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Religion Of The Mind And Most General Term For Science And Philosophy - GnosisReligion Of The Mind And Most General Term For Science And Philosophy - GnosisThe most general term, however, by which they named their science and philosophy and religion was Gnosis; it occurs in almost every sermon and excerpt and fragment of their literature which we possess. The doctrine and the discipline of Mind, the Feeder of men and Shepherd of man¡¯s soul, are summed up in that fairest word--Gnosis .
Let us then briefly consider the meaning of the name as the followers of this Way understood it. Gnosis is knowledge; but not discursive knowledge of the nature of the multifarious arts and sciences known in those days or in our own. On this "noise of words," these multifarious knowledges of the appearances of things and vain opinions, the followers of the True Science and Pure Philosophy looked with resignation; while those of them who were still probationers treated them with even less tolerance, pg 27 declaring that they left such things to the "Greeks"; for "Egyptians," of course, nothing but Wisdom could suffice.
At any rate this is how one of the less instructed editors of one of the collections of our sermons phrases it. For him Egypt was the Sacred Land and the Egyptians the Chosen Race; while the Greeks were upstarts and shallow reasoners. The like-natured Jew of the period, on the other hand, called the body "Egypt," while Jud©¡a was the Holy Land, and Israel the Chosen of God; and so the game went merrily on, as it does even unto this day.
But the real writers of the sermons knew otherwise. Gnosis for them was superior to all distinction of race; for the Gnostic was precisely he who was reborn, into the Race, the Race of true Wisdom-lovers, the Kinship pg 28 of the Divine Fatherhood. Gnosis for them began with the Knowledge of Man, to be consummated at the end of the perfectioning by the Knowledge of God or Divine Wisdom.
This Knowledge was far other than the knowledge or science of the world. Not, however, that the latter was to be despised; for all things are true or untrue, according to our point of view. If our standpoint is firmly centered in the True, all things can be read in their true meaning; whereas if we wander in error, all things, even the truest, become misleading for us.
The Gnosis began, continued and ended in the knowledge of one¡¯s self, the reflection of the Knowledge of the One Self, the All Self. So that if we say that Gnosis was other than the science of the world, we do not mean that it excluded anything, but only that it regarded all pg 29 human arts and sciences as insufficient, incomplete, imperfect.
Indeed it is quite evident on all hands that the writers of the Trismegistic tractates, in setting forth their intuitions of the things-that-are, and in expressing the living ideas that came to birth in their hearts and heads, made use of the philosophy and science and art of their day. It is, in very deed, one of the stories of their endeavour that they did so; for in so doing they brought the great truths of the inner life into contact with the thought of their age.
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