(g) The assertion that Christ revealed a God hitherto unknown.
(h) The doctrine that in the person of Jesus Christ—the Gnostics saw in it redemption, but they reduced the person to the physical nature—the heavenly Æon, Christ, and the human appearance of that Æon must be clearly distinguished, and a "distincte agere" ascribed to each. Accordingly, there were some, such as Basilides, who acknowledged no real union between Christ and the man Jesus, whom, besides, they regarded as an earthly man. Others, e.g., part of the Valentinians, among whom the greatest differences prevailed—see Tertull. adv. Valent. 39—taught that the body of Jesus was a heavenly psychical formation, and sprang from the womb of Mary only in appearance. Finally, a third party, such as Saturninus, declared that the whole visible appearance of Christ was a phantom, and therefore denied the birth of Christ.[357] Christ separates that which is unnaturally united, and thus leads everything back again to himself; in this redemption consists (full contrast to the notion of the ανακεφαλαιωσις).
(i) The conversion of the εκκλησια (it was no innovation to regard the heavenly Church as an Æon) into the college of the pneumatic, who alone, in virtue of their psychological endowment, are capable of Gnosis and the divine life, while the others, likewise in virtue of their constitution, as hylic perish. The Valentinians, and probably many other Gnostics also, distinguished between pneumatic, psychic and hylic. They regarded the psychic as capable of a certain blessedness, and of a corresponding certain knowledge of the supersensible, the latter being obtained through Pistis, that is, through Christian faith.[358]
(k) The rejection of the entire early Christian eschatology, especially the second coming of Christ, the resurrection of the body, and Christ's Kingdom of glory on the earth, and, in connection with this, the assertion that the deliverance of the spirit from the sensuous can be expected only from the future, while the spirit enlightened about itself already possesses immortality, and only awaits its introduction into the pneumatic pleroma.[359]
In addition to what has been mentioned here, we must finally fix our attention on the ethics of Gnosticism. Like the ethics of all systems which are based on the contrast between the sensuous and spiritual elements of human nature, that of the Gnostics took a twofold direction. On the one hand, it sought to suppress and uproot the sensuous, and thus became strictly ascetic (imitation of Christ as motive of asceticism;[360] Christ and the Apostles represented as ascetics);[361] on the other hand, it treated the sensuous element as indifferent, and so became libertine, that is, conformed to the world. The former was undoubtedly the more common, though there are credible witnesses to the latter; the frequentissimum collegium in particular, the Valentinians, in the days of Irenæus and Tertullian, did not vigorously enough prohibit a lax and world-conforming morality;[362] and among the Syrian and Egyptian Gnostics there were associations which celebrated the most revolting orgies.[363] As the early Christian tradition summoned to a strict renunciation of the world and to self-control, the Gnostic asceticism could not but make an impression at the first; but the dualistic basis on which it rested could not fail to excite suspicion as soon as one was capable of examining it.[364]
Literature.—The writings of Justin (his syntagma against heresies has not been preserved), Irenæus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Epiphanius, Philastrius and Theodoret; cf. Volkmar, Die Quellen der Ketzergeschichte, 1885.