EPILOGUE 773river—and thereby achieves union (enosis) and divinization (theosis). Monism
is typically neoplatonic and Christian. John of the Cross (Juan de la Cruz)
seeks self-abolition, being lost in god, one with god, and with one identity,
god. The most common Christian gnostic articulation of mystical experience
is the monistic model, where one moves from initial unknowing (the agnosia
of darkness and error, as opposed to gnosis) to full illumination and total
union. The notion of being deified, of passing into and becoming the light, is
found in Plotinos, whose "one becomes the One," and similarly in the writings
attributed to the pagan gnostic Hermes Trismegistos. In Hermes the soul rises
on an ascending scale of mental states though the spheres. Hans Jonas de-
scribes the journey of the self, while still in the body, which "attains the Ab-
solute as an immanent, if temporary condition." In that instant there is a
translation "of objective stages into subjective phrases whose culmination has
the form of ecstasis, gnostic myth has passed into mysticism (neoplatonic and
monastic), and in this new medium it [the attainment of the Absolute] lives
on long after the disappearance of the original mythological beliefs."^13
By contrast with platonist mystical fusion and oneness, Martin Buber in I
and Thou rejects the monistic notion of "I am god." For the theist the notion
of becoming the godhead is shameful and deprives the creator of independ-
ent existence. Theistic mysticism—characteristic of the Bible, Jewish gnosti-
cism, the Kabbalist Zohar, and a majority of postmedieval seekers—holds to
an ultimate separation of the human and the divine. As Scholem states, the
Jewish mystic "retains a sense of distance between the Creator and His crea-
ture."^14 This dualism of person and god is frequently symbolized in the
merkabah, the divine throne-chariot that carries the soul skyward to god,
which is illuminated by god's presence but does not disappear into and be-
come god. There is the ascent, adhesion but not the fusion.
The divine chariot draws its inspiration from Ezekiel 1:10 and provides the
metaphor at the origins of Jewish mysticism. In the Dead Sea Scrolls is a strik-
ing picture of cherubim blessing the chariot as it ascends, with its cargo of
spirit, near god in his precincts. In reading this description of the cherubim
and the merkavah, note that a cherub (a little angel) in the Jewish tradition
would not resemble the sentimentalized plump children in Raphael's Sistine
Madonna but perhaps a multi-faced Picasso grotesque, since the model in
Ezekiel for cherubim and seraphim flitting about in god's court has four faces
and four wings:
- Jonas, Gnostic Religion, 165-66.
- Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 14.