Why Ancient Gnostics Would Have Hated Virtual Reality

“The Ladder of Divine Ascent” is a 12th-century icon representing the teachings of an ascetical treatise of the same name written c. 600 by John Climacus and found in the Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai (Egypt).

American Christians these days love to talk about how our digital age is a Gnostic fantasy come true. They argue that technology disconnects us from material reality just like Gnosticism of old despised the good earth and preached false gospels of disembodied spiritual escape. It’s a simple and convincing narrative with a pious feel to it as we all watch ourselves and our loved ones gradually disappear. Our faces are only increasingly lost in our glowing screens and our minds more and more occupied by the billowing fog of news alerts, endless entertainment feeds, or dreams of consciousness uploaded into the virtual and eternal ether. However, the simple fact of the matter is that ancient Neoplatonists, Christians, and Gnostics all would have looked with equal pity on our sad condition in this digital age. The categories required to grasp this will not fit neatly into a marketing headline, but they are well worth a little attention in my experience.

Benjamin Wiker (2011), Rod Dreher (2021), and Peter Robinson (2025) are among those who I have read or heard declaring that modern advocates of virtual reality and digital consciousness are actually just echoing the old Gnostic heretics. These and the many others repeating this pious misconception are, ironically, perpetuating the popular Cartesian dualism that we cannot seem to see past no matter how hard we try these days. All ancient gnostic schools, in fact, would have understood—better than any of these confused Christian pundits of our sad times—two key corollaries. First, machines deal with less substantive realities than the natural and material processes that machines are built to manipulate, imitate, and accelerate. Nature involves life and mind. Machines only deal with shortcuts in the various tasks that some living things might wish to perform. Second, virtual reality and artificial intelligence are simply disembodied machine processes—digitalized information that is directed to follow computational and imitative patterns at astonishingly high speeds and volumes. Any Gnostic devotee contemplating our sad contemporary world would be utterly disgusted by the idea of sullying their minds with such phantasmagorical distractions from their higher noetic disciplines. To be clear, I am not defending either Gnostics or virtual reality, but I do wish that contemporary Christians could better understand the world out of which their own faith came. It would, truly, help us to speak more meaningfully into the pathetic puddle of confusions that characterize our particular age. Many great sources exist for those interested in this much-needed education, and I’ll share a few below for my tireless readers in the course of making my case.