3. THE GNOSTICS AND THE CHURCH
St. Justin is an example of the philosopher turned Christian who uses his philosophy to gain a hearing for the Church's teaching. The aim of the Gnostics was far different. Where St. Justin only strove to translate that teaching into a language understood of the non-Christian thinking world, the Gnostics urged that the Church's teaching should itself be remodelled. There was a higher knowledge than that of the traditional catechesis, and only in accordance with this higher knowledge could the revelation of God to man really be understood.
Gnosticism in its relation to Christianity is a subject of bewildering complexity. The simplest way to explain the very real danger it became is, perhaps, to describe the systems of two of the leading Christian Gnostics of the time -- Basilides and Valentine. Better so than in any other way -- in a work where space is limited -- can we see how a school of thought within the Church, inspired by an all powerful religious tendency of the time, and using its methods, hoped to find a deeper meaning in Christianity than that offered by the gospels and tradition, and to transform the religion of the Church into a mystery cult of dreams and initiations. Apart from the matter of these Gnostic-Christian speculations, the long crisis is important in another way. For Gnosticism is also, historically, an attempt on the part of the Christian "intellectuals" -- some of them thinkers of unusual power -- to usurp a right of speculating, of systematising and dogmatising in the strictest sense of the word after the manner of the pagan schools of philosophy.
To the ordinary man the detailing of the beliefs and theories of these heretics is a wearying business. Speculations seemingly as divorced from right reason as the schemes of the professors in Laputa, nightmarish mechanically-contrived fantasies, a wilderness of sounding phrases and necromantic names, a chaos where sounds abound and sense is all to seek -- in studying these systematic aberrations we have to remind ourselves at every turn that their bizarre extravagance covers a discussion, and an offered solution, of the most fundamental of all problems. The nature and origin of evil, of man, of God, the purpose of life and its attainment through living -- these are the problems, theoretical and practical, which the Gnostic interpretation of Christianity claimed to answer. Nor was Gnosticism a mere academic discussion. It offered itself as a religious system. It had its ritual and its observances, its regulations and its officials. It was a formidable competitor to traditional Christianity, and to Gnosticism the Church lost some of its best minds and most energetic spirits. Nor did the influence of the movement end with the second century. That century witnessed a life and death struggle between the Church and the Gnostics which ended in the Gnostics' expulsion from the Church, but the defeated theories survived outside the Church to provide, for centuries yet to come, an undercurrent of influences which never ceased to irritate and disturb the development of Catholic thought.
Of Basilides himself we know little except that he flourished at Alexandria in the reign of Hadrian (117-138). The beginning and first principle of all things, according to his theology, is the unbegotten Father. Thence, by a series of successive emanations, derive the eight intermediary and complementary divinities-Nous, Logos, Phronesis, Sophia and Dynamis, and from this last couple the Powers, Archons and Angels. This personification of abstractions was all in the contemporary fashion, as was also the arrangement of intermediary divine agencies between the first principle and the created universe. The ogdoad of intermediary divinities is also a familiar notion in the religions of ancient Egypt.
The Powers, Archons and Angels made the first heaven. Other Angels, issue of these first Angels, made the second, the third and the rest of the heavens to the number of 365. The origin of the world is conceived as from two opposing principles Light and Darkness, between which there is an irreducible opposition. This dualism finds its counterpart in the opposition between the Supreme God and the first of all the Archons. This Archon, the leader of the wicked Angels, is the God whom the Jews adore. The apparition of the Holy Spirit at the baptism of Our Lord bred in him a terrible fear which was for him the beginning of Wisdom. The system offers a theory about Our Lord, about the redemption, the creation of the world and the nature of the divine life. It is a miscellany in which reminiscences of biblical theology and of Egyptian and Persian religion find their place. In addition Basilides lays claim to a special knowledge deriving from the secret teaching of the Apostle St. Mathias.
In the next generation Valentine built up a system still more complete upon much the same foundation. Where and when Valentine was born, what influences shaped his early formation is not known. He came to Rome in the second quarter of the century and was sufficiently prominent in the Roman Church at the death of the pope St. Hyginus (c. 140) to hope himself to secure election as its bishop. He was disappointed and, according to Tertullian, this disappointment was the occasion of his breach with Catholicism. Tertullian's account of this crisis in the life of Valentine has been called in question. Be it true or false, there is no doubt whatever as to the success of the grandiose system of which Valentine was the founder. All contemporary writers agree that his sect was the most numerous and the most powerful of all. In time it divided and while one school ofValentinians spread through Egypt and Syria, the other filled Italy and southern Gaul. It is this western Valentinianism which is best known to us, for in Gaul it met the man who was to be its greatest adversary and in whose writings the memory of it is best preserved, the Bishop of Lyons St. Irenaeus.
In the Valentinians the Christian aspect of the movement is clearer than with the followers of Basilides. It is more apparently their object to find a solution for the paradoxes of the Christian mysteries in the fashions of contemporary ideas. Valentine supposes a dual principle at the origin of things. He has the old hatred of matter as a thing necessarily evil, and thence, in his theology, the theory of the Supreme God in necessary opposition to the divinity through whom He creates, and a theory of the Incarnation that makes the humanity of Christ Our Lord a matter of appearance only.
At the summit of all being is God, the Father, and His companion Sige (Silence). God is One, unique, known only to Himself, remote, inaccessible; and between God and the world is a whole universe of "demi-gods." From the Father and Sige proceed Intellect and Truth, and from these Word and Life, and from these again Man and the Church; these are the eight superior eons. This process of generation among the eons continues until the Pleroma is complete -- the perfect society of divine beings, thirty in all. So far all is abstraction, idea. Physical reality originates through a breach of the harmony of the ideal pleroma, "a kind of original sin". . . . The lowest of the thirty eons, Wisdom, conceives a desire to know the Father -- an inordinate desire, necessarily, since the Father is knowable only to His own first born, Intellect. This inordinate desire of Wisdom is a new being, imperfect necessarily and therefore cast out from the Pleroma. Its name is Hachamoth. To prevent any recurrence of such disorder Intellect and Truth produce a sixteenth pair of eons, Christ and the Holy Ghost to teach the rest the limits of their nature. Then in an act of Thanksgiving all the thirty-two eons unite their powers and produce the thirty-third eon, Jesus the Saviour. The thirty-third eon and the eon Christ are now dispatched by the Pleroma to Hachamoth -- the imperfect desire of Wisdom. From the eon Christ it receives a beginning of form and the elements of conscience -- whence a sense of its own inferiority. The thirty-third eon separates the passions from it. The separated passions are inanimate matter (hylike); Hachamoth, freed from them, is animate matter (psychike). Hachamoth's vision of the Saviour results in a third substance, the spiritual (pneumatike). So originate the elements of the world that is to be. Hachamoth, from the psychike, produces the Creator, Demiurge, and he gives form to the rest of creation.
Demiurge is ignorant of his own origin, believes himself supreme. He is the maker of man, material and animated, the god of the Jews and the Old Testament, a bad god and to be resisted. (Whence the common Gnostic teaching of a fundamental opposition between the Old Testament and the New.) Men are of three types, according to the element predominating in them. There are material men (hylikoi), who cannot be saved; spiritual men (pneumatikoi) who have no need of salvation (the Gnostics); and animate men (psychikoi) who need salvation and can attain to it. For these last there is the plan of Redemption. The redeemer is spiritual, he is animate, he has the appearance of the material and, a fourth element in him, he is the eon Jesus. This eon descended into him at his baptism and remained until the trial before Pilate when it returned to the Pleroma, taking with it the spiritual element. The actor in the Passion was no more than the animate element with its appearance of matter. The Passion is not the source of redemption. Salvation, the redemption of the spiritual in man from the influence of the psychic, is due to the knowledge brought by the thirty-third eon -- knowledge of the secret traditions and mysteries, knowledge of the Gospel, which can only be truly known through this esoteric knowledge. The possession of this knowledge is the key to life, and knowledge is the highest of virtues. Matter is the source of evil in man, and since the Gnostic is spiritual, his actions cannot but be good. Spirit and flesh are independent, and the spirit is not responsible for the flesh.
The system of eons proceeding the one from the other by pairs is not Valentine's own invention, and the idea of a pleroma of thirty eons is to be found in Plutarch. Peculiar to Valentine is the introduction of the two new eons Logos and Life and this, together with the presence in the lower series of the Only-begotten and the Paraclete, is no doubt explainable as a borrowing from the Gospel of St. John. But these Christian expressions are no more than trappings to decorate a pagan masquerade, mere names which have lost all their Christian meaning when they have not been distorted to a new meaning altogether. [1]
It was not through such elaborations of learned fantasy as these that the new religion was to live. This was again to show itself as primarily the tradition of an unaltered block of truth revealed once and for all. The test, for the Church, of the Gnostic theology's truth was its accord with the tradition; and the judge of that accord was to be, not the encyclopaedic erudition of the Valentines and Basilides, nor even the trained minds of convert philosophers. Victory was to lie with the tradition and its sole authorised exponent the hierarchy of bishops. The adversary par excellence of Gnosticism in the Church, is, fittingly enough, no Apologist but a bishop, St. Irenaeus of Lyons.
1So with Love. In the system of Valentine it is the principle of all the emanations. It is not Love in the Christian sense, however, but the simple desire of the physical pleasure associated with sex.
St. Justin is an example of the philosopher turned Christian who uses his philosophy to gain a hearing for the Church's teaching. The aim of the Gnostics was far different. Where St. Justin only strove to translate that teaching into a language understood of the non-Christian thinking world, the Gnostics urged that the Church's teaching should itself be remodelled. There was a higher knowledge than that of the traditional catechesis, and only in accordance with this higher knowledge could the revelation of God to man really be understood.
Gnosticism in its relation to Christianity is a subject of bewildering complexity. The simplest way to explain the very real danger it became is, perhaps, to describe the systems of two of the leading Christian Gnostics of the time -- Basilides and Valentine. Better so than in any other way -- in a work where space is limited -- can we see how a school of thought within the Church, inspired by an all powerful religious tendency of the time, and using its methods, hoped to find a deeper meaning in Christianity than that offered by the gospels and tradition, and to transform the religion of the Church into a mystery cult of dreams and initiations. Apart from the matter of these Gnostic-Christian speculations, the long crisis is important in another way. For Gnosticism is also, historically, an attempt on the part of the Christian "intellectuals" -- some of them thinkers of unusual power -- to usurp a right of speculating, of systematising and dogmatising in the strictest sense of the word after the manner of the pagan schools of philosophy.
To the ordinary man the detailing of the beliefs and theories of these heretics is a wearying business. Speculations seemingly as divorced from right reason as the schemes of the professors in Laputa, nightmarish mechanically-contrived fantasies, a wilderness of sounding phrases and necromantic names, a chaos where sounds abound and sense is all to seek -- in studying these systematic aberrations we have to remind ourselves at every turn that their bizarre extravagance covers a discussion, and an offered solution, of the most fundamental of all problems. The nature and origin of evil, of man, of God, the purpose of life and its attainment through living -- these are the problems, theoretical and practical, which the Gnostic interpretation of Christianity claimed to answer. Nor was Gnosticism a mere academic discussion. It offered itself as a religious system. It had its ritual and its observances, its regulations and its officials. It was a formidable competitor to traditional Christianity, and to Gnosticism the Church lost some of its best minds and most energetic spirits. Nor did the influence of the movement end with the second century. That century witnessed a life and death struggle between the Church and the Gnostics which ended in the Gnostics' expulsion from the Church, but the defeated theories survived outside the Church to provide, for centuries yet to come, an undercurrent of influences which never ceased to irritate and disturb the development of Catholic thought.
Of Basilides himself we know little except that he flourished at Alexandria in the reign of Hadrian (117-138). The beginning and first principle of all things, according to his theology, is the unbegotten Father. Thence, by a series of successive emanations, derive the eight intermediary and complementary divinities-Nous, Logos, Phronesis, Sophia and Dynamis, and from this last couple the Powers, Archons and Angels. This personification of abstractions was all in the contemporary fashion, as was also the arrangement of intermediary divine agencies between the first principle and the created universe. The ogdoad of intermediary divinities is also a familiar notion in the religions of ancient Egypt.
The Powers, Archons and Angels made the first heaven. Other Angels, issue of these first Angels, made the second, the third and the rest of the heavens to the number of 365. The origin of the world is conceived as from two opposing principles Light and Darkness, between which there is an irreducible opposition. This dualism finds its counterpart in the opposition between the Supreme God and the first of all the Archons. This Archon, the leader of the wicked Angels, is the God whom the Jews adore. The apparition of the Holy Spirit at the baptism of Our Lord bred in him a terrible fear which was for him the beginning of Wisdom. The system offers a theory about Our Lord, about the redemption, the creation of the world and the nature of the divine life. It is a miscellany in which reminiscences of biblical theology and of Egyptian and Persian religion find their place. In addition Basilides lays claim to a special knowledge deriving from the secret teaching of the Apostle St. Mathias.
In the next generation Valentine built up a system still more complete upon much the same foundation. Where and when Valentine was born, what influences shaped his early formation is not known. He came to Rome in the second quarter of the century and was sufficiently prominent in the Roman Church at the death of the pope St. Hyginus (c. 140) to hope himself to secure election as its bishop. He was disappointed and, according to Tertullian, this disappointment was the occasion of his breach with Catholicism. Tertullian's account of this crisis in the life of Valentine has been called in question. Be it true or false, there is no doubt whatever as to the success of the grandiose system of which Valentine was the founder. All contemporary writers agree that his sect was the most numerous and the most powerful of all. In time it divided and while one school ofValentinians spread through Egypt and Syria, the other filled Italy and southern Gaul. It is this western Valentinianism which is best known to us, for in Gaul it met the man who was to be its greatest adversary and in whose writings the memory of it is best preserved, the Bishop of Lyons St. Irenaeus.
In the Valentinians the Christian aspect of the movement is clearer than with the followers of Basilides. It is more apparently their object to find a solution for the paradoxes of the Christian mysteries in the fashions of contemporary ideas. Valentine supposes a dual principle at the origin of things. He has the old hatred of matter as a thing necessarily evil, and thence, in his theology, the theory of the Supreme God in necessary opposition to the divinity through whom He creates, and a theory of the Incarnation that makes the humanity of Christ Our Lord a matter of appearance only.
At the summit of all being is God, the Father, and His companion Sige (Silence). God is One, unique, known only to Himself, remote, inaccessible; and between God and the world is a whole universe of "demi-gods." From the Father and Sige proceed Intellect and Truth, and from these Word and Life, and from these again Man and the Church; these are the eight superior eons. This process of generation among the eons continues until the Pleroma is complete -- the perfect society of divine beings, thirty in all. So far all is abstraction, idea. Physical reality originates through a breach of the harmony of the ideal pleroma, "a kind of original sin". . . . The lowest of the thirty eons, Wisdom, conceives a desire to know the Father -- an inordinate desire, necessarily, since the Father is knowable only to His own first born, Intellect. This inordinate desire of Wisdom is a new being, imperfect necessarily and therefore cast out from the Pleroma. Its name is Hachamoth. To prevent any recurrence of such disorder Intellect and Truth produce a sixteenth pair of eons, Christ and the Holy Ghost to teach the rest the limits of their nature. Then in an act of Thanksgiving all the thirty-two eons unite their powers and produce the thirty-third eon, Jesus the Saviour. The thirty-third eon and the eon Christ are now dispatched by the Pleroma to Hachamoth -- the imperfect desire of Wisdom. From the eon Christ it receives a beginning of form and the elements of conscience -- whence a sense of its own inferiority. The thirty-third eon separates the passions from it. The separated passions are inanimate matter (hylike); Hachamoth, freed from them, is animate matter (psychike). Hachamoth's vision of the Saviour results in a third substance, the spiritual (pneumatike). So originate the elements of the world that is to be. Hachamoth, from the psychike, produces the Creator, Demiurge, and he gives form to the rest of creation.
Demiurge is ignorant of his own origin, believes himself supreme. He is the maker of man, material and animated, the god of the Jews and the Old Testament, a bad god and to be resisted. (Whence the common Gnostic teaching of a fundamental opposition between the Old Testament and the New.) Men are of three types, according to the element predominating in them. There are material men (hylikoi), who cannot be saved; spiritual men (pneumatikoi) who have no need of salvation (the Gnostics); and animate men (psychikoi) who need salvation and can attain to it. For these last there is the plan of Redemption. The redeemer is spiritual, he is animate, he has the appearance of the material and, a fourth element in him, he is the eon Jesus. This eon descended into him at his baptism and remained until the trial before Pilate when it returned to the Pleroma, taking with it the spiritual element. The actor in the Passion was no more than the animate element with its appearance of matter. The Passion is not the source of redemption. Salvation, the redemption of the spiritual in man from the influence of the psychic, is due to the knowledge brought by the thirty-third eon -- knowledge of the secret traditions and mysteries, knowledge of the Gospel, which can only be truly known through this esoteric knowledge. The possession of this knowledge is the key to life, and knowledge is the highest of virtues. Matter is the source of evil in man, and since the Gnostic is spiritual, his actions cannot but be good. Spirit and flesh are independent, and the spirit is not responsible for the flesh.
The system of eons proceeding the one from the other by pairs is not Valentine's own invention, and the idea of a pleroma of thirty eons is to be found in Plutarch. Peculiar to Valentine is the introduction of the two new eons Logos and Life and this, together with the presence in the lower series of the Only-begotten and the Paraclete, is no doubt explainable as a borrowing from the Gospel of St. John. But these Christian expressions are no more than trappings to decorate a pagan masquerade, mere names which have lost all their Christian meaning when they have not been distorted to a new meaning altogether. [1]
It was not through such elaborations of learned fantasy as these that the new religion was to live. This was again to show itself as primarily the tradition of an unaltered block of truth revealed once and for all. The test, for the Church, of the Gnostic theology's truth was its accord with the tradition; and the judge of that accord was to be, not the encyclopaedic erudition of the Valentines and Basilides, nor even the trained minds of convert philosophers. Victory was to lie with the tradition and its sole authorised exponent the hierarchy of bishops. The adversary par excellence of Gnosticism in the Church, is, fittingly enough, no Apologist but a bishop, St. Irenaeus of Lyons.
1So with Love. In the system of Valentine it is the principle of all the emanations. It is not Love in the Christian sense, however, but the simple desire of the physical pleasure associated with sex.
