Mystagogy 1 part 11/13

(54) He who has divinely completed the sixth day for himself with fitting works and thoughts, and himself, together with God, has well brought to completion his own works, has passed by contemplation beyond all the existence of things under nature and time, and has been transferred to the mystical contemplation of the ages and the things eternal;

keeping the Sabbath unknowably in mind, in the total relinquishment and transcendence of beings.

But he who has also been deemed worthy of the eighth day has risen from the dead;

I mean from all the things after God, both sensible and intelligible, and principles and concepts;

and he has lived the blessed life of God, who alone in truth is properly both called and is Life;

inasmuch as he himself also has become, by deification, a god.

(55) The sixth day is the complete fulfillment of the practical activities concerning virtue according to nature;

and the seventh is the consummation and cessation of all the natural concepts concerning the ineffable knowledge in the contemplative life;

and the eighth is the transference and crossing-over of the worthy unto deification.

And perhaps the Lord, intimating this seventh and eighth in a more mystical way, called them a day of consummation and an hour, as circumscribing all the mysteries and the principles.

(56) The sixth day intimates the principle of the being of beings;

and the seventh signifies the mode of the well-being of beings;

and the eighth declares the ineffable mystery of the ever-well-being of beings.

(57) Knowing that the sixth day is the symbol of practical activity, let us fulfill in it the whole debt of the works of virtue;

so that it may be said of us also: "And God saw all the things that He had made, and behold, they were very good."

(58) He fulfills the debt of the good labor that is praised by God, who through the body labors to work in the soul the well-ordered variety of the virtues.

(59) He who has fulfilled the preparation of the works of righteousness has crossed over to the rest of gnostic contemplation;

according to which, having comprehended in a God-befitting manner the principles of beings, he rests from the movement of the mind concerning them.

(60) He who has partaken of God's sabbatical rest that is for our sake, and through participation of His octaval activity for our sake according to deification, that is, of the mystical resurrection;

having himself also left lying in the tomb the linen cloths and the napkin that was upon the head;

which, if any Peter and John behold, they believe that the Lord has been raised.

And the linen cloths are the principles of sensible things together with the modes of virtue;

the napkin, the simple and unvaried knowledge of the theology that is possible, by which the Word was formerly made known, while He holds for us, entirely apart from these, the apprehension that is beyond them.

(62) Those who bury the Lord with honor will also behold Him risen in glory;

while to all who are not such, He is unseen.

For He is no longer subject to capture by those who plot against Him, no longer having the outward veils through which He seemed willingly to be captured by those who wished it, and consented to suffer for the salvation of all.

(63) He who buries the Lord with honor is revered by all who love God;

for he fittingly delivered Him from triumph and reproach, leaving no occasion of blasphemy to the unbelievers in His nailing upon the wood.

But those who set seals upon the tomb and station soldiers as guards are hateful in their undertaking;

who also slander the risen Word as having been stolen;

with silver, just as they bought the false disciple unto betrayal;

and I mean the ostentatious manner of virtue;

so too buying the soldiers for the slandering of the risen Savior.

The gnostic knows the inner significance of the things said;

not being ignorant of how and in how many ways the Lord is crucified, and buried, and rises;

as it were making dead the passion-laden thoughts that sit beside the heart through the demons;

those that are divided up in temptations like garments—the modes of moral seemliness;

and surpassing, like seals, the impressions laid upon the soul of the sins committed in anticipation.

(64) Every lover of money, feigning virtue under the guise of reverence, when he finds the longed-for material to procure, abjures the manner in which he was formerly thought to be a disciple of the Word.

(65) When you see certain proud men who cannot bear that their betters be praised, and who contrive to make the spoken truth unproclaimable, hindering it with countless temptations and lawless slanders;

understand for me that again the Lord is crucified by these, and buried;

and guarded by soldiers and seals.

Whom the Word, turning back upon themselves, rises;

shining forth all the more by being warred against;

as one being tempered toward dispassion through sufferings.

For He is stronger than all, as both being and being called Truth.

(66) The mystery of the embodiment of the Word holds the power of all the enigmas and types according to Scripture, and the knowledge of the visible and intelligible creatures.

And he who knows the mystery of the cross and the burial knows the principles of the aforesaid things;

but he who has been initiated into the ineffable power of the resurrection knows the purpose for which God, in the first place, established all things.

(67) All visible things need the cross;

the cross of the habit that restrains the inclination of the activities exercised upon them according to sense.

And all intelligible things require the burial;

the burial of the total immobility of the activities exercised upon them according to mind.

For when, together with the inclination, the natural activity and movement concerning all things is taken away, the Word alone, existing by Himself, appears as one raised from the dead, holding by circumscription all things that are from Him, since nothing at all has its kinship with Him by natural inclination.

For according to grace, but not according to nature, is the salvation of those who are saved.

(68) Both the ages, and the times, and the places belong to the category of relatives;

without which none of the things conceived together with these exists.

But God is not of the relatives;

for He has nothing at all conceived together with Him.

...of grace shall it be, having God Himself as its place, according to what is written:

"Be to me a God who protects, and a strong place, to save me."

(69) The end has nothing whatever resembling a midpoint;

and a midpoint is all the things that, after the beginning, are behind the end.

If, then, all the ages and times and places, together with all the things conceived together with them, are after God, who is a beginning without beginning;

and inasmuch as they exist far behind Him who is the infinite end, they differ in nothing from a midpoint;

and the end of those who are saved is God, there will be nothing of a midpoint contemplated together with those who are saved when they have come to be at the uttermost end.

(70) The whole world, circumscribed by its own principles, is called both a place and an age of those who dwell in it;

having by nature the modes of contemplations innate within it, able to produce in them a partial understanding of the wisdom of God that is over all;

of which, so long as they make use for understanding, they cannot be apart from a midpoint and partial apprehension.

But since the partial is abolished when the perfect appears, and all the mirrors and the enigmas pass away when the truth comes face to face, he who is saved, having been perfected according to God, will be above all worlds and ages and places, by which he was meanwhile, as a child, being tutored.

(71) Pilate is a type of the natural law;

and the multitude of the Jews, of the written law.

Therefore he who, according to faith, has not come to be above the two laws, cannot receive the truth that is beyond nature and reason;

but altogether crucifies the Word;

either, as a Jew, deeming the Gospel a stumbling-block;

or, as a Greek, deeming it folly.

(72) When you see Herod and Pilate making friends with one another over the slaying of Jesus, then understand the concurrence unto it

of the demon of fornication and that of vainglory, agreeing with one another to put to death the principle of virtue and knowledge.

For the vainglorious demon, feigning spiritual knowledge, hands over to the demon of vainglory.

(73) It is good not to allow the mind to attend to the flesh and the passions.

For "they do not gather," He says, "figs from thorns";

that is, virtue from the passions;

that is, from the flesh, the knowledge that gladdens.

"For the Lord," says Moses, "came from Sinai";

that is, from the temptations;

"and appeared to us from Seir";

that is, from the bodily labors;

"and came down from Mount Paran with myriads of Kadesh";

that is, from the mount of faith with myriads of holy knowledges.

(75) Herod holds the principle of the mindset of the flesh;

and Caesar, that of sensible things;

and the Jews, that of the soulish reasonings.

When, therefore, out of ignorance the soul attaches itself to sensible things, it betrays the Word to sense-perception unto death, ratifying against itself, by confession, the kingdom of corruptible things.

For the Jews say, "We have no king but Caesar."

(76) Herod holds the place of the activity of the passions;

and Pilate, of the deluded habit concerning them;

and Caesar, of the dark world-ruler.

Whenever, then, the soul, bowed down to the passions, hands over virtue captive to the habit of vice, it manifestly denies the kingdom of God;

and goes over to the corruption-bearing tyranny of the devil.

(77) The subjection of the passions does not suffice for the soul unto spiritual gladness, unless it acquire the virtues by the fulfilling of the commandments.

For "rejoice not," He says, "that the demons are subject to you";

that is, the workings of the passions;

"but that your names are written in heaven";

transferred, by the grace of adoption through the virtues, to the place of dispassion.

(78) For the gnostic, the wealth of the virtues through practice is altogether necessary.

For "he who has," He says, "a purse";

that is, spiritual knowledge;

that is, the abundance of the virtues that richly nourishes the soul.

But he who does not have, evidently, a purse and a bag;

that is, knowledge and virtue, let him sell his garment and buy a sword.

Let him give over, He says, eagerly his own flesh to the labors of the virtues, and let him wield wisely, for the peace of God, the war against the passions and the demons;

namely, the habit, in the word of God, that discerns the worse from the better.

(79) The Lord appears when He is thirty years old;

teaching the discerning, by this number, the mysteries concerning Himself in a hidden way.

For the number thirty, mystically understood, introduces the Lord as Maker and Provider of time and of nature, and of the intelligible things that are above visible nature.

Of time, through the seven;

for time is sevenfold (sabbatical);

and of nature, through the five;

for nature is fivefold, on account of sense-perception being divided in five ways;

for above the measured period of time is the coming-into-being of the intelligible things;

and of Provider, through the ten;

both on account of the holy decade of the commandments, which leads men toward the good, and because the Lord, when He became man, mystically began His appellation with this letter.

Having joined together, then, the five, and the seven, and the eight, and the ten, you fill out the number thirty.

He, therefore, who knows how to follow the Lord well as his leader, will not be ignorant of the principle according to which he too will be revealed as thirty years old, able to proclaim the Gospel of the kingdom.

For when he shall blamelessly create, as a kind of visible nature, the world according to the practice of the virtues, not having altered the period upon the soul itself—as a kind of time occurring through contraries—and through contemplation shall reap without stumbling the knowledge of intelligible things, and shall have been able providentially to instill the same habit in others as well;

then he too, however he may be in bodily age, is thirty years old in the spirit, manifesting together the activity of his own good things in others.

(80) He who is given over to the pleasures of the body is neither active toward virtue, nor easily moved toward knowledge.

that is, prudent reasoning;

so that, when the water is troubled, he may cast him into the pool.

That is, into the virtue receptive of knowledge, which heals every disease—unless perhaps the sick man, putting it off through sloth, is forestalled by another who prevents healing from coming to him.

For he who does not behold the visible creation unto the glory of God, and does not piously raise his thought up toward the intelligible nature, fittingly remains diseased for the said number of years.

For the number thirty, taken in its natural sense, signifies the sensible nature;

just as, considered in its practical sense, it signifies practical virtue.

But the number eight, understood naturally, indicates the intelligible nature of incorporeal beings;

just as, contemplated in its gnostic sense, it indicates the all-wise theology.

He who is not moved toward these things by God remains paralyzed, until the Word, coming, teaches him the swift manner of healing, saying:

'Take up your bed and walk'—

[commanding] the mind to rise up from the pleasure-loving habit that holds it down, to take up the body upon the shoulders of the virtues, and to go away into his house;

that is, [commanding him to go] into heaven.

For it is good that the lower be lifted toward virtue by the better upon the shoulders of action, rather than that the better be borne toward pleasure-loving through softness by the lower.

Until we have in mind purely gone out beyond our own substance and that of all things after God, we have not yet received the habit of immutability in virtue.

But when this dignity has been achieved in us through love, then we shall know the power of the divine promise.

For we must believe that the worthy are there, in unmovable settledness, where the mind, having first through love taken its stand, has rooted its own power.

For he who has not gone out from himself and from all things that can in any way be conceived, and has not come to rest in the silence beyond conception, cannot be wholly free from change.

Every act of thinking has the appearance of multiplicity,

or at the very least, altogether of duality.

For it is a middle relation of certain extremes, joining to one another the one thinking and the thing thought.

And neither of the two is by nature able to preserve simplicity throughout.

For that which thinks is a certain subject, having altogether co-conceived with it the power of thinking;

and the thing thought is altogether a certain subject, or [exists] in a subject,

having co-conceived with it the power of being thought;

or it has presupposed the substance of which it is the power.

For nothing of beings is in and of itself a simple substance or thought, such as to be an indivisible monad.

But as for God: whether we call Him substance, He does not have by nature co-conceived with Him the power of being thought, lest He be composite;

or whether [we call Him] thought, He does not have by nature an underlying substance receptive of thinking;

but God Himself is, according to substance, thought;

and wholly thought, and that alone;

and He Himself is, according to thought, substance, and wholly substance, and that alone;

and He is wholly beyond substance, and wholly beyond thought, because He is also a monad indivisible and partless and simple.

Therefore he who has thinking in any respect whatever has not yet gone out from duality;

but he who has wholly left it behind has come to be in some measure in the monad, having transcendently put off the power of thinking.

In the many there is otherness and unlikeness and difference;

but in God, who is properly the one and only One, there is only identity and simplicity and likeness.

It is therefore not safe to apply oneself to contemplations concerning God before one has come out from the many;

and Moses makes this clear, pitching the tent of his understanding outside the camp, and then conversing with God.

For to attempt to speak of the Ineffable with uttered speech is perilous;

because uttered speech is duality, and more.

But to behold Being with the soul alone, without voice, is most powerful;

because it stands according to the indivisible monad, and not in the many.

For the high priest, who is barely permitted to enter within the veil into the Holy of Holies once a year, teaches that he alone must do so—he who has passed beyond [the court] and the holies, and has come within into the Holy of Holies;

that is, he who has passed beyond all the nature of sensible and intelligible things, and has become pure of every property of generation, and applies himself with an unclothed and naked understanding to the conceptions concerning God.

Moses the great, having pitched his own tent outside the camp—

that is, having established his judgment and understanding outside the things that are seen—begins to worship God;

and entering into the thick darkness, the formless and immaterial place of knowledge, there he remains, being initiated into the most holy mysteries.

The thick darkness is the formless, immaterial, and incorporeal condition, which holds the paradigmatic knowledge of beings;

in which he who has come to be within, like another Moses, by a mortal nature comprehends the unseen;

and through it, having painted within himself the beauty of the divine virtues, like a painting well representing the image of the archetypal beauty, he comes down;

showing also in this, to those who wish to imitate virtue, the philanthropy and ungrudging bounty of the grace in which he had partaken.

Those who pursue the philosophy according to God without stain find the greatest gain from its knowledge:

namely, no longer to let their judgment change along with circumstances,

but with steadfast firmness to undertake eagerly all that befits the principle of virtue.

Having in Christ through the Spirit been baptized into the first incorruption according to the flesh, we await the last incorruption according to Him in the Spirit;

that is, through the increase of good works and the death according to purpose, having kept the former [incorruption] unstained;

in which none of those who possess it fears the loss of the goods acquired.

God, willing to send down from heaven to those on earth the grace of divine virtue through His mercy toward us, symbolically constructed the sacred tabernacle and all things in it;

which is an image and type and imitation of wisdom.

Wherefore the Apostle says that the law is spiritual.

The law, then, according to the letter grows old and ages, being abolished;

but according to the spirit it is ever young, being continually operative.

For grace is altogether incapable of growing old.

The law has the shadow of the Gospel;

but the Gospel is an image of the good things to come.

For the one forbids the workings of evils;

but the other sets forth the practices of good things.

We say that all the Holy Scripture is divided into flesh and spirit;

as being, as it were, a certain spiritual man.

For he who says that the letter of Scripture is flesh,

and the meaning is spirit, or soul, will not err from the truth.

And manifestly wise is he who lets go of what is corruptible,

and becomes wholly [a man] of the incorruptible.

The law is the flesh of the spiritual man according to the Holy Scripture;

the prophets are sense-perception;

but the Gospel is the intellectual soul;

operating through the flesh of the law, and through the sense-perception of the prophets;

and manifesting its own power in [these] operations.

The law had the shadow, and the prophets the image, of the divine and spiritual goods in the Gospel.

But the Gospel itself showed forth, present to us through the written words, the very truth—

the truth which was foreshadowed by the law and prefigured by the prophets.

He who fulfills the law through manner of life and conduct rests only from the conclusions of vice, sacrificing to God the activity of the irrational passions;

and he is content with this manner for salvation, on account of the spiritual infancy in him.

He who is tutored by the prophetic word, in addition to the casting off of the activity of the passions, also rejects their consents that take form in the soul;

lest, seeming to abstain from vice in the worse [part], I mean the flesh,

he unwittingly let it operate abundantly in the better [part], I mean the soul.

He who genuinely embraces the evangelical life has cut off both the beginning and the end of vice in himself;

and pursues every virtue in deed and word;

offering a sacrifice of praise and confession, being delivered from all the disturbance of the passions in their activity, and being free from the struggle in the mind against them;

and having only that pleasure—insatiable—which nourishes the soul in the hope of the good things to come.

To the more earnest students of the divine Scriptures, the Word according to the Lord appears as having two forms;

the one common and more ordinary and visible to not a few, according to which it is said, 'We saw Him, and He had no form nor comeliness';

and the other more hidden and attainable by few, [appearing] to those who have already become like Peter and James and John, the holy apostles, before whom the Lord was transfigured unto a glory overcoming sense-perception;

according to which He is 'fairer in beauty than the sons of men.'

Of these two forms, the former is suited to beginners;

but the second is proportionate to those who have been perfected in knowledge as far as attainable.

And the one is an image of the first coming of the Lord, to which belongs the letter of the Gospel that purifies the practical [men] through sufferings;

but the other is a prefiguration of the second and glorious coming, in which the spirit is understood;

[the coming] which through wisdom transfigures the gnostics unto deification;

[so that] from the transfiguration of the Word in them, they behold with unveiled face, as in a mirror, the glory of the Lord.

He who unshakably endures hardships for the sake of virtue has working upon himself the first coming of the Word, purifying him from every stain;

but he who has transferred his mind through contemplation to the condition of the angels has the power of the second coming, working in him impassibility and inviolability.

Sense-perception follows the practical man, who sets the virtues aright through toil;

but insensibility follows the gnostic, who has drawn in his mind from the flesh and the world toward God.

For he who through the practical [life] strives to loose the soul from the natural bonds of its relation to the flesh has his judgment continually bowed down by toils;

but he who through contemplation has pulled up the nails of this relation is altogether held fast by nothing;

having become already pure of that which is by nature liable to suffer and to be mastered by those who wish to seize it.

The manna given to Israel in the wilderness is the Word of God, fitting Himself to every spiritual pleasure for those who eat Him, and being blended unto every taste according to the difference of the desire of those who eat;

for He has the quality of all spiritual food.

And to the weak [He becomes] a vegetable, comforting the suffering power of the soul;

but to those who through habit have the senses of the soul exercised to discern good and evil, He gives Himself as solid food.

And the Word of God has also other boundless powers, which cannot be contained here;

but one who has been dissolved [from the body] and has become worthy to be set over many or over all things will receive those powers of the Word whole, or some of them, because he was here faithful in the least.

For every height of the divine gifts of grace given here is, in comparison with those to come, something least and moderate.

[God is] a monad without beginning, simple, and beyond being;

and partless and indivisible;

wholly the same monad according to substance, and wholly the same Trinity according to the hypostases.

For the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are the Godhead, and the Godhead is in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

The same [Godhead] is wholly in the whole Father;

and the Father is wholly in the whole same [Godhead];

and the same is wholly in the whole Son;

and the Son is wholly in the whole same.

And the same is wholly in the whole Holy Spirit;

and the Holy Spirit is wholly in the whole same.

The same is wholly Father, and in the whole Father;

and the same is wholly the whole Son;

and the same is wholly in the whole Son;

and the Son is wholly the same, and in the whole same.

And the same is wholly the Holy Spirit, and in the whole Holy Spirit;

and the Holy Spirit is wholly the same, and wholly in the whole same is the Holy Spirit.

For the Godhead is not in the Father in part, nor is the Father God in part;

neither is the Godhead in the Son in part, nor is the Son God in part;

neither is the Godhead in the Holy Spirit in part, nor is the Holy Spirit God in part.

For neither is the Godhead divisible;

neither is God the Father, or the Son, or the Holy Spirit incomplete;

but the same [Godhead] is wholly perfect, perfectly in the perfect Father;

and the same is wholly perfect, perfectly in the perfect Son;

and the same is wholly perfect, perfectly in the perfect Holy Spirit.

For the Father is wholly and perfectly in the whole Son and the Spirit;

and the Son is wholly and perfectly in the whole Father and the Spirit;

and the Holy Spirit is wholly and perfectly in the whole Father and the Son.

For there is one and the same substance and power and operation of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit;

none of them existing or being conceived apart from the other.

Every act of thinking belongs to those that think and the things thought;

but God is neither of those that think nor of the things thought;

since [otherwise] He would be circumscribed, needing—as one who thinks—the relation to the thing thought,

or [needing], as falling naturally under the one who thinks, to be thought because of the relation.

It remains, then, to suppose that God neither thinks nor is thought;

but is beyond thinking and being thought.

For thinking and being thought belong by nature to the things after Him.

Every act of thinking, just as it altogether has its position in a substance as a quality, so also it has its movement about a qualified substance.

For nothing that is in general detached and simple, subsisting in itself, is able to receive it, because it is not detached and simple.

But God, being in both respects altogether simple—both substance free from being in a subject, and thought having nothing whatever as a subject—

is not of those that think and the things thought, as being manifestly beyond substance and thought.

Just as in the center the position of the lines extended from it in straight directions is beheld as altogether indivisible;

so he who has been deemed worthy to come to be in God will know all the principles of created things that pre-exist in Him, by a certain simple, indivisible knowledge.

The act of thinking that takes form according to the things thought, the one [act of] thinking becomes many [acts of] thinking, taking form according to each species of the things thought.

But when, having passed beyond the multitude of the sensible and intelligible things that give it form, it becomes wholly formless, then the Word who is beyond thinking fittingly appropriates it to Himself, causing it to cease from those things that by nature alter it with the forms of concepts;

which he who has experienced, even he himself rested from his works, just as God [rested] from His own.

He who has attained the perfection attainable by men here bears fruit to God: love, joy, peace, long-suffering;

and, with respect to the age to come, incorruption and eternity, and the like;

and perhaps the first [fruits] belong to him who has perfected the practical [life];

but the second to him who through true knowledge has stood outside created things.

Just as sin is the proper work of disobedience, so virtue is the proper work of obedience;