Pistis Sophia

Why now was this miscellany made? Not certainly for edification or the use of the sect or school[42] whose doctrines it sets forth. Every Coptic inscription on tombstone or wall and nearly every Coptic religious text has at its head the words [Coptic], with God, generally accompanied by the so-called Coptic or Orbed Cross, itself an adaptation of the ankh or symbol of life in Pagan Egypt. That this was the practice with heretics as well as orthodox Christians is shown by the Bruce Papyrus, which actually bears as its frontispiece such words and such a cross with the letters Α and Ω and which seems to be a reproduction of the Constantinian Labarum.[43] If, too, we put side by side the passages in our MS. and the Bruce Papyrus which are practically identical—as is the case with the three sacraments or baptisms mentioned in the Fourth Document of our text—we find that the “seals” or diagrams, passwords, and names given in the Oxford MS. have all been omitted from the London book. No one who is familiar with the beliefs current in Pagan Egypt can mistake the reason of this omission, which is obviously to avoid the risk of their being used in magic.[44] A like precaution was taken with many chapters of the Book of the Dead and becomes more insistent with every successive recension. It is absent from the Pyramid texts, doubtless because when these were once carved on the inside of a royal burying-place and the entrance closed, there was little risk of these being seen by unauthorised persons.

The same reason doubtless operated in the same way with the wooden coffins of the eleventh dynasty on which the next recension was inscribed. But with the Theban recension of the New Empire, the case was changed. “Let no one outside know it. It is a mystery which is not known to the common people,” says the hundred and sixty-first chapter after directions to engrave it on the coffin of the dead. “Reveal it not to anyone, may he be thy father or thy son except thyself. It is a real mystery.”[45] So, too, with the Saite recension. “This book is most secret,” says the hundred and sixty-second chapter, which M. Pierret thinks was intended to be the last. “Let it not be seen by any man, for it is forbidden to know it. Let it be hidden. It is called the mistress of the hidden abode. This is the end.”[46] That similar ideas persisted into Christian times may be guessed from the Homily de Magis ascribed to St. Ephraim in which the Homilist tells his hearers that in his day (circa A.D. 450) even the clergy resorted to magicians for these mysterious writings. “Instead of the blessings of the Saints,” he says, “they carry about the incantations of the magicians, and instead of the Holy Cross, they carry the books of devils ... and a child who knows nothing at all, carries about devil’s names and comes to church.”[47]

It was evidently, therefore, for the information of orthodox persons that our MS. was made, but not for that of the orthodox public generally, whether clerical or lay. Had it been so, it would have been weighted with a running commentary casting scorn upon its erroneous doctrines, or by so-called refutations like those which encumber the pages of heresiologists such as Irenæus, Hippolytus, and Epiphanius. Had it been written by an ecclesiastic, moreover, it would certainly have borne some preface, or colophon, as does the Philosophumena, claiming merit for, and giving the date of the completion of the work.[48] Yet there is nothing in the present text to show that it was written by an ecclesiastic of any kind, while it follows from what has been said above that it was begun by a scribe who took unusual pains to ensure an accurate copy, and that when he handed over for a time the continuation of his work to a subordinate, he yet went over and corrected the latter’s work with as much care as he bestowed upon his own. All this suggests that it was made for official or judicial use; and the most reasonable guess is that it was the draft or copy of a legal document made for the enlightenment of some conciliar, episcopal, or even secular tribunal concerned in the suppression of heresy, such as the Inquisitors of the Faith set up by Theodosius. This would solve the problem which has so vexed the minds of commentators like Prof. Harnack and Dr. Schmidt as to the occurrence of the colophon “Part of the Books of the Saviour” at the foot of the Second and Third Documents.

It is natural enough that the second or subaltern scribe, continuing the work of which only the first part was once thought sufficient, should preface the continuation by the title “The Second Tome of Pistis Sophia”; but that as he completed the copying of each subsequent extract stichometrically arranged, should add the words: “Part of the Books of the Saviour” to indicate the collection of MSS., probably seized in a raid by the Imperial authorities on some heretic’s library, from which they were all taken.

If this be admitted, it certainly alters materially the view which recent German scholars, following, perhaps, after their manner, the first German commentator Köstlin, have formed of the whole text, and in which we might be inclined to acquiesce if we considered it a mere Encyclopædia or, as Epiphanius calls his own collection, a “bread-basket,” in which heterogeneous scraps of doctrine were thrown together anyhow. If, on the other hand, it was made for the use of a tribunal, it would be in the order of things concerned with the tenets of one school or sect alone, and this we find on investigation to be the case. Although the episode of Pistis Sophia comes to a stop about halfway, she is, as has been said, mentioned in the Fourth Document as well as in the First and Second, and even in the Third there are phrases which show that its author has the same general conception of the constitution of the universe, of the Person and Mission of Jesus, and of the means of salvation as the writers of the earlier parts. Yet it is equally plain that no two of the documents are by the same hand.

While the First Document makes the Power which Jesus received from Barbelo “the body which He wore in the Height,”[49] and His soul another power received from one of the great leaders of “the Height,”[50] the Second Document attributes the Incarnation to a lesser power of “the Middle” who casts what came from the same leader into “the matter of Barbelo,” which thereupon becomes the earthly and not the heavenly body of the Saviour.[51] In like manner, while the First Document puts into the mouth of Mary the Mother a story not traceable to any other source about the Holy Spirit coming down from the First Mystery in the exact likeness of Jesus’ earthly body, and says that after kissing each other, they become one,[52] the Second Document makes St. John say that the First Mystery himself came down upon Jesus in the form of a dove, but in a “vesture of light” received from Barbelo.[53] So, again, the First Document especially declares that “the disciples” (not the Apostles) were endowed by Jesus at His coming with twelve powers from the Treasure-house of Light instead of the souls which they would otherwise have received from the Rulers,[54] while the Second makes Jesus tell them that their souls instead of coming straight from the Treasure-house have suffered much from transmigration into different bodies.[55] So, too, the Sphere of Destiny, which in the First Document is described as “the Second Sphere”[56] (or the one which is reached from the earth next after passing through the First Sphere, below which is the visible firmament), is in the Third Document transformed into a

Place called “Great Destiny,”[57] which is in the Place of the head of the Æons [or Zodiac] which Place they call “the Place of the Kingdom of Adamas,” the Ruler of the twelve Æons or signs, and in the Fourth Document is made equivalent to the Sphere or visible firmament only.[58] And so again “the cause of sin,” which in the Third Document is laid upon the shoulders of “the Five Rulers of Great Destiny,”[59] is in the Fourth assigned to certain demons from the Middle Way who enter into man.[60] These discrepancies are too great to be accounted for as merely clerical errors or mistakes in translation, and we can therefore only attribute them to the different documents being the work of different authors.[61]

This being the case, we must, to get a true perspective of the work, seek for the earliest document in it, and then endeavour to arrange the others in their relative order of date; and I have no hesitation in deciding that in this, the scribes followed the usual practice in legal matters and that the earliest document is that which comes first in the MS. Not only has it a regular preface, an advantage which it shares with the Fourth, but it is the one of the four principal documents which alone gives an orderly and coherent account of the heavenly hierarchy and its “Places,”[62] and therefore affords the reader a sort of key to the system of its successors. Hence it must be considered as the mother document, so to speak, from which all the rest are derived, or to which they refer; and it will be found on examination that while all these contain what may be called supplemental information as to the different universes or worlds and their inhabitants, there is none which deals so exhaustively with the speculations that during the early centuries of our Era occupied the attention of orthodox and heretic alike, that is to say, the Constitution of the Godhead and the relation of the Saviour to the Supreme Being.

It is also probable that anyone making extracts for judicial use from the books of a sect would begin with the most informative; and while Pistis Sophia is here described so fully as to leave no doubt in one’s mind that the author knows that he is here introducing her to his readers for the first time, the references to her in the other documents are so brief as to show that their writers knew that their readers had already heard about her. But the most conclusive proof at present of the anteriority of the First Document as compared with the others, is that it does not quote from the Fourth Gospel. The opening words of St. John would have been extremely useful to the author in expressing the relations between his Ineffable One and the First Mystery, and are in fact so used later both in the Excerpta Theodoti and the Bruce Papyrus.[63] Ptolemy and Heracleon,[64] the leaders of the sect to which, as will be shown later, our text can with the greatest likelihood be attributed, both knew of this Gospel and discuss its words and especially its opening at length. Yet the author of our First Document not only makes no use of this, but he gives no quotation among the many from the New Testament to be found in this Document that can by any possibility be assigned to the Fourth Gospel, save those which may equally well be taken from the Synoptics. The one apparent exception to this statement is neither conclusive in itself, nor strong enough to found any argument upon it.[65] In the later part of the Second Document, however, the words of St.

John: “Where I am, there shall my servants be,” may possibly be thought to underlie the sentence in our text: “Wherefore I said unto you aforetime: Where I shall be, there will be with Me my Twelve servants,”[66] the word διάκονος being used in both cases; and in the Fourth Document there appear unmistakably the conversation of Jesus with the Samaritan woman,[67] and the spear thrust in His side at the Crucifixion,[68] neither of which incidents are recorded in the Synoptics. The conclusion, therefore, seems irresistible that while the author of the First Document did not know of St. John’s Gospel, the writer of part of the Second may have done so, and the writer of the Fourth was fully acquainted with it.

Yet the literary critic, especially he who is acquainted with the literature of the early Christian centuries, will hardly require further proof of the relative dates of our four chief Documents than that afforded by a comparison of their contents. In the First, apart from a sketch of—to use a comprehensive word—the uranography of the sect, and the speculations about the Divine Nature before referred to, the author devotes nearly all his space to the episode of Pistis Sophia, which may fairly be looked upon as an allegory pointing out to man the penalty of transgressing the Divine Law, and the necessity of repentance. Thus, in one of the “Penitences” addressed to the highest Power that she knew, Pistis Sophia confesses that she has offended “the Law of the Light” and attributes her deliverance from Chaos to her consequent repentance.[69] There is more than one hint in the text that both the fall and the repentance take place within what is called “the world of humanity,” and we can without any overstraining of the allegory consider Pistis Sophia as representing the heathen world before the light of Christianity raised it from the degradation into which it had fallen by its material luxury, and restored it to something like what was supposed to be its primeval innocence.[70] Hence we have a fairly close parallel to stories like that of Christian in the Pilgrim’s Progress, who leaves the city of Mansoul to strive upward to the Heavenly City; and allowing for the difference of time and place, there is no reason why we should consider the Coptic version as the more ignoble

allegory of the two. It should also be noticed that in this Document, the terrors of hell are hardly touched upon, and the “afflictions” of Sophia are spoken of throughout as confined to the loss of “light” and her consequent impotence to return without Divine aid to the Place which she had wilfully abandoned. Lastly magic and astrology are expressly if briefly condemned as unlawful knowledge brought to men by the sinning angels.

From this fairly lofty standard of thought, the remaining Documents show one long and successive degradation. The author of the Second Document, after making a somewhat clumsy effort to conclude the history of Pistis Sophia, does not, as we might expect him to do, continue the account of Jesus’ upward journey, but dismisses it to plunge into a series of inquiries as to the exact nature of the heavenly hierarchies and the amount of “Light” which each of them enjoys; and the answers of the Saviour not only describe these at great length, but indicate, though obscurely, the various steps by which man can approach divinity. But the benefits there promised are to be confined evidently to a small and privileged class chosen out of the main body of Christians. The use of these means, moreover, is a good deal more magical than religious—that is to say, they apparently act by compulsion rather than by propitiation of the celestial powers—and was perhaps bound up with the different “arrays” of stars in a fashion which shows a distinct leaning towards the astrology of the time.[71] The rebel Rulers of the stars are here made for the first time the instruments in the punishment of sinful souls,[72] and the terrors of hell are held out as a menace which may induce mankind to accept initiation into the mysteries offered.

In all this, we cannot but see the reversion to Pagan practices, to the dualistic theory of the universe, and to the tendency to appeal to ignoble motives into which post-Christian gnosticism sank in its decadence, and which finds, perhaps, its fullest expression in Manichaeism.

The Interpolated Fragment is, it is true, markedly free from these objections. The gaze of the author of this is indeed turned upwards instead of downwards, and we find him indulging in unrestrained speculation as to the “members” of the Supreme Being which are still unmanifested but existed before even the First Mystery, and have apparently remained without emanation.[73] The fragment is too short for us to guess of what practical use these pretended revelations are supposed to be; but Jesus is represented as saying with regard to the “Members,” that “He is the Treasure-house of them all.” Something of the kind is hinted at in the long catalogue of transcendental powers given in the Second Document; and it is therefore possible that this Fragment may once have formed part of some continuation of the account of Jesus’ journey upwards which was in course of narration when broken off to recount the episode of Pistis Sophia.

The Third Document, however, resumes the descent of the slope of degradation with increased speed. As with the Egyptian funerary texts which succeeded and in some measure supplanted the Book of the Dead,[74] the punishments after death and the way to escape them form the principal theme of this Document. As for magic, the gifts of healing and working of miracles, here explained as the raising of the dead and the casting out of devils, which the Epistle to the Corinthians puts among the Charismata or gifts of the Spirit,[75] are here said to belong to the Rulers or wicked Archons, and to be only lawfully exercised by the disciples for the purpose of spreading the faith throughout the world.[76] So, too, the information as to the fourfold division of man’s incorporeal part: Power, Soul, Spirit Counterfeit, and Fate, is all taken from the popular beliefs of Pagan Egypt; and the formulas enabling the initiate to “loose the bonds” which bind the soul to the worst of these, are as clearly to be referred to the belief in the power of names and in the compulsion of the spirit-world which Iamblichus tells us was the main peculiarity of Egyptian magic.[77] The divisions of the place of punishment into four hells of graduated intensity and the final doom of annihilation for the worst sinners are also taken from the same literature.[78] So far does this go, that even the uninitiated dead when in the worst of all the hells can escape from his torments and enjoy a qualified beatitude, if he then repeats certain names which he has learned during his life.[79] It is quite true that we hear

With the Fourth Document, we seem to have reached the bottom of the slope. The disciples here know nothing—it will be remembered that the scene is supposed to take place directly after the Resurrection—of the higher worlds and their mysteries, or even of the parts of this Chorema or Space which are above the Treasure-house; and their flight upward with Jesus has for its object merely the exhibition of the terrors of one of the Places of Punishment. So, too, the information which they obtain both by sight and by word of mouth as to the disposition and names of the stars and planets can hardly have been of use to them except for the purpose of magic and astrology. Of the joys prepared for the faithful and of the glories of the Divine Presence described in the Book of Enoch and other Apocrypha, they are told nothing. The sacraments that Jesus celebrates for them are, it would seem, to be given to them in return for leaving all and following Him;[80] but are entirely magical in character, and nothing is said of any abandonment of sinful practices or of any repentance being necessary for their efficacy. The sign that He asks for from His Father,[81] here called merely the Father of the Treasure-house, although not here specifically described, is, as we know from the parallel passage in the Bruce Papyrus, the conversion of the wine in one of the wine-cups into the “water of baptism,”[82] in a way which strongly reminds us of the juggling sacraments attributed by Irenæus and the other heresiologists to the magician Marcus.

The formal remission of sins which precedes this sacrament is accomplished by the invocation of many powers with incomprehensible names, and, if we read the passage correctly, only extends to sins of the flesh.[83] They are told to “hide this mystery and give it to none” save those who observe His commandments in words which almost repeat those of the Book of the Dead.[84] Yet even these sacraments would appear not to be needed by those who know the Great Name, the utterance of which will put to flight all demons, dissolve their houses of torment, and subjugate the highest material powers of the universe.[85] Nothing is wanting to show that the sect which put forth this Document had slipped back into the preoccupation with the terrors of hell which is the prevailing feature of the Egyptian religion of the last native dynasties,[86] and that the belief in magic and astrology into which Hellenic Paganism had sunk during the third and fourth centuries had taken the place of the loftier if vain speculations of the earlier Documents of our text. So much is this the case that the Ineffable One and the First Mystery of the first three Documents are not even mentioned here, and the only link connecting this with the story of Pistis Sophia is the casual mention of her name as supplying a “Power” for the planet Venus.[87]

With the Fifth Document a still lower level is reached. Hell and its torments form the only subject of this book, which as has been said above, is probably nearly complete, only a few pages of the conclusion being beyond recall. More proper-names of fiends are given here than in any of the preceding documents; and as has been said, these now include many of the Pagan gods such as the Egyptian Typhon, the Syrian Adonis, and the Greek Persephone and Hecate. These may possibly have been included among the subordinate “gods” several times referred to in the First Document, but the fact that their names are here openly given, seems to point to a time when the Pagans were in a minority in the Eastern world. The increasing influence of the belief in astrology with which even the Neo-Platonists of Alexandria did not disdain to meddle, is also shown by the answer already mentioned of Jesus to an inquiry of Mary Magdalene wherein He tells her that the allotment of souls to “righteous” and “wicked” bodies respectively is periodic and depends wholly on the disposition of the stars.