# Quote — Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion

> It is no accident that, whereas the libertinistic version of gnostic morality was represented by decidedly esoteric types, our examples for the ascetic version are taken from... exoteric types of Gnosticism. Both Marcion and Mani intended to found a general church... and ... was a community religion of popular complexion. Anarchy is incompatible with institution... and any religious establishment will lead in the direction of discipline. To some extent the church takes over the function of the ; ideally it aspires to being an all-embracing itself, in this world though not of this world, replacing the secular civitas in regulating the lives of its members. This must necessarily give rise to a canon of "virtues"... In short, institutionalized salvation, that is, the very idea of the "church," favors the discipline of ascetic morality over a literal understanding of the ideal of pneumatic freedom, which the anticosmic position... suggests. ...The Christian Gnostics listed by Irenaeus as holding libertine views regarded their "freedom" as an executive privilege never meant for the ordinary members... Generally... except for a brief period of revolutionary extremism, the practical consequences from gnostic views were more often in the direction of asceticism than of libertinism.

- Author: [Hans Jonas](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hans-jonas.md)
- Book: [The Gnostic Religion](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hans-jonas/the-gnostic-religion.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Gnostic_Religion#Quotes) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/hans-jonas/the-gnostic-religion/it-is-no-accident

## More from this book

> In the Mandaean literature, it is a standing phrase: life has been thrown into the world, light into darkness, the soul into the body. ...Ejected into the world, life is a kind of trajectory projecting itself forward into the future.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hans-jonas/the-gnostic-religion/in-the-mandaean.md)

> The ontological relation of Sophia and is best expressed in the statement "the Sophia is called ',' the Demiurge, 'soul' "... For the rest, we meet in the Demiurge of the Valentinians... traits of the world-god... his ignorance first... which in the first place relates to things above him. These, including his mother, remain entirely unknown to him; but also considering his own fashioning beneath himself he "is unthinking and foolish, and knows not what he does and effects"... which permits his mother to slip her own designs into what he believes he does on his own. On his ignorance then is based the second major trait which he shares with the general gnostic conception of the Demiurge: the conceit and presumption in which he believes himself to be alone and declares himself to be the unique and highest God.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hans-jonas/the-gnostic-religion/the-ontological-relation.md)

> The purity of their substance, the perfection of their circular motion, the unimpededness with which in thus moving they follow their own law, the incorruptibility of their being and the immutability of their courses—all these attributes make them in the sense of Greek philosophy "divine"... eminence of being. Among these constancy of being and immortality of life are paramount. Divine, therefore, are the stars, primarily not by their action but by the rank which they occupy in the hierarchy of things according to their immanent properties. And these are just the properties of order, eternity, and harmony which constitute the "cosmos" character of the All in general: this they represent most purely and completely. ...Beyond this ideal significance, their perfection is also the real guarantee of the duration of the whole, i.e., of the eternity of cosmic movement and life. Thus they are the most powerful assurance which the Greek affirmation of the world had been able to conceive.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hans-jonas/the-gnostic-religion/the-purity-of-their.md)