Note (return) — Chapter IV

This necessary allegorical interpretation, however, brought into the communities an intellectual philosophic element, a gnosis, which was perfectly distinct from the Apocalyptic dreams, in which were beheld angel hosts on white horses, Christ with eyes as a flame of fire, hellish beasts, conflict and victory.301 In this γνωσις, which attached itself to the Old Testament, many began to see the specific blessing which was promised to mature faith, and through which it was to attain perfection. What a wealth of relations, hints, and intuitions seemed to disclose itself, as soon as the Old Testament was considered allegorically, and to what extent had the way been prepared here by the Jewish philosophic teachers! From the simple narratives of the Old Testament had already been developed a theosophy, in which the most abstract ideas had acquired reality, and from which sounded forth the Hellenic canticle of the power of the Spirit over matter and sensuality, and of the true home of the soul. Whatever in this great adaptation still remained obscure and unnoticed, was now lighted up by the history of Jesus, his birth, his life, his sufferings and triumph. The view of the Old Testament as a document of the deepest wisdom, transmitted to those who knew how to read it as such, unfettered the intellectual interest which would not rest until it had entirely transferred the new religion from the world of feelings, actions and hopes, into the world of Hellenic conceptions, and transformed it into a metaphysic. In that exposition of the Old Testament which we find, for example, in the so-called Barnabas, there is already concealed an important philosophic, Hellenic element, and in that sermon which bears the name of Clement (the so-called second Epistle of Clement), conceptions such as that of the Church, have already assumed a bodily form and been joined in marvellous connections, while, on the contrary, things concrete have been transformed into things invisible.