and by itself the higher, eternal, perfect consciousness of man in Christ.

This is, in one way or another, what the sayings of Jesus recorded in the Gospel of Thomas on which we are commenting are really all about. Likewise, this is almost invariably the common basis of most of the pericopes, parables and actions narrated in the canonical Gospels, especially when viewed in terms of their hidden aspect.

Regardless of the angle from which one approaches the Gospels, what the New Testament writers are pointing out in different ways is that the psychic man whom the mind imagines it knows, and which we call the soul, is not the essential man but a self-representation or image which this essential man reproduces in his consciousness. In this sense, the soul is a coming-together, a sum or succession of data of a psychic (or psychosomatic) nature that are secretly contemplated by our selves.

It goes without saying that these our selves which are, in the language of the New Testament, expressed in the term the Son of Man,[951] can be contemplated by no one, for it is always he himself who is doing the contemplating, and in any act of contemplation, who could contemplate the contemplator? This explains how consciousness, which is always made up of psychic contents, remains unaware of the Son of Man, its true Being, and consequently lives in utter ignorance of his life-giving, immortal breath, the breath of wisdom.

Thus man, imprisoned by the narrow horizon imposed by the contents of his consciousness, believes himself to be no more than a soul, a desert, an island doomed to suffer and to die. Still, this does not prevent a certain vague awareness from lingering in that consciousness, like a perfume that never completely vanishes: intuition of the true Being, the I AM. Tirelessly, Jesus strives to awaken in all who approach to hear him the presence of that essential man, wrongly relegated to the outer edge of our lives.

Thanks to the ineradicable persistence of that perfume of Being, consciousness never completely forgets that there is in its depths a contemplator who is its true Being. That is why we find-and are never surprised by them-so many expressions that implicitly point to the duality of the soul, beset by all its manifold states, and the Son of Man who contemplates these transient states: and I will say to my soul: My soul, you have plenty of things;[952] You must love the Lord your God […] with all your soul;[953] My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord;[954] or, as explicitly stated in an agraphon handed down by Clement of Alexandria, Save yourself and your soul;[955] or in Jesus’ beautiful exclamation, so pregnant with knowledge: My soul is sorrowful to the point of death.[956]

It must be understood that it is not the soul, as ego or personal entity, that says I will say to my soul, My soul proclaims, or that warns With all your soul, save your soul.

As is well known, the soul, consciousness, possesses a protean reflexive quality that enables it successively and deliberately to make lightning switches from being its own actor to playing spectator to itself, and back again. The soul may sometimes perform as every man’s one exclusive actor and at other times as a critic interested in his own actions. This does not, however, invalidate the obvious fact that consciousness is dominated by the firm conviction-one we could describe as instinctive and deep-seated-a conviction reflected by language, that the soul is an actor who reacts with more or less obedience and discipline to higher commands coming from another inhabitant of the same house, sometimes called the ego, sometimes the will or the self.

The fact is that the Son of Man-the name given by Jesus to this higher fellow-householder of whom we are now speaking-never enters into the psyche’s battlefields as an actor. When this figure confers bliss and the breath of wisdom, this is not purely the outcome of his action but a fact, an occurrence that invariably takes place when the soul becomes aware of his witnessing presence.

The logion shows up the fact that the soul-psychic consciousness-lives with its back turned to the constant presence in its own house of this exceptional eyewitness. The soul’s daily life boils down to ignoring the presence of the eternal beholder, and this results in the splitting of man as a unified being into a psychic-spiritual duality. Hence, fear, ignorance and loneliness. Jesus warns insistently of the negative outcome of this dichotomy[957]: …If a household is divided against itself, that household can never stand. And: A man’s enemies will be those of his own household.[958]

The general intent of the Gospel is to proclaim the means whereby these two separated householders or principles, the pneumatic captive and the oppressed psyche-oppressed because of his own blindness-can attain the union that will signify redemption for both. Jesus first sets this out when he reads from a text of Isaiah in the synagogue at Nazareth. Thus, he reveals the two facets of the action he intends:

To proclaim liberty to captives (pneumatic men, the poor to whom the good news is announced).

To set the downtrodden free (meaning psychic men, once they have recovered their sight, for they are blind).[959]

Far later, in the momentous words in Saint John’s Gospel said to have been pronounced by Jesus immediately before his Passion, he again insists, in his entreaties to the Father in prayer, on the dual nature of the redemption that he brings. He says: I pray not only for these [for the pneumatic men consecrated[960] in the truth of the Word] but for those also [the psychic men] who through their words [the Word that dwells within them] will believe in me. May they all be one.[961]

This all comes down to realizing unity, the unification of the two separate dwellers under the same roof. Such is the task that Jesus’ Gospel sets itself from the very outset when it proclaims baptism.

With the culmination of the long and complex process of baptism, following the two baptisms by water and the Spirit, the assumption takes place in the Son of Man of all those contents of the psyche which their worth for justice has enabled to survive the hard test of refinement like silver in the fire of the Spirit.[962]

The baptism preached first by John and, in its totality, by Jesus, is the science of religion revealed for the benefit of the Christian community, a complete science of religious askesis, the methodological development of which has barely been studied or practiced in the Christian sphere, since it is necessary to admit that, going beyond its manifest expression as the traditional bath performed in order to receive grace, a lengthy immersion in the contents of the soul is necessary for purification to take place. This immersion calls for a method to be followed; it calls for compliance with standards like those of a science, even though grace comes, not through science, but as the Spirit wills it.

The fundamental of immersion is none other than conversion-metanoia-when the soul, whose primary, undisciplined tendency is always to look outside of itself, turns in on itself in order, first to acknowledge and contemplate its own contents; following which, conversion takes place of its own accord, without the interference of any qualifying action, whether of condemnation or praise. This makes for a preliminary cleansing, an essential precondition for undertaking a religious askesis.

Contemplation of the contents of the psyche leads without question to a better understanding of what motivates the soul. It is an action that has effects parallel to what the apostle St. James called the confession of sins[963], even though its accomplishment must in this case be purely inward. In the literature of the mystics, who discover many things through the apperceptive power of love alone, despite their ignorance of religious science, this process that arises in conversion is known as the dark night of the soul.

Purification calls for a quarantine of sustained askesis, although no set period of time is specified. This simply means however long it takes for the purification of the soul to attain a certain degree. In the Gospel texts, the period in question is symbolized by the forty days in the wilderness. Throughout this passage through drought and aridity, one is continually beset by those temptations of which both the Gospel and the lives of the saints tell.

These temptations should not come as a surprise. As we now know all too well, the soul is, among other things, a mnemonic storehouse of lived experiences and when one peers into it, its first reaction is to disclose all its frustrations and residual desires, which in any case constitute a large part of what it in fact is.

The cleansing of the soul, when performed in accordance with the science that pertains to it, consists of the revelation and consequent acknowledgment of temptations. Only after this process can the clean waters of the mind freely receive the descending influence sent by the Spirit. The purifying properties of the introspective action of baptism by water (= immersion in the contents of the soul) are quite evident. John put it in these words: Prepare a way for the Lord, make his paths straight;[964] and this is expressed even more clearly in Isaiah’s direct text: Prepare in the wilderness [in the soul] a way for YHVH.[965]

Contemplation of the contents of the psyche calls for deep humility, if it is to be effective. This means renunciation, annihilation of the ego, never identifying with the temptations, or apparitions of the psyche. This absolute humility calls for energetic practice until such apparitions are no longer ever perceived by consciousness to be part of oneself, becoming mere external objects. Humility consists in this, being nothing, hence the saying: Zeal for your house devours me.[966] All these objective appearances, those on which one does not act, merely performing the objective action of seeing them, remain thereafter in their condition as dead matter, not grain for storage but chaff which the perfect pitchfork of objectification first separates then winnows, subsequently to be burnt and so never to return. To the extent that this can be verified, such burnt chaff is a sterile aggregate that had become attached to the soul, until renounced. The true way, the path of baptism, consists of renunciation, meaning, as Jesus asks, renouncing oneself.[967]

The way is hard and narrow and calls for perseverance. It can therefore be trodden only by those who love intensely freedom, truth or the path itself. Continuous contemplation of whatever mental content arises will straighten the inner way and clear it of obstacles. Until one day you notice that, without observing it, you have begun to perceive, or be revealed, the ineffable intuition of Being.

There is no way of foreseeing the intuition of Being, but it will come only when the heart is pure enough, as in Saint Matthew’s beatitudes.[968] Then you will understand how right the Gospel was when it proclaimed: The kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent, and believe the good news.[969] For those who now perceive this perfume of Being, it is indeed easy to believe, and once you believe, you learn that the Kingdom is close, it is within one, although for those who do not know and so do not believe, it may seem infinitely far.

Saint Luke speaks of what then often arises: A time will come when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man and will not see it; [970] but there will be no point in trying to run after it, for it cannot be seen. You only know that it is there, very close, that which you cannot see, nor can it be seen, for it is what-one-is, what- is. Inseparable from the probing consciousness, it is the seeker’s very essence. This is the real eternal Being, that which is named as the absolute, inseparable ground of one’s self when the soul says I AM.

It has all simply been a matter of turning inward on oneself and on the intuition of Being, something so alive, so fleeting: as the lightning from one part of heaven lights up the other.[971] Yet thenceforth the presence remains-as indeed it has always been there-that of the dweller in the house who, as one now discovers, is not the “other” householder, the one who lives above, but the one and only true householder: the mountain that was far off and is now near, very near.

Matthew, too, says this, but one must know how to read the words: And then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven.[972] The sign is the intuition of his presence, which opens the gates to faith, and heaven is the clear, clean depth of the waters of the soul. He then adds: So with you when you see all these things: know that he is near, at the very gates.[973]

950 Logion 106 expresses a thought similar to that in this logion, but in the perspective of the absolute unification of the two spheres of consciousness which naturally coexist in every man.

951 In the Old Testament and in apocrypha like the Ethiopian Enoch, the expression son of Man has a meaning parallel to that of the Son of Man in the Gospels. This sameness is not usually recognized when Christ is considered in terms of his manifest aspect, but becomes clear when studying his hidden aspect. Examples include David’s Lord and the visible glory of the prophets—Before Abraham was, I am—for the Son of Man is the higher immortal man, the Spirit, the essence. This term is a circumlocution for the Self, that-which-is.

952 Luke 12:19

953 Matt. 22:37

954 Luke 1:46

955 Clem. Alex, Excerpts of Theodotus 2, p. 2638. Agrapha 21 (A. de Santos Otero, Los Ev. apocrif, BAC, 1956, Madrid, p. 123).

956 Mark 14:34

957 Mark 3:25; Matt. 12:25

958 Matt. 10:36

959 Luke 4:18; Isai: 61:1

960 Consecrated means set aside for God, sanctified.

961 John 17:21-22. Through their words means through the Spirit of Truth that dwells in them, in their pneumatic principle. Be one means here to make ourselves one, to be unified. With regard to unification, see GT logia 4,11, 22, 23, 30, 61, 75 and 106, inter alia.

962 Zech. 13:9

963 Jam. 5:16

964 Luke 3:4; Matt. 3:3

965 Isai. 40:3

966 John 2:17; Ps. 69:9

967 Matt. 16:24-25

968 Matt. 5:8

969 Mark 1:15

970 Luke 17:22

971 Luke 17:24

972 Matt. 24:30

973 Matt. 24:33

LOGION 49

Jesus said:

“Blessed are the solitaries[974] and the chosen,

for you will find the Kingdom;

as you are from it, to it you will return.”

COMMENTARY

The logion identifies as blessed and chosen those who have succeeded in being one,[975] the two dwellers in the same house, now unified in a single consciousness, mental and spiritual.

The chosen ones are the stone, the precious cornerstone laid according to God’s plan as the foundation of the new holy city. This, the prophet Isaiah prophesied, proclaiming that the Lord will make integrity the measure, justice the plumb-line; meaning the exact proportions of the just man, the believer who shall not stumble, being firmly settled in the faith.[976]

It was at a decisive juncture in the testing of his disciple Simon’s faith, and thus in the birth of a chosen one, that Jesus reminded us of the importance of this stone that must be supported by a compact, steadfast faith. It is from the solitude, from the wilderness of his soul, with absolute faith, with calm patience, that the chosen one must contemplate the moment when the eternal hidden dweller in his own house manifests at last the first sign of his presence. This presence which enables him to sense that-which-is, he-who-is, is none other than the parousia-or better, the first light of the coming of the Son of Man, that coming described by the Evangelists amidst arid allegorical mists.

Here is a possible interpretation: if you do not believe, you can discover nothing; but if you believe that the Son of Man is the very essence of your self, you will, when your time comes, discover the first sign of his presence within you. You must then pray, long remaining in contemplation in the secrecy of your room, until that first, perhaps weak, sign of the presence grows greater and stronger in your consciousness, and the Son of Man arrives. This will be the Day of the dweller in your house. When you have united with him to the point that consciousness is one and undivided; when both the pneumatic and the psychic are one, consecrated in truth, then you will be a chosen one.

The apostle Peter, who himself bore witness to the discovery of the cornerstone, expresses it thus: …that you may be living stones [chosen ones] making a spiritual house. [977] It was indeed Simon Peter who was first to receive the sign of the presence, for this is what, in terms of the hidden exegesis, was meant by his exclamation: You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.[978] By this revelation that comes only from the Father, being reserved for those whose hearts are pure and who can receive the ardent Word in the intimacy of their room, he was chosen to be a member of the assembly of the chosen, those who know no death, for there can be no death for a consciousness united with the Son of Man, the eternal dweller within us.

The chosen one never lets his attention stray from the presence, so that it may grow and become ever stronger within him. In the dim light of his first intuition, he senses, beyond the mists that are lifting little by little, the new Way, and simultaneously it reveals itself to him as the truth.[979] Nothing frees him from the birthpangs.[980] Like a new Jonah, he must endure three days and three nights in the belly of his special fish that great distress, the days of which will be shortened for the sake of the chosen ones.[981] In the end, all must come together at the gates of the Kingdom. The indwelling presence holds the keys to those gates and gives them up, for now they belong to both. The psychic man, coming from earth, and the pneumatic one, descending from heaven, are no longer two separate knowers but, the former being purified and the latter acknowledged, they are now a single consciousness. The duality once experienced by the two householders is at an end. In the cosmos of a chosen one, heaven and earth fall in step and correspond perfectly in seamless union. That is why Jesus says to the chosen one: whatever you bind on earth shall be considered bound in heaven.[982]

The logion says that the chosen one, the unified one, will in the end return to the Kingdom whence he came; but it may fairly be asked, do this exile and this return really exist? When Isaiah looks up at the chosen one from earth, with the eyes of a psychic beholder, one born of woman who has found union with the eternal dweller within, he exclaims: Here is my chosen one, in whom my soul delights.[983] But in the Transfiguration, that took place on a high mountain, the voice that is heard from within the cloud of glory speaks, not of the soul ascended, but of the Son who is fulfilling his work: This is my Son, the Chosen One.[984] In the unity of the Chosen One, heaven and earth reveal their true oneness. In the form of an enigma, it is said that No one has gone up to heaven except the one who came down from heaven.[985]

974 Gr. Monakhos. Translator’s note: Pla’s version departs from usual practice with wording that translates as “the unified and the chosen».

975 John 17:21

976 Isai. 28:16-17

977 1 Pet. 2:5

978 Matt. 16:16

979 John 14:6

980 Matt. 24:8

981 Matt. 24:22

982 Matt. 16:19

983 Isai. 42:1

984 Luke 9:35

985 John 3:13

LOGION 50

Jesus said:

”If they say to you: ‘Where have you come from?’

say to them: ‘We have come from the light,

from the place where the light came into being by itself;

it arose, and appeared in their image.’

If they say to you: ‘Is it you?’

say: ‘We are its children and the chosen of the Living Father.’

If they ask you: ‘What is the sign of your Father in you?’

say to them: ‘It is motion and rest’.”

COMMENTARY

The fourth Gospel says that the Word was in the beginning; it was with God and it was God. It also says that the Word was the true light. And of this true light, which is the Word, it is said that it is the robe of majesty and glory worn by God.[986]

The light was not made-in the literal sense-it was uttered; being pre-existing, for God was at the beginning, and he shone (spread) in the darkness. That is why Jesus, the Son, says: I am the light of the world,[987] being identical to the robe of glory worn by the Father and the light of the Father, one with Him.

When, in the Gospel, the Son identifies with light, he is referring to the true light, self-arisen and uttered, and not to the light of a created sun, the splendor of which was subsequently called light, because in this world it provides an image of the true light.

The true light which Jesus justly claims, is the Son, the Word, and constitutes the Kingdom of the Father, the kingdom of the light, in which hunger and thirsting after bliss, life and wisdom can all be satisfied, as the psalm so poetically puts it: You give them drink from your river of pleasure; yes, with you is the fountain of life, by your light we see the light.[988]

The logion confirms that pneumatic man is born of the light that is born of itself. He is, then, light that recognizes itself in the light. So it is that pneumatic men, although they are light, are not the light, but children of the light.[989] This is the apostle’s meaning when he says You are all sons of the light.[990]

The filiation of the light that comes to pneumatic man consists of three lineages of the same order as those through which the true light of the Kingdom of the Father becomes a common and inseparable essence in the Son: it is the eternal torrent of bliss, the inexhaustible fountain of life, and contemplation of the wisdom of the light-thanks to the light-that make this contemplation possible. But, being light that recognizes itself in the light, pneumatic man is the faithful image of the Son, a drop or spark of the true light, which is the Son.

Nevertheless, what man’s consciousness knows of itself is not the man who comes from the light, but terrestrial man-the psychic Adam-revealed as the image and shadow of his celestial counterpart, yet appointed and predestined to reproduce the image of the Son.[991] There are in fact two images: one is the image of the Son, the light contemplating the light, and the other, which is revealed on earth as the shadow and image of the light celestial. It was to these two images that the apostle referred when, in another context, he said: and we, who have been modelled on the earthly man, will be modelled on the heavenly man.[992]

Certainly, man’s complete reality, in his capacity as the accomplishment of God’s plan, is that of the chosen one, called thus-as we have already said-because in him are united, made one, the two dwellers in the same house: the image of the Son, coming from the light, and what remains, refined like silver, of man’s psychic-hylic image or shadow, whereby the light is revealed in the visible terrestrial world. And such are the chosen ones of the living Father.

As for the sign of the Father, of which the logion says it is in you, it says this because it complements Jesus’ promise: If anyone loves me he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we shall come to him and make our home with him.[993] Once the Father has made his home in the chosen one, there dwells in him the dual sign of the Father: he is motion, for such is the eternal Life that comes from the Father; a Life unceasing which, like a torrent, sustains the world created and enlivened by Him; and it is rest, for the Father remains in himself, immobile and immutable. Through the movement which He is, it is possible to encounter him in the sabbatical rest which was from the beginning reserved for God’s chosen people.[994]

Motion and rest are a single sign in the Father, one and the same; and this is what is meant when Jesus says: Come to me and you will find rest for your souls.[995]

986 Ps. 104:1-2

987 John 8:12

988 Ps. 36:9-10

989 Luke 16:8

990 1Thes. 5:5

991 Col. 1:15

992 1 Cor. 15:49

993 John 14:23

994 Heb. 4:9

995 Matt. 11:28-29

LOGION 51

His disciples said to him:

«When will the repose of the dead come about,

and when will the new world come?»

He said to them:

”What you look for has come

but you do not know it.”

COMMENTARY

The dead are, in the language of the Gospel, those children of the light who, although immortal, have not yet attained the requisite degree of perfection: to be one, to become one with the psychic contents of the dweller in the same house, the soul. Those who live in this disunified state-that of almost all humanity-are described by Jesus as resembling whited sepulchers; meaning that they may look alive when seen from outside, but they are dead within.[996] In speaking these words, Jesus is thinking of the Son of Man, the dweller from above, who is the only one to have true life, but who remains a captive, his sole mode of expression being secretly to instill life in his mortal tenant.

The children of the light are the just, the lost sheep, and the will of the Father, expressed to the Son when he sent him is, in Jesus’ words: that I should lose nothing of all that he has given to me, and that I should raise it up on the last day.[997] The expression the repose of the dead-of the children of the light-refers to the open period of uncertain duration that begins with the first sign or intuition in the soul that there is a son of light living-ignored, unknown, as though dead-upstairs, in the uppermost, never-entered story of the house. This is when a man’s consciousness first awakens to the presence or parousia of the son of light and to the foreknowledge that it will be possible for him to come into, even burst into the open, on the last day of that great religious process which the Gospel calls the resurrection of the dead.

Great care must be taken in interpreting what things are called in the New Testament, since death and resurrection are mentioned with a double meaning that cannot always be determined incontrovertibly. Thus, there are two classes of the dead in the Gospel, the manifest dead, who go to judgment or the weighing of souls and await the resurrection to rise again to life;[998] and those whom we must call the living dead, who live in the world but are not and never were of the world; it is these who will enter the Kingdom, once they have attained unity with the psychic sons of Adam dwelling in the same house, thus becoming transformed into chosen ones.

The term resurrection has a correspondingly double meaning in the Gospel. One was well known among Jewish people in Jesus’ day. Then there is what Jesus referred to as the resurrection of the dead, which concerns only the living dead.

Jesus had in mind the two classes of the dead when speaking to the disciple who asked if he could first bury his father before following him. In his reply, the rabbi uses the double meaning of the word dead, and this sounds very hard in the compound logion given by the evangelists, if it is only taken to refer to the manifest dead. At the same time, here is an object lesson, differentiating the two types of the dead referred to in the Gospel: Leave the [living] dead to bury their [manifest] dead.[999]

The living dead are none other than the children of the light, waiting in captivity until the soul, man’s psychic consciousness, becomes aware that its essence comes from the breath of the Word. The promise to this order of the dead is that from death they will pass to life-to the clarity of man’s consciousness- without having to undergo judgment.[1000] Of these Jesus says that some will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming with his Kingdom.[1001]

To see the Son of Man coming means that man’s consciousness has already attained such purity, such translucency, that the son of the light, the Son of Man, manifests in them in complete union, without any duality of consciousness. Such are the chosen ones. Of them we can say, if we look on them from the soul, if we look on them with a newly enriched consciousness, that they see, they discern, they know that the perfume of life arising from their innermost being comes to them from the Son of Man in them; for he is them. Of these, it is said: I tell you most solemnly, whoever keeps my word will never see death.[1002]

Jesus confided, not without some impatience, that the living dead-here, the psychic consciousness in which the children of the light lie like living dead-would hear the voice of the Son of Man, and that is why he insisted that the hour is here already for every consciousness to hear the voice of the Son (the Word) sown within; for the Word is the true Being, the essence, the Son of Man, the heavenly member of the household. Jesus then declares, in a statement of the greatest importance, that the Father has appointed the Son, who is life itself, supreme judge, because he is [not only the Son but] the Son of Man.[1003]

Making him supreme judge comes down to the same thing, here, as empowering him to resurrect, bringing from death to life by a discriminative judgment all that which, in the two householders, has attained the condition of being one, thus becoming worthy of salvation.[1004] Jesus says, furthermore, that all those who are in their graves shall hear his voice.[1005] When he says all, this is to be understood as including not only the children of the light, the captives whose liberation he proclaimed, but the children of this world, the oppressed, whose freedom was also announced when he brought the Good News at Nazareth, offering new sight of the light to all the blind.[1006] The latter are all those enlivened psychic contents, living, yet without a life of their own, but one loaned to them by pneumatic man. Once refined like silver, in the same sepulcher as the son of the light, they may succeed in hearing the voice of the Son of man and gain a share in immortality through their new-found oneness with the chosen.

The voice is the judgment, for it decides the judgment: the refined silver is the remainder that becomes one with the chosen one in the culmination of his repose. Correspondingly, when the psychic contents that remained impure (the Gospel speaks of those who did evil) abandon their psyche’s whited sepulcher and are separated from the mind that fed them, they will arise again as dust to be blown by the winds of ruin far from the granary of immortality.[1007]

We have said that there are two classes of the dead according to the Gospel: the living dead, in whom the son of the light remains captive and the psychic components of the son of this world are oppressed; and the manifest dead, who are simply dead.

It follows that there are two classes of resurrection according to the Gospel: that known by the Jewish people, which concerns only the dead; and the resurrection from among the dead proclaimed by Jesus. The latter is referred to on other occasions as the resurrection of the virtuous, these being the living dead. [1008] It takes place in this world, since resurrection is the step-the Passover-that frees the sons of the light held captives in the world, without them leaving the world, to which they do not, in any case, belong.

Such is the great work which the Good News proposed for the Son of Man, according to the plan of the creation: that, before tasting death, the Son of Man should be visible and one, being born from above in the psyche’s consciousness.[1009] Thus Luke tells-although in the hidden mode-of Simeon the just, to whom the Holy Spirit had revealed that he would not see death until he had set his eyes on the Christ of the Lord.[1010]

There are various places in the Gospel that mention the two distinct kinds of resurrection. The discussion with the Sadducees, who did not accept the existence of the resurrection because, so they maintained, there was no written tradition about it in the Pentateuch, provide the synoptic Gospels with an opportunity to draw a distinction between the resurrection in question and what Jesus called the resurrection of the dead. This differentiation is very plain in the account given by the first Gospel in which, after a lengthy discussion about the resurrection, taken to mean what could happen to the children of this world after death, [1011] the writer ends with these words: And as for the resurrection of the dead […].[1012]

Jesus pays special attention to this resurrection of the dead which concerns only the just, that is, the children of the light and the justified remainder of every son of this world. These, he says, can no longer die, for they are the same as the angels, and being children of the resurrection, they are sons of God.[1013] Developing what he has just said, Jesus speaks of three just men: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who, being worthy, will not rise again after dying, for they were already reborn in the flesh, as corresponds to the living dead, before they died to this world. As Luke makes clear, for God, all the dead, whether manifest or living, live because he is God, not of the dead, but of the living.[1014]

Proof that the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead is specifically a teaching of Jesus is to be found when he tells his disciples that the Son of Man will rise from the dead;[1015] yet these disciples, who must have been aware of the resurrection known to the Jews, discussed among themselves what “rising from the dead” could mean.[1016]

In the episode of the raising of Lazarus, which can be understood as an account of the resurrection of one of the living dead, independently of the fact that it tells of his manifest resurrection, Jesus tells Martha: your brother will rise again. Martha then thinks that he is speaking of the resurrection of a son of this world, in the sense of the resurrection as understood in the Jewish tradition, and answers: I know that he will rise again at the resurrection on the last day. But Jesus is speaking of the resurrection of the dead, the resurrection of the just, among whom he includes Lazarus, and this can be accomplished in the flesh if the Son of Man sends the breath of his light to the consciousness of the son of this world so that both become one. That is why Jesus says: I am the resurrection and the life.

Jesus goes on to explain something about the two kinds of resurrection: one concerns those who die believing in the Son of Man; the dead who, although they die, will live. The other kind of resurrection is that of the man who believes in the Son of Man and without departing from the flesh, realizes in this life the work of unifying one’s consciousness that opens the way to rising from the dead. Of such a one it is written that he will never die.[1017]

The first of these will rise again to Life after dying, but not without having first given up their accumulated psychic contents for destruction.[1018] The second are those living dead who listen unceasingly to the voice of the Son of God. Once discovered, the presence nourishes itself, day after day, until purification is completed and they rise as those chosen from among the dead who pass to life before tasting death.[1019]

There can be no question but that, in the Gospel, Jesus mentions two different orders of resurrection, resurrection after death for those who believe firmly in the son of the light; and the resurrection of the dead which, being in itself a definitive transition of consciousness to immortality, robs death of its sting, so that it can no longer be called death. Nevertheless, both thus attain their final repose, as the psalm puts it, return to your resting place, my soul.[1020]

The difference between the two orders depends on this: that only those raised from among the dead can, in the indecisive landscape of their days, see what they hope for. This they recognize very close to them, for it is their own very self, their I am, so that they no longer remain two for they know that they are one. They behave like the prodigal son of Saint Luke’s parable who, when he had come to his senses,[1021] returned to his father, who could then say: this son of mine was dead and has come back to life; he was lost and is found.[1022]

Jesus also speaks of the resurrection in regard to those who neither await nor know the one who has come. Because they have not come to their senses, they do not enter into themselves and recognize him. Moreover, when he said: the Kingdom of God is close at hand, he left the door wide open for everyone, because the urgent message of the Good News was to proclaim liberty to captives, to set the downtrodden free.

For those who have not in their lives entered into themselves, Jesus says in a concise body of doctrine that has been little understood by manifest exegesis that, on the day they die, the Son of Man will manifest in their consciousness. What will occur on that solemn occasion is told by the evangelists in an account which, freed from its difficult allegorical language, turns out to be a judgment of resurrection.

Luke sums it up clearly[1023]: ‘When that day comes, anyone on the housetop [at his highest point, at one with the dweller above], with his possessions in the house, must not come down to collect them [he must abandon the adventitious contents of his soul], nor must anyone in the fields [beyond the limits of his soul, which he erroneously takes for himself] turn back either [he must not return to his conditioning and memories as a son of this world].’

It is useless to cling to the little life that is the life of this world, because in it there is always the pain of death. Better to let go and let oneself die confidently and in peace, for life is always one and the same, and living and dying are two forms of life. That is why it is written that: Anyone who tries to preserve his life will lose it; and anyone who loses it will keep it safe.

What must take place thereafter, in the judgment of resurrection entrusted by the Father to the Son, and by the latter to the Son of Man-to his spirit, which is in us-Jesus then explains: I tell you, the two in one bed are the dwellers in the same house, the son of light and the son of this world. One will be taken [to the Kingdom], the other left. The two women grinding corn together are the purified and impure contents that live together in the soul. The winnowing fan will separate them at that moment: one will be taken, the other left. Many then ask: Where, Lord? Where will she be left?

Where will the impure contents be left that have lived alongside the true Being, the son of the light, once he is no longer dwelling in that house? The sharp, concise reply reminds one of an old Parsee refrain: Where the body is [close to the body], there too will the vultures gather. Since the body and the psychosomatic contents left sticking to it are just so much corruption to be consumed, they will be fodder for the vultures.

996 Matt. 23:27

997 John 6:39

998 John 5:29

999 Matt. 8:22

1000 John 5:24

1001 Matt. 16:28

1002 John 8:51

1003 John 5:26-27. This important statement of identity amounts to saying that the Son, being the light, the Son of Man is also light.

1004 John 5:21. The Son gives life to whom he wishes, to those he chooses.

1005 In those whited sepulchers that look alive from outside but are dead within.

1006 Luke 4:18

1007 John 5:21-29

1008 Luke 14:14

1009 Matt.16:28

1010 Luke 2:25-26. The Christ here is in his full sense as God’s anointed.

1011 Luke 20:34-36; Matt. 22:23-30

1012 Matt. 22:31

1013 Luke 20:34-36

1014 Luke 20:37-38

1015 Mark 9:9

1016 Mark 9:10

1017 John 11:23-26

1018 John 5:29

1019 John 5:25

1020 Ps. 116:7

1021 Luke 15:17

1022 Luke 15:24

1023 Luke 17:31-36

LOGION 52

His disciples said to him:

“Twenty-four prophets have spoken in Israel

and they all spoke of you.”

He said to them:

“You have disregarded the living one among you

and have spoken of the dead.”

COMMENTARY

Here, the emphasis is on the hidden Christ. Of the Word, of the Christ, it is written that he was made flesh, he lived among us,[1024] and this truth which ecclesiastical authority justly upholds would be no absolute truth if the expression among us did not lay claim to Christ’s universal presence. Ever since the first Adam, there could be no man without Christ indwelling; sent by the Father but unknown to many, meaning hidden, despite being the essential, eternal Being, the immortal life of every one of us.

This teaching lies at the core of the entire Gospel message and it may be said that not one single passage fails to manifest the clear determination of Jesus and the evangelists to bear lasting witness to the presence of the Christ of God in the Scriptures. Thus, among Jesus’ first steps with his disciples, we know of Philip’s announcement to Nathanael: We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, the one about whom the prophets wrote,[1025] nor is it fortuitous that, after his resurrection, when his work was done, Jesus should have walked to Emmaus alongside his disciples in order to explain to them what was written about him in all the Scriptures, not without complaining about those among them who were so slow to believe the full message of the prophets.[1026] As he was to say afterwards: This is what I meant when I said, while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses, in the Prophets and in the Psalms, has to be fulfilled.[1027]

In order faithfully to accomplish the universality expressed by Jesus, ecclesiastical exegesis has since the first Christian centuries striven to discover and mark in the Bible those lines where both Testaments converge when referring to the Messiah, to the point of formulating a typological interpretation that sees certain persons and events in the Old Testament as a spiritual prefiguration of the Gospel revelation of Jesus, Son of God.

All this is well known, there is nothing new in it to be brought to light now; it should, however, be borne in mind that these biblical studies all concern the manifest aspect of Christ, for which reason they concern themselves mainly with divine or prophetic predictions of the Messiah’s coming in accounts of what took place at the time of which the Gospels tell. Consequently, the typological interpretation in ecclesiastical exegesis seems to attend only to the Messianic presence in relation to the fact that he lived among us or, as will be understood, how he manifested in the world in order to proclaim the Good News in the exceptional events, places and circumstances of which the Gospels tell according to their manifest interpretation.

This interpretation is of course true, yet it does not cover the whole truth and consequently makes for what Jesus refers to as slowness to believe; for it fails to say all that is said about him in the Scriptures. In effect, witness to Christ in the Old Testament is neither only temporal and typological, nor is it concerned only with some future accomplishment drawn from certain models which the prophets experienced in their own fashion and which were realized in Jesus Christ. There is a good deal more involved here, even if this interpretation does tell us plenty. The Old Testament’s witness is a reality told literally, not free from the allegorical figures of speech employed by those patriarchs and prophets who, in their highly spiritual consciousness, discovered the amazing fact that the Messiah had made his home in them, meaning that they in essence were the Messiah, the Christ, inasmuch as their spirit was light, son of the light; and the light, as we already know, is the Son, the cloak of God.

This is the testimonial of the Scriptures that Jesus was so concerned to show clearly to posterity; yet now, after so many centuries, it has still been very little studied by those who follow Christ. Nevertheless, the canonical Gospels are faithful witnesses. When Jesus says: your father Abraham rejoiced to think that he would see my day; he saw it and was glad,[1028] those who read this in terms of the manifest aspect interpret it as Jesus speaking of a prophetic phenomenon, Abraham seeing and being glad to see what centuries later would mean the birth of Jesus and his coming to Jerusalem; yet Jesus is speaking here of the eternal Christ, who lives in and is the true light lighting every man who comes into this world. Hence his reply: Before Abraham ever was, I Am.[1029] For Abraham saw the Savior, the Christ, the Lord’s eternal anointed. Like Simeon the just, of whom Luke tells, it was given him to see Christ the Lord before he tasted death.[1030] Abraham saw the spiritual fruit of his old age born of the Covenant, hence his gladness on his Day.[1031]

The institution of prophecy according to the promise made to Moses may be included in the same dimension of universality, despite the two-edged character of the narrative. Says YHVH: …Your God will raise up[1032] for you a prophet like myself, from among yourselves, from your own brothers.[1033] The hidden meaning of this prophecy is that God’s promise to Moses signifies that in every prophet the Christ of the Lord would be raised from the dead-and this would be the sign of a prophet-Christ having made his home among us for this purpose, even with the first man, from the beginning of the world. This is what Peter announced in his address to the people, as told in the Acts of the Apostles: In fact, all the prophets that have ever spoken, from Samuel onwards, have predicted these Days [of the Lord].[1034]

Jeremiah and Isaiah are, doubtless, to be counted among those who raised their indwelling inhabitant from the dead.[1035] Of the former, we know that he was born a chosen one, already consecrated, and that he was consequently held to be a child.[1036] He is indirectly alluded to in Saint John’s Gospel when Jesus says: While you still have the light, believe in the light and you will become sons of light.[1037]

As for Isaiah, his prophecy is evoked in the Gospel: Who could believe what we have heard, and to whom has the power of the Lord [the Son, as God’s cloak of light] been revealed?[1038] And if these words were repeated in the Gospel, it is because, so it is affirmed, the light of the Son was revealed to Isaiah; meaning that he saw his glory, and his words referred to Jesus.[1039]

Glory is, as we know, the cloak of light which the Son receives from the Father. Of this, John says in the Prologue to his Gospel that it is the glory of the one that lived among us. The evangelist affirms: We saw his glory [the presence or manifestation of he who dwells among us].[1040] It goes without saying that this is none other than the glory seen by the prophet Isaiah, for it is unique, there is no other. The prophet saw it as a sign crowning his dwelling and that is why he said: The maiden [the cleansed, virginal soul] is with child and will soon give birth to a son, whom she will call Immanuel.[1041]

The maiden’s Son is ever living in the presence of whoever resuscitates him through faith, to the point of conceiving him as the son of the promise-as light-in the joyful plenitude of his own being. This is the Christ of God, of whom Jesus says: You study the scriptures, believing that in them you have eternal life; now these same scriptures testify to me.[1042]

Whoever discovers the Christ of God living within himself will acknowledge the truth of the scriptures’ testimonial that the Christ was, from the sixth Day, the heavenly dweller in us. This, for all men, in all ages. This, David found when, according to the psalm, he received YHVH’s decree: You are my son, today I have become your father.[1043] This divine son is the fruit of the male seen by the Israelites as God’s promise, and thus giving rise to the manifest expectation of the Messiah’s coming in time. Yet, this son is no different from the one promised to Abraham and to Moses, who was proclaimed as an institution in all prophets. Invariably, this is Immanuel, God with us, namely Jesus Christ. Hence the reason why the Master proclaimed himself not only Son of David but Lord of whoever, moved by the Spirit, discovers his presence within.[1044]

Nevertheless, if one is to attain this great transformation, one must first receive, even only as briefly as lightning striking in the east and flashing far into the west,[1045] the first intuition or glimpse of the coming (the presence) of the Son of Man. This is the flame in which faith is at last ignited. Thereafter, as we already know, no apparent cause can account for the things we can see.[1046]

1024 John 1:14

1025 John 1:45

1026 Luke 24:25-27

1027 Luke 24:44

1028 John 8:56

1029 John 8:58

1030 Luke 2:26

1031 Gen. 17:17

1032 Gr. anástasei = to resuscitate, to raise. To raise from the dead.

1033 Deut. 18:15; Acts 3:22

1034 Acts 3:24

1035 John 5:46-47

1036 Jer. 1:5-7. The prophet counted himself among those children of whom it is written in Saint Matthew’s Gospel that they are the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven (Matt. 18:4)

1037 John 12:36; Jer. 13:16. In truth, Jeremiah says: Give glory to [Manifest the light of] YHVH, our God.

1038 John 12:38; Isai. 53:1

1039 John 12:41

1040 John 1:14

1041 Isai. 7:14

1042 John 5:39

1043 Ps. 2:7

1044 Matt. 22:42-44; Ps. 110:1

1045 Matt. 24:27

1046 Heb. 11:3. Or, otherwise expressed, “the visible is born of the invisible”.

LOGION 53

His disciples said to him:

“Is circumcision beneficial or not?”

He said to them:

“If it were beneficial,

their father would beget them

already circumcised from their mother.

But the true circumcision in spirit

is altogether valuable.”

COMMENTARY

According to the scriptures, there are two kinds of circumcision prescribed by God as the seal of the covenant: circumcision of the flesh (external, manifest) and of the Heart (inner, hidden). Both were described by the Law[1047] and the prophets[1048], indeed Jeremiah said of those uncircumcised at heart and of hearing, plainly their ears are uncircumcised, they cannot listen.[1049] In so doing, he provided a basis for drawing a deeper distinction between the two forms of circumcision.

All this is well known; yet the logion is very radical, for it seems to mean that, as a cultural ritual, circumcision of the flesh serves no useful purpose,[1050] only circumcision in spirit. All of this is endorsed by the apostle, who tells the Romans that the real circumcision is in the heart-something not of the letter but of the spirit,[1051] reasoning that when Abraham received the sign of circumcision as seal,[1052] he had already shown that the faith he had before his circumcision [in the flesh] justified him.[1053] Hence, Paul would say that, in truth, it is a good thing to be circumcised if you keep the Law.[1054]

What the logion calls true circumcision in spirit is without question a cleansing or purification of the contents of the soul, while the rite of circumcision of the flesh prefigures it as seal of the covenant or true union arising from faith. It is this seal that empowers one to perceive the presence (parousia) of the Son of Man and consequently enables the man circumcised in the eyes and the heart to attain the goal proclaimed by the Divine Law: justice and sanctity.

It is in this sense of faith that circumcision may be said to be a sign endowed with the same meaning as baptism in the Gospel. The cultural rite of faith is succeeded by the sacrament of faith, and in both instances this will be nothing more than a ritual if the waiting, outstretched arm of God does not arouse the righteousness or justice of faith, the gateway to sanctity.

Saint Luke does not fail to mention in his Gospel John’s and Jesus’ circumcision ceremony when the child was eight days old and, both times, this coincides with the imposition of the divinely ordained name given by the angel. [1055]

John’s Way was that of the lamp alight and shining to give testimony to the truth,[1056] while the Way of Jesus-in himself, the Way-begins when the lamp testifies to itself only through its works, being a lamp that burns without wick or fuel, in keeping with the one sent by the Father whose shape no one has seen.[1057] But both paths are one, the Way of man, on which he treads from his very first steps in the world until the final redemption, until the accomplishment of the covenant with the Father.

True circumcision is useful and beneficial for the purposes of the final covenant, just as true baptism in the spirit is useful and beneficial. Where both forms are external, they amount to mere cultural rituals, devoid of any useful or beneficial qualities. What matters, as is borne out by the hidden meaning of both rituals, is renewal, the new life that can be attained only by those who are sincere in heart and filled with faith, their minds free from any trace of bad conscience.[1058]

1047 Deut. 10:16, 30:6

1048 Ezek. 44:9

1049 Jer. 5:21, 6:10

1050 Gr. ophelei, opheleo (usefulness, assistance, help, profit, advantage, support)

1051 Rom. 2:29

1052 Gr. sfragis

1053 Rom. 4:11

1054 Rom. 2:25. Keeping the Law is to be understood here according to the clause in Deuteronomy: Circumcise your heart then (Deut. 10:16). There can be no question but that our logion is synoptic with the doctrine concerning circumcision, as explained by Paul in the Epistle to the Romans. The difficult point is to decide whether Paul knew Jesus’ saying or whether Thomas is repeating the apostle’s words. This is in any case a clarification that concerns the manifest exegesis. From the standpoint of the hidden aspect, it is not relevant.

1055 Luke 1:59-63, 2:21

1056 John 5:33-35

1057 John 5:37

1058 Heb. 10:22

LOGION 54

Jesus said:

“Blessed are the poor, for yours is the Kingdom of Heaven.”

COMMENTARY

The poor referred to in the logion[1059] are poor, not because of what they do not have but because of what they do not want to have. This affirmation is of a religious order, not a social one, and it means that only he who is destitute in the world and voluntarily forgoes earthly treasures leaves room in himself for God’s abundance.

The poor man’s condition finds fulfilment in the higher consciousness of man, that which, so the Gospel puts it[1060], dwells on the rooftop, in the region of the spirit, of the pure, naked I AM, quite distinct from the psychological construct that goes to make up what we call the soul. It is up there, on high, outside the home, free from any intention of going down to fetch things from the house, that the Son of Man dwells in his glorious poverty; for of him it is said that he has nowhere to lay his head.[1061]

Every one of the poor in spirit (every spirit that is poor because it is spirit) is clearly a son of the light, a spark from God’s hearth, never having left the kingdom of the Father, despite transient captivity in consciousness. To them Jesus promises liberation not from poverty but from captivity.[1062] This explains why, according to the logion, Jesus does not promise the poor the Kingdom of Heaven, for they are from heaven and there they remain, even when they lie sleeping. If they were not sons of heaven they could never reach there, and this is made quite clear: No one has gone up to heaven, except the one who came down from heaven.[1063] With these words, Jesus reminds the poor that they belong to the Kingdom: Yours is the Kingdom, he says, then exhorting them to manifest as light, according to the light of Christ, as in that early Christian hymn:

Wake up from your sleep,

rise from the dead,

and Christ will shine on you.[1064]

Matthew follows a sure sense of logical order when the blessings on the poor are succeeded by the Beatitude that exalts the gentle, and the pair must be examined together, for in many ways they complement one another: Happy are the gentle, they shall have the earth for their heritage.[1065] If the poor belong to heaven, the gentle or humble belong to earth, for these are the people of salvation that grow among the rich as ears of good corn grow among weeds.

Riches are the sum of all that goes to make up the psychic construct, which always manifests as inert, clinging to the dust-to the earthly treasure-from which Adam and his psychic offspring were formed. These do not realize that the form in which YHVH fashioned them was not made to house only the breath of a limited life; it was made especially for man -and consequently for the children of men-created in the image of God on the sixth Day.

The poor and the rich, the heavenly and the earthly, both dwell in every single consciousness. The poor, the essential man, made in God’s image, lives on his own rooftop, unacknowledged by many; meanwhile, his wealthy counterpart makes use of all the things in the house and regards them as his property, for he thinks he is the only resident. Both the sons of man (the poor) and the sons of Adam (the rich) are called upon together by the psalmist: Hear this, all you peoples, give ear, all inhabitants of the world, sons of Adam, sons of men, rich and poor alike.[1066]

However, those summoned by Matthew’s second Beatitude are not the rich but those sons of Adam who, after immersion in the psychic waters of the baptism of conversion, discover in their cleansed consciousness the presence (parousia) of the one who dwells above them. Once this has taken place, the son of Adam (the soul) leaves off seeing himself in terms of his possessions; lost in contemplation of the light to which a second birth has raised him, he is transformed into a gentle, humble, helpless being, attentive to the voice of the spirit that calls him to the blessing of the Messianic wedding feast, that of sharing in salvation in the Kingdom of Heaven.

The biblical connotation of humility (or gentleness) is generally that of man’s being raised from earth, from his origin and that of his mortal life, through total submission to a higher power, that of eternal life. Such are the humble in the Messianic sense, of whom examples abound in the Scriptures: Seek YHVH all you, the humble of the earth, [1067] or The humble shall have the land for their own[1068].

This meaning, which we are now studying in the two Beatitudes, that of the heavenly poor and that of the gentle being who rises above earth, is to be found in the psalm that opens the Hallel[1069], which Jesus and his disciples are thought to have sung after the Passover supper, in keeping with tradition. There, it is written, in poetical language rich in metaphor, that the defenseless [the gentle, the humble] whom he lifts from the dust-raising him from the dust of Eden from which he was fashioned-and the poor man whom he raises from the dunghill [the world in which he lies captive] are one and the same. These are the chosen, unified in the Messianic wedding and given a place with princes, meaning that they are seated on the right hand of God.

The prophet Zephaniah says the same thing in different words: In your midst [in you, in your I AM] I will leave a humble and lowly people [the chosen one, both humble and poor], and those who are left in Israel will take refuge in the name of YHVH.[1070] As already mentioned, those who are left, the remainder, means those contents of the soul that are saved in the chosen one, having been found worthy, as gold refined and tested, of feeding in the pastures of the Lord.[1071]

As for the awakening of the poor as one who is dead and has returned to life, reborn in the consciousness of the psyche, this being the seal of the Messianic union and the end of captivity, it is of this that the psalm’s closing words speak: He enthrones the barren woman in her house by making her the happy mother of sons.[1072] In the Bible the sterile woman is often to be seen as representing the soul which, once pure, virginal and humble, remains enthroned in her house, a happy mother to the heavenly son, the promised[1073] fruit of her body, anointed by God and soon to anoint the soul with the oil of gladness.[1074]

Without in any way detracting from the manifest reading, the same meaning may be adduced from the hidden aspect of the Magnificat intoned by Mary. The poor and the humble (who hunger after justice) are chosen according to the promise, and the spirit (the spirit of the whole man, the poor man, the one who dwells on the rooftop of the same house) exults in God. The gentleness of the soul, a prerequisite for her to receive the heavenly son and so to inherit the earth, is confirmed by Saint Luke: My spirit exults in God my savior, because he has looked upon his lowly handmaid.[1075]

1059 The logion and the parallel texts in the canonical Gospels: Matt. 5:3; Luke 6:20

1060 Matt. 24:17

1061 Matt. 8:20

1062 Luke 4:18; Isai. 61:1-2

1063 John 3:13

1064 Eph. 5:14

1065 Gr. Prays = gentle, humble, meek

1066 Ps. 49:2-3

1067 Zeph. 2:3. These humble beings (Heb. anavim) are those who submit to the will of God.

1068 Ps. 37:11

1069 Ps. 113:7-9

1070 Zeph. 3:12-13

1071 Isai. 14:30

1072 Ps.113:9

1073 This is the hidden meaning of those sterile mothers in the Bible who give birth to a divine son: Sara, the wife (feminine principle) of Abraham, his hitherto sterile soul, and Hannah, the wife (or soul) of Elkanah, the father of Samuel (Gen. 16:1 and 1 Sam. 1:1) whose Canticle is echoed by the evangelist Luke in Mary’s Magnificat.

1074 Ps. 45:8; Heb. 1:9

1075 Luke 1:47-48

LOGION 55

Jesus said:

“He who does not hate his father and mother

cannot be my disciple,

and he who does not hate his brothers and sisters

and bear the cross as I do

will not be worthy of me.”

COMMENTARY

By using the word “to hate”[1076] Jesus sets out to show explicitly that whatever comes from the world, be it fathers, brothers, sons, disciples, our soul and its contents, our very life, will be worthy of love only thanks to the Word sown by the Father, whereby his will shall be done, for this is the vehicle of true love, and there is no other.

What Jesus demands is the practice of love free from all attachments, free from earthly riches and treasures, for these invariably lead to the setting up of a false lord, one who conditions those who serve him, one incompatible with the true Lord, who is in this world but is decidedly not of it. It is not always easy to make an adequate distinction between these two, and the evangelists, including Thomas, do not fail to provide various sayings which, each in its way[1077], proclaim that for Jesus and for all the sons of man, the ultimate sure bond of love, the one and only source of unity, is to be found in the fruition of the Word sown in us all by the Son as the seeds of the Glory of the Father. That is why he said: I have given them the glory that you gave to me, that they may be one as we are one.[1078]

It is this unique, limitless glory, that of the Light granted to the sons of light to enjoy as beneficiaries, Light devoid of physical substance or spiritual form, utterly free from all attachment or psychic conditioning, that Jesus has in mind when he refuses to acknowledge any kinship, any mother or brothers save those who believe the Word of God and do His will.[1079]

That which is separate exists through the glory of unity, which many do not perceive, although it is in them. Whoever contemplates this indivisible glory in the difficult transparency of what is divisible, will love the latter, not as something divisible but because of the glory that he contemplates and with which he is one.

Herein lies the message Jesus most wanted to be understood; that his Gospel should empower those hearing it to raise their eyes and behold the first splendors of the glory of unity, that this they should find in themselves and in others, just as it is: a torrent of joy and of love. That is why Caiaphas, when he made his prophecy as High Priest, said that Jesus was to die, as indeed he did, to gather together in unity the scattered children of God.[1080]

The unity in question belongs to the realm of the Glory, which is said to be the cloak of Light of the Father, that cloak in turn being the Son manifesting the Father. As for the sons of light, these are without exception the pure consciousness of man, that great unknown of whom it is said: God created man in the image of himself.[1081]

Nevertheless, there can in this world be no doubt but that for psychic man, a fortiori for the psychic-hylic Adam, to attain consciousness of the Glory-of the Self, the I AM, of Man-means taking a long road, one that entails renouncing, day after day, everything that makes for separation. As for this renunciation, people will see it as self-negation, only to discover that it is rather the negation-and consequently, renunciation-of all that is not the Self, all that is not Glory.

Since such negation does not come easily but calls for very hard work, it is said that one must take it day by day, simply following on without aiming in any way to save one’s life or one’s soul. Our living is not Life, merely the life that must be negated because it has nothing to do with what we are, and the soul, or rather what we believe to be the soul, is nothing but a succession of images of one’s self, mistakenly attached to the Glory that we truly are. Hence, the saying: […] anyone who wants to save his soul will lose it; but anyone who loses his soul for my sake will find it.[1082]

Jesus had in mind the glorious unity of the sons of God, to proclaim which Good News he had to die, and when he spoke of unity, he intended that the Way of negation of all that is not really what we are, the Way of renunciation and willingness to bear one’s cross, are all to be understood in their fullest sense: For I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and you made me welcome; naked, and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, in prison and you came to see me.[1083]

1076 Gr. Misei = to hate, to detest, to abhor [Cfr. de Suarez, récuser = to reject]

1077 Matt. 10:37-38, 12:47-50; Luke 8:20-21, 14:26-27

1078 John 17:22

1079 Matt. 12:49-50; Mark 3:34-35; Luke 8:20-21

1080 John 11:52

1081 Gen. 1:27

1082 Luke 9:23-24. We have chosen to use the translation soul rather than life, following the N.T. text of the Pontifical Commission for the New Vulgate (cfr. N.T. Trilinguë, Bover-O’Callaghan, BAC, Madrid, 1977. The term “psyche” is therefore to be understood as referring to experiences both conscious and unconscious.

1083 Matt. 25:35-36

LOGION 56

Jesus said:

“Whoever has come to know the world

has discovered a corpse,

and whoever has discovered a corpse,

of him the world is not worthy.”

COMMENTARY

What the logion says is that when we deepen our knowledge of the world, we find that the world is dead, for it has no life of its own. Yet, only from the standpoint of life is it possible to contemplate death as death, and when someone finds the world to be a cadaver, that is because he has first passed from death to life; he is one revived, reborn through faith in life, and that is why it is said that the world, being a corpse, is unworthy of him.

Although there is no saying parallel to this logion in the canonical Gospels, there is no lack of references in the New Testament to the condition of those dead in the world, for herein lies the fundamental principle of Jesus’ universal doctrine proclaimed in Saint John’s Gospel: I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.[1084] The Father is said to be the source of life, and this, the Son is too, for he has made the Son the source of life.[1085] This is why the world, which did not know the Word that had life in him,[1086] together with whoever does not eat God’s bread, the bread of life that descends from heaven and gives life to the world,[1087] is called dead until the worldly being hears the voice of the Son of God.[1088] Only then, according to the Gospel, can it be said to have passed from death to life.[1089]

To enter into life from death is to fulfil the promise made to whoever believes in the Son, to whoever lifts up within himself the presence of the Son. This and only this is the narrow gate and hard road that leads to life,[1090] for it is to those who contemplate His presence that the Son, who loves them, gives life.[1091]

What the Gospel says is that only the Father and the Son are the source of life, and he, the Son, instils this in the spirit of man-the son of the light-that he may no longer walk in darkness but have the light of life.[1092]

From this it will be understood that only the Father, the Son and the spirit of man-the latter through the indwelling Spirit of God-have within them the source of eternal, inalienable life, for the very essence of life is being, and nothing else. Every other thing upon which we look is death, because the life that so many things in the world seem to have, they have on loan, it does not belong to them but is merely leased to them for a while by the one who is the source of life.

It is the spirit that gives life.[1093] As the apostle says, the last Adam has become a life-giving spirit, while the first man, Adam, became a living soul.[1094] Living is to be understood here as animated, meaning that this life is held on loan, and like all things given animation, without a life of their own, it is something dead that one finds to be a cadaver when viewed from the true life of the spirit. That is why the logion says that whoever has come to know the world has discovered a corpse, and therein lies the great revelation promised to those who know how to offer themselves to the Spirit of God as one dead returned to life.[1095]

As the Book of Revelation puts it in Old Testament language: Those who prove victorious I will feed from the tree of life set in God’s paradise.[1096]

1084 John 14:6

1085 John 5:26

1086 John 1:10, 1:4

1087 John 6:33-35

1088 John 5:25

1089 John 5:24

1090 Matt. 7:14

1091 John 5:21

1092 John 8:12

1093 John 6:63

1094 1 Cor. 15:45

1095 Col. 3:4

1096 Rev. 2:7

LOGION 57

Jesus said:

“The Kingdom of the Father is like someone with good seed.

His enemy came at night and sowed weeds among the good seed.

He did not let them pull up the weeds but said to them:

‘No, or you might go to pull up the weeds

and pull up the wheat along with them.’

On harvest day the weeds will be conspicuous

and will be pulled up and burned.”

COMMENTARY

It is important to make clear that the wheat and the weeds in this parable[1097] are not to be interpreted, although that is the facile, the usual solution, as images of the good man and the bad man respectively. Rather, they represent the good or bad feelings that have grown up and settled in a man during his lifetime.

Once again, we must remember to avoid the simplistic notion of the division of the world into good and evil when interpreting the corpus of Jesus’ parables gathered together by Saint Matthew-this being one of them-and due account must be taken of the Evangelist’s overall conclusion, which is valid for all these parables: Every scribe who becomes a disciple of the Kingdom of Heaven is like a householder who brings out from his storeroom things both new and old.[1098]

What this means is that all these tales about the Kingdom of Heaven refer to the behavior that a man may adopt, depending on whether he manifests his spiritual (new man) or psychic-hylic (old man)[1099] nature. Such behavior patterns represent the contents every man keeps in his storeroom, i.e. in himself, and these may be like the good seed or like the weeds. The former grow to become wheat to be stored in the granary, while the latter is gathered for burning.

From the very beginning of the Christian era the parable of the weeds in the field has attracted many exegetists both lay and ecclesiastical, but, despite its not in fact being hard to understand, there cannot be said to have been many clear interpretations of its pure inner meaning, the hidden one. In general, exegesis has tended to fall for the somewhat superficial theoretical dualism of good and evil, as though absolute goodness and absolute evil were something commonly to be found in the human heart.

As for the interpretation attributed to Jesus and also handed down by Saint Matthew,[1100] it must be said that, as with many clarifications of Gospel language, the explanation itself seems to take the form of yet another parable. This may be so, yet it does open other doors for a better understanding of the contents of the text.

As stated in that explanation, the sower of the good seed is the Son of Man.[1101] This in itself provides sufficient information to indicate that the field of the world in which the sowing takes place is the soul which, as is stated elsewhere in the Gospel, belongs to the world, is indeed the world, as opposed to the Son of Man, the sower, who is not of this world.[1102]

As for their origin, the components/qualities of the good seed are correctly referred to as the subjects of the Kingdom, being seed taken from the granaries of the Son of Man; this is not, however, the only seed sown in the soul, for when man’s as yet unawakened consciousness lies sleeping, the devil, who is to be understood here as man’s psychosomatic nature, comes and sows other seed in the newborn soul, that of weeds, and these, given their sterile, separative character, are described as the enemy of the unifying, multiplying the spiritual work which the Son of Man has set out to perform in it.

According to the reasoning in Saint Matthew’s Gospel, the wheat and the weeds must grow together in the soul, in the world, both being undividable in their latent state as seeds. It will be for consciousness, once it has ripened, to know the quality of the different plants that grow and multiply in the soul and, thanks to the soul’s inclinations and to what that consciousness waters, to facilitate the growth of one kind or the other. And so it will go on until the end of the world, that is, until each soul’s life comes to an end, for that is when what grew from the seeds is gathered together in the now spent soul. Once the harvest is over, the weeds are gathered and thrown in the fire, while the nourishing wheat, the fruit of the soul, is stored in the granary of the Son of Man.

When that takes place, reaping will be entrusted to the angels sent by the Son of Man. As we already know, an angel, being a satellite or drop of the Savior’s light, is the spirit of man, the pure masculine pneuma, the pneuma-pneuma. It is indeed the spirit that reaps his own soul when both spirit and soul come to the end of their sojourn in the world, for it is the spirit that has life and that gives it. He then gathers together from the dwelling he has shared with the soul, to which he had until that moment given life, all the heterogeneous contents that had grown up in it.

The weeds, which in Saint Matthew’s interpretation are described as the subjects of the evil one, consist of a purely mortal psychosomatic mixture (such as we encounter in our everyday life), and this is cast into the fire of time to be consumed by it. Being dead, separated from the spirit that gave this mixture life, nothing remains of it but a cadaver.

As for the wheat, the new grain grown in the worldly fields of the soul from the good seed sown there by the Son of Man, mixed with what the enemy had come to sow there afterwards, is gathered together in the Kingdom by the harvesting angels who receive the wheat as their wages, as they are bringing in the grain for eternal life.[1103] It is in truth thus that, well-tended, the spirit in every man grows from its original spirit. The pneuma-psyche, the seed multiplied by its contact with the world, enters the granary of the Son of Man.

Each new grain, purified during its life in the soul, in the world, and constituted as pneuma-psyche goes to its rest as a spiritualized psyche to join all God’s seeds consecrated in their final consummation. Such is the purified remainder of the soul that attains salvation, consisting of those seeds that have attained justice, meaning that they are free now of the clouds that once obscured their light and have, by adoption, become the possessors of eternal life.

As the Gospel puts it: Then the virtuous will shine like the sun in the Kingdom of their Father.[1104]

1097 The parable usually known as that of the weeds in the field is to be found only in this logion and in the considerably fuller version to be found in Saint Matthew’s Gospel (Matt. 13:24-30) which is, moreover, accompanied by an interpretation attributed to Jesus (Matt. 13:36-43). The differences in composition do not, however seem to alter the general meaning of the parable.

1098 Matt. 13:52

1099 Concerning the old man and the new according to the apostle, see Eph. 4:22-24.

1100 Matt. 13:36-43

1101 Matt. 13:37

1102 John 18:36

1103 John 4:36

1104 Matt. 13:43

LOGION 58

Jesus said:

“Blessed is the man who has suffered:

he has found life.”

COMMENTARY

The blessed in this logion are the same as those of whom Saint Matthew speaks in his third beatitude: happy those who suffer; they shall be comforted.[1105] The difference between the two texts is the prize promised to the one who overcomes suffering, in the one instance, Life,[1106] in the other, consolation. These are, however, simply two ways of explaining how to come to the gates of the Kingdom.

The offering demanded of man as a pledge for redemption is always the same: to overcome suffering through the strength of faith; and the crown to be gained is always that of Life; yet the blessing is said to come from two sides, but these converge and complement each other: the one is to give up one’s life (soul) as a means towards encountering Life, the other, to discover and to raise up within oneself the Spirit of Truth, the consoler who dwells in every man and whose inner action can take place only through renunciation and the death in the soul of everything in it that is not wholly authentic.[1107]

What God asks of every candidate for beatitude is that he renounce self and take up the cross of death,[1108] the one and only gateway to perfection that leads through suffering to Life. Scripture puts it thus: Happy the man who stands firm when trials come. He has proved himself and will win the prize of life, the crown that the Lord has promised to those who love him.[1109]

What must be understood is that although death and self-renunciation manifest separately they are one and the same thing on the religious path.

In the Christian mystery, the death of Jesus, Christ manifest, raised on the cross, is the seed sown in the Christian world for the enlightenment of all. This act of death, this giving up of the blood, this acceptance of suffering, this giving of one’s life in a sovereign gesture of limitless generosity has, down the ages, stood as an utterly exemplary sign, the emblematic keystone of the religion.

However, alongside this death of the flesh and blood, Christ’s visible death, stands the Passion. Here, it is not Jesus’ death but his life that shows us the universally valid exemplar of the dying of the soul: a process that can take place only from day to day, as the culmination of a silent, hidden motion, one of which many are unaware or do not value for what it is.

The dying of the soul is nevertheless a reality, an invisible crucifixion, one that takes place in solitude, step by lesser or greater step, consisting not only of generosity to others but of self-renunciation; for others’ being and our own are one and the same in the scales of justice: they are Being. To attain complete self-denial, the soul must be given up in small everyday deaths until all that distinguishes it from the Father is laid low.

Only through humility realized does the light of the hidden, invisible Christ arise, only thus does his coming, his presence, grow within us, becoming more and more perceptible as the density of the soul decreases. It is of this Christ that Jesus spoke to his disciples when he said to them: In a short time you will no longer see me, and then a short time later you will see me again.[1110]

Jesus was speaking here of his certain resurrection, and also of that other Christian mystery which is not rooted in the death and new life of the manifest Christ, but in the deathless, eternal Life of the hidden Christ, ready to rise again from his captivity in time, resplendent as the crown of Life, and given to whoever accepts and triumphs in the test of suffering through the faith. Such was the promise made to those who love him.

According to the Gospel, the Spirit of Truth is sent to us in a breath from Christ. We know the spirit, even when we are unaware of its being spirit, as the essence of our consciousness, of our very selves. That is why it is written: He is with you, he is in you. Through the flames of the fire of knowledge spreading from the spirit can be descried, ever unseen by the world, the light resplendent of the hidden Christ and, as Jesus said, on that day of contemplation, you will see me, because I live and you will live.[1111]

Jesus describes in a parable the first presence, the first intuition of this eternal presence, the arising in man of the hidden Christ, drawing on the image of the sadness of a mother when the time has come for her to give birth, and her joy that a new man has been born into the world.[1112] Here, Jesus is really speaking of the birth in the soul of the Son of Man, he who comes from above, he who has risen from the dead. Thus it is that Jesus speaks in parable of the eternal Christ, raised up in our consciousness.

The consolation that comes to us with the Spirit of Truth and eternal life: these are the crown of plenty promised to those blessed ones who overcome suffering through the trial of faith. The first step towards redemption, one that is often both arduous and slow, depends, never forget this, on the growth of the firm faith that Christ, the hidden Christ, is ever present in us, as was proclaimed in the Good News: The Kingdom is close at hand.

In truth, the Kingdom, and with it the Christ, is near, very near, for those who believe, although it may appear to be far, very far, for those who do not believe. All this, Jesus explains: On that day you will understand that I am in my Father, and you in me and I in you.[1113]

1105 Matt. 5:5

1106 Gr. paraclisis

1107 John 14:16-17

1108 Matt. 16:24-25

1109 Jam. 1:12

1110 John 16:16-19

1111 John 14:17-19

1112 John 16:21-22

1113 John 14:20

LOGION 59

Jesus said:

“Look to the living one as long as you live

or you may die and try to see the living one

and you will not be able to see.”

COMMENTARY

The living one is the inner Christ who lies hidden and whom Simon Peter discovered, not through flesh and blood perception but when this was revealed to him as the real being of Jesus, the I AM; whereupon he exclaimed: You are the Christ, the son of the living God.[1114] What the logion is saying is that the living Christ is to be sought while we still have life, for our life is only a little grain of his life; and life is one, although many of us live our life as though it were a promise that we should see the living one and thus know that it is through him that we have life. This is why the two angels reported by Saint Luke asked: Why look among the dead for someone who is alive?[1115] It is as though they were saying: look for him among the living, for he is the Life that is in the living.

But that looking must never seek to see the visible; it must be an alert contemplation able to reveal the invisible. We say see, but seeing, and in many cases, hearing, are the same as believing, and believing is a deeper way of looking at the invisible, looking at what does not appear, so that, thanks to the blessing of faith, all that needs be acknowledged will, being Life itself, reveal itself in the end.

Such is the mystery of the faith that Jesus called for: that we should see the Son as the presence of his breath within us, not because the spirit comes to us when we believe, but because it always was in us although we did not know it; and even now, the spirit is in every one of us, though many do not know it. And this is what we must understand and so believe even before we see, for believing and seeing are one and the same thing; yet seeing follows upon believing.

What comes through faith is not the presence of the Son of Man but rather our acknowledgment of his eternal presence, joy in the Kingdom’s glory. That is how the Kingdom is close to us, as is written. Otherwise expressed, that is how we come to be in it.

The Kingdom is immutable, for it is limitless and pervades all things with its plenitude; thus it seeks no one, thus it never departs from anyone. It is always there, very near, in the self of whoever reveals it. Likewise, the Son of God never abandons the throne and the right hand of the Father, even while his breath is ever in us.

When he who seeks to believe says Maran-atha-or Come, Lord[1116]-crying out from his imaginary and often anxious solitude, he is calling for the presence of the one who always was present in his I AM, nor could he ever cease to be present, being inseparable from our essential self. Once the seeker after belief succeeds in believing with his whole being, firmly convinced that there is only one breath, one Life, one Being, the presence is discovered, recognized once and for all and adored in every instant of every day.

Of such a one it may be said, as it was indeed said: Happy are those who have not seen, and yet believe.[1117]

1114 Matt. 16.16

1115 Luke 24:5

1116 1 Cor. 16:22

1117 John 20:29

LOGION 60

He saw a Samaritan carrying a lamb

as he was going to the land of Judea.

He said to his disciples:

“That person is carrying the lamb around.”

They said to him:

“To kill it and eat it.”

He said to them:

“He will not eat it while it is alive

but only after he has killed it

and it has become a carcass.”

They said:

“Otherwise he cannot do it.”

He said to them:

“So with you. Seek a place of rest

or you may become a carcass and be eaten.”

COMMENTARY

In this logion, Jesus confronts the natural, visible lamb carried by the Samaritan with the invisible spiritual lamb, the son of light that every man carries within himself, for this is his true Self. The first, the natural lamb, is destined only to be eaten, once it has been sacrificed and become a carcass; and this, too, is the end that will be met by every disciple in his capacity as a natural and visible man: to die and turn into a cadaver, food for the vultures and the worms.

That is why Jesus recommends us to seek within ourselves the holy place of the invisible, spiritual Lamb of eternal Life, whose flesh and blood are the true sustenance of the soul in search of rest; the only food that brings redemption. This is the meaning of the words: They have washed their robes white again in the blood of the lamb.[1118]

The first mention of the spiritual Lamb is to be found in the fourth Gospel, in the mouth of John the Baptist, when he sees Jesus coming towards him and exclaims: Behold the lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world.[1119] As is well known, the Christological figure of the Lamb conjoins with the messianic image of the servant in the second Isaiah, who takes on himself the faults of many, and the Passover lamb of the traditional Jewish rite.[1120] Both these aspects would of course be fulfilled in Jesus, as the hidden spiritual, universal Lamb of God. Yet, how surprising, in the context of a manifest reading is the immensity of the Baptist’s exclamation that the Lamb takes away the sins of the world, meaning all the sins that, despite everything, still remain on earth. It is indeed amazing that the Baptist should have known so perfectly and so much in advance the higher meaning or the life, passion and death of Jesus.

These difficulties are resolved when one attends, as the evangelists no doubt did, to the exposition and development of the words’ hidden aspect. Given the universality of the inner Christ, whose action is exercised from the highest heaven of every man, and given the hidden universal meaning, assigned in parallel to the Baptist in his capacity as precursor or first man within every human consciousness, his words serve to express the amazement or jubilation of the living soul on discovering the presence within his own home of the last Adam, the Life-giving spirit.[1121]

The Gospel says that the Baptist saw Jesus coming toward him and this expression is to be understood as the soul’s first intuition, perception or parousia of the eternal, indwelling spirit within. The exclamation that follows confirms this supposition,[1122] since, in effect, the man coming after him-Jesus-is the pneumatic man described elsewhere in the Gospel as the second who will be first, since he comes before the psychic man, the Baptist, the latter being the precursor, the first who will be last. Moreover, the man who comes after him existed before him, being pre-existent, eternal.

This explains the absolute nature of the Baptist’s description: Jesus is the Lamb of God. Every psychic man receives the promise of redemption, that there will awaken in his consciousness the coming of the Lamb of God, whose food of Life frees the soul born to the world of all sin, once the true meal that comes from him has been completely assimilated and his work of freeing the oppressed has thus been accomplished.

Although received by every man as the food of his soul, the Lamb of God is only one, just as the Spirit of God is only one, and not even when the spirit is identified as the ultimate essence of the triple nature of the complete man-body, soul and spirit[1123]-can this be taken to mean that the plurality of psychic men, divided into persons, implies a plurality of pneumatic men; since, in the infinite ocean of the light that is Jesus Christ, every child of the light, every one of those of whom we sometimes speak metaphorically, is a drop of light whose dimensions no mind could ever measure.

Jesus explained all this, although in parable, and Matthew handed it down uncompromisingly in its parable form,[1124] speaking of the ultimate solemn act prepared by God for our human generation, once the world (teleia) has been consumed and all the drops of light, now redeemed, have as angels accompanying the Son, attained the steps of God’s throne of glory.

On that occasion, the sheep-the drops of light-among them, the Lamb, the Son of Man, according to the scriptures without blemish, a male, one year old,[1125] will be gathered on the right, while the goats, representing those components of the psyche that did not accept purification, will be placed on the left.

It seems that the numerical proportion of those on one or other side of the throne is determined by the efficacy of the sacrifice of the Lamb of God who, with his life-giving food and blood of the remission of sins penetrates the realm of the soul, cutting like any double-edged sword, but more finely,[1126] after which he bears off with him, as the celestial booty from his work, the purified remainder that will be saved. The new treasure thus produced, the new generation of sheep, is destined for the true sheepfold that it has conquered, on the right hand of God’s throne.

All those on the right-hand side will, according to the parable, inherit the Kingdom prepared for them since the creation of the world, while the others, the less-than-lucid angels on the left that have persisted in separation-in other words, the Devil-will like chaff be sent to be consumed by fire, since they were unable to believe that the just teleia in life consists of that work of unification that Jesus explains: May they all be one. Father, may they be one in us, as you are in me and I am in you.[1127]

The Father’s final plan is that all nations, both those made up of sheep and those made up of goats, the latter being recoverable for the Kingdom of the spirit depending on the exercise of their freedom, should in the end be one, when the border barriers of error are smashed by faith and by the knowledge that comes with the work of faith. The departure point of this plan is the real fact that all those islands, all those nations of the psyche that we think we perceive, are nothing but the sad, inconsistent effect of our remaining besotted with a limited, separative ego that never was planted by God.

Therefore, on the day of consummation, the Son of Man will make the clearest, most complete declaration of unity as related in the Gospel, and thus will be banished all the factors that make for separation: For I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me drink.[1128]

In the passage from Saint John’s Gospel in which Jesus proclaims himself to be the good shepherd of the sheep, saying of them that they know him because they come from his sheepfold-which may also be called the church of the spiritual kingdom-he explains that he has other sheep too that he means to bring to his sheepfold, for they have heard his voice-his Word-and he assures us that there will be only one flock, and one shepherd.[1129]

The sheep from outside that go to make up this flock are, without question, those that come from the kingdom of the psyche, for there are no other sheep, no other kingdoms. Jesus, being both the good shepherd and the gate through which all sheep must enter, means to keep them for himself, through the Life that he freely gives and recovers in every successful new union. However, these new sheep that come from the other sheepfold, that of the world, come to the Son of Man after long yearning for spiritual food. This they receive when it is generously given them by the Lamb of God for the forgiveness of sins.[1130]

The deepest expression of the Lamb of God’s action of salvation was given by Jesus at his last Passover supper, commonly known in Christendom as the Lord’s Supper. We have four accounts of this messianic meal: the three in the synoptic Gospels and Paul’s document in his first Letter to the Corinthians; but only the third Gospel makes a distinction within the Passover supper between the moving farewell meal before the Passion and the institution of the Eucharist as the first banquet in the heavenly Kingdom.[1131]

According to Saint Luke’s Gospel, after Jesus had confessed his longing to eat this farewell Passover with his apostles before his Passion,[1132] he blessed the bread and wine and shared them with all, assuring them in regard to the bread-the bread of eternal life-that I shall not eat it again until it is fulfilled in the Kingdom of God.[1133] As for the wine, after taking it and sharing it among them, he said: I shall not drink wine until the Kingdom of God comes.[1134] Mark adds: until I drink the new wine in the Kingdom of God.[1135]

This concludes Jesus’ (manifest) farewell. What Luke then goes on to speak of is the heavenly banquet in the completed Messianic kingdom. This concerns the hidden spiritual Christ. It entails the sacrifice of the Lamb of God. Thus, neither the flesh nor the blood of which Jesus speaks from this moment on, during the supper, after the supper, symbolize or represent Jesus’ mortal flesh and blood but his true flesh and blood according to the spirit.

All possible figurative or symbolic interpretations of the flesh and blood of Christ are excluded from every one of the four Gospel accounts, for Jesus says: This is my body, this is my blood, not this bread is my body, the wine is my blood. Yet there can be no question of any unilateral view that sees the manifest Christ as the sole protagonist. The one who shares the bread and wine in the sacrificial banquet of which Luke speaks (offering the cup after supper) is the hidden Christ, the spiritual Lamb of God, whose flesh and blood are in fact his true flesh and blood, while the bread and wine of the Passover meal are the manifest, visible representation of the real, invisible food which the Lamb shares of himself, in spirit.

All this comes down to the same thing as what John tells in the to some extent parallel, to some extent supplementing passage concerning the Last Supper, although his version does not follow the kind of figurative course to be found in the synoptic Gospels, especially in Luke’s flights of inspiration, choosing rather to keep to more philosophical or discursive ground.[1136]

In his teaching at the Capharnaum synagogue, Jesus confirms the need to eat the flesh of the Son of Man, the Lamb of God, and drink his blood, if one is to have eternal life; and this he says because his bread, which is his flesh, is Life and he who receives it has life in itself.

Jesus says: my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.[1137] As if he were to say: this is my body, this is my blood; and of this flesh and blood of the Lamb of God, what takes place in man is the sacred act of being one, becoming one with Christ; for it is written: He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me and I in him.[1138]

Through eating and drinking of the Lamb of God, the believer makes himself one with the Life of the Christ within, receiving him and taking him into himself, and this prodigious, ineffable assimilation of the living Lamb within oneself (as opposed to the dead Lamb, without) is itself the way whereby faith in the hidden Christ, (close, very close to one’s soul, to one’s mind, and yet still undiscovered). leads to the finding of the presence within oneself and, through this presence, to the mythical gate to the Kingdom of the flock, in indissoluble communion with the Shepherd who has come to the believer.

This is the seal and the accomplishment of the seal of the new Covenant, the mystery of unity generated by the fecundity of the faith and consisting, so it is written, in gathering together in unity the scattered children of God.[1139]

Moreover, for all of this to be effective it must be known in the spirit that gives life and not in the flesh-the outer wrapping of psyche and dust-which has nothing to offer. The true flesh and blood of the living Lamb exercise their transformative action, bringing about a new birth from above, when eaten with faith and knowledge, for they are Eternal Life and God’s Wisdom. Only by consuming this food is it possible to see the Son of Man (hidden) rise to where he was before. John the evangelist insists on this when he exclaims: The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life.[1140]

1118 Rev. 7:14. The great persecution which, according to the text of the Revelation precedes the whitening of the robes may, in terms of manifest history, be interpreted as the purification that took place in many Christians as a result of the persecution they suffered in Nero’s day; from the angle of the hidden interpretation, however, this persecution amounts to the birth pains that precede the manifest presence of the Son of Man, that inner presence known as the Day of the Lord.

1119 On the next day, the Baptist was to repeat his announcement to the disciples, but without explaining the expiatory significance of the Lamb. (John 1:29).

1120 Isai. 53:11; Ex. 12:5

1121 1 Cor. 15:45. The life-bringing spirit and the living soul, endowed with life by the action of the spirit, combine to make the complete man in his triple aspect according to Paul and many other witnesses.

1122 John 1:30

1123 1 Thes. 5:23

1124 The Evangelist saves in his account all the imagination contained in the scene of the parable; it is the one who receives the tale who must carry out the intelligent work of cutting through the mythical aspect to extract its essence, the profound truth expressed therein.

1125 Ex. 12:5

1126 Heb. 4:12

1127 John 17:21

1128 Matt. 25:31-46

1129 John 10:16. Faithful to a manifest and very much worldly interpretation, some ancient theologians explained that the sheep whom Jesus meant to recuperate were in danger of ending up in a Jewish sheepfold. There can, nevertheless, be no question that human nations and kingdoms have no place in the heavenly city—the Kingdom of Unity—for which the sheep are bound.

1130 Matt. 26:28

1131 Biblical criticism makes it clear that the accounts by Matthew (Matt. 26:26-29) and Mark (Mark 14:22-25) which coincide closely, probably originate in the Palestinian tradition that Peter brought to Rome, while Luke’s version (Luke 22:15-20) and Paul’s (1 Cor. 11:23b-25) seem to follow the lay-out known as the ethnic Christian tradition, which Paul spread in the course of his missionary travels. Paul’s account consists of a precise reading, although abbreviated for purposes of catachesis, and only Luke keeps the two phases of the Supper that a clear understanding of the events calls for. Moreover, the abbreviation that appears in codex D and in various manuscripts of the Latin Vetus that do not appear in Luke verses 19b-20, enable us to posit that, for the same reasons, Matthew and Mark’s narratives suffered from a similar cut, so that in the first and second Gospels the farewell to the world and the entry into the heavenly kingdom involve one loaf of bread and a single cup, even at the risk of seeming incongruous, as though the Lamb of God did the impossible, eating his own flesh and drinking his own blood after being sacrificed.

1132 The Vulgate explains the Passover as the transit, the passage, but it might be more accurate to speak of the leap. In any case, when Jesus said that he longed to eat this last Passover, he was speaking of his longing to complete, through his own Passion, Death and Resurrection, the one process or sign promised to this generation (of Jonah) and its glorious final stage of ascending to the Father, as he indeed did (John 20:17).

1133 Luke 22:16. Jesus had consumed the bread of eternal life and attained the fulfilment of this life in the Kingdom of God.

1134 Luke 22:18

1135 Mark 14:25

1136 John 6:26-62

1137 John 6:55

1138 John 6:56

1139 John 11:52

1140 John 6:63

LOGION 61

Jesus said:

“Two will rest on a bed: the one will die, and the other will live.”

Salome said to him:

“Who are You, man, that You, as though from the One,[1141]

have come up on my couch and eaten from my table?”

Jesus said to her:

“I am He who is, I issue from the Equal.[1142]

I was given of the things of my Father.”

[Salome said:] “I am Your disciple.”

[Jesus said to her:]

“Therefore I say, the disciple who is unified [equal][1143]

will be filled with light, but the one who is divided

will be filled with darkness.”

COMMENTARY

The two who will rest on a bed, as though it would be said of them that, on the coming of the Day of the Lord, they will be dwellers in the same house, coming together as a single consciousness, are, as has already been commented, on the one hand, the essential spirit of man, imbued with a life of its own, being the spirit that is life, and, on the other hand, the assemblage of active or latent psychic components; the first is the true, eternal I, while the other is the soul which, since it has no essence of its own, as that essence belongs to the spirit, is said to be a soul to which life has been leased.

When it speaks of these two who will rest on a bed,[1144] the text suggests matrimonial union between a feminine principle, the soul, represented by Salome in the logion, and the masculine spirit, always represented by Jesus, as the Son of Man, in the Gospels.[1145] Of these two, the spirit is immortal while in the soul, all those components that have not been so purified as to attain substantive unity with the spirit on the last Day are mortal. Since on that Day each of these will be separated, the spirit, which is one, will live and the other (the components of the psyche that have not been integrated) will be left aside and will die.[1146] As for how, in the meanwhile, both principles live together in a unified consciousness, this is what the soul, here represented by Salome, describes as coming up on my couch and eating from my table.

Salomé may be unaware of who the male is who is sharing her house, yet the spiritual progress that has arisen in her is very important, for she does not deny the Savior’s presence within her and shows that she has had the first perception of her Parousia. That is what brings her to ask after her true being: Who are you, man?

In his reply, Jesus does not just reveal his origin, he even explains the purpose of his heavenly presence so close to the soul. Jesus issues from the Equal, for therein, in the Father, from whom he has come as the Son, nothing exists that is not identical to itself. Hence, this therein is referred to as the One.

As for the work assigned to Jesus by the Father, this was already spelled out in the Gospel: Everything [every component of the psyche that has passed through baptism by the fire of purification in unity] has been entrusted to me by my Father.[1147] Here, according to what he affirmed at an early age, is where Jesus must be, busy with my Father’s affairs.[1148] These affairs are all the psychic components which, once purified, will, like refined silver, enter the higher Kingdom of that which is Equal.

Salomé’s answer, I am Your disciple, expresses, without departing from the pure demythified simplicity of the logion, the submission of the soul enamoured of the Lord on receiving the annunciation of the coming birth from her womb of the spiritual fruit that will redeem her: […] he has looked upon his lowly handmaid.[1149] True redemption consists, according to this, of the soul’s components turning towards the One, that is, towards that which is equal to itself, being the Christ, the light that fills all things. It also consists of the soul casting out all that is separate; but both things, turning towards the light and leaving the shadows, take place in a single movement, being a single action. That which is equal will live, for this is why Jesus says: […] whoever comes to me, I shall not turn him away.[1150] Correspondingly, whatever persists in remaining separate, differentiated, will remain mortal, for it is nothing but a dweller in darkness.

What the logion expresses is one of the channels whereby the Gospel means to lead many to the knowledge of unity. In a passage from the now lost Gospel of the Egyptians, Salomé asks when those things of which they have spoken will take place. Perhaps they had spoken of the coming of the Lord, or of the consummation of unity, since Jesus, doubtless thinking of the unification of the two occupants of the same bed, says: When the two come to be one and the same thing, and the male, together with the female, are no longer female or male.[1151]

1141 Ph. De Suarez translation. Brill translation: whose //son, or from someone.

1142 Ph. De Suarez translation. Brill translation: [from Heaven] which is equal

1143 Brill translation: equal or (optionally) unified.

1144 Luke 17:34. Text parallel to the logion.

1145 The evangelists use every one of the three women who were at the foot of Christ’s cross, Mary, Mary Magdalen and Mary Salome (Mark 15:40) as it suits them to express in terms of the hidden aspect the universal meaning of the psychic feminine principle in the senses or states of the virginal soul (Mary), the passive soul flooded with love (Mary Magdalen) and the anxious, seeking soul (Mary Salome).

1146 Compare Luke 17:34 and the logion.

1147 Luke 10:22

1148 Luke 2:49

1149 Luke 1:48

1150 John 6:37

1151 This does not, of course, imply any kind of encratism since, if the text speaks of male and female, it is in respect of the higher (spiritual) realm and the median (psychic) one. Cfr. Gospel of the Egyptians fragment 5: Clem. Alex. Strom. III, 13; PG 8, 1192 D-1193 A (cfr. A. de Santos: Los Ev. Apócrif. p. 60, BAC, Madrid).

LOGION 62

Jesus said:

“I disclose my mysteries to those who are worthy of my mysteries.

Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.”

COMMENTARY

The doctrine of the mysteries according to the logion is the same as that set forth in the synoptic Gospels, for Matthew says: The mysteries of the Kingdom of heaven are revealed to you but they are not revealed to them. Mark speaks of the secret of the Kingdom of God, a single mystery, the synthesis of all mysteries which, he says, is not given to those who are outside, to whom everything comes in parable.[1152]

The revealer of the mysteries of the Kingdom is Jesus, in his capacity as God’s envoy, and this he confirmed when he spoke in parables to the many, while yet in truth only to the tight circle of the chosen Twelve.

The indwelling hidden Christ is in himself the mystery of mysteries, the Prime Mystery, on the elucidation of which all the other mysteries depend. This Mystery, to which we dedicate all the strength of our weakness, is Christ within us, God’s First Mystery in which, so says the Apostle, all the jewels of wisdom and knowledge are hidden;[1153] and once these have been made manifest in man’s consciousness, he being privy to the Mystery and no longer outside it, is given to know all the wealth of the Kingdom as a presage of glory.

Of all this, Paul spoke on many occasions, since he had doubtless received the revelation of the Mystery, and this enabled him to declare himself to be not only Christ’s servant, which others too were, but a steward entrusted with the mysteries of God.[1154]

Paul set out to proclaim the Mystery of Christ [the hidden Christ] and to announce the message.[1155] He confesses his intention to make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery, the mystery that has been kept hidden in God through all the ages,[1156] a most daunting task, only made possible by grace, besides wisdom and the cleansing of the soul.

The Apostle explained the Mystery as the [hidden] wisdom of God, predestined to be for our glory before the ages began, yet unknown to the masters of this age.[1157] He went on to describe[1158] the phrase in Genesis according to which man and woman become one body [1159] as prefiguring the union of Christ with the little flock of the faithful. To them, to those who believe and who through faith feed on the flesh of the Lamb of God that gives eternal life, to them Jesus says: it has pleased your Father to give you the Kingdom.[1160]

In terms of the hidden exegesis, the little flock consists of those sheep whom the Son of Man places at his right hand, as described in the parable of the last Judgment. These are the souls that become light because they believe in the light of the lamp they have in themselves. They are the psychic church transfigured into the pneumatic; the feminine principle, which Paul refers to as the masters of the world, become masculine with the conjunction of the two lovers, female and male, in one flesh. They then are, or discover that they are, the body of Christ,[1161] neither female nor male,[1162] but the Son of Man,[1163] made manifest in the end after remaining hidden in God since the foundation of the world.

This and none other is the revelation of the First Mystery, the Mystery of Christ within us, the one sacred Body predestined by God for those worthy of it through faith and the wisdom that faith brings. Thus is God’s mystery consummated.[1164]

The second proposition in the logion, which proceeds from the first, also merits an explanation, as to why those worthy of the mysteries are only those on the right, while those on the left may not know them since the First Mystery has not revealed itself to them.//

This affirmation is to be understood in several senses, for example, in terms of the hands, as in the Gospel according to Saint Matthew,[1165] in which the left hand is seen as symbolizing an inadequate instrument, too self-centered to be party to an act of generosity that is not self-conscious, one that can be undertaken only by the right hand, following an impulse towards unity inspired by knowledge of the First Mystery.

Likewise, when it comes to the mysteries, the psychic consciousness (the left) is not so constituted as to be able fully to comprehend the higher perception of the Christ within us where this presence has been realized by the consciousness of the pneumatic man. Jesus is coming close to this when he says that the wind blows wherever it pleases; you hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.[1166] The one who hears the voice is the pneumatic man (of the right hand) while the one who knows neither where this silent nothingness of a sound comes from nor where it is going is the soul, the psychic consciousness (the left hand).

This symbolism of the right and the left is clearly prefigured by the sheep and the goats of Matthew’s synteleia which, according to the parable, the Son of Man gathers on either side of his throne. Only those who have attained the revelation of the First Mystery may sit on the right, for they have totally assimilated the reality of the mystery that is Christ within us, and this includes all those sheep, and also those goats which, by employing the wisdom imparted by the Mystery have been transformed into sheep and counted as pneumatic males.

Now one can understand quite how inadequate was the request expressed by the sons of Zebedee when they asked Jesus to be seated in his glory, one on his right and the other on his left. As Jesus told them, this was not his to grant, for these seats belonged to those to whom his Father had allotted them.[1167]

Nevertheless, the cup of Christ, the blood of the Lamb of God spilt without sparing for those who want to drink it as the fruit of wisdom, is precisely, the hidden treasure in the Mystery that penetrates those to whom it has been revealed.

The revelation will then be a living one, quite beyond the incredulous thinking of the soul. Thus, it was indeed written, would be his Coming: like lightning striking in the east [right] and flashing far into the west [left].[1168]

Such will be the Son of Man on his Day, in his manifestation as Christ within us: as the lightning flashing from one part of heaven lights up the other,[1169] meaning that he will be received in the totality of our reunified being.

1152 Matt. 13:11; Mark 4:11; Luke 8:10

1153 Col. 2:2-3

1154 1 Cor. 4:1

1155 Col. 4:3-4

1156 Eph. 3:9

1157 1 Cor.2:7-8

1158 Eph. 5:30-31

1159 Gen. 2:24

1160 Luke 12:32

1161 Eph. 5:30

1162 Cfr. Gospel of the Egyptians, fragment 5 (op. cit.)

1163 Male and female were created together according to Genesis (1:27). According to one tradition the essential man was created male on the right side and female on the left.

1164 Rev. 10:7

1165 Matt. 6:3

1166 John 3:8

1167 Matt. 20:21-23

1168 Matt. 24:27

1169 Luke 17:24

LOGION 63

Jesus said:

“There was a rich man who had many possessions.1170

He said: ‘I shall invest my wealth to sow, reap, plant,

and fill my barn with produce.

Then I shall lack nothing.’

These things he was thinking in his heart,

But that very night he died.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

COMMENTARY

There is a canonical parallel to the logion in the Gospel of Saint Luke,[1171] in which the parable is further developed. The basis for the account in the third Gospel is a warning from Jesus not to treasure goods that are unreliable, since they cannot guarantee lasting life.

This, too, seems to be the idea behind the logion, although it is not expressed directly, but somewhat obliquely. That, at least, is suggested by the phrase oft-repeated throughout the Gospels at the close of a passage with a double meaning: He who has ears to hear, let him hear; always a hint that beneath the easy-to-understand surface there lies another, deeper meaning to be read into the text, one that faithfully serves the Evangelists’ purpose.

It is not too difficult to find the meaning that lies between the folds of the logion. The many possessions accumulated by the rich man-and never forget that in the Bible riches is the general expression for the various kinds of accumulations with which the psyche identifies-consist in the last resort of nothing but straw blown in the wind from the threshing floor.

The character in the parable thinks that these accumulations which he regards as adding to his person and his wellbeing will count towards eternal life and so he hastens to stock up his barn with the produce of his worldly fields. Yet as it is, the true grain, the seed sown by the Father, the essence, the true Self, quite apart from not being of this world, is unique and nothing can be added on to it. The beauty, the grandeur of the grain does not consist of appearing to be rich or well-dressed, for it is complete in itself. Rather, it means to be poor, pure and naked, so that its intense light may shine on all unclouded.

On the night of his ignorance of which the logion speaks, the man rich in accumulations which he saw as possessions, died, for no mortal image superimposed on Being can escape its mortal condition, nor indeed the day when the immortal reveals itself in its temporary captivity. On that solemn occasion, regardless of the quantity of mortal possessions worn to cover the poverty of the life-giving spirit, regardless of how attached we are to them, they will die, as will all that is transient and mortal. That is when what is immortal shines forth.

In Saint Luke’s version the underlying meaning of the parable remains the same, but the Evangelist includes a telling reference to the soul. In keeping with the night of his ignorance, the rich man deposits all his possessions in the new barn of his psyche, which he has built to house all the stores he has accumulated for eternity. To his soul, he says, […] my soul, you have plenty of good things. But God warns him, according to the parable, that this very night the demand will be made for his soul, which will then be parted from its possessions. And God asks: This hoard of yours, whose will it be then?

The conclusion to be drawn from this is-and here, what counts is that those who have not understood the true meaning of the parable should understand it now-that the true Being, every one’s true self, is not the soul but that which in his innermost says to the soul: My soul, you have plenty of good things. What says this to the soul is not the soul itself but the essence, the I AM, which has no need of barns for its harvest because it is the grain-the one true, eternal grain-and all the good things of the world stored in the barns of the psyche are nothing but ephemeral straw destined for the undying fire of time that consumes all things.

Thus, in the parable, the Evangelist places the final sentence in God’s mouth: So it is when a man stores up treasure for himself [for his soul] in place of making himself rich in the sight of God [discovering the presence of the Son of Man].

1170 Gr. Xréma. The Brill group translate this as “money”; Ph. De Suarez as “fortune”.

1171 Luke 12:16-21

LOGION 64

Jesus said:

“A man was receiving guests. When he had prepared the dinner

he sent his servant to invite the guests.

The servant went to the first and said:

‘My master invites you.’

That person said:

‘Some merchants owe me money.

They are coming tonight.

I must go and give them instructions.

Please excuse me from dinner.’

The servant went to another and said:

‘My master invites you.’

He said to the servant:

‘I have bought a house

and I’ve been called away for a day.

I have no time.’

The servant went to another and said:

‘My master invites you.’

He said to the servant:

‘My friend is to be married

and I am to arrange the banquet.

I can’t come. Please excuse me from dinner.’

The servant went to another and said:

‘My master invites you.’

He said to the servant:

‘I have bought an estate and I am going to collect rent.

I shall not be able to come. Please excuse me.’

The servant returned and said to his master:

‘Those you invited to dinner have asked to be excused.’

The master said to his servant:

‘Go out into the streets and invite whomever you find for the dinner.

Buyers and merchants will not enter the places of my father.’”

COMMENTARY

The parable which the logion tells is, with a few variations, the same as that given by Matthew and Luke[1172] in two synoptic Gospels, versions that have given rise to much comment; yet all these commentaries have almost invariably followed the pathways of the manifest aspect and are by no means exempt from worldly superficiality, hardly in keeping with the timeless, universal meaning of the parable.[1173] This may perhaps explain why exegetists have been unable to give a common meaning to the two canonical accounts.[1174]

When, however, this parable is approached in terms of its hidden, inner meaning, it is not difficult to find in it a coherent and very well-articulated teaching explaining the final destiny of souls as the consequence of their behavior. That said, it would be appropriate to begin by referring to the parable of the sower, on which the logion depends since, as is hinted at in the second Gospel, all the parables are based on it: Do you not understand this parable? Then how will you understand any of the parables?[1175]

In the parable of the sower it is explained that the Word-as we know, the true light that enlightens all men[1176]-was sown in every man by the sower (the Father), while in the parable with which we are now concerned, if we attend to the double version in Matthew and Luke, of the dinner[1177] for many [those called] and the banquet[1178] for the few [the chosen], we learn of various outcomes for the man in whom the seed of light-the Word-has come to dwell. From the place where the seed settles the soul receives the food of true light of which Jesus spoke, saying: I have food to eat that you do not know about.[1179]

When he spoke of this food, Jesus was doubtless addressing those who had not yet begun to discern within themselves the presence of that precious chosen cornerstone placed by God in the center, in the I AM of every man, as the pure essence of Being, proclaimed by Isaiah[1180] and subsequently committed insistently by Jesus to our memory and perception, stressing the fact that what is usually rejected or neglected is nevertheless the cornerstone of man’s realization.[1181]

The parable which we are now setting out to explain speaks of this stone which is none other than the Word sown in us. All men possess this seed, but the parable classifies them according to the fruit obtained from the seed into three main species or families, which may subsequently be broken down into various sub-species. Let us consider this:

The invited guests who made excuses

It is not difficult to see in all those who, on various pretexts, made excuses for their non-attendance at the dinner those who, having failed to recognize the seed sown in them, pass through the world without producing fruit for salvation. Of such men, it could be said that they do not receive in their Adam’s psychic consciousness the splendors of the true light immanent in them, in the pneumatic man dwelling under the same roof. Not perceiving the light, they have no faith in the light, and having no faith, they refuse to attend the banquet of immortality to which the Lord calls them. Their blindness keeps them out, and that is what is to be understood by Saint Luke’s affirmation: Not one of those who were invited shall have a taste of my banquet.[1182]

The meaning of the various pretexts offered by the many who were called is summed up concisely in the closing phrase of the logion: they are buyers and merchants who will not enter the places of my Father. This expression doubtless corresponds to the passage concerning the purification of the Temple in Saint John’s Gospel: Stop turning the house of my Father into a market,[1183] but it also refers, in the parable of the sower, to the detailed catalogue of cases setting out the various grounds for losing the Word that has been sown in men. Some seed fell, it is said, by the edge of the path; others (where the seed fell on patches of rock) received the Word gladly but being inconstant and not well-rooted, failed to care for the seedling’s growth; while yet other seed fell among thorns, meaning, among other things, that those men’s interest was awoken and they even perceived the Word that was in them, yet it choked because of the world’s lures, as they preferred to remain wedded to the things of this world. In the words of the Evangelist, the seed produces nothing.[1184]

The order in all this should be perfectly clear. Every man who comes into this world is called the moment he is born; it is his dense awareness that prevents a man from turning his attention inward (metanoia) to discover the Spirit-the one that dwells in him and speaks in tongues of fire-the seed of light sown by the Father. Since he does not know the Spirit (his spirit), he does not believe in the Son from whom he receives the breath of which one knows neither whence it comes nor where it is going, so that the man remains unaware of the sustenance he is being offered. He is invited to the messianic banquet but makes excuses for not coming. Other things are taking up his attention, things down below; things that do not lead to the resurrection and the life. That is why Jesus says: If you do not believe that I am He, you will die in your sins.[1185] Or, as otherwise expressed in the parable, their town, the sinful habits by which they live, will be burned, since they maltreated and killed[1186] the messengers sent by the light of the Word from their innermost to the surface of their consciousness.

The newly invited guests

There are men in whom the seed sown within bears fruit; they hear the Word, they receive it and they are revived. The fruit yielded is the measure of a man, it depends on each one of us, and this measure itself constitutes the judgment, concerning which it is said, in somewhat mysterious terms, that three mansions have been prepared.[1187]

The Gospel also tells us that there are three different measures for fruitfulness when the seed is sown in good soil, and that these are the real measures of the soul and its transformation into pneuma. However, two of these measures, thirty and sixtyfold, are measures of imperfection and only one measure, referred to as a hundredfold, represents the perfection of fruitfulness.[1188]

Saint Luke’s version of the parable deals with the two measures of the fruit of imperfection. Those corresponding to the lower measure, valued at thirty, are said to be in the city’s streets and alleys, as though to indicate that they have set out in search of the way without, however, reaching the source of the light. Consequently, they are called poor, meaning pneumatic, being pure in heart and hungering and thirsting after the justice of the spirit; nevertheless, the condition of these neophytes of the spirit may be that of the halt, the lame and the blind, thus referred to because this gives the measure of their imperfection. According to the Gospels, the work of the Good News is growing ever stronger in these imperfect beings who seem to be struggling towards the light of the Logos on one foot, or without being able to see it, impelled by a faith that cannot see the light yet senses it.

The souls whom the Lord sent for in the open roads and the hedgerows[1189] represent a more advanced order in the process of spiritualization. The Lord told his servants, meaning the Pentecostal tongues of fire that flood the soul that turns in on itself-the second (sixtyfold) measure of fruit-with knowledge, to force such souls to come. This is a way of referring to the urgent intensity of the spirit that may sometimes be endured by the soul enamored of God, an anxiety expressed by Christ in the Gospel when he says: I have come to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were blazing already![1190] These souls, which are now very close to yielding the perfect measure, may expect to occupy the rooms prepared for the perfect.[1191]

III. The Chosen

These are the guests who, in the final act of the glorious transformation prepared by God for man, are described by Matthew as coming together in the wedding hall. The souls that take their place there are all virginal, having undergone the two baptisms by water and by fire; the first, cleansing the soul, the second, in which it is purged by the flaming tongues of the knowledge of unity sent by the Spirit. During that difficult process of catharsis, two thirds of the (psychic) components of the soul are lost, diluted-according to Zechariah[1192]-thanks to the metanoetic action of water on the psyche. These were in any case worth no more than straw blown by the wind from the threshing floor. The other third, the rest to be saved, is refined in the fire as silver is refined, tested as gold is tested. The silver of which the prophet speaks is the soul, the psychic man who became one of those called from the moment he entered this world, while gold represents the spirit that dwells in the same house as the soul, unknown to it, yet ever ready to send down from its upper room those waves of fire that will purify the soul and enable it and the spirit to discover one another and to proceed to their spiritual wedding.

This encounter, the mystic union of the bridegroom (the spirit) and the spouse (the soul) is commonly described as a spiritual vestment bestowed on the soul. Hermas, the author of The Shepherd, expresses it thus: The virgins [once united with the bridegroom] are blessed spirits, and there is no other way for man to enter the kingdom of God save by [the soul] putting on the vestment [of the spirit].[1193]

In the allegory, to be united is expressed as putting on the vestment, the immaculate white wedding garment that transforms the soul, one of the many called, into a member of the Chosen, that glorious perfection of soul and spirit made One, fit now to receive the food of the wedding feast and to gain the heavenly nuptial bed. Hence the words: Wear white all the time.[1194]

No soul that has not put on a wedding garment may enter the hall where the ceremony is taking place. Those who enter are called souls who have already set out on the way; they have contemplated their cathartic robe of immortality and the remission of sins to the point of having been chosen. It is fair to assume that if Saint Matthew tells of the presence of a guest not wearing a wedding garment, it is to warn of the need for this.

In the language of myth commonly employed by the Bible, this wedding corresponds symbolically to the union of the sons of God (holy spirits) with the daughters of men, those souls born to life on earth; but, to put it less obliquely, it is the meeting between man’s psychic components and their essence. This is a mystery indeed, for man’s essence or nucleus is the very man, the Self, the knower who, precisely because he is the knower cannot be known, as there is no other knower to know him. Who could know him?

As for the clothing of the soul through catharsis, this consists of the remnant present in it after cleansing, which identifies with the spirit and becomes one with it. This transformation is referred to in the passage from the marriage at Cana when water (the psyche) is turned into wine (pneuma).[1195]

Otherwise expressed, again in mythical terms, it is said that the soul, regarded as feminine because of its passive aspect, is made masculine by its wedding with the spirit. Concerning this, there exists a Naassene text: into the house of God, it says, enter those who succeed in stripping away their clothing [of impurity]. They are then transformed into bridegrooms, made male through the virginal spirit.[1196]

1172 Matt. 22:2-10; Luke 14:16-24. Matthew’s version is commonly known as the royal wedding feast while Luke’s, which is closer to that of GT, is known as the parable of the invited guests who made excuses.

1173 Even today, manifest Christian exegesis has still not succeeded in ridding itself of the very worldly interpretation according to which those who did not respond to the call of the Son of Man are the Jews, although a few of them, according to this exegesis, managed to be chosen, together with (note “together with”) the members of the Church. This is surely far removed from Jesus’ universal spiritual intention when he gave the parable.

1174 The theory most widely held nowadays is that Matthew put together two parables, one similar to that in Luke 14:16-24 and another only given by Matthew in verse 11 et seq. These verses are, however, the necessary conclusion of the entire parable, including the GT text.

1175 Mark 4:13

1176 John 1:9

1177 Gr. deipnon. Luke 14:16

1178 Gr. aristón.

1179 John 4:32

1180 Isai. 28:16

1181 Matt. 21:42

1182 Luke 14:24

1183 John 2:16

1184 Mark 4:14-19

1185 John 8:24

1186 Matt. 22:6-7

1187 Mark 4:8; John 14:2

1188 Mark 4:8-20

1189 Luke 14:23. To be on the road is to move towards Christ, who said I am the way (John 14:6)

1190 Luke 12:49

1191 John 14:2

1192 Zech. 13:8-9

1193 Cfr. Hermas. El Pastor, comp. IX 13:2 (E. Ruiz Bueno: Padres apostólicos, BAC, Madrid)

1194 Eccl. 9:8

1195 John 2:9-10

1196 Cfr. Hip. Ref. V, 8:44 et seq.

LOGION 65

He said:

”A [good man][1197] owned a vineyard and leased it

to some tenant farmers to work it

and from them he would collect its produce.

He sent his servant for the farmers to give him

the produce of the vineyard. They seized, beat,

and almost killed his servant, who returned

and told his master. His master said:

‘Perhaps he did not know them.’ And he sent

another servant, but they beat him as well.

Then the master sent his son and said:

‘Perhaps they will respect my son.’

Since the farmers knew the son was the heir

of the vineyard, they seized him and killed him.

He who has ears, let him hear.”

1197 Gr. Khrestós. Primitive form of Christ, meaning the anointed, the virtuous, the good, the one who has followed the Way and has gathered its fruit (Cfr. Justin martyr. Apol I). Paul says: I must go through the pain of giving birth to you all over again, until Christ is formed in you. (Gal.4:19) [Translator’s note: The papyrus has been damaged here in the original text and part of the word is missing. The other possible reconstitution: “a usurer”. Pla uses the term “purified”, or “anointed”.]

LOGION 66[1198]

Jesus said:

”Show me the stone which the builders rejected.

It is the cornerstone.”

COMMENTARY

The logion tells the parable of the wicked husbandmen and this version is to be added to the three in the synoptic Gospels, with a few additions.[1199] Although the texts of the four versions tally closely, there are a number of differences, especially in relation to Thomas, but fortunately the latter text is helpful for completing the work of exegesis.

Ancient biblical images speak of the vine, the vineyard and the fruit of the vine as a set of basic symbols prefiguring things like wisdom,[1200] fruitfulness[1201] and life,[1202] among other principles; but it is in the poem of the vineyard outlined by Hosea and so beautifully sung by Isaiah and the prophets of the Babylonian exile that these images acquire the more restrictive meaning of a warning to the vineyard of Israel, telling of the choice and repudiation of the House of Israel and the men of Judah.[1203]

When, later, Jesus reclaimed the image of the vineyard to explain and deepen the meaning of the Good News, as in the Saint John’s Gospel[1204] or in the parable of the wicked husbandmen, his purpose was clearly not to stress events during the exile of the Jewish people, nor did he intend to blame this entire people for the sin of having remained true to their traditional religion, let alone that of having brought Christ to his historical death by crucifixion, which was perpetrated by some and for which he himself pardoned all from the cross of his agony.

Nevertheless, it was precisely the precedent of the prophets’ interpretation of the interplay of symbols in the poem of the vineyard that the Church was for centuries to adopt with irrepressible zeal to explain the meaning of the parable of the wicked husbandmen. And that is, with few differences, the kind of thinking that has to this day prevailed in the interpretation of the parable; a pattern still all too present in many minds which just cannot get away from the idea that the wicked husbandmen of whom it speaks are the Jews, condemned as infidels for not having accepted the messenger of the Good News in the flesh. Consequently, the people (labeled good) to which the vineyard is to be entrusted for cleansing and saving is supposedly that of the Christianized Gentiles.

The six main points that go to make up this manifest interpretation, one by no means free from superficiality and misplaced passion, and still that espoused by the Church in general, are as follows:

The owner of the vineyard is God;

The vineyard is Israel, in its quality as the former chosen people;

The servants are the prophets;

The son is Jesus, who died on the cross;

The wicked (homicidal) tenants are the faithless (unconverted) Jews;

The other people now entrusted with the vineyard are pagan converts to Christianity.

Alongside this manifest interpretation, a parallel study may be carried out of the hidden, inner exegesis of the parable, one in which good and evil are not so sharply distinguished by factors external to man but rather evaluated in terms of a deep judgment of identity grounded, not in a historical representation drawing upon circumstantial factors, but in what every man in himself is.

To face up to the implications of this new exegesis it will, in the first place, be necessary to set aside details that seem incompatible with what Jesus will have been thinking at the time and to draw a distinction between the parable in itself and the commentary attached to it by the writers of the synoptic Gospels.[1205] Although the concluding text undoubtedly relates to the parable itself in its capacity as an exemplary precedent, there can be no ignoring the fact that it tells a substantive story from which the subsequent verses claim to draw a generalized teaching. There is, however, no reason to think that the characters represent the same thing in both passages,[1206] as has always been presumed by the manifest exegesis.

That being said, let us now study the parable with a view to discovering its hidden inner, individualized exegesis.

The parable

The manifest explanation takes the owner of the vineyard to be God. Mark 12:1 and Luke 20:9 use the plain word Anthropos, which favors that interpretation; but Matthew 21:33 adds oikodespotes, a word that evokes the house of the Father, i.e. a man living in the house of the Father. The logion of Thomas refers to a man who is khrestos, meaning one who lives in his upper story, for the inner Christ-the Khrestos-has already manifested within him, in the house of the Father, which corresponds to his own nature as a son of God. So we are talking of the Holy Spirit, the consoler, the Paraclete, who is in us. Such a man is thus an anointed one, or so he may be called; a man who is in the words of the Apostle a khrestos, because the Christ, God’s anointed, dwells in his heart.[1207]

The vineyard, Isaiah’s symbol for Israel is in the parable a metaphor for the human race, in which man first manifests as Adam, the living soul, and only after bearing fruit in plenty does he remain securely on the vine; for when a vine branch bears much fruit, it does not wither and get thrown on the fire[1208] but is eventually, after cleansing, transformed into spirit-the life-giving spirit-to dwell forever in the glory of the Father. Soul and spirit united in the sacred wedding, that is the true meaning of the Chosen People.

The triple allegory of the fence, the winepress and the watch tower is taken from Isaiah[1209] by the Evangelists Matthew and Mark. The fence represents the borders of the individual soul-the vine-as opposed to the universality of the Father and the Son. The limiting effect of the fence turns the Father’s mantle of infinite light-the Son-into the brief lamplight of each man. The winepress is where the grapes are trodden down to produce the new must, the water of the soul transformed into the wine of the spirit; that is why the winepress is dug in the vineyard, in the depths of the soul, so as not to waste a single drop of the sacred wine of God’s wisdom. As for the watchtower, it is a lookout place, but also a place for drawing nearer to the spiritual bridegroom who dwells in the same house as the soul, but higher up.

As for the tenants, the husbandmen, it was indeed written that each is a vineyard and at the same time his own husbandman,[1210] which amounts to saying that the soul and the work to be undertaken to yield the fruit of faith and purification are one and the same thing. Yet the husbandmen, the mob of man’s thinking, feeling and desiring, have a leasehold on the soul’s will and in the absence of the spirit, the only true essence that governs them, their actions will be purely self-determined.

The servants are said to be sent by the master of the house, or in his absence by the Khrestos; but in fact the Spirit, being limitless, can never leave its land-for there is no other land-yet it remains unknown to the ignorant soul that receives its wine of wisdom only in the form of servants, God’s emissaries. Manifest exegesis identified the servants in the parable with the prophets of Israel, yet these are not alone in time’s span. There is, too, the fruit of every Word of wisdom, every Word that keeps visiting the husbandmen (the soul) again and again. If these men are wicked, as in the parable, they receive the servants badly and beat them until they drop the obstinate demands for fruit they make with every visit.

The observation of the master of the vineyard: Perhaps he did not know them, is to be found only in Thomas’ logion and does not accord with the manifest exegesis, in which the work does not appear to correspond to the prophets (servants) knowing the Jews (the husbandmen) but the other way around. In terms of the hidden exegesis, it is the doctrines that come to the husbandmen in the form of servants of God’s word that must be well acquainted with the origin, condition and motivations of those husbandmen; this being a feature of all doctrines genuinely born of the Word, since its product consists precisely of obtaining good fruit or, in other words, transforming the bad husbandmen into good ones. This argues in favor of thinking that the failure to convert the husbandmen may correspond not to the latter’s wickedness but to the servants’ lack of goodness or knowledge.

Both in the manifest and in the hidden exegesis, the son in the parable is always the Son of Man, otherwise known as the Son of God. In his manifest form, he came as the Son in the flesh, sent by God, remaining in this world for a time, until his death on the cross. During that brief time, he lived in a small community and was seen by the people. Some believed in the Son of God and were saved. His teachings, those that served his purpose, were servants for many, since the husbandmen were known to them and, being known, were transformed. Thus, many vines found and are still finding salvation.

Of the hidden Son, the parable says figuratively that he comes or is sent, yet in truth the Son makes his home in every man who comes into this world, to enlighten him with the true light from the moment he is born. The Son does not come, he is already there, it is he who sends his breath as the seal of his presence; therefore, his presence, his real, hidden, inner, permanent Parousia is a universal fact valid in every age and for all men and all peoples.

The action of the Holy Spirit, the Khrestos formed in man’s consciousness, consists only of leaving signs in the vineyard so that the Son may be known by the husbandmen, just as he knows them. When the husbandmen are good, they come to know the Son as the sole heir to the Kingdom and move the soul to seek and know him, for he dwells in her. But when the vines are in the hands of bad husbandmen, who are or think they are part of the soul, they know perfectly well that the presence of the Son presages their destruction, and so as to avoid that-to kill the Son within them-they lead the soul into the valley of shadows in which they dwell (or rather, think that they are dwelling) all alone.

The Evangelists’ conclusions added to the parable

The sentence about the stone, much employed in the Old Testament,[1211] is used by Jesus to restore a general meaning to the particular account in the parable. According to Saint Matthew, Jesus asks about the destiny of those husbandmen,[1212] and the substantial audience of important priests and Pharisees gathered together in that place answers in accordance with the line taken by the manifest exegesis adopted by the Church; for, as the Evangelist explains: […] they realized that the parable was aimed at them.[1213]

The stone was the stone of the place of the Father, that on which Jacob laid his head and which was for him a stairway or bridge joining heaven and the terrestrial world,[1214] to the point of building on it the House of God; the hidden meaning of this stone is the same as that of the hidden treasure or the precious pearl alluded to in other Gospel parables.[1215] All of this alludes to a universal symbol for the Son of Man or Son of God, the Man of the sixth day, of divine origin, identical-being a ray of light-to the father Anthropos[1216] who reigns in heaven.

What Jesus means by mentioning the stone in his conclusion to the parable is that the stone is the Son, or the inner man. The Son, he explains, is the marvellous, the chosen, the precious, fundamental work that the Father made for our eyes to behold. And what this in turn means is that this stone stands within us, accessible to the soul only through faith that it is our inner guest and that it can be made manifest. The prophet says that the believer shall not stumble,[1217] and the cornerstone is indeed the one foundation that man has on which to build the edifice of the perfect man.

This supreme lesson, the decisive teaching of the Good News, is without doubt what Jesus meant to explain to his disciple Peter; yet the hidden aspect of his words has not been well understood by those who have tried only to explain their manifest aspect. Peter, at a crucial instant in his life, had the intuition of the Anointed One, the inner Christ, the Son of the living God.[1218] It is plain that, for him, this discovery begins with Jesus, Christ in the flesh, the image of the living God who stands before him; but perhaps this sight provoked in him the first sparks of knowing himself to be inwardly one with Christ, eternal and universal, the Son of the living God.

There can be no doubt that an intuition as vast and as deep as that which came to Peter could not, as Jesus himself pointed out, have come to him through flesh and blood, but only by inner revelation from the Father. Jesus then confirms: So I now say to you, you are Peter (Simon being the name or outer flesh-and-blood image); you are the cornerstone rejected by many of those who have been called to build in themselves the perfect edifice.

This chosen, precious, fundamental stone which, as the prophet Zechariah said, puts aside the iniquity of this land in a single day,[1219] is the Christ hidden in every man, the stone with which Jesus entrusts the building of a church or congregation of faithful and perfect men, chosen, and eternal. Being masters of immortality, the doors of the house of the dead cannot prevail against them.

As to the dual function of this stone, well explained by Saint Luke as a colophon to the parable: Anyone who falls on that stone will be dashed to pieces; anyone it falls on will be crushed.[1220] The stone remains the stumblingblock for whoever has failed to purify his vine; but when, like a star falling from heaven to earth, it falls on the chosen one, it is like a sacred sieve that cleanses the good wheat and winnows the remaining chaff. For it is written that only those with God’s seal on their forehead will be spared.[1221]

1198 Although the phrase about the stone has an independent origin (cfr. Ps. 18:22-23; Isai. 28:16-17; Zech. 3:8-9) the three synoptic Gospels coincide in using it to close the parable. In GT it appears as an independent logion, while implicitly accepting its conclusive relationship with the parable, given its place as the logion immediately following. For this reason, we are treating the two logia as being distinct, yet the second completes the first, so it is appropriate to include both in a single text.

1199 Matt. 21:33-43; Mark 12:1-11; Luke 20:9-17

1200 Ecclu 24:17

1201 Ps. 128:3

1202 Rev. 14:18-20

1203 Hos. 10:1; Isai. 5:1-7; Jer. 2:21; Ezek. 15:1-8

1204 John 15:1 et seq.

1205 The Gospel accounts separate these first and second sections as follows: Matt. 21:33-39 and 40-45; Mark 12:1-8 and 9-11; Luke 20:9-15 and 16-18.

1206 Thomas’ logion supports this opinion by spontaneously isolating the parable from all context and conclusions drawn, as though these were mere accretions added by the canonical scribes.

1207 Eph. 3:17

1208 John 15:6

1209 Isai. 5:1-2

1210 Clem. Alex. Strom. VII. 12, 77, 5

1211 Inter alia, Ps. 118:22-23; Isai. 28:16 et seq; Zech. 3:9

1212 In Mark 12:9 and Luke 20:16-17, it is not the crowd that answers but Jesus himself gives everyone the manifest conclusion before pronouncing the sentence about the stone.

1213 Matt. 21:43-45 So much fidelity to ecclesiastical exegesis seems suspect, especially in regard to the words of the scribe in verse 43: I tell you, then, that the Kingdom of God will be taken from you. This takes it for granted that not even one of the Jews there present would be capable of caring for his vineyard sufficiently to find salvation through the fruits of conversion.

1214 Gen. 28:11-22

1215 Matt. 13:33, 44-48

1216 The Naassenes called him Adamas (the precious stone) placed as the foundation of Zion, the spiritual edifice.

1217 Isai. 28:16

1218 Matt. 16:13-18

1219 Zech. 3:9

1220 Gr. likmesei, to winnow. Luke 20:18

1221 Rev. 9:4

LOGION 67

Jesus said:

“One who knows all but lacks

within lacks all.”

COMMENTARY

What the logion says is that the Self shares the same essence as the essential all, because the essence is only one. To know oneself means to be the essence itself. Therefore, for one who knows himself, there cannot possibly be any privation of the all, for, to be the essence of what one is means also to be the essence of the all. Contrariwise, where self-knowledge is lacking, there is a lack both of one’s self and of the all. Not to know oneself is to be far from the essence, of which one and all partake.

When it was said of Jesus, in prophecy, that he was to die to gather together in unity the scattered children of God,[1222] what this points to implicitly is that men are in essence the children of God. As God’s children, in Him they have their being. When man turns inward and knows himself as essence, he abandons all that is not essence, all that is scattered, and in the same epiphany he knows himself and the essence of all. That is how the children of God are gathered together in unity.

What this shows is that the Self and the all are not antagonistic for they share the same essence. Antagonism arises between the one and the scattered, for the scattered must cease to be for the one to be. Something similar arises between the light and the world which, although they appear to live together are never confused one with the other. That is why Jesus, being the light, says: As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.[1223] There we see the light and the world living together; but, to look upon the light, which is Jesus’ Self, our beholding must go beyond all that is the world, not the light. That is what the scriptures allude to when they say: They will look on the one whom they have pierced.[1224]

Only when we see through things, only when our looking pierces through them, can we see the light. Thus, it is written: By your light we see the light.[1225] When man beholds the light, the essence, he sees the light of Christ in the world, for he sees with his own light, with the perception proper to a child of light.

Then man knows the all as all, that is, as light in the world (not just light), and he sees himself too as light in the world, nor is he deprived of the all, which is in the light, or of himself, who is light.

To know this, it is necessary truly to believe in the light that can be seen only when it pierces through the world. According to the fourth Gospel, Jesus said: I, the light, have come into the world, so that whoever believes in me [the light] need not stay in the dark any more.[1226]

1222 John 11.52

1223 John 9:5

1224 John 19:37; Zech. 12:10

1225 Ps. 36:9

1226 John 12:46

LOGION 68

Jesus said:

“Blessed are you when you are hated and persecuted.

Wherever you have been persecuted they will find no place.”

COMMENTARY

The passage known as the beatitudes constitutes the expressive form employed by the evangelists to enumerate or explain the various ways in which the Good News can be put into practice in order to attain eternal bliss in the Kingdom of the Father.

The beatitude in the logion possesses to the full that quality of being a way towards the Kingdom, yet it has the peculiarity of standing as the culmination, the sum and substance of them all. It is the same as the somewhat differently expressed passage that crowns and closes Matthew’s series (eight, plus this one) and that set forth by Luke (three, plus this one).[1227] It had to come last in the series, since it expresses the fundamental meaning of all the different ways, although what this beatitude calls for is not the last, but the first thing that is needed to effect the sacred wedding with the Spirit of God.

With the expressions hate, abuse, drive out, persecute that appear in all three versions of this beatitude, it seems that the Gospel scribes mean to speak of the happy solitude which is, at the end of the day, that of every man who, through faith in the inner Christ, in the Anointed One hidden within, in the Self-in whom few believe-is in the world without being of the world. The believer comes to live in unity and light, without ceasing to be in the world, yet without being subject to the separation and shadows that go to make up daily life in the world of unbelievers.

For those who have not yet discerned in their lamplight the light of the Son of Man, the life of those who are moving towards their final conversion into that light will perforce seem to be unpleasant, even horrible. Humility and sound judgment will be taken for other-worldliness or madness, while the real world of the light will be taken for a pointless appearance without any relation to the time and space that is regarded as being the only real one.

Those who do not yet perceive the light think that there is one world here and another in the light, but this is a very immature way of thinking, for the world of shadows in which many live is the same world that can be contemplated while living in and fully enjoying the light. What distinguishes those who are of this world from those who are not is that the latter perceive and live in the light within the same house in which the others perceive only shadows, and suffer accordingly.

This is the full meaning of the explanations given by Jesus to his disciples when, attentive to the light of the master, yet without moving from their place in the world, they were beginning to contemplate the world as light: if you belonged to the world it would love you as its own; but because you do not belong to the world, because my choice withdrew you from the world, therefore the world hates you.[1228]

Jesus-he who is the light-wants all men who enter this world to understand that every man, every single, is the light of the world. This he proclaimed: You are the light of the world;[1229] but those who only attend to appearances, the outer shell of the world, do not see the light, do not see reality, but deny it. Their ignorant, superficial looking takes an ignis fatus for true light.

The Lucan version of the beatitude with which we are concerned speaks of the unbelievers denouncing the name of believers as criminal. Luke employs here a well-known Semitic turn of speech, defining a thing by its name, yet it is really of the divine Name, that which in truth corresponds to all those who follow the Son of Man, that he speaks; for it is written: Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.[1230]

The divine name, the name revealed to Moses according to the scriptures, is the only name on which each one of us can count for the purpose of referring to oneself when one lays claim to becoming a child of God, invoking the real inner man of whom Jesus says that he is the light of the world: I AM he who is. The light of the world possesses an absolutely unitary vocation. There is only one light of the world, that which is; and no other thing that is not the light of the world firmly is. This is what Jesus explains-although he was not listened to-when in his great monologue he claims for all the knowledge of the unitary vocation of their own light: that they may be one as we [you, Father, and I] are one [one, in the light, in the divine name, proscribed by the world]. With me in them and you in me, may they be so completely one that the world will realize that it was you who sent me.[1231]

The same meaning attaches to the driving out of the divine name, announced by Luke as the world’s action towards that which is not of this world, as to the absence of any place for the world’s names proposed by the evangelist Thomas when he says: Wherever you have been persecuted, they will find no place.[1232]

Luke’s text speaks of the divine name driven out-not known-by the world, while Thomas speaks of the names of the world that must be driven out from within oneself by he who aspires to beatitude. These are two ways of referring to the same substantial phenomenon: the only true name is the divine name, which is one and unique, and which the world abhors; a name which whoever would be not-of-this-world can obtain only by first denying all the false plurality of the world’s names. Jesus was referring to this denial when he said: If anyone wants to become a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross every day and follow me.[1233]

It is essential to clarify the depth to which this self-denial demanded by Jesus reaches down; it calls for a persistent, step-by-step denial, day after day, of all the names acquired in the world as treasures accumulated on earth, by the plain, pure Being in every man. This is the prior action that must be undertaken, that of destroying everything with which the soul identifies that is other than the divine name. This name-I am that I am-reveals only the Son of Man-he who is-when the soul that would follow him, stripped of all the world’s names, stands alone as an empty place, one so empty in the world’s eyes that the sword of persecution can find no space in which to sink its blade.

The Gospel knows and explains the alternative possibility, namely that the place is occupied by the real Man, the spirit, the pure Self, beyond the earthly structure of the soul and its capacity for gaining Life or losing it. The Gospel references to the soul in this sense all express a contradiction, one that can be explained only by the well-known fact that to be in this world is to be nothing in the eyes of the real world, for the world’s accumulations are nothing in the heavenly world, that of the Son of Man. That is why it is written: What gain, then, is it for a man [the soul] to have won the whole world and to have lost or ruined his very self [his spirit]?[1234]

The denial that Jesus calls for on the part of whoever would follow him, the soul that aspires to be one with the spirit, the pure Self, must always begin with the expulsion of all the places or names of the world that have attached themselves to the soul, in the vain belief that they are genuine; the denial that Jesus calls for is a baptismal cleansing of the soul, one so deep, so complete that it must bring the soul to a place bordering on being sad to the point of dying and finally drinking with Jesus the cup of death that he drank,[1235] for the cross and the death of Christ prefigure in the Gospel that of every one who follows in the footsteps of the Son of Man.

The contradiction ordained for the soul appears in many Gospel logia, but special note may be taken of the following passage from St. John’s Gospel: Anyone who loves his soul [life] loses it; anyone who hates his soul [life] in this world will keep it for the eternal life.[1236] Here, it is not the world that hates and drives out the divine name, but the soul that is called upon to hate the worldly names and accretions that are erroneously thought to constitute a worldly soul. It is these accretions that must be denied, meaning unmasked, recognized as what they really are, a useless adjunct to the soul.

The Way planned for the soul must culminate in this place, this Calvary, where there stands the Cross the soul has taken up and willingly raised there. In this death, in this crucifixion of the soul that has denied itself resides the truth of the Good News, to have made itself nothing more than an empty space, as demanded by the logion. Of this humility, of the soul’s self-denial enabling the divine name that has hitherto lain captive on the far edge of consciousness, Mary tells in her Magnificat: My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord and my spirit exults in God my savior.[1237]

The Gospel passages which tell of the manifest events of Jesus’ death are in many respects a hidden figure for the blessed fact of the willingly accepted death of the soul and the immediate resurrection of the inner Christ. Once the death of Jesus had been consummated-and this may be seen too as a hidden figure for the soul’s cessation, freed from its impurities by persistent self-denial-Matthew and Mark tell that the veil of the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom.[1238] This means the breaking, within the body, the temple of the spirit, of the fine veil of ignorance that comes between the two spheres, heaven and earth, into which the gnoseological scenario of the universe is divided.

The veil could never tear from bottom to top (despite all the efforts made by many to attain just that) for the soul, born below, must before all else, according to the hidden plan, realize the nothingness of perfect humility. The psychic elements saved following this intense catharsis will then stand like virgins, passively waiting with lamps lit for the coming of the bridegroom.

The veil which, like a bronze firmament, marks the limits of the soul within man and prevents him from contemplating the eternal light, is torn at the end; but its complete tearing is not a task to be undertaken by the soul,[1239] but by the Spirit which, through its rain of fire (knowledge) makes possible the soul’s purification; to this corresponds the falling away of the veil that separates the light of knowledge from the reign of darkness. From his place above the spirit descends on the soul, overflowing itself, ecstatic in its cessation, in its being nothing, and the Spirit takes to itself as booty for the Son of God, the purified residue, transformed into refined gold, in that last gesture of the soul that was once soul and is now the soul of the soul, the Spirit of God.

Such is the resurrection of the dead in the captive spirit that has languished long ignored, and is now brought to freedom by his sacred wedding with the soul. Thus, the soul of the prudent man whose faith, knowledge and virtue have faced down the world’s persecution and hatred on account of the Son of Man, attains redemption, fulfilling the Gospel proclaimed by Jesus, and is led to the final beatitude, its true eternal home.

1227 Matt.5:11; Luke 6:22

1228 John 15:19

1229 Matt. 5:14

1230 John 1:12

1231 John 17:23

1232 Gr. Topos. Meaning that nothing, no one will be found where you have been persecuted.

1233 Matt. 16:24; Mark 8:34; Luke 9:23

1234 Luke 9:25

1235 Mark 10:38-39

1236 John 12:25. Many witnesses translate psyche by soul, while others, scared perhaps by the importance of the death of the soul, translate it by life. [Translator’s note: as in the English version of the Jerusalem Bible.] In so doing, they move away from the concept of man’s conscious experiences—the soul and the life and moods of the soul-and settle for an impersonal basis: life. This, they do, because they have fallen into the error of regarding the soul in the Gospel as the most valuable and essential part of man, the eternal, that which will always subsist. Nevertheless, the only truly eternal element in man is the essence, the soul of the soul, the Son of Man, the Spirit of God, of whom it is said symbolically in the Gospel that he is born again from the dead, while the soul amounts to a nothingness, being the humble slave of the Spirit that governs it.

1237 Luke 1:46-47

1238 Matt. 27:51; Mark 15:38

1239 Only of hope is it written that: Here we have an anchor for our soul, as sure as it is firm, and reaching right through beyond the veil. (Heb. 6:18-19)

LOGION 69

Jesus said:

“Blessed are those who have been persecuted in their heart;

these are they who have known the Father in truth.

Blessed are the hungry, for the belly of him who desires will be filled.”

COMMENTARY

This beatitude is only one, even though the logion presents it as two, because it is tasted by the believer in two separate phases: first, knowledge of the Father in spirit, meaning, in truth, and secondly, the birth of the Son as the heart fruit of whoever loves him with a true hunger for justice; for it is written: Blessed is she [the soul] who believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled.[1240]

It is always the world that persecutes the soul which, being immature and easily seduced, believes that real life resides only in the world she can see. Then, when the soul hears the Word of God and keeps it within,[1241] the world’s persecution grows more oppressive, for the Word penetrates the soul as what is, coming like a breath sent by the spirit that is in man to lead him back to his origin, to the center of his being, to the pure Self. This self the scriptures refer to figuratively as the heart.

In this heart, the ultimate essence of Being, there lies behind the veil the threshold to the knowledge of God; and if we say threshold, it is because this is the place where the presence of the Son of Man is made manifest. This Parousia is the beginning of the knowledge of which Jesus said: If you know me, you know my Father too.[1242]

What the logion says is that once persecution has reached as far as the sanctuary of the heart, this signals the time of the true worshippers, those who worship the Father-who is spirit-in spirit, and so, in truth.[1243] However, to worship in spirit is to know and be known, for the only knower, he who knows in all knowers, being knowledge itself, is God. When the fire of the world’s persecution reaches the heart, He is there in spirit and truth, the Father who knows our hearts, and who is known only by virtue of his knowing.[1244]

Knowledge is the food received by those blessed ones who hunger and thirst after justice, and this is very clear in the logion when it says that the belly will be filled, until, like the fruit of the male, comes the light of the second birth, that of the Son of Man.

Here would be an occasion for asking once again the question put by the leading Jew Nicodemus: Can [a grown man] go back into his mother’s womb and be born again?[1245] Yet the man who has begun to know puts no questions, for he has no reason to do so. He has recogniced the spirit whitin himself, he has been born of the Spirit as a sign of the forthcoming fruitfulness of this seed planted in his soul, and now his one concern is to keep his lamp burning, that his soul may remain pure and virginal, until her union with the bridegroom.

Here, then, is the meaning of the two beatitudes. The first follows the discovery of the eternal guest; the Parousia that always comes to the searcher, guided by his hunger and thirsting after justice. The second beatitude, reserved for those who believe because they have seen, or sometimes have not even seen, consists of being endlessly refreshed by the living waters that spring from above and descend like a torrent of knowledge.

This doubly sacred action is described in the fourth Gospel, which states that the Son must first be glorified before those who believe in him can receive the Spirit: If any man is thirsty, let him come to me! Let the man come and drink who believes in me. As the scripture proclaims: From his breast shall flow fountains of living water.[1246]

1240 Luke 1:45

1241 Luke 11:28, which reads: …Happier those who hear the Word of God and keep it.

1242 John 14:7

1243 John 4:23

1244 Gr. Kardiognostes. Cfr. Luke 16:15

1245 John 3:4

1246 John 7:37-38. The polemic between certain exegetists commenting on the manifest aspect of the scriptures, as to whether the rivers of living water flow from the breast of the Son of Man or from that of the believer do not affect the hidden aspect which we are trying to explain, for in this view the Son of Man lives in the believer’s heart, having become one with him. The knowledge that springs up, one and eternal, like living water, knows nothing of the distinctions drawn by the children of this world.

LOGION 70

Jesus said:

“When you bring it into being within you,

what you have will save you.

If you do not have that within you,

what you do not have will kill you.”

COMMENTARY

In the logion, “it” refers to the spirit, man’s eternal essence, endowed with life of its own. Hence, the use in the New Testament of an abundant set of names, such as the treasure, the pearl, the jewel, the stone and, most especially, the Son of Man.

It is man himself, the pure Self, while for the soul, which is so involved with its ornamentation, all its worldly, temporal interests, it is a nameless unknown, its true name unknowable. The spirit is ever present, very close, for it is the soul’s very foundation, the soul of the soul, tirelessly spreading within it the constant perfume of life. And yet, it remains buried in the captivity to which the soul has condemned it. This it is not in the soul and the absence of the life-bringing spirit will cause the soul to die.

The other potentiality open to the soul is to draw on one of the two great powers with which she is endowed for her own salvation. The first power is faith, never blind but clairvoyant, whose penetrating gaze opens the doors of perception simultaneously to what does not appear yet is, while distinguishing that which only seems to be; for every wellspring draws its waters from a hidden source. The other power open to the soul is purification, so that the waters may once more become clear, transparent to the light of the spirit. Thus, it is engendered in the soul and the soul will be saved by having it within.

All of this is can also be expressed in the rather more mythical language of the Gospel. What man brings forth in order to obtain salvation is the inner Christ, the hidden Holy of Holies, of which the soul can sing with the anointed psalmist: You are my Son, today I have become your father.[1247] In truth, the Son was born of God in the beginning and if the psalmist and others say of him that he was begotten today, this tells not of his origin but of his worldly birth in the believing soul.

It should not, however, be forgotten that it is never the Son that is born but the soul that is reborn from an incorruptible seed, of which Peter speaks in his first epistle: Your new birth was not from any mortal seed but from the everlasting word of the living and eternal God.[1248]

1247 Ps. 2:7; Acts 13:33; Heb. 1:5, 5:5

1248 1 Pet. 1:23

LOGION 71

Jesus said:

“I shall destroy this house,

and no one will be able to rebuild it.”

COMMENTARY

The house and its inhabitants

The house of which Jesus speaks on a number of occasions represents the complete human person, being the shared dwelling of various principles, both inner and outer, that all come together, live together and have their being in it.

Both in the synoptic Gospels and in the Gospel of Thomas[1249], Jesus declares his purpose of bringing purification and division to this house. Both of these actions are interrelated, since the constituent elements of a person who does not accept the process of catharsis are cast aside by the action of the inner Christ. The house of man is then so utterly destroyed that no rebuilding will be possible. This is the ultimate function of baptism by the spirit and fire: to place in Christ’s hands a pitchfork with which to winnow the threshing floor, cleansing it of all impurities.[1250]

Jesus explains that when the baptism by fire which he sends to earth[1251] from above-from all that is purest in man-strikes the house, this house will be divided, so that of the five who dwell therein, namely the five spheres of activity or areas of life that go to make up every household, three will oppose two. Three will then be destined for the all-consuming fire, while two will be united, once the house has been destroyed, in a celestial culmination that excludes the other three.[1252]

The five inhabitants of the house are to be found in the Gospel, which describes them as enemies living together, noting the opposition between son and father, daughter and mother and, lastly, the daughter-in-law, for whom the mother is mother-in-law.

All of this had already been set out with the greatest possible precision by the prophet Micah, from whom the Gospel text no doubt originates: For son insults father, daughter defies mother, daughter-in-law defies mother-in-law; a man’s enemies are those of his own household.[1253]

Micah’s text, long predating Christian times, shows us that the Christ who bursts into every household with his consuming fire is not the manifest Christ known to ecclesiastical theology but that, here again, Matthew and Luke speak of the hidden inner Christ, on whom the Good News is founded, alongside Christ manifest, each representing one of the two aspects set forth by the Gospel.There can be no doubt but that the prophet Micah could only have been referring to this hidden Christ, who is part of every human household, dwelling in every man who comes into this world, when he speaks of the son of the divided house whom Jesus sees as the target of his purifying purpose.

The son of every human household is the Son of Man, so it should not be too difficult to identify the daughter of the house with the soul. When the latter receives the impulse to rise above herself instigated by the presence of the Son, she feels impelled to confront her natural mother, namely the soma or hylic body, every man’s solid shadow. Hence, the trichotomy of spirit, soul and body, which the apostle says go to make up the complete man, his whole being.[1254]

Yet the human personality suggested by Micah and the Evangelists does not consist only of Saint Paul’s trichotomy, for the complete description of man calls for the acceptance of a fourth aspect, since the two components not mentioned by the Apostle, namely the father whom the son insults, and the daughter-in-law who defies her mother-in-law, can readily be understood as not being from heaven but from earth. Together with the soma, these form the three which, through the influence of the fire sent by the Son, clash with the two-the son (the spirit) and the daughter (the soul) -who, according to the logion, will stand alone, united.[1255]

It is no easy task to find in the canonical texts of the New Testament clues that can enable one to identify directly these two characters from below, who go to make up the fivefold aspect of the human household. Nevertheless, the fact that all five are mentioned by the Evangelists may be taken as a starting point for an exploration via non-canonical texts, to investigate whether the two personages we are trying to identify are to be found concealed behind other names and concepts.

With this in mind, some potentially useful information is to be found in a little gnostic text, probably of Valentinian origin, entitled The Books of the Savior.[1256] This text deals at length with the question of man’s fivefold make-up, affirming that every child is born with small portions of strength (the spirit), soul, soma and what the book calls the anti-mime [the imitator, the substitute] of the spirit.[1257] After these four components, the treatise mentions last of all, the moira, of which it says that it is not mixed with the other four, and thus is not weak on the birth of the child, so that it remains in the same form as when it entered the world.[1258] This perhaps means that, although it has cohabited with them since childhood, it is not an aspect of consciousness like those with whom it shares the house.

The treatise goes on to affirm unequivocally that the information on which it draws for the purpose of explaining this five-member family comes from Jesus’ own explanations, as recorded in the Gospel (Luke 12:50-52). The treatise places this passage from Saint Luke in Mary’s mouth and declares that what was then expressed in parables is now-in the treatise-explained with greater clarity by the Savior.[1259]

The good news which the treatise provides (and which was not provided by the Gospel) consists of identifying the persons who go to make up the fivesome. As in Saint Paul’s trichotomy, the human household consists of the spirit (the son), the soul (the daughter) and the body (soma), plus the remaining inhabitants of the house: the daughter-in-law and the father, whom the treatise designates as the moira and the antimimos of the spirit, respectively.[1260]

Consequently, we need to undertake a study of these personages, in order to deepen our understanding of their meaning and to investigate what connections they may have with the structure and the language used in the Gospel. We shall begin with the first of the pair.

The moira

The Books of the Savior doubtless borrowed the name of this member of the household from Greek mythology, yet this does not mean that the function assigned by the Gnostic scribe to the daughter-in-law implies any dependence on Hellenistic thought. The Gnostic moira of the Books of the Savior has nothing in common with any notion of Fate or of a personal destiny, as is the case with the Greek moira. The only common factor is that its role in regard to a man’s life involves a certain relationship with that assigned by mythology to the third of the Parcae, little Atropos, death.

The inclusion of the moira, the daughter-in-law, in the Gospel’s house representing the human person confirms the natural, inexorable fact that all men are mortal and bears witness to the predestined ending of every man’s sojourn on earth, when Atropos, the inflexible, cuts the thread of life. When the Moira wove his destiny-says Homer before the death of Hector-the threads of Fate were spun for him that dogs should eat his flesh.[1261] In the Books of the Savior, however, death is explained without any mythological embroidery: When that man’s time has run its course, first will come the moira, leading the man to death.[1262]

What the Gnostic scribe strives to make clear is that the daughter-in-law in the Gospel text is there to remind us all, in the language of parables, that one of the five ingredients that go to make up a human being is mortality. Death is the moira, whose mother-in-law is the mother, Nature or the natural soma, because she is not capable of taking from her the infinite life that reigns in her, but only death which, with inexorable timing, breaks surface and on the morrow brings to naught the life of today.

This does not, however, make the moira-Atropos-man’s enemy, but merely a straightforward representation of man’s condition; she does not dictate man’s destiny, she merely records it. The Gnostic scribe explains this clearly: The moira, he says, is not mixed with them (i.e. with the four other components that go to make up consciousness) but lets herself be guided by them, simply following them.[1263] [She walks] behind the soul and the body[1264]; and when the soul, united to the soma, goes towards death, she lives alongside them both, for the pair are, then, from below, they are mortal, being of this world.

It is the soul’s attachment to the body that leads the two to die together, this being in the nature of the body but a matter of choice for the soul. This, Jesus made clear, in words recorded in the fourth Gospel: If you do not believe that I am He, you will die in your sins.[1265] But such a death will not be attributable to the moira, since she does nothing but follow, a submissive Atropos who does no more than cut the threads when she receives the order. This, the Gnostic writer confirms: The moira will follow behind a man until the day of his death. This is the task of the moira and she will perform no other action but this.[1266]

The Books of the Savior also set out to explain what happens to the human house when it is struck by the fire that Christ brings down upon earth.[1267] The mysteries made fire-the writer says-pursue in the soma the antimimos of the spirit[1268] and the moira, to separate them from the force [spirit], so that antimimos, moira and soma are on one side and strength and the soul on the other.[1269]

The function of the mysteries of fire is to fill the soul with the fire of knowledge, so that, rid of the unnecessary attachments of the soma, rid of impermanence and limitations and washed clean by baptism, it can be freed from being followed by the moira. Thus, nothing that can die persists in the soul. This means that the soul (psyche), which is life, once cleansed of all that is death, is left in a state of virginal purity and can manifest as what it is, being identical with itself and, thus, one with Christ, who is its essence.

Expressed in language less mythical, the soul is always life, but this life is mortal so long as its conscious contents remain united with the impermanent residues of the body and of the world, while it is eternal life once, following the catharsis of baptism by fire (knowledge), it has recovered its state as the virginal psyche, the maiden sung by Isaiah. The soul is then seen as the daughter in the personal human household; however, in her impure state of being subject to mortality, she is not seen as the daughter of the house in the Gospel parable, but represents the daughter-in-law in man’s fivefold make-up, in other words, the moira.

As for what happens to the moira in the end, the Gnostic author explains this in his peculiar mythical language: From the very moment when she [the soul] says the mystery, she abandons the moira in her place among the Archons.[1270] The place of the Archons refers to those levels of consciousness over which death reigns. The soul escapes from these regions through the mystery of baptism and parts company with the moira forever. Then, the scribe adds, […] you can keep your moira, from now on I shall never return to this place.[1271]

The Gospel account describes the causes of the destruction of death’s Sting-destruction through baptism by fire-in another mythical context, one that still has the same meaning: This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that a man may eat it and not die.[1272]

The antimimos of the spirit

This character is very clearly identified in The Books of the Savior as one of the five who go to make up Saint Luke’s house representing the human personality.[1273] Since we have already presented the other four, we must by a process of exclusion infer that the antimimos of the spirit is none other than the father of the human family.

Since the Greek Word antimimos (antimimesis) means imitation, sham, replica, etc., we must conclude that the father of the household is but a false father, a falsified version of the heavenly Father whose temple is the human household. This explains why the action of the son consists essentially of insulting the sham father.[1274] This he does by bringing knowledge and energy to the house, thus unmasking the impostor father, just as the Son did when he exclaimed: Stop turning my Father’s house into a market.[1275]

When the Gospel says that the sham father is one of the five members of the human household, what it is clearly proclaiming is that consciousness, the soul, takes or constructs this character as a substitute for the heavenly Father who dwells within, represented by the figure of the Son. He, the Son, must deliver the soul from her ignorance, her identification with the antimimos, so that she may become unified with Him. This affirms the principle of unity with the Father, since the Son of Man himself revealed in the Gospel the great mystery: The Father and I are one.[1276]

In making a first attempt at an approximate, and not excessively mythical, interpretation of what the father of the human household means, it should be understood that consciousness, at its psychic level, i.e. at the intermediate levels of the cosmos, does not know the heavenly Father, tries to replace the true Father, by a substitute, a sort of factitious father. This is the antimimos of the spirit, which the psyche endeavors to use as a means to establish itself as a personal entity in time and space. After a manner of speaking, the soul, aided and abetted by memory, can be seen as imagining and develing a personal ego, thus providing herself with a sense of continuity, whereupon she comes to see this ego as the complete synthesis of all the components of consciousness. Thanks to the action of memory, these components arise as a succession of images, thus cancelling out the disagreeable experience of a void in the psyche, which is in fact the truth.

The character thus created-and here we are citing the Secret Book of John, otherwise known as The Apocryphon of John, a Gnostic work that contains many passages explaining the antimimos-is the exclusive product of matter, darkness and desire. It is the adversary spirit, the Adversary of the heavenly Father, the adversary incorporated in man; and this makes it hard to overcome, not because of any weakness on the part of the Father but because of the soul’s feebleness. The text adds, as an ultimate synthesis of man’s configuration: This is the prison,[1277] which it is indeed for the unwary soul that trusts in the adversary, just as Saint Peter so unsparingly expresses it: prowling around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to eat.[1278]

The author of The Apocryphon of John describes some of the special features and consequences of the antimimos of the spirit. He says that, once the antimimos enters into them (souls) they are seduced by it and led astray.[1279] To be led astray means for the Gnostic, to prevent souls from recognizing their perfection,[1280] and what this involves is the antimimos inculcating in the soul the idea that she is a discrete ego, a small, individualized being. It is precisely this view of herself as a psychosomatic entity, one that sees itself being endowed with a personality, drawing on all the accumulated ups and downs of temporal life. But this temporal state is an island, a false, invented center, within which the untutored soul sees herself as a captive, at times railing bitterly against its walls of smoke, while making no attempt to break through them, for she takes that smoke for solid iron. What is more, the soul takes good care of her prison, which she sees as her very life, whereas it is in reality an antimimesis, a mere imitation of the absolute, eternal life of the All, the life received from the Spirit, Christ’s hidden envoy.

The Gnostic author explains this infirmity common to souls: When the antimimos of the spirit multiplies [when it grows in importance within souls] they stumble and do not know the All.[1281] To the abundant information he provides on the antimimos, the Gnostic adds a point that deserves to be stressed: The antimimos-he says-remains outside the soul, being clothing for her, in some way resembling her, like a sheath of apparel outside her.[1282]

This clothing is outside the soul, and the author defines it as being something the soul takes with her and regards as inseparable from herself.[1283] All of this refers without question to the ego, which the soul names when she says I, and which she imagines to be inseparable from herself, wearing it as an inseparable garment that is never changed. And if this is said to resemble the soul, it is because the ego, being a creation of the psyche, has its being in the same region of consciousness as the psyche that created it.

As for the action which the author ascribes to the antimimos, this expresses hatred for the soul, since her interests tend towards the search for perfection, while the antimimos, being limited, enclosed into its egocentric confinement, will be her [the soul’s] enemy and will cause her to desire all the things of the cosmos.[1284]

The biblical names given to the antimimos of the spirit

For the author of the Apocryphon of John, Adam’s deep dream (Gen. 2:21) expresses the incapacity of the newly created soul (Adam) to become aware of himself as himself, a reflection that brings to consciousness the light of his own perceptions. The Gnostic calls this deep dream drunkenness with darkness.[1285]

In order to awaken Adam, YHVH brought before him, not the bone from my bones (his rib = Eve), as in Gen. 2:23, but his luminous reflection. This, the reflection, is the true soul of the soul, according to the meaning of the allegory which, in Adam’s prophetic song, employs the Word bone to mean the soul.[1286] It is said that the luminous reflection stripped away the veil that covered Adam’s intelligence,[1287] and it was by reason of the light it brought him that Adam named Eve, his reflection, the mother of all those who live.[1288]

Thanks to the luminous reflection (Eve) Adam discovered the existence of knowledge. Thus he saw the need to eat the fruit of that tree in order to be able to look up to heaven for perfection.

However, the Gnostic author adds: It was the serpent who taught him to sow desire, impurity and destruction.[1289] This refers to the two opposite directions on the road that opened up before Adam. The fruit of the tree is, indeed, the seed of the faculty of knowledge[1290]; as the work of luminous reflection, the fruit of the tree opens the way to perfection, while the seed sown by the serpent brought with it desire, impurity and destruction, in other words, desire for all the things in the cosmos.

At this point, it becomes clear that the serpent in Genesis is one of the names that the Old Testament gives to the antimimos, the fifth member of the human household. The other name for the antimimos used in both Testaments is consequently, the Adversary (Satan), who is identical to the ancient Serpent. If he is called the Adversary, it is because consciousness takes him for its “I”, its very spirit, but this it is not. In reality, it is nothing but a parody of the Spirit of God: an adversary of God set up in men’s consciousness.

When Genesis speaks of the Adam who ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, it sets out to describe the man fully able to exercise unlimitedly his faculty of knowing; but access to knowledge is not possible unless man is first impelled by the desire to know. It must not be forgotten that desire is the one and only power of the will that man possesses if he would approach knowledge.

The purpose of the passage in Genesis is, through allegory, to confirm this truth, namely that desire is always essentially the desire to know. The holy narrator of Genesis sets forth a dual direction, two separate ways that can be taken by desire, which knowingly chooses to move towards good or evil. Everywhere in the biblical forest, we come upon these two ways, from Cain and Abel onwards; and that includes the Gospel, coming many centuries later: one wide and spacious road leads to perdition, but it is a narrow gate and a hard road that leads to life.[1291]

Genesis tells of man’s innate capacity-signified by Eve as the mother of all those who live-to take one or other of the two ways. Being an allegory of the soul’s capacity for reflection, Eve is the source of the real life of all, for her luminous, reflexive nature arouses the desire to know, which is desire itself; as we have already said, the essence of desire is the desire to know. The two opposing ways that set out from the tree of knowledge do not depend on knowledge itself, but on the direction elected by desire, depending on its inclination to know imperfection or perfection.

This clash in the choice of directions is explicit in the scriptural passage known as the judgement on the serpent.[1292] The enmity it announces between the lineage of the serpent and that of the woman amounts to a sort of allegory for the rivalry between man’s following his desire for the visible, usually referred to in the scriptures as the world, and the invisible, which is also the world but is to be seen through. Various names are given to this invisible world, but in the Gospel, it is usually called the Kingdom of God.

Seen from this standpoint, it is not hard to understand how, when the context is expressed in its most mythical terms, the serpent’s progeny should come to be known as God’s Adversary-Satan. This is the lineage which lies at the lowest levels of consciousness, waiting to strike at the heel of the soul’s luminous thinking faculty and to obstruct that faculty’s freedom to fly at the height to which it is best suited.

If this reflection was a symbol called woman, it was because of its quality of passivity, being above all beholding, a capacity for seeing through that in itself dominates and treads down the lineage of the adversary and discovers the object of knowledge. Passive beholding is a contemplation that opens up the rivers of the spirit and knowledge, that they may irrigate consciousness.

What the judgment on the serpent means is that every man who comes into this world will sooner or later be faced, in his own house, with the tremendous conflict between the two strongest enemies within: the son, who made his home in the essence of the soul, and the sham father, the antimimos, trying to pass himself off as the real Father, a usurper and so, the Adversary of the true one.

In the Son, who remains invisible, although perceptible to the subtle consciousness, is the knowledge of perfection, while in the antimimos, clinging to the soul like clothing, is the superficial knowledge of what is visible and imperfect.

It must be accepted that the idea of this limited ego which the soul imagines to be its center, a sort of island formed by the mind, is nothing but a product of the serpent’s offspring. If it is seen as the Adversary of the Father, of the Self, this is because the latter is only conceivable as a sphere without a center, every point in the cosmos being the pure and absolute center within it. Thus, crushing the head of the serpent has the same meaning as destroying the idea of being a psychological self. That destruction can, however, take place only where there is knowledge of perfection.

The name of the antimimos of the spirit in the New Testament

The author of the Book of Revelations declares that the Dragon, the ancient serpent (who tempted man to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge), the Devil and Satan, are all names given to the Adversary of the Heavenly Father, the antimimos of the spirit.[1293] This makes fairly clear the language used by the New Testament to identify the father in the human household.

As the enemy who lives in the same house and hates the good seed stored within, the Devil is the sower of tares.[1294] Jesus uses this hidden mode when he expresses his recrimination against those listening to him in a certain passage from St. John’s Gospel. They do not love the Son, and so they have not yet acknowledged the Word within themselves. If, then, they do not belong to the Son, they cannot be called God’s children. Jesus tells them: The Devil is your father.[1295]

Jesus speaks of Satan, the Adversary, especially when he encounters an egocentric motivation in someone, a lower impulse that gives rise to a distorted way of thinking, behavior that engenders separation. In such cases, Jesus warns of the Satanic tendency that is emerging. One such example is when Peter, seeing Jesus as a person and not as the Son of God, remonstrates with him for announcing his passion, which he is plainly ready to face. Jesus then berates him harshly: Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle in my path.[1296]

Such comments on Satanic or diabolical influence are abundant in the Gospel, but do not imply any identification with the person of Satan. They simply draw attention to behavior which, being far from the universality of the Father, is to some extent redolent of the darkness surrounding God’s adversary.

The same could be said of Judas. The man’s conduct is certainly heinous, not only because of the meanness of his betrayal but because of the exceptional nature of the being he betrayed. This is why Christians came subsequently to see in Judas, not a man who performed an act of betrayal, but the historic symbol of someone totally possessed by evil.

All this is well known and would not be worth mentioning here, were it not for the fact that there are in the New Testament abundant clues that the symbolic potential of Judas’ betrayal was well understood by the Gospel scribes, who played their part in converting the damned twelfth apostle into the hidden representation of the fifth character in the human household.

The Evangelists’ purpose is, with the consummation of Judas’ death, to record the fulfilment of the curse prophesied both in the proto-Gospel and in Micah, who had written that the sham father of that household would in the end be wounded by the son.[1297] The Son was to say later, when explaining his Gospel: Anyone who prefers father or mother[1298] to me is not worthy of me.[1299]

By acknowledging the historic person Judas to be the hidden figure of God’s Adversary, the scriptural prophecy was fulfilled. This, moreover, confirmed Jesus as being the promised Messiah. The Evangelists wasted no opportunity to reveal these two messianic identifications. This shows how the mean Judas Iscariot came to be made a figure of myth, and it is therefore appropriate that we should now study him since, in terms of the hidden interpretation, there can be no doubt but that this Judas-and the character described through him-is used by the Gospel scribes to depict the fifth person in the household, Satan, the Adversary of the spirit, in the make-up of every man’s psyche. Saint Luke confirms this identification, unhesitatingly saying: Then Satan entered into Judas.[1300]

Jesus was referring to the inner psyche of the Judas of the household when he addressed that general warning to Peter: Simon, Simon! Satan, you must know, has got his wish to sift you all like wheat.[1301] Here, the Gospel scribe pointedly calls Peter by his earthly name, for it is Simon, not Peter, who is to be sifted with that sieve called for by the Adversary of the light in all men. It is quite clear that only the wheat unified in Peter (in keeping with the name’s meaning as the cornerstone rejected by many) will be left for Life. The rest consists of mere dried husks. It is powerless to escape the boundaries of a narrow separate ego, and so belongs to the fifth member of the household, the Adversary of the infinite universal light. The sifted chaff will blow in the wind. The time has come for hastening the conversion of chaff into wheat, which is the work of the spirit.

Through the description of Judas as a hidden inner character that is born and grows up within every man, what we see is the interiorization, the hidden description of the proto-Gospel serpent that is known as the Devil or Satan. As we have already made clear, the Book of Revelation confirms the fact that these are different names for the same entity. These characters should, however, be seen, not so much in mythical terms, but rather as the fifth member of the human household, present in man from birth. They represent an erroneous idea, in itself the very incarnation of original sin, being the mark of that separative pride present in all men. This sin consists of believing in one’s own image as a god, albeit a small, tightly circumscribed god, that tries to upstage the true God. This personal god leaves the world split into the many, leaving man unable to establish true unity in himself. That unity must be ransomed from servitude to the many. This was in fact Jesus’ hidden meaning when he explained that the Son of Man [had not] come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.[1302]

Heaven is here, in man’s hidden inner home, eternally present in his real, pure, absolute I AM; but likewise present in him is the hell that every man builds for himself, one as limited and ephemeral as mortal life. Hemmed in by the walls erected by the idea of being a person, a discrete entity, man becomes a puny, void shell of ego.

The antimimos, the Adversary, that false father erected by ignorance, stands like a lay figure accompanying the soul, seeming to travel the same paths, while in fact leading her astray, leading her to isolation and suffering. Operating within his house as an enemy of that house, the Adversary builds a real hell in which it imprisons its one and only victim, the soul.

This lasting close confinement of victim and tormentor is explained in the brilliant allegory of Gen.3:15. It is the clash between two lineages, each of which seeks to inherit knowledge. The lineage of the woman, the light of the soul, seeks the place of justice, the place of union with the spirit,[1303] while the ancient serpent goes in search of worldly pleasure. Although united by knowledge, both lineages tend in opposing directions. One, the first-born, seeks after the pleasures of imperfection, while the other is drawn onward by the desire for perfection. This is perhaps what was meant by the utterance of the prophet: I showed my love for Jacob and my hatred for Esau.[1304]

According to the Gospel account, when Satan entered into Judas, he decided to hand over Jesus to the chief priests. With this betrayal, the prologue was written for consummation of the death of the manifest Savior and his resurrection in the Father; yet, at the same time, the betrayal marks the culmination of the paradigm manifestly constructed by Jesus, for thus was accomplished what every man must undergo in his hidden inner being, his own death and resurrection in Christ.

This death and resurrection are the price of freedom, the price that must be paid if the Adversary, close on every man’s heels, is at last to release his prey. This can, however, take place only when the soul, awakened to knowledge, unmasks the inanity of thinking beings to be many and not one. This is the hidden meaning. As for what took place in manifest terms, it is well known that they paid [Judas] thirty silver pieces.[1305] In hidden terms, this is precisely the price set by the Law for freeing a slave,[1306] the price to be paid as a ransom for the lineage of the woman, sentenced to cohabit with the lineage of the serpent.

The Gospel tells how, during supper, Jesus rose from the table to wash the feet of his disciples, performing this act of washing, so it is explained, in order that the judgment on the serpent might be accomplished. However, Jesus reminds us here of the text in the Psalter that most closely resembles the Gospel scene: Yea, mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, which did eat of my bread, hath lifted up his heel against me.[1307]

The writer of the fourth Gospel places the reference to the ancient serpent between the washing of the feet and the announcement that unleashes Judas’ betrayal.[1308] Seen from the standpoint of the hidden, both things share the same meaning and it is the psalm that makes the connection and shows up this identity. This means that the purification of the feet-the Scribe goes to some length to stress the cathartic character of this washing-marks the final nullification of the judgment in Genesis that served as the basis for establishing original sin. No longer will the serpent lie in wait for the chosen one after he has performed deep self-purification, to the point of extirpating from consciousness the very root of the limited, personal ego that dared confront the Father. As was written: Only the chosen crush the energy of the evil one [the serpent].[1309]

To confirm the decisive importance of this baptism or ultimate cleansing, the Evangelist shows Peter-the apostle whom the Gospel scribes often cite as expressing the vox populi-offering a certain shy resistance to being washed by the Master, and Jesus tells him: If I do not wash you, you can have nothing in common with me.[1310]

It will be understood that this washing, which compels the serpent to let go of the chosen one’s heel, can come only from above, just as the tearing of the veil of the temple, which it heralds, can only be from the top downwards. This indeed calls for intervention by the inner Christ, since, as the Gospel puts it: No messenger is greater than the man who sent him.[1311]

Jesus is in truth one, both the messenger and the master who sends him, for he is his own witness in the Gospel and the Father is his witness. It is as though we were to say that he is, in absolute unity, the knower and the known, and whoever aspires to the resurrection and the Life must never forget this. Jesus, then, needs no one to wash his feet. He knows who is lying in wait at his heels; he knows that it is a member of his own household, a companion so close to him that he pretends to be his very self; such is the antimimos whom he is about to cast out from himself once and for all.[1312]

Seen from the hidden standpoint as God’s Adversary, Judas in this Gospel passage represents Christ’s false alter ego. Hence it can be stated quite indisputably that Judas ate the piece of bread that Jesus gave him (from his own dish).[1313] This amounts to saying that the shadow can be illuminated only by the light that reaches it from the (inner) light. Being shadow, this it lacks.

The true hidden inner meaning of Judas, according to this passage, is clearly revealed by Jesus’ next words: What you are going to do, do quickly.[1314] If one takes the manifest standpoint, it is hard to deny that this command seems to exempt Judas from a large share in guilt, since the betrayal was commanded. Quite apart from this, it is shocking that Jesus should desire his own death, even going so far as to invite his betrayer to perform so grave a deed, not only for the soul of Judas but for the entire Jewish people, for thus he was opening the gates for the consummation of deicide.

However, this dilemma arises only in the context of the manifest version, not in the hidden one with which we are dealing here. From that standpoint, the Adversary’s leaving at night (the night of the soul) marks the first step, the first decisive stage in the freeing of the captive. This explains Jesus’ impatience for an end to bondage. This hidden ending calls for no guilty party.

With Judas’ hasty final departure, the ancient serpent of the curse let go and left the soul free to fly at last to the Father. In truth, the house lay destroyed and could never be rebuilt. That is why, when the enemy had gone, Jesus said: Now has the Son of Man been glorified and in him God has been glorified.[1315]

1249 Matt. 10:34; Luke 12:49-51. Also GT 16, to which we appended a commentary on the same lines.

1250 Matt. 3:12

1251 Luke 12:49

1252 GT 16. The two are the son and the daughter, united as spouses by the sacred marriage.

1253 Micah 7:6

1254 1 Thes. 5:23

1255 GT 16.

1256 This treatise has received scant critical attention. It was discovered in Greece in 1850 by Dr. A. Askew, who died shortly after the find. In 1851 it was transcribed and published in Berlin by J.H. Petermann. However, the codex consisted of two treatises, the first of these Books of the Savior (BS) being entitled Pistis Sophia, not the second. Petermann, whose intention was surely not to engage in any advanced critical study, called the whole codex by the name Pistis Sophia, without anyone seriously questioning the autonomy of the second treatise to this day, despite its being set out with Part I coming after Part II. All of this suggests a lack of close reading of this second treatise. Its origin is Valentinian, like that of the Pistis Sophia, and it probably dates back to the end of the 3rd century.

1257 BS. pp. 281-282

1258 BS. p. 282

1259 BS. pp 300-301

1260 The only hypothetical decision to be taken is as to whether the moira really corresponds to the daughter-in-law in the Gospel and the antimimos is the Gnostic name for the father of the household, or whether the identification should be the other way round. Many arguments militate in favour of the first choice.

1261 Iliad XXIV, 209

1262 BS. p.284

1263 BS. p.347

1264 BS. p.350

1265 John 8:24

1266 BS. p.350b

1267 Luke 12:49

1268 See hereinafter the results of our research into this fifth character.

1269 BS. p.300

1270 BS. p.287

1271 BS. p.290. It should not be forgotten that the Greek word moira means part, or portion. In returning the moira to the Archons, what the soul is doing is to abandon to its true masters the mortal portion allotted to it in the world.

1272 John 6:50

1273 BS. 350-351

1274 It will be remembered that in Micah 7:6, son insults father. Likewise, in Luke 12:53 and in GT 16, it is the son who clashes with the father.

1275 John 2:16

1276 John 10:30

1277 Secret Book of John 16:3, 10. Many texts from the first centuries of the Christian era include references to the antimimos of the spirit, the substitute spirit. But the The Apocryphon of John makes an unusually detailed study of the antimimos. This document is usually seen as dating back to the beginning of the 2nd century. Three copies of the text were found in the Nag Hammadi trove, but we are citing here another brief version discovered at an earlier date: that in papyrus Berolinensis 8502 (cfr. Puech’s summary, The Apocryphon of John, in N.T. Apocrypha I).

1278 1 Pet. 5:8

1279 AJ 67:15, (14:10-11, N of E)

1280 AJ 56:15; (14:15, 15:18, N of E)

1281 AJ 68:15; (15:25, N of E)

1282 BS. p. 338

1283 BS. p. 285

1284 BS. p. 283

1285 AJ 59:20, (12:5-6, N of E)

1286 For the bone/soul allegory see GT 63, 1 et seq.

1287 AJ 60:1, (12:5, N of E)

1288 AJ 60:10, (12:9, N of E); Gen. 3:20

1289 AJ 60:15, 57:15-58, (11:17-18, N of E)

1290 The nakedness discovered by the man and the woman after eating the fruit of the tree is the nakedness of knowledge and, consequently, of the desire to obtain it (Gen. 3:7, 10-11.) It is not bodily nakedness as is usually thought, but nakedness of the soul. The body, or tunic of flesh, which the Gnostic explained as being made of gloomy darkness (AJ 62:1) was a later addition by YHVH (Gen. 3:21). In 61:1, he says: By means of the tree I instructed him that he might eat of [the original] perfection, since his defect was ignorance.

1291 Matt. 7:13-14

1292 Gen. 3:15

1293 Rev. 20:2

1294 Matt. 13:38-39

1295 John 8:42-44

1296 Matt. 16:23

1297 Micah 7:6

1298 Mother, meaning, the soma, or Nature.

1299 Matt. 10:37

1300 Luke 22:3

1301 Luke 22:31

1302 Matt. 20:28

1303 BS. p.282

1304 Rom. 9:13; Mal. 1:3. Jacob’s yearning for perfection obtained for him, once enlivened by rûach following his fight with God, transfiguration into Israel, meaning, the Son of Man. Esau, the senior twin, was enlivened by nefesh, man’s instinctive vital principle.

1305 Matt. 26:14-15

1306 Ex.21:32

1307 John 14:18; Ps. 41:9 [Translator’s note: KJV cited of necessity, the Jerusalem Bible version is unhelpful here.]

1308 John 13:6-10

1309 Clem. Alex. Strom. VI 7, 60, 3

1310 John 13:8

1311 John 13:16

1312 The Gnostic author describes the antimimos as a paralemptor (meaning one who lives hard by the soul without entering into her).

1313 John 13:26. Mark expresses this clearly, for when the disciples ask Not I, surely? Jesus answers It is one of the Twelve, one who is dipping into the same dish with me. (Mark 14:20)

1314 John 13:27

1315 John 13:31

LOGION 72

A man said to him:

“Tell my brothers to divide my father’s possessions with me.”

He said to him:

“O man, who has made me a divider?”

He turned to his disciples and said to them:

“I am not a divider, am I?”

COMMENTARY

The possessions of which the logion speaks are those of the knowledge that comes from the Father, the only true master; and it is sharing in this common treasury of knowledge-since to know and to be are one and the same thing when knowledge is genuine-that makes men brothers and heirs. Matthew bears witness to this: You have only one master, and you are all brothers[1316].

If the man in the logion asks Jesus for his share in those possessions already enjoyed by his brothers, it is because Jesus said: No one can come to the Father except through the Son[1317]. Indeed, these possessions of knowledge that lead to the Father always proceed from the spirit, when engulfed in fire by the Son, the sender of fire. What Jesus is saying is that genuine possessions -those endowed by knowledge-are not subject to sharing, they are a matter of being. This means that no one receives the fire of the spirit unless he himself becomes spirit, nor can he obtain the Son’s knowledge unless he shares in the Son’s unity. The Son of Man gave his life to gather together in unity the scattered children of God[1318], meaning that he gave his life for the many-and gives it-that they may be one in the Life of the Son of Man. In giving Life, however, he gave all of himself-his being and his knowledge, these being his possessions-without these being divisible.

The logion comes to this point, but in the third Gospel, the text is followed by a warning against greed for knowledge where it is not genuine. This, it sets out to clarify by means of a brief parable that goes with the logion, known as the parable of the foolish rich man[1319].

Plainly, the goods hoarded by the man in the parable are treasures of knowledge. Since they are handed to the soul for safekeeping, there can be no doubt that these are riches belonging to the soul. However, being riches laid up for oneself, it is to be understood that the fruit harvested from that man’s fields are one and the same as the worldly wisdom that God derided, as spoken of by Isaiah and corroborated by Paul[1320].

The mean granaries of memory cannot possibly contain the abundant grain of that worldly wisdom, grounded in knowing without being. Hence the project of building other, bigger barns (perhaps the hypothetical kingdom of the book) in which to store all that so-called knowledge. The foolish rich man takes all these barns to be a safeguard for his soul and goes confidently to his rest, without a thought for God’s question in the parable: and this hoard of yours, whose will it be then?

What the parable says is that if the knower stays ensconced among the stores of his goods, it is because he is laying up treasures for himself. The true knower takes the Life and the knowledge that the Son gives him, to consume himself in its fire. The knower who knows is free from duality, he is knowledge itself, one with the Son. Thus is true knowledge attained, that which consists of being knowledge. Such are riches towards God.

There are in the Gospel two references to this mystery of the knower who, when he knows the truth is transformed into knowledge itself (pneuma, spirit, wind):

What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed swaying in the wind?[1321] And: The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. That is how it is with all who are born of the spirit[1322].

With all this, one might imagine that there is nothing to add to the commentary on the logion and the parable; yet Saint Luke’s account reveals yet again the trichotomy that goes to make up the whole man. One wonders, who, what is it in the man in the parable that speaks with the soul and says: My soul, you have plenty of good things laid by? Or: for whom will the demand be made for his soul that very night?

The speaker must be the spirit, for the spirit is the one and only true holder of wisdom, even though it is as elusive as the wind blowing through the reeds. This is truly a mystery for consciousness, which can know the spirit only when it ceases and, no longer itself the knower, becomes true knowledge, one with the Son and the Father, as it is written: that they may be one, as we are one[1323].

1316 Matt. 23:8

1317 John 14:6 [A deliberate change by Pla to fit in with his argument. All the original texts say “me”.]

1318 John 11:52

1319 Luke 12:13-15. For the parable, Luke 12:16-21. In some versions it is referred to as Not hoarding possessions.

1320 1 Cor. 1:20 et seq.; Isai. 29:14

1321 Luke 17:24

1322 John 3:8

1323 John 17:21

LOGION 73

Jesus said:

“The harvest is rich but the laborers are few,

so ask the Lord to send laborers to his harvest[1324].”

COMMENTARY

The laborers and the harvest

According to the traditional manifest interpretation, the harvest is to be taken as a metaphor for the total number of persons ready (i.e. whose souls have been prepared) to convert to the Christian faith. As for the laborers, these are, still according to the same interpretation, all those who, belonging to this faith, willingly follow the example of the first disciples chosen by Jesus, these being the first laborers, to whom the Master gave precise instructions to enable them to accomplish their mission[1325].

In terms of the hidden aspect, however, the harvest is to be taken literally as that which was sown. Consequently, it calls for no more metaphorical an interpretation than the parable of the sower: the sower (the Father) sows the Word (the Son) in every man (the harvest) who comes into this world[1326].

If what is sown in every man is the Word, there can be no doubt but that the Son of Man is the seed that must germinate and produce fruit. Hence, the laborers, who are given this name because they are called upon to carry out the work of God, are those souls which have begun to yield a certain measure of the fruit of knowledge. The task to be carried out by these laborers is not a mission to convert other souls into laborers. Rather, it consists of attaining their own inner realization, as explained in the fourth Gospel: This is working for God: you must believe in the one he has sent[1327].

The work consists of believing that the Son of Man was sown in us all, and that his Kingdom is here, very near, since he has made his dwelling in every man. This is the first task, that from which the fruit of knowledge is born, the fruit whose development and ripening determines whether each man is a good laborer in the harvest.

It is written that the harvest is rich-for the harvest consists of all the men who come into this world-while the laborers are few. The disproportion is very great, since the only laborers are those who believe in the invisible seed, even without seeing it, and it is only with the vague presentiment of the presence of the guest that faith causes the seed to germinate.

Thus, the unity of the seed is revealed in the end, when it becomes clear that the seed, the Son of Man, is only One and ever the same. This is the outcome for those laborers in the harvest who persevere, those whose souls have been refined like silver and tested like gold: thus, they discover their glorious identity with the never-failing seed.

The two groups sent forth

Not the slightest trace remains in the New Testament to show whether the expeditions of the Twelve, the Seventy (or Seventy-two) organized by Jesus took place before the Master’s death and resurrection. Such is the absence of concern in the Gospel to record any factual detail concerning the actual accomplishment of these travels in pairs[1328] that this lacuna raises serious difficulties when it comes to accepting the manifest interpretation or, at the very least, a non-metaphorical understanding of what was meant by these two groups of missionary envoys; especially when one considers the Seventy (or Seventy-two) of whom Luke says the Lord sent them out ahead of him, in pairs, to all the towns and places he himself was to visit[1329].

The words ahead of him invalidate the presumption that Christ was thinking of this work taking place after his death. If, however, it was to be done during the manifest life of Jesus, it becomes obvious, given the many visits made by the Master himself during the last period of his life and what this meant in terms of activity on the part of the thirty-five or thirty-six pairs, that we cannot take literally the instructions given by Jesus when sending forth the Seventy.

Saint Luke’s mention of a second institution of disciples has given food for thought to many, and not without reason, given the parallelism between these two groups with the two accounts of the multiplication of loaves[1330]. Both these things are indeed closely related from several points of view.

The bread that is multiplied is without question the same as that to which Jesus refers in the fourth Gospel when he says: I am the bread of life[1331]. This bread, which is Christ and which we hold within us, may be said to be like leaven, rising and growing when one believes, until it reveals to man the eternal life and perfect knowledge which are his heritage. This is holy bread. It is not human, although it is destined for man; and that is why Saint Mark the Evangelist says of it that it is far superior to what can be made with the yeast of the Pharisees or of Herod[1332], both of which Jesus warns that we should be on our guard against, not, of course, because it was made by Pharisees but by human beings.

The good leaven implanted in every man as the inner, hidden, Christ, thus transforming into the bread of Life, is another way of expressing what, in the parable of the sower, is referred to as three measures of fruit, i.e. of true knowledge. It is to be understood that the three measures of this fruit are valued in the parable on a hundredfold scale that sets them out as a hundred, sixty and thirty; but where these measures appear in the Gospel as an expression symbolizing the Mystery of Christ, the figures used to signify the two higher measures are twelve and seven.[1333]

The sign which these two measures gives us must not be forgotten, for, as the fruit of what was sown, the fruit of the harvest, twelve and seven are obtained, while with the bread of life multiplied by Jesus, the leftovers amount in one case to twelve baskets and, in the other, to seven. Whoever eats this bread receives Christ’s mystery in the same measure as he eats of it.

This is to be understood as the effect of eating the fruit: the institution of the Twelve, meaning, not only Jesus’ twelve apostles but all those who, as chosen laborers, have brought in the rich harvest, thus attaining perfect knowledge, epignosis, that which can be obtained only from the bread of Christ, eaten until the attaining of the three measures. As is explained in the parable, those souls are like the yeast of the Kingdom of Heaven that a woman took and mixed with three measures of flour till it was leavened all through[1334].

There is another institution connected with the Mysteries: that of the Seven. It was explained by Saint Luke in the Acts as being at the service of the Twelve, as deacons. The virtue that corresponds to the Seven is described as fulness of Spirit and of Wisdom, i.e. sufficient knowledge of the First Mystery; while the Twelve were devoted to prayer and the mystery of the Word. If, when reading this passage, one takes into account the interplay between different lines sometimes used by Luke, it is possible to understand that all those who attain perfect knowledge of the truth of Christ enter into the spiritual corporation of the Twelve. The Seven are knowers of that wisdom that comes from the Spirit, but the level of their knowledge is imperfect[1335].

The Seven do make an appearance in the third Gospel, but in a form that is not readily recognizable, that of seventy, in some manuscripts seventy-two. The members of this institution, that of the Seven, are entrusted with helping with the regeneration of the harvest. The difference between the fruit obtained by the Twelve and by the Seven is made clear by the terms employed by Jesus in two missionary statements.

These passages, set out in extenso-Saint Matthew’s on the Twelve, Luke’s on the Seven-contain many expressions pertaining to pilgrimage, common to the missionary work to be carried out by both institutions. That is their manifest meaning, yet every man’s spiritual life is, figuratively, a pilgrimage, a return, a final homecoming to the House of the Father. Thus, everything about this journey can turn us towards a hidden meaning.

Here, both accounts explain the inner labor of the soul for the regeneration of the harvest of what she had sown and how she is to behave in the world if she is to enable many to release the captive Spirit sleeping within.

Thus, the towns, the places, the houses that the soul visits during its peregrinations are a metaphor for the mansions of knowledge that every soul discovers in itself, rather than real places. Every occasion when the light penetrates or descends upon the pilgrim soul marks her arrival at a new inn, a new place, a new sphere of knowledge.

Other passages speak of the indispensable purification and the concern to sow purity, so that others may gather the fruit they bear in themselves. Likewise, encouragements abound to cultivate poverty or sobriety of spirit, as in the Beatitudes.

Lastly, Matthew’s account concerning the Twelve and Luke’s concerning the Seven differ in respect of certain specific requirements of the Kingdom, in keeping with the respective goals and merits of the members of each institution.

Herein, the general exegesis of the two accounts in question; but when it comes to certain vicissitudes and with a view to ensuring maximum fidelity to the texts, it may perhaps be useful to provide a specific commentary[1336].

Beginning the Ascent to Jerusalem

Instructions for the journey (Matt. 10:5-6)

Do not turn your steps to pagan territory;

Do not enter any Samaritan town;

Go rather to the lost sheep of the House of Israel.

The soul’s natural pilgrimage is directed towards the city of Jerusalem; not the earthly Jerusalem but the free city above, the heavenly city, that of pure spirit[1337]. Being an evangelical journey, one that must serve as a paradigm for the pilgrimage of every soul undertaking God’s work, the expeditions Jesus sent forth consisted of an approach to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem where, at the end, with his death, the veil of the temple, the veil that guarded the secret, was torn right down the middle. This is what he then proposed to the Twelve:

The way of the pagans leads to the Jerusalem trampled down by them[1338], the sterile, earthly city unable to give birth. Therefore none of the Twelve is to take this way to perdition.

Luke tells that the Samaritans would not receive Jesus when his messengers asked for lodgings at one of their villages on his way to Jerusalem[1339]. Hence, Matthew’s injunction not to enter any Samaritan town. But Luke adds that the disciples James and John asked the Lord if he wanted them to call down fire from heaven to burn up the Samaritans. Fire from heaven is the bearer of knowledge that always consumes whatever is not pure spirit, pure Being. Through the action of fire, the Samaritans would cease to be hostile to the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, for the goal of that journey is the soul’s coming to the Kingdom of I AM.

Israel is the one born from above, the fruit of Jacob’s heart, of his strength in prevailing against the God without a name[1340]. As for the lost sheep, the term represents those whose labor is to gather the fruit that will open up for them the gates of Jerusalem. They live very near to the House of the one born of water and the Spirit, one of whose Old Testament names is Israel: the manifestation of God’s strength[1341]. And if the sheep are said to be lost, this had been pointed out by Ezekiel: My flock is straying this way and that; on mountains and on high hills[1342].

The sick and the Kingdom (Matt. 10:7-8, Luke 10:9)

As you go, proclaim that the Kingdom of Heaven [of God] is close at hand;

Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out devils;

You received without charge, give without charge.

How very close the Kingdom is (in time and in space, for both are one in this context) is something that must be proclaimed ever and insistently, for it is not easy to perceive. The Kingdom is near for those who believe in it and far for those who do not believe. Luke, who tends to focus sharply on things, says to those who are on the way: [It] is very near you.

Proclaiming the Kingdom gains the exact measure for many, the soul’s salvation. The sick who have been banished are cured; pneumatic man is reborn from the dead; the soul is purified by baptism by water and by fire, and thus the devils that cling to ignorance are expelled. According to Saint Luke’s text, these are the sick of the household. The third Gospel recommends: Eat what is set before you, and this may be understood as meaning, remedy any absence of the Kingdom that you meet with in that house.

To go up to the Kingdom is a gift that every man already holds in his possession, since the Kingdom is here. Whoever proclaims this inwardly, and also to the impure and the sick, is helping everyone to recognize this gift which was given to us as a pledge of God’s knowledge and blessing, for we are heirs to both things, together with the Son. As you have received this gift, pass it on.

The poor in spirit (Matt. 10:9-10; Luke 10:4, 7)

Provide yourselves with no gold or silver, not even with a few coppers for your purses;

With no haversack for the journey, or spare tunic or footwear or a staff;

For the workman deserves his keep

The laborer who works for the harvest may celebrate at three different altars, of gold, silver or copper. Gold, the region of the spirit, in order to refine it, as Zacharias requested; silver, the life of the soul, for purification; copper, for the cleanliness and health of the body and the perpetuation of the species. This threefold classification corresponds to the three cosmic regions in Genesis, the Light, the waters and the earth. What Jesus is saying is that the workman always enjoys these elements quite naturally and freely. To load one’s haversack with goods would be to give in to greed, an impulse not in keeping with the confident poverty of the blessed.

To go up to the mount of the heavenly Jerusalem, one needs nothing but to drink from the fount of wisdom that flows from the wellsprings of the Son of Man, and that water of Life cannot be carried in haversacks, for it amounts simply to what one is. There is therefore no need to put on some other tunic made of what is not or to wear sandals that are of no use for the soul’s progress or to seek outside information or go to ceremonies, since the true Master is ever here, within. He is Man, the Son of Man.

For those who believe in him and heed and fulfill his Word, the Son of Man is never-failing, tirelessly providing. Thus, the workman’s only need is to gain access to the holy place.

4. Visiting towns or houses along the way

(Matt. 10:11-14; Luke 10:4-7)

Whatever town or village you go into, ask for someone trustworthy and stay with him until you leave;

As you enter his house, salute it, and if the house deserves it, let your peace descend upon it; if it does not, let your peace come back to you;

And if anyone does not welcome you or listen to what you have to say, as you walk out from the house or the town, shake the dust from your feet.

The town is a collection of houses, and every house is sometimes, in the now familiar language of the Gospel, a complete man. The trustworthy person to be asked for is what Saint Luke calls a son of peace, in other words, one who receives from Christ freedom and bliss, as he said: Peace I bequeath to you, my own peace I give you[1343]. In the house where that peace prevails which the world cannot give, only the Son, there, says Jesus to his Twelve and his Seven, stay until you leave.

The greeting of a son of peace is always the peace of the Son, for he is the only one who can give peace. If the house that receives the salutation is worthy of that peace, the salutation will rest on the son of peace of that house, but if it is not worthy, the peace of the Son will return whence it came; for it will stay only when it rests in a son of peace.

That is the meaning of the twofold expression in Saint John’s Gospel: Peace I bequeath to you, my own peace I give you. The Son always gives peace, for he is peace; but he who has not awakened the son of peace within himself cannot keep that peace. Then it is said that the peace-which cannot be abandoned-returns whence it came, to the Son, who is peace.

c) A son of peace is at one with the Son. That is why Jesus says: Anyone who welcomes you welcomes me[1344]. Since these are one, whoever does not receive the son of peace does not receive the Word. One must indeed always be wary of the impure dust of such a house or town.

When they speak of the dust to be shaken from one’s feet, Matthew and Luke are implicitly making an oblique reference to the dust from the soil[1345] with which YHWH made the first form to be housed in the Man made in His image on the sixth day.

The dust from the soil of Paradise is certainly the appropriate subtle, primordial, material from which the spiritual man, being formless and without any outline, was fashioned. When YHWH blew into his nostrils that breath of life known as nefesh, the dust itself became the subtle embodiment of an instinctive soul, the mortal, impure daughter-in-law of whom Micah speaks.

All this has been dealt with elsewhere, and if we are now repeating these things, it is because the identification of Man’s consciousness with some of the components of the house-consisting of one or more of its inhabitants-is what may in the language of the Gospel be accorded the hidden meaning of the town, the village, or even-in the broadest sense-the nation.

The house and the town are metaphors for one and the same thing, but the house has a decidedly subjective or inward connotation, while the town, the village or the nation imply an objective reference, one in which there is no mention of the inhabitant, but rather of the state with which that inhabitant -consciousness-identifies.

When they speak of the town, Saint Matthew’s text concerning the Twelve and Saint Luke’s concerning the Seven move away from the subjective expression-the house-towards a collective meaning: the town.

The journey through towns

Characteristics of towns (Matt.10:15-19; Luke 21:12)

I tell you solemnly, on the day of Judgment, it will not go so hard with Sodom and Gomorrah as with that town;

Remember, I am sending you out like sheep among wolves; so be as cunning [prudent] as serpents, and yet, as pure[1346] as doves;

Beware of men; they will hand you over to Sanhedrins and scourge you in their synagogues. You will be dragged before governors and kings for my sake, to bear witness before them and the pagans.

The rigor of the Judgment will go against that town. Impurity reigned in Sodom and Gomorrah, but there lived Lot, who was able to escape the destruction because he found his refuge in another town which, like the cornerstone of the parable, seemed to be worthless, a little place. But that town, Zoar, seemingly nothing, turned out to be the city of salvation, the holy place[1347]. Nevertheless, the very being of a town built from the dust of the soil, must consist of impurity. When the breath of life, nefesh, is withdrawn from such a town, nothing remains but death, and such is the judgment.

The sheep are all those souls which, as with the Twelve, as with the Seven, have begun to produce a certain measure of the fruit of knowledge: they may even be lost, yet they are trying to find their way. Confronting them, the wolves in the text are the representatives of the world, even the world itself; meaning, those men who produce none of the fruit of knowledge because they have never awoken the seed that was sown in them. This stands, too, for those towns, those objective circles in which men usually move, and where the sheep, too, will have to live.

The fact that it is Jesus who is sending forth the sheep shows that they, in a sense, emanate from him. They are like somewhat attenuated sunrays of his wisdom, yet, being this, they are in union with him. That is why Jesus insists: Anyone who welcomes you welcomes me; and those who welcome me welcome the one who sent me[1348]. The two qualities that Jesus asks of the sheep arise from the action of the two baptisms, by fire and by water. Through prudence (or cunning), they must (as we know) show that they are able to discern good from evil, that being the meaning of eating from the tree of knowledge; while purity calls for keeping spotless, unmixed, neither conditioned by the world nor contaminated by it.

The men whose influence the sheep must guard against are, here, those with a talent for the world, but not for the fruit of knowledge. These men are always those who govern, those who reign, those in command of the world’s justice. They defend with rigor the postulates of their organized and manifest beliefs, as represented in the text by the synagogue. What Jesus asks of his sheep is that they should bear witness before those men who have borne no fruit, worldly men, those of the synagogue, those from other nations, showing the fruit that has grown and ripened within them. Since the seed is sown in every single man who comes into this world, it is right that the Good News should be proclaimed to all men.

Unity with the Spirit, the Son and the Father[1349]

(Matt.10:19-20; Mark 13:11; Luke 10:16)

But when they hand you over, do not worry about how to speak or what to say. What you are to say will be given to you when the time comes;

Because it will not be you who is speaking. The Spirit of your Father will be speaking in you.

Anyone who listens to you listens to me; anyone who rejects you rejects me, and those who reject me reject the one who sent me.

The two first passages are part of Matthew’s account of the address to the Twelve, the third comes from the instructions to the Seven in Saint Luke’s Gospel. Every one of these excerpts aims to show up the unity between the Son, the Spirit and the Father, who are one with the sheep that have obtained the complete fruit of knowledge. There is, however, an appreciable difference between the two sets of sheep. The Twelve are in the sphere of epignosis, while the Seven have not attained complete perfection. This resembles the case of their Old Testament forerunners, the Seventy elders appointed by Moses to assist him, according to the Lord’s promise: I will take some of the spirit which is on you and put it on them. So they will share with you the burden of this nation[1350].

The passage in Matthew explains the real fact of the Spirit’s subtly taking possession of consciousness. By acknowledging its nothingness, the soul becomes submissive and docilely receives the First Mystery, thus little by little attaining its proper place, that of a reed swaying in the breeze[1351]. The fallacy of time then ceases for the soul, now that she is open, entrusted to the breeze that bears her, and so she lets herself be nothing but the Mystery, living without probing the future, yet utterly attentive to the words of silence. This is, in truth, the miracle of innocent belief, the bliss of being He, for He is I.

It is certain that the prophet Jeremiah knew the mystery of the Word of the Father who spoke with him. Thus he knew that the Lord knew him before he had formed him in his mother’s womb; when he fearfully claimed ignorance in order to flee the Word, the Oracle of the Lord said to him: Do not say, ‘I am a child.’ Go now to those to whom I send you and say whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to protect you[1352].

Then-Jeremiah adds, this time speaking in symbols- YHWH put out his hand and touched my mouth and said to me: Behold, I have put my words into your mouth[1353].

The logion directed to the Seven does not give instructions so that unity may be expressed by the envoy, as does Matthew’s text addressed to the Twelve. Luke transmits his message of unity so that it is heard and directly realized by all hearers. The word that issues from the mouths of the Seven is the Word of the Son sent by the Father. Unity is realized through the subtle action of the Word. There may be different names and forms in the Word, but all is One and the same. It must be understood through this unity that the Word always, always emanates from the Father, for only He IS-who-He-IS.

Matthew—the final address to the Twelve

The action of the Spirit of the Father

(Matt. 10:21-22; Mark 13:12-13)[1354]

Brother will betray brother to death, and the father, his child; children will rise against their parents and have them put to death.

You will be hated by all men on account of my name.

But the man who stands firm to the end will be saved.

It is the Spirit-the agent that transmits the knowledge that comes from the Father-who leads the relatives here mentioned to their death. As we have already studied the composition of the anthropological household which Christ wanted to divide with his fire from the Spirit, it is not difficult to understand that when, here, the text speaks of death, it is in a figurative sense. The sword that confronts and then separates kinsmen is Christ. Another way of looking at this is to remember that Christ is the seed sown within every man. The dilemma that separates kinsmen from one another is whether to care for this seed so that it grows and gives fruit, or to ignore it throughout one’s lifetime, a decision that brings Life to those who water the plant and death to the others.

This comes up many times in the Gospel and it need only be faithfully understood. My mother and my brothers are those who hear the Word of God and put it into practice[1355]. Mark puts it even more clearly: I tell you solemnly, there is no one who has left house, brothers, sisters, father, children or land for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel who will not be repaid a hundred times over[1356], houses, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and land-not without persecutions[1357]-now in this present time, and in the world to come, eternal life[1358].

Thus, it becomes quite clear what the Gospel means when it says that [the Spirit] will lead brother to betray brother to death, etc., for everything that persists in being sterile chaff must die, being mere straw, mere ignorance, yielding no fruit.

As for the business of one brother dying and the other living, this too can be accorded a different meaning, that of the oracle through which YHWH spoke to Rebecca: There are two nations in your womb, your issue will be two rival peoples. One nation shall have the mastery of the other, and the elder shall serve the younger[1359]. The two nations were presented figuratively in the scripture as two twin brothers, the younger of whom bore fruit as one born from above: Israel. So it was with these two, the last became the first, while the other, the elder brother became last, leaving no descendants.

It is plain that when the text says all, it is not referring exclusively to the Jews, as was thought by a number of exegetists during the first centuries of the Christian era, but of all those who see only the world’s surface and are consequently unwilling to admit the existence of other inner strata which they cannot see. Of all these, it may be said figuratively that they hate those who, although they remain in the world, are no longer of it.

The latter, those whom the world hates, are those who believe in the Son of Man. But all this was set out in the fourth Gospel[1360], as in the Psalms, which speak of those who hate me for no reason[1361].

In praising perseverance to the end, the evangelist is not referring to the ruin of the Temple or to the end of the world, as was thought by manifest exegesis. Rather, this is a way of speaking of the long human wanderings that culminate in the soul’s salvation.

Christian exegetics always found in the Gospel texts the announcement of a Way in Christ, one that begins to be recognized as the Way when the presence of the hidden, inner Son, who was in reality never absent, becomes known. Since Christ is permanently present in man, it can be said that no one entered the Way, for it was always there. What was absent until the parousia was knowledge of that presence.

Once the presence of the Son has been acknowledged, the Way leads to knowing the Father[1362] and to the final goal, salvation. Knowing the Son reveals the eternal unity of the Son with the Father, for the Son is an emanation of the Father and goes to the Father whence he came[1363]. The Son confirms that he is one with the Father, and this is his great testimonial: I and the Father are One[1364].

Arrival at Jerusalem (Matt. 10:23)

If they persecute you in one town, take refuge in the next; and if they persecute you in that, take refuge in another.

I tell you solemnly, you will not have gone the round of the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes.

The round of the towns represents the Way, while the towns are the various states of consciousness, from worldly superficiality to the depths of the Kingdom, which the soul must experience until it completes its peculiar process of accumulating knowledge.

The soul, which has apprehended amidst the mists the presentiment of a perfume, the presence of the beloved, of the inner Christ, is persecuted by the Spirit of God in every town it lives in. What comes to her is a pillar of fire, the fount of knowledge that penetrates the soul and raises within her the Way to the next town, the next psychic station. Thus, the Spirit gives remission to the soul, paradosis and surrender, with each wave of fire attaining the new height that corresponds to it.

Such is the progress in the soul of coming to know the beloved, a progress that must bring her to the renewed encounter, the acknowledgement of a union so intensely sought after because she did not know that union had always been there. Here is the end of the Way: to find that to know and to be known are, in perfect knowledge, one and the same thing.

Matthew’s showing the Way that must be trodden by the Twelve until they attain epignosis concludes with this passage. The account he began, alongside the chapter in Saint Luke’s Gospel setting forth the Way of the Seven, a breviary of the steps followed by a soul until the attainment of partial knowledge, comes to a confluence with the Way of those souls that persevere to the very end in order to attain salvation.

The final stage in the Way is explained later by the evangelists, but now Matthew, who began his account speaking of the work of the laborers of the harvest, concludes with the announcement of the coming of the Son of Man.

What Matthew says is that the round of the towns of Israel that he describes is by no means enough. He must no doubt be thinking that the pilgrim has still to complete his ascent to Jerusalem, the heavenly Jerusalem, the City of God, of which the Son of Man, in a song of unity, exclaims: How often have I longed to gather your children, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings![1365].

But, before the ascent to Jerusalem, the presence of the Son of Man must be realized to the full, stably, durably; for, as he said: No one has gone up to heaven except the one who came down from heaven, the Son of Man[1366]. Likewise, the destruction of the Temple will be possible only for the Son of Man, since this is a task entrusted to him before his ascent to the City of God.

Now, in Saint Matthew’s account of the Way of the Twelve who labored for the harvest, the only thing lacking is the exile’s cry of immense joy on finding at last his true home:

Blessings on him who comes in the name of the Lord![1367]

1324 Footnote relevant to the Spanish text only.

2 The synoptic Gospels speak of the mission of the Twelve disciples (Matt. 10:1-23; Mark 6:6-12; Luke 9:1-16) but Luke (Luke 10:1-12) tells of another missionary expedition entrusted to Seventy (or Seventy-two in other manuscripts). The Church’s figurative interpretation refers to Twelve as the number representing Israel, while the Seventy refers to the mission to the pagan nations.

3 Mark 4:14

1325

1326

1327 4 John 6:29

1328 Regardless of the esoteric significance of organizing the missionaries in pairs, its only known expression is to be found in the formula adopted by Matt. 10:1-4; Luke 6:13-16; Mark 3:6-7, 14-19, counting the Twelve in pairs. It must, moreover, be pointed out that the fact that they were Twelve is more important than the names of the apostles. The evangelists always mention Twelve (even in the Acts, where care is taken to point out that, following the death of Judas Iscariot, only Eleven remain). In the third Gospel, however, the name Thaddeus is replaced by that of James, son of Alphaeus. The exegetes’ explanation that Thaddeus and Judas, son of James are different names used to designate the same person can only be seen as a facile but not very scientific way out of the problem. The main issue remains unresolved: what really matters, what the evangelists are at pains to pass on before all else, are not the names of the twelve apostles, but the institution of the Twelve.

1329 Luke 10:1. Among the few instances mentioned in the Gospels of messengers being sent on ahead is the visit to a Samaritan village to make preparations for Jesus (Luke 9:53), together with the two mysterious episodes of the tethered donkey and a colt with her found by two disciples near the village of Bethphage (Matt. 21:2) and the search for the house in which the Passover was to be celebrated (Matt. 26:18).

1330 It is said in theological circles that the double multiplication of loaves presupposes the coexistence of two parallel traditions referring to the same event: one, of Palestinian origin (from the west bank of the lake) involves twelve baskets, like the twelve tribes of Israel; while the other, from a Christian source of pagan origin (east bank) ends with seven baskets like the seven pagan nations of Canaan before the conquest. The places in the Gospel where the multiplication of the loaves involves the first multiplication of twelve large baskets are Matt.14:13-21; Mark 6:30-44; Luke 9:10-17; John 6:5-13. As for the second multiplication of loaves (leftovers, seven baskets) this is mentioned only in Matt. 15:32-39 and Mark 8:1-10. Some have wondered whether the failure of Saint Luke to mention the second multiplication of loaves might not be linked to the fact that Luke is the only evangelist to refer to the missionary group of the Seventy.

1331 John 6:34-35

1332 Mark 8:15

1333 The higher and middling measures to be found in GT 9 are a hundred and twenty and seventy, but these are the product of multiplication by a hundred, as is suggested in Luke 8:8. The lowest measure is set at thirty, sometimes twenty, since it represents the measure of a child of three or two, meaning one recently born to the life of the spirit.

1334 Matt. 13:33; Luke 13:20-21

1335 Acts 6:3 et seq.

1336 For the purposes of this specific commentary we shall take Saint Matthew’s account concerning the Twelve (Matt. 10:5-23), the terms of which are repeated in Saint Luke’s Gospel. For the passages concerning the Seven, we refer to Saint Luke’s account (Luke 10:1-12, 16).

1337 Gal. 4:26; Isai. 65:17-19; Rev. 21:1-3

1338 Luke 21:24

1339 Luke 9:51-54

1340 Gen. 32:29

1341 Gen. 32:28. According to the manifest interpretation, the House of Israel may be a Hebrew expression for the Jews. Its hidden meaning is however the House of the Son of Man.

1342 Ezek. 34:6

1343 John 14:27

1344 Matt. 10:40

1345 Gen. 2:7

1346 Gr. Akeraiki = pure, unadulterated. Others translate this as harmless or simple.

1347 Gen. 19:22

1348 Matt. 10:40

1349 We have omitted from this commentary the speech to the Seven containing the complaint about the cities of Cho razin, Bethsaida and Capernaum (Luke 10 :13-15) because it in fact repeats the prediction concerning the town that would not receive the son of peace.

1350 Num. 11:17

1351 Matt. 11:7

1352 Jer. 1:5-8

1353 Jer. 1:9

1354 The fact that this passage appears twice, in both Matthew and Mark, raises a serious difficulty for the various hypotheses supported by manifest exegetics. However, looking at this from the hidden side, the Twelve are not those twelve apostles, the named ones, neither are they their ecclesiastical successors acting as missionaries; here, rather, is a reference to the inner realization of the complete fruit of knowledge of the Spirit. As Mark explains precisely this -knowledge as a way to salvation-it is logical that these two passages should coincide. Nevertheless, Mark 13 contains words that coincide with the words to be found in Matthew and Luke, but with a different meaning; for, as we shall be seeing, he is referring to the Coming of the Son of Man.

1355 Luke 8:21

1356 This is the fruit increased a hundredfold, as explained by Luke (Luke 8:8), meaning all the seed that falls on good ground: Twelve thus becomes a Hundred (or a hundred and twenty), the measure of perfect knowledge.

1357 What persists is the Spirit of God which, with its fount of knowledge, is able to raise man from death to life.

1358 Mark 10:29-30

1359 Gen. 25:23

1360 John 15:18-25

1361 Ps. 35:19; 69:5

1362 John 14:7

1363 John 7:29

1364 John 10:30

1365 Matt. 23:37. Note the parallel between this logion and that in the fourth Gospel, which says that Jesus must die to gather together in unity the scattered children of God (John 11:52).

1366 John 3:13

1367 Matt. 23:39; Ps. 118:26

LOGION 74

He said:

“Lord, there are many around the wells

but there is no one in the wells.”

COMMENTARY

Every complete man is like a well whose living waters are the inexhaustible elements that go to make up his soul, flowing ceaselessly and watering his life. Where such waters are conscious, they are known as soul (psyche) and where they are unconscious, they too are known as life (psyche). In both cases, water is the biblical figure of speech for the soul while the well is the place that circumscribes and contains it. In the Song of Songs, the mystic bridegroom (the Spirit) says to the bride (the soul): Fountain that makes the gardens fertile, well of living water![1368]

If it is said of the well that its waters are living, this is because the life of the soul-living water-is the life it has received on loan from the Spirit of God, who is the only truly living being, in himself the Living One. Thus, the unfathomable wellsprings of the Living One give life to the waters of every one of the wells, like a bountiful source that penetrates and dwells therein. Jesus refers to this in the logion when he complains that no one is in the wells, in union with the Living One, but all stand around the wells.

The true meaning of Jesus’ saying is very difficult to realize, for it must be understood directly, understanding must be alive, and this does not depend on reasoning, it comes as a gift which alone has the power to open the gates of the soul to faith. It is perhaps for this reason, and also because, as the logion puts it, there is no one in the wells, that Jesus addresses these words, not to listeners but to the Father, the Lord, asking him to let his waters flow so that these, the souls, may discover their own true being in the wells and not lose themselves in vain searching all around them. Here, Jesus is using the well as a metaphor for the psyche, as in the Old Testament tradition that draws on the original image of water as soul.

The most eloquent version of this metaphor is to be found in the desert wellspring in whose waters the slave girl Hagar finds her own image, putting to her the first questions asked by Being: Where have you come from, and where are you going?[1369] In response to her searching within herself, expressed by the voice in the spring, or what amounts to the same thing, the voice of conscience (represented in the Scriptures by the Angel of YHWH), Hagar takes heed and accepts submission to Sarai, the free one. Both Hagar and Sarai, united to the same husband, correspond to those two other women in the Gospel at the millstone, grinding.[1370] One of these two women, free because purified, will be taken, while the other, the impure slave girl, will be left.

Hagar’s self-baptizing submission amounts to a soul’s self-denying willingness to remain enslaved because of her impurity. The allegory in Genesis expresses this decision as the conception and birth of a son of the psyche, Ishmael-meaning Listen God, God has listened- with saving consequences, for this represents the first step in the process of the soul’s salvation.

In the exegetic passage set out in the Letter to the Galatians, the birth of Ishmael, the son of the slave girl, means the earthly alliance (alliance=union) with the Jerusalem below, mother of slaves. Likewise, the birth of Ishmael is the earthly foreshadowing of the birth of Isaac, son of Sarah, the freeborn. This new soul son of Abraham, born to Sarah,[1371] the barren one, fruit of the spiritual covenant, the only one to be taught in the Gospel, corresponds to the Jerusalem above, free, mother of all the twice-born.[1372]

Studying that spring in Genesis, it must be said that the name given it by the slave girl Hagar provides the textual clue that makes possible the hidden exegesis of this entire passage. To the angel of the Lord who announces the future birth Hagar says: You are El Roi [the God of Vision]; and she adds: Surely this is a place where I, in my turn, have seen the one who sees me. This is why this well is called the well of Lahai Roy [meaning, the well of the Living One who sees me].

If the well is interpreted as being a metaphor for the soul, it is easy to accept that in the mysterious depths of its waters, in the profound I AM, is to be found the one sent by God, the Son of Man who, being ever the root of Being-pure Being, beyond all conceptions must be called the Living One who sees me.

We must not forget the golden rule for attaining true understanding of the process of knowledge: when the eye sees, it is not the eye that does the seeing but the soul, for the eye is its instrument; moreover, when the soul sees, it is not the soul that sees but the Living One, although unknown (invisible) to the soul, to reason, to the mind, being ever the one and only Prime Cause. This means that the spectator of all the acts of consciousness-the spectator, never the actor-is always the Living One, who dwells in the depths of the well, beyond the waters.

Hagar’s enlightenment brings her into fleeting contact with the God who sees-El Roi. What this text describes is the first intuition of Being, the discovery that throws open the gates of faith and, so doing, reveals the Presence. At the same time, the account makes it possible to see quite how unstable was this perception of Hagar’s. Hence, Abraham’s lament to God that the slave girl’s son was unable to live in the presence of God (presence, shekinah, the dove).[1373]

The one who was later to settle at this very spot, the well of Lahai Roy, was Isaac, son of the freeborn woman, fruit of the alliance with the spirit. The Bible tells that Isaac lived near the well of Lahai Roy[1374]. This means figuratively that Isaac dwelled in the presence of God, of Being.

Thus, Isaac was one of those who succeeded in gathering around the well but did not attain the state of being in it. The difference between these two is very important and not too hard to understand, although being in the well is possible only for those who have been granted the gift by God. Wherever man perceives the slightest difference, however seemingly insignificant, between himself and the hidden inner Christ, then, without question, the unity which Jesus begged of the Father in his priestly prayer to Him has not been realized: …that they may be one as we are one.[1375] Absence of unity is the one and only factor that determines who has not entered the well, who is not in it.

In the hermeneutics practiced for the purpose of explaining the Christian kerygma, the allegory of the well developed as part of the Old Testament tradition made a displacement which rendered it less of a mystery, so that its genuine meaning became more accessible. In the New Testament, the depths of the well are beyond sounding and the I AM is unreservedly the hidden, inner Christ, the indwelling spirit present in every man.

The fourth Gospel expresses this in the chapter that tells of Jesus’ lone encounter with a Samaritan woman.[1376] The geographical center of this scene is a well described as Jacob’s, although not mentioned in Genesis.

The water of which Jesus speaks here is not the usual well water which the Samaritan woman knows and drinks, but living waters from the spring that feeds the soul. Like the tongues of fire of knowledge emanating from God, these flow from all the world’s subterranean rivers and gather in the soul, enriching her with the flows of salvation.

These are the waters that staunch the thirst for eternal life, thirst that is in the final analysis the soul’s one true thirst. All such waters received by the soul are transformed into an inner spring whose flow makes possible the sacred wedding with the spirit. This is doubtless what Jesus’ surprising allusion to the Samaritan woman’s husbands is all about. Those husbands are denounced by Jesus as inadequate (psychic) bridegrooms, for the only true wedding is that celebrated with the pneumatic bridegroom, and this, when lucidly experienced, fills the entire life of the soul.

The hidden inner wedding, or better expressed, the Way to those nuptials of sacred union, entails constant adoration that can be practiced only in spirit and in truth. Those who attain this level of practice are worshippers according to Christ’s hidden aspect, priests who officiate while prostrating themselves before the one born from above, who is within them. In truth, the presence of this one born of the Spirit is like the wind whose voice is heard without one’s knowing how or why, but true worshippers need no other temple or earthly mountain to prostrate themselves in complete adoration.

The Samaritan woman, who has no husbands, then says: I know that the Messiah-that is Christ-is coming. And Jesus answers I who am speaking to you, I am he. In terms of the hidden interpretation, it is as though he had said: The Christ, in spirit and in truth, is here, present before your eyes.

As for his coming, he always comes if you see him and know how to understand that it is he who is looking at you. He is the Living One who sees you, from your bottomless depths. When your soul becomes of one flesh with him, you will no longer be living by the well, but in it.

You must know that you are at one and the same time the well, the Living One who sees you, and the transitory mortal image that looks and seeks on the surface of the well. This last is the image to be forgotten.

1368 Song 4:15

1369 Gen. 16:7-14

1370 Matt. 24:41

1371 Isai. 54:1

1372 Gal. 4:21-31. Possibly for reasons connected with teaching, Paul explains the allegory in Genesis in external, manifest terms, yet the meaning is the same as that which we shall now explain according to its inner significance.

1373 Gen. 17:18. For this presence to become established in consciousness, Sarah, the free woman, must first have a son, fruit of the eternal spiritual alliance, that with the heavenly Jerusalem.

1374 Gen. 25:11, 24:62

1375 John 17:22

1376 John 4:5-26

LOGION 75

Jesus said:

“There are many standing at the door,

but it is the solitaries[1377] who will enter the bridal chamber.”

COMMENTARY

We know the door to be Christ, because the fourth Gospel states very clearly: I am the gate of the sheepfold.[1378] Through this gate, which is the Son of Man, all sheep (souls) must pass that seek salvation. This means that all souls must recognize the presence in themselves of the indwelling higher pneumatic principle. The transition from psychic consciousness to the spirit, born from above, is expressed in the language of the Gospel by the metaphor of passing through the door or gateway; and this is not something far off but within, for it is the pure Being of every man.

That is why Saint Mark’s Gospel says: know that he is near, at the very gates,[1379] and if he speaks of gates, it is because he is referring to the gate that is always open in every single man, although the same for all, Christ, the Son of Man; so there is only one gateway although there may seem to be many, precisely because, as the logion says: There are many standing at the door.

This one in many is the great mystery in which many lose their way; only through humility and baptismal purification can it be understood. There is only one inner Christ. When contemplated firmly, he is known as stone, the cornerstone, the rock; where, however, he is contemplated as the way to the subsequent presence and coming, he is called the gate. Hermas’ The Shepherd speaks of this. He tells that the rock is old and the door is new. The Son of God is older than all His creation; for this reason he is old (the rock); but the consummation of every man, the hidden Christ, becomes manifest (in everyone); thus it is that the gate always seems to be new. Likewise, the one gate seems to be a multitude, since all enter the Kingdom of God through it.[1380]

Following consummation (synteleia), the Tower of the Creation becomes of one stone with the rock. They who have believed on the Lord through His Son and are clothed with his very spirit will become one spirit, one body and the color of their garments shall be one.[1381] This is doubtless what Jesus meant when he exclaimed: Jerusalem, Jerusalem…[He was referring to the heavenly Jerusalem, made of the spirit] How often have I longed to gather your children, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings.[1382]

The children gathered together to whom Jesus alludes are souls dressed in spirit, i.e. wearing the garments required for the sacred wedding.[1383] As the Spirit is one and one only in the unity of the Tower, formed by all those who have believed in the Lord and have made themselves children of God, it is easy to understand that these, the Chosen Ones, should be called single (monaxos), for they are doubly so: theirs is a single consciousness when they find their rest in the wedding chamber as soul pneumatic, and the Son of Man receives the glory of the Father, the glory that is One, as His only Son.[1384]

As for the stone and the gate, Jacob’s dream provides the Old Testament archetype that corresponds to what we are now studying. Returning from his dream, or ecstasy, Jacob understands that he has had his first glimpse of God’s presence and he exclaims: How awe-inspiring this place is! This is nothing less than a house of God; this is the gate of heaven![1385]

Afterwards, in order to establish that constant presence (shekinah), he took the stone pillow on which he had rested his head and put it up as a monument. Lastly, he poured oil over it in an act of worship and named it Beth-El, the gate of heaven, heaven being the house of God.[1386]

The stone was anointed and in truth it and its anointment are one. That is why when Jesus announced the Good News in Nazareth, he took as his text the words of Isaiah: The spirit of the Lord has been given to me, for he has anointed me.[1387]

Anointed: another way of indicating the hidden Christ immanent, who, like the old rock that was there before the Creation, is the foundation of all things. Thus it was with Jacob who succeeded in resting his soul on it; thus it was with Isaiah, for he received anointment, the presence, and this opened the gates for him to the contemplation of His Glory; thus it was with Jesus, revealing to him the hour for him to proclaim the Gospel, and it is there for us, too, that we too may, through faith, be anointed for God’s presence. The Christ of God is, in any case, always the same, being eternal, standing outside time. Christ is the anointed stone, Beth-El, the gate of heaven; yet anointment is new for each soul: when the Spirit of the Lord comes, in the form of a dove (although invisible), when it comes like a perfume, it is the unction that reveals the presence of the hidden Christ, and its working opens the gateway for his coming.

When we speak of the coming, we are, like the Gospel, referring to the recognition of what lies within us, for the coming of the Son of Man implies no movement on his part, but rather, self-discovery. Moreover, for this discovery, beginning subtly with the anointment of the presence, to serve as gateway for the coming, it is necessary to follow in Jacob’s footsteps, anointing the stone, making of it a monument, consecrating it through worship or contemplation, firmly, perseveringly sustained to the point of blissful absorption. As the Psalmist said to David: God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness.[1388]

All this is what is to be understood by the parable of the ten bridesmaids told by Saint Matthew.[1389] Of the purified souls in that parable, half are described as sensible, meaning well able to discern good from evil, the two ways opened up when one eats the fruit of the tree of Paradise, while the other bridesmaids are called foolish, being imprudent, lacking in the discernment which confers that cardinal virtue.

According to this account, when awaiting the coming of the mystic bridegroom with whom they are to pass through the door to the wedding, the sensible souls had unceasingly anointed the stone erected as a monument, the Christ of God, and each had her lamp ready, together with extra oil in her bottle sufficient to light her way to the banqueting hall. The other bridesmaids, without enough light in their lamps, having neglected the act of anointment, were unable to recognize the place and, when the supreme moment came, with the arrival of the Son of Man, they knew not his Word.

Since the parable doubtless refers to souls that have made great progress on their Way in Christ, having received anointment conferred by the Spirit of the Lord, it seems likely that the meaning of the parable is that no one can be certain of attaining the goal of their evangelical process until the Tower of unity is one with the rock; until then, Jesus’ advice must be followed: Stay awake and pray.[1390]

The Deluge which, according to Saint Peter, is to be considered as a metaphor for baptism,[1391] reached its culmination only when the dove [the shekinah, the Presence] came back to Noah with a new olive branch in its beak.[1392] The Spirit of the Lord, in the form of a dove-the Shekinah-the Presence-settled on Noah and anointed him. According to the hidden interpretation which we are applying here, all this means that a sign[1393] was given to the human generation, when a rainbow appeared in the clouds, a theophany or universal Way opening up to the soul.

From the olive branch brought by the dove comes oil for the lamp of all Earth’s sensible bridesmaids. Access to its anointment is the pledge, the promise that peace is possible, rest for the soul, through the alliance (union) with God.

The anointment conferred on you by the dove (the Presence) tells you: have faith in the stone that you are, free from all conceptualization. Set your inner Christ up as a monument to be anointed unceasingly, for, although you do not yet know him, he is the Anointed One when you worship him in spirit and in truth.

Be sure that the day will come when the rainbow will shine forth among the clouds of your heaven, and a secret, hidden voice, silent but true, made manifest for you, will say: You are my Son, the Beloved; my favor rests on you.[1394]

1377 Gr. Monaxos. Cfr. Logia 16 and 49

1378 John 10:7

1379 Mark 13:29

1380 Cfr. Hermas, The Shepherd, simil. IX, 12, 1-3

1381 Cfr. Hermas, The Shepherd, simil. IX, 13, 2-4

1382 Matt. 23:37

1383 Matt. 22:11-12. Parable of the wedding feast, already commented on in connection with logion 64.

1384 John 1:14

1385 Gen. 28:17

1386 Gen. 28:18-19

1387 Luke 4:18; Isai. 61:1

1388 Ps. 45:8; Heb. 1:9

1389 Matt.25:1-13. The third Gospel presents a sort of summary version of the parable in Matthew. (Luke 12:35-40)

1390 Matt. 26:41

1391 1 Pet. 3:21

1392 Gen.8:11

1393 We are using the term “generation” in the same sense as it appears in the Gospel when interpreted according to the hidden exegesis: Our generation, the generation that must receive the sign from Jonah, consisting of all those souls that have eaten of the fruit of the Tree of Paradise and which aspire to be transformed into a flame as vibrant as a sword blade, passing the Cherubim that guard the gate and coming into the Tree of Life, to eat of its eternal fruit.

1394 Mark 1:11

LOGION 76

Jesus said:

“The kingdom of the Father is like a merchant

who had a load of goods and found a pearl.

That merchant was wise.

He sold the load and bought for himself the pearl alone.

You also, seek after the treasure which does not fail but endures,

where moth does not come near to devour nor worm to destroy.”

COMMENTARY

The pearl, the jewel, the indestructible treasure, these are three distinct ways in which the Gospel speaks of the Word that lived among [in] us.[1395] As explained in the parable of the sower, to which one must return again and again, the Word of the Kingdom is sown in every man at birth. That is why the Word, the pearl, is man in himself, his essential being. The point is that the Word, the Son of Man, transcends man’s natural consciousness, and that is why worldly men do not understand the Word of the Kingdom sown within them, nor can they recognize their true Being therein.

The transition from natural consciousness to transcendental consciousness is a great inner religious process, man’s supreme mystery as proclaimed and explained by the Gospel. What the parable of the sower says is that, when the soil is good-when man turns inward on himself (metanoia)-it becomes possible for him to hear and understand the Word. To hear the Word means to find the pearl, the indestructible treasure, while to understand the Word is to become fruitful, realizing one’s inner transmutation, so that the encounter, the first finding, is birth from above, and to understand represents the culmination of the mystery of being One with the Son and the Father, as Jesus so fervently prayed for us to become, according to the fourth Gospel.

When explaining the meaning of the parable of the sower, Jesus mentions various degrees of fruitfulness, and it is not difficult to identify the first of these with birth in the spirit, the sign of which is, doubtless, perception of the inner presence of the divine Son. Thus it was said and recorded in the scriptures: I will pour out my spirit on all mankind.[1396] Here begins the quest for the pearl, for with the Spirit comes certainty that there lies within us an inexhaustible wellspring: The Word. There then follow the paths of bliss and eternal Life sung by the Psalmist: you will reveal the path of life to me, give me unbounded joy in your presence.[1397]

Ever since Jesus’ proclamation in Galilee that the Kingdom of God is close at hand,[1398] the only way to be taken by a man searching in the Gospel consists in firm belief, so that his eyes may learn to see with faith. Such a man will no longer be troubled by the need to search, for he will already have found, and his only prayer will consist of realizing God’s presence, never letting his eyes wander from the pearl that stands before him, near him, and is his very own essence sown in him at birth. Thus he can say with the prophet Abraham: The Lord, in whose presence I have walked.[1399]

Walking in the presence, the new man’s consciousness grows and is strengthened, filling with wisdom, for God’s grace is upon him. This wisdom enables him to lay down the load he has borne hitherto. He had kept this because he thought that the burden was himself, and so, indispensable. All the parallel passages in the Gospel mention the need to rid oneself of this burden, selling all that one possesses, and one should pay attention to these injunctions. This does not refer only to the generous giving up of material goods, so much as to an act of humility and understanding. The burden or the worldly treasure to be laid down includes all those contents of consciousness on which the natural ego depends when it affirms I am in its poor little individual scenario. To give this up in its entirety is a supreme act of faith.[1400]

To walk in the presence calls for a loving heart that knows how to place its treasure in the Word. Once the heart is empty, the unobstructed presence is transformed into the torrent of the Lord’s coming.[1401]

Then sounds the hour of universal man, of the accomplishment of unity according to Jesus’ sacerdotal prayer to the Father: That they may be one as we are one.[1402] This is the hour of perfect knowledge, of the Word’s complete fruitfulness; the hour of the coming that moved the early Christians to exclaim: Maranatha, the Lord comes; or, in words that amount to the same thing: Now I am in the Lord.

1395 John 1:14. Parallels with logion 76 include especially Matt.13:44-46, but there are other related texts, for this is a common Gospel expression.

1396 Joel 2:28; Acts 2:17

1397 Ps. 16:11; Acts 2:28

1398 Mark 1:15

1399 Gen. 24:40

1400 Matt. 6:21, 19:21, 13:44, 13:45-56

1401 Joel 2:1

1402 John 17:22

LOGION 77

Jesus said:

“I am the light that is over them all. I am the All.

The All came forth from me.

And to me the All has come.

Split the wood — I am there.

Raise the stone, and you will find me there.”

COMMENTARY

When in the logion Jesus affirms I am the All, he is saying the same thing as when in Saint John’s Gospel he proclaims: I am the light of the world.[1403] Manifest or hidden, Christ is always an infinite ocean of light, limitless consciousness of wisdom and love: He is the cloak of Glory that covers the Father, not one thing had its being but through him.[1404]

The light is over all that exists, meaning, over all that appears as the world. The light is not the world, but is in the world, and that means it is in all that exists in the world, for all came forth from the light without ever ceasing to be in it. That is why, when Jesus was describing the Last Judgment, he said: I was hungry and you (never) gave me food; I was thirsty and you (never) gave me drink.[1405] When he spoke thus, he was addressing all nations and bearing witness to the greatness of the Glory: …because God wanted all perfection to be found in him [in the light, in Christ].[1406]

The Judgment is to be understood as the final stage on a way that returns from darkness to light. As the Apostle revealed: There is one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things and we by him [by him we come to the Father].[1407] The logion is pointing towards this way to redemption when it says: To me All has come. But the fourth Gospel, speaking of the light, puts it even more clearly: Anyone who follows me will not be walking in the dark; he will have the light of life.[1408]

There are many memorable testimonials concerning this matter of the renewal of Creation: The path of the virtuous is like the light of dawn.[1409] The Psalmist, too, highlights the identity between that-which-returns and that-which-is: By your light we see the light.[1410] In a well-known passage the prophet Isaiah explains the first steps towards that realization for which so many yearn so deeply: On those who live in a land of deep shadow a light has shone.[1411] This light is the presence of the Word, of which we have already spoken. It is, however, when all is said and done, Jesus who in the Gospel of Saint John hands us all the keys to open the doors to the return of the light: I, the light, have come into the world, so that whoever believes in me need not stay in the dark any more.[1412]

To live in the light is to return, it is redemption, and there is no difference between that-which-returns and that-which-is other than the distinction between the All and what comes forth from the All; between the world and the light that is over the world.

In the figurative language of poetry, Isaiah symbolizes man’s image as being made up of wood and of stone,[1413] nor is it hard to see wood in this as man’s visible shadow, so that only by splitting it with conviction will the stone be found. This, the stone, is doubtless the stone that was chosen, the precious foundation stone-the Word sown in every man-of which Jesus spoke.[1414]

What Jesus is now saying according to the logion is that the stone must be for us, as it was for Jacob, a means to bridge the gulf between the shadows and the light. The stone must be raised as a monument[1415] to mark the place of worship, for He is present in it. Only thus can we found the Bethel of the return, the gate of heaven and the House of God.

1403 John 8:12

1404 John 1:3

1405 Matt. 25:35, 42

1406 Col. 1:19

1407 1 Cor. 8:6

1408 John 8:12

1409 Prov. 4:18

1410 Ps. 36:9

1411 Isai. 9:1-2

1412 John 12:46

1413 Isai. 37:19

1414 Isai. 28:16

1415 Gen. 28:18

LOGION 78

Jesus said:

“What brought you out into the country?

Was it to see a reed shaken by the wind?

Or to see a man dressed in soft clothing

like your kings and your great men?

They wear fine apparel and cannot recognize truth.”

COMMENTARY

Quite apart from Jesus’ comments on John the Baptist in the Gospels of Saints Matthew and Luke,[1416] with which this logion seems to be connected, it seems easier to interpret this in its plain sense as a definition of the visible man, the man whom people can see.

Man’s visible body is described, then, as a reed-a hollow one-shaken by the wind, perhaps by the passions.[1417] Certainly, we are not used to seeing this primal reed-man’s body- naked, unclothed, and often, when a man fulfils high functions on earth, we see such personages arrayed in costly, even complicated and colorful apparel. That in no way alters their condition of being mere reeds shaken by the wind. Whatever its outward appearance, a reed cannot know the truth.

Here is the realist definition of the visible man, as expressed and explained by Jesus in the Gospel. We stress the words visible man.

Many commentators were subsequently to affirm that the complete man, now and always, is an inseparable conjunction of the passions (invisible but perceptible) and the reed, both raised to immortality and to knowledge of the truth.

Others, however, are convinced that what the eyes can see is the greatest, even the only reliable reality. Consequently, they believe that what we call man is simply and solely the visible reed and its experience of the wind (anemos), a corollary of the reed.

Nevertheless, when Jesus sets out in the fourth Gospel to describe the complete twice-born man, man first born of woman and subsequently born of the Spirit, he does not separate the visible man from the invisible, the reed from the wind, but speaks of the functions and characteristics of both: the wind [1418]blows wherever it pleases; you hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.[1419]

The wind (pneuma) blows on the visible reed, which is acted on by all winds: the first wind (anemos), the wind of passion, and the second wind (pneuma), the Spirit whose aims are unknown, for the Spirit is not of this world.

In both cases, the reed is visible and mortal, flesh born of flesh, but what is born of the Spirit is spirit,[1420]and as such, immortal and invisible.

This and only this is the Mystery in Christ, for the spirit, born of the Spirit, knows the truth that was destined for it from the beginning of time.

1416 Matt. 11:7-8; Luke 7:24-25

1417 Gr. Anemos, meaning both wind and strong passion.

1418 Gr. Pneuma, spirit.

1419 John 3:8

1420 John 3:6

LOGION 79

A woman in the crowd said to him:

“Blessings on the womb that bore you

and the breasts that fed you.”

He said to her:

“Blessings on those who have heard the Word of the Father

and have truly kept it. Days will come when you will say:

Blessings on the womb that has not conceived

and the breasts that have not given milk.”

COMMENTARY

A woman, a soul among the multitude hails the blessed motherhood of the one who alone made possible the presence in the world of the manifest Christ, and in his reply Jesus hails the blessed soul who, on hearing and truly obeying the Word, the seed of the Father sown in her, makes possible the glorious resurrection within her of the hidden Christ.

Thus, the hidden blessing is added to the manifest, for there is no incompatibility between them, each complements the other in what is to be explained and understood as the Mystery of Jesus Christ and his Good News.

Entry into the bliss of the Word of the Father is, however, always described as being preceded by great signs in the soul, first, signs of death, then, of life; for the self-denial[1421] which Jesus preached as a precondition for the coming of the Son of Man is, as has been explained, the greatest tribulation that the Creation has reserved for man.[1422]

The renunciation referred to in the Gospel is the voluntary death of the soul (psyche) or, otherwise expressed, annihilation of the contents of that worldly ego that every natural man imagines himself to be, thus casting light on the eternal hidden Christ who awaits resurrection within every man. This is the transfiguration of the many into the one, bringing all together in the heavenly Jerusalem, as Jesus so yearned,[1423] a yearning for the joy of rebirth to new life, all the while fully aware that this can follow only on the death of all that is mortal. Hence, the passage in Saint John’s Gospel: unless a wheat grain falls on the ground and dies, it remains only a single grain; but if it dies, it yields a rich harvest.[1424]

Herein lies the grandeur of the Gospel handed down by Jesus for the sake of all men: that only the death of that single, solitary grain opens the gates to the life and light of the Word. We must be aware that both the man born of the flesh and the one born from above are represented by the two men in the field [of consciousness], one of whom will be taken while the other will be left.[1425] The latter, the puny ego which will be left behind, will not abandon his ignoble adversary’s realm without defending tooth and nail every one of the contents of the psyche still standing when his hour comes.

Hence, the meaning of the third blessing of which Jesus reminds us in the logion, which exalts the blissful song of those souls able to transform themselves into sterile, empty, dry husks before undergoing the great tribulation. As for the others, those souls which, when the days come for them to abandon the ego for the Word, hang onto any vestige of intent to save their mortal lives, the synoptic Gospels warns of the pains of their lonely passion: Alas for those [souls] with child or with babies at the breast when those days come.[1426] The days in question are the three days spent by the prophet Jonah all alone in metaphorical travail in the belly of the whale, and these must, according to the prophecy, always precede the manifestation of the Son of Man.

This is the Passion of the messianic birth, which Jesus had to undergo[1427]-for the nation, for all-and this he explained when, overflowing with love for all those who must, sooner or later, face their own personal Passion, he said to his disciples, as recounted in Saint John’s Gospel: You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn to joy. A woman in childbirth suffers, because her time has come; but when she has given birth to the child she forgets the suffering in her joy that a man has been born into the world.[1428]

1421 Matt.16:24

1422 Mark 13:19

1423 Matt. 23:37

1424 John 12:24

1425 Matt. 24:40

1426 Matt. 24:19; Mark 13:17; Luke 21:23

1427 John 11:51

1428 John 16:20-21

LOGION 80

Jesus said:

“He who has known the world has found the body;

and he who has found the body,

the world is not worthy of him.”

COMMENTARY

HE is the Son of Man, made in God’s image on the sixth day. When he came to know the world, he found an earthly abode, one that can only come to ruin, for death is part and parcel of it.

HE is the spirit in man who lies suffering in his dwelling of mortal flesh. Yet he will resurrect and enter his true heavenly abode, for the world is not worthy of him.

It is for this that the Lord’s anointed came. He came to proclaim the liberation of the captive Spirit, while all that is mortal would be absorbed by life.

LOGION 81

Jesus said:

“Let him who has grown rich be king,

and let him who possesses power renounce it.”

COMMENTARY

The two desires expressed by Jesus according to the logion are in fact two ways of expressing one and the same thing: his intense yearning that the purifying fire which he was bringing to the earth[1429] should blaze in all hearts, and so consummate the baptism in the spirit offered by the Gospel.

He who possesses power is one born of the spirit, one who has consequently begun to harvest the fruit of the Word. Such a man has understood that the psychological ego-the Adversary-is nothing but a one-off creation of his soul. Starting out from that decisive discovery, his consciousness has found in itself, in its very depths, the Son, the true universal and eternal I AM, and has begun to believe in this with indestructibly firm faith. The Gospel is then realized in him through the mystery reserved by the Word for all those who enter the institution of the Twelve: What you are to say will be given to you when the time comes, because it is not you who will be speaking; the Spirit of your Father will be speaking in you.[1430]

To such a man, one who has gained such a harvest, such power, the words pronounced by the Angel of the Lord apply, those words which he uttered when, we are told, he appeared to Zacharias and prophesied concerning John the Baptist: He will be filled with the Holy Spirit… With the spirit and power… he will go before [the Lord his God].[1431]

The spirit is always God’s life and his wisdom, and power is the force (dinamis) that enables a man to serve this harvest which one does not have but receives for a time in usufruct, as willed by the Father.

What Jesus is asking for in the logion is that whoever receives power should use it as a deposit entrusted to him by the Father, as a treasure that does not belong to him but to the Most High. Renunciation consists in this: in never forgetting that the wise man is deemed wise not because of the wisdom that he has but because of that which he receives, thus persevering in the heavenly bliss of the poor in spirit.[1432] As for the man who has grown rich, he is, as we already know, one who has accumulated wealth for its own sake without enriching himself in the sight of God.[1433] Such riches may be material, but they may also be things of the mind, and the latter are all the more dangerous in that they accumulate for the soul while failing to take account of the fact that she, the soul, can never find safety in the things she thinks she owns-worldly virtue and wisdom-but only in hearing the Word of God and obeying it.[1434]

The apostle speaks of riches accumulated for their own sake in a passage that is well known but little followed: If any one of you thinks of himself as wise, in the ordinary sense of the word, then he must learn to be a fool before he really can be wise. Why? Because the wisdom of this world is foolishness to God.[1435]

What Jesus demands of those who have attained worldly wisdom or wealth, which is foolishness to God, is that they should be prepared to become wise among the perfect ones who are not of this world but of God.[1436]

Without question, scorn for and abandonment of riches for their own sake lead to the royal role of the anointed one, that of the king who is not of this world, as was written: This is my king, installed by on Zion, my holy mountain.[1437]

The true king dwells on that holy mountain, in Zion, which is not of this world, but at the heart of the heavenly Jerusalem. Through the workings of faith, he discovers in himself the perfect sage, united to the hidden Christ from all eternity as his I AM. In man lies not only the hidden Christ but his mansion, one of the many mansions Christ declared he owned. That is why Jesus said: If you had faith, you could say to this mountain, “move from here to there,” and it would move.[1438]

It was for the perfect sage, anointed with the wisdom of heaven, that the psalmist raised his cry of victory: Lift up your heads, O ye gates; even lift them up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in.[1439]

Strictly speaking, the King of glory does not come in, for he is already present within. When the sage, being poor in spirit, discovers the seed of light sown in him since the beginning of time, at the very moment of this discovery the gates open, so that the Word may grow in his soul and reach into every corner. That is the hidden meaning of the praises sung to Jesus, the Christ both manifest and hidden, when he entered Jerusalem in glory: Blessings on the king, who comes in the name of the Lord.[1440]

These praises, which none of the four canonical evangelists omits, manifestly fulfill the prophecy of Zechariah. At the same time, they provide a hidden description of the transcendental, decisive, moment of the coming of the Son of Man; the first inkling of the firm discovery of the inner Christ, thereafter manifest in the soul as the King of Glory:

Rejoice heart and soul, daughter of Zion!

Shout with gladness, daughter of Jerusalem!

See now, your king comes to you;

he is victorious, he is triumphant,

humble and riding on a donkey,

on a colt, the foal of a donkey.[1441]

We must endeavor to explain the hidden meaning of this reference to the colt on which the inner Christ is riding when he makes his entry to Zion. As in many Old Testament prophecies, its meaning seems far more veiled than parallel texts in the New Testament. This reminds us that the Gospel was largely revelation, making manifest what had long been secret for the tradition of Israel.

Common Christian theology explains, in terms of the manifest aspect, that Jesus chose to ride the colt on the solemn occasion of his messianic entry into Jerusalem in order to show his spiritual royalty, while plainly renouncing the pageantry of the historical kings of Israel and Judah. There is, nevertheless, a hidden meaning behind this act, nor is it hard to descry, in the task given by Jesus to two disciples when they were drawing near to the Mount of Olives: Go to the village facing you and you will immediately find a tethered donkey, and a colt with her.[1442] This information is inevitably surprising. Jesus knew that in a village facing him there was a tethered donkey, and a colt with her; and he says that it would be found at once, which suggests this would be in the entrance to the village; and that it would be at the immediate, uncontested disposal of the two disciples. Mark adds something even stranger: a colt that no one has yet ridden.[1443] With these instructions, the two disciples sent by Jesus found the colt he had asked for.

From the point of view of the hidden interpretation, the mysterious colt seems to represent metaphorically the most subtle and purified contents of the soul, and that is why they may be said to appear facing man’s habitual consciousness. Such contents therefore possess the spiritual purity required for them to serve as a mount for the inner Christ when he manifests, in other words, at the moment of his coming to man’s consciousness. Then the gates lie open, their heads lifted up, so that consciousness may pass over into the blessed space of Mount Zion. The colt is a mount of honor; and yet, at the same time, and above all, it raises the radiance of the Glory of the Father’s cloak of light modestly, while veiling it. This light is one with the Son, its brilliance is not of this world and cannot be contemplated face to face when completely unveiled. That is why it is said that Moses covered his face, fearing to see God, during the dazzling episode of the burning bush at Mount Horeb.[1444]

In the words used by Jacob to bless his son Judah, the latter is described as a lion cub, that is, the very archetype of the inner Christ. Of him, it is said too that he ties up his young ass to the vine, to its stock, the foal of its she-ass.[1445] In Jesus, the Christ both manifest and hidden, both of these names given in Genesis come together. As a lion cub, there can be no doubt but that the author of the Book of Revelation calls him the lion of the tribe of Judah, adding then another title: the root of David.[1446] What this means is that the hidden Christ was in Judah and in David, as well as having been in Abraham, which is why Jesus said: Before Abraham was, I am.[1447]

We also know, however, that the young ass that was tied to the vine and the foal of the she-ass tied to the vine stock are metaphors for means whereby the hidden Christ became manifest, the outer clothing he needed in order to be manifest as well as hidden. This made clear by the fourth Gospel, in which Jesus explained the meaning of the vine as a metaphor standing for the hidden Christ, when he said: I am the true vine.[1448] In line with the allegorical character of this passage, it is quite clear that the she-ass, tied to the vine, is the soul of every man, just as the good vine shoot must stay united with the vine (tied to it) if it is to bear fruit. As for the colt that has never been ridden, the uncontaminated offspring, like the vine shoots firmly united to the stock, it represents the essence born in the soul.[1449] This trunk or vine stock is, of course, the inner Christ in himself, naked (no vine shoots), in other words nothing but the pure radiance of Glory-which cannot be contemplated-a sheen like bronze at the heart of the fire, as described by Ezekiel in his theophany.[1450]

It becomes easier to understand now that the colt tied directly to the vine stock on which Jesus mounted in order to be seen on the day of his Messianic entry into Jerusalem, corresponds figuratively to Jesus’ inner clothing, the undergarment […] seamless, woven in one piece from neck to hem[1451]of which Christ was stripped only at the last moment.

Moreover, in the Gospel of Saint John, the fine, light, pure, seamless garment replaces the Veil of the Temple mentioned in the synoptic Gospels. It is possible that the evangelist John may have intended to remove from his text a reference to the sacred Jewish tradition of the Veil of the Sanctuary, but the sign in the synoptic account survives perceptibly in the top-to-bottom -neck to hem-words used to describe the robe.

God’s truth protected by the Veil, the Son of Man visible only in the linen robe, Christ manifest in his spiritual royalty, riding on an uncontaminated colt: here are three scriptural forms used to describe the Coming, the sacred, solemn, triumphal entry of the King of Glory into Zion.[1452]

Regardless of form, when the Veil of the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom, meaning from Christ’s Glory down to the earthly temple, so that men might contemplate the splendor of his I AM, the centurion and those who were present had never seen the Veil, nor did they know of its tearing, for this could not be seen from the foot of the cross. Yet they must all have been aware of something, for they said: In truth, this was a son of God.[1453]

1429 Luke 12:49

1430 Matt. 10:20

1431 Luke 1:15-17

1432 Matt. 5:3

1433 Luke 12:16-21 (applies to the whole of this paragraph).

1434 Luke 11:28

1435 1 Cor. 3:18-19

1436 1 Cor. 2:6

1437 Ps. 2:6

1438 Matt. 17:20

1439 Ps. 24:7

1440 Luke 19:38, Ps. 118:26

1441 Zech. 9:9

1442 Matt. 21:2

1443 Mark 11:2

1444 Ex.3:6

1445 Gen. 49:9-11

1446 Rev. 5:5

1447 John 8:58

1448 John 15:1

1449 What, in the language of the Old Testament is referred to as nêsâmah, the third part that will not be exterminated according to the prophecy of Zechariah, the Remainder, of which the prophet declares: and the remainder will be left. (Zech 13:8-9)

1450 Ezek. 1:4

1451 John 19:23

1452 Matt. 27:51; Mark 15:38

1453 Matt. 27:54

LOGION 82

Jesus said:

“He who is near me is near the fire,

and he who is far from me is far from the Kingdom.[1454]”

COMMENTARY

In this logion, Jesus points out an important difference: seen from afar, Christ is the Kingdom; from near, he is fire. Christ, the hidden, inner Christ, neither moves away nor does he draw near, for he is the eternal, absolute I AM in every one of us; and yet, Christ is far off for those who neither believe in him nor discover him, and near, very near, for those who believe in him.

Thus contemplated, when Christ is far off, he is seen as the Kingdom. The Kingdom is then a place, and seemingly inaccessible. Christ made his home among us, yet as king and founder of the Kingdom, Christ is from above, while the tent in which he dwells is from below. This makes him distant.

When Christ is near it is because one has lit a flame to burn the chaff which is always from below. This is when Christ’s presence is first perceived, when he is beginning to draw near, for it is written that: The voice of the Lord sharpens lightning shafts.[1455]

No one should be surprised then at the fire which has broken out within him,[1456] for Christ said that he had come to bring fire to the earth.[1457] This means the sky dissolving in flames and the elements melting in the heat, all to speed his Coming.[1458]

Thus, fire descends from heaven to earth[1459] and the Kingdom that is far off becomes a flame that is near; a flaming fire, in the midst of which Christ is revealed.[1460] Our God is a consuming fire.[1461] Those who enter that devouring fire, which is so near to us, will dwell in it and be consumed by it.[1462]

Then is Christ revealed in the midst of the flame, known for who he is, the true I AM, absolute and eternal.

1454 There are versions of this logion to be found in the work of Didymus the Blind of Alexandria: Expositio en Psalmos 88:8; and in that of Origen: Homilia in Jeremiah 20:2.

1455 Ps. 29:7

1456 1 Pet. 4:12

1457 Luke 12:49

1458 2 Pet. 3:12

1459 Rev. 13:13

1460 2 Thes. 1:8

1461 Heb. 12:29; Deut. 4:24

1462 Isai. 33:14

LOGION 83

Jesus said:

“Images are manifest to man

but the light that is in them is hidden.

In the image of the light of the Father,

it will be revealed,

and the images (manifested to man)

will be hidden by his light.[1463]”

COMMENTARY

It seems best, for a start, to clarify the meaning of the logion itself. It says that everything manifest to man’s consciousness (the world, and in it the psychosomatic man whom every man can recognize) is an image of the light, while the light itself remains hidden from his gaze, hidden in its image. But the light (the Son, according to the Gospel), the resplendence of the Father’s glory, the imprint (image) of his essence,[1464] will be revealed, and then the images (of the light), the manifest world, will be hidden, concealed by their own light.

What is explained here is a series descending in three spheres of Being from the Father, invisible to the manifest world, through an arduous revelation leading to the final resurrection of the light. The Father is lumen de lumine, light of light, and the Son is, as light, the image of his essence.[1465] Something like the perfect imprint left by a seal. That is why Jesus says in the fourth Gospel: To have seen me is to have seen the Father.[1466] Finally, the world-the third sphere-consists of the manifest images of the Son’s glorious radiance, meaning, images in which the light is always an underlying hidden presence.

This was illustrated most poetically by the prophet Isaiah, in a text that speaks of Jerusalem, symbol of the manifest city of this world, which will in the end be revealed as the heavenly Jerusalem, hidden until that moment. The first consists of all manifest images, the second of Mount Zion, the true light of the Father and the luminous glory of the Son, who dwells in the heart of man and whose resurrection will take place on the Day of his Coming, to hide once and for all the world of images: No more will the sun give you daylight, nor moonlight shine on you, but YHWH will be your everlasting light, your God [the hidden inner Christ] will be your splendor.[1467]

Concerning Christ’s splendor, his glory, it has been said that he is God’s image.[1468] Christ is explained as being the image of the unseen God[1469] but, although an image, Christ is light, since the image of the true light is not something other than light, and God is always true light, for in him there is no darkness.[1470]

If the lover of the Gospel would penetrate the meaning of the word light, wishing, in other words, to know the true meaning of this word for Jesus and his disciples, he must for a start remember that Jesus, the Christ at once hidden and manifest, said: I am the light of the world.[1471] When he said this, he was not speaking of the light in itself, the naked light, perfect in the bosom of the Father, but of that same light, for there is no other, hidden in the images that every man in the world can see. That is why Jesus did not say simply: I am the light, for that would have meant the purely spiritual light, utterly intact, referred to by the apostle John in his first epistle when he said: God is light.

There are many passages in the scriptures that can serve to clarify which aspects of light can be perceived by our intelligence through the expression light of the world.

When the psalmist recites: With you is the fountain of life, by your light we see the light,[1472] what he is saying is that Christ’s glorious light is the power of God that we must learn to receive in its double acceptation as eternal life and knowledge. This light that emanates from the Father as sunlight radiates and spreads from the sun, is indeed the fountain of eternal Life, deathless, hidden in, yet imbuing all the images of this world. The man born of the Spirit takes shelter in the shadow of your wings,[1473] meaning that he lives under the blessed refuge of the light, following the hidden path prescribed by the light while renouncing the fruit of manifest images. Thus it is through the light hidden in the world’s images that the pneumatic man receives light and is enlightened, so that his mortal life is transformed into imperishable Life.

Like a parallel subjective flow, the luminous glory of Christ, the light of the world, is knowledge for mankind. As the psalmist proclaims, this is the light that enables us to see the light. That is why it is said that the wisdom-the glory of Christ-is a reflection of the eternal light.[1474] The light whereby we see the light, that glory, is certainly none other than the light of knowledge, and this in turn is a light that appears fragmented into ideas or thoughts, so that the absolute light, wisdom, which surrounds Christ like a crown from which truth shines forth, may be made visible to the world. The Letter to the Ephesians states: May […] the Father of Glory […] give you a spirit of wisdom and perception of what is revealed, to bring you to full knowledge of him.[1475]

The luminous glory is, moreover, power, strength, and it is said of it that you will have in you the strength.[1476] He who follows his path can enter into perfect knowledge, fill with truth and receive the revelation of eternal life. The glory of Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life,[1477] and consequently, the foretaste of resurrection.

Christ’s Gospel comes to fruition when the light remaining hidden in the world’s images reveals itself in the end as the daughter of the resurrection. In regard to the resurrection of man, the explanation given by the apostle is well known: You have stripped off your old behavior [your old image] with your old self, and you have put on a new self [made of light] which will progress to true knowledge the more it is renewed in the image of its creator.[1478]

The pilgrimage from the image to the light is the great religious renovation of man according to the Good News, for it is in itself the journey to the true essence. The first man-the old self, the old man-whom Paul on another occasion[1479] called Adam, the living soul, is the one whose consciousness appears to be identified in a natural, ingenuous way, although only because of ignorance, with the ephemeral, temporary images of the psyche, which it mistakes for its true Self, its I AM. This first man, the one who will be last according to the Gospel, is called living because everything with which he identifies is mortal, being an earthly, manifest image of the true man. His life, being on loan, lasts only for the term of that loan.

When this first man, psychic man, is converted and moves on following the light instead of remaining attached to his clay vessel, the identification of his consciousness is transferred to that of the last man, whom the apostle calls Adam, the life-giving spirit. Of this second man it is said that he is life-giving because he possesses eternal life and shares in the glory of the Son, in whom the Father vested that glory from the very beginning.

Once consciousness has identified with the man from above, a being regenerated by the Spirit, the light is revealed and the image becomes hidden for good. This was written in the epistle: anything illuminated turns into light.[1480]

As the prophet Isaiah proclaimed in the language of poetry for the benefit of all human generations:

For your dew is a radiant dew

and the land of ghosts will give birth.[1481]

1463 We have relied on the translation of Ph. De Suarez (Editions Metanoia 1975). There seems to be a punctuation error in the version produced by the professors in the Brill group, since this reads: the light within them is hidden in the image of the Father’s light.

1464 Heb.1:3

1465 Col. 1:15. He [Christ] is the image of the unseen God. [A possible further clarification: All that we know, we know through consciousness, yet we are not (usually) conscious of our own consciousness. Yet the Light (Christ) from which our consciousness arises will one day be revealed and this revelation of the Light will transform us, eclipsing the light of our usual consciousness of the world. N.of E.]

1466 John 14:9

1467 Isai. 60:19

1468 2 Cor. 4:3-4

1469 Col. 1:15

1470 John 1:3-5

1471 John 8:12

1472 Ps. 36:9

1473 Ps. 36:7

1474 Wisd. 7:24-26

1475 Eph. 1:17

1476 Col. 1:11

1477 John 14:6

1478 Col. 3:9-10

1479 1 Cor. 15:45-47

1480 Eph. 5:14

1481 Isai. 26:19

LOGION 84

Jesus said:

“When you see your likeness, you rejoice.

But when you see your images which came into being before you,

and neither die nor are made manifest,

how overwhelmed you will be!”

COMMENTARY

Jesus is not speaking here of those worldly images that obscure the light, but of the spirit of man, made in God’s image, which is the true light, and whose image, being an image of light, lies unmanifest in every man who comes into this world, like a seed sown in him before he came to exist.

It is written: God created man in the image of himself.[1482] The image of God and cloak of his glory of light is the Son, that image from which, light of light, man was made in spirit.

God’s complete purpose was, according to Genesis, to make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves,[1483] but this came first of all: God created man in the image of himself, in the image of God he created him.[1484] To be the image of the light means to be light, for it is in the nature of light to be featureless, the image of light always being a perfect image, for it need only conform to its own nature.

Saint Paul proclaimed: you are all sons of light,[1485] and the Gospel affirms this filiation when it gives the assurance: You are the light of the world,[1486] which Jesus had said of himself. Jesus spurs every man to show the shining light that is in him, the light of the Son contained in every single man, light divided into images of light, immortal but as yet unmanifest, for, as it is written: There is nothing hidden but it must be disclosed.[1487]

The subsequent division of the light of the Son into many scattered sons of God whom, as the High Priest prophesied, Jesus was to gather together in unity,[1488] was the work of likeness, ordered by God on the sixth day but created subsequently. The likeness came in order to conceal the flesh of light, which was formless by nature, in heavenly apparel[1489], grading the light of the image in various degrees of translucency, as is explained in those passages where the synoptic Gospels speak of man’s inner lamp.

In regard to the light in which God is cloaked, the light of the Son, the image calls for identity of substance, while the likeness allows for qualitative diversity, depending on the figure, color and transparency, that is, the affects and passions experienced by the lamp that diffuses the image of the light.

There is no need to know much more in order to understand that the image, being identical to the light, since it is light, is the share in the Spirit of God received by every man, that he may discover it, hidden within him, in the privacy of his room, and it may then be made manifest. Of this image, the apostle says that God has marked us with his seal and given us the pledge, the Spirit, that we carry in our hearts.[1490]

It must be said that the image is ecstatic in relation to God, since it is light that reflects his light, and his dynamic consists of being expansive, just as the sun’s rays shine forth and spread in the objective universe. At the same time, although the sun’s rays are reflected in water and interact with all the movements produced on its surface, never do they mix with the water’s impurities. Both the image and the sunray remain ever identical to themselves, retaining the same uncontaminated nature, without taking on the characteristics of the medium in which they manifest.

Unlike what happens with the image, the likeness, meaning the soul in Christian anthropology, implies a dynamic quality of a temporal order. The expression in the likeness of ourselves in Gen. 1:26 is to be understood as referring to the psychic man, whose substance is none other than the Spirit of Life, clothed by the factors determined by his psychic condition and moving within what we call the soul.

The union (henótes) of the expansive power of the Spirit of God with the receptivity of the soul, whose assimilative dynamic tends towards a perfect resemblance with the Spirit, has been explained in Messianic language by the sacred wedding of the mystic bridegroom and bride. Thus, it will be recognized that both spouses are the anthropological representation of an expansive masculine principle and a feminine one that only attains its object when it leaves off its search for similarity and turns passively to overflowing contemplation of the Son of light. This seems to have been what the holy scribe intended when, instead of saying in the likeness of God he created them, Genesis adds image to likeness: Male and female he created them.[1491]

All of this is set out very clearly by Justin the Gnostic when he adds: This was the wedding of the damsel Eden, the soul [in Gen. 2] and Elohim, the pneuma, the image of God [Gen 1:27].[1492] With this verse, however, the holy scribe is not only applying a sexological definition to the psychic and spiritual levels, but referring to the origins of the diversification of the one into the many; or, otherwise expressed, the multiplication of the one light of God into an infinity of lamps, each of which shines like an imperishable jewel in the heart of every man.

The dynamic of assimilation implied by likeness tends towards the discovery of the image through identification with it. The image is the essence, the true being of the soul; hence, perfect resemblance with the image of light will be self-realization, for the soul is perfectible and can come to resemble more the Spirit of God. The work of assimilation is in itself a destiny to be accomplished, one that God has assigned to the soul from the very beginning.

Perhaps some clarification of this last point may be useful. Man can never succeed in resembling God solely by exercising the rational faculties with which the soul is endowed. This calls for an active seed of eternal life sown in the soul, its essence, its very basis. Knowledge of this divine seed will be dispensed once the soul has freely adopted the precepts of wisdom of the Spirit, to the point of attaining the unity sought after through transfiguration. The image alone possesses the means of the soul’s renewal and dispenses it to the soul when she requests it.

Perfect assimilation means not only the consummation of union with the Son of light, but acknowledgment in our consciousness that we are God’s children, for this is the power that all souls attain thanks to the true light.[1493] Many biblical texts refer to this recognition which alone restores the condition of being in God’s image. Thus John, in his first letter, says: We are already the children of God but what we are to be in the future has not yet been revealed. All we know is that, when it is revealed [the soul’s essence, the hidden Christ] we shall be like him because we shall see him as he really is.[1494]

The apostle also explains what the manifestation of the image of light entails: an act that must be identified as the Coming of the Lord in his hidden aspect: Now we are seeing a dim reflection in a mirror; but then we shall be seeing face to face. The knowledge that I have now is imperfect[1495] but then I shall know as fully as I am known.[1496]

The soul, assimilated to the point of union with the image of God, the soul that has endured, the soul that has firmly understood once and for all the enigma of the mirror, that soul can truly say I am He.

1482 Gen. 1:27

1483 Gen. 1:26. Many Church Fathers saw in this our an expression of the Trinity, consisting of God, who is light, the Son and the Spirit of God, dwelling in the complete man.

1484 Gen. 1:27

1485 1 Thes. 5:5

1486 Matt. 5:14

1487 Mark 4:22

1488 John 11:52

1489 1 Cor. 15:39-40

1490 2 Cor. 1:22

1491 Gen. 1:27

1492 Hipol. V, 26, 3.8

1493 John 1:12

1494 1 John 3:2

1495 The knowledge of the psychological ego is partial, individual and limited to the psychic island occupied by the adversary of the light. He who knows the soul’s limited knower is the universal, infinite, limitless Christ.

1496 1 Cor. 13:12

LOGION 85

Jesus said:

“Adam came from great power and great wealth,

but he was not worthy of you.

Had he been worthy,

he would not have tasted death.”

COMMENTARY

The two centers of consciousness

When it speaks of Adam, the logion is referring to the entire human generation, whose prototype, Adam, Man, was made in spirit, in other words, in God’s image, and subsequently formed, clothed, with a soul gifted with a temporary breath of life.

The great power mentioned here is the Son of Man, the inner Christ, a lamp hidden in Zion-the immaterial heart-the precious, foundation cornerstone,[1497] the Spirit and strength of God.

As for great wealth, this is none other than the soul which, when it takes possession of the elements of the world,[1498] cloaks itself in an opaque veil that covers the light of the spirit. The unfortunate wealthy of this kind lack transparency, and are thus unaware of the blessings of the Kingdom, the chosen stone, present in their hearts; for this, according to the Gospel, is reserved for the poor in spirit.[1499]

If the logion makes no mention of Adam’s material body, the clothing of skin and flesh[1500] made by God, which must surely be part of the anthropological description of the complete man, it is because Jesus is speaking here only of the spirit and the soul as the two centers of consciousness to which, from the dynamic point of view of the Gospel, man has access.

These two centers are the natural one, meaning that active in every man born of woman, which is, as the Gospel puts it, destined to decrease until it attains humility and absolute cessation, and consciousness reborn in the Spirit, which must grow until it attains perfect assimilation in Christ. John the Baptist spoke of these two forms of consciousness, saying that he [Christ] must grow greater, I must grow smaller, while Christ said of him of all the children born of women, a greater one has never been seen.[1501]

When John spoke these words, he was explaining what was his to accomplish according to God’s plan, for the soul’s reduction always bears witness to the light of the spirit, and it was precisely to witness to this so that all should believe in the light, in Christ, that, according to the fourth Gospel, John was sent by God.[1502]

In the language of the Gospel, the decrease or weakening of the factors representing the world that are present in the soul, is described as poverty, and when this decrease is total, the word used is death, a glorious death of the soul, leading to resurrection in Christ, as expressed in the fine saying: Unless a wheat grain falls on the ground and dies, it remains only a single grain; but if it dies, it yields a rich harvest.[1503] When the grain remains, that means it is still rooted in a separate consciousness, in an ego that is God’s adversary, one that Jesus yearned to destroy. The death of this insularity is union in the bosom of the Father.

The decrease in great wealth

One example in the Gospels of the world’s shrinking in the psyche might be the account by Saint Luke of that senior tax collector, a wealthy man called Zacchaeus, who climbed a sycamore to wait for Christ’s Coming.[1504] The sycamore, the tree that Zacchaeus climbed to make up for his short stature, is a false fig tree, a tree that is generally full-bodied but which produces inedible figs.

The sycamore is therefore classified among fig species, and already in the Old Testament, the tree was used by the scribes and prophets of Israel to refer figuratively to the soul and its fruits. When Adam and Eve, after eating the forbidden fruit, opened their eyes to wisdom, they saw, according to Genesis, that they were naked, bereft of wisdom, whereupon they sewed fig leaves together to make themselves loincloths.[1505] This was the first instance in which the fig tree was used in relation to the soul, since the soft leaves of the fig tree in paradise announced not only the coming of summer but, in parable, the development of the soul that has come to know the dweller within it, for Jesus said: When you see all these things: know that he is near, at the very gates.[1506]

The fig tree and its fruit are, in both Testaments, a symbol of the soul as universal as is the juice of the vine for the spirit, for the Son of Man. Hence, to give the fullest possible expression to joy or desolation of soul and spirit, the holy scribes mention both trees: Each man will eat of his vine and his fig tree.[1507] And elsewhere, to express inner dryness: There are no grapes on the vine, no figs on the fig tree.[1508]

It is hardly surprising that the fig tree, its trunk, its leaves and its fruit that ripens twice yearly[1509] should have been chosen as the exemplary tree, the one that bears God’s first seeds for sowing in the soul,[1510] for it displays a mythological representation of the soul and of its functions.

Jesus’ dialogue in the fourth Gospel with his new disciple Nathanael[1511] is to be interpreted only in terms of its hidden meaning. Being the inner Christ, Jesus is aware of the religious activity of the man who had stayed beneath the fig tree-a soul lost in deep adoration. Jesus’ comment reveals God’s presence (the Shechinah) with Nathanael, settling above the purified soul, as described in the episode of Jacob’s ladder in Genesis: You will see heaven laid open and, above, the Son of Man, the angels of God ascending and descending.[1512]

The fig tree, the soul, must surely produce, together with its new leaves, the fruit of the seed, the Word sown within it. This inner work, which is necessary in every man who comes into this world, becomes unavoidable once heaven has opened up and he who comes in the name of the Lord has established his dwelling on Mount Zion. Praises, meaning fruitfulness, then become obligatory, ready even for those newborn to awareness of the Spirit, as the Psalm says and the Gospel reminds us: Above the heavens is your majesty chanted by the mouths of children, babes in arms.[1513]

According to Christ’s hidden aspect, from the latter’s Messianic entry into the inner temple, following the purifying action that drove all the money changers and vendors from the soul’s outer, superficial enclosure, it becomes natural to abandon the fig tree, the soul, which persists in its barrenness, and so to do away with that soul. The comment in Saint Mark’s Gospel that it was not the season for figs,[1514] does not speak up for the soul but justifies Jesus’ attitude. Never can the growth of the fruit cease, for no such cessation is possible for the prudent, virginal soul which receives the visit of the timeless, eternal Spouse, as a pledge of the sacred wedding.

Luke’s account[1515] is very different, in his parable of the barren fig tree. Here too the subject is the soul that yields no fruit, although not yet admonished by the Spouse. Although still far from the goal of the final wedding, the soul is in no immediate danger of ending up as firewood. The rest its life still lies before it, there is time in which to receive the spiritual food needed for its growth.

Rather like the dried-up, sterile fig tree is the sycamore, with its indigestible figs, which the ignorant Zacchaeus climbed to see the Coming of the Lord. In his blindness, Zacchaeus trusts in his tree, his sterile soul, as a means to enter the longed-for resurrection of the spirit. Yet his tree is really destined for death, like the unmarked tombs that men walk on without knowing it.[1516] What is more, the exceptionally dense, hard, almost rotproof wood of the sycamore was used in some nations for making coffins.

It was the voice of the Lord that called on Zacchaeus to climb down from his great wealth and make himself worthy of great power by receiving the Lord in his home. That was birth in the Spirit, and Zacchaeus, being obedient and diligent, came straight down from the tree and took on the humility of the poor in spirit. The evangelist then cites Jesus proclaiming how the man has complied with his hidden duty: Today salvation has come to this house, because this man too is a son of Abraham. This he says because Zacchaeus has grown smaller in consequence of faith in order to enable the growth of the hidden Christ. And since faith has moved him, Jesus recognizes him as a son of Abraham, whose faith was considered as justifying him, on account of which he received the promise that he and his spiritual descendants would inherit the world.[1517]

As the ending of the tale of Zacchaeus puts it: …The Son of Man has come to seek out and save what was lost. Here indeed was the Good News that Jesus proclaimed to the poor when read from the scroll in the synagogue at Nazareth: The spirit of the Lord […] has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives [and] to set the downtrodden free.[1518]

The death of great wealth

When the logion says that Adam would not have tasted death, it does not speak of the death of the body, for the logion does not mention that, or the death of the spirit, which is immortal, but that of the soul. Adam’s consciousness was unable to let go of his great wealth and give itself up wholly to death to live in Christ.

Those Adams who die in their soul always do so for lack of faith in the Christ that dwells in them as their very essence, so that they are unable to say to the fig tree: Get up and throw yourself into the sea,[1519] or to the barren sycamore: Be uprooted and plant yourself in the sea.[1520] If this journey, this physical shift, has been explained in the Gospel, it is because through devotion to the manifest Jesus or through the knowledge that the hidden Christ is one’s true being, it becomes possible to diminish the soul to the point of dying. Only thus is it possible to transfer the consciousness of mortal life, tested as gold is tested and refined as silver is refined, to the consciousness of Christ, being the power and wisdom of God.[1521]

Of those who succeed in making this difficult transition of consciousness and thus attaining the cloudless true life of eternity, it is said that they will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming with his kingdom,[1522] or before they see the Kingdom of God come with power.[1523] There is abundant information in the New Testament about the necessary death of the soul as the one and only precondition for obtaining eternal life, for this is the fundamental seal of the Good News. While Jesus consummated death in his body of Christ manifest, a death foretold that was part of God’s plan, in so doing he fulfilled in paradigm the process of salvation which, in the soul, not in the body, but sometimes in the body too, must be traversed by every man if he is to awaken and manifest the hidden Christ who dwells within him.[1524]

In the account of Jesus’ final appearance on the banks of Lake Tiberias, the fourth Gospel tells of both kinds of death to glorify God, that which involves physical death and that which entails the death of the soul-the first being more bloody but no less distressful than the second. Jesus revealed quite explicitly to Peter the kind of death he was to suffer in order to consummate in his body as well as in his soul the manifestation of the hidden Christ; but although, in the case of John, the rumor went out among the brothers that this disciple would not die, Jesus had not said this, but that the Coming of Christ would take place in this life, before his physical death, that Coming which only calls for the death of the soul as a precondition, since thus the hidden Christ is made manifest.[1525]

Paul explains this very clearly on a number of occasions: while we are still alive, we are consigned to our death every day, for the sake of Jesus, so that in our mortal flesh the life of Jesus, too, may be openly shown;[1526] Through the Law I am dead to the Law, so that now I can live for God;[1527] Life to me, of course, is Christ, but then death would bring me something more;[1528] You have died, and now the life you have is hidden with Christ in God.[1529]

In conclusion, we should remember that extract from the writings of Theodotus which was copied by Clement of Alexandria: He whom Christ regenerates is transferred to Life, and they die to the world but live to God, that death may be loosed by death and corruption by resurrection.[1530]

1497 Isai. 28:16

1498 Referred to thus in the Letter to the Colossians (Col. 3:3)

1499 Matt. 5:3

1500 Job 10:11

1501 John 3:30

1502 John 1:6-7

1503 John 12:24

1504 Luke 19:1-10

1505 Gen. 3:7

1506 Matt. 24:32-33

1507 Isai. 36:16; 2 Kings 18:31; Zech.3:10, in which this abundance is explained by the coming of the Branch. Then will come the hour of bliss, as explained by the prophet Micah: Each man will sit under his vine and his fig tree, with no one to trouble him. Micah. 4:4.

1508 Jer. 8:13; Joel 1:7, 1:12; Isai. 34:4

1509 Apoc. Petri C.2, in the Ethiopian version.

1510 Hippol. Ref V, 2-6.

1511 John 1:45-51

1512 John 1:51. In Gen. 28:12-17, Jacob concludes by exclaiming: This is nothing less than a house of God. This is the gate of heaven!

1513 Matt. 21:16; Ps. 8:2

1514 Mark 11:13

1515 Luke 13:6-9

1516 Luke 11:44

1517 Rom. 4:9, 13

1518 Luke 4:18

1519 Matt. 21:21; Mark 11:23

1520 Luke 17:6

1521 1 Cor. 1:24

1522 Matt. 16:28

1523 Mark 9:1, Luke 9:27

1524 This is how the Messianic revelation is to be understood in terms of its hidden aspect, as is shown so persistently in the Old Testament; a revelation which the manifest interpretation has seen as a typological Messianic prediction. But all the sons of theophany in the Old Testament, from Isaac to the Emmanuel of Isaiah, follow upon manifestation in the pure, virginal soul of the hidden anointed one, that is, the birth in the soul of Christly consciousness. The soul then joyfully accepts its goal of complete psychic poverty.

1525 John 21:19-23

1526 2 Cor 4:11

1527 Gal. 2:19

1528 Phil. 1:21

1529 Col. 3:3

1530 GT 80.

[http://www.eartlychristianwritings.com/text/theodotusexcerpts.html]

LOGION 86

Jesus said:

“Foxes have holes and the birds have their nests,

but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head and rest.”[1531]

COMMENTARY

The Son of Man has no place because the spirit, every man’s essential being, was not formed but made. Form came later, in Paradise, and this was when the One, a compound being both male and female, image and semblance, was scattered into many sons of God. But in the beginning man was made; and thus, man’s pure essence was light in the image of the Light: the Son of Man.

Hence, the Son of Man lacks a form, since the heavenly clothing was to come later, so that he has no place, no limits, no outline; nor time, nor space, nor way, only eternity, for it is written: Have you ever […] sent the dawn to its post? …Which is the way to the home of the light?[1532]

No, there is no place, no room, for that which is the place, no need to seek a way to that which is the Way, the Truth and the Life.[1533] It is in the world of foxes and of birds that there are dens and nests, while the Son of Man is his own place, the place of the infinite solitude of the One, the Father and he.[1534]

All this, Jesus explained very clearly when he said that no one knew the Son well, save the Father.[1535] Not to know well is, however, not to know except through signs. There is in truth no way to knowing the Son and the Father, and here lies the great stumbling-block a man encounters when he endeavors to take the grace and truth of Jesus Christ as his object.[1536] Christ, the hidden Christ, can never be the object of knowledge. He is the knower, and how could one know the knower? Nor is there a way to find the dwelling place of he who is the place itself. This is a newcomer’s question, the same question put to Jesus by those two disciples mentioned in the Gospel: Rabbi, where do you live?[1537]

Dens and nests are valid homes in the manifest world, but Christ does not manifest in the world, from which he remains hidden, with the one exception of those who love him and keep his Word, those who know how to see, how to pierce through to what is hidden. Hence, the question put to Jesus by Judas-not Judas Iscariot-Do you intend to show yourself to us and not to the world?[1538]

As for the place, so for rest. In his solitude of Oneness, the Son of Man has no one on whom to rest. It is he who as manifest Spirit of Glory rests on us,[1539]on those who love him. Meanwhile, the words of the Psalmist apply to those for whom he remains hidden, because they do not love him with their whole heart, their whole soul, their whole strength[1540]: I swore that not one would reach the place of rest I had for them.[1541]

When the Son of Man manifests in the consciousness of a man reborn in the Spirit, one who has taken up the yoke of Christ, the Lord gives him his rest, lasting peace for his soul.[1542] This is the rest which he bestows on the man who knows himself to be, in the end, perfectly One.[1543]

In one of his explanations concerning these things, Jesus confirmed his great promise of oneness with those who love him: My Father will love him […] and we shall make our home with him.[1544]

1531 This logion is to be found in Matt. 8:20 and Luke 9:58

1532 Job 38:12, 19

1533 John 14:5

1534 John 17:21-23

1535 Matt. 11:27

1536 John 1:17

1537 John 1:38

1538 John 14:22-23

1539 1 Pet. 4:14

1540 Deut. 6:5; Matt. 22:37. Strength=Spirit, power of God.

1541 Ps. 95:11; Heb. 3:11

1542 Matt. 11:29; Ps. 34:19

1543 John 17:23

1544 John 14:23

LOGION 87

Jesus said:

“Wretched is the body that depends upon a body. And wretched is the soul

that depends upon these two.”

COMMENTARY

I

What the logion states enigmatically, with its deliberate verbal asceticism, is that man’s body is unfortunate because it depends of the body’s natural limitations, while the soul, too, is wretched because of its dependence on the conditioning imposed on it by the body, in addition to its own deficiencies as a soul.

It is clear enough that the limitations of the body and those of the soul differ in kind, since those of the soul can be overcome, rescued by willingly accepting assimilation with the spirit, while those of the body are a natural phenomenon and, as such, cannot be overcome.

There is in fact no basis whatever in the text of the canonical Gospels for the Church’s doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh, with its promise of a glorious destiny for the body. On the contrary, the Gospel says: Where the body is, there too will the vultures gather.[1545] It is easy enough to see in this reference to the action of carrion birds the devouring work of time, with which we are all familiar. Yet some read more into these words: the cadaver reduced to dust by God´s command, in order to reconstitute the body and to raise it to share in His glory, according to one interpretation of a text of Isaiah: Bring back my sons from far away… whom I have created for my glory.[1546]

It is absolutely clear that the Gospel does not say this. Rather, words condemning the body: …There… will the vultures gather. Here, for once, the manifest exegesis took a leap in the dark and thought it saw something occult, something that had not in fact been said at all, something that was nevertheless to prove a useful addition to the manifest view. We, however, have no reason to get involved in this argument, since this study is not concerned with the manifest aspect of the Gospel but with its hidden counterpart.

That said, when the pursuit of knowledge in spirit and in truth shows up a given opinion as being nothing but a superficial veneer, a first purely theoretical fumbling towards true knowledge, anyone for whom a mere opinion is good enough is a man in thrall to total dependence on natural means, heaping up data and rational proofs, all for the purpose of propping up that opinion. Opinion can never approach the things that pertain to the Spirit of God unless it be first transformed into knowledge. That transformation can be attained only by following a very narrow path, a path so narrow that it is simply oneself. This is in fact the ultimate way to attain knowledge, knowing in truth. Such knowledge goes straight to the spirit and makes for sound judgment.

In regard to the body, a man whose outlook is limited to what is manifest[1547] will only recognize the totality of himself when that totality includes the body, with which his consciousness identifies. For that consciousness, man is in fact nothing but a combination of psychic-the soul-and physical factors, a mixture of two dissimilar substances that gives rise to a single psychosomatic consciousness, a synthesis of both substances.

For this psychosomatic consciousness, the death of the body is death and there’s nothing else to it, for that is precisely what the break with the body signifies, once attachment has given rise to ties of identification and dependency. For some minds whose outlook is manifest, that break will be seen as once-and-for-all, for others with the same view, it may be seen as transitory. In that case, they will expect the disembodied soul to be left waiting for judgment, in the hope that it will bring an end to exile and restore lost integrity.

This will not be at all the case for a man whose view is the hidden one, for he will have come to this, not because of some opinion, but because he no longer identifies with his body. He is not his body, his is a body-the house built for him by the Lord[1548]-that is something more than mere clothing, yet still of the same order.[1549]

The consciousness of a man whose view is the hidden one will not be psychosomatic, even though he will be affected by whatever happens to the body and may then identify briefly with these occurrences. His consciousness is only psychic, although there may at times be traces of pneuma once he has begun to draw on that essence which frees the inner movements of the soul, the wind whose sound is heard, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.[1550]

Such a man will often ask-without being in the least perturbed by the question-Who will rescue me from this body doomed to death?[1551] This he can say because he knows that death is only the death of the body and of all that clings to it through erroneous identification.

It is this identification that makes death so sharp a break. Where there is no identification, the pain of death is attenuated and may even lose all power, for death is diminished when it loses its worst sting: attachment, identifications. Truly, a man who sees in terms of the hidden view can say with the Apostle: To live in the body is to be exiled from the Lord.[1552] And when we feel this homesickness, we actually want to be exiled from the body and make our home with the Lord.[1553]

II

The differences between the manifest and the hidden conceptions correspond to differing interpretations of the death of Jesus on the cross.

According to the manifest version, Jesus, the Christ, possessed in the flesh and possesses in his eternal home the image of the Father and semblance with the form of God. The latter, the semblance, clothed him perfectly from the moment of his resurrection from the dead. Image, semblance and body constitute in Jesus Christ a manifest reality-although now invisible to us-in an inseparable unity of consciousness.

Nevertheless, some Christian Gnostics, having accustomed themselves to non-identification not only with their body but with the movements of its semblance (or soul), saw from their hidden view a dissociation of the unity constituting Christ Jesus into a trichotomy of different levels of consciousness. This dissociation enabled them to contemplate the tremendous real occurrence of Jesus’ death on the cross from various distinct superimposed angles.

What these Gnostic Christians speak of is not only the hidden Christ, the image or mantle of Light of the Father that is Jesus’ essence, but also the soul, the psychic consciousness, which they sometimes call the animal Christ. Lastly, when the Gnostics contemplate Jesus nailed to the cross, they see a privileged body with which the rest of the dwellers in Christ’s household, the Temple, harmonize perfectly. The essence of this household was to rise again after the symbolic three days. In this occurrence there subsists no identification whatever, because the functions assigned to the hylic, psychic and pneumatic orders belong to different kingdoms and are perfectly dissociated, without affecting Jesus’ unity.

By means of this description, with its bold anthropological x-ray view, the Gnostics direct their gaze towards Jesus without ceasing to see in him everything that bespeaks the paradigm of the universal Anthropos, i.e. of every man who comes into this world.

The narrative of the historic fact of Jesus’ death on the cross, seen from within, from within Jesus, through a penetrating gaze that is possible only when granted in spirit by the Savior, the resplendent one full of light, is most revealing, and it is well worth studying this with the help of a number of those documents now fortunately recovered. This study calls for the by no means easy prior task of subjecting the powerful but ambiguous light that emerges from among the usual excesses of the imagination of the Gnostic Christians to the rigorous purity of the hidden aspect.[1554]

In the account to be found in the (Gnostic) Apocalypse of Peter, the Apostle, who supposedly contemplates Jesus nailed to the cross, speaks of a hylic-psychic-pneumatic trichotomy, with the final pair perceptible only to those who see, those who have received the Mystery of the Kingdom of God.[1555] This ternary and, as we shall see, in a sense quaternary division of Jesus, is possible only in terms of a theoretical analysis, yet even so, it has validity and, by extension, it applies to every man, since its general structure is identical, apart from the qualitative differences.

Here is the starting point of Peter’s account: And I saw someone about to approach us who looked like him [Jesus] and like [the Living Jesus] the one who was laughing above the cross. He was [an image-of Jesus-] woven in holy Spirit. He was the Savior. And there was a great ineffable light surrounding them, and the multitude of ineffable and invisible angels, blessing them.[1556]

The text sets out in terms suited to the universal category of Jesus the composition of the complete man, which corresponds to the specific quality of every one of the three kingdoms of the universe according to Genesis: the spiritual (Light), the psychic (water, above and below) and the material (earth or clay). These are, moreover, the three levels of consciousness, contemplated in theoretical analytical dissociation (almost purely anatomical) since the author is intent on describing the Christ from the inside.

The first dissociated Jesus mentioned is Jesus in a passible body: the one into whose hands and feet they are driving the nails. This temporal Jesus is described in various verses as the firstborn, the home of the demons, the clay vessel in which they dwell, those who drive nails into the hands and feet of this Jesus. He is also called the man of Elohim (the man who was given form by the Archons) for this is the fleshly image, the plasma born in the likeness of the Living Jesus. Later on, it says of him that he is the man of the cross, who is subject to the Law; the one who will suffer (on the cross), the embodied Jesus, the son of Mary, inasmuch as the body is the ransom for human salvation, the one they put to shame, the son [the product] of their vainglory.

The second dissociated Jesus described is the Living Jesus, the one you see above the cross, glad and laughing. Of him, the text says: He who was in him in the body before, the one who was seized. And he was released [from the body] on the way to Calvary. He stands joyfully, looking at those who treated him violently. They are divided among themselves. Therefore, he laughs at their inability to see. He knows that they are born blind. They know not what they say. The son of their vainglory they have put to shame, instead of my servant [diakonos] [the Living Jesus] whom they intended to punish. So says the Savior.

Finally, the Savior says: I am the spirit only perceptible by the spirit, filled with radiant light; the one you saw coming to me, and to you.[1557]

The anonymous Christian author of Apocalypsis Petri set forth the crucifixion with prodigious harmonic precision. First, before Peter (the spectator), one and the same thing as himself, the Light, the Logos. Then, above the cross, the psychic Christ, the blessed soul, the Lord, and last, moving further, on the summit of Calvary, hanging from the cross, the passible body of Jesus, the body of the suffering man.

The Savior (the Logos), the Lord and the man (Jesus) who suffered constitute three forms of expression of one and the same essential consciousness, ranging from the hidden to the manifest. This is explained by another Gnostic writer: I did not die-says the Savior-in reality but in appearance.[1558] Or, which amounts to the same thing, I died, not in my hidden divine nature, but in manifest, human nature.

What the anonymous author proclaims in sum is that the divine nature and the psychic consciousness of Jesus were not identified with the passible body that was nailed to the cross. The author of Acta Iohannis confirms this: Neither am I he that is on the cross-says the Savior. I was reckoned to be that which I am not, not being what I am to many others.[1559]

Thou hearest that I suffered, yet did I not suffer;

that I suffered not, yet did I suffer;

that I was pierced, yet I was not smitten;

hanged, and I was not hanged;

that blood flowed from me, and it flowed not .[1560]

III

According to the synoptic Evangelists, on the way to Calvary, the soldiers of the magistrate seized on a passer-by, one Simon from Cyrene, who was coming in from the country, and made him shoulder the cross and carry it behind Jesus.[1561]

The Gnostics took this information with a view to explaining it. The Living Jesus declares that[1562] at first he was in this body, and this is to be understood as meaning there was a time when his consciousness was identified with his body, which is a way of becoming imprisoned. I was seized-he adds-then released from this body on the way to Calvary.

The Living Jesus-the soul of Jesus-must have been well aware that the cross is the limit of Plenitude, the final sign that separates the inner man, who is whole, from the hylic man, who is incomplete. That is why he said: If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me.[1563] Self-denial means withdrawing one’s consciousness from its sclerotic identification with the body, which is the object of incompleteness, to free it and bring it beyond limitation, to Wholeness, to the shining Kingdom of the Living Jesus. Here lies the way, the border path, climbing to Calvary: this, the will to break all bounds, is in itself the cross. A Gnostic Christian, cited by Clement, says this: In carrying Jesus on his back, in carrying on his shoulders the weight of the seed [the sown Word], he brings the latter [by means of the sign] into the Pleroma.[1564]

What has erroneously been called Jesus’ abandonment of the cross is not to be understood as an abandonment. On the path to Calvary lies the border point at which Wholeness is found. The manifest version of the mystery suggests the abandonment of the cross on the shoulders of the man from Cyrene on the way to the Place of the Skull; yet the hidden truth was, doubtless, that the cross which Jesus took upon himself when he proclaimed the Good News ceased to be the cross for him, for the compassionate soul of the Living Jesus, before he even reached the top of the hill on which to raise it.

What we do not know and need to know is in what dimension of himself Jesus suffered, if he did suffer, when his body was raised onto the cross. The anonymous Christian wrote: As he knew how to suffer, he was able not to suffer; as he consented to suffer, he was able not to suffer.[1565]

Logically enough, in response to the manifest version, the interpretation of the Gnostic Basilides of Irenaeus[1566] has Jesus change his form into that of Simon on the way to Calvary; and the soldiers fell into the trap and put to death the man from Cyrene instead of nailing Jesus to the cross. This goes far beyond any of the narratives, both manifest and hidden, except that the form to which Basilides refers is none other than the modelled clay (plasma) born in the image of the Living Jesus which is mentioned in the Gnostic Apocalypsis Petri as precisely that of the bodily Jesus.

But, what is this plasma, this form? How is it to be understood? According to Genesis, God breathed into this modelled form that breath which in Hebrew is called nefesh and which is to be understood as the breath of individual, animal life, tied to the body, meaning that it is, like the body, subject to the physical impulses of desire, the passions, sensation; it lives its life, which is not free from irrationality, in the body, and it dies with the body. This breath, nefesh, is in a way a deformed inner image of the average consciousness of a man who is not degenerate, since this consciousness is present in the frame of his animal life.

There is another breath of life, rûach, which was inspired later on, with Adam’s dream, a dream which was to be inseparable from him and was called the mother of all the living. Rûach could be described as the soul, the individual soul, compounded with active contents received from divine life. When, moreover, rûach attains the requisite degree of universality and knowledge, it is said-to use the expression of the prophet Zechariah-to have been refined as silver is refined. Thenceforth, it is known as neshâmâh and is called the mystic third, God’s Remainder, the Son of Man who unites with the Spirit of God.[1567]

In the mythical Gnostic scenario of Calvary, the Living Jesus is, as consciousness, the closest parallel to this Hebrew idea of neshâmâh.

However, it fell to Simon from Cyrene to represent nefesh, the inferior image of rûach, given from by the Archons in the service of YHWH. To Simon there thus correspond the demons (passions, desires, etc.) that dwell in that house (the passible body of Jesus), as identified by the Gnostic scribe, and he takes possession of that house in his quality as firstborn, since he came to being before the rûach, the breath of divine consciousness.

This breath of consciousness, with its divine connection, is what enables man to keep alive the resolve to overwhelm one day-once purified and transformed into neshâmâh-the angels with a flaming sword that guard the way to the Tree of Life. And yet, what guards this way is unquestionably the cross, the tree of death.

Those two basic classes of a psychic order, nefesh as the breath of (mortal) life, stained by irrationality and naturally tending to sink to the lower spheres of existence, and rûach, the breath of divine origin, capable of becoming assimilated to the Spirit of God, since it is Life (the mother of the Living) and life-instilled, are announced in the psychic realm (=water) which already on the second day of the Creation appeared to be divided into two irreconcilable sectors, the waters below and the waters above the insurmountable firmament of burnished bronze.[1568]

In the Gospel, the two psychic biblical orders survive alongside the two descending and ascending tendencies-the two paths-that live on in the soul. Figuratively, the presence of these two orders in the same soul are represented by the two women milling at the same mill, or the two men in the same field. The message is the same in both cases: one will be left-for crucifixion and the death of the body-while the other will be taken for resurrection from among the dead.[1569]

This same doctrine of the two psychic orders (the two kinds of waters in Genesis) forms part of the Old Testament, but here, as frequently, its hidden footprints, its method of interpretation is denser and more difficult to unravel than in the New Testament.

The hidden formula employed here consists of confronting two brothers, one of whom, the firstborn-meaning nefesh- lives in a state of attachment to the world because his ceiling, his firmament, marks his limit, while the other one, the second-born, identifiable with rûach, sits on the rooftop, the platform of the firmament, where there are no limits to prevent his ascent towards the Spirit of God. Likewise, regardless of narrative variations, higher aspirations will always culminate in a third character (neshâmâh), the consummation of the human psychic order in a messianic triumph.

An exemplary case is to be found in the story of Esau and Jacob in which, according to the prophecy, the elder shall serve the younger.[1570] Just like the passible Jesus, Esau was the firstborn, but he sold his birthright to his brother Jacob. Both were twins. Likewise, when the Living Jesus was identified with the body, he was undifferentiated from the passible Jesus-a man cannot be differentiated from his body when he is identified with it.

Of Jacob, we know that through his hard all-night struggle he obtained God’s blessing with the coming of dawn. That blessing made a new, enlightened man of him, Israel, one meaning of that name being May God [the Savior] show his strength.[1571]

In the saga of Cain and Abel in Genesis, the firstborn was a farmer and offered God the fruit of the soil, while Abel, the shepherd, offered God the firstborn of his flock. The holy scribe tells that YHWH looked with favor on Abel and his offering, but did not look with favor on Cain and his offering.[1572] Why, then, should the offering of the one been acceptable and the other, not? It was certainly not the scribe’s intention to say that YHWH is an arbitrary and capricious God, or indeed that Cain’s offering, being of so low a level and consisting of the produce of the soil,[1573] could not be pleasing to God. Like the mythical pair Esau and Jacob, Cain and Abel represented two nations, two clearly differentiated psychic regions, born of the same womb but destined to go different ways.[1574]

Exceptionally, in the tale of the brothers Cain and Abel, it is the second-born who must die. This mythical pair, the first of the kind to be mentioned in the scriptures, represents a sign that works in the opposite direction from the usual one, for it represents a primitive view, not even an imperfect version of the ascent to Calvary, but rather, the original descent of consciousness into the world. That was why Abel died, leaving Cain. Yet the latter did not prevail, in the view of the sacred scribe, and he was severely admonished: When you till the ground it shall no longer yield you any of its produce [of perdition].[1575]

The one who prevailed, so that the way should lie open for humankind to attain the glory to come, was Seth who plays the same higher role as Israel in the Old and New Testaments, and as the glorious hidden Christ, the shining Savior of the Gnostics. These are all the builders of their House, whether that of Seth, of Israel or of David, for the House is the mystic all-uniting, all containing body. The last thing that Genesis tells us about Adam is that he fathered Seth, of whom it is stated clearly that he is the son of Man, engendered (by Adam) in his likeness, as his image. This was the first son of Man[1576] to be entered in the list of Adam’s generations[1577], to be transformed in the Gospel into the Son of Man.

IV

When they speak of Simon from Cyrene, the Evangelists provide one manifest detail, namely that he was the father of Alexander and Rufus, as well as a hidden clue: He was returning (Mark)-coming (Luke) from the country.

As a hunter, Esau was a man from the country. When he sold his birthright, he had just returned from the countryside[1578] and when he was expecting to receive his father’s blessing, he went into the country,[1579] obeying the request of Isaac, who said go out into the country.[1580]

Cain, too, being a farmer, busied himself with the soil and its fruit and, when very angry and downcast because of his greed, he said to his brother: Let us go out.[1581] According to the text, while they were out in the open country, Cain set on his brother Abel and killed him.[1582]

According to the hidden view, the same meaning is to be accorded to the two men of whom the Gospel speaks who were awaiting the Coming of the Son of Man in a field. One would be taken for the resurrection, while the other would be left to be raised on the cross.

In the great Gnostic crucifixion scene, the man who remains nailed to the cross, identified with the body of Jesus, left in it, in the body, as the limited vestige of the instinctive consciousness, and in order to confer on the body-the stone or clay vessel- its suffering condition, is, according to the hidden aspect of the scene, Simon from Cyrene. That is why it was he who shouldered the cross. His role, as the Anthropos Jesus, to climb to Calvary and die with the hylic body of the passible Jesus.[1583]

This is the body of Jesus, kept still passible on the cross because of the nefesh remaining in him, the breath of psychosomatic consciousness, naturally attaching to the body. Such is the body of the man on the cross of whom the Gnostic says that he is subject to the Law.[1584] This is the passible bodily Jesus, born of Mary.

The Christian author of the Gnostic Apocalypsis Petri also comments that this passible body of Jesus is the ransom for the salvation of the men who dishonor him (who deny Christ), the son of their vainglory.[1585]

As the price of freedom, this ransom was paid to Judas with thirty silver coins, the price fixed by the Law for the freeing of a slave.[1586] The full payment of this ransom (already paid in part) is the death of the passible body, which is the bodily image of the incorporeal body of the Living Jesus.[1587]

V

There, standing above the cross, is the Living Jesus in an incorporeal psychic body, invisible, not even subtle, just a light, a substance spreading limitlessly through the immensity of the cosmos: a sea of light, identical to the Savior, resplendent as the robe of Light clothing the Father.[1588]

There was a time when the Living Jesus was in the flesh and blood body, a captive because of identification with it, but then he broke free of this body on the way to Calvary, and stood to one side, free, joyful, blissful; and laughing in an incorporeal body.[1589]

When the text says that the Living Jesus is standing, that means his higher psychic consciousness, freed from the psychosomatic attachments of flesh and blood,[1590] remains constantly in the presence of the splendor of the Savior’s light. Since the Living Jesus has already ceased to identify with his body, he looks on the passible body of Jesus on the cross, culminating in its natural death, as dictated by the Law that governs the passible outer clothing. Flesh and blood, the passible body, will not inherit the Kingdom of God.[1591]

It is all these things that are causing the Living Jesus to laugh. Laughter in the Bible (and sometimes the smile) are the inner sign that God’s joy has entered man. When the Lord announced to Sara-Abraham’s pure, virginal soul-that the one coming from the spirit was to be born to her, both he and she laughed; Abraham, with his face to the ground, in higher humility,[1592] like the soul that says: The Lord… has looked upon his lowly handmaid.[1593] Laughter enters man’s heart when he leaves humanity’s vale of tears to contemplate God’s lineage. That is why it is written that: The One whose throne is in heaven sits laughing,[1594] and Luke adds: Happy you who weep now: you shall laugh.[1595]

Very near, far nearer than the Living Jesus is the Savior, who said: I am the spirit filled with radiant light;[1596] the one you saw coming to me, and to you.

This seeing the splendor of the Light as though it were oneself explains how the manifestation in man’s spirit of the Savior, the invisible Spirit, leads man to see him, for he sees him mirrored in himself; and he sees him in one and indivisible glory-not split into tents of glory-which is why it was said of man: You have made him little less than a god, you have crowned him with glory and splendor.[1597]

In truth, the glory that is man’s crown of light mirrors the glory of the resplendent Savior, who is the measureless mantle of God.

VI

Concerning the resurrection of bodies, not in this terrestrial world where Jesus, according to the record, performed several temporary resurrections,[1598] but in that world, the (eternal) Kingdom of Heaven, the Gospels have little to tell us. Apart from Jesus’ resurrection and his bodily apparitions (whether incorporeal or not), all of which belong to an exceptional sphere not only because of their dual, hidden and manifest, significance, but because of the extreme dignity of Jesus’ person, there is no other report of the bodily revival of a dead person.

Saint Matthew is alone in handing down a single item, one that is eschatological in nature. He was not, however, in a position to have directly witnessed the event he reports, and provides no details of the indirect witness from whom he obtained it, so this cannot be accepted unreservedly, i.e. it cannot be taken for what, according to the manifest view, might provide for the interpretation of a hidden sign: The tombs opened and the bodies of many holy men rose from the dead.[1599]

Nevertheless, in contrast to the scarcity of information about bodies’ ability to obtain glorification, there is an abundance of passages in the Gospel that mention and confirm the intrinsically mortal condition of the body, with no promise of resurrection: Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; fear him rather who can destroy both body and soul in hell.[1600] Not to fear the death of the body in this passage seems to confirm the absence of any lasting connection between the body and consciousness, between the body and the personal subject, while it is valued as privileged clothing for the soul. As in the saying: Surely… the body means more than clothing?[1601]

As for the resurrection, in the one and only passage in which he speaks directly of it, his dialogue with the Sadducees about the resurrection of the dead, Jesus explains quite clearly that those who attain worthiness to be part of that world (the Kingdom of God) and of the resurrection of the dead, can no longer die, for they are the same as the angels,[1602] meaning, pure spirits continually in the presence of the Father in heaven.[1603]

There is nothing in the Gospel (apart from the personal case of Jesus) that could lead one to expect the eschatological glorification which the mortal shell of clay is supposed to attain according to the manifest Christian exegesis. Perhaps the origin of this doctrinal exegesis that is so utterly contra naturam is to be found in the intensity of the loving gaze with which many new Christians looked on the manifest crucified Christ as the Lamb of God. This may have inculcated a very earthy, very physical view of the Son of God, so that form trumped essence. Above all, the suffering flesh of the just one sacrificed on the cross, flesh that everyone saw as reflecting his own identification with the flesh; this will have been seen more dramatically than the fact of the Spirit of God lying captive in a prison of flesh. Hence the glorification of the flesh, grounded in the paradigmatic character of the death, resurrection and final ascension of Jesus to the Father, in his body of glory.

The consequences of this glorification of the flesh were all too soon to be expressed in the anthropological metaphysics that were to emerge as a sign of triumph in the first centuries of the Christian era. This doctrine was to develop according to an entirely tautological process that fitted in with the previous idea: man was made in God’s image, but the image of God is the Son, in whose image man was made. When the Son became manifest to men, he showed that his image (man) is similar to himself. So, man was created in God’s likeness, meaning, the Son was created in God’s likeness, and man was created in the likeness of the Son. Then, when the Son was born of a Virgin, he assumed his own physicality in order to show the identity of man’s physicality with his own.

These men with their manifest view did not want to see the hidden, and consequently, unborn Son whom we are now setting forth, although they certainly knew him. Nevertheless, the Son is essentially the Light-together with Wisdom and Life-the image of the infinite Light of the Father transmitted to-imprinted on-the spirit of man as the image of Himself. As the Father and the Son are one in essence, so too is man as spirit, once he has attained union with his own indwelling essence.

The primary form of the soul is dynamic and manifestly distinct from the light, ever different and separate from it, oppressing the light from the mansions of its intermediate kingdom, that of the psyche. The soul holds the light, the spirit, in captivity, for it does not know it, and only by means of an unstoppable dynamic effort claims to find union with the light. Liberation is at once the death of form and the freeing of the light, which then ceases to lie imprisoned under the soul’s walls of form. Light, once freed, recognizes itself in the light and thus recovers lost unity.

What, then, is bodily form, or physicality? For the manifest exegesis, it is an irreplaceable component of the integrity of the self, of man. This integrity will only be restored to wholeness-so thinks the man whose view is the manifest one-when, after the resurrection at the end of time, body and soul are restored, fully one with the Spirit of God. Then, every man will, after Judgment, come to be a complete entity of body, soul and spirit: the complete man.

For the hidden exegesis, physicality is little more than clothing, a necessary covering for the purposes of the difficult transit through matter, but no longer of any use once this earthly passage has come to an end. Man is, moreover, born complete, since the eternal spirit, the essence of man, was made before him, as the light and image of the Son who is the Logos, the Light of God. The thing is that man does not know his spirit until he discovers it and it is revealed to him as the essence of his soul. For as long as man is flesh, identified with his body, he remains ignorant of the spirit that gives him life. Hence these words: My spirit must not forever be disgraced in man [in his consciousness], for he is but flesh.[1604]

VII

Are there, nevertheless, well-founded reasons for expecting, as the manifest view does, the restored integrity of spirit, soul and body in a future celestial world? Is it possible to think of this bodily form renewed and purified in the Kingdom of God? Is any kind of bodily presence necessary in these formless dominions of infinite light?

The manifest view depends above all on the interpretation of Pauline texts to support a favorable hypothesis in response to the questions thus raised. The hidden view also accepts these admirable texts of the Apostle, but with a differing interpretation.

As Saint Paul explains in 1 Cor. 15, Christians’ belief in the resurrection is grounded in the faith that Christ-Christ manifest and hidden, not only in Jesus, but in every man-rose from the dead. This resurrection of Jesus, the Christ, is the only Gospel antecedent for resurrection in the Kingdom of God, nor could there be another, for Jesus was the first to rise again. Paul puts this on record: Christ has in fact been raised from the dead, the first fruits of all who have fallen asleep (verse 20).[1605]

With those words about sleep, the Apostle reminds us of that Christian hymn to be found in Ephesians, and which takes on a meaning of the hidden Christ’s resurrection:

Wake up from your sleep,

rise from the dead,

and Christ will shine on you.[1606]

But the man who must rise and live again is not the man of Adam, for Adam and all the manifest Adams who were to follow all died like him. Never forget, the first fruit of those who slept and rose again was Christ. Then followed those men who are reborn in Christ, those who receive the Coming of Christ, hitherto hidden, in the crucible of their soul. Hence, the words of the Apostle: Just as all men die in Adam, so all men will be brought to life in Christ (verse 21).

In truth, in rising from the dead, the manifest Christ was the first fruits, after which we follow, those of the hidden Christ, received on the occasion of his Coming, when he is discovered by everyone in the world.

Then death will be destroyed, by each one of us and in oneself (vv. 26-28) and when everything is subjected to him, then the Son himself will be subject to the One, who subjected all things to him.

All this, in regard to the resurrection, but Paul then goes on to ask rhetorically: How are dead people raised, and what sort of body do they have when they come back to life? (v. 35). Answering this question, the Apostle takes up the question of what has been called the mode of resurrection, in which mode, the question does not arise as to whether there is or is not a resurrection; for, quite clearly, there is one, as shown by the antecedents studied; nor is any attempt made to clarify whether those who return to life (in the Kingdom) do so with a body, since yes, it is with a body according to Paul. The specific question is this: What sort of body do those who rise from the dead have when they come back to life [in the Kingdom]?

In answer, the apostle provides a broad, detailed answer rich in imagery which, unfortunately, given the transcendent doctrinal and historic importance of the problem, has not been given the correct reading. In this case, therefore, it will not be appropriate to carry out a methodological comparison of the two views, hidden and manifest, but simply to understand the text for what it is.

The Apostle explains: The thing you sow is not what is going to come. You sow a bare grain of wheat or something like that, and then God gives it the sort of body he has chosen; each sort of seed gets its own sort of body (vv. 37-38).

As with the wheat grain, or the seed of any other plant, this is not the body that will rise at the resurrection, but the one God has willed. Paul’s text explains that one is the body that dies and the other is the body that clothes the soul, the peculiar soul body given by God.

The body given the soul by God, the body peculiar to the soul has not the same kind of flesh as that of men on earth, because everything that is flesh is not the same flesh. That is why there are heavenly bodies and there are earthly bodies (vv. 39-40).

The soul’s body for its life in the Kingdom is a heavenly body,[1607] distinct from the earthly one in its specifics, its substance and its condition. The thing that is sown is perishable but what is raised is imperishable; the thing that is sown is contemptible but what is raised is glorious (its flesh is light); the thing that is sown is weak but what is raised is powerful; when it is sown it embodies the soul, when it is raised it embodies the spirit (vv. 42-43).

This is why the Apostle says that a natural body is sown but a spiritual one is reborn. By the thing that is sown, we are to understand the body with which every man on earth is born and dies. By what is raised it is quite clear that the Apostle is not referring to the same body one had on earth, made incorruptible and immortal, but to a distinct body peculiar to life in the Kingdom. To have thought that the invisible body of the resurrection is the same earthly body, although modified, is the prime historical error concerning the resurrection.

The peculiar body gained by the soul is a new and distinct one. It is not the natural, visible body with which man is endowed in the world but a luminous spiritual one, visible only to those eyes that can see the soul, and it serves to mark off a unity of consciousness, not scattered throughout infinite space, for the last Adam, the life-giving spirit (v. 45).

This Adam is the second man, the one from heaven (v. 47). Born of the spirit, this Adam is spirit, and Jesus spoke of him to Nicodemus according to the fourth Gospel. The body that will clothe this Adam, the body peculiar to the soul, the one we shall wear at the resurrection, will be, not the image of the earthly man, the flesh and bone tunic of man in this world, but the image of heavenly man (v. 49).

So as to be quite sure that everyone has understood the real meaning of his speech, Paul adds: Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God; and the perishable cannot inherit what lasts for ever (v. 50).

1545 Luke 17:37; Matt. 24:28 speak, not of soma (the body) but of ptoma (the corpse).

1546 Isai. 43:7

1547 In this and the following paragraphs, expressions like manifest outlook / conception and hidden conception / view are to be taken in a general sense, one that draws on the manifest and hidden aspects of the Christian religion which we are now studying.

1548 Ps. 127:1

1549 Matt. 6:25

1550 John 3:8

1551 Rom. 7:24

1552 2 Cor. 5:6

1553 2 Cor. 5:8

1554 The texts on which we shall now be commenting are to be found among the following Gnostic documents: Apocalypsis Petri (Gnostics), Acta Iohannis and The Second Treatise of the great Seth.

1555 Mark 4:11

1556 Apoc. Petri 82:4-14

1557 Apoc. Petri 81:14-82

1558 2nd Treatise of the Great Seth p. 53:3

1559 Acta Iohannis pp.98-99

1560 Acta Iohannis, p. 101.

1561 Matt. 27:32, Mark 15:21, Luke 23:26

1562 Apoc. Petri 81:14-82

1563 Mark 8:34

1564 Strómata (Excerpts of Theodotus) Clem. Alex. Strom.

1565 Acta Iohannis p. 96

1566 Iren. I, 24:4

1567 W. Eichrot: Teología del A.T. vol.II Partes constituyentes del ser humano

1568 Gen. 1:6-7

1569 Matt. 24:40-41

1570 Gen. 25:23

1571 Gen. 32:23-30

1572 Gen. 4:4-5.

1573 The soil of Paradise is a psychic soil, a psychosomatic one attached to the flesh.

1574 Like the two women (souls) in the Gospel, in the same mill together and the two men in the same field.

1575 Gen. 4:12

1576 He is without a doubt the Son of Anthropos mentioned by the Naassenes and the Ophites. He is the Son of Man too, being the pure spirit of God in man, who is present when God manifests to Enoch, Ezekiel and Daniel, and whom Jesus mentions in his Gospel as an enigma of himself and for all men. The Son of Man is the Savior, the pure ray of the Light of the Father, who enables psychic man to gain his freedom, once consummated the sacred marriage with him.

1577 Gen. 5:1-3

1578 Gen. 25:29

1579 Gen. 27:5

1580 Gen. 27:3

1581 Gen. 4:6. Out where? Esau and Jacob came out too (from Rebecca’s womb).

1582 Gen. 4:8

1583 In the Second Treatise of Seth (N.H. VII:2) this variant on the synoptic Gospels appears: It was another who bore the cross on his shoulders. It was on another’s head that they placed the crown of thorns. Without that crown, the soldiers could not have mistaken Simon for Jesus. But the crown woven from thorns was put on Jesus’ head in the Praetorium, before he went out onto the road, and that is why it does not say in the Gospels that it was put on Simon’s head.

1584 The law that inexorably brings death to all that is mortal by nature.

1585 In contrast to the glory of the true light, the Son, manifested by Jesus on the mountain in the Transfiguration.

1586 Matt. 26:15

1587 Apoc. Petri 83:4-11

1588 Ps. 104:2. Wrapped in a robe of light.

1589 Apoc. Petri 83:4-11

1590 Gen. 9:4. When it says in Genesis, I give you everything, with this exception: you must not eat flesh with life, that is to say blood, in it, there is an identification between nefesh and the blood adhering to it. Nefesh, seen according to myth as borne in the blood, is the soul in its aspect expressing passion, desire, etc.

1591 1 Cor. 15:50

1592 Gen. 17:17

1593 Luke 1:48

1594 Ps. 2:4

1595 Luke 6:21

1596 Apoc. Petri 81:14

1597 Ps. 8:6

1598 If we say temporal, it is because those blessed ones who were brought back to life were only briefly fortunate, for they continued to be mortal. In truth, Jairus’ daughter, the son of the widow at Naim and Lazarus all died twice, and we cannot say whether this can be called fortunate or unfortunate.

1599 Matt. 27:52

1600 Matt. 10:28

1601 Matt. 6:25

1602 Luke 20:36

1603 Matt. 18:10, 22:30; Mark 12:25

1604 Gen. 6:3

1605 Almost all of Saint Paul’s texts on the resurrection are concentrated in 1 Cor. 15.

1606 Eph. 5:14

1607 This heavenly body mentioned by Paul is also that spoken of by the author of the Apoc. Petri (82:17) when the Living Jesus (the soul of Jesus) says: What the Archons have left free [of the passible body that hangs on the cross] is my incorporeal body. Moreover, Hippolytus’ Naassenes (ref. V 6:6-7) say that the risen Jesus possessed two bodies, one being psychic (that of the Living Jesus) and the other, angelic (i.e. pure spirit) clothing the glory of the Savior. Hylic man, the irrational soul (nefesh) subject to passions, has neither of these bodies, and was raised on the cross as Simon from Cyrene. Concerning the angelic body of which the Naassenes speak, it must be made clear that it is the one which Jesus detached from himself, thanks to which he ascended to the Father.

LOGION 88

Jesus said:

“The angels and the prophets will come to you,

and they will give you what is yours.

You also, give them what is in your hands, and say to yourselves:

‘On what day will they come to take what is theirs?’”

COMMENTARY

The angels announced here come only to consciousness, for every man who comes into this world has his holy angel who is in heaven from the very start, in the inner heaven of the soul from which he never descended nor need descend. But when the soul discovers his presence in her own heaven, she imagines this presence to have come down from heaven, whereas it never was anywhere but in her.

Jesus explained this when he spoke of those recently born to the Spirit, the latest discoverers of the hidden Christ, those whom he called little ones. He said: Their angels in heaven are continually in the presence of my Father in heaven.[1608]

Every single holy angel is a ray of the light from the Son shining in man’s pure spirit, for that is what the spirit of man is. When Jesus calls the spirit angel, being pure and without a body, he is using the same kind of expression as is commonly to be found in the Old Testament, in which the manifestation of the divine presence is referred to as the Angel of the Lord.

Spirit or essence unknown to the soul is how the holy angel is seen by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, when he says Some people have entertained angels without knowing it.[1609] They were hosts to them, and yet these people were guarded by the angel, in his capacity as guardian of the soul, regardless of the direction chosen by the latter. Their orders: He will put his angels in charge of you to guard you.[1610]

All this clarifies the constitutive identity of the Son of Man and his angels, who always accompany his Coming. All these are lamps shining the same light. It is he who gives every man what is his, meaning bliss and eternal life. The pneumatic man, the guardian angel of the soul, possesses all this for it was given to him by God when he made it over to his Son.

This is what is described in coded form in those passages in which Jesus predicts the climbing and descending of angels over the Son of Man.[1611] Then, he says, the Son of Man will declare himself for him [for his soul] in the presence of God’s angels.[1612]

Being the essence of man in man, the angels are the servants of the light, for they are light. When they gather together, the chosen ones gather together, for they are the chosen;[1613] and the just stand apart, for they are the just;[1614] and the harvest stands apart, for here are the reapers and the harvest.[1615] The harvest, awaiting redemption from the soul’s ignorance; the captive to be freed. Hence, the joy among the angels of God when a soul is converted[1616] to the glory of the Father, the holy place where their eternal tent has been raised.[1617]

Ï = Ò

That said, the prophets do not come to consciousness, for they are consciousness. When the soul repents and converts to the glory of the Father, the soul hearkens to the words which the breeze brings and takes them to heart. Once they have become intelligible, she spreads them throughout the world.

This is the task that the prophets take on. The spirit receives God’s voice directly, but gives it in oracular form. It is for the prophet to interpret God’s breath, using the indirect medium he possesses, worldly reason.

This is very clear from the story of Moses. After beholding the burning bush in Horeb, Moses became the interpreter of God’s words, but when, later on, the charge became too heavy for him alone, the Lord said to him: I will raise up a prophet like yourself for them from their own brothers; I will put my words into his mouth.[1618]

This describes the institution of prophecy, meaning, the lucid mystery of how certain men, once they have turned towards the glory of the Father, listen to the words which the breeze brings them in oracular form, and then, if they are true prophets, interpret them and proclaim them to all.

An example of this was God’s work, as reported, with the seventy elders of Israel. Once they had gathered around the Tent, the Lord came down in the Cloud. He took some of the spirit that was on him and put it on the seventy elders. When the spirit came on them, they prophesied.[1619]

These were the first prophets after Moses to apply what is set out in the text instituting prophecy. The portion of spirit put by God on man, speaks mysteriously, as an oracle, and some then prove to possess the faculties that are needed to interpret the word they have heard and repeat it in a language that most men can understand.[1620]

Jesus explains this to the Twelve when he sends them out on their missionary work and makes them prophets, telling them: it is not you who will be speaking; the spirit of your Father will be speaking in you.[1621] Peter sets out very well the institution of prophecy according to both Testaments. He says that the (ancient) prophets were seeking the salvation brought by Christ and trying to find out at what time and in what circumstances to expect the Spirit (the angel) of (the hidden) Christ which was in them.[1622]

Like the sown Word, the spirit of Christ is hidden in men. Some succeed in discovering it and by it they are made prophets, with the message of salvation in them.

This is explained by the logion on which we are now commenting, together with the entirety of the Good News if we understand its hidden meaning. The discovery is the coming of the angels. This we know: angels are something[1623] of the Spirit of (the hidden) Christ and it is they who come when his hidden presence is discovered.

The time and circumstances in which all this takes place depend on the work of interpretation of the prophets. Then, each gives what is his: the angel gives salvation and the prophet shows the Way to salvation.

Man, for his part, holds in his hands all that there is to be given. For the coming of the angels, the word is self-renunciation. For the prophets, the continuation: Take up your cross and follow me.

All of this has been very well explained by Jesus: Anyone who welcomes a prophet because he is a prophet will have a prophet’s reward; and anyone who welcomes a holy man because he is a holy man will have a holy man’s reward.[1624]

As for the Day of the Coming: Be on your guard, stay awake.[1625] Vigilance means saying and understanding every day, every hour, every minute: Maran-atha. The Lord is coming.[1626]

1608 Matt. 18:10

1609 Heb. 13:2

1610 Luke 4:10; Ps. 91:11-12

1611 John 1:51

1612 Luke 12:8-9

1613 Matt. 24:31; Mark 13:27

1614 Matt. 13:49

1615 Matt. 13:38-39

1616 Luke 15:10

1617 Mark 8:28; John 17:24

1618 Deut. 18:18

1619 Num. 11:25

1620 It seems that the Jews, drawing on Deut. 18:18, hoped for the Messiah as a new Moses. Nevertheless, the Messianic expectation could come only from the promise of the fruit of thy body made to David, since the promise made to Moses concerned the institution of prophecy (cfr. Acts 3:22-24, and especially Matt. 22:41-46, Mark 12:35-37 and Luke 20:41-44, all of which confirm that the Messianic expectation of the Christians was founded in David).

1621 Matt. 10:20

1622 1 Pet. 1:10-11

1623 Num. 11:25

1624 Matt. 10:41

1625 Mark 13:33

1626 1 Cor. 16:22

LOGION 89

Jesus said:

“Why do you wash the outside of the cup?

Do you not understand that he who made the inside

is also he who made the outside?”

COMMENTARY

The logion explains that not only do an outward and an inward man coexist in every man but that both men share a common maker. In this, the logion is parallel to the third Gospel when the latter says: Did not he who made the outside make the inside too?[1627]

The Apostle speaks of man’s duplicity on a number of occasions, explaining that one of these men, the outward one, is falling irremediably into decay with all his works, while the other is renewed day by day, until he attains epignosis. Unquestionably, all seemingly dual existence in the world must tend towards this goal, reduction to unity. Of the two forms of duality, the one that only is within the tight limits of time, consists of being but ends up not being. In the end, only the true being, that which never ceased being, can survive. In other words, duality is possible only in the world of not knowing, of ignorance, because in eternity, in absolute reality, there is only unity.

Speaking of the outward man, the Apostle says that he is falling into decay, and by this he refers to the gradual but implacable wearing down which natural law imposes: time and the fatal descent towards death.[1628] But this outer man decays not only in his body of mortal flesh but in the tendencies of his psyche and in his works, all attached to the passible body to the point of identification.

As for the inward man, he is nothing but pure unalloyed spirit which, the Apostle says, is renewed day by day,[1629] in a present ever new and eternal. Although the passible body and its inclinations die because, he says, of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.[1630]

The two inward and outward men, the one eternal, the other temporal, coexist in the complete being of every man during the course of his life on earth and are useful for explaining the doctrine of man’s duality without getting into too much myth-making. This doctrine originates in the two creations of man according to Genesis.

Some Christian schools during the first centuries busied themselves with clarifying how man made in Plenitude (pleroma) by God (Elohim) in Gen. 1:26-27 and man formed (modeled) in inadequacy (Kenoma) by YHWH in Gen. 2:7 united subsequently in an anthropological marriage. To the first of these, to the spirit, made in the image, it fell to be the essence; to the second, formed as a likeness, fell the task of clothing the essence, not only with his own heavenly body, but afterwards, that of clothing all men born with the mortal and passible tunic of flesh and bone, thus predestined to die. The first, as a chosen inward spirit, the second as a soul called upon to receive the spirit when her Day comes.

The two accounts of the Creation in Genesis led many to think that two creators had collaborated in the birth of man: God and the Demiurge, the first being perfect, the second, imperfect. Paul, Luke and our logion counter this view, which was rather widespread among early Christians, and by no means exempt of anthropomorphism.

Of the two men coexisting in every man as a unit of consciousness, only one really exists, for the other is not genuine when studied in terms of pure Gospel meaning. The one that is not genuine cannot prevail because he does not possess eternal life in his own right, his life is on loan.

The outward man, the one who is not genuine, in fact lives in the world at the mercy of his own dynamic demands. For him, death is always there waiting, an inescapable death that will annihilate him once all the substances that go to make him up become completely worn out. There is no need to speak here of the death of the body, but rather of that other more subtle and specific event in the Gospel, the glorious surrender of the psyche, self-denial, that growing smaller, that diminution of which John the Baptist spoke, a process that begins, step by step, once the purified soul can lose herself as the lowly handmaid [1631] of the sacred bridegroom, once pride [in a separate identity] has been abased in her own heart.[1632]

Such is the work whereby the outward man is transformed into the inward man. All this is set out in the Gospel, for the birth of the Spirit in every man is the primordial purpose of its proclaiming. The mystery of this birth means that a soul has exercised its right, conferred by God from the beginning, to become a child of God.[1633]

This also implies a dynamic purifying impulse in a man’s life. In Saint Paul’s language, the dynamic towards the spirit is expressed in the terms old and new. The outward man progresses from being the old self to be stripped off, while the inward man is glorified, the new man, the new self who, being spirit, is not subject to decay and is renewed day by day, instant by instant, in his progress toward true knowledge.[1634]

Jesus was right when he asked first for the purification of the inside of the cup, for once this inward purification has been realized, its luminous whiteness will overflow and the outside too will be cleansed.[1635]

Once the cup has been well washed both inside and out, it is ready to be glorified, not its own glory but that of the Father. Of this high occasion it is said that the eternal, infinite Spirit becomes one with the spirit, bearing witness to our being children of God.[1636]

This final union is not the work of the new man, but of the Father. It consists, not of ascending to the unattainable, but of opening one’s eyes and beholding the light.

When the beholder is ready, the Father descends to his place. Hence the words: the veil of the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom.[1637]

1627 Luke 11:40

1628 2 Cor. 4:16; Rom. 8:2

1629 2 Cor. 4:16

1630 Rom. 8:10

1631 Luke 1:48

1632 Luke 1:51

1633 John 1:12

1634 Col. 3:9-10

1635 Matt. 23:26

1636 Rom. 8:10

1637 Matt. 27:51

LOGION 90-91

Jesus said:

“Come to me, for my yoke is easy and my lordship is mild,

and you will find repose for yourselves.”

They said to him:

“Tell us who you are so that we may believe in you.”

He said to them:

“You read the face of the sky and of the earth,

but you have not recognized the one who is before you,

nor can you recognize his time.“

COMMENTARY

1. The Coming of the Son of Man, which is celebrated with the song of hope, The Lord is coming,[1638] and the intimate call of the Son of Man when he says, Come to me, are one and the same thing once it is understood that in the world of the Spirit limited space and limited time no longer count. There is no need for the Son of Man to come; he is already present in man as his very essence, and so he has been from the beginning. Nor need man’s consciousness go anywhere, its one and only ground lies in looking hard until the discovery of He-who-is in his very center.

To take up the yoke of the Son of Man is to unite with him on his wayless way that leads to resurrection and the life, while likewise, it is acceptance of his lordship, and his load, that frees from captivity and brings repose without end.

Thus is the soul magnified when she receives the visit of the Lord and is filled with humble joy by the salvation he proclaims.

2. Once again, the disciples’ question is the one that asks about Being. Tell us who you are, who and where is the hidden life-giving Christ? If he is in ourselves, why do we not see or at least perceive him? Why do we not know him? Why do we not believe, if you say that he came to his own domain among us?

You said You will die in your sins…if you do not believe that I am He.[1639] What must we then do in order to believe, and so, not die but have eternal life?

Jesus’ reply to those who, in the Gospels, ask him for a sign, just as in the logion they ask him who he is, suggests that Being is to be discerned as you know how to read the sky (or as one reads the signs of the times). However, he adds in the logion that [the Being-He-who-is-] is before you [in the heaven of your soul] but you have not recognized him. Likewise, you cannot discern the signs of the times [the time of his Coming].[1640]

3. No, there is no sign (other than discernment) to enable one to discover He-who-is, the Christ. That is why the second Gospel says: No sign shall be given to this generation.[1641] This generation does not mean the men living in Jesus’ day or a little later, but the entire human race which, as such, receives the Word at birth, to shine on it with its true light and, once the time is ripe, to enable men to become the children of God.

Of course, the Gospel spoke in other passages of the sign of Jonah;[1642] this is not, however, a sign of discovery but a message to tell everyone that the resurrection of the dead, the resurrection of the spirit that arises before a man tastes death, is a glorious event that awaits true believers, according to God’s plan.

The resurrection of the spirit is attained by all those who find the hidden Christ in themselves, as their very essence, their true being, then care for and water the seedling daily so that it bears fruit.

Upon discovery, it is known as His presence, and when it bears ripe fruit, it is called His coming.

Paul said all these things very clearly and did so boldly, despite the fact that he was revealing something which, in those early Judeo-Christian years was held to be a mystery. Yet even today he has not been properly understood, after many centuries of mistranslation. The Apostle said: We are not all going to die, but we shall all be changed.[1643]

To be changed means here that Christ’s resurrection within us, the arising of every man’s pure, immaculate Being, has borne fruit; and that means that man’s spirit has become one with him. What follows is not death, for once all that is not Christ has died, there no longer remains in that man any death to die.

This means that those who have realized this have already undergone the death of all the soul’s contents, following on total self-denial, and on the third day, meaning once the work assigned to the men of this generation has been completed, they will rise again to the light.

From within Jonah’s whale, from the land and shadow of death in which they dwell,[1644] these chosen ones will arise as dead men returned to Life.

Of them, it may indeed be said, as of the prodigal son in Saint Luke’s parable, He was dead and has come to life.[1645]

1638 Maran-atha (Aramaic)

1639 John 8:24

1640 Matt. 16:3

1641 Mark 8:12

1642 Matt. 12:39, 16:4; Luke 11:29-30

1643 1 Cor. 15:51

1644 Matt. 4:16; Isai. 9:1-2

1645 Luke 15:32

LOGION 92

Jesus said:

“Seek and you will find.

In the past I did not tell you the things

about which you asked me.

Now I am willing to tell you, but you do not seek them.”

COMMENTARY

In its usual paradoxical style, the logion confirms the identity of Jesus, the manifest Christ, with Jesus, the hidden Christ, he being both hidden and manifest. Christ was and always is the source of knowledge, man’s helper in his search for the wisdom of God.

Christ’s dual aspect applies to Jesus in all the texts of the New Testament, and this becomes quite clear once one learns to read into them; but only in the fourth Gospel is the dual meaning studied. Here, confronting both aspects, Christ can be apprehended as at once manifest and hidden.

During the short time when Jesus Christ manifested in the world, his disciples put many questions to him,[1646] but these questions were put to the manifest Christ and could be answered only in words, in parables, in symbols of reality. That is why, in the logion, Jesus states that he had given no answer to the things he was asked about in the past. In truth, only a reply that comes to consciousness from the hidden inner Christ will carry a direct instruction, expressed not in words, but in light, bringing true knowledge.

Nevertheless, although such replies are the only completely true ones, and although the hidden Christ is always sure to answer, few make use of their power to ask him, for they lack the faith to expect an answer from him, nor have they the transparency of soul with which to contemplate and hear it.

This doctrine is very clearly set forth in the dense passage in John 16 in which Jesus announces that he will very soon be returning. Jesus is announcing his passion here, his death and resurrection, but the Evangelist transmits this key sequence of events in its hidden, inner sense: In a short time, you will no longer see me, and then a short time later you will see me again.[1647]

The one whom the disciples will soon no longer be seeing is Jesus, the manifest Christ, shortly to be raised on the cross; and the one they will soon be seeing again is the Christ, but the hidden inner Christ, once they have glorified him, provided that they have been able to look upon him pierced on the cross.[1648]

The absence of the manifest Christ will be a source of sadness, mourning and lamentation for the disciples, but this will change to joy when their soul lights up the birth within of the man from above (verses 20-22). It is for certain that the disciples will succeed in seeing the inner Christ, and then their hearts will overflow with unceasing delight, for to behold the presence of the hidden Christ is the same as keeping the gate raised to ask the Father in Christ’s name, something not done until then. If they ask in the name of the hidden Christ, they will receive and their joy will be complete (verses 22b-24).

That is why Jesus says: The hour is coming when I shall no longer speak to you in metaphors; but tell you about the Father in plain words. When that day comes you will ask in my name (verses 25-26).

The dual doctrine of Christ manifest and hidden, namely the teaching on the living Christ, manifest in Jesus, and the hidden pre-existing Christ, whose Day was seen by Abraham, because in him-in Abraham-he made himself manifest in his time,[1649] can be explained only by the study of the action of the Holy Spirit, on whom it depends.

According to the third Evangelist, when Jesus read in the synagogue at Nazareth, he spoke these words: The spirit of the Lord has been given to me, for he has anointed me.[1650] Drawing on the Old Testament text of Isaiah, Jesus bore witness to the fact that the anointment received from the Holy Spirit, which transformed him into the Christ (the anointed one) was an act of the Spirit, and as such was known from the beginning, not only to Abraham, but to Isaiah, when the latter saw his glory, and his words referred to Christ,[1651] which is why he was sent.[1652]

That is perhaps why, in Jesus’ seek and you will find, what the seeker will invariably find is the Holy Spirit. As Saint Luke puts it, the Spirit is what the Father never denies to those who ask him.[1653]

What, however, is the meaning of receiving the Holy Spirit? According to the Gospel of Saint John, Jesus’ disciples received the Holy Spirit at the time when they were sent,[1654] but it does not say there that the Spirit alighted in them and anointed them, as happened to Jesus.

In regard to the Spirit, the Gospel’s teaching is very difficult and hard to penetrate but, if we are to apprehend the dual meaning of Christ, both hidden and manifest, as approached in the fourth Gospel, our studies must dig deep. We shall then see that the dual view for referring to Christ does not imply duality; but the myriad rays that shine forth from the hidden Christ.

In a passage of inestimable didactic value, Paul says: The Spirit himself and our spirit bear united witness that we are children of God.[1655] What the Apostle undoubtedly means is that the spirit, the essence of every man, is of the same nature as the Spirit of God. And it is this identical nature shared with the Spirit which, once realized, means that all men are children of God. Contrariwise, where the soul, the psychic consciousness, does not know its own essence and does not realize the reality of our shared nature with the Spirit, of such a psycho-physical man it can only be said that he is an adoptive child of God.[1656]

A time may come when this man with his psychic consciousness will turn towards the spirit that he is, his true, yet unacknowledged Being. He will then seek him and invoke him, to calm the cares of his solitude. In the course of this tribulation, the soul will burn all the gross material that adheres to her, in a bonfire that will consume all but the one thing that cannot burn, the essence, the spirit. This is the point at which the Spirit unites with man’s spirit, like the sea absorbing a drop of water into itself. Thus, the soul receives the Spirit of God, together with acknowledgment of her divine filiation. Hence Paul’s words: Everyone moved by the Spirit is a son of God.[1657]

In the fourth Gospel, the Holy Spirit which, when received by man’s spirit becomes united with that spirit and helps a man until he has realized the power that is his to become a child of God, is called the Paraclete. On Jesus, the Holy Spirit settled like the dove of God’s presence, anointing him; and thus he was Jesus Christ, whose teaching of the Good News is a powerful help towards attaining the complete truth.

Now, however, Jesus is to be raised on the cross and his time as the already glorified manifest Christ is about to come to an end. Such are the signs that mark the hour of the hidden Christ, the one for whom there is no ending, and Jesus tells that he does not wish to leave men as orphans and that this is also the hour of the other Paraclete, the one that manifests in the time of the hidden Christ. Being the Spirit of truth, this Paraclete can bring anointment to the spirit of the man who receives him, transforming his spirit, then, into the hidden Christ, differentiated from the manifest Christ only in his being hidden. That is why Jesus, the Christ manifest and hidden, promises everyone that he will soon return.

Few are the verses dedicated to glossing the Paraclete-the Advocate-in the fourth Gospel. Apart from a mention in Saint John’s first epistle, there is, moreover, no other place in the holy scriptures that deals with this figure of the Spirit. That said, the Paraclete raises many difficulties in interpretation for manifest exegetics.

The Paraclete is unquestionably one of the conceptions in the fourth Gospel that has not only remained hermetic to manifest exegesis right down to the present day, but has even added to the host of unknowns surrounding that Gospel. Perhaps there is no way in which the figure of the Paraclete can be the subject of a convincing manifest interpretation. We shall now move towards an interpretation in terms of the hidden view, which will prove far more accessible to some of Saint John’s modes of expression.

There are three chapters in the fourth Gospel, usually known as the farewells, in which the Paraclete is directly mentioned and a number of explanations are provided. These mentions and the corresponding explanations we shall now study.[1658]

I

Announcement of the Paraclete

John 14:16-23

VERSE 16: I shall ask the Father and he will give you another Advocate.

In saying another, Jesus points out a duality, and this may be interpreted, so it will be seen, as the Spirit that anointed Jesus, whereby he was Christ (manifest); and the Spirit, ready to anoint the spirit of those who receive him, thus, hidden until that time.

The fact that these words, promising the soteriological assistance of the Paraclete, were addressed to many is to be understood as meaning that they are addressed to everyone, for he is with you, he is in you. The Spirit is shared by everyone and while in this sense many receive him, this in no way denies his unity as one single Spirit.

Also, when Jesus says another Advocate, it will be understood that, from the moment when he said: The Spirit of the Lord has been given to me, for he has anointed me, he himself began as the manifest Christ to exercise the function of Paraclete (advocate, helper, counsellor) when he shared with those who followed him, as teachings, the fruit of the anointment he had received.

As for his request to the Father, in his quality as Son, to be one with the Father, this guarantees continuity between Jesus’ revelatory action, as the manifest Christ through the action of the Spirit who anointed him, and the direct revelatory action of the Spirit given to all those who receive him. The Son, instituted as the Son of Man, the hidden Christ present in all men through the revelation of the Spirit, is the guarantee of such continuity.

VERSES 16b-17: […] to be with you forever, that Spirit of truth whom the world can never receive since it neither sees nor knows him; but you know him, because he is with you, he is in you.

That the Spirit of God dwells in every single man, this is the supreme teaching of the Good News, and it calls for no further comment. Yet, only those who receive the Spirit and make it one with their own spirit can see and know this.

This is accomplished in Jesus’ disciples who receive it, see it and know it because they do not belong to the world (John 17:16). Conversely, those who belong to the world cannot receive it.

If the Spirit is referred to here as the Spirit of Truth, it is because the name goes with the function, that of leading man forever to the complete truth (16:13).

VERSES 18-19 I will not leave you orphans; I will come back to you. In a short time, the world will no longer see me; but you will see me, because I live and you will live.

When he says I will come back to you, Jesus reveals that he is one with the Holy Spirit. The Spirit settled over him and anointed him, and thenceforth Jesus was the Christ manifest, filled with God’s Spirit, now about to leave the world. Yet no one will be left an orphan, for the seed sown in every man can bear fruit in abundance, thanks to anointment by the Spirit.

Spread among many, the Spirit of God will, in every man who receives him, be the other Advocate, the one who will help him light up within him the hidden inner birth of Christ. This is what is meant by the words I will come back to you.

Once Jesus, the manifest Christ has been glorified through his death and resurrection, he will be seen by those who love him-yet not only in outward apparitions, explained by the manifest exegesis, but forever; for the presence of the hidden Christ is unquenchable in those who attain the eternal Life brought to them by the anointment of the Spirit, and they will live because he lives.

VERSE 20 On that day you will understand that I am in my Father and you in me and I in you.

The expression on that day has nothing to do with chronological time. Rather, it is a way of speaking of the attainment of the light of the Glory of the Father and of the Son, the eternal Life. Therein is knowledge of the perfect unity of the Father, the Son and man’s spirit. Perfect unity consists of the spirit of man being perfectly one with the Son, just as the Son is perfectly one with the Father. Perfect knowledge of this unity is reserved for those whom the Spirit has anointed. Transformed into the hidden Christ, they will discover their perfect unity with the manifest Christ.

VERSE 21 Anybody who receives my commandments and keeps them will be one who loves me; and anybody who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I shall love him and show myself to him.

It is easy to understand that love for the Son should consist of receiving and keeping his commandments, for those commandments are grounded in the unity that is born of love; hence, it will be understood too that it is love for the Son that will bring one to receive the love of the Father. What is less well known, although no less certain, is that when a man loves the inner hidden Christ, the Son is manifested in him.

This truth of the hidden Christ is unknown to those who love the world yet is shown to those who love and keep his word. Hence the question put by the disciple Judas (not Iscariot). What Jesus no doubt means is that he who loves the Son that dwells hidden in him and keeps his Word that was sown in him will see the Glory of the Father and the Son become manifest within him, for there is nothing hidden but it must be disclosed.[1659]

Such is the order of manifestation of that which lay hidden and now is shown to the one who loves him, despite remaining hidden from the world. First comes the doctrine of those who think there is nothing hidden, that all is manifest; then follows the intuition of what lies hidden, and the search for it; and in the end, because of love of the Son, what was hidden becomes manifest.

This is what Jesus affirms when he speaks of the Glory of the Father and of the Son. The dwelling place of that Glory was ever present in man, but hidden, unknown to many, like the rejected cornerstone. He who loves and keeps his Word then discovers what lies hidden and, finally, makes it manifest. This is spoken of as His Coming, and yet He was already there.

That is why Jesus says: My Father will love him, and we shall come to him and make our home with him (verse 23).

II

The Paraclete, witness to Christ

John 15:26, 14:26

VERSE 15:26 When the Advocate comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who issues from the Father, he will be my witness.

This verse is parallel or complementary to 14:26: […] but the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything

The Advocate-the Paraclete-is the Holy Spirit. He is not some person or institution performing a mediating function, not some helper’s helper in revealing Jesus. If he is also called the Spirit of Truth, this is because of his very function, one that can be performed by no other, in leading man to the complete truth (16:13). As the Apostle John puts it in his Epistle, The Spirit is the truth.[1660]

Whether the Paraclete is sent by the Father in the Son’s name or sent by the Son (14:26) from the Father (15:26) amounts to an irrelevant cavil over language.

It is, nevertheless, important to understand what is meant by the Paraclete being Christ’s witness. When Christ was on earth, he himself was the manifest counsellor, the Paraclete, anointed by the Holy Spirit. With Jesus’ glorification and ascension to the Father, it is the Son of Man-the hidden Word-who, through the anointment given by the Holy Spirit (referred to as the other Paraclete) testifies to man, to every man, on behalf of himself (the Son). Thus, he teaches man and reminds him from within of all the doctrine of Jesus, the manifest Christ.

The words he will be my witness mean that, thanks to the Spirit of truth, revelation of the hidden Christ comes within reach.

III

The Work of the Paraclete

John 16:7-16

VERSE 7 Still, I must tell you the truth: it is for your own good that I am going because unless I go, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I do go, I will send him to you.

What Jesus is saying is that he must complete his work according to the divine plan, consisting of the Passion, death and resurrection, for the glorification of the Son of Man. This consummation will result in the immediate absence from the world of the manifest Christ; an absence that will, however, serve all those who follow thereafter, since the complete way that Jesus must accomplish is a paradigm for all.

Whoever knows how to behold the Son of Man raised[1661] on the cross and believe, will live, for he will thenceforth be enabled to receive the Holy Spirit sent by the Son who is with the Father.

Yet one must learn to behold Jesus on the cross, piercing through what one looks upon, to see, through the anointed one, the Son of Man. That is why the Evangelist reminds us of what is written in the scriptures: They will look on the one whom they have pierced.[1662] Only those who are able to pierce through Jesus when they behold him raised on the cross will see the Son of Man.

VERSES 8-11 And when he comes he will show the world how wrong it was, about sin, and about who was in the right, and about judgment: about sin: proved by their refusal to believe in me; about who was in the right: proved by my going to the Father and your seeing me no more; about judgment: proved by the prince of this world being already condemned.

The Paraclete is always the Holy Spirit whose task is to lead man to the complete truth. Once he has settled above Christ’s follower, the Paraclete begins to accomplish his work, which consists of anointing the spirit of man with truth. Where anointment is lasting, Spirit is united with spirit, leading the latter to the truth about the world by showing the truth of what is not the world.

Thus, confronting the world’s characteristic unbelief, a man attains the confident, firm faith that the Son of Man, wisdom and eternal life, has made his home in every man, and is present there, a seed ready to grow and bear fruit. Not to believe this is sin, man’s essential weakness.[1663]

Thus is justice discovered: how the manifest Christ in the world will ascend (has already ascended) to the Father and this same Christ is the hidden one, invisible yet, like a perfume, perceptible to the awakened consciousness; for he is the spirit of man once anointed by the Spirit.

Thus it is that the true judgment is given by the anointed one, who condemns the world, having discovered by his own means that life is not of this world, but that the world lives it on loan from the Spirit.

VERSES 12-13a I still have many things to say to you, but they would be too much for you now. But when the spirit of truth comes he will lead you to complete truth.

It is the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, who leads to complete truth, for truth can be discovered only by a man questioning himself, then waiting through the Self for the response of the Spirit in whom he puts his faith.

Generally speaking, the questions one puts to oneself are made with no faith in receiving an answer and fall by the wayside. Nevertheless, when a man believes in the Spirit who is with you, is in you (14:17b) he puts his questions in the belief that he will be answered. In such cases, the answer comes unfailingly.

This attitude is what Jesus calls showing the world how wrong it was about sin. Not to believe this is sin. To believe it brings freedom from sin and from ignorance, which is the origin of sin.

VERSES 13b-14 […] he will not be speaking as from himself but will say only what he has learned; and he will tell you of the things to come. He will glorify me, since all he tells you will be taken from what is mine.

All that is spoken by the Paraclete always comes only in answer to the question-whether silent or not, whether clearly formulated or not-that a man puts to himself. The work of hearing what he hears calls for training, it calls for a certain way of asking calmly and with faith. Juan Ramon Jiménez put it well: Throw today’s stone, then let go and sleep on it.

The answer that comes from the Spirit is the breath wherein the hidden Christ shows himself little by little. The Spirit receives the Son and together they come to transform the man into an anointed envoy, to whom his glory is communicated; the Glory that is the Father’s, for He is arrayed in it, and of the Son.

This outcome is what Jesus seeks, for it is the accomplishment of his teaching.

What comes to man’s consciousness is the breath, a wind that blows wherever it pleases; you hear its sound but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.[1664] On this breath comes the Son of Man, proceeding from the Father, filled with Glory.

This is what is meant by being born of the Spirit.[1665] Herein, the complete explanation of the logion in the Gospel: In a short time you will no longer see me, and then a short time later you will see me again (John 16:16).

1646 John 13:36-37. “Simon Peter said, ‘Lord, where are you going?’ Jesus replied, ‘Now you cannot follow me where I am going, but later you shall follow me.’ Peter said to him, ‘Why can I not follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.’”

1647 John 16:16

1648 John 19:37; Zech. 12:10; This is the hidden meaning of seeing the inner Christ.

1649 John 8:56-58

1650 Luke 4:18; Isai. 61:1

1651 John 12:41

1652 Isai.6:8

1653 Luke 11:13. In a parallel passage, Matthew refers euphemistically to the Holy Spirit as good things (Matt. 7:11)

1654 John 20:21-22

1655 Rom. 8:16

1656 This is the interpretation that may be accorded to Rom. 8:15, and which we are following.

1657 Rom. 8:14

1658 The Paraclete is directly mentioned in John 14:15-19, 25-26, 15:26, 16:7-14, while there are indirect references in John 7:39 and 20:22.

1659 Mark 4:22

1660 1 John 5:6

1661 Gr. úpsóo = to raise, to lift up. Figuratively, to glorify.

1662 John 19:37; Zech. 12:10

1663 John 8:24 If you do not believe that I am He, you will die in your sins.

1664 John 3:8a

1665 John 3:8b

LOGION 93

Jesus said:

“Do not give what is holy to the dogs, lest they cast it on the dunghill. Do not throw pearls to the swine, lest they cover them with filth.”[1666]

COMMENTARY

Like the treasure, the good fish, the stone, the lost sheep, etc., the pearl is a Gospel name for the pneumatic man, the divine eternal seed sown in every man. As for the holy, the pure, it is in the Gospel teachings the inner voice that emanates from the Word, the anointment of the Spirit. This is the food, the sacred bread that enables consciousness to penetrate our Sanctuary, therein to renew the hot coals and incense of knowledge on the altar erected before the Holy of Holies. Behind the cloud, behind the veil, the immaculate pearl: pure Being.

The two kinds of animals, dogs and swine, represent metaphorically both the passions of the soul that obscure contemplation of the truth and those whose ignorance prevents them from discerning the sacred. Unable to recognize the existence of the pearl within themselves, they confuse the sacred with the profane, denying or prostituting the truth of the Word.

It goes without saying that this explanation has not always been accepted. True understanding calls for a vision free from conditioning, instead of which, partisan attitudes all too typical of human thoughtlessness have identified these figurative animals with those who do not share the same concept of the sacred, the same view concerning the unknown pearl. Thus, the Old Testament pagans, the Gentiles, were called dogs, unworthy of eating the sacred Temple food, or compared to swine, animals whose meat could not be eaten, for it was called impure in the scriptures.

Returning injustice for injustice, down the centuries, the manifest heirs of the gentle Jesus found no difficulty in calling Jews dogs when they had not converted, thus accepting the new outward signs of Christ’s teaching. Likewise, those Jews in Spain who had been terrorized into conversion or who had failed to prove their Christian faith were called marranos-pigs.[1667]

Nevertheless, the biblical separation between the sacred and the profane is the outcome of an intelligent natural distinction, intended to preserve what is sacred. When, in Exodus, YHWH says to Moses: You will mark out the limits of the mountain,[1668] the concern is to preserve the transcendence of the sacred, for: Whoever touches the mountain will die [be put to death]. This means that whoever enters the path towards consummation must deny himself, accepting the death of the soul, the burning of its contents, a hard Passion reserved only for those souls already strong in faith in the seed planted within them.

Likewise, when Leviticus proclaims: No lay person may eat holy things,[1669] this means that the lay are subject to the conditions governing the laity, i.e. those whose faulty knowledge does not enable them to distinguish what is sacred. For suchlike, not to eat results, not from a prohibition, but from the fact that immaturity makes this practically impossible.

It is clear that because of a superficial manifest interpretation of the scriptures, Jews of all times have believed that God’s choice of the children of Israel had an ethnic meaning, that of a manifest psycho-physical people, whereas the House of Israel, the children of Israel are, according to the hidden view, those born of God’s Spirit. Scripture shows Israel as the outcome of Jacob’s strength of spirit in his face-to-face encounter with God’s presence-as close as the Kingdom of God in the Gospel- whereby he attained the true eternal Life.[1670]

All this shows that Israel is the chosen people (Gr. laos) in the same sense as the Christian way uses the term chosen for those born from above, the spiritual people, God’s people.

To be chosen is throughout the scriptures a title of sanctity, a qualification distinct from that of those whom the New Testament refers to as being called, that is, all men not yet chosen, who persist in centering their consciousness on the psycho-physical, thus implicitly or explicitly denying the need to discover the pneumatic man. To be chosen is not an ethnic title of nobility, nor has it anything to do with the fact of being Jewish, Christian, Gentile, pagan or anything else: only inner spiritual development.

This is how the explicit mention in Exodus is to be understood: Say this to the House of Jacob, declare this to the sons of Israel [the spiritual sons of Jacob-Israel], You yourselves have seen […] how I carried you on eagles’ s wings [those of the Spirit of God] and brought you to myself […]. I will count you a kingdom of priests, a consecrated nation.[1671]

Many Old Testament passages are adduced with a view to setting forth and explaining this spiritual conception of the true children of Israel which are doubtless to be interpreted as Messianic, but in a universal sense, since they are an integral part of the Judeo-Christian tradition, one that concerns both the past of the Jewish tradition and all men in future times.

When Exodus says: Israel is my first-born son,[1672] this is to be understood as speaking of a single one born of God, or of all the holy people born of God, as when the Psalmist says: You are my son, today I have become your father.[1673] What all this affirms above all is the possible presence of the one anointed by God’s Spirit, the hidden pre-existing Christ, mentioned in all scriptures[1674] from the time of Moses down to that of the prophets.

The Jews’ belief that they alone, simply because they were born Jews, together constitute the holy people consecrated to God-they, rather than only those born of the Spirit, those who stand in Israel as God’s firstborn-is as erroneous and at least as one-sided as the claims of those manifest Christians who are ignorant of the presence of the hidden Christ in all, yet manifest in few. These Christians do not know of the spiritual law of the dissemination of the One in many; they do not know that the manifest and hidden Christ is always the one and only, the Son of God in man, the Son of Man made manifest in Jesus.

Isaiah, a true and, so it seems, a royal son of Israel, inveighed in God’s lamentation about the Jews against their erroneous one-sided view, forgetting that they are only potentially children of Israel, this being a title of sanctity and perfection that must be attained, a title spiritually accessible to all human beings regardless of ethnic origin: I was ready to be approached by those who did not consult me, ready to be found by those who did not seek me.[1675]

As for the universality of the hidden Christ, mentioned, as we have seen, in the scriptures according to the Jewish tradition under the name Israel, a good example is to be found in Simeon’s Nunc dimittis, in the third Gospel.[1676]

It was revealed to Simeon by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death until he had set eyes on Christ the Lord (verse 26). In terms of the hidden view, this means it had been revealed to him that he would receive the anointment of the Spirit-the descent of the Spirit-union with him in oneness, before tasting death.

With the utmost hermeneutic skill, the evangelist melds here in a single text the manifest-the act of taking in his arms the Christ child, Jesus-and perception of the deep inner presence, that of the Spirit, transforming him into the hidden Christ, the personal beneficiary of the mystery of the long-awaited anointment of his spirit by the Spirit.

Luke adds another hermeneutic subtlety to complete the grandeur and complexity of his scribe’s mission. Jesus, the manifest and hidden Christ, was sent to announce the Good News, and since he said: The spirit of the Lord has been given to me, for he has anointed me,[1677] his proclamation was made, as will be seen, under the same sign of the Spirit as that received by Simeon.

In the arms of this upright and devout man was laid the visible, manifest representation of the universal Christ, he who was sent to reveal to the new human generations the mysteries of the Coming in Glory and power of the Son of Man. At the same time, into the spirit of this man of Jerusalem, the pneumatic Simeon, flowed the anointment that transformed him into the hidden Christ, ready to become manifest in him.

Thus Simeon, the humble servant, could depart in peace for his eyes had doubly seen salvation: that prepared for every man according to the divine plan and that brought by the Good News prepared for all the nations to see. Simeon describes this salvation drawing on texts from the Jewish scriptural tradition, yet it is none other than the salvation proclaimed by the Gospel:[1678] a light to enlighten the pagans, and the glory of your people Israel (verse 32a).

The pagans (Gr. ethnos) are not, according to the hidden view, the non-Israelite peoples, but those not chosen, meaning the souls that had been called, being devoid of a light (and Life) of their own, who are to be enlightened. In Jesus’ proclamation in the synagogue at Nazareth, these are the downtrodden whom he means to set free.[1679]

And the glory of your people Israel (verse 32b): The people (Gr. Laos) is a group made up of the chosen, in each of whom a particle of eternal light becomes the pneumatic man. According to Genesis, they are a unique people, who spoke the same language, with the same vocabulary.[1680] Once reunited, made one, these chosen ones are God’s cloak of light which, in the Old Testament is called by its hidden meaning, Israel.

In the Nazareth proclamation, these are the captives whose liberation Jesus announces;[1681] those who after their resurrection from the dead see the coming of the Son of Man in Glory and power, amidst all the angels.

 = 

The most complete example of the identical meaning of the process of salvation in the two Testaments is to be found in the episode of the healing of the Canaanite woman’s daughter, as related by Matthew and Mark with few variations.[1682]

If one reads the passage concerning the Canaanite woman in terms of its manifest aspect, especially Jesus’ warning that he was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel, one soon finds oneself embroiled in a whole series of difficulties. If this statement is taken literally, it shows up not only a lack of universality in Jesus’ work of salvation but on the part of the Father who sent him.

Nevertheless, if the account is read in its hidden sense, it shows that Jesus’ spiritual teaching is far beyond any predilection or distinction imagined or offered by the human wisdom of the manifest exegesis.

What the evangelists tell is that, in the course of his wanderings, Jesus came to the region of Tyre and Sidon, Canaanite territory, concerning which YHWH commands in the book of Exodus: Make no pact with the inhabitants of the land.[1683] The purpose of that prohibition by the God of Exodus was, as the text explains, to avoid a contamination of a religious order, for, unlike the true, inner, hidden Being signified by the nameless divine Name I am that I am, the Canaanites prostituted themselves to their external, exclusively transcendental gods in a form of idolatrous, superstitious worship adopted by many of the peoples of the earth, a form that risked being handed down from generation to generation.

It is possible that this is the symbol that Jesus’ strange incursion into these Syrian-Phoenician lands is meant to reveal. The cry which the woman utters shows, moreover, in the hidden view, that the Savior’s presence is seen, intuited by a Canaanite soul. In this account, the Canaanite soul nevertheless represents the idolatrous worshipper of a god outside oneself, and this idolatry is then revealed as a daughter, a passion or incapacity of the soul that only the discovery of the saving presence of Being can cure.

Matthew tells that the Canaanite woman came out and started shouting Sir, son of David, take pity on me! Manifest exegesis interprets the words came out as meaning that Jesus was seen by the woman, perhaps on reaching the border of Canaan, and the woman, while shouting, ran after him, crossing into the land of Galilee. It goes without saying that this version makes no sense, especially given the fact that Mark records that Jesus went into a house.[1684]

What the Canaanite soul came out from could be none other than her superficial, external religious attitude upon discovering in her anthropological house, in her very home, under the roof of her psyche, the dawning of the inner Messiah. Hence the surprising knowledge denoted by her shouting, for without having needed any kind of information, she sees in the unusual guest whom she discovers in her house, the Lord, the Son of David, the Christ of the Promise, and this she confesses straightaway.

Jesus’ reply follows: I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel (verse 24). It is not the only time that Jesus pronounced this grave observation. When giving his instructions to the Twelve for their missions, he told them: Do not turn your steps to pagan territory, and do not enter any Samaritan town; go rather to the lost sheep of the House of Israel.[1685]

Apart from the logical flaw inherent to going into Canaanite lands in order to exercise no saving or purifying action there, note the different nuance between the mission confided in Jesus by the Father and Jesus’ injunctions to the Twelve. The difference is important, since the work of Jesus, the Christ, is directed solely to the lost sheep of the House of Israel, whereas the missionaries are instructed to go rather, in other words, preferably, to those lost sheep, but not only to them.

But, who are these lost sheep Jesus is so concerned with? Matthew provides some information about them, and this merits reviewing,[1686] since Jesus refers to the lost sheep among a hundred, and expresses the joy of finding the sheep, since the heavenly Father does not with a single of these little ones to go missing.[1687]

That the sheep are the little ones is quite clear from Matthew’s text. The little ones are a particular class of human beings, meaning neither all the Jews, where the sheep of Israel are mentioned, nor all those called Christians, where the reference is only to sheep.

It is, however, clear enough that the little ones, the children, are the mirror in which all those who mean to enter the Kingdom of Heaven must look; to enter the Kingdom, one must become like these children, like these little ones.[1688] This amounts to saying that one must be born of the Spirit to be like the Spirit.

The teaching is completed when Jesus explains in this passage about children that the angels of these little ones-not those who made themselves like little ones, but the mirror of themselves in which they looked in order to become like little ones, like angels in heaven, who are the mirror: their angels in heaven are continually in the presence of my Father in heaven.[1689]

It is clear enough, then, that these angels, these particles of light who are everyone’s true Being, are the little ones, are the sheep. This explains the joy in heaven for the sheep that was lost and is found, for the meaning of the sheep is the same as that of the pearl, the treasure, the stone, pneumatic man, God’s seed, said to be lost when it lives as a captive, buried beneath the weight of the soul’s ignorance.

The sheep, the pearl, symbolize the one real, true Being in man, man in himself, eternal, while all the rest amount to adventitious, transitory outer coverings that cannot attain true Life. The sheep, lost and found, expresses the same truth as the pearl, which must be protected from the ignorant, who will keep it covered in all the filth that they take for their true self, so that they can neither see nor know it: Jesus came, he was sent, to free these sheep from captivity and restore their lost freedom.

When all this is borne in mind and complemented by what we studied in regard to the true meaning of the word Israel, we can begin to understand the hidden meaning of Jesus expression, the lost sheep of the House of Israel. Manifest exegetics read into this the literal meaning that Jesus must, to perform the will of the Father, dedicate himself to the salvation of the Jews. That is the reading, yet those who make it either soften or conceal it, for such a reading amounts to an unthinkable atrocity. That is why this purpose of Jesus is typically presented as having priority, because the Jews are the chosen heirs to the promise; and yet this interpretation cannot be exclusive, as one might think on the basis of an over-rigid reading of Saint Matthew’s text.[1690]

There is, indeed, such a sense of priority in Jesus recommendation to the Twelve: Go rather to the lost sheep of the House of Israel.[1691] Yet the disciples, as apprentice missionaries, had to learn a lesser task, that of distributing the bread of heaven to souls, making it easier for them to become like little ones, each becoming like his inner pneumatic man, like the angel in heaven continually in the presence of the Father. What remains to Christ is the work of final redemption, the realization and resurrection of the Spirit that lies captive, saving the lost sheep of the House of Israel; or employing the expression of the Gospel text, the House of Christ.

The above is the final sign in the Gospel of the tale of a Canaanite soul who had a daughter, a passion, described as being tormented by a devil; a resistance to the resurrection of the Son of God dwelling within her.

According to the account, Jesus in his mercy was willing to accept that even the passions that arise in the soul, the inseparable little household dogs, should also receive the holy nourishment he brings: I am the bread of life.[1692] Yet he knows that this direct sustenance from pure Being is not for them, but for the lost sheep.

The Evangelist seems to be saying on behalf of the Canaanite soul that something of the light of Being received by the captive spirit from anointment by the Spirit, will be received by the dogs as an oil of knowledge that falls from the table of the captive spirit. Every single day, the soul consumes the crumbs of the holy meal, learning self-denial, lighting up within herself knowledge of true Life.

Here we find the mystery and the beatitude trickling onto all those who have not seen yet believe.[1693]

1666 The last word is missing from the manuscript. We have followed the hypothesis proposed by Ph. De Suarez, “filth” (Fr. saletés).

1667 Even today, we find a good manifest theologian wondering, in a note on Matt. 7:6, the logion parallel to GT: “The text does not make clear which people [those called dogs and swine] are meant: The hostile Jews? The pagans?”

1668 Ex. 19:12

1669 Lev. 22:10

1670 Gen. 32:23-33

1671 Ex. 19:3-6. God’s Spirit that hovered over the water (Gen. 1:2) is not a dove in the Old Testament, like that to be found in the Gospel and in the episode of Noah’s ark, but an eagle spreads his wings and hovering over his young (Deut. 32:11). The children of Israel are those begotten without blemish [Deut. 32:5] and not the faithless and perverse generation, as yet not reborn.

1672 Ex. 4:22

1673 Ps. 2:7

1674 Luke 24:27

1675 Isai. 65:1

1676 Luke 2:25-32

1677 Luke 4:18

1678 To compose his hymn, Luke takes fragments from the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Songs of the Servant (Isai. 42:1-2, 49:3, 52:13).

1679 Luke 4:18c

1680 Gen. 11:1

1681 Luke 4:18

1682 Matt. 15:21-28; Mark 7:24-30

1683 Ex. 34:15

1684 House here has the same hidden meaning as in the reply of the centurion in Capernaum when he says Sir, I am not worthy to have you under my roof (Matt. 8:8).

1685 Matt. 10:6

1686 Without there being any need to seek the complete data in Chapter 10 of the fourth Gospel, or in Chapter 34 of Ezekiel, in which the lost sheep are named as in Matthew as being of the House of Israel (Matt.10:6), the origin of the scriptural metaphor of the evangelical sheep is quite clear.

1687 Matt.18:12-14

1688 Matt. 18:3

1689 Matt. 18:10

1690 This is one of the many problems that can arise from the purpose of the Evangelists, their school of scribes and their hermeneutics, to provide a text which combines readings both manifest and hidden.

1691 Matt. 10:6

1692 John 6:35

1693 John 20:29

LOGION 94

Jesus said:

“He who seeks will find

and he who calls out will be let in.”

COMMENTARY

I

What every man will find if he seeks with intelligent, wide-awake faith, with perseverance and pure motivation, is the pearl within, his true Being, the inexhaustible fount of joy and bliss. This is the deep meaning of the Good News.

With intelligent, wide-awake faith: this means that the pearl is present within oneself, it always has been there and always will be, and this, one must believe.

Intelligence consists of understanding that there is no reason to doubt that the pearl can be found. All this is true faith, not a half-asleep, forced faith but faith born of conviction.

Perseverance means that one has to keep at it, regardless of how many days are spent in the desert, for it is certain that in the end the soul’s clamor in its solitude will be calmed.

Pure motivation means without any ulterior purpose, for the pearl, being eternal, has no end purpose; the pearl is its own end, it is eternity and the fount of eternity.

Jesus assures us all that the pearl will be found and that the doors that stand in the way of finding it will open. And how could we not be assured of finding it, since the pearl is the untransferable self of each one of us? As it is written: each gate being made of a single pearl.[1694]

If one persists in the search-and this is what calling out means, for there is no other call, no other cry-if one persists in searching, because one needs what one is seeking, the answer is there, lying quietly, and it always was there, although this, the soul does not know. This in turn must be understood, for it is written: But there stands among you-unknown to you-the one [the Treasure, the Pearl].[1695] And this is among us because it is our very self.

Once this has finally been understood; once the soul has realized that what she aspired to is here, nearby, at the gates, that it is not on its way, for it has already arrived, that there is no need to call for it, for it is the eternal companion that was never absent, then, she looks deep within herself, into the essence of essences, into the Self of one’s self, and the meeting takes place. Whereupon an all-inundating flood of joy wells up, annihilating all troubled waters.

This is the joy of being, the bliss of believing without seeing and of seeing without looking, for nothing is lacking. Safety and peace come, through the very fact of realizing that oneself (the keystone, the pearl) is inseparable from Being, consubstantial with the light of knowledge and the power of Life.

What the searching soul will one day encounter is the presence of the Spirit that is with you, is in you,[1696] after which, to behold the coming of the presence is simply to realize that it always was there and there it remains.

And once one has realized-something that can take place only for one who has believed-it remains only to be watchful, every moment alert, because the presence, which is always there, will only be present for you when you are aware that it is. The presence does not come, it is you who discover it again and again.

He who perseveres will see the presence move more deeply into his soul, burning it and taking possession of it until it stays, making the soul its home forever.

And if the presence burns the soul it is because what descends from heaven[1697] is a consuming fire, the fire that Jesus longed to bring to the earth,[1698] the fire that must burn us all, for that is its task.

II

Once the soul has caught fire, once the chaff that darkened the corn has been well winnowed, consciousness from above is born in man, consciousness of being a man in Christ,[1699] and with that birth in Spirit the works of exaltation begin.

The presence brings with it joy and it makes its way to the purified soul all on its own-provided it is watched over with unbroken attention. In the soul there then remains nothing but the essence of herself. She, the soul, is the essence, at once identical to and one with the presence that comes.[1700] What comes is the hidden Christ, anointed by the Spirit; and if it is said of the one who receives it that he is a man in Christ, this is to show that he is a new man in whom the Spirit of the presence has become one with the spirit, with the essence of the purified soul.

What follows is the final phase of the process of consummation according to the Gospel, the exaltation of Christ, that lifting up which is explained in terms of its hidden meaning only, and then most succinctly, in the fourth Gospel.

For the questing consciousness, the exaltation of Christ is the final action that can be taken for the purpose of the quest, or at least the last action that can be explained in terms of consciousness. Here, we are concerned with a region already very far into the cloud of the encounter and words there become too material to be able adequately to express the mist. The few New Testament texts that mention the closeness of the encounter are parables too, but even in that form, we shall be depending on them.

The exaltation of Christ to the Glory of the Father begins with the raising to the cross, and even without departing from the manifest exegesis it is possible to understand it in an objective and in a subjective sense, since the crucifixion is in itself the exaltation, both the action of being Christ lifted up on the cross and the ascension to the Glory and power of the Father.[1701]

This double objective-subjective meaning used by the author of the fourth Gospel is fairly clear. The body of Jesus is raised on the cross, while in the inward, subjective sense, the Son of Man is, in the same action, exalted to heavenly Glory.

In terms of the hidden exegesis, Saint John’s Gospel draws on the Old Testament doctrine of the exaltation of the just man and incorporates the return from the world to the heavenly fatherland. John’s text studies in parallel the lifting up of the cross which man shoulders and the exaltation in spirit of the inner Christ, with whom the bearer of the cross has become one in his consciousness as a man in Christ. This is the consummation of the return, the meeting of the angel, the pneumatic man, with the Son of Man, with whom he unites, partaking of his universality, his Glory and power.

All this calls for rather thorough clarification. In the Gospel of Saint John it is possible to read three passages in which the raising (Gr. hypsóó) is mentioned in this double sense of (objective-spatial) lifting and exalting (which is subjective, non-spatial attaining the light of Glory).[1702] Let us, then, pass on to these passages in John in order to study them in terms of their hidden aspect.

3:14-15. … And the Son of Man must be lifted up as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.

As with many of John’s texts, the manifest meaning is here subordinate to the hidden one. What Jesus is concerned to explain is not his exaltation as the Son of Man (manifest meaning) but that it is possible for men to lift up the Son in themselves, through the Spirit which is in them, and to believe, in order to have eternal life.

Recourse to the Old Testament aims not only to explain the hidden meaning of an episode in the book of Numbers, told more hermetically than here in the Gospel, but to affirm that the knowledge here revealed is consolidated by traditional knowledge or experience, although this may have been largely forgotten in Jesus’ day.

Moreover, the passage from the Old Testament affirms that, when Jesus refers to the lifting up of the Son of Man, he is not referring only to his Passion and personal nailing to the cross, but to the tribulations and crucifixion that it falls to every man to suffer. Doubtless the Mosaic text was not cited as an antecedent or parallel to the elevation of the manifest Christ but as an example of the general task assigned to the hidden Christ.

What Jesus has just explained (in verse 13) is that the Son of Man does not belong to the world but to heaven, although he descended from heaven, and is therefore, in the complete man, the Son who, precisely because he is from heaven can certainly ascend (be lifted up) to heaven.

To lift up the Son is every man’s task, although in truth it is not the Son who is to be lifted up but rather, one must behold him until one sees him where he is, in heaven, and not where we imagine him to be, on earth.

All this is very important and it must be realized inwardly. The order in which this process takes place is explained in John 3, and we can follow it. First of all, unless a man is born through water and the spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God (verse 5), this, according to the two baptisms spoken of in the synoptic Gospels.

To be born through water requires us, as we already know, to undergo the baptism of purification, so that the soul may be washed clean of its accretions and attachments until there remains in it nothing but its very essence, the spirit.

As for being born through the Spirit, the second baptism by fire, this is to be understood as meaning that the Spirit is united with the spirit-like the sea with a drop of water-settling above it to anoint it, thus endowing it with a share, expressed as holy oil, as knowledge, in the wisdom of God.

All this is knowledge of the way to God, since, thanks to the cleanness of the soul that becomes transparent and to the rain of fire, it becomes possible to discover the presence of the Spirit within us. Thereafter, if vigilance is maintained, if we persevere in awareness of the presence, union of the Spirit with the spirit will be consummated.

This is the union, and once concluded there follows the birth in our consciousness of the hidden Christ, the Lord’s anointed, and a gradual shift from mortal life to eternal Life. Such is the regeneration, the beatitude of the new man in Christ.[1703]

But what the Gospel now says is that the Son must be lifted up, as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert.[1704]

The serpent that Moses put on a standard, and which the Gospel explains as a metaphor for the Son of Man, was made of bronze. Of the serpents that bit the people, it was said that they were fiery, and these are often identified with the winged seraphim guarding the ante-room to the Holy of Holies. Whoever was bitten by these fiery serpents-a clear biblical forerunner of the tongues of fire that came to rest on the Apostles at Pentecost[1705]-was unable to attain Life, for, it is said, their bite brought death to the people of Israel. Then Moses put a bronze serpent on a standard and if anyone was bitten by a fiery serpent, he looked at the bronze serpent and lived; meaning, he attained Life.[1706]

The knowledge that the serpent raised by Moses was bronze provides us with a fact that is most enlightening. The metaphor revealed is, however, somewhat complex, and this obliges us now to accompany it by a number of explanatory notes.

The vault in the waters which God created on the second day to divide the waters in two,[1707] was of burnished bronze. The hidden meaning of this is that this firmament is the solid, imperishable[1708] vault that separates (or isolates) psychic consciousness (represented by water) from the Kingdom of Heaven (the light) or higher consciousness. That is why Deuteronomy says, in the chapter of curses on the common man: The heavens above you will be brass.[1709]

As is well known, mirrors in antiquity were made of burnished bronze (brass) and, bearing witness to this, women’s mirrors were melted down to make the Temple’s bronze basin and its support.[1710] Job sees the vault of heaven as a mirror of molten metal, while Ezekiel describes as a sheen like bronze at the heart of the fire the fiery creatures he finds in the chariot of YHWH.[1711]

The being burnished like a mirror, the bronze of the vault of heaven, is a sign of hope, for the mirror enables us to see reflected, enigmatically, the higher region which is supposed to lie beyond the limit imposed above the head of every man.

For all these reasons the serpent which Moses raised on a standard in the desert was, figuratively, a mirror of the God of divine name I Am who I Am. The mirror offers an imperfect way of knowing, but whoever looks into it and is able to pass through it comes to see face to face and thus to believe and to gain eternal life, for this is to know as one is known.[1712]

When the Gospel says that the Son of Man must be lifted up, it is not referring only to Jesus being lifted up on the cross, as he was, but to the Son, hidden in all men, who must be lifted up within; first, his presence must be discovered in Spirit, confusedly, imperfectly, and then he must be exalted so that he may be beheld and believed in.

8:28. When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He.

What must be held clearly in mind is that, apart from the visible cross onto which Jesus was lifted up, there is an invisible cross on which the world can crucify and lift up the Son of Man, the hidden inner Christ. It is the Son of Man who is lifted up, but all this calls for explanation.

The efficacy of the cross corresponds to its universality, for it is certain that it was part of the divine plan in the act of creation. Jesus was alluding to the invisible, universal cross when he declared to everyone: Anyone who does not carry his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.[1713]

To carry the cross means to take it up and follow the bitter road that consists of crucifying the world within oneself and raising it to redemption. Contrariwise, whoever is unwilling to carry his cross ends up crucified in the world. It used to be said that whoever consents to being crucified crucifies the world and who refuses this is crucified by the world. This, at least, was what was proclaimed by an anonymous early Christian: Blessed is he who has crucified the world and not been crucified by it.[1714]

The cross is, as a universal symbol and an inner reality, the border between the world and the heavenly kingdom, the tree of knowledge of the Plenitude of the Father. Those who have made themselves sons of God go up to the cross to abandon the world, forever leaving behind them their now useless apparel.

In the morphology of the sign of the cross the first Christians saw the cross’s double function, thanks to which it is possible to know the love of Christ which is beyond all knowledge.[1715] To know the hidden Christ, as the plenitude of Life inhabiting man, and the manifest Christ on the cross, in order to transcend that cross.

The cross comprises depth (Gr.bathos) -i.e. both height and depth-as well as breadth and length (Gr. Platos).

Breadth is the firmament that circumscribes the vault of heaven like a bronze sheet, separating it from the world, since it stretches above it. The world is what was created; what lies above is the unborn. In the cross, this is the horizontal, the horos, dividing the universe into the above, which is invisible, and the below, which is visible. Within, it is the veil that prevents communication with Plenitude. This is the frontier Spirit that must be surmounted if one is to come to the kingdom of the light.

The horos combines in the cross, and this is what makes it a cross, with the vertical (staurós), thus opening up a way connecting the world with the region of the heavens. It represents height, at whose head union is possible, since it is the function of staurós to unite. That is why it is said that he who does not take up the cross will not enter the kingdom.

If one applies the inner meaning, the true meaning, what this means is that the Son of Man must be lifted up to the invisible cross that one has made within oneself. One must climb to it following the vertical (staurós) which confers height, yet doing so in a subjective sense, not a spatial one. This is the only way that the vault of the inner sky, that of the soul, can be traversed so as to raise consciousness to the higher kingdom on the far shore, that of the unborn.

The way of staurós is that of the glorification of the Son of Man, and it calls for denial of the soul. We already know, for it was written: only that which dies gives fruit. That is why those who love their life (that of the soul) will lose it, while anyone who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.[1716]

Only when the soul ceases, when it is at the point of death, does it appear to be prepared to enter into the service of the Son of Man. That is why Jesus says to the soul that is rich in worldly life […] where I am going, you cannot come,[1717] and now he warns everyone if a man serves me, he must follow me, wherever I am, my servant will be there too.[1718]

Thus, what comes first is to discover the presence of the Spirit that is in us. It is said of this presence that it comes by the grace of God, but what takes place is not coming but discovery, for the presence is eternal, a grace granted to every man from the moment of his coming into the world.

Thereafter, it is necessary to keep watch, to be alert, so that the Spirit can anoint the spirit until the birth of the hidden Christ. We speak of birth, but this means realizing what is already there.

Finally, and this is what we are trying now to explain, comes the lifting up of our contemplation from the Lord’s anointed to the Glory of the Son of Man. At first, one sees him imperfectly, as though he were like us, but when our gaze rises to the perfection of the Son of Man, we behold him, not as we are, but as he is, a sea of fire attaining Plenitude. That is what the Gospel means when it affirms Then you will know that I am He.

12:32. And when I am lifted up from the earth, I shall draw all men to myself.

The evangelist knows that the true meaning of the expression to lift up (subjectively, to glorify) is not easy to reveal, and that is why he places in the mouths of the people the question: How can you say, the Son of Man must be lifted up?[1719]

Christ remains forever, and is ever equal to himself. It is the gaze that contemplates the Son of Man that must raise the image it holds within, until the soul´s image of herself becomes identical to the Son, and so, one with him. The outcome of this is to know that He-is, or better, to know He-is-I.

Deeply in accord with this is an explanation by the Apostle: And we all, with unveiled face reflecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit.[1720]

The Glory of the Lord (of the Father) is the Son of Man and this is the Glory that he who has received anointment and is now the inner Christ reflects in his face, once he has broken the veil that prevented him from contemplating the presence of the Spirit.

Nevertheless, to contemplate is to reflect, to see as in a mirror, since only enigmatically, in a mirror, is contemplation possible when it takes place from this side, from the familiar lower side of the horos of the cross. And yet, to see in a mirror remains a confused, imperfect way of seeing, for our looking must be raised at least to the limit of the cross.

The limit could be death and it could also be eternal Life, the measure is conferred by faith, as Isaiah put it: The Lord will stretch the measuring line of chaos and the plumb line of emptiness.[1721] The limit is the cross and its mystery.

To lift up one’s spirit is transformation, to turn from the earth to the Son of Man, and that means being, not our image, not like a mirror of our self-image, but one with the Glory of the Lord, in accordance with the Lord’s action within us.

That is why Jesus says: Walk while you have the light.[1722] To believe in the light is the foundation of everything, but then one must lift up one’s eyes that look on the Son of Man, to behold him no longer on earth, but in perfection. This means contemplating the staurós, the vertical that penetrates the heights, looking from below to above, until one penetrates beyond it, piercing with the lance of beholding beyond the veil which then tears, mercifully, from the top down.

That is what the evangelist is pointing out when he cites the scripture: They will look on the one whom they have pierced.[1723] As though he were singing with the psalmist of: breaking bronze gates open.[1724] Once through the burnished bronze firmament which God placed above man’s head, once freed from the enigma of the image, each and every one will know as fully as he is known[1725] by the one and only knower.

Speaking of the Son of Man, the Book of Revelation says: It is he who is coming on the clouds, everyone will see him, even those who pierced him, and all the races of the earth will mourn over him.[1726]

But only those races that are still attached to earth will mourn, those who do not raise themselves towards the Son of Man, who has been calling on them for all eternity to lift him up within themselves and ascend with him to the cross, and then to penetrate beyond it.

1694 Rev. 21:21

1695 John 1:26

1696 John 14:17

1697 Rev. 20:9

1698 Luke 12:49

1699 For man in Christ, see 2 Cor. 12:2

1700 This fact of the soul’s being the pure essence of itself is what the Gospel calls humility and poverty in spirit.

1701 Gr. hypsóó, to elevate, to exalt, to raise. Figuratively, to glorify.

1702 John 3:14-15, 8:28, 12:32-34. Acts 2:33 and 5:31 may be studied too. These refer indirectly to the same thing, but the meaning is the same.

1703 This is what Saint Paul explains when he says: […] may he give you the power through his Spirit for your hidden self to grow strong, so that Christ may live in your hearts through faith. (Eph. 3:16-17)

1704 Our commentary on logion 38 provided us with an opportunity to explain the hidden meaning of Numbers 21, as adduced by the fourth Gospel. Let us refer back to that commentary, on which we shall now be expanding.

1705 Acts 2:1-4

1706 Num. 21:6-9

1707 Gen. 1:6

1708 Job 37:18

1709 Deut. 28:23

1710 Ex. 38:8

1711 Ezek. 1:4

1712 Interpretation of Saint Paul’s idea in 1 Cor. 13:12

1713 Luke 14:27

1714 Jehu, Book I ch. 1 (translated by H. Ch. Puech)

1715 Eph. 3:19

1716 John 12:24-25

1717 John 13:33

1718 John 12:26

1719 John 12:34

1720 2 Cor. 3:18 [KJV text. The Jerusalem Bible is too weak here.]

1721 Isai. 34:11

1722 John 12:35

1723 John 19:37; Zech. 12:10

1724 Ps. 107:16

1725 1 Cor. 13:12

1726 Rev. 1:7

LOGION 95

Jesus said:

“If you have money, do not lend it at interest,

but give it to one from whom you will not get it back.”

COMMENTARY

What Jesus is recommending above all is not giving alms, that being a natural instruction of a purely worldly order, but giving what one has in order to attain the perfection of being poor forever. That is why he says that the act of giving should be without any repayment, without any reward that would again enrich us.

The prohibition imposed on the Twelve-the perfect ones of the Gospel-when they are about to be sent on the Way, has the same meaning: […] Take nothing for the journey; neither staff, nor haversack, nor bread, nor money; and let none of you take a spare tunic.[1727]

On the ascetic path that leads to the cross which every man must take up, the soul, ready to die in order to bear fruit, must give up all the treasured accretions with which she identifies and in which she shelters in order to avoid self-denial: the stick on which she leans; food, the soul’s bread; worldly wealth; mortal life, all the spurious, mistaken outer clothing with which she imagined she could enhance her personality.

Likewise, in the case of the man called Zacchaeus, what saved him was when, following the announcement of Christ’s presence in his home, he stood up, in other words, he stood above himself and decided on the spot to give-to negate-half of his worldly goods.

Zacchaeus opted for poverty in spirit, in essence; he rid himself of the soul’s aggregates, those that represented the terrestrial half of his treasure, keeping only the essential, the spirit, the real treasure, the heavenly, eternal part of what he believed himself to be. Thus, he was saved.[1728]

Such is the deep hidden meaning of Jesus’ comment on that young man who abandoned the way because he was not able to give up his wealth. No soul enriched, sheltered by the worldly treasures that have accrued to her can enter the Kingdom of God. To enter by that strait gate the soul must first have washed herself clean in absolute poverty, in the poverty that consists in being nothing, in being only one’s very essence- which amounts to nothing in the eyes of the world-adding not a thing. A stripping away, a self-denial that is indeed hard to attain.

The evangelist tells us that some then asked: In that case, who can be saved? To which Jesus replied: Things that are impossible for men are possible for God.[1729]

The gate is certainly too narrow for the soul, yet, when she withdraws into her inner silence, when she accepts to deny herself, she will receive the spirit, the soul’s essence, and the unifying anointment of the Spirit of God.

Then the spirit, glorified in the Spirit, will rain down to strengthen the soul and fill her with wisdom. She will receive the fulfilment of the heavenly treasure, and God’s favor will be upon her.[1730]

1727 Luke 9:3

1728 Luke 19:1-10

1729 Luke 18:24-27

1730 Luke 2:40

LOGION 96

Jesus said:

“The kingdom of the Father is like a woman who took a little yeast,

hid it in dough and made it into large loaves.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear!”

COMMENTARY

The parable of the yeast that appears in this logion is parallel to that to be found in Matthew and Luke,[1731] yet there are clear differences.

The yeast serves in every instance as another metaphorical way of expressing the divine, immortal seed sown by God as the essence of every man who comes into this world. However, what the synoptic version stresses is that the harvest yields up to three measures of grain when the seed falls on good soil, while the logion reminds us yet again that the seed, here represented by leaven, is hidden in all men. The yeast in the parable shares its meaning with the pearl, the treasure, the cornerstone, the Word, etc., representing the essence, the true Being of man. The dough is the soul, in which the yeast is hidden, for the latter remains unknown to consciousness until it results in enough growth for its presence to be recognized. Lastly, the dough appears divided into loaves, and each of these represents a human personality, a psycho-physical unit, with a portion of yeast hidden within.

Since what is explained in the parable of the yeast is the primordial revelation of the Good News, the sayings of Jesus copied in the Gospel of Thomas return to it again and again. This, we can never stress enough.

The many loaves seem to correspond to the life of the separate individual consciousness; but this view corresponds to a superficial understanding of the symbolism of the loaves. For the deep view born of knowledge, it is clear that the small amount of yeast which the will of the Father-the woman in the parable-has taken from his kingdom and hidden in the dough is a life-giving essence, for it is Life itself that causes it to ferment, it is indeed man’s true Being.

What our looking must discover, if it seeks knowledge, is the unity of manifestation underlying the presence of the yeast in many loaves.

Since the yeast is spirit, corresponding to the metaphor of the wind, God’s breath, it is dispersed in the loaves but reunited, once redeemed from its captivity in the soul and in matter.

The yeast in the parable is, moreover, readily identifiable with the Son who, as the invisible and immortal guest in the dough represents the perfect stranger, while another correspondence is with the stone rejected by many, yet the foundation of man’s edifice. It is intense contemplation of this yeast that confers on all men the power to become children of God.[1732]

This is what inspired the song of Zechariah when, filled with the Holy Spirit, he prophesied in his Benedictus: by the tender mercy of our God who from on high will bring the rising Sun to visit us, to give light to those who live in darkness and the shadow of death.[1733]

1731 Matt. 13:33; Luke 13:20-21

1732 John 1:12

1733 Luke 1:78-79

LOGION 97

Jesus said:

“The Kingdom of the Father is like a woman

who was carrying a jar full of meal.

While she was walking on a distant road,

the handle of the jar broke and the meal emptied out

behind her on the road.

She did not realize it; she had noticed no accident.

When she reached her house,

she set the jar down and found it empty.”

COMMENTARY

The parable illustrates the mystery of the bread of life, the food of eternal life that comes only from the Son of Man.[1734] The woman, the soul, comes into the world bringing with her a jar of meal, which is to be understood as the indispensable materia prima of the bread which every soul that believes in the Son -who is her very essence, the Self-and goes towards him, will need to staunch her hunger and thirst for life.[1735]

Now, the soul in the parable is walking on a distant road. The text does not say what this road is distant from, but it is not hard to suppose that it is far from the Kingdom of the Father and no road in that direction will be right for going to the Son and receiving from him the food that he provides.

The breaking of the jar handle may perhaps be a metaphor for the loss of the ability to use the meal, the flesh (in parable) of the Son. From that point on, the road on which this woman is walking is, like so many other human roads, marked by the daily spillage of the treasure of Life deposited in every soul at birth.

The misfortune built into this unconscious but natural attitude is that of not realizing how one’s fortune is being squandered with every step one takes, and few are the souls that learn this. Only when she comes to the end of the road and the jar is no longer in her hands but on the ground are all souls willing to look into the jar. But by then it is empty.

The parable describes a frequent event, one that is no less certain, no less painful for being familiar. Nevertheless, Saint John’s Gospel says: Yes, it is my Father’s will that whoever sees the Son [1736] and believes in him, shall have eternal life: and that I shall raise him up at the last day.[1737]

1734 John 6:27

1735 John 6:24

1736 To see the Son is to discern one’s inner Being and to acknowledge that this really is the Son sent to man by the Father, with his glory and power.

1737 John 6:40

LOGION 98

Jesus said:

“The Kingdom of the Father is like a person

who wanted to kill an important man.

He took the sword in his own house and thrust it

into the wall in order to be sure

that his hand was firm:

Then he killed the important man.”

COMMENTARY

The logion seems to explain in parable that there are two kinds of life according to the Good News: eternal life, which pertains to the Kingdom of the Father, and mortal life. However, one endowed with the latter form of life is as insubstantial as a shadow on a wall. Although the world may regard him as important, such a man is a mere shadow and all shadows end under the sword of the Kingdom.

I

The one Life

The Gospels sometimes distinguish two forms of life, life mortal and eternal, yet they seem to draw this distinction only for the sake of expressing matters more simply. A rather more searching analysis will show that they speak of only one form of life, eternal life, which pertains to God, He being eternal, and to all that falls within His Kingdom.

This means that, when studying the Gospel, we must isolate and contemplate the principle of life-so involved with consciousness-separately from the existence of living beings, who live because they share in life, each in their own way.

It will then be easy to see that if the New Testament texts often speak of two kinds of life, this is because they are at times referring to the multiplicity of living beings, those that we see as living-and here we are dealing with mortal life-while elsewhere they are speaking of the Life, life in itself, intrinsic life, which is a property of the Father, consubstantial with Him and belonging to the sphere of heaven.

Gospel doctrine is very transparent in this respect: eternal life, the one and only life, belongs to whoever holds it in himself, either because his is Life itself, as with the Father, or because he has received it as a direct gift deriving from Him. In that case, the one so endowed possesses and is Life from the very moment of receiving life.

This sums up the Gospel teaching on life. The fourth Gospel lends itself especially to this study, not because the teaching varies from one Gospel to the next, but because John goes to greater lengths to provide information on the matter.

According to the Gospel, the Father holds Life in Himself, and it is He who conferred Life on the Son[1738]. That is why the Son (the Word) is Life,[1739] for the Father marked the Son with His seal.[1740]

As for the Spirit of God, which was given to Jesus and anointed him,[1741] it can be stated that this, too, is endowed with Life, being the Spirit of the Father.[1742]

Lastly, the Son gives Life to anyone he loves,[1743] to everyone who believes in him,[1744] to those who eat the bread of life which he gives them,[1745] for he is God’s bread that gives Life to the world.[1746]

Those whom he loves are the sheep who hearken to the voice of the Son, to the Word, and who follow him.[1747] That is why Christ Jesus says: If anyone believes in me, even though he dies he will live; and he then adds to clarify what he has just said: whoever lives and believes in me will never die.[1748]

The sheep are those who, through metanoia, followed by the double baptism, have become united with the essential, pneumatic man, and have come to be their own very essence. Through prolonged, sustained anointment, the Spirit, which is at first merely presence, is united in the end with the spirit of man; and this spirit of man, once turned towards the inner, pre-existing, universal Christ-he who is the gate[1749]-receives life itself from the Good Shepherd.[1750]

It must be stressed that the shepherd, the Son, does not lose life when he gives it as a ransom for many[1751]-for all the sheep.[1752] The life of the pre-existing Christ flows from him, for he is Life, nor is the flow halted when he gives it to free from the regime of mortal life the many captives, some of whom have long been waiting with lamps well-lit. The food of eternal life which he gives can entail no loss of eternity for the Son of Man, for eternity is measureless.

Life is the power of the Son of Man-just as wisdom is his glory-and when he gives it to convert the captives into living beings, the Life he gives grows in the life which the sheep take when they unite with him in the eternal life of all, for there is one life only.

That is why Jesus speaks of a ransom, not through his death on the cross, but because the life he gives to many is their redemption, and he receives it in the redeemed.

That, according to the hidden exegesis, is the meaning of the passage in Saint John’s Gospel: I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me; I lay it down of my own free will, and as it is in my power to lay it down, so it is in my power to take it up again.[1753]

II

Life and the dead

It is very instructive to observe quite how radical Jesus is in passing judgment on all that is not eternal life. For him, mortal life, that in which our daily consciousness resides, that which we call life, is no life at all, it is death.

This does not mean that Jesus undervalues this mortal life of ours, for he explains that it is in this death that our sharing in life is decided;[1754] but when he calls eternal life simply life, without any qualifying attribute or adjective, this means that for him life is simply and solely what we with our crude vision call eternal life in order to distinguish it from the life with which we mortals are familiar.

For Jesus, eternal life is the one true original Life in the bosom of the Father.[1755] All the rest is not life at all, but in every case death temporarily enlivened.

Moreover, Life is not solely an eschatological value, some future existence. Rather, all that is far from the Father is death, only reunion with the Father is life, regardless of whether that consummation takes place in the world or in some other kingdom.[1756]

In truth, it is Christ who gives life to those who believe in him and unite with him, for only thus can those who were living as dead, those who were dead, enter into the Life. That is why it is said that he who believes has passed from death to life.[1757]

Although the search for life always implies a future to be attained, one should not see any cosmic duality in this. Life always presupposes a future for whoever has not attained it, but a present for whoever has entered into it, regardless of whether this transition takes place on earth or in heaven.

Many may think of eternal life as a prolongation of mortal life, as though there were two interchangeable modes of life; but Jesus’ teaching does not allow us to think in dualistic terms, for he says: Anyone who believes in the Son has eternal life, but anyone who refuses to believe in the Son will never see life.[1758] If it is said of the one who resists the Son that he will never see life, it is because without belief there can be no life, only death.

When in the sixth of the seven indictments set forth by Matthew, Jesus accuses the hypocritical scribes and Pharisees of being like whited sepulchers,[1759] he seems to have in mind those dead which, with their semblance of soul and body, strive to keep buried the sheep to whom he wants to give the food of life. That is why the discourse concerning the work of the Son contained in the fourth Gospel says: the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice.[1760]

It is the body and the contents of the soul that set themselves up as sepulchers, while, lying dead within those sepulchers are the sheep which will from their graves hear the voice of the Son of God, and all who hear it will live,[1761] meaning, they will awaken again to life.

These are the very words repeated by Jesus: The sheep that belong to me listen to my voice.[1762] Some passages, like the parable of the prodigal son, have this deep meaning, for the son was dead and has come back to life; he was lost and is found.[1763] Paul repeats this: offer yourselves to God, and consider yourselves dead men brought back to life.[1764]

This is also to be found in the passage set forth by John: Whoever listens to my words [whoever hears my voice] and believes in the one who sent me has eternal life, without being brought to judgment, he has passed from death to life.[1765]

Once scholars studying the religion of the living God, the God living in all men, have managed to rid themselves of the strange, superstitious idea that the soul and the mortal body-neither of which is innately stable-will rise again after their ordinary death, they will be able to understand what Jesus meant when he spoke of the resurrection of the dead.[1766]

Jesus, when questioned about the resurrection, explained that the living God of the Patriarchs, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, is God, not of the dead, but of the living. Thus, he testified that those Patriarchs had passed from death to life before their ordinary death, and so they live on in their God, for he who enters into life enters it for good.

The death of the body and the dissolution of the conscious contents or experiences of a worldly order arising from the soul, these are deaths to which the world attaches its concern with life; but Jesus, the Christ both hidden and manifest, has other reasons and it emerges from his teachings that there are for him two kinds of dead.

There is what is dead because it never had Life, nor will it ever, and yet it appears to live because it has been quickened.[1767] This is precisely the case of the soul, which seems to live through the life given it by the spirit.[1768] Likewise, the body, which takes its simulacrum of life from its work as lackey to the soul. Neither the body nor the contents of the psyche are endowed with Life, they are and always will be mortal, for such is their nature.

The other dead of which Jesus speaks are the sheep, the spirit, the particles of the light to which the Son gives life, for he loves them. The sheep, being of the same nature as the light of the Son, are alive, for they own their life and if it is said that they are dead it is because they stay buried beneath the whited sepulcher prepared by the body and the worldly contents of the soul.

For these sheep, for these particles of light which are the eternal, essential Being of man, the Son performs his work, resurrecting every one of these living dead from the dead. This resurrection is possible because the dead in question are by nature living, for their God is the God of the living. This resurrection does not entail the occupation of some future heavenly mansion; belief in the pre-existing inner Christ and union with him is the only requirement, for He alone is.

As Jesus showed, life-he is Life-is not incompatible with being in the world, for he himself was in the world as the Christ manifest when he said […] I do not belong to the world.[1769]

In truth, to enter into life is only in the future for whoever is far from God, not united, made one, with the pre-existing inner Christ.

Nevertheless, he to whom the Son has given life, he who is united with Christ, has life, and that life has the same value in the world and after the world.

This, Jesus confirms when he says:

There are some

standing here who will not taste death

before they see the Kingdom of God

come with power.[1770]

III

The quickened soul

We shall be studying the soul, seen as the full set of its successive conscious contents or experiences, including those images attributable to memory as the active storehouse of experience, and to the repetitive subconscious action of memory.

When these are grouped together for examination-in that theoretical conglomerate which we call the soul-without exercising any profound, subtle discrimination in relation to them, something that would not be easy to undertake, we see that the rapid, continuous flow of these experiences gives rise to two lasting major errors of manifest interpretation of the soul according to the Gospel, errors revealed when the matter is seen from the hidden viewpoint. These we must now study from that hidden viewpoint: in the first place, the soul as the impersonal basis of life and, in the second place, the soul as an entity that is, up to a point, autonomous, functioning as a personal ego.

1. Is the soul an impersonal underlying basis of life?

The concept of the soul, that is, the idea of a consciousness of a psychic or psycho-physical order encompassing all experiences, such as movements, perception, sensation etc. and functioning as a receptive and distributive center, may explain how this consciousness or soul can come to be seen as the seat of life.

If, however, the soul can be said to be the seat, the transformer and distributor of the life it receives, it may be admitted, if we take a step further, simplifying as we go, that the soul is man’s life; finally, if we take this line of thought even further, we cannot deny every man’s right to say that the soul is his life.

This is an erroneous process, one that we have followed in three main steps: if we take it that the soul is for man the vehicle of life in all its dimensions, it will not be hard to understand that life and the soul are in many respects one and the same thing for our consciousness, and even the Greek word psyche, which the New Testament texts employ readily, has the double meaning of life and of soul as the seat of life.

However, this soul=life identification which confuses consciousness (the soul) with the power to exercise it (life) is seriously out of keeping with the Gospel teachings. These admit of no life other than that which the Father has in Himself, and which the Son and the sheep whom the Son loves hold by virtue of having been given it.

This is not the place in which to clarify the difference between pure consciousness, the consciousness of being, which is attributable to the sheep, to the spirit, and the dual, reflexive consciousness that is the soul’s. Life is one and one only, nor does it admit of the plurality which can be assigned to consciousness.

If the power of life is ascribed to the spirit and to the soul, we can say that man’s spirit-represented by the sheep-is life because of justice,[1771] as was affirmed by the Apostle, while the soul, as the holder of the life she has received, may be said to have been quickened;[1772] thus, the soul is living insofar as she receives and administers life, but this life does not belong to her.

This idea of the non-immortality of the soul, which has no intrinsic life, underlies many of the sayings of Jesus, and it can be easily confirmed. If the soul were not mortal, Jesus would not have pronounced during the agony in the garden of Gethsemane that phrase which can absolutely not be taken figuratively: My soul is sorrowful to the point of death.[1773]

Paul fully endorses this teaching of the vivifying of the soul, and he repeats it on a number of occasions, as when he gives the Corinthians his definition of the two Adams-one that has been so widely misunderstood. The Apostle says: The first man, Adam, became a living soul; but the last Adam has become a life-giving spirit.[1774]

Misled by the importance for the anthropology of the manifest view, with its dichotomous model of man as soul and body, the scriptures have been interpreted as meaning that the first man was not the spirit made in God’s image on the sixth day, but the soul modelled by the hands of YHWH in Paradise. As a result, few have seen that the essence of Paul’s text lies in the distinction it draws between life-giving and living.

When life is given, this is because, in the pure sense of the New Testament, life is a perpetual property. Contrariwise, to have life through its having been quickened is to give credit to a transitory mode of living, one not exempt from mortality. There is no freedom from death when the vivifying process comes to an end.

Moreover, since the spirit is the real Being of the last Adam, the complete Adam, Paul’s words point to the glory of immortality for which the psychic consciousness is destined when, through faith in Christ pre-existing, faith in the Spirit of God, faith to the point of union, it discovers its essence, thus attaining true eternal pneumatic Being.

Many will be very surprised to hear it explained that the soul in the New Testament is not man’s essence, the eternal core of his being, as in Hellenistic culture, which seems to have colored the manifest Christian anthropology.

The New Testament sees the complete man as a trichotomy made up of body, soul and spirit,[1775] and this is the whole of a man’s being. Within this totality, the soul is the psychic principle, compounded of conscious contents or experiences. It is to this aggregation that the spirit, the Being, the true Self, refers when he says my soul.

The soul’s a battlefield. Within her confines, the struggle is waged to fulfil the evangelical task of resurrecting the spirit, consigned to death there. This is not so much a matter of bringing about that resurrection; rather, the soul must find her essence and reduce herself to being nothing other than that essence. This means breaking the boundaries that separate soul and spirit.

To complete this difficult task of liberating the spirit, the soul can count on the free assistance of the Word of God, which cuts like any double edged sword, but more finely.[1776] This succor is absolutely effective, not only through the Revelation transmitted by Jesus but through the very gradual revelation of the inner pre-existing Christ.

Thus the soul dies a little every day until it grows at length to God, when the revived spirit is united with Him and life is saved.

This the Evangelist Luke declares in his Magnificat: My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, and my spirit exults in God my savior.[1777]

2. Is the soul to some extent an autonomous entity, a personal self?

The word psyche has a double meaning, and this permits the reader to see it as soul or as life, depending on one’s exegetic approach. Thus, according to the hidden interpretation, Jesus taught that there is only one life. For strictly worldly purposes, however, there are said to be two kinds of life, the one, immortal and eternal, the other mortal and transitory.

This last interpretation, which has the support of manifest theology, suggests the coexistence of two worlds, that here and that of the afterlife; in other words, a dualistic view.

Moreover, the manifest anthropology sees man as a body-soul dichotomy and tends, drawing logically on the built-in ambiguity of the word psyche, to allow for no relationship between the soul and anything touching on death that might lead to the conclusion that the soul is mortal.

To admit that the soul is mortal would be catastrophic for dichotomous man, since it would leave him with no inherent principle endowed with eternal life. That being the case, how could the Son of Man, on Judgment Day, give immortal life to mortal souls despite their constitutional make-up? This, not only for the perpetuation of the just but for the pointless satisfaction of seeing the unjust receive eternal punishment.[1778]

Certainly, the manifest exegesis is mindful of the promise of the universal outpouring of the spirit on the last days,[1779] in accordance with the promise in Saint Luke’s Gospel that the Spirit will be given to whoever asks for it.[1780]

Only the spirit of man can receive the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God is universal while the spirit of man is personal and individual, yet the higher sphere of his being, the spiritual Self of the psychological self. The difference between the Spirit and the spirit is one of scale and potentiality, just as the flame of a lamp and that blazing in the hearth both share the same fiery nature.

After bringing his presence down on man in tongues of fire, the Spirit initiates a long-lasting, sustained anointment. The anointment of the Spirit is the means of his union-faith, knowledge, universality-with the spirit; for every dense drop of holy oil that comes from the Spirit is for man a sign of his transformation to God’s universality, the step-by-step ascent to the Father. The first stage of this beautiful mystery is described by Paul: The Spirit himself and our spirit bear united witness that we are children of God.[1781]

Precisely because the spiritual Self of man is the one and only knower,[1782] man’s spirit is not known by psychological consciousness. That is why no one can find the spirit within himself and classify it as part of man’s psychological structure.

The spirit is what is highest in man’s structure, but being of a different order, not psychological but spiritual, it cannot be known. If it could somehow be known, it would cease to be the knower and become the known, and another spirit would have to come and take the place of the knower. This would give rise to an endless regression.

Nevertheless, since the spirit is the soul’s essence, the soul may, through a laborious process of recognizing her conscious experiences as ephemeral data of consciousness and, having done so, letting go of them as marginal, adventitious, mortal residues, come to discover-a discovery born of faith and discernment-that her one stable, immutable feature is the spirit, her very self, the Self of the self, the inseparable companion.

Then the soul will speak the words of John the Baptist, the evangelical archetype of the soul that seeks and finds: This same joy I feel, and now it is complete. He must grow greater, I must grow smaller.[1783]

IV

Reflections on the death of the soul

What must grow is the spirit, the essence of the soul, the true Self, for the spirit must join God and become one with Him.[1784]

What must grow smaller is the soul, i.e. the conscious, active contents or experiences of the soul, since the soul must attain self-denial to the point of death.[1785]

Renouncing the soul’s contents, that is the cross one must take up every single day,[1786] every hour, forever. Renouncing the soul is not a matter of the soul dying a cruel death while all her self-affirmations survive, but of a ceasing to be that is possible only when the will to self-denial is exercised moment by moment, with unfailing vigilance, unfailing mindfulness.

Every instant of the life of the questing soul must be a death to herself, such is the encounter. And the more she dies to herself, the more life the spirit will gain with every passing instant, such is the Law.

Death means humility, annihilation; it means being nothing, and when the soul attains to that nothingness by consummating self-renunciation, there remains nothing to be done, for all that remains is the essence, the eternal spirit, which has life in himself through the work of the Son, and it is He that lives.

The great mystery of the death of the soul through renunciation of her contents and gaining thereby the life of the spirit, this is a consummation entrusted to the consciousness of every true follower of Christ. Yet it is in truth no mystery; rather, it is the higher act of exchanging death for life, once death has been acknowledged for what it is, death; once death has been cast aside as being nothing but death.

This calls for an effort to acknowledge the simplicity of the entire process of this turning around of man in himself, so as better to understand its character, which is simple and humble, free from fear.

To transform myth into a daily reality is very hard, for man’s life has been dramatized by all and sundry, as though this business of living and dying were not dramatic and difficult enough in itself.

This calls for understanding that the Gospel describes the higher deed of transforming consciousness from its natural state of identification with psychic and psychosomatic contents, until it is rid of them. Not because garments are not there, but once they have been put aside, they no longer belong to the soul.

With the arising of the new perception that comes with a pure consciousness, the soul recognizes herself, but no longer as the personal ego she once took herself for, imprisoned in her own extraneous walls, but as the eternal Self, the limitless free spirit. This is what the Gospel means by being brought from death to life.

What the Gospel teaches is that we must die every day to the transitory contents of the soul and leave off, again and again, our identification with those very experiences. These are adhesions we need to be rid of, for without them death is less death, and perhaps not death at all once death has lost its sting and life has grown into more life in the fullness of its beauty.

The naked soul, the pure core of the soul, is no longer soul but spirit, and the spirit freely finds bliss in union with the Son of Man.

Ï = Ò

Some will then realize that the spirit never was in captivity but forever free. The chains of his prison were the contents of the soul and the captive remains what he always was and will be: man’s very Being, the living God whose temple we are.

Then we shall be better able to understand a saying of Jesus which embodies the entire message of the Gospel. To mark its importance, the Evangelists included it six times.[1787]

Because of the double meaning of the Greek word psyche (life, soul) the translation according to the manifest exegesis differs from that according to the hidden exegesis. The manifest version reads life every time the text suggests death, because it thinks the soul will be preserved for all eternity, just as it is, together with all the trappings it is weighed down by in the world, later to enter a place assigned to it in Glory or in eternal fire.

However, the hidden exegesis finds no need to translate psyche here as life but as soul. The duality proposed by the manifest view-two lives, each with its distinctive nature (mortal and eternal) and two worlds to house them-is thus refuted and the soul returned to its truth, that of being one single essential grain, spirit, although it always appears clothed in chaff, the soul.

Anyone who loves his soul [psyche] loses it; anyone who hates his soul [psyche] in this world will keep it for the eternal (zóén) life.[1788]

b) For anyone who wants to save his soul (psyche) will lose it; but anyone who loses his soul (psyche) for my sake [and for the sake of the Gospel] will save it.[1789]

1738 John 5:26

1739 John 1:4, 14:6

1740 John 6:27

1741 Luke 4:18

1742 Rom. 8:10

1743 John 5:21

1744 John 3:15, 6:40, 6:47, 11:25

1745 John 6:35, 6:51, 6:53

1746 John 6:33

1747 John 10:27-28

1748 John 11:25-26

1749 John 10:9

1750 John 10:11

1751 Matt. 20:26-28

1752 The Christ who dies in Jesus raised to the cross is the Christ manifest. It is he who dies for the world after his brief sojourn there, and then rises again, although now no longer manifest, but hidden. The Son possesses Life and no one can take that from him; not even in the manifest exegesis is there notice of this-nor could there be so ludicrous a thing-for the immortal, pre-existing, unborn Son of Man could never die.

1753 John 10:17-18

1754 Matt. 7:14; Mark 10:17; Luke 10:25

1755 Mark 9:43-47; Matt. 19:17

1756 Luke 15:24, 15:32

1757 John 5:24

1758 John 3:36

1759 Matt. 23:27

1760 John 5:28

1761 John 5:25

1762 John 10:27

1763 Luke 15:24

1764 Rom. 6:13

1765 John 2:24. This text explains two things about the judgment: that to hear the Word and to believe in it is already the judgment in itself, for it is to receive life; nor is the judgment separate from realization, although it may be a consequence of the latter, regardless of where it occurs or under what conditions, before or after ordinary death.

1766 Mark 12:26-27

1767 Only the Father is the source of life. (John 5:26)

1768 That is why the apostle speaks of a living soul (one that has been animated, lent life) and of a life-giving spirit (1 Cor. 15:45). But soul means here the soul’s contents, its experiences.

1769 John 17:16

1770 Mark 9:1

1771 Rom. 8:10

1772 Col. 2:13

1773 Mark 14:34. And if the soul were not mortal, to what other region of oneself could the capacity for dying be attributed, apart from the body?

1774 1Cor. 15:45

1775 1Thes. 5:23

1776 Heb. 4:12

1777 Luke 1:46-47. The mention side by side of soul and spirit in the Magnificat is no mere parallelismus membrorum, as averred by some manifest theologians, but a reference to man as a trichotomy. The dual function of the soul-to proclaim the greatness of God, her savior-and of the spirit-exultation-is very clearly differentiated in the Lucan text.

1778 Matt. 25:46

1779 Acts 2:17

1780 Luke 11:13

1781 Rom. 8:16

1782 1Cor. 2:11

1783 John 3:29-30

1784 1 Cor. 6:17

1785 Mark 14:34

1786 Luke 9:23

1787 Although the texts may not be identical, the essential idea is the same in all six versions (Matt.10:39, 16:25; Mark 8:35; Luke 9:24, 17:33; John 12:25).

1788 John 12:25

1789 The passage between square brackets occurs only in Mark. In the Lucan version there appears at the end the Greek word zóogonései, the real meaning of which is will be vivified (by the spirit).

LOGION 99

The disciples said to him:

“Your brothers and your mother are standing outside.”

He said to them:

“Those here who do the will of my Father,

these are my brothers and my mother;

they are the ones who will enter into the kingdom of my Father.”

COMMENTARY

What matters most in the logion[1790] is that these brothers and this mother, whom Jesus is being pressed to welcome, are outside, they are not here, together with those who are accomplishing the will of the Father.

The difference between being outside and being here is very important, for being here means that the hidden inner Christ has been perceived, discovered by consciousness, so that his presence as a newborn, here within one, has already begun to advance in wisdom, in stature, in favor with God.[1791] This, and only this, is what is meant by accomplishing the will of the Father.

The significance of all this is that there are among us human beings who have succeeded in receiving the presence of the hidden Christ within themselves-here-for when faith arises, it pours out blessings on those who are able to believe without seeing. Then, resonance in spirit makes it possible to breathe the aroma of the inner Christ-here-hidden in all beings, for we ourselves all are the sweet smell of Christ who leads to life.[1792]

Contemplation of the presence, here, in this world, is the first great step in the religious life according to the hidden exegesis, for it means to contemplate the essence of the one God, of whom it is written: He is one and there is no other.[1793] And if there is no other, none outside of him, what mother and brother are these who stand outside?[1794]

According to Saint Luke’s Gospel, those who are outside must knock at the door,[1795] for Christ assures us: Whoever comes to me, I shall not turn him away.[1796] He then adds: Anyone who does not remain in me is like a branch which has been thrown away.[1797]

The one who is thrown away is the Prince of this world,[1798] who is kept tethered, unfree, outside the door, like that colt which Jesus, the Living One, sent for in order to enter Jerusalem, mounting it as though it were his body.[1799]

It is certain that neither the Prince of this world nor the colt outside the door are going to Christ; yet Jesus’ mother and siblings are going to Christ, only they appear outside the door. What this means is that some seek Christ outside, according to the manifest order, while others seek to breathe his presence here, according to the hidden doctrine.

It is to this that Jesus is alluding in the logion. It does not mean that Jesus ranks parental ties of the flesh below spiritual relationships, for that would be a timid, inadequate truth. When Jesus says, according to the Lucan text: If any man comes to me without hating his father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, yes and his own soul too, he cannot be my disciple, [1800] this is a well-established universal reality, one which many must experience.

For he who perceives the aroma of Christ and breathes it in as the very here of all beings, brothers, mother, etc. are beloved, not for what they seem to be from without, but for the Christ hidden within, whose presence is perceived in them.

Next comes detachment as a necessary step, which the Gospel calls figuratively hatred, hatred for all the outer coverings that come between the direct contemplation of everyman’s here. And this is not hatred, for that would be out of place, but knowing how to look as though through a translucency, seeing through the opacity clothing it the light of the one who said: I am the light.

Surely, intense joy will always be felt by whoever contemplates the presence of Christ hidden within beings, within all beings wherever they may be, brothers, mothers, whatever… all joined together in spirit, even if they are asleep to this reality. But while some hold Christ sleeping within, buried in their whited sepulcher, others have revived him as a new Christ.

When the aroma of the living Christ is perceived in one who is here, that one is your brother, your mother, your very self, in the shared plenitude of joy.

1790 Apart from a few differences, this logion is the same as that which appears in the synoptic Gospels (Matt. 12:47-50; Mark 3:32-35; Luke 8:20-21)

1791 Luke 2:52

1792 2 Cor 2:15-16

1793 Mark 12:32

1794 Matt. 12:46

1795 Luke 13:25

1796 John 6:37

1797 John 15:6

1798 John 12:31

1799 Mark 11:4

1800 Luke 14:26; Matt. 10:37

LOGION 100

They showed Jesus a gold piece and said to him:

“Caesar’s men demand tribute from us.”

He said to them:

“Give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar;

and to God what belongs to God;

and what is mine, give it to me.”

COMMENTARY

The logion provided by Thomas concerning the tribute money owed to Caesar is also to be found in the synoptic Gospels[1801] and in Justin,[1802] with a few significant variations.

Those who study texts by analyzing the history of how they came to be written mark the difference between the various versions by noting that neither Justin nor Thomas present the episode as a controversy, as in the synoptic Gospels. They are therefore inclined to think that the account in its present synoptic form is attributable to a scriptural variant and that it is the work of a later scribe whom they call Mk-Intermediate.

The finding of the scriptural investigation is very precise and probably correct but, as so often happens with conclusions reached via the manifest interpretation, it is inadequate, contenting itself with contemplation of the fruit while failing to taste its sweetness.

Regardless of the authorship of the synoptic version we all know, what matters is to note the mutilation that Jesus’ saying seems to have suffered in the process, since the three creditors mentioned in the Gospel of Thomas, Caesar, God and the Son of Man have been reduced to only two, with the third disappearing on its way to the end of the sentence: and what is mine, give it to me.

The resultant synoptic text goes no further than to distinguish man’s duties towards the powers of this world -Caesar-from his duties to heaven-God-which reduces Jesus’ reply to a commonsense observation: since you are de facto accepting the Roman occupation by using coin bearing the emperor’s image, you must necessarily decide to pay the taxes which the occupying power demands.

Perhaps it was the scant spiritual relevance of the episode that caused the last synoptic scribe to enrich it with allusions to the cunning way in which the question was framed, as though this were no more than an attempt to catch Jesus out taking sides in the opposition between Caesar and God.

Jesus’ three-way classification of what every man must give back stands in contrast to the narrow framing of the manifest account, which limits it to transitory affairs. His reply is a universal spiritual lesson, one of a hidden order.

As is well-known, the denarius was in Jesus’ day known as the tribute coin, because every Jew had to pay this poll tax (tributum capitis) to the Roman authorities.

On seeing the tribute money, Jesus issues a reminder of the three tributes that every man must pay in this life. The first tribute is death, that of the end (telos) of worldly life. This tribute is owed because of the brief natural duration of the life of the body. In the tribute money, this customs payment for transit is represented by Caesar’s effigy engraved on the coin.

The second tribute is that of self-denial, the consummation of the soul, to pay which one must rid oneself of all fear (phobos). This is a tribute owed to YHWH God who formed the soul and breathed into it the breath of life.

Lastly, the third tribute is that of honor to the divine (times) which is owed to the Son of Man. It is he who must be exalted in glory, for glory is the honor that corresponds to him. In the tribute money, he is the coin itself, the substance, the true Being who manifests as the gold that gives value to the coin.

In his Epistle to the Romans, the Apostle issued a reminder of the episode of the tribute money when he said: Render therefore to all their dues: tribute [phoros] to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom [telos]; fear to whom fear [phobos]; honor to whom honor [tûme].[1803]

1801 Matt. 22:21; Mark 12:17; Luke 20:25

1802 At that time some came to Him and asked Him, if one ought to pay tribute to Caesar; and He answered, Tell Me, whose image does the coin bear? And they said, Caesar’s. And again He answered them, Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. (Justin Martyr, Apology I: chapter17)

1803 Rom. 13:7 [Translator’s note: The author seems not to have noticed the discrepancy between the tribute coin, the silver denarius, and the far more valuable gold coin, presumably the aureus, mentioned in GT. This is no doubt an issue for future scholarship.]

LOGION 101

Jesus said:

“Whoever does not hate his father and his mother

as I do cannot be my disciple.

And whoever does not love his father and his mother

as I do cannot be my disciple.

For my mother gave me my body, but my true mother gave me life.”

COMMENTARY

I

The father and mother whom Jesus would have us hate are both members of the five-part human family mentioned in various places in the Bible.[1804]

The so-called father is taken for father without really being it and plays his part in our natural consciousness, in which he appears as our separate individual ego, i.e. as a god created and built up by our ignorance, a false god who maroons us in an island, a god whom men worship, believing him to be their very self.

Since his kingdom is falsehood, for only erroneously is his existence taken to be real, Jesus calls him God’s Adversary, Satan, and if he calls him the Adversary it is because the psychological ego opposes and usurps the true, absolute Self in our minds, which is identical to the Being Jesus means to express when he says I AM.

As for the mother who is to be hated, she is our hylic nature, which gives birth to the body according to the way of the flesh. It is said that identification with the goods that this mother offers, goods which are not the true prize to be treasured, prevent the soul from attaining purification and thus growing strong in her aim of attaining justice.

These are the grounds for the hatred-i.e. the non-identification-that Jesus is preaching.

Standing against this father, this mere phantasm spawned by the imagination, and this mother, the begetter of mortal nature with its almost invincible Court of Fear, are the true Father and Mother, who are not members of the anthropological family, for they are the forerunners of Mankind; they are Being and Life, their clothing, the Glory (the wisdom and Light of God) and the power (strength, dynamis, Life) that accompany the Son of Man when he comes in the clouds.[1805]

It should be clear that the clouds amidst which the Son of Man comes, moving as though behind a lattice, are not clouds that he is bringing with him. They are the last subtle veil between consciousness and the Son. That is why these clouds can be said to prevent the accomplishment of the greatest commandment in the Law: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart.[1806]

These clouds are in fact the border barrier which the false father and the natural mother cannot pass to fulfil the great commandment in its absolute, unitary sense, as expressed by Jesus: The Father and I are one.[1807]

The false father and the natural mother make for separation. Never will they allow man to be one, to the point of union with the Father.

We shall now speak of this unity beyond the clouds or veils created by consciousness, the unity that Jesus demands of all those who would be his disciples: that they should be perfectly one.[1808]

II

The unity-being one-called for by Jesus, is accessible to our understanding in regard to the Father but can be realized only through the Mother, that is, the Holy Spirit, which is the Mother of the complete man. Yet he will receive this perfect maternal blessing only when the spirit, man’s essence and his crown, is united with the Spirit of God to the point of perfect union.

As maker and giver of eternal Life, the Spirit of God was, from the earliest days of Christianity, seen as a fertile mother. Genesis says that in the darkness before the world was made God’s spirit hovered over the water.[1809] Later, in Deuteronomy, the engendering maternal function is described as being like an eagle watching its nest, hovering over its young.[1810]

From the majestic wings of the eagle to the wingbeat of the evangelical dove, the image becomes gentler, and yet its real meaning remains unchanged.[1811] With or without that symbolic dove, the feminine character of the Spirit is the same, her powerful, dynamic function: to bring Life to all those nesting below her wings.

Thus, in the Gospel of the Hebrews, Jesus says: Even so did my mother, the Holy Spirit, take me by one of my hairs and carry me away on to the great mountain Tabor.[1812] It should be pointed out that this passage, saved from the almost total disappearance of all Jewish material by the dual testimony of Origen and Saint Jerome, in itself represents a highly significant explanation of the function of unity entrusted to the Holy Spirit in its capacity as mother. The hair here stands for strength (dynamis, power)[1813] which is revealed in the head (the essence, spirit or crown of the complete man). As for the ascent to the mountain, this bears witness to the ascension of consciousness inhabited (known) by the Holy Spirit.

There are plenty of biblical examples to support the allegorical representation of hair as strength or power. God’s anointed-the nazir, the chosen one[1814]-would for the period of his vows undertake never to cut his hair, so that its strength should be left to work in him. This explains why Samson- God’s nazirite since he left his mother’s womb-said in words that reveal the meaning of the hair as the power of anointment by the Spirit of God: If my head were shorn, then my power would leave me and I should lose my strength and become like any other man [one who does not receive the breath or lie under the shadow of the Spirit].[1815]

The Spirit of God is the power of the Father, one of the two great wings pertaining to the absolute Being (the other wing being Glory, the wing of Light pertaining to the Son). Its work is to endow with Life whoever receives its presence, therein lies its power, its strength, the one Life.

This means that the soul, once purified of all that is mortal in her-the chaff-empties herself until she is nothing but herself, her very essence, whereupon she knows this essence to be the spirit which-like God’s seed-was always present in her, although she, the soul, was not aware of this.

It is a fact that those who do not discover the Spirit can know only on the basis of their natural psyche. This is explained in the passage of the fourth Gospel which speaks of that spirit of truth whom the world can never receive since it neither sees nor knows him.[1816] Conversely, the purified soul will always receive the news of her birth in spirit, that birth whereby the anointed are at length brought to the light. Luke confirms that the Holy Spirit always gives the Father to those who ask,[1817] and the Gospel’s one and only way of asking is through purification of the soul.

The Gospel’s hidden message is the angel’s annunciation to the virginal soul: The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will cover you with its shadow.[1818] The coming of the Spirit upon the soul in her quintessence means the outpouring of Spirit onto spirit, as prophesied by Isaiah: Once more there will be poured on us the spirit from above.[1819] Thus commences the anointment of Life, for this, the Life of the Most High, is the chrism which the Spirit pours onto the anointed spirit until the Spirit himself and our spirit bear united witness that we are children of God.[1820]

This making oneself one with the Spirit is the consummation. When the Spirit comes, it comes like the dove bearing an olive branch in its beak, olives from which is pressed the oil of Life to be poured on the head (spirit) touched by it, until it flows down through the entire Being.

This, the Psalmist sings: Fine as oil on the head [1821] and Solomon’s bard sees it poetically as a song for the anointed one:

The Dove fluttered over the Messiah, because He was her head;

and she sang over Him.[1822]

When the Spirit comes over the soul, first comes his covering shadow, his presence. Thus, the ointment of Life imbibes the soul, so that she may shed, day after day, those exhausted residues of separative conditioning that still cling to her.

Only when the soul becomes spirit, the very essence of herself-sung by tradition as the mystical wedding-can the anointment of spirit by Spirit be consummated. Until that moment, the Presence will be there, hovering overhead like a shadow, like the cloud that is not darkness but the half light that heralds the coming of day.[1823]

It is as well to know that the shadow, although stable and reliable, only knows when it is known. Although it dwells in everyone, like a seed planted on the first day, if it is to manifest its presence, it must be known, daily, hourly, instant after instant. This means vigilance, constant alertness, remembering that it is here, contemplating this and receiving the ineffable joy of knowing that Being IS, eternally, since before the world was made.

And so it must be until the cloud empties and vanishes, dissolving in Spirit. Then, as in the ancient text alluded to by Jesus, comes the moment of awakening: The spirit of the Lord has been given to me, for He has anointed me.[1824]

III

The Christ, the Lord’s anointed, is always one consecrated in truth, one set aside for God, one not of the world though in the world.[1825]

Christ is Life through the Spirit and Consciousness through the Word, the seed God has sown in man.

Thus the one born again in the Spirit soars on two wings until perfect communion with the Father: Life, which he receives from the Spirit, thus becoming one with him, and knowledge, whereby the soul, consciousness, discovers herself to be identical to her spirit, to her seed-of-God, the essential Being.

When in the Jewish tradition it is said that the Holy Spirit raised the Savior to Tabor, the sublime mountain, this is the same as the account in the synoptic Gospels when they say that he was led by the Spirit through the wilderness, then led to a height (the head, the crown, where the Spirit rests) to be shown the kingdoms of the world.[1826]

What the Adversary then offered was power and glory as seen by the world, over which he rules. But true power (Life) and true Glory (Light, wisdom) are not of this world, they belong to the Father, and they come down as though they were the two wings of the Spirit of God, alighting.

Of these two wings that confer upon the Spirit of God its motherly, protecting flight, the one is Life and the other is Wisdom (the Light), for it is riding on Light that the Son of God, the divine Son made Thought of God, comes, borne by the Spirit. Endowed with these two wings, the Spirit is at one and the same time Life and Consciousness (power and Glory) in the Will of the Father.

The descent of the power and Glory of God, from the unfathomable absolute of the Father to man’s pure consciousness is described by the Evangelists in parable, representing through the brief scene of the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan the long-drawn-out process of spiritual realization in man.

The account melds into a single action the two baptisms by water and by fire, presenting the latter as already realized through his already complete and perfect anointment. This perfection does not, however, deny the paradigmatic character which the baptism of Jesus has for every man in Christ.[1827]

The tearing or opening of the heavens, an event mentioned by the Evangelists, is a sign of the new transparency of the roof of consciousness in man. As for the coming of the Spirit in the form of a dove, this is not so much a descent (despite nevertheless being just that, in that it comes down from God to man) as an ascent from the seed to the head or crown of man, on which the Spirit settles like a dove, to begin the work of anointment with the nectar of the olive.

And if Luke explains that the Spirit descended in bodily shape,[1828] this is not as though the Spirit could be other than spirit, but because it had taken form and a bodily manifestation in Jesus; and here the fire of knowledge broke out, which is anointment, also being the fire that Jesus, the holder of that fire, wished to bring to the earth.[1829]

The Christian tradition of the appearance of fire in the episode of the double baptism, which is not mentioned by the Evangelists, was taken up by Saint Ephrem, although incompletely, when he wrote: A fire broke out in the Jordan.[1830] This should have been on the banks of the Jordan, since the synoptic Gospels coincide in telling that the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove descended when Jesus, after his baptism, was at prayer.

The Spirit is the bringer of fire, since his anointment of knowledge descends on the soul turning towards God in prayer like a river of fire. Yet this new fire does not burn on mixing with the waters of the soul, however pure those waters may be but, being an emanation of the Light (Wisdom, the Glory of the Son), its flame is cold and white, expressing the beauty of the Light. This pure new fire comes only once the water of the baptism of penitence has been tasted.

Such is the descent of the Light and the Life which Christ takes from the wings of the Spirit when they settle on him like a dove on completion of his second baptism, that of anointment. And this is the Son of Man, of whom it is said that he come s-although he does not come, but rather, is discovered, for he was always there as the grain or the seed-with great power and glory.[1831]

Thus, the cantor of the Odes of Solomon sings the very moment of the dawning of the inner Christ, the true anointment, in a flight of high poetic inspiration:

As the wings of doves over their nestlings,

and the mouths of their nestlings towards their mouths,

so also are the wings of the Spirit over my heart.[1832]

1804 Logion 16, Matt. 10:34-36; Luke 12:51-53; Mark 7:6

1805 Mark 13:26

1806 Matt. 22:37; Deut. 6:5

1807 John 10:30

1808 John 17:23

1809 Gen. 1:2

1810 Deut. 32:11

1811 Likewise, the dove sent forth three times by Noah and returning from its second flight with a new olive branch in its beak is a biblical metaphor for the Spirit of God, poised to anoint man’s spirit with its oil of Life. Here, it seems, is the origin of the theologically significant New Testament symbolism of the dove as an embodiment of the Spirit of God.

1812 Orígenes, In Jo. 2, 6: PG 14, 132 C (transl. A. de Santos, Los evangelios apócrifos pp. 38, 41. BAC, 1956, Madrid.

1813 Power or strength are the two words used to translate dynamis from the Greek.

1814 The Chosen One is a translation of nazir. Thus in Gen. 49:26, They [the blessings] shall be on the head of Joseph, and on the crown [brow—nazir] of the head of him that was separate [set apart] from his brethren. While Deut. 33:16 speaks of the favor of him who dwells in the Bush. May the hair grow thick on the head of Joseph, of the consecrated one among his brothers.

1815 Judg. 16:17, 13:5

1816 John 14:17

1817 Luke 11:13

1818 Luke 1:35

1819 Isai. 32:15

1820 Rom. 8:16

1821 Ps. 133:2

1822 Ode of Solomon 24:1

1823 Ex.13:22, 19:16, 24:16

1824 Isai. 61:1; Luke 4:18

1825 John 17:16-17

1826 Luke 4:1-6 I will give you all this power and the glory of these kingdoms, for it has been committed to me and I give it to anyone I choose..

1827 The arrival of the Spirit is described as occurring after the baptized Jesus had come out of the water, in which the first baptism had taken place. Matt. 3:16; Mark 1:9; Luke 3:21.

1828 Luke 3:21

1829 Luke 12:49

1830 Saint Ephrem, Dial 88:3

1831 Mark 13:26

1832 Odes of Solomon 28:1. In the Acta Thomae, the Holy Spirit is called the holy dove that begot the two pigeons, and among the names that may be invoked are those that refer to the two pigeons: Come, treasure of Glory and come, Mother, you who confer Life [power] although hidden. Cfr. Acta Thomae c. 50 (166, 7 ss). Good information is provided in A. Orbe: Cristología gnóstica, I, p.535. BAC.

LOGION 102

Jesus said:

“Woe to the Pharisees,

for they are like a dog lying in the manger of the cattle;

for he neither eats nor does he let the cattle eat.”

Commentary

According to the Good News, there are two kinds of food: perishable food that cannot preserve those who eat it from death and food that endures to eternal life, food made from the wheat of heaven, food which is given only by the Son of Man.[1833]

It is of this food that the Living Jesus speaks, food that brings about the transformation of consciousness into spirit, opening up the passage from death to Life.

The manger is a metaphorical variation on the jar in which the Spirit, as the seal of God, places his ointment so that the soul may attain its consummation, that of being its own very essence. The ointment offered by the spirit is the presence which everyone must discover. The presence is the anointment that feeds our spirit, the sustenance that does not permit death.

The presence must, however, be supported in one’s mind by patient, persevering discipline, until it transcends its primitive condition, that of a presence vaguely known, like a mirror that reflects the Glory of the Lord,[1834] and comes to be Glory, firmly rooted in the consciousness that knows it.

As Jesus says in the fourth Gospel, these are the works that God wants: first of all, to believe in that presence which is a herald announcing the Father.[1835] To believe is the sign, for it is the work; the bread of heaven given by the Father. Not, as Jesus reminds the listeners, the bread given by Moses when the people were in the desert.

This explains why Jesus, Christ manifest and hidden, says: I am the bread of Life,[1836] for he is the Christ, both immanent and transcendent, of man in Christ, he who distributes the manna from heaven. In giving this bread as food, Christ is always there, waiting half concealed in the presence, ready to manifest to those men who seek him. This, Jesus explains as follows: Yes, it is my Father’s will that whoever sees the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life.[1837]

What Jesus is saying is that this presence is at first seen vaguely, as though behind a veil; but there then follows a long, deep labor to be performed with the presence until the Lord’s anointed is found therein.

This is the way of beatitude, that which feels no fear when faced with death’s sting, that of the pure, complete joy which arises whenever the soul remembers the presence and exalts it within herself; whenever, in other words, she knows the presence and, on the rebound, is known by it.

Luke speaks of the presence when he says that the Holy Spirit (the presence) rested on Simeon, to whom it had been revealed by that same Spirit that he would not see death until he had set eyes on the Christ of the Lord.[1838]

On the contrary, those who only understand superficially and clean the cup on the outside (those whom the logion and the Gospels identify as Pharisees) are behaving like a dog lying in the manger. They are not eating the true food which the presence of the Spirit provided for them-the seed of God within them-for this can be eaten only by those who are awakened, not by sleepers. Nor do they allow those who could in their day discover the presence to be fed by it, as they get in the way with their sleeping body.

These Pharisees-who are to be found in every century- deny that there is anything but air in the cup and weary themselves denying the light in which they do not believe, thinking in their lack of humility that if they do not see the light, it is because there is none.

These Pharisees do not know that the wind of which you know not from where it comes or where it is going, is the presence, unclear at first, clear later, of the Spirit in which we must be born, once we have learned to hear his voice.[1839]

1833 1 John 6:27

1834 1 Cor. 13:12; 2 Cor 3:18

1835 John 6:28-29

1836 John 6:35

1837 John 6:40

1838 Luke 2:25-26

1839 John 3:8

LOGION 103

Jesus said:

“Blessed is the man who knows where

and when the brigands will enter during the night,

so that he can rise, muster his force[1840]

and gird up his loins before they come.”

Commentary

The logion sets out to describe a frontal (although prior) detail of that great event which the New Testament scriptures call the coming of the Son of Man. From the hidden view, this coming (parousia) is the raising to consciousness of the presence of the inner Christ, hitherto concealed like a mere seed but now manifest, once the border assigned to the cross has been traversed, through worship or perseverant contemplation.

It is natural that the coming to our consciousness of the Son of Man should always take place by night, for there is no light, only darkness, the night of the soul, before receiving the Day of the Son. That is why it was said that the Day of the Lord is going to come like a thief in the night.[1841] The blessing, in terms of the logion, is not that the brigands should not enter, since what counts is knowing that they are coming-that is what faith is about-but watching, so that when they come, it should not be like an ordinary burglar getting in through some side entrance, but through the main gate, opened wide, as befits the true Christ, the Good Shepherd.[1842]

All the Gospel mentions of the thief who comes by night[1843] or the wise virginal souls coming lamp in hand to meet the bridegroom,[1844] with their flasks plentifully supplied with oil, serve to point out in parable some of the main lines of that incomparable, unique and final event, the reunion of consciousness with the true Being, the pure, imperishable, absolute, inseparable essence of what one is.

Certainly, Jesus understood that there must in his time as the manifest Christ be revealed things that had lain hidden since the foundation of the world.[1845] Yet, although this was doubtless the purpose dearest to his heart, that for which he made every moment of his life a teaching, when he opened his mouth to expound these secrets which he intended to reveal, he did so in parables.[1846] He spoke in parables, as affirmed by the first Evangelist, fulfilling the text of the psalm.[1847]

And yet perhaps now, almost two thousand years after that jubilant revelation, raising what had hitherto been hidden to the level of parables, it is time to make a poor modest attempt-one that many will undertake-to make manifest a number of those parables. So here is what we are about: that those who listen may understand, and those who look may see. That they may understand from the heart and be converted, and that the Gospel may care for them forever.

The parable is a way of using myth to recount what was hidden, yet myth and reality are so interwoven that it is impossible to know where the one ends and the other begins. It is not easy to be sure that the reality now being told may not contain some residue of mythical concealment. Attempts to open up the parable to manifestation will always be imperfect; something of the ancient myth-laden parable will always survive in the uncertain new reality.

When Jesus says in the Gospel: Stay awake, because you do not know the day when your master is coming,[1848] he is opening his mouth to speak a parable that points in several distinct directions, for the Lord, the inner, eternal Christ, is the Self, the master of your house, your very essence, the real-I-that-you-are; and when he says you do not know the Day when he will come, he is warning us that man does not know what the perfect, luminous, inner perception-the Day-is. It is identical to the act of knowing, or better, recognizing, the true Self, Being, and if he says stay awake, what he is asking for is not that we do away with sleep but that we keep vigilant watch over all the events that arise in the soul.

These occurrences, these decisions of the soul must be unmasked, discovered for what they are, mere adventitious appendages that we take for the soul itself-while they defile it. And if he says Stay awake, it is because Jesus knows that when these appendages cease, that is the end of it; when they all are acknowledged for what they are, appendages, pure, diaphanous contemplation of Being arises, for this is the Day of the Self in the new-found peace of the soul.

Likewise, when the Gospel says have your lights burning,[1849] it is speaking in parables;[1850] and when the logion says let your loins be girded about, Jesus is referring through the light or the gathering up of one’s strength to the manifestation of the Spirit of God, settling on man’s consciousness like a halo or crown around the head transformed to gold.

This is what happens when man receives anointment and marries the spiritual teachings of knowledge and unity, for such is the nature of the mixture of the oil of unction that it spreads over the whole man. Thus, as knowledge is love, it is unity too; and, being unity, it is the light of perfection. Hence, the words: You will receive power when the holy Spirit comes on you.[1851]

The Gospel speaks in parables or, to be more precise, in common metaphor, when it says: gird up your loins,[1852] for the loins or kidneys[1853] are the seat or physical vehicle of consciousness in the language of the Old Testament, as is confirmed in the Psalms: I will bless the Lord, who hath given me counsel: my reins also instruct me in the night seasons;[1854] and in the Epistle to the Ephesians, which draws on Isaiah: Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness.[1855]

To gird up one’s loins is synonymous with standing watch, and what is explained in a number of New Testament scriptures is that the Coming of the Lord will, like a thief breaking into the house, take by surprise those who are not on the lookout; while, on the contrary, blessings await those who, seeing it, announce the glorious irruption of the Lord into their night, thus transformed into Day.

This is explained by the author of the Book of Revelation: If you do not wake up, I shall come to you like a thief, without telling you at what hour to expect me.[1856] Elsewhere, he writes on the contrary that Happy is the man who has stayed awake and not taken off his clothes [faith, knowledge, love, etc.] so that he does not go out naked and expose his shame.[1857]

As the first Epistle to the Thessalonians puts it: those who do not keep watch live in the dark, but those who watch are all sons of light and sons of the day; meaning that they will inherit the light (the Day) for it already is in them, and will live united to the Lord [identified with, made one with him].[1858]

Jesus expresses the same meaning, although seen from a quite different angle, when, as the Christ not only manifest but hidden, he proclaims himself in Saint John’s Gospel to be the Good Shepherd: the thief, the brigand, gets in some other way, which is why the thieves and brigands come in first; but if consciousness is wide awake and vigilant, the one who enters through the gate is the shepherd of the flock (the souls). For the gate (consciousness) and the shepherd are one and the same thing. Jesus says: I am the gate of the sheepfold; I am the good shepherd.[1859]

It is important to understand that Christ is the gate giving access to the consciousness of the believer whose vigilant stand makes him a son of the light and he is, at the same time, the shepherd, the master of the house (of the soul) and the “I” of consciousness.

When man discovers in himself that the gate of the soul and his essence, his Lord, his shepherd, are one and the same, there can be no doubt but that the work of unity that Jesus sought has been realized in this man, in Christ, for there then remains nothing but the one and only living and eternal indweller, Christ.

It must be clear that the vigilant stance demanded by Jesus is a state of firm, persistent adoration, a contemplation in which the soul, focused on the one born from above, whom she cannot see yet whose presence she perceives like a ray of her own sun, attains rapture, freeing her from herself, and nothing remains in her but the object of her contemplation, undifferentiated from herself.

The adoration of the Magi as described by Matthew, when, after a long quest they were able to draw near to the child, the Son of God, and fell down, and worshipped him,[1860] this adoration is part of God’s commandment, his ultimate plan for all his children, in which they are now made angels, gods, pneuma.[1861]

In his dialogue with the Samaritan woman, in the fourth Gospel, Jesus speaks of this worship, of this state of vigilance, of this contemplation to the point of forgetting oneself, as of the accomplishment of man’s life in spirit: God is spirit, and those who worship must worship in spirit and truth.[1862]

What Jesus explains here is very important, for he says that the time has come-and this is still true of our time-when the worship of the Father must take place neither on this mountain or in Jerusalem (i.e. neither there nor in any objective place) but that true worshipers (those who know how to worship and do so in truth) will worship what they know (within themselves) and will worship the Father in spirit and truth.[1863]

To keep vigil is to live in vigilance, in contemplation of the Father, who is known without being seen, without it being necessary to see him, for the organ of sight is not God’s best witness. That is knowledge, the inner sense of knowing, and it is this higher sense, which is denied by many, that reveals how one is to worship, without seeing, in spirit and truth.

This state of vigil is how those worship who, using the fruit of the seed they have received, are exercising their power to become God’s children.[1864] Those who are on watch live wide awake, for they have killed sleep in order to shake off ignorance of God and now they await the Life that the Son of Man brings.

It is of them that Jesus speaks when he says, There are some of those standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming with his Kingdom,[1865] for they wait having gathered up their strength, having well girded up the loins of their consciousness, ready to contemplate in spirit and truth the hour of his Coming.

The fourth Gospel tells that when the Living Jesus, appearing to his disciples on the shores of Lake Tiberias, was with Peter (of whom he had just prophesied the kind of death by which he would glorify God) Peter asked this concerning John, and Jesus answered: If I want him to stay behind until I come, what does it matter to you? [1866]

He did not say He will not die, but that the Son of Man would come to John before he died.

Precisely this was what the apostle Paul was to say of himself many years later: Any of us who are left alive until the Lord’s coming will not have any advantage over those who have died [those who received the coming after dying].[1867]

Those who attain Life before tasting death are only the few, the blessed ones who are not children of the night but sons of the Day, those who keep vigil. For them, the Lord need not come like a thief, he will come as the Son of Man, to be one with them and, with the Father, to make his home in them.[1868]

1840 Force (conjectural)

1841 1Thes. 5:2

1842 For the whole of this paragraph, cfr. John 10:1-2 et seq.

1843 Matt. 24:43; Luke 12:35; 1Thes. 5:2-10

1844 Matt. 25:1-13

1845 Matt. 13:35b

1846 Matt. 13:35a

1847 Ps.78:2; Matt. 13:35

1848 Matt. 24:42-43

1849 Luke 12:35

1850 Repeating the parable of the wise virgins (Matt. 25:1-13)

1851 Acts 1:8

1852 Luke 12:35

1853 In Pla’s original Spanish version of the logion.

1854 Ps. 16:7. Also in Ps.26:2, 139:13; Prov. 23:16; Jer. 11:20-the Spirit of God that instructs even in the night becomes in the Gospel the seed of the Kingdom that grows of its own accord (Mark 4:26 et seq.).

1855 Eph. 6:14; also Isai. 11:5-and righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins.

1856 Rev.3:3

1857 Rev.16:15

1858 1 Thes. 5:4-10

1859 John 10:7-8, 10-11.

1860 Matt. 2:11

1861 Deut. 32:43; Heb. 1:6; Rev. 19:10; Matt. 4:10; Deut. 6:13; Luke 4:8,

1862 John 4:24

1863 John 4:23-24

1864 John 1:12

1865 Matt. 16:28

1866 John 21:22

1867 1 Thes. 4:15. Or what amounts to the same thing: Those still living on earth when they receive their parusia.

1868 John 14:23

LOGION 104

They said to him:

“Come, let us pray today and let us fast.”

Jesus said:

“What sin have I committed?

Or in what way have I been defeated?

When the bridegroom leaves the wedding chamber,

then, let them fast and pray!”

Commentary

Here, for the third time the logia of the Gospel of Thomas speak of fasting and prayer.[1869] On this occasion, the disciples invite Jesus to fulfil two of the three main practices of justice according to the Law;[1870] but the disciples speak of these practices in their manifest sense while Jesus answers them in terms of the hidden meaning, which calls for interpretation in spirit. This difference provides the contrast that justifies the logion’s expression in the usual paradoxical style.

I

The fasting of which Jesus speaks is privation of the bread of Life which, in Jesus’ language, means sin, implying that one has been found wanting, ignorant of wholeness. In its hidden sense, sin is the contrary of justice, as darkness is of light.

A soul that has not found her essence and has not become one with her true Being is a soul that has not undergone death, that death which consists of discarding the outer husk with which she has protected herself and with which she has identified; a soul that knows not the grain and which consequently cannot receive the food of Life which the Father sowed in her at birth. That is why this soul practices fasting, not for justice, but because of sin.

Nevertheless, when through purification of the chaff and coming to know the grain, the soul discovers the bridegroom who is present in her own house, the common home of both becomes the bridal chamber in which the bride (the soul) and the bridegroom (the spirit) cease to be two but are one flesh.[1871]

This is the mystery that must be realized, the mystery of Wholeness, that of the unity (of consciousness) which one must attain within oneself. According to scripture, God created man male and female,[1872] but this does not mean that he made some humans male and others female, as the manifest interpretation would have it (for that came later) but that man, the species God created in the image of himself, was both male and female.

What the scripture means by this is that in every man, within each singular consciousness, there is a configuration of duality in which the spirit (the essence, the Self) is mirrored in the waters of the soul; and this reflection causes consciousness to take itself for the changing semblance that appears reflected in those waters. This psycho-spiritual man is called the divine Hermaphrodite, because in him/her there always arises the seeming duality of the beholder whose regard is from the breath of himself-the true Being-and the image beheld in the tremulous waters of the soul.

All this, Jesus said in the Gospel: What God has united, man must not divide.[1873] The soul (the wife) is realized in the husband (the spirit) and this consummation consists of the soul making herself one with her essence, in unity that can arise only within the unity of the spirit, ever an underlying presence without any limiting borders. That is why the Apostle says: Anyone who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with him.[1874]

This explains the surprising discussion about fasting between John’s disciples and those of Jesus, as reported in the synoptic Gospels. The first knew of no bridegroom and were confined to the limited mortal sphere of psychic consciousness, since John, whose voice had recently been heard in the desert, crying out his solitude, had only just discovered the eternal, immortal, pre-existing Lamb of God (the spirit).[1875] This is why John’s disciples (followers) were fasting.

Jesus’ disciples, constantly invited by their master to celebrate their own sacred wedding, had no cause to fast. Theirs to eat the bread of Life, that of anointment by the Spirit which the bridegroom poured forth over them. The bridegroom was with them, and this they knew.[1876]

That is why Jesus was right when he said that to fast is to attribute sin to oneself, whereas he had never been found wanting.

II

Of prayer Jesus now says that it is tantamount to an admission of defeat, just as, in logion 14, he had said: If you pray, you will be condemned. The meaning of this is that prayer, when understood according to the hidden interpretation, means the condemnation of the chaff and the defeat of the grain, the Self; this is how the double meaning of prayer, both positive and negative, is to be understood.

According to the world’s manifest view of the religious life, man uses prayer as a flexible and efficient vaulting pole, one with a deliberate purpose, to get us to the other side of the ravine, to the far bank of consciousness, from the known psychological ego to the unknown, the mystery.

From one point of view, prayer is a transaction in which faith and dedication are accorded for responses of a somewhat specific order. This is, of course, only the first level of prayer, yet it is still evident that such a view is grounded in the belief that there is more to the world than the visible entity we perceive, and that this is a covering that conceals something invisible and holy. Such manifest prayer deserves our respect.

Within ask and it shall be given to you, in other words, without departing from the transactional sphere, with all the faith that this implies, prayer may be expressed not as a request for psycho-physical goods but as a call for energy, courage, knowledge, wherewith to burn the chaff, identification with which obscures the true contours of the soul.

It is of such prayer, prayer that invokes the Holy Spirit, that Jesus was speaking when he said: Give us this day our daily bread,[1877] prayer all the more suited to Jesus’ purpose to the extent that it expresses our need for the Bread of Life, that is, the outpouring of the knowledge of God which the Spirit bears on its wings.

Since its purpose is to rid us of the chaff that is stifling our soul, the bread for which we are praying-bread that is always given to us when we pray for it as bread that has already been washed clean-represents condemnation of the chaff, and that is what logion 14 means when it says: If you pray, you will be condemned.

The thing to be condemned is the psychological ego, which is so abundantly served by the limits of individualization imposed by God’s Adversary; yet, ever shining behind that condemnation is the blessed light of the pure in heart,[1878] the light that opens our gaze on the shoreline of the invisible.

From the flight of the dove in whose wings the Life of the Spirit of God descends to the wisdom distilled in our consciousness by the Spirit when it unites with our spirit, there is a long road, that of all that is best in a man’s religious life: a road that leads from being two, male and female, to being one flesh in the Lord’s anointed, the one and only fruit of the seed.

This is a higher mode of prayer: prayer to the Father who sees in secret and knows what the soul needs before she asks;[1879] prayer that arises because faith has trusted in the Kingdom of the Light to the point of union; prayer in which the Lord’s anointed, made one with the Father who has made his home in him,[1880] spreads like pure love, without form and without object.

From his complete oneness with the Father, what Jesus calls prayer is not that outward prayer to which his disciples are calling him, one that must always involve a worshipper imprisoned by the narrow walls erected by his psychological ego.

Prayer is always an act of duality, since the one in prayer is separated from the God with whom he hopes to be united. It is an act born of pain in solitude. That is why Jesus says that prayer, the form of prayer which they are asking of him, signifies the defeat of the Christ who knows unity.

Jesus the Living One knows very well that true prayer consists of being one with the Father and, from the one eternal mansion of the Spirit that is common to them, ceaselessly contemplating the non-duality of Father and Son.

Both this fasting and this prayer which they are calling for belong to the manifest order and are suited to those who live in any of the forms of duality. That is why, without any pejorative intention, but acting from feelings of the greatest solidarity, Jesus asks that they should practice this fasting and this prayer.

1869 Logia 6 and 14. Matt. 9:14-15; Mark 2:18-20; Luke 5:33-35.

1870 For the Jews, fasting and prayer were, together with the giving of alms, the three principal practices of justice. Matt. 6:1-6, 12-18.

1871 Matt. 19:6a; 1 Cor. 6:16; Gen. 2:24. The sense of the word flesh here, as in many other places, has the same metaphorical meaning of being an homogeneus sustrate that may be physical, psyquic and even spiritual.

1872 Gen. 1:27

1873 Matt. 19:6b. This is, in its hidden sense, marriage, or union in one flesh; i.e. the marriage of psyche and spirit, since in terms of its manifest meaning, a man and a woman are not one flesh because they are married, rather they continue to be two bodies of flesh endowed with well differentiated natural life that entails life, sickness and death.

1874 1 Cor. 6:17

1875 John 1:23-29

1876 Mark 2:19b: As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they could not think of fasting.

1877 Matt. 6:11

1878 Matt. 5:8

1879 Matt. 6:6, 8

1880 John 14:23

LOGION 105

Jesus said:

“He who knows his father and his mother

will be called the son of a harlot.”

COMMENTARY

I

According to the specifically Semitic tradition which emerges in all its force in the New Testament texts, a man is the son of his works and inclinations and is seen as being fully party to them. Thus, references to filiation, which recur so frequently in the Scriptures, are not indicative only of origin but can serve either for the purposes of a transitory ascription, or a final, definitive one.

Filiation is, strictly speaking, the short form used to represent a situation or reality which would otherwise call for fuller explanations, which might perhaps be more difficult to express. Hence the advantages, and the difficulty, of an exegetic study of the reasons behind every mention of filiation, since these to tend to make for important clarifications.

A specific example of the workings of these attributions of filiation (not, however, registered by manifest exegetics) is to be found in the ways in which Jesus addresses his disciple Simon Peter. When the future apostle goes out in search of the Messiah, Jesus calls him son of John.[1881] In so doing, he mentions implicitly, not the name of his father in the flesh, which would be of no evangelical significance, but the fact that he is coming from the baptism in purifying water given by John the Baptist, whom Jesus sees as the father of Simon Peter at this stage in his religious life.

Later on, when though inner revelation the apostle discovers the anointed one, the Christ, in his real signification as Son of the living God, Jesus alludes to this realization by calling him son of Jonah[1882]: his spirit is ready to receive the sign of Jonah, he is an ardent candidate for the third day, the day of his resurrection, preparing to attain contemplation of the Coming of the Son of Man.

Finally, when the Living Jesus appears to his disciples on the banks of Lake Tiberias, he addresses Simon Peter three times in succession, thus emphasizing what he is about to say, and calls him Simon son of John. In this, he is no longer alluding to a filiation but to a consequence of that filiation, for Jesus is clearly referring to his coming from the baptism of John as a warning of the baptism by the cross whereby he is to give glory to God.[1883]

Taking filiation in its general sense, there are no few examples in the New Testament that call for study, but the most important of them all is, without question, that of Son of God. According to the scriptures, man’s Way culminates in the highest, the decisive act of making oneself a son of God. This is a Way open to all men, and lighting up its paths so as to enable its realization is the very basis of Jesus’ difficult task and the essence of the Good News.

John’s affirmation in the Prologue to the fourth Gospel that all of us have already received the Word (God’s seed[1884] sown in us) and it is the presence of the Word in us that empowers us to become children of God,[1885] is no isolated expression of circumstance but the cornerstone of the Gospel, at the heart of Man’s Way. It is this presence that justifies man’s life on earth and Jesus’ work of enlightenment.

Moreover, the parable of the sower, which in itself sets forth in its entirety the task that falls to man, leaves us in no doubt as to the exercise of this power to become children of God. The natural means is to make fruitful the seed sown in us.

The importance of this parable is marked not only by its presence in the three synoptic Gospels but by the fact that it is accompanied and completed by Jesus’ clarifying comment, to ensure that none of its meaning is lost: Do you not understand this parable? Then how will you understand any of the parables?[1886]

The entire Gospel is to be studied as one great parable, and this was said by Jesus himself if we understand the general purport of his words in the fourth Gospel, I have been telling you all this in metaphors[1887]. In this sense, the comment in Saint Mark’s Gospel is to be understood as confirming that the parable of the sower is the key to understanding the Gospel.

Certainly, we men of this long generation that runs from Adam to our times, just as we are and according to the works we choose, can be children of this world or children of the light[1888] (the light, as we already know, is the Word). The world is the field in which the good seed is sown, and yet darnel grows there too. When the seed begins to bear fruit, that signals entry onto the path to becoming sons of our Father in heaven,[1889] but it is always the good seed that is in everyone (and not the darnel that may spring up in the field and gather round or adhere to that good seed) that makes a man into a son of the Kingdom.[1890]

It is this seeming duality in man´s natural state of consciousness, that of being not just the seed-the true Being-but darnel, too, ready to burn in the fire of his all-too-brief time on earth, that make it so difficult for man to see himself as a son of God.

The seed is a great unknown for our psycho-physical consciousness, an unknown to be resolved by means of painful and sometimes prolonged efforts, while the darnel always appear quite openly on the surface of our lives, as the routine reality of our Being. Nevertheless, whoever through purification and through faith comes to know the blessed perennial nature of the eternal seed that is his true Being, and to discriminate this from the painfully fleeting transit of the darnel, will without the slightest doubt set out on the Way that leads to being a son of God. This has nothing to do with any ambition on the part of the darnel, it is a matter of realizing the truth of the seed that-one-is.

With a view to clarifying as far as possible this paradox of man who is the son of God through the seed yet seems to himself to be a son of the world through the chaff, the apostle Paul came out with his theological metaphor of the son of God by adoption, one that has not been properly understood by manifest exegetists.

The adoption set forth by Paul does not and could not imply two ways of being the son of God, one consisting of being the son, preexisting from the beginning, and the other, of becoming a son, starting out from being the chaff. The title of son of God can be true only if it defers invariably to the preexistence of the Father, for it calls for the unity of nature in eternity. This Nature can never be set aside. That is why a new filiation is, strictu sensu, out of the question, nor is a plurality of the sons of God possible since all are one in unity with the Father.

What Paul says is that we men have all received the Spirit of adoption;[1891] but by this he does not mean that the spirit of man -the true Being-which is able, through union, to become one with the Spirit to the point of bearing witness to his divine filiation,[1892] is the adoptive son of God.

Adoption is reserved for the one able freely to adopt filiation to God, namely the soul of man, and that occurs only when, on discovering that the spirit is her very essence, she becomes one with him in eternal, preexisting filiation-not without first having burnt all the chaff that could impede that decision.

It is, in other words, possible to say that it is ignorance of our filiation that condemns us to behavior inconsistent with being a child of God. In truth we are not sons to the extent that we do not recognize that this we are; but once we have witnessed the Spirit, we are able to adopt the fact of being sons of God according to the Spirit, for error is dispelled and we then know again the ontological reality that we have been sons of God since the beginning.

This reconquered reality of being sons of God in the anointed spirit, the inner, preexisting Christ, is described by Paul in himself, in his own existence, and consists of a self-denial that seems at the beginning to be an inner nothingness, a void of being, yet is in reality none other than the opening of the soul’s gates so that the Lord’s anointed, the son of the living God, may be born therein; for he was always near, very near.

Paul explains this mystery thus: I live not now with my own life but with the life of Christ who lives in me.[1893]

II

Just as it is possible to become a son of God through works of justice, and even to be one born of God, so those who do not work for justice are children of the devil.[1894]

Filiation according to one’s works means that our paternity is naturally that of the influence we follow. This is what, according to the fourth Gospel, Jesus explains to a group of followers who believed in him but who, as Jews, are affirming that their father is Abraham and not the heavenly Father of whom Jesus speaks.[1895]

Jesus is spelling out here the difference between paternity according to the world and paternity according to the Kingdom and, for this purpose, taking as the respective fathers the antonyms God (the Kingdom) and the devil (the world). The metaphor or representation is very clear: God, he explains as the love that he, Jesus, asks for himself of all those who follow God and his law as their Father, whereupon he says I have come here from God and I have come from him (v.42).

As for the devil, he describes him as the father of sin, who engenders slavery and temporality (vv. 33-35) and whose kingdom is death, for he was a murderer from the start (vv. 44a) and lives in falsehood, error and lies and not the truth, because he is a liar, and the father of lies (v. 44b).

What Jesus is affirming here is the absolute, unchanging reality of the invisible heavenly Kingdom, the essence of whose unity is the firm cohesive force of love; he is at the same time denouncing the absolute unreality of the fleeting world, subject to temporality, death and error, all of which condemns the world to a second-class order of reality.

This provides a very clear explanation of the nature of the father as mentioned in the logion. Where the father is the world, he who knows or acknowledges the world as his father lives in impermanence and takes this impermanence for an absolute reality, a primordial one, despite the fact that it can be taken only for relative reality. The son of such a father is, in consequence, a slave whose place in the house is not assured.

But the logion also mentions a mother whose worldly children are the fruit of prostitution. This mother is the soul that has not been purified by baptism, the unfaithful woman who turns away from the spirit that inhabits the same house, the spirit to whom she is betrothed.

Being impure, this soul worships the world’s false gods and takes no part in the sacred marriage; consequently, she will engender, not that fruit of heaven, the son of the living God, [1896] but those other children of the world called Unloved [1897] and No-People-of-Mine[1898]. These are the children who will, according to the logion be called the sons of a harlot.

Thus will be accomplished what was said of those days: The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.[1899]

1881 John 1:42

1882 Matt. 16:17

1883 John 21:15-19

1884 Mark 4:14

1885 John 1:12

1886 Mark 4:13

1887 John 16:25

1888 Luke 16:8

1889 Matt. 5:45

1890 Matt. 13:38

1891 Rom. 8:15

1892 Rom. 8:16

1893 Gal. 2:20

1894 1 John 3:9-10

1895 For the whole of the passage that follows, see John 8:31-33 and 39 et seq.

1896 Parallelism with Hos. 2:1

1897 Parallelism with Hos. 2:6

1898 Parallelism with Hos. 1:9

1899 Jer. 31:29

LOGION 106

Jesus said:

“When you make the two into One,

you will become a Son of Man,

and if you say to the mountain,

‘Move from here!’ it will move.”

COMMENTARY

Introduction

Manifest scriptural exegetics teach their understanding that, since the two days in Genesis when God created the heavens and the earth, two irreducible opposite principles have co-existed which, although not coeternal in origin, since the original principle was monist, remained in opposition during the unfolding of the Creation and will persist even after the end of the world as an irreducible and eternal duality.

This all presupposes an original monism and strict dualism as from the act of creation, a dualism that transforms the universe into a battlefield between two principles, good and evil, in a confrontation that invades post-eschatological eternity, even establishing itself therein once and for all as from the last judgment.

In contrast, the hidden exegesis finds duality neither in the origin nor in the completion of creation, existence being between those two.

A seeming duality arises during the transit through the created heavens and earth, if by seeming we understand a duality that arises from the coexistence in tension of two elements that are supposedly opposites: a divine principle that is pre-existing and eternal and a created pseudo-principle which is ultimately destructible, limited and finite.

Our task is to explain in this outline of the hidden exegesis an aspect of the world according to the Gospel in which the two elements in question appear to coexist in opposition to one another. Since neither before the beginning nor upon its completion is there duality, we must assume that the kind of duality we know arises within the creation and that either before or at the moment of the end-time, this duality will again be resolved into unity.

It therefore becomes necessary to clarify the consistency and ultimate destiny, according to the Gospel, of the three orders of duality into which the creation can be subdivided for the purposes of this study: the cosmological duality covered by the general terms God and the world; the duality that may be called anthropological, since it refers to the yawning gulf that separates God and man, and the gnoseological duality, which may be defined as the duality that consciousness establishes in relation to itself.

We shall see too that the Gospel, when studied from the angle of the hidden interpretation, provides the explanation for all the forms of unity that must arise, since the consummation of all things is precisely this: that all forms of duality are temporal, engendered by the creation and will resolve into unity before or at the end-time.

Such is the content of our studies during the course of this commentary. Unity is in fact a pre-existing and indestructible reality, and if we perceive it in terms of pairs of opposites, this is because we have not attained the Plenitude of consciousness, for in that case we would realize that the duality we see consolidates into unity of its own accord.

These forms of unity that arise or, to express them in terms of the logion, this making the two into One in the teachings/doctrine ambience within which the Gospel unfolds, constitute the essence of Jesus’ teaching. They can be summed up as three realizations of unity which are, in turn, subsumed in the unity of God.

God’s unity is affirmed in the Old and in the New Testament and is confirmed by the following sentence: He is One and there is no other.[1900] But God’s unity must be determined in three different spheres:

The unity of the world in the Kingdom of God;

The unity of all men among themselves and of all with the Father;

Man’s unity with himself in the one, universal Self.

THE REALIZATION OF UNITY

Part One

Chapter 1

Unity before the world’s creation and after the end-time

What God created in the beginning, according to the brief passage that tells of the creation, were the heavens and the earth. These are what we call the world.

In their objective sense, the heavens are the firmament and the waters, while the earth is the dry land; however, seen subjectively, the heavens and the earth are two great kingdoms: that of the psyche which, in man, we call the soul, and that of matter, the hylic, which in man we call the body.

Together, objectively and subjectively, these two kingdoms form the entire created world; and yet their existence depends (although they are almost invariably unaware of this) on a kingdom primordial, invisible, spiritual, and uncreate. This primordial kingdom is that of the light, the Word, the Son, and is generally known as the Kingdom of God.

Being two created realms, the heavens and the earth cannot be eternal and are therefore destined to be consumed together with all that pertains to them. This means that the two kingdoms will end one day or, as Jesus puts it, using a verb that marks the temporal nature of the two: Heaven and earth will pass away.[1901]

Concerning this reality that the heavens and the earth are destined to pass away, the scriptures abound in testimonials in both Testaments, but the loveliest, the defining one is to be found in Isaiah’s prophecy: The heavens will vanish like smoke, the earth wear out like a garment, and its inhabitants die like vermin.[1902]

Whether atmosphere, water or soul, the natural destruction that must befall the heavens is by dissipation; matter or body, the earth must suffer the stubborn, unceasing wear and tear of time. As a dweller in heaven and earth, psycho-physical man’s one final destiny is, as we know, death.

2. Facing the consumption of the created, the eternity of the innate. Thus, it is written: The word of the Lord remains for ever.[1903] Coinciding with this, we find in the Old Testament book of Daniel: He is the living God, he endures for ever, his sovereignty will never be destroyed and his kingship never end.[1904] This unquestionably refers to the end of all that was created, for what was never born can never die. Thus, that which was uncreate will come to no end.

This all means that when the realms of heaven and earth have disappeared, the spirit of the dwellers will shine in unity with the living God in his one, eternal Kingdom.

Thus, the hidden exegesis of the Gospel finds no duality either at the beginning or at the end of creation, for the post-eschatological eternity, one outside time, will consist of unity recovered in the Kingdom of God.

All the grains that were sown at the beginning of time will then have produced the fruit of transformation. Here are the words of Saint Paul: We are not all going to die, but we shall all be changed.[1905] Thus, the apostle explained transformation, recognizing oneself as the grain and letting the chaff be winnowed-that is what is asked of us. To this he added that some could attain the blessed state of change before they die.

Change, transformation, that rebirth from among the dead, consisting, as we know, of acknowledging the grain within us, defeats death’s sting; for what dies is the chaff, and death ceases to be death and becomes consciousness resurrected to eternal Life. Eternal life was destined for all grains from the very beginning, for they, the grains, were always endowed with it.

Such is the great change, recognizing the grain that we in essence are, as opposed to the chaff, the outer husk with which we usually identify, thus bringing ephemeral, mistaken duality to an end; for all is one in the unity of the seed sown by the Father.

The presence of the divine seed, the one and only eternal Life implanted in the world, serves as the seal of unity, confirming that all must belong to a single kingdom, that of God, once the world has passed away.

In truth, the world has already passed away for all those who, from the beginning until this day, have realized essential consciousness, the grain. Once all the grains have become revealed, once all that pertained to the psyche has vanished like smoke, once all outer clothing has worn out, Isaiah’s prophecy will have been realized.

This vanishing, this dissolution is the self-renunciation of which Jesus spoke. It arises with the discovery of the truth about the evanescent nature of the psyche; as when the waves of the sea, dying down, go nowhere but settle back into the ocean, disappearing as though they never had been.

As for the worn apparel, it is time that wears it out then burns it until it becomes smoke. With the passing of time it is forgotten and nothing remains of it. As though it never had been.

Once the realms of heaven and earth have passed away, all will have returned to unity in the Kingdom of God.[1906]

3. If the manifest interpretation of the Bible ascribes strict dualism to post-eschatological eternity, it is because of its peculiar understanding of Saint Matthew’s beautiful image of the chaff and the grain with which John the Baptist opens his preaching. We have already spoken about this in other commentaries.

Baptism by fire, the fire that Jesus proclaimed he had come to bring to the earth,[1907] to spread wisdom over the hearts of men, is another way of expressing Christ’s inner purifying action in separating the chaff from the grain, winnowing the harvest to leave the threshing floor clean.[1908]

As we know, the chaff is in every man the outer covering of the grain, while the grain itself is the essential Being, the spirit, the pre-existing eternal Word sown in all men.

The fact that the chaff stands here for all those mortal contents proper to the world with which man clothes himself, while the grain is a metaphor for the eternal seed of God’s Kingdom, is so obvious that in itself it refutes the manifest notion that the purpose of Christ’s winnowing is to consign the chaff-bad men-to the ovens of an eternal inferno outside this world, while the clean wheat grains-the good men-are destined for God’s granary.

Interpretation of the parable of the darnel follows a parallel path. Here, the good seed is the Son of Man-representing the seed that enables man’s regeneration or birth from above-while the darnel is what spreads from the field of the world, growing around the essential seedlings and threatening to stifle them so that they neither can grow nor yield grain.

When, however, the parable says that the angels-the individual spirit, the particle of light in every man-will cast into the fire all things that provoke offenses and all who do evil, the manifest exegesis reads the evil ones where the text speaks of darnel. In so doing, it contradicts the conclusion which the evangelist provides shortly afterwards, saying that all this is like a householder [the Son of Man, the Word that has been sown] who brings out from his storeroom things both new [the good seed] and old [the darnel].[1909]

Chapter 2

The non-duality of the Kingdom

The main purpose of this commentary is to explain that, according to the teaching of the scriptures, there is no duality in the origin of the Creation, nor can there be after the end, for the entire Creation must recover its unity either before or with the coming of this end-time.

During the period or transit of the world, when ingenuous natural opinion and the manifest exegesis regard duality as being real, the hidden interpretation can conceive of it only as a working tool. Given its ephemeral condition, duality is admissible only for purposes of representing the multiple forms in which non-duality manifests, until such time as knowledge has completed its work of removing from consciousness all perception of elements that are not eternal as being individuals endowed with Life of their own, whereas they are in fact merely aggregates to eternal unity.

It is of course true that the account of the creation affirms the co-existence of three realms, two created ones pertaining to the world, the heavens and the earth which will pass away, and one increate and pre-existing, represented by the expression Let there be light. This kingdom, which the Gospels call the Word, cannot be said to be of the world, even if it certainly is in the world. This explains how Jesus could say Mine is not a kingdom of this world.[1910]

This explains, too, why discovering the Word is the task incumbent on the human generation, which is why Jesus said: Happier those who hear the word of God and keep it.[1911]

In subjective terms, the kingdoms of heaven and earth are to be understood as the psycho-physical world that man knows in himself. However, the Kingdom of the Light (the Word, Wisdom-the Spirit-is the unknown which natural psycho-physical consciousness must discover and keep until it bears fruit, with the transformation of that consciousness.

In this transformation of consciousness there is an event that may be readily experienced because it is common: when knowledge appears, ignorance vanishes like smoke, just as Isaiah wrote of the contents of the soul. Knowledge takes the place of ignorance when the latter falls silent.

Where, then, does this ignorance go? Or better expressed, why should ignorance be taken for an objective entity having its own discrete existence, independent of not knowing, i.e. of the ignorant being? Many may see this transformation in terms of the knowledge-ignorance duality, but what is for sure is that it is impossible for both principles to coexist or for there ever to be a tension between them, since they do not know each other, nor can they ever meet. That which passes from ignorance to knowledge is consciousness, and consciousness alone, which explains how the transformation is brought about.

This is explained very well in the Genesis account of the Creation, for when God had said: Let there be light, this light, the Word, was to be understood in its fullest sense as Wisdom, the Son of God. And as the light that shines in the dark.[1912]

This means that darkness, like the abyss, like the unconditioned and abstract space in which the created heaven and earth manifest, are as nothingness for men’s understanding.[1913]

That is why darkness and its subjective correlate, ignorance, can be explained only in negative terms, as the absence of light and of knowledge. Genesis says that the first Day, that of the first uncreated Kingdom, consisted of the presence of this light-knowledge: light (day) and darkness (night).[1914]

Darkness is accorded no principial existence in Genesis: it is in truth non-existent and the so-called light-darkness (or wisdom-ignorance) duality exists only for those who consider the matter ingenuously and in limited terms, disregarding unity and failing to take into account the fact that there is in the Kingdom of God only light-wisdom.

When we speak of the absence of light-wisdom, we are using a truncated and incorrect form of expression since light-wisdom, which is pre-existing, cannot be sometimes present, sometimes absent. It is eternally primal, it is one. Nor could it ever be overcome by darkness; the fact is simply that our consciousness sometimes fails to receive it.

Between receiving and failing to receive light-wisdom is the passing of our consciousness. It belongs to the psycho-physical realm of heaven and earth, which will pass away, unlike light-wisdom, eternal and ever one: The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God remains for ever.[1915]

The life-death duality and its apparent dual correlate life eternal and mortal have already been dealt with in another commentary.[1916] Nevertheless, it may perhaps be useful to go over a brief summary in order to confirm that there are not two orders of life in the Gospel but only one Life in the unity of the Kingdom of God.

When the Gospel refers to the Life (eternal) as opposed to life (mortal), it is in the first instance speaking of Life in itself, intrinsic Life, while in the other case it is speaking of the living.

Life is an intrinsic property of Being (just as heat is a property of fire). Life is an invariable property of its nature. Thus, when the spirit is said to have Life, this does not mean that it has life as an aggregate of its existence as spirit but that Life is in the very nature of the spirit.

When, on the contrary, we say of something that it dies, this does not mean that we see Life dying here, for Life being Life cannot be death. Rather, the Life that was leased temporarily has been taken back from one who, having usufruct of Life, appeared to be living.

As for the living one who appears to die, it is to be understood that he never really lived, his was nothing but an appearance of Life; and since he was never alive he cannot be said ever to have died. The only truth is that he experienced himself as alive when Life endowed him with living, after which he was counted as dead when the Life that had endowed him left him.

With the consummation of the world, Life will remain where it always has been, in the Kingdom of God, while the chaff that appeared to be Life will be recognized as the chaff it always was and will vanish like smoke.

Part Two

Chapter One

The roads to unity

1. The created world is all moving towards attaining oneness in the Kingdom of God. But many are the orders of unity that must be reconciled at the time of the consummation. On the day when the heavens and the earth enter the straits of their passing away, earth will have worn out like old clothing and the things of the psyche-the heavens-will have vanished like smoke.

Yet this happening would mean that the spirit, naked as the fertile grain after the death of the chaff, had regained unity in the Spirit, just as many flames make one fire in the hearth.

Jesus’ whole life, his preaching and his work, was an insistent call for one fire, uniting all men and the Son, and so the Father. This purpose is so plain in the Gospel that many may see no reason to mention it. Nevertheless, it must be understood that the unity demanded by Jesus is not just a matter of solidarity-although that is already something immense-but so thoroughgoing that it entails the destruction of all those psychic and material aggregates that stymie and circumscribe Being.

Jesus called for perfect unity, unity that necessarily involves the downfall of the walls of heaven and earth that hold the spirit captive and prevent his union with the Lord in one single pneumatic Body.

To attain this perfect destruction of all walls, the first unity to be attained, the first fruit of all, is according to the hidden exegesis man’s unity with himself. And here the logion explains how from two to make one.[1917]

2. Several routes lead to man’s unity with himself but the surest one consists of seeking what it is that engendered the two in man. In this connection, the best known two is that to be found in the first chapter of Genesis, where Man, i.e. every single human being, is described as a conjunction of male and female, and is said to have been created according to this design.[1918]

This account tells that Man, created as image, was male, and the words as image mean among other things that he was, like his creator, pure spirit. However, this pneumatic essential man was then clothed in the psychic fields of Paradise with form, as semblance, and this was psycho-pneumatic man, a compound of spirit (male) and soul (female).

This was the first two in man, and its final resolution into being one is the most important task facing every single human being of this long generation. The Scriptures refer in very different ways to this making the two one and the Gospel takes this as the axis of its teaching.

The Spirit, as we already know, is the mystic bridegroom, identical in essence to the Spirit of God with which he is united; and the soul is the bride, consciousness, which, once purified, receives the anointment of the Spirit of God and learns, through knowledge, how to cast down the walls that keep her formally imprisoned in the world.

This destruction is what Jesus calls self-renunciation, complete to the point of death, although strictu sensu it is negation of what the soul imagines herself to be, until she becomes only her very essence, pure Consciousness, spirit.

In the language of the mystics, this inner process has been called the wedding of bridegroom and bride, and Jesus speaks frequently of this wedding, although sometimes in parable. This wedding is the highest and most illustrious form of man’s unity in the world.

3. Another well-known two, famed because it comes from the days of the Garden of Eden, is the two of the soul with herself. Man’s task is, during his sojourn in the world, to convert this into one; a task not devoid of suffering that leads on the third Day to his coming out or resurrection, as Jonah is said to have come out from the whale.

This second chapter of Genesis tells in the form of a difficult and highly cryptic enigma that, in order to dispel the deep sleep of Adam’s consciousness-we speak here of the psycho-physical Adam-God took the bone from his bones and flesh from his flesh and with this so arranged matters that part of this consciousness which manifested only as male should be woman.[1919] Once in possession of this acquired dual sexuality of a psychic order, Adam was endowed with the consciousness held thenceforth by all human beings, and this, it is said, enabled him to give names to all living beings without exception.[1920]

In some primitive Christian texts, now known as Gnostic, the woman, taken from a bone of a soul that was exclusively male, was described as the luminous reflection; here, the holy scribe meant to show that the feminine counterpart of every consciousness is the indirect light of knowledge that illuminates the awakened soul. Doubtless, this turning back on oneself, reflection, which we all know our consciousness to be endowed with, is the factor that distinguishes man from other animal species, proving and characterizing him as rational.

Moreover, the capacity for reflection converts consciousness into a two that divides its unitary being, a two that looks at itself and discovers its nakedness of knowledge in the solitude of being two, separated, isolated from the other consciences of the entire world.

Such is the drama and the glory of the soul; condemned to solitude and thus impelled to seek the oneness it has lost. There opens up for the soul the possibility of knowing good and evil, and then reflection provides the science that is needed to become one in God. This is affirmed by the God of Paradise: See, the man has become like one of us.[1921]

This same door open onto power and freedom leads the soul in its isolation to create from the shadow of its own reflexive light looking into itself, the ego, a parody of the true God who remains unknown to reflection, a Deus inversus that spins a hard worldly spell throughout a man’s life.

This is the serpent of old, the bringer of the curse, man’s sentence, the one whom Jesus called Satan, God’s Adversary, for in his capacity as the psychological ego, the seeming nucleus of the soul, for which purpose he goes disguised as an angel of light,[1922] he proves to be the strongest enemy of the true name of God. That name, God’s name, is, we know, the true absolute I whose nature is not psyche but spirit and truth, as he himself proclaimed in his revelation: I am that I am.

One of the many sobriquets of the ancient serpent is the Prince of this world,[1923] and in naming him thus Jesus confirms that he is a principle, that of evil, that of ignorance of the good. Yet his life span does not predate the creation, nor does it extend beyond the time of the world’s consummation.

When in the fourth Gospel Jesus announces the nearness of the glorification of the Father, he is giving notice that the Prince of this world is to be overthrown.[1924] This means that he will be shown up and found out by everyone, and that simple fact will suffice to dispel him like smoke.

At the heart of the Gospel story Jesus will denounce Judas’ betrayal during the Last Supper; and Judas is, according to the hidden Gospel hermeneutics, taken to be the figure of Satan, that Satan who entered into him, into Judas. When Judas then left the supper, to do quickly what he was going to do, we know that with this the last act of the great tribulation was at hand, the culmination of the first part of the Passion, and that herein Jesus accomplished the greater victory, for he said: Now has the son of man been glorified, and in him God has been glorified.[1925]

4. All this, to explain that when consciousness denounces the imposture of this psychological ego, hitherto seen as the true father, what it is doing is to overthrow God’s Adversary in his very redoubt and, by this act, to glorify the one true God, the Being who alone can be recognized when by direct inner realization, in spirit and in truth, we come to know the purport of those words in the Old Testament: I am that I am.

Now it will be readily understood that with the final consummation of the heavens and the earth, the Prince of this world will be cast into outer darkness-nothingness- dispelled, worn out like the world itself. In the individual, every man’s starting point is when he denounces and condemns the adversary before his own consciousness, an act that is in itself the Glorification of God and the beginning of his own freedom.

This, the Apostle sets out to explain in terms that show this denunciation and condemnation to be part of his idea of the meaning of the work of consummation: After that will come the end, when he [the Christ pre-existing, now manifest] hands over the Kingdom to God the Father, having done away with every sovereignty, authority and power[1926]-meaning, when all those powers opposed to the consummation in the Kingdom of God have been overthrown.

Chapter Two

The forms of unity according to the Gospel

1. The other forms of unity that are to arise, according to the Gospel, before or at the time of the passing away of the heavens and the earth, are easier to understand, although no less easy to fulfil, since their direct realization depends on the two forms of unity which have just been explained.

It is well known that Jesus main purpose, and thus that of the Gospel, was to gather together in unity the scattered children of God.[1927] The children of God to whom John’s text refers are to be understood as the particles of light, the drop of spirit in every man that constitutes his true essential Being-the essence of the soul-which, in every one of us, remains in a state of separation as a result of the egocentric action of the walls of the soul. Ending this captivity by transforming the soul to her essence is the first form of unity.

Then, once recuperated in themselves as light, the gathering together of those who made themselves children of God is the natural consummation of the scattered rays of light, for as it is written: By your light we see the light.[1928]

Jesus must have had in mind the same sense of unity in spirit when he referred to the symbolic heavenly Jerusalem, uttering that cry-a true lament, no mere exclamation, as many have supposed: How often have I longed to gather your children, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings.[1929]

2. There can be no doubt that according to Jesus’ teaching, the gathering together in one of all God’s children is correlative with their union in one sole Spirit, in the Son of Man; and this union in turn is also union with the Father, for the Father and the Son of Man are one.[1930]

To explain the true meaning of this three-in-one, only accomplished in perfect union, Jesus uses several different expressions:

To confirm the union between the Son and the Father:

I am in the Father and the Father is in me.[1931]

The Father and I are one.[1932]

When it is understood that the light of the spirit is one and the same as the light of the Son of Man, who said of himself I am the light of the world, it becomes possible fully to understand that between God, one with the Son, and man’s Being or essence, there is no duality or separation save that which we impose through our own ignorance of unity.

b) To explain the double sense in which the union of men with the Father can be realized, Jesus uses two forms which are both convergent and complementary: the Father as the home of man’s spirit (objective union) and the spirit of man as the dwelling place of the Father (subjective union):

There are many rooms in my Father’s house.[1933]

If anyone loves me he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we shall come to him and make our home with him.[1934]

The bond of this union is the presence of the Spirit (which always begins with an intuition of that presence). When this simple look of God’s is contemplated with love the Spirit arrives at last to take possession of his demesne.

c) to testify for the three signs of perfect unity:

May they all be one, Father. May they all be one in us, as you are in me and I am in you.[1935]

I have given them the glory you gave me, that they may be one as we are one. With me in them, and you in me, may they be […] completely one.[1936]

The Glory that Jesus gives to those who love him is the mantle of light surrounding the Father. In that light of Glory, which is Spirit, in that Glory perfect union becomes possible.[1937]

Confirming this teaching and showing its consummation, its final place, Jesus, once arisen from among us, the dead, completes perfect union and then asks that all his brothers be told: I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.[1938]

3. The expression to ascend to the Father serves to provide a somewhat mythical but accurately described image showing that consciousness regenerated in the Spirit, once all the barriers or psychic limits constricting it have been transcended, becomes one, meaning that it expands infinitely and attains perfect oneness with the Father. As when a perfume bottle is broken and the fragrance, once freed, fills the whole house, so it is when the soul, through self-renunciation, through its spreading, abandons its center and opens its doors to the Spirit. Being wind, it blows where it will in infinite space.

Jesus Christ’s ascension to the Father was a first manifestation, and yet it is open to every one of us in this long generation. Such was Paul’s understanding of this blissful reality that he spoke of the glory which is waiting for us. And since this glory is the revelation of the spirit of man as child of God, he expressed it as the whole creation […] eagerly awaiting for God to reveal his sons.[1939]

With the ascension to the Father the cycle of revelation proffered to all men comes full circle and closes. Its content: that they make themselves children of God in spirit and thus attain perfect unity with and in the Father.

This revelation will in itself be the signal that the end-time has come for heaven and earth, the heavens dispelled like smoke, earth, simply worn out; for it is mere outer clothing. For the hidden exegesis, which sees no strict duality in the Kingdom of God once the creation (heaven and earth) have passed away, little remains to be explained, although, as we shall be seeing, there are still a few items of no small importance.

This is, however, decidedly not the case with the manifest exegesis. According to its doctrine that the chaff in Saint Matthew’s parable told by John the Baptist is not just dust to be blown by the wind but individuals of this human generation who have incurred the imminent wrath of the Lord,[1940] the manifest exegesis expects, after the dissolution of the created world, i.e. in the post-eschatological no-world, a place or places or states designed to inflict on the deceased, after the Judgment, either the fire of purification (purgatory) or the eternal fire of condemnation.

A consequence of this doctrine is that the manifest exegesis postulates strict dualism for all eternity, a dualism that perpetuates the separate existence of good and evil, an eternally dual existence, one that will survive the heavens and earth after their passing.

The third part of this Commentary consists of an investigation of the bases of this manifest doctrine.

Part Three

Chapter 1

The worlds of the dead

Neither in the account that speaks of Elohim nor in the development that speaks of YHWH does the Old Testament mention any place other than the heavens and the earth. Yet the scriptural tradition abounds in references to the existence of places independent of the created realms, the dwelling places of the dead.

The New Testament has two names for these places, Hades and Gehenna. Moreover, the Septuagint uses the Greek word Hades almost invariably to translate the Old Testament term Sheol. Likewise, Gehenna is the Aramaic name corresponding to the Hebrew Ge Hinom, referred to in the Old Testament mainly by the prophets. Although use of the same names is no guarantee of identity of meaning, there do exist important similarities between these places in the two testaments, and these merit examination.

The most significant etymology of the word Hades is the invisible and in Greek literature it serves to designate the place where the dead-described as shades-spend their existence.

The same can be said of Hades as a version of the Hebrew Sheol, since this is the subterranean world that receives the dead.[1941] The most significant thing that can be said of Sheol, the world of the dead, is that it is a place of living beings. Therefore it is not possible to identify Sheol with the visible earthly tombs in which the corpses of the dead are buried, this being only a place for the dead.

This distinction is very important, as it makes for the implication that the Shades that dwell in Sheol are the dead who abandoned their bodies with the death of those bodies. The corpse is entombed while the shade, which is living and invisible -although sometimes glimpsed under special circumstances- goes on living an individual, differentiated life.

There is documentation in the Scriptures concerning this differentiated life. Of the men of Korah it is said They went down alive to Sheol, they and all their possessions.[1942] Of the hordes of Egypt, that The mighty chiefs shall speak of them […] out of the midst of Sheol.[1943] What is more, those living beings that dwell in Sheol have kept their capacity for consciousness, for they are able to recognize the place where they are: You have plunged me to the bottom of the Pit.[1944] They are able to lament, too: He makes no lament, save for his own life.[1945] They even say: Who can avoid the clutches of Sheol?[1946]

Since the dead who go down to Sheol are living-which is what one can deduce from the texts-there can be no doubt that it is only their hylic body that has died and been entombed, so that what can be said to remain alive is consciousness, however you may label it, although deprived of a material body. This consciousness is, according to the Septuagint translation, the breath, the soul, dwelling in this place or state of the living dead known as Sheol.

Given this particularity of being disembodied souls, invisible to our earthly eyes, yet sometimes visible, sometimes barely discernible, the inhabitants of Sheol are sometimes called Shades, like the inhabitants of the Greek Hades. Certainly, shades does not mean invisible, just that these are a subtly visible replica of the bodily form that has been abandoned.

We also know that in Sheol there were two categories of Shades, the refaim, or ghosts, and the elohim or specters of the higher dead close to godly status. Examples of refaim are those inhabitants of Sheol mentioned in the book of Job: The Shades [refaim] tremble beneath the earth,[1947] and one example of the elohim is, as we shall see, the specter of Samuel.

The other detail to be noted is that Sheol, as with the Greek Hades or with Hades in the New Testament, is a state or place not of eternal but limited duration. This makes it not unlike the later Christian purgatory.

This fact of Sheol being the realm where the deceased dwell only transitorily has been denied by historical exegesis, an opinion with no few consequences for the manifest Christian doctrine. It is certain that the secrecy that always surrounded Old Testament conceptions of this order incited the doctors to make pronouncements grounded in opinion, not in knowledge that was always hard to consolidate.

Secrecy concerning Sheol is, in fact, very tight, and only a few more recent scriptural texts or writings already pertaining to late Judaism show that souls do not dwell eternally in Sheol. One example is Psalm 49: [The souls] like sheep to be penned in Sheol, death will herd them to pasture.[1948]

Invocation of the sheep dwelling provisionally in Sheol, invisible to men’s eyes yet occasionally glimpsed as fleeting shadows was, as is well known, an act qualified as necromancy and therefore strictly forbidden-not without reason-by the Law.[1949]

Yet the same Law that forbid invoking the souls in Sheol serves to confirm that from the times of Leviticus until Isaiah there was a deep-rooted popular belief in Israel that the dead could appear as shades or specters, meaning, clothed with that very light subtle body very different from the material body which the Apostle was far later to call the spiritual body, as opposed to the natural body.

This permits us to conclude that the manifest assumption that the Jewish people had no notion of an independent breath, soul, or real Self endowed with autonomous life following separation from the dead body, is unfounded.

Manifest exegetics were much concerned with finding explanations for the reprehensible necromantic action of invoking the dead. In some cases, like that of Saul and the witch of Endor who called up the specter of Samuel, the customary nature of this practice is quite obvious.[1950] What matters for the hidden exegesis is not, however, the ethical cataloging of the practice,[1951] which the narrator probably dramatizes as in so many other passages of scripture, but the doctrine that it reveals. The narrator takes for granted widespread common knowledge that the soul, or the deceased, dwells in Sheol, without possessing any dense bodily clothing, which will have died previously.[1952]

The account opens by confirming that: Now Samuel was dead, and all Israel had mourned him and buried him at Ramah.[1953] This excludes any possibility of Samuel appearing in his mortal body, which had been buried. When, later, the witch invoked the specter of Samuel, what she saw was an elohim arising from Sheol. The specter or pure elohim that now was Samuel must have resembled the living Samuel, for he was recognizable.[1954]

The invocation scene ends with a statement of a general character: Tomorrow [says the specter] you and your sons will be with me [in Sheol].[1955]

Saul and his sons did indeed die in battle against the Philistines and thus go to Sheol, doubtless as bodiless denizens.[1956]

2. The New Testament heir to Seol is Hades,[1957] although it cannot be excluded that Gehenna, dating from the time of the prophets,[1958] may to no small extent come from Sheol.

As is well known, the word Hades makes a reappearance in the texts of the New Testament, but this does not authorize us to suppose that the New Testament scribes gave the same meaning to the word as that accorded by the Old Testament scribes. Moreover, there is reason to think that Jesus’ qualified information allowed him to invoke aspects substantially different from those relating to the traditional Sheol (Hades).

To sum up, we could say that in the New Testament the word Hades designates a place or state in which souls arrive imperfectly purified after the death of the body and are subjected to a purifying fire that is eternal in nature. Once the process of purgation has been completed, the souls separated from their mortal body conclude their transitory stay in Hades and gain access to the presence of God’s Judgment.

If this objective description fits in with what the New Testament has to say about Hades-and this is what we shall be checking on now in terms of the hidden order-it will follow that the New Testament Hades is to a considerable extent the Gospel precursor to the place or state officially given the name Purgatory by Pope Innocent IV at the Council of Lyon (1245).

The fact that Hades and Purgatory are basically identical would have been-and still is-the proof bearing witness to the period of purification necessary for those souls that have not yet attained the knowledge of God during the life of the body, since Hades is mentioned and explained in various canonical New Testament texts.

But when in the closing years of the 4th century Saint Jerome published his Latin revision of the Gospels, a work that was to form part of the Latin Bible known as the Vulgate, he used the Latin word infernus for Hades.

In taking this decision, Jerome may perhaps have been influenced by that opinion present in late Judaism that the souls of the impious are punished in Hades. This is confirmed in the Psalm of Solomon, The inheritance of sinners is Hades, darkness and perdition.[1959] What is certain is that the use of the word inferno to designate Hades brought this place into line with the idea of eternal damnation and, in so doing, caused almost all the New Testament texts that bear witness to the need for action by purifying fire to be interpreted in terms of the hell of damnation.[1960]

The consequences were exceedingly grave for the unity of the manifest Church of Christ, for when twelve centuries later Luther impugned the existence of purgatory, his most important negation was that it is to be found nowhere in the canonical texts of the New Testament.[1961]

Chapter 2

Hades and Gehenna

1. The existence of Hades is, without question, affirmed by Jesus in an important passage from St. Matthew’s Gospel. It is reaffirmed by Peter in his first catechistic teaching reported in Acts where, incidentally, Hades is authenticated via a reference to Psalm 16; and it is confirmed several times in the Book of Revelation.[1962]

The data provided by these materials is the only direct information in the New Testament that we possess concerning Hades. Also, if we add to them indirect sources that speak of fire, brimstone, death, etc. in connection with Hades, it will not be difficult to build up an image based strictly on the revelation obtained from these texts.

When Simon Peter shows that he recognizes Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God, the Master predicts for him the blessing of resurrection in the near future-calling him allegorically son of Jonah. Baptizing him anew with the name Peter it is already plain that the consciousness of Simon is becoming identified with Being, with He-who-IS, the cornerstone whose presence he has begun to intuit. Jesus then explains that on this rock in its collective, universal sense, on the essence or particle of light in each and every man, he, Jesus, the hidden pre-existing Christ, will build the community of the chosen ones: and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.[1963]

Here, Jesus declares the transit through Hades to be a mere passage. Whoever is a guest of Hades can leave through any of its gates once he has, through identification with the pre-existing universal Christ, attained that unity with the Son of Man which Jesus requested in his great prayer to the Father.

But not everyone need make a halt in Hades for, as Peter explains (completing Jesus’ own words that […] there are some of these standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming with his Kingdom[1964]) Jesus himself, as the first among the resurrected was freed from the pangs of Hades.

Likewise, in the psalm invoked by Peter, the psalmist King expresses the hope that through his holiness, and through his having kept the presence of the Lord constantly before him, his soul will not fall into Hades.[1965]

It is the author of the Book of Revelation who explains the most about Hades, and we must therefore study various passages from his writings. When the Son of Man reveals himself to the author as the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the living One, he announces to him that he holds the keys of Death and of Hades.[1966]

This means that he who has attained unity with the Son of Man will not linger in death and in Hades but will leave the ways of these two horseman far behind without being detained by them at all.

The author of the Book of Revelation tells, too, that: So I looked, and behold, a pale horse. And the name of him who sat on it was Death, and Hades followed with him.[1967] The color of the horse is explained by the deathly pallor of corpses, and the fact that Hades follows behind it shows the processional order of the last moments: Death and Hades, followed by the Glory of the Resurrection.

Last of all, in a very long and revealing passage, the Book of Revelation speaks of the final hour of time. Given the difficulty of explaining the matter, the text has to make use of mythical forms. The sea gave up all the dead who were in it; Death and Hades were emptied of all the dead who were in them; and every one was judged according to the way in which he had lived.[1968]

When it says the sea, the text is no doubt referring to the realm of the heavens, in its subjective sense as the waters, the element assigned to souls by the scriptures. The dead abiding in this sea are living souls separated from the body. Otherwise expressed, Death and Hades will give up those living souls which have since the death of the body resided in Hades, the psychic sea.

The hour had struck for the consummation, for the end of the world, the end of time. This is why the author of the Book of Revelation had warned a little earlier that In his presence [that of the One] earth and sky vanished.[1969] This means that the two realms that make up the world ceased to be, just as Jesus had announced in the Gospel when he said: The heavens and the earth will pass away.

Death and Hades are, however, part of these heavens and earth and it is in this psycho-physical world that they have their existence. That is why they are destined to pass away, coming to an end at the same time as the world.

Death passes away, for with the passing of the world death simply ceases to be. In the world is the living, which Death separates from Life, and what must remain when the world passes away is Life, which allows no Death. Thus Death, deprived of its raison d’être, will vanish like fog. After all, it never really existed.

As for Hades, it is a place without being one, invisible, the state or way of being of souls. This means that bodiless souls have their proper place in the realm of souls which, being purely subjective, is neither above nor below, for souls have no abode. Perhaps the best way of expressing its lack of any place would be to say that it is within, its substance being a branch of congregated thoughts and feelings.

And why should this substance of souls call for some place other than the created heavens and earth? In the earth live thoughts and feelings, the substance of embodied souls, and there seems to be no reason why this substance should not live alongside the substance of souls separated from the body.

There is, then, no reason why Hades should have to be a place, rather than a name referring to the psychic sea of souls living disembodied and having so to abide until they complete the purification they did not conclude during their bodily life.

If it is said of Hades that it has gates, it is because when souls come loaded with ephemeral contents, regarded as impurities, they are said to enter, and then, once purification has rid them of everything transitory and mortal, they are said to leave. Moreover, it could be said that, likewise, for as long as what is mortal is housed in souls, those souls cannot emerge to Life; while, once what is mortal has been reduced by fire, Life is recognized and becomes resplendent.

The process of purification while separate from the body need not be-and is not-any different from the purification of the soul united to the body. For as long as the soul has not been purified by the spirit, it suffers the penalty of pain that consists of not seeing God; but this privation is well known to many souls, while others pass through the state without realizing it. Deprivation of seeing God is the main suffering of the soul.

Regardless of the form it takes, the task of the soul consists of self-renunciation, the death of all that is transitory, to the point of becoming nothing but the essence, the spirit which, once anointed by and united with the Spirit, is the hidden Christ himself, eternal and preexisting. This is why it is said of Christ, the lasting inextinguishable light, that he holds the keys of Hades and opens its gates forever, for such is the Judgment. Then Death and Hades were thrown into the burning lake-this burning lake is the second death.[1970]

Death and Hades receive the separated souls, which together form a psychic ocean usually seen as being underground because earth rests above it and because its substance can be seen only in the transparency of matter, just as the substance of the soul-thoughts and feelings-can be known only through the body in which they manifest. Now, this sea rests in turn on the lake of fire, the root, the origin of everything, that can be seen only through the soul once made transparent by purification. Once this mystery of the interpenetration of realms has been understood, it becomes possible to receive the intuition of God’s presence.

Of fire, Deuteronomy tells us: Your God is a consuming fire.[1971] Jesus spoke of this same fire when he said: I have come to bring fire to the earth.[1972] Even those tongues that seemed as of fire that separated and came to rest on the head of each of the twelve apostles when they came together on the day of Pentecost[1973] were doubtless flames of God’s same fire.

The opinion sometimes expressed by the manifest exegesis to the effect that there are two classes of fire, a fire of purification and a fire of punishment, seems to correspond to a very limited understanding of fire, this fire.

The higher fire is always the beautifully destructive action that impels the Wisdom of God. To the soul, this fire always comes as that knowledge which frees her from the burden of not knowing God.

Otherwise expressed, ignorance is the chaff burned in the fire, leaving the grain naked and pure, ready for the consummation. Conversely, knowledge reveals to the grain the beauty of its nakedness which then casts off and throws in the fire the husk that impedes realization.

There are in truth not two ways for the fire, but only one, both converge in the consummation or realization of God’s work.

The same convergence into one way of what had seemed to be two explains the reference in the Book of Revelation to the second death by fire. The text that bears witness to this second death, which is the gateway to realization, appears in the precondition demanded by Jesus: Let him renounce himself, take up his cross and follow me.[1974]

This self-renunciation is one way of explaining the difficult path that involves destroying within oneself everything that is chaff. Then comes the generosity and courage needed to free oneself of all that, for it is all too easy to believe that this chaff is identical to oneself.

This is a frequent experience, one known to many. For every shirt that the soul discards there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, for the death that the soul consigns to the fire seemed good for clothing the grain; it even seemed to be the grain itself and not its outer clothing. The soul did not know this, but then she discovers that her nakedness is the one true splendor.

This is the sense of the parable of the darnel: And they will throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and grinding of teeth. ·Then the virtuous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Listen, anyone who has ears![1975]

The second death of which the Book of Revelation speaks is the death of the soul, the final passage of self-renunciation, announced by Jesus when in the hour of his agony he says: My soul is sorrowful to the point of death.[1976] In truth, once the lake of fire has performed its work, the decisive, difficult and generous hour has struck when the soul must be given up to save Life.

This abandonment of the soul in order to be reborn to Life may be performed as Jesus himself did or may perhaps take place as for the few, the chosen ones who come to the Son of Man before tasting death. This death of the soul must also be undergone after the first death, that of the body. In that case, reserved for the many, the second death, that of the soul, will come through immersion in the infinite lake of eternal fire. This is Hades.

God’s mercy is the eternal work of his consuming fire. That is why Jesus says that the sin against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven,[1977] either in this world or in the next (in Hades).[1978] This means that one who has not received the fiery anointment of the Spirit before dying will receive this baptism with the Holy Spirit and fire[1979] thereafter, in an immense bath of fire prepared for his soul in Hades, the second death, before the blessing to come.

In that infinite ocean, the soul will receive the light of knowledge that she needs to see, through the transparency obtained by her self-denying, the ray of God’s presence that guarantees her bliss.

The Gehenna of the Gospels is a confluence of Sheol and Hades with the tradition that tells of the sacrifice of children burnt in honor of Moloch, a practice that had taken place in the valley of Ben-hinnom. The prophet Jeremiah dedicated one of his finest elegiac poems to these sacrifices.[1980]

Historically, and still in the days of Jesus, Gehenna was the furnace (the Tophet) where the bodies of sacrificial offerings were burned, as well as being the permanent burning place for the garbage of the city of Jerusalem. In that sense, Gehenna serves to describe with great dramatic force a visible fire (not an eternal one) for the perishable hylic bodies that may be immolated therein as a punishment.

In its biblical sense, Gehenna is a close image of the invisible Hades within which an eternal, invisible purifying fire consumes souls until they expel the worm that does not die. There are great similarities between this version of Gehenna and Hades.

The boiling lake of Hades corresponds to a furnace-a Tophet-and the sulfur that regenerates souls used to set fire to the lake becomes the salt that gives inner consistency to the unceasing fire of knowledge, in Gehenna.

As we can see, not one single reference to Gehenna affirms or suggests that it will last forever, unless the fire burning therein is interpreted as being the place’s eternity. But this is the invisible fire which, being the Spirit of God, was never created nor will it ever go out. The visible fire in the furnace is not, however, eternal and can be easily extinguished.

Given all these factors, there is good reason to wonder how for so many centuries manifest Christian exegetics, with such a panoply of wise and brilliant scholars, should not have thought of discerning the difference between the invisible fire that performs its work of purification in Gehenna and the necessarily transitory character of a created place in which a visible natural fire is kept lit, a fire reserved not for souls but for corpses.

Even the Athanasian symbol does not succeed in expressing what the manifest exegesis appears to claim it does, if it is supposed to affirm an eternal inferno, for it says: And they that have done good shall go into life everlasting, and they that have done evil into everlasting fire.[1981] The real meaning of this is that they who have done evil will go to purification by the fire of the Spirit, which is eternal, until they are returned to the resurrection and the Life.

It will be important to revise a number of scriptural texts which the manifest exegesis regards as decisive for the dogma of the existence and eternity of the hell of eternal damnation. Here are some of these texts.

Old Testament

Be very humble, since the punishment for the Godless is fire and worms.[1982]

According to the hidden exegesis, this text explains that humility and the abasement of the soul (self-denial in Jesus’ language) is the only way of avoiding the painful action of the purifying fire before gaining eternal Life. We know that the fire is eternal and that the worm never dies, but the eternity of the punishment is never mentioned in the text.

Moreover, the worm or worms mentioned here seem to be those engendered by the putrefying body, the corpse thrown into the Tophet of the visible Gehenna. Neither in these worms nor in this fire can any signs of eternity be descried.

Sinners in Zion are struck with horror and fear seizes on the godless. Which of us can live with this devouring fire, which of us exist in everlasting flames?[1983]

No soul will be able to live with the eternal fire, for the flames of this fire consume everything in the soul that is chaff, sin, impiety. They consume all the chaff, and once the soul is naked, it attains the second death. Then the grain, now freed, is reborn from among the dead.

And on their way out [from the presence of the Lord] they will see the corpses of men who have rebelled against me. Their worm will not die nor their fire go out; they will be loathsome to all mankind.[1984]

Those who prostrate themselves to worship the Lord are the particles of light, they are the grains that have attained perfect nakedness. To these it is given to see, on their way out, meaning, if they come out from themselves, the corpses-that which has died, the winnowed chaff-of those souls that were unwilling to acknowledge the Lord as their true Being.

These souls clothed in chaff took the psychological ego, the Adversary for their true Self, their real I. If it is said of this worm that it will not die, it is because it never lived, it never existed except in man’s misinterpretation. What does not exist cannot die, and only when its real non-existence is discovered is it cast out into the nothingness of what was not created.

This is what Jesus explained when he referred to the worm that does not die, meaning the ancient serpent, whose figure and representation were assigned to Judas by the Gospel, saying: Now sentence is being passed on this world; now the Prince of this world is to be overthrown.[1985] He did not say, now he will die, but now he will be overthrown, now he will be cast out. By this he meant that, once he had been acknowledged to be non-existent, this deathless worm would no longer have any place in the world.

But… what does it mean to be cast out of the world? Out of the world can only mean cast out from the Kingdom of the Son who is unborn, who is not of the world; either that, or it refers to the Abyss and the darkness above which were created the heavens and the earth-the world-and which were reputed to be nothingness. Into this nothingness, into this Abyss, outside the created world, is cast the worm that does not die, the Prince of this world, once his non-existence has been shown up by the knowledge of the inextinguishable fire.

All of this is confirmed by the Book of Revelation, which turns out to be less mythical here than the prophet and the Gospels: the Dragon, the ancient Serpent who is the Devil, Satan (one and the same) was cast into the Abyss of outer darkness and left in chains there for a thousand years, meaning, for an almost uncountable period of time, until the coming of the new generation which is perhaps to follow, once these heavens and earth have passed away.[1986]

Of those who lie sleeping in the dust of the earth many will awake, some to everlasting life, some to shame and everlasting disgrace.[1987]

If we did not know Saint Matthew’s image of the winnowed chaff and the grain, we might think that Daniel is speaking here of men completely good and completely bad. But John the Baptist and perhaps Daniel too seem to get their image from the prophet Isaiah: You shall thresh and crush the mountains [the human beings], and turn the hills [the false accretions] to chaff. You shall winnow them [with a threshing sled] and the wind will blow them away, the gale will scatter them [all the chaff, the accretions that are not the naked grain].[1988]

New Testament

Go away from me, with your curse upon you, to the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.[1989]

This is the most important textual statement taken as a guide by manifest exegetics as guaranteeing eternal damnation. Once again, as with the Athanasian Symbol which, after a fashion, implicitly reproduces this passage, what is affirmed here is the eternity of the divine fire, not the eternity of the punishment.

We also know from other texts that this fire, the fire of knowledge, was prepared so that the Devil and his angels should be cast into the outer darkness of the Abyss, thus freeing the children of the light from the curse of captivity.

Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; fear him rather who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna.[1990] See Luke: Do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that can do no more. ·I will tell you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has the power to cast into Gehenna. Yes, I tell you, fear him.[1991]

It is God’s Adversary who has the power to bring soul and body to perdition in Gehenna. The body will burn in the Furnace of the visible Gehenna, while the soul which proved unable to achieve self-renunciation during the life of the body will be cast into Gehenna, where the eternal, invisible fire that corresponds to the invisible Gehenna and the invisible soul, will complete its work of consuming all that is inessential.

And if your hand should cause you to sin, cut it off [if your foot should cause you to sin, cut it off, if your eye should cause you to sin, tear it out…] it is better for you to enter into life maimed than to have two feet [hands, eyes] and be thrown into Gehenna where their worm does not die nor fire go out. For everyone will be salted with fire.[1992]

Saint Mark’s text skillfully alternates its references to the visible Gehenna outside Jerusalem, where the body of an evildoer could be thrown, with allusions to the invisible Gehenna, where the undying worm can be expelled from the soul, that it may receive the bath of purifying fire which, being deficient in salt, it so needs.

Neither the deathless worm nor the undying fire tell of eternal damnation either in Gehenna or in Hades, but of a way to the regeneration of the soul separated from the body through final purification by God’s fire, the source of knowledge.

This cannot be stressed enough. The hell of damnation defended by the manifest exegesis is the outcome of a fallacious reading of the Gospel texts. This preponderantly irrational historical error has been compounded by the misreading which Jewish schools practicing manifest exegetics have taught concerning Old Testament texts, sometimes announcing an eternal Seol or Ge-hinnom.

The torments of the Gospel fire taught by Jesus are birth pains that concern the whole of Creation, not the irremediable punishment of sinners. A sound proof of this is to be found in Saint Mark’s text in which the fire of Gehenna is qualified as a means of salting.

The Scriptures state that the fire brought by the knowledge of God must be salted within us to enhance the consistency of the purification and the persistence of the knowledge instilled. In Saint Matthew’s words, Jesus’ disciples were so rich in pure and consistent salt as to be the salt of the earth.[1993] This enriched purification of souls is the purpose of the fire of Gehenna.

The salting of sacrificial victims was Law according to Leviticus: You must salt every oblation that you offer, and you must never fail to put on your oblation the salt of the Covenant [of unity] with your God.[1994] Mark adds: Have salt in yourselves. It is as though he were saying that man’s direct realization does not consist solely of receiving God’s fire but of becoming one with that fire, for that is the purpose of the eternal fire: to attain everlasting alliance (unity).

Colophon

The ascent to the mountain of God

The Man known to consciousness and referred to as the soul is merely a representation, an image of the true, essential man: the spirit.

The spirit is the knower and the soul is the known; a duality that is resolved into unity only when the knower discovers the image, the soul, as image and not as the self, which he had hitherto believed to be the case.

From this point on, the enigma ceases and with it, the mirror. This is what the logion explains as making the two into One. Then, it says, the remaining One following the resolution into unity, is the Son of Man. Consciousness of being is then that of being the Son of Man.

Perfect unity means that when there is hunger, thirst, solitude, nakedness, illness or captivity, it is invariably the Son of Man who is hungry, thirsty, lonely, naked, sick or a prisoner.

This is something that must be seen, something one must be able to see, directly, with the consistency gained by the knower from the salting. And it is to be seen, even through the transparency of things, for this is the first sign of God’s presence.

When man discovers this blessed presence where he turns his attention, what he beholds is God’s simple beholding, meaning, the Son of Man. The hunger, thirst, solitude, nakedness, sickness or captivity which he then discovers… is the Son of Man on whom he has directed his beholding, and this too is the Son of Man who governs the gaze of the beholder.

Within unity there is no one other than the Son of Man, for unity is the redemption of the entire Creation into unity, in the realization of oneness with the Son of Man.[1995]

Only thus, with the striking of the fated hour for the dissolution of all created things, will Jesus’ great Priestly Prayer be accomplished:

…That they may be [perfectly] one

as we are one.

With me in them and you in me.[1996]

Once the heavens have dispelled, as the mere mist and smoke they are, once the earth has been laid waste, scorched by the corrosive action of time to the point of no longer being, the creation will have passed away.

The hidden mountain, the Holy Place, where man’s true self must ascend and behold with the eyes of transparency, to adore in spirit and in truth, will then move, impelled by the fire of God, and will cover the sea of souls.

This is the inner mountain where unity has reigned and will forever reign, creation or no creation, this is the mountain that the Psalmist yearned to ascend when he sang:

This is my king, installed by me on Zion, my holy mountain.[1997]

1900 Mark 12:32; Deut. 6:4, 4:35; Isai. 43:10-13

1901 Matt. 24:35

1902 Isai. 51:6; 2 Pet. 3:10; Rev. 20:11

1903 1 Pet.1:25

1904 Dan. 6:27

1905 1 Cor.15:51

1906 In the Old Testament, the heavens are known as the second kingdom, thus pointing out that there are two classes of waters, those above and those below the firmament. Understood subjectively, this classification corresponds to the rational soul (rûach) and the instinctive soul (nefesh). Matthew’s speaking of the kingdom of heaven as though it were God’s dwelling place gives rise to some confusion. The Kingdom of God is the primordial Kingdom, increate, its expression being the light, the Word, the Son; and it can even be said that the Kingdom of the Father, which is ineffable, IS, since it is Being (He-who-IS).

1907 Luke 12:49

1908 Matt. 3:12

1909 Matt. 13:36-43, 52

1910 John 18:36

1911 Luke 11:28. Keep it means keeping the Word within ourselves as the good seed from which to obtain the fruit of realization.

1912 John 1:5. The light which Genesis mentions as being before the Creation (Gen.1:3) is what the fourth Gospel says was in the Word, which had life in him, and that light was the life of men. It is of this light that Jesus is speaking when he says I am the light of the world (John 8:12). This light, God’s Glory and Wisdom, has nothing to do with the light of the sun or the moon, for before these two lamps were created, the Light already was.

1913 This is why in 2 Mac. 7:28 the Creation is described as being ex nihilo: […] for God made the world from what did not exist.

1914 Gen. 1:5 speaks of Day in the same subjective, spiritual sense that will be used in later passages: YHWH, your yourself are my lamp, my God lights up my darkness (2 Sam. 22:29) or [It is he] who makes both dawn and dark (Am. 4:13).

1915 Isai. 40:8

1916 Logion 98

1917 The logia that speak of this progression towards unity are many. They include logion 4, 11, 22, 23, 30, 48, 61 and 75.

1918 Gen. 1:27

1919 Gen.2:21-23 The special characteristic of the symbols of the symbols of psycho-pneumatic sexuality used in the Scriptures to describe its transformations is to be male in regard to the world and, conversely, to be female-woman, bride-when in search of the sacred spouse, the spirit. This accords with the two modes or mystic nights of the soul, active when affirming, passive when in self-renunciation and surrender. The final act of this surrender, culminating in complete humility, is when the pure soul is transformed into the virginal mother of Christ, absolute and pre-existing. For the Gospel of Thomas, this mystery, which consists in changing from being woman, the spouse who adores the spirit, to the mother of the Son of God newborn in her, is the transmutation of consciousness, when the latter ceases to be woman and is transformed to male. We shall, however, have occasion to study this last transformation, which represents the final goal of the task reserved for mankind.

1920 Gen. 2:18-20

1921 Gen. 3:22

1922 2 Cor. 11:14

1923 John 12:31, 14:30, 16:11

1924 John 12:31

1925 John 13:31

1926 1 Cor. 15:24

1927 John 11:52

1928 Ps. 36:9

1929 Matt. 23:37

1930 John 10:30

1931 John 14:11

1932 John 10:30

1933 John 14:2

1934 John 14:23

1935 John 17:21

1936 John 17:22-23

1937 Glory is one single indivisible light. This, Peter learned when, following the Transfiguration he wanted to make separate tents for the Glory of Jesus, Moses and Elijah, He did not know what he was saying. (Luke 9:33).

1938 John 20:17

1939 Rom. 8:18-19

1940 Since Old Testament times, the wrath of God has been the coming of his holy fire, to prepare with its purifying anointment the revelation of the pre-existing Christ present in every man. This is in general known as the messianic era, but it relates to individuals and only he who reveals Christ in himself is messianic. (Num. 11:1)

1941 The term subterranean world connects the Hebrew Sheol with the invisible subterranean world of Ancient Egypt.

1942 Num. 16:33

1943 Ezek. 32:20-21. For the complete passage: 32:17 et seq.

1944 Ps. 88:6

1945 Job 14:22

1946 Ps. 89:48

1947 Job 26:5; Isai. 14:9 On your account, Sheol beneath us is astir to greet your arrival.

1948 Ps. 49:15-16. Note the similar metaphorical use of sheep as souls in the Gospels of Saint Matthew and Saint John. Also: Enoch 22; 51:1; 102:5; 103:7. According to Josefo, this is what the farisees and the essenians thought.

1949 Lev. 20:6; Deut. 18:10-11.

1950 1 Sam. 28:1-19 gives the full account.

1951 The manifest explanation vacillates between divine intervention, diabolical intervention and trickery on the part of the woman.

1952 Given its opinion of what occurred, namely that God certainly permitted the appearance of Samuel’s soul, the interpretation given by manifest theology denies the veracity of the practice of necromancy, while leaving intact the popularity of the doctrine concerning souls in Sheol.

1953 1 Sam. 28:3

1954 1 Sam. 28:13-15. Samuel’s question to Saul: Why have you disturbed my rest, conjuring me up? is the same as might be received by today’s necromancers or spiritualists. However, the fact that Samuel’s shade or specter was recognized by the witch as being an elohim (a god) and not one of the rifaim, or common shades, represents an important difference.

1955 1 Sam.28:19. It is to be hoped that no one should think they would be with him as corpses but as psychic shades.

1956 1 Sam. 31:1 et seq.

1957 In adopting the Greek name Hades, the New Testament follows the example of the Septuagint.

1958 Gehenna is the Aramaic name for the valley of Ben Hinnom. This alludes to the valley of that name near Jerusalem where in the reigns of Ahab and Manasseh the Jews had immolated their children in braziers (Tophet) in honor of the idol Moloch. Josiah declared this place to be unclean and ordered that all garbage should be thrown there, including corpses, etc. This practice continued for a long time so that the valley came to be the sewer and cesspit of Jerusalem. Permanent fires consumed the garbage and the prophets, especially Isaiah and Jeremiah, took this name as a metaphor for Sheol.

1959 Psalms of Solomon 14:9

1960 Strictly speaking, using the common name inferno, the lower, subterranean world, the Church was designating a number of distinct places: the inferno of the condemned, purgatory, the limbo of the children and the limbo of the patriarchs-already cancelled.

1961 Luther: Retractionem purgatorii (1530)

1962 Matt. 16:18; Acts 2:24; Ps. 16:10; Rev. 1:18, 6:8, 20:13-15, 21:8. To these, add the lament for the imperfections of Capharnaum (Matt. 11:23).

1963 The Church claimed for itself the ekklesia built by Christ and there can be no denying this in regard to the manifest Church; but the elect, the chosen ones in the hidden sense are the community of particles of light, the spirit present in every man.

1964 Matt. 16:28

1965 Ps. 16:8-10; Acts 2:25-28

1966 Rev. 1:18

1967 Rev. 6:8

1968 Rev. 20:13

1969 Rev. 20:11

1970 Rev. 20:14

1971 Deut. 4:24

1972 Luke 12:49

1973 Acts 2:3-4

1974 Matt. 16:24; Mark 8:34; Luke 9:23

1975 Matt. 13:42-43

1976 Mark 14:34

1977 Sin should be taken to mean offense, failing, deficiency.

1978 Matt. 12:32

1979 Luke 3:16

1980 Jer. 7:28-31, 8:3, 19:3-9

1981 Athanasian Symbol (Quicunque)

1982 Ecclu 7:17

1983 Isai. 33:14

1984 Isai. 66:24

1985 John 12:31

1986 Rev. 20:1-3

1987 Dan. 12:2

1988 Isai.41:15-16

1989 Matt. 25:41

1990 Matt. 10:28

1991 Luke 12:4-5

1992 Abbreviated version of Mark 9:43-49

1993 Matt. 5:13

1994 Lev. 2:13

1995 Matt. 25:31 et seq.

1996 John 17:22-23

1997 Ps. 2:6

LOGION 107

Jesus said:

“The Kingdom is like a shepherd who had a hundred sheep.

One of them, the fattest, went astray.

He left the ninety-nine and sought the One[1998]

until he found it. Having gone to so much trouble,

he said to the sheep:

‘I love you more than the ninety-nine’.”

COMMENTARY

In this logion, the Gospel of Thomas gives us a new version, expressing the hidden meaning of the parable of the lost sheep, complementing the two by Matthew and Luke which are to be found in the canonical Gospels.[1999]

1. The sheep as the image of the soul, whether essentialized or not, is in the Scriptures the universal symbol used to designate man as a member of a species that tends to wander, out of weakness or helplessness, when living without a shepherd; but God has made provision for them to be gathered together at the end of time as his very own flock, that of his sheepfold.

The oldest biblical expression for the needy soul seeking to feed in the pastures of the Lord is to be found in Abel, the shepherd.[2000] This is indeed the first time that we come upon the figure of the spiritual pastor. He is followed by all the patriarchs of Israel who pastured sheep, from Abraham to Moses.

Subsequently, in the biblical tradition of prophecy, the conviction appears that God is the only good shepherd. This comes at the time of complaints about the work of the so-called shepherds of Israel who, it was claimed, feed themselves.[2001]

The texts of the prophets dedicated to proposing the Lord’s direct and complete substitution for human shepherds are very clear. They plainly mean an end to such defective intermediaries between man and God in matters touching the religious sustenance of the sheep.

It is in this sense that Ezekiel’s accusations are to be understood: The Lord says this: I am going to call the shepherds to account. I am going to take my flock back from them and I shall not allow them to feed my flock. In this way the shepherds will stop feeding themselves. I shall rescue my sheep from their mouths; they will not prey on them any more.[2002]

In the New Testament revelation, Jesus, being at one and the same time the Christ manifest and hidden, claims not only to be the Good Shepherd chosen by God, the shepherd who knows his sheep, but the gate of the sheepfold, the gateway known to the sheep.

In the historic process of interiorization which we are studying in order to explain the sources of knowledge needed for the religious realization of mankind, the manifest Christ is the true Shepherd, while the hidden Christ is the inner gateway within every sheep. The hidden Christ is in fact the gate that every sheep must pass through in order to take hold of the Life which the Son of Man gives in accordance with the will of the Father with whom he is one.[2003]

This is the stage at which we are (and shall remain for many centuries), the stage that must be understood by those who worship God in spirit and in truth.

The good shepherd who must be followed until one becomes part of his sheepfold is the hidden inner Christ, who appears both as the gateway and as the shepherd whom every sheep must discover and recognize as being his very self, from all eternity. This recognition is the only sign that can save from hesitation between belief and disbelief, it is the recognition that saves from the abyss opened up by external or superficial shepherds between man’s being and the merciful God waiting at the gateway and saying I am you.

Once this has been understood as the lesson to be learned by the soul, it will become far easier to explain the hidden meaning of the parable of the lost sheep.

2. The sheep mentioned by Jesus in his parable are all the sheep, all the souls of this long human generation. They are described as being a hundred, which is a perfect[2004] number, because it is inclusive. It does not, however, imply that they themselves are perfect, for if that were so, they would not be involved in this long human generation.

The sheep are scattered, separated from one another; their bodies, being impenetrable, separate them wherever they may be on earth. Some wander over the mountains and high passes, others weaker, sicker or injured, seek pasture in the desert, but there is no one to care for the flock and no one comes looking for them.

Sometimes, however, without it being possible to discern for what reason, one of these sheep goes off looking for true paths, gets lost and goes astray, not knowing the sheepfold to which it wants to return. These sheep suffer hunger and thirst for justice and search conscientiously. And this is the finest and most effective way of praying to be reunited with the Father.

These are the sheep that receive the presence of the Spirit that is within them, whereupon he reveals himself as the eternal dweller in his sanctuary. Anointment is the means used by the Spirit to seek and, in the end, to find the sheep that had gotten lost and gone astray.

Thanks to the sustenance received from the Father, the lost sheep is now the fattest and strongest of the flock, the one which the shepherd justly keeps and puts out to pasture.[2005] The Evangelist says that the Good Shepherd then lays the sheep across his shoulders, as they say that Jesus took up his cross, in order to bring it to the mountain of Life.

Perhaps Luke means that, being the fattest, the time has come for this sheep to face the sacrifice.[2006] But the sacrifice of a soul consists of dying daily to the world, little by little, until she has become pure essence. Such is the sacred wedding of the soul, that may be understood as her death, yet is the first step towards her resurrection in spirit.

According to the hidden exegesis, the soul once converted into spirit by becoming her own very essence is the soul that has made the two into one, thereby attaining unity. That is why the logion speaks of this realized sheep as the One (alone), for although the sheep lost and found may be many, they are always one in the unity of the Father.

On the other hand, however, on the left, is the place for those that have not found unity; and there we find the goats which the shepherd separates from the Unique sheep.[2007] These are the sheep (goats) that did not even know they were lost or had gone astray, for they never even imagined during their wanderings in the desert or the mountains that a blessed home awaited them on their conversion (return). These are the ninety nine sheep, the imperfect ones which did not attain the perfection of being unified.

The logion closes this parable with the shepherd’s confession of his matchless love for the sheep that found Oneness. Matthew explains the Father’s will that all souls which were born from above and have made themselves small, all those souls newborn in the Spirit, are to have eternal Life and enter the Kingdom.[2008]

At the close of the parable Luke stresses the joy in the Kingdom of the Father at the return of a soul that had become lost and had then strayed through the soul’s vast range of possibilities, presaging its way to conversion.

Very different from this converted sheep are the ninety-nine which, like so many sinners who gathered around Jesus to hear him without realizing that they themselves were sinners,[2009] remained unaware that the time had come to wake up to their being lost and in need of conversion.

Those sheep, the ninety-nine, are not yet of the true fold; yet they will be led there, and they will hear the shepherd’s voice and be united with the same flock, for there can in truth be only one flock and one shepherd.[2010]

This is what Jesus pointed out in his sermon on the work of the Son in the fourth Gospel: the One sheep, having attained perfection, will rise from her worldly grave and be resurrected to the Life, while the imperfect ninety-nine will rise when they hear the voice of the shepherd, for a resurrection of justice, meaning a bath in the everlasting salted fire of purification until they attain perfection; for that is the meaning of the judgment.[2011]

When the time comes for conversion, there must be no forgetting that the good shepherd is the one who stands in the midst of the scattered sheep,[2012] the God waiting patiently at the gate within every one of us, for He is the gateway.

1998 “The One” (l’Unique) according to Philippe de Suarez. The Brill group and BJ read “that one”.

1999 With a number of variations. See Matt. 18:12-14, Luke 15:3-7

2000 Gen. 4:2

2001 Ezek. 34:2. Writtings of the prophets concerning this transformation may be seen in Isai. 53:6; Jer. 23:1-3; Zech. 13:7; Ezek. 34:1 et seq.; Ps. 119:176.

2002 Ezek. 34:10

2003 As set out in John 10:7 et seq.

2004 A hundred is the number representing the perfect harvest, i.e. those who hear the Word and understand it, as explained in the parable of the sower. Matt. 13:23.

2005 GT L.107

2006 Ezek. 34.16 ; Luke 15:4-5, 23

2007 Matt. 25:32; Ezekiel speaks sometimes of rams and he-goats (Ezek. 34:17)

2008 Matt. 18:3

2009 Luke 15:1

2010 John 10:16

2011 John 5:28-29

2012 Ezek. 34:12

LOGION 108

Jesus said:

“He who drinks from my mouth will become like me,

and I will become him,

and the hidden things will be revealed to him.”

COMMENTARY

The logion is concerned with the realization of perfect unity, which Jesus called for in his Priestly Prayer: May they be completely one.[2013]

The realization of perfect unity is the task assigned to mankind, and work towards the accomplishment of that purpose must be the main aim of life, which will otherwise be largely meaningless.

All of this follows quite obviously from the doctrine of the Gospels; and for some, the whole logic of reality clearly points in the same direction: the true Way of man is to realize complete unity. Failure to encompass this purpose must mean that whatever steps a man takes in life will be devoid of a higher, redeeming plan; this amounts to living in a void, without the inspiration that leads to the blessed deed of accomplishing the work of unity for which all men were born.

The realization of perfect unity can be accomplished only if the steps towards that unity are well directed towards revealing what lies hidden: the immanent, transcendent Son of Man.

If the Son of Man is said to be hidden, it is because the consciousness of natural man remains unaware of him, despite the fact that he is man’s very self. To reveal him means to evoke the capacity to see the Son of Man with the eternal eyes of knowledge as the very self of all men. This is to discover the one true link with perfect unity.

Discovery is not realization. We discover with the higher vision of knowledge, yet, at this still superficial level of knowing, many things must die before we can attain consummation. The true knowing that may then follow is identical to being, it is a deep knowledge that entails direct realization. From that there follows a transformation that makes manifest that which was hidden.

Transformation is the realization whereby everyone comes to be what he is and not what he wished to be or thought he was. This is a being outside time. It is to know and directly to fulfil the true name of God: I am that I am; the name which the Son of Man rightfully claims for himself when he says: I am.

In the New Testament revelation, this direct realization is called eating, or also drinking, for both forms concern the food of Life which man must receive and assimilate in order to arrive at that transformation which makes manifest the real Being, until then hidden. This realization is the bread of heaven which every man needs to receive daily in order to become transformed; it is the water that wells up for eternal Life when sought in copious fountainheads, the water which calms thirst forever.

Realization is also served by spirit and Life,[2014] the true flesh and blood, of which it was said: If you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you will not have Life in you.[2015] The Son of Man serves as food and he bleeds in truth, that the unity which consists of realizing oneself to be I am that I am may be attained by all.

To eat and to drink the spirit and the Life, to receive and to assimilate the Son of Man-the Lamb of God-to the point of becoming one, that is what the logion expresses as to drink from the mouth of Jesus the Living One. As it was written in the Gospel, the piece of bread dipped in the dish and given by Jesus served to cast the Prince of this World into outer darkness. This expulsion is the necessary precondition for the Glory that the Father gave the Son to engulf man and make him perfectly one.[2016]

This is what Jesus confirmed on that night when Judas-Satan took the piece of bread dipped in the dish that Jesus gave him, this was what made it possible for the rabbuni then to say: Now has the Son of Man been glorified, and in him God has been glorified.[2017]

The explanation of perfect unity which the logion provides is two-way: He will become like me and I will become him.

Glory is the cloak of light in which the Father is wrapped, and consequently the Glory, his radiant splendor, is the Son, whose nature, being identical to that of the Father, is light and wisdom. That is why the author of the Letter to the Hebrews says that the Son is the radiant light of the Father’s Glory[2018]-and so, Glory being radiance-the Father is light of light.

All of this is known to manifest exegetics. However, what we are endeavoring to speak of here is not knowledge, since such knowing is only the first step towards cognizance, while here we are speaking of being, of becoming one, through feeding on and assimilating the radiance of Glory which is the Son of Man. This consummation must have begun to take place in Paul when the Apostle said: I think that what we suffer in this life can never be compared to the glory, as yet unrevealed, that is waiting for us.[2019]

The Paul who suffered at that time was, it seems, those contents of himself still separated without being consumed in unity; and the Glory perceived or assimilated was the Son of Man already manifest within him, even if he was only at the early stage of lifting a corner of the veil.

Of the two kinds of unity mentioned by the logion, the one that explains how I [Christ] will become like him is the subjective view that John the Baptist speaks of when he says: He must grow greater, I must grow smaller.[2020]

The Baptist was sometimes taken by the Evangelists for a figure of man’s natural consciousness, but one already alert, awakened, vigilant; the consciousness in many of us that does not want to stay asleep, but to speak for the light,[2021] so that many should come to believe in the light.

It is, however, this natural consciousness that must in the end die, must grow smaller, that the light of the Glory hidden within us since the beginning may become manifest. This is what Jesus meant when he affirmed: I have given them the glory you gave to me.[2022]

If this Glory given us by the Son of Man, which shows us to be identical to him in essential nature, had not always been present in us, although hidden, realization of this manifestation of Glory, which is unity, would not be possible; for unity implies limitless radiance. Our true nature cannot be transformed, only revealed.

When the text says that the Son of Man gives us glory, what this means is that he enables the transition, so that the seed hidden within us-hidden, just as the Son of Man’s presence is hidden from our natural consciousness-may become the fruit of transformation. This is what the Baptist explained when he warned: A man can lay claim only to what is given him from heaven.[2023]

This perhaps needs to be stressed, because it is of primordial importance: transformation consists of the revelation of the hidden Glory, which is like an image that cannot be distinguished under muddied water. Only the action of faith and knowledge can open up the way to its manifestation; yet the image is not transformed, it becomes lifted up to the surface. The Apostle explains this well: But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory.[2024]

In the language of Saint John, this growing smaller that the Son of Man may grow greater becomes a torrent of Glory that floods man’s consciousness and transforms him. Jesus explains it thus: If anyone loves me he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we shall come to him and make our home with him.[2025]

When the Father and the Son, who are one, make their home, this means that the good seed that was sown in the beginning has manifested at last, and borne fruit. The soul that has renounced herself and become as nothing will have received the light to become as all and to fulfil the word of the Living Jesus: I will become him.

The other, objective, sign of perfect unity which the logion mentions consists of acquiring that subtle, spiritual beholding that enables vision in transparency. Jesus, the Living One, describes this sign of unity: He will become like me.

For this sign of unity, consciousness must directly realize the fullness of him who fills the whole creation,[2026] thus knowing the blissful reality that the entire universe is full of God’s presence.

The author of the Letter to the Ephesians must have contemplated this presence and thus come to behold the love of Christ (hidden and manifest) which is beyond all knowledge, whereby we may be filled with the utter fullness of God.[2027]

The grass withers,

the flower fades,

but the word of our God remains for ever.

2013 John 17:23

2014 John 6:63

2015 John 6:53

2016 John 17:22-23

2017 John 13:31

2018 Heb. 1:3

2019 Rom. 8:18

2020 John 3:30

2021 John 1:7

2022 John 17:22

2023 John 3:27

2024 2 Cor. 3 :18

2025 John 14:23

2026 Eph. 1:23

2027 Eph. 3:19

LOGION 109

Jesus said:

“The kingdom is like a man who had a hidden treasure

in his field without knowing it. And after he died, he left it to his son. The son did not know (about the treasure). He inherited the field and sold it. And the one who bought it went plowing and found the treasure. He began to lend money at interest to whoever he liked.”

COMMENTARY

With few differences in relation to other parables the logion repeats the basic hidden doctrine proclaimed by the Gospel: in himself every man has the true eternal treasure, the source of bliss-he has it in his field-yet hidden, for it is the seed, the Word, planted by God, the Fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.[2028]

Many are those who pass through life and come to death without their natural consciousness feeling the least concern to know this treasure hidden in their field.

Others then come-and we are those-who inherit from their fathers ignorance of the treasure. They take possession of the field without realizing the existence of the treasure. No one ever told them of it, for knowledge of the hidden treasure had been lost, the tradition had petered out, undocumented in the annals of history. Nor did anyone seem to care about it-and this represents the one who sold his field cheaply.

And yet a few do go to the trouble of plowing their field, and here we have one of those. Someone who stays alert, awake and, as he goes down into himself, he succeeds in ripening the fruit of conversion-and that is the treasure. Then, having this fruit, wisdom and virtue, in his hands, and being free to give what he has, he shares it among those he loves, his brothers in spirit.

For this sharing he receives his reward with increase, for then the treasure shows itself for what it is: bliss and eternal Life.

2028 John 1:16. The manifest exegesis sees in this grace upon grace the new covenant superposed on the old, as the Gospel explains it in its manifest sense: over and above the Mosaic Law comes the grace and truth attained by Jesus Christ (John 1:17). The hidden meaning is that, over and above the Fullness we have all received as the seed, must be placed, grace upon grace, the truth set forth by the hidden Jesus Christ.

LOGION 110

Jesus said:

“He who has found the world and become rich,

let him renounce the world.”

COMMENTARY

To find the world is not only to be in the world, it is to be the world. To have become rich in the world means to have taken the things of the world for oneself and to have made of them attachments with which those who are of the world identify.

The man who has found the world and has become rich is one who lives in duality and he himself is a duality, for he has strengthened a powerful dichotomy, with, on the one hand, what he really is, and, on the other, all those worldly riches that he takes himself for because they have become part of his persona.

Of such a man who has become a duality, Jesus asks, as one who offers a prayer, the hardest thing and the most beautiful: that he be prepared to renounce the world.

To renounce the world means to save the reality of pure Being, poor, uncontaminated by clinging to riches; it means to live the truth of Being, clean of extraneous attachments added to Being; it is to know Being and to attain the higher peace of life in unity.

In contrast to the unstable duality expressed as I and the world, those who have renounced the world find only the unity of Being, discovered in oneself as I AM. With renunciation, the world dissolves, and it becomes clear that one can be in the world without being of the world.

Perfect unity, excluding nothing but encompassing all that is, it is of this that Jesus spoke when he said: My kingdom is not of this world.[2029]

Being excludes nothing and includes all, for it is the world, but without borders, without limits, without the walls and fences that enclose and protect those full of worldly wealth. That is why to renounce is always to reclaim unity, the unity proclaimed in the cry of victory: I have conquered the world.[2030]

2. With its vertical conception of the world, a stratification that ranges from the heavens above to the realms underground, not to mention the earth’s surface, the manifest exegesis has done much to comfort the widespread idea that there are several worlds, this one, which we know and live in; and the other. Duality.

Nevertheless, for the hidden exegesis, the world is a non-dual interpenetrating whole. This means that the invisible world is be found interwoven with the visible, for there is only one world.

This unity, in which the visible world and the invisible make up one world was explained in the fourth Gospel, in the passage that proclaims that the Word, the true (invisible) light was in the world [from the beginning] and the [visible] world had its being through him, and the world [mankind, those who live in the world] did not know him.[2031]

Nevertheless, the invisible (the true light, the Word) is the substrate on which the visible world and the invisible depend, and that is why it is said that God gave the world his only Son (the substrate) so that everyone who believes in him may not be lost… so that through him the world might be saved.[2032]

Even more than this. When in the same Gospel of John it is written that the hour had come… to pass from this world to the Father,[2033] this does not imply that there are two worlds (the visible and the invisible one) plus the Father, but that the Father is the essence, both total and interpenetrating, the First Kingdom, in one single world.

The Gospel often uses simplified forms of language that need interpreting. Thus, when Jesus says to his disciples: you do not belong to the world, because my choice withdrew you from the world,[2034] he does not mean that he has removed them from the visible (material) world and the invisible (sensitive) world, to bring them to the (intelligible) substrate of the world, but that by their having renounced the world, these disciples, through the work of knowledge and the outpouring of love, were now in the world but no longer of the world, just as the true light in the world remains unacknowledged by the world.

When the logion speaks of one who has grown rich in the world, this does not seem to refer especially to material wealth as, for instance, is frequently the case with manifest exegetics, which tend to interpret the Gospel comminations against riches in sociological rather than sacral terms.

The Gospel always distinguishes the function corresponding to each of the three cosmic realms and it certainly does not limit the destructive effects of the possession of their goods to the riches of the visible world.

One of the most significant passages in the Gospel, the parable of the sower, explains this, saying that when the seed fell among thorns, this means that the worries of this world and the lure of riches choke the Word and so he produces nothing.[2035]

The parable does not say it is riches that choke the virtue of the Word, but the seduction exercised by riches, whatever their nature, over the soul. That seduction is a bramble that never stops growing. It is not having that blights the soul, it is wanting to have-a passion shared by rich and poor alike-that withers it.

That rich man in the Lucan parable who kept building barns in which to store up treasure for himself instead of making himself rich in the sight of God,[2036] how could he possibly think he was storing up treasure for God if that treasure was material in nature? Would not this not be treasure for the soul, to build up her power in the world, under the alibi of virtue and wisdom? There are times when the Gospel probes very deep into the dark folds of the psyche.

When Jesus, speaking of the wealthy young man says that How hard it is for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God,[2037] one cannot help thinking that there is an enemy worse than having, one that always arises where there are material goods, and that is the greed which causes one to want to have, a serious disease to which only the soul is prone. Greed is the tether that holds back those who have grown rich or think they are going to become rich, preventing them from renouncing the world. It is greed that is most deeply opposed to self-renunciation, the poverty in spirit which, as we know, opens the gates to the Kingdom of God.

Now, after twenty centuries of futile manifest condemnation of material wealth, that condemns those who have while saying nothing about those who want to have, it is high time to seek the roots of the soul’s infirmity, roots that have nothing to do with the social order, since the virus attacks rich and poor alike.

This disease of the soul can be psychological, it can be intellectual, it can be spiritual, and it affects all men without distinction. It is a condition to which all are prone, but it is one that must be cured by the spirit, for all these other things will be given you as well.

The soul is said to be living because she holds life on loan, since the life she holds is given her by the spirit which owns that life and is its essence. Fulfilment of the law of mortality to which she is subject demands that the soul renounce herself to the point of death and rebirth in the spirit, as proclaimed for her by Christ.

But, knowing no better, the soul in thrall to greed sets her heart on growing and growing… and so she keeps on growing until death comes for her.

To the soul thus set on accumulating riches in contravention of the law to which she is subject, Jesus in his compassion says: May you renounce the world.

2029 John 18:36

2030 John 16:33

2031 John 1:10

2032 John 3:16-17

2033 John 13:1

2034 John 15:19

2035 Matt. 13:22

2036 Luke 12:20-21

2037 Mark 10:23; Matt. 19:23

LOGION 111

Jesus said:

“The heavens will be rolled up and likewise the earth,

in your presence,

and the living one, come forth from the Living One,

will not see death or fear,

because Jesus says:

He who finds himself, of him the world is not worthy.”

COMMENTARY

We know that heaven and earth are not eternal. We know that one day they must come to an end, for, apart from it being logical that they should end, since they were created, Jesus said this, and the message is repeated time and again in the scriptures.

However, the logion adds in your presence, and in so doing it reveals that the passing away of heaven and earth is not only a universal dissolution, simultaneous for all those present at the end of time, but the consummation of the created things that every man must witness in himself, in his consciousness, when he comes to transform himself into the Living One.

In the language of this Gospel of Thomas, the Living One means he who has gained Eternal Life.

Jesus, the hidden, pre-existing Christ, is the Living One and the source of the Living. When a man’s spirit is anointed in the Spirit, he becomes one in the Spirit. Thus, too, he who is reborn from above is born as the Living One, come forth from the Living One, one in the infinite Glory of the Son of Man.

He who has found the world-and that is man’s natural consciousness-has the reality of the world before him; but for the one who has found himself there is no other. For him, in truth, the consciousness that found the world no longer exists, for it has passed away.

Likewise, he who has been born as the Living One finds that the only reality is the inexhaustible treasure of being one with the Father.

The world then dissolves. For him, it ceases to be. The heavens and the earth flee from the presence as mist rises at dawn. Of them, nothing remains. It is as though they had never been.

Only the Living One remains, eternal, free from fear, in the incomparable, supreme reality of being for ever and ever one with himself.

The armies of heaven rot.

The heavens are rolled up like a scroll

and their armies all drop like leaves,

like vine leaves falling, like falling fig leaves.[2038]

But yourself, you never change,

and your years are unending.[2039]

Surely, the world is unworthy of him, of the Living One.

2038 Isai. 34:4

2039 Ps. 102:27

LOGION 112

Jesus said:

“Woe to the flesh that depends on the soul!

Woe to the soul that depends on the flesh!”

COMMENTARY

The two lamentations in the logion suggest the same response: the flesh and the soul must eschew all dependence on one another.

It is true that, when the flesh is all alone, in isolation, it has no tendencies, no temptations, for those come not from the flesh but from the soul; it is likewise true that the soul, when she has no sway over the flesh, produces no fruit of death, for that does not belong to her but was engendered by her living with the flesh.

The difficulty arises when man’s consciousness-the soul- attaches to the flesh instead of resting beneath the spirit. Then the flesh is beset by deathly tendencies alien to it and the soul has bartered her harmonious life for passion.

It is probably to this that Jesus was alluding when, in the hour of his agony, he asked his disciples: You should be awake, and praying not to be put to the test. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.[2040]

The soul must navigate between the prompt response of the spirit and the weakness of the flesh. A state of alert vigilance, in adoration of the invisible presence, not only guarantees that response but frees the soul from falling into dependence on the flesh.

For those souls that live according to the flesh, the spirit seems so far away that all that remains of it is the name of some non-existent wind that never blows over the soul. Thus, the flesh becomes a hearth in which the passions catch fire all on their own.

This is all very simple and straightforward, yet it seems so far removed from today’s lifestyles that it may perhaps be useful to look into the factors of interdependence between the flesh and the soul that underlie the logion’s laments.

The basic general idea shared by so many today is to let those who choose to live according to the flesh live by the flesh, while those who want to live according to the spirit can live by the spirit; and this, they call freedom. Others go further, adding that desire is like hunger, and so they apply what they see as the self-evident rule that the satisfaction of carnal desires slakes the appetite of the flesh, and that, in short, makes for physical and mental health.

All this may ring true, yet since desire is a form of dependence or engenders it by creating addiction, it follows logically that freedom to depend on the flesh increases the soul’s interdependence with it to such a degree that both soul and flesh end up losing their freedom. What is more, dependence on desire, being so tied up with the repetitive demands of memory, not only fails to satisfy the appetite but augments it.

The problem with this interdependence of the flesh and the soul must have been evident to the Apostle Paul since, in the Letter to the Romans he provides an explanation, one that turns inside out the crude, ingenuous view held by so many people today: …Those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit.[2041]

Saint Paul’s view is without question the same as that set forth in the logion. Hence we can say: desire is the soul’s energy, it cannot be silenced by the will, nor is it possible to live without it, for it is a concomitant of life. But desire is not intelligence, it is a force and in no way does it set beforehand the direction it is to follow. It is the soul, according to her way of life, her ideas and influences, that creates the direction taken by desire. Once that has been done, the flesh and the soul merely follow the course set for desire, either mutual dependence or freedom.

It is not true that the satisfaction of desire stems dependence on desire, although it does certainly bring momentary relief, just as drinking alcohol calms the immediate needs of the alcoholic. Only intelligent, vigilant penetration into the very nature of desire can enable one to discover its origins and aims, in other words, to understand desire.

Understanding what it is that motivates desire does not cancel out desire, nor is the destruction of this energy of the soul either possible or advisable, yet understanding can transform desire into a source of knowledge when guided towards freedom, away from the interdependence of the flesh and the soul, along paths proposed by intelligence.

Where flesh and a soul are not dependent on one another but have found mutual understanding, they cease to be in thrall to suffering, now they are free to live by the spirit and to attend to its promptings, as recommended by Jesus.

2040 Matt. 26:41

2041 Rom. 8:5

LOGION 113

His disciples said to him:

“On what day will the kingdom come?”

Jesus said:

“It will not come through watching for it.

They will not say: ‘Behold, it is here! or: Behold, it is there!’

But the kingdom of the Father is spread out over the earth,

and men do not see it.”

COMMENTARY

The logion explains the wait for the Coming in terms of its true, deep, hidden meaning. The Kingdom is infinite, it is eternal, it cannot come but must be discovered; for it is already present, it cannot arrive, since there is no place that it has not occupied since the beginning of time. To say of the Kingdom, of the Son of Man-who is the Kingdom-that he is coming or that he has not come is a figure of speech, like saying that the sun rises or sets.

The spirit of man is the Kingdom of God, and what we call the Coming of the Kingdom to us, the Coming which Christianity is awaiting, is in truth the opening up of consciousness to the light of the Son of Man, the light which is knowledge and life and which in essence we are and always have been, without knowing it.

The third Gospel states this very clearly: The coming of the kingdom of God does not admit of observation and there will be no one to say, ‘Look here! Look there!’ For, you must know, the kingdom of God is among you.[2042]

Man’s salvation, the meaning of the Coming, takes place through the manifestation of God in the soul. This is a decisive event in every man’s life, but an intimate, personal, non-transferable one, accompanied by absolute silence in the soul and the redemption of the spirit. It has nothing to do with cosmic catastrophes or with the end of the world, even less with the destruction of a temple, although that temple is situated in Jerusalem.

That said, the accounts in the synoptic Gospels and, with them, ecclesiastical tradition have followed manifest appearances, and this has led them to see a mutual dependence between things as disparate and heterogenous as the discovery of God in one’s soul and the dissolution of the world in a celestial conflagration.

The eschatological discourse in Mark 13 and, with a few variations, in Matthew 24 seems, for reasons which are difficult to discern, to be mixing up the mystic marriage of the soul with the fall of the heavenly bodies and the stars amidst an outbreak of collective madness on the part of human beings, many of whom are suddenly transformed into mad assassins and turncoats.

The heterogenous nature of what it describes has in the past century made the eschatological discourse into a serious stumbling block for exegesis, for it is without question the most notoriously obscure text in all the New Testament.

This textual obscurity may, however, be more apparent than real. If the eschatological discourse is studied strictly in terms of the hidden exegesis, as the announcement of an event that takes place within the soul, purely affecting the individual, it becomes possible to see the cosmic drama described therein as the dramatic telling, not without some deliberate bombast, of certain everyday occurrences in the workings of the spirit.

It will then be understood that the one and only subject of the eschatological discourse is man’s salvation, his final act in the world, when he attains the Glory of dying in Christ and, with this glorification by the Father, receives resurrection in the spirit.

What is more, the eschatological discourse describes in terms that run parallel to the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus, the Passion and Resurrection of every man, once he discovers in himself the pneumatic man and is converted into the Chosen One. The Discourse that corresponds to this humble man is far distant from the paradigmatic grandeur of the Christ, who consented to being nailed to the cross; and yet, in an attenuated minor key, this man’s inner Christ renews in him the sacrifice of the Lamb of God offered by Jesus as a prefigurement of that realization.

In order to find God’s Being, it is certainly necessary for every man to offer himself as a holocaust and to consent to the sacrifice of his own being, his psychic self; but as was told of Abraham in days of old, when neither the hand nor the knife for the offering are denied, the blessing is very near. Man’s sacrifice is not always death; the invariable need is for transformation[2043] and this, as we already know, is the fruit of denying oneself and taking up one’s cross.

It is man’s transformation that brings freedom to the captive spirit, the freedom for all that was Jesus’ purpose when he proclaimed the Good News.[2044] The explanation of what is to be done or not done to bring about this transformation which is freedom and realization forms the doctrinal body of the Gospel, which is always in essence a teaching. However, the chapter concerning the Coming, the account of the descent of the Spirit into man’s consciousness, is not intended to serve as an admonition but, primarily, as a general description of the successive stages of a theophany.

It is no secret that the great accounts of theophany in the Old Testament employ the language of metaphor, often the only way possible, given the exceedingly subtle nature of what they set out to describe. Theophany is not an act of thought; consequently, it is neither thinkable nor understandable, nor can it be described using direct images in language.

The evangelists Mark and Matthew were surely no exception in being aware of the inapprehensible character of the event they meant to describe and, in the chapter that tells of the Coming of the Son of Man, they followed the standard approach of their predecessors Moses, Elijah, Ezekiel and Daniel, drawing on hermeneutic colors from the hidden view.

Predominance of the hidden view is not typical of Mark and Matthew. Like most of the New Testament scriptures admitted to the canon, their Gospels usually maintain a good simultaneous balance between the hidden and the manifest. That is why today, after almost twenty centuries of manifest interpretation, it is not that easy to detect the sign enabling us to study the hidden exegesis.

Certainly, in obtaining a balance in their exposition between the manifest and the hidden view, the first Christian authors had to draw on skill in the practice of a consummate hermeneutic science, a difficulty they were able to overcome thanks to the support of the Old Testament tradition. This explains the praise which the elder Papias heaped on Mark, saying that he was a faithful hermeneut of Peter.[2045]

This information shows that Mark did not limit himself to setting down Peter’s memoirs in writing, he went further and interpreted them, without this in any way implying either carelessness or trickery.[2046] The virtue of interpretation here is how it succeeds in reconciling the dual hidden and manifest aspects in the Gospel account without betraying the truth on either side.

Because of all this, we should not be surprised at the fact that modern exegetists who take the manifest view usually find the texts they are studying diaphanous and clear. Nevertheless, when a text causes them to stumble and they find it notoriously obscure, as with Mark, chapter 13, and Matthew 24, this is because exegesis of these passages is possible only when taking the hidden view, the hermeneutic science they do not practice.

This science is, however, the very basis of our study. Since the description of the Coming of the Son is singularly important because it is an attempt at describing, although from the hidden viewpoint, the Passion and resurrection of every man who aspires to attaining his end, his telos, in the world, it will be necessary to subject this account to a somewhat painstaking exegesis.

For the purposes of this task, we shall take as a basis Mark 13, structured by its author as a totality in itself, without omitting to mark the places where the variations to be found in Matthew 24 and the short fragment in Luke 21 are missing, at least where these variations provide some new insight of interest.

INTRODUCTION TO THE DISCOURSE

Section I

The destruction of the Temple

(Mark 13:1-4, Matt. 24:13, Luke 21:5-7)

Verse 1. As he was leaving the Temple one of his disciples said to him, Look at the size of those stones, Master! Look at the size of those buildings!

Jesus spoke figuratively of the Temple and gave it to be understood that he was referring to his body.[2047] Later on, Paul was to identify the body of all men and every man as the temple of the living God, saying God’s spirit dwells in you.[2048]

When now, in the discourse, the Evangelists speak of Jesus leaving the Temple, this is likewise to be interpreted figuratively as the beginning of a thought expressed by Jesus that arises from non-identification with his body. The response of a disciple-any disciple-who still makes this identification is filled with admiration for those temples, those constructions or bodies he sees, as though they had eternal life.

Verse 2. And Jesus said to him: You see these great buildings? Not a stone will be left on another: everything will be destroyed.

Jesus explained to the disciple the impermanence of the human temple. No stone preferred to, piled up on top of the cornerstone, the eternal inner Christ, can avoid destruction by time. In the end, when all has been consummated, only the eternal stone will prevail.

All this concerns the figurative Temple and there will be no need to mention it again in the Discourse. The ruin of the temple of the body is, moreover, an easy, infallible prediction, and it is mentioned as it symbolizes the destruction of the hylic, the death to which all things transitory are sentenced.

This brings to an end everything in a man that is of the world, simply confirming the final dissolution of all that is terrestrial.

Section II

Questions put by the disciples

Verse 3. And while he was sitting facing the Temple, on the Mount of Olives, Peter, James, John and Andrew questioned him privately.

There is no interval between leaving the Temple and sitting on the mount. The transitory state of leaving, walking, is now followed by that of sitting. The psalmist says that the Lord, the anointed, sits forever at the right hand of God.[2049] But Jesus has not yet been resurrected and is not seated at the right hand of the Father, but on the Mount of Olives, facing the Temple.

The mountain symbolizes a higher sphere and that is why it is always the scene of every theophany. But the Jesus seated there is not the Jesus who will be raised to the cross in his suffering body but Jesus the Living One, the psychic Jesus, consecrated by God, the one who receives His anointment. That is why he is seated on the mountain, close to Gethsemane, where the press stands to extract the oil of wisdom which God’s spirit pours upon him. From the Mount, Jesus looks on the Temple, as though it were foreign to his true being, facing him, not in him. Here, Mark repeats the scene in which Ezekiel saw the Glory of God leave the Temple to pause on the Mount of Olives.[2050]

Matthew says that his disciples then came (to Jesus) privately; but Mark specifies that the disciples who were able to approach Jesus the Living One were only four, the four he names.

It is possible that to approach Jesus the Living One, to draw near to him, is to be interpreted as meaning that these disciples have attained the state of higher perception that enables them to stay at the same level of consciousness as the Master. In any case, the expression privately (Gr. Kat’indian) which neither of the two evangelists fails to mention, may indicate that the discourse that follows cannot be transmitted publicly, just as it stands, perhaps because the language in which it is expressed is not of this world. Its higher nature calls for transcription into the allegorical form of a parable, so that it may be understood up to a point in the words used by the world.

Verse 4. Tell us, when is this going to happen and what sign will there be that all this is about to be fulfilled? (Matt. …and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the world?)

Two questions are put in Mark’s version, and three in Matthew’s; but in reality Matthew’s second and third questions are contained in Mark’s second question.

The first question is when? When is this going to happen? This, according to the context, means the destruction of all the impermanent stones in the world, piled up on top of the cornerstone which was made by the Lord. This is the true stone, which bears the weight of all the perishable worldly constructions built over it. When will all these worldly structures fall, that pneumatic man, alone, pure, uncontaminated, may at last manifest.[2051]

The second question concerns the sign, meaning the distinctive signs that this, the resurrection of the spirit, the liberation of the guest condemned by men’s ignorance, is on the point of being fulfilled. It is to be clearly understood that the disciples are not asking for the sign that will enable them to recognize the Coming of the true Being, for it had already been made clear that this sign would not be given to this human generation. What the disciples were asking for was the sign that realization is impending.

Realization is the consummation (synteleia) of the task that every man in the world must perform, and this then is the Coming, the permanent, not passing, presence of Being, the glorification of the eternal Spirit that dwells in the impermanent structure of the temple

Realization consists, among other things, of man’s knowing that he is from above and not below, as he had believed until teleia came to him, and this he knows because consciousness has been conferred on the man born from above; or-and this comes to the same thing-he knows it once he has found the Kingdom of God in his heart.

This new man knows that the world below is null, since for him the world has come to an end (telos) in his own heart.

The disciple has acquired the power to be in the world without being of the world, and that is the summum of discipleship. In this the disciple is following in Jesus’ exemplary footsteps, for he, when he was in the world, was not of it, as he made clear to his followers: You are from below, I am from above. You are of this world, I am not of this world.[2052]

FIRST PART OF THE DISCOURSE

Section I

The beginning of sorrows

(Mark 13:5-8, Matt. 24:4-8, Luke 21:8-11)

Verses 5-6. Then Jesus began to tell them, “Take care that no one deceives you. Many will come using my name and saying ‘I am He,’ and they will deceive many.”

What Jesus the Living One begins to tell his disciples, the program of his discourse, is the description of the final process of man’s salvation, the arduous process that concludes with the coming, the discovery, of the Son of Man.

In its ultimate sense of consummation, which we call Parousia, the presence of God’s Spirit is stabilized, permanent; this is when consciousness finds its own identity, its true Being, its real eternal Self, never again to forget it, present thereafter in every single instant. In the long, rich Christian saga the true Self is pointed out by the pure-born, virginal inner Christ; or by the Son of Man and his Coming.

What Jesus now says is that this self-discovery is not free from difficulties because it means nothing less than taking as the point of identification of true Being, not some mere notion of Being, not some seeming, circumstance-bound ego but, in truth, the Self-that-one-is.

Nothing could be more subject to delusion than the intention to discover our true I AM, and Jesus endeavors to warn us all of this. As is well known, consciousness tends to identify with all that is contingent: name, home, job, clothing, body, passions, pain, etc. Every single page in a man’s history is a center of identification for ego, whether as idea or image.

But names and forms are not the Self, not the Son of Man, they are nothing but the names and forms that the Self sees and knows. All this blows across the true Self like gusts of wind, without altering, without ever coming to know that Self, for in man’s journeying the Son of Man, the true Self, is always the knower, never the known.

The four Gospels repeat on a number of occasions, invariably for clear didactic purposes, the expression I AM, placed in the mouth of Jesus, who says I AM by right, for he is the manifest and hidden Christ, the universal Christ. But the expression I AM is an abbreviated form of the holy name which was, according to the Old Testament, revealed to Moses: I Am who I Am. [2053]

When Jesus says I AM, not only does he claim for himself the holy Name of the God of Israel, which would in reality be a thing of lesser importance, but the reality that, as the inner Christ, he is the I AM, he is Being, that of all men who were, are or will be, according to the words of the Apocalypse: I am the Alpha and the Omega, who is, who was, and who is to come.[2054]

Once and for all, I AM is an affirmation of absolute unity, of no plurality, parallel to the unity referred to in the passage from Saint Matthew: I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, etc.[2055] This unity, this gathering all together, Jesus sought after anxiously, and that is why he said that, to bring it about, he wanted to send men an immense baptism by fire, a baptism by knowledge in the spirit.

The scriptural expression I Am who I Am or, as read by the Septuagint, I am He who is [or that which is] is an exclusive affirmation, which denies duality, affirming that only the Being is. It is at the same time a transcendent reality, for the Being of the Holy Name, the Christ at once manifest and hidden, is the Only One who is, in all, and in all beings.

But the real Being, the true I AM, whose discovery is the only important and decisive task set for the man who aspires to be in Christ, calls for a difficult and deceptive quest, for it is all too easy to take the transitory for the eternal and to get lost therein.

Jesus the Living One warns us against such deceptions.

Verse 7. When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed, this is something that must happen, but the end will not be yet.

The wars of which the text speaks are the inner wars of the soul.

Man, at once ignorant and a victim, enthrones in the innermost, holiest place in himself a false ego which, being a limited center, an island, is the origin of the scattering of the one into many. This ego is the object of man’s cult and truly it sets itself up as the Adversary of the true I AM.

Yet, when the soul strives assiduously for conversion (metanoia) which the Gospel commends as the starting point in the quest for God, she (the soul) stands as a kingdom divided against itself. War, or at least the imminent danger of war is implied by the tensions between being and wanting to be (the latter, a form of not being) and this takes the form of an outbreak of war in the soul.[2056]

What Jesus is saying is that these wars of the soul with herself are necessary; but they do not put an end to the Adversary, even though the soul may sometimes imagine that she has attained her end. In such instances, it is possible to feel the perturbation, the trembling[2057] of the soul, feeling that the Beloved thrust his hand through the hole in the door.[2058]

That is why Jesus the Living One warns that the end will not be yet. This, the mystic Bride experiences: I opened to my Beloved, but he had turned his back and gone.[2059]

Verse 8. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes here and there; there will be famines. This is the beginning of the birth pangs.

The two nations that will rise and which always arise in the soul whenever man sets out in search of the light of knowledge, are described in Genesis in a general allegory valid for the whole human generation. The inclusion of this allegory in the parable telling of the Coming draws upon the Old Testament, in keeping with the habitual method of the evangelists.

It is told in Genesis that Rebecca conceived twin sons, who clashed in her womb. For her, that clashing was tantamount to feeling war rising up within her and she, realizing the difficulty of living with this, consulted the Lord, who said to her: There are two nations in your womb, your issue will be two rival peoples. One nation shall have the mastery of the other, and the elder shall serve the younger.[2060]

The expression your issue means that the two nations are recognized by consciousness. And this is the meaning of nation will rise against nation.

If there is an uprising, in other words, if there is awareness of a real clash of opposing impulses, it is thanks to the saving process of objectification, which all psychic contents undergo when the soul moves to inner conversion, metanoia, or systematic self-consciousness, as proposed by the Gospel from the very outset.

Bear in mind that the two nations are, according to the language of the Old Testament, the two fractions of the soul. First, the instinctive soul aroused in the form of Adam, nefesh, and second, the breath of reason that came later, with the creation of Eve, drawing the first Adam forth from his unconscious dream.

The second breath, rûach, arose as a nation, and the two nations of the soul became two peoples with clashing impulses: the first, instinctive one, is attached to soma, while the second, rational one, is a seeker after knowledge. It was this second impulse, yearning after knowledge, that brought about for the soul, already transformed into the mother of all living ones who seek Life, the division which the evangelists mention here and which they express as nation rising up against nation. This general warfare was presaged in the scriptures by the sentence against the ancient serpent.

As for the Son of Man and his future dominion over the soul when she attains synteleia or the consummation of her wars, this was invoked after a fashion by the psalmist: I will give you the nations for your heritage.[2061] Isaiah insists on this, too: I have endowed him with my spirit, that he may bring true justice to the nations.[2062]

As for nation rising against nation, this is very easy to explain, for the evangelists used no more metaphor here than elsewhere in the whole Gospel. There are in truth no more than two kingdoms, that of God, which Matthew calls the kingdom of Heaven, and that of Satan, the Adversary, referred to as a kingdom in the passage concerning the scribes’ calumny, to which Jesus responded with a parable: How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot last.[2063]

The earthquakes announced in the text are not the one told by Matthew, which occurred when Jesus, his suffering body, died: The earth quaked; the rocks were split.[2064] Nor does the total darkness over the land arise here,[2065] neither that nor the tearing of the veil of the Sanctuary.[2066] All that happened in daytime and here the text is speaking of the dark night of the soul.

What now follows is the beginning of the birth pangs, the first phase of destruction that takes place in hylic man-the suffering body, earth-when the light of knowledge starts breaking through into consciousness. This is not the end (telos). It is not the revelation of the Son of God, but these are the first tremors, the first onset of the force that will destroy all that resists birth, coming to the light, perception of the light.

As for hunger, the inseparable companion of thirst after justice, this is the first important symptom in the man soon to be sated with the bread and water of eternal life, the first signs of beatitude.

Such are the first birth pangs. The apostle is doubtless discovering these pains in all life, for all that lives seeks to rise to the light and suffers getting to it. That is why he says: From the beginning until now the entire creation, as we know, has been groaning in one great act of giving birth.[2067]

The prophet Micah simply says to the soul:

Writhe, cry out, daughter of Zion, like a woman in labor.[2068]

Section II

THE PRESENCE OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

Verses 9 et seq. Be on your guard.

For Jesus, keeping watch does not mean sleep deprivation but maintaining an unbroken inner state of awareness, one that makes possible the unceasing growth of the Lord’s presence in the soul.

Through the parable of the seed that grows on its own, Mark explains the mystery of the spontaneous growth of the Kingdom of God: A man throws seed on the land. Night and day, while he sleeps, when he is awake, the seed is sprouting and growing; how, he does not know.[2069]

But the seed that must grow in man has been sown in him from all eternity and there is no need to scatter the grain for it to sprout and grow. The only factor that is missing is vigilant attention, for this mindfulness, this vigilance is itself the only compost the earth needs to be fruitful.

Such is the deep meaning of the parable of the sower, a parable of the greatest importance, containing as it does in few words the entire grandeur of Jesus’ doctrine.

Man’s pure innermost center, that center where there is no resting place, yet which everyone names and senses when saying I AM, is the unknown Holy of Holies in which dwells the seed sown by God. Before being born on earth clothed in flesh it was already sown in that mysterious place, and how could God grow and harvest fruit if the seed had not been sown there beforehand?

From the very first day of his ministry, when Jesus proclaimed God’s Good News, he announced that the Kingdom of heaven is at hand. And this means that it was sown in man. On this occasion the Master explained the terms of a brief and concise technical process on which every man can depend to enliven the growth and fertility of the seedling.

In itself, this doctrine proposes a science for man’s use in realizing the Gospel, a science to be practiced with diligent perseverance. Of this, we have already spoken on a number of occasions and we shall now return to it in the imperative Be on your guard that appears in this verse. However, Mark holds back until the end of this chapter the most complete explanation of this attitude and of the need to practice it. We shall be following the order he laid down, without prejudice to the considerations that now follow.

In its most real sense, conversion brings with it knowledge at first tenuous but gradually becoming more and more intense, concerning the invisible God who dwells in the Holy of Holies, in the pure Self. This knowledge corresponds to the yield received by the farmer in Mark’s parable who scattered seed on the ground.

With conversion, with one’s attention absorbed in the heart of hearts, the seed that has been sown naturally begins a process of growth and purification, two things which are, up to a point, identical. The impurities lodged in the soul then begin to emerge and to show themselves without any prompting.

It is as though the soul were impregnated with the events of its own history and, on coming to light, every single such impregnation then turns to ash, thus freeing the soul of its useless weight. This is salt that dissolves. Henceforth it can turn no one into a statue.

It may in some cases be necessary to prolong the practice of this technique of discovery recommended by Jesus. It is even possible that the forty days and nights in the desert may represent a secret measure of the time for man’s purification when practicing metanoia as proposed by Jesus, as a technique for the discovery and nurturing of the seed sown by God.

Let us then understand being on guard as a way of stressing the need to remain in the state of conversion. This entails a form of vigilance in which the person on guard keeps watch over himself, his very self being the object/subject in which God’s seed dwells.

Once there is mindfulness, ceaseless, unbroken awareness of the Presence of that seed, it will-as the parable says-grow all on its own and yield ripe fruit.

In truth, uninterrupted Vigil causes this Presence of God to grow decisively and in ways that are quite unexpected. Such realization through the faith that Jesus calls for is known as the Coming of the Son of Man.

Verses 9 and 10: They will hand you over to sanhedrins; you will be beaten in synagogues; and you will stand before governors and kings for my sake, to bear witness before them, since the Good News must first be proclaimed to all the nations.

The golden rule to observe if one is not to get lost in hidden byways when interpreting the telling in parable of the Coming of the Son of Man is to keep continually in mind that what is being said here is a verbal transcription of the non-verbal message which Jesus the Living One made intelligible to his disciples in the course of that ascension to the Mount of Olives.

The events explained by Jesus do not constitute a total Passion like his own, one that includes bodily suffering, since consent to this suffering was a privilege of his own and of those whom he strengthened. The Passion to be undergone by the followers of the Gospel calls for a cross of the mind, the total abnegation of one’s own soul, to the point of annihilation, the complete extinction of every single one of the psychic elements that gather therein and which, compounded, form what we call the soul.

Life, which was granted on loan to Adam the living soul at birth, must be returned to Adam, the life-giving spirit who gave it as a pledge of itself. This is what Jesus said by way of admonition: Anyone who loses his life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.[2070]

It will now be understood that the four testimonials announced in this passage regarding the Passion which all true followers of the Gospel must suffer concern a version of the Passion that affects the psyche, while Jesus suffered both in the flesh and in the soul: My soul is sorrowful to the point of death.[2071]

Although Mark will at a later stage have cause to return to these testimonials, he now announces them, while stressing that all of those who have in truth proclaimed the Good News both instinctively and rationally within their souls-i.e. in the nations of their psyche-must fulfil them.

All disciples must bear witness to justice before all the courts of law before which they are arraigned. The precursor of this witness was that when Jesus stood before the Sanhedrin, for many gave false witness against him telling of how he had said he would destroy the Sanctuary made by men. And this testimonial was not the truth, for today we know that he was not referring to the Sanctuary of natural stone, but to that modeled from clay by God to serve as a home for the Son of Man, the cornerstone, the living God[2072] of this temple.

Those who follow Jesus will have to show gentleness when bearing witness before those so-called priests who do not know the Gospel. This is clearly told of Jesus, the paradigm, who appeared before them and gave witness while Some of them started spitting at him and, blindfolding him, began hitting him with their fists and shouting, “Play the prophet!”[2073]

Those who follow Jesus must bear witness to the Spirit of God that dwells in them, the inner Christ, when they are questioned by a governor. Answering Pilate’s question: Are you the King of the Jews? Jesus’ testimonial was complete: It is you who say it.[2074] Here, the hidden Christ and Christ manifest bore simultaneous witness, for he confessed himself to be King, not of the world but of heaven, not of the Jews, but of all men, as in the prophet’s song: See now, he comes to you; he is victorious, he is triumphant.[2075]

When, before this, the High Priest, the religious King of this world, questioned him, asking: Are you the Christ? Jesus answered: I AM.[2076] In so doing, he bore exemplary witness for all those followers of the Good News to the Coming of the Son of Man.

Verse 11. And when they lead you away to hand you over, do not worry beforehand about what to say; no, say whatever is given to you when the time comes, because it is not you who will be speaking: it will be the Holy Spirit.

What Jesus said to the Twelve, according to Matthew,[2077] Jesus the Living One now repeats from his psychic vantage point on the Mount of Olives, and what he is saying now is addressed directly to all who follow the Gospel.

The prodigious fact of the Spirit’s taking possession of consciousness, which is birth in the spirit, an event that can take place only when the soul has surrendered, acknowledging her nothingness, her absolute deprivation of any self, to the point of death, surely constitutes the hardest, most universal straits in the Gospel of Christ.

The submissive, docile soul turns back to the action of Christ from whom she receives betrothal in preparation for the sacred wedding. The soul is then clothed with the sanctifying spirit, as though her body were celestial, and this is apparel of intelligence and reason. The soul takes in as a mist-bound guest the breath of the First Mystery, that spirit which must be deciphered. Once freed, this can be handed over in words to the many souls that await this bread of knowledge.

The words to which the soul listens come to her as wind, for these are words of silence, the miraculous gift which the sanctified soul receives upon surrendering everything she had believed herself to be. She discovers what she truly is and can then say in spirit and in truth: He is I.

Verse 12. Brother will betray brother to death, and the father his child; children will rise against their parents and have them put to death.

Once more, the Gospel refers to the anthropological family with which we are already familiar, having studied it elsewhere. Now it mentions only four of the five characters, because Jesus the Living One-the psychic Jesus-here excludes the mother, the hylic body endowed by nature.

The brother who betrays another brother to death is one of the two nations that divide the soul, those which Verse 8 announced would rise to make war on one another. The one who rises victorious against his brother is invoked in the Old Testament under the name of Jacob who, after obtaining his elder’s birthright and after his struggle with God, won a new name of divine origin, Israel.

Reborn from above, of the spirit, not of woman, Israel was the scriptural predecessor of Jesus, the Christ both hidden and manifest. The other brother, the firstborn twin, born of the breath (nefesh) of YHWH in Paradise, is the man of the fields (of the world) who, according to the Gospel, will be left to die, as was the passible body of Jesus.

Mark speaks too of a father who betrays his child to death, but this is a covert reference to the archetypal meaning of Judas, the last of the Twelve, of whom the Son of Man was to say early on, in Gethsemane: My betrayer is close at hand already.[2078]

If Judas is called the father it is because according to what is told in the fourth Gospel, when Judas took the piece of bread that Jesus gave him, to encourage him to do what he was going to do quickly, Satan entered into him.[2079] But it is with reason that Satan is called the Adversary because in the heart of man he often plays the part of the Father, although in the selfish, separative direction which he is able to perform.

This needs explaining. Since the Spirit of God dwells in man and occupies the principal Holy Place that falls to him, the Spirit is in truth every man’s Being, his pure, eternal Self.

But man’s consciousness, being so unstable and mobile, does not recognize the Spirit of God, just as it does not know itself; it knows not the pure, eternal Self, for both are names for the same thing: if one says the Spirit of God, that is-here-the same as saying I. Unfortunately, when man says Spirit or when he says I, he is naming, not the thing he should be naming but a word he is using to represent what he is thinking in his consciousness.

It is obvious that in itself a word cannot provide the true meaning, but an adventitious one created by consciousness. As for the pure Self, Jesus named it using the expression I AM, not as a roundabout way of pronouncing the personal pronoun I, but because he was trying to explain that in so doing he was not referring to the limited personal I that many imagine when they say I, but to the Universal I which has no center, equivalent in its meaning to God, the Father. So then he said: I AM.

On the contrary, the meaning a man has in mind when he says I as a personal pronoun is an island, an individualized center.

Without question, the inner existence of this psychological ego, this misbegotten runt of the mind does generate the idea of a little tin god in total opposition to all the aspirations to unity proper to the eternal, universal Self. This opposition is the clash-nation rising up against nation-of which the scriptures tell. Standing against the holy name of God, I Am/ who I Am, there arises in man, flaunting power usurped, the idea of a personal, psychological ego, which the Ancients called by the mythical name Satan, the Adversary.

Thus, in almost all anthropological houses, there always arises like a mirror image facing the Father Eternal, a false father whose secret means to his own survival is to hold the Son prisoner. This is what Judas did, Judas as the archetypal Gospel representation of Satan, the historical fruit of the sentence against the ancient serpent that coils around the feet of the I Am.

Yet, in the consummation of man’s evangelical process it is always the Son who will at the end rise victorious over the false father. Knowledge of the truth and faith in the Coming of the Son of Man are the arms that bring victory.

Verse 13. You will be hated by all men on account of my name; but the man who stands firm to the end will be saved.

The hatred of which this verse speaks is the hatred of darkness for the light which it does not know. This fulfils the Law, for, as the psalmist sings: They hated me for no reason.[2080]

When Jesus the Living One tells his disciples that they will be hated by all men, he is not speaking of persecutions that will befall them from outside themselves; what he is explaining is that everything in man that is terrestrial and attached to the world feels natural rejection for the revelation of the Son of Man. And since he is not of this world, they hate and deny him, for they do not know him.

Hence the difficulty of attaining the Kingdom of the Light at the end, for this is a project that must arise from amidst all the attachments that enshroud the I Am. The force of inertia exercised by these attachments causes one to walk in darkness without ever rising from the earth. That is why it is said of those on whom the light shone that they lived in a land of deep shadow.[2081]

Moreover, it is not that the Kingdom of God is not in the world, but rather that the world does not see it and, as it is invisible for the world, it is said not to be of the world although it is in the world.

The end (telos) is the realization of every man’s task. This end is individual and has nothing to do with the eschatological destruction of the world. This simply means that the realization of one who has attained the Life is the attainment of one who is not of the world, and yet has not departed from it.

This, Jesus told his disciples when he and they were all still in the world: you do not belong to the world, because my choice withdrew you from the world.[2082]

SECOND PART OF THE DISCOURSE

Section I

The abomination of desolation

(Mark 13:14-16, Matt. 24:15-28, Luke 21:20-21)

Verse 14. When you see the disastrous abomination set up where it ought not to be [Matt. variation set up in the Holy Place] (let the reader understand).

The fact of seeing comes as a result of watching. Souls seeking purification stay with lighted lamp and a good supply of oil; these are prudent, watchful souls, and so they see, they discover, they realize. This in itself brings redemption, for what was hidden becomes manifest and thus the soul comes to know what she knew not.

This is the method taught by Jesus for realizing the Good News. First comes conversion, then watching, alertly attentive, and lastly what counts is all a matter of seeing and realizing. Once this third stage has been attained, all that was there is revealed and all that was to be accomplished is consummated.

This is what comes to pass with what the evangelist calls the abomination of desolation, taken from the Book of Daniel[2083] and from 1 Maccabees.[2084] Abomination refers to all that is impure, execrable, and desolation to what has been devastated, turned to desert, thus becoming sterile, infertile.

What Jesus the Living One wants to make clear through his disciples for the entire human generation is, according to what he said, that the spiritual heart of man, the recondite Holy of Holies that everyone is trying to name whenever he says I, I AM, was set apart from the beginning of time to be the dwelling place of the Spirit of God. At home in this Holy Place, the Spirit of God is man’s true immaculate Being, the Being which, moreover, man, or his conscience, knows not.

Because of her ignorance of the Being-the Self-the soul covers the Spirit of God with innumerable veils of shade, to the point that when the soul says I, I AM, what she imagines, what she is really referring to is not the Spirit of God but a usurper, an imitator (an antimimon) of the Spirit, an abominable ego of psychological origin, in other words one created and sustained only by the mind.

So it is that in opposition to the true Self, the eternal fount of light and of life, the soul erects a mortal ego, envious of the immortality it does not possess, and this, playing on its imaginary presence, takes a stand as God’s Adversary. This is what Daniel prophesied when he said: Forces of his will come and profane the sanctuary citadel; they will abolish the perpetual sacrifice and install the disastrous abomination there. [2085]

Profanation indeed-and no small one-erection in the holiest place, the source of Life, of the Baal of desolation; this profanation consisted in the first place of abolishing the perpetual sacrifice, the continual adoration in spirit and in truth on behalf of the people of God. This, God’s people, consists of all the individual lit, virginal lamps in which shines the Spirit of God. When one of these lamps does not receive acknowledgment of its existence, this is tantamount to placing the disastrous abomination on the altar of the holocausts.[2086]

Countering this, the next act is seeing, realizing, as the prologue to a quarantine of purification in the desert. In this holy transition, which seems desolate, the protagonist of desolation is always the Adversary. According to the Evangelists’ account, Jesus accomplished in the desert what had been decreed by the Spirit and, when he found the Evil One he expelled him from the Place-from his heart-where he had no right to be. In so doing, he taught the work of taking cognition which every man must perform before he undertakes his Gospel Way. As Daniel put it: and on the wing of the Temple will be the disastrous abomination […] until the doom assigned to the devastator.[2087]

This is explained in the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians: It cannot happen until the Great Revolt [negation of the true Self] has taken place and the Rebel, the Lost One, has appeared [has been discovered]. This is the Enemy, the one who claims to be so much greater than all that men call “god,” so much greater than anything that is worshiped, that he enthrones himself in God’s sanctuary [in the Holy of Holies] and claims that he is God.[2088]

A clear understanding of this text could hardly be more revealing and must lead to the threshold of realization. It must, however, be well understood that the Spirit of God and the Adversary may, as a result of human ignorance seem both to be seated in the same Holy Place. Hence the confusion that arises in many minds.

Once one follows Jesus example in the desert, expelling the Evil One, the Rebel, it becomes clear that there never was anything but the Spirit of God in the Holy Place, for there is only one Lord, and there cannot be two.

It was the soul that saw two lords where there was only one. It was the soul that saw an island ruled by the Son of Perdition, where in reality there was the unending ocean of the Son of God. At no time and in no place did the Adversary ever sit on God’s throne.

 =

The Evangelist’s exhortation-Let the reader understand- shows that the work written by Mark and Matthew is a transcription of the expressions of Jesus the Living One and that the account they are transmitting conceals a great element of parable which, the Evangelists fear, may not be understood.

Verses 14b to 16: Then those in Judaea must escape to the mountains; if a man is on the housetop, he must not come down to go into the house to collect any of his belongings; if a man is in the fields, he must not turn back to fetch his cloak.

With this exhortation to flee Jesus is recommending us to move away from any psychic places of consciousness close to the false kingdom of the Adversary. When the Evangelist speaks of Judea, he is speaking of the desolate land which represents the devastator’s mythical dwelling place. It is in the desert of Judea that Jesus was tempted,[2089] it was there that he inflicted the first, introductory defeat on the Evil One when he manifested his usurping presence. Only much later, when Satan entered into Judas, came fulfilment of what was written in the Scripture: He who shared my bread has turned against me.[2090]

The opposition between desert and mountain which is peculiar to all the Scriptures denotes the difference between low places devastated by the usurper and the high regions propitious for theophany, for there God dwells. That is why the man on the rooftop is urged to stay up there in that high place, corresponding to the mountain. He is warned not to go down into his house to collect anything. This warning is the same as that given to Lot by the angels when they said: Run for your life. Neither look behind you nor stop anywhere on the plain. Make for the hills...[2091] What the Evangelists are surely doing is to compare the house and all that is in it to the ark filled with all the subconscious contents that have become lodged in the soul. Someone up on the clean heights of the housetop would risk regression if he were to bring these to mind in the critical days of war against the usurper.

Likewise, he who is in the fields-the lower regions of the soul-is advised not to turn back to fetch his cloak. Possibly, the Evangelists may be using this cloak to allude to identification with the body as the soul’s outer covering. The Gospel’s warning reminds us of when Elijah crossed the waters (of the psyche) without wetting his feet but had to leave his cloak behind. He did not go back to recover it, preferring to be taken up in the chariot of fire.[2092]

Section II

Those days

(Mark 13:17-20, Matt. 24:19-22, Luke 21:23)

Verse 17: Alas for those with child, or with babies at the breast, when those days come!

Pregnant women are souls suffering birth pains and close to delivering the one born from above, the fruit of the Spirit, not one born of woman. For them, the day of the Lord’s Coming is drawing near, and Jesus the Living One is in pain for those souls which, when their time is approaching, have not yet given everything up in that surrender that culminates in total self-abnegation.

Jesus refers on a number of occasions to these souls who discover lucidly the Christ dwelling within them, yet cannot deny their soul (psyche = their life) to the point of dying in Christ, because they love themselves too much.

Jesus says, and the third Evangelist reminds us of this, that this negation of all that is not redemption must extend to the entire anthropological family. Only thus is it possible to follow Christ and to become one with him.[2093]

What is more, the image of pregnant women as a metaphor for those souls whose hunger and thirst after knowledge that can be sated only following the destruction of the fruits of the world growing within them is frequent in the Old Testament: A blessing on him who takes and dashes your babies against the rock! [the cornerstone][2094] Just as you do not know how the breath comes to the bones [the Self] in the mother’s womb, so you do not know the work of God, who makes everything.[2095]

Lastly, 1 Thes. Includes a text that reveals the joint relationship for Gospel hermeneutics of the Lord’s Day, the image of the pregnant (souls) and the fruit of this world that must be refused: You know very well that the Day of the Lord is going to come like a thief in the night. It is when people are saying, “How quiet and peaceful it is” that the worst suddenly happens, as suddenly as labor pains come on a pregnant woman.[2096]

As regards such expressions as that day, the Day, those days, etc., to be found so frequently in the New Testament, especially where the Coming of the Son of Man is concerned, it seems necessary to make a brief digression in order to clarify their meaning from the hidden standpoint.

DIGRESSION

THE MEANING OF THE WORD DAY

I

From a manifest point of view, such expressions as the day, the days, etc. designate an indefinite period of time which theological consciousness cannot manage to determine, apart from inferring a collective process of distress which must have occurred, according to the dates, from the beginning of a supposed invasion (of Judea? of the city of Jerusalem?) up to the destruction of the Temple, which took place in the year 70. To this limited known data, some add what they see as a second period of time (another set of “those days”) when, with the cessation of another time of collective distress, the Coming of the Son of Man should take place, which would perhaps coincide with the end (telos) of the world.

Seen from the hidden viewpoint, the Coming of the Son of Man is, however, the unsurpassable blessed mystery of the theophany which every faithful follower of Christ can expect as the redemption of his life. Consequently, it is devoid of any collective meaning. The Coming is an individual occurrence, and while the main lines of this event prepared by the divine plan for the entire human generation may be described in parable as a shared episode, as the Evangelists have done, there is not and cannot be any specific time in which this is to take place.

Likewise, no earthly sign will ever arise to enable someone who is not the subject of the theophanic mystery to contemplate and feel the apparition, the growth and the permanent stabilization in his consciousness of the seed sown by God, the hidden Christ, who stands firmly in the spiritual heart of every man.

As for the word Day, it must be understood that, for the hidden exegesis, this is used not to designate a given time, but a gradation or transit of Light, understood in in its higher sense of eternal life and fount of knowledge.

This meaning is explained and authorized by the first holy scribe of Genesis, saying: God called light “day”.[2097] Thereafter, many authors of the Scriptures used this hidden Day-Light acceptance freely, wherever the text called for it, while the temporal measure of duration-namely a human, terrestrial day of twenty-four hours, or sometimes a day of a thousand years in the sight of God, as a vague measure of time-is used for the purposes of narration of a manifest order.

Clearly distinguishing whether a passage relates to the hidden aspect or to the manifest one is part of the exegete’s work of hermeneutics, and this can at times be far from easy. Nevertheless, when we come to a chapter as decidedly occult, both in its topic and the veil of allegory present, as Mark 13, there can be no possible justification for the way in which theologians have for twenty centuries, right down to the present day, interpreted those days in temporal terms when it is clear that they can make sense only from the angle of light-knowledge.

Moreover, the authors of the Scripture use a complex technique for applying the hidden meaning of the noun Day. It will, perhaps, make sense to explain this usage and its various meanings quite systematically, while keeping such explanatory elements short. In any case, there will be no need for any lengthy technical analysis, given the limits we had set for such material in this work.

II

The complete set of expressions having a hidden meaning employed by the four Evangelists for the word Day may be broken down into four separate groupings:

The Sabbath Day;

Night or day;

On the following day;

The days of the Son of Man.

The Sabbath Day (Matt. 12:5, 11, 12; Mark 2:23; Luke 23:54; John 5:9, 9:14, 19:31)

The expression, the Sabbath is generally used in its manifest sense and its meaning seems evident. Nevertheless, in the episode of the ears of corn picked on the Sabbath day, the explanation given by Jesus justifying his disciples’ picking corn on the Sabbath returns it and its Day to the hidden meaning. The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath; so the Son of Man is master even of the Sabbath.[2098]

The Son of Man-the essential, pneumatic man-is the light (the Day), and so, in the Sabbath : Temple opposition on which Jesus rests his reasoning according to the account in Matthew, the Evangelist takes care to mention the Day, the Sabbath day, since what is greater than the Temple is not the Sabbath but the Day. The text is quite explicit: Have you not read in the Law that on the Sabbath day the Temple priests break the sabbath without being blamed for it? Now here, I tell you, is something greater than the Temple.[2099] Nor can Jesus be seen here as attributing greatness to the Son of Man and not to the Day, for the Day, in its hidden sense of Light, is the Son of Man, who is the light, and these are nothing but two terms for an identical reality.

III

Night and day (Mark 4:27; Luke 2:37, 18:7)

Other expressions with a parallel meaning: As long as the day lasts (John 9:4); A man can walk in the daytime (John 11:9-10); When the day came (Luke 6:13); Day after day (Luke 22:53).

The manifest opposition between Day and night is correlative with the opposition between Light and darkness, as confirmed by the complete affirmation of the first scribe of Genesis: God called light “day” and darkness he called “night”.[2100]

Consequently, there are many passages in the Gospel in which the opposition between Day and night is expressed either directly or indirectly; and these can authoritatively be interpreted in the hidden sense of Light in opposition to darkness. This is the case with the seed which, according to the parable, grows by night (darkness, inner inertia, ignorance) and by day (light, work of the soul, knowledge).[2101]

According to the third Evangelist, the prophetess Anna never left the Temple, serving God by night (fasting) and by day (praying).[2102] This same alternation can be interpreted as light and darkness in the parable of the unjust judge, where God’s chosen cry to him (to God) day and night.[2103]

Quite explicitly, the fourth Gospel accords the hidden meaning of the opposition between the Day (Light) when Jesus can carry out the work of the one who sent him and night (darkness) when no one can work. Plainly, Jesus calls the light Day (knowledge, eternal Life). In the last verse of this passage, he confirms this: As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.[2104]

Jesus goes on to confirm this a little further on when he decides to go and raise Lazarus. The opposition here between Day (knowledge) and darkness (ignorance) is undeniable: A man can walk in the daytime without stumbling, because he has the light of this world to see by; but if he walks at night, he stumbles, because there is no light to guide him.[2105]

Likewise, with the delicate choice of the Twelve, the opposition arises between night and Day, in the hidden gnoseological sense of darkness: light. When Luke tells that Jesus went up into the hills to pray and he spent the whole night in prayer to God. When day came (inner light for the decision to be taken) he summoned his disciples and picked out twelve of them.[2106]

This same opposition between Day (light) and darkness is to be found in Luke’s account of the arrest of Jesus, who says to those who had come for him by night. When I was in the Temple among you day after day, you never moved to lay hands on me. But this is your hour; this is the reign of darkness.[2107]

IV

Next day (Mark 11:12; John 1:29, 35, 43; 6:22; 12:12)

Other expressions: tomorrow (Matt.6:34), to this day (Matt. 28:15), all day (Matt. 20:6), that very same day (Luke 24:13)

When the Evangelists use the expression On the next day, this represents a hidden sign for what might be described as a step forward or a measure of light in the process of the accomplishment of the work of salvation. Mark tells how, next day, as they were leaving Bethany, before entering Jerusalem, Jesus felt hungry (for justice) and he then cursed the sterile fig tree-the spiritually arid soul-which did not provide its fruit at the time and hour when Christ requested. It is Jesus’ new hunger that endows with meaning the demand for more light for the new day, the next day. He intended to enter Jerusalem with new power.[2108]

According to the hermeneutic method used by the author of the fourth Gospel, the process of approaching the light (coming to Jerusalem) is measured and explained through a series of Passovers in which these find their true, original meaning of leap, or transit, to the far side or Kingdom.

This meaning is of course based on the crossing of the Red Sea as recorded by Jewish tradition; but in John’s secret language the crossing is a supreme act of knowledge which sets the chosen one, become a life-giving spirit, apart from the one who has been called (the consciousness of the living soul). Men who are of this world remain on this bank, on this shore, while on the far side we find those of whom Jesus said: My choice withdrew you from the world.[2109]

John’s system explains every Passover as though it were a week,[2110] meaning a set or process of knowledge complete in itself. The week is, in turn, divided into Days, and each of these days represents an ascending transit towards knowledge. After the first day, all days are presented using the words on the next day, the meaning being exclusively gnoseological and having nothing to do with the measurement of time.

Let us take the first Passover described in this Gospel as a general example of John’s methodology:

The first day, the first day of the gnoseological week, i.e. of the first Passover (John 1:19-28). John the Baptist, the Gospel prototype of Adam, the living soul, the man who has been called, of whom Jesus was to say that of all the children born of women, there is no greater than John[2111], spoke of himself as an I-AM that cries in the solitude of the wilderness.[2112] Consequently, John baptizes with purifying water (not the fire of the Spirit).

On the next day, the second day of the gnoseological week (verses 29-34) John discovers the Lamb of God, the hidden Christ, whose inner consecration brings freedom from sin -the world’s deficiency-and manifests plenitude. His soul receives the first testimony of the presence (the dove) of God’s Chosen One.

On the next day. The third day of the gnoseological week (verses 35-42). It is possible that Andrew and the other unnamed disciple who followed Jesus in John’s account of the Lamb of God may have provided the Evangelist with evidence of the first acts of transformation of the psychic consciousness of those called to new spiritual consciousness, that of the chosen ones. In any case, the questions put by these first disciples of Jesus reveal the very first probing concerning Being, the question that arises in consciousness when it awakens to the light: Where do you live? The text then goes on to describe the joy that comes with discovery of the presence, the first encounter with Being: We have found the Messiah [the Christ].

On the next day. Fourth day of the gnoseological week (verses 43-51). Jesus asks Philip to follow him and reveals himself to Nathanael as the eternal hidden Christ. First inner perception of the Son of Man, i.e. opening of the stairway between heaven and earth. You will see heaven laid open-says Jesus-and, above the Son of Man, the angels of God ascending and descending.

Three days later. On the seventh day (John 2:1-12). This is the seventh day, the sabbath day, if we count the full week; but the third day, the last one, counting in the gnoseological order from the day of the contemplation of the Son of Man through the newly opened heaven.

The wedding at Cana is the allegorical account of a first union, a transitory, minimal theophany, but not, however, an unimportant one, in which the soul beholds the Glory of the Son.[2113] Jesus explains clearly, in few words, the primordial character of this theophany: My hour has not come yet.

This seventh (third) day culminates with Jesus going up to Jerusalem. The task to be accomplished there, on this first visit, is the cleansing of the Temple, so that the earthly dwelling built for the Father may, however briefly, be purified.

This sanctuary-now we know it-was his body, as an example of every man’s body, to be destroyed by death, then restored anew, a spiritual body rising on the third day.

V

The Days of the Son of Man (Luke 17:22-26). This covers the following expressions: When the day comes (Matt. 7:22); That day (Matt. 13:1, 22:23 and 46, 24:36, 42 and 50; Mark 2:20, 4:35, 13:32, 14:12; Luke 1:20, 6:23, 10:12, 12:46, 17:24, 29, 30,31, 19:43, 21:34); The day of Judgment (Matt.10:15, 11:22-24, 12:36). The day Noah went into the ark (Matt. 24:38, Luke 17:27). On the third day (Matt. 16:21, 17:23, 20:19, 27:64; Luke 13:32, 24:7, 21). My Day (John 8:56). From Paul’s letters, the following parallel meanings may be added: That day of wrath (Rom. 2:5); to be set free when the day comes (Eph. 4:30); the Day of Christ (Phil. 2:16), Sons of the Day (1 Thes. 5:5).

All the expressions mentioned here relate either directly or indirectly to the Days of the Coming of the Son of Man. From a hidden, gnoseological standpoint, the Coming of the Son of Man to perception by consciousness, that is, the discovery and stabilization of the I AM, is identical to judgment, redemption, the Day of Christ, and to the Third Day. In not a single one of these cases does the word Day refer to a period of time. Invariably, it speaks of access to a situation in which the Spirit of God is present as the I AM of every man. At the same time, it is perception of the light in the sense of eternal Life and knowledge.

That day (also those days, this Day, in his day, my Day). This is sometimes a stereotypical expression, as often happens where the word day is present, devoid of any chronological precision, and yet still to some degree chronological. Nevertheless, on other occasions this expression does refer to the Day when the Son of Man will come, together with Judgment. In its true sense, this expectation, the wait for That Day, aspires to the plenitude of contemplation of Being.

The day of Judgment, of wrath, of salvation, of redemption). The Coming of the Son of Man and the contemplation of Being are no different from an act of judgment whereby man denies himself (his psychic consciousness) and thus destroys all within himself that is not the Son of Man. That denial is the judgment and both things are the Coming, just as the disappearance of darkness is light, even where this was not intended. In this light of knowledge and eternal Life, consciousness that has attained self-denial and judgment is drowned, and this is the Day, just as it is also salvation (Matt. 10:15, 11:22, 24, 12:36).

The day of Judgment is an expression proper to Matthew, yet judgment is sometimes mentioned as in the days of Sodom and Gomorrah, the days of Lot or the days of Noah, when he entered the ark to save himself from the Deluge (Matt. 24:38, Luke 17:27).

On the third day (after three days, on the last day) (Matt. 12:38-40, 16:21, 17:23, 20:19, 27:64; Luke 13:32, 24:7, 21; John 6:39-40).

The three days of which Jesus speaks do not signify time but the complete interval of a transition to the redemption of pneumatic man. This transition consists of three successive phases, for the scenario is that of the three spheres or kingdoms of the cosmos.

Applied to the resurrection, this transition or Passover explains in terms of the hidden exegesis that pneumatic man, who lies captive in a mortal body, imprisoned by the egotistical inclinations of the psychic consciousness, attains in the end union with the Father, in the plenitude of his Glory and freedom.

This conception of the three days is as ancient as the text of Genesis, for its origin lies in the words of the creation story. For many generations, it must have formed part of the special knowledge of the best masters in Israel, and there are various places in the scriptures where this is mentioned; but their secret must have been kept so jealously that it seems to have been lost.

If we study the first thirteen verses of Genesis, we shall see that these explain the part of the work of creation that takes place in the space of three days. Creation is in truth a descending process in which the Spirit of God manifests in three distinct Kingdoms, and each kingdom is a day.

Of the three Kingdoms, the first was that of the Light which was certainly not created but named. This is why it is said that Light, the Word Let there be Light, is unborn, for it already existed and was in God before the creation. The only work of God in this respect was to separate the Light (wisdom and therefore fount of knowledge and eternal Life) from darkness (no knowledge, no life), for there was darkness over the deep (verse 2), meaning, unconditioned, abstract space. Then, according to the holy scribe, God called the light day and the darkness he called night. Evening came (night) and morning came (day): the first day (verse 5).

In the making of Man, which came later,[2114] light-the first Kingdom-is the image of God, the hidden Son, undiscovered in each man, yet present throughout all mankind, as the universal is present in the individual. The light in the lamp of every man is eternal Life; but the true man is light, not the lamp.

The second Kingdom was the firmament which, according to scripture, God called heaven (verse 8). This second Kingdom was the first of God’s two creations in the beginning (verse 1), consisting of an unbreakable vault dividing the waters. Thus, the waters below were separated from those above. These waters were evening (night) and morning (day) of the second day (light).

In the Anthropos who was then made, the waters, the second Kingdom, were the two sources of perishable life enjoying a life which was not their own but one they received from the light, which held it from God by right. Therefore his life was mortal and not eternal, like that of the light. The waters below were called nefesh and those above rûach, and these are the breath of men’s life.

Rûach has the nature of water (life) so endowed as to be able to ascend to knowledge and the eternal life that comes to it from the light. Being above the vault of the firmament, rûach is able to make this ascent to unity; nephesh will, however, never be able to go beyond this limit imposed above it by God. For later Christians, these waters came to be called soul.

The third Kingdom consisted of the terrestrial waters (the seas) and the (dry) land, and this is the Kingdom which we now call material, because it was the mother of all bodies. To this Kingdom, too, came the Spirit of God in the course of its broad descent into the deep, and thus, all bodies were endowed with more or less developed life, according to each species, but invariably life-on-loan, intrinsically perishable, issuing from those centers of immortal life which the holy scribe called seed (verses 11-12). And these waters (the seas) and this (dry) land with seed were the evening (night) and the morning (day) of the third day (light).

In the Anthropos who was then made, the bodies of the third Kingdom were called the passible body, being a mixture of the material of the third Kingdom and of Nefesh, the lower waters of the second Kingdom.

This is how the three Days or Kingdoms were distinguished from one another, those which in the objective world are known by the element that goes to make them up: fire, water and earth respectively, while in the Anthropos, who was created later, these were Light (spirit), soul and body.

VI

All of this explains the first three days of the creation story according to Genesis. Precisely because these are days of creation, they unfold in a descending process. What the Good News sets forth is not, however, the point of departure of man from the creation down to his present state, but the way that must be realized by man established on earth. This return is an ascending movement, like Jacob’s dream of the ladder which Jesus recalls when he says: You will see heaven laid open and, above the Son of Man, the angels of God ascending and descending.[2115]

This ladder consists of three steps or Days which must be covered in the opposite direction from that of the creation, meaning the Return, because the movement is from the third day to the first, which is, however, called the third Day, the last day, in the Gospel.

The Return, the way back, is narrow, and so is the entrance to it, as Jesus said. Man must set out in the world, in the third Kingdom, that of earth, but as he ascends, his consciousness identifies with the ever more subtle layers of the second Kingdom, that of the soul. And so it continues, until he may sometime discover that the essence of his soul is not those elements with which he identifies, and which boil down to pleasure and pain, but the knowledge that reaches him from the light. Then, through a supreme act of self-abnegation-and here lies the crux-a man may make himself one with the Light of the first Kingdom, thus completing his Return. To attain oneness with the Light is known as the third day, and its arrival is the Resurrection.

The Old Testament contains a number of accounts and rules which show that, in terms of the hidden order, the Israelites of other times knew the doctrine of this Return set forth by Jesus. When Abraham chopped wood for the sacrifice on Mount Moriah required of him by the Lord, the scripture reads: On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place [of the sacrifice] in the distance.[2116]

The first vision of the Holy Place is indeed always in the distance because the eyes do not yet know how to apprehend; and yet, as the Gospel says, the kingdom of God is close at hand.[2117]

This Kingdom of God is, of course, the first Day, even if it is described as the third Day on the road of the Return, for it is here that consummation takes place. Here is the same process in Exodus: Let them… hold themselves in readiness for the third day because on the third day YHWH will descend on the mountain of Sinai in the sight of all the people.[2118]

What we call the Resurrection is in the end none other than the arrival of consciousness in the Kingdom of the Light; but man’s sufferings on the way to attaining the inner feeling of the presence of the Light do not take place only on the earthly level, but also, and above all, in the intimacy of the soul, in the intermediate Kingdom; for it is there, in the second Kingdom, that the contents of perishable life that have taken up residence in the soul must die for all to be transformed to immortality.

This is what the prophet Hosea meant when he called for a return to the Lord. Hosea expressed this in terms of Days of Light: After a day or two, he will bring us back to life, [in the Kingdom of the soul/life/psyche] on the third day he will raise us and we shall live in his presence [with eternal life, in tenure].[2119]

This, too, is what Jesus explained in response to the earthly threats of Herod: Look! Today and tomorrow I drive out devils (purification) and heal (knowledge), and on the third day I attain my end.[2120]

Great is, without question, the meaning of the expression on the third day because these words announce the Passion, death, not without suffering, of the soul and sometimes the body, followed by the resurrection that awaits every man. As a paradigm for the entire human generation, Jesus announced three times without hesitation the arrest, death and resurrection of the Son of Man, to which he meekly consented.[2121]

It is important that, not only did Jesus announce his own realization on the third day, but that of the entire human generation. Jesus announced the only sign that would be given, that of the prophet Jonah. This he did so that no one should ask him again what the sign would be, saying: For as Jonah was in the belly of the sea monster [in the world] for three days and three nights, so will the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth [held captive within us, within our earthly consciousness] for three days and three nights.[2122]

Truly, as the author of Lamentations said of the third day:

This is the day we were waiting for;

Now we can touch it, see it.[2123]

Section II, Continuation

Verse 18. Pray that this may not be in winter.

The text of this verse 18 should be amply sufficient to enable even exegetists according to the manifest sense to accept that the account of the Coming provided in Chapter 13 of Saint Mark’s Gospel can be explained only as a parable and, consequently, as a hidden gnoseological datum referring to the inner realization of the individual, although the teaching is valid for all human beings.

The expression in winter is to be understood here as the season of those who sleep barren in the dust of the earth. Its correlative opposite is the summer, the time when those who attained the state of the just will reveal their fruit of plenitude and salvation.

This is the explanation suggested by Hermas in The Shepherd concerning the symbolism of the winter and summer seasons: (For) as in the winter the trees, having shed their leaves, are alike, and are not distinguishable, which are withered, and which alive, so also in this world neither the just nor the sinners are distinguishable, but they are all alike.[2124]

It is important that Hermas’ explanation should appear to coincide with Mark, in the example of the fig tree which he includes in his chapter in order, as he says, to facilitate understanding of teaching by parable, where the greenness of the tender green fig leaves shows the approach of summer, when the fruit of salvation can be revealed.[2125] [2126]

Verse 19: For in those days there will be such distress as, until now, has not been equaled since the beginning when God created the world, nor ever will be again.

The distress or tribulation (Gr. Thlipsin) spoken of here is the voluntary death which the chosen one must joyfully undergo before seeing the Son of Man. This is a mystery which a number of mystics have known and which the Gospels mention in various places.

What Jesus calls self-denial is the beginning of the distress or, otherwise expressed, the birth pains, but the complete tribulation comes when one reaches the extremity (telos) of denial. Mark says that this distress is the greatest that a human being can know, a Day the like of which he will never see or have seen.

Jesus describes in paradoxical terms a state of extreme distress and says, speaking as the hidden Christ, the Son of Man: Anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake, that man will save it.[2127]

It is not easy to transform the meaning of this logion into inner reality, for in it the double sense of the word psyche in the original Greek-soul, life-raises an initial barrier to understanding. The manifest Jesus asks all to deny themselves and so, through this negation and by following Jesus’ example, to attain contemplation of the (universal) Son of Man. This contemplation cannot, however, take place until the negation of the soul and of perishable life which she presupposes has become absolute.

That is why Jesus says that one must lose one’s soul (psyche, the mortal life of the soul) if one is to attain eternal Life (psyche) which is in itself the Son of Man. Otherwise expressed, whoever would save his (eternal) Life must first willingly lose (his perishable) life of the soul, the world. This is a gainful exchange.

This giving up, the self-negation which everyone must fulfil as a condition for seeing the Son of Man is the great distress, the dark night, without which the door to the third Day remains closed. Everything is summed up in these words: One must die to attain the Life.

The doctrine of tribulation was sketched out incompletely in oracular language by the prophets of Israel, with only one difference in relation to the Christian revelation, that it shows that tribulation as preceding the Day of YHWH and not the Day of the Son of Man: The great day of YHWH is near, near, and coming with all speed.[2128] It is clear that the oracle of the prophet Zephaniah, in which God appears as a warrior is a terrifying manifestation, and this is why ecclesiastical theology does not accept the identification of this Day with that of the Son of Man described by Mark in his parable, but in truth the only change is in the symbolic scenography of the account. The fact that the two are really identical is revealed when the prophet says: A day of wrath, that day, a day of distress and agony.[2129]

The prophet Joel expresses himself in similar terms when he says The day of YHWH is coming, yes, it is near.[2130] Many of the tribulations mentioned here were taken over quite literally in Mark’s parable.

In any case, the finest and most direct reference to the hidden meaning of Mark’s parable is to be found in the fourth Gospel in the passage in which Jesus, the Christ at once manifest and hidden, explains to his disciples, who see him with their bodily eyes, the approaching time of their Day, of his Coming to them, meaning that soon they will see him in spirit. He says: In a short time you will no longer see me, and then a short time later you will see me again.[2131]

The fourth Evangelist explains the causes of sadness-of tribulation-and keeps comparing those days, as Mark does in chapter 13, with a woman suffering in childbirth, who then forgets the suffering (thlipsin) she has passed through in her joy that a man has been born into the world.[2132]

The man who is born into the world through tribulation (although he comes from above) is the Son of Man, and this is his Day. Thereafter, it will not be necessary for the disciples, or for all those who pass through tribulation, to have translated for them the true meaning of that Day, in language accessible to the human mind, i.e. in parable (verse 25). The one who will then speak to them clearly and directly will be the Son of Man, his Day, and they will have become identical with him, already possessing his inner message.

John’s beautiful passage comes to an end with these words: In the world you will find trouble, but be brave: I have conquered the world (verse 33).

Verse 20. And except that the Lord had shortened those days, no flesh[2133] should be saved: but for the elect’s sake, whom he hath chosen, he hath shortened the days.

Bear in mind yet again that with the expression Days, the Evangelist is referring not to a period of time, but to the steps -the stages-of the transition to the light, to the Day of the Son of Man. Only thus can the Lord’s concern to shorten the Days for the elect be understood.

The elect, the chosen ones, are those few who differ from the many who have been called, in that their spiritualized consciousness is beginning to perceive the presence of the one born from above. These are the twice-born who now believe firmly in the hidden inner Christ, he is in them although they have not yet succeeded in becoming one with him.

It was surely the Lord, Jesus, the manifest Christ, who proclaimed and taught the Good News and, in so doing, shortened the transition, the Days until the salvation of the elect. As the hidden Christ, it was he who chose them all and who still chooses them.

The knowledge and practice of the Gospel provide the means necessary to free oneself from the flesh and this detachment shortens the way to salvation, the passage through the Days.

Section III

THE FALSE CHRISTS AND PROPHETS

(Mark 13:21-23; Matt. 21:23-25)

Verse 21. And if anyone says to you then, ‘Look, here is the Christ’ or ‘Look, he is there,’ do not believe it.

If you seek the hidden Christ, do not look for him here, or there, or anywhere else; for the hidden Christ is not here, or there, even if they tell you that he is, but sown in all men as their true Being.

The hidden Christ is always the Self of every man, that and nothing else. He is the knower, nor can he be known. Being the knower, who could know him?

That is why Jesus said: If you do not believe that I AM…

Verse 22. False Christs and false prophets will arise and produce signs and portents to deceive the elect, if that were possible.

Many have seen in the signs and portents pair a reprise of the portents in Exodus, as told by Jeremiah: You performed signs and wonders in the land of Egypt... You brought your people Israel out of the land of Egypt with signs and wonders.[2134]

According to the hidden view, this is the meaning of Mark’s verse: none of those of whom it is said that they are here or there is the hidden Christ, Being. He alone and only he is the true Son of Man.

It is he who, when the Day of his Coming arrives will bring his chosen ones, those who bore witness to and sustained his Light, to the far shore.

Verse 23. You therefore must be on your guard. I have forewarned you of everything.

The predictions of the parable have come to an end and the chapter closes with an exhortation to all Christ’s followers: You are all sons of light and sons of the day.[2135] You are not sons of the night, so you should not go on sleeping but stay wide awake and sober; that the seed of the Word may grow in you more swiftly, that the voice of the world may not serve to make you drunk and prevent you from standing as chosen ones.

Happy is the man who has stayed awake, for he shall be clothed in knowledge, and he shall see the Son of Man.[2136]

PART THREE OF THE DISCOURSE

Section I

The signs in heaven

(Mark 13:24-25, Matt. 24:29)

Verse 24. In those days, after that time of distress, the sun will be darkened, the moon will lose its brightness

The intention behind Mark’s predictions is to tell in parable of the sufferings and distress which every man in Christ must undergo from the moment of his surrender to the consummation of his self-denial. During this period, while he is traversing those Days, man bears his cross until he consents and gives himself up to be crucified. Only then does the time of distress come to an end.

The Evangelists Matthew and Mark, especially the latter, seem to have taken great pains to make quite plain in their Gospels the parallelism existing between the Passion-Resurrection of Jesus and what is written in the parable directed to every man in Christ. The Passion-Resurrection of Jesus is the paradigm for the Passion-Resurrection of every human being. A number of observations merit study now concerning this parallelism.

With the betrayal by Judas (14:42) in the Passion of Jesus the pains of enlightenment began (13:8) and these are described for all in the parable when it says: the Father will betray his child [12:2]

The meaning of Judas, according to the representation attributed him by the Evangelists, confers universality on his act of betrayal. That is why, in the fourth Gospel, when Judas had left the room of the Last Supper, the Evangelist tells that night had fallen, an anguish-filled night of the soul, and he then puts these decisive words in Jesus’ mouth: Now has the Son of Man been glorified.[2137]

Since Judas stands figuratively for the Adversary of God -the limited individual ego we all erect in our consciousness as the God of ourselves-it is not hard to realize that the symbolic representation of Judas and the announcement of his betrayal are one and the same thing. When consciousness discovers the limiting, restrictive action of the individual ego (to discover is to denounce), it is ready to be handed over for the death of this limitation. That death is the glorification of consciousness, which is from that hour inundated by the Glory of the Son of Man.

We shall have now to review the vigils of this night of the soul, as told by Mark, from the arrest of Jesus (14:43) following Judas’ betrayal and his appearing before the Sanhedrin (14:53). In the parable for the sake of all hearers this corresponds to the words: They will hand you over to sanhedrins (13:9)

First thing in the morning (the fourth vigil of the first day of Unleavened Bread) they handed Jesus over to Pilate.[2138] In parallel, the parable says: You will stand before Governors (13:9).

In the account of Jesus’ Passion, it is said that the soldiers struck his head with a reed and spat on him, etc. The parable mentions this distress valid for all when it says: You will be hated by all men on account of my name (13:13).

It was the third hour when they crucified Jesus (15:25). This is the hour when the great distress comes to an end. Later, when the sixth hour came, so it says, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour (15:33). The parallel with this passage for the Passion of every man in Christ is to be found in verse 24, on which we shall now comment. Here it says that the sun will be darkened after that time of distress which concluded on the third hour, the hour of the crucifixion.

An hour is a fraction of the Day. In a chronological day, an hour is a measurement of time shorter than the day itself. In the Day of the Light, the hour marks a transit, an occurrence, a step briefer than the Day, towards knowledge and eternal Life, both of which are expressions of the Light.

In the hour which we are now studying, darkness, that is cessation of the light, is over the lower earthly consciousness (Mark did not fail to note that there was darkness over the land). This describes the death of worldly consciousness, the mind’s cessation, a cessation that was to last until the new hour-the ninth hour-as confirmed by the Gospel.

Both in the Passion of Jesus and in the parable account of the Passion which awaits every man in Christ, the new hour, the ninth hour, describes a passage towards the light, towards the Day of the Son of Man, bearing no relation to the light from sunbeams or moonshine.

Verse 25. The stars will come falling from heaven and the forces in the heavens will be shaken.

Here, Mark uses such myth-charged metaphorical language, so very much the parable, that one is compelled to advance slowly, almost word by word, to perform the hidden exegesis.

The stars are the angels, and these are the spirit of the complete man, the pneumatic man, in other words, the elect. In the Book of Revelation, it is said that the tail of the great red dragon-which tradition identifies with Satan-dragged a third of the stars from the sky and dropped them to the earth.[2139] This was interpreted as the fall of the angels-a cosmic drama, one which in truth took place at the beginning of time. For the churchmen, these stars were the bad angels, later legion, at Satan’s service. For some Gnostics, however, these falling angels were particles of light that fell on the human generation, meaning, the spirit of man, the elect who lie captive under the thick, barely permeable layer of ignorance of psycho-hylic men. It is these that Jesus came to ransom.

As for the expression from heaven, both indeterminate and in the singular, it means that something-stars, angels-belongs to God’s domain, being of divine condition. This is, for example, what is affirmed of the treasure in heaven which will be obtained by the rich young man to whom Jesus is speaking, if he gives the poor all that he possesses.[2140] And the same is said of John the Baptist’s baptism, namely that it can be from heaven.[2141]

When Mark says here that the stars will come falling from heaven, what he means in hidden terms, in parable, is that those who are ready to be crucified-the limit of self-abnegation-suffer distress unprecedented (in their lives) and unrepeatable, for this is the most extreme distress that can be borne. To live through this distress means nothing less than to overcome the world.[2142]

Following this victory, the ladder dreamed by Jacob, down which the stars in the sky may descend to psychic consciousness, becomes open for communication between the three cosmic realms established forever. The keys to this gateway, whereby acts on earth are also acts in heaven, as in a mirror, are and were held by Jesus, being the Christ both hidden and manifest.[2143]

When we come to the forces, these should be understood, by logical extension, as the spiritual beings, endowed with eternal life and consequently the givers of life. It was of these that Paul was speaking when he said that the last Adam, the one born from above, was the life-giving spirit;[2144] whom he contrasted with psychic man or Adam, the (mortal) living soul.

The angels who are in the heavens-in the heaven of heaven-in the dwelling place of the Father, he from whom all life flows, are those who have already traversed the resurrection. This is what Jesus explained when he said that those who rise from the dead are like angels in heaven.[2145]

And if it is said that these stars or forces once raised again to life will be shaken or, better, moved, it is by the bliss that arises with the descent of the Son of Man into the consciousness of the one who has triumphed through crucifixion and now sees the Son of Man coming in the glory of his Father [accompanied by] the holy angels [i.e. among them].[2146]

The passage in the Passion of Jesus that corresponds to the description in the parable is where it says: And the veil of the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom (Mark 15:38).

Throughout the sixth hour darkness was over the land and this earthly darkness symbolized by the cessation of the light from the heavenly bodies, which is in truth the cessation of light for all mortals, must last until the veil-the firmament of burnished bronze in Genesis-covering the Holy of Holies, the most recondite sanctum of man’s consciousness is torn, enabling the chosen one to receive in the now total darkness below the complete light from above.

But it was during this period when light had ceased and just when the temporal cloak of darkness was coming to an end, i.e. at the beginning of the ninth hour, that the Evangelists Matthew and Mark tell how Jesus cried out in a loud voice: Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? which means My God, my God, why have you deserted me?[2147]

This anguished cry from the cross has been interpreted by many as telling of Jesus’ desperation at feeling himself abandoned by the Father. The truth is that in the manifest interpretation lies the accusation, or at least the presumption, that Christ had been left to his natural fate at the hands of his executioners, and this not only makes it possible to call Jesus’ divinity into question but teaches a Father-Son dualism in total contradiction to Jesus’ repeated affirmation that The Father and I are one.[2148]

Consequently, the manifest Christian exegesis wished to explain Jesus’ exclamation as a real but momentary cry of helplessness which, far from expressing any lack of confidence is above all an ardent prayer of messianic affirmation and triumph. This can be understood, especially having regard to the complete text of Psalm 22, of which Jesus repeats the second verse.

It is indeed not difficult to discover among the seven words which Jesus pronounced on the cross the words of various psalms whose textual content speaks of a situation parallel to that described by the Evangelists. This parallelism is interpreted by manifest ecclesiastical exegetics as showing the presence of a precise prophecy in the Psalms.[2149] Psalm 22 is said to contain the true way of understanding the exact meaning of the abandonment, which is only momentary or, perhaps, a semblance.

Nevertheless, in terms of the hidden aspect, which is concerned with the inner, spiritual, preexisting Christ, the interpretation respects the manifest opinion, and then follows a very different parallel route. There is no clash between the two, yet neither are they coincident.

The difficulty for manifest exegesis arise because the hagiographers of the canonical Gospels have not always been able to offer a version with simultaneous validity for the manifest and hidden aspects. This, we have already explained.

In the so-called abandonment of Christ on the cross, the hidden view sets out to describe a primordial step in the process of realization of man’s spirit, since in this, the spirit, the essential man faces the supreme moment in which he is to traverse the desolation of distress, leaving behind the shore of darkness signified by the sixth hour, and passing over to the resurrection of the light in the ninth and last hour, when the veil of the Temple is at last to be torn.

Thus, the first exclamation of the one who lay captive and is now free is a strong cry of beatitude: Eloi, Eloi, why did you abandon me?[2150]

The abandonment to which both the Psalmist and the Gospel scribes refer is not the brief but intense wooden cross, but the long, hard cross which every holy angel fallen into the human generation was bound to find and suffer in himself.

The unexplained steps of stauros, the cross’s vertical, make for a difficult climb, one which every angel of God must ascend over the Son of Man, as Jesus explained to Nathanael.[2151] But the walls of stauros are a long and painful prison whose subtle fabric, made up of suffering day after day, encloses the spirit in a vessel of individuality, as a separate drop of light, unable to unite with the Spirit with which it is one, as the Apostle asked.

At the head of stauros is the door to leave the cross. This ascension takes place at the ninth hour, when darkness gives way to light. At that hour comes the death of all that is of the world, the death of everything except the spirit and the soul that has found her essence, Being, the true Self who IS; and this now breathes its last[2152] and surrenders,[2153] which is why Jesus, the whole Jesus dying on the cross, gave up his spirit -commending himself to himself-to the Father, during the light dream of the passing: Into your hands I commit my spirit.[2154]

Then, at last, the veil of the Temple was torn, and the Son of God was recognized.[2155] The hour of dusk was drawing near, the day of the Preparation was beginning (Mark 15:42), the third day. Thus the Coming of the Son of Man was imminent, the hour of the resurrection, once all had been consummated. Someone who sensed this said: In truth this man was a son of God (Mark 15:39).

The final act of the Son of Man is described by the Evangelist John as having taken place on the first day of the new week,[2156] when Jesus said to Mary: Go and find the brothers, and tell them: I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.[2157]

These words of Jesus explain that the fulfilment of his death and resurrection provides the paradigm for death and resurrection prepared by God’s plan for the entire human generation, the generation he came to teach, tracing the paths for it to follow.

Jesus was also explaining that he was now about to accomplish his consummation, ascending to the Father to find perfect union in the sea of light, thus bringing to an end his captivity as a drop of light separated from the Father.

He was and ever will be, as the First Mystery of the Father, the Light abandoned in every man, in all men, since the beginning of time.

And this is the light abandoned by the Father, ransomed by itself in its own light.

Section II

The coming of the son of man

(Mark 13:26-27; Matt. 24:30-31)

Verse 26. And then they will see the Son of Man coming in the clouds with great power and glory. (Matt. Variation: And then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven; then too all the peoples of the earth will beat their breasts.)

In scriptural terms, seeing is the same as knowing or, better, recognizing what is, for the Son of Man does not really travel to consciousness, to the soul. Rather, the soul herself, washed by the baptism of purification and stripped of her psychic adhesions, attains birth in spirit and enters the Holy Place, the dwelling of the Son of Man. It is there that he reveals himself in the end.

It now becomes clear that Jesus was right when he said that no sign [of the coming] shall be given to this generation;[2158] and no such sign is indeed necessary since the Son of Man is his own sign. His presence is unmistakable and the clouds in which the Son of Man comes are more visible than the rainbow that God placed in the sky as the sign of unity, alliance, between man and God,[2159] although there was in reality never any duality between them.

When the Son of Man comes in the clouds, the Cloud which everyone discovers within himself arises above the Dwelling Place,[2160] and the Cloud shows him the way. By day-as we know-he is led by a pillar of Cloud, and at night, by a pillar of fire.[2161] The cloud is a filter for the presence, so that the new eyes of the spirit may contemplate the intense radiance of the consuming light so tempered as to be bearable. The fire is that same burning Light, unclouded, and this manifests when the soul enters a state of night. Then the sparks of the fire of knowledge rain upon the soul like new seeds scattered by God.

As Matthew explains, this signifies mourning for all the peoples of the earth, in other words, for all the earthly contents of the soul, because knowledge lays waste all the things that are of earth while raising to the Light all that pertains to heaven. That which arises is always everything in her that believed in the Son of Man. That is why, according to the third Gospel, Jesus wondered: But when the Son of Man comes, will he find any faith on earth?[2162]

Nor is there any need to ask who will see the Son of Man. The subjects who can see (know) the Son of Man are potentially all of us individuals belonging to the vast human generation. In every one of us he made his home, from the beginning of time, and we are all entitled to make ourselves children of God.[2163]

The power the Son of Man comes with is that of giving eternal Life. This, he holds from the Father, imparting it to whoever receives it; and Glory is the cloak of Light of the Father with which the Son, dwelling in man, is clothed. Glory is God’s wisdom, and the particles of Light (of the radiance of Light which is fire) constitute the knowledge whereby the chosen redeem themselves until they attain beatitude.

As the prophet Isaiah says, Though night still covers the earth and darkness the peoples; above you the Lord now rises and above you his glory appears.[2164]

Verse 27. Then too he will send the angels to gather the chosen from the four winds, from the ends of the world to the ends of heaven. (Matt. Variation: And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet to gather his chosen from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.)

It is important to have a clear understanding of the expression Son of Man which the Evangelists place in Jesus’ mouth. Only thus is it possible to understand the true meaning of the passages in which this expression appears.

However, this clear understanding is not just cultural, i.e. concerned with knowledge about the origin of the expression and the authenticity of the sayings concerning the Son of Man. Such information of a manifest nature is not relevant; when all is said and done, it does little or nothing to throw light on the expression Son of Man, and consequently on the complete meaning of the doctrine whose teaching is attributed to Jesus.

For many today, the Son of Man is an obvious circumlocution in place of the personal pronoun I, an expression in the third person like saying this man, the man I am; but this verbal subterfuge which is unnecessary and not very logical in terms Jesus’ invariably direct expressive integrity, does nothing to explain the insertion of the noun Son in the periphrasis.

Moreover, the identity, involving only distances in verbal positioning which are not easy to evaluate between the Son (the Son of God) and the Son of Man, is fully vouched for in the fourth Gospel in the Discourse on the work of the Son, for there, Jesus says: For the Father, who is the source of life, has made the Son the source of life; and, because he is the Son of Man, has appointed him supreme judge.[2165]

This testimonial not only confirms the identity expressed by the word Son, but the fact that the Son whose work the Gospel studies in his capacity as Son of God (verse 25) is also the Son whom Jesus calls the Son of Man. This is quite clear. The only -not insignificant-difference between the two expressions, consists in the fact that whenever the Son is named in the expression Son of Man, the main focus of attention is on the work or function of the Son as the essence or crowning of the notion of the complete man.

The power and the glory proper to the Son, namely, the capacity to judge and to give eternal life (the power) and Wisdom (the Glory) distributed as knowledge, are also proper to the Son of Man, who transforms the Power and the Glory which the Father entrusted to the Son into active possessions of man (Verses 21-22).

From this point of view, it is certain that the expression Son of Man is a circumlocution, but not one that stands for the personal pronoun I, rather an impersonal self-designation on an absolute level, representing what may be called I AM; but this expression has both a collective and an individual meaning. On many occasions, Jesus seems to have used this I AM redolent of the true name of God as a way of expressing an impersonal I.

The Son of Man, as an impersonal I, bridges the gulf between mortal man-body and soul, two kingdoms that are compounded and thus necessarily mortal-for whom we quite mechanically use the pronoun I, and the Son who, as the Son of Man, becomes pneumatic man, the Spirit of the complete man.

It must be made clear that the Son does not designate some future measure of man, something that is not now but still to come. The Son is present now, present in every man-the Son is every man’s crown. The Son is in the future only for the psychic consciousness that does not yet know him. This is what the fourth Gospel is getting at when it affirms that the Son of Man is in heaven and yet he descended from heaven. The Son of Man is ever present in man. But the Son’s being is irrevocably of heaven. In truth, it is this manifestation of the heavenly Son, once recognized, that is described in mythical form as the Coming.

It may perhaps not be difficult now to understand the fact that the expression Son of Man has at one and the same time a collective, universal meaning, and an individual one. The dual prerogative of being the Son and the essence of man, of every man, explains the simultaneous arising of both categories which, while differing, are complementary.

The man known to consciousness as Adam, the living soul, may indeed be an individual person, and yet in reality, it is the Son of Man, of whom psychic consciousness is so unaware, who presides over the complete man from his seat as the true essence; and it is he who, in the end, raises man, with his higher consciousness, to his place in a universal collective order.

It will be understood that in many places in the Gospels the expression Son of Man is how Jesus refers to himself, not a name or a title. This expression is used to designate Jesus, bearing in mind that Jesus’ psychic consciousness knows the Son, having received him and identified with him; however, this designation extends-bearing in mind differing levels of consciousness-to all those who have received/known the Coming of the Spirit, making them children of God. Once they have received him, they will always accompany him in his Coming, for they have been made one with him.

In regard to the origin of the expression Son of Man, although knowledge of this origin falls within the manifest order while not substantially affecting the hidden meaning, a number of possible hypotheses are worth raising here as subjects for future investigation.

If Man in our own image (Gen. 1:26-27) is taken to be pneumatic man, coming later in the human generation, there is no difficulty in according the name Man to this spiritual summit of the complete man. Something of this is apparent in Gen. 5:2. Consequently, having regard to a well-known Semitic usage, there is nothing surprising about the fact that every one of Man’s successors should be named son of Man, with this designation concerning only pneumatic man. The presence of this name in theophanies and eschatological passages or in apocalyptic contexts, as in the writings of Daniel, coincides with the uniquely spiritual character of the son of Man.

Despite the foregoing, with Jesus’ use of the expression the Son of Man, there arises a new way of applying this name. It matters not whether this is an idea derived from the form used by Daniel. Jesus uses the word man in such a way that it loses its meaning in Genesis as man who is spirit alone. Thereupon, the emphasis falls upon the word Son, and thus the expression comes to designate the Son of God in man, the Son of Man.

In any case, and regardless of the differences, when Daniel, Enoch and Ezekiel speak of the son of Man, they are, like Jesus when he says the Son of Man, proclaiming a pre-existing divine condition.

Daniel uses this as an individual but undefinable, even amorphous figure. Thus, he says like a son of Man. But this like a son of Man is identified with the communion of saints of the Most High, as though every one of these saints were a spark of the total Light of Man.

In Mark’s later parable transcription of the Discourse of Jesus the Living One on the Coming of the Son of Man, the saints of the Most High in Daniel’s dream appear as the holy angels and the chosen ones, as the particles of light that remain enclosed in the chimney of every man’s lantern, which, taken all together, constitute the Son of Man.

The angels who come with the Son of Man are, in effect, the saints of the Most High in Daniel’s dream, those of whom he says they are a people to which an eternal Kingdom will be given.[2166] This is the Kingdom of Glory, the cloak of Light of the Father in which Jesus said that the Father, the Son of Man and the holy angels come together.[2167]

These holy angels are called stars, and they are the particles of light that were at the beginning of time destined to fall into the human generation on earth. In every tripartite complete man, they constitute the essence, the individualized ray of the Spirit of God, the life giving spirit that dwells in the perishable temple formed by the body and soul in their dual psycho-physical capacity. They, the holy angels, are therefore every man’s Being, the oppressed captives living in the shadow of a psychic consciousness that is almost invariably unaware of them, the poor in spirit of the Gospel, the true people of God, being his direct sons. These are the ultimate receivers of the redemption promised by Jesus in the Good News.[2168]

However, the scripture points to two possibly distinct situations for these holy angels. Some are those who have already completed the work assigned to them; these were released from captivity and attained the resurrection which Jesus calls the resurrection of the dead. These dwelled in man as though dead and were truly returned to life. It is to these that Jesus is referring when he says they will be like the angels in heaven.[2169] Once raised, they remain united, made one in the blessed home of the Father’s cloak, made of power and Glory.

The other holy angels are the elect , the rays of light whose souls have not yet found unity, union with the Father and the Son, as Jesus asked in his priestly prayer: May they all be one, Father, may they be one in us, as you are in me and I am in you.[2170]

These holy angels dwell in heaven, and never ceased to be there, so that, if it was said of them that they fell like stars, this is because they were clothed in an earthly body and soul. That is what coming down from heaven means, although heaven is not a place, neither a here nor a there.

As for the soul, she is-as we already know-the mystic bride of the spirit, since both dwell in the same household; yet the redemption of the elect may come only when the soul denies herself entirely, to the point of consuming all that she thinks she is, until, washed clean and arrayed in white, she passes through tribulation and, at the end, the death of worldly light. This is described as darkness, but it is the dark night of the soul.

Until this darkening of the soul takes place, the chosen ones remain scattered, like separate drops, for the clothing of the soul has not yet lost that which separates each from the others. This the prophet Zechariah proclaimed when he interpreted the Oracle: To the four winds of heaven I have scattered you.[2171]

Only with the crumbling of the thick walls of false personality and lovelessness built up by the soul will it become possible for what has been scattered to return to unity and in so doing to complete the task assigned to this human generation. This, Jesus knew well, which is why the search for reunion was the deep project underlying his work. In a prophetic sentence, placed surprisingly in the mouth of the High Priest, the author of the fourth Gospel bears witness to Jesus’ hunger for unity: he, Jesus, was to die, to gather together in unity the scattered children of God.[2172]

The scattered children of God are the holy angels, the elect, scattered like drops of light from the true I AM in each man and in all men. Jesus takes care to remind everyone of his concern that this coming together should take place, and it is in this sense that he admonishes Jerusalem, the city where his Passion is to be accomplished, taking her as the representative of all earthly cities: How often have I longed to gather your children, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you refused! [2173]

The gathering of all the drops of light is in effect the consummation of the entire human generation; but it is accessible only in the realm of the light, meaning, in the Son of Man.

Whenever the Coming of the Son of Man takes place within a fortunate consciousness or-and this amounts to the same thing-whenever a man comes to contemplate the splendors of light of the Son of Man and identifies once and for all with this light, the drop of light that had been among those scattered, i.e. individualized, is united with the absolute, total Light of the Son of Man.

No matter where in heaven or on earth the spirit of man may have lain captive, once risen from among the dead, once the mental and physical barriers that hindered it have been removed, nothing can prevent the light from being reunited with the light. Resurrection and union are the direct consequence of the Coming.

Herein, fulfilment of the mystery of the sheep scattered without a shepherd, whereby they are brought together; likewise, fulfilment of the Old Testament promise: Had you wandered to the ends of the heavens, YHWH your God would gather you even from there, would come there to reclaim you.[2174]

The Son of Man, the shepherd, always comes to the spirit of man, accompanied by his retinue of holy angels-those already resurrected-and by the elect. These he gathers in his Light in the act of their resurrection, reuniting them, wherever they may be, with the Glory of his wisdom and his power of eternal Life; for this is the meaning of the Judgment.

The words of the prophet Ezekiel: The Lord YHWH says this: Come from the four winds, breath; breathe on these dead; let them live![2175]

AFTER THE DISCOURSE

Section I

Recommendations concerning the Coming

(Mark 13:28-32, Matt. 24:32-36, Luke 21:29-33)

Verse 28. Take the fig tree as a parable: as soon as its twigs grow supple and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near.

The parable is not about how the awakening of life in the fig tree heralds the approach of summer. Rather, it completes the much mythicized version given by Mark of the Discourse on the Coming of the Son of Man pronounced by Jesus the Living One on the Mount of Olives. There is no reason to go any further in search of the parable, for the Discourse according to Mark is the parable. It entails the complete description of the Parousia, the way and the end, the Coming of the Son of Man.

The Discourse itself has come to an end and the brief mention of the fig tree is an illustration of a pericope from that Discourse. All the rest of the chapter consists of material to help the reader understand the meaning of certain passages in the parable which Mark regards as being in need of rather more clarification.

The fig tree metaphor refers to verse 18: Pray that this may not be in winter. The new suppleness of the twigs and the budding of the leaves should be a sign for the soul-the fig tree often stands for the soul in the scriptures-that the seed planted by God to dwell in man is about to bear fruit.

The coming of summer, the season of fruition, is heralded by signs. Just as fair weather or storms can be predicted by observing the sky,[2176] so can the first faint tremors of new life arising in the soul be an unequivocal sign for those who anxiously await the Coming.

Verse 29: So with you when you see these things happening: know that he is near, at the very gates. (Variant in Luke: the Kingdom of God).

With you means here Within yourselves. Be aware that when you perceive these signs, He is near, just as you realize that summer is coming when you see the signs on the fig tree.

The pronoun he means here the Son of Man. The text in the third Gospel speaks of the Kingdom of God and this variation only goes to show that the Son and the Kingdom of God are two names for the same thing.

What is said here is that He is near (the Son of Man, the Kingdom of God) and it is of the greatest importance to understand the correct meaning of this statement, since the expression is near (Gr. engus estin) could be taken as a dynamic indication in terms of time or in a static, spatial sense.

Thus, the Evangelist can say without any possible ambiguity: Summer is now near (near in time) and also: My betrayer is close at hand already (near in space).[2177] Certainly, there is no difficulty in reading the correct sense of is near into the coming of summer or the presence of Judas in Gethsemane. The same does not, however, apply where there are expressions that need to be interpreted in order to understand whether the proximity in question is spatial or temporal: when, for example, the Evangelist writes: The time has come, and the kingdom of God is close at hand,[2178]or in the present verse 29, He is near, at the very gates.

In these two last passages, a reading in terms of time fits in with a manifest conception of the Kingdom of God. Originally sited in a heaven outside man, in a place not to be found in the universe, the manifest interpretation means that, with the proclamation of the Good News, the far-distant future coming of the Kingdom of Heaven has become nearer in time, to the point at which its coming could be a fact present for one and all. Such is the manifest concept of the Coming of the Son of Man in a flight of Glory and power from the Kingdom, accompanied by the holy angels and by the elect. This appears to have been the ecclesiastical way of reading the text from the very first centuries of the Christian era, in accordance with the Church’s manifest conception.

This view has persisted, regardless of the historical fact that the Kingdom of God failed to manifest, despite the firm and widespread belief in those first years that its coming was imminent; regardless, too, of the difficulties in interpreting Saint Mark’s eschatological and even apocalyptic account of the Coming of the Son of Man. Despite all this, many still read these scriptural passages according to the manifest view, meaning, in temporal terms.

And yet, even the most basic logical analysis of the manifest interpretation in terms of time must raise many insoluble difficulties attaching to that interpretation.

In his words proclaiming the Kingdom of God Jesus say that the time has come and this is a temporal reference, a dynamic fulfilment, guaranteeing that the Kingdom is close at hand, nearby in a static, spatial sense. Rather than admit this, many followers who held to the temporal meaning of those words felt that they had been deceived, because the collective time of the Coming never came.

Likewise, when the Evangelist says of the Son of Man that He is near, at the very gates, quite apart from raising the same objections as apply to the temporal proximity of the Kingdom of God, this statement can plainly not be interpreted in terms of time without raising the question of what the gates or entrances are all about.

What then are these gates through which the Son of Man must come? Could not the Gospel be referring to the gateway of the soul, the gates of contemplation which are opened by the soul in adoration? The psalmist sees it thus: Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the king of Glory shall come in![2179] Here, too, time is not the matter, but space in its purest sense of psychic or spiritual closeness, with the Son revealing his presence in the soul.

If the is near of the two pericopes is seen as nearness in the sense of psychic space, as understood according to the hidden view, the texts become far more diaphanous and intelligible.

In regard to the passage proclaiming the Good News, the time which Jesus tells has come is that for publicly teaching that God and the essential Man are not two separate and distinct entities but share a single identity which must be discovered and acknowledged. The time for knowing that the Being of the world is not plural, is not a duality, has indeed come for knowers of the Gospel. It came twenty centuries ago and has held true to this day for all those who are and have been alive to the knowledge. The time has come. God and man’s essence are one, and this is the paramount knowledge taught by the Gospel, the knowledge that opens the gates of the soul to the transformations of redemption.

When Jesus says in his message that the Kingdom of God is near, what he is saying is that if a man seeks his very essence and seeks it with generosity and faith, abandoning, if need be, everything that is not that essence, he will come to realize that what he calls his self is an incorruptible, sacred treasure, for it is the Kingdom of God.

That is why Jesus says that the Kingdom is near, for he is speaking of the essence of every one of us, nor could this be any nearer, for it is what we are. Very far for those who neither know nor believe, yet very near for those who have believed and have found. Herein lies the meaning of the Word, so beautifully and clearly described as the seed in the great parable of the sower. The seed was planted in the spiritual heart of man even before the complete man was, for it has always been, and its fruit is God’s reign in man.

It is from this real standpoint that the expression the coming of the Son of Man is to be understood, since the Son is for every man the seed sown in him by God. The seed is a way of telling in parable of the transparency that arises in the purified soul once she has learned to die to all the worldly accretions with which she had come to identify, discovering at last that the Son alone is her very essence.

What then arises is a peaceful, creative and bliss-filled contemplation which reveals to consciousness the Glory and power which she truly is, redeeming her from her previous identification with the world’s shortcomings.

It must be made quite clear that every telling of the Son of Man is and always will be in parable, for to know the Son of Man is to attain knowledge that is untransferable and only the human being who has realized the necessary transparency is able to see for himself what the Gospel calls the Son of Man, although no name or explanation can touch this truth.

Only the one who has acquired the transparency to see within himself can become a true knower, transcending parables. This is what Jesus explained shortly before being raised on the cross to die as the Christ manifest. He knew that his presence as the hidden Christ, as the Son of Man, was and is eternal in every man who comes into this world, and that his mission was always to teach the long human generation from within. And he said: I have been telling you all this in metaphors, the hour is coming when I shall no longer speak to you in metaphors; but tell you about the Father in plain words.[2180]

Verse 30: I tell you solemnly, before this generation has passed away all these things will have taken place.

Verse 31: Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

This generation is not an expression that can be used for chronological calculations. What it means is all humankind, that is, all human beings and each one of them taken individually. The admonition is that what was said before is a process of spiritual redemption which all men must necessarily undergo.[2181]

What must take place is the redemption of all those who succeed in seeing within themselves the Coming of the Son of Man with Glory and power. Jesus assures us that this possibility is available for everyone, for this human generation, nor will it cease until the passing of this generation.

In the Old Testament this prospect of redemption is broadly echoed, but wrapped up in terms that are very dense and which render it difficult to recognize. Those who have already been redeemed are called the just, those who like Noah and all his household can enter the ark and take refuge from the imminent deluge. Those who receive Life from the Son of Man, that they may not perish.[2182] These are also the few, the elect, who will enter the promised land.[2183]

Heaven and earth are the two kingdoms that God created in the beginning, and they will come to an end, like all created things, for they come under time’s dominion. But the heaven and earth referred to here are not the planet earth and the atmosphere of the heavens, but the physical, material world, and the psychic one.

Correlative to this earth and heaven in man are his body, which belongs to the earthly kingdom and is mortal, and his soul, the Second Kingdom, that of the waters of the psyche (not, of course, the Kingdom of the Light, where Jesus says we must lay up treasure).[2184]

Of the soul, we know not only that she is mortal, but that her death serves as a ransom when her life is given for many.[2185] This, Jesus explained when he said: anyone who loses his life [soul=psyche] for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.[2186]

From the foregoing it is quite clear that when this heaven and this earth pass away, coming to an end for consciousness, redemption is very near, it is at the gates; likewise, it is certain that the consummation in the spirit which Jesus’ teaching entails does not presuppose any withdrawal from this passing away of heaven and earth but a blessed speeding up of the end.

What Saint Mark’s text says is that what will remain forever, what will not pass, are the words of the Son of Man, but this he says with a double meaning. The content of the Discourse of Jesus the Living One, his words, will not have to pass away because what it reveals is not heaven and earth, which will come to an end, but the Light; however, the Light, the First Kingdom, is the word which is uncreated, for it emanates from God and so has neither beginning-being unborn-nor end.

If the Son of Man speaks of his words, it is because the Light, it is said, remains in captivity, scattered among many. But the particles of light, which are the essence of the soul (of man) are destined to dwell united, in the absolute unity of oneness with the Father, the Son and the holy angels who form the Son’s retinue, all of them wrapped in the cloak of Light. And who could be so bold as to differentiate the particles of light when they are in the light? Although the words are many, what was sown is the Word.

From all this it becomes possible to affirm that the fulfilment of the promise to enter into the Kingdom is as certain for man’s essence as the final dissolution of the manifest universe, whether visible or invisible, since both entry and dissolution are isochronous as the one engenders the other. Yet the purpose and the promise are only entrance to the Kingdom.

Destruction of the false reveals the true, and vice versa, knowledge of the true dissolves the false. This is what takes place with fire, the light of knowledge, which is not only wisdom for souls but a crucible for their purification. That is why Jesus longed to bring fire to the earth and to keep it blazing, burning ceaselessly until the total consumption of all that was not fire.[2187] What he surely wanted was to transform all into Light, that is, into the Son of Man.

The apostle Peter was well aware of all this when he said: The word of the Lord remains forever.[2188] Indeed, the apostle knew that By the same word, the present sky and earth are destined for fire.[2189] And if they are so destined, it is until Judgment Day (until the Light=wisdom), that is, all men’s consummation in the Son.[2190]

Section II

Be on the alert. Be on your guard.

(Mark 13:32-37, Matt. 24:42-44, Luke 21:34-36)

Verse 32: But as for that day or hour, nobody knows it, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son; no one but the Father.

To avoid confusion when interpreting this verse, we should bear in mind that the Day and the hour are not chronological indications. While the Day (Light) denotes knowledge, and therefore, the degree of identity with the realm of the Son of Man, each hour marks a state or gnoseological stage, and a specific mode of behavior on the road to realization.

Once understood thus, it should come as no surprise that neither the holy angels-the particles of light that are to be found in every man, in pneumatic man-nor the Son of Man whose Coming is awaited, know when the veil will be torn from top to bottom, enabling the revelation to consciousness of the Son of Man, to the point of bursting out with cries of joy and praise. The Gospel accords throughout with the words of the prophet: That day… will be a day of wonder [known only to the Lord]. In the evening it will be light.[2191]

To tell the truth, no one can know when anyone will receive the Glory and power of the Son of Man-and how, indeed, could anyone know, since that not-knowing is grounded in the soul’s freedom to recognize the light that is her life, or to reject it?

The issue is precisely that of recognizing or rejecting one’s essence. To say that the Son of Man comes is a mere figure of speech, for man was modeled from the eternal seed, from the particle of light which we call Man, he was made. The whole seed-the Son-was not breathed forth by the Father and planted later in man. The scripture puts it well: All things were created through him [through the Son] and for him.[2192]

What must be known now is whether man, every man will, in his Day, at his hour, discover the infinite light, the Glory that reveals the Son of Man. Will man discover his true I AM? As Jesus says, this, no one but the Father knows.

Verse 33. Be on your guard, stay awake, because you never know when the time will come.

The various imperatives in the original Greek translated in the English version of the Jerusalem Bible by Be on your guard (Verse 33 and vv. 9, 23);[2193] and Stay awake (verses 33,[2194] 35, 37[2195] and 34[2196]) are the movers and shakers in this final section of Mark 13. They are important.

In the manifest interpretation of the Good News, next to nothing remains of what must for the Evangelists and for Jesus’ first disciples have been so meaningful for salvation, that inner disposition consisting of being mindful, attentive to oneself, without losing sight of the ultimate purpose (telos) of man’s existence according to Christ’s teaching.

Of that admonition to be alert, on your guard, which appears so often in New Testament texts little more remains now than the customary celebration of vigils, no longer in their original sense of adopting an attitude of inward reflection, as a way in which to access a source of knowledge, just pious preliminaries for the celebration of some event in the ecclesiastical calendar. Few seem to remember the recommendation in the First Epistle to Timothy: Pay close attention to yourself and to your teaching; continue in these things, for in doing this you will save both yourself and your hearers.[2197]

As for the time of the Coming, remember that the Son does not come in response to a when but the accomplishment of the hour, the precise inner event signaling that the seed planted by God has ripened and can be harvested.

Verse 34. It is like a man traveling abroad: he has gone from home, and left his servants in charge, each with his own task; and he has told the doorkeeper to stay awake.

Verse 35. So stay awake, because you do not know when the master of the house is coming.

The inner disposition called for by Jesus consists of being on one’s guard and staying awake, meaning, keeping a close watch on oneself, with one’s consciousness uninterruptedly alert. It is not easy to put into practice. Nevertheless, on it depends the good and timely obtaining of the fruit, the shortening of the Days, which Jesus assures us has been established for the sake of the elect who await his Coming (Verse 20).

Nor is it easy to understand well what the practice of the science of God, consists of-that great and beautiful science which Jesus explained, which served for cutting short the days of distress, and not only for cutting them short, for Jesus said that, were it not for that science, no one would have been saved. For the purpose of clarifying this and of speeding up the revelation (the Coming) of the Son of Man, Mark 13 now provides the illustration of the man traveling abroad.

There can be no question but that the man traveling abroad represents metaphorically the Son of Man, whose Coming (return) is awaited. The home of the traveler-the Son-is the complete man, the man in whom the Son has his dwelling, as though he were a temple; and if it is said of the traveler that he traveled abroad, this does not in fact signify any change of place; rather, it takes account of the fact that man’s natural consciousness (the soul being the doorkeeper) is so deeply unaware of the Son’s existence, despite his being the real master of the house, that she thinks he is not there. That is why the prudent soul awaits the return of the one who was never absent. That is why she speaks of his Coming when she discovers him.

Although consciousness may quite naturally be unaware of the master of the house, no servant, no faculty or potentiality of the soul, is ignorant of the duties that fall to it, these tasks having been ordered by the Son to coordinate their work.

Especially important is the job assigned to consciousness, called the doorkeeper in the illustration, because it is on his vigilance that the opening or closing of the doors of the soul must depend when the light of the master of the household appears.

Consciousness is called upon to be ever attentive, ever on the alert to whatever is taking place within itself, and its duty is to stay awake, on guard, without giving way to sleep. Only thus will the soul be able to perceive one Day the presence of the Son and to enter into unending contemplation.

Once this self-awareness, this staying awake to contemplate the presence, is practiced uninterruptedly by consciousness, without the inevitable external occurrences being allowed to disturb or distract it, consciousness may be said to have attained a stabilized attitude.

The Gospel proclaims that, through this attitude, the days of the elect have been shortened. Keeping up such a disposition full time calls for a great dose of energy and of love for the Creator, while forgetting created things; yet, through this attitude darkness can become light. As the prophet Zechariah says, In the evening it will be light.[2198]

Once consciousness becomes stable in this awakened state, in unbroken vigilance, in contemplation, in constant expectation of the joyous presence of the Glory of the Son, nothing remains to be done by the soul, nothing but to wait, without impatience, with gladness-for the Son is there and now she knows that he was never absent-to wait for that hour which each consciousness can and must call my hour, when the veil will be torn from top to bottom.

She knows then that in reality the master of the house was never absent. And now here he is, very near, at the gates; and all this she sees, for the light of day shines intensely although it is night (St. John of the Cross).

 = 

Thanks to the parable provided by the Gospel according to Saint Mark, it becomes easier rightly to understand the true purport of the word Convert preached by Jesus when he first proclaimed the Gospel: Repent [Change your hearts and minds] and believe the Good News.[2199]

Various places in the Gospels speak of this conversion (or inner disposition towards vigilance) in order to attain consummation, full realization of the Good News. Conversion, changing one’s heart and mind, is where the science of God explained by Jesus has its beginning. This is a science that consists in the practice of being on guard and seeing, so as to cut short the days. Our commentaries have already included a scattering of references to this little studied science, and now Mark’s parable of the man traveling abroad enables us to assemble a body of useful information on the matter.

Conversion (Gr. Metanoia)[2200] is a turning in of consciousness on itself, whereby this same consciousness which in its natural workings is usually directed towards viewing the external world is enabled to deal with the facts-thoughts, representations, emotions, etc.-that take place within. This turning inward is conversion, and the activity of reflection that follows on from it, i.e. the faculty that arises to practice conversion effectively, is what the Gospel refers to in many places as looking, being on one’s guard,[2201] or watching, staying alert, staying awake, realizing, etc.

During the initial period of this practice, which can take any amount of time, the fruit of attending to oneself is purification. In the language of the Gospel, this is known as the baptism of conversion. It is not given directly by Christ, but by John the Baptist or by Jesus’ disciples.[2202]

This special disposition of inner conversion means that no movement of the mind passes unnoticed by consciousness. Being on the alert, it is aware of and registers every single movement of the mind. It is important to know that the act of maintaining this state of inner attention results soon enough and to a not inconsiderable extent, in a first cleansing of those conscious or unconscious contents that tend to clog consciousness.

The servants, the powers or faculties of the soul, on seeing the reflected image of their deluded ideas in consciousness, come to hate these ideas and spontaneously to expel them. This fulfils the law whereby recognizing impurity is in itself the first step towards purification.

Likewise, it is important to know what conduct to follow in dealing with the deluded ideas projected by the servants in the parable, and this consists in following Saint Peter’s advice to the elders in his epistle: Watch over the flock, not simply as a duty but gladly, because God wants it. Never be a dictator over any group that is put in your charge.[2203]

The task of the doorkeeper in Mark’s parable consists solely in watching, staying awake, watching over and seeing the action of the servants. This means that the action of consciousness contemplating the movements that arise in the mind must not go beyond observing and registering those movements. This entails the systematic exclusion of any judgment or evaluation of the mental contents observed.

This limitation must be observed faithfully. As the fourth Gospel proclaims, it is to the Son of Man that the power to judge has been given,[2204] so that if consciousness exercises judgment it is acting abusively and usurping the Son’s powers.

The doorkeeper in Mark’s apologue must not behave as though he were the master of the house, nor must the soul forget the lowliness of the handmaid.[2205]

It is the Son of Man who is empowered to judge, while the handmaid-the soul-has only the delegated power to be on guard. Great things will be done for her when the Son of Man has looked upon her.

In less mystical language, it may be said that the consciousness which is on guard and is thus aware of all that is taking place within itself is a consciousness turned in upon itself, doubled, made two for purposes of self-reflection. One wing of this consciousness is the one that sees all the contents projected onto the other wing. But the wing that sees must limit itself to watching as impersonally as possible; for once it becomes involved in what it sees and tries to impose its own judgments on them in an act of the will that makes it a dictator over the flock, reflection fails and conversion ceases.

It must be clearly understood that the being on guard, the watching called for by conversion must always consist of being the spectator of what one is watching, staying on guard without identifying with or rejecting what one sees; for once consciousness intervenes it ceases to be a spectator and becomes part of the show. A soul that has turned into an actor can never be a humble, selfless handmaid on whom the Lord can look and for whom he can do great things. What the Gospel calls for is constant, peaceful and impersonal contemplation, whose sole interest is in the act of contemplation, ever wakeful, unsleeping.

No one can know how long this state may last but one day perseverance will cause the Glory of the Son of Man to descend on the wing watching in this wide desert.

Call it as you will, this is as though the flower of the soul had opened. Initially, the presence will be very tenuous, barely perceptible, but with contemplation it will grow. What it brings is a rain of knowledge, that same rain of which the Acts tell, descending on the Twelve in tongues of fire,[2206] for it is written: I will pour out my spirit on all mankind.[2207]

That is why the third Gospel proclaims: Happy those servants whom the master finds awake when he comes.[2208]

This last point relates to the watches mentioned by Mark, and these we must now study, for they provide the model for staying awake taught by Jesus during the vigils of his Passion. According to Mark, these hold corresponding validity for the Passion of the followers of Christ who have invoked the Coming of the Son of Man.

Verse 35: So stay awake, because you do not know when the master of the house is coming, evening, midnight, cockcrow, dawn.

Verse 36: If he comes unexpectedly, he must not find you asleep.

In each of the four watches into which the Evangelist Mark divides the night of the soul, we must stay awake and alert, ready to respond with our witness of truth to the great event of the Coming.

Mark has his reasons for naming here the four watches whose meaning he will allude to in more or less veiled terms in his account of the Passion of Jesus. His purpose seems to be to teach that the events which he has described in parable, using mythical forms, affect the entire human generation, since they announce in hidden terms the Passion which all must undergo in the measure that corresponds to them.

The Passion of Jesus was in paradigm the Passion that awaits all those who sincerely invoke the Coming within them of the Son of Man: Maranatha. To teach that truth, the Gospel sets out to reveal glimpses between the passing clouds of the veil, the parallel that exists between the watches lived by Jesus and those that await every man, which have been described in parable without there having been any direct allusion to them.

We can but admire Mark’s hermeneutic skill (or that of the scribes working with him). Not only does he manage to superimpose the meaning of the two narratives of the Passion but, in telling what took place during the second and third watches, he brings to bear the contrast between Jesus’ wakefulness and the sleep that in one way or another overcomes the disciples’ consciousness.

Here, it should be pointed out in vindication of these disciples that the Evangelist does seem to be using them to represent metaphorically those servants mentioned in the parable, the servants who were not awake when the master of the house returned home.[2209]

Now, however, let us consider the description of the four watches of the Passion which Mark mentions intentionally, to serve as parallel representations in parable.

1st Watch. In the evening (14:17). The first day of Unleavened Bread, when the Passover lamb was sacrificed (14:12)

We already know that, in the hermeneutics followed by the Evangelists, the disciple Judas was to take the part of the Adversary, Satan. This is confirmed by the author of the third Gospel when he says: Then Satan entered into Judas.[2210] That is why, having studied the commentary on verse 14, the announcement of Judas’ betrayal can be readily identified in Mark’s parallel parable of the Passion-with the decisive act of seeing the disastrous abomination set up where it ought not to be (in the Holy of Holies).

2nd watch. This is the midnight watch, standing opposite the sixth hour of the day, midday. If, with the coming of the sixth hour, darkness came over the land, in other words, over passible man, now, at the previous midnight, darkness came over the soul. Consequently, it is not difficult to identify the fear and great distress which the Evangelist tells that Jesus felt in Gethsemane (14:33) with the great distress (thlipsin) of which Mark tells in his parable.

This being the second watch, it is the servants’ duty to stay awake, as pointed out by Luke,[2211] and the servants are indeed present in Gethsemane but, in keeping with the hermeneutics of the Evangelists, these servants are represented by the three disciples, Peter, James and John, with the first of the trio in the role of doorkeeper, i.e. consciousness.

The three hours that go to make up a watch will take on a significance of their own during this second watch, so that every single hour should to some extent be read in its own right:

1st hour. Jesus said My soul is sorrowful to the point of death (14:34). According to the hidden meaning, the death of the soul is the accomplishment of self-denial, the death of consciousness of the world, this being the cross that Jesus asked his disciples to take up and what he foresaw when he said: the Son of man came to give his life [soul] as a ransom for many.[2212]

After this, Jesus asked the servants, the powers of the soul, to stay awake: Wait here, and keep awake. This request must be seen as a contradiction, as an instinctive movement to reaffirm the life of the soul, now in the trance of consummation. Its meaning coincides with Mark’s expression when he says that he threw himself on the ground. In the prayer that follows, there are two distinct moments. The first comes from the ground: Take this cup away from me shows a consciousness revealing itself in an instant of weakness in the face of the trial that lies before it. The second moment moves to immediate elevation, with consequent consent and voluntary surrender: […] but let it be as you, not I, would have it.

2nd hour. There is no variation from the first hour. A new recommendation to the servants to watch and pray, after which he went away and prayed, using the same words. When he returned to the servants, yet again he found them sleeping.

3rd hour. This time Jesus did not ask his servants to stay awake. Since the surrender of the soul was decided-Let it be as you would have it-there was no more reason for the servants to keep watch. Jesus withdrew to pray a third time and only when the third hour had come to an end did he say to the servants: You can sleep on now and take your rest. Note that take your rest implies here that the work has been completed, as it is written: Happy are those who die in the Lord. Now they can rest forever after their work.[2213]

With the words It is all over, the hour has come, Jesus expresses the accomplishment of the plan of salvation in the second watch. The hour is here the hour of Jesus, these are his hours, these are what the soul can call my hour, that of her surrender. When Judas, the Adversary, comes to Gethsemane, Jesus will be his for the taking. As for Judas, he will take the passible body of Jesus, to hand it over, but in his quality of Adversary he will find no soul to take. She having denied herself to the point of consummation, according to the Law, has faithfully accomplished the mystery of the sacred wedding, which consists of being one with and identical to the Son of Man.

There is a double interpretation to Jesus’ next words, depending on whether one takes them in the manifest sense or in the hidden one: Now the Son of Man is to be betrayed into the hands of sinners (14:41). In the manifest sense, Jesus will be raised on the cross; in the hidden sense, he has already accomplished the work that must be done before the tearing of the veil that prevents the eyes of the world from contemplating the holy angels who accompany the Son of Man according to the promise: You will see heaven laid open and, above the Son of Man, the angels of God ascending and descending.[2214]

3rd Watch. The cockcrow watch is readily identifiable in the Gospel because of Peter’s triple denial, one for each of the three hours of the watch. But while these denials exemplify not being awake, its very contrary, bearing witness, takes place before the Sanhedrin, where Jesus with his spiritual awareness wide open denies nothing but answers twice with silence, before bearing witness, when he says: I AM. One answer for every hour of the watch.

Peter’s denials occur when the disciple is in the courtyard among the servants, and the Gospel is thus indicating that Peter is there in his capacity as doorkeeper, consciousness, according to the meaning of the parable which sets out to explain what it means to stay awake.

When Jesus is brought before the High Priest in the Sanhedrin, this accomplishes what had been announced in the parable, concerning the Passion that awaits many […] they will hand you over to sanhedrins (verse 9). If Jesus bears witness and denies nothing, it is because in him shines forth the deep higher consciousness of the Son, which arises in the one who has known how to stay awake to the point of death (14:34) and has then surrendered.

The doorkeeper’s denial then becomes of no importance, despite his having given way to sleep in the worst way possible, overcome by fear. Fast asleep and with his eyes fast shut-there we find the doorkeeper when the great distress arose on his watch. But once the seed has borne fruit, it no longer matters that the soul should be sleeping. The grain abounds in the ear of wheat. The Son watches over it all with his inextinguishable light.

4th watch. Mark does not fail to note that Jesus was brought before Pilate first thing in the morning (15:1). Thus the fourth watch is accomplished, likewise as announced in the parable as the Passion for the many: You will stand before governors (Verse 9).

In the course of this watch the hour of the manifest handing over of Jesus to the tribunal takes place, and Jesus, the hidden Christ, has nothing to say here, nothing to answer, because his Word is silence for men under the spell of the manifest.

Here, the Son of the Father, the Savior, was freed from his voluntary captivity between the hands of sinners and, as prophesied, a king among men was sentenced to be raised on the cross and to be pierced by those who look on him.

Colophon

(Mark 13:37)

Verse 37. And what I say to you I say to all: Stay awake!

It was not only for the four disciples mentioned by Mark at the beginning of the chapter that Jesus the Living One pronounced his discourse and uttered his late thoughts on the Mount of Olives. This difficult explanation was given for the sake of the entire human generation, to serve the men of all times, since the seed of the Father had been sown in all, and so that seed will grow in all those who call for and believe in it, until it yields its fruit of light.

Now, this has already been said: there is a science of God which Jesus the Living One explained, and its purpose is to shorten the days for all the elect who believe and who practice accordingly. This science of God is, in its practice, an inner disposition, one that conversion of the soul makes possible, one whereby consciousness contemplates itself. The practice is vigilance, staying constantly awake and alert. Thus the seed grows and transforms into presence, and this in turn becomes ever more stable, yielding ever more blessings.

Until a day dawns when consciousness, the soul, at the point of death, surrenders in complete self-denial. This is darkness descending on the earth, only to be transpierced-sometimes even at the same time-by an intense light shining on the people that walked in darkness, in a land of shadows.

This is none other than the Glory, the power of the Son of Man. This is the blessing of the one of whom it is said that he must come-for he was sown in us and he IS in us. It is he who comes, bringing freedom for the holy angels, the children of God. It is he who is coming on the clouds.

2042 Luke 17:20-21 [Cfr. King James Version (KJV): 20 The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: 21 Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.]

2043 Paul confirms this in 1Cor. 15:51 when he says: …We are not all going to die, but we shall all be changed.

2044 Luke 4:18

2045 Eusebius EH III 39:15

2046 Eusebius EH III 39:15

2047 John 2:19, 21-22

2048 1Cor. 3:16, 2Cor. 6:16

2049 Ps.110:1; Heb. 10:12

2050 Ezek. 11:23. The place name is added in the Targum. (Cit. Strack B I 84). Cfr. also Zech.14:4.

2051 Matt. 24:3

2052 John 8:23

2053 Ex. 3:14

2054 Rev.1:8

2055 Matt. 25:35

2056 Luke 12:51

2057 The pejorative interpretation usually given by exegetes to the end (telos) causes them to seek for the verb throeo the acceptance to be shocked or alarmed, whereas the positive sense of the text is exaltation, enthusiasm, excitement.

2058 Song 5:4

2059 Song 5:6

2060 Gen. 25:23

2061 Ps. 2:8

2062 Isai. 42:1b

2063 Mark 3:23-24

2064 Matt. 27:51

2065 Matt. 27:45

2066 Matt. 27:51

2067 Rom. 8:22

2068 Micah 4:10

2069 Mark 4:26-27

2070 Mark 8:35

2071 Mark 14:34

2072 Mark 14:53-59

2073 Mark 14:65

2074 Mark 15:2

2075 Zech. 9:9

2076 Mark 14:62

2077 Matt. 10:19. This, we studied when commenting on GT Logion 73.

2078 Mark 14:42

2079 John 13:27

2080 John 15:25; Ps. 35:19

2081 Isai. 9:1b

2082 John 15:19

2083 Gr. Bdélygma tes eremoseos

2084 Dan. 9:27, 11:31, 12:11; 1 Macc. 1:54

2085 Dan. 11:31

2086 1 Macc. 1:54

2087 Dan. 9:27b

2088 2Thes. 2:3-4

2089 Matt. 3:1

2090 John 13:18

2091 Gen. 19:17

2092 2 Kings 2:8-11

2093 Luke 14:26-27

2094 Ps. 137:9

2095 Eccl. 11:5

2096 1 Thes.5:2-3

2097 Gen. 1:5

2098 Mark 2:27-28

2099 Matt. 12:5-6 (for the entire episode in its double version-Matthew and Mark-see Matt. 12:1-8 and Mark 2:23-28).

2100 Gen. 1:5

2101 Mark 4:26-27

2102 Luke 2:37

2103 Luke 18:7

2104 John 9:4-5

2105 John 11:9-10

2106 Luke 6:12-13

2107 Luke 22:53

2108 Mark 11:12

2109 John 15:19

2110 This may be the true hidden meaning of the seventy weeks set by the prophet Daniel for the liberation of the Chosen People (Dan. 9:24 et seq.)

2111 Luke 7:28

2112 It will be remembered that the wilderness represents a lower level of life, as opposed to the mountain, which stands for the higher sphere.

2113 Our commentary on logion 28 provides the hidden exegesis of this episode in the fourth Gospel.

2114 Gen. 5:2

2115 John 1:51

2116 Gen. 22:3-4

2117 Mark 1:15

2118 Ex.19:11

2119 Hos. 6:2-3

2120 Luke 13:32

2121 First announcement: Matt. 16:21; Mark 8:31; Luke 9:22. Second announcement: Matt. 17:23; Mark 9:30-31; Luke 9:44. Third announcement: Matt. 20:19; Mark 10:32-33; Luke 18:31-33.

2122 Matt. 12:39-40

2123 Lam. 2:16c

2124 Hermas: The Shepherd, Parable 3, 1 [52]: 3.

2125 Hermas: The Shepherd, Parable 4, 1 [53]:2-5

2126 Mark 13:28

2127 Matt. 16:25; Mark 8:35; Luke 9:24

2128 Zeph. 1:14

2129 Zeph. 1:15

2130 Joel 2:1

2131 John 16:16

2132 John 16:21

2133 I have translated literally all flesh (Gr. pasa sarx). (Jerusalem Bible reads no one). [Tr. KJV.]

2134 Jer. 32:20-21

2135 1Thes. 5:5

2136 Rev. 16:15

2137 John 13:31

2138 Mark refers to the first day of Unleavened Bread in 14:12

2139 Rev.12:4

2140 Mark 10:21

2141 Mark 11:29-32

2142 John 16:33

2143 Matt. 16:19

2144 1Cor. 15:45

2145 Mark 12:25

2146 Mark 8:38

2147 Mark 15:34; Matt. 27:46

2148 John 10:30

2149 The Psalms invoked by Jesus’ words at this time and consequently regarded by ecclesiastical exegesis as Messianic prophecies are Psalms 31, 69 and 119, as well as Psalm 22 which we are now studying.

2150 As is well known, the highly expressive Greek verb enkatélipes is in the aorist tense, indicative of a distant past, (Cfr. F. Lacueva: N.T. Interlineal).

2151 John 1:51

2152 Matt. 27:50

2153 John 19:30

2154 Luke 23:46

2155 Mark 15:39

2156 John 20:1

2157 John 20:17

2158 Mark 8:12

2159 Gen. 9:13

2160 Ex.40:36

2161 Ex.13:21

2162 Luke 18:8

2163 John 1:12

2164 Isai.60:2

2165 John 5:26-27

2166 Dan. 7:27

2167 Luke 9:26

2168 Luke 4:18

2169 Mark 12:25

2170 John 17:21

2171 Zech.2:10

2172 John 11:52

2173 Matt. 23:37; Luke 13:34

2174 Deut. 30:4

2175 Ezek. 37:9

2176 Matt.16:2-3

2177 Mark 14:42; Matt.26:46

2178 Mark 1:15

2179 Ps. 24:7

2180 John 16:25

2181 This is also the meaning, according to the hidden interpretation, of the expression this generation in Mark 8:12, 38; 9:19.

2182 Gen. 7:1

2183 Matt. 22:14

2184 Mark 10:21

2185 Mark 10:45

2186 Mark 8:35b

2187 Luke 12:49

2188 1 Pet. 1:25

2189 2 Pet. 3:7a

2190 2 Pet. 3:7b

2191 Zech. 14:6-7

2192 Col 1:16; John 1:3

2193 Gr. blépete

2194 Gr. agrüpneite

2195 Gr. gregore

2196 Gr. Îna gregore

2197 1Tim. 4:16 [Translator’s note: NRSV text. The only translation I could find that articulates the content as completely as Pla-perhaps even more so-is the “Orthodox Jewish Bible”.]

2198 Zech.14:7

2199 Mark 1:15 Translator’s Note: Pla has used the term convert/conversion throughout, although most English and Spanish versions of the Gospel speak of repent/repentance and one, “Vuélvanse a Dios” (Return to God). This is close to the Hebrew teshuva, generally translated by repentance. After a single reference to the familiar Repent, we shall use convert/conversion.

Cfr. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metanoia_(theology)

2200 The expression metanoia is sometimes translated erroneously as repentance and, elsewhere, as penance; but metanoia is not about remorse for acts of commission or omission; it is not an act of inner mortification. Metanoia (beyond the mind) is self-beholding, in which the beholder’s standpoint lies beyond the mind.

2201 Mark 13:9

2202 Mark 1:4; Matt.3:8 et seq.; Luke 3:16

2203 1 Pet. 5:2-3

2204 John 5:27

2205 Luke 1:46-48

2206 Acts 2:3

2207 Joel 3:1

2208 Luke 12:37. Peter and his companions were heavy with sleep when Christ’s transfiguration came, but they kept awake and saw his Glory (Luke 9:32).

2209 In the account of the faithful and prudent servants (Luke 12:35 et seq.) which, in its first part, seems to coincide with Mark’s illustration of the master of the house, Luke mentions especially the servants’ intervention in the second and third watches of the night: It may be in the second watch he (the Lord, the Son of Man) comes, or in the third, but happy those servants if he finds them ready (verse 38).

2210 Luke 22:3. Also John 13:27 At that instant, after Judas had taken the bread, Satan entered into him.

2211 Luke 12:38

2212 Mark 10:45

2213 Rev. 14:13

2214 John 1:51

LOGION 114

Simon Peter said to them:

“Let Mariam go out from among us,

for women are not worthy of the Life.”

Jesus said:

“Behold, I will guide her to make her male,

that she too may become a living spirit like you males.

For every woman who makes herself male

will enter into the kingdom of heaven.“

COMMENTARY

1. Thomas mentions in other logia[2215] the figurative representation of the soul (woman) that must become spirit (male) in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, although there are a number of scriptural differences that merit study.

To simplify, if we were to strip the logion of all the metaphors in which it is clothed, it might read rather like this: Simon Peter said to him: “Let the soul cease to be the center [the ego] of every man, since souls do not have eternal life”. Jesus said: “I [the pre-existing Christ] shall guide her so that she may find her essence and be transformed into spirit. For every soul that is transformed into spirit will enter the Kingdom of God.[2216]

What the logion unquestionably explains, once freed of the dense aroma that surrounds it figuratively-but only figuratively-is that every soul must become spirit by decantation into its very essence, as a supreme act of transformation.

Transformation is the great mystery that must take place in every human being. It is the unavoidable task that every single soul must complete, the one task which in itself justifies all the labors undertaken by Jesus of Nazareth in proclaiming the Good News to mankind.

The Apostle was fully justified in his categorical statement that no soul will be spared this transformation: We shall all be changed.[2217]

Paul thought that in saying this he was revealing a mystery, and he was right, for transformation as the realization of man’s life is a mystery, a great Gospel mystery. However, transformation plainly remains a mystery with all its seals intact, since it is not possible to understand it perfectly unless and until one has realized this transformation directly in oneself. Only the transformed soul reveals the mystery in herself, through herself-and for herself alone.

It is doubtless because of the fact that transformation is a non-transferable mystery that its final realization has been interpreted in a number of markedly different ways that need to be placed on record.

For centuries the soul has served as the representation of the mystic Bride who consummates unity in her sacred wedding with the Bridegroom. This is the wedding celebrated by the mystic overwhelmed by love. Of these nuptials the Gospel of the Egyptians tells that when Salome, the Gospel figure for the inquiring, seeking soul, asks when the transformation will be, the Lord says to her: When you clothe yourself in blushes [in purity] and when the two become one, and the male together with the female are neither male nor female.[2218]

In two logia, 22 and 61, not only does the Gospel of Thomas espouse the description of the transformation given by the Egyptians, it explains it. In the second of these two logia, Jesus defines himself, saying I issue from the Equal, being equal to the One] who came up on her couch [that of Salome, the soul] and ate from her table. This means that Christ made himself one with the soul and assimilated as spiritual food the purified contents of the soul.

According to this reading, Jesus, the eternal Christ, is described as the divine androgyne, a symbiosis of male and female, issuing from the union of the Bridegroom and the Bride; and if Christ is the light of the world, it is because that which is unified will be filled with light, but that which is separated will be filled with darkness.[2219]

This is a description of the transformation into unity which results from the union of soul and spirit. In this union the eternal Christ becomes manifest, born from above, not before the Spouse has consumed, on the sacred couch, the purified but non-eternal food that remains on the table of the soul.

2. There is only one transformation and it is destined for everyone, but its description may vary, since the being transformed enters into the mystery by the same act in which language loses the names of things. The mystery is then revealed for the one who received it, but since it remains sealed for those who did not enter it, this revelation cannot be shared with them.

The description given by the canonical Gospels dramatizes the supreme hour of transformation and explains it as death that brings one to life, in the same way as a wheat grain that falls on the ground and dies yields a rich harvest.[2220]

But why do the Gospels speak of death? Because it is certain Jesus Christ died on the cross as a paradigm and prelibation for all deaths, but when he spoke of the cross that must be shouldered by whoever would follow him, he was not referring to a wooden cross or nails; if that were so, there could be no salvation for anyone in a civilization that has abolished this punishment.

The cross of which Jesus speaks is metaphorical and refers to a burden upon the psyche that must be borne until it falls apart. Only after this cross has disintegrated, falling to the ground in tears and in fragments of pain, only when it too has died like the grain will it yield its harvest of transformation into spirit.

It is the transitory worldly components of the soul that die in the transformation, and what then arises is eternal Life, which has been present in the soul since the beginning as an unknown seed, unreceived by consciousness, unrecognized for what it is: spirit. That is transformation.

Those sayings of Jesus which allude to it in mythical terms corroborate the mystery of the transformation of the soul. The synoptic Gospels maximize the drama with which they surround the mystery when they say: Anyone who loses his soul [life=psyche] for my sake will find it.[2221] On the other hand, the author of the fourth Gospel settles on a form of description that tones down the dramatics, so that instead of lose (die) we find the permutation hate [reject] as the Gospel means for eliminating the worldly contents of the soul that hinder transformation: Anyone who hates his life in this world will keep it for the eternal life..[2222]

There can be no question but that the couch of Salome, on which according to the Gospel of the Egyptians and likewise, the Gospel of Thomas, Christ came to eat from her table and that other bed on which according to Luke two will be lying: one will be taken [the spirit], the other [the soul] left,[2223] when the Coming of the Son of Man takes place, are one and the same bed in the unity of consciousness of the man who undergoes transformation.

If in some cases the transformation that concerns us all is expressed as the death of the soul, in others, as perfect purification, this is only attributable to differences in the description of the same mystery. It must be borne in mind that those who could describe the mystery precisely lost the linguistic means to communicate it to us. Likewise, whoever attempts such description does so either through an alien, transmitted voice, or else he returned from the mystery intending to speak of it but necessarily lost something of it, forgotten on the way.

In any case, we have to ask: when a larva completes its metamorphosis from chrysalis to butterfly, what remains of the worm? Who would venture to diagnose whether the original larva died in the nymph, or rather, was it consolidated with the wings of its transformation?

3. The deep mystery of transformation does not, after all, lie on the larva’s side but on the right hand side, forever in Christ, and this is why he was named the First Mystery.

According to the hidden exegesis, the complete man is a three-part being (for purposes of analysis, at least, since he functions as one): body, soul and spirit, the spirit being the particle of light of the Father which, being his essence (also called treasure, stone, pearl, etc.) is present from the beginning in its envelope of flesh and psyche, as the living God in his temple.

The fact that the primary, natural psycho-physical consciousness of man does not know its eternal guest is well known. Because of this, many deny it, many disbelieve in it. It is the fog in the soul that prevents this recognition, opposing this higher faith of the eyes of knowledge, which is the basis of man’s self-realization. The work assigned to the soul consists of raising this fog so as to be able to see one’s very basis; this is the transformation.

It is said that when the soul calms her anxieties, once she has grown quiet, the spirit, of which the soul is the image of the image, shows himself for what he is, the image of God, reflected in the calm waters, and then the soul contemplates this image with the newly opened enraptured eyes of knowledge.

The contemplation of which we now speak is the principal task of the soul according to the Gospel, and we are all destined to undertake it, now or later. We shall then behold and contemplate the presence (both are the same thing). Thus the spirit who, as the Gospel puts it, is with us, is in us, is received by consciousness and begins to be known by it, by the soul.[2224]

The unceasing, stabilized practice of contemplation of the presence dispels the fog that seemed to be stifling the soul; for the presence is as expansive as sunlight (being a spiritual dawning) and while it grows unaided, like the seed in Saint Mark’s parable, darkness declines and vanishes with the coming of the light.

Through worship in spirit and in truth, contemplation of the presence then spreads throughout God’s many other temples and mansions, extending everywhere. Every increase is an anointment spreading over the spirit, and thus the Holy Spirit anoints the spirit, revealing the unity of his presence in all his mansions.

Thus anointed, the spirit revealed to the soul as the Holy Spirit, God’s Christ is born from above in the confluence of unity.

4. It is on the mythical bed of Salome that soul and spirit consummate unity. But the spirit is not the bridegroom, the male that receives the soul; nor is Salome, the seeking soul, the bride, the woman awaiting the male.

The transformation brought about in the soul by unceasing contemplation of the presence has freed her of the world’s fog and she has in the end taken on the clothing of blushes (purity) and has turned into Mariam, the humble, virginal handmaid, to the point of perfect self-denial. From the womb (essence) of Mariam there manifests, there is born Christ, the Son of the living God.

Beheld from the right, road joins with road. The indwelling spirit of man is the anointed one whose anointment is spread over the soul by virtue of the unceasing contemplation and adoration of the presence, which reveals itself in the soul as the Holy Spirit, one with the spirit.[2225] In the end, he manifests, anointed for the sacred wedding of unity, as the Christ, the son of the living God.

With this, the transformation is accomplished, the work of Christ, sent by the Father, is complete, perfect consummation is attained.

5. In the unity that then arises, the male made one with the female, the outcome is neither male nor female but the Son of Man, the divine androgyne created male and female.[2226] Then, those who have attained unity will see him coming, without clouds, with great power and glory, for He is themselves.

For the believer, unity is the resurrection, and it is the Judgment, for in the grace of belief he entered contemplation, and in contemplation he beheld and so was lifted up.[2227]

But it is not easy to know whether the resurrection came after the death of the soul, or whether there was no death, simply life in unity with the Spirit. It all depends on how the transformation is described, for in the true eternal Life of Christ death and revival are one and the same.

2215 Cfr. logia 22 and 61.

2216 Simon Peter often figures in the evangelists’ symbolic presentation as consciousness, the doorkeeper of the soul, who opens the gates to the Kingdom of Heaven; while Miriam represents the virginal young girl, the pure and purified soul that receives in her womb her essence, the spirit, transformed into the Anointed One of the living God. As with the spirit united with the Spirit, the spirit resembles every (male) spirit that is one with the Father.

2217 1Cor. 15:51. It is said that no soul can elude this transformation (for we shall all be changed). This should mean that the soul which is not changed in this life, in this body, will have to make that change in a subsequent disembodied life in the Hades that interpenetrate the world. Basilides (s.II) endeavored to complete this supposition with his hypothesis of the reincarnation (metensomatosis) of souls after death as an option whereby all are transformed. The hidden exegesis does not, however, deal with such knowledge, only with transformation itself. The place where change occurs is merely anecdotal (Cfr. Origen In Mt., comment. No. 38 (MG 13:1653).

2218 Gospel of the Egyptians, fragm. 5: Clement Alex., Strom. III; PG 8:1192 (loc. sit. in comment. on logion 61, note 11).

2219 Logia 61 and 22.

2220 John 12:24

2221 Matt. 10:39; Mark 8:25; Luke 9:24

2222 John 12:25

2223 Luke 17:34

2224 John 14:17. This is the Spirit as Paraclete (the consoler) bringing Truth to the soul.

2225 Rom. 8:16

2226 Gen. 1:27

2227 John 3:14-15

FINAL DOXOLOGY

He is eternal, he is the One,

He is the true essence,

He is the supreme crown of creation.

He is not visible, neither is he invisible,

He is the firm conviction of Being,

He is the bliss that every man must discover.

For He is one with the Father,

He is One and there is no other.[2228]

2228 Mark 12:32; Deut. 4:35; 6:4, Isai. 43:10-13 (for the last verse).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Roberto Pla Sales (Valencia 16/12/1915 - Madrid 17/2/2004). Musician and writer, he specialized in translating and commentaries on wisdom texts. He lived in Madrid.

In music, he was involved in many significant developments during the course of his career. Founder, director and professor of musicology at the Escuela Superior de Canto, later to become part of the National Orchestra and Choirs, his work on the transcription of early Spanish music was of great importance.

Roberto Pla translated and/or commented extensively on the following:

Viveka–Suda–Mani: The supreme jewel of discernment (Sankara, Sirio);

Tao Te King (Lao Tse, Diana);

Kârikâ and comments on the Mâmdûkyopannhada (Sirio);

A Yoga for the West: Arparshayoga (J.M Riviere, Etnos);

Odas de Salomón (Dharana)

Treatise of Unity (Ibn Arabi, Sirio);

Bhagavad Gita (Olañeta)

El Hombre Templo de Dios Vivo (Man, Temple of the Living God) was published in 1990.

Additional information can be found in www.robertopla.com

Inner life

Roberto Pla was in the process of completing Man, Temple of the Living God when he met Prof. Lahiry, from Benares, then visiting Madrid. The two struck up a close lifelong friendship as shown by their correspondence (see www.robertopla.com) from which we extract a few paragraphs:

In October 1988 Roberto wrote,

My beloved brother: I am now fulfilling my karma, writing a book that represents the fruition of two far-reaching projects:

To revive to the greatest extent possible the truth of what Jesus Christ said, writing an elegy, a little flower dedicated to him for his love’s lost labors.

To dedicate a little effort of love to those Westerners called Christians who have been deprived of receiving the beautiful realization of Pure Consciousness that Jesus Christ set forth for them.

In February 1989 Prof. Lahiry wrote,

… I am happy knowing that you have finished the book you were writing on the authentic teachings of Jesus Christ. Now, for you the time has come to remain immersed in Supreme Peace, the state beyond qualities and duality, in the perfect union beyond knowledge, the knower and the known.

In May 1989 Roberto wrote,

My dearly beloved brother: The moment I completed my book on what I see as the true teaching of Jesus, I could indeed try to live immersed in the peace of inner silence. Therefore I did so.

... An inner change has taken place ... one that has completely transformed my way of viewing the world. This state does not detract from my peace, rather it seems to have made it permanent, stable, fixed, for it moves me to live in constant adoration of That, of the Being that I am and IS.

For many years, the essence of my meditation consisted in objectifying the mind and, undoubtedly, this objectification helped me to understand and live on the basis that there is no psychological self anchored in the mind. Later I understood that what we call “mind” is nothing more than a succession of thoughts, and this understanding meant the destruction of the mind; yet even so, the thought or the silent contemplation that sometimes occurred, was from the mind ...

But now there has been a complete change of direction, a radical change that has taken place on its own, almost suddenly, without magic lights or any altered emotional state, and this corresponds accurately and in truth to the phrase I am That. When I am silent, immersed in my conscious peace, or when I live, speak, write, think, I am always That, and not because I think or believe that I am That, but because That is the absolute, eternal and unchanging background of my being, of what I am. Now, I do not seek ... happiness, for I am happiness...

It is important for me to explain to you that what I am speaking of is not an abnormal, exalted state, because nothing else has changed. I don’t really see anything. There are no lights, no perceptions of any kind. Nor am I wiser or “fulfilled”, etc... The only thing I could tell you is that I was always on one shore and now I am on the other, eternal, perfect, changeless, forever. As for the landscape of this new shore, I do not know it; it only seems to me to be made of love, of unity with everything and of humility.

Yet, when I look at my mind, I laugh at myself for having identified with it for so many years, believing it to be me...

In February 1990 Roberto Pla wrote,

My dear brother: For months now I have put off answering your inestimable letter because I wanted to be careful about how I reply. Today, I can confirm that your appeal to the Gita VII:19 was exactly what needed to be said to me at that very moment. I can tell you that my consciousness is now finding its refuge in THAT like a humble newborn s’arana gata; whenever it slides back inadvertently towards ego, it turns back on itself to that inner emptiness which is its true home. Thereupon, the flame of the lamp burns as steadily as when there is no wind, and there arises an unsuspected timeless Dhyân Mârga. And what else could I tell you from within this new joy when, as now, revived by my remembrance of you, I am overwhelmed by the love of THAT?

In March 1990 Prof. Lahiry wrote,

My dear beloved brother: I am extraordinarily happy to have received your wonderful letter. May God in His Infinite Grace establish you in the Stable State that HE (THAT) IS. What else need I (or can I) say?

In October 1991 Roberto Pla wrote,

My dear brother: I observe that the infrequency of my letters does not interrupt our well-loved communication. I also see that when a thought functions as simple mechanical thought, free from all interference by the thinker, that is, without a subject, without the desire to become, it is then a thought that easily ceases and never breaks the Silence that everything communicates.

I want to tell you that from the Silence—from THAT—there sometimes seems to emanate … a sound, or knowledge that cannot be transformed into the knowledge of the intellect: a reality of consciousness … that makes Peace without limits more intense.

In January 1992 Prof. Lahiry wrote,

... One can say (with Ramana Maharshi): “Silence is the language of Being”. And the … sound without origin (literally not struck), is also the language of the Self. My great-grandfather has said: “Desiring is the only bondage”; the spontaneous and natural cessation of all desires is Liberation in Life …

This is a state in which the triad of knowledge, knower, and the known does not exist. This is the post-meditation state, the… “I and my Father are One”, of Jesus Christ!

In November 1994 Roberto Pla wrote,

My dear brother: THAT is now present in thoughts and even more within, in consciousness, as the real, unique and permanent Presence of a universal oneself.

Everything is THAT and seeing it in everything and everyone is a beautiful reality, an inexplicable Fullness, not sought or imagined, one that comes and lives of its own accord. I am happy to live that love without limits...

In November 1994 Prof. Lahiry wrote,

My dear beloved brother: Many thanks for your beautiful letter of November 2nd. “At the end of many births the man of knowledge surrenders into Me. Very rare is the great soul who knows that Vasudeva, the Omnipresent Being, is all that is”. (Gita VII:19). With profound recognition to THIS Vasudeva and infinite love to the costumes with the names and forms of Roberto and Carmen…

PRAYER OF UNITY

Grant us, Lord, the absolute

and eternal consciousness of Unity.

May our thoughts, words, and deeds be

always His thoughts, His words, His deeds.

May the transformation of our consciousness into His not make us feel chosen by Him.

Grant us, Lord, to die at last to all attributes,

forever.

May nothingness welcome and pacify us.

May Unity not flourish in us, but simply be,

so that it does not appear stained with our shadow.

Lord, grant that our mind may cease

through real or figurative death.

May something of the mind remember, when it ceases, that it is Unity.

Let the mind know and not forget that, when it ceases, it is You.

Grant us, Lord, to know that everything

has been granted to us from the beginning.

May we be happy with the happiness that we are.

May we know with the knowledge that we are.

May we love with the flame of love that we are.

Grant us, Lord, the one thing you have not yet granted us:

May the Lord recognize the Lord, in the Lord!

BASIC TEXTS USED

1. The Jerusalem Bible. Spanish Edition, Desclée de Bouvier.

2. Trilingual New Testament. Edition from J.M Bover and J. Callaghan. BAC. Madrid 1977

3. The Holy Bible. Translation from Vulgara Latina, by F. Scio, Gaspar and Roig. Madrid 1852

4. The Gospel of Thomas. Translated to German, English and French by the teachers : A. Guillaumont. H.Ch. Puech, G. Quispel, W.Till and Abd al Masih. Spanish edition from Biblioteca Esotérica, Barcelona 1981.

5. L´Evangile selon Thomas. Direct translation from copto by Ph. de Suárez. Metanoia, París 1975.

BIBLE REFERENCES

Acts

Acts 1:5 56

Acts 1:8 621

Acts 2:1 56

Acts 2:1-4 56, 568

Acts 2:1-13 265

Acts 2:3 784

Acts 2:3-4 668

Acts 2:17 592, 462

Acts 2:24 664

Acts 2:25-28 665

Acts.2:28 462

Acts 2:33 566

Acts 3:22 325

Acts.3:22-24 531

Acts 3:24 326

Acts 4:11 69

Acts 5:31 566

Acts 6:3 68, 433

Acts 7:30-32 58

Acts 8:10 106

Acts 9:8 218

Acts 9:18 218

Acts 10:9-10 118

Acts 13:33 404

Acts 17:22-28 33

Acts 17:27-28 46

Acts 21:20 165

Amos

Am.4:13 647

Colossians

Col.1:11 488

Col.1:15 123, 312, 485, 486

Col.1:16 778

Col.1:19 465

Col.2:2-3 365

Col.2:3 31, 44

Col.2:13 589

Col.3:2 53

Col.3:3 495, 501

Col.3:4 342

Col.3:9-10 49, 89, 488, 535

Col.3:10 49, 231

Col.4:3-4 366

Corintios

1 Cor.1:20 426

1 Cor.1:24 500

1 Cor.2:6 478

1 Cor.2:7 134

1 Cor.2:7-8 366

1 Cor.2:7-9 264

1 Cor.2:9 133

1 Cor.2:11 245, 264, 592

1 Cor.2:12-13 270

1 Cor.3:8 159

1 Cor.3:11 69

1 Cor.3:16 55, 224, 710

1 Cor.3:18-19 478

1 Cor.4:1 366

1 Cor.6:10 263

1 Cor.6:16 628

1 Cor.6:17 593, 629

1 Cor.6:19 225

1 Cor.6:19-20 265

1 Cor.8:5-6 209

1 Cor.8:6 465

1 Cor.11:23-25 358

1 Cor.12:4-11 54

1 Cor.12:8-11 92

1 Cor.12:10 50

1 Cor.12:12 162, 164

1 Cor.13:12 64, 73, 102, 494

569, 573, 615

1 Cor.14:14-16 118

1 Cor.15 525

1 Cor.15:24 653

1 Cor.15:39-40 492

1 Cor.15:39-44 225

1 Cor.15:42 175

1 Cor.15:44 173, 175

1 Cor.15:45 139, 164, 190, 201

265, 247, 342, 354, 586, 590, 756

1 Cor.15:45-47 488

1 Cor.15:45-49 154

1 Cor.15:47 123

1 Cor.15:49 312

1 Cor.15:51 539, 642, 707, 792

1 Cor.15:50 175, 521

1 Cor.15:53 158, 231

1 Cor.15:54 175

1 Cor.16:22 352, 532

2 Cor.1:22 492

2 Cor.2:14 146, 147

2 Cor.2:16 265

2 Cor.3:18 572, 688

2 Cor.4:3-4 486

2 Cor.4:6 49, 168

2 Cor.4:16 533, 534

2 Cor.5:6 509

2 Cor.5:8 509

2 Cor.6:16 45, 227, 710

2 Cor.5:16-17 124

2 Cor.11:14 652

2 Cor.12:2 174, 565

2 Cor.12:4 270

Daniel

Dan.4:9 155

Dan.6:26-28 79

Dan.6:27 642

Dan.7:10 29

Dan.7:13 134

Dan.7:27 766

Dan.9:24 739

Dan.9:27 728

Dan.9:27b 729

Dan.11:31 729

Dan.12:2 673

Dan.12:3 102

Dan.12:11 728

Dan.13:53 149

Deuteronomy

Deut.4:10-14 96

Deut.4:24 97, 239, 484, 667

Deut.4:35 641, 799

Deut.6:4 641, 799

Deut.6:5 176, 504, 606

Deut.6:13 623

Deut.8:3 115, 143

Deut.9:9 115

Deut.10:14 101

Deut.10:16 329, 330

Deut.18:10-11 660

Deut.18:15 276, 325

Deut.18:18 290, 531

Deut.28:23 102, 569

Deut.30:4 768

Deut.30:6 329

Deut.32:5 555

Deut.32:8 208

Deut.32:11 555, 607

Deut.32:32 248

Deut.32:43 623

Deut.33:16 608

Deut.34:10 96

Ecclesiastes

Eccl.9:8 379

Eccl.11:5 732

Ecclu

Ecclu 7:17 671

Ecclu 24:1 150

Ecclu 24:15 150

Ecclu.24:17 382

Ecclu 39:1-3 82

Ephesians

Eph.1:13 266

Eph.1:17 487

Eph.1:23 689

Eph.2:2 190

Eph.2:18 110

Eph.2:20 69

Eph.3:9 366

Eph.3:16-17 568

Eph.3:17 384

Eph.3:19 570, 689

Eph.4:17 199

Eph.4:22-24 49, 344

Eph.4:24 89, 231

Eph.4:30 741

Eph.5:14 334, 489, 525

Eph.5:18 198

Eph.5:30 366

Eph.5:30-31 366

Eph.6:14 622

Eph.6:17 129

Exodus

Ex.3:2 96

Ex.3:6 481

Ex.3:14 51, 72, 74, 245, 257, 715

Ex.3:15 58

Ex.4:22 555

Ex.12:5 354, 356

Ex.12:29-30 123

Ex.13:21 96, 761

Ex.13:21-22 134, 232

Ex.13:22 610

Ex.19:3-6 555

Ex.19:11 745

Ex.19:12 554

Ex.19:16 134

Ex.19:18 96

Ex.19:24 239

Ex.20:19 239

Ex.21:32 422

Ex.33:18-23 72

Ex.33:20 72

Ex.34:15 558

Ex.38:8 569

Ex.40:34-38 232

Ex.40:36 761

Ex.40:38 96

Ezekiel

Ezek.1:4 482, 569

Ezek.1:7 102

Ezek.1:27 29

Ezek.11:23 711

Ezek.15:1-8 382

Ezek.17:23 155

Ezek.31:8 145

Ezek.32:17 659

Ezek.32:20-21 659

Ezek.34:1 680

Ezek.34:2 680

Ezek.34:6 436

Ezek.34:10 680

Ezek.34:12 683

Ezek.34:16 682

Ezek.34:17 682

Ezek.34:30-31 120

Ezek.37:9 769

Ezek.37:27 45

Ezek.39:19 199

Ezek.40:2 213

Ezek.44:9 329

Ezek.47:12 151

Galatians

Gal.1:16 63

Gal.2:16 62

Gal.2:19 501

Gal.2:20 637

Gal.3:27 231

Gal.4:9 64, 246

Gal.4:19 62, 381

Gal.4:21-31 450

Gal.4:26 435

Gal.6:3 203

Genesis

Gen.1:1 99

Gen.1:2 178, 555, 607

Gen.1:3 646

Gen.1:5 65, 277, 647, 735, 737

Gen.1:6 569

Gen.1:6-7 101, 516

Gen.1:6-10 99

Gen.1:26 73, 491, 493

Gen.1:26-27 534,765

Gen.1:27 71, 172, 338, 491, 493

628, 650, 797

Gen.2 493

Gen.2:1 71, 99

Gen.2:5 173

Gen.2:7 172, 439, 534

Gen.2:9 144

Gen.2:18-20 651

Gen.2:21 415

Gen.2:21-23 651

Gen.2:23 197,415

Gen.2:24 366, 628

Gen.3:7 415, 497

Gen.3:15 417, 421

Gen.3:20 197, 415

Gen.3:21 149, 174, 415

Gen.3:22 245, 295, 296, 652

Gen.3:24 128, 150

Gen.4:2 679

Gen.4:3-5 120

Gen.4:4-5 517

Gen.4:6 519

Gen.4:8 519

Gen.4:12 518

Gen.4:15 195

Gen.5:1-3 518

Gen.5:2 743, 762

Gen.6:1 145

Gen.6:1-4 207

Gen.6:3 179, 208, 525

Gen.6:5-6 101

Gen.7:1 775

Gen.7:12 101

Gen.8:11 458

Gen.9:4 242, 520

Gen.9:13 761

Gen.9:20-21 194

Gen.9:21 231, 232

Gen.9:22-23 232

Gen.10:11 415

Gen.11:1 558

Gen.15:4 243, 244

Gen.15:17 95

Gen.16:1 336

Gen.16:7-14 450

Gen.17:1-2 27

Gen.17:5 244

Gen.17:16-17 27

Gen.17:17 325, 521

Gen.17:18 451

Gen.19:17 731

Gen.19:22 440

Gen.22:3-4 745

Gen.24:40 462

Gen.24:62 452

Gen.25:11 452

Gen.25:23 444, 517, 717

Gen.25:29 519

Gen.27:3 519

Gen.27:5 519

Gen.28:11-22 387

Gen.28:12 244

Gen.28:12-17 498

Gen.28:17 456

Gen.28:18 467

Gen.28:18-19 457

Gen.32:23-30 517

Gen.32:23-33 555

Gen.32:28 435

Gen.32.29 435

Gen.35:7 231

Gen.49:9-11 481

Gen.49:26 608

Hebrews

Heb.1:3 485, 687

Heb.1:5 404

Heb.1:6 623

Heb.1:9 336, 457

Heb.3:6 120

Heb.3:11 504

Heb.4:9 313

Heb.4:1-11 59

Heb.4:12 129, 252, 356, 591

Heb.5:5 404

Heb.6:18-19 398

Heb.7:26 102

Heb.9:14 45

Heb.10:12 711

Heb.10:20 45

Heb.10:22 331

Heb.11:3 327

Heb.12:29 484

Heb.13:2 207, 529

Hosea

Hos.1:9 638

Hos.2:1 638

Hos.2:6 638

Hos.6:23 746

Hos. 10:1 382

Isaiah

Isai.1:3 182

Isai.2:2 213

Isai.4:3 181

Isai.4:5 96

Isai.5:1-2 385

Isai.5:1-7 382

Isai.5:1-13 199

Isai.6:8 211, 543

Isai.6:9-10 86

Isai.7:11 28

Isai.7:14 27, 326

Isai.9:1 103, 169, 727

Isai.9:1-2 92, 466, 539

Isai.9:2 282

Isai.9:5 90

Isai.9:6 91

Isai.9:18 97

Isai.11:5 622

Isai.11:10 181

Isai.14:9 659

Isai.14:30 336

Isai.19:14 179, 199

Isai.22:14 231

Isai.26:9 179

Isai.26:19 489

Isai.28:16 69, 375, 387, 388

466, 495

Isai.28:16-17 307, 381

Isai.29:6 97

Isai.29:10 179

Isai.29:14 426

Isai.32:15 181, 609

Isai.32:15 181

Isai.32:20 181

Isai.33:14 484, 671

Isai.34:4 497, 700

Isai.34:11 573

Isai.36:16 497

Isai.37:19 466

Isai.40:3 277, 304

Isai.40:3-4 118

Isai.40:8 647

Isai.41:15-16 673

Isai.42:1 309, 718

Isai.42:1-2 557

Isai.43:2 97

Isai.43:7 507

Isai.43:10-13 641, 799

Isai.43:20 261

Isai.49:3 557

Isai.49:26 195

Isai.51:6 99, 642

Isai.51:17 105, 107, 126

Isai.52:13 557

Isai.53:1 326

Isai.53:6 680

Isai.53:8-9 277

Isai.53:11 354

Isai.53:12 184

Isai.54:1 450

Isai.56:7 224

Isai.58:11 116

Isai.60:2 762

Isai.60:19 486

Isai.61:1 56. 202, 204, 281

457, 543, 610

Isai.61:1-2 263, 333

Isai.61:3 145

Isai.61:10-11 212

Isai.65:1 556

Isai.65:17-19 435

Isai.66:15 95

Isai.66:22 100

Isai.66:24 672

James

Jam.1:12 348

Jam.1:18 25

Jam.1:21 25

Jam.1:27 192

Jam.5:16 264, 303

Jeremiah

Jer.1:5-7 326

Jer.1:5-8 442

Jer.1:7 19

Jer.1:9 443

Jer.2:21 248, 382

Jer.5:21 329

Jer.6:10 329

Jer.7:11 224

Jer.7:28-31 670

Jer.8:3 670

Jer.8:13 497

Jer.11:20 622

Jer.13:16 326

Jer.19:3-9 670

Jer.23:1-3 680

Jer.23:3 181

Jer.31:29 638

Jer.32:20-21 751

Jer.32:39 146

Jer.49:10 231

Job

Job 1:6 209

Job 10:11 174, 495

Job 12:10 175

Job 12:22 231

Job 14:12 99

Job 14:22 659

Job 26:5 659

Job 37:18 102, 569

Job 38:12 503

Job 38:19 503

Joel

Joel 1:7 497

Joel 1:12 497

Joel 2:1 463, 749

Joel 2:28 462

Joel 3:1 784

John

1 John 1:7 169

1 John 3:2 32, 494

1 John 3:9 262

1 John 3:9-10 637

1 John 3:14 50

1 John 5:6 549

1 John 5:12 63, 249

John 1:1 100

John 1:3 465, 778

John 1:3-5 486

John 1:4 82, 341, 582

John 1:4-5 187

John 1:5 86, 121, 646

John 1:5-9 121

John 1:6-7 496

John 1:7 688

John 1:7-8 274

John 1:9 25, 33, 86, 170, 216

236, 374

John 1:9-12 165

John 1:10 191, 341, 694

John 1:11 86, 131

John 1:12 130, 395, 494, 535

578, 624, 634, 762

John 1:14 20, 25, 86, 124, 323

326, 456, 461

John 1:15 143

John 1:16 691

John 1:17 504, 691

John 1:18 71

John 1:19-28 739

John 1:19-34 276

John 1:20 276

John 1:23 274, 277

John 1:23-29 629

John 1:26 564

John 1:26-27 276

John 1:29 263, 277, 354, 738

John 1:30 355

John 1:31 279

John 1:33 277

John 1:34 278

John 1:35 283, 738

John 1:38 504

John 1:38-39 167

John 1:42 113, 633

John 1:43 738

John 1:45 323

John 1:45-51 498

John 1:51 498, 530, 744, 759, 788

John 2:1-11 196

John 2:1-12 740

John 2:9-10 380

John 2:13-17 224

John 2:16 376, 412

John 2:17 227, 304

John 2:19 710

John 2:19-21 33, 43

John 2:21 225

John 2:24 586

John 3 567

John 3:3 232, 237

John 3:4 400

John 3:3-5 46

John 3:5 138, 147

John 3:6 67, 470

John 3:6-8 264

John 3:8 55, 66, 162, 220, 243

256, 367, 427, 470, 509, 617

John 3:8a 552

John 3:8b 552

John 3:10 66, 241, 285

John 3:11 89

John 3:13 84, 112, 202, 237

309, 333, 447

John 3:14 72, 238

John 3:14-15 566, 797

John 3:15 238, 582

John 3:16-17 694

John 3:18 236

John 3:19 191

John 3.23 284

John 3:27 688

John 3:29-30 593

John 3:30 227, 275, 496, 687

John 3:31-35 117

John 3:34 270

John 3:36 63, 250, 284, 585

John 4:2 283

John 4:5-26 452

John 4:23 400

John 4:23-24 231, 624

John 4:24 623

John 4:30-34 116

John 4:32 375

John 4:36 346

John 4:44 211

John 5:9 736

John 5:21 317, 342, 582

John 5:21-29 318

John 5:24 51, 103, 316, 341, 584

John 5:25 51, 320, 341, 585

John 5:26 341, 582, 586

John 5:26-27 317, 763

John 5:27 206, 783

John 5:28 585

John 5:28-29 683

John 5:29 316, 320

John 5:33-35 330

John 5:37 330

John 5:38 252

John 5:39 19, 327

John 5:46-47 326

John 6:5-13 432

John 6:22 738

John 6:24 579

John 6:26:62 359

John 6:27 579, 582, 615

John 6:28-29 615

John 6:29 430

John 6:33 582

John 6:33-35 341

John 6:34-35 432

John 6:35 72, 79, 562, 582, 616

John 6:37 363, 598

John 6:39 315

John 6:39-40 742

John 6:40 112, 124, 580, 582

616

John 6:47 582

John 6:50 50, 411

John 6:51 582

John 6:53 582, 686

John 6:55 359

John 6:56 360

John 6:63 204, 271, 342, 360, 686

John 6:68 271

John 7:29 445

John 7:33 235

John 7:34 235

John 7:37-38 401

John 7:38 261

John 7:39 545

John 8:7 262

John 8:12 73, 87, 187, 191, 217

296, 311, 342, 465, 466, 486, 646

John 8:20 271

John 8:21 235

John 8:23 71, 192, 256, 713

John 8:24 35, 51, 87, 257, 263

265, 377, 410, 538, 550

John 8:25 256, 259

John 8:27 257

John 8:28 72, 236, 566

John 8:31-33 637

John 8:39 637

John 8:42-44 418

John 8:47 270

John 8:51 103, 317

John 8:52 51

John 8:56 26, 290, 325, 741

John 8:56-58 542

John 8:58 27, 257, 275, 325, 481

John 9:1 219

John 9:3 219

John 9:4-5 219, 737

John 9:5 169, 391

John 9:7 220

John 9:9 220

John 9:12 220

John 9:14 736

John 9:39 187, 218, 220

John 9:41 187, 221

John 10:1-2 619

John 10:7 455, 680

John 10:7-8 623

John 10:8 184

John 10:9 583

John 10:10-11 623

John 10:11 120, 583, 623

John 10:16 357, 683

John 10:17-18 584

John 10:27 585

John 10:27-28 582

John 10:30 92, 125, 258, 412

445, 606, 654, 655, 757

John 10:34 205

John 10:36 207, 209

John 11:9 192

John 11:9-10 735, 737

John 11:23-26 320

John 11:25 51, 582

John 11:25-26 103, 150, 583

John 11:40 133

John 11:51 472

John 11:52 126, 164, 203, 338

360, 391, 425, 447, 492, 654, 768

John 12:12 738

John 12:23 291

John 12:24 105, 125, 291, 472

496, 793

John 12:24-25 571

John 12:25 73, 397, 595, 794

John 12:26 571

John 12:31 598, 652, 672

John 12:32 236, 238

John 12:32-34 566

John 12:34 237, 572

John 12:35 573

John 12:35-36 237

John 12:36 170, 326

John 12:38 326

John 12:41 27, 290, 326, 543

John 12:45 125

John 12:46 168, 192, 392, 466

John 12:48 271

John 13:1 695

John 13:3 235

John 13:6-10 422

John 13:8 423

John 13:16 423

John 13:18 43, 731

John 13:19 220, 257

John 13:26 424

John 13:27 43, 424, 725, 786

John 13:31 424, 653, 687, 753

John 13:33 54, 571

John 13:33-36 54

John 13:36-37 541

John 14:2 377, 378, 655

John 14:5 503

John 14:5-8 54

John 14:6 87, 88, 308, 341, 378

425, 488, 582

John 14:7 399, 445

John 14:9 125, 486

John 14:10 270

John 14:11 258, 655

John 14:15-19 545

John 14:16-17 55, 347

John 14:16-23 545

John 14:17 57, 95, 187, 225, 265

269, 564, 609, 796

John 14:17-19 349

John 14:18 422

John 14:20 350

John 14:22 31

John 14:22-23 504

John 14:23 192, 220, 313, 505

625, 631, 655, 689

John 14:23-30 291

John 14:25-26 545

John 14:26 55, 265, 548

John 14:27 438

John 14:30 652

John 15:1 159, 194, 232, 247

382, 481

John 15:1-7 149

John 15:3 164

John 15:4 164

John 15:6 384, 598

John 15:18-25 445

John 15:19 394, 695, 727, 739

John 15:25 727

John 15:26 54, 56, 545, 548

John 15:26-27 54

John 16 542

John 16:7-14 545

John 16:7-16 549

John 16:11 652

John 16:13 54, 55, 265

John 16:14 148

John 16:16 542, 552, 749

John 16:16-19 348

John 16:20-21 473

John 16:21 749

John 16:21-22 349

John 16:25 41, 635, 774

John 16:33 694, 756

John 17:11 110, 248

John 17:16 546, 587

John 17:16-17 611

John 17:20-21 117

John 17:21 126, 307, 356, 426

655, 767

John 17:21-22 302

John 17:21-23 503

John 17:22 110, 247, 337, 452

463, 688

John 17:22-23 655, 677, 686

John 17:23 29,110,126,155, 161

165, 239, 395, 504, 606, 685

John 17:24 135, 530

John 17:26 117

John 18:6 74

John 18:36 344, 645, 694

John 19:23 482

John 19:30 184, 759

John 19:31 736

John 19:37 236, 239, 392, 542

550, 573

John 19:39-40 150

John 20:1 759

John 20:17 126, 236, 358, 656

759

John 20:21-22 543

John 20:22 261, 266, 545

John 20:23 267

John 20:29 43, 267, 352, 562

John 21:15-17 113

John 21:15-19 634

John 21:18 163

John 21:19-23 501

John 21:22 624, 710

Jude

Jude 1:14 165

Jude 14:42 753

Judges

Judg.13:5 608

Judg.16:17 608

Kings

1 Kings 8:27 101

2 Kings 2:1-14 285

2 Kings 2:8-11 731

2 Kings 2:10 286

2 Kings 2:15 288

2 Kings 18:31 497

Lamentations

Lam.2:16c 747

Lam.3:6 79

Lam.3:10 79

Lam.4:21 195

Levitico

Lev.2:13 97, 675

Lev.10:2 97

Lev.19:18 171

Lev.20:6 660

Lev.22:10 554

Lev.26:11 45

Luke

Luke 1:2 20

Luke 1:15-17 477

Luke 1:17 106, 107, 285

Luke 1:20 741

Luke 1:26 275

Luke 1:35 281, 609

Luke 1:39-44 279

Luke 1:45 399

Luke 1:46 300

Luke 1:46-47 397, 591

Luke 1:46-48 783

Luke 1:47-48 336

Luke 1:48 363, 521, 535

Luke 1:51 535

Luke 1:59-63 330

Luke 1:77 242, 264

Luke 1:77-78 169

Luke 1:78 169

Luke 1:78-79 578

Luke 1:79 103

Luke 2:21 330

Luke 2:25-26 319, 616

Luke 2:25-32 556

Luke 2:26 325

Luke 2:35 130

Luke 2:37 737

Luke 2:40 576

Luke 2:49 92, 362

Luke 2:52 116, 597

Luke 3:4 274, 304

Luke 3:16 669, 782

Luke 3:20-22 279

Luke 3:21 612

Luke 4:1-6 611

Luke 4:2 116

Luke 4:3 143

Luke 4:8 623

Luke 4:10 530

Luke 4:18 56, 202, 204, 263, 302

318, 333, 457, 500, 543, 557, 558

582, 610, 707, 766

Luke 4:18c 557

Luke 4:18-19 281

Luke 4:22 287

Luke 4:23 212

Luke 4:24 211

Luke 4:31-37 212

Luke 5:33-35 117, 283, 627

Luke 5:36-39 293

Luke 5:35 235

Luke 6:12-13 738

Luke 6:13 735

Luke 6:13-16 430

Luke 6:20 119, 333

Luke 6:21 521

Luke 6:22 393

Luke 6:23 741

Luke 6:38 90, 93

Luke 6:43-45 258

Luke 6:45 269

Luke 7:6 57

Luke 7:22 204

Luke 7:24 255

Luke 7:24-25 469

Luke 7:28 117, 123, 245, 739

Luke 8:4-8 140

Luke 8:8 90, 432, 444

Luke 8:10 242, 365

Luke 8:11 86

Luke 8:11-15 81, 198

Luke 8:14 293

Luke 8:16-18 252

Luke 8:17 71

Luke 8:18 249

Luke 8:20-21 337, 338, 597

Luke 8:21 127, 444

Luke 8:43-47 196

Luke 9:1-16 429

Luke 9:2-5 120

Luke 9:3 575

Luke 9:7-9 286

Luke 9:10-17 432

Luke 9:18-19 287

Luke 9:18-21 111

Luke 9:22 746

Luke 9:23 396, 593, 668

Luke 9:23-24 73, 339

Luke 9:24 595, 748, 794

Luke 9:25 396

Luke 9:26 766

Luke 9:27 52, 291, 500

Luke 9:28-36 290

Luke 9:29-31 20

Luke 9:30-31 290

Luke 9:32 784

Luke 9:33 28, 656

Luke 9:34 95

Luke 9:35 309

Luke 9:44 746

Luke 9:51-54 435

Luke 9:53 431

Luke 9:58 256, 503

Luke 9:60 103

Luke 10:1 431

Luke 10:1-12 429, 434

Luke 10:4 437

Luke 10:4-7 438

Luke 10:4-13 120

Luke 10:7 437

Luke 10:8 122

Luke 10:9 121, 436

Luke 10:12 741

Luke 10:13-15 441

Luke 10:16 434, 441

Luke 10:19 176

Luke 10:21 67

Luke 10:22 362

Luke 10:23 133

Luke 10:23-24 211

Luke 10:24 134, 235

Luke 10:25 584

Luke 10:27 171

Luke 11:4 296

Luke 11:9 53

Luke 11:13 54, 297, 543, 592, 609

Luke 11:14-22 223

Luke 11:20 261

Luke 11:28 399, 478, 646

Luke 11:29-30 538

Luke 11:30 113

Luke 11:34 187

Luke 11:40 533

Luke 11:41 119

Luke 11:44 499

Luke 11:52 44, 241

Luke 12:4-5 674

Luke 12:8-9 530

Luke 12:10-12 261

Luke 12:11-12 122

Luke 12:13-15 426

Luke 12:16-21 369, 426, 478

Luke 12:19 300

Luke 12:20-21 696

Luke 12:22 229

Luke 12:23 230

Luke 12:32 366

Luke 12:33 119

Luke 12:35 619, 621, 785

Luke 12:35-40 458

Luke 12:37 784

Luke 12:38 786

Luke 12:46 741

Luke 12:49 128, 378, 405, 410

477, 483, 565, 612, 644, 668, 776

Luke 12:49-50 98

Luke 12:49-51 405

Luke 12:50-52 408

Luke 12:51 716

Luke 12:51-53 127, 605

Luke 12:53 412

Luke 13:6-9 499

Luke 13:18-19 92, 153

Luke 13:20-21 433, 577

Luke 13:21 90

Luke 13:25 598

Luke 13:28 138

Luke 13:30 138

Luke 13:32 741, 742, 746

Luke 13:34 768

Luke 14:14 318

Luke 14:16 375

Luke 14:16-24 374

Luke 14:23 378

Luke 14:24 376

Luke 14:26 598

Luke 14:26-27 732

Luke 14:27 570

Luke 15:1 683

Luke 15:3-7 679

Luke 15:4-5 682

Luke 15:8-10 208

Luke 15:10 530

Luke 15:17 321

Luke 15:23 682

Luke 15:24 321, 584, 585

Luke 15:32 539, 584

Luke 16:1-13 294

Luke 16:8 296, 312, 635

Luke 16:13 293, 294

Luke 16:15 400

Luke 16:16 282

Luke 16:17 99

Luke 17:6 500

Luke 17:20-21 192, 705

Luke 17:21 62, 65, 76

Luke 17:22 305

Luke 17:22-26 741

Luke 17:24 306, 368, 427, 741

Luke 17:27 741, 742

Luke 17:29 741

Luke 17:30 741

Luke 17:31 741

Luke 17:31-36 321

Luke 17:33 595

Luke 17:34 361, 362, 794

Luke 17:35 130

Luke 17:37 507

Luke 18:7 737

Luke 18:8 762

Luke 18:17 67

Luke 18:24-27 576

Luke 18:31-33 746

Luke 18:35-43 219

Luke 19:1-10 497, 576

Luke 19:10 254

Luke 19:11:27 253

Luke 19:26 249

Luke 19:38 111, 479

Luke 19:40 111

Luke 19:43 741

Luke 19:45-46 224

Luke 20:9 384

Luke 20:9-15 383

Luke 20:9-17 382

Luke 20:16-17 387

Luke 20:16-18 383

Luke 20:17 154

Luke 20:18 389

Luke 20:25 601

Luke 20:34-36 319

Luke 20:36 52, 208, 523

Luke 20:37-38 319

Luke 20:38 63

Luke 20:41-44 45, 531

Luke 21:8-11 714

Luke 21:5-7 710

Luke 21:12 440

Luke 21:15 122

Luke 21:20-21 727

Luke 21:23 472, 732

Luke 21:24 435

Luke 21:25-27 62

Luke 21:27 102, 134

Luke 21:29-33 770

Luke 21:33 99, 270

Luke 21:34 741

Luke 21:34-35 199

Luke 21:34-36 777

Luke 22:3 420, 786

Luke 22:15-18 107

Luke 22:15-20 358

Luke 22:16 107, 358

Luke 22:18 358

Luke 22:19-20 107

Luke 22:31 420

Luke 22:37 184

Luke 22:52 184

Luke 22:53 735, 738

Luke 23:26 513

Luke 23:32 184

Luke 23:46 185, 759

Luke 23:54 736

Luke 24:5 351

Luke 24:7 741, 742

Luke 24:13 738

Luke 24:21 741, 742

Luke 24:25 26

Luke 24:25-27 323

Luke 24:27 26, 556

Luke 24:44 324

Luke 24:49 57, 158, 230

Luke 31:37 212

Maccabees

1 Macc.1:54 728, 729

Malaquias

Mal.1:3 421

Mal.2:15 208

Mal.3:20 276

Mal.3:23 290

Mal.4:5 285

Mark

Mark 1:2 274

Mark 1:4 264, 782

Mark 1:9 612

Mark 1:9-11 279

Mark 1:11 459

Mark 1:12-13 143

Mark 1:14-15 282

Mark 1:15 62, 63, 305, 462, 745

771, 781

Mark 2:17 263

Mark 2:18 283

Mark 2:18-20 117, 627

Mark 2:19 629

Mark 2:20 235, 741

Mark 2:21-22 293

Mark 2:23 736

Mark 2:23-28 736

Mark 2:27-28 736

Mark 3:6-7 430

Mark 3:22-30 223

Mark 3:23-24 718

Mark 3:25 302

Mark 3:28-30 261

Mark 3:32-35 597

Mark 3:34-35 338

Mark 3:35 107, 127

Mark 4:8 377

Mark 4:8-20 377

Mark 4:11 85, 365, 511

Mark 4:12 85

Mark 4:13 81, 85, 374, 635

Mark 4:13-20 81, 198

Mark 4:14 25, 29, 429, 634

Mark 4:14-19 376

Mark 4:15 82

Mark 4:18 293

Mark 4:19 140

Mark 4:21-22 266

Mark 4:21-24 249

Mark 4:22 26, 31, 71, 492, 548

Mark 4:24 93

Mark 4:24-25 90, 252

Mark 4:25 249

Mark 4:26 622

Mark 4:26-27 83, 720, 737

Mark 4:26-29 92

Mark 4:27 23, 735

Mark 4:28 140

Mark 4:30-32 92, 153

Mark 4:33-34 82, 86

Mark 4:35 741

Mark 6:4 211

Mark 6:6-12 429

Mark 6:8-11 120

Mark 6:14-16 286

Mark 6:30-44 432

Mark 7:6 605

Mark 7:24-30 558

Mark 8:1-10 432

Mark 8:2-3 116

Mark 8:12 113, 538, 761, 774

Mark 8:14-21 68

Mark 8:15 432

Mark 8:22-26 144, 218

Mark 8:25 794

Mark 8:27 287

Mark 8:27-30 111

Mark 8:28 530

Mark 8:31 746

Mark 8:34 396, 514, 668

Mark 8:34-35 73

Mark 8:35 595, 722, 748

Mark 8:35b 775

Mark 8:38 756, 774

Mark 9:1 52, 500, 587

Mark 9:2-8 290

Mark 9:3 230

Mark 9:9 319

Mark 9:10 320

Mark 9:11 291

Mark 9:19 774

Mark 9:30-31 746

Mark 9:35 138

Mark 9:43-47 584

Mark 9:43-49 674

Mark 9:49-50 98

Mark 10:15 67

Mark 10:17 584

Mark 10:21 755, 775

Mark 10:23 696

Mark 10:28-31 138

Mark 10:29-30 444

Mark 10:31 138

Mark 10:32-33 746

Mark 10:38-39 396

Mark 10:41-45 106

Mark 10:45 775, 787

Mark 10:46-52 219

Mark 11:2 480

Mark 11:4 598

Mark 11:12 738

Mark 11:13 498

Mark 11:15-17 224

Mark 11:23 500

Mark 11:29-32 756

Mark 12:1 384

Mark 12:1-8 383

Mark 12:1-11 382

Mark 12:9 387

Mark 12:9-11 383

Mark 12:10 154

Mark 12:17 601

Mark 12:25 523, 756, 767

Mark 12:26-27 586

Mark 12:32 176, 597, 641, 799

Mark 12:33 171

Mark 12:35-37 45, 531

Mark 13 443, 706, 733, 774, 776

Mark 13:1-4 710

Mark 13:5-8 714

Mark 13:9 782

Mark 13:11 122, 441

Mark 13:12-13 443

Mark 13:14-16 727

Mark 13:17 472

Mark 13:17-20 732

Mark 13:19 471

Mark 13:21-23 751

Mark 13:24-25 753

Mark 13:24-32 62

Mark 13:26 102, 134, 606, 613

Mark 13:26-27 28, 761

Mark 13:27 530

Mark 13:28 747

Mark 13:28-32 770

Mark 13:29 455

Mark 13:31 99, 270

Mark 13:32 741

Mark 13:32-37 777

Mark 13:33 532

Mark 13:37 790

Mark 14:12 741, 754

Mark 14:19 430

Mark 14:20 424

Mark 14:22-25 358

Mark 14:25 82, 358

Mark 14:34 301, 589, 593

669, 723

Mark 14:42 725, 771

Mark 14:48 184

Mark 14:51-52 158

Mark 14:53-59 723

Mark 14:62 724

Mark 14:65 723

Mark 15:2 723

Mark 15:21 513

Mark 15:23 150

Mark 15:27 149

Mark 15:34 757

Mark 15:38 398, 482, 757

Mark 15:39 759

Mark 15:40 362

Mark 15:42 757

Matthew

Matt.1:16 46

Matt.1:23 28

Matt.2:9 169

Matt.2:11 623

Matt.2:16 90

Matt.3:1 731

Matt.3:2 62

Matt.3:2b 62

Matt.3:3 117, 262, 274, 304

Matt.3:8 782

Matt.3:12 83, 204, 405, 644

Matt.3:13-17 279

Matt.3:15 279

Matt.3:16 612

Matt.3:17 147

Matt.4:1-4 143

Matt.4:2 116

Matt.4:10 623

Matt.4:12 282

Matt.4:16 282, 539

Matt.4:17 62

Matt.5:3 87, 119, 203, 333

478, 495

Matt.5:5 347

Matt.5:6 116, 263

Matt.5:8 245, 305, 630

Matt.5:11 393

Matt.5:13 97, 675

Matt.5:14 168, 213, 394, 491

Matt.5:14-16 214

Matt.5:16 168

Matt.5:17 202

Matt.5:18 99

Matt.5:19 106

Matt.5:45 635

Matt.6:1 115

Matt.6:1-6 76, 627

Matt.6:2-6 31

Matt.6:3 367

Matt.6:6 631

Matt.6:8 631

Matt.6:11 630

Matt.6:12-18 627

Matt.6:13-14 295

Matt.6:19-22 294

Matt.6:21 463

Matt.6:22 187

Matt.6:22-23 167, 169

Matt.6:23 187

Matt.6:24 293, 294

Matt.6:25 229, 230, 509, 522

Matt.6:33 53

Matt.6:34 738

Matt.7:2 90

Matt.7:6 554

Matt.7:7 53

Matt.7:11 543

Matt.7:13-14 416

Matt.7:14 342, 584

Matt.7:16-18 258

Matt.7:22 741

Matt.8:8 559

Matt.8:20 203, 256, 333, 503

Matt.8:22 103, 316

Matt.9:14-15 117, 283, 627

Matt.9:15 235

Matt.9:16-17 293

Matt.9:27:31 219

Matt.9:37 121

Matt.10:1-4 430

Matt.10:1-23 429

Matt.10:5-6 434

Matt.10:5-16 120

Matt.10:5-23 10, 434

Matt.10:6 120, 121, 560, 562

Matt.10:7-8 436

Matt.10:9-10 437

Matt.10:11-14 438

Matt.10:15 440, 741, 742

Matt.10:15-19 440

Matt.10:16 226, 241, 245

Matt.10:19 724

Matt.10:19-20 122, 441

Matt.10:20 477, 531

Matt.10:21-22 443

Matt.10:23 446

Matt.10:26 71

Matt.10:27 215, 216

Matt.10:28 522, 674

Matt.10:34 405

Matt.10:34-36 127, 605

Matt.10:36 131, 302

Matt.10:37 419, 598

Matt.10:37-38 337, 595

Matt.10:39 73, 119, 595, 794

Matt.10:40 438, 441

Matt.10:41 532

Matt.11:7 163, 255, 442

Matt.11:7-8 469

Matt.11:11 46, 66, 117, 123

Matt.11:12 224, 283

Matt.11:19 117, 213

Matt.11:22 742

Matt.11:22-24 741

Matt.11:23 664

Matt.11:24 742

Matt.11:27 242, 503

Matt.11:28-29 313

Matt.11:29 504

Matt.12:1-8 736

Matt.12:5 736

Matt.12:5-6 736

Matt.12:11 736

Matt.12:12 736

Matt.12:22-28 223

Matt.12:25 67, 302

Matt.12:31-32 261

Matt.12:32 224, 669

Matt.12:35 269

Matt.12:36 741, 742

Matt.12:37 271

Matt.12:38-40 113, 742

Matt.12:39 538

Matt.12:39-40 242, 746

Matt.12:40 113

Matt.12:46 598

Matt.12:47-50 337, 597

Matt.12:48 127

Matt.12:49-50 338

Matt.13:1 741

Matt.13:1-9 140

Matt.13:1-52 81

Matt.13:10-11 68

Matt.13:10-12 250

Matt.13:10-17 211

Matt.13:11 242, 365

Matt.13:12 82, 249

Matt.13:14-16 82

Matt.13:16-17 211

Matt.13:17 134, 235

Matt.13:18-23 198, 250

Matt.13:19 86

Matt.13:22 88, 293, 695

Matt.13:23 90, 250, 681

Matt.13:24-30 81, 343

Matt.13:31-32 92, 153

Matt.13:31-33 81

Matt.13:33 90, 198, 388, 433, 577

Matt.13:35 82, 86, 620

Matt.13:36-43 343, 344, 645

Matt.13:37 249, 344

Matt.13:37-38 190

Matt.13:38 635

Matt.13:38-39 418, 530

Matt.13:42-43 669

Matt.13:43 346

Matt.13:44 269, 271, 463

Matt.13:44-45 81

Matt.13:44-46 461

Matt.13:44-48 388

Matt.13:45-46 249, 463

Matt.13:47-50 81

Matt.13:49 530

Matt.13:52 89, 343, 645

Matt.13:57 211

Matt.14:1-2 286

Matt.14:13-21 432

Matt.15:11 225, 270

Matt.15:13 218, 248

Matt.15:14 188

Matt.15:19 269

Matt.15:21-28 558

Matt.15:32-39 432

Matt.16:2-3 770

Matt.16:3 538

Matt.16:4 113, 538

Matt.16:13 111

Matt.16:13-14 287

Matt.16:13-18 388

Matt.16:16 242, 244, 308, 351

Matt.16:17 112, 634

Matt.16:18 76, 664

Matt.16:19 309, 756

Matt.16:21 741, 742, 746

Matt.16:23 419

Matt.16:24 396, 471, 668

Matt.16:24-25 305, 347

Matt.16:25 595, 748

Matt.16:28 103, 317, 319, 500

624, 664

Matt.17:1-8 290

Matt.17:2 28

Matt.17:10 291

Matt.17:11 291

Matt.17:12 291

Matt.17:20 479

Matt.17:23 741, 742, 746

Matt.18:3 67, 560, 682

Matt.18:4 326

Matt.18:4-5 67

Matt.18:10 67, 144, 208, 523

529, 561

Matt.18:12-14 560, 679

Matt.18:20 205

Matt.18:22 91

Matt.19:6a, 6b 628

Matt.19:14 67

Matt.19:16-22 202

Matt.19:17 584

Matt.19:21 463

Matt.19:23 696

Matt.19:23-24 202

Matt.19:26 140

Matt.19:27-28 138

Matt.19:27-30 138

Matt.19:28 66

Matt.19:30 138

Matt.20:1-16 138, 167

Matt.20:6 738

Matt.20:16 138

Matt.20:19 741, 742, 746

Matt.20:20-28 106

Matt.20:21-23 368

Matt.20:23 105

Matt.20:26-28 583

Matt.20:28 421

Matt.20:29:34 219

Matt.21:2 431, 480

Matt.21:12-13 224

Matt.21:13 224

Matt.21:16 90, 161, 498

Matt.21:21 500

Matt.21:23-25 751

Matt.21:25 280

Matt.21:32 262

Matt.21:33 384

Matt.21:33-39 383

Matt.21:33-43 382

Matt.21:38-42 110

Matt.21:40-45 383

Matt.21:42 69, 154, 243, 375

Matt.21:43-45 387

Matt.22:2-10 374

Matt.22:6-7 377

Matt.22:11-12 456

Matt.22:14 775

Matt.22:21 601

Matt.22:23 741

Matt.22:23-30 319

Matt.22:30 208, 523

Matt.22:31 319

Matt.22:37 176, 300, 504, 606

Matt.22:39 171

Matt.22:41-45 27

Matt.22:41-46 531

Matt.22:42-44 327

Matt.22:42-45 46

Matt.22:45 90

Matt.22:46 741

Matt.23:8 425

Matt.23:13 241

Matt.23:26 535

Matt.23:27 47, 244, 315, 585

Matt.23:37 447, 456, 472

654, 768

Matt.23:39 447

Matt.24 706, 708, 709

Matt.24:3 712

Matt.24:4-8 714

Matt.24:8 308

Matt.24:13 710

Matt.24:15-28 727

Matt.24:17 333

Matt.24:19 472

Matt.24:19-22 732

Matt.24:22 308

Matt.24:27 327, 368

Matt.24:28 507

Matt.24:29 753

Matt.24:29-31 62

Matt.24:30 134, 306

Matt.24:30-31 761

Matt.24:31 530

Matt.24:32-33 497

Matt.24:32-36 770

Matt.24:33 306

Matt.24:35 270, 641

Matt.24:36 741

Matt.24:38 741, 742

Matt.24:40 472

Matt.24:40-41 183, 516

Matt.24:41 130, 450

Matt.24:42 741

Matt.24:42-43 620

Matt.24:42-44 777

Matt.24:43 619

Matt.24:45-51 251

Matt.24:50 741

Matt.25:1-13 458, 619, 621

Matt.25:14-30 250, 251

Matt.25:29 249

Matt.25:31 676

Matt.25:31-46 357

Matt.25:32 682

Matt.25:35 163, 465, 715

Matt.25:35-36 339

Matt.25:41 673

Matt.25:42 465

Matt.25:46 592

Matt.26:14-15 422

Matt.26:15 520

Matt.26:18 431

Matt.26:26-29 358

Matt.26:28 357

Matt.26:31 128

Matt.26:39-44 126

Matt.26:41 458, 701

Matt.26:46 771

Matt.26:64 102

Matt.27:32 513

Matt.27:45 718

Matt.27:46 757

Matt.27:50 184, 759

Matt.27:51 398, 482, 536, 718

Matt.27-52 522

Matt.27:54 482

Matt.27:64 741, 742

Matt.28:15 738

Micah

Micah 4:4 497

Micah 4:10 719

Micah 7:6 127, 406, 412, 419

Nehemiah

Neh.9:6 101

Numbers

Num.11:1 657

Num.11:17 442

Num.11:25 531, 532

Num.12:8 96

Num.16:33 659

Num.21:6-9 568

Num.21:8 238

Num.22:31 231

Num.24:6 145, 150

Peter

1 Pet.1:10-11 532

1 Pet.1:10-12 211

1 Pet.1:23 45, 404

1 Pet.1:25 642, 777

1 Pet.2:4-8 69

1 Pet.2:5 308

1 Pet.3:18 106

1 Pet.3:21 458

1 Pet.4:12 483

1 Pet.4:14 504

1 Pet.5:2-3 783

1 Pet.5:8 199, 413

2 Pet.3:7a 777

2 Pet.3:7b 777

2 Pet.3:7-10 100

2 Pet.3:10 62, 158, 183, 642

2 Pet.3:12 483

Phillipians

Phil.1:21 501

Phil.2:16 741

Phil.3:8-10 135

Proverbs

Prov.4:18 466

Prov.18:2 231

Prov.20:27 179

Prov.23:16 622

Prov.23:20 198

Prov.23:31 198

Psalms

Ps.1:4 180

Ps.2:4 521

Ps.2:6 478, 677

Ps.2:7 123, 327, 404, 555

Ps.2:8 718

Ps.3:8 78

Ps.4:7 72

Ps.7:3 78

Ps.8:2 498

Ps.8:3 82, 90, 161

Ps.8:6 206, 521

Ps.10:9 78

Ps.11:7 73

Ps.14:1-3 263

Ps.14:5 106

Ps.15 61

Ps.16 664

Ps.16:7 622

Ps.16:8-10 665

Ps.16:10 664

Ps.16:11 462

Ps.17:12 78

Ps.17:15 73

Ps.18:22-23 381

Ps.21:3 170

Ps.21:4 148

Ps.22 757, 758

Ps.22:78 755

Ps.22:22 78

Ps.24:6 73

Ps.24:7 479, 772

Ps.26:2 622

Ps.27:8 73

Ps.29:1 206, 208

Ps.29:7 96, 483

Ps.31 185, 758

Ps.31:6 185

Ps.35 78

Ps.34:19 504

Ps.35:19 445, 727

Ps.35:25 78

Ps.36:7 487

Ps.36:9 392, 466, 487, 654

Ps.36:9-10 312

Ps.37:11 335

Ps.41:9 422

Ps.41:10 43

Ps.45:7 206

Ps.45:8 336, 457

Ps.45:9 150

Ps.49 660

Ps.49:2-3 202, 297, 334

Ps.49:15-16 660

Ps.57 78

Ps.57:4-6 78

Ps.58:2 206

Ps.58:7 78

Ps.68:10 172

Ps.69 758

Ps.69:5 445

Ps.69:9 304

Ps.78:2 82, 86, 620

Ps.78:14 96

Ps.82 205, 206, 208

Ps.82:1 206

Ps.82:6 205

Ps.82:7 206

Ps.85:10 29

Ps.85:11-12 288

Ps.88:6 659

Ps.88:8 483

Ps.89:7 206

Ps.89:48 659

Ps.90:2 190

Ps.91:11-12 530

Ps.95:11 504

Ps.97:3 96

Ps.102:27 700

Ps.104:1-2 311

Ps.104:2 29, 520

Ps.104:4 96

Ps.105:4 73

Ps.107:16 573

Ps.107:26-27 199

Ps.110:1 28, 46, 327, 711

Ps.110:1-2 80

Ps.113:7-9 335

Ps.113:9 336

Ps.116:7 321

Ps.118:2 154

Ps.118:22 69, 93, 154

Ps.118:22-23 243, 387

Ps.118:26 111, 447, 479

Ps.119 758

Ps.119:18 231

Ps.119:176 680

Ps.124:4-5 175

Ps.127:1 509

Ps.128:3 382

Ps.132:11 45, 67, 244

Ps.132:17 146

Ps.133:2 146, 609

Ps.137:9 732

Ps.138:1 206

Ps.139:13 622

Ps.150:5-6 179

Psalms of Solomon

Psalms of Solomon 14:9 663

Revelation

Rev.1:7 574

Rev.1:8 715

Rev.1:18 664, 665

Rev.2:7 342

Rev.2:8 141

Rev.3:3 183, 622

Rev.5:5 481

Rev.6:8 664, 665

Rev.7:14 353

Rev.8:3-4 148

Rev.9:4 389

Rev.10:7 367

Rev.12:4 755

Rev.13:13 484

Rev.14:13 787

Rev.14:18-20 382

Rev.16:15 158, 233, 622, 752

Rev.19:9 270

Rev.19:10 623

Rev.19:14 158

Rev.20:1-3 673

Rev.20:2 418

Rev.20:9 564

Rev.20:11 100, 642, 666

Rev.20:13 665

Rev.20:13-15 664

Rev.20:14 667

Rev.21:1 100, 213

Rev.21:1-3 435

Rev.21:2 214

Rev.21:3 100

Rev.21:8 664

Rev.21:10 214

Rev.21:21 563

Rev.22:1-2 151

Rev.22:13 137

Rev.22:14 141

Romans

Rom.2:5 741

Rom.2:25 330

Rom.2:29 329

Rom.3:10 263

Rom.4:9 499

Rom.4:13 499

Rom.4:11 329

Rom.6:13 50, 51, 63, 238, 585

Rom.7:24 509

Rom.8:1-2 263

Rom.8:2 266, 533

Rom.8:5 702

Rom.8:6 49

Rom.8:10 50, 534, 536, 582, 589

Rom.8:11 50

Rom.8:14 544

Rom.8:15 544, 636

Rom.8:16 125, 543, 592, 609

636, 797

Rom.8:18 687

Rom.8:18-19 656

Rom.8:22 719

Rom.8:26-27 265

Rom.8:27-29 124

Rom.9:8 123

Rom.9:13 421

Rom.9:26 45

Rom.13:7 603

Rom.13:12 158, 231

Rom.14:23 263

Rom.16:25 241

Samuel

1 Sam.1:1 336

1 Sam.9:15 231

1 Sam.10:6 146

1 Sam.10:9 146

1 Sam.16:13 146

1 Sam.17:36 79

1 Sam.28:1-19 661

1 Sam.28:3 661

1 Sam.28:13-15 661

1 Sam.28:19 661

1 Sam.31:1 661

2 Sam.1:9 175

2 Sam.5:7 213

2 Sam.22:29 647

Song of Songs

Song 3:1 129

Song 5:4 716

Song 5:6 716

Song 5:13 148

Song 4:15 449

Thessalonians

1 Thes.4:15 625

1 Thes.5:2 62,158, 183, 619

1 Thes.5:2-3 733

1 Thes.5:2-10 619

1 Thes.5:4-10 622

1 Thes.5:5 73, 55, 168, 312, 491

741, 752

1 Thes.5:6 199

1 Thes.5.23 100, 176, 355, 406, 590

2 Thes.1:8 484

2 Thes.2:3-4 730

Timotheo

1 Tim.4:16 779

2 Tim.4:17-18 78

Wisdom

Wisd.6:12 134

Wisd.7:24-26 487

Zechariah

Zech.2:10 767

Zech.3:8-9 381

Zech.3:9 69, 387, 389

Zech.3:10 497

Zech.9:9 479, 723

Zech.12:1 239

Zech.12:10 239, 392, 542, 550, 573

Zech.13:7 128, 680

Zech.13:8 181

Zech.13:8-9 378, 481

Zech.13:9 130, 181, 182, 254, 303

Zech.14:6-7 777

Zech.14:7 780

Zech.14:4 711

Zephaniah

Zeph.1:14 749

Zeph.1:15 749

Zeph.1:18 97

Zeph.2:3 335

Zeph.3:12-13 336

OTHER SOURCES. INDEX OF REFERENCES

Acta Johannis: pp. 511, 513, 514

Apocalypsis Petri: pp. 497, 511, 512, 513, 515, 520, 521, 527

Apocryphon of John: pp. 413, 415

Books of the Savior (The): pp. 407, 409, 410, 411

Clement of Alexandria: Stromata: pp. 58, 59, 251, 300, 363, 385, 423, 501, 514, 793

Didymus the Blind, of Alexandria:  Expositio en Psalmos: p. 483

Enoch (Books of): pp. 23, 31, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 660

Eusebius of Caesarea: History of the Church: p. 708

Eusebius of Caesarea: Theophilus Siriaca: p.183

Ephrem (Saint): Dialogues: p. 612

Gospel of the Egyptians: pp. 172, 363, 366, 792, 793, 794

Hermas of Rome: The Shepherd: pp. 379, 455, 456, 747

Hippolytus of Rome: Philosophumena: pp. 172, 380

Irenaeus: Anthropology: pp. 173, 174

Judas Thomas: Acta Thomas: p. 613

Judas Thomas: Hymn of the Pearl: p.44

Justin Martyr: Apologia: p. 601

Ode of Solomon: pp. 609, 613

Origen: Homilia in Jeremiah: p. 483

Papyrus Oxyrhynchus (P.Oxyr.): pp. 58, 61, 71, 205, 229, 241

Pistis Sophia (attributed to Valentinus): pp. 145, 288, 407

Qumran: pp. 22, 292

Second Treatise of the great Seth (The): pp.511, 513, 519

Theodotus: Excerpts: pp. 301, 502, 514

Zohar (attrib. Shimon Bar Yohai & Moishe of Leon): pp. 145, 174, 179, 180

OTHER AUTHORS CITED

Al Massih, Yassah Abd: pp. 36, 229

Al-Ghazali: p.256

Blanco, E.G.: p. 288

Boismard, M.E.: p. 36

Bousset, W. p. 30

Bover, J.M.: pp. 259, 339

Champdor, A.: p. 238

Chevalier, J.: p. 238

Corriente, F.: p. 145

de la Cruz, Juan (Saint): p.58

de Santos, A.: pp. 106, 172, 183, 205, 280, 301, 363, 607

de Suárez, Philippe: pp. 36, 105, 256, 485, 553, 679

del Agua Pérez, A.: pp. 21, 30

Dodd, C.H.: p. 30

Dujovne, L.: p. 174

Eichrot, W. p. 515

Filson, Floyd V.: p. 62

Frididsen, A.: p. 30

Guillaumont, A.: pp. 36, 157, 229

Heit Müller, W.: p. 30

Lacueva, F.: p. 756

Le Déaut, R.: p. 30

Lesêtre: p. 223

Luther: p. 663

Messina: p. 37

O´Callaghan, J.: pp. 259, 339

Orbe, A.: p. 613

Patte, D.: p. 22

Perrot, Ch.: p. 30

Petermann, J.H.: p. 407

Piñero, A.: p. 145

Puech, H.C.: pp. 36, 157, 229, 413, 570

Quispel, G.: p. 229

Resé, M.: p. 30

Ruiz Bueno, E.: p. 379

Schmidt, H.: p. 206

Schoeps, H.J.: p. 30

Schokel, L.Alonso: pp. 30, 181

Sicre Diaz, J.L.: p. 181

Steinmann, J.: p. 292

Stendhal, K.: p. 30

Teran Fierro, J.Daniel: p. 288

Till, W.C.: pp. 36, 229

Westerman, C.: pp. 231, 171

CONTENTS

Foreword to the English Edition

Getting Lost in Traslation

Purpose of the author

In Commemoration

A book with transformative power

Foreword

Incipit

These are the hidden words which the Living Jesus spoke

and Didymos Judas Thomas recorded

Logion 1

And he said:

“Whoever discovers the interpretation

of these sayings will not taste death”.

Logion 2

Jesus said:

“Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find.

When they find, they will be awestruck.

When they are awestruck, they will become amazed,

and will reign over the All.”

Logion 3

Jesus said:

“If your leaders say to you ‘Behold, the Kingdom is in the sky!’

then the birds will be there before you are.

If they tell you that the Kingdom is in the sea,

then the fish will be there before you are.

Rather, the Kingdom is within you, and it is outside of you.

When you understand yourselves, you will be understood.

And you will understand that you are Sons of the living Father.

If you do not know yourselves,

then you exist in poverty and you are that poverty.”

Logion 4

Jesus said:

“The man old in days will not hesitate to ask a small child

seven days old about the place of life, and he will live.

For many who are first will become last,

and they will become one and the same.”

Logion 5

Jesus said:

“Recognize what is before your face,

and what is hidden from you will be revealed to you.

For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed.”

(The Greek logion adds: “or buried that will not be resurrected.”)

Logion 6

His disciples questioned Him and said to Him:

“Do you want us to fast? How shall we pray?

Shall we give alms? What diet shall we observe?”

Jesus said:

“Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate,

for all things are plain in the sight of Heaven.

For nothing hidden will not become manifest,

and nothing covered will remain without being uncovered.”

Logion 7

Jesus said:

“Blessed is the lion that a man eats and the lion becomes man.

And cursed is the man that a lion eats, and the lion becomes a man.”

Logion 8

And he said:

“The man is like a wise fisherman who cast his net into the sea

and drew it up from the sea full of small fish.

Among them the wise fisherman found a fine large fish.

He threw all the small fish back into the sea

and chose the large fish without difficulty.

Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.”

Logion 9

Jesus said:

“Behold, a sower went out, took a handful of seeds,

and scattered them.

Some fell on the road, and the birds came and gathered them.

Others fell on rock, and they did not take root in the soil,

and they did not produce ears of grain.

Others fell among thorns, and they choked the seeds,

and worms devoured them.

And others fell on good soil, and it brought forth a good crop, yielding sixty per measure and one hundred and twenty per measure.”

Logion 10

Jesus said:

“I have cast fire upon the world, and behold,

I am watching over it until it blazes.”

Logion 11

Jesus said:

“This heaven will pass away, and the one above it will pass away.

The dead are not alive, and the living will not die.

During the days when you ate what is dead, you made it come alive.

When you are in the light, what will you do?

On the day when you were one, you became two.

But when you become two, what will you do?”

Logion 12

The disciples said to Jesus:

“We know that you will leave us; who will then be great among us?” Jesus said to them:

“As matters now stand with you, you will go to Jacob (James) the Just:

what comes under heaven and earth is his concern.”

[For his sake heaven and earth came into being]

Logion 13

Jesus said to his disciples:

“Make comparisons and tell me what I am like.”

Simon Peter said to him:

“You are like a righteous angel.”

Matthew said to him:

“You are like a wise philosopher.”

Thomas said to him:

“Master, my mouth is completely unable to say what you are like.”

Jesus said:

“I am not your master. You have drunk from the bubbling spring that I have poured out and become intoxicated.”

And he took him, and withdrew, and spoke three words to him.

When Thomas returned to his companions, they asked him:

“What did Jesus say to you?”

Thomas said to them:

“If I tell you one of the words he told me, you will pick up stones and hurl them at me. A fire will come out of the stones and burn you up.”

Logion 14

Jesus said to them:

“If you fast you will bring sin upon yourselves,

and if you pray you will be condemned,

and if you give to charity you will harm your spirits.

When you go into any region and walk through the land, and people receive you, eat what they serve you

and heal the sick among them.

What goes into your mouth will not defile you,

but what comes out of your mouth will defile you.”

Logion 15

Jesus said:

“When you see one who was not born of woman,

fall on your faces and worship him.

That one is your Father.”

Logion 16

Jesus said:

“Perhaps people think that I have come to cast peace upon the world.

They do not know that I have come to cast conflicts upon the earth:

fire, sword, war. For there will be five in a house:

there will be three against two and two against three,

father against son and son against father,

and they will stand alone.”

Logion 17

Jesus said:

“I will give you what no eye has seen and no ear has heard

and no hand has touched and what has never risen in the mind of man.” [Saint Paul, repeating this logion, ends it with the words:

“all that God has prepared for those who love him.”]

Logion 18

The disciples said to Jesus:

“Tell us how our end will be?”

Jesus said:

“Have you then discovered the beginning

that now you are asking about the end?

For where the beginning is, there will be the end.

Blessed is he who takes his stand at the beginning.

He will know the end, and he will not taste death.”

Logion 19

Jesus said:

“Blessed is he who was before he came into being.

If you become My disciples and listen to My words,

these stones will serve you.

For there are five trees in Paradise for you.

Summer and winter they do not change and their leaves do not fall.

Whoever knows them will not taste death.”

Logion 20

The disciples said to Jesus:

“Tell us what the Kingdom of Heaven is like.”

He said to them:

“It is like a mustard seed, the smallest of all seeds.

But when it falls on tilled soil,

it produces a great plant and becomes a shelter

for the birds of the sky.”

Logion 21

Maryam said to Jesus:

“Who are your disciples like?”

He said:

“They are like small children who have settled in a field

that does not belong to them.

When the owners of the field come, they will say: ’Leave us our field!’

They take off their clothes in their presence in order to leave their field and return it to them.

That is why I say:

If the master of the house knows that the thief is coming,

he will be on the alert before the thief comes, and will not let him break into the house of his Kingdom to make off with his goods.

As for you, be on your guard against the world, gird up your loins with great strength, lest the robbers find a way to get to you;

for then they will find the necessaries on which you are counting.

Let one who is wide awake be in the midst of you!

When the fruit was ripe, he came swiftly, sickle in hand, and picked it.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear!

Logion 22

Jesus saw some babies nursing. He said to his disciples:

“These nursing babies are like those who enter the Kingdom.”

They said to him:

“Shall we then enter the Kingdom as babies?”

Jesus said to them:

“When you make the two into One,

and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner

and the upper like the lower,

and when you make male and female into a single one,

so that the male will not be male nor the female be female,

when you make eyes in place of an eye,

a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot,

an image in place of an image, then you will enter the Kingdom.”

Logion 23

Jesus said:

“I shall choose you, one from a thousand and two from ten thousand,

and they will stand as a single one.”

Logion 24

His disciples said:

“Show us the place where you are. We must seek it.”

He said to them:

“He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

There is light within a man of light and he shines on the whole world.

If he does not shine, there is darkness.”

Logion 25

Jesus said:

“Love your brother like your soul,

guard him like the pupil of your eye.”

Logion 26

Jesus said:

“You see the mote in your brother’s eye,

but you do not see the beam in your own eye.

When you cast the beam out of your own eye,

then you will see clearly to cast the mote from your brother’s eye.”

Logion 27

Jesus said:

“If you do not fast from the world, you will not find the kingdom.

If you do not observe the Sabbath as Sabbath,

you will not see the Father.”

Logion 28

Jesus said:

“I took my stand in the midst of the world,

and I appeared to them in flesh.

I found them all drunk yet none of them thirsty.

My soul ached for the human children

because they are blind in their hearts and do not see.

They came into the world empty

and seek to depart from the world empty.

But now they are drunk.

When they shake off their wine, they will repent.”

Logion 29

Jesus said:

“If the flesh came into being because of spirit, it is a marvel,

but if spirit came into being because of body, it is a marvel of marvels.

Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell

in this poverty.”

Logion 30

Jesus said:

“Where there are three gods, they are gods.

Where there are two or one, I am with him.”

Logion 31

Jesus said:

“No prophet is accepted in his own village;

no physician heals those who know him.”

Logion 32

Jesus said:

“A city built on a high mountain and fortified cannot fall,

nor can it be hidden.”

Logion 33

Jesus said:

“What you will hear with your ear, with the other ear,

proclaim it from your rooftops.

For no one lights a lamp and puts it under a bushel,

nor does he put it in a hidden place.

Rather, he puts it on a lamp-stand,

so that everyone who comes in and goes out will see its light.”

Logion 34

Jesus said:

“If a blind man leads a blind man,

they will both fall into a pit.”

Logion 35

Jesus said:

“It is not possible for anyone to enter the house

of a strong man and take it by force

unless he binds the owner’s hands;

then he can ransack his house.”

Logion 36

Jesus said:

“Do not be concerned from morning until evening and

from evening until morning about what you will wear.”

Logion 37

His disciples said:

“When will you appear to us, and when shall we behold you?”

Jesus said:

“When you strip naked without being ashamed

and take your clothes and put them under your feet

like very small children and trample them,

then you will see the Son of the Living One

and you will not be afraid.”

Logion 38

Jesus said:

“Many times you have desired to hear these words,

these that I am speaking to you,

and you have no one else from whom to hear them.

There will be days when you will seek me

and you will not find me.”

Logion 39

Jesus said:

“The Pharisees and the scribes have taken the keys of Knowledge

and hidden them. They themselves have not entered,

nor have they allowed to enter those who wish to.

You, however, be as shrewd as serpents and as innocent as doves.”

Logion 40

Jesus said:

“A grapevine has been planted outside of the Father.

Since it is not strong, it will be pulled up by the root and destroyed.”

Logion 41

Jesus said:

“Whoever has something in his hand will receive more,

and whoever has nothing,

even the little he has will be taken from him.”

Logion 42

Jesus said:

“Be passers-by.”

Logion 43

His disciples said to him:

“Who are You, that You should say these things to us?”

Jesus said to them:

“You do not realize who I am from what I say to you,

but you have become like the Jews,

for they (either) love the tree and hate its fruit

or love the fruit and hate the tree.”

Logion 44

Jesus said:

“Whoever blasphemes against the Father will be forgiven,

and whoever blasphemes against the Son will be forgiven,

but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit

will not be forgiven either on earth or in heaven.”

Logion 45

Jesus said:

“Grapes are not harvested from thorn trees,

nor are figs gathered from thistles.

They yield no fruit.

A good man brings forth good from his treasure.

A bad man brings forth evil things

from the corrupt treasure in his heart and says evil things.

From the abundance of the heart.”

Logion 46

Jesus said:

“From Adam to John the Baptist,

among those born of women,

none is greater than John,

for his eyes are not broken.

But I have said that whoever among you becomes a child

will know the Kingdom and become greater than John.”

Logion 47

Jesus said:

“A person cannot mount two horses or bend two bows,

and a servant cannot serve two masters,

or he will honor one and offend the other.

No one who drinks old wine suddenly wants to drink new wine.

New wine is not poured into old wineskins or they may break,

and old wine is not poured into a new wineskin or it may spoil.

An old patch is not sewn onto a new garment or it may tear.”

Logion 48

Jesus said:

“If two make peace with each other in one house,

they will say to the mountain, ‘Move from here!’ and it will move.”

Logion 49

Jesus said:

“Blessed are the solitaries and the chosen,

for you will find the Kingdom;

as you are from it, to it you will return.”

Logion 50

Jesus said:

”If they say to you: ‘Where have you come from?’

say to them: ‘We have come from the light,

from the place where the light came into being by itself;

it arose, and appeared in their image.’

If they say to you: ‘Is it you?’

say: ‘We are its children and the chosen of the Living Father.’

If they ask you: ‘What is the sign of your Father in you?’

say to them: ‘It is motion and rest’.”

Logion 51

His disciples said to him:

“When will the repose of the dead come about,

and when will the new world come?”

He said to them:

”What you look for has come

but you do not know it.”

Logion 52

His disciples said to him:

“Twenty-four prophets have spoken in Israel

and they all spoke of you.”

He said to them:

“You have disregarded the living one among you

and have spoken of the dead.”

Logion 53

His disciples said to him:

“Is circumcision beneficial or not?”

He said to them:

“If it were beneficial,

their father would beget them

already circumcised from their mother.

But the true circumcision in spirit

is altogether valuable.”

Logion 54

Jesus said:

“Blessed are the poor, for yours is the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Logion 55

Jesus said:

“He who does not hate his father and mother

cannot be my disciple,

and he who does not hate his brothers and sisters

and bear the cross as I do

will not be worthy of me.”

Logion 56

Jesus said:

“Whoever has come to know the world

has discovered a corpse,

and whoever has discovered a corpse,

of him the world is not worthy.”

Logion 57

Jesus said:

“The Kingdom of the Father is like someone with good seed.

His enemy came at night and sowed weeds among the good seed.

He did not let them pull up the weeds but said to them:

‘No, or you might go to pull up the weeds

and pull up the wheat along with them.’

On harvest day the weeds will be conspicuous

and will be pulled up and burned.”

Logion 58

Jesus said:

“Blessed is the man who has suffered:

he has found life.”

Logion 59

Jesus said:

“Look to the living one as long as you live

or you may die and try to see the living one

and you will not be able to see.”

Logion 60

He saw a Samaritan carrying a lamb

as he was going to the land of Judea.

He said to his disciples:

“That person is carrying the lamb around.”

They said to him:

“To kill it and eat it.”

He said to them:

“He will not eat it while it is alive

but only after he has killed it

and it has become a carcass.”

They said:

“Otherwise he cannot do it.”

He said to them:

“So with you. Seek a place of rest

or you may become a carcass and be eaten.”

Logion 61

Jesus said:

“Two will rest on a bed: the one will die, and the other will live.”

Salome said to him:

“Who are You, man, that You, as though from the One,

have come up on my couch and eaten from my table?”

Jesus said to her:

“I am He who is, I issue from the Equal.

I was given of the things of my Father.”

[Salome said:] “I am Your disciple.”

[Jesus said to her:]

“Therefore I say, the disciple who is unified [equal]

will be filled with light, but the one who is divided

will be filled with darkness.”

Logion 62

Jesus said:

“I disclose my mysteries to those who are worthy of my mysteries.

Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.”

Logion 63

Jesus said:

“There was a rich man who had many possessions.

He said: ‘I shall invest my wealth to sow, reap, plant,

and fill my barn with produce.

Then I shall lack nothing.’

These things he was thinking in his heart,

But that very night he died.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

Logion 64

Jesus said:

“A man was receiving guests. When he had prepared the dinner

he sent his servant to invite the guests.

The servant went to the first and said:

‘My master invites you.’

That person said:

‘Some merchants owe me money.

They are coming tonight.

I must go and give them instructions.

Please excuse me from dinner.’

The servant went to another and said:

‘My master invites you.’

He said to the servant:

‘I have bought a house

and I’ve been called away for a day.

I have no time.’

The servant went to another and said:

‘My master invites you.’

He said to the servant:

‘My friend is to be married

and I am to arrange the banquet.

I can’t come. Please excuse me from dinner.’

The servant went to another and said:

‘My master invites you.’

He said to the servant:

‘I have bought an estate and I am going to collect rent.

I shall not be able to come. Please excuse me.’

The servant returned and said to his master:

‘Those you invited to dinner have asked to be excused.’

The master said to his servant:

‘Go out into the streets and invite whomever you find for the dinner.

Buyers and merchants will not enter the places of my father.’”

Logion 65

He said:

”A [good man] owned a vineyard and leased it

to some tenant farmers to work it

and from them he would collect its produce.

He sent his servant for the farmers to give him

the produce of the vineyard. They seized, beat,

and almost killed his servant, who returned

and told his master. His master said:

‘Perhaps he did not know them.’ And he sent

another servant, but they beat him as well.

Then the master sent his son and said:

‘Perhaps they will respect my son.’

Since the farmers knew the son was the heir

of the vineyard, they seized him and killed him.

He who has ears, let him hear.”

Logion 66

Jesus said:

”Show me the stone which the builders rejected.

It is the cornerstone”

Logion 67

Jesus said:

“One who knows all but lacks

within lacks all.”

Logion 68

Jesus said:

“Blessed are you when you are hated and persecuted.

Wherever you have been persecuted they will find no place.”

Logion 69

Jesus said:

“Blessed are those who have been persecuted in their heart;

these are they who have known the Father in truth.

Blessed are the hungry, for the belly of him who desires will be filled.”

Logion 70

Jesus said:

“When you bring it into being within you,

what you have will save you.

If you do not have that within you,

what you do not have will kill you.”

Logion 71

Jesus said:

“I shall destroy this house,

and no one will be able to rebuild it.”

Logion 72

A man said to him:

“Tell my brothers to divide my father’s possessions with me.”

He said to him:

“O man, who has made me a divider?”

He turned to his disciples and said to them:

“I am not a divider, am I?”

Logion 73

Jesus said:

“The harvest is rich but the laborers are few,

so ask the Lord to send laborers to his harvest.”

Logion 74

He said:

“Lord, there are many around the wells

but there is no one in the wells.”

Logion 75

Jesus said:

“There are many standing at the door,

but it is the solitaries who will enter the bridal chamber.”

Logion 76

Jesus said:

“The kingdom of the Father is like a merchant

who had a load of goods and found a pearl.

That merchant was wise.

He sold the load and bought for himself the pearl alone.

You also, seek after the treasure which does not fail but endures,

where moth does not come near to devour nor worm to destroy.”

Logion 77

Jesus said:

“I am the light that is over them all. I am the All.

The All came forth from me.

And to me the All has come.

Split the wood — I am there.

Raise the stone, and you will find me there.”

Logion 78

Jesus said:

“What brought you out into the country?

Was it to see a reed shaken by the wind?

Or to see a man dressed in soft clothing

like your kings and your great men?

They wear fine apparel and cannot recognize truth.”

Logion 79

A woman in the crowd said to him:

“Blessings on the womb that bore you

and the breasts that fed you.”

He said to her:

“Blessings on those who have heard the Word of the Father

and have truly kept it. Days will come when you will say:

Blessings on the womb that has not conceived

and the breasts that have not given milk.”

Logion 80

Jesus said:

“He who has known the world has found the body;

and he who has found the body,

the world is not worthy of him.”

Logion 81

Jesus said:

“Let him who has grown rich be king,

and let him who possesses power renounce it.”

Logion 82

Jesus said:

“He who is near me is near the fire,

and he who is far from me is far from the Kingdom”

Logion 83

Jesus said:

“Images are manifest to man

but the light that is in them is hidden.

In the image of the light of the Father,

it will be revealed,

and the images (manifested to man)

will be hidden by his light.”

Logion 84

Jesus said:

“When you see your likeness, you rejoice.

But when you see your images which came into being before you,

and neither die nor are made manifest,

how overwhelmed you will be!”

Logion 85

Jesus said:

“Adam came from great power and great wealth,

but he was not worthy of you.

Had he been worthy,

he would not have tasted death.”

Logion 86

Jesus said:

“Foxes have holes and the birds have their nests,

but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head and rest.”

Logion 87

Jesus said:

“Wretched is the body that depends upon a body.

And wretched is the soul

that depends upon these two.”

Logion 88

Jesus said:

“The angels and the prophets will come to you,

and they will give you what is yours.

You also, give them what is in your hands, and say to yourselves:

‘On what day will they come to take what is theirs?’”

Logion 89

Jesus said:

“Why do you wash the outside of the cup?

Do you not understand that he who made the inside

is also he who made the outside?”

Logion 90-91

Jesus said:

“Come to me, for my yoke is easy and my lordship is mild,

and you will find repose for yourselves.”

They said to him:

“Tell us who you are so that we may believe in you.”

He said to them:

“You read the face of the sky and of the earth,

but you have not recognized the one who is before you,

nor can you recognize his time.“

Logion 92

Jesus said:

“Seek and you will find.

In the past I did not tell you the things

about which you asked me.

Now I am willing to tell you, but you do not seek them.”

Logion 93

Jesus said:

“Do not give what is holy to the dogs, lest they cast it on the dunghill.

Do not throw pearls to the swine, lest they cover them with filth.”

Logion 94

Jesus said:

“He who seeks will find

and he who calls out will be let in.”

Logion 95

Jesus said:

“If you have money, do not lend it at interest,

but give it to one from whom you will not get it back.”

Logion 96

Jesus said:

“The kingdom of the Father is like a woman who took a little yeast,

hid it in dough and made it into large loaves.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear!”

Logion 97

Jesus said:

“The Kingdom of the Father is like a woman

who was carrying a jar full of meal.

While she was walking on a distant road,

the handle of the jar broke and the meal emptied out

behind her on the road.

She did not realize it; she had noticed no accident.

When she reached her house,

she set the jar down and found it empty.”

Logion 98

Jesus said:

“The Kingdom of the Father is like a person

who wanted to kill an important man.

He took the sword in his own house and thrust it

into the wall in order to be sure

that his hand was firm:

Then he killed the important man.”

Logion 99

The disciples said to him:

“Your brothers and your mother are standing outside.”

He said to them:

“Those here who do the will of my Father,

these are my brothers and my mother;

they are the ones who will enter into the kingdom of my Father.”

Logion 100

They showed Jesus a gold piece and said to him:

“Caesar’s men demand tribute from us.”

He said to them:

“Give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar;

and to God what belongs to God;

and what is mine, give it to me.”

Logion 101

Jesus said:

“Whoever does not hate his father and his mother

as I do cannot be my disciple.

And whoever does not love his father and his mother

as I do cannot be my disciple.

For my mother gave me my body, but my true mother gave me life.”

Logion 102

Jesus said:

“Woe to the Pharisees,

for they are like a dog lying in the manger of the cattle;

for he neither eats nor does he let the cattle eat.”

Logion 103

Jesus said:

“Blessed is the man who knows where

and when the brigands will enter during the night,

so that he can rise, muster his force

and gird up his loins before they come.”

Logion 104

They said to him:

“Come, let us pray today and let us fast.”

Jesus said:

“What sin have I committed?

Or in what way have I been defeated?

When the bridegroom leaves the wedding chamber,

then, let them fast and pray!”

Logion 105

Jesus said:

“He who knows his father and his mother

will be called the son of a harlot.”

Logion 106

Jesus said:

“When you make the two into One,

you will become a Son of Man,

and if you say to the mountain,

‘Move from here!’ it will move.”

Logion 107

Jesus said:

“The Kingdom is like a shepherd who had a hundred sheep.

One of them, the fattest, went astray.

He left the ninety-nine and sought the One

until he found it. Having gone to so much trouble,

he said to the sheep:

‘I love you more than the ninety-nine’.”

Logion 108

Jesus said:

“He who drinks from my mouth will become like me,

and I will become him,

and the hidden things will be revealed to him.”

Logion 109

Jesus said:

“The kingdom is like a man who had a hidden treasure

in his field without knowing it. And after he died, he left it to his son.

The son did not know (about the treasure).

He inherited the field and sold it. And the one who bought it went plowing and found the treasure.

He began to lend money at interest to whoever he liked.”

Logion 110

Jesus said:

“He who has found the world and become rich,

let him renounce the world.”

Logion 111

Jesus said:

“The heavens will be rolled up and likewise the earth,

in your presence,

and the living one, come forth from the Living One,

will not see death or fear,

because Jesus says:

He who finds himself, of him the world is not worthy.”

Logion 112

Jesus said:

“Woe to the flesh that depends on the soul!

Woe to the soul that depends on the flesh!”

Logion 113

His disciples said to him:

“On what day will the kingdom come?”

Jesus said:

“It will not come through watching for it.

They will not say: ‘Behold, it is here! or: Behold, it is there!’

But the kingdom of the Father is spread out over the earth,

and men do not see it.”

Logion 114

Simon Peter said to them:

“Let Mariam go out from among us,

for women are not worthy of the Life.”

Jesus said:

“Behold, I will guide her to make her male,

that she too may become a living spirit like you males.

For every woman who makes herself male

will enter into the kingdom of heaven.“

Final Doxology

About the author

Basic texts used

Bible references

Other sources

Other authors cited

Table of Contents

Foreword to the English Edition

Getting Lost in Translation. Translator’s Foreword

Purpose of the author

In Commemoration

A book with transformative power

To the happy few who have not seen and yet believe

Foreword

I

II

III

IV

MAN, TEMPLE OF THE LIVING GOD

Incipit

logion 1

logion 2

logion 3

logion 4

logion 5

logion 6

logion 7

logion 8

logion 9

logion 10

logion 11

logion 12

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logion 14

logion 15

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logion 17

Logion 18

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logion 24

logion 25

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logion 36-37

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logion 113

logion 114

FINAL DOXOLOGY

About the author

Prayer of Unity

Basic texts used

Bible references

Other sources. Index of references

Other authors cited

Contents