AMKent books

Gnostic Texts

In the gnostic texts, scrapped in early Christianity due to their impediment on the growing state powers and the eventual church hierarchies, a much different Christianity is told. I won’t spend this entire article retreading over the nuances of the text, however, they are fundamentally different to modern Christianity in as much as there is a quest for knowledge rather than redemption. The primary antagonist here is ignorance, not repentance, in-fact, according to these early scripts, Jesus encouraged his followers to understand their metaphysical standing in existence in order to transcend a flawed, material God. This would lead them to the ‘Monad’, or an absolute akin to Hegel’s, Spinoza’s, and even mine. This is interesting due not only to its embrace of polytheism, something monolithic religions seek to distance themselves from, but also its focus on a supposedly unforgivable sin in modern religion, the attempt to be God. As with most religion, much of this echoes Plato, the essence that we draw from pre-birth, knowledge that transcends the discoveries of man, such as Math and Geometry. In these texts, Jesus emphasises to his followers a kind of Zen approach, with quotes about splitting wood and he is there, lifting a rock and he shall be found, we are to become the Christ in Christianity. Jesus orders Judas to begin the process of his sacrifice, not to free us all of sin, but to rid himself of his materialistic prison and transcend from the demiurge to the monad.

In my paradigm, the monad is the observer, and we are all products of its observation. These texts have me wondering about the nature of the absolute, it exists in a dimension past what we can comprehend entirely, yet through a funnelling-down effect we are essentially created. Whilst my paradigm does not account for the spiritual, I suppose this absolute, or ‘Soul’, exists on what we would deem a spiritual plain. In the physics sense it is a passive agency that eventually martyrs itself, or commits cosmic suicide due to a chain reaction of observation eventually becoming a mirror where it observes itself back, a cursed recursion of sorts. If I were to apply Jesus’ teachings to this from the gnostic texts, then we are essentially striving for a holism, our consciousness would be a catalyst to the eventual understanding of our own state, and our final evolutionary act would be one of self-destruction, so that we would return to the process that eventually eats itself. We would be fighting against our nature to exist materialistically, something the gnostic texts blame on the demiurge, the materialistic God akin to the Old Testament. In an ironic twist, this sabotaging on inherent natural instinct would actually reveal our true natural purpose, or as the gnostic texts would proclaim, we had shed ourselves of our ignorance. Mary would be our Sophia, a cursed wisdom battling through ignorance to regain its former quintessence. I find with all things human, our problem is our love for dramatics, narrative, and cohesion. Whilst this is something I will lament over time, it pushes an agency on something I have declared natural occurring, without anthropomorphic intention, and both a catalyst and a reaction as the Soul.