DeConick A.D

71
THE GNOSTIC TRUE MAN
their vision of the God within as the True Man, literally overthrew the
traditional gods and religious practices, especially rituals based on models
of appeasement, such as sacrifice. The severity of this inversion is such that
the element of transgression is enormous.
Imagine what this meant about the traditional gods. Who were the
Olympians? YHWH and his host of angels? Isis and Osiris? Marduk and
El? If the transcendent God was the source of all, including the human
spirit, then why were humans the servants of gods like Zeus, YHWH, or
Marduk?
The Gnostics were convinced that the traditional religious communities
had been duped by trickster gods who were really demons or fallen
angels. The traditional religions were fakes and their gods frauds. Without
even being aware of it, human beings were trapped in snares of cosmic
proportions that kept them locked in lifetime bondage to gods who actually
were capricious and malicious demons.
It was this inversion of the conventional religions that made the Gnostics
the enemies of the religiously faithful. What the Gnostics were saying
is that the gods of conventional worship, including the biblical God
YHWH, really are not gods but slaveholders who keep the truth of the
real God’s existence from us. We are not the property of the gods. We are
something far superior and more powerful. We are children of the holy
wholly Other, and the gods and their kings and priests can no longer trick
us into believing otherwise.
This, in fact, is what really upset Plotinus, the great philosopher of
Plato, about the Gnostic message. How audacious, Plotinus thought, that
the Gnostics go around telling people that because they are children of
God they are meant to be nobler than everything, including the gods.
The Gnostics said that the gods we have been worshipping since antiquity
are really the mortals, not us! The gods are mortal because they are not
God’s children. They do not contain his spirit. “You, without lifting a
hand,” the Gnostics preached, “are nobler than the very heavens” (Plotinus,
Ennead 2.9).
Imagine the reaction at the street level when the Gnostics started insisting
that the gods were not to be worshipped and feared. “We ought
to stop making sacrifices,” we can hear the Gnostics saying. “Why?” the
people would have asked. “Because we are God ourselves,” the Gnostics
would have responded. “We have been tricked by cruel deities to serve