Defining "Gnosticism"

At present, there is a heated discussion among scholars as to how the term "Gnosticism" should be defined or whether it is precise and useful enough to be used at all. Those who want to abandon it altogether think that the connotations of "Gnosticism" are so generalized as to be more misleading than helpful when individual texts and phenomena, traditionally called gnostic, are studied. Other scholars insist that even if the term "Gnosticism" is not abandoned, the historian should recognize the ideological and apologetic ways in which the term has been used in the ancient and modern discourses of orthodoxy and heresy.

In the present website the terms "Gnosticism" and "gnostic" characterize those religious doctrines and myths of late antiquity that maintain or presuppose that the cosmos is a result of the activity of an evil or ignorant creator and that salvation is a process in the course of which a human being receives the knowledge of his/her divine origin and returns to the realm of light after having been freed from the limitations of the world and the body.

In gnostic Christianity knowledge is not necessarily seen as a reference to the intellect but has a religious significance. The object of knowledge is the divine origin of humanity, which the individual can be reminded of and to which he/she is urged to return. The question is really one of a saving knowledge. In gnostic Christianity knowledge is not necessarily seen as a competitor with faith, but as complementing and deepening faith. One gnostic Christian defined saving knowledge thus:

We are not only saved by baptism, but by the knowledge of Who we were and where we came from, Where we have been and where we have come to, Where we are going and from what we have been freed, What is birth and what is rebirth.

Clement of Alexandria, Excerpts from Theodotus, 78.2

Gnosticism is also referred to in a looser sense as the stress on the spiritual and seeking for truth within. However, this is an unnecessarily imprecise description of the content of Gnosticism. Such spiritual endeavours were very common in antiquity, as they are today, and it is not meaningful to describe them as gnostic.