Note (return) — Chapter IV

To begin with the second point, the great Gnostic schools were flanked on the right and left by a motley series of groups which at their extremities can hardly be distinguished from popular Christianity on the one hand, and from the Hellenic and the common world on the other.318 On the right were communities such as the Encratites, which put all stress on a strict asceticism, in support of which they urged the example of Christ, but which here and there fell into dualistic ideas.319 There were further, whole communities which, for decennia, drew their views of Christ from books which represented him as a heavenly spirit who had merely assumed an apparent body.320 There were also individual teachers who brought forward peculiar opinions without thereby causing any immediate stir in the Churches.321 On the left there were schools such as the Carpocratians, in which the philosophy and communism of Plato were taught, the son of the founder and second teacher Epiphanes honoured as a God (at Cephallenia), as Epicurus was in his school, and the image of Jesus crowned along with those of Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle.322 On this left flank are, further, swindlers who take their own way, like Alexander of Abonoteichus, magicians, soothsayers, sharpers and jugglers, under the sign-board of Christianity, deceivers and hypocrites who appear using mighty words with a host of unintelligible formulæ, and take up with scandalous ceremonies, in order to rob men of their money and women of their honour.323 All this was afterwards called "Heresy" and "Gnosticism," and is still so called.324 And these names may be retained, if we will understand by them nothing else than the world taken into Christianity, all the manifold formations which resulted from the first contact of the new religion with the society into which it entered. To prove the existence of that left wing of Gnosticism is of the greatest interest for the history of dogma, but the details are of no consequence. On the other hand, in the aims and undertakings of the Gnostic right, it is just the details that are of greatest significance, because they shew that there was no fixed boundary between what one may call common Christian and Gnostic Christian. But as Gnosticism, in its contents, extended itself from the Encratites and the philosophic interpretation of certain articles of the Christian proclamation, as brought forward without offence by individual teachers in the communities, to the complete dissolution of the Christian element by philosophy, or the religious charlatanry of the age, so it exhibits itself formally also in a long series of groups which comprised all imaginable forms of unions. There were churches, ascetic associations, mystery cults, strictly private philosophic schools,325 free unions for edification, entertainments by Christian charlatans and deceived deceivers, who appeared as magicians and prophets, attempts at founding new religions after the model and under the influence of the Christian, etc. But, finally, the thesis that Gnosticism is identical with an acute secularising of Christianity, in the widest sense of the word, is confirmed by the study of its own literature. The early Christian production of Gospel and Apocalypses was indeed continued in Gnosticism yet so that the class of "Acts of the Apostles" was added to them, and that didactic, biographic and "belles lettres," elements were received into them, and claimed a very important place. If this makes the Gnostic literature approximate to the profane, that is much more the case with the scientific theological literature which Gnosticism first produced. Dogmatico-philosophic tracts, theologico-critical treatises, historical investigations and scientific commentaries on the sacred books, were, for the first time in Christendom, composed by the Gnostics, who in part occupied the foremost place in the scientific knowledge, religious earnestness and ardour of the age. They form, in every respect, the counterpart to the scientific works which proceeded from the contemporary philosophic schools. Moreover, we possess sufficient knowledge of Gnostic hymns and odes, songs for public worship, didactic poems, magic formulæ, magic books, etc., to assure us that Christian Gnosticism took possession of a whole region of the secular life in its full breadth, and thereby often transformed the original forms of Christian literature into secular.326 If, however, we bear in mind how all this at a later period was gradually legitimised in the Catholic Church, philosophy, the science of the sacred books, criticism and exegesis, the ascetic associations, the theological schools, the mysteries, the sacred formulæ, the superstition, the charlatanism, all kinds of profane literature, etc., it seems to prove the thesis that the victorious epoch of the gradual hellenising of Christianity followed the abortive attempts at an acute hellenising.