Summer Harvest

God never really asked for a Temple to be built in his name. Really, it’s right there in 2 Samuel 7. King David (a real jerk, by the bye) has a palace built of cedar for himself (which was a pretty huge deal: a King in a Palace in a City– what a change from a tent and rule by Judges!), and gets it in his mind that God needs a house, too. Essentially, he wants to “civilize” God bgy constructing a Temple. God isn’t terribly amused:

Are you the one to build me a house to dwell in? 6 I have not dwelt in a house from the day I brought the Israelites up out of Egypt to this day. I have been moving from place to place with a tent as my dwelling. 7 Wherever I have moved with all the Israelites, did I ever say to any of their rulers whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, “Why have you not built me a house of cedar?

God’s basically saying, “look, you expect me to live in this big building? I’m EVERYWHERE!” Still, this isn’t good enough for David. Alas, the good king comes to a (well-earned– read the stories) ignominous end, and the desire for a Temple passes along to his son Solomon.

It’s interesting, what’s happening during this part of the story. See, here’s the thing: during the time, *every* god had a temple in which they lived. Every pagan deity and his or her brother had a massive stone edifice in which to put up his or her feet. Solomon’s temple was really nothing special for the time; indeed, compared to other similar structures in Egypt and Mesopotamia, it was pretty much par for the course. Until this point, God had been a God of the desert, not a God of civilization. By constructing a “house” for God, David and Solomon essentially civilized Him, reduced Him to the stature of a local God instead of the God of and In Everything.

God, however, changes his mind once Solomon finishes the construction of the First Temple. It helps that Solomon issues a rather cloying plea at the Temple’s dedication, acknowledging (unlike his father) that God is too big to contain in a building:

But will God really dwell on earth? The heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot contain you. How much less this temple I have built! 28 Yet give attention to your servant’s prayer and his plea for mercy, O LORD my God. Hear the cry and the prayer that your servant is praying in your presence this day. 29 May your eyes be open toward this temple night and day, this place of which you said, ‘My Name shall be there,’ so that you will hear the prayer your servant prays toward this place. 30 Hear the supplication of your servant and of your people Israel when they pray toward this place. Hear from heaven, your dwelling place, and when you hear, forgive.

God agrees, declaring he’ll dwell in the Temple as long as Solomon and his people “walk before me in integrity of heart and uprightness.” He agrees to become “civilized,” so long as His people agree to obey his Law, and to refrain from the worship of other Gods (a promise that Solomon breaks almost immediately by building additional temples to Pagan deities a few years later).

So what’s with the Temple, anyhow? First of all, it was a massive complex with a series of courtyards and a number of different gates. Access to the various areas in the Temple were dependent upon varying proscriptions (i.e. sacrificants here, women here, foreigners here), but what concerns us here is the actual dwelling place of God, the Holy of Holies. The most important part of the Temple, surrounded by this entire complex, was a room about the size of a closet which contained (until its mysterious disappearance) the Ark of the Covenant. This room was entered once a year, on Yom Kippur, and could only be entered by the High Priests.

(A brief and interesting aside– before the Temple, when the Holy of Holies was still in the back of a tent, King David once danced in it and was chastized for showing off his genitalia in front of the Ark! I’m telling you, this David was a real piece of work.)

Now, this dwelling place of God, including the Holy of Holies, was twice destroyed by Empires. Solomon’s Temple came to an end when the Babylonians invaded, but not before the entire complex fell into terrible disrepair. The post-Solomonic Kings of Jerusalem were a mixed lot, but more than a few took insane liberties with the Temple, bringing in pagan altars, looting the golden decorations, etc. By the time of the Babylonian Exile, the Temple had lost much of its essential meaning.

The Second Temple was essentially a massive renovation of the remains of the First, undertaken by King Herod (only marginally worse than David). Herod unabashedly intended the Second Temple to impress foreigners, most notably the Romans, to whom he especially kowtowed by erecting a massive golden eagle over the Temple gates (when a pair of Zealots tore the eagle down, he had them burned alive). This is, of course, the Temple into which Jesus marched and turned over the tables of the merchants. After studying the history of the Temple a bit, we have to wonder whether the merchants were really the cause for his ire, or if he was protesting the desecration of the Temple that started about ten years after the First one was constructed by Solomon. Jesus, you see, not only kicks the merchants out of the Temple, but delcares that he intends to destroy the Temple in such a way that it can never be rebuilt!

We find Jesus promising to destroy the Temple in all of the Canonical Gospels, and Thomas, so it seems fairly likely he actually said it. Of course, in Mark’s Gospel he is said to have claimed, “I will destroy this man-made temple and in three days will build another, not made by man,” and in Thomas he says, “I will destroy this house, and nobody will be able to rebuild it.”

It seems to me that in calling for the destruction of the Temple, Jesus is accomplishing two things. To begin, he’s returning to the original protest against the Temple by God himself, when David originally came up with the idea. God didn’t think it was the best idea, as He couldn’t be contained in a stone building. Still, Solomon went ahead with it, and as God predicted, the Temple was a drastically failed experiment. (Yet another aside– God also predicted that the institution of a King of any kind would be a failed experiment, and He was right about that, too!) Jesus is telling us, “look, this Temple is nice and all, and if God lives here, it doesn’t deserve to be desecrated by moneylenders and merchants. But listen: you don’t *need* it. There’s a *spiritual* Temple that’s far nicer.”

For Gnostics, the correlative can be found in the Gospel of Philip:

At the present time, we have the manifest things of creation. We say, “The strong who are held in high regard are great people. And the weak who are despised are the obscure.” Contrast the manifest things of truth: they are weak and despised, while the hidden things are strong and held in high regard. The mysteries of truth are revealed, though in type and image. The bridal chamber, however, remains hidden. It is the Holy in the Holy. The veil at first concealed how God controlled the creation, but when the veil is rent and the things inside are revealed, this house will be left desolate, or rather will be destroyed.

I discuss this in some depth in The Face of the Sky and Earth:

The Temple itself is representative of the “manifest things of Creation.” As we know, the Temple, surrounded by a “veil,” contains the Holy of Holies. The Temple, as a giant, magnificent stone building located in beautiful downtown Jerusalem, means absolutely nothing without the Holy of Holies contained therein. The “veil” represents the veil of illusion that covers the World of Forms, and the Holy of Holies is the spirit within the body, the Pleroma and fullness of God within the individual and the world.

According to Judaic Law, only the High Priest was ever allowed to enter the Holy of Holies, and only on certain days. What Jesus wants to do, however, in destroying the “Temple,” is remove this veil and make the essence within available to all seekers on every day, not just those who are somehow better because they are priests. Of course, instead of thinking of this as “Jesus wants to do away with the High Priest and Holy Days,” the Gnostic might think of it instead as “Jesus wants to make everyone High Priests and every day Holy.” Jesus wants everyone to realize that the external appearance of the Temple, and thus the world and the body are nothing compared to what exists within. In doing so, he destroys the Temple, meaning he destroys the illusion of strength presented by the insane delusions of the Universe. By telling us that he wants to destroy this house, Jesus refers not to some kind of physical destruction, but an end to the false power structures that prevent each and every one of us from entering our own Holy of Holies.

Essentially, Jesus is telling the people that God doesn’t need a house or a structure, nor is access to Him restricted to certain people or certain days of the year. It’s always available, any time. As soon as the house is built, it becomes subject to the imperfection of the World of Forms. Even those with the most noble intentions– like King Solomon– cannot succeed when attempting to limit God to a particular segment of space and time.

Now then, where am I going with all of this? Believe it or not, I’m continuing the discussion on definition versus inspiration, so ably picked up by Donald over at In Puris Naturalibus. When discussing Gnosticism, how much definition is too much? When do the lines become so defined that instead of a religion, we have a fundamentalism?

It strikes me that what we have here might be a false dichotomy, a conflation of the exoteric and esoteric. In Gnostic studies, the canonical scriptures are generally considered exoteric, designed to teach us about Law, morality, ethics, interaction with the physical world in which we live. The Gnostic scriptures, however, are considered esoteric teachings, teachings concerning the inner life, mystical experience, etc. For much of modern history, these two different approaches to religion have seemed at odds to many interested in spirituality and religion. The overused trope is that the exoteric teachings were for the masses, the esoteric for the initiated few, that the exoteric teachings (the Temple) contained the esoteric teachings (the Holy of Holies), which in turn contained God.

In essence, let’s think of the exoteric teachings as the temple compound, the courtyards, etc. Let’s think of the esoteric teachings as the Inner Sanctum, the Holy of Holies. If the exoteric teachings surround, or house the esoteric teachings, then only a few individuals can access the inner life, and average individuals are restricted to the courtyard. As God only dwells in the Holy of Holies, only those who have access to the esoteric teachings have access to God.

According to Jesus, this misses the point, and, here’s why: God cannot be contained. Jesus knew his scriptures, especially the parts about King David. He would have known that the very first time David came up with the idea of a temple, God told him it was a bad idea. Instead of esoteric teachings contained in exoteric proscription– the Holy of Holies contained within the Temple, Jesus says that both the exoteric and esoteric house God, and are accessible to everyone. In addition, the Temple as a physical building, as the House of God, exists within the world of forms and is therefore imperfect, and always has been.

Just as God dwells in the wilderness, not in the Temple, God dwells in both the exoteric and the esoteric, the inner and the outer (as Jesus says, when you make the outside like the inside, the Kingdom will be yours). The two are not at odds; according to Jesus, *all* of the teachings of God are available to *everyone*. Jesus, for this reason, was a great spiritual equalizer in his own right, and in my opinion intended with this analogy to do for his spiritually segmented culture what the Buddha tried to do for the Hindu caste system. This is also why I sometimes

In my opinion, this false dichotomy between the esoteric and exoteric is responsible for the contention we find when discussing whether Gnosticism can be defined by its scripture (the Nag Hammadi Library, etc.). Donald and others are absolutely justified in their concerns that using Gnostic Scripture to define Modern Gnosticism is a dangerous game. God cannot be contained in scripture, just as He cannot be contained in a Temple. When I posted my call for a general Modern Gnostic reclamation of our tradition, I in no way meant to suggest that we need build a House for God.

We need both the exoteric and the esoteric, the canonical books that made it into the Bible, the orthodox books that did not (The Acts of Thomas, The Acts of John, etc.)– these are as much our legacy as the NHL. They are our Temple Complex. But, we get more. The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, the esoteric teachings, these are our Holy of Holies, our inner teachings. We can’t have one without the other. We’re not a rebellion against the canonical tales of Jesus, we’re a supplement. (FWIW, this is why I personally can’t imagine Gnosticism without the Jesus myth or Judaism, the inner without the outer.)

To summarize up to this point: to God, the Temple was completely unnecessary. He told King David he preferred camping out in a tent, after all. He’s the God of *everything*– why would he need the same kind of building as the other Gods of the area? Consider this idea the “Holy of Holies” of this discussion. My post, until this point, focuses on the esoteric. Let’s go a little exo- and hopefully where I’m coming from will be a bit clearer.

Now, we know the Temple was no biggie to God, but what did the Temple mean exoterically? What did it mean to the Jewish people? Let’s remember that even though God was originally not too keen on the Temple, he did agree to hang out there as long as the people kept their promise to him to live with integrity and uprightness. The Temple became an exceptionally powerful symbol for Judaism, so powerful that when Jesus did threaten its metaphorical destruction, it was tantamount to terrible blasphemy.

After the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans, the Jewish people were forbidden from the Old City of Jerusalem, and would gather to mourn the loss of the Temple on the Mount of Olives. It wasn’t until the Turks conquered Jerusalem in the Sixteenth Century that the Jewish people were allowed by the to return to the Temple complex and mourn the Temple’s destruction at the Western Wall (yes, they were allowed to do so by Muslims!). The Temple hasn’t existed in almost two thousand years, except as a symbol of the Jewish people, a reminder of God’s presence on Earth and in Jewish Culture. Just because God cannot be contained within the Temple, doesn’t mean that He’s not there anyhow. But this is what it’s all about: Culture.

No, God cannot be contained, that’s the esoteric part of the story. But, the exoteric part of the story is that God Dwells Among Us In Our Culture. Indeed, the Temple has been transformed into a Spiritual Temple that can no longer be destroyed by humans, and with this marriage of the eso- and exoteric, God has indeed come to dwell within the Holy of Holies symbolized by the Temple, for generations of Jews, and likely for their descendants.

This is the place scripture can have in Gnosticism. We know God doesn’t literally dwell within the Nag Hammadi Library. We know scripture cannot define us, any more than a physical building can define a people. Gnostic Scripture, however, can (and must, in my opinion) provide all Modern Gnostics with an underlying sense of culture.

Donald, for instance, mentions in his post that his communion is the Apostolic Johannite Church, a church for which I hold great regard. He finds foundation for his faith in the AJC principles, not in scripture, in which he finds inspiration. My Gnostic path, however, is not grounded in the AJC principles, as I’m not a member of that Church. So, why are we similar? How do we establish an identity? What can we use as this Temple that doesn’t house God, but helps us remember that He is contained in everything, that the Holy of Holies is available to everyone?

Do we say gnosis? Gnosis is our aim and goal, but it’s rather abstract to use to establish a cultural identity. We also need to take into consideration the fact that Gnosticism isn’t just for people who have experienced gnosis, it’s also for those who are interested in cultivating the experience but haven’t yet.

So, what do we have? Right now, we have the Nag Hammadi Scriptures. Above and beyond anything else, above and beyond the tradition of Apostolic Succession, to which many of us do not ascribe, above and beyond abstractions and lineages and sacramental forms, we have these amazing and inspirational scriptures that give us an identity which transcends Gnostic “flavors” in the same way that the Temple, as a symbol, transcends the various branches of Judaism. They are what we can return to, what we can rebuild, and what can help us relate to one another in spite of our different approaches. It’s true, they were only discovered recently within the context of Gnostic history, but that’s an even better reason to use them as a starting point.

Take them literally? Never– God is not restricted to the Temple. Remember them as a legacy of our *culture*? Absolutely. Our culture is a desert culture, but one which has infiltrated our cities and become urban. It is a wild culture in which God is everywhere, a culture of outsiders that has seen persecution. It has lain fallow, housing living information from a number of different traditions, syncretic, sacramental. And, it was rediscovered and revivified in the Modern Era and is evolving at an unprecedented rate. It’s all there in the NHL– the history of these documents is the history of Gnosticism itself. It’s *ours*, and nobody can take it from us.

That’s the exoteric story, just as full of God as the mystical.