The paradox of Gnosis could be formulated this way: whereas the goal of knowing galvanizes human being, it demonstrates human ignorance about its own origin.
It was through acknowledging such ignorance that homo sapiens was born.
Awareness of that essential ignorance is the founder moment of the human project, illuminating the gap between homo faber and homo sapiens.
No acquired knowledge, no cultural progress, even the wholeness of human knowledge, are able to close the painful awareness of that fall into matter and time which affects human being,
since Gnosticsm was born.
Is the radical opposition to the world which caracterized ancient gnosticism a permanent feature of Gnosis, or only the circumstantial aspect
of an already outdated définition? Does Gnosis boil down to the historical gnosticism – usually said heretical - or to the traditional one – said esoteric?
The modern Gnoses of Sampaio Bruno or Raymond Abellio brought up other models of speculative lucidity. Through more or less convergent ways,
some thinkers like Hans Jonas or Kurt Rudolph have tried to free Gnosis from a strictly theological field.
The Colloquium “Gnosis between Tradition and Modernity” aims at an updating of the critical knowledge about Gnosis, in our present time of civilization encounters (and splits),
and at sharpening Gnosis' relevance in a time apparently deconsecrated and affected by uncertainty and fear.
From these reflections, we invite you to join us to enrich thinking and debating on the following themes:
- Gnosis and Tradition, Gnosis and Modernity.
- Gnosis and the personalities of the portuguese thought.
- The portuguese thought as “Gnosis of western world”?
- Fernando Pessoa and the Autognosis.
- Science and Spirit: towards a new Gnosis?
- The contributions to a christian Gnosis?
José Guilherme Abreu
Henrique Manuel Pereira
Porto, february 2021