Gnosticism
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A wide variety of Jewish and early Christian sects having an interest in gnosis, or divine knowledge, and generally holding the belief that there is a god greater than the Demiurge, or the creator of the world. countable, uncountable
"Another contemporary scholar of Gnosticism, C. G. Jung, has taken this notion of the twin ray and applied it to his own model of the contrasexual nature of the self."
- 2 Alternative form of Gnosticism. alt-of, alternative, countable, uncountable
- 3 a religious orientation advocating gnosis as the way to release a person's spiritual element; considered heresy by Christian churches wordnet
Example
More examples"Gnosticism was a religious movement older than Christianity. There were both types of Christian and non-Christian Gnosticism because there was syncretism, or mixing. They believed that humans were trapped in their bodies and in this evil material world that was created by a cosmic disaster, by a malevolent deity who was not Christ. Christian Gnostics believed that Christ was one of the aeons or divine beings from the Pleroma, the Divine Realm, as described in the Apocryphon of John, part of the Nag Hammadi Library of Gnostic literature. Salvation was by esoteric knowledge, although ultimately self-knowledge. Gnostics believed in the dualism of the good spirit and evil matter. The material world was an evil place from where Gnostics had to escape. They believed that not all humans had the Divine Spark. The aeons emanated from the Ultimate God, the Monad in the Pleroma. The origins of Gnosticism are unclear today, but probably it came from Persia or further east. It had a lot of Greek influences. Today, after the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library as leather-bound papyrus codices in a sealed jar in Egypt, in 1945, some people are trying to revive Gnosticism. "Gnōsis" is Greek for knowledge."
Etymology
From Gnostic + -ism.
Related phrases
More for "gnosticism"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.