As in earlier Gnostic religion, resurrection ... is distinctly not something that takes place after death.... Resurrection is accomplished by the wind of heaven that sweeps the worlds.

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" Resurrection can be judged as one of the sharpest Valentinian

differences from dogmatic Christianity, a difference that appears in

Sufism and other esoteric traditions, and in many varieties of what I

have called the American Religion, the denominations and sects

indigenous to the United States. As in earlier Gnostic religion,

resurrection for Valentinus is distinctly not something that takes

place after death. Henry Corbin, in support of his Sufi Gnostics,

quotes from Balzac's novella Louis Lambert, itself a Hermetic tale:

 

Resurrection is accomplished by the wind of heaven that sweeps the

worlds. The Angel carried by the wind does not say: Arise ye dead! He

says: Let the living arise!

 

This is the kernel of the Valentinian resurrection: to know releases

the spark, and one rises up from the body of this death. Ignorance

falls away, one ceases to forget, one is again part of the Fullness.

The Valentinian Gospel According to Philip, a sort of anthology, has

nine crucial passages on resurrection, of which the bluntest

insists, " Those who say the lord first died and then arose are

mistaken, for he first arose and then died. " Another adds, " While we

exist in this world we must acquire resurrection. " Baptism, for the

Valentinians as for many Americans, itself was the resurrection,

again according to The Gospel of Philip:

 

People who say they will first die and then arise are mistaken. If

they do not first receive resurrection while they are alive, once

they have died they will receive nothing. Just so it is said of

baptism: " Great is baptism! " For is one receives it, one will live…

 

The crucial text for understanding Valentinus is the subtlest and

fullest we have by him, the beautiful sermon named The Gospel of

Truth, and I turn to it now seeking what is most central to

Valentinus's sense of resurrection.

 

Layton shrewdly remarks upon the " Gnostic rhetoric " of The Gospel of

Truth, and notes its spiritual similarity, in atmosphere and in the

concept of salvation-resurrection to the proto-Gnostic Gospel of

Thomas, which I suspect deeply influenced Valentinus. Both works, the

sermon and the collection of Jesus' " hidden " sayings, are allied by a

wonderful freedom from dogma and from myth, both Christian and

Gnostic. In each, there is a directness and a passion that breaks

down the barriers of reservations put up by historicizing scholars.

We are addressed directly, whether by Valentinus or Jesus, and

challenged to see what it is that is all around us, what it is that

we already know, even if we do not know that we know….

 

What makes us free, according to Christian dogma, is knowing the

truth, which is Christ's Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection,

and this truth is to be known by faith, the faith that at a moment,

both in and out of time, these events once took place. When however

we say that what makes us free is Gnosis, or " knowing, " then we are

Gnostics, and instead of believing that something was and is so

(something that would be still different for Jews, and again for

Muslims), we rely upon an inward knowledge rather than upon an

outward belief. Gnosis is the opposite of ignorance, and not of

disbelief. As an ancient Greek word widely used by Jews and

Christians, Gnosis did not mean knowing that something was so, but

rather just knowing someone or something, including knowing

God. " Knowing God " has a special twist that makes it the Gnosis: it

is a reciprocal process in which God also knows what is best and

oldest in you, a spark in you that always has been God's. This means

that knowing God is primarily a process of being reminded of what you

already know, which is that God never has been wholly external to

you, however alienated or estranged he is from society or even the

cosmos in which you dwell….

 

Here is Valentinus upon our present state in his one complete

surviving work, the beautiful meditation The Gospel of Truth:

 

Thus they did not know God, since it was he whom they did not see.

Inasmuch as he was the object of fear and disturbance and instability

and indecisiveness and division, there was much futility at work

among them on his account, and much empty ignorance—as when one falls

sound asleep and finds oneself in the midst of nightmares: running

toward somewhere—powerless to get away while being pursued—in hand-to-

hand combat—being beaten—falling from a height—being blown upward by

the air, but without any wings; sometimes, too, it seems that one is

being murdered, though nobody is giving chase—or killing one's

neighbors, with whose blood one is smeared; until, having gone

through all these dreams, one awakens.

 

This nightmare of death-in-life, composed eighteen centuries ago,

need but little modification. The Gnostic Jesus of The Gospel of

Thomas, a wayfaring Jesus, closer to Walt Whitman than to the Jesus

of the Churches, speaks to us as if each of us is a passerby, and

with an ultimate eloquence tells us precisely into what we have been

thrown:

 

But if you do not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty, and you

are poverty.

Fortunate is one who came into being, before coming into being. "

 

 

Harold Bloom, Omens of the Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams,

and Resurrection, pages 188-243

Paperback: 255 pages

Publisher: Riverhead Books (October 1, 1997)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1573226297

ISBN-13: 978-1573226295

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http://adishakti.org/_/as_in_earlier_gnostic_religion_resurrection.htm