It is Gnosticism's conception of the self that is most interesting and radical: Gnosticism makes a distinction between the soul (in Greek the
psyche) and the spirit (the
pneuma). The
psyche is primarily what we traditionally associate with the mental self, most exhaustively treated by Freud in his psychoanalysis: appetites and passions certainly, but also our love and our tastes, and much - perhaps all - of our personality. Emerson, an implicit Gnostic, referred to this as the "adhesive self."[
4] Christianity, implicitly or explicitly, conceives of the body as a prison for the soul; Gnosticism conceives of BOTH the body and the soul (again, the personality, appetites and desires) as a prison for the spirit, the Gnostic spark, the part of God. (Freud's "bodily ego" admits the connection of body and psyche, though not as a prison for something else).
Emerson's Gnosticism is evident in his remarks about his son. He laments that grief (which occurs at the level of the psyche) cannot get him closer to "real nature"; for a Gnostic everything but the pneuma is unreal, including to a large extent other people. Bloom associates the spark with Genius;[
5] it is probably best to think of it as the self that is beyond all categories, catalogues of traits, and definitions. Because Saint Paul defeated the Gnostics in the battle to control the destiny of the church (in much the same way Plato defeated the Sophists in the battle to control the destiny of philosophy), contemporary culture has nothing like this distinction, which is why it is so anti-intuitive. The imagination of the traditional Christian, for example, conceives of an ascent to heaven that would transport the individual to a blissfully happy place; we still recognize personalities, however happy, in Dante. Gnosticism, by contrast, speaks of the afterlife as the re-integration of the Gnostic spark with the divine, shedding the shell of both the body and the
psyche. It is difficult to picture what would be left.
The Matrix, Gnostic in its cosmology, could have been Gnostic in its "psychology" as well: Morpheus may have gotten Neo out of the illusory prison the Machines built to trap us, but can he get him out of the love he has for Trinity? A fully Gnostic director could conceive of his love for her as occurring on the level of the
psyche, as another trap created by the Archons to keep him from waking up to realize his own power, his Gnostic spark.[
6] These examples show that recognizing such a distinction has radical consequences, particularly when we use it to question existing conceptions of the Post-Human.