Surely Some Revelation is at Hand

In The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik reviews Elaine Pagels' new book on politics, prophecy, and the Book of Revelations. Most interesting to me is Gopnik's question of why the Bible ends the way it does -- particularly when John of Patmos' revelation was very nearly excised from the text, and when it was markedly only one of several texts of revelations. Others, the Gnostic texts, were only discovered this century, buried in the desert, and they strike a very different tone from the more well-known one. Gopnik's thinking about this seems to be unwittingly well-tuned to our contemporary public conversation on the relationship between church and state, common good and individual autonomy, our beliefs and our bodies, and what well of morality we draw from when we make rules for others to live by.

As an alternative revelation to John’s, (Pagels) focusses on what must be the single most astonishing text of its time, the long feminist poem found at Nag Hammadi in 1945 and called “Thunder, Perfect Mind”—a poem so contemporary in feeling that one would swear it had been written by Ntozake Shange in a feminist collective in the nineteen-seventies ... In a series of riddling antitheses, a divine feminine principle is celebrated as transcending all principles ... and opening the way toward a true revelation of the hidden, embracing goddess of perfect being who lies behind all things:

I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.
I am the mother and the daughter.
I am the members of my mother.
I am the barren one
       and many are her sons.
I am she whose wedding is great,
       and I have not taken a husband.
I am the midwife and she who does not bear.
I am the solace of my labor pains.
I am the bride and the bridegroom . . .
Why, you who hate me, do you love me,
       and hate those who love me?
You who deny me, confess me,
       and you who confess me, deny me.
You who tell the truth about me, lie about me,
and you who have lied about me, tell the truth about me.

[...]

You can’t help feeling, along with Pagels, a pang that the Gnostic poems, so much more affecting in their mystical, pantheistic rapture, got interred while Revelation lives on. But you also have to wonder if there ever was a likely alternative. Don’t squishy doctrines of transformation through personal illumination always get marginalized in mass movements? As Stephen Batchelor has recently shown, the open-minded, non-authoritarian side of Buddhism, too, quickly succumbed to its theocratic side, gasping under the weight of those heavy statues. The histories of faiths are all essentially the same: a vague and ambiguous millennial doctrine preached by a charismatic founder, Marx or Jesus; mystical variants held by the first generations of followers; and a militant consensus put firmly in place by the power-achieving generation. Bakunin, like the Essenes, never really had a chance. The truth is that punitive, hysterical religions thrive, while soft, mystical ones must hide their scriptures somewhere in the hot sand.

Comments

[Russell Hyland]

The original mission of the followers is to spread the spiritual experience they shared with their master. Sooner or later the mission changes to one of perpetuating their organization. The message becomes more important than the the experience. Creeds appear and the mystical experience is lost in the noise of words.