Autonomos is built from autos, self, and nomos, law: the self that becomes its own law, and the root of our word "autonomy." Classically it described a city that governed itself. Carried into the spiritual life it names the quiet move at the center of the modern misconception, making the self, the conscience, the inner sense, the source and standard of the knowledge of God, so that His own self-disclosure becomes unnecessary. However reverent it feels, it is the respectable face of what Yeshua called anomia. It is the oldest offer in the garden: to be as God, deciding good and evil from inside ourselves rather than receiving it from the Father.