/lit/ - Literature

>>20940543
>The Romans who persecuted Christ and His followers became the Roman Catholics who persecuted heretics and led to the horrors of the Inquisition.
Note: this is not an exact and literal equivalence but a spiritual one. They didn’t literally become them but they were alike, the persecuted became the persecutors, so to speak.
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Paradoxically, this focus on the unio mystica/attainment of gnosis which led to a higher state of the human soul, manifested in the wide range of Gnostic sects and belief-systems as either radical hedonism and antinomianism (“Since we are already one with Him, why do we need strict disciplines?”), or, conversely, as radical asceticism and world-denial in the vein of the Christian hermits and Desert Fathers (“Since the Nous, the divine spark of the Logos or God within us, is trapped in this prison of the flesh and cannot be adequately experienced without struggle against this flesh and separation from the corruption of this world, we must therefore take on this ascetic way of life”).

Another way its been put is also that, despite that Gnosticism does have a moral system close to mainstream Christianity, with an intuitive distinction between good and evil, the focus on Gnosticism is not so much on a heavy fear-and-reward-based, guilt-and-pride-based, moral system of sin and repentance, but one closer to Eastern philosophical and religious systems about illusion and enlightenment (an insight Pagels made). In fact, in the original Greek, the famous word “repentance” of the New Testament, is actually “metanoia,” as mystics and scholars have made much of, meaning more like a transformation of or going beyond (meta-) the mind (nous as the root-word of -noia).