Spirituality

Put your hand flat on the table and look at it for a few seconds. Knuckles, a scar or two, the veins that show more every year. Somewhere behind those fingers is the one doing the looking, and nobody has ever explained to anyone’s satisfaction how the two got together. Saying 29 of the Gospel of Thomas is about that exact puzzle. It gets quoted as proof that the Gnostics hated the body, because it ends by calling the body “poverty.” Read the whole thing, though, and the word that keeps coming back is “marvel.” Let’s look at what the saying actually claims, and how the wonder in it outweighs the insult. ...

“Demiurge” sounds like the name of a monster. In Greek it was an ordinary word for a craftsman, somebody who made things for the public, like a potter or a carpenter. Plato picked that humble word for the maker of the world, and he meant it kindly. Five or six centuries later, Gnostic teachers used the same word for a blind and jealous ruler who had trapped the soul in a body. They didn’t get the idea from nowhere. They had read Plato closely, and they kept almost everything he said except his opinion of the craftsman. That one change is the most useful key I know for reading Gnostic myth, so let’s follow it through Plato’s two most famous images. ...

I skipped saying 7 for years. Every time I read through the Gospel of Thomas, I’d hit the lion, shrug, and move on to the fisherman in saying 8, who at least made sense. It read like a riddle with a line missing, or a copying error somebody forgot to fix. It turns out the saying makes a lot of sense once you know what a lion meant to a reader in the second or third century. Two other texts help, one by Plato and one from the Gnostic library itself, and both were sitting in the same pile of books buried near Nag Hammadi. Read with them, Thomas 7 becomes one of the most practical sayings in the collection. ...

A Roman emperor once wrote in his private notebook that “life is a warfare and a stranger’s sojourn.” Put that line next to the forty-second saying of the Gospel of Thomas, where Jesus says only “Be passersby,” and you’d have a hard time guessing which came from a Stoic and which from a Gnostic gospel. Both tell you to travel light. Both treat fame and possessions as things you rent for a while and give back. ...

Grief has a name in the Secret Book of John. It’s Nenentophni, and it sits in a list of 365 angels and demons who, according to the text, built the human body one part at a time. Fear is Blaomen. Pleasure is Ephememphi, and desire goes by the short, almost friendly name Yoko. Most readers skim this section. It’s pages of unpronounceable names assigned to eyelids and toenails, and it looks like the least useful part of a difficult book. But tucked inside it is a compact theory of the emotions, borrowed from the best psychology of its day and bent into a Gnostic shape. I think it’s one of the more practical things in the whole Nag Hammadi library. ...

You’ve probably carried a grocery bag with a small tear in the bottom. Somewhere between the car and the kitchen, a thin trail of rice follows you across the driveway, and you feel nothing. You find out when you set the bag on the counter and it slumps over, half as full as when you left the store. Jesus tells almost exactly that story in the Gospel of Thomas, and it appears in none of the four gospels in the Bible. Right after it comes a second parable missing from the canon, about a man who practices a murder before he commits it. Sayings 97 and 98 make a strange pair. Read together, they describe two ways a spiritual life can go, and they’re worth a slow look. ...

Here is the version you’ve probably seen, on a poster or a quote site or tucked into a book on creativity: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” It’s a beautiful sentence. The two halves mirror each other perfectly, and the message is easy to carry around. Express what’s in you or it will eat you alive. Write the novel, start the business, say the thing you’ve been holding back. ...

Ask most people what the Gnostics thought of the Hebrew Bible and you’ll get a one-line answer. They hated it. The God of Moses was the villain, the jealous craftsman who trapped us in matter, and the whole Old Testament was his propaganda. There are Gnostic texts that come close to saying exactly that, and this site has walked through some of them. Then there is a letter from a teacher named Ptolemy to a woman named Flora, and it does something nobody expects. It takes the Law of Moses apart piece by piece, with a scalpel rather than a hammer, and it ends up treating most of the Law with respect. If you’ve only met the cartoon version of Gnosticism, this is the text that complicates it. Here’s how the argument works, where it still falls short, and what a modern reader can borrow from it. ...

Near the end of the New Testament, two men get named and condemned for a single idea. Hymenaeus and Philetus, the writer of 2 Timothy warns, “say that the resurrection has already taken place, and they destroy the faith of some.” We never hear their side. Their teaching spreads “like gangrene,” the letter says, and then it drops them. In 1945 a jar came out of the Egyptian sand holding, among much else, a short letter from a teacher to a student named Rheginus, and its thesis is the sentence the church had warned against. Not that the resurrection will come. That it has. The Treatise on Resurrection is a sustained second-century argument for that position, it runs under two thousand words, and it turns out to be one of the warmest things in the whole library. Let’s walk through it and ask what living from it might look like. ...

In 1244, the most respected religious teacher in Konya met a wandering dervish named Shams of Tabriz, and the meeting ended the teacher’s career on the spot. Jalal al-Din Rumi had been a theologian of rank, head of his late father’s community, secure in his learning. Four years later Shams vanished, probably violently, and the scholar’s grief broke open into poetry that has not stopped moving readers in eight centuries. ...