(1) Jesus said, “This heaven will pass away, and the one above it will pass away. (2) The dead are not alive, and the living will not die. (3) During the days when you ate what is dead, you made it alive. When you are in the light, what will you do? (4) On the day when you were one, you became two. But when you become two, what will you do?”
— Thomas 11 (NHS)
What will you do? That’s the generic ethical-pragmatic question. As usual in the Gospel of Thomas, we’re not given much context for it here, so let’s try constructing one that will bring out its pragmatic implications.
In the synoptic gospels (Matthew 24:35, Mark 13:31, Luke 21: 33), Jesus says ‘Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words (λόγοι) will not pass away.’ The first sentence of Thomas 11, on the other hand, offers a hierarchy of heavens that will pass away, but no eternal logos. If we put a semiotic spin on this, it could be saying that living semiosis (like the evolution of life) continues into the indefinite future, as every sign falls behind, passing the torch of meaning to its interpretant. The passing away of determinate signs, or of ‘heavens’ as inhabited meaning spaces, is the pressing on of theoretical inquiry toward an ideal Truth, or in practice, living the time toward the yet-undetermined future. All signs will pass away, but there is no life without semiosis.
In her explanation of part 3 of this logion, DeConick (2007a, 79) quotes from Hippolytus a variant saying which ‘may, in fact, represent an earlier version of L. 11.3 than the Coptic translation’: ‘If you ate dead things and made them living, what will you do if you eat living things?’
When you consume what is dead as food, you incorporate it into a living system, and thus ‘make it alive.’ What would it mean, pragmatically, to consume what is alive? You do this, in a sense, when you “consume” living signs to inform the system which guides your practice. What you do next is the energetic interpretant of those signs, and you live ‘in the light’ (or in the ‘heaven’) of this interpretant – until it in turn determines another interpretant, ‘the one above it’ in the semiosic process, which will pass away in its turn, ad infinitum (as Peirce would say). In terms specific to early Christian practice, the signs would be the sacraments of baptism, anointing, and especially the eucharist, ‘eating the living body of Jesus’ (DeConick 79), which act as a purifying ‘light.’
The contrast between eating the dead and eating the living is further developed in the Gospel of Philip, which follows Thomas in Codex II of the Nag Hammadi Library. Here it is Truth which Jesus brought to this world as lifegiving food, replacing the tree of knowledge (‘the law’) which brought death with a new tree of knowledge which ‘has brought people back to life.’
This world eats corpses, and everything eaten in this world also dies. Truth eats life, and no one nourished by [truth] will die. Jesus came from that realm and brought food from there, and he gave [life] to all who wanted it, that they might not die.
[God planted] a garden, and humans [lived in the] garden. There are some [who dwell] with… God…. This garden [is where] it will be said to me, “…[ eat] this and do not eat that, [as you] wish.” This is where I shall eat everything, where the tree of knowledge is. That tree killed Adam, but here the tree of knowledge has brought people back to life. That tree was the law. It can give knowledge of good and evil, but it neither freed Adam from evil nor made him good, and it brought death to those who ate of it. For when it was said, “Eat this and do not eat that,” death began.— Gospel of Philip 73, 19 – 74, 12 (NHS)
As for Part 4 of Thomas 11, ‘becoming two’ when you were originally one can surely be taken as a reference to the Fall (from unity into division). Many commentators associate this with the division of the sexes in the Garden of Eden, and DeConick argues that a ‘return to the prelapsarian condition of singleness’ is enacted through celibacy. (This is a classic example of polyversity, since other texts of the time take marriage, or the consummation of marriage, as a primary symbol of reunion!) A pragmatistic interpretation (less symbolic but more general) could take ‘becoming two’ as “being of two minds” about what to do in some situation, i.e. having to make some practical choice. What will you do? You will have to decide, and then your practice becomes a conscious practice. This adds another layer, another dimension (another ‘heaven’?) to living semiosis.
In this part of Thomas, at least, Jesus seems to value questions over answers. The answer killeth, but the question giveth life. The tone here bears a certain resemblance to that of Dogen‘s dharma talks, and so does the emphasis on impermanence, on becoming, on being-time (Dogen’s ‘uji’).
When one phrase or one verse permeates your body and mind, it becomes a seed for illumination for limitless kalpas, and this brings you to unsurpassable enlightenment. When one dharma or one wholesome action permeates your body and mind, it is also like this. Moment by moment a thought appears and disappears without abiding. Moment by moment a body appears and disappears without abiding. Yet the power of practice always matures.
— Dogen (Tanahashi 2000, 83)