Is The Matrix Gnostic?
From a historic Christian perspective, one’s attitude toward the physical world and the body is very important.
Christianity has a positive, world-affirming view of matter and the body, which are the work of God’s creative activity and are therefore both real and good.
By contrast, many religious traditions, including heretical gnostic offshoots of Christianity and Judaism, have a negative, world-denying view of matter and the body. The physical world is variously seen as somehow illusory, intrinsically defective, or outright evil, and bodily existence is regarded as a trap or a prison, perhaps a punishment or a process of purification.
In any case, physical existence at best seen as a necessary evil from which the goal is to escape. Those who succeed go on to a disembodied higher state; those who don’t may be forced to perpetuate their corporeal entanglement through reincarnation.
This vision of the afterlife contrasts sharply with the Christian hope, which is not a purely spiritual existence in heaven, but the resurrection of the body and the renewal of the physical world.
Where gnostics long to put off the body, the Christian longing is "not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed" (2 Cor 5:4), that "this mortality must put on immortality" (1 Cor 15:53).
For we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened: not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life. 2 Corinthians 5:4 KJV rather than watered-down translation (that mortality be swallowed up of life rather than life be swallowed up by death.)
For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. 1 Corinthians 15:53 (something corruptible isn't necessarily corrupt, but it is important to know the nature of the fabric you are dealing with so that you can apply the remedy--"Your clothes
can get dirty" doesn't make them dirty. The remedy on how to keep them clean or to enhance them is revealed.)
Why is Neo dressed like a Jesuit priest?
Significantly, there is one character who shows no enthusiasm for physical or sensory experience, even in the simulated world of the Matrix. In the film’s lone flash of something like real gnostic-like contempt for bodily and physical experience, the malevolent Agent Smith — an enemy computer program — expresses disgust at even the simulation of physicality around him.
"I hate this place," he tells Morpheus. "This zoo, this prison, this… reality, whatever you want to call it, I can’t stand it any longer. It’s the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink and every time I do, I fear that I’ve somehow been infected by it."
Even the traitor, who would rather eat steak in the Matrix than real-world rations on the Nebuchadnezzar, doesn’t have the utter world-rejecting attitude of Agent Smith, the movie’s one true gnostic.
According to some Agent Smith/Cain is channeling Gnosticism at that point.