"Gnosticism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... understanding of Christianity was speculative, not spiritual, and their knowledge of it the result of thinking, not of life; like the Jews they denied the possibility of the Word becoming flesh and of a realisation of the infinite in the finite; indeed, Gnosticism was at once a speculative and a practical denial that Christ was God manifest in the flesh, and that participation in Christianity was, as He presented it (John vi. 53), participation in His ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... reader of Christian history] comes to the second century," says Dr. Burton, "he finds that Gnosticism, under some form or other, was professed in every part of the then civilized world. He finds it divided into schools, as numerously and as zealously attended as any which Greece or Asia could boast in their happiest days. He meets with names totally unknown ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... contriver of the stakes" and adds, "Some understand the word figuratively, of the firm establishment of Pharaoh's kingdom, because the Arabs fix their tents with stakes; but they may possibly intend that prince's obstinacy and hardness of heart." I may note that in "Tasawwuf," or Moslem Gnosticism, Pharaoh represents, like Prometheus and Job, the typical creature who upholds his own dignity and rights in presence and despight of the Creator. Sahib the Sufi declares that the secret of man's soul (i.e. its emanation) was first revealed when Pharaoh declared ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... Obviously the allusion here is to that antinomian license which many early Gnostic teachers managed to extract from the spiritual teaching of the Gospel. We find germs of this immoral doctrine a full half century before the professed date of Polycarp's Epistle, in the incipient Gnosticism which St Paul rebukes at Corinth [119:2]. We have still clearer indications of it in the Pastoral Epistles; and when we reach the epoch of the Apocalypse, which our author himself places somewhere in the year 68 or 69, the evil is almost full ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot |
