# Quote — Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion

> We come now to the ascent of the knower's soul after death, the main prospect held out to the true Gnostic or tic, in the anticipation of which he conducts his life. After what we have heard about... the astral descent of the soul, the description of the ascent in the requires no further explanation: it is the reversal of the former. ...The celestial journey of the returning soul is indeed one of the most common features in otherwise widely divergent systems, and its significance for the gnostic mind is enhanced by the fact that it represents a belief not only... expressive of man's relation to the world, but... the meaning of gnosis is to prepare for this final event, and all its ethical, ritual, and technical instruction is meant to secure its successful completion. Historically there is an even more far-reaching aspect... (though no longer passing under the name of Gnosticism) the external topology of the ascent through the spheres, with the successive divesting of the soul of its worldly envelopments and the regaining of its original cosmic nature, could be "internalized" and find its analogue in a psychological technique of inner transformations by which the self, while still in the body, might attain the Absolute as an immanent, if temporary, condition: an ascending scale of mental states replaces the stations of the mythical itinerary: the dynamics of progressive spiritual self-transformation, the spatial thrust through the heavenly spheres. Thus could transcendence itself be turned into , the whole process becomes spiritualized and put within the power and the orbit of the subject. With this transposition of a mythical scheme into the inwardness of the person, with the translation of its objective stages into subjective phases of self-performable experience whose culmination has the form of ecstasis, gnostic myth has passed into mysticism (Neoplatonic and monastic), and in this new medium it lives on long after the disappearance of the original mythological beliefs.

- 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/we-come-now

## 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)