Compared with apostolic Christianity, Gnosticism was full of surprises, not the least of which was a strange doctrine of “predestination,” for lack of a better term. Many Gnostics recognized a kind of proletariat and bourgeoisie of heaven. The lower spiritual class lived by faith and the upper class, the illuminated or the perfect, lived by knowledge. Still a third group, the spiritually disadvantaged, were not capable of gnosis under any circumstances. Some capricious deity had created them without the capacity to “see” even under the best guru.
