The Nature of the Rulers invites an ideal audience to “wake up” to their true nature, as a spiritual soul living in a foreign land. The problem is that such an awakened person is still forced to live in this alien and meaningless world. I think the opening scenes in the Acts of Thomas represent two contrasting but complimentary remedies to this gnostic predicament, represented by two allegorical interpretations of the narrative of Thomas’s sending to India and the events at the wedding banquet he is forced to attend.
The first allegory
In the first allegorical interpretation, Thomas-the-gnostic is something of a comic character. His gnostic feeling of being a Spiritual Mind/Soul belonging to a superior divine world, alienated from a meaningless worldly world makes him resist any involvement in this world he feels as foreign to him (he is “Hebrew” forced to go to “foreign” India, where he doesn’t speak the language). But this turns out to be foolish resistance, because it turns out to be a good thing that the power of the world is forced upon him. The climax of this forced and painful involvement, represented by he servants’ slap in the face, somehow brings him to an awareness of God’s presence in this world, represented by the the hymn he sings about the bride at the wedding who represents the Shekinah of the Jewish tradition, the divine presence in the world which is also the feminine side of God. This revelation of the divine in the world overcomes his feeling of alienation from the world. In this allegory, Thomas as initially resistant Spiritual Mind is transformed into a passive recipient of an intensely meaningful revelation of the wondrous presence of the divine in the world.
The second allegory
In the second allegorical interpretation, the worldly world (“India”) is indeed a meaningless place ruled by demonic forces opposing the divine world to which the Spiritual Mind belongs. But here Thomas as Spiritual Mind is a very active and powerful force, able to draw on its creative power to transform the world, destroying the (“demonic”) forces which hold the world back from being a meaningful revelation of the divine. (The servant whose slap woke Thomas up in the first interpretation, now figures as a demonic force, destroyed by Thomas’s curse.) In this interpretation, it is not Thomas as Spiritual Mind who is transformed. Rather the world-as-experienced by the mind is transformed, something achieved by the creative power that the mind has to transform the way the world is experienced.
All this could be read as a continuation of the Platonist tradition. In Plato the main contrast is between
(1) the concrete visible world (material and social) perceived by aisthesis, “sense perception,” and
(2) perfect “divine” virtue-Forms perceivable only by noesis, the ability to grasp abstract concepts separated from anything concrete, and also common human concrete-mindedness which prevents them from raising their minds to grasp divine/abstract virtue-Forms.
We can see how easily this contrast could be interpreted as a contrast between the Mind, conceived of as belonging to a “heavenly/divine” world, and “the world” which includes normal concrete-minded human society. This could give rise to a popularized Platonism appealing to many individuals in the Roman Empire feeling alienated from the society around them. In this way Gnosticism can be seen as a development within the Platonist tradition.
The two allegories in the Acts of Thomas can then be seen as directed to people attracted to Gnosticism of this kind. It assumes this kind of Gnosticism as a starting point, but is also a critique of it, suggesting a way out of alienation. That is, this extremely dualistic gnostic vision of the world does not have to be a fixed doctrine about the relation of the Spiritual Mind and the Worldly World.
On the one hand, it draws on the Platonist idea that there is goodness in the concrete world, because realities in this world “participate in” the perfect Goodness of Platonic virtue-Forms. (One passage in the Nature of the Rulers says “Starting from the invisible world, the visible world was created). This comes to expression in mythical terms, as a “divine” presence in the world, the topic of Thomas’s wedding hymn. Seeing this divine presence in the world, making the world a meaningful place to live in, requires an inner transformation in Thomas’s psychology. That is, we are not dealing here with a world that has a fixed character. We are dealing with the world-as-experienced by us. And the way we experience the world depends partly on our own mentality, our attitudes toward the world, the way we relate to the world. One way out of the gnostic predicament is to change our attitude toward the world, which will also change the character of the world as we experience it. Thomas’s transformation, represented by the Wedding Hymn he sings after the servant slaps him, represents this kind of transformation, in the first allegorical narrative
The second allegory introduces another possibility, the possibility the Spiritual Mind has to play a very active role, creatively infusing the world with meaning inspired by its contact with the heavenly divine world. The mind has the power to actively and creatively interpret the world-as-experienced in a way that transforms this world into a more meaningful world.
This again is an approach very different from approaches that treats gnosticism as a static doctrine about the fixed nature of the world and the place of a Spiritual Mind within it. First, it assumes that “the world” here refers to the world-as-experienced, not the world as it unchangeably is. Secondly, it assumes the possibility of fundamental transformation: Transformation in the Mind’s attitude toward the world, which will also transform the character of the world-as-experienced.
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