Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 07:39:36 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: The Father



The Coptic Gnostic treatise known as _The Tripartite Tractate_ (NHLE:
51,5) begins, after a short introduction, with a startling statement
concerning the Father:

     "He existed before anything other than himself came into being."
(51:5)

Now the question of whether or not this statement was startling or
even comprehensible to the contemporary readers of the text cannot be
answered definitively, although it may be assumed that this work was
intended to function as a guide for the initiate into the Valentinian
belief system (or some derivative school), positing the Father as the
Supreme Unknowable One in order to awaken in the initiate a thirst to
know the unknowable: salvation.  The important thing to understand
here is that, for the Gnostics, the Father was not unkowable in a
negative sense -- meaning, the Gnostics did not conceive of their
supreme 'root' in the diseased manner of Bataille, who writes:

"God finds rest in nothing and is satisfied in nothing. Every
existence is threatened, is already in the Nothingness of His
insatiability.  And no more than He can appease himself can God _know_
(knowledge is rest). He knows nothing of the extent of His thirst. 
And just as He _knows nothing_, He knows nothing of Himself.  If he
were to reveal himself to Himself, He would have to recognize himself
as God, but he cannot even for an instant concede this.  He only has
knowledge of His Nothingness, that is why he is an atheist, profoundly
so.  He would cease right away to be God (instead of his dreadful
absence there would no longer be anything but an imbecilic, stupified
presence if He saw himself as such)" (_Inner Experience_, p. 103).

First, let me clarify that the 'disease' I speak of is the post-'God
is dead' syndrome (witch) which still haunts contemporary thinking. 
Symptoms of this 'disease' can be found in the writings of one like
Bataille, who views absolute knowledge as a closed circle of
repetition rotten with despair.  Absolute knowledge (even in the
Hegelian sense) does not imply knowledge of _everything_, but rather
knowledge of the All -- and that is precisely how the Gnostics
conceived of their Most High God: to ascend to the 'home on high' was
to know, not every THING, but the All, the supreme possibility of
perfection -- not only perfect nothingness but perfect presence.  And
this perfect presence is not "imbecilic" or "stupified," but
necessarily dualized, reciprocal in its nature (_physis_, understood,
after Heidegger, as "rising (self-revealing)" or "essential
unfolding"; see _Early Greek Thinking_, p. 113), and implies not a
stationary God, but an ever-rising, emanating Root.

Secondly, what strikes me in Bataille's passage is the way he plays
with capitalization in the writing of 'God' and 'god', 'Himself' and
'himself', etc.  By so doing he demonstrates that the nature of God
(His 'inner experience'?) is already divided, although, in Bataille's
thought, the Father is ignorant of this.  Yet the problem was already
confronted and, historically, put to rest by the ancient Gnostic
philosophers, albeit in an 'archaic', pre-disease, manner.

The writer of _The Tripartite Tractate_ dualized the Father in a more
rigorous manner, and the way he wrote 'himself' in the striking
passage quoted above, betrays an intuitive understanding of the
infinite that is lacking in so many thinkers of today.  For, in the
Gnostic text, 'himelf' is already understood as the result of the
Father 'viewing' himself in the midst of existence.  Again, the
passage reads: "He existed before anything other than himself came
into being."  This sub-primal 'before' represents an infinity of
non-being in which the Father existed, and -- STILL EXISTS, for his
_self_, as the reflected portion of his existence, was the Son, "the
one who first came into being" (65:30).  That the Father has always
remained restful in that infinitude of sub-primality is expressed in
the following passage:

"[The Son], however, stretched himself out and it was that which he
stretched out which gave a foundation and a space and a dwelling place
for the universe, a name of his being 'the one through whom', since he
is the Father of the All ..." (65:5-15).

This inherent dualism of the Father, which permitted the writer of
this tractate to speak of the Son as the 'Father of the All', solves
Bataille's little problem, for it allows the existent Father to
recline eternally in the mi(d)st of infinite nothingness, while his
reflected self extends into the world of being(s) and acts as both its
ground and its motivational force.

  .................................................

~~ P.V.














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