THE GOD BEYOND GOD
Gnostics believe that God is inconceivable and cannot be known directly. Therefore he defies accurate description. He is boundless, without beginning or end and is the basis of all things. He comprises all things without being contained. Everything including the world lies within the divinity and continues to be part of it. The Godhead manifests itself through a process of emanations in a successive diversity of being while maintaining its unity. The Father of Truth is a perfect being who dwells outside the perceptible world and is the true master of the universe. The physical world is not his design, but the work of a inferior being. This anonymous power that is inaccessible from the world is properly described only negatively or in images which are intended to express his incomparable status, free from any kind of relation to the material world. To define sufficiently the nature of the Father is unachievable; of all the symbols constructed to signify his perpetual and incomprehensible state, a clean, blank sheet of paper is the least flawed. The paper being blank characterize all that cannot be thought of, all that cannot be sensed, and all that cannot be restricted by any physical function of consciousness. No created intelligence has ever fathomed its depths; No god has ever discovered the true nature of its essence. The gods in their ignorance do not know the true God and therefore act as if he does not exist.
Both the old and new testament use male language to describe God. Most of the analogies used for God throughout scriptures such as father, and King, are male. Does this mean that God is male? Neither male nor female sexuality is to be attributed to God. Sexuality is a Characteristic of those that are created which cannot be compatible to any such division within the true God. Today with the political correctness of our era some people advocate that God unites male and female characteristics. These individuals, like those who assume God is entirely male should consider that any ascription of sexuality to the True God is in error. Gnostics believe that God is androgynous. This is related to the impression that God provides the universe with both structure and substance. Traditional Christians and Jews have had no reluctance in speaking about God in personal terms. Christianity and Judaism credit God all types of human features such as sorrow, love, anger, and other traits which seem to have personal associations.
The True God is an entity who escapes all effort at objectification and surpass all description. Traditional Christians must learn to recognize and come to grips with the presence of God, realizing that this presence cannot be condensed to a concise list of facts. For the Gnostic Warrior Jesus’ revelation is not simply a making of known facts about God, but a knowledge of God through direct experience. The notion of a personal god is inherent to the Christian and Jewish outlook. But such an idea of a personal god arises a number of questions which require a closer look. A personal god may seem to imply that God is a human being. To speak of God in this manner is to reduce him to our level. To refer to God as a person implies that God, shares with human beings the necessity to be located at some definite place. Given the Gnostic understanding of God this notion seems out of place.
The Gnostic conception of God is really quite different from the simplistic notion of traditional Christians and Jews that our failings anger God. For if that were true then we would actually control God. We would be able to make him happy or sad, angry and calm. God remains unchanged by what we do. In a sense God is the ideal parent. God does not angrily punish nor happily reward. God is beyond such concerns. To be perfect is to be unchanging and self sufficient. It is therefore impossible for God to be affected or changed by anything outside itself. If God is perfect than change in any direction is an impossibility. If God changes it is either a move away from perfection (in which case God is no longer perfect) or toward perfection (in which case God was not perfect in the past.) Emotion attributed to God implies vulnerability and potentially that God could be affected by our sorrows or moved by our misery. To accept the notion that God changes is to deny the divine perfection. God is compassionate in terms of our experience, but not in terms of the Divine being itself.
The language of love and compassion should be treated as purely figurative when used in relation to God. We may experience God as empathetic this does not mean that God is compassionate. An obviously difficulty arises here. Jesus Christ suffered and died on the cross. Traditional Christians declare that Jesus Christ was God incarnate. It therefore seems to follow that God suffered in Christ. Not so! Declares the Gnostic Warrior. Christ Suffered in his human nature not his divine nature. God thus did not experience human suffering, and remained unaffected by this aspect of the world. The Christian and Jewish doctrine of God as creator implies the goodness of creation.
There is no place in traditional Christian and Jewish theology for the Gnostic notion that the world is inherently flawed even though the world is fallen through sin, it remains God’s good creation and capable of being redeemed. It is obvious to the Gnostic Warrior that the creation is imperfect. The recognition that the world is a departure from the true nature of the Gnostic. The spiritual person often feels deflected from his intended course. The idea of man as the cause of the worlds ills does not sit well with Gnostics. The world is filled with suffering and pain because the very nature of the material is flawed and its creator is imperfect. The spiritual substance of the Gnostic is trapped in the body and has fallen from the glory of the Pleroma. The world as we see it is not the creation of the True God but that of the Demiurge who is the Hebrew tribal god of the old testament.
The existence of human sin, evil and death are themselves tokens of the extent of the departure of the created order from the Father of truth. For this reason Gnostic reflection on redemption entails the notion of salvation through gnosis for the spiritual persons trapped within the material creation so that they are restored to their original spiritual substance within the Pleroma. The tradition theologian naively continue to affirm the perfection of creation and avoid the suggestion by Gnostics unacceptable to most Jews and Christians that the creator god is responsible for evil. The Gnostic image of creation suggests that creation of the spiritual and physical world originated with the Father of Truth (God). This occurred through a series of overflowing of the creative energy of the True God. Just as light derives from the sun and reflects its nature , so the created order derives from the Father of Truth and expresses the divine nature.
The implication here is that God did not directly create the physical universe, but instead emanated lesser spiritual beings who fashioned the universe. According to this paradigm, creation proceeds as an outpouring or even transformation in the original Godhead. The supreme light or consciousness descends through a series of stages, becoming progressively more material and embodied, The Gnostic Warrior attempts to turn around this process to return to the first cause The father of Truth, retracing the steps through spiritual knowledge (gnosis), contemplation and ascent. The orthodox religions have two main points of contention with this Gnostic tenet. Emanation implies an involuntary action by God rather than a conscious decision to create.
Traditional Jews and Christians have consistently emphasized that the act of creation rests upon a prior decision by God to create. Which this Gnostic model denies. Secondly emanation implies and impersonal nature. The idea of a personal god, expressing a personality both in the very act of creation and the subsequent creation itself is not conveyed in the Gnostic model. It is crucial to know that Gnostics have a special word for God. The Term is Bythos that means Depth. God is without end and is eternal. This is the name Gnostics employ in thinking about God. The concept of Bythos is very important for Gnostics. One reason is that the Bible contains different names of God and that each name is understood very specifically. What is Bythos? To begin with , it is important to be aware that the term Bythos does not appear in the Old Testament. Other divine names are mentioned such as Elokim but not Bythos. To Gnostics this indicates that the actual Name of God appears no where in the Old Testament; the other names are not references to God.
In English translation of the bible , the word God is used over and over but in the Hebrew version different words are used in different places in the Bible, Bythos is never used. Gnostics regard God as something utterly beyond human comprehension. That has to be the starting point for all Gnostic contemplation about God that God is completely transcendent of human language. There literally is nothing we can meaningfully say about God. One cannot start a sentence with the word God and complete it with anything meaningful. For example, we cannot meaningfully say God is good; because God totally transcends our limited conceptions of good and evil. God is without limits. The moment we declare God is …. The sentence loses its meaning, because God is without limits.
The vivid Gnostic analogy for this notion is the image of a fist holding a thought: Just as it is impossible for a fist to hold a thought the human mind cannot hold the concept of God. Why is it a fist cannot hold a thought? The reason of course has nothing to do with how strong the fist is. No matter how strong we make the fist, it will never hold a thought. This is because a fist exists on one level or plane of existence and a thought exists on a totally different plane. They are both real. A thought is real and a fist is real. But they exists in two different realms and there is no way we can reach in with the fist to the world of thought and grab anything. In a like manner it is simply impossible for the human mind to grasp the concept of God.
This conclusion now leads us to an interesting issue. Is God spiritual? Clearly, if we ask whether God is physical the answer would be negative. But is God spiritual. The Gnostic Warrior says no. God is as different from the spiritual as he is from the physical. The same distance that separates God from the physical must separate God from the spiritual. Gnostics definitely emphasize that many other planes exist besides ours and that many spiritual beings inhabit such realms. But this fact has nothing to do with the concept of God and our inherent inability to comprehend God. This compelling notion can best be understood by way of analogy; for example think of the sun. On a bright day, it is literally impossible for us to look directly at the sun without an intervening shield like sunglasses. The human eye cannot gaze at that type of brightness. Furthermore, there is a certain distance that we must keep from the sun. If a human started to approach it, he could only get within a certain number of million miles before physically evaporating. Yet the same sun is just one medium sized star among billions of stars that science has identified. If the power and magnitude of a medium sized star is so great, then clearly, the power of God is so incomprehensibly immense that a vast distance must by necessity separate God from each of us. This analogy begins to help us to comprehend that the power of God is not only beyond all human conception but also beyond our capacity to withstand.
A system comprising a step down arrangement between God and the human individual must exist between our separate identities. With such a step-down system, communication between God and human individuals can take place. This form of communication would be indirect, of course since many step down stations would be involved. Gnostics teach that precisely such a step down system exists; to effect a communication system between God and Man.
The Father emanated a set of forces called Aeons that went on to create this universe. God did not directly conduct creation, but did so indirectly through the Aeons. It is not hard to imagine how historically people have come to regard the Aeons as akin to gods. In one section of the Bible we are told that men and women began to call upon the names of God to achieve certain ends. These people understood quite well the relationship between the Aeons and power, because the forces they comprise create and sustain everything in our universe. Certainly it is easy to see how individuals might start to treat an Aeon as a god to deify, worship and pay homage to it. Perhaps this outlook underlay the early pagan notions that a multiplicity of gods ruled the cosmos. This outlook is precisely what has caused the monotheistic religions to mistakenly worship the Demiurge as the ultimate God.
CIRCLE : An ancient and universal symbol of unity, wholeness, infinity, power. It represents spirit or force, the cosmos or a spiritualized and a sacred space. Gnostic traditions linked the unbroken circle to the "world serpent" forming a circle as it eats its own tail.
