It's a truly fascinating ancient Christian 'hymn' and your persona experience strongly reminded me of its worldview
I thought it quite pertinent for this thread, actually, given some of the binary dichotomies - between religious and secular (and hence my decision to choose the '
deeply spiritual with no dichotomy' option) - in the OP's poll.
Thunder, Perfect Mind (generally dated second century A.D.) basically bulldozes 'mutually exclusive categories', through a series of mystical paradoxes that trip up the rational mind and strive to illustrate the coincidence between apparent opposites, namely the sacred and the profane since the one God is: "the divine Oneness that comprehends all else in undifferentiated and unlimited unity" to quote the fifteenth century German Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa:
Cusanus, Nicolaus [Nicolas of Cusa] (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Arguably the most important German thinker of fifteenth century, Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) was also an ecclesiastical reformer, administrator and cardinal. His life-long effort was to reform and unite the universal and Roman Church.
His first proposal is that God is the “coincidence of opposites.” The implication, in other words, is that God’s reality lies beyond any familiar domain where the principle of contradiction holds sway.
At the same time this “coincidence” underlines the divine Oneness that comprehends all else in undifferentiated and unlimited unity. It is not that creatures coincide with God or God with creatures, but that in God all else coincides as nothing else than God.
To quote the scholar Elaine Pagels (Professor of Religion at Princeton University and generally considered the eminent authority on ancient gnostic Christianity):
'Thunder Perfect Mind' is a marvelous, strange poem. It speaks in the voice of a feminine divine power, but one that unites all opposites. One that is not only speaking in women, but also in all people. One that speaks not only in citizens, but aliens, it says, in the poor and in the rich. I
t's a poem which sees the radiance of the divine in all aspects of human life, from the sordidness of the slums of Cairo or Alexandria, as they would have been, to the people of great wealth, from men to women to slaves. In that poem, the divine appears in every, and the most unexpected, forms.....'
-- Elaine Pagels, from her interview in FRONTLINE's
Our ancient female Christian mystic - speaking as a literary embodiment of the heavenly
Sophia (Wisdom) of God - claims to have reconciled these opposites within herself and reached a state of psycho-spiritual wholeness; including bringing her apparently 'sinful' exterior into consonance with her inner state of self-restraint and 'sinless' purity, such that she represents both simultaneously. Its similar, actually, to the statement attributed to God by the prophet Isaiah in the Old Testament:
"
I am the Lord, and there is no other;
besides Me there is no God..
6In order that they know
from the shining of the sun and from the west
that there is no one besides Me;
I am the Lord and there is no other.
7Who forms light and creates darkness,
Who makes peace and creates evil;
I am the Lord, Who makes all these."
(Isaiah 45:6-7)
Even cooler: the director Ridley Scott's daughter Jordan, used many lines from the poem in her 2005 'ad' for Prada:
THUNDER PERFECT MIND
Miuccia Prada wanted to have the complexities of being a woman portrayed and Jordan Scott presented her with a text called "Thunder, Perfect Mind", a long feminist poem discovered among the Gnostic manuscripts buried at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945 and dating back to the second or third century AD.
It was part of scripts that were in fact “alternative” texts to what, at the end of the fourth century, became part of the canonical Bible, namely The Book of Revelation. This is of course is the final book of the New Testament and features perennial favourites such as scorpion-tailed locusts, the Whore of Babylon and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
“Thunder, Perfect Mind” takes the form of parallel strophes in which an immanent female divinity expounds her virtues and starts with the lines: I am the whore and the holy one. / I am the wife and the virgin. / I am the mother and the daughter. / I am the member of my mother. / I am the barren one/ and many are her sons. / I am she whose wedding is great, /and I have not taken a husband...
In the beautifully shot and edited Prada film, Canadian model Daria Werbowy moves through Berlin dressed in different, naturally spectacular, outfits while the lines of the poem are recited as a kind of narrative commentary.
The locations featured include a nightclub, a remaining part of the Wall, the view from the back of a taxi and the area around Potsdamer Platz, a newly developed urban space filled with hi-rise architecture in the place which after WWII and until after the Wall came down had been deserted wasteland, a no-man's land between East and West Berlin through which, in Wim Wender’s masterpiece “Wings of Desire” (1987), the old actor Curt Bois can be seen wandering, looking for remnants of the past.
The effect of all these connotations in the film is quite mesmerising and I guess Ridley Scott must be very proud of his daughter – who has since directed commercials for brands like Agent Provocateur, Armani Jeans and Credit Suisse as well as Cracks, her first feature film (2009) – to have come up with this idea.