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 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.

The knowledge thus revealed, even though called simply “the knowledge of God,” comprises the whole content of the gnostic myth, with everything it has to teach about God, man, and world; that is, it contains the elements of a theoretical system. On the practical side, however, it is more particularly “knowledge of the way,” namely, of the soul’s wa

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.

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

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

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.

Gnosis meant pre-eminently knowledge of God, and from what we have said about the radical transcendence of the deity it follows that “knowledge of God” is the knowledge of something naturally unknowable and therefore itself not a natural condition.

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