"Gnosticism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and served as corner-stone for the development of the faith. Irenaeus is explicit; now, Irenaeus came from the school of John, and between him and the apostle there was only Polycarp. The part played by this Gospel in Gnosticism, and especially in the system of Valentinus,[6] in Montanism,[7] and in the quarrel of the Quartodecimans,[8] is not less decisive. The school of John was the most influential one during the second century; and it is only by regarding the origin of the Gospel as coincident with the rise ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... the Greek mystery-religions. It would be impossible to translate them into any Eastern language. The Rabbinical disputes with the Jews about justification and election have disappeared; the danger ahead is now from theosophy and the barbarised Platonism which was afterwards matured in Gnosticism. The teaching is even more Christocentric than before; and the Catholic doctrine of the Church as the body of Christ is more prominent than individualistic mysticism. The cosmology is thoroughly Johannine, and only awaits ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... of the churches their supreme importance as an authoritative rule of faith and practice, and also the necessity of carefully defining their extent as well as their true interpretation. Heretical teachers arose who sowed in the Christian church the seeds of gnosticism. Of these some, as Marcion, rejected on dogmatical grounds a portion of the apostolic writings, and mutilated those which they retained; others, as Valentinus, sought by fanciful principles of interpretation to explain away their true meaning. Chap. 2, No. 12. The reaction upon the churches ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... whole history of human mind there is not a more instructive chapter at once stranger and sad, interesting to our curiosity and mortifying to our pride, than the history of Platonic philosophy sinking into gnosticism, or in other words, of Greek philosophy merging in Oriental Mysticism; showing, on the one hand the decline and fall of philosophy, and, on the other, the rise and progress of Syncretism. Perhaps, also, it is the most remarkable instance on record, that out of the religious, moral, ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden
... the first heresy of the commonly-accepted Christian era, and is believed by them to have been the originator of those systems of religio-philosophy and theosophy which are now somewhat inaccurately classed together under the heading of Gnosticism. And though this assumption of the patristic heresiologists is entirely incorrect, as may be proved from their own works, it is nevertheless true that Simonianism is the first system that, as far as our ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead |
