If there can be no true union between the world of spirit and the world of matter, then the cosmic Christ of the gnostics can never truly have taken flesh by a human woman, and he can never have felt what fleshly people feel – particularly human suffering. His Passion and Resurrection in history were therefore not fleshly events, even if they seemed so; they were heavenly play-acting (the doctrine known as Docetism, from the Greek verb dokein, ‘to seem’).
