792 EPILOGUE
become god. Such flouting of authority is of course suppressed as heresy. To
understand this universal push by the gnostics toward self-realization, we may
remember the sixth-century BCE pre-Socratic philosopher Herakleitos, exiled
for his radical disagreements with his native Ephesos, one of whose surviving
sayings centers the search for mind in "I looked for me."
Consider the rationalist lens grinder from the Amsterdam ghetto Baruch
Spinoza (1623-77), whose central ideas pronounce the words of discordant
gnosis. In his day he could not say that the creator god did not exist. He said
something equally radical, which he conveyed by correspondence to Leibnitz
and other philosopher friends, which is that the universe is a single substance
capable of an infinity of attributes, including physical extension and thought.
God is not the creator of nature beyond himself. God is nature in its fullness,
its plenum (Latin for the Greek pleroma of the gnostics). In Spinoza's ethical
system the intellect is active and escapes earthly desires through knowledge,
scientia (Latin for gnosis). A human is equal to god because all is god, which is
understood in solitude by the active intellect. For his ideas, and for his higher
criticism of the Jewish Bible, which he was translating, he was early excom-
municated (1656), and his blasphemous pantheism could not be published
during his lifetime.
Elaine Pagels speaks of the gnostics' independence from the authority of
orthodox religion and of god, and of god's divinity, which can be, through
knowledge, found within us. She writes, "Orthodox Jews and Christians insist
that a chasm separates humanity from its creator: God is wholly other. But
some of the gnostics who wrote these gospels contradict this: self-knowledge
is knowledge of God; the self and the divine are identical."^25
In the Gospel of Thomas, a gnostic Jesus (in parabolic words resembling a
Daoist saying or a Zen koan) states that while the orthodox leaders separate
humans from god's heaven by placing it outside and up in the sky, god and his
realm are actually inside us and everywhere outside. In the pantheism of the
living Jesus, god's realm and self are identical and everywhere:
If your leaders tell you, "Look, the kingdom is in heaven,"
then the birds of heaven will precede you.
If they say to you, "It's in the sea,"
then the fish will precede you.
But the kingdom is inside you and it is outside you.- Pagels, Gnostic Gospels, xx.