Whose next?

The disciples said to Jesus, ‘We know that you will depart from us. Who is to be our leader?’ Jesus said to them, ‘Wherever you are, you are to go to James the righteous, for whose sake heaven and earth came into being.’

— Thomas 12 (Lambdin)

In the Gospel of Thomas, seekers after an authoritative leader do not usually get such a straightforward answer from Jesus; indeed the very next saying (Chapter 6) presents the role of Jesus himself as a mystery. Saying 13 also elevates Thomas, not James, to the highest position. Perhaps, as Helmut Koester suggested, Sayings 12 and 13 were meant to juxtapose James as an exoteric or ‘ecclesiastical’ authority figure with the esoteric understanding represented by Thomas (Valantasis 1997, 74). Or perhaps they are later accretions to the gospel, as DeConick (2007a) argues.

Saying 12 is the only mention of James in the Gospel of Thomas; he may be the brother of Jesus also mentioned in Matthew 13:55, Mark 6:3 and Galatians 1:19, but we can’t be sure of that. So perhaps we should read the description of him in this saying as the essential clue to what qualifies him (or anyone) as the right leader for a community in need of one: he is the one ‘for whose sake heaven and earth came into being.’ But this sounds very much like the Tsaddik or ‘Righteous One’ of the Jewish mystical tradition, or Traherne’s ‘sole heir of the whole world’, or the ‘king over the All’ of Thomas 3, which the seeker himself becomes after passing through dismay and astonishment. So for this group of disciples, James is to be the external sign of the primal person.

The bride and the bodhisattva

Arthur Green describes the Zohar, the great classic of Kabbalah, as

a lush garden of sacred eros, filled to overflowing with luxurious plantings of love between master and disciples; among the mystical companions themselves; between the souls of Israel and Shekhinah, God’s lovely bride; but most of all between the male and female elements that together make up the Godhead.

— Green (2004, 3)

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Coming through

Sioux healer Black Elk told John Neihardt (1932, Chapter 18):

… many I cured with the power that came through me. Of course it was not I who cured. It was the power from the outer world, and the visions and ceremonies had only made me like a hole through which the power could come to the two-leggeds. If I thought that I was doing it myself, the hole would close up and no power could come through. Then everything I could do would be foolish.

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Minding, not minding

The ability to concentrate attention – to be oblivious to distractions – is a sign of mind. Darwin, for instance, in his study of earthworms, noted that ‘Their sexual passion is strong enough to overcome for a time their dread of light,’ and took this as an indication of mental power:

When a worm is suddenly illuminated and dashes like a rabbit into its burrow – to use the expression employed by a friend – we are at first led to look at the action as a reflex one. … But the different effect which a light produced on different occasions, and especially the fact that a worm when in any way employed and in the intervals of such employment … is often regardless of light, are opposed to the view of the sudden withdrawal being a simple reflex action. With the higher animals, when close attention to some object leads to the disregard of the impressions which other objects must be producing on them, we attribute this to their attention being then absorbed; and attention implies the presence of a mind. Every sportsman knows that he can approach animals whilst they are grazing, fighting or courting, much more easily than at other times. The state, also, of the nervous system of the higher animals differs much at different times, for instance, a horse is much more readily startled at one time than at another. The comparison here implied between the actions of one of the higher animals and of one so low in the scale as an earth-worm, may appear far-fetched; for we thus attribute to the worm attention and some mental power, nevertheless I can see no reason to doubt the justice of the comparison.

— Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with observations of their habits (Project Gutenberg e-text vgmld10.txt)