Gnosis (γνῶσις) — A Greek word meaning “knowledge,” used in a philosophical-religious sense to denote not discursive or demonstrative learning but a spiritual, intimate, and revealed knowledge capable of liberating the soul. The term derives from the verb gignṓskein (“to know”) and came to prominence in the Gnostic currents that flourished in the first centuries of the Common Era around teachers such as Valentinus and Basilides. For these groups, gnosis is a saving knowledge: to know the divine origin of the soul, imprisoned in the material world, allows it to reascend to the pleroma, the divine fullness from which it came. On this view the sensible world was created not by the supreme God but by a lesser, ignorant demiurge, which lends Gnosticism a pronounced dualism between matter and spirit, darkness and light. The decisive contrast is between gnosis and faith (pistis): whereas faith assents to a received doctrine, gnosis is a direct, transformative experience of the divine, reserved for a chosen few (the “pneumatics”). Church Fathers such as Irenaeus of Lyon attacked these sects as heretical, and for centuries Gnosticism was known almost solely through such refutations, until the 1945 discovery of the Coptic codices at Nag Hammadi, in Egypt, brought Gnostic texts to light firsthand. In the twentieth century Hans Jonas, in The Gnostic Religion, offered an influential philosophical interpretation of the phenomenon, while Carl Gustav Jung reappropriated the concept for his psychology of archetypes and the collective unconscious. Closely related terms include pleroma and demiurge.
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