29 Jesus said: If the flesh has come into being because of the spirit, it is a marvel; but if the spirit (has come into being) because of the body, it is a marvel of marvels. But as for me, I marvel at this, how this great wealth has settled in this poverty.
Which is scarier? That spirit might be the cause/origin of flesh or that it is flesh that is the cause/origin of spirit?
Perhaps this life is a soul-making factory. Perhaps we aren't born with spirits but they are created in us as we turn our attentions our consciousness away from life as it is and imagine a life that could be and there find ourselves confronted by a God waiting for us.
How I read this passage is conditioned by all sorts of prior reading hearing knowing and half-knowing.
When I read Paul and the many many many spiritual writers from within the Christian traditions that followed him - and I'm thinking especially of writers like the anonymous author of Theologia Germanica -- I hear the word flesh and think not meat blood and bone but that spirit that reigns and rules in me despite my better intentions -- that spirit of self-will whose constant mantra is me, my, mine.
But when I hear this in Thomas I'm less certain of the sense of it. That prior reading hearing knowing and half-knowing tells me Thomas was a Gnostic -- or more cozy with them than John and Paul were. And I associate Gnosticism with those folks who have swerved from the truth by claiming that the resurrection has already taken place (2 Timothy 2:18). For them flesh is matter and matter doesn't matter. For them they have already entered the kingdom in its fullness. The Ranters that George Fox distanced himself from. Those who felt they had attained the divinity that Christ was the seal and promise of.
But also I know that all I know of these people is the preserved writings of those who disagreed with them and who disagreed so violently they were willing to imagine a just and loving God consign these people to flames throughout eternity.
4 comments:
This is a very thought-provoking post, David. I read it twice; then I read Leloup's comments and read yours again. Now I want to comment on your post:
You've certainly posed the "scary" question well. I want to share a snatch of conversation Ellie had years ago with an associate at the Defense Mapping Agency, a nice, intelligent young man headed for a personal tragedy. She asked him if he considered himself primarily as a body or a spirit.
He said body. (His body failed him terribly soon thereafter, not his, but his bride's, who had a terrible traffic accident leaving her body a wreck-- I don't know why I mention this; it's really not relevant to the question. Anyway he was surely called upon thereafter to look at the spiritual dimension of life.)
I'm afraid a great many people will say 'body'.
Your 'perhaps' hypothesis seems to address that point of view. But suppose we began as spirit and were encarnated like Jesus was.
Leloup translated the last sentence like this: "How is it that this Being, which Is, inhabits this nothingness?"
From this point of view we are part of the creation. You might say that God has created (and is creating) us, using matter to give us flesh, but with his spirit within from the beginning. As we Quakers say 'there is that of God in everyone.' And that, I truly believe.
For me, LeLoup's translation makes it worse -- more Gnostic and less tanable for me. The flesh/world/matter thing becomes Nothingness and the spirit the only true reality. This life becomes a trap to be escaped.
The objective - I hope -- is to have life more fully -- not to escape from its shallowness.
Perhaps "soul-factory" was an inappropriate metaphor. How about womb?
Perhaps we aren't born with spirits but they are created in us as we turn our attentions our consciousness away from life as it is and imagine a life that could be and there find ourselves confronted by a God waiting for us.
Would that mean that not everyone would end up with a soul?
Sometimes I visit gnostic sites and blogs, like
this one ... it is interesting stuff but it seems fairly different from what I think of as christian thought.
"The flesh/world/matter thing becomes Nothingness and the spirit the only true reality. This life becomes a trap to be escaped."
Are you projecting your Gnostic presuppositions onto Thomas?
Matter without spirit is indeed nothing. Spirit can be seen even in rocks. Life is breath, is spirit; when it departs nothing is left.
The great emphasis on the dead body in our culture indicates only the most pervasive reductive materialistic outlook on life-- actually a contradiction of terms. The life that remains is only the micro and macro organisms of decomposition.
Post a Comment