In the previous episode, I talked about the characteristics of the Father as recounted by the Tripartite Tractate in the Nag Hammadi library. Now, the funny thing about that whole last episode discussing the characteristics of the Father is that the Father is unknowable. The father is ineffable and illimitable, and all those gigantic words which mean that we can’t really comprehend the Father at all. So, it was an ironic episode as a description of the Father. Let me add that this material is not easy. This is advanced material when trying to read directly out of the Tripartite Tractate. That’s why my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, is much simpler and easier to understand. In The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated I take this material and I reword it into simple, common vernacular that anyone can understand. It’s a very short book, beautifully illustrated—very, very simple as far as sharing the gnosis of the Tripartite Tractate. It is not an academic book. It is a very simple book for understanding. So if this material is too thick and difficult for you, forget about it. Skip it for now. Get my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, and sit with it for a while, and then I think if you come back to this type of material directly from the Tripartite Tractate, you will be able to easily understand what’s being said.

So, how is it that we can claim to know these characteristics of the Father—his sweetness, his greatness, and so forth? Well, that is because the Father reveals his own characteristics through what is called the Son, and the Son is actually the God that we are able to relate to. The Son is the relatable father to us and to the Aeons, whereas the Son is the only Son of that Father who is otherwise inexpressible. The Son does reflect and incorporate the characteristics of the Father, so it seems to me that we can infer the characteristics of the Father from the Son, and that’s what I think the author of the Tripartite Tractate did—inferred what the characteristics of the Father must be by examining the characteristics of the Son.

And so now, in this episode, I would like to share more about the characteristics of the Son. And, what is the Son? What does it mean to be the only begotten Son of God? And what was this first expression of the Father?

In the Tripartite Tractate, the Son is the Father of the Totalities, and sometimes these names get interchanged where the Son begins to be referred to as the Father. Again, this is a confusing bit because the Father is the originating source, the ground state of consciousness from which all else emanates, but the Father of us and of the Totalities before us—that is the Son, the Begotten Son.

The translation of the Tripartite Tractate that I’ll be sharing is from the gnosis.org website, and this is the translation by Attridge and Mueller.

It all emanates from the Father. So here, near the beginning of the Tripartite Tractate, the writer is saying, “Concerning the Father, rather, one should speak of him as good, perfect, complete, being himself the Totality. Not one of the names which are conceived or spoken, seen or grasped, not one of them applies to him, even though they are exceedingly glorious, magnifying, and honored. However, it is possible to utter these names for his glory and honor, in accordance with the capacity of each one of those who give him glory.”

Which is saying that it is a reflection of the speaker, like me saying these things, or the writer of the Tripartite Tractate claiming these things about the Father that are good and glorious. It is more a reflection of our capacity to understand and grasp the Father rather than the Father itself, because the Father is unknowable and ungraspable, and so the glory that we give is a reflection of our capacity to give glory. The Tripartite says of the Father that, “He is the one who is inconceivable by any thought, invisible by anything, ineffable by any word, untouchable by any hand. He alone is the one who knows himself as he is.”

And, after describing our inability to conceive of the Father, the Father therefore brings forth the Son, which is someone that we can begin to praise and grasp with any sort of true reflection of its Self.

So it is saying we really don’t know any of this stuff that we’re saying about the Father. But what we can infer is that now, as it says again, “He is the One who projects himself thus as generation, having glory and honor, marvelous and lovely; the One who glorifies himself, who marvels, who also loves; this is the One who has a Son who subsists in him, who is silent concerning him, who is the ineffable One in the ineffable One, the invisible One, the incomprehensible One, the inconceivable One in the inconceivable One. Thus, the Son exists in the Father forever. The Father is the One in whom he knows himself, who begot him having a thought, which is the thought of him (the Son). That is the perception of him.”

The book says, “Just as the Father exists in the proper sense, the One before whom there was no one else and the One apart from whom there is no other unbegotten One, so too the Son exists in the proper sense, the One before whom there was no other and after whom no other Son exists. Therefore he is a first-born and an only Son. ‘First-born’ because no one exists before him and ‘only Son’ because no one is after him.”

So now we have the Son sitting inside of the Father, generated by the Father because the Father wished to be known. And there is no other generation of the Father other than this first One–the Son.

The Tripartite Tractate goes on to say something interesting here, that “Not only did the Son exist from the beginning, but the Church too existed from the beginning. Now he who thinks that the discovery that the Son is an only son opposes the statement about the Church because of the mysterious quality of the matter, it is not so. For, just as the Father is a unity and has revealed himself as Father for himself alone, so too, the Son was found to be a brother to himself alone, in virtue of the fact that he is unbegotten and without beginning. The Son wonders at himself along with the Father, and he gives himself glory and honor and love. Being innumerable and illimitable, his offspring are indivisible: those which exist, (that is the Church of which we were speaking), those which exist have come forth from the Son and the Father.”

And then this is an interesting analogy that the book uses. It says that the Church comes forth like kisses, a “multitude of kisses” that exist between the Son and the Father essentially kissing one another, like “the multitude of some who kiss one another with a good, insatiable thought, the kiss being a unity, although it involves many kisses.”

So, in this analogy, the Church, the constituents of the Church, are kisses that the Father and the Son exchange between one another. It says, “This is the nature of the holy, imperishable spirits upon which the Son rests, since it is his essence, just as the Father rests upon the Son.”

So, the Son is a singular unity, what I would say is the first fractal emanation of the consciousness of the Father. It is like the bucket dipped into the sea. It has the same characteristics of the Father, and this is how we infer what are the characteristics of the Father–by looking at the Son. And the Son is comprised of innumerable imperishable spirits that have been exchanged between the Father and Son like kisses. So the Son is a singular entity, however, the Son consists of uncountable spirits.

The Son is both One and many at the same time. Just as we humans, let’s say, have a singular spirit that governs ourselves–our governing unit of consciousness is what I call it. This is what many people refer to as “the soul.” You have your one governing unit of consciousness that you think of as yourself, yet you are comprised of countless billions and trillions of subunits, in the sense of cells—these are your smaller units of consciousness that make up your great Self.

The Son is the same way. The Son’s countless, illimitable–meaning an infinite number of–spirits make up the Son. And at this point in the Tripartite Tractate, these spirits are called the Totalities of the Church. So, this Church, it seems to me, is not procreation in the sense that, when we procreate, the ones we give birth to go about their own, independent ways. They leave our body and go about and be their selves, right? But the Church actually remains within the Son. The Son “wears them like a garment” and they “wear the Son like a garment,” is how the Tripartite Tractate puts it. This is akin to our bodies and the cells inside of our bodies. Our cells don’t go walking around on their own without us. We go everywhere they go and they go everywhere we go. And the Son has that same exact type of relationship with the Church—or the first emanation of spirit. (In fact, this is another example of the precept: “As above, so below.” The Totalities of the ALL, or the pre-existent Church, are to the Son as our cells are to us. As above, so below.)

Here’s how it’s put in the Tripartite Tractate: “The Church exists in the dispositions and properties in which the Father and the Son exist. Therefore, it subsists in the procreation of innumerable Aeons. Also, in an uncountable way, they too beget by the properties and dispositions in which the Church exists, for these comprise its association, which they form toward one another and toward those who have come forth from them toward the Son, for whose glory they exist.”

We will revisit this idea of the generation of the Aeons later, but for now we will focus on the purpose of the Church, which is to give glory to the Son. That’s their main job. And that’s why we have the same word “church” down here on earth, where we meet on Sundays and Wednesday nights—that church’s job is to give glory to the Father and to the Son, as it was in the beginning. The celestial Church’s job is to point toward the glory of the Father and the Son.

My definition of glory and giving glory is to be in perfect alignment with the will of the Father and the Son. When you are in perfect alignment with the Father, you are “giving glory” to the Father. It has to do with where you put your focus, and the focus of the celestial Church is to give glory to the Father and the Son. And here the Tripartite Tractate is saying that these spirits inside the Church also beget. And the way they do that is through associations they form with one another and toward those who have come forth from them toward the Son, “for whose glory they exist.” So, they form relationships—and when the Aeon of the Aeons, the Church, form relationships with one another, they are begetting new forms out of those relationships. It’s an unending and uncountable number of relationships that can be formed. There is pretty much an infinite number of relationships that can be formed within the Church.

So, the Church—which is the breakout fractals of the Son—the Son being the first fractal of the Father, the Church is innumerable fractals of the Son. And then, off of those innumerable fractals come more innumerable fractals as those create relationships with one another. And, in this way, the Aeons beget themselves. The Tripartite Tractate says, “They alone have the ability to name themselves and to conceive of themselves. Of those places that are ineffable and innumerable in the system, which is both the manner and the size, the joy, the gladness of the Unbegotten, nameless, unnamable, inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible One (the Father), it is the Fullness of paternity, so that his abundance is a begetting of the Aeons.” 

This episode is supposed to be about the Son, but we have hardly heard anything about the Son himself, right? We hear about the Father being indescribable, and we hear about the infinite number of spirits of the Church that form the body of the Son, but we haven’t really heard much in the way of descriptions of the Son itself because the only way that the Son can be described is through its Aeons—through the fractals that come off of it. And, each step that we get away from the inconceivable Father, and then the barely conceivable Son, we become more and more concrete, so to speak, to where we can begin to recognize properties of these Aeons.

That’s plenty to chew on for today. Let’s pick this up next week, when we’ll talk more about the emanations of the Son known as the Aeons. Until then, onward and upward! And, God Bless.