The Gnostic Imagination and Its Imaginaries

Abstract

Applying cognitive theories about human creativity, this paper theorizes how the Gnostic as an identity is an idealization of a discrete metaphysics or spirituality forged by the human imagination and diversified as radical imaginaries and social imaginaries. The emergence of Gnostic spirituality was made possible because a novel cognitive script had developed that theorized religion in kinfolk terms, rather than conventional slave, vassal, or client terms. This script allowed people to understand their true selves as God’s offspring who had become separated from their divine parent(s), lost, and in need of rescue by their divine kin. This new spirituality came to be associated with the word Gnostic which was used to identify religious people in the Roman world who claimed to have knowledge (gnosis) of the true God, the true pathway home, and their true selves as God’s offspring. Once this idealization of the Gnostic was framed, it functioned as the cognitive structure upon which a variety of constellations of the ideal were then ratcheted. These constellations are radical imaginaries built using concrete images, stories, and legends to make sense of the human predicament and authorize certain practices and moral codes. When a radical imaginary is shared collectively it can become a social imaginary which serves to legitimate group behavior as happened, for instance, in the case of the Valentinian, Basilidian, and other Gnostic imaginaries. This paper considers the ideological and social implications of the distribution of radical imaginaries, especially those offloaded onto artifacts which circulate beyond any single social situation.