Note 132 — Chapter VIII · POST-CHRISTIAN GNOSTICS: THE OPHITES

Including in that name some who attained to high office in the Catholic Church. Thus Hatch, H. L. p. 255, says with apparent truth that Clement of Alexandria “anticipated Plotinus in conceiving of God as being ‘beyond the One and higher than the Monad itself,’ which was the highest abstraction of current philosophy.” The passage he here relies on is in Clement’s Paedagogus, Bk I. c. 8. Hatch goes on to say, “There is no name that can properly be named of Him: ‘Neither the One nor the Good, nor Mind, nor Absolute Being, nor Father, nor Creator, nor Lord’”—expressions to be found in Clement’s Stromata, Bk V. c. 12. Clement’s orthodoxy may be called in question; but no fault has been found in that respect with Synesius, Bishop of Ptolemais and the friend of Hypatia. Yet in his Hymns he uses expressions which would have come naturally to the lips of any Ophite. Thus:

Σὺ δ’ ἄρρην, σὺ δὲ θῆλυς,

Σὺ δὲ φωνά, σὺ δὲ σιγά,

Φύσεως φύσις γονῶσα,

Σὺ δ’ ἄναξ, αἰῶνος αἰών,

Τὸ μέν, ᾗ θέμις βοᾶσαι;

“Male thou and female,

Voice thou and silence,

Nature engendered of Nature,

Thou King, Aeon of Aeons,

What is it lawful to call thee?”

and again

Πατέρων πάντων

Πάτερ, αὐτοπάτωρ,

Προπάτωρ, ἀπάτωρ,

Υἱὲ σεαυτοῦ....

Μύστας δὲ νόος

Τά τε καὶ τὰ λέγει,

Βυθὸν ἄρρητον

Ἀμφιχορεύων.

“Father of all Fathers,

Father of thyself,

Propator [Forefather] who hast no father,

O Son of thyself....

But the initiated mind

Says this and that,

Celebrating with dances

The Ineffable Bythos.“

(Hymn III)

The ineffability of divine names was an old idea in Egypt, especially in the Osirian religion, where it forms the base of the story of Ra and Isis. So the name of Osiris himself was said to be ineffable. See Eug. Lefébure in Sphinx, Stockholm, vol. I. pp. 99-102. The name of Marduk of Babylon is in the same way declared ineffable in an inscription of Neriglissar, Trans. Roy. Soc. Litt. 2nd series, vol. VIII. p. 276. The name of Yahweh became ineffable directly after Alexander. See Halévy, Revue des Études juives, t. ix. (1884), p. 172. In every case, the magical idea that the god might be compelled by utterance of his secret name seems to be at the root of the practice. Cf. Erman, Life in Ancient Egypt, Eng. ed. p. 354.