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20 October 2006

Experience and Belief

Responding to the second chapter of Elaine Pagel's Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (2003), titled "Gospels in Conflict: John and Thomas," from my nascent girardian point of view:

 

Pagels identifies a couple of areas of conflict between the two gospels -- one of which, John, is in the Bible, the other of which, Thomas, was kept out of the Bible (much more about that process in her book):

 

  • the gospel of Thomas speaks of divine light "hidden in everyone, although most people remain unaware of its presence" (p. 41); the gospel of John claims that "Jesus alone embodies the divine light" (p. 41) and that "we can experience God only through the divine light embodied in Jesus" (p. 40). (Actually, I don't think John locates divine light in Jesus alone: John 1:9: "The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world;" John 11:9-10: "Jesus answered, ‘Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Those who walk during the day do not stumble, because they see the light of this world. But those who walk at night stumble, because the light is not in them.’" 
 
  • in contrast to the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke), "both John and Thomas include some sayings suggesting that "those who come to know God are very few" (p. 46). Pagels adds that the sayings she finds crucial for interpreting Thomas suggest that "everyone, in creation, receives an innate capacity to know God." 
 
  • Pagels says that Thomas encourages personal knowledge of God through direct experience while John requires belief in Jesus (p. 35). (John also speaks often about abiding in Jesus or God, which might perhaps be seen as more experiential than belief-driven. In John 15:4, Jesus indicates that he abides in us, a rather Thomasine idea.)

 

These so-called conflicts seem to me related.

 

First, I wonder if there actually is a conflict between the idea that God (or the divine light) is in everyone but we are often unaware of this, and the idea that we can experience the divine light only through Jesus? What if, for instance, being made in God's image, we do all share the divine light, and all have an innate capacity to know God, and, what if, at the same time, most of us somehow remain unaware of the divinity manifest in each other, and don't come to know God?

 

What if we just don't recognise divinity in each other or in God clearly, even though we could if our eyes were opened somehow?

 

James Alison (in a webcast titled "Embodying God’s Earth-shaking Mercy," Jan. 2004) speaks of Christian faith as "a receiving something. It's someone having done something for us." This seems quite different from how faith is normally defined -- as a confident belief in something we can't prove. Receiving is experiential, right? When I receive something, my arms and heart might feel full, I may experience delight, wonder, gratitude as a response, without feeling I am really thinking about anything or believing anything. But, before I can experience these things, I do have to believe (or think or have the opinion) that the thing I am receiving is good. For example, someone might suddenly give me a bouquet of flowers. I don't have to have any particular belief in mind to experience these happy receiving feelings when I am handed flowers -- except that I have to believe or have the opinion that flowers are good, something I want. In fact, it's possible that my beliefs or opinions -- such as that I don't deserve flowers, or that flowers are an inferior gift -- can prevent me from receiving fully what's given or to reject it.

 

What if we as humans (even as children) have so many beliefs about the nature of God and of ourselves that these beliefs blind us to the light in us, in others, and in the world, and keep us from receiving what is freely given (that is, from having "faith")? What if we don't often notice the mediating effect of our beliefs but think that we are experiencing directly when we are not? (Not that I'm arguing that one can't experience directly -- that's apparently something that regular meditation can bring about, according to Buddhists and others. But perhaps we often don't experience stimuli directly, and don't usually realise that we don't.)

 

Could perhaps both Thomas and John be speaking about what amounts to the same thing, when they speak of the need to know oneself to recognise God, and the need to know Jesus to recognise God? And perhaps both recognitions have a saving effect -- that is, keep us from forming our lives around death. (See Thomas 1, 11, 18, 19, 59; and John 5:24, 6:50, 8:51-52, 11:26) What if we have innate knowledge and sight but are running into difficulty accessing them? What if Jesus reveals something that can open our eyes and give us in-sight into self- and God-knowledge? In Thomas 91, the disciples "said to him, 'Tell us who you are so that we may believe in you.' [Jesus] said to them, 'You examine the face of heaven and earth, but you have not come to know the one who is in your presence, and you do not know how to examine the present moment.'" Recognition -- of what's in front of us -- and belief (in Jesus?) seem to be somehow related. 

 

James Alison, in a Sept. 2006 interview in Christian Century, says about worship that it is meant to be boring. That is, "it is about our learning to be approached by our Victim, who is forgiving us, moving toward us, nudging us out of our excitements and false identities into the quiet, gentle bliss of recognizing ourselves as loved and of loving our neighbors as ourselves." He speaks of the process of coming to know ourselves in the light of Jesus as the forgiving victim; when we see that Jesus was accused, scapegoated and lynched by humans, then how he returned to show us that death is an illusion, and forgave us, and shows us what it looks like to exist outside of rivalrous desire -- when we see who Jesus is, then at the same time we can see ourselves more clearly as well. We can recognise, as Alison says, ourselves and the rest of creation for exactly who we are -- people who "know not what we do" (Luke 23:34) in our rivalry and violence, and who are forgiven, liked, and welcomed.

 

Gil Balie (in his "Slavery to Freedom" tape series) speaks of humans as being all drawn into the vortex of mimetic desire, rivalry, and violence, with its concommitant mythologies and stories to cover up the victimisation; and none of us can get herself or the rest of us out of the vortex, none of us can see the fabrications for what they are -- they seem real and true! Only someone outside the deep, dark, spinning vortex can reach in, shining a bright steady light from the entrance, and help us emerge.

 

Alison (in Raising Abel; scroll down) says much the same thing in his study of John 8:

 

"Jesus affirms that his Father is unknown and impossible to know except through him, and not because he's being pretentious, or teacher's pet, but because the secret of that satanized god is death: while people are still formed by a world which begins and ends in death they have no way of knowing a God who has nothing to do with death. Only someone who does not know death can begin to make accessible who that God is. ... Jesus didn't come to tell us that God is our Father. That is excessively banal. He came to create the possibility that God in fact be our Father, or rather, that we should really become God's children, which is, in every case, something strictly impossible for humans to be naturally, since we are all enclosed in a mistaken identification of God with an ambiguous or satanic figure." 

 

If we mistakenly identify God as satanic, as violent, as one whose power derives from and is spent in judging, accusing and excluding, then we probably mistakenly identify who we are as humans, and if we seek to be godly, good, faithful, or just, we may find ourselves firmly believing that judging, accusing, excluding, victimising, scapegoating, requiring that others earn insider status and acceptance and love, can all be done in the name of good, in the name of order, peace, justice, and god. 

 

In fact, we may actually experience a sense of what we would call peace once we blame, accuse, and expel someone we deem to be "evil" from our midst -- though we would probably, in these seemingly enlightened times, term them unhealthy, unwilling, inappropriate, dysfunctional, disruptive, addicted, and so on. That peace might feel like clarity, openness, a fresh start, hopefulness, progress, relief.

 

From a girardian perspective, though, we have not experienced peace, although it feels to us for all the world exactly like peace. From a girardian perspective, as I understand it, we are experiencing the power of satan, i.e., the power of a violent expelling mechanism that human culture commonly employs in the mistaken belief that it brings about true and lasting peace. And in fact, it feels just like that to us. It feels like we've done something right and effective in expelling the blameworthy, because we are all so much happier and feel so much freer in their absence. 

 

I think the concept of direct experience of divinity, and of internal and external stimuli generally, is largely false. We misread and fail to recognise so much that is right in front of us, right inside us, our own motivations and intentions, our own pattern of actions. We are cluttered with beliefs, some of which we really believe (foundational, unquestioned, and non-conscious assumptions that we make) and some of which we parrot but don't act as though we believe. As Alison says, in On Being Liked, "Revelation is never a matter of simple disclosure of information, but always received as a process of discovery" (p.28). Pagels, explicating the gospel of Thomas (p. 56), says "[D]iscovering the divine light within is more than a matter of being told that it is there, for such vision shatters one's identity." I see both the gospels of John and Thomas pointing us towards our own discovery of revelation, our own identity-shattering.

 

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Resources for Further Study

 

  
  • Translations of Thomas: 
 
   

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