DeConick A.D

62
THE GNOSTIC TRUE MAN
The nous is the aspect of the human being that can perceive what is
bigger than us. The nous makes it possible for us to become aware of
what is beyond our mundane day-to-day identities, to perceive what is
universal about our existence, what is God. Because of its transcendent
nature, the nous links us to the supreme God. The human nous is, in the
opinion of the Gnostics, the self that transcends the psyche. It is our true
self, the True Man.
Adam the First Man
How did the transcendent nous come to inhabit the human being? To
answer this question, some Gnostics turned to traditional creation stories
like the Genesis story in the Bible. They thought that we received this
transcendent self when the Creator God YHWH blew into our nostrils.
At that moment, unbeknownst to YHWH, the incorporeal spirit of the
transcendent God was instilled in Adam in a substantive way. Because the
supreme God is incorporeal spirit, they reasoned, the nous instilled in
Adam must also be God’s spirit in a substantive way.
This is a very different perspective from that of other thinkers at the
time who were arguing that the Creator’s breath blew in a spirit that resembled
God as closely as possible. No, the Gnostics said, the first human
being contained an actual piece of the supreme God’s mind or spirit. The
human nous is equivalent to God’s pneuma (spirit). As such, the human
nous is not like God, not some derivative copy that makes humans resemble
God. It is God within.
This clash of perspectives coincided with the trendy intellectual scene
in Alexandria, Egypt, at the start of the first century CE. Alexandria was
edgy. Artsy. Cerebral. It was the place to be. It is where Jews, Greeks, and
Egyptians were discussing metaphysical topics, including the nature of the
human mind. One of these Alexandrian intellectuals was a famous Jewish
philosopher by the name of Julius Philo. We know of more than thirty
philosophical books that Philo published during his lifetime.
In his publications, Philo rereads the Jewish scripture in light of Greek
philosophers like Plato. So it is not surprising that he takes on the problem
of the human nous and tries to sort out whether the philosophical
concept is biblical. The kind of nuances and complexities that Philo raises
when he talks about the nous are best explained as responses to the Gnos-