Timothy Freke and Peter
Gandy, Jesus and the Lost Goddess: The Secret Teaching of the
Original Christians. Harmony Books (AKA Crown
Publishing/Random House)
Reviewed by Robert M. Price
As the authors admit right up front, this book
is rather a different sort of beast than that to which it forms a
sequel. The Jesus Mysteries (1999) was mainly a historical
reconstruction job, a powerful demonstration that there was very
likely no historical Jesus, but that the character was based on a
sectarian Jewish adaptation of pagan god-men such as Dionysus, Osiris,
and Attis, a view I happen to share. As the Jesus thus disclosed
functioned as an allegorical cipher for a specific kind of ancient
spirituality (the Gnostic/Mystery cult variety), it was necessary even
in that book to devote some space to the exposition of that
spirituality. And since the authors plainly espouse it, a good deal of
space was devoted to advocating it, too. (Surely that should not seem
strange to anyone who is used to works of New Testament criticism
written by devout Christians, like Joachim Jeremias, whose own piety
suffuses their pages, to no disadvantage.) This sequel, Jesus and
the Lost Goddess, reverses the proportions: the historical is kept
to the needful minimum, while exposition and exhortation take the
lion’s share (“Blessed is the man who eats the lion…”). This fact is
important to keep in mind since this time around, as they warn the
reader, Freke and Gandy are employing the term “Gnostic” in a much
wider sense, referring to any ancient or modern religious people who
transcend scriptural literalism in favor an esoteric reading tending
toward nondualist mysticism.
In
a strange sense, then, they are giving us the mirror image of Karen
King’s recent disdain for “Gnosticism” as a pejorative, sneaky synonym
for “heresy” that ought to be abandoned by Politically Correct New
Testament scholars, a view I for one regard as hopelessly silly. King
also decrees that the ancient “Gnostics falsely so-called” (not her
quote, but it ought to be) constitute a label too broad to fit any
particular bottle, that it blurs the differences between different
groups. But King has, like many of her colleagues, forgotten what an
ideal type is supposed to be: you outline the common elements and use
the resulting yardstick to measure where the various specific
phenomena diverge from it, so as to understand each one better in
terms of its uniqueness. She might as well argue that there is no such
thing as Buddhism or Protestantism. Well, anyhow, Freke and Gandy have
widened the scope of Gnosticism far beyond what historically
descriptive usage would allow. But they are only doing what has long
been done with terms like “docetism,” “encratism,” and “adoptionism,”
or with brand names like Xerox, Jello, and Kleenex, for that matter.
And this broadening is important to recall for another reason: our
authors will be recommending their brand of “Gnosticism” as a modern
approach to spirituality, and they don’t necessarily mean you ought to
do everything the Phibionites or the Carpocratians did.
Having issued all these warnings, I must still register a bit of
dissatisfaction with the lingering suggestion, actually, the repeated
assertion, that Freke and Gandy have herewith excavated “the secret
teachings of the original Christians.” That seems to me something of
an extravagant and immodest claim. There is an analogy between their
effort here and that of the late John M. Allegro in his much-scorned
(though I do not scorn it) The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.
Allegro argued that the earliest Christians were a Jewish version of
Vedism, centered upon Soma mysticism. Freke and Gandy are telling us
that the first Christians were a Jewish version of Vedanta, of
nondualism. For them, it is hardly too much to say, earliest
Christianity was Mahayana Buddhism and Neo-Platonism. This is a
dangerous game.
The
authors are in danger of engaging in what Derrida called “the
dangerous supplement,” supplanting a thing by pretending/trying merely
to elaborate it. One takes aim at a product of culture, making it
suffer by comparison with its newly discovered “natural, original”
counterpart—while forgetting that this hypothetical “original” has not
been found via time travel but only fashioned by research, thus no
less a product of culture, albeit perhaps counter-culture. Thus does
every “historical Jesus” (re?)construction seek to supplant
traditional Christology with what is only a newer Christology (at
least as far as we will ever be able to verify). Every mysticism
performs this operation, claiming only to restore the original
profundity of the parent tradition by interpreting it non-literally.
The Sufis, Philo, and others made such claims, but how plausible are
they? Usually such hermeneutical attempts are really efforts at
modernizing an outmoded faith which has become an embarrassment to its
latter-day adherents. Was the belief of the Stoics really older than
that of Homer and Hesiod? I doubt it. Freke and Gandy may well be
offering us a better version of Christianity, but that is a very
different matter than offering us the original version.
Let
me not be misunderstood, though: I do think that Gnostic sects
predated Christianity and that Catholic-Orthodox Christianity is a
secondary form of the faith, combining elements from Gnosticism,
Mystery Religions, and hero-cultism. But I cannot help suspecting that
what the authors are doing is closer to Carl Jung and Hans Jonas than
what the ancient Gnostics were doing. I think Freke and Gandy are
skipping a step: they are demythologizing and psychologizing Gnostic
mythology and then attributing the result to the ancients themselves.
It is a slippery business, and they may be right. But there is reason
to doubt it. Put it this way: as Paul Veyne once asked whether the
ancient Greeks believed their myths, I ask whether the Gnostics
believed in their myths of the Demiurge, Sophia, the Primal Man, the
Aions, the archons, etc. I suspect that they did. What was the
supposed esoteric truth of which the Gnostics boasted? Was it a
psychologization such as this book expounds? If it was, my guess is
that they would simply have interpreted our familiar gospels and
epistles in an allegorical way (and of course that was going on, too).
Whence all the super-extravagant mythology of multiple redeemers and
cosmogonies? I picture the ancient Gnostics as no less superstitious
than their Catholic cousins, just addicted to more elaborate
theosophical fantasies analogous to those of Madame Blavatsky. Their
gnosis, I imagine, was privileged possession of sophistical
speculations of which outsiders were impatient and deemed unworthy. I
imagine that their knowledge was like that of New Age believers today:
just more elaborate and syncretic versions of what most people
believed. Yes, Plotinus counted some Gnostics among his students, but
I suspect that even this implies these few were looking for a more
sophisticated, more genuinely philosophical, mysticism than Gnosticism
offered them.
In
the end, I think Freke and Gandy are offering readers the same sort of
gospel as that preached by Stephan A. Hoeller in his Gnostic Church: a
demythologization of Gnosticism for moderns, conducted along Jungian
lines—which is fine by me. Like Jung, they are demonstrating the
unsuspected contemporary relevance of ancient writings too easily
dismissed as the delusional rantings of crazed hermits. If nowhere
else, this modernizing element is surely evident in the
world-affirming characteristic of this book. It is just hard to
believe any ancient Gnostic would agree that the gist of the Gnosis is
“Life is essentially good” (p. 183). Nor would you really need lists
of the names of hermaphrodite angels for that. The great danger of
allegorizing myth is to rationalize it by reducing it to acceptable
platitudes. This is the ubiquitous process of “naturalizing” the text
(as Jonathan Culler calls it) whereby we try to smooth away the rough
edges of a puzzling text by making it mean something we can
understand. We reduce its daunting strangeness at the cost of learning
less from it, since we make it synonymous with something we already
knew. Philo and Origen often did just this when they allegorized the
Bible, reducing it to tepid moralisms or pointlessly coded typologies
of the human psyche. Is this what the erudite moderns Freke and Gandy
have done, appealing to ancient forbears in the manner of ecologists
idealizing the American Indians?
Or
think of the anxiety of the Gnostics preparing for their anticipated
heavenward journey, rehearsing all their magic formulae to stammer at
the interrogating archons trying to bar their way to the Pleroma. Can
we imagine that these people were just tooling along in the laid-back
manner prescribed in this book? People who looked at this world as if
they were Steve McQueen in The Great Escape? It is as hard to
believe Freke and Gandy are really describing the ancient Gnostics as
it is to imagine the enthusiasts of ancient Corinth having anything in
common with Bultmann or Burton Mack.
What is supposed to be so darn great about Gnosticism? That is a
question some treatments of the subject can skirt. Elaine Pagels, in
her classic The Gnostic Gospels, seems to invoke Gnosticism
mainly as an ancient precedent for freethinking Christian modernism,
as if to say, “Look! We have early Christians on our
side, too!” But Freke and Gandy have obligated themselves to go a good
second mile farther than Pagels did. They are heavily invested in
rehabilitating Gnosis as “good news for modern man.” Set aside the
essentially adolescent self-satisfaction of the gloater over secret
mysteries. What is the enlightened life of the person who accepts the
Gnostic evangel as preached by Freke and Gandy (literally, at
traveling seminars, for which I applaud them)?
For
one thing, as one might expect from the large-scale parallels to
Oriental nondualism, a Gnostic lifestyle would include the Yogic
element of detachment, “mere witness,” the distancing of
oneself from emotional investment in the passing sideshow of life. Of
course, Stoicism counsels the same. I think of an anecdote concerning,
I think, Sri Ramakrishna, who once had to undergo sensitive throat
surgery without benefit of anesthesia: he asked the doctor to give him
a minute, then meditated into an inner zone in which he distanced the
witnessing atman from the experiencing ego and successfully prescinded
from the pain. Whether Freke and Gandy would offer us that power, I
don’t know.
But, as in Buddhism, such detachment does not serve selfishness.
Rather it frees the enlightened person from any vested ego interests
so he can look upon all beings with impartial compassion and act
gladly on their behalf. (If he were more compassionate than me, he
might even take the trouble to use gender-neutral pronouns, if there
are any.)
Freke and Gandy prescribe a life of working on one’s virtue and
character development, punctuated by periods of blissful absorption
into nondual consciousness. The first is life on the psychical
plane, the penultimate existence as an individual reflecting the One
but still distinct from it, still on the plane of Samsaric existence.
The second is a series of adventures into the pneumatic plane
where one experiences identity with/as the One. A la the dialectic of
Nagarjuna, one rejoices in the ephemeral beauty of the Samsaric world
because one can see through it to its Nirvanic Ground of Being. No
longer falsely expecting Samsara to provide ultimate satisfaction, one
can appreciate it for what it is, neither making it into an idol of
maya nor ascetically despising it for not being what it is not.
And
even everyday life, the longer periods of psychical existence,
the neo-Gnostic learns to experience as living myth, noticing the
pleasant coincidences of Jungian synchronicity and taking them as
signs of hidden meaning (Ira Progoff devotes a fascinating book to
this topic, Jung, Synchronicity, and Human Destiny). To me,
this is getting uncomfortably close to the delusions of reference in
which fundamentalists indulge when they take minor coincidences as
“confirmations” of divine guidance, like God getting them parking
spaces.
But
ultimately, Freke and Gandy seem to take Gnosticism as more or less
equivalent to liberal tolerance and a spirituality of seeking, and of
openness to all traditions. I wonder if they are not so far from
Pagels after all.
The
authors are quite effective in conveying a coherent and clear account
of nondualism as a realistic, almost commonsensical, outlook on the
world. They are in this respect reminiscent of Alan Watts, the C.S.
Lewis of Buddhism. But their presentation smacks more of Neo-Platonism
(partly via Dionysius the Areopagite) than Buddhism. First there is
the One, which is not even self-aware, since that would imply a
subject-object distinction of which it is blissfully free. But for
love to exist, as well as knowledge, on a lower level of
reality/experience, the One bifurcates into Consciousness and Psyche,
the Knowledge and the Knower. Further down the scale, the One is
manifest in many fragmentary forms or images. Insofar as Consciousness
occupies the standpoint of these images it begins to identify with
them, and the illusion of individual ego-identities is born. But
through Gnostic initiation these images may, like Freke and Gandy
themselves, begin to slide back down the spokes to the central hub of
Consciousness, and to remember their uniative mutual identity.
I
find myself thinking of the recent New Age exploitation flick about
quantum physics, What the Bleep Do We Know? In it we are told
that the tantalizing bafflements of quantum physics, such as the
alleged fact that subatomic particles can be in two places at once,
ought to revolutionize our living of everyday life. Characters
plagiarize lines that sounded impressive in Dune and The
Matrix, fantasy movies in which characters “fold space” and cause
flying bullets to drop from their trajectories. People in What the
Bleep suddenly morph into younger versions of themselves or find
themselves dribbling multiple basketballs all over the court at the
same time, somehow because of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. I
guess the producers hope the viewer does not notice that such things
in fact never happen in real life and are not going to start happening
to him after seeing this film either. The film jumps from the way
things happen on a subatomic level to the way they supposedly might
happen on the macro level where we live. But the film is wrong.
Quantum physics is just trying to throw new light on the unsuspected
inner workings of the same old mundane world we have always lived in.
It is not telling us that things happen differently or that they
might. B.F. Skinner said it well in Beyond Freedom and Dignity:
“A theory about a thing does not change the thing the theory is
about.” A couple of times I saw Skinner strolling through Harvard
Yard. He didn’t move like a robot because he espoused determinism.
Ramanuja, the great exponent of the leading alternative to Shankara’s
Nondualist Vedanta, namely Visistadvaita (“Difference-in-Identity” or
Qualified Nondualism), had the same reservation about nondualism: even
if it’s true, why is it any more than an explanation of the way things
are and how they work? Why isn’t metaphysics like physics? Why would
understanding how things get from there to here be a warrant for going
someplace else than here? Ramanuja admitted that nondualists
could work their way into nondual awareness, but when they had done
so, he figured, they had merely experienced the undifferentiated
ground out of which everything emerged. But the articulated reality
was where the action and the meaning are. Ramanuja anticipated Freud’s
judgment on mysticism as merely a retrogressive attainment of the
Oceanic feeling of the womb, no advance but a retreat. He was even
closer to modern brain physiologists who say nondual experiences are
simply a function of an induced malfunction in the temporal parietal
lobe of the brain, whereby the little gizmo that comes on line in
infancy to differentiate self from others goes temporarily back
offline. For Ramanuja, that’s all you’re doing. Once you snap out of
it, a mountain’s just a mountain again.
In
the end, Freke and Gandy reduce (and expand) Gnosticism into a
Socratic refusal to think one has everything all figured out. Their
enlightenment is to gaze and gape at the Mystery of Being. And in
that, I think they are very wise. But if anybody ever thought they had
the whole thing figured out, it was the ancient Gnostics, whether they
were the “original Christians” or not.