Spiritual Practice

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. ...

This is the second post in a three-part series on Sophia. The first post covered The Fall of Sophia. After the fall, there was darkness. Sophia, divine Wisdom, had made her error. Her unilateral attempt to create had produced the Demiurge, the ignorant craftsman who fashioned our flawed world. Now Sophia herself was trapped in the chaos below, her light-power stolen, surrounded by hostile forces that mocked her suffering. This is where many stories would end. The fall leads to destruction. Mistakes are fatal. ...