This knowledge, however, is withheld from him by his very situation, since “ignorance” is the essence of mundane existence, just as it was the principle of the world’s coming into existence. In particular, the transcendent God is unknown in the world and cannot be discovered from it;

The goal of gnostic striving is the release of the “inner man” from the bonds of the world and his return to his native realm of light. The necessary condition for this is that he knows about the transmundane God and about himself, that is, about his divine origin as well as his present situation, and accordingly also about the nature of the world

Enclosed in the soul is the spirit, or “pneuma” (called also the “spark”), a portion of the divine substance from beyond which has fallen into the world; and the Archons created man for the express purpose of keeping it captive there.

The name “Gnosticism,” which has come to serve as a collective heading for a manifoldness of sectarian doctrines appearing within and around Christianity during its critical first centuries, is derived from gnosis, the Greek word for “knowledge.” The emphasis on knowledge as the means for the attainment of salvation, or even as the form of

Adolf von Harnack to his famous formulation that Gnosticism was “the acute Hellenization of Christianity,”

In the gnostic context, however, “knowledge” has an emphatically religious or supranatural meaning and refers to objects which we nowadays should call those of faith rather than of reason. Now although the relation between faith and knowledge (pistis and gnosis) became a major issue in the Church between the gnostic heretics and the orthodox, this

the gnostic systems compounded everything—oriental mythologies, astrological doctrines, Iranian theology, elements of Jewish tradition, whether Biblical, rabbinical, or occult, Christian salvation-eschatology, Platonic terms and concepts.

Man, the main object of these vast dispositions, is composed of flesh, soul, and spirit. But reduced to ultimate principles, his origin is twofold: mundane and extra-mundane.

The transcendent God Himself is hidden from all creatures and is unknowable by natural concepts. Knowledge of Him requires supranatural revelation and illumination and even then can hardly be expressed otherwise than in negative terms.