Pistis Sophia

Almost everything associated with this literature reached the modern world in 1945. Pistis Sophia did not. The Askew Codex, a parchment book of some three hundred and fifty pages, was acquired by the British Museum in 1785 from the estate of Anthony Askew, a London physician and bibliophile; where he obtained it is not known. It has been in British public hands ever since, and is now in the British Library.

That accident of chronology matters for how the text has been used. A Latin translation appeared in the 1850s, German and French versions followed, and by the later nineteenth century Pistis Sophia was the single work by which educated readers outside the specialist literature knew anything at all about this kind of Christianity from the inside. Everything else came filtered through the church fathers who attacked it. For roughly a hundred and sixty years, this book carried that weight almost alone, and a great deal of what was written about the movement before the Second World War is in effect generalisation from one late and unrepresentative manuscript.

The codex itself is usually assigned to the fourth century. The Coptic is a translation from a Greek original, and the composition is normally placed in the third century, with the fourth book widely thought to be earlier than the first three and sometimes separated off as a distinct work. That makes the text late by comparison with most of the Nag Hammadi material, whose underlying Greek often reaches back into the second century. It is a product of a developed Egyptian tradition rather than of its formative period, and it should be read as such.

The frame is startling in itself. Where the canonical gospels give the risen Jesus days or weeks, Pistis Sophia has him remain with the disciples for eleven years, teaching them only as far as a certain level, before ascending, being clothed in a garment of light and returning to disclose the rest. Everything of substance in the book happens in that extended afterwards.

The central story is the fall of Pistis Sophia, faith-wisdom. Deceived by a false light, she descends from her station in the thirteenth aeon into the lower regions, is stripped of her power by a lion-faced ruler and other hostile powers, and cries out. Her cries take the form of a series of repentances, thirteen of them, each recited, then interpreted by a disciple who matches it to a psalm or to an ode of Solomon. She is progressively raised, restored and returned to her place. The later books turn to the fate of souls, the punishments awaiting the unpurified, the mysteries that release them, and a scheme of ascent through the ranks of the cosmos.

The disciples are named and they speak, and the distribution is unusual. Mary Magdalene puts by far the greatest number of questions and supplies most of the interpretations, and Jesus repeatedly commends her understanding; Peter at one point objects that she does not let the men have their turn. Salome, Martha and Mary the mother also speak. Whatever the community behind the text practised, it was content to place a woman at the intellectual centre of its scripture, and it recorded the resentment that provoked.

Pistis Sophia is hard going, and specialists say so. The repentances repeat, the interpretations repeat, formulae of praise run for pages, and long stretches consist of strings of names and vowel sequences intended for ritual recitation. It has none of the compression of the Gospel of Thomas or the argumentative drive of the Apocryphon of John. The system it assumes is broadly the one found in the Sethian or Barbeloite texts, with an unknowable first principle, a hierarchy of aeons and rulers, and a fallen wisdom, but it is a late and heavily ritualised development of it, closer to a manual of mysteries than to a cosmology.

Its influence has been out of proportion to its readability. G. R. S. Mead published an English version in 1896 and a revised one in 1921, issued through Theosophical channels, and through him the book entered the vocabulary of late Victorian and Edwardian occultism. Theosophists, members of the Golden Dawn and their successors treated it as a surviving fragment of a secret teaching, and its terminology, its ascending aeons and its ranks of rulers passed into a body of esoteric writing that had little interest in Coptic manuscripts as such.

The result is that the text now carries two histories. As a historical source it is a late Egyptian Christian composition of limited representativeness. As a cultural object it is one of the main channels by which the idea of a suppressed inner Christianity reached the modern imagination, and the confidence with which that idea is still asserted owes more to Mead's readers than to the manuscript.