DeConick A.D

61
THE GNOSTIC TRUE MAN
said that humans are only mortal vessels molded from mud and animated
by the breath of a god. They did not agree with the people who claimed
that we are destined to live out eternity as an underworld shade, an ancestral
ghost, or even a bright star. Even the concept of the immortal soul
was not big enough to contain the human. The human is much bigger
than this. Of this they were certain.
To explain the transcendence of the human, the Gnostics turned back
to the old religious stories. They began to ask what it really means to say
that humans were formed as a flux of Atum’s tears or that we were enlivened
by God’s breath, as all the old myths related? Was something more
than a wind blown into our nostrils, to quicken a human body molded
from clay?
Some Gnostics turned back to the writings of their philosophical heroes,
such as Plato, in search of answers. We can imagine them musing
over Plato’s famous analogy of the psyche, the soul, as a charioteer with
his two horses, one representing the moral impulses of the soul, the other
the ignoble passions. The charioteer, the rational self, must work constantly
to keep the two horses controlled and moving in the same direction.
The Gnostics would have agreed with Plato that the human psyche
comprises the reasoning, moral, and emotive aspects of the self.
But how does the charioteer, the rational self, know in which direction
to steer his team? Plato explains that the charioteer’s head must be lifted
above the highest surface of the topmost heaven to view what is real. This
reality is colorless, formless, intangible Being. It is Good, Justice, Temperance,
Knowledge, and Intellect, but not in the forms that they take in
our world. Reality, from this vantage, is glimpsed as absolute existence.
The nous (mind) can gaze upon the transcendent reality perched above
the highest heaven. Indeed, Plato calls the nous “the pilot of the soul”
( Phaedrus 247c). The transcendent vision of the nous nourishes the soul
and helps the charioteer to drive his chariot in the right direction.
The Gnostics understood Plato to be saying that the nous is a distinct
intellectual organ of the human being. It is the eye that sees the Real. As
such, it designates our capacity to discern and intuit Truth. It is the aspect
of the human being that allows us access to knowledge beyond what we
can reason intellectually or learn from our corporeal senses. The human
nous runs on insight, intuition, and imagination, rather than logic and
sense perception.