The quote is from John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga. It seems to me that what I (and many other) scholars have taken as 'Gnosticism' is a response to the existentially valid idea that the appreciation of Beauty originates in loneliness. I do not mean the pedestrian loneliness of 'all by myself' but rather the primordial loneliness of vision cut short by the limits of intellect. Is this not what the unkown author of the

Secret Book of John

had in mind when s/he posited forethought (

pronoia

) as the first, productive desire of the first thinking entity?