The Gnostic Crucifixion

by G. R. S. Mead

Those who have consciousness of these spiritual verities, nay, even those who have but dimly felt their greatness, will easily understand that the story of the crucifixion as believed in by the masses was for the Gnostics but the shadow of an eternal happening that most intimately concerned every man in his inmost nature.

19. The outer story was centred round a dramatic crisis of death on a stationary cross—a dead symbol, and a symbol of death. But the inner rite was one of movement and “dancing,” a living symbol and a symbol of life. This was shown to the disciple—indeed, as we have seen, he was made in the Dance to partake in it—that he might know the mystery of suffering in a moment of Great Experience. He saw it and became it; it was shown him in action. He had seen sorrow and suffering, and the cause of it had been dimly felt; but its ceasing he did not yet know really, for the ceasing of sorrow could only come when he could realize sorrow and joy, suffering and bliss, simultaneously. And that mystery the Christ alone knows.

20. Let the disciple then first see the suffering of the man through, not his own, but His Master’s eyes. He will first only see the mystery, grasp it intellectually; he will not as yet realize it. When he realizes it, there will then be bliss indeed, for he will begin to become the Master Himself. And the Master is the conqueror of woe—not, however, in the sense of the annihilator of it, but as the one who rejoices in it; for he knows that it is the necessary concomitant of bliss, and that the more pain he suffers in one portion of his nature, the more bliss he experiences in another; the deeper the one the deeper the other, and therewith the intenser becomes his whole nature. His Great Body is learning to respond to greater and greater impulses or “vibrations.”

The consummation is that he becomes capable of experiencing joy in sorrow and sorrow in joy; and thus reaches to the gnosis that these are inseparables, and that the solution of the mystery is the power of ever experiencing both simultaneously.

21. It may thus to some extent become clear that what is asserted of the Christ in the general Gospel-story is typically true and yet is not true. Those who look at one side only of the living picture see in a glass darkly.

If we could only realize that all the ugliness and misery and confusion of life is but the underside, as it were, of a pattern woven on the Great Loom or embroidered by Divine Fingers! We can in our imperfect consciousness see only the underside, the medley of crossing of threads, the knots and finishings-off; we cannot see the pattern. Nevertheless it exists simultaneously with the underside. The Christ sees both sides simultaneously, and understands.

22. But the term that our Gnostic writer chooses with which to depict this grade of being is not Christ, but Word or Reason (Logos). This Reason is not the ratiocinative faculty in man which conditions him as a duality; it is rather more as a Divine Monad, as Pure Reason, or that which can hold all opposites in one. It is called Word because it is the immediate intelligible Utterance of God.

23. This is the first mystery that man must learn to understand; then will he be able to understand God as unity; and only finally will he understand the greatest mystery of all—man, the personal man, the thing we each of us now are, God in multiplicity, and why there is suffering.

24. With this the writer breaks off, knowing fully how difficult it is to express in human speech the living ideas that have come to birth in him, and knowing that there are still more marvellous truths of which he has caught some glimpse or heard some echo, but which he feels he can in no way set forth in proper decency.

And so he tells us the Lord is taken up, unseen by the multitudes. That is to say, presumably, no one in the state of the multiplicity of the lower nature can behold the vision of unity.