DeConick A.D

65
THE GNOSTIC TRUE MAN
But this is not so for the Gnostics, who will have nothing to do with
the human nous as a copy of God that is not identical to God. This one
tiny nuance had enormous consequences. It is the tiny flap of the butterfly
wing that causes a hurricane on the other side of the world. It allowed the
Gnostics to pose the question, if the highest aspect of ourselves is God,
how is it that we are servants to the gods, either now or after death?
This logic assumed equality with the gods, at least, not subservience
or enslavement to them. It might even assume superiority to the gods,
they reasoned, especially if we understand our primal source to be a God
who is above all the gods. The true human was the nous, the spirit or
pneuma embedded within the human soul. The soul, in its liberated state,
could only hope to exist as a star in the sky or a hero in the underworld.
The spirit, however, was superior even to the heavenly habitat of the
immortal gods.
This is the type of reasoning that generated the Gnostic orientation.
Our true nature as humans is superior to anything created, even the cosmic
gods who themselves were born from the union of earth and heaven.
The Gnostics postulated that our True Man is uncreated, deeper than our
physical bodies, and even deeper than our human psyches or souls. They
understood the true human to be something beyond the conscious mental
processes that enable us to reason and learn and construct mundane
identities for ourselves. It is the deep self, the nous, which the Gnostics
identified as our pneuma or spirit.
This is not to say that the Gnostics were universalists. But then, neither
were most other thinkers in the ancient world. The Gnostics were like the
philosophers Philo or Plutarch, who also divided the human being into
mind, soul, and body and proposed classes of human beings based on their
perception of the intellectual and moral aptitude of people (Kooten 2008,
282–7; Dillon 1996, 211–14). In the absence of modern science, which
has revealed to us the genetic basis of our shared humanity, the ancients
perceived physical, moral, and psychological variations in human beings
very differently from the way we perceive them today. Such variations led
the ancient people to believe that not all humans were equal. Although
there may have been a common human ancestor who was perfect when
he was created by God, things happened along the way that resulted in
differences and deficiencies among the human beings subsequently born.
These differences and deficiencies led some ancient people to conclude