DeConick A.D

54
THE GNOSTIC TRUE MAN
solely on physical explanations for the way humans think. For our purposes,
it illustrates the kind of knowledge meant by the word gnosis .
The thought experiment centers on a scientist, Mary, who is quarantined
in a black and white room. For her entire life, she has been forced
to learn about the world through a black-and-white monitor in the room.
She is a specialist in neurophysiology, having learned, from books and
from observations through the monitor, all there is to learn about how
we see. She knows the exact wavelengths of light that stimulate the retina
to produce the color red. She can speak intelligibly about red tomatoes
and understands how the vocal chords produce the sentence “The tomato
is red.” What will happen when Mary leaves her room and sees a red tomato?
Plato would have said that Mary would gain gnostic understanding,
knowledge of the object that can only be acquired by the direct experience
of it.
The Gnostics believed that they had gnosis because they had found
and met the hidden God directly, by undertaking an ecstatic quest. What
was shocking was that the God they found was not numbered among the
gods of the Babylonian, Egyptian, Jewish, or Greek myths that were being
worshipped in the temples down the street.
The Transcendent God of Egypt
Although it is abundantly clear that Gnostic spirituality was forged in ecstatic
fires, it is less easy to identify the exact fire, particularly when we take
into consideration how eclectic Gnostics were. In addition to personal
revelation, Gnostic systems were fashioned from a wide variety of religious
and philosophical sources. The first Gnostics were pluralists, drawing from
any tradition or source that helped them answer their existential questions.
So we have thousands of footprints but no animal.
First and foremost, though, we know that the Gnostics took the idea
of a supreme transcendent God very seriously. In fact, Irenaeus, bishop
of Lyons, identifies this as the central feature of Gnostic teachings. He
opens his five-volume book series Against the Heresies by objecting to the
Gnostics’ claim to be able to reveal to initiates a God who is more excellent
and sublime than the biblical God, YHWH, who created heaven and
earth (Irenaeus, Against the Heresies 1.1.1, 1.19.1–2).
Different Gnostic groups recognize this sublime God by a variety of
names. They call this God Perfect, Eternal, Unbegotten, Unoriginated,