Note (return) — Chapter IV

We are no longer able to form a perfectly clear picture of how these schools came into being, or how they were related to the Churches. It lay in the nature of the case that the heads of the schools, like the early itinerant heretical teachers, devoted attention chiefly, if not exclusively, to those who were already Christian, that is, to the Christian communities.341 From the Ignatian Epistles, the Shepherd of Hermas (Vis. III. 7. 1; Sim. VIII. 6. 5; IX. 19. and especially 22) and the Didache (XI. 1. 2) we see that those teachers who boasted of a special knowledge, and sought to introduce "strange" doctrines, aimed at gaining the entire churches. The beginning, as a rule, was necessarily the formation of conventicles. In the first period therefore, when there was no really fixed standard for warding off the foreign doctrines—Hermas is unable even to characterise the false doctrines—the warnings were commonly exhausted in the exhortation: κολλασθε τοις 'αγιοις, 'οτι 'οι κολλωμενοι αυτοις 'αγιασθησονται ["connect yourselves with the saints, because those who are connected with them shall be sanctified"]. As a rule, the doctrines may really have crept in unobserved, and those gained over to them may for long have taken part in a two-fold worship, the public worship of the churches, and the new consecration. Those teachers must of course have assumed a more aggressive attitude who rejected the Old Testament. The attitude of the Church, when it enjoyed competent guidance, was one of decided opposition towards unmasked or recognised false teachers. Yet Irenæus' account of Cerdo in Rome shews us how difficult it was at the beginning to get rid of a false teacher.342 For Justin, about the year 150, the Marcionites, Valentinians, Basilideans and Saturninians, are groups outside the communities, and undeserving of the name "Christians."343 There must therefore have been at that time, in Rome and Asia Minor at least, a really perfect separation of those schools from the Churches (it was different in Alexandria). Notwithstanding, this continued to be the region from which those schools obtained their adherents. For the Valentinians recognised that the common Christians were much better than the heathen, that they occupied a middle position between the "pneumatic" and the "hylic", and might look forward to a kind of salvation. This admission, as well as their conforming to the common Christian tradition, enabled them to spread their views in a remarkable way, and they may not have had any objection in many cases, to their converts remaining in the great Church. But can this community have perceived everywhere and at once, that the Valentinian distinction of "psychic" and "pneumatic" is not identical with the scriptural distinction of children and men in understanding? Where the organisation of the school (the union for worship) required a long time of probation, where degrees of connection with it were distinguished, and a strict asceticism demanded of the perfect, it followed of course that those on the lower stage should not be urged to a speedy break with the Church.344 But after the creation of the catholic confederation of churches, existence was made more and more difficult for these schools. Some of them lived on somewhat like our freemason-unions, some, as in the East, became actual sects (confessions), in which the wise and the simple now found a place, as they were propagated by families. In both cases they ceased to be what they had been at the beginning. From about 210, they ceased to be a factor of the historical development, though the Church of Constantine and Theodosius was alone really able to suppress them.