87 The reality is one and indivisible

LG87

Jesus said:
miserable is the body
that is a slave of the body.
and miserable the soul
who is a slave to the two.

Gnostics is a teaching of redemption. There is the redeemed state and redemption. Gnostics often refer to the unsolved state as slavery.
And what is the redemption? That is not so much a liberation of the redeemed person, even more so: the liberation of being free itself. “We are called to be free,” says Paul in his letter to the Galatians.
And what is the result of being free? That, in that space, we can love our neighbor as ourselves, Paul adds, freedom as a condition for love.

Paul also says in Galatians:

“Christ delivered us so that we might live free; So hold on and don’t be put on a slave yoke again. “

The concept of slavery also plays an important role in Judaism, and then it refers to slavery in Egypt, from which God delivered the Jewish people, the Old Testament says. This narrative, regarded as a historical event, is also frequently symbolically interpreted within Judaism, and then it is also about the slavery of the soul, that is to say, slavery as an image of the redeemed state.

Slavery and freedom, these are important themes, not only for Paul and in Judaism, but also in Gnostics.

The gospel of Philip 11 says it this way:

The powers wanted to mislead people because they saw that they are related to the true good. They took his name from what is good and gave it to the bad to deceive the people with that name and to bind them to the bad.

And oh, how nice they are to people! As a favor, one may accept their false goodness.
They knew what they were doing. They wanted to capture the free man and make them their slaves forever.
This logion is also about slavery.
It is not so difficult to see what could be meant by slavery on the body. Anyone who allows his actions to be determined entirely by his physical urges may have the illusion of being a free person – I do what I feel like doing and I don’t care – but that is in reality a plaything of fancy and desires. And as attractive as that may seem, it is a very unfree state that will certainly not make you happy.
What does the phrase “miserable is the soul that is a slave to the two”? That is certainly not immediately clear.
The key to understanding this is the frequent statement in Thomas that we “must make the two one.” It is therefore about the term “the two”.

In Thomas 22, Jesus says:

When you have made the two one (…)
then you will enter into the kingdom.

And in Logion 106, Jesus says:

If you make the two one,
you will become a son of man.

The Coptic word translated “the two” in Logion 22 and 106 can also be found here in Logion 87. So here too, and as far as I am concerned, we have to translate that with “the two.” And certainly in terms of meaning, we must see the similarity.

Well, making the two one is important. Thomas is about wholeness, because the human being in his wholeness is part of the Source. And the whole belongs to that wholeness.

But how can you as a soul be a slave to “the two”? What is that all about?
In the time of Jesus there is a great influence of Plato’s dualism on religious life. And this logion resists this. It is a sneer at the dualism of body and soul as it was popularized by Plato, in which “the two” are just glorified, and even made the condition for a purely spiritual life.
Plato was a Greek philosopher. He lived in Athens about three hundred years before Christ. His influence on Christianity forming itself in the centuries after Jesus has been immense.
Plato divided reality into two realms of being, matter and spirit. That is “the two” that this logion turns against.
For Plato, all matter is inferior, despicable. He saw the spiritual as the only good, far beyond matter. The body of man belongs to the sphere of being of matter, and the soul of man belongs to the sphere of being of the mind, according to Plato. In this way he introduced a dichotomy between the body of man, which is purely matter, and the soul of man, who is purely spiritual. He came up with ‘the two’ of which this logion says rather viciously that you can be a slave to that.

In his book, De Phaedo, Plato explains how the human body is an obstacle to spiritual life. The truth is purely spiritual in nature, says Plato. Whoever wants to get to know this truth must therefore separate himself from his body. Only those who completely free themselves from everything that has to do with the body can look into the spiritual sphere of eternal and unchanging truth, Plato thought.

He wrote:

A real sage you can recognize a true philosopher by the fact that he strives more than other people to free his soul from fellowship with the body.

Only those who so liberate their souls from their bodies can know the truth, because:

If the soul tries to investigate something together with the body, it is deceived by the body.

And so, Plato thought, we must, in this life, still attached to our despicable body, take an advance on death, because:

Did we not just call “death”: the liberation of the soul from the body?
And did we not claim that the release of the soul is the pursuit of the true sages?
Well, true philosophers practice dying.

For example, Plato formulated the requirement for the body to die as a condition for a spiritual life.
That vision of Plato about the contempt of the body and the exaltedness of the mind has exerted a great influence on the forming Christian tradition. This is all the more remarkable because the Jewish tradition, of which Christianity would nevertheless be a continuation, did not at all know that distinction between matter and spirit, body and soul. The Phaedo of Plato, however, enjoyed great popularity among the early Christian Fathers.
The “true philosopher,” according to Plato, later even became the role model of the Roman Catholic “clergyman” who, following Plato, should live celibate, to this day.
The demand for mortification of the body is also found among the Protestants. Thus Luther, one of the founders of Protestantism, stated in his famous Wittenberg theorems that the notion of one’s own sinfulness is not sufficient to attain God’s grace, because:

The sense of sinfulness is meaningless if it does not bring about the death of the flesh. (Luther, Theorem 3)

And Calvin, the other leader of Protestantism, spoke enthusiastically about “the sinfulness of the flesh.”
And all in imitation, no, not from Jesus, because he will not have talked about it as a Jew, but from Plato.
So this logion says that you can not only be a slave to the body, but also to “the two” of the platonic dualism of body and soul, of matter and spirit.

But this logion also says that you can be addicted to the body? Is that not in accordance with Plato?

No, that’s not it.

This logion talks about slavery, and that is an attitude. Not the body or matter is wrong in itself, but the slavish submission to it. No part of reality is good or evil in itself. Slavery is a form of dealing with reality. Reality itself is beyond that. You are only a slave to the body if you make yourself a slave to it. The body does not do that, you do that yourself.

And so you can also slavishly submit yourself to “the two” of the distinction between body and soul, between matter and spirit, as if only the soul were good. And that is just as much a miserable state because that conviction also places man outside the wholeness of creation, and is thus the cause of the separation from Source.
Plato called the body a dungeon of the soul. This logion says that the belief in the dualism of body and soul is just as much a form of slavery. The redemption that Gnostics seeks is also a redemption of “the two,” of the dualistic image of reality. Because the reality of which we are part is one and indivisible.
The often-proclaimed view that the body would be a hindrance to a spiritual life is just another slave yoke.
The body is not good, nor is it bad. It’s just there. But how do you deal with it? Are you making it your master? Are you making it outcast? Or is it a good friend with whom you sometimes have difficulties, but with whom you want to build a pleasant relationship as a free person?

Being free can only be found in wholeness.