Say the word “God” quietly to yourself and watch what comes up. For a lot of people it’s an old man on a cloud, or a church smell, or a parent’s voice telling them to sit still. Almost nobody gets the thing the word was invented to point at.

A second-century Christian writer noticed the same problem and wrote it into a gospel. The Gospel of Philip, one of the books buried near Nag Hammadi, spends a surprising amount of its length worrying about words. I touched on this in my walk through the Gospel of Philip, but it deserves more room, because the teaching turns out to be something you can practice on an ordinary Tuesday.

Philip’s Complaint About Words

Here’s the passage at its sharpest, in Marvin Meyer’s translation:

“Whoever hears the word ‘god’ thinks not of what is real but rather of what is unreal. So also with the words ‘father,’ ‘son,’ ‘holy spirit,’ ’life,’ ’light,’ ‘resurrection,’ ‘church,’ and all the rest…”

Look at that list. It’s the whole vocabulary of Christian worship, and Philip says every word in it misleads the person hearing it. That’s a strange thing for a religious text to admit about its own tools.

The text is careful about where the fault lies, though. Philip says the words “refer to what is real.” The problem is in the hearing. By the time “father” reaches you, it has collected every father you’ve ever known, and the word now points at them instead.

I find this oddly comforting. If you’ve ever sat in a service and felt nothing at a word that was supposed to move you, Philip would say that’s an honest response to a worn-out label. The deadness lives in the word, and the thing behind it may be fine.

Who Swapped the Labels

Philip doesn’t stop at the observation. It offers an explanation, and it’s a very Gnostic one. The rulers of this world, the archons, saw that people have a kinship with the good, so they went after the names.

“They took the names of the good and assigned them to what is not good, to fool people with names and link the names to what is not good.”

If you’ve read my post on what the archons are, you know they’re the powers in Gnostic myth that keep human beings asleep. Here their method is almost bureaucratic. They don’t need to destroy anything good. They only need to move its label onto something else and let habit do the rest.

You don’t have to believe in cosmic rulers to recognize the move. Advertising calls a subscription you can’t cancel “membership,” and a workplace calls unpaid overtime “passion.” A government calls a war by a name that sounds like a holiday. Every one of those is a good word reassigned, and once the swap takes, the original meaning gets harder to reach.

One Name That Stays Unspoken

Right after the complaint, Philip makes a turn. There is one name, it says, that never gets worn out, because it’s never pronounced here at all. It is “the name the Father gave the Son,” and the text adds a line I keep coming back to: “Those who have this name understand it but do not speak it.”

The Gospel of Truth, another text from the same Valentinian circle, builds a whole meditation on this idea. Its compact version is “The Name of the Father is the Son.” The Father’s name is a person, the one who came from him, and you know that name the way you know someone you love. You don’t look it up.

There’s a lesson in that for how we hold the names we do say. The most important things in a life tend to resist being put into words. People who’ve had a powerful experience in prayer or meditation often get vague when they describe it, and I used to think that was a dodge. After reading Philip, I’m more inclined to think it’s accuracy.

Being Called by Name

The Gospel of Truth also turns the whole question around. Instead of asking what we call God, it asks whether God has called us. “One whose name has not been spoken is ignorant,” it says, “for how could a person hear if that person’s name had not been pronounced?”

Then it describes what happens when the call comes:

“If called, that person hears, replies, turns to the one who is calling, and goes up to him. He knows how he is called.”

That last sentence is the one I’d underline. Knowing how you’re called is different from knowing what you’re called. Your legal name is on your driver’s license, but the name that wakes you up is something else, and the text treats hearing it as the start of knowledge. I wrote more about that moment of being woken in The Call.

Philip has a matching image. In its version, the people who belong to the bridal chamber “have only one name, and that is rest.” All the labels a person picks up in this world (job title, diagnosis, the role they play at family dinners) fall away, and what’s left is a name that’s also a condition.

Philip Doesn’t Give Up on Language

It would be easy to read all this as a call to stop talking about God. Philip doesn’t go there. A few lines after the warning, it admits that “no one can refer to truth without names.” Truth is one, the text says, and it shows up as many for our sake, so we can learn the one through the many.

So the instruction amounts to keeping your words honest. Use them, and keep checking whether they still point where you meant them to. A name is a tool, and a tool can drift out of true without anyone noticing until the cut goes crooked.

Practicing It

Here’s what I’ve tried, and what I’d suggest if you want to work with this teaching for a week or two.

  1. Pick one word from Philip’s list. “Father” or “light” work well. For a few days, every time you hear or read it, pause and notice the first image that shows up. Write a few of them down.
  2. Ask where the image came from. Usually it’s a person, a painting, or a sermon. That’s the furniture the word picked up on its way to you.
  3. Try a substitute and watch it fail. Swap in another word for a day and see how fast the new one fills up with the same images. This is pretty humbling, and it shows you the problem is in the listener.
  4. Catch one reassigned label in the wild. Find a good word being used to sell or excuse something. Say to yourself what it actually describes.
  5. Sit for five minutes without any names. Don’t name your breath, your thoughts, or God. When a word arrives, let it pass. The silence that’s left is one place Philip’s unspoken name might be heard.

I’ve done the first step with “light” for about a month now. At the start, the word brought up a ceiling fixture and a hymn I didn’t like. Lately, every so often, it brings up nothing at all for a second, and that empty second is the most interesting thing the word has done for me in years.

The Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Truth are quoted from Marvin Meyer’s translations in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2010). The Philip passages come from the sections Meyer titles “Words and Names,” “The Name of the Father,” “Truth,” “The Archons,” and “Slaves and the Free.” The Gospel of Truth passages come from “The Father Utters the Names of People Who Know” and “The Father’s Name Is Revealed.”