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content of the call

quinta-feira 25 de janeiro de 2024

  

What is it that the call has come to communicate to men? Its content is determined by its aim of “awakening,” the simple naming of which may sometimes be the whole message itself, and nearly always is the opening part of it. “I am the call of awakening from sleep in the Aeon of the night,” begins an excerpt from a scripture of the Peratae in Hippolytus   (Refut. V. 14. 1). Here the call as such is its own content, since it simply states what its being sounded will effect: the awakening from sleep. This awakening is constantly designated as the essence of his mission either by the messenger himself or by those who send him.

I am a word, a son of words, who have come in the name of Jawar. The great Life called, charged and prepared me, me, Anosh [Man], the great Uthra the son of mighty ones. . . . It sent me forth to watch over this era, to shake out of their sleep and raise up those that slumber. It said to me: “Go, gather thee a following from the Tibil. . . . Elect, and draw the elect out of the world. . . . Instruct the souls, that they may not die and perish, nor be kept back in the dense darkness. . . . When thou comest to the earth Tibil, the evil ones shall not know of thee. . . . Fear not and be not dismayed, and say not, I stand here alone. When fear overcomes thee, we shall all be beside thee. . . .”

(G 295 f.)

They bestowed upon the guardians a sublime call, to shake up and make to rise those that slumber. They were to awaken the souls that had stumbled away from the place of light. They were to awaken them and shake them up, that they might lift their faces to the place of light.

(G 308)

Accordingly, the first effect of the call is always described as “awaking,” as in the gnostic versions of the story of Adam (see next section). Often the merely formal exhortation, “Wake from your slumber” (or “from drunkenness,” or, less frequently, “from death”), with metaphorical elaboration and in different phrasings, constitutes the sole content of the gnostic call to salvation. However, this formal imperative implicitly includes the whole speculative framework within which the ideas of sleep, drunkenness, and waking assume their specific meanings; and as a rule the call makes this framework explicit as part of its own content, that is, it connects the command to awake with the following doctrinal elements: the reminder of the heavenly origin and the transcendent history of man; the promise of redemption, to which also belongs the redeemer’s account of his own mission and descent to this world; and finally the practical instruction as to how to live henceforth in the world, in conformity with the newly won “knowledge” and in preparation for the eventual ascent. Now, these three elements contain in a nutshell the complete gnostic myth, so that the gnostic call of awakening is a kind of abbreviation of gnostic doctrine in general. The gnosis transmitted by the message and compressed in it into a few symbolic terms is the total cosmogonic-soteriological myth within whose narrative the event of this message itself constitutes one phase, in fact the turning point with which the total movement is reversed. This compendious “knowledge” of the theoretical whole has its practical complement in the knowledge of the right “way” to liberation from the captivity of the world. In the numerous literary versions of the call, one or the other of these aspects may preponderate or be expressed exclusively: the reminder of origin, the promise of salvation, the moral instruction.

We shall quote some of these calls of awakening from gnostic literature, beginning with Manichaean examples. The first of such calls in the rigidly constructed Manichaean world-drama occurs before the beginning of our world and is addressed to the Primal Man, who is lying unconscious in the depths after being defeated and swallowed up in the first pre-cosmic contest of light and darkness. The following scene is from the Syriac account of Theodore bar Konai.

Then the Living Spirit called with a loud voice; and the voice of the Living Spirit became like to a sharp sword and laid bare the form of the Primal Man. And he spoke to him:

Peace be unto thee, good one amidst the wicked,

luminous one amidst the darkness,

God who dwells amidst the beasts of wrath

who do not know his30 honor.

Thereupon Primal Man answered him and spoke:

Come for the peace of him who is dead,

come, oh treasure of serenity and peace!

and he spoke further to him:

How is it with our Fathers,

the Sons of Light in their city?

And the Call said unto him: It is well with them. And Call and Answer joined each other and ascended to the Mother of Life and to the Living Spirit. The Living Spirit put on the Call and the Mother of Life put on the Answer, her beloved son.31

Here the call apparently has the form of a simple salutation. As such, however, it includes the reminder of the divine origin of the one saluted, that is, the reawakening of the knowledge of himself, lost through the poison of the darkness, and at the same time the promise of his salvation: the address “Good one amidst the wicked,” etc., represents the reminder, the salutation “Peace be unto thee” the promise. The touching inquiry of the Primal Man about the sons of light in their city must be understood in connection with the fact that he had gone forth to his destiny for their protection. Awaking from his stupefaction, he wants to know whether the sacrifice has fulfilled its purpose.

Another version of this scene has come to light in the Turfan fragment M 7:

Shake off the drunkenness in which thou hast slumbered,

awake and behold me!

Good tidings to thee from the world of joy

from which I am sent for thy sake.

And he answered him who is without suffering:

I am I, the son of the mild ones.

Mingled am I and lamentation I see.

Lead me out of the embracement of death.

[The messenger speaks:]

Power and prosperity of the Living

unto thee from thy home!

Follow me, son of mildness,

set upon thy head the crown of light.32

Detached from the mythological context, we find the call addressed to the soul in general in another Turfan text, the so-called “Abridged Mass of the Dead.”

My soul, O most splendid one, . . . whither hast thou gone? Return again. Awake, soul of splendor, from the slumber of drunkenness into which thou hast fallen . . ., follow me to the place of the exalted earth where thou dwelledst from the beginning. . . .33

We pass to the Mandaean literature, where versions of the call of awakening are extremely numerous, addressed either to Adam (not identical with Primal Man) or to the indefinite number of the believers in the world. The symbolism connected with Adam will be dealt with later on; here we shall say merely that the biblical motif of his sleep in the Garden is turned into a symbol of the human condition in the world. A precise parallel to the Manichaean versions is the following passage.

They created the messenger and sent him to the head of the generations. He called with heavenly voice into the turmoil of the worlds. At the messenger’s call Adam, who lay there, awoke . . . and went to meet the messenger: “Come in peace, thou messenger, envoy of the Life, who hast come from the house of the Father. How firmly planted in its place is the dear fair Life! And how sits here my dark form in lamentation!” Then replied the messenger: “. . . All remembered thee with love and . . . sent me to thee. I have come and will instruct thee, Adam, and release thee out of this world. Hearken and hear and be instructed, and rise up victorious to the place of light.”

(I 57)

The instruction mentioned here is frequently included in the call as the explication of the command “Sleep not,” and sometimes grows into lengthy moral homilies which monopolize the whole content of the call and by their sheer extent make of the basic situation simply a literary fiction.

An Uthra calls from without and instructs Adam the man. He speaks unto Adam: “Slumber not nor sleep, and forget not that with which thy Lord hath charged thee. Be not a son of the house, and be not called a sinner in the Tibil. Love not pleasant-smelling garlands and take not pleasure in a fair woman. . . . Love not lust nor deceiving shadows. . . . At thy going out and thy coming in see that thou forget not thy Lord [etc., etc.]. . . . Adam, behold the world, that it is a thing wholly without substance, . . . in which thou must place no trust. The scales stand prepared, and of thousands they choose one. . . . Scented garlands fade, and the beauty of woman becomes as if it had never been. . . . All works pass away, take their end and are as if they had never been.” 34

Sometimes the call of awakening is immediately connected with the summons to leave the world: it is at the same time the message of death, and is then followed by the ascent of the soul, as in the following example.

The savior approached, stood at Adam’s pillow, and awakened him from his sleep. “Arise, arise, Adam, put off thy stinking body, thy garment of clay, the fetter, the bond . . . for thy time is come, thy measure is full, to depart from this world. . . .”

(G 430)

Sometimes the whole content of the call is concentrated in the one admonition to be watchful of oneself:

I sent a call out into the world: Let every man be watchful of himself. Whosoever is watchful of himself shall be saved from the devouring fire.

(G 58)

The typical formula of awakening has passed also into the New Testament, where it occurs in Eph. 5:14 as an anonymous quotation:

Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.

In conclusion we quote from the Poimandres   the Hellenistic rendering of the call of awakening, which has become detached from the myth and is used as a stylistic device of religious-ethical exhortation.

O ye people, earthborn men, who have abandoned yourselves to drunkenness and sleep and to ignorance of God—become sober! cease from your intoxication, from the enchantment of irrational sleep! . . . Why, O earthborn men, have ye given yourselves over to death, being vested with power to partake in immortality? Change your ways, ye fellow-travellers of error and companions of ignorance; turn ye away from the dark light [i.e., of the cosmos], take part in immortality and forsake corruption.35

(C.H. I. 27 f.) [Hans Jonas  ]