A great number of the texts in the Nag Hammadi LibraryFootnote 1 pay considerable attention to describing the soul's plight in the present world, the things that lure it away from what is genuinely good, and the ways of escaping from these inferior attractions. In this collection, the soul's condition is usually explored in the form of narratives. This issue stands in focus not only in labyrinthine stories of how the world was created by an ignorant creator-god. There are also plainer stories of the soul, in which its present plight and the difficulties it experiences on its way back are narrated without adducing any account of the creation of the world.
In what follows, I will call the more mythical variety ‘demiurgical’ and the plainer variety ‘nondemiurgical’. The clearest representatives of the nondemiurgical variety are the Exegesis on the Soul in Nag Hammadi Codex II and the Authoritative Discourse in Nag Hammadi Codex VI. In addition to them, I will discuss here three demiurgical texts in Nag Hammadi Codex II: The Secret Book of John, The Nature of the Rulers, and On the Origin of the World. I seek to demonstrate that, in both types of stories, ethical concerns are intrinsically linked with the portraits painted of the soul's present condition in the state of forgetfulness, and its transformation, described in terms of its awakening and ascent.
Although specialists have addressed the philosophical background of moral teachings in Nag Hammadi texts for quite some time, these texts have not yet gained the attention they merit in the study of early Christianity and ancient philosophy. To mention only one example, a valuable new collection of essays related to the topic of this study contains three chapters on Paul and one on Clement of Alexandria, but none on Nag Hammadi texts.Footnote 2 And yet these texts contain lots of evidence on these issues, as has been amply demonstrated already in the studies by Takashi Onuki, Clemens Scholten, and Michael Williams, all published in the 1980s.Footnote 3 One of the claims I seek to make here is that the Nag Hammadi texts are no less relevant than Paul and Clement in the big picture of how early Christians adopted and adapted philosophical traditions related to moral progress.
It has been suggested that the two nondemiurgical texts to be discussed here presuppose a demiurgical myth but do not want to lay it bare to less advanced audiences. In the most recent English translation of the Nag Hammadi Library, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, the Exegesis on the Soul is introduced as an attempt ‘to explain the doctrine of gnosis in a rather simple and attractive form’ and ‘to communicate the message to a wider public and not only to the members of a Gnostic group’.Footnote 4 In like manner, the Authoritative Discourse is described as ‘a tractate written with the goal of simplifying and proclaiming the Gnostic myth of the soul’.Footnote 5
The more general problems connected with the term ‘Gnosticism’ (and with the discourse of orthodoxy and heresy the usage of this term maintains) have already been addressed often enough and need not be discussed here.Footnote 6 Suffice it to say that the exoteric interpretation of the Exegesis on the Soul and the Authoritative Discourse finds little support in these two texts themselves: unlike Ptolemaeus in his Letter to Flora (and unlike John's gospel, for that matter),Footnote 7 nowhere do their authors promise subsequent, and more advanced, teaching.
The alternative model I seek to develop here is that the plain, nondemiurgical stories of the soul, and the more complicated demiurgical stories are narrative variations on one and the same basic ‘script’:Footnote 8 both sets of myths are used to address, in narrative form, the soul's ideal state, the obstacles that hinder it from reaching this state, and the necessity for its conversion. The basic script can be rehearsed in different narrative contexts, and sometimes the basic storyline is repeated several times within one text alone.
1. Philosophical Antecedents
Some elements in the ‘script’ underlying different kinds of early Christian stories of the soul may seem intuitive—such as the notion of the soul's movement up and down—but most of them are culturally conditioned. The metaphors Plato used in his dialogues to illustrate the soul's condition set the scene for subsequent discussions on this issue; stories of the soul in Nag Hammadi texts are no exception.
Considerable variation in Plato's different accounts of the soul suggests that his point in discussing this issue was ethical rather than doctrinal. The ethical aspects of his views about the soul become especially clear in his simpler accounts of the soul in Phaedo and Phaedrus.Footnote 9
The picture Plato paints in Phaedo of what the soul should do is quite plain. The soul should turn inwards (83a) and devote itself to intellectual reflection concerning things divine. This activity makes the soul lighter and thus gradually enables its ascent to the divine realm. In company with the gods, the soul becomes ‘happy, and free from error, lack of understanding, fear, all-consuming love’ (80e). Attachment to the body, in contrast, weighs the soul down since the body is ‘burdensome, heavy, earthly and visible’ (81c). Grave misconduct—‘gluttony, debauchery, and drinking’—makes the soul so heavy that it will enter an animal's body in its next reincarnation (81e). It follows that the soul should seek to escape the body. In this way, it ‘departs pure, dragging with it nothing of the body’ (80e).
In Phaedrus, the core narrative is similar to that in Phaedo: the soul committed to seeking the vision of the divine becomes lighter and ascends, whereas the soul clinging to visible things becomes heavy and falls down. In Phaedrus, however, Plato offers a more detailed account of the stages the soul must go through on its way up. The soul focused on the divine is ‘free from harm until the next cycle’. The soul can repeat its success time and again, but lapses are always possible: ‘it may happen’ that even a progressing soul ‘is filled with forgetfulness (λήθη) and evil (κακία)’, becomes heavy, loses its wings, and ‘falls to the earth’ (ἐπὶ τὴν γὴν πέσῃ).Footnote 10 Failure in one cycle, however, does not entail full degradation; it only takes the soul one step down in the next reincarnation.Footnote 11 Progress and degradation are possible in each reincarnation: ‘Now in all these states, one who lives justly (ὃς…ἂν δικαίως διαγάγῃ) obtains a better lot, while one living unjustly receives a worse one’ (248e). One either progresses or slips back. Therefore, one must constantly aim at moral improvement.Footnote 12
Plato used stories of the soul as an invitation to a philosophical way of life,Footnote 13 which he promoted as a bargain: ‘doing philosophy without guile’ reduces the time needed for the soul's release from the cycle of incarnations by 7000 years (from 10,000 to 3000).Footnote 14 In addition, it is at the philosopher stage that the soul is again supplied with its wings, which it had lost on its way down. These wings are needed for the soul's ascent to, and recollection of, divine reality.Footnote 15
More immediate gains in living the life of a philosopher are that it brings about freedom from emotions, and removes the fear of death. Plato considered emotions the most pernicious evil since the soul is attached to the body through them. Emotions dupe the soul into believing that their objects are ‘most splendid and true’.Footnote 16 In other words, the soul deceived by emotions accepts as truth what the body claims to be true. Reliance on wrong messages sent by bodily senses deceives the soul, making it ‘confused and dizzy like a drunk’.Footnote 17
The bad habits the deceived soul develops in this life keep it in the cycle of reincarnation, because this soul is so fond of the body that it seeks to find a new one as quickly as possible.Footnote 18 Accordingly, ‘the true philosopher’ steers away from delight, desire, distress, and fear.Footnote 19 The method is contemplation of the divine things, which ‘brings about calm’ in the storm of emotions. Consequently, a person in the know is no longer afraid of the destruction of his soul at death since his soul will continue doing what it already started on earth, that is, contemplating divine things. The only difference is that the soul is now ‘released from human calamities’.Footnote 20
After Plato, emotions became subject to intensive scrutiny in moral philosophy.Footnote 21 Particularly, Stoic philosophers developed subtle categorizations, in which dozens of emotions were grouped under the four emotions already mentioned by Plato.Footnote 22 Like Plato, the Stoics viewed emotions as based upon faulty reasoning that attaches value to external things. The control of emotions, thus, became a major issue in the philosophers' discussions about moral progress. Obnoxious emotions became designated as the sickness of the soul, with the philosopher as the physician offering the cure: a person entangled with emotions could be cured by identifying and correcting the wrong thought patterns underlying them.Footnote 23 In theory, it was debated whether the goal should be complete extirpation of emotions (apatheia) or their moderation (metriopatheia), but in practice most parties agreed that the latter is the only viable option for most humans.Footnote 24
2. Authoritative Discourse (NHC VI, 3)
In addition to the fact that the Authoritative Discourse does not present itself as an exoteric text, as was mentioned above, the present context of this text in Nag Hammadi Codex VI offers little support for a ‘Gnostic’ reading of this text. The demiurgical myth assumes a very marginal role in this codex: there is only one passage in the entire codex referring to a distinction between the true God and an inferior creator-God.Footnote 25
The selection of texts in Nag Hammadi Codex VI is especially puzzling since it contains both more or less openly Christian textsFootnote 26 and works that are clearly of non-Christian origin, including Plato's Republic and some Hermetic texts.Footnote 27 One of the recurring features in different tractates of this codex, however, is the healing of the soul. Concern for the soul's sickness and healing, thus, is one of the common themes that may explain why these diverse texts were put together.Footnote 28
In the Authoritative Discourse, ‘word’ is described as ‘a medicine’, applied on, and healing, the soul's blind eyes.Footnote 29 In the opening tractate, the Acts of Peter and 12 Disciples, Christ not only appears to his disciples in ‘the form of a doctor with a medicine bag’, but he also gives this bag to his disciples, urging them to ‘heal all the people of the city who are sick and believe in my name’.Footnote 30 The disciples are commissioned to heal both body and soul, but what really matters is the cure they offer to the soul: ‘the doctors of this world heal what is of the world, but the doctors of souls heal the heart’. Healing of the body is only of instrumental value:Footnote 31 its purpose is to convince people that the disciples ‘also have the power to heal sicknesses of the heart’.Footnote 32 The final text in the codex, an excerpt from the Hermetic Perfect Discourse, also emphasizes the necessity of healing the emotions: ‘Knowledge of what is right is truly healing for the passions of material existence… God has perfected learning and knowledge…so that by means of learning and knowledge (human beings) might restrain passions and vices’.Footnote 33
The story of the soul's plight and rescue in the Authoritative Discourse follows in essence the two-way pattern set in Plato's dialogues:Footnote 34
1) The soul's descent: the spiritual soul is ‘cast down into a body’, becomes subject to emotions,Footnote 35 and succumbs to wine-drinking, debauchery, and gluttony. These things cause the soul's memory loss concerning the things divine: ‘The soul forgets her siblings and her father, and sweet pleasures deceive her’. While Plato taught that the soul filled with evil will end up in an animal's body in the next cycle, this text teaches ‘realized reincarnation’: the deceived soul lives an ‘animal life’ already in the here and now (23–24).
2) The ascent: the soul ‘flees upwards’ from its ‘enemies’ (28)—which probably can be identified with the ‘fleeting sweet passions’ the soul is said to abandon (31). Rehearsing the Platonic ideal, the people adopting this lifestyle are no longer attached to ‘created things’ but their hearts are focused on ‘what truly is’ (27). Accordingly, the enlightened soul renounces its attachment to this world and to the body: ‘The soul returned the body to those who had given it to her’ (32). This may point to the separation of soul and body at death, yet the new attitude towards the body means hard times for the soul already in this life since those who have adopted this lifestyle wander in this world hungry, thirsty, sick, weak and in pain (27).
The author of this text not only speaks of ‘desire (
), hatred (
) and envy (
)’ on a general level.Footnote 36 The transformation of the spiritual soul into a ‘material soul’ (
) also means that the soul is attached to ‘external companions’ (
), comprising ‘grand passions, the pleasures of life, envy filled with hatred, bragging, talking nonsense, accusations’.Footnote 37 The author is even more graphic in condemning ‘the desire for a piece of clothing (
)’, and a number of other similar things: ‘love of money, pride, arrogance, one kind of envy being envious of another kind of envy, bodily beauty, leading people astray’.Footnote 38 Wine and food are also an issue: the author regards wine as the source of debauchery,Footnote 39 and warns against gluttony.Footnote 40 In addition, food is one of the metaphors illustrating the devil's attempts to misguide people.Footnote 41
The descriptions of the errors of the soul succumbing to matter may be understood as being directed against other Christians who, in his view, have adopted an erroneous lifestyle. For the author expresses strong disapproval of some people whom he considers fools, and who are not seeking God; these ignoramuses are most likely wrong kinds of Christian since the author deems them to be worse than ‘pagans’ (33).Footnote 42
The wrong lifestyle described in the text is no doubt a thing to be avoided. Nevertheless, there is little room for explicit moral exhortation in this text. One is either in the know or outside it. The ‘fools’ seem to have no hope of moral improvement. Their ascent is not only hindered by ignorance but also by ‘the demon of deception’ (
). At this point, however, the text sends a mixed message since the author is also confident that the knowledge of what is evil is sufficient to bring about change for the better: it is this knowledge that makes the soul adopt ‘a new kind of conduct’ (
) (31).
The way the soul's story is told in the Authoritative Discourse leans mainly on Platonic tradition, but it also offers a glimpse of a demiurgical myth in one passage: the ‘merchants of body’ (
),Footnote 43 to whom the soul returns its body, are described in the same way as are the angels responsible for the creation of Adam's body in demiurgical sources: they created the body in order to ‘bring down’ the soul, and yet they were unaware that it already had ‘an invisible spiritual body’ (32–33).Footnote 44 This one passage does not make the whole text a demiurgical one, but it shows that the demiurgical myth belonged to the pool of traditions from which the author drew inspiration for his own account of the soul.Footnote 45
3. The Exegesis on the Soul (NHC II, 6)
The Exegesis on the Soul is placed in Nag Hammadi Codex II, which is more demiurgical in its outlook than Codex VI: demiurgical myths are related in three of its seven tractates, and one additional text, the Gospel of Philip, mentions the ignorant creator-god in passing (NHC II, 75). Nevertheless, there are also three nondemiurgical texts in this codex. In addition, the arrangement of texts may suggest that the demiurgical myth was not the major issue even in this codex. There is no development of argument from nondemiurgical works to demiurgical ones, or vice versa.Footnote 46 The codex opens with a demiurgical text (Secret John), but closes with two nondemiurgical texts (Exegesis on the Soul; Book of Thomas). In addition, the three demiurgical texts are not grouped together, but two nondemiurgical texts are placed between Secret John and Rulers.Footnote 47 It seems that whoever put these texts together did not do that in an attempt to create a unified demiurgical corpus, which would serve as a foundation, in light of which the other texts should be interpreted.
What brings all these three texts together is, again, concern for the soul. The first and last texts even contain similar discussions between Jesus and his disciples about the fates of different kinds of soul.Footnote 48 In addition, the emphasis placed upon the mastery of emotions in Secret John may be one of the reasons why this text was placed at the beginning of Codex II.Footnote 49
In the Exegesis on the Soul, explicit sexual imagery is used to illustrate the soul's plight in the body. Porneia is one of the key metaphors in the text. Alluding to explicit language used in the book of Ezekiel (ch. 16) to portray Jerusalem's unholy alliances with the nations, the author of Exegesis describes the soul as playing the whore (
) and sleeping with everyone it meets (128; cf. Ezek 16.25, 32). In keeping with this imagery, the soul's inner enemies are described as ‘adulterers’, and the soul as seeking, and finally finding, its true husband: at a later point of the story God sends the soul from above its male counterpart (
), also described as its ‘brother’ (
) and ‘bridegroom’ (
) (132). This implies that the soul, which was originally androgynous, did not fall down completely: its other half remained with God, and can now be reunited with the fallen part.Footnote 50
This text describes the soul's descent in a Platonic fashion: the soul ‘fell down into the body’, where it ended up in the hands of ‘many robbers’ (
) and ‘unruly men’ (
). The latter term recalls, most likely intentionally, ‘the unruly horse’ in Plato. Plato used this term to illustrate the desiring part of the soul, which the charioteer must train to obedience by restraining it by force time and time again.Footnote 51
This allusion is one of the many indications that what is at stake here in Exegesis is the poor state of affairs within the soul prior to its conversion: the robbers and unruly men are powers active inside the soul. Also in keeping with the Platonic tradition, the soul is described as suffering from memory loss, this time combined with the notion of the soul's bridegroom: ‘She did not know what he looked like, she no longer remembers since the time she fell from her father's house’ (132).
The soul's ascent is mentioned in Exegesis, but this is only one of the many ways of describing the soul's restitution; other descriptions include resurrection, redemption from captivity, and rebirth (134). A clear modification of Plato's two-way pattern is the role God plays in the whole process: the soul, which recognizes its situation, does not immediately ascend to God but God must visit it from above (128).
It almost feels inappropriate to pose the question of the method enabling the soul to ascend since the author so vehemently denies that any exists: neither ‘words of training’ (
), nor ‘skills’, nor ‘book wisdom’ are of any help (134).Footnote 52 It all boils down to the mercy God shows in response to true repentance,Footnote 53 demonstrated by sighing, weeping, confession of sins, ‘mourning for ourselves’, and ‘hating ourselves because of our condition’ (135). The author has no qualms about emotions shown for the right reasons: ‘Repentance takes place in distress (
) and the pain of heart (
)’.
Rituals seem to play little role in the soul's conversion according to this text. The author's view of baptism is a fully spiritualized one. The author is emphatic that it is the soul's return to its original nature that should be regarded as the true baptism,Footnote 54 taking place when the soul ‘turns inwards’ and becomes ‘cleansed of external pollution’ (131–32).
Although the author quotes and interprets biblical passages referring to prostitution, illicit sex is not a primary moral concern in this text.Footnote 55 It is made very clear that the porneia the author speaks about should not be understood literally but metaphorically. The author emphasizes that, in prohibiting visits to prostitutes in 1 Corinthians, Paul ‘was not only speaking of the fornication of the body, but first and foremost (
) of that pertaining to the soul’.
Leaning on Eph 6.12, the author maintains that the real battle the soul must wage is that against ‘the cosmic rulers of this darkness and the spirits of wickedness’ (130–31). The reference in Ezek 16.26 to ‘the sons of Egypt, …men of great flesh’ is explained, not as denoting sexual desire, as one could expect, but as referring to all ‘things related to flesh, sensual perception, and earth, by which the soul is defiled’.
Strikingly, sex is not included in the author's list of earthly matters at all; the items that are mentioned are ‘wine, olive oil, clothing, and other kinds of external follies used to cover the body, these things that the soul thinks it needs’ (130). Biblical and philosophical traditions shake hands again: most items mentioned here are drawn from the portrayal of the lewd Jerusalem in Ezekiel 16 (esp. vv. 15–22), but the point made with them is unmistakably philosophical: it is the soul's erroneous value judgement that glues it to the visible things.
4. The Secret Book of John (NHC II, 1)Footnote 56
The soul is a major theme in the second main part of The Secret Book of John, which offers an elaborate account of the creation of humankind, based upon a radical rewriting of the first chapters of Genesis.
Unlike in Plato, the soul itself is not the link connecting human beings to the divine realm in Secret John. The soul was produced by inferior ‘angels and demons’, involved in Adam's creation. They first created a body consisting only of the soul (
) for Adam,Footnote 57 but this proved a failure: this creature ‘remained completely inactive and motionless’ (II, 19). This is another deviation from Plato, who described the soul as invisibly moving the body.Footnote 58 What made the ‘body consisting of soul’ stand up and move, according to Secret John, is the divine spirit, transmitted to the soul when the creator-god Yaldabaoth ‘blew into its face’.Footnote 59 The presence of the divine spirit also made the soul ‘radiant’, ‘naked as regards evil’, superior in thinking—and the subject of its creators' envy (II, 19–20).
The events in the subsequent story are narrative variations on one theme: the soul is sent into a downward movement by the cosmic rulers, and yet, at each new stage of its descent, it is provided with a divine instructor that shows the way back. The instructor's teaching is summarized in a Platonic fashion: it teaches Adam's soul ‘about the descent of his offspring and about the way of ascent (which is) the way it came down’ (II, 20). Adam is here clearly a paradigmatic character, as is demonstrated by the account of the divine Providence concluding the long version of Secret John: this character offers similar instruction to a human being awakened from the state of ignorance (II, 30–31).Footnote 60
The subsequent stages in Secret John's account of Adam's creation illustrate, in the form of mythic narration, the obstacles preventing the soul's ascent. The text taps into well-established Platonic imagery, not only in describing how the creator angels created a body of flesh for Adam out of fire, earth, and water (II, 20–21), but also in describing this body as ‘the tomb’ and ‘fetter of forgetfulness’ (II, 21).Footnote 61
A crucial juncture in the story is the introduction of the excessive desire for procreation (
) and sexual intercourse (
), by which means Yaldabaoth succeeds in lulling humankind into the state of forgetfulness (II, 24–25). Nevertheless, even sexual desire did not completely work in the way Yaldabaoth wanted. The ensuing account of how Adam ‘knew the likeness of his own foreknowledge’ and then begot Seth (Secr. John II, 24–25) may imply that sexual intercourse took place between Adam and Eve, and that something good resulted from it.Footnote 62
Sexual desire, thus, is one of the stages in the story of how humankind was cast into darkness, but even this stage did not bring about complete detachment from the divine realm. Hence the need for yet another deception: luxury. The story of the sons of God taking human wives in Genesis 6 reappears in Secret John as a story of angels luring humankind with ‘gold, silver, gift, copper, iron, metal and all kinds of appearances (
)’.Footnote 63 This account in Secret John is doubtless indebted to a traditional Jewish lore, in which all kinds of crafts, including production of swords, knives, and shields, are ascribed to the fallen sons of God, mentioned in Genesis 6 (1 En. 7–8; cf. also Gen 4.22).Footnote 64 The author of Secret John retells the story in a way that leaves no doubt that his point is not so much aetiological as it is ethical: the traditional story turns into one in which the evil angels dupe humans ‘into great trouble’ with luxury metals.Footnote 65Secret John's version of the story, thus, lends itself to a Platonic interpretation: the luxury items are, or illustrate, one way in which the world of appearances distracts the soul from what really matters, that is, ‘the true God’.Footnote 66
Control of emotions is an important aspect in the soul's battle against the demons, although this theme is not systematically worked out in Secret John. In one passage, contained only in the long version, four basic emotions (distress, delight, desire, and fear) are ascribed to a gang of four chief demons. The listing of subcategories of emotions, arranged under each of the four main ones, betrays an academic interest in the topic since this passage closely follows a fixed Stoic classification of emotions.Footnote 67
The meticulous Stoic classification of emotions, however, remains an oddly isolated piece of tradition since this passage is not called upon later in the story. One later passage, however, shows that Secret John subscribes to the Stoic ideal of apatheia. In the description of the perfect souls, the most concrete indication of their advanced status is their freedom from emotions, including anger (
), envy (
), jealousy (
), desire (
), and their ‘lack of unsatisfied needs’ (
) (II, 25). This latter listing of emotions is probably more original in Secret John since it is also included in the two short versions of the text, while the fourfold classification in the earlier part is only present in the long version of the text. In any case, in the long version of Secret John, the link drawn between the emotions listed in this latter passage and the earlier listing of the four primeval demons responsible for them is clear. Control of emotions is in this version identified as the method by which the soul wages war against the demons.
In addition to the perfect souls, Secret John also mentions (1) less advanced people who can become endowed with the spirit, but are still in danger of succumbing to ‘the counterfeit spirit’, and (2) the deceived souls, which end up in new cycles of reincarnation.Footnote 68 These poor souls are described in terms derived from Platonic tradition: the wrong spirit makes them ‘heavy’ and draws them towards ‘the works of evil’. The soul belonging to this latter group is thus bound to reenact the same events that Adam went through in the mythic past, until it finally ‘awakens from forgetfulness and acquires knowledge’.Footnote 69 The only group for whom there is no hope of salvation whatsoever are apostates: those ‘who knew and turned away’ will be taken to a ‘place where there is no repentance’ (II, 26–27).
5. Two Other Demiurgical Texts in Nag Hammadi Codex II
The myths narrated in The Nature of the Rulers (NHC II, 4) and On the Origin of the World (NHC II, 5) resemble closely that related in Secret John.Footnote 70 The powers involved in the creation of the first humans are as much characterized by unruly sexual desire as they are in Secret John. Just like in Secret John, the object of these powers' desire is Adam's spiritual instructor, who, notably, is in the two texts called his ‘physician’ (
).Footnote 71 What these two texts add into the mix are new characters, who are, as I seek to argue below, illustrations of the soul's battle against desire.
Rulers runs a story of Norea, described as the fourth child of Adam and Eve, and as one who repels the rulers' sexual advances. She resorts to two methods. The first is that she calls upon her true nature: ‘I am from the world above’. The second is prayer: She asks the true God to rescue her from the rulers' hands. The whole episode looks like a narrative dramatization of the soul drawn between earthly and heavenly things, and making the right choice. If one follows this course of interpretation, one can recognize a subtle point made in the form of narrative: Norea's affirmation of her being ‘from above’ does not yet stop the unruly powers requesting sexual favors from her; it is only after her prayer that they leave her alone.Footnote 72 The text, thus, finds value in refreshing the memory of the soul's true origin, but does not consider this sufficient to extinguish the urges issuing from the body; prayer and divine help are also needed to rescue the soul from those urges.
The most important new element in the myth related in both Rulers and Origin is the story of Yaldabaoth's dethronement and the ensuing conversion and enthronement of his son Sabaoth.Footnote 73 This story, just like that of Norea, can be understood as an allegory of the soul making the right choice.
The story in Rulers describes Sabaoth as undergoing conversion: he first ‘repents’ (
), and then ‘condemns his father and matter (
), his mother’. Such details would make little sense, if the point were only to report a change in the cosmic administration, whereas they make perfect sense as illustrating a repenting soul that renounces its attachment to the material world. In Exegesis the soul was described as playing the whore, and then repenting. The same storyline finds here a more mythic expression: Sabaoth was one of the lustful powers in his former life, and he now repents. Sabaoth is also described in terms making him similar to Adam: just like Adam, Sabaoth is provided with divine instructors, Wisdom and Life, and they raise him up: they ‘took him up over the seventh heaven, below the curtain between what is above and what is below’ (95). The story thus reproduces the same two-stage pattern of detachment and ascent as Plato's myth of the soul.Footnote 74
One noteworthy by-product of this story about Sabaoth is that, stripped of his cosmic power, the dethroned creator-god Yaldabaoth can only pester humans with less powerful means—with passions. The brief remark in Rulers (96) that Yaldabaoth's envy of Sabaoth brought about deathFootnote 75 is further elaborated in Origin (106–7).Footnote 76
This text also provides a detailed list of the male and female names of death's offspring: ‘These are the names of the males: envy, wrath, weeping, roar, grief, loud shouting, sobbing. These are the names of the females: anger, pain, lust, sighs, curses, bitterness, strife.’ What is especially striking in this passage is the list of ‘male’ names, in which five of the seven displays of emotions are related to mourning. The image evoked by these names seems to be that of ritual lamentation at funerals. The image of ritual lament seems very appropriate here because of its obvious connection to death. In addition, the question of whether one is entitled to display emotions at funerals, and if so, to what extent, was a classic issue of debate among philosophers. Rites of mourning were also controversial among early Christians. As Antigone Samellas details, early Christian leaders systematically sought to tone down what they considered excessive displays of grief by condemning them as theatrical, feminine, barbarian, and ultimately going back to Satan.Footnote 77 Although the literary context, in which this issue is referred to in Origin, is very different from the texts discussed by Samellas, the author of this text shares the educated persons' disapproval of excessive displays of grief, explaining them as subversion of true masculinity, and as stemming from the true God's adversary.Footnote 78
It is more difficult to tease out from Origin a clear idea of what kind of behavior is expected of people of the right persuasion. Humans are divided into the spirit-endowed, soul-endowed and material ones, but no ethical qualities are attached to these groups. The only more practical thing one learns here is that different sorts of baptisms (by spirit, fire, and water) are needed for different groups (122).
If the story of Sabaoth is intended as an illustration of the soul making the right choice, as I have argued, then repentance and avoidance of unruly desire would be self-evident requirements that need not be separately stated. Given the link drawn in this text between emotions and the lesser gods, it stands to reason that the condemnation of these gods ‘by blessed spirits’ (123) also involves control of emotions, but this is also not spelled out. What is clear is that the author of this text, just like the author of Exegesis, does not fully endorse apatheia since he approves of one kind of anger, that shown towards the rulers of darkness (121)—a view that links this text with the Peripatetic tradition rather than with the Stoic one.Footnote 79
6. Conclusion
The texts I have discussed above show that the story of the soul's descent and ascent can be placed into quite different narrative contexts. There are certain culturally conditioned key elements that simply seem to belong to this story, regardless of the context in which it is placed. (1) It goes without saying that the story provides an occasion for exploring the soul's relationship to the body—with one exception, which is the story of Sabaoth's conversion. However the soul's ascent is described, it always involves detachment from the body and material world. (2) The image of the soul's forgetfulness and the recovery of its memory of its divine origin is reproduced in different ways. (3) Emotions are a recurrent element in these stories. One sign of the sense that they are intrinsic to the soul's story is the amplification of this aspect by expansions that can be detected in the long version of Secret John, and in the Origin of the World.
The core narrative of the soul's descent and ascent functions like a magnet, drawing to itself new metaphors, some of which become more permanent features and are in turn expanded by means of mythmaking. The idea of a divine instructor or companion, needed as the soul's guide, can be expressed in a number of different ways, most prominently with marital imagery (Adam and ‘ur-Eve’; husband and wife; bridal chamber).
The guiding principle in such descriptions is that the soul cannot save itself; it needs help from outside.Footnote 80 This view is expressed in different ways: the soul cannot move by itself but must be animated by the divine breath; only the soul joined with the spirit can stand strong against the attacks of evil spirits; or the coming together of the soul and spirit makes one able to experience visio dei.Footnote 81
It is by no means surprising that the two sets of stories of the soul discussed here did not stand in isolation from each other as regards these issues. It is only to be expected that some articulations of the soul's present plight floated freely from one kind of story to another.
The authors of the texts I have discussed above were not interested in the soul's plight and salvation as theoretical issues only; one can also trace more mundane concerns in these texts. It may come as a surprise that control of sexual desire does not seem to be the greatest moral concern in them. Perhaps the implied audiences of these works had already gained mastery over this issue? However that may be, these audiences' battle against the demons gluing them to the visible world is far from over.Footnote 82 The demons are now resorting to less dramatic, and hence more devious means, including seduction by wine, olive oil, fancy clothing, luxury metals, love of money, pride, and arrogance.Footnote 83 How alien indeed is the moral landscape painted in these texts from the moral challenges we face today…
(29.33) as ‘things’; cf. Michael Waldstein and Frederik Wisse, The Apocryphon of John: Synopsis of Nag Hammadi Codices II,1; III,1; and IV,1 with BG 8502,2 (NHMS 33; Leiden: Brill, 1995). This translation hides what seems to be a deliberate Platonic allusion to the allure of ‘visible things’.
) is aroused by wine drinking, how this desire was triggered by Eros, and how all beings, including ‘the first soul’, fell in love with this god (Orig. World 109–11), probably suggests that this desire is a thing to be avoided, but the text is not very explicit about this either. The only passage in this section containing what looks like a real argument against sexual desire is a reference to ‘the tree of knowledge’, identified as Adam's ‘female companion similar to him’ (
). Whereas he loved this true companion, he ‘condemned and loathed other kinds of copies’. The relevant section (110.29–111.2) is introduced as stemming from the (otherwise unknown) Holy Book. The section is part of a larger whole (Orig. World 109–11) that may be of Manichaean origin; cf. 
