Hans Jonas

"[T]he speculative principle of ...the "pneumatic equation"—namely: that the human-individual event of tic knowledge is the inverse equivalent of the pre-cosmic universal event of divine ignorance...

The results of... prolonged studies are published in German under the title Gnosis und späntantiker Geist, of which the first volume appeared in 1934, the second—because of the circumstances of the times—only in 1954, and the third and concluding one is still to come. The present volume, while still retaining the point of view of the larger work and restating many of its arguments, is different in scope, in organization, and in literary intention. ...[T]his treatment ...strives to reach the general educated reader as well as the scholar. ...[I]n some respects the present volume goes beyond the earlier presentation: certain texts are more fully interpreted... and it has been possible to include new material of recent discovery. Inevitably... it does duplicate, with some rephrasing, certain parts of the German work.

In the the ascent is described as a series of progressive subtractions which leaves the "naked" true self, an instance of Primal Man as he was before his cosmic fall, free to enter the divine realm and to become one again with God. ...[W]hat begins the ascent is already the pure disengaged from its earthly encumbrances... the rulers of the spheres are hostile powers trying to bar its passage... Wherever we hear of the doffing of garments, the slipping of knots, the loosing of bonds in the course of the upward journey, we have analogies to the Poimandres passage. The sum of the knots, etc., is called "psyche": thus it is the soul that is put off by the pneuma... In this way the ascent is... putting off the worldly nature. ...[T]he mysteries of the Mithras had for their initiates the ceremonial passing through seven gates arranged on ascending steps representing the seven planets... in those of we find successive putting on and off of seven (or twelve) garments or animal disguises. The result... was called rebirth (palingenesia): the initiate himself was supposed to have been reborn as the god. The terminology of "rebirth," "reformation" (metamorphosis), "transfiguration" was coined in the context of these rituals as part of the language of the mystery cults. The meanings and applications... were wide enough to make them fit into various theological systems... But... they were eminently suited to gnostic purposes.

In the Gnostic formula it is understood that, though thrown into temporality, we had an origin in eternity, and so also we have an aim in eternity.

Here is one simple criterion for what is "Christian" (orthodox) or "gnostic" (heretical): whether the guilt is Adam's or the Archon's, whether human or divine, whether arising in or before creation.

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"

To scandalize has always been the pride of rebels, but much of it may satisfy itself in provocativeness of doctrine rather than deeds. Yet we must not underrate the extremes to which revolutionary defiance and the vertigo of freedom could go in the value-vacuum created by the spiritual crisis. The very discovery of a new vista, invalidating all former norms constituted an anarchical condition, and excess in thought and life was the first response to the import and dimensions of that vista.

The Hermetic... mythological fantasy: not just a rejection of the physical universe in light of pessimsism, but the idea of an entirely new idea of human freedom, very different from the moral conception of... the Greek philosophers... However profoundly man is determined by nature... there still remains an innermost center which is not of nature's realm and by which he is above all its promptings and necessities. ...It is the first time in history that the radical ontological difference of man and nature has been discovered and the powerfully moving experience of it given expression... This rift between man and nature was never to close again, and protesting his hidden but essential otherness became in many variations an abiding theme in the quest for truth concerning man.

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.

Gnosticism gave a new turn by conceiving the planetary constituents of the soul as corruptions of its original nature contracted in its descent through the cosmic spheres. The Christian Arnobius reports this as a Hermetic teaching. ...A very close parallel (in the inverse direction) to the account of the soul's ascent. ...[W]hat attaches itself to the soul on its downward journey has the character of substantial though immaterial entities... frequently described as "envelopes" or "garments." Accordingly the resultant terrestrial "soul" is comparable to an onion... on the model of the cosmos... in inverse order: what is outermost there is innermost here, and after the process is completed with incarnation, what is innermost in the spherical scheme of the cosmos, the earth, is as body the outer garment of man. That this body is a fatality to the soul had long ago been preached by the Orphics, whose teaching were revived in the era of Gnosticism. But now the psychical envelopments too are considered impairments and fetters of the transmundane spirit.

The Pythagoreans had found in the astral order the proportions of the concordant musical scale... a harmonia... Thereby they created the most enchanting symbol of Greek cosmic piety: "harmony," issuing in the inaudible "music of the spheres," [as] the idealizing expression for the same fact of irrefragable order that astrology stresses less optimistically... Stoic philsophy strove to integrate the idea of destiny as propounded by contemporary astrology with the Greek concept of harmony: to the Stoics is the practical aspect of the harmony, i.e., its action as it affects terrestrial conditions and the short-lived beings here. And since the stellar movements are actuated by the cosmic and this logos functions in the world-process as providence (pronoia), it follows that in this wholly monistic system heimarmene itself is pronoia, that is, fate and divine providence are the same. The understanding of and willing consent to this fate... as the reason of the whole distinguishes the wise man, who bears adversity... as the price... for the harmony of the whole. The existence of the whole... is the ultimate and no further questionable, self-justifying end in this teleological scheme: for the sake of the cosmos its constituent parts exist... for the sake of the whole organism. Man... is by no means the highest mode of being, he is not the end of nature, and the cosmos is not for his sake.

To look at what is there, at nature as it is in itself, at Being, the ancients called... contemplation, theoria. But... if contemplation is left with only the irrelevantly extant, then it loses the noble status... as does the repose in the present... Theoria had that dignity because of its Platonic implications—because it beheld eternal objects in the forms of things, a transcendence of immutable being shining through the transparency of becoming. Immutable being is everlasting present, in which contemplation can share in the brief durations of the temporal present. Thus it is eternity, not time, that grants a present and gives it a status of its own in the flux of time; and it is the loss of eternity which accounts for the loss of a genuine present. Such a loss of eternity is the disappearance of the world of ideas and ideals in which Heidegger sees the true meaning of Nietzsche's "God is dead"; ...[i.e.,] the absolute victory of over realism. ...[T]he same cause which is at the root of nihilism is also at the root of the radical temporality of Heidegger's scheme of existence, in which the present is nothing but the moment of crisis between past and future.