Like other Gnostic texts, the Acts of John distinguishes two gods. One is “a serpent outside the law,” who gave the Jews who had Jesus arrested their law (Pulver 1955, 178). I am reminded here of the “Ophite diagram,” with its tail-eating snake ringing the planets. The other god is the Father, who Jesus also is: “I am thy God,” he tells the disciples, “not the betrayer’s God” (179). The text tells how Jesus, on the eve of his crucifixion, does a song and dance routine for the dumbfounded disciples. The song, the so-called Hymn of Jesus, was quoted by Augustine in his 237th letter, for the purpose of denouncing it as an absurd fraud. This letter was readily accessible in Shakespeare’s day, and someone interested in heresy could easily have found it.
The setting for the Hymn is after the Last Supper, when Jesus is awaiting his arrest. He asks the anxious disciples to dance in a circle around him while he teaches them a new song; they are to say “amen” after each line that he sings. Matthew 26:30 and Mark 14:26 do mention some singing, but say only “And when they had sung a hymn, they went out into the Mount of Olives.” The Acts of John gives words to such a hymn:
I will be freed and I will free, Amen.The word that Pulver translates as “will,” actually means “intend to,” according to Hennecke and McWilson (1964) in their more recent translation. Augustine’s translator uses “wish”: “I wish to save,” etc. Mead (1903, 431ff) has “I would.”
I will be saved and I will save, Amen.
(six similar lines, using "wound" "beget" "consume" "hear" and "know")
I will be washed and I will wash, Amen.
Grace paces the round. I will blow the pipes.
Dance the round all...(Pulver 1955, 179)
The hymn has more, about various groups in the realm above--"the eight," "the twelve," "the All," dancing the round with them. The below affects the above, as consciousness affects the unconscious. Then there are three more “I will”’s: "I will flee," " I will adorn," and "I will unite," and the corresponding phrase in the passive voice.
Augustine quotes four of the “I will”’s—save, free, be born, and adorn. He says he knows how the “heretics” publicly interpret these verses: To say that one will be free, they say, is to say that the Lord has released us from the world that we may not become entangled in it again. To be saved is to be saved through baptism, and to save is to guard in us the spirit given us in baptism. To adorn, and be adorned, means that Christ may adorn our hearts. All of this is orthodox, he says, no different from the canonical teachings.
But Augustine adds that the “heretics” must have a secret interpretation as well, because otherwise why do they insist that the hymn imparts secret teaching? He does not speculate on what that teaching might be. Yet it seems to me that the unorthodoxy is right on the surface. For Jesus to say “I would be saved” now, long after his baptism, is to say that he, Jesus, is still in need of redemption, even after all his teachings and healings. The mere presence here of a redeemer needing to be redeemed is a departure from orthodoxy. Jesus as wholly God, for the orthodox, is himself in no need of redemption. The mystery unfolds in later sections of the story, in a later section that Augustine alludes to but does not talk about.
Next the Hymn speaks of the suffering that Jesus is to undergo, and its meaning for humanity:
If thou dancest, ponder what I do,Of this Augustine quotes only the last two lines. Translated from Augustine’s Latin, these lines read: “By a word I made sport of all things and I am never made sport of.” (1956, 189). For his part, Augustine fumes at the very idea of a jesting Jesus. Augustine asks rhetorically “Where are we to go, to whom are we to give ear, in whose speech are we to have faith, in whose promise are we to put hope, if by a word Christ has made sport of all things?” (1956, 189). It is precisely this sentence, however, that would have appealed to someone like Shakespeare. It puts Christ in the same class as Lear’s Fool, someone who makes a jest out of everything yet speaks pure wisdom. It is also, of course, aligns Christ with the Fool of Tarot. This unorthodox Jesus, like Lear’s Fool, is no stranger to irony and humor. Later we shall look at the playful Lear.
for thine is this human suffering that I will suffer...
If thou understoodest suffering
thou wouldst have nonsuffering.
See through suffering
and thou wilt have nonsuffering...
And if thou wouldst understand that which is me, know this:
all that I have said, I have uttered playfully--
and I was by no means ashamed of it.
(Pulver 1955, 180; my arrangement into lines)
Let us go back to the earlier part of the passage just quoted, on which Augustine was silent, in which Jesus expounds on suffering. Jesus says that the suffering he is to undergo is merely humanity's own suffering reflected back to it, role-modeled, so to speak, so as to be transcended.
How is that to be done? Translators differ on how to render the text. Pulver’s translation goes:
If thou understoodest sufferingOther translators (most recently Bowe 1999) render these words differently:
thou wouldst have nonsuffering.
See through suffering
and thou wilt have nonsuffering.
If you learned how to suffer
You would have nonsuffering.
Learn how to suffer
And you will have nonsuffering.
Literally, the Greek reads, “If thou learned suffering” and “Learn suffering.” Pulver’s translation suggests a kind of rational insight into one’s suffering, so that we can come to terms with it. This sense is also implied by Jesus’s Biblical epithet “Logos,” meaning “word,” or “reason,” as in putting into words, becoming conscious, grasping the reason. What can we learn from suffering? we ask. It may be a matter of learning from our mistakes or a mistaken attitude, as Lear does, and living more wisely and fully. The other translation suggests some other process, such as laughing at our suffering, or singing and dancing about it (as the von Trier film “Dancing in the Dark.” also shows us.) Such a process is what Hindus call a “yoga,” a discipline: focusing on one’s breathing, for example. Such activity helps us to realize: I am not my suffering, I am more than that. Both senses, insight and adding another activity, help one to detach from the immediacy of suffering and transcend it.
Suffering is what Adam and Eve begin in leaving the Garden of Eden, in living by the sweat of their brow. Suffering is what Job does, losing all that he has, and now Jesus. Like Lear from Edgar, we learn from their example and try to understand, gain insight. Not all suffering leads to self-knowledge. Humans have a great capacity to repeat their suffering endlessly without getting outside it. Hence the need to understand. Lear sees his former arrogance as that which led to his suffering. That is part of understanding: learning to live better.
Another part, exemplified in the play first by the symbolism of Lear’s trying to disrobe, and now more directly his banter with Gloucester, is learning how to detach from life's seriousness. Jesus recommends in the Acts of John that the disciples think playfully, be playful and not be ashamed of it, as we might if we thought it were childish or undignified. Children are our model, in fact. Part of what is needed is to get rid of the dignity, or really pride, that would judge negatively a playfulness about one's projects. Jesus's play is his singing and dancing on the eve of his crucifixion, which the Church found too undignified and confusing to be worthy of including in the record, as though it undermined the significance of his suffering the next day.
I think now we can see one way in which Jesus is in need of redemption, freeing, birth, washing, being consumed. He has taken on “perishable rags,” as the Gospel of Truth puts it, i.e. materiality, for the purpose of showing humanity the way out of their situation. Humanity, likewise, is spirit imbedded in matter. Now he is in matter to show humanity the way.
A torch am I to thee who perceivest me, Amen.We are reminded of the fool’s mirror, in Holbein’s illustration to Erasmus (Fig. 2, in section 2 of this essay), and Hamlet’s mirror, the actors. The phrase “who passest” is sometimes translated as “a wayfarer”; Jesus would have the disciples pass through life without attachments, as pictured by the tarot Fool. The way Jesus shows is through suffering, when it leads to detachment from suffering and detachment from the world. The crucifixion is simply a dramatic example, a mirror for humanity to see itself. In this sense, his redemption is humanity’s, as revealed by his suffering on the cross.
A mirror am I to thee who discernist me, Amen.
A door am I to thee who knockest at me, Amen.
A way am I to thee who passest. (Pulver 1955, 179)
The hymn puts the crucifixion, and all human suffering, in the form of a short drama, a kind of play that can be repeated by the disciples and their disciples. Thereby it is itself a way of detaching from suffering: if one can play-act suffering, then one is something other than the suffering one; thereby one detaches from suffering. It is another way of “making sport” of “all things” without being made sport of, or of being ashamed of what one does.
The Hymn is over. But there is another section, which Augustine only refers to briefly and does not quote. In it Jesus speaks again, commenting further on the crucifixion. This part was read and condemned by the second Nicean Council of 787, which said, “No one is to copy (this book): not only so, but we consider that it deserves to be consigned to the fire” (Hennecke 1964, 193). Fortunately some of it was preserved in the Acts of the Council. (Fortunately, too, the whole text was preserved in one manuscript found in 19th century Vienna [Hennecke 202f].)
During the crucifixion, this part relates, the terrified John runs from the scene and hides in a cave on the Mount of Olives. Augustine stops there: He objects: how could this be true, when we know from the Gospel of John that he stayed below? But the text as we have it goes on: In the cave John sees a cross of light, along with a voice that sounds like that of Jesus, only sweeter. Jesus tells John to "have no concern for the many" (Pulver 1955, 182) who see him as the one on the cross of wood. It is his humanity that is on the cross: "Thine is this human suffering that I will suffer" (181). Jesus in his divine state is there in that cave, on the cross of light:
It [the light-cross] is not that cross, the wooden cross which thou wilt see when thou goest down thither. Nor am I he upon the stake, whom thou canst not see now, but whose voice alone thou perceivest. I passed for that which I am not, for what I was to the many others. What they will say of me is wretched and unworthy of me. Those who neither see nor name the place of stillness will much less see the Lord. (Pulver 1955, 181-182)Jesus gives a suggestion of what he is through a series of paradoxical utterances: "A suffering one was I and one who suffered not/ Blood flowed from me yet it did not flow" (182) and so on. He is still playing with John, making sport, yet with a serious point. He has two natures, human and divine; one suffers, and thereby instructs; the other instructs verbally and suffers in a different sense. The spiritual Jesus goes on to say that he suffers incompleteness, a kind of amputation of his spiritual body; his “members” are in humanity, they are his “blood,” and he will not “be what I am” until all have come unto him. They are the “sparks of light,” in Irenaeus’s summary of the Gnostics (Barnstone 2984, 655), which overflowed their spiritual container and fell into matter. In returning home they also redeem him: Humanity redeems him as much as he redeems humanity. In fact, since they are part of his body, they and he are one (Lalleman 1998, 193ff). The “I” of the hymn now includes the disciples and all the sparks of light, as parts of himself that have become detached from him and attached to matter. When the disciples detach from their human suffering, and enter “the place of stillness,” they will be rejoining his spiritual body.
I do not think that King Lear goes so far as to illustrate such a view of redemption, as Jesus’s own completion. Shakespeare is more concerned with humanity than he is with God. For him what matters is the teaching that would have the bitter fool and those like him understand their suffering, play with it, speak of it in paradoxes, detach from it, and so become sweet, as the Fool is sweet. When Lear takes up the Fool’s playfulness in the midst of his suffering, it is as though he were following the lead of a playful Christ: and thereby it is not only play but redemption.
Lear embodies the bitter fool when he distributes his land and then sees his elder daughters refusing to live up to his expectations. Later he becomes the second, the sweet fool of play, in the hut during the storm. There he conducts a mock-trial of Goneril and Regan, with Tom as "Thou robed man of justice" (III.vi.21), and the Fool as “his yoke-fellow of equity” (III.vi.36-37), i.e. his fellow judge. When Lear addresses the mock-Goneril, the fool exclaims, “Cry you mercy, I took you for a joint-stool” (III.vi.51). As for the mock-Regan, the Olivier film has Lear holding a chicken as he speaks to her; when it gets away, he says, "Stop her there!" and "False justicer, why hast thou let her ''scape?" (III.vi.53-55).
Such activity and commentary tell us that Lear is not merely hallucinating. His activity is more akin to the Gestalt Therapy of Fritz Perls, a staple of which is addressing an empty chair containing an absent but significant other. As with Hamlet, it is not always clear when Lear is mad and when he is playing. This ambiguous playfulness, we shall see in the next section, continues the next morning with Gloucester, Edgar, and the soldiers, with whom he jokes and plays on the heath, even about quite serious things.
Shakespeare suggests the Hymn’s point about playfulness obliquely in a remark that Edgar makes to himself after the storm, on the heath near Gloucester's castle:
Edgar. ...To be worst,The usual interpretation of the last line (Foakes' note, Arden edition) is by the saying, "When things are at the worst, they will mend." The laughter is the joy of improved conditions, once we have hit bottom. For Edgar, unfortunately, things become worse yet, seventeen lines later, when his father tells him (without knowing that it is his son) that he was made blind.
The lowest and most dejected thing of fortune,
Stands still in esperance [hope], lives not in fear.
The lamentable change is from the best;
The worst returns to laughter... (IV.i.2-6)
But there is another way of taking "the worst returns to laughter," along the lines of Lear's process: If we can endure being the lowest without fear, we can also laugh at our worldly attachments. This interpretation connects with Jesus’s remark at the end of his Hymn, that he says everything in sport or play.. It also connects with what Edgar says three lines later, when he sees his father approaching on the heath, led by an old man:
Edgar. ...But who comes here?If we are too attached to life, we will resist death too strongly. Laughing at and despising our attachment to the world will ease the transition. In this context, detachment from suffering means not just from the moment of suffering but from life as a whole.
My father, poorly led? World, world, O world!
But that thy strange mutations make us hate thee,
Life would not yield to age. (IV.i.9-12)
Yet the goal of life is not simply to be ready to leave it. That would be Hamlet's "The readiness is all" (Ham.IV). Gloucester is all too ready to leave this life; he is in such despair that he says:
Glou. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;He has even solicited Edgar to lead him to the cliffs of Dover, so that he may commit suicide. Edgar leads him to a small mound where he may jump off. Edgar is playing with his father. The trick works, and he is not sad for a while. But the urge returns. In reply to his father’s despair, Edgar gives this play’s equivalent of Hamlet’s bon mot, continuing the Fool’s fruit metaphor:
They kill us for their sport. (IV.1.38-39)
Edgar. What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endureNow life itself is a fruit, for Gloucester a bitter one--hence his readiness to end it. He is thoroughly detached from life; yet his fruit is still bitter. We might ask: Since he seems already detached from life, why not let him die? Why wait? Edgar says, in contrast, is saying that one must endure one’s suffering until one’s life, as a fruit, is ripe and thereby sweet.
Their going hence even as their coming hither;
Ripeness is all. (V.ii.8-11)
But what is it to be ripe? A fruit is ripe, in this philosophical metaphor, when it has fulfilled its potential as a fruit, its purpose. But what potential has been left unfulfilled? There is one thing, in fact, a learning that Gloucester has yet to experience--namely, of his son Edgar's forgiveness of his father for his unjust persecution and the son's continued love, as shown in his being with and protecting Gloucester in various disguises. Having detached from life, Gloucester needs to connect long enough to know this forgiveness and continued love. It is an unexpected knowledge, which comes as if from nowhere, by pure accident, as though an act of grace. When the ego is confounded, then comes knowledge of the transcendent from an unexpected quarter.
The point is a Christian one, both orthodox and Gnostic. To depart in peace and joy from the world, one should know before one dies whether one is forgiven and loved, by others one has wronged and by the divine. That is the symbolic function of prolonging his life: Edgar must perform a kind of "last rite." The same will happen later with Lear and the people he has wronged, Cordelia and Kent.
It might be asked, why does Edgar wait so long to reveal himself? Is he not sadistic, making his father suffer like that? Again we must look to Edgar’s words “Ripeness is all”. A popular slogan in the Renassance was Festina lente, hasten slowly (Wind 1958)—a principle which I would argue affects Hamlet’s famous delay. The Roman emperor Augustus had also taken the slogan as his own. In his Adagia (starting in the 1508 edition), Erasmus expounded on the slogan by citing the Roman author Gellius, who observed that the concept “is expressed in Latin by the single word matura, ripe. For we call things ‘ripe’ that happen neither prematurely nor later than the proper time, but just when they should” (1991, 5). In Gloucester’s case, Edgar does not trust his father to keep his identity secret. The father has a way of naively trusting the wrong people, first Edmund and then Regan, whose husband took out his eyes. Edgar needs to get his father out of harm's way before it is safe to tell him his identity. Edgar is following the motto “Ripeness is all” in the sense of festina lente, waiting for the right moment and then acting quiickly. He does so elsewhere as well. He walks slowly in disguise with his father until the steward Oswald attacks them; then he catches Oswald off guard with his stick. Later he waits for just the right moment to make his appearance to Edmund: His half-brother issues a challenge to all comers, and Albany is standing by to read the letters Goneril had sent with Oswald. Even then Edgar does not reveal his true identity until the outcome has been decided. (I owe this interpretation of “Ripeness is all” to Wind, 1958, who makes this motto the title of his chapter on festina lente. He makes the point rather obscurely however, for while he cites Erasmus on matura, he never mentions the play or the line in his text.)
It might be asked, what makes these scenes of imitatio Christi Gnostic as opposed to Christian in the usual sense? The point seems to be an orthodox Christian one, about the power of suffering to purify one and about detaching from the things of this world. so as to be ready to receive the next one. The difference is that for the Gnostic it does not matter whether there was really a Jesus on the cross or not. Jesus is simply a teacher, and an example precisely in as much as he is only human; as such, a play illustrating the point will do as well as the real thing. It is about suspending the ego and letting it connect with the Self, in Jungian terms. The orthodox Christian insists upon the actual space-time event, an actual death and resurrection. The Gnostic says the actuality of that event is not as important as the images; and that is what Shakespeare, too, provides, regardless of whether or not the event occurred.
It might be asked, how do we know that this Christ, whom let us say we imagine as both crucified and a figure on a light-cross, represents a real connection between us and a higher realm? We only know if we cultivate him as a figure within ourselves, in the same way as he is in all these characters in the play. Looking at Lear, we get clues on how to get "knowledge of the Father" within ourselves, a knowledge which may exist only as a feeling of powerlessness against something, fate or whatever, the nature of which remains a mystery, but to which we can only submit in awe and gratitude, for what it teaches. The knowledge of the mystery is sweet and not bitter. Against a cruel fate we can be bitter; yet our submission to that which lets Cordelia die is not only bitter. It also makes demands on us, and to the extent we are not responsive on an ego-level--and we are always unresponsive somehow on that level--death can result. How we respond on other levels, the levels of play and the Self, and with what consciousness, can help us to transcend bitterness.
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