I have now been on an eleven-month journey of writing about wealth and poverty during the first five hundred years of Christianity. Along the way, I’ve learned many interesting things, but one favorite insight is among the simplest: namely, that during the second and third centuries, two Gospel stories were frequently told together, paired like peanut butter and jelly.
The first of these stories is Jesus’ encounter with the rich man, an exchange recorded in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In the Lucan version (18.18-25), a rich man approaches Jesus and asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. When Jesus replies that he must adhere to the commandments, the rich man proudly tells him ‘I have kept all these since my youth’ (18.20-21). Then Jesus famously adds that there is still one thing lacking: “Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” The rich man becomes very sad for “he was very rich” and had many possessions, and so he walks away disheartened by Jesus’ words. Jesus concludes this encounter and this teaching on wealth with the blunt statement: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God’ (18.25).
When told together, the two stories form a meditation on the cost of discipleship. Jesus is clear that the price is very high; following Jesus will cost us everything. In each story, Jesus essentially asks rich men to give up all that they own in order to follow him. Whereas the first man sees only what he stands to lose, however, the second perceives that he is ultimately gaining something of far greater value. The man in Luke 18:18-25 would eventually symbolize the wealthy who were attached to material existence, and was contrasted with the merchant who sold everything he had to purchase the ‘pearl of great price’, the Kingdom of Heaven. [1] Told together, they can be imaginatively understood as a single story told in two parts, or perhaps even as the story of one wealthy man making different choices at separate points in his life.
Reflecting on the two stories together raises important questions for all who are would-be Christians: Why is truly of value in this world? What is the real cost of following Christ? What are we to make of Jesus’ statement that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for the rich to enter the Kingdom of God?
Such questions continued to haunt and trouble early Christians who wrestled with Jesus’ difficult messages on wealth and poverty. And so, some Christians developed sophisticated strategies for softening his statements over the first few centuries. One text where historians and biblical scholars see such strategies at work is in the beautiful poem The Hymn of the Pearl, a second-century spiritual epic embedded in the popular third-century text The Acts of Thomas.[2] The Hymn of the Pearl is an example of how Jesus’ statements on material poverty became spiritualized, an allegory for the lost soul’s lack of salvific wisdom and self-knowledge.
The Hymn of the Pearl recalls the adventurous story of a prince who must leave his kingdom to retrieve a single pearl - long interpreted as the pearl of great price - from the clutches of a devouring dragon in Egypt. In going on his mission, the prince has to first remove his royal robes, and he must travel well beyond the safe confines of his parents’ kingdom. When he enters Egypt - the land of the yoke of slavery - he wears the clothes of the Egyptians to conceal his true identity. There he is tricked into eating the food of the locals and falls into such a deep sleep that he forgets his true identity and purpose of his mission. Hearing of their son’s confusion, his parents, the king and queen, send him a magical letter to remind him of who he actually is and what he is there for.
Vivid images of poverty and wealth are interwoven throughout the poem. After snatching the pearl from the dragon, the prince “took off the dirty clothing and left it behind in their land” and returns to his parents’ kingdom where “they had my money and wealth in their hands and gave me my reward: The fine garment of glorious colors, which was embroidered with gold, precious stones, and pearls to give a good appearance.”[3] In contrast to the ‘dirty clothing’ of the land of Egypt, this fine garment stirs with the ‘movement of knowledge’ and appears as a mirror of the self.
In Lost Scriptures: Books That Did Not Make It Into the New Testament, Bart D. Ehrman offers a traditional interpretation of the meaning of this poem. For Ehrman, the Hymn of the Pearl “represents a Gnostic allegory of the incarnation of the soul, which enjoys a glorious heavenly existence (‘my father’s palace’) from which it descends (to ‘Egypt’) to become entrapped in matter (‘clothed myself in garments like theirs’). Forgetting whence it came, the soul eventually relearns its true nature from a divine emissary. When it awakens to its true identity (‘son of kings’), it returns to its heavenly home where it receives the full knowledge of itself.”[4]
Clearly, this is a fascinating and complicated text, and over the past few weeks I’ve enjoyed reading scholarly debates about whether the Hymn of the Pearl is, in fact, an example of Gnosticism (with some asking ‘What is Gnosticism, anyway?’) and whether this poem was originally composed as a Christian text, or was simply popularly interpreted as such for centuries on account of its being embedded in the Acts of Thomas.[5] The reason that I am writing about this poem here is that it represents a stop along Christianity’s long journey toward spiritualizing away discussions of material wealth and poverty, and an early example of treating each as referring solely to interior realities. One scholar, Edward Moore, puts it bluntly: “The one who recovers this wisdom is the wealthy man; the one who fails to recover it remains in poverty, that is, enthralled to darkness and matter, and will not be permitted to return to the realm of the blessed.”[6] This spiritualizing approach to wealth and poverty is alive and well in a particularly insular version of the faith that still condescendingly sees discussions of societal poverty and injustice as spiritually immature.
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As mentioned above, the Hymn of the Pearl is found in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas. There the apostle Thomas sings the hymn while praying for himself and his fellow prisoners.
The Acts of Thomas was likely written in Syria during the first half of the third century and “hovered on the borders of acceptability in Christian sacred literature until the sixteenth century, when the Council of Trent (justifiably in its own terms) dismissed the book as heretical.”[7] Even so, the Hymn of the Pearl was likely a much earlier text embedded into the Acts of Thomas, added in much the same way the New Testament interweaves poems and teachings from what Christians now call the Old Testament. The Hymn is “perhaps originally a narrative text of Babylonian Syria, since its language attests to a non-Edessan and preclassical Syriac” and is probably a non-Christian text at that, insomuch as Jesus or other specifically Christian language is never mentioned.[8] Nevertheless, the poem was encountered by Christians for centuries through the Acts of Thomas and appears to have been included because perfectly serves as “a summary (perhaps a popular one) of the Thomasine theological framework and model.”[9]
With its focus on taking off the robe of material wealth to go retrieve a single pearl which then opens the door to salvific self-knowledge, the Hymn encapsulated the theme of ascetic renunciation that runs so strongly through both the Acts of Thomas and the earlier Gospel of Thomas. Thomasine literature is described as reacting to the persecution of Christians through a hyperfocus on the need for Christians to renounce material wealth and sex. This is a critical point insomuch as both wealth and poverty were not simply allegories in the original Thomasine context; the cost of following Jesus for these ascetics was very real and very high. In his article “The search for the true self in the Gospel of Thomas, the Book of Thomas and the Hymn of the Pearl", Patrick Hartin writes that the Thomasine Christians’ detachment from the world is the result of persecution “both from outside as well as from within. Without doubt, the world has the power to affect them and to persecute them. But, only through a process of separation from the world do the Thomas Christians come to know the Father.”[10] Historian Diarmaid McCullough notes how this separation from the world manifested itself in sexual abstinence and strict austerity: “Amid its descriptions of Thomas’s adventures on his mission to India are fervent commendations of celibacy: The Apostle’s first major move was to persuade two newlyweds to refrain from sexual relations…”[11]
Perhaps, then, the most generous read on the spiritualization of wealth and poverty is to say that the trauma of persecution led to an intense interiorization of Christianity, and that the giving up of wealth was already assumed within the ascetic context. This may help to describe why there is a striking shift toward interiority and a focus on coming to salvific knowledge of the self. “Starting with the experience of opposition that emanates from the world around them, they experience an interior struggle to discover themselves. They escape the world by concentrating upon themselves. The world may be able to harm their bodies, but the inner being is the place where they encounter the Father.”[12]
Tragically, however, this results in a transformation of Jesus’ message on poverty and wealth that ultimately goes well beyond the Thomasine context. On the beatitudes, “the hungry are those Thomas Christians for whom the search for the Father is an all-consuming desire and struggle” and “the hungry will ultimately be filled with a knowledge of the Father.”[13] In the process, Jesus’ teachings on societal poverty and hunger begin to become lost in the mix.
While I recognize that what follows oversimplifies a complicated trajectory, I still think it’s important to point out that the above description includes many of the elements of a version of Christian spirituality that is alive and well today. There is a retreat from the dangers and complications of the outer world in favor of an intense focus on interiority. Many of Jesus’ statements about external injustices such as poverty are reread as referring solely to interior attitudes; the thirst and hunger of the ‘least of these’ which Jesus speaks of satisfying in Matthew 25:31-46, becomes the spiritual thirst and hunger of Christian ascetics now termed the ‘holy poor’. Jesus’ beatitudes and his descriptions of the Kingdom of God - on earth as it is heaven - become reframed within the terms of Christian’s contemplative journey toward salvific self-knowledge.
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Even knowing all this, however, it is hard not to fall under the spell of the Hymn of the Pearl, for it is a strikingly elegant text about the soul's journey of self discovery. The poem begins with a King and Queen divesting their son of a royal robe - a garment “set with gems and spangled with gold which they had made out of love for me” - and setting a covenant with their son that he would not forget.14 The covenant, laid out in verses 12-15, states: “‘If you go down to Egypt and bring the one pearl which is in the land of the devouring serpent, you shall put on again that garment set with stones and the robe which lies over it, and with your brother, our next in command, you shall be a herald for our kingdom.”
Having been stripped of this robe, the prince goes in search of the pearl into Egypt, a land that evokes the memory of slavery. There he takes on the garments of the Egyptians to avoid detection: “Being exhorted to guard against the Egyptians and against partaking of unclean things, I clothed myself in garments like theirs, so that I would not be seen as a stranger, and as one who had come from abroad to take the pearl…” (v 28-34). Even so, somehow the Egyptians learn that he is not their countryman. While there, he is tricked into eating food that makes him forget both why he went there and his true identity. This is the nadir of the poem, a time of interior confusion about who he is and why he is there. “They dealt with me treacherously, and I tasted their food. I no longer recognized that I was a king’s son, and I served their king. I forgot the pearl for which my parents had sent me. And I fell into a deep sleep because of the heaviness of their food,” (v 28-34).
It is only through a magical letter sent from his parents that he is able to recall his true identity and purpose. “Awake, and rise from your sleep. Listen to the words in this letter, Remember you are the son of kings, you have fallen beneath the yoke of slavery. Remember your gold-spangled garment, recall the pearl for which you were sent to Egypt…” (v 43-44). Critically, this turn of events is represented by another removal of robes -- specifically, of the dirty clothing he had put on while in the land of Egypt: “And I snatched the pearl and turned about to go to my parents. And I took off the dirty clothing and left it behind in their land” (61-62).
He successfully retrieves the pearl and is then able to return to the kingdom he had left as well as his beloved robe. Having just removed the dirty clothes of the land of the Egyptians, we hear his joy at returning to his original wealth: “And they had my money and wealth in their hands and gave me my reward: The fine garment of glorious colors, which was embroidered with gold, precious stones, and pearls to give a good appearance,” (81-83). Yet crucially, the robe has changed: “Stones of lapis lazuli had been skillfully fixed to the collar, And I saw in turn that motions of knowledge were stirring through it,” (87-89). These motions included the salvific knowledge of the true self: “But, when suddenly I saw my garment reflected as in a mirror, I perceived in it my whole self as well, and through it I knew and saw myself” (76).
Putting on the robe of self-knowledge, the prince is able to enter even further into the Kingdom at the poem’s end: “When I had put it on I ascended to the land of peace and homage. And I lowered my head and prostrated myself before the splendor of the father who had sent it to me. For it was I who had obeyed his commands and it was I who had also kept the promise, And I mingled at the doors of his ancient royal building. He took delight in me and received me in his palace,” (98-102).
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In his essay on images of wealth and poverty in the Hymn of the Pearl, Edward Moore writes that “Poverty, the ‘servile yoke’, here denotes not lack of material wealth but the ontological status of a soul that has lost and forgotten its true wealth. The wealth in question, of course, is not temporal or worldly wealth but the promised eschatological wealth of a soul embroiled in history and seeking repose.”[15] “Poverty became defined as ignorance, that is, as a lack of knowledge of one’s homeland. Wealth became defined as knowledge of one’s homeland,” and “Poverty is lack of this transformative vision of God. Wealth is living in wonder, knowing that God’s love pervades all things and that we, like the prince in the Hymn of the pearl, are on a journey to our Father’s kingdom.”[16] Such a view helps to explain the later historical paradox of 'ascetics for aesthetics' -- that is, the 'holy poor' who had taken vows of poverty becoming among the most ardent defenders of liturgical splendor. If poverty is solely ignorance and lack of knowledge of one's spiritual homeland, the wealth of the church becomes an aid to a return to transcendent wonder.
Of course, poverty isn’t – and hasn’t ever been - simply a lack of “self-knowledge” or a lack of “knowledge of one’s spiritual homeland.” One of my favorite historians is John Anthony McGuckin, a former professor at Union Theological Seminary, because even as he expertly guides readers through the evolution of how Gnosticism fused with Christianity during these centuries, he occasionally stops the bus, turns to us the passengers, and says what is obvious to everyone who has ever seen or experienced material poverty up close: namely, that poverty is not just a metaphor.
Speaking of this second- and third-century move to spiritualize poverty, he argues “this overall position became very widespread in the Christian consciousness. But even so, is it not dangerous to transmute poverty into a ‘spiritual’ symbol? Poverty is actually profoundly noxious to health and human life. It is not ‘spiritual detachment’ we mean when we normally speak of poverty, but bad health, bad education, bad housing, social oppressions, injustice, and often violent lives. And the endemic ‘spiritualizing approach’ to poverty (glossing it in a bourgeois manner as long as the bitter effects of impoverishment have passed the commentator by) has often masked what is nothing other than the wealthy’s tolerance of inequity under a cloak of pious romance.”17
McGuckin sees spiritualized poverty as the result of a clash in cultural values between the message of Jesus in the Gospels and Hellenistic culture’s valuing of knowledge - including self-knowledge - over any kind of concern for the poor, and he argues that Christianity’s transformation of poverty into allegory is just one of several strategies Christians used to soften Jesus’ uncomfortable messages around poverty and wealth.18 If the Magnificat contains shocking imagery of God’s dream of societal reversal, the rise of this spiritualized and allegorical approach helped to put things back into their proper place.
In this, the Hymn of the Pearl in the Acts of Thomas lays the groundwork for thinkers like Clement of Alexandria who argued in the late second and third century that Jesus’ discussion of wealth and poverty is entirely figurative and that Jesus’ statements really have nothing to do with external societal realities: “‘Sell all that you possess’: what does that mean? It does not mean as some superficially suppose, that he should throw away all that he owns and abandon his property. Rather he is to banish those attitudes toward wealth that permeate his whole life, his desires, interests, and anxiety.”[19] With poverty now about inner attitudes, Clement goes on to argue that there are wealthy who, through their piety and humility, are more truly poor than the poor who are so rich in vices, and he rejects the notion that Jesus called the poor blessed on the grounds of material poverty alone. Clement rails against the Gospel’s preferential option for the poor when he states, “It is not a great thing or desirable to be without any wealth, unless it be we are seeking eternal life. If it were, those who possess nothing - the destitute, the beggars seeking food, and the poor living in the streets, would become the blessed and loved of God, even though they did not know God or God’s righteousness. They would be granted eternal life on the basis of this extreme poverty and their lack of even the basic necessities of life!”[20]
Spiritualizing poverty and wealth lays the groundwork for a form of highly internalized, insular form of Christianity that is alive and well today. Once again, McGuckin offers refreshing clarity on this matter: “The church is quite willing to idealize poverty - be it as the Lady Bride of St. Francis, or the ‘poor in spirit’ of the Beatitudes - indeed, too willing to make this concrete source of bitter suffering into a dreamy aspiration of ‘holy simplicity.’ But once the discussion should turn toward the actualities of equitable wealth distribution, all sides of the question become agitated.”[21] Christianity has traditionally resolved this agitation by allegorizing Jesus’ statements on wealth and poverty and transforming them into statements on interior attitudes -- aligning true poverty with piety and humility - and deeming discussion of external poverty to be irrelevant, missing the point, and spiritually immature.
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Like the rich man Jesus encounters, Christianity continues to turn away from Jesus’ teaching that we must sell all that we possess and give all to the poor in order to follow him, for “he was very rich.”
Upon leaving, sad and dejected, from Jesus' harsh words, Christianity has created all sorts of clever ways of circumventing Jesus’ clear statement, fabricating theological arguments to insist that Jesus is wrong on this point, and the image of the rich as a camel trying to fit through the eye of the needle could not possibly be true.
Fairly quickly, Christians seized on the fact that in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus says “if you wish to be perfect” to the rich man to say that this requirement to get rid of one’s wealth only refers to ascetics seeking holy perfection, and is therefore not a requirement of all followers but ‘a counsel of perfection.’
Later, Jesus’ statements on wealth and poverty became allegories for interior, spiritual realities. The Hymn of the Pearl exemplifies how poverty became a symbol of lack of self-knowledge, with wealth signifying the kingdom to which all souls must return.
Other thinkers like Clement of Alexandria and, much later, Augustine (who drew largely on Clement’s arguments on the utilitas of wealth), argued for the complete detachment of wealth and poverty from external reality. Clement opened the eye of the needle wide by arguing that the pious rich are oftentimes more truly poor than the poor who are so rich in vices, and that wealth could be redeemed through holy use (especially when that wealth was given to the Church). He ultimately rails against the notion that God cares for the materially poor.
All these arguments buttress a faith tradition - of which Episcopalians are the prideful inheritors - which has made an easy arrangement with wealth, and which condescendingly sees discussions of injustice and poverty as spiritually immature.
Nevertheless, I’d like to believe that many are sensing something is missing. I, along with many others, walk around the Church with a pervasive sense that something is profoundly missing -- that for all our wealth and power, for all our institutions, all our beautiful architecture and liturgy, there is a deadness at the heart of this tradition. The Church’s wealth and privilege have prevented it from acquiring “the pearl of great price” and so I continue to believe there must be literal (not just metaphorical) acts of dispossession of wealth, power, and privilege if we are to ever to gain what is truly of value.
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1 Moore, Edward. Wealth, Poverty, and the Value of the Person: Some Notes on the Hymn of the Pearl and Its Early Christian Context. Wealth and Poverty in Early Church and Society, Susan Holman, ed. 56-57
2 Bart D. Ehrman. Lost Scriptures?: Books That Did Not Make It Into the New Testament. Oxford University Press, 2003. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e025xna&AN=120915&site=ehost-live&scope=site. 324
3 Translation from Bart D. Ehrman. Lost Scriptures?: Books That Did Not Make It Into the New Testament. Oxford University Press, 2003. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e025xna&AN=120915&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
4 Bart D. Ehrman. Lost Scriptures?: Books That Did Not Make It Into the New Testament. Oxford University Press, 2003. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e025xna&AN=120915&site=ehost-live&scope=site. 324
5 Grant RM, Aune DE, Young RD. Reading Religions in the Ancient World?: Essays Presented to Robert McQueen Grant on His 90th Birthday. Brill; 2007. Accessed March 2, 2021. https://search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e025xna&AN=252913&site=ehost-live&scope=site Chapter by Robin Darling Young “Notes on Divesting and Vesting in the Hymn of the Pearl” 204
6 Moore, Edward. Wealth, Poverty, and the Value of the Person: Some Notes on the Hymn of the Pearl and Its Early Christian Context. Wealth and Poverty in Early Church and Society, Susan Holman, ed. 59
7 MacCullough, Diarmaid. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years 202
8 den Biesen, K. (2014). HYMN of the PEARL. In A. Di Berardino, Encyclopedia of ancient Christianity. InterVarsity Press. Credo Reference: http://ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/login?qurl=https%3A%2F%2Fsearch.credoreference.com%2Fcontent%2Fentry%2Fivpacaac%2Fhymn_of_the_pearl%2F0%3FinstitutionId%3D1878
9 Hartin, Patrick. "The search for the true self in the Gospel of Thomas, the Book of Thomas and the Hymn of the Pearl." HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies [Online], 55.4 (1999): 1001-1021. Web. 2 Mar. 2021, page 1015
10 Hartin, Patrick. "The search for the true self in the Gospel of Thomas, the Book of Thomas and the Hymn of the Pearl." HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies [Online], 55.4 (1999): 1001-1021. Web. 2 Mar. 2021 1002
11 MacCullough, Diarmaid. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years 202
12 Hartin, Patrick. "The search for the true self in the Gospel of Thomas, the Book of Thomas and the Hymn of the Pearl." HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies [Online], 55.4 (1999): 1001-1021. Web. 2 Mar. 2021 1002
13 Hartin, Patrick. "The search for the true self in the Gospel of Thomas, the Book of Thomas and the Hymn of the Pearl." HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies [Online], 55.4 (1999): 1001-1021. Web. 2 Mar. 2021 1002
14 Verses 9-11
15 Moore, Edward. Wealth, Poverty, and the Value of the Person: Some Notes on the Hymn of the Pearl and Its Early Christian Context. Wealth and Poverty in Early Church and Society, Susan Holman, ed. 58
16 Moore, Edward. Wealth, Poverty, and the Value of the Person: Some Notes on the Hymn of the Pearl and Its Early Christian Context. Wealth and Poverty in Early Church and Society, Susan Holman, ed. 63
17 McGuckin, Anthony. Christianity: First Thousand Years 1042
18 John A. McGuckin, The Westminster Handbook to Patristic Theology (Lousiville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 360
19 Clement of Alexandria, The Rich Young Ruler, in Helen Rhee’s Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity. Ad Fontes: Early Christian Sources, Location 764
20 Clement of Alexandria, The Rich Young Ruler, in Helen Rhee’s Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity. Ad Fontes: Early Christian Sources. Location 774
21 McGuckin, Anthony. Christianity: First Thousand Years. Page 1026
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