# Quote — Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion

> Philo was enough heir to the Stoic and Platonic tradition to accord to the concept and name of areté an important place in his thought. ...The very meaning of areté is withdrawn from the positive faculties... and placed in the knowledge of nothingness. Confidence in one's own moral powers, the whole enterprise of self-perfection... and the self-attribution of the achievement—integral aspects of the Greek conception of virtue—this... is here condemned as the vice of self-love and conceit. ..."[Q]ueen of the virtues," the most perfect... is faith, which combines the turning to God with the recognition and contempt of one's own nothingness. ..."[T]he vice most odious to God" is vainglory, self-love, arrogance, presumption—in brief, the pride of considering oneself as one's own lord and ruler and of relying on one's own powers. This [is a] complete disintegration of the Greek ideal of virtue... While to the Hellenes from Plato to Plotinus man's way to God led through moral self-perfection, for Philo it leads through self-despair in the realization of one's nothingness. ..."For then is the time for the creature to encounter the Creator, when it has recognized its own nothingness"... To know God and to disown oneself is a standing correlation in Philo. "...fly from oneself and flee to God." ..."he who flees from his own flees to that of the All" ..."escape even thyself, and pass out of thyself, raving and God-possessed like the Dionysian Corybantes"

- 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/philo-was-enough

## 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)