Note 102 — BOOK VII BASILIDES, SATURNILUS, AND OTHERS

As has been said, there appears no reason to doubt that Hippolytus took his account of Basilides’ doctrines directly from the works of that heresiarch or of his son Isidore. The likeness of the quotations from Basilides or “those about Basilides” in Clement of Alexandria—a far more accurate and critical writer than Hippolytus—to our text leave no doubt on this point, and it is even probable that, as Hort thought, most of Hippolytus’ information is gathered from Basilides’ Exegetica. His account of the universe and its creation is largely Stoic, as may be seen by a comparison of this chapter with that on the Universe in Prof. E. V. Arnold’s excellent Roman Stoicism (Cambridge, 1911); but he differs from all the Pagan philosophy of his time by his view of matter which he makes neither pre-existent nor malignant. In this, and in the “happy ending” to his drama of the universe, we may perhaps see the result of the Golden Age of the Antonines, and it is to this, perhaps, that he owed the influence that he, without any great followers or successors, had upon the future theology of orthodox and heretic alike. Many of his ideas, and even a few of his very words, appear in documents like the later parts of the Pistis Sophia, and in certain Manichæan writings, although the strict monotheism which distinguishes them is in sharp contrast with the dualism of his successors. This begets a doubt whether these last were conscious borrowers of his opinion, or whether both he and they took their doctrines from some common source of Eastern tradition not now recognizable; but on the whole, the first-named hypothesis seems the more probable.