I think I was first introduced to the idea of the false binary decision by Danielle Lewis-Egonu in her workshop for MATPN last year, but it has cropped up in so many conversations recently with Haili Hughes, Jon Hutchinson and then this week with Rachel Higginson, Yamima Bibi and Morgan Whitfield, that it got me thinking about this ancient text.
I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.
These lines come from Thunder, Perfect Mind, a Gnostic poem discovered in 1945 among the Nag Hammadi texts — a collection of early Christian and Gnostic manuscripts found buried in a clay jar in Upper Egypt. Written in Coptic and likely composed in the second or third century AD, the poem is structured as a series of declarations spoken by a feminine divine voice, each one pairing what we would normally consider opposites: honored and scorned, powerful and forgotten, mother and daughter, known and unknown. It does not resolve the contradictions.
Which, I believe, is exactly what makes it worth reading.
Who Is Speaking?
The identity of the speaker in Thunder, Perfect Mind remains one of the enduring mysteries of early religious scholarship. Some scholars identify her as Sophia — the feminine wisdom figure of Gnostic cosmology, a divine being who exists in the space between the highest God and the material world, at once exalted and entangled, spiritual and fallen (King, 2003; Pagels, 1979). Others read her in the tradition of Egyptian goddess aretalogies, hymns in which a deity such as Isis declares her own attributes and powers in a kind of cosmic self-proclamation (Meyer, 2007). The scholarly debate continues, but what is agreed upon is this: she is a figure who cannot be reduced. Every time you try to fix her in a category, the next line moves the ground.
That she speaks in a feminine voice is not incidental. In the ancient Mediterranean world, as in much of the history that followed it, women were relentlessly sorted into categories: pure or impure, respectable or fallen, inside or outside the boundary of social and religious acceptability. The speaker in this text systematically dismantles every one of those categories. She is the wife and the virgin. The mother and the daughter. In the same breath, she occupies every position that social convention sought to keep apart. What reads initially as paradox is, on closer attention, something more deliberate: a refusal to be contained by the very structures that make paradox possible.
Feminist theologians have noted the radical quality of this move. In a world organised by the binary logic of purity codes and gender hierarchy, a feminine divine who refuses to be captured by any one category is more than a literary device (Pagels, 1979; King, 2003). It is an act of resistance from the inside of the tradition itself.
The Brain That Needs to Choose
We might be tempted to read Thunder, Perfect Mind as beautiful but distant — a curiosity from the ancient world that tells us little about how we live now. But the problem it is confronting is anything but ancient. It speaks directly to one of the most persistent features of human cognition.
Our brains are, in many respects, binary machines.
Research in cognitive psychology has consistently shown that the mind defaults to rapid, categorical thinking as a way of managing the complexity of the world (Kahneman, 2011). Kahneman’s influential distinction between fast, intuitive System 1 thinking and slower, more deliberative System 2 processing helps explain why we reach so readily for either/or categories. In or out. Right or wrong. Safe or dangerous. Us or them. Binary judgments are cognitively efficient. They allowed our ancestors to make quick decisions in uncertain environments, and they remain seductive because they work well enough in familiar situations.
Evans (2008), reviewing decades of research on dual-process theories of reasoning, found that our intuitive judgments are heavily shaped by heuristics — mental shortcuts that work well enough in familiar situations but break down when confronted with genuine ambiguity. Binary framing is one of the most persistent of these shortcuts. We force continuums into categories, experience into labels, and people into boxes. Not because it is true, but because it is easier.
The poet John Keats had a name for the opposite of this. He called it negative capability: the capacity to remain in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (Keats, 1817/1958, p. 193). It is a rare and difficult thing. And it is, I want to suggest, exactly what the speaker of Thunder, Perfect Mind demands of her reader.
The Cost of Either/Or
The problem with binary thinking is not merely philosophical. It has real and practical consequences for how we see one another — and nowhere more so than in educational settings.
When we reduce young people to categories — engaged or disengaged, thriving or struggling, belonging or uncertain — we lose them. We replace the complex, contradictory, still-becoming person in front of us with a label that fits a spreadsheet or a policy framework. Schools are structurally inclined toward binary categorisation: meeting expectations or not, included or excluded, in the intervention group or out of it. These categories serve a function, but they can also obscure the reality of what is actually happening in a young person’s experience.
Crenshaw’s (1991) foundational work on intersectionality made a powerful case against exactly this kind of reductive thinking. She demonstrated that the experiences of individuals who occupy multiple, overlapping social categories cannot be understood by analysing each category in isolation. A young woman who is also Black, working-class and neurodiverse does not experience four separate dimensions of identity that can be neatly disaggregated. She experiences a reality that exceeds any single category. Forcing her experience into binary terms — included or excluded, supported or unsupported — misses almost everything that matters.
Belonging itself cannot be binary. Research consistently shows that the sense of belonging is not a switch that is simply on or off, but a dynamic, relational state that shifts across contexts, relationships and time (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Goodenow, 1993). A young person can feel deeply known by one teacher and invisible to another. Connected to their friendship group and estranged from the formal institution. At home in the art room and adrift in the corridor. These experiences coexist. A binary lens cannot hold that, and any framework that pretends it can will misread the situation.
Sitting with Both
Thunder, Perfect Mind does not tell us how to think. It unsettles us enough to notice that we are already thinking in a particular way.
When the speaker declares I am the knowledge of my inquiry, and the finding of those who seek after me, she is not offering a resolution. She is inviting a different kind of attention — one that can hold complexity without immediately resolving it into something more comfortable. Psychologists describe something similar when they speak of integrative complexity: the capacity to acknowledge multiple, sometimes contradictory perspectives, and to recognise that reality often contains genuine tensions that cannot be collapsed into a single answer (Tetlock, 2005). This capacity, research suggests, is associated with more nuanced decision-making, greater openness to revision, and more accurate judgement over time.
There is something quietly instructive about sitting with a text that refuses to let you settle. It mirrors the experience of genuine encounter with another person — someone whose full humanity exceeds whatever category you first placed them in. Someone who surprises you. Someone who does not fit. In educational contexts, that kind of attention — the willingness to hold the student in front of you as more complex than your first impression of them — is not just good pedagogy. It is the foundation of belonging.
The feminine voice in this ancient poem speaks across two thousand years to remind us that the most real things in human experience tend to live in paradox. That the divine — whatever we understand by that — refuses the binary. That the person in front of us is always, if we are paying enough attention, more than we first thought.
I am she whose wedding is great, and I have not taken a husband.
Both things. Always look for both things.
Not a problem to be resolved, but a truth to be held, nurtured, held valued.
References
Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497–529. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497
Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299. https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039
Evans, J. St. B. T. (2008). Dual-processing accounts of reasoning, judgment, and social cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 255–278. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093629
Goodenow, C. (1993). The psychological sense of school membership among adolescents: Scale development and educational correlates. Psychology in the Schools, 30(1), 79–90. https://doi.org/10.1002/1520-6807(199301)30:1%3C79::AID-PITS2310300113%3E3.0.CO;2-X
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Keats, J. (1958). The letters of John Keats, 1814–1821 (H. E. Rollins, Ed., Vol. 1). Harvard University Press. (Original letters written 1817)
King, K. L. (2003). What is Gnosticism? Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Meyer, M. (Ed.). (2007). The Nag Hammadi Scriptures: The international edition. HarperOne.
Pagels, E. (1979). The Gnostic Gospels. Random House.
Tetlock, P. E. (2005). Expert political judgment: How good is it? How can we know? Princeton University Press.
The Belonging Collective 