Probably one of the first changes to take place in the Ophite faith was the withdrawal into the background of the serpent worship which respect for the ancient cults of Asia Minor had imposed upon the earlier members of the sect. In the diagram, Ophiomorphus does not seem to have been depicted in his proper shape, although he may perhaps be identified with the Leviathan there shown as surrounding the terrestrial world. Those Ophites who wished to obtain proselytes among Christian catechumens no doubt felt the advisability of not insisting upon this conception, inasmuch as “the serpent” was the figure under which the Oriental Christians loved to allude to the Pagan worships which still opposed them in Asia Minor[[265]]. Hence there arose much confusion among the Ophites themselves as to the character of the serpent, and while some, according to Irenaeus, asserted that Sophia the mother of Ialdabaoth herself became the serpent[[266]], Theodoret, a very late witness, thinks that the Ophites of his time held that Ophiomorphus, although originally the minister of Sophia, had gone over to the other side, and had become the enemy of mankind[[267]]. In this we may also, perhaps, see, if we will, the effect of Egyptian influence upon the earlier Ophite teaching; for in Egypt, the serpent Apep was always looked upon as the enemy of Râ, the Sun-god, who was rightly considered the great benefactor of humanity. It is no doubt due to the same influence that in one of the documents of the Pistis Sophia—one part of which, as will be seen later, was probably written for the furtherance of a late form of the Ophite heresy—the serpent, while keeping his place in the Cosmos as the great ocean which surrounds the earth, is transformed into the outer darkness of the Canonical Gospels, and described as a huge torture-chamber for the punishment of souls[[268]]. The same document shows us how the Ophites, while adopting all the ideas of their predecessors the Orphics as to the respective states of the initiated and uninitiated after death,—including therein their reincarnation, the draught from the lake of memory and the like—contrived to mix with them the current astrological ideas of the time which made all these events happen in an order determined by the motions of the stars[[269]]. This tendency, already visible in Hippolytus’ time in the Ophite sect which he calls the Peratae[[270]], will, however, be better considered when we come to deal with the documents of the Pistis Sophia themselves.
There remains to be said that the Gospel according to the Egyptians mentioned above is the only apocryphal document that Hippolytus directly attributes to the earlier Ophites or Naassenes. The sects derived from them seem to have made use of a great number of others, among which we find a Book of Baruch otherwise unknown to us, The Paraphrase of Seth, the Gospels of Nicodemus, Philip, and Thomas, together with a Gospel according to the Hebrews, which may or may not have been identical with the one which Hippolytus calls that according to the Egyptians[[271]]. Of these, the first two are entirely lost, and the documents which we possess bearing the name of the Gospel of Nicodemus relate the events of the Crucifixion in much the same way as the Canonical Gospels, but add thereto the visit of Jesus to Hades. A Gospel of Thomas, which is also extant, contains only the account of miracles performed by Jesus in His infancy, and therefore goes to controvert the Ophite theory that Christos and Sophia only descended upon Him at His baptism, and that up to that period He was as other men. It is probable, however, that our copies of these Apocryphal Gospels have been severely edited so as to expunge everything which savoured of Gnostic teaching and may really have been partly or wholly the work of Ophites[[272]]. Of the Gospel of Philip, Epiphanius has preserved a short passage as follows:
“The Lord has revealed to me what the soul ought to say when she goes to heaven, and how she ought to answer each of the Powers on high. ‘I have known myself,’ she says, ‘and I have collected myself from everywhere, and I have not begotten children for the Archon, but I have rooted out his roots, and I have collected the scattered members, and I know thee what thou art. For I, she says, am from above[[273]].’ And thus he [i.e. Philip] says, she is set free. But if, he says, she is found to have begotten a son, she is retained below, until she can receive again her own children, and draw them up to herself[[274]].”
Similar expressions are to be found in two of the documents of the Pistis Sophia, and the abstinence from sexual intercourse which they enjoin is direct and first-hand evidence rebutting the accusation of promiscuous immorality which Epiphanius brings against the Ophites or their related sects. Epiphanius attributes to the same sect of “Gnostici” the use of a Gospel of Perfection which “others”—the context shows that he means certain Ophites—“are not ashamed to call the Gospel of Eve.” Of this he also preserves a single passage as follows:
“I stood upon a high mountain, and I saw a huge man and another who was mutilated [or perhaps only smaller, κολοβὸν] and I heard a voice of thunder, and I drew near to hearken and he spoke to me and said, ‘I am thou and thou art I; and where thou art, there am I, and I am scattered through all things. And whencesoever thou dost wish, collect me, and in collecting me, thou dost collect thyself[[275]].’”
Is the greater and lesser man here the Adamas or Father-and-Son of the Ophites, in which case the latter part of the passage doubtless refers to the scattering of the light through the world of matter and the necessity of its collection and return to the Godhead. The “I am thou and thou art I” phrase is repeated in the Pistis Sophia by the risen Jesus to His disciples[[276]], and seems to refer to the final union of the perfected human soul with the Deity.
In addition to these books, the Ophites whom Irenaeus and Hippolytus describe quoted freely from the Canonical books of the Old Testament, from one of the apocryphal books of Ezra and from the Book of Tobit, as also from such books of the Canonical New Testament as the Gospels, including that of St John, and most of the Pauline Epistles, including that to the Hebrews[[277]]. But it would be going too far to say that they “accepted” these or attributed to them a Divine origin, or thought them inspired in the sense in which the word was used by the Catholic Church. On the contrary, Epiphanius complains that they thought many of the contents of the Old Testament Books at any rate were inspired only by Ialdabaoth and the creators of the world of matter for the purpose of misleading mankind[[278]]; and throughout they seem to have considered all the Canonical Scriptures that they quote as on an equality with the writings of Homer, Hesiod, the legendary Orpheus, and other heathen writers such as Herodotus. Without attempting to deny or question the historical truth of the facts or legends recorded by all these authors, they regarded them merely as figures having an allegorical or typical meaning, which they could interpret in any manner they pleased, so as to make them accord with their own preconceived theories. Thus the Naassenes when they found St Luke quoting from the Proverbs of Solomon that “the just will fall seven times and rise again,” declared that this referred to the downward passage of man’s soul through the planetary heavens[[279]]; and Justinus, one of the Ophite teachers, finding a story in Herodotus about Heracles and the serpent-tailed girl whom he met in Scythia, said that it was a type of the generation of the universe by the combination of the invisible and unforeseeing Demiurge and the female principle or Sophia[[280]]. The same dialectic had already been made use of by the Orphics, by Philo of Alexandria, and by Simon Magus; but the Ophites seem to have been the first to apply it to all literature. The full effect of this method of interpretation we shall see later.
Generally speaking, it may be said that the Ophites seem to have been the first to bring about any kind of amalgamation between the popular religions of the Near East and the rising faith of Christianity. By interpreting the “mysteries” or secret rites of Asia Minor and elsewhere in their own sense, they supplied Christianity with a mythology which it would otherwise have lacked and the absence of which must always have proved a bar to its propagation among other than Semitic peoples. At the same time they greatly exalted the figure of Christ, who in their system became much less the personal teacher and master of the Jewish-Christian communities[[281]] than the angel or messenger of the Supreme Being sent from above in pursuance of a vast scheme for the redemption of the human race. In this capacity it went some way towards identifying the historical Jesus with the great god of the Mysteries and towards giving the sacraments of the newly-founded Church the secular authority of the rites practised in them. The influence of the Ophite system or systems upon the sects which succeeded them is at present hard to define, but there can be little doubt that some of the documents, which have come down to us in the Coptic MSS. before mentioned and will be more fully described in [Chapter X], can only be explained by reference to them.
CHAPTER IX
POST-CHRISTIAN GNOSTICS: VALENTINUS
It seems fairly plain that the originators of the Ophite teaching were uneducated men[[282]]. A few quotations from Homer and Pindar, probably familiar to anyone who listened to the Rhapsodists, are indeed to be found in the anonymous author whom Hippolytus quotes under the name of “the Naassene.” But the reading of the learned of that day consisted not of poetry but of philosophy; and there is no trace in his speculations of direct acquaintance with the works of any philosopher whatever. This is the more striking because Heraclitus of Ephesus, Zeno of Cyprus, and Cleanthes of Assos might have been brought into court in support of his cosmogonical ideas; and the Stoic philosophy was especially an Asiatic one, having one of its principal homes in Tarsus, and therefore not very far from Phrygia proper. Its cosmology as taught in Rome at the period now under discussion[[283]], differed very little from that of the earlier Ophites, and its theory of “seminal reasons” (λόγοι σπερματικοὶ) or particles of fiery matter descending from heaven to earth and there becoming formative principles, together with its belief in metensomatosis or transmigration has many resemblances with the Ophite scheme of redemption[[284]]. Yet the Naassene author in an age when philosophy was most in fashion never appeals to the authority of the founders of the Stoic school or of those followers of theirs who must have been his contemporaries and countrymen; and Hippolytus, whose own acquaintance with Greek philosophy was superficial and hardly first-hand, in his summary of the Naassene doctrine draws no parallel between the two. On the other hand, the Naassene author perpetually refers to the Old Testament which he seems to have known in the Peshitto or Syrian version, although, as will have been seen, he by no means regards it from the Jewish standpoint as a divinely inspired rule of life, and pushes down Yahweh, its God, into a very inferior position in the scale of being. As the date of the Peshitto has not yet been put further back than the second century A.D.[[285]], this would lead one to suppose that it had only recently come to the notice of the Naassene writer, who probably welcomed it as a valuable source from which to draw materials for spells and exorcisms. This excessive reverence for the letter as apart from the spirit of a document is characteristic of the magician of the early Christian centuries, and is further exemplified in a magic papyrus of the IIIrd century A.D., now in the British Museum, where “a number of single lines taken without any regard to sense or on any discernible principle from the Iliad and Odyssey” are arranged in a certain order for use as a fortune-telling book, and appear in company with magical recipes for obtaining dreams, compounding love philtres, and all the usual paraphernalia of a wizard of the period[[286]]. Such a use of writings venerable for their antiquity would never enter into the head of anyone endowed with any literary sense, but seems natural enough to persons of limited reading, to whom they form their sole material for study. In reading into the lives of the Jewish patriarchs hidden allusions to the theories of the origin of the universe and the destiny of man then current over the whole Hellenistic world, the Naassenes did not behave differently from our own Puritans of Cromwell’s time, who discovered in texts like “Take the prophets of Baal, Let not one of them escape[[287]]!” a justification for “knocking on the head out of hand,” the clergy of the opposing party[[288]]. We may, if we please, picture to ourselves the earlier Ophites as a handful of merchants, artizans, freedmen, and slaves inclined by inherited custom to magical practices and to ecstatic or hysterical forms of religion, and, as it were, intoxicated by the new field of speculation which the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into their own tongue had opened to them. At the same time, their anti-Semitic feeling, dating perhaps from the time of the Maccabaean resistance which had materially contributed to the downfall of the Syrian Empire, and considerably exacerbated by the atrocities committed by the Jewish rebels at the close of the Ist century A.D., must have forced them into an attitude in every way opposed to Jewish national pretensions; while it is easy to understand that such persons must have caught eagerly at any via media which enabled them to reconcile the Jewish traditions, long familiar to them through spells and charms, with the legends of the Greek Mysteries, and at the same time protected them against the social and moral obloquy attaching to open adherence to the Jewish rites. Such considerations, perhaps, explain alike the immediate success of St Paul’s preaching in Asia Minor, and the outburst of activity among the Gnostics which followed close upon it[[289]].