Love and Knowledge

Certainly one of the most curious of the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas is Logion 22, where Yeshua speaks of male and female becoming a single whole. This image accords in some fundamental way with our modern sensibilities that the male and female aspect of our human person (the anima and the animus, to use the psychological terminology) has become bifurcated, and in order to be whole, healthy human beings psychologically, at least, we must reunite them into a unity of personal well-being.

But there is more here than a psychological interpretation of this saying. This image also clearly points toward the esoteric figure of the hermaphrodite. This idea may be both compelling and repelling in its own way, but when one looks deeper at the origins of the word itself something important emerges. Etymologically, a hermaphrodite is the union of the god Hermes (knowledge) with the goddess Aphrodite (love). This figure is portrayed in medieval iconography as a double-headed person (one male, one female) holding in its hand the symbolic rose of enlightenment.

Could it not be that this is precisely Yeshua's meaning; that only when love and knowledge figured as masculine and feminine are united in a single individual can there be true fullness (or oneness)--which is the prerequisite for entry into the Kingdom of Heaven, because the Kingdom itself is the place where love and knowledge exist together in equilibrium. It is there also that heaven and earth are united (the higher with the lower) and together all these images symbolize the essence of Wisdom which has overcome fragmentation into a new wholeness. It is that wholeness, that oneness that Yeshua sees clearly.