We can only know the radiation of the sun, never its heart, where light is most dense and always hidden to us. Both physicists and mystics speak of the darkness at the core of light. Of course these are only analogies, yet their message is that in the physical domain, as in the spiritual, the essential always eludes our minds. We only come close to it through silence and repose.
Having said all this, Mary became silent
It is vanity to speak too much of the ineffable Silence, even though it is through words that we arrive at it. Beyond a certain point, there is only wordless communion.
for it was in silence that the Teacher spoke to her.
These meetings between Logos and Sophia reverberate in realms of both words and silences.
Happy are those who have ears to hear the Teacher’s words;
Happier still are those who have ears to hear his silence.
Of course there must have been a sharing of words, feelings, and sense experiences, as well as silences, between Yeshua and Miriam. But it was surely silence that began to fill them when they left the talkative company of the other disciples, and walked together of a star-filled evening beside the softly lapping waters of the Sea of Chennereth. Walking, alone together in that silent communion, even the noetic image was left behind, for there was nothing left to see—only that living, overflowing Nothing which, the next morning, in the language of their time, they would refer to as the Father.
[Page 17, continued]
9 Then Andrew began to speak, and said to his brothers:
10 “Tell me, what do you think of these things she has been telling us?
11 As for me, I do not believe
12 that the Teacher would speak like this.
13 These ideas are too different from those we have known.”
14 And Peter added:
15 “How is it possible that the Teacher talked
16 in this manner, with a woman,
17 about secrets of which we ourselves are ignorant?
18 Must we change our customs,
19 and listen to this woman?
20 Did he really choose her, and prefer her to us?”
Miriam has ceased speaking. Her silence annoys her critics as much as her words do, for it is a sign of the peace of the One who inhabits her. They cannot accept her story of the voyage of the soul through the different climates, for it seems like ordinary imagination to them. Yet, in spite of themselves, they appear to be intrigued by her teaching about the relation between psyche, nous, and Pneuma and the difference between the merely psychic person, who only hears the word as they do, and the noetic and spiritual person who is also capable of vision.
How could it be that the Teacher led her into realms unknown to them, his beloved disciples? Had they not shared bread, love, travel, and many hardships with Yeshua? It is Peter who is most predictably irritated by Miriam’s questions and the answers she claims to have received. This annoyance is mentioned in only one of several gospels that include the theme of Peter’s impatience with her and with women in general:
Peter said:
“My Lord, can’t these women stop asking so many questions
so that we may ask our own?”
Jesus said to Mary and the other women:
“Then let your brothers ask their questions.” 152
But more ominous than the recurrent male/female tensions within the group of disciples is the implication of Andrew’s reaction when he questions the validity of her report itself, suggesting that her words are a false teaching:
“Tell me, what do you think of these things she has been telling us?
As for me, I do not believe
that the Teacher would speak like this.
These ideas are too different from those we have known.”
As far as he is concerned she has been ranting. In fact, the subtle and complex cosmology implied by her vision is something better addressed to educated folk, not to simple Galilean fishermen. Yeshua had preferred to speak to them in parables—which they generally did not understand either, but at least these left an imprint on the heart, the message of which could emerge later.
As in other gospels, Matthew confirms the importance of this practice of using parables:
All this Jesus said to the crowds in parables; indeed he said
nothing to them without a parable.
This was to fulfil what was spoken by the prophet: “I will open
my mouth in parables, I will utter what has been hidden since
the foundation of the world.” 153
The Teacher makes it clear in these passages from the canonical Gospels that these words and images will be interpreted according to the level of consciousness of the person. He also indicates that at least some disciples are capable of deeper understanding beyond the need for parables. Why should Miriam not have been among those privileged disciples to whom he could reveal the hidden meaning of images such as the Kingdom, or the reign of the Spirit (Pneuma) evolving within the Anthropos:
Then the disciples came and said to him, “Why do you speak to them in parables?
” And he answered them, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.
For to him who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will
be taken away.
This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. With them indeed is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah which says: ‘You shall indeed hear but never understand, and you shall indeed see but never perceive.
For this people’s heart has grown dull, and their ears are heavy of hearing, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should perceive with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn for me to heal them.’ But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear.
Truly, I say to you, many prophets and righteous men longed to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.” 154
The Teacher’s words about giving more to him who has, and taking away from him who has not, may seem harsh and puzzling. There are at least two levels of meaning that must be considered in order to understand this. First, for those who are filled with intelligence and love, all things seem to be given; but for those who lack the love and intelligence needed in order to come into relation with Being, nothing really has savor or meaning, no matter how many possessions they may have.
At another level—perhaps closer to the anthropology of the Gospel of Mary, but also found in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke—those who “have not” are those who operate only through gross sensual perception, and who therefore have no access to the Kingdom of the Spirit (Pneuma). They see the world only in its densest aspects and lack any light and subtle perception of its poetic aspect. They have no sense of the “visible surrounded by the invisible,” nor of any sort of impalpable dimension of an object they hold in their hands.155
Access to the Kingdom requires not only the awakening of the nous, but also of those spiritual senses that can put us in contact with that realm in between the realm of the physical senses—understood through weight, measure, and analysis—and the world of the Deus Absconditus, 156 purely immaterial, divine world of the clear light.
The Kingdom would seem to correspond to the mundus imaginalis, which we mentioned earlier in connection with Corbin. A very special sensitivity, love, and intelligence must be developed in order to perceive this world. The reason given by Yeshua for spiritual blindness and deafness is that the nous,157 or spirit, has become calloused, and the heart closed. The obstruction of the inner eye means that things can only be seen from the outside. The attention comes to rest and is trapped in their appearances, in their being-for-death.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Yeshua is quite explicit on this subject:
The eye is the lamp of the body. S
o, if your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light;
but if your eye is not sound, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is that
darkness! 158
Could it be that the nous of some of the disciples has become closed? Might they not be prey to the climate of darkness evoked in Matthew as well as in the Gospel of Mary?
We must bear in mind that our narrative takes place after the Resurrection. The Teacher has left the world of history and anyone who longs to remain in relationship with him must learn to use unaccustomed organs of perception if they are to apprehend a new world. “It is no longer through the flesh that we shall know the Christ,” said Paul of Tarsus.
The reaction of Andrew and Peter in the Gospel of Mary is an illustration of the climate in which the disciples found themselves after the Resurrection. They experienced emotions of grief and fear, and a refusal to really accept the Good News, especially if it happened to come from women, and particularly from the one known as Miriam of Magdala:
Now when he arose from the tomb early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons.
She went and told those who had been with him, as they mourned and wept.
But when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe it. 159
Now it was Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary the mother of James and the other women with them who told this to the apostles;
but these words seemed to them idle rambling, and they did not believe them. 160
Mary’s words are, then, the idle ramblings of a woman and therefore are of no interest or importance—each of them could comfortably turn his attention elsewhere. Peter adds:
“How is it possible that the Teacher talked
in this manner with a woman
about secrets of which we ourselves are ignorant?
Must we change our customs,
and listen to this woman?
Did he really choose her, and prefer her to us?”
There can be no doubt that Peter is genuinely shocked that a woman could speak with such authority, revealing secrets that they, Yeshua’s closest male disciples, did not know. There are plenty of other early Christian texts dealing with this subject, and several of them make specific mention of Peter’s mistrust of women—apparently even including his own daughter!
Our brother Peter shunned places where women were present. Even more, when there arose a scandal regarding his daughter, he prayed to the Lord, and his daughter became paralyzed on her side, so that no one could lie with her.161
There is even a second version of this same event:
The leader of the apostles, Peter, would flee at the sight of a woman’s face. But his daughter was so pretty to look at that a scandal was provoked by her beauty of form, and he started to pray, and she became paralyzed.162
Thanks to her father’s influence, Petronilla (for such was her name) was able to die “a virgin, a saint, and a martyr.”
But not everything is explained by Peter’s misogyny. Like Andrew, what really disturbs him is that a woman might know more than he and his men, and might even be able to guide them! For most Jews of that era, this was unthinkable. Like other pious men, Peter thanked God in his prayers each morning for not having made him “invalid, poor, or a woman.”
“Must we change our customs?”
Must we grant women a place of equal respect and authority in the community? But were women not made to serve men and to satisfy them when asked? For Peter, such customs were not just social, they were religious. The Teacher’s behavior with regard to women had always been a puzzle to him. The Samaritan woman, the adulteress, Miriam herself—all these women he had favored with teachings of “prayer in spirit and in truth” (the Samaritan), or “the mercy and forgiveness of the living God” (the adulteress), and finally, the first revelation to Miriam of the Resurrection, the very essence of Christianity itself, as Peter conceived it.
On a more ordinary psychological level, it would seem that the chief of the apostles was simply afraid of women. Wasn’t it a woman, a servant who came to warm herself next to him at the fire, who frightened him into denying his master three times, even though he had sworn never to betray the Teacher?163
Is it possible to give serious attention to this gospel attributed to a woman, and to dare to learn something of this feminine perspective of the Teacher, without casting doubt on the value of the canonical Gospels?
“Did he really choose her, and prefer her to us?”
Doesn’t Jewish scripture also deem it natural for a man to sometimes prefer the company of a woman for intimate sharing? And is this not also a realistic picture of Yeshua’s humanity?
But the core of the problem is deeper than this. Before we can become truly spiritual beings, informed and guided by the Pneuma, we must accept ourselves as psychophysical creatures with a soul (psyche) and a body (soma). And this means that the acceptance of our feminine dimensions is absolutely indispensable if we are to have true access to the nous, or for that matter, to the masculine dimensions of our being.
As Karl Graf von Dürkheim remarked, in our age the rediscovery (or discovery) of the spiritual must occur through a reconciliation with the feminine. The goal is the wedding of the masculine and the feminine: the Anthropos. This wedding must be initiated within us on a social level; on a neurophysiological level (the harmonization of the brain hemispheres); and on a more universal and planetary level. It must be an authentic alliance—without confusion and conflict—of the archetypes of Orient and Occident.
Peter has not yet entered into the climate of the new wedding proposed by the Teacher. The climate of jealousy still holds him back, and his consequent mistrust of the feminine prevents him from reclaiming the missing parts of his love.
[Page 18]
1 Then Mary wept,
2 and answered him:
3 “My brother Peter, what can you be thinking?
4 Do you believe that this is just my own imagination,
5 that I invented this vision?
6 Or do you believe that I would lie about our Teacher?”
Faced with Peter’s incomprehension, Miriam’s tears are not the ones she knows best—those of grief, love, or awe—but the tears of a child before an adult who refuses to believe her at the very moment when she has most opened her heart in truth.
“My brother Peter, what can you be thinking?”
It is significant that she first addresses him as a brother and friend. One of the practices that the Teacher enjoined upon his disciples was to treat each other as brothers and sisters, with no institution of spiritual hierarchy among them. Indeed, it is this very atmosphere of fellowship in love that makes them recognizable as his disciples. Miriam is thus not addressing Peter as a superior, certainly not as some sort of bishop or pope, but as a brother who has wounded her through his misunderstanding.
Clearly Peter is “in his head” rather than “in his heart.” And the thoughts circulating there are those of doubt and suspicion rather than discrimination. And what is happening in his heart? Jealousy and perhaps even contempt are stirring—in any case, certainly not that willing suspension of disbelief that enables us to listen to words we may not always agree with, but that we at least can try to understand.
“Do you believe that this is just my own imagination, that I invented this vision?”
Here Miriam implicitly affirms the imaginal, transpersonal nature of this vision. It is not merely a “personal” affair. In fact, at least two persons are required: the one who allows herself to be seen, and the one who sees. The personal imagination can of course produce all kinds of colorful representations, but these do not have the power and presence of that which is given through the awakened nous, the fine point of Miriam’s soul.
We do not invent this reality, we see it. Of course we see it in forms accessible to us, hence it cannot be the totality of the
Real. And yet it is the Real, just as a ray of the sun is not the entire sun, and yet it is the sun.
For Andrew and Peter, the temptation is to label Miriam’s account as mere personal storytelling. And they already know how to judge such stories, using good sense and reason. But these are insufficient for understanding the meta-story, the epiphany of a world and awareness that is “other,” of an “Other-Than-Being”164 in the very core of her story. Beyond sense and reason, this requires an opening of the doors of perception, the awakening of nous, which can then allow the entrance of the Pneuma, or Holy Spirit, also known in Christian discourse as the Consoler, the consolus, meaning “that which is with the one who is alone.”
Miriam is not simply alone with her personal imagination. She is visited by the living spirit of him who told his disciples in John 16, and in the last verse of Matthew, that he would always be with them. This spirit re-activates the images in her psyche in such a way that they are no longer just memories. They are vehicles of the real Presence of the Teacher, the Anthropos, Son of Man and of God.
One might say that the Holy Spirit brings about a kind of transubstantiation of the image of the Teacher, so that it becomes truly alive, resurrected within her. This may be accompanied by certain phenomena that mere memory or imagination cannot produce, such as manifestations of light and heat; but above all it is accompanied by peace, patience, confidence, and love.
It is worth noting that in the Orthodox Christian tradition, the Epiclesis is a time when one prays that the Holy Spirit may “descend upon us and upon these offerings” of bread and wine, so that they may become transformed into the “flesh and blood,” which also means the action and contemplation, of the living Christ in our midst. In a sense, Miriam has lived this Epiclesis, for the Holy Spirit has informed her mind and heart (nous, kardia) in such a way that the Teacher is now truly seen by her and continues to guide her.
This world of the imaginal is just as real as visible reality, and also just as real as invisible Reality; yet as we have said, it is neither visible nor invisible. In the West it is too easily associated with fantasy, in part because of the resemblance to the word imagination. Yet the imaginal is the opening of physical space-time into a different and vaster dimension of time and space. It is not the ultimate Eternity of the Uncreated, yet it leads us there, recalling Jacob’s ladder as a symbol of different levels of Being.
The Gospel of Mary Magdalene Page 15