"Gnostic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and other sects developed from the Gnostic systems, assigned great power to stone amulets, and prepared them for their initiates, who used them for identification and for curative purposes. They quickly acquired a celebrity undiminished for ages, and were known under the general name of Abraxas. They were ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... Paul and the Judaising element in the Apostolic Church which opposed Paul whithersoever he went. In 1835 his disquisition, Die sogenannten Pastoral-Briefe, appeared. In the teachings of these letters he discovered the antithesis to the gnostic heresies of the second century. He thought also that the stage of organisation of the Church which they imply, accorded better with this supposition than with that of their apostolic authorship. The same general theme ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... Horapollo, Chiflet's gnostic gems, and other repertories of the same class, one might, peradventure, make a tolerable case in favour of the mythological identity of the legend of Ladybird—that is, the sun-chafer, or barn-bie, the fire-fly, ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.26 • Various
... the beginning seventeen different Christian societies, just as there were nine among the Jews, including the two kinds of Samaritans. The societies which flattered themselves at being the most orthodox accused the others of the most inconceivable obscenities. The term of "gnostic," which was at first so honourable, signifying "learned," "enlightened," "pure," became a term of horror and scorn, a reproach of heresy. Saint Epiphanius, in the third century, claimed that they used first to tickle each other, the men and the women; that then they gave each other very immodest ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... collection of monographs, and thereby lose its proper value. I have endeavoured to subordinate everything to the aim of exhibiting the development which led to the ecclesiastical dogmas, and therefore have neither, for example, communicated the details of the gnostic systems, nor brought forward in detail the theological ideas of Clemens Romanus, Ignatius, etc. Even a history of Paulinism will be sought for in the book in vain. It is a task by itself, to trace the aftereffects of the theology of Paul in the post-Apostolic age. The History of Dogma can only ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... in nature is as firmly rooted today as it was in the dawn of man's intellectual development. The form in which the idea has been presented has changed with the ages. Mythology succeeded animism, and has in turn yielded to many curious and vanished theories, polytheistic, gnostic, pantheistic, and the rest. Now, the belief in distinct beings behind natural phenomena has virtually disappeared. Not so the belief in some form of universal life or consciousness—of which belief representative ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... founded in 1843, their doctrines a mixture of pantheistic with Gnostic and Buddhist beliefs; adverse to polygamy, concubinage, and divorce; insisted on the emancipation of women; have suffered from persecution, but are ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... dazzling, God-crowned summit, the Naza- rene stepped suddenly before the people and their schools of philosophy; Gnostic, Epicurean, and Stoic. He must stem these rising angry elements, and walk serenely over their fretted, foaming ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... for babes and sucklings about one-third of it had better be expurgated. The Apocrypha was a favourite work, but above all I loved the Revelations, a work which, I may say by the way, is still a treasure to be investigated as regards the marvellous mixture of Neo-Platonic, later Egyptian (or Gnostic), and even Indian Buddhistic ideas therein. Well, I had learned from it a word which St. John applies (to my mind very vulgarly and much too frequently) to the Scarlet Lady of Babylon or Rome. What this word meant I did not know, but this I understood, that ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... relating to the reception of the Fourth Gospel in the second century. Its theology is stamped on the teaching of orthodox apologists; its authority is quoted for the speculative tenets of the manifold Gnostic sects, Basilideans, Valentinians, Ophites; its narrative is employed even by a Judaising writer like the author of the Clementines. The phenomena which confront us in the last quarter of the second century are inexplicable, ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... Britling's idea of Gnosticism, not of orthodox Christianity. He went off for a time into faded reminiscences of theological reading. What had been the Gnostic idea? That the God of the Old Testament was the Devil of the New? But that had been the idea of ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... Let not the non-gnostic portion of our readers imagine, that if they haunt the justice-seat of Birnie and his judicial co-mates, that they will ever witness such pleasant, sparkling, humorous examinations as those reported in the columns of the papers which matinally grace their ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... modern times it is applied contemptuously (e g. by the early opponents of the evolution theory) to a conception or hypothesis which purports to be a simple solution of apparently insoluble phenomena. The Gnostic physician Serenus Sammonicus gave precise instructions as to its mystical use in averting or curing agues and fevers generally. The paper on which the word was written had to be folded in the form of a cross, suspended from the neck by a strip of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of anterior civilizations—a mere compound of Greek and Oriental elements—it is not the less certain that it brings to the human mind the satisfaction vainly sought by it in the East as in the West. Omnia subito is not its device, but that of the Gnostic heresy. Better to say, with Clement of Alexandria and Origen, that the night of paganism had its stars to light it, but that they called to the Morning-star which ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Jewish doctrine of a divine Creator and Governor of this world with that of a divine Redeemer to lead us into another. Persons were not lacking to perceive the contradiction inherent in such an eclecticism; and it was the Gnostic or neo-Platonic party, which denied creation and taught a pure asceticism, that had the best of the argument. The West, however, would not yield to their logic. It might, in an hour of trouble and weakness, make concessions to quietism and accept the cross, but ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... as a savant and a thinker; but I was, nevertheless, astounded at the mere multitudinousness of the curios he had contrived to crowd into the space around him. Side by side rested a palaeolithic implement, a Chinese 'wise man,' a Gnostic gem, an amphora of Graeco-Etruscan work. The general effect was a bizarrerie of half-weird sheen and gloom. Flemish sepulchral brasses companied strangely with runic tablets, miniature paintings, a winged ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... his Mysterium Baphometis relevatum, &c., and Die Schuld der Templer, revived the old charge against the Templars. The word, according to his interpretation, signifies the baptism of Metis, or of fire, and is, therefore, connected with the impurities of the Gnostic Ophites (q.v.). Additional [v.03 p.0364] evidence of this, according to Hammer-Purgstall, is to be found in the architectural ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... they say it, of course it may be so. But, sir, that of which my ex-associates are ignorant, and which doubtless will astonish you, is that I have been many other things,—in religion, by turns a Protestant, a Papist, an Arian and Semi-Arian, a Manichean, a Gnostic, an Adamite even and a Pre-Adamite, a Sceptic, a Pelagian, a Socinian, an Anti-Trinitarian, and a Neo-Christian; [72] in philosophy and politics, an Idealist, a Pantheist, a Platonist, a Cartesian, an Eclectic (that is, a sort of ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... about 340 and dying September 30, 420, made him not only the foremost authority within the Church itself throughout the Middle Ages, but also one of the chief guides to secular scholarship. Abelard repeatedly quotes from him, particularly from his denunciation of the revival of Gnostic heresies by Jovinianus and from some of his voluminous epistles. He also refers extensively to the charges brought against Jerome by reason of his teaching of women at Rome in the house of Marcella. One of his pupils, Paula, a wealthy widow, followed ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... and clay of the earth. In a generous eclecticism, within the bounds of her liberty, and as by some providential power within her, [127] she gathers and serviceably adopts, as in other matters so in ritual, one thing here, another there, from various sources—Gnostic, Jewish, Pagan—to adorn and beautify the greatest act of worship the world has seen. It was thus the liturgy of the church came to be—full of consolations for the human soul, and destined, surely! one day, under the sanction of so many ages of human experience, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... danger lay if—as the Comes promised—Serapis were to be overthrown on the morrow, one of the assembly answered in the name of his colleagues. This man, now very old, had formerly been a wonderfully successful exorcist, and, notwithstanding that he was a faithful Christian, he was the leader of a gnostic sect and a diligent student of magic. He proceeded to argue, with all the zeal and vehemence of conviction, that Serapis was the most terrible of all the heathen daemons, and that all the oracles of antiquity, all the prophecies of the seers, and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers |
