summa3 » APPENDIX Z15: Gnosticism

APPENDIX Z15: Gnosticism

APPENDIX Z15:

Gnosticism

(selected WIKI excerpts)*

“Gnosticism (from gnostikos, “learned”, from Greek:

γνῶσις gnōsis, knowledge) is a modern scholarly

term for a set of religious beliefs and spiritual
practices

found among some of the early Christian sects
called

“gnostic” (“learned”) by Irenaeus and other early
Christian

heresiologists. The term also has reference to parallels

and possible pre-Christian inuences of the
Christian

gnostics.

Gnosticism was primarily dened in Christian
context, or

as ‘the acute Hellenization of Christianity’ per
Adolf von

Harnack (1885), until Moritz Friedländer (1898)
advocated

Hellenistic Jewish origins, and Wilhelm Bousset (1907)

advocated Persian origins….”

Common characteristics

“….The Christian sects rst called “gnostic” a
branch

of Christianity, however
Joseph Jacobs and Ludwig

Blau (Jewish Encyclopedia, 1911) note that much of
the

terminology employed is Jewish and note that this
“proves

at least that the principal elements of gnosticism
were

derived from Jewish speculation,….”

Monad (apophatic theology)

“In many Gnostic systems (and heresiologies), God
is

known as the Monad, the One, The Absolute, Aion
teleos

(The Perfect Æon), Bythos (Depth or Profundity, Βυθος),

Proarkhe (Before the
Beginning, προαρχη), and E Arkhe

(The Beginning, η αρχη).
God is the high source of the

pleroma, the region of
light. The various emanations of

God are called æons.

Within certain variations
of Gnosticism, especially those

inspired by Monoimus, the Monad was the highest
God

which created lesser gods, or elements (similar to
æons).

According to Hippolytus, this view was inspired by the

Pythagoreans, who called the rst thing that came
into

existence the Monad, which begat the dyad, which
begat

the numbers, which begat the point, begetting
lines,

etc….”

Wikipedia Online, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism (accessesd February 26, 2012)

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