Skip to content
Back to the Library

The Church Fathers · c. 150–200

The Three Forms of First Thought

Trimorphic Protennoia

Anonymous

Full text

What it is

A feminine divine voice speaks in three descents — as Voice, as Speech, as Word — putting on the likeness of each order of being in turn until she takes the form of a man and is not recognised.

Why it lasted

Its closing section reaches for the vocabulary of John's prologue — the Word, the light, the dwelling among men — closely enough that the parallel has been argued over for fifty years without resolution. What the text shows plainly is a Sethian writer working with the gospel's language already in wide circulation.

Scripture it works from

Read it here

The full text is held here and can be read in the reader.

16 sections · complete, from The Three Forms of First Thought (Other Gospels, zinner).

Elsewhere

The complete text is held here and can be read in the reader.

These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.

Read next

Close to this one