Pearls

 

     The charm of the pearl is its combination of the sensuality of an iridescent nacreous surface with the abstract Platonic perfection of a perfectly spherical form.  The minute ridges on its surface, while discernible to the eye only as a subtle shimmer, suggest the myriad phenomena of the world of experience, marvelously compacted, far smaller than a crystal ball, until it is capable of representing everything that is, like the universe just before the Big Bang or Borges’ “The Aleph.” 

     The rarity and aesthetic appeal of pearls led to their use as a figure of speech for anything of high value, and, in particular, words that are wise and beautiful.  In the King James version a passage in Job (28:18) declares wisdom to be preferable even to pearls, but scholarship has decided that this is in fact a reference to crystal.  In the Greek Testament, though, the pearl is repeatedly used, most notably perhaps in the parable of the “pearl of great price” (Matthew 13:46) signifying salvation or enlightenment, while non-metaphorical pearls are condemned as a sign of vicious luxury (as in I Timothy 2:9).  In a similar bipolar opposition, Revelation employs pearls first as adornments on the Whore of Babylon (17:4 18:12) and then as part of paradise’s décor, the well-known “pearly gates” (21:21).

     The “Hymn of the Pearl,” contained within the extra-canonical Gospel of Thomas describes a heroic quest for an Egyptian pearl signifying perfect wisdom that the seeker must snatch it from a threatening guardian serpent, the sort of dragon guarding treasure that appears in stories like those of Hercules, Jason, Beowulf, and Fafnir.  In Chinese lore the Fuzanglong watches over riches but particularly prizes a certain pearl as the most precious of things.  The hero of the “Hymn” succeeds in charming tfhe monster into sleep by “Chanting o’er him the Name of my Father, The Name of our Second, [my Brother], And [Name] of my Mother, the East-Queen”  (in the translation by G.R.S. Mead from The Hymn of the Robe of Glory: Echoes from the Gnosis).

     Connotations both of preciousness and of wicked arrogant wealth operate in a story told by Pliny the Elder around the same time as the “Hymn.”  In his Natural History (9.58) he says that Cleopatra wagered Antony that she could expend the fabulous sum of ten million sesterces in a single meal.   She succeeds by dissolving one of the two largest pearls in the world in vinegar and downing it, though the second is saved by Lucius Plancus, who declares Antony “defeated” (victus) in the bet, according to Pliny, an ill omen prefiguring his defeat by Octavianus.  The reader is aware, too, of Cleopatra’s suicide a short time after such sumptuous entertainments.  Pliny goes on to describe Romans who imitated Cleopatra’s grandly wasteful act.  In Caligula the gesture reached its epigone, when the emperor bedecked his horse Incitatus (the one he meant to make a consul) with pearls.  Here such ornaments are the extreme of luxury and conspicuous consumption. 

     In the lovely medieval poem called Pearl (Perle) the speaker laments his loss of a pearl, apparently identified with a deceased daughter, though the image’s associations remain fluid.  Through the polysemous subtleties of allegory, often mistaken for a reductive code, this pearl is at once a gem, a two-year-old, a grown woman, and anyone’s soul, and the perfection of paradise.  The exquisite charm of the pearl itself is detailed in one of the most well-structured and elaborately crafted poems of the late Middle Ages.  Every line of Pearl sings with rhymes, concatenations, and other more or less irregular forms of verbal music.

     This pearl, in female form but trailing associations with the highest human and spiritual values,  appears in a dream.  He plunges into the river that separates him from his “privy perle wythouten spot” only to be awakened by the “prince” of the other world, whereupon he can only praise God and accept for the present his loss with the consolation of an ultimately just divine order.  The poem’s tightly developed and subtle formulation presents the pearl as the lovely lost daughter and thus all the losses inevitable in all the ephemeral joys of the sublunary world while at the same time dialectically suggesting the eternal joys of things as they are, a perfect world order guaranteed by a loving creator. 

     A poem of disputed authorship in The Passionate Pilgrim uses very much the same comparison, calling a lady who died young a “bright orient pearl, alack, too timely shaded!” (132)  More certainly Shakespearean usage forms a semiotic pattern with considerably less focus and less assurance, though in the end the same bipolar opposition is implied.  The primary association of pearls with wealth and luxury appears a good many times, including the suggestion of the pomp and power of kingship in Henry V which mentions after crown and scepter “the intertissued robe of gold and pearl” (IV, 1, l. 271).  Pearls in Shakespeare are often a figure of human beauty as in the claim “Black men are pearls in beauteous ladies' eyes.” “But pearls are fair, and the old saying is,/Black men are pearls in beauteous ladies’ eyes.” (Two Gentlemen of Verona V, 2, 2062-3)

     Surely there is a sinister omen in the description of “pearly sweat, resembling dew of night” (Rape of Lucrece, 463) on Lucrece’s hands as she is admired, yet unknowing, by her attacker.  Pearls are often linked to the dead, as in Ariel’s song “Full fathom five thy father lies” in which bones are of coral and “Those are pearls that were his eyes” (Tempest I, 2, 562).  A similar vision informs Clarence’s frightening premonitory dream of “a thousand men that fishes gnawed upon” along with gold, jewels, and pearls of which “some lay in dead men's skulls”, (Richard III I, 4, ll. 26, 30)

     This ambiguity is everywhere in Shakespeare.  Cordelia’s tears are likened to pearls in Lear (IV, 3) as are Arthur’s in King John (II, 1).  In Two Gentlemen of Verona (V, 2) Proteus says that “Black men are pearls in beauteous ladies' eyes,” provoking Julia to say aside “'Tis true; such pearls as put out ladies' eyes,” which ostensibly refers to her closing her eyes to avoid the sight, though the undertones are more sinister.  And, of course, to his immense and instant regret Othello “threw a pearl away/ richer than all his tribe” (V, 2).

     The symbolism of pearls can appear in unlikely places.  Joe Hill’s song “The White Slave” employs the association with female beauty to lament the downfall of “one little girl, fair as a pearl” whose poverty leads her to a miserable and unhealthy life of prostitution.  “Same little girl, no more a pearl.”  Perhaps a similar sense of vulnerable beauty led to Janis Joplin’s being called Pearl. 

     The association of pearls with excellence in verbal practice (“pearls of wisdom,” “pearls before swine”) can survive in unlikely surroundings.  When I worked as librarian in a prison, one of the most popular volumes in the collection, so attractive it had to be kept behind the counter, only to be brought out and lent by special request.  The book, Pearls of Love by Ara John Movsesian, subtitled How to Write Love Letters and Love Poems, was a collection of little lyrical bits for prisoners to include in their letters to wives and lovers. 

     A. E. Housman, whose poetry can be achingly emotional, connected pearls with art in an image he found to correspond to his own experience.

"I think that the production of poetry, in its first stage, is less an active than a passive and involuntary process . . . I should call it a secretion; whether a natural secretion, like turpentine in the fir, or a morbid secretion, like the pearl in the oyster. I think that my own case, though I may not deal with the material so cleverly as the oyster does, is the latter; because I have seldom written poetry unless I was rather out of health, and the experience, though pleasurable, was generally agitating and exhausting."

         A.  E. Housman, “The Name and Nature of Poetry,”

     Housman is insightful enough to see beyond his view of his own case and include the possibility that for some the poetic secretion may be more “natural.”  With becoming wit and modesty, he suggests that poetry (or at least its inspiration) just comes to him uninvited, and that its coming into being is to him more a trial than a pleasure.  He nicely exploits the feeling of serendipity or even of grace that accompanies creation, while implying that the point is to eliminate an irritation in the mind just as the oyster combats a particle of sand in the intimate realm of the shell.  Perhaps the often difficult lives of artists provide evidence for the “morbidity” of the artistic sensibility.  Perhaps people who feel no contradictions produce no art.  The work of art might be conceived as the relic of a frustration, neurosis, or anxiety overcome and integrated into the self, not eliminated but mysteriously transformed.  Some will, or must, feel irresistibly the drive to make something like a pearl, round and mysterious, and beautiful, and just imperfect enough to be real. 

A Survey of Early Christian Heresies

 

I approach this topic neither as an ecclesiastical historian nor as a theologian, but as a literary critic.  Whether a given human belief is objectively “true,” it is always meaningful as an image, a symbol, a shadowing forth of character and desire.  In the ferment of the early centuries of Christianity, as the new belief supplanted ancient practices, a range of opinion blossomed, fascinating both as speculation and as spectacle.  In the mere listing of the names of heretical schools I find an incantatory power.  A romance, too, lingers about the ghosts of a thousand lost causes.  May this minimal survey summon a whiff of such old and wandering spirits momentarily reanimated, perhaps, by the reader’s sympathetic mind!

 

      Theological essays find few readers today even among believers.  The issues that once aroused fierce passions, energetic contentions, and, at times, persecution and war, seem to make little difference in the contemporary world.  As increasing numbers abandon organized religion altogether, the differences among sects or even belief systems seem less significant than what they share.  An expanded sense of “many mansions” informs the more liberal even among many whose creeds demand exclusivity.  The details of belief that once meant everything now seem all but inconsequential.

     In the Christian church’s early centuries, before the great councils that formed an orthodoxy of settled dogma, great ferment surrounded theological issues.  The word heresy is derived from αἵρεσις, meaning “choice” or “thing chosen,” originally with no anathema attached.  In the beginning before the enforcement of uniformity in the Christian community there was a broad spectrum of views from which to select that most fitting to the devotee’s spiritual needs,  Due to relentless persecution by those espousing majority views, most of the writing by these early heretics have vanished and their views can only be reconstructed with the aid of the hostile arguments of their opponents, most significantly Irenaeus in the second century and Epiphanius two hundred years later. 

     Amid the confusing proliferation of beliefs during this period, several common areas of controversy emerged.  Gnostics at first questioned the authority of the god of the Hebrew scriptures.  The everlasting punishments of hell remained a minority opinion for centuries.  For half a millennium and more clerics debated the enigmatic concept of the Trinity and, in particular, the exact nature of Christ.

    Most dramatically transgressing the orthodoxy that eventually coalesced were the sects labeled Gnostic.  Some were associated with Judaism, some with Christianity, and some with paganism, yet the common name may be justified by certain characteristics.  In the gnostic view, more dualistic than Christianity, the material world is inherently sinful, the creation not of the Supreme Being but of a demiurge.   The devotee’s goal is enlightenment and passions are considered obstacles to knowledge rather than sins.  Neoplatonism contributed substantially to gnostic cosmologies and the movement tended to veer (like Tibetan Buddhism) toward the esoteric and the mystical, including the construction of layers of mystical beings between humanity and the true god.

     Among the gnostic peculiarities was a particular interest in Seth, Adam and Eve’s third son, who was regarded as a forerunner of Christ and was made a model of wisdom and a culture hero, responsible, according to Josephus, for many inventions and discoveries.  The gnostics were prone to the elaboration of complex cosmological schemes unsupported by Hebrew scripture.  In the Apocryphon of John attributed to the apostle (2^nd c. C.E.) Ultimate Reality is the Monad, an utterly transcendent deity, who produces as a “first thought” an Aeon, or emanation of the divine, a female (or sometimes androgynous) entity called Barbelo.  A series of further Aeons are then created, one of whom, Sophia of Epinoia (“wisdom of thought or insight”) goes rogue, creating a demiurge called Yaltabaoth without the Monad’s oversight.  Sophia realizes the transgressive character of Yaltabaoth and conceals its existence, thus causing the created world to be ignorant of its source the Monad. 

     Related sects propounded a variety of such creative systems.  The Archontics and Borborites imagined eight archon-governed heavens; the seventh ruled by Sabaoth, the Hebrew god whom they depicted as an ass or a hog.  According to Epiphanius they used menstrual blood and semen in their eucharist. 

     The significance of similar trends in early Christian thought is apparent in the fact that the gnostic theologian Valentinus was, according to Tertullian, at one time considered for the position of bishop.   His numerous followers opposed the efforts of their opponents to expel them from Christian communities.  Valentinus claimed to be transmitting an esoteric doctrine that had passed from Paul the Apostle through Theudas to him.  Valentinus described the Aeons and emanations and the world’s fall through the action of Sophia, importing Platonic terms to distinguish spiritual and material worlds. 

     The Gospel of Truth is a Valentinian apocryphal text that attributes the creation to the Aeons and characterizes Christ’s crucifixion as Error’s attempt to maintain ignorance.  The book also contains an exposition of the esoteric name of Christ, an example of the numerology and esoteric analysis of letters that became common in later Gnosticism.  The Marcosians, for instance, built on earlier Hebrew and Pythagorean systems to investigate the mystic meaning of numbers, using, in particular, the method of isopsephy, adding the figures associated with the letters of a word to get a significant sum.  A student of Valentinus named Colarbasus maintained that study of the esoteric implications of the Greek alphabet could reveal all truth. 

     Basilides led another second century gnostic cult which is said to have followed the Pythagoreans (and more distant Hindus and Buddhists) in proposing metempsychosis.  Like other gnostics Basilides considered that salvation was a matter of knowledge rather than faith, and that souls advanced through a series of lives.  Thus his followers thought that Christian martyrs were simply working out the bad karma of an earlier life and were thus unworthy of praise.   

    Similar ideas were also circulating under the name of Marcion of Sinope, a second century evangelist who claimed to be the transmitter of the doctrines of St. Paul whom he considered the only true apostle.  Having been taught by a certain Cerdo, a follower of Simon Magus (who was himself said to fly).  Marcion, too, distinguished a supreme being associated with Christ’s unbounded love from a lesser creator called Yahweh by the Jews ruling the temporal world.  Marcion produced a book, the Antitheses, which sought to demonstrate the incompatibility of the two by contrasting parallel passages of Hebrew and Greek scriptures.  For him Christ was fully divine and his appearance before people was an illusion, a view called Docetism.  For a considerable time Marcionite congregations spread and flourished, for a time rivaling the orthodox.

     Jewish texts prior to a few hundred years B. C. E. promise no afterlife; the strongest hints of such a notion are in Daniel, a book atypical in language and content.  Many early Christians expected the Apocalypse to overtake the world at any moment, rendering any individual death incidental, but passages such as “And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal” (Matthew 25:46) clearly anticipate individual judgement resulting in rewards or retribution.   According to a recent study (Bart Ehrman’s Heaven And Hell: A History Of The Afterlife), the idea of heaven and hell, absent in mainstream Jewish thought in which body and soul were identified and the end of one implied the end of the other, actually derived from Greek influence.  

     The fact is that belief in eternal punishment after death was a minority opinion in early Christianity.  For influential theologians such as Origen, Clement of Alexandria, and Gregory of Nyssa hell was a temporary purgation which purified the soul prior to its entry into heaven.  Of the six major schools of thought in early Christianity, four (those centered in Alexandria, Antioch, Caesarea, and Edessa) were universalist, that is, they believed in the ultimate salvation of every soul.  This belief was founded on passages such as “For the Lord will not cast off for ever” (Lamentations 3:31) and “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” (1 Corinthians 15:22)  The dogma of a permanent hell did not appear until the pseudo-Athanasian Creed and universalism is not condemned until the Second Council of Constantinople in 533 C. E.   Belief in universal salvation (or apokatastasis) persisted, for instance in the work of St. Isaac the Syrian during the 7^th century and never really vanished in spite of the church’s opposition, resulting in the nineteenth century founding of the American Universalist Church. 

     The most tangled and perplexing disputes arose over the character of the Trinity and in particular the nature of Christ.  Those defending what came to be orthodox interpretations had to confront two paradoxes: first, the claim that Christianity is monotheistic while recognizing three divine persons, and, second, the claim that Christ is both god and human at the same time.  A great range of interpretations sought to make sense of this unique and ungainly concept.  A good many gods had been thought to appear in human form while remaining fully gods, a sort of disguise that in Christianity became the heresy of Docetism, the notion that Christ on earth was a sort of illusion, only appearing to be like other people while in fact omnipotent and unlimited.  On the other hand, the Audians thought that not Christ alone but god himself had a physical human form and thus were also called Anthropomorphites. 

     The problems of this complex of conundrums were evaded by those called Monarchianists who urged the sole power of God the Father.  Some asserted an Adoptionist view (also called psilanthropist), claiming that Christ was a virtuous mortal who had been selected by God as his agent.  Among these were the vegetarian Ebionites and the Valentinian gnostics who followed Theodotus’ teaching that, while Christ was born of a virgin, he had received the Holy Spirit only at the time of his baptism and had become wholly divine only upon his resurrection.    Other Monarchianists favored the Modalism of Sabellius who argued that God was a single person and that the three “persons” are in fact only three “modes,” aspects or roles of one agent.  As this view maintains Christ’s total divinity, he cannot have suffered or died as people do. 

     The most influential heretic who privileged God the Father over Christ was Arius, a writer from Cyrenaica (today Libya) who thought that Christ had not always existed and does not share the essence or nature of God the Father but is instead one of his works.  This group itself split into a more moderate faction, sometimes labeled semi-Arians, that described Christ’s nature as “similar” to God the Father or “homoiousian” and those who maintained that there was no likeness, the Anomoeans (also called Heterousians).  Varieties of Arianism were adopted by the Germanic tribes and persisted until the late seventh century. 

     In the fourth century Bishop Macedonius of Constantinople argued against the divinity of the Holy Spirit, saying that it had been created by the Son.  The supporters of this view were called Pneumatomachi, “those who battle the spirit” in the Hellespont area and Tropici in Egypt. 

     Monophysites for whom Christ had only a single divine nature lasted far longer, indeed into the present day (as the Miaphysites of the Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopian, and Syrian Orthodox churches).    So-called “real” Monophysites adhered to the teaching of Eutyches of Constantinople that Christ’s unitary nature combined human and divine, but the divine so dominated as to absorb or transmute the human element.  Some, favoring the view of Severus the Great that while Christ’s body was corruptible, he nonetheless had a single nature, were known as “verbal” Monophysites.  Endless regional political relationships as well as philosophical hair-splitting resulted in the Acephali, the Agnoetae, the Aphthartodocetae, the Apollinarians.  In the sixth century Monophysitism dominated the eastern empire under the patronage of Justinian’s wife Theodora though the emperor himself was a Chalcedonian. 

     Though the Sabellians, Monarchians and Pneumatomachoi considered the orthodox Trinitarians to be in fact “Tritheists,” believing in three gods (a view common among Muslims and Jews today), at the Council of Chalcedon the Homoousians, those for whom God and Christ had the same essence, won the day, defeating Monophysitism, Modalism, Arianism, and Homoiousianism, and defining acceptable belief on the issue until the Reformation.

     This unsystematic overview omits more than it contains.  There were those who welcomed new prophets, for instance, such as the followers of Montanus and his female sybils, called Cataphrygians, whose activities included ecstatic gatherings.  The Ascitae, for instance, danced around burst wine-skins, recalling practices of Pentecostals, Shakers, and Hasidim. 

     Outsiders of all sorts are often accused of antinomianism and especially with sexual transgressions, Such claims are often made with little or no evidence, yet unconventional sexual practices (sometimes exploitative) are common among cults.  Moderns will never know, for instance whether the Nicolaitians (who are actually mentioned in the Christian testament) indeed practiced promiscuity.  Epiphanius may have been maligning Deacon Nicolas when he quoted him as saying "Unless one copulates every day, he cannot have eternal life." Did the Carpocratians and the Phibionites also practice free love?  Today the  truth is obscure, impossibly jumbled with polemical propaganda. 

     The corpus of pseudepigrapha has increased significantly even in the last century.  The Gospel of Thomas, in which Christ dances with his followers like Krishna with the gopis, had long attracted attention.    The Gospel of Mary, a second century text, narrates the exchanges of a certain Mary, variously identified as the Mother of Christ, as Christ’s sister, and as Mary Magdelene, with skeptical disciples including Peter and Andrew.  In the Sethian gnostic Gospel of Judas it appears Judas is the sole confidant of Christ to whom he conveys an esoteric message: that liberation is not enabled by his death which, like animal sacrifice and the “cannibalistic” Eucharist, is abhorrent to a benevolent deity, but is rather available within each soul through contemplative practices.   

     Many have seen a kind of philosophia perennis underlying religious traditions in widely separated  parts of the world, particularly in the records of mystics.  Yet spiritual experience is not independent of individual sensibility and even taste.  Each heretical opinion reflects not so much a hermeneutic approach to scriptural authority as a style of approach to the holy.

     The gnostics begin with revulsion, conceiving of the creation as a thing of evil, gone wrong from the start, requiring the most rigorous efforts to overcome while promising a potential reward in the end of enlightenment.   The Aeons and the rest of the imagined cosmic machinery seem like baroque, over-elaborate decoration similar to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite dreaming up nine orders of angels or the fourteen  worlds of the Puranas and the Atharva Veda. 

     Clearly those who reject the notion that eternal punishment awaits the unrighteous after death are motivated by their loving kindness, which cannot conceive of an utterly punitive deity.

     The Christological disputes arise from subjective spiritual experience.  In Christianity the equivalent of enlightenment is to locate in oneself what George Fox called “that of God in every man.”  Some, such as Meister Eckhart, find at times what feels like a total identification.  For others the divine remains largely Other, to be propitiated with prescribed ceremony.  These opposed extremes allow as well countless intermediate positions. 

     Enforcement of orthodoxy has mercifully become far less common than it once was, yet the living ferment of religious experience within Christianity at any rate seems torpid today, focused mainly on political issues of ethics.  The breadth of spiritual choice, meanwhile, has enlarged with the popularity of New Age and exotic beliefs, and the earnest adoption of other people’s rituals.  Perhaps the most reasonable of arguments for the existence of god, the argument from desire, maintains that since all people everywhere seek god, it would be absurd if no such thing exists.  Yet the splitting of sects in every tradition indicates that a conviction of Ultimate Reality is only a beginning of a definition, not of the divine in itself, but of the individual’s spiritual desire.