The Gospel of Philip

FOREWORD

The discovery in 1945 of manuscripts that have come to be known as the Gnostic gospels was one of the most momentous archaeological finds of our time. Accidentally unearthed by an Egyptian peasant near the desert village of Nag Hammadi and dating from the very beginnings of the Christian era, these texts have exerted a profound influence on our thinking about the origins and nature of Christianity, an influence that continues to grow with every passing year.

Like many of these “Gnostic” documents, the text of the Gospel of Philip consists mainly of sayings and doctrines attributed to Jesus—here called Yeshua *2—which point to an astonishing body of knowledge about man and the cosmic world and about the practices leading to inner freedom and the power to love. As is common in all the great spiritual traditions of the world, this knowledge is expressed mainly in allegory, myth, and symbol, rather than in the intellectual language we have become accustomed to in science and philosophy.

How are we modern men and women to understand these ancient sayings and symbols? What are they telling us about the illusions that suffocate our minds and freeze our hearts—and about the way of life that can actually awaken us to what we are meant to be? Do these texts ask us to deny essential doctrines of Christianity that throughout the ages have brought hope to millions? Many observers view them in that way. For others, the effect of these documents has been to provoke a hardened skepticism that dismisses them with such labels as “superstition,” or “heresy.” Yet another widespread reaction has been to treat this material as justification for either uncritical speculation about the life and mind of Jesus or blanket condemnation of those who sought to stabilize the institution of the Church in the turbulent centuries immediately following the death of Jesus.

The work of Jean-Yves Leloup presents a wholly different approach to these writings, one that is formed by a rare combination of spiritual questioning and masterful erudition. As has already been shown in his translation and study The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, these “Gnostic” codices must be offered to us in a way that helps us to hear them—to hear what they actually may be saying in response to our era’s newly awakened need. It is as though after two thousand years of Abrahamic religion—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—the unending barbaric violence and moral desolation of humankind has finally brought the whole of our global world to a life-or-death hunger for a new kind of knowing and moral direction.

Can the ideas and practical indications contained in the Gospel of Philip and the other Nag Hammadi texts be approached as something more than fascinating curiosities far from the so-called mainstream of our culture’s canons of knowledge and faith? Is the world itself, or enough people in the world who can make a difference, ready to hear with new ears the forgotten wisdom of humankind offered in a language free of the opinions and emotional associations that have decayed into illusory certainties and eviscerated moral sensibilities?

Perhaps such texts as the Gospel of Philip contain, necessarily in the form of symbolic language, a treasury of answers that we as individuals might have all but given up hope of finding. In a time when the role of religion in human life has become one of our world’s most agonizing concerns, texts such as the Gnostic gospels invite us to risk stepping back in a new way from many of our most cherished opinions not only about the teaching and acts of Jesus, but about who and what we are as human beings. As this book indicates, it is in this specific new effort of separating from our own thoughts and feelings that an entirely unexpected source of hope may be glimpsed, both for ourselves and for our world.

To begin to understand this text, we need to have a question, and to question ourselves. That said, the issue then becomes not only what are our questions, but how do we ask them? What does it really mean to have a serious question of the heart and to ask it from the whole of ourselves, or at least from the part of ourselves that is able to hear an answer? For one of the most remarkable aspects of spiritual knowledge (in the ancient meaning of the term gnosis) is that its answers can be fully received only in response to a real question, a real need. And it is no doubt true—and also often forgotten—that the inner meaning of all scripture, whether canonical or not, can be received only in the state of spiritual need. If approached without this need or genuine state of questioning, texts such as the Gospel of Philip are likely to be either regarded at arm’s length as mere scholarly and archaeological riddles or curiosities, or greedily appropriated as fuel for fantasy. The first step then toward a new kind of questioning, a new kind of knowing, is a step back into ourselves, apart from all that we think we know about ourselves. If there is such a thing as transformational knowing (and this is the true meaning of the term gnosis), its first stage is the inner act of not knowing.

In his beautiful and courageous introduction to the Gospel of Philip, Jean-Yves Leloup concludes by saying, “I have articulated some of the questions raised by this gospel. I have never pretended to have the answers to these questions . . .” Yet he goes on to add that “this must not lead me to deny the nearness of a source that is capable of satisfying the thirst for these answers.”

He does not dare to name that “source.” But as we turn the pages of the text itself, we may begin to sense numerous indications of its nature in the bittersweet state of self-questioning that this gospel can evoke. Under Jean-Yves Leloup’s hand, we are guided to both the known and the unknown in ourselves and in our understanding of the Christian teaching.

Concerning our relationship to the teachings of Christianity, Leloup invites us to regard this hitherto “hidden” and “secret” text as pointing to the hidden or subconscious teachings of Christianity, in the sense that what is ontologically subconscious in human life is what secretly influences and directs that which we call our consciousness. This is to be contrasted with the well-known or, in this limited sense of the word, conscious canonical Gospels under the light of which, in Leloup’s words, the Church originally “staked a claim, so to speak, on the entire territory of Christianity, fencing in a land that was originally open and free.”

We might also think of the subconscious and the conscious as essence and manifestation—what we are in the depths of our hidden being and how we act and manifest in the conditioned and relative realm of time and the world we live in. It might also be suggested that in our own individual lives, as well as in the life of a great tradition that compassionately struggles to penetrate the worldly life of humankind, essence and manifestation often drift apart from each other, to the point that outer expression or manifestation loses or “forgets” its source and essence—and thereby, knowingly or unknowingly, even contradicts or denies the authority of its source. In that case, to confront essence and manifestation together, especially in their accrued mutual contradiction, is nothing less than a great shock of awakening—and it is there where we may experience the state of self-questioning that is both joyous and bittersweet.

In this sense, speaking in terms of gnosis or sacred knowing, a genuine question that corresponds to a state of spiritual need involves the experience in ourselves of our own essential being together with our actual manifestation. It means being present to both the divine essence within and how we manifest or act in ways that generally serve only the illusions and attachments of the ego. There can be great suffering in this awareness of how we forget or betray the truth of what we are. But this awareness itself, when it is deep enough, opens the way to a reconciliation of these two opposing currents in ourselves, and this awareness can lead us toward “the peace that passes understanding.” Here knowledge and love fuse.

Jean-Yves Leloup’s inspired approach to the Gospel of Philip is articulated in the opening pages of his introduction: “It is not my intention,” he writes, “to set the canonical and the apocryphal gospels against each other, nor privilege one over the others. My aim is to read them together: to hold the manifest together with the hidden, the allowed with the forbidden, the conscious with the unconscious.” The reconciling force of such an honest approach to this text, which open-heartedly examines subversive ideas with patience, humility, and respect, allows us to hear the way Yeshua speaks of the meaning of sacramental bread and wine; of the true and “illusory” human body; of the meaning of death and resurrection as stages on the path of inner work; of the purity of the Virgin as the immaculate and fertile silence (parthenos) or void within the human soul; or—in what is bound to attract much attention—in the way Jesus is allowed to speak about marriage and sexuality. There is a teaching here that is very deep and very high, and woe to us if we too hastily attach ourselves to one or another surface meaning of what is expressed in these pages. The text speaks of the sexual act in marriage as “the holy of holies,” and Jean-Yves Leloup offers wise and heartfelt reflections about the possible sexuality of Jesus himself in his fully realized humanness. At the same time we find such passages as the following:

Even the worldly embrace is a mystery;