# Quote — Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion

> The enlightenment by a ray of the divine light... which transforms the psychic nature of man... is sometimes claimed and even described... in the religious literature of the age, inside and outside Gnosticism. It involves the extinction of the natural faculties, filling the vacuum with a surprisingly positive and... negative content. Annihilation and deification of the person are fused in the spiritual ecstasis... immediate presence of the acosmic essence. In the gnostic context, this transfiguring... experience is ... exalted... paradoxical... knowledge of the unknowable. ...The mystical gnosis theoû—direct beholding of the divine reality—is itself an earnest of the consummation to come. It is transcendence become immanent... of divine activity and grace. It is... as much a "being known" by God as a "knowing" him, and in this ultimate mutuality the "gnosis" is beyond the terms of "knowledge"... As beholding a supreme object... "knowledge" or "cognition"; as being absorbed in, and transfigured by... "" or "rebirth"... the knower's being merges with that of the object—which "object" in truth means the obliteration of the whole realm of objects. The experience of the infinite in the finite cannot but be a paradox... it unites voidness and fullness. Its light illuminates and blinds. With an apparent... suspension of time, it stands within existence for the end of all existence: end in the... negative-positive sense of ceasing everything worldly and... spiritual... fullfilment... the double-edged character of the true eschaton... and anticipation of death...

- 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/the-enlightenment-by-a-ray

## 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)