But perhaps God needs the longing, wherever else should it dwell....
Nelly Sachs
For the embodied persona of an ostensibly loving God, the risen Jesus of John's gospel seems to be oddly withholding. By various means, he reveals himself to all of his disciples—even to the famously dubious Thomas, who has to put his hand into Jesus's wounds before he is willing to believe (20:1-27). The whole process of revelation, however, is set into motion by Mary Magdalene, who first brings Simon and Peter to see the empty tomb and later tells all the other disciples that Jesus has returned. It might reasonably follow that she is especially well treated, that she gets to experience more of Jesus than anyone else does. But the story unfolds quite differently.
In each canonical gospel, Mary is first at the empty tomb, alone or with other women. In John's version, she weeps at Jesus's absence. Seeing a man standing nearby, she asks him if he has taken the body (and if so, if he will take her to it). It is only after he speaks that she recognizes him as the one she seeks. It is here that Jesus tells her noli me tangere, or in the Greek of the gospel, me mou haptou—"stop holding onto me," or "stop clinging to me" (20:13-17). Mary seems to be the only one among Jesus's followers who is rebuked, even rejected, by her risen Lord. At the same time, she is the one chosen to reveal the resurrection, at first without and then with knowledge of it (only Luke does not describe her as a messenger to the rest of the disciples). She is the one who knows the Word by his words, the first both to see and to hear him. She is the one for whom the play of knowing and desiring requires the reminder to let go, understanding that Christ is present makes her want to hold on. And though the sources do not become part of the orthodox canon, Christian texts from Nag Hammadi tell us that Jesus loved her best of all.[1]What do we make of such peculiar love?
I have argued elsewhere that the revelations to Mary and the disciples give each follower just enough evidence to sustain the desire for more.[2]The balance between a level of frustration that would simply turn them away and the complete satiation that would end their desire is held in each case, more in tension than in stillness. There is something theologically essential, I think, in this pull. Between the voice that must be heard and the hand that cannot grasp is the difference between divinity as stasis and as infinite, mobile possibility; between truth as fixity beyond the knower and as slipping beyond the knowing that it nonetheless pulls after it. If, as John also declares, "in the beginning was the Word (Logos)" (1:1), a Word identified with God, then we do not begin where we can hold on. Words slip by; they show their meaning, as Augustine of Hippo will say, only after they fall silent.[3]Logos, of course, is "principle" too, suggestive of a more sturdily stable origin story. But what if not holding on is a means of listening that can tell us as well how to see, how to know, how to love? To suggest that it might be, I want to frame the story of Mary's response with two other tales of divine denial, one earlier and one later, one Jewish and one Valentinian, both attuned the truths that aren't still, both maintaining that slight crucial distance between lover and divinity.
The older instance comes from the book of Exodus in the Hebrew Bible. Here the object of love and rejection is Moses, who has led his people out of Egypt. Ostensibly headed for a divinely promised new home, the people find themselves displaced, wandering through inhospitable land for forty years. They are understandably angry with God and Moses both. It hardly helps that this God remains an abstraction, refusing to present himself to the senses, appearing at most as a column of cloud with which Moses alone converses (33:7-11). The people's frustration spills over when Moses ascends Mt. Sinai, where he will spend many days alone with God. During this time, God engraves his commandments onto stone tablets with his own finger. Below them, the rest of the people work with Moses's brother Aaron to create a calf out of gold, a much more satisfying object of worship, one that can be seen and touched and even held on to (31:18-32:8). When Moses's anger at the sight of the calf leads him to smash the tablets, he must go back up the mountain, once more confer with God, and write down the commandments himself (33:1-28).
Though Moses seems sturdier in his faith than the rest of his group, he asks if on this second ascent he might be granted a favor--“Please, show me Your glory!” (33:18) God qualifies his assent, because the sight of the divine face is fatal for humans. Instead, Moses is to stand on a rock, "and … I will put you in the cleft of the rock and cover you with My hand until I have passed by.Then I will take My hand away and you shall see My back, but My face shall not be seen” (33:22-23).
Though there is much to be said of the multiple refusals of sight here, we might also notice the strange work of God's hand. That hand inscribes words on stone, offering them with maximum stability. But those tablets are smashed before they can be read. Even for Moses, they were a reminder of commandments he had already heard from God (31:18). When Moses finally presents the people with the tablets, the laws have been inscribed by his merely human hand, though God initially says that he himself will rewrite them (34:1; 34:27-28). When Moses wishes to see the glory with whom he speaks, God's hand obscures his vision as well. Even God's back can be viewed only transiently. To keep his sight to a brief passage, God's hand covers over Moses's seeing, hides knowledge from him. No look at God or his words may linger.
The hand that first inscribed the covenantal tablets would surely be something remarkable to see, and still more to hold. Grasping the hand, even from within a rock cleft, might even help Moses to grasp what that hand has written, and to make sense of the painfully bizarre and puzzling events of the exile into which, on the Lord's own say-so, he has led all the people who trusted him. But God uses his hand instead to preserve the uncertainty. So Mary might have held on to Jesus, with her hands and perhaps by his, were she not instructed against it. Jesus offers Mary his words, but refuses her grasp. Nothing by the Lord's hand lasts for Moses, or can be offered as proof and reassurance to his skeptical and obstinate people. God offers Moses a hand not to grasp, not to lead him out of the wilderness or even the rock, but to keep him from knowing more than knowledge can hold. Divinity dwells in passing. It says not to hold on.
By the time that the gospel of John is written, newly emerging Christianity is already dividing itself. Within very few centuries, an especially marked division splits what will become orthodoxy, with its emphasis on a divine bodily sacrifice, from the groups labelled gnostic, which emphasize redemptive knowledge. Early heresiologists, including Irenaeus and Tertullian, are especially hostile to the followers of Valentinus, perhaps because they are so nearly "orthodox," or perhaps because their ideas are widely appealing. Among these ideas, knowledge is not the only redemptive value. Desire is accorded a more fundamental and more urgent role than it has elsewhere—not just in questions of resurrection and redemption, but in the beginning too, in the stories of creation (though the structure of Valentinian myths makes it difficult to keep these stages strictly distinct). The God, the beloved, and the pulling away are all more abstract and poetically mythical here than in our other stories, but the movements of knowing and desiring are just as vivid.
Like the creative Logos in John's gospel, through whom all things are made (1:3), here all things are made through Limit, a power of the divine Son who is the first emergent from the Father (a name given to the source of all, despite its ambiguous androgyny). Limit's role is at once mythopoetically complex and exactly as we might expect. It does the work of forming and creating by making edges—essential both to the existence of distinct things and, as Anne Carson has pointed out, to the movement of desire.[4]
Early in the creative process, the paired entities called Aeons emerge and are delimited from the Father. The Tripartite Tractate explains that the Father “did not wish that they should know him, since he grants that he be conceived in such a way as to be sought for….”[5]The Aeon that is Wisdom, however, loves the unknowable source so much, and is so curious about it, that she wants to meet with it, to know it—with disregard for Limit. It by Limit, however, that she exists, that she is anything other than the source. Only Limit keeps her from resorption into the Father.[6] To offset the strength of her desire, Limit sets Wisdom apart by an additional boundary.
Though Wisdom is at first more lover than beloved, she becomes especially loved as the partner of the Savior, with whom she will shape and redeem the material world that she creates. And she is especially pushed out: one limit having nearly yielded to her force, she is doubly cut away before she begins to create. Wisdom is cut off not as a punishment, but so that she can continue both to exist and, like the other Aeons, to want. After she has paired and created with the Savior, she can rejoin the other Aeons, but must remain across the Limit from the Father. It is perhaps appropriate that whether the material world is good or not is ambiguous and variable with Valentinian and gnostic texts: love may sometimes move very like rejection.
Wisdom recklessly seeks fusion and dissolution, as if she could satisfy herself even as she loses herself. Mary does not seek fusion, but to hold too tightly will stop her movement and deaden her desire. Reading the midrashim on Exodus, Avivah Zornberg sees Moses's desire to view God as "at the same time the desire … to be transformed by His gaze." She cites Elliot Wolfson, who describes the wish “not only to see the face of God but to become that very face in the visual confrontation.”[7]But instead, Zornberg writes, Moses "experiences God only by indirection … he must accept a distance, a difference. … [T]he only union possible is in relationship, which means separateness.”[8] Desire demands edges, and divinity demands desire—not selfishly, but as the way to sustain the existence of what it loves. Neither Moses, nor Mary, nor Wisdom can grasp the beloved.
Each of these stories reads as a narrative of divine arrogance or impatience, of a God too (self-) important to be held onto by a woman, to be face to face with an ill-tempered man, to be known by an imperfect Wisdom. But they are also stories of an existence that can only be sustained by a move that sustains desire. In fact, they suggest that all divine making, with its necessary separation, is making for desire. To keep the divine from being-grasped is not simply a matter of a being that remains superior, like the gods who worry in the book of Genesis about the humans who have eaten from the tree of knowledge—"see, the man has become like one of us" (3:22). Not-grasping allows just enough knowing to sustain desire, to remain other than the ungrasped divinity, but this separation is what it is to be; this desire is what it is to live; this knowledge is what it is to wonder. It is difficult to imagine a harder command, when the reach has come so close. It is hard to imagine a greater love, than to leave the beloved alone. Do not hold onto me frees Mary to tell of that love.
[1]See The Gospel of Philip 63, 30-64, 10; The Gospel of Mary 18, 10-20. Both in James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1990). Cf. The Gospel of Philip 59, 5-10.
[2]See Word Made Skin (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), esp. "Word Made Flesh," 25-48.
[3]Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 11.27.35.
[4]The catechetical Valentinian Exposition lists the powers of Limit as separation, strengthening, substance-producing, and form giving. Trans. Einar Thomassen and Marvin Meyer, in Meyer, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (New York: HarperCollins, 2008) 27,20–21. See Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), passim.
[5]Tripartite Tractate 71, 14–19, in Robinson. Cf. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, in Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1 (Buffalo: Christian Literature, 1885), 1.2.1; Tertullian, Against the Valentinians, chap. 9, trans. Mark T. Riley, 1971, at http://tertullian.org/articles/riley_adv_val/riley_00_index.htm.
[6]See Tertullian, Against the Valentinians, chap. 9; Irenaeus, 1.2.2.
[7] Avivah Zornberg, The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus (New York: Schocken, 2001), 441. Citing Elliot Wolfson, Through a Speculum that Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 392.
[8] Zornberg, 441.