Fantastic Metropolis

According to the Desenzano story, Lucifer, who was the son of the evil god, ascended into heaven and discovered the celestial wife of the good God without her divine husband. Despite her initial resistance, she finally yielded to him when he promised that she would beget from him a son whom Lucifer would make a god in his kingdom and have him “worshipped like a god.” Falling on the authority of Revelation 11:15: “The Kingdom of this world is become our Lord’s,” the Desenzano teaching asserts that it was from this sexual union that Jesus was born and in this way that he was able to assume and bring his flesh down from heaven. This peculiar Christology, which is described as a “great secret,” remains docetic and angelic: Christ continues to be regarded as an angel incarnate and his Passion is seen as having occurred only in appearance, as he did not assume or ascend in actual human flesh but ascended in the flesh that he had brought from heaven, which itself was a product of Lucifer’s intercourse with the wife of the celestial God of good.

—Yuri Stoyanov, The Other God

Try and imagine, as a devout Catholic who sees visions you believe are vouchsafed by God, discovering that little chestnut. Christ as the son of Satan? Man, after you hear that one, that makes that whole “Jesus really faked his crucifixion and moved to France with Mary Magdalene” thing seem tame, huh? It seems likely that anyone who heard this particular nugget of Catharist Gnosticism (or the inverted one, that the whole mess was started by the God of good tearing off a piece of the evil god’s wife… oh, yeah, some Cathars believed that instead) would take it the wrong way. I should mention, probably, that around the same time that Hildegard was going into raving fits at the idea of schismatics and heretics, someone in Languedoc (home of the Cathars, everybody come visit) was publishing the first version of Sepher Bahir, the famous Kabbalistic text known for the opening quote from the Book of Job, “And now they do not see light, it is brilliant in the skies,” “Bahir” meaning “brilliant.” That’s correct, the self-same Cathars who drove Hildegard so insane with their weird cosmology of Satan screwing God’s wife to make Jesus (or God screwing Satan’s, however you like it) were swapping notes with the Provençal school of Kabbalism.

So Hildegard, herself possibly visited by the gnosis vouchsafed by Pistis Sophia, is not able to bear the Cathar heresy and its teaching that Jesus is in fact the son of Satan, or that God in fact created Jesus through working His influence on the wife of some evil demiurge. Ultimately, through her own strong Manichaean tendencies, she makes the same error as the Apostle Mani himself, identifying flesh and matter with evil and spirit with good. It’s a bit ironic that Mani, who devoted himself to opposing Error, should make so fundamental a mistake himself. His decision to include Orphism, “Greek thoughts,” into the original cosmology of the Katharoi ended up promulgating itself in later Catharism, which attempted to understand the original lesson of dualism through the lens of qualitative judgment insisted on by Mani’s infection of Orphism into Zoroastrian thought. The Sepher Bahir gets it closer to being right, I suspect, and I think if Hildegard could have gotten past her own revulsion (and the influence of the anti-rational Bernard of Clairvaux, for she herself was quite exquisitely rational when she wrote her books on physics, as an example) and perhaps studied the work of Peter Abelard (whose Sic et non was very definitely influenced by the work of ol’ Rambam himself, Moses Ben Maimon or Maimonides), then she may have happened upon a greater truth. The Ophites come close, with their serpent locked between states of existence, like a collapsing wave… So let us explore a possible answer that leaves both Hildegard and the Cathars, paradoxically, speaking to the same God.

All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors:

1. That Man has two real existing principles; Viz: a Body & a Soul.

2. That Energy, call’d Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, call’d Good, is alone from the Soul.

3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies. But the following Contraries to these are True:

1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.

2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.

3. Energy is Eternal Delight.

—William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell