Crossword clues for gnostic
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Gnostic \Gnos"tic\, a.
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Knowing; wise; shrewd. [Old Slang]
I said you were a gnostic fellow.
--Sir W. Scott. (Eccl. Hist.) Of or pertaining to Gnosticism or its adherents; as, the Gnostic heresy.
Gnostic \Gnos"tic\, n. [L. gnosticus, Gr. ? good at knowing, sagacious; as a n., man that claims to have a deeper wisdom, fr. gignw`skein to know: cf. F. gnostique. See Know.] (Eccl. Hist.) One of the so-called philosophers in the first ages of Christianity, who claimed a true philosophical interpretation of the Christian religion. Their system combined Oriental theology and Greek philosophy with the doctrines of Christianity. They held that all natures, intelligible, intellectual, and material, are derived from the Deity by successive emanations, which they called Eons.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1580s, "believer in a mystical religious doctrine of spiritual knowledge," from Late Latin Gnosticus, from Late Greek Gnostikos, noun use of adj. gnostikos "knowing, able to discern," from gnostos "knowable," from gignoskein "to learn, to come to know" (see know). Applied to various early Christian sects that claimed direct personal knowledge beyond the Gospel or the Church hierarchy.
"relating to knowledge," 1650s, from Greek gnostikos "knowing, able to discern," from gnostos "known, perceived, understood," from gignoskein "to learn, to come to know" (see know).
Wiktionary
a. (alternative case form of Gnostic English) n. (alternative case form of Gnostic English)
Usage examples of "gnostic".
Waite was one of the first to recognize the alchemical, hermetic and Gnostic elements in the stories.
The framework in which these articles were placed virtually continued to be the apologetic theology, for this maintained a doctrine of God and the world, which seemed to correspond to the earliest tradition as much as it ran counter to the Gnostic theses.
It is ultimately the dispute between morality and religion, which appears as an unsettled problem in the theses of the idealistic philosophers and in the whole spiritual conceptions then current among the educated, and which recurs in the contrast between the Apologetic and the Gnostic theology.
The Gnostic speculations were repudiated, whereas those of the Apologists were accepted.
Spirit of Christ which operates through knowledge, asceticism, and holy consecration: thus originates the perfect Gnostic, the man who is free from the world, and master of himself, who lives in God and prepares himself for eternity.
There arose in this way an extremely difficult theoretical problem, but practically a convenient occasion for throwing asceticism altogether overboard, with the Gnostic asceticism, or restricting it to easy exercises.
Gate were little enclaves of Druses, Zoroastrians, Buddhists, Confucianists, Taoists, Shintoists, Hindus, Pantheists, Gnostics, Orphics, Metempsychosans, Dualists, Unitarians.
New Testament, and was consequently obliged to adopt the Gnostic exegesis, which was imperative as soon as the apostolic writings were viewed as a New Testament.
But there is a desire to treat the given material in a strictly scientific manner, just as the Gnostics had formerly done, that is, on the one hand to establish it by a critical and historical exegesis, and on the other to give it a philosophical form and bring it into harmony with the spirit of the times.
They seized knowledge wherever they found it: from the Arabs they took the principles of sacred geometry, and their apparent close contacts with the Cathars added an extra Gnostic gloss to their already heterodox religious ideas.
The Epic of Dante is Johannite and Gnostic, an audacious application, like that of the Apocalypse, of the figures and numbers of the Kabalah to the Christian dogmas, and a secret negation of every thing absolute in these dogmas.
Theoclet, Johannite Pontiff, initiated de Payens into the Gnostic Mysteries, 817-u.
Gnostic societies, and the mystagogue was at once knowing one and priest, so also in the Catholic Church the priest is accounted the knowing one.
To Clement and Origen, however, teacher and mystagogue are as closely connected as they are to most Gnostics.
To teach us wisdom, and the folly of endeavoring to explain to ourselves that which we are not capable of understanding, we reproduce the speculations of the Philosophers, the Kabalists, the Mystagogues and the Gnostics.