ABSTRACT
GNOSTICISM is a vague term covering a wide range of ideas. By derivation (gnosis = knowledge) it implies the pursuit of esoteric truth: common people knew the ordinary facts of religion, the wise had much private information that lifted them out of the ranks of the vulgar. This esoteric knowledge claimed to be scientific and cosmological as well as theological. We can thus understand why Harnack saw in it an ‘acute Hellenisation of Christianity’. But in point of fact it was strongly dualist, combining a physical with a moral dualism, and its type of thought was far more Oriental than Greek. As a kind of theosophy it had affected most of the religions into the midst of which Christianity was born. It is therefore customary to trace Gnostic influence in many of the various types of heretical thought that arose around the cradle of the Christian faith. This is probably correct, although the latest English authority on the subject, Professor Burkitt, refuses to give the name of Gnosticism to any but the great outstanding systems that were known by that name in the second century. In his view, as in that of Dr. Schweitzer, Gnosticism was an effort to find a substitute for that apocalyptic hope of an immediate return of Christ which was now felt to be illusory. It was an attempt to explain on rational grounds how men came from God and can return to Him without cataclysm.
