The first two or three centuries of the Christian era witnessed a luxuriant outcrop of sects which we nowadays group together under the label ‘gnostic’. But ‘gnosticism’, as the name of a religious movement, is a modem invention. True, some of these sects did like to style themselves ‘gnostic’; but the Greek word gnosis only means ‘knowledge’, and that is a thing to which not only heretical sects laid claim. On the contrary, from the very beginning of the Christian Church’s history, it was part and parcel of God’s manifold gifts to his faithful, of which the Christian community believed itself to be the privileged recipient. St Paul himself writes to the Corinthians about the diversity of gifts and ministries in the believing community, under the One Lord: ‘But to each one’, he writes, ‘is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the profit of all: to one it is given to speak the word of wisdom through the Spirit, to another the word of gnosis, of knowledge, according to the same Spirit’, and so forth. And yet he, too, knew of ‘profane babblings and paradoxes of the falsely so-called gnosis’, and he warns his disciple Timothy against their seduction. This self-styled gnosis is, in his eyes, the parody of the God-given knowledge enjoyed by the faithful.

From St Paul onwards, gnosis has retained this two-faced character. On the one hand, for a Christian Father like Irenaeus, the ‘gnostic’ could become almost synonymous with the ‘heretic’; on the other, the no less orthodox Clement of Alexandria could write of the ‘true gnostic’ as the ideal of the Christian theologian, the model of the man to whom is vouchsafed a Spirit-given insight into the mystery which penetrates deeper than that of his fellows with a more easy-going faith.