Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [288]
The belief in a progressive transformation into the male spirit is reminiscent of Neoplatonic notions of the order of the universe in which it is divided into a hierarchy of three levels of divine being: the One, the Divine Mind, and the Soul, under which resided the material world. In the Enneads, Plotinus suggested that in rising from the Divine Mind to the One, we leave behind the last shreds of division and separation, even the duality between the knower and the known. We do not see the One, nor even know it, but are made One with it.36 Notions of this kind can be found throughout The Gospel of Thomas:
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 …then you will enter [the kingdom.] (Logion 22:4-6)
The otherness of all that was not pure spirit would be healed. The female would be swallowed up in the male and would become male.
Wayne Meeks claims that the unification of opposites served in early Christianity as a prime symbol of salvation.37 This notion is exemplified by a passage from The Gospel of Philip when read with Logion 18 of the The Gospel of Thomas about the necessary return to the beginning:
When Eve was in Adam, there was no death; but when she was separated from him, death came into being. Again if [she] go in, and take [her] to himself, death will be no longer. (G. Philip 166:22-26)
Have you discovered the beginning, then, that you are seeking after the end? For where the beginning is, the end will be. Blessed is the one who stands at the beginning: that one will know the end and not taste death. (Logion 18).
This comparison further emphasizes Jorunn Buckley’s argument for the necessary return to Eden.38 The “secret knowledge” necessary for eternal life can be intepreted as gaining self-knowledge through unification. Meeks explains, “The emphasis on salvation by self-knowledge suggests that the terms “male and female” are used metaphorically in the Thomas sayings to represent aspects of the individual personality.39 Whether the dichotomy is taken literally or metaphorically, The Gospel of Thomas positions the female in the lowest initiatory stage. The female needs to be abolished in the male before the transformation into the spirit can occur.40 A woman is twice removed from God, therefore making it more difficult, albeit possible, for women to gain salvation. In this text, Christ is not only seen as the revealer and teacher of salvific knowledge but also functions as a father and spouse for female followers.41 Although The Gospel of Thomas maintains the patriarchal hierarchy, with the help of Jesus as their teacher or spouse, women do have the opportunity to transcend the material world and gain salvation through spiritual exercises leading to the gnōsis or saving knowledge.
The apocalyptic ending, the characteristic that Paul and the Gospels have in common, is entirely missing. In its place is a spirit mysticism, which does not use the term “soul” but instead uses Jewish mystical terms like “image” and “form” and “shape,” emphasizing that our human shape is a reflection of the divine, as in Genesis 1:26 and other places in the Bible. This seems as close as the resurrection tradition of Christianity can come to the Greek notion of the immortal soul without actually stating it. Jesus’ resurrection body can be seen as merely one more spirit. Indeed, Greek dualism of soul and body deny the reality of fleshly resurrection, which by now was