DeConick A.D

53
THE GNOSTIC TRUE MAN
Ancient religion was supposed to maintain justice and order, and the
first Gnostics were disturbed by the fact that life is far from fair. Even
though the king and the priests did their jobs, the big fish still ate the
little fish whenever possible. Placating the gods with service and gifts was
not always successful. Plague and famine leveled cities, even those with
top-notch priestly programs in place. Befriending the gods, while it had
its benefits, was not foolproof. Bad things still happened to extreme devotees.
Suffering was ongoing, no matter the magic. Life was chaotic, out of
control. The life they were living seemed an elaborate hoax.
Like Truman, the first Gnostics decided that the time had come to
get some answers. Like Truman, the answers they sought could not be
found within the chaos of their world, a universe that seemed constructed
to deceive them at every turn. What they sought was reality beyond the
door in the sky, at the top of the celestial dome, beyond whatever cunning
simulation this world might be.
The quest for reality is the central feature of Gnostic spirituality. The
Gnostics understand this quest to culminate in the direct knowledge of a
supreme God who dwells outside the known universe. The God of their
quest is a hidden, secret God, unknown to most people.
It may come as a surprise that the word gnostic did not begin as a
religious word at all. The word is a technical word coined by Plato four
centuries earlier from the noun gnosis (knowledge). Gnosis referred to the
discernable knowledge of objects, the direct apprehension or experience
of things. It allowed people to be able to talk about knowing the thing, in
contrast to knowing about the thing.
Plato invented gnostic as an adjectival form of the noun gnosis (Smith
1981, 799–801; Layton 1995; Markschies 2003, 7). He did so to contrast
gnostic understanding with practical understanding in a famous discourse
about the kind of person who would be the best statesman. He argued
that the best statesman is the person who has gnostic understanding of the
great ideals, such as the Good or justice, rather than practical knowledge
of them. Gnostic understanding is an intellectual intuition of the ideals,
whereas practical understanding is the secondary application of them,
gained on the job.
There is a very famous contemporary thought experiment called Mary’s
Room, proposed by the philosopher Frank Jackson (1982, 127–36). The
intention of the thought experiment is to refute modern views that rely