KNOWLEDGE

KNOWLEDGE. In Greek, gnosis, the term figures prominently in the New Testament writings, especially in the Pauline and Johannine books, later on in early Christianity, and throughout the Orthodox ascetic and theological tradition to the present day. “This is eternal life,” says Christ, “to know [ginoskein] you, the true God” (Jn 17:3). The experiential character of knowledge implied in this text has governed the treatment of this term in subsequent Orthodox Christian writers.

The knowledge of God (q.v.) is first and last an experience that transforms the recipient, and only secondarily a matter of correct form or language, i.e., an intellectual activity. In early Christianity this understanding was challenged on two fronts, from outside the Church via Plato and Greek philosophy, and from inside by gnosticism (qq.v.). The latter advanced the idea of a gnosis at once technical, that is, based on a secret tradition and involving what amounted often to “passwords” to the higher spiritual realms, and ontological or “predestinarian,” i.e., that one was born with or without a capacity for the saving knowledge. For Plato, Plotinus, and Neoplatonism (qq.v.) generally, the knowledge communicated by philosophy, while including a generous amount of the experiential or “mystical,” still embraced a fundamentally intellectual and rational activity, an education almost in the university sense, and hence was limited to the elite of the Greco-Roman world.

The Christian response began with the Apologists and Irenaeus of Lyons, and then with the Alexandrian school represented by Clement and Origen (qq.v.). For the latter two, knowledge of God is, as in Platonism or Gnosticism, the end or goal of Christian life. That life, however, is rooted in an ecclesial setting, placed firmly in the context of an asceticism (q.v.) based on the Gospels, and joined to the idea of the believer’s appropriation of the work of Christ. Subsequent generations, in particular the Desert Fathers, Cappadocians, Evagrius of Pontus (qq.v.), and the Macarius of the Macarian Homilies, further elaborated the notion of the Christian, preeminently the monk, as the true “philosopher.” Finally, in the writing of Maximus the Confessor, knowledge is subordinated to the love of God, realized in Christ and at work in the believer.