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Summary: Suppressed Prayers
Review: From the publisher:This book is about Gnostic prayers and hymns from the beginning of Christianity. The authors of these hymns and prayers were branded as heretics and thrown out of the church. However, many documents of Gnostic spirituality have survived, sometimes handed down by the polemical reports of the church fathers. These documents have become especially accessible since the spectacular discoveries at Nag Hammadi in 1945. For the Gnostic, knowledge is primarily self-knowledge and the human soul is of heavenly origin. The world and all matter is faulty, the coming into being as a result of a false step by a divine power. The divine soul is imprisoned in the material and has forgotten its true homeland. By the call of the redeemer, whom the Christian Gnostics identify with Jesus, the soul awakens from its sleep and its drunkenness. It is instructed about its origin and its fall, and this knowledge brings it redemption and reunites it with the Pleroma ("fullness") from which it comes. At the center of Gnostic spirituality, then, stands the question of what it is to be human. Who were we? What have we become? Where were we? Into what have we been thrown? Where are we going? What are we freed from? What is birth? What is rebirth? These questions represent the religious feelings of Gnosticism, all of which are represented by the hymns and prayers chosen for this book. Together they give a lively impression of how Gnostics felt about the world and, with their shimmering images and poetic symbols, attest to their unique religious creativity.
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