After Christ has died, it is this woman whom Peter addresses with deference, recognizing that the Teacher had loved her differently from them and from other women. Perhaps this also contains at least a grain of recognition that she has been given teachings that the men have not been ready to hear—for in spite of her status as a mere woman, she has gone farther upon the path to becoming fully human, an Anthropos.
“Tell us whatever you remember
of any words he told you
which we have not yet heard.”
[Page 10, continued]
7 Mary said to them:
8 “I will now speak to you
9 of that which has not been given to you to hear.
10 I had a vision of the Teacher,
11 and I said to him:
12 ‘Lord I see you now
13 in this vision.’
14 And he answered:
15 ‘You are blessed, for the sight of me does not disturb you.
16 There where is the nous, lies the treasure.’ ”
Peter has asked Miriam for words of the teacher that they have not heard. Yet she chooses to answer him in terms of a vision she has received:
“I will now speak to you
of that which has not been given to you to hear.
I had a vision . . .”
This deliberate shift from the auditory to the visual will come as no surprise to scholars of early Christianity and the Judaism of Yeshua’s time. It is related to an ancient argument as to the primacy of vision over audition. It would be tempting, though simplistic, to conclude that Semitic peoples tend more toward audition (Shema Yisraël, “Listen, O Israel!”) and Greeks toward vision. What position did the earliest Christians take in this debate as to the favored organ of divine perception?
According to certain texts attributed to the apostle John, it would seem that vision is privileged: “The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it.” And he has Yeshua himself say: “Your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day. He saw it and was glad.”106 Thus vision would be the fulfillment of the promise of audition, its plenitude and joy. One could read the Gospel of Mary as saying that Peter and the others have heard the Word, but have not yet attained vision of it as has she. This theme of vision as higher than audition is prominent in the writings of Philo of Alexandria, which predate the redactions of the canonical Gospels. Especially in his De migratione Abrahami, we find passages like this:
The sage is he who sees. Fools are blind and nearsighted. Thus prophets were called “seers” in olden times (1 Sm. 9:9). Did not the ascetic take care to exchange ear for eye, so as to see what he could only hear before? Thus he became heir to the kingdom of seeing, and went beyond that of hearing. Henceforth the coin of study and teaching evoked by the name of Jacob is stamped with the new image of Israel, the See.107 This is the entrance of the vision of divine light, which is the same as science. And this science opens the eye of the soul so as to lead it to apprehensions that are clearer and more luminous than those of the ear.108
It is God who makes us see; it is the Light that awakens the light within us. Philo comes to a conclusion that is hard for many to accept: “To see is better than to possess.” He offers the example of Moses seeing the Promised Land from afar, as told in Deuteronomy 34:4: “When He had shown Moses the entire land, God said to him: ‘I have made you see with your eyes, but you shall not enter there.’”
Do not believe that this is any sort of stricture upon this greatest of sages, as some narrow minds have maintained. No, what this is telling us is that the prerogatives of adults are not to be confused with those of children. The latter are called exercise, the former wisdom. It follows that the wonders of nature are meant more to be seen than possessed (possedere meaning “to sit upon”). Is possession still possible for one who participates greatly in the Divine? But vision remains possible for such a one. Though such vision is not given to everyone, it is at least possible for the most purified people, whose vision has been honed, and to whom the Father of the Universe has shown his own works.
What life can surpass the life of contemplation? What could be more fitting for a being endowed with reason? It is because of this that, although the voice of mortals is meant for the ear, the word of God, like light, is meant to be seen. It is written that “All the people saw the voice”109 instead of “heard the voice,” because there was in fact no shaking of the air from any organs of mouth or tongue. This was the splendor of virtue, the very source of the Logos.110
Yet the Deuteronomist tradition seems opposed to this primacy of vision over audition. Nevertheless, a thorough examination of Hebrew literature shows that these two organs of perception are meant to complement, not to oppose one another. On the one hand, it is said that the ear must be primary, for “man cannot see God and live.”111 On the other hand, it is also supposed to be possible to see and contemplate God: “Moses went up, along with Aaron, Hadab, Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel. They saw the God of Israel. . . . They contemplated God, and then ate and drank.”112
This ancient debate was taken up yet again by the Fathers of the Roman Church.113 But all the polemics in favor of one sense or the other tend to pale when we remember that it is not our physical, outer senses that are called upon, but our inner ones—sometimes called the eye of the heart or the innermost ear.
Even Philo spoke of intuition in this sense: “It is said that God ‘saw’ all that he had made, but this does not mean that he directed his eyes to these realities, but that he had the intuition, knowledge, and apprehension of what he had made.”114
So the question posed by the Gospel of Mary is not whether those who hear the Teacher or see him are more privileged. The question is how this inner audition (for Peter) and this inner vision, the eye of the nous (for Miriam), are possible. This requires that we take into consideration the context of anthropological beliefs surrounding this gospel—and let us recall that the very existence of this Coptic version suggests that we are dealing with an anthropology that cannot be encompassed by Greek and Semitic worldviews.
Miriam’s declaration is forthright and candid:
“I had a vision of the Teacher . . .” 115
She is not troubled or agitated by this vision, which again is a sign of the inner peace that governs her emotional and psychic powers. This vision is neither a dream, a fantasy, a trance, nor one of those cataleptic states brought about by techniques current in those times (in those days there were numerous schools of prophecy, not unlike our contemporary schools of channeling or mediumship).
Miriam remains undisturbed, and like Theresa of Avila and other later visionaries, she speaks directly to the Teacher:
“‘Lord, I see you now
in this vision.’”
She addresses what she sees, and what she sees addresses her. Thus there is no opposition of word and vision. Just as he did in his mortal existence, the Teacher responds to Miriam’s thirst for truth and knowledge:
“‘You are blessed, for the sight of me does not disturb you.’”
From the beginning, she possesses this grace of not being caught up in psychic excitation when confronted with this phenomenon—which could also be seen as freedom from the dualism of visible vs. invisible, or material vs. spiritual Reality. She remains in the same intimacy with him as when he lived in space-time. Having gone beyond space-time, he is just as alive, and it is this to which she bears witness:
“‘There where is the nous, lies the treasure.’”
These exact words have often been quoted in later Christian writings, such as those of Clement of Alexandria, Justin, Macarios and a number of others, which is evidence that the Gospel of Mary circulated widely during the first centuries of Christianity. It is important to remember that nous has no such place in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, which substitute the word heart and change the tense from present to future: For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.116
The usual meaning of ka
rdia is the “general inner nature of a person.” To speak of nous rather than of kardia has far deeper significance than merely a stylistic difference. We could even say that it suggests something specific about what Yeshua’s anthropology might have been. Especially in the passages that follow this one, the Gospel of Mary displays a kind of revealed anthropology. Of course this is bound to be of interest to us, given all the current difficulties and confusions in this domain.
As Anne Pasquier points out, this passage from the Gospel of Mary is certainly related to the teaching of the Presence of the Son of Man within every human being. Hence the treasure referred to in these lines is not some pie-in-the-sky, nor is it of some future time.
In the Gospel of Mary, the nous does not represent the whole human being, nor even an element, such as heart or intellect, which will someday have to discover the treasure. For here there is no more division between the treasure that one must acquire little by little, and oneself. There is no difference between the treasure and that part of us that is the nous—the nous is the treasure, an inner element that the disciple has no need to acquire through some moral action, but something that he already possesses by nature, and that must also be discovered.
Furthermore, the absence of the possessive pronoun in the Gospel of Mary indicates that the nous represents far more than the individual or personal soul:
“There where is the nous, lies the treasure.” 117
In other words, we become what we love and we become what we know. My desire for Being is Being itself, desiring itself in me. As Meister Eckhart said, “The eye with which I see God is the eye with which he sees me.”
[Page 10, continued]
17 “Then I said to him:
18 ‘Lord, when someone meets you
19 in a Moment of vision,
20 is it through the soul [psyche] that they see,
21 or is it through the Spirit [Pneuma] ?’
22 The Teacher answered:
23 ‘It is neither through the soul nor the spirit,
24 but the nous between the two
25 which sees the vision, and it is this which . . .’”
[Pages 11–14 are missing]
The canonical Gospels, even that of John, have left us unprepared for this kind of question. It is as if the disciples of those gospels were totally uninterested in epistemological or metaphysical questions. Being men of practical intelligence, they were concerned only with questions of how to live and act. It is as if they had no interest in probing the nature of their own knowledge and perception of the resurrected Christ. But what is the basis of belief in their perception of the resurrected Christ ? Is there a way of knowing real vision from vision that merely seems to be real? And how does this gnosis work—what are its means and organs of perception? Such questions are not asked, and it would seem that you have either to believe it or not.
Are these a woman’s questions? Or questions of a man endowed with intuitive and imaginative intelligence? In any case, Miriam of Magdala’s questions are important ones, for the question of how one knows the resurrected Christ is also a question of the nature of Reality itself and involves the very foundations of Christianity.
But isn’t all this just a representation—a story that has been experienced, thought, dreamed, imagined, told, and retold? If so, how does such a representation originate? Is the story fiction or truth? In the very asking of this question, we see how invested we are in a certain Western mode of thought and interpretation: the either/or assumption—either it’s a dream, or else it’s real. Any third possibility is excluded.
And what if it is precisely in this excluded third possibility that Reality lies: a kind of synthesis or reunion of subject and object that had temporarily been dissociated so as to make the representation intelligible? And how is all of this possible? How is a representation of the resurrected Christ possible? How did Christianity become possible?
We can begin to understand why some disciples were taken aback by the audacity of such a question:
“‘Lord, when someone meets you
in a Moment of vision,
is it through the soul [psyche] that they see,
or is it through the Spirit [Pneuma]?’”
In other words, how is it possible that I see you, and through what eyes? Are they the eyes of the psyche, or of the spirit? Many people today would reduce this to, “Am I going crazy, or am I a mystic?” Still others couldn’t care less about the distinction between psychic and spiritual experience, for both belong to psychopathology, and people who see such things probably need help. They are in the same class as others who have hallucinations of things that are not of this world—the world that everybody sees with the eyes of consensus. After all, what other world is there? This view, which is still very influential, would have us deny the existence of a different perception or consensus than the dominant one.
The Teacher’s answer does not make things easy for us, especially considering the unfortunate lack of pages 11–14. It would seem that he is just about to develop this theme and perhaps even reveal his anthropology of different modes of knowledge.
But this could also be seen as a blessing in disguise. It certainly encourages our humility as exegetes—there will always be a huge question mark in our interpretations, and this gap may offer a space of freedom for those who want to take their quest further. Thus we continue to feel the lack of any adequate, tangible representation of the Real that can be imagined or thought. And the yearning for Truth with which this leaves us is in fact the source of our aliveness:
“The Teacher answered:
‘It is neither through the soul nor the spirit,
but the nous between the two
which sees the vision, and it is this which . . .’”
These fragments give rise to a number of reflections: First, this apparition of the resurrected Christ to Miriam is of neither a purely psychic nor a purely spiritual order. The language of Roman Catholicism from the era of Gardeil, Lubac, Maritain, and so forth, would interpret this as being “neither natural nor supernatural.” However, the response in this gospel compels us to go beyond this binary mode of thinking in which our brain normally operates. The excluded middle of our dualism is:
“‘. . . the nous between the two
which sees the vision, and it is this which . . .’”
It is up to us to complete the ellipsis. This would of course be influenced by our anthropological beliefs—but it would be better if we were to use our own imaginal capacity. The possibilities are endless, of course . . . but is each of them Real? Which of them are necessary and true? Which are most in harmony with the silence that permeates this discontinuity in the sayings of Yeshua?
It is the nous that . . . sees? Feels? Intuits? Imagines? Knows? Loves? Is aware?118 The choice is ours, provided that we are very clear as to what we mean by seeing, hearing, imagining, knowing, loving.
Before making a choice, let us outline several systems of anthropology in which the place of nous may be considered, in the light of its importance in the Gospel of Mary.
1. There is no place for it in any modern one-dimensional anthropology, where a human being is regarded as being essentially a physical body, however complex—a mere composite form that will soon decompose and be no more. There is not even adequate space for psyche here, much less for spirit (nous). Intelligence is reduced to a play of energy in neural networks, a phenomenon of the brain. Certainly there is no place for an entity such as the Holy Spirit (Pneuma)—all such notions are mere comforting illusions to cushion us from the certainty of the annihilation of death.
2. It also has no place in a dualistic anthropology of body/mind split, such as the Cartesian worldview. Such an anthropology ignores the nous and the Pneuma. Although there is some place for psychic, or soul activity, there is neither spirit nor Spirit.119
3. It does have a place in Platonic and Neoplatonic systems. Human beings have a body, a soul, and a spirit: soma, psyche, and nous. The spirit
is the divine dimension, which needs to be liberated from the clutches of sensations (soma) and emotions (psyche).
4. In the Gospel of Mary, however, the nous is not presented as the fully Divine in us, but as the intermediary between the realm of psyche (soul) and the realm of Pneuma (Spirit). It is the Pneuma—the Breath, or Holy Spirit—that is considered as truly divine in the anthropology of this gospel. This brings us to a fourfold anthropology in which the nous also finds its rightful place, though it is a different one from that in the Platonic system. Thus the human being is a composite of body (soma), soul (psyche), mind (nous), and Spirit (Pneuma).
This Pneuma is not itself a component of the human complex, however, but the Reality that gives life to the other components. In this perspective, to become spiritual is not to disincarnate (i.e., to arise from the tomb of the body), nor is it to deny our feelings and emotions (i.e., psychic activity and the happy/unhappy memories that underlie it). It does not imply any devaluing of the mind aspect of the noetic dimension of humanness, which includes intellect, intuition, and imagination—an intelligence capable of forming ideas or representations (images) of the Real. Instead, spiritualization is a process of imbuing these different dimensions of the human being with the presence of the Holy Spirit, or Pneuma. This transfigures the body, expands and calms the soul, and it simplifies and clarifies the mind and spirit (nous). Here is a summary of these for view:
One-Dimensional Humanity
One material body, intelligent and impermanent
The body is the only value. There is no reality beyond
that of its space-time.
Two-Dimensional Humanity
soul (psyche) immortal
body (soma), mortal
The body is animated by an informative value that is
perhaps non-mortal and independent of the body’s
The Gospel of Mary Magdalene Page 11