 20. Baptism (of Spirit) |
Apparently this Carpocrates deceived the presbyter in the church at Alexandria and obtained a copy of it. Thereafter he went about preaching interpretations that were his own. This is Clement's complaint in his letter to Theodore. He writes identifying that there was a secret teaching and at least one book, perhaps others, that contains the secret teaching, although perhaps other aspects of the secret teaching were verbally or secretly communicated. As Clement suggests, even this secret Gospel did not contain everything.
Apart from the account of miracles, the secret Gospel quoted by Clement describes how an individual was initiated into the mystery of the kingdom of God or the secret teaching. In a very short passage are described some of the circumstances that surrounded such secret initiation. "And in the evening the youth came to him wearing a linen cloth. (He was naked except for this cloth.) And it was at night. And he stayed with Jesus that night. And Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God."
Perhaps the heretic Carpocrates had been speculating some sort of sexual relationship to Jesus, you see. That is probably the vulgar things that Clement refers to. Apart from the politics of the Church, this passage corroborates the theory that there was an esoteric teaching given by Jesus and furthermore describes something of the circumstances in which the secret teaching was given. In this case the individual actually came to Jesus, having had some previous instruction. For some reason he was naked except for a simple white cloth, which apparently signified repentance and purity. The individual came at night, one of the reasons for which was surely secrecy. He stayed that night with Jesus, who taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God.
To be taught the mystery of the kingdom of God is to be baptized in the Spirit. The mystery of the kingdom of God is the metaphor for the high and secret teaching of Jesus. As Jesus said to Nicodemus in the passage we read earlier,"lf a man is not born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." The mystery of how one attains the kingdom of God is what the secret teaching and the secret baptism is all about. So somehow or other, in secret, one was born again, one was given Spirit-baptism.
In the Old Testament and, particularly, the New Testament are many references to the Spirit and to the kingdom of God. Clearly the New Testament was basically selected from many streams of instruction that were extant in the early Church, and then modified and edited over time according to the point of view of the Church as it developed as a cult. But in this letter, in the words of an early patriarch of the inner circle of the Christian community, is described a secret dimension to the teaching that was not outwardly communicated and not therefore present in the New Testament as it now exists. Beyond even the secret written teaching there was also a secret form of communication and initiation. Clearly the teaching that appears in the New Testament itself was about realizing the kingdom of God. That process is viewed in esoteric terms, in terms of mystery. It was about being born again in the Spirit, going through the process of baptism, first water baptism and then Spirit or fire baptism.
Clearly baptism by the Spirit existed. It is referred to often in the New Testament, but it is not described there. Clearly it existed. Many early figures in the Christian Church refer to it, including Clement in this particular example. Thus, we conclude that there was an esoteric inner circle at the time of Jesus, and it was this baptism by the Spirit that was the core of his activity. However, it is not at all the core of the exoteric teaching of Christianity as it soon developed and persists today. You may not go to the Pope or to some high individual within the Christian Church and receive from him this Spirit baptism. The leaders of the Church today do not know about the Spirit baptism. It has been lost. At least it is certainly not openly referred to anywhere. It may be hidden away somewhere in the Vatican library.
You cannot invent the Spirit, but you can relate to God in all kinds of ways. Thus, the world is filled with all kinds of cultural media for associating with the Divine. Some of those media are spiritual and others are not. Some are just worldly. These look toward improving Man's circumstance. They view Man not as a spiritual being, but as a mortal, human, fleshy individual. Thus, idealisms tend to be addressed by most exoteric religions. Other religious cultural movements seem to be spiritual in some way because they relate to secret mystical teachings and uncommon experiences of what might be presumed to be the Divine.
Even so, they do not often teach the total conversion of the individual in the Spirit. Rather, they usually call you to conceive of yourself as an immortal soul, somehow situated deeply within this human appearance, that natively exists in a spiritual world, and if you can invert yourself from this carnal, psycho-physical life to a state of identification with the immortal soul, then as the immortal soul you can contemplate and ultimately rise up to the spiritual world.
There are two common conventional dimensions of persuasion in the world that are associated with religions. One is ascetical and mystical and relates to the being as an immortal soul. The other is worldly and idealistic and relates to the religious message as proposed by the exoteric cult of Christianity. But there also exists true esotericism, and we can see that Jesus' teaching is clearly related to that dimension of spirituality, however indirectly we try to deduce its description. We can see that such true esotericism was what he was about. Likewise, we can see other individuals in human time who are related to the same spiritual esotericism, which is quite a different thing from ascetical mysticism and worldly idealism.
