But Clement preceded that time, and in fact the term Gnosis occurs in the Gospels. Saint Paul spoke of it in the following passage from Corinthians: "...whether there be gnosis, it shall vanish away." In the Greek New Testament, the word he uses actually is Gnosis, and it is that chapter of Corinthians that ends with these verses: "When I was a child I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three: but the greatest of these is love." ( I Corinthians, 13: 11-13.) When this passage is read properly - 'con amore', with love, and with an understanding of its meaning - your heart may reveal to you that this itself is an expression of a Gnosis or inner knowledge that awakens the heart to its own kind of knowing. For it is true that the heart can know.

This Gnosis, this forgotten form of knowledge, is holistic in character. This is what makes it difficult to describe - and if you can understand this statement, you have begun to understand what gnosis is. It touches on the inner life of man and of the universe.

To answer people’s problems with this whole concept, Clement himself quoted texts such as the following: "This cannot be explained like other branches of study. But as the result of great intimacy with this subject, and living with it, a sudden light, like that kindled by a coruscating fire, arising in the soul, feeds itself." (That light is Gnosis, so that sometimes the word becomes the light). How powerfully (and exactly) this echoes Plato's statement in his seventh letter about unwritten knowledge. And Clement then adds:

"Are not these statements like those of Zephaniah the prophet?" 'And the Spirit of the Lord took me, and brought me up to the fifth heaven, and I beheld angels called Lords; and their diadem was set on in the Holy Spirit; and each of them had a throne sevenfold brighter than the light of the rising sun; and they dwelt in temples of salvation, and hymned the ineffable, Most High God.'" ( Clement of Alexandria: Stromata.)