ABSTRACT
In terms of religious belief, the Gnostic approach guarantees that God is within ourselves, and thus within our grasp without assistance. The notion of religious revelation is that God or other divine agencies have handed down truths to the human race, which by and large, it otherwise could not attain. Gnosticism has been analyzed in a broad historical context to explain twentieth-century ideological politics by one prominent philosopher, and by historians of religion and literary scholars who can discern in Gnostic doctrines connection to the most varied items of human experience. Gnosticism starts with an insight common to all religions but forecloses the immense possibility that the divine, God as a person or a force or a presence or a design, is something different from and greater than ourselves. Pope Benedict's address is a thoughtful re-presentation of the case for God, but it has a kind of double difficulty in which the elements combine to make up a contradiction.
