By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
Today’s story begins with the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas—a text composed entirely of sayings allegedly spoken by Jesus. To borrow Islamic terminology: the Gospel of Thomas is a collection of hadiths about Jesus.
You cannot be rich in this world, because the world is, ultimately and incurably, impoverished—just as Thomas knew, just as the Gnostics knew. Everything you can possess in this world is worthless, because the world itself is worthless.
The brilliance of Thomas’s text, however, lies not in its content but in its form. The Apostle writes without paragraph breaks, without capital letters, without punctuation. In his Greek manuscript—whose Coptic translation was found at Nag Hammadi—there is no crucifixion, no resurrection; no narrative; no spatial or temporal context. As we said: only the supposed words of Jesus. The internet may tell you the text was originally written in Aramaic. It wasn’t: as I said, it was Greek.
Scriptura continua, if we think about it more deeply, is actually an archaic form, not a hypermodern one. Because: Thomas wrote like that, and then it took writers nearly twenty centuries, in their pursuit of modernity, to rediscover the same technique.
And then they say there’s such a thing as progress.
Scriptura continua appears in the most unexpected places… Long before Bernhard and Krasznahorkai—both great writers, with Bernhard the greatest, hats off to them both—scriptura continua shows up… where? In an official report written by the police officer who interrogated De Sade. What a master. That seemingly simple man, almost certainly uninterested in literature, sensed that the excessive story he was hearing demanded to be recorded in an excessive manner. The man was so stunned by what the Marquis told him that he forgot to add commas and full stops, forgot about spacing and paragraph breaks. And in doing so, that French policeman proved that literature is often found in the most unlikely places—more often in police reports than in academies. After all, it should be clear by now that the academy of arts and sciences is the last place one should go looking for art—just as the church is the last place a rational person would go searching for God.
From a literary point of view, the Gospel of Thomas deserves a place in the New Testament. A collection that already includes four versions of the same event (the life and death of Christ), Paul’s philosophical-poetic insertions, and John’s Revelation—the ultimate fantasy, whose sweep and scope far surpass anything written by Tolkien or Lovecraft (who, in relation to John, stand far, far below—about as far below as Njegos does to Homer)—surely cries out for an interior monologue from Jesus himself, free of witnesses and chroniclers; cries out for some form of Christ’s stream of consciousness. In any case, the extraordinarily complex and undeniably brilliant structure of the New Testament—against which Kurosawa’s Rashomon and Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction feel like the stammering of a child trying to retell what it has learned about dramaturgy from the Bible—has, together with the rest of the Greek legacy, defined Western civilisation from the outset as a space of multiplicity rather than a single discourse.
From the New Testament, we learned that all good stories are, at the very least, ambiguous—and blessed by a lack of evidence. Ambivalence is art’s merciful sister. It is what stirs the imagination, and imagination is essential for faith. We do not truly believe in stories that are bolted shut, screwed down, welded into a single version—stories that claim, “this is exactly how it was, and it could not have been otherwise.” We merely accept them. Ambiguity provides the empty space, the margin where we write our own commentary on the text we read. How many times have you watched a film that began brilliantly, only to be utterly disappointed by the resolution of a mystery that once held such promise? That’s what I’m talking about. The need to explain everything is a clear sign of insecurity—in thought, in writing, and ultimately, in faith.
That’s why—we so deeply love the story of life after death: because it is, at the very least, ambiguous and unburdened by proof.
To put it in the most banal terms: for the same reasons, we cling to the story of joining the European Union as the happy ending to our history. EU integration is a purely secularised religion. At the end of that story stands salvation. The famed process of “aligning with the EU acquis” is nothing more than the acceptance of the Law: you will be saved only when you submit to the Decalogue. Every missed or postponed accession date is not interpreted as proof that the story is false, but as proof that our faith is true—we just need to believe a little longer.
Were I malicious—as I am—I would say that the story of EU integration for the Balkans and Eastern Europe is the best imperial invention since the beads and trinkets once used to buy the favour of Indigenous peoples while preparing to slaughter them and seize their lands.
(Columnists’ opinions and views do not necessarily reflect those of the CdM editorial team)
