In the end, Little Women is far more memorable for its sins than it is for its repentances.
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When Muslims believe that the gates of heaven are open to receive, unequivocally, their hopes and dreams, their repentances and their losses.
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Martha appears in the sacred gnostic text Pistis Sophia. She is instructed by the risen Christ on several of the repentances that must be made in order to have salvation. She also makes several prophetic interpretations of different Psalms.
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Questions like 'why do all my repentances lead to a craving to sin again' are just pointless self-recrimination (13.1). We are what we are and free-will is powerless to change this. "It is thou, O Lord Jesus Christ which wounds the souls of thy redeemed ones, through thy spiritual absence; and it is Thou who must heal them with thy glorious presence" (13.12). Why? Because that's the way divine love and free grace work.
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Pistis Sophia recites several prayers/repentances, and after each one a disciple interprets the repentance in light of one of the Psalms or Odes of Solomon. Unlike other versions of the Gnostic myth, such as the Apocryphon of John, here Pistis Sophia is a being of the lower, material aeons. She is not a high, divine being, and her restoration is not to the realms of light, but only back to her place in the thirteenth aeon. This is significant in distinguishing the theology of this book from other Gnostic systems – it prioritizes its own, distinct cosmology and mythology above the Sophia myth, which to this author represents inferior, material struggles.
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The story of Pistis Sophia's fall and restoration (chapters 29-82) dominates much of Books 1 & 2\. She dwells in the thirteenth aeon, is tricked into leaving her aeon and descending into Chaos, has her light-power stolen, and is not allowed to return to her place until Jesus ascends through the aeons. She recites many repentances and prayers, and is repeatedly persecuted by wicked archontic beings before being allowed to wait just outside of the thirteenth aeon for restoration. It is noteworthy that she is not a divine being, as portrayed in other versions of the Gnostic myth such as the Apocryphon of John.
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One of the major themes within the book, and a popular area of scholarly research regarding its writer Daniel Defoe, is that of spiritual autobiography. Spiritual autobiography is defined as "a genre of non-fiction prose that dominated Protestant writing during the seventeenth century, particularly in England, particularly that of dissenters". Books within this genre follow a pattern of shallow repentances, followed by a fall back into sin, and eventually culminating in a conversion experience that has a profound impact on the course of their life from that point moving forward. The two scholars to first analyze the pattern of spiritual autobiography in Defoe's works, publishing within the same year, were George A. Starr and J. Paul Hunter.
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Moll's "abortive repentances" are highlighted, such as her "repentance" after marrying the bank clerk. However, Moll is unable to break the pattern of sin that she falls into, one of habitual sin, in which one sin leads to another. Starr describes this gradual process as "hardening", and points to it as what makes up the basic pattern of her spiritual development. In examining her conversion experience, Starr highlights her motive as being "the reunion with her Lancashire husband, and the news that she is to be tried at the next Session, caused her 'wretched boldness of spirit' to abate. 'I began to think,’ she says, 'and to think indeed is one real advance from hell to heaven" (157).
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So many misfortunes affected Lope emotionally, and on May 24, 1614, he finally decided to be ordained a priest. The literary expression of this crisis and its repentances are the Sacred Rhymes, published in 1614; there it says: "If the body wants to be earth on earth / the soul wants to be heaven in heaven", unredeemed dualism that constitutes all its essence. The Sacred Rhymes constitute a book at the same time introspective in the sonnets (he uses the technique of the spiritual exercises that he learned in his studies with the Jesuits) as devotee for the poems dedicated to diverse saints or inspired in the sacred iconography, then in full deployment thanks to the recommendations emanated from the Council of Trent.
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