Halfway through the Gospel of Truth there’s a parable about moving house. A family packs up, and some of their jars turn out to be bad ones that crack on the way. The owner doesn’t grieve over them, because the full jars made the trip, and those were the ones worth carrying.

Then the parable gets restless. A great disturbance breaks out among the jars, “for some were empty and others were filled, some were ample and others were depleted, some were purified and others were broken.” I read that line on my laptop with a row of tabs open above it, each one too narrow to show its title, and I had the uncomfortable sense that the text was describing my screen.

So here’s the question I’ve been chewing on. The old Valentinian teachers had two words for where a soul can live, and the internet is the biggest place most of us spend our waking hours. Which one is it?

Two Words for Two Places

The first word is pleroma, Greek for fullness. I wrote a beginner’s guide to it back in August, and the short version is that the Valentinians pictured the divine realm as a household of paired qualities flowing out of an unknowable source. Nothing in it stands alone, and nothing in it lacks anything.

Everything outside gets the second word. Irenaeus, the second-century bishop who summarized the Valentinian system so he could attack it, reports that when Wisdom’s troubled thinking was cut off from the fullness, it was “cast forth in a region of shadow and emptiness.” The Greek behind that emptiness is kenoma, and modern scholars use it as the name for the whole region below the fullness. Our world sits in it.

Here’s the detail people miss. The kenoma is crowded. According to Irenaeus, the lower world was furnished with images of the higher one, copies of the aeons made in their honor. What it lacks is a connection to the thing it copies.

The Gospel of Truth calls that condition deficiency, and it gives a surprisingly exact diagnosis of where deficiency comes from:

Since deficiency came about because the Father was not known, from the moment when the Father is known, deficiency will cease to be.

Deficiency, in other words, is a shortage of knowing where you came from. You can be buried in things and still be in it. That’s the distinction I want to carry into the rest of the question.

The Case for Fullness

I’d be lying if I said the internet was all shadow. This blog depends on it. I can read the Gospel of Truth in several translations on a weeknight, find a Coptic grammar a stranger put online for free, and watch someone in another hemisphere explain a manuscript fragment I’d never heard of. For a reader of old texts, that’s pretty close to a miracle.

The network also has a structure the Valentinians would have recognized. A link is a pointer to something beyond itself. Every page on the web exists in relation to other pages, the way every aeon in the fullness exists in a pair. Nothing online stands entirely alone, which is more or less the first rule of the pleroma.

And some nights it really does feed you. You go looking for one answer, find it, and close the laptop knowing more about something you love. I don’t want to pretend that never happens.

The Case for Emptiness

Hans Jonas, the philosopher whose 1958 book The Gnostic Religion still shapes how these texts get read, noticed something odd about how they described the world. They didn’t call it chaos. They called it an order, and they hated it for being one:

The blemish of nature lies not in any deficiency of order but in the all-too-pervading completeness of it.

That sentence fits the internet better than anything a tech critic has written. The trouble with the feed isn’t that it’s missing anything. It’s complete enough that you never need to leave. There’s always another post below the last one, and the bottom of the page has been engineered away.

The Gospel of Truth also has a figure called Error, who works her material “in vain” and builds a fashioned substitute for the truth she can’t see. Later the text says flatly that “Error is empty,” with nothing inside her at all. The platforms share her trick, filling up with images of fullness (friendship, news, wisdom, belonging) built by systems that have no idea what any of those things are for. I covered the powers behind that machinery in Algorithmic Archons, so I won’t repeat it here.

What I’ll add is the feeling. You can spend two hours online, read thousands of words, and come away hungrier than you went in. That’s the kenoma’s signature. It’s crowded with copies, and the copies don’t feed.

The Missing Boundary

There’s one more piece of the Valentinian myth that I think settles the question, or at least tells you how to answer it on a given night.

In the version Irenaeus reports, Wisdom strains forward to grasp the unknowable source, more and more, until she nearly dissolves. She “would have been swallowed,” in Bentley Layton’s translation, if she hadn’t run into a power the teachers called the boundary, Horos in Greek. The boundary holds her back. It keeps the fullness whole by marking where it ends.

That’s a startling idea for a mystical system. The fullness has edges. Endless reaching is the thing that nearly destroyed Wisdom, and the limit is what saved her.

So my answer to the title question is that the internet turns into a kenoma when it loses its boundary, and most of the apps on your phone were built to remove every boundary they can find. The Gospel of Truth’s jars make the same point in a smaller key. A full jar, the text says, is usually sealed with wax, and a jar whose seal breaks starts to leak.

Putting a Seal on It

What this asks for is edges, and you can add them without a digital detox or a cabin in the woods. Here’s what I’ve been trying.

  • Go in with a question. Write it on paper before you open the browser. When it’s answered, close the tab. That’s the seal.
  • Follow the link upstream. When an article quotes a source, go read the source. Then see what that one cites. The Gospel of Truth treats knowing your origin as the cure for deficiency, and the web rewards anyone who traces a claim back to where it came from.
  • Check the hunger afterward. When you close the laptop, ask whether you’re more fed or less. That one question tells you which region you were just in, and it’s more honest than a screen-time report.
  • Keep one full thing that ends. A paper book, a long letter, a single album played start to finish. Anything with a last page reminds your nervous system what completion feels like.

If you want a fuller structure for the week, A Rule of Life for the Internet Age lays one out. But start smaller than that. Tonight, before you open anything, decide when you’ll close it.

The Gospel of Truth is quoted from Marvin Meyer’s translation in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2010). Irenaeus’s account of the Valentinian system, including Wisdom’s restraint by the boundary and her exile to “a region of shadow and emptiness,” is quoted from Bentley Layton’s translation of Against Heresies 1.2.2 and 1.4.1 in The Gnostic Scriptures (2nd ed., Yale, 2021). Hans Jonas is quoted from The Gnostic Religion (Beacon Press).