§ 3 The Gnostic Movement in the Second Century
In New Testament Greek the same word has to stand for “sect” and “heresy,” a fact premonitory of what must happen to every new idea in religion. Any process of reasoning whatever must have led to differences of opinion among the converts of Paul or of the Pauline epistles; and such differences, leading necessarily, among zealots, to animosities, are among the first phenomena of Christism. As we have seen, the chief “heresies” of the first century, stigmatized as such by the later Church, were really independent cults older than itself; and there is reason to think that the “Nicolitaines” execrated in the Apocalypse were really the followers of Paul. At the beginning of the second century, again, the first heretics on record are the Elcesaites, who, however, as we saw, were obviously not an offshoot from the Jesuists, but a separate body, their Christ being a gigantic spirit and their doctrine a cluster of symbolisms. It is with the so-called Gnostics, the claimants to a higher Gnosis or knowledge, that heresy begins in Gentile Christianity; and as some of these are already in evidence in the Pauline epistles, and had interpolated the synoptics (Mt. xiii, Mk. iv, Lk. xii, 49, sq.), to say nothing of framing the fourth gospel, they may fairly be reckoned among “the first Christians.” Ere long, however, they begin clearly to differentiate from the Christism of the New Testament.
If the early Gnostic systems be compared with that of Paul, they will be found to have rather more in common with it than with the Judaic Jesuism from which he ostensibly broke away. It is thus not unlikely that their Christism, like his, is older than that of the gospels, which is primarily of Jewish manufacture. The “Simonians” of Samaria have every appearance of being non-Jewish Christists “before Christ”; and the later Gnostics have several Samaritan affinities. Like “Paul,” they have no Jesuine biography; but whereas he ostensibly holds by an actual man Jesus, however nondescript, they usually declare outright for a mere divine phantom,1 bearing a human semblance, but uncontaminated by mixture with matter, which was the Gnostic symbol for all evil. They did but attach the name of the Christos, and the hope of salvation, to a general theosophy, as Paul attached it to Judaism; and their great preoccupation was to account formally for the existence of evil, which they commonly figured as either an evil power or an essential quality of matter, forever opposed to the principle of good. Hence the allusion to the “oppositions of science falsely so-called”—that is, “the antithesis of the Gnosis”—in the Pauline epistle. But they varied somewhat in details according to their environment, being roughly divisible into two groups—Asiatic and Egyptian.
At the beginning of the second century those of Syria are identified with the teaching of Saturninus of Antioch, in whose theory a good God had made the seven angels, who in turn made the world and created a low type of animal man in God’s image, whom, however, God compassionately endowed with a reasonable soul. Of the seven angels one was left to rule the world, and figured as God of the Jews; but the others competed with him; and Satan, the chief evil power, made a race of men with an evil soul. Thereupon the Supreme God sent his son as Jesus Christ, human only in seeming, to bring men to the knowledge of the Father and defeat the rebel angels. Another Syrian, Bardesanes, who lived in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, was less anti-Jewish, and made the one God the creator of the world and of man, who was at first ethereal and pure, but seduced and so degraded to the form of flesh by the Adversary; the Christ’s function being to secure a higher future life to those who accept him. From both points of view, mortification of the flesh was a primary duty—all the carnal instincts being evil—and Jesus on the same ground was denied bodily existence. Always the effort is to account for evil as involved in matter, the work not of the Supreme God, but of a subordinate power who will be vanquished. Thus Tatian, a pupil of Justin Martyr and contemporary with Saturninus, makes the world-creator a subordinate God, and seems to have derived Judaism and the gospel similarly from inferior deities. Some, as Bardesanes and Tatian, held by a bodily resurrection; others, as Saturninus and Cerdo (fl. 140), stressed the anti-material principle and denied that the resurrection could be in bodily form. On such an issue, of course, it was easy to compromise in the concept of a “spiritual body” the same to the eye as the real body, but impalpable to touch—in short, the “spirit” of all ages.
It is reasonable to infer that the Gnostic systems were suggested by the spectacle of the earthly Governments around them, no less than by the previous theologies. Even as the Autocrator reigned without governing, and the evils of misgovernment were chargeable on proconsuls, so, it was thought, the head of the universe, the Pantocrator, could not be implicated in the evil wrought under him. Such a conception seems to have first arisen in the great monarchies of the East. It followed, however, that as some satraps and proconsuls governed well, there might be good subordinate deities; and in the system of Basilides the Egyptian, who belonged to the brilliant reign of Hadrian, the attribute of goodness is graded endlessly, down to the angels of the 365th heaven, who made this world and its inhabitants. As in the system of Saturninus, God gives these a reasonable soul, but the angels rebel, and their chief, who becomes God of the Jews, draws on that nation the hatred of all others by his arrogance. Egyptian Gnosticism thus bore the stamp of the old Egyptian pantheism, its every power emanating from the Unbegotten One; while the Asiatic systems embody in some form the Mazdean principle of two opposed powers, of which the worse is only ultimately to be defeated. Egyptian precedent explains also the countless generations of the Gnostic systems of Alexandria. As in Egyptian history dynasty followed on dynasty, and as in the pantheon God was begotten of God, so in the system of Basilides the Unbegotten produces from himself Nous, Mind; which produces the Logos; which produces Phronesis, Judgment; which produces Sophia and Dynamis, Wisdom and Power; and these last in turn produce angels, who in turn reproduce others down to the 365th grade. The system of Valentinus, assigned to the period of Antoninus Pius, frames fresh complications, partly suggestive of an immemorial bureaucracy which had duplicated itself in the heavens, partly of an à priori psychology which sought to explain the universe, now by first principles, after the fashion of the early mythology of Rome, now by adaptations of the current theosophy.
In the hands of Valentinus religion becomes an imbroglio which only an expert could master; and the functions of the Christ in particular are a mere tangle of mystery. Nous, the first of many “Æons,” is the “only begotten” Son, his mother being Ennoia, Thought; yet with him is born Truth; and these three with the Father make a first Tetrad. Then Nous produces the Logos and Life; which beget Man and the Church; which two pairs beget more Æons; and so on. In a later stage, after a “fall,” Nous begets the Christos and the Holy Spirit; while later still the Æons produce the Æon Jesus, Sophia and Horos playing a part in the evolution. Such a maze, though it is said to have had many devotees, could not possibly be the creed of a popular Church, even in Egypt; and wherever the gospels went their ostensibly concrete Jesus held his own against such spectral competition. The systems which made Jesus non-human and those which made of him an elusive abstraction were alike disadvantaged as against that which declared him to have been born of woman and to have suffered the last agony for the sons of men. Women could weep for the crucified Man-God as they had immemorially done for Adonis and Osiris: they could not shed tears for a phantasmagoric series of Nous—Logos—Christ—Æons—Jesus, begetting and begotten.
Other Gnostics, still making mystical pretensions, were content to represent Jesus as a superior human being born of Joseph and Mary in the course of nature. Carpocrates of Alexandria, who so taught in the reign of Hadrian, had a large following. Such tolerance of “materialism,” however, brought on the sect charges of all manner of sensuality; and there is categorical record that, following Plato, they sought to practise community of women. Similarly, the Basilidians were charged with regarding all bodily appetites as indifferent, their founder having set his face against the glorification of virginity, and taught that Jesus was not absolutely sinless, since God could never permit an innocent being to be punished. There is no proof, however, that any sect-founder was openly antinomian; and while license doubtless occurred in many, we have the evidence of the Pauline epistles that it could rise in the heart of the primitive Church as easily as in any sect. In the same way, whatever might be the doctrine of particular sections, it may be taken as certain that the charge of bowing before persecution, cast at some, held partly true of nearly all.
Systems such as the bulk of those above described, drawing as they did on any documents rather than the Old and New Testaments, are obviously not so much Christian schisms as differentiations from historic Christianity—developments, in most cases, of an abstract Christism on lines not merely Gentile but based on Gentile religions, as against the Jewish. Broadly speaking, therefore, they tended to disappear from the Christist field, inasmuch as paganism had other deities better suited to the part of the Gnostic Logos. The intermediate type, bodiless at best, must die out. Gnosticism had not only no canon of its own, but no thought of one: while the fashion lasted every decade saw a new system, refining on the last and multiplying its abstractions, till the very term gnosis must have become a byword. Success, as has been said above, must remain with the simple and concrete system, especially if that were organized; and the Gnostics of the second century attempted no general organization. Yet Gnosticism left a lasting impress on Christianity. In its earlier stages, as we have seen, it modified the gospels; and after it had evolved away from the gospel basis it left an influence on the more philosophically-minded writers of the Church, notably Clement of Alexandria, who is as openly anxious to approve himself a “good Gnostic” as to found on the accepted sacred books of the Church. Deriving as it partly did from the Jewish Platonist Philo, it brought into the Church his fashion of reducing Biblical narratives to allegories—a course much resorted to not only by Origen but by Augustine, and very necessary for the defence of Hebrew tales against pagan criticism. Further, the regular practice of the Church in the matter of separating catechumens from initiates was an adoption of the Gnostic principle of esoteric knowledge.
In yet other ways, however, Gnosticism influenced early Christianity. It was the Gnostics who first set up in it literary habits: they were the first to multiply documents of all kinds; and it is not unlikely that their early additions to the gospels gave a stimulus to its expansion on other lines. They were, in short, the first to introduce a tincture of letters and art into the cult; and it was their spirit that shaped the fourth gospel, which gave to Christism the only philosophical elements it ever possessed. They are not indeed to be regarded as having cultivated philosophy to any good purpose, though they passed on some of the philosophic impulse to the later Platonists. Rather the average Gnostic is to be conceived as a leisured dilettante in an age of learned ignorance and foiled intelligence, lending an eager ear to new mysticisms, as so many half-cultured idlers are seen still doing in our own day. They cared as much for abracadabral amulets, apparently, as for theories; and their zeal for secret knowledge had in it something of the spirit of class exclusiveness, and even of personal arrogance. It would seem as if, when tyrannies in the ancient world made an end of the old moral distinctions of classes, men instinctively caught at new ways of being superior to their fellows—for the spirit of Gnosticism arose among the later Greek pagans, who here followed the lead of Egyptian priests, as well as among Samaritans and Grecized Jews. At most we may say of the Gnostics that they were much more concerned than the orthodox to frame a complete and consistent theistic theory of things, and that in their learned-ignorant way they sought to walk by reason as well as by faith. Necessarily they were in a minority. It was, however, their theoretic bent, surviving in the gospel-reading Church, that determined the dogmatic development of the Christist creed. Their recoil from the conception of a Saviour-God in a human body comes out in the later debates and creeds as in the fourth gospel; and if the final doctrine of the Trinity be not truly Gnostic, it is because the Gnostics showed more concern for plausibility, and never aimed at tying thought down forever to a plainly self-contradictory formula. Much of their movement probably survived in Manichæism, which, though sufficiently dogmatic, never flaunted such propositions as those of the Nicene creed, and was a critical thorn in the flesh of the Church. Even their amulets seem to have had a Christian vogue; and the worship of angels, which began to flourish among Catholics in the fourth century, seems to have been a reflex of their teaching.
In some respects, finally, the modern Church has confusedly reverted to their view of a future state. While the “orthodox” Christians of the second century believed that souls at death went to the under-world, to be raised with the body for the approaching millennium, or thousand-years reign of Christ, the Gnostics, scouting the millennium as a grossly materialistic conception, held that at death the soul ascended to heaven. That appears to be the prevailing fancy among Protestants at the present day, though men have grown cautious of formal dicta on the subject.