The Gospel of Mary Magdalene

by Jean-Yves Leloup

  “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart.”

  Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?

  For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.

  For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom,

  but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles,

  but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

  For the folly of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. 136

  The folly of God is the wisdom of the cross, which symbolizes both the wisdom of love and the human being at the crossroads of the four directions. This intersection is the incarnation of love in the acts of the One whose wisdom transmits the “peace which passeth understanding.”137

  In contrast to the wisdom of the sophists and the Pharisees, who “speak but do not act,” Yeshua offers an entirely different wisdom. The very desire for it is an expression of Being, and the thought of this Being translates the desire, generating words that are inseparable from acts. This is the fourfold wisdom of the cross, symbolizing the incarnation of all the dimensions of humanity.

  Figure 9

  The crossroads of these opposites is found in the heart, the abode of the wisdom of love.

  In more contemporary schools of thought138 we can find echoes of this fourfold Wisdom of the cross also expressed as the intersection and integration of human faculties (see figure 10).

  Figure 10

  The center here is called the Self. This is the abode of the fully human individual, liberated from all dualism and dispersions, reborn and reharmonized so as to constitute a true Anthropos. The Gospel of Mary is in accord with certain currents of contemporary psychology that define illness in terms of the disharmony of our faculties. Often one or another of our faculties will start to operate independently of the others, very much as if it were contemptuous of them. This discord of our functions is also an aspect of the climate of wrath. Such fragmentation is ultimately fatal to our health, for each component (feeling, thinking, sensing, intuition) can only perform its true function in harmonious concert with the whole.

  It is significant that the Gospel of Mary insists upon this distinction between true wisdom and false, worldly wisdom infected by guile and madness. In some of the earliest Christian communities, Miriam of Magdala herself was considered to be an incarnation of Sophia, she who was destined in both history and metahistory to marry the Logos. But in order to attain this true wisdom, which is the realization of wholeness and maturity, it is necessary to have passed through and overcome the illusory wisdom symbolized by the fifth, sixth, and seventh climates, or demons, that oppress the soul.

  Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away.

  But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification.

  None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

  But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him.” 139

  In these words from Paul, those who do not love God are not only blocked from access to this wisdom, they remain under the influence of wrath, like children who revile and trample upon a gift from someone whom they hate, yet who loves them.

  “These are the seven manifestations of Wrath, and they oppressed the soul with questions:

  ‘Where do you come from, murderer?’

  and ‘Where are you going, vagabond?’”140

  The soul that succumbs to these seven demons is thus treated not only as a vagabond whose orientation to the nous and Pneuma has been lost, but as a murderer as well. It would seem that the negation of the noetic-spiritual dimension of humanness is a kind of murder of that which is truly human, leaving the soul with the ability to produce only a grotesque parroting of wisdom, which will ultimately reduce it to a subhuman existence. This is to rob ourselves of what is both best and essential in us: the possibility of a wisdom that is capax Dei, “capable of God,” of an intimacy with one’s Creator.

  Might not some modern psychologies create an obstruction to this precious capacity of becoming fully human? Certainly some of them refuse to acknowledge any reality beyond psychic activity fed only by sensory input and memory components of the unconscious. This is often accompanied by a scientific reductionism that equates feelings and thoughts with physiological and neural activity, mistaking the biological support of the psyche for the psyche itself.

  Those who object to the term murdered as too harsh a description of those of us who experience the effects of such schools of thought will at least have to accept crippled, for this is how we are left when we adopt belief systems that literally cut us off from that dimension that enables us to become fully human.

  Paul would seem to be in accord with the viewpoint of the Gospel of Mary when he addresses those who are still stuck in a psychic climate dominated by wrath and jealousies of the flesh:

  But my brothers, I could not address you as spiritual men, but as men of the flesh, as babes in Christ.

  I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it.

  And even now you are not ready, for you are still of the flesh. For while there is still jealousy and strife among you, are you not still of the flesh, and behaving like ordinary men? 141

  [Page 16, continued]

  15 The soul answered:

  16 ‘That which oppressed me has been slain;

  17 that which encircled me has vanished;

  18 my craving has faded,

  19 and I am freed from my ignorance.’”

  The previous interrogation has been a necessary “oppression” in the soul’s self-questioning as to its place in the human world and in the universe. After voyaging through the wrathful climates of darkness, craving, ignorance, jealousy, and madness masquerading as wisdom, it finally reaches deliverance and intones its chant of victory:

  “‘That which oppressed me has been slain;

  that which encircled me has vanished;

  my craving has faded,

  and I am freed from my ignorance.’”

  This is the psyche turned toward the nous, and through it toward the Pneuma. It is no longer subject to craving and ignorance, for it has discovered the harmonious order of the human manifold. The soul’s spirit can now rejoin the Holy Spirit.

  It is interesting that Paul also makes this distinction between the merely psychic, mortal man (likened to a murderer or to a dead man himself ) and the spiritual man. The latter is like a living Breath, filled with the Spirit (Pneuma) that plumbs all the depths and heights of God. Unlike the merely psychic man, the spiritual man can be neither judged nor understood by any person. As the Teacher says in Jn 3:7–8: “The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes nor where it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit.”

  Paul elaborates on this theme in 1 Cor 2:10–15:

  Indeed the Spirit [Pneuma ] 142 searches everything, even the depths of God.

  For what person knows a man’s thoughts except the Spirit that is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.

  Now we have received not the spirit of the world, 143 but the

  Spirit that is from God, 144 that we might understand the gifts bestowed on us by God.

  And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom, but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual realities 145 to

  those who possess the Spirit.

  The psychic man 146 does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are fo
lly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.

  The spiritual man judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one.

  Having become spiritual, the soul of Miriam participates in this rediscovery of freedom, which is also sovereignty and detachment. When certain other apostles begin to judge her, they only show that they are still captives of the psychic and the fleshly, which ultimately lead only to mortification and mortality.

  We know that we have passed from death into life, because we love one another. He that does not love abides in death.

  Whoever hates his brother is a murderer: and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him. 147

  It is surprising to find in both these words attributed to John and the words in the Gospel of Mary this same theme expressed with the same language. Worldly wisdom is loveless wisdom, ruled by wrath and cunning. It is also murderous, for it is cut off from the Breath of Life in itself. The wisdom (Sophia) of love (agapé) is limitless and unconditional. Because it is beyond all boundaries, it cannot be encircled by the objects of its attention. Because it is always larger than its contents, it neither encloses, craves, nor possesses what it loves.

  One may well ask at this point: Is a love without craving or self-interested desire really possible for us? Speaking from a purely psychic standpoint, the answer would have to be no. Simple psychological honesty compels us to admit that our psychic experience of love is never totally untainted by self-interested desires, whether conscious or unconscious. We generally love expecting at the very least to be loved in return—though this has not yet reached the point of craving.

  It is clear that there can be no psychic love that is free and disinterested. But the love of which we are speaking is of an entirely different desire. This spiritual desire that Miriam embodies is the same love that she encounters in the eyes and on the lips of her rabbuni, Yeshua. As she herself says, “my craving has faded.” We might also translate this as “my desire,” in the merely psychic sense of that word. Yet this does not mean that her desire has been annihilated. Miriam’s spirit (nous) has been awakened to the Spirit of God, but this does not mean she has ceased to be endowed with a soul or psyche as long as she lives in space-time.

  What it does mean is that this soul, with all its psychic activity, is at peace. Its transparency no longer obscures the vision of what is and therefore of her true relation with what is, which is agapé, or love. She has been delivered from the tension that is always at least subtly present in our loving when we do not unconditionally accept the another’s right to be different, to not love us in return, or to leave us. She has been delivered from the ignorance that makes another into an object that we may possess and keep for life, and into that knowledge that sees the other as a subject endowed with inalienable freedom whom one may love for life.

  [Page 17]

  1 “ ‘I left the world with the aid of another world;

  2 a design was erased,

  3 by virtue of a higher design.

  4 Henceforth I travel toward Repose,

  5 where time rests in the Eternity of time;

  6 I go now into Silence.’ ”

  7 Having said all this, Mary became silent,

  8 for it was in silence that the Teacher spoke to her.

  It requires a higher love to free oneself from a lower love. By the same token, it takes a higher and vaster representation of the world to free oneself from a lower one. Scientific progress itself depends on this.

  Applying this to anthropologies, it is imperative that we find a less fragmented, more holistic vision of humankind than the ones dominant today if we are to evolve in a positive sense—for the world in which we human beings live is shaped by our own image of ourselves. A better world necessitates a better anthropology.

  The Gospel of Mary, along with other gospels, can help us fine-tune our representations of human-ness through the image of the Teacher—a privileged image of the fully human being who is made in the image of God, a Man-God or a God-Man.

  “‘I left the world with the aid of another world;’”

  The world of the soul is freed by its opening to the nous-pneuma, revealing another world. To change worlds is to change worldviews. The eyes of the flesh and the eyes of the spirit do not see the same reality.

  We noted previously that it is by virtue of her discovery of the imaginal through the awakening of her nous that Miriam is able to move from the material to the spiritual. The imaginal is that in-between zone where spirits become embodied and bodies become spiritualized. It is where the vision of a homogeneous reality (whether a material or a spiritual one) gives way to a vision of multidimensional realms, a hierarchy ranging from the densest to the most subtle realities.

  The different phases of Miriam’s soul-voyage have enabled us if not to see then at least to experience these climates, albeit with our baggage of reserve, enthusiasm, irony, or whatever constitutes our habitual patterns of thought.

  For sensory reality, as for historical reality, the distinction of real vs. imaginary tends to boil down to true vs. false. This is not the case for imaginal reality, however. For the imaginal is not merely something that is at best possible, as is the imaginary. Rather, it is of an ontological reality entirely superior to that of mere possibility.148 Imaginal realities are no less endowed with real Being than are the factual realities that are the basis of history. Furthermore, history itself ceases to exist when it degenerates into a mere collection of facts unconnected by a story—and this story cannot be found without a transcendent dimension that sees these facts from within and beyond.

  Those who change history create a fracture in the deterministic story of their era. Like Yeshua, Miriam, and many other founders of great spiritual traditions, they are like flashes of lightning in the dark of our ordinary history. They embody what the Greeks called kairos, an instant of “the intersection of time and eternity,” which introduces the salutary vertical dimension into the horizontality of chronos.149

  “‘ . . . a design was erased,

  by virtue of a higher design.’”

  The lower design is that of ordinary time, containing the world and its humanity. As long as this design prevails, the imaginal itself becomes but a moment through which soma, psyche, nous, and Pneuma live out their passage (pessakh, in Hebrew—the word also used for the holiday of Passover, and for Easter by the first Christians). Yet:

  “‘Henceforth I travel toward Repose,’”

  Thus the fulfillment of a week of work is Shabbat, whose etymological root means “to stop”—to stop doing, producing, thinking, to stop time.

  The Anthropos created in the image of YHWH knows true repose and how to savor individual being as Being, free of all need to prove ourselves or to justify our existence through any sort of accomplishment.

  The difficulty for the psyche is that this highest climate has no weather! It lacks all the sensations, emotions, thoughts, and even intuitions through which the psyche has become accustomed to feeling its own existence. Even love does not feel like love in this space. Yet here is precisely the test of the soul’s authenticity, for this is the space of the very source of love. Is the soul still capable of love here, where it can no longer feel love? To the extent that we are attached to the feeling of being “in love,” we lack authenticity of soul, for in reality we love our own pleasurable emotions (i.e., motion) that we experience through another. But when we truly love another unconditionally, the psyche basks in that climate of repose and has no need to be moved by this love.

  As Aristotle so eloquently said, contemplation is the purest of human action. It brings us closest to the original act of the unmoved Mover that sets all worlds into motion yet is itself moved by nothing. Miriam’s path now leads toward this purest act, her utterly gratuitous love, which is not other than Being itself. It is here that:

  “‘. . . time rests in the Eternity of Time;’”

  Eternity is the absence of time, and is tot
ally incompatible with conventional religious doctrines of eternal life. In these systems, time is still in fact going on forever—though perhaps at a slower pace—in the sense of continuing to flow without coming to an end. But we can all too easily imagine boredom in such an eternity, and this is precisely why it is bogus.

  In order for boredom to even be possible, we must first have a background of passing time. But there is no passing time in Eternity. As creatures of passing time, the closest we can come to representing it is through those instants of greatest aliveness and intensity of Presence—and of course any representation of such an instant is bound to be a relative and fleeting image.

  The eternal Son of Man in us is also the Son of the Instant, and it is here that Miriam comes, in silence, to experience her wedding with eternity. The repose to which she goes is also silence, as she says in the same breath. Yet this silence is also of the beyond—it cannot be reduced to the popular slogan “here and now,” inasmuch as that implies dependence upon experience in passing time.

  In ancient traditions, silence was called “the breast of the Father” (en sigeī hn noukarōf), the transcendence in the heart of immanence. Ignatius of Antioch explicitly states that the Word (Logos) comes from Silence and returns to Silence (symbolized by the Father). Between the Silence of the Source and that of the end, there is a time for word (logos) and breath (pneuma) when human beings are given the possibility—which is also their blessing—of participation and of understanding as much as they can.

  Even Clement of Alexandria had some rather strange and beautiful words to say on this:

  Silence, they say, is Mother of all beings born of the Abyss. Inasmuch as she has expressed the inexpressible, she has kept to silence. Inasmuch as she has understood, she has named it: the incomprehensible.150

  This is part of the great apophatic tradition of the early Church Fathers.151 According to it, YHWH remains incomprehensible, inaccessible. We can only know his names, qualities, reflections (Gregory Palamas called them his “energies”); we can know the Son and the Holy Spirit, but not the inaccessible Essence.