"The enlightenment by a ray of the divine light... which transforms the psychic nature of man... is sometimes claimed and even described... in the religious literature of the age, inside and outside Gnosticism. It involves the extinction of the natural faculties, filling the vacuum with a surprisingly positive and... negative content. Annihilation and deification of the person are fused in the spiritual ecstasis... immediate presence of the acosmic essence. In the gnostic context, this transfiguring... experience is '... exalted... paradoxical... knowledge of the unknowable. ...The mystical gnosis theoû—direct beholding of the divine reality—is itself an earnest of the consummation to come. It is transcendence become immanent... of divine activity and grace. It is... as much a "being known" by God as a "knowing" him, and in this ultimate mutuality the "gnosis" is beyond the terms of "knowledge"... As beholding a supreme object... "knowledge" or "cognition"; as being absorbed in, and transfigured by... "" or "rebirth"... the knower's being merges with that of the object—which "object" in truth means the obliteration of the whole realm of objects. The experience of the infinite in the finite cannot but be a paradox... it unites voidness and fullness. Its light illuminates and blinds. With an apparent... suspension of time, it stands within existence for the end of all existence: end in the... negative-positive sense of ceasing everything worldly and... spiritual... fullfilment... the double-edged character of the true eschaton... and anticipation of death..."