[99] So in the Pistis Sophia, the incorporeal part of man is said to consist of four parts.
[100] ὑπόθεσις.
[101] καὶ τὸ πάθος οὐκ ἄλλου τινὸς χάριν γέγονεν [ἢ] ὑπὲρ τοῦ φυλοκρινηθῆναι τὰ συγκεχυμένα.
[102] 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.
[103] Σατορνεῖλος. So Epiph., Haer. XXIII, and Theodoret, Haer. Fab., I, 3, spell the name. Iren., I, 22; Eusebius, H.E., IV, 7, and later writers spell it Σατορνῖνος. All these accounts, however, together with that in our text, are in effect copies of the chapter in Iren., which is the earliest in time that has remained to us. Salmon in D.C.B., s.v. “Saturninus,” thinks that this last is itself copied from Justin Martyr, which is likely enough, but remains without proof.
[104] Epiphanius, Haer. XXIII, p. 124, Oehl. adds to this that Saturninus and Basilides were co-disciples, which, if true, would connect their systems with Menander’s teacher, Simon Magus. Nothing further is, however, known about Saturnilus or Saturninus or his heresy, which Epiphanius makes the third after Christ, nor is there any mention in any of the heresiologies of any writings by him. His story of a First or Pattern Man made in the image of the Supreme Being is common, as has been said, to many of the early heresies, and reappears in Manichæism. It is probably to be referred to some tradition current in Western Asia. See Bousset’s Hauptprobleme der Gnosis, cap. “Der Urmensch.”
[105] τῆς αὐθεντίας, “one who holds absolute rule.” Summa potestas, Cr.
[106] Cf. Gen. i. 26.
[107] This story is also met with among the Ophites. See Iren. (I, xxx. 5), where life is given to the grovelling figure by Jaldabaoth, the chief of the seven powers. Epiphanius adds to it that the world-makers divided the cosmos among them by lot, and that it was a spark of his own Power that the “Power on high” sent down for the vivification of the First Man, “which spark, he says, they fancy to be the human soul.”
[108] καὶ τὰ λοιπὰ ἐξ ὧν ἐγένετο, εἰς ἐκεῖνα ἀναλύεσθαι.