The New Gnostic Gospel

Does this scenario seem vaguely familiar? If so, it may be that you're
reminded of a similar scene in the hit movie The Matrix.

The New Gnostic Gospel

By Steve Kellmeyer

The Matrix is only the first of a three-part series, with Matrix II and
III being filmed back-to-back even as you read. Will the sequels

continue their retelling of the ancient heresy, or will they degenerate
into a couple of mindless shoot-em-ups, lacking the technical skill and
intentional message of the original?

Only one thing is for sure - at
this rate, it will be a long time before we see a new sequel to The
Bells of St. Mary's.

The New Gnostic Gospel


By Steve Kellmeyer


Two women lead a young man into a dusty, poorly-lit room. The
furnishings are simple: two chairs and a table. Near the table stands a
dark-skinned man. The young man had prepared for, longed for, this
meeting for quite some time. Finally, he was about to meet the man he
had known only by legend and rumor. The darker man motions towards a
chair and both take a seat at the table. The dark man begins. "You
want to know the answers to your questions." The younger man nods
warily. "I can reveal them to you. Are you ready to learn?" The
young man nods again. "The world has been pulled over your eyes to
blind you from the truth. You are a slave, born into bondage, living in
a dream world . . ."



As the speaker continues his revelations, the young man leans in close,
drinking in every word.

Does this scenario seem vaguely familiar? If so, it may be that
you're reminded of a similar scene in the hit movie The Matrix. Yet
this is not a clip from a Hollywood movie. Even though artificial
reality, illusions and delusions, and the building of dream worlds lie
at the very heart of the modern movie industry, Hollywood's media
moguls did not originate the ideas embodied in this scene.

Thousands of years before motion picture technology existed, the idea
of artificial reality, of a dream world built for men, informed the
lives of thousands of men and women throughout the Near East and
beyond. The scene above is a composite drawn from the experiences of
those men and women, whose philosophy seriously threatened Christianity
almost from her birth. Now Hollywood has imported this dangerously
false view of the world into an increasing number of its movies,
showing us what it looks like when it's placed firmly into our time.

Remember when Hollywood produced wonderfully Catholic films such as The
Bells of St. Mary? Times change. The wild success of the Star Wars
series began a Hollywood trend in "alternative" theologies that has
recently become quite sophisticated, most especially in the cult
favorite The Matrix.

Such a trend may seem discouraging to those of us who lament the
deepening religious confusion of our culture. Yet Catholic apologists
who recognize the theological roots of a film such as The Matrix, and
who appreciate the reasons for its popularity, can use such a movie as
an intriguing springboard for discussion with non-Christians. Analyzing
Hollywood's aberrant theology allows us to contrast it with Catholic
truth - and thus to clarify the Faith.


Gnosticism, Ancient and Recent

Few realize that much of The Matrix's appeal lies in the
quasi-Christian themes tightly woven into the plot, a plot that
actually provides an excellent model for understanding the ancient
religious movement called Gnosticism. While there were almost as many
variations of Gnosticism (from the Greek word gnosis, which means
"knowledge") as there were Gnostics, most Gnostics had at least a
few basic beliefs in common. Larry and Andy Wachowski, the brothers who
wrote the script for The Matrix, did a technically superb job of
presenting these popular beliefs in a dynamically visual setting. But
in order to see how they accomplished this, we must first know
something about the ancient believers in this religion.

Gnosticism flourished in the first and second century, and Gnostic
ideas of one sort or another have reappeared in Christian trappings
throughout Church history. In most recent times, the Gnostic worldview
has reemerged within some strands of the New Age movement.

According to many ancient Gnostics, the Godhead is not a Trinity of
Persons. Rather, it is a collection of roughly thirty or so spiritual
entities called aeons. Together, these aeons comprise the pleroma, the
"fullness," which is one of the Gnostic terms for the Godhead. In
Gnostic mythology, one of the aeons in the pleroma named Sophia
("wisdom") generated a spiritual being of great power but small
intelligence, who thought he was the ultimate God. This being took a
portion of the pleroma's divine essence and with it fashioned the
whole of the created world, along with archons, spiritual rulers of the
world. This work earned him the name Demiurgos, or in English, the
Demiurge - the semi-divine "craftsman."

Because the Demiurge was not too bright, he created a flawed world.
Selfish and cruel, he trapped human souls by enclosing them in flesh
and keeping them in the prison we call creation. Every human being
knowingly or unknowingly serves this false god. According to the
Gnostics who made use of Christian Scripture, the God of the Old
Testament and the God of Creation is the Demiurge, whose attributes are
clearly shown in the nastiness He displays in the Old Testament.
Sophia, seeing what happened, tried to free the first human beings,
Adam and Eve. While Adam and Eve were in the garden, Sophia entered a
serpent and, speaking through the serpent, told Adam and Eve that they
could attain to the godhead, but only if they made contact with the
divine spark that rests within each human being. Adam passed this
knowledge on to his son Seth, and it continues to be passed on through
each generation. Meanwhile, other aeons have been sent to inform us of
the true nature of divinity, the last and greatest one speaking through
Jesus. Jesus was an ordinary man, but one of the aeons, an aeon named
Christ, spoke through him in order to tell us how to free ourselves.
Gnostic teaching relies heavily on myth and mythic images. According to
Gnostics, the necessary knowledge for salvation is primarily formed by
our direct experience of the world and the experience of the revealed
knowledge about our spiritual origin. The world around us distracts us
from the truth of who we are by intoxicating us with falsehoods. We can
be freed from these falsehoods by "Messengers of Light," who teach
and who establish salvific mysteries (sacraments) that put us in
contact with our true selves.

Gnostic Elements in The Matrix
Once we're acquainted with this worldview, we can see how The Matrix
clearly unfolds as a modern retelling of the Gnostic version of
salvation history. From the opening credits to the closing scene, a
complex interweave of pagan myth and Christian symbol is used to create
the Gnostic worldview right before our eyes.

Openly Christian terms are deployed for effect as well. Water, a
reminder of baptism, is a constant theme. Thus, we see a waterfall
digital display in the opening credits, which cuts to a pitch-dark room
where we meet the woman we will later know as "Trinity." (The
choice of this name is important not just for its obvious Christian
meaning, but also because "Trinity" is the name of one of the aeons
in ancient Gnosticism).

Trinity is in contact with Morpheus, a man named for the Greek god of
sleep and dreams. Because Trinity is in serious danger in this opening
scene, Morpheus directs her to the corner of Lake and Wells (subtle,
aren't they?) so that she may be saved from agents who are trying to
capture her. Throughout the movie, the agents will play the role of the
archons, the rulers of this present world, while Trinity's boss and
her friends represent the Messengers of Light. She is chased by agents
in a dump truck (reminding us of what flawed creation really is), and
is saved by literally being called out of this created world when she
answers a ringing phone.

The rest of the movie can be divided into fairly clean segments: what
we'll label "the Call," "the New Adam," "the Last
Supper," "the Oracle," "the Passion and Descent into
Death/Hell," and finally "the Resurrection/Ascension." Within
each segment, symbols and imagery are used to foreshadow coming
segments and summarize preceding segments.


The Call

In the first segment, "the Call," we're introduced to the
protagonist, Neo, whose name is an anagram of "One" (as in "the
One") and means "new" in Greek. He's asleep at a computer
screen filled with news of Morpheus, thus foreshadowing what will soon
be revealed: He is in a dreamworld.
After an interesting computer screen conversation, Neo assists a
character named Troy, whose three-minute role serves to tell us who Neo
is: "Hallelujah, you're my saviour, man, my own personal Jesus
Christ." Neo soon meets Trinity, who warns him of impending danger,
and tells him that Morpheus, whom Neo is looking for, will find him.


Neo is given a new cell phone through which Morpheus, acting as his
guide, calls him, warning him that agents are even now searching the
building for him. Neo is told to "get on the [window-washer's]
scaffold and go to the roof," a reference to the scaffold of the
cross upon which Jesus is raised. He refuses to follow this guidance
and is consequently captured by three agents, who subject him to a
trial.

These three persons interrogate him and plant a tracking device on him.
During this interrogation, we discover that Neo's full name is Thomas
A. Anderson. Most viewers would recognize the doubting Thomas
reference, but only the careful viewer knows "Anderson" means
"son of man."


The New Adam

The story now enters the "New Adam" sequence. Our doubting Thomas
is told to go to Adams street, where he meets Trinity under a bridge
from which water pours in sheets. Together, they pass through the water
and Neo agrees to meet with Morpheus.
Trinity is able to remove the tracking device and they enter a building
with chessboard tiles where Morpheus meets him. We hear Duke
Ellington's "I'm Beginning to See the Light" play in the
background. In an unusual amalgam of Alice's Wonderland and Adam in
the Garden of Eden, Neo is asked to eat a forbidden pill in order to
move to the next level. As he contemplates his choice, the first part
of Gnostic philosophy is revealed to him: "The world has been pulled
over your eyes to blind you from the truth. . . . You are a slave, born
into bondage. . . . How would you know the difference between the dream
world and the real world?"

Morpheus explains that words are insufficient. In order to know the
truth, Neo must experience it, see it for himself. After eating the
pill, Neo enters a mirror which is "c-c-cold [as death]" and which
does, indeed, bring him to cardiac arrest, the first death. This is a
harbinger of the baptism in which he quickly finds himself, for he
awakens in a womb-like bath of liquid, surrounded by snake-like cables
in a totally different existence (compare Rom. 6:4). He is rescued from
the waters by Morpheus, who greets him with the words "Welcome to the
real world," and who then re-builds (re-creates) his body.

Neo soon finds that he is on a large spaceship-style hovercraft, named
the Nebuchadnezzar, after the Old Testament king of Babylon who
destroyed Jerusalem, burned down the Temple, and sent the Hebrews into
exile. He learns that the ship model is Mark 3, No. 11 (Mark 3:11).
This subtle reference to Mark 3:11 was not accidental, but calculated
to further the goal of identifying Neo as a Christ character, a savior
who will defeat the computer rulers of the matrix: "And whenever
unclean spirits saw him, they would fall down before him and shout,
'You are the son of God'" (Mark 3:11).

Neo is then introduced to the crew. Of these, the most notable are
Cypher, presumably a take-off on the name Lucifer, the one who will
betray Neo and Morpheus; and Dozer and Tank, brothers born in the last
human city, Zion, the source of everyone's hope. Zion is of course
another biblical name that refers in the Old Testament to Jerusalem and
in the New Testament to heaven - both viewed as the city of God.

Neo discovers that the Matrix is a computer-generated dreamworld, built
so men could be enslaved and serve the computer that created it. This
is very close to the Gnostic scenario: The pleroma (men) created an
(artificially intelligent) entity who in turn creates an intentionally
flawed "reality." Human beings are now trapped in this false
reality and must be freed.

Neo learns that there was once a man born inside the Matrix who learned
how to control the artificial reality, doing whatever he wanted. He
freed the first men and taught them the truth. The Oracle (a prophet)
predicted that at this man's return, all would be freed from bondage.
Thus, these freed men and women now free others, looking for the One
who has been prophesied.

Neo discovers that Morpheus believes him to be the One (the New Adam).
Morpheus, again acting as guide, spends the next several scenes trying
to free Neo's mind so that Neo can operate as the saviour he is. As
this budding "Christ" rests between training sessions, Trinity
feeds him.

The Last Supper
Following "the New Adam" segment, we see an extended paraphrase of
the Last Supper. Cypher is on duty to watch the Matrix displays.
Startled by Neo, Cypher exclaims, "Neo, you scared the bejesus out of
me," and then shares a drink with him.


In the very next scene, Cypher is in the Matrix eating an excellent
meal with the agents and promising to betray Zion, Morpheus and Neo.
The scene following shows Neo eating with his friends, the hovercraft
crewmen.

The Oracle
With the completion of "the Last Supper" sequence, Neo is now ready
to go to the Oracle and find out who he really is. The team enters the
Matrix, the false world that Neo formerly inhabited, and Cypher
immediately begins their betrayal. Meanwhile, Neo is told that the
Oracle is not right or wrong, but merely a guide.

Morpheus and Neo enter an elevator and rise to where the Oracle lives.
As he waits for her, Neo is told to realize the truth: this Matrix
"reality" does not exist. The Oracle meets him, gives a cryptic
welcome, and warns of a coming choice.

The Passion and Descent Into Death/Hell
As the team tries to leave the Matrix, they discover they have been
betrayed. This begins the "Passion and Descent Into Hell" segment.
Some of the crew, including Neo, escape by descending down the walls
into the sewers and running to a TV repair shop (a metaphor for Neo's
attempt to repair the world of illusion that humans live) so they can
be called out of the Matrix.
Meanwhile, the captured Morpheus is tortured while one of the agents
explains that the computer intentionally created a flawed world because
human beings didn't seem to thrive in any other kind. The agent
drives home the point by referring to reality as "this zoo, this
prison," throwing in a few modernist references to overpopulation and
the cancer of humanity upon the earth. The crew members who
successfully escape sadly believe that Morpheus, "the father to
us," must inevitably be killed.

This last theme corresponds to a variant of ancient Gnosticism in which
the Propater, the Father figure in the pleroma who is threatened by the
Demiurge, is saved by the Christ. Knowing this, we should not be
surprised to see that Neo decides to save Morpheus.

So Neo and Trinity together set out to rescue Morpheus. During this
extremely violent project, the false witness of an agent concerning who
Neo is ("only human") is contrasted with the true witness of Tank
concerning Neo ("He's the One!" paraphrasing the centurion in
Mark 15:39). Successful, Morpheus, Trinity and Neo head for a subway
station with a phone line out of the Matrix.

After an extended subterranean fight with an agent, Neo is directed to
Wabash and Lake, where the ringing phone, the call to salvation, will
be found in the Heart of the City Hotel, Room 303: combined references
to baptism, the eternal Trinity, and salvation in the Sacred Heart. In
room 303, however, he is shot to death by an agent before he can answer
the call.

The Resurrection and Ascension
Nevertheless, the love of Trinity in Nebuchadnezzar's real world is
sufficient to raise him from the dead, both in reality and in the
illusion which is the Matrix. When he rises from the dead, he finds he
has full control of the Matrix and easily defeats the three persons
(agents). The movie ends as Neo picks up a pay phone within the Matrix
and tells the artificial intelligence, "I will show these people a
world with no rules, no controls, borders, or boundaries. A world
without you. What happens next is up to you." Neo then flies
(ascends) into the heavens.

While several liberties had to be taken with the original Gnostic story
in order to make it fit Hollywood's format, the movie outlines the
essentials of this ancient religion. We live in an illusion, creation
is an evil prison in which we serve its creator, and we must be freed.
The careful attention to symbolic detail throughout the movie (the
script went through seventeen rewrites), combined with the nearly
constant paraphrasing of Scriptural concepts or stories, serves to
magnify the power of the presentation.

The Matrix is only the first of a three-part series, with Matrix II and
III being filmed back-to-back even as you read. Will the sequels
continue their retelling of the ancient heresy, or will they degenerate
into a couple of mindless shoot-em-ups, lacking the technical skill and
intentional message of the original? Only one thing is for sure - at
this rate, it will be a long time before we see a new sequel to The
Bells of St. Mary's.




http://www.envoymagazine.com/backissues/4.5/coverstory.html