The only ceremony to which such grace as is here set forth was likely to be attributed by any Christian in the early age of the Church was that of Baptism. It was called by writers like Gregory of Nazianza and Chrysostom a μυστήριον[[571]]; while we hear as early as St Paul’s time of “those who are baptized over [or on behalf of] the dead” (βαπτιξόμενοι ὑπὲρ τῶν νεκρῶν)[[572]], the theory being, according to Döllinger, that those who had wished during their lives to receive baptism but had not done so, could thus obtain the benefit of the prayers of the Church, which could not be offered for an unbaptized person[[573]]. So much was this the case with some sects, that it was an offence charged by writers like Tertullian against the Valentinians that they were in the habit of delaying baptism as long as possible and even of putting it off till they were about to die[[574]], as in the case in the text. Baptism, too, was spoken of in sub-Apostolic times as the “seal” (σφραγίς)[[575]], or impress, which may be that which the soul has to exhibit, both in the Ophite system and in that of the Pistis Sophia, to the rulers of the next world. In any event, the rite was looked upon by Catholic and heretic alike as an initiation or commencement of the process by which man was united with Christ. The other eleven “mysteries of the First Mystery” are not specifically described in the Pistis Sophia; but it is said that the receiving of any one of them will free its recipient’s soul from all necessity to show seals or defences to the lesser powers and will exalt him after his death to the rank of a king in the kingdom of light, although it will not make him equal to those who have received the mystery of the Ineffable One[[576]]. It therefore seems probable that these “twelve mysteries of the First Mystery” all refer to the rite of baptism, and are called twelve instead of one only to accord with some trifling juggling with words and letters such as was common with the followers of Valentinus[[577]]. That baptism was held in the sub-Apostolic age to be, in the words of Döllinger, “not a mere sign, pledge, or symbol of grace, but an actual communication of it wrought by the risen and glorified Christ on the men He would convert and sanctify, and a bond to unite the body of the Church with its Head[[578]],” will perhaps be admitted. According to the same author, St Paul teaches that “by Baptism man is incorporated with Christ, and puts on Christ, so that the sacramental washing does away with all natural distinctions or race;—Greek and Jew, slave and free, men and women, are one in Christ, members of His body, children of God and of the seed of Abraham[[579]].” He tells us also that the same Apostle “not only divides man into body and spirit, but distinguishes in the bodily nature, the gross, visible, bodily frame, and a hidden, inner, ‘spiritual’ body not subject to limits of space or cognizable by the senses; this last, which shall hereafter be raised, is alone fit for and capable of organic union with the glorified body of Christ, of substantial incorporation with it[[580]].” If Döllinger in the XIXth century could thus interpret St Paul’s words, is it extraordinary that the author of the Pistis Sophia should put the same construction on similar statements some sixteen centuries earlier? So the late Dr Hatch, writing of baptism in this connection, says: “The expressions which the more literary ages have tended to construe metaphorically were taken literally. It was a real washing away of sins; it was a real birth into a new life; it was a real adoption into a divine sonship[[581]].”
If this be so, it seems to follow that the Mystery of the Ineffable One must be the other and the greatest of the Christian sacraments. Jesus tells His disciples that it is the “One and unique word,” and that the soul of one who has received it “after going forth from the body of matter of the Archons” will become “a great flood of light” and will fly into the height, no power being able to restrain it, nor even to know whither it goes. He continues:
“It shall pass through all the Places of the Archons and all the Places of the emanations of light, nor shall it make any announcement nor defence nor give in any symbol; for no Power of the Archons nor of the emanations of light can draw nigh to that soul. But all the Places of the Archons and of the emanations of light shall sing praises, being filled with fear at the flood of light which clothes that soul, until it shall have passed through them all, and have come into the Place of the inheritance of the mystery which it has received, which is the mystery of the sole Ineffable One, and shall have become united with his members[[582]].”
He goes on to explain that the recipient of this mystery shall be higher than angels, archangels, and than even all the Powers of the Treasure-house of Light and those which are below it:
“He is a man in the Cosmos; but he is a king in the light. He is a man in the Cosmos, but he is not of the Cosmos, and verily I say unto you, that man is myself and I am that man.”
“And, in the dissolution of the Cosmos, when the universe shall be caught up, and when the number of perfect souls shall be caught up, and when I am become king in the middle of the last Parastates, and when I am king over all the emanations of light, and over the Seven Amen, and the Five Trees, and the Three Amen, and the Nine Guards, and over the Boy of a Boy, that is to say the Twin Saviours, and when I am king over the Twelve Saviours and all the numbers of perfect souls who have received the mystery of light, then all the men who have received the mystery of that Ineffable One shall be kings with me, and shall sit on my right hand and on my left in my kingdom. Verily I say unto you, Those men are I and I am those men. Wherefore I said unto you aforetime: You shall sit upon thrones on my right hand and on my left in my kingdom and shall reign with me. Wherefore I have not spared myself, nor have I been ashamed to call you my brethren and my companions, seeing that you will be fellow-kings with me in my kingdom. These things, therefore, I said unto you, knowing that I should give unto you the mystery of that Ineffable One, and that mystery is I and I am that mystery[[583]].”
That this is the supreme revelation up to which the author of the Pistis Sophia has been leading all through the book, there can hardly be any doubt. Its position shortly before the close of the book[[584]], the rhapsodic and almost rhythmical phrases with which the approach to it is obscured rather than guarded, and the way in which directly the revelation is made, the author falls off into merely pastoral matters relating to the lesser mysteries, all show that the author has here reached his climax. But does this revelation mean anything else than that Jesus is Himself the victim which is to be received in the Sacrament or μυστήριον of the Altar? That the Christians of the first centuries really thought that in the Eucharist they united themselves to Christ by receiving His Body and Blood there can be no question, and the dogma can have come as no novelty to those who, like the Ophites, had combined with Christianity the ideas which we have seen current among the Orphics as to the sacramental efficacy of the homophagous feast and the eating of the quivering flesh of the sacrifice which represented Dionysos. Döllinger gives the views of the primitive Church concisely when he says it is “because we all eat of one Eucharistic bread, and so receive the Lord’s body, that we all become one body, or as St Paul says, we become members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones.” “We are nourished by communion,” he continues, “with the substance of His flesh and blood, and so bound to the unity of His body, the Church; and thus what was begun in Baptism is continued and perfected in the Eucharist[[585]].” Thus, Justin Martyr, who lived in the reign of Antoninus Pius, says “the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh[[586]].” That the same idea was realized by the heretics may be gathered from what has been said above as to the wonder-working celebration of the Eucharist by Marcus, when the wine was made to change visibly into blood before the eyes of the recipient[[587]].
It is plain also that the Pistis Sophia does not look upon this perfect union as within the reach of all. Basilides, the first of the Egyptian Gnostics, had said that not one in a thousand or two in ten thousand were fit to be admitted to the higher mysteries, and the same phrase is repeated by Jesus Himself in one of the later documents of the MS. of which the Pistis Sophia forms part[[588]]. Those who were worthy of admission to the mysteries of the Ineffable One and of the First Mystery were the pneumatics or spiritual men predestined to them from before their birth. For the others, the psychic or animal men, there were the mysteries “of the light,” which are, so to speak, the first step on the ladder of salvation[[589]]. These are nowhere described in the Pistis Sophia or first document of the book, the hearer being therein always referred for their details to the two great Books of Jeû mentioned above, “which Enoch wrote when I (i.e. Jesus) spoke with him from the tree of knowledge and from the tree of life, which were in the Paradise of Adam[[590]].” It is here expressly said that Jesus’ own disciples have no need of them; but their effect is described as purifying the body of matter, and transforming their recipient into “light” of exceeding purity. On the death of one who has taken them all, his soul traverses the different heavens repeating the passwords, giving in the defences, and exhibiting the symbols peculiar to each mystery until it reaches the abode assigned to its particular degree of spiritual illumination. These mysteries of the light are open to the whole world and there is some reason for thinking they are the sacraments of the Catholic Church, the members of which body, Irenaeus says, the “heretics” (Qy the Valentinians?) held not to be saved but to be only capable of salvation[[591]]. If the recipient of these lesser mysteries dies before complete initiation, he has to undergo a long and painful series of reincarnations, his soul being sent back into the Sphere of Destiny and eventually into this world by the Virgin of Light, who will, however, take care that it is placed in a “righteous” body which shall strive after the mysteries until it finds them. But the way to these lower mysteries is the complete renunciation of this world. Man naturally and normally is entirely hylic or material, being, as Jesus tells His disciples in the Pistis Sophia, “the very dregs of the Treasure-house, of the Places of those on the Right Hand, in the Middle, and on the Left Hand, and the dregs of the Unseen Ones and of the Archons, and, in a word, the dregs of them all[[592]].” Hence it is only by the cleansing grace of the mysteries that he can hope to escape the fate which is coming upon the Kerasmos, and to obtain these, he must avoid further pollution.
“Wherefore preach you to the whole race of men, saying: Slacken not day and night until ye find the cleansing mysteries. Say unto them: Renounce the world and all the matter that is therein; for whoso buys and sells in the world and eats and drinks in its matter, and lives in all its cares and all its conversations, takes unto himself other matter as well as his own matter.... Wherefore I said unto you aforetime: Renounce the whole world and all the matter that is therein lest ye add other matter to your own matter. Wherefore preach ye to the whole race of men ... cease not to seek day and night and stay not your hand until ye find the cleansing mysteries which will cleanse you so as to make you pure light, that ye may go into the heights and inherit the light of my kingdom[[593]].”
We see, then, that the author of the Pistis Sophia really contemplated the formation of a Church within a Church, where a group of persons claiming for themselves special illumination should rule over the great body of the faithful, these last being voluntarily set apart from all communion with their fellows[[594]]. This was so close a parallel to what actually occurred in Egypt in the IVth century, when the whole male population was said with some exaggeration to have embraced the monastic life[[595]], and submitted themselves to the rule of an ambitious and grasping episcopate, as to give us a valuable indication as to the authorship and date of the book. It may be said at the outset that the conception of the universe which appears throughout is so thoroughly Egyptian that it must have been written for Egyptian readers, who alone could have been expected to understand it without instruction. The idea of the Supreme Being as an unfathomable abyss was, as has been said in Chapter II, a very old one in Egypt, where one of the oldest cosmogonies current made Nu or the sea of waters the origin of both gods and men[[596]]. So was the peculiar theory that the lesser gods were the limbs or members of the Supreme[[597]]. An Ogdoad[[598]] or assembly of eight gods arranged in syzygies or couples was also well known in the time of the early dynasties, as was the Dodecad of twelve gods which Herodotus knew, and which M. Maspero refers on good evidence to the time of the Pyramid-Builders[[599]]. So was the view that men and other material things were made from the tears of the celestial powers[[600]], a notion well known to Proclus the Neo-Platonist, who attributed it to the legendary Orpheus[[601]]. Not less Egyptian—perhaps in its origin exclusively Egyptian—is the view that the knowledge of the places of the world after death and their rulers was indispensable to the happiness of the dead. “Whosoever,” says M. Maspero in commenting upon some funerary texts of the Ramesside period, “knows the names of these (gods) while still on earth and is acquainted with their places in Amenti, will arrive at his own place in the other world and will be in all the places reserved for those who are justified[[602]].” The resemblance between the system of the Pistis Sophia and the doctrines of the Egyptian religion in the days of the Pharaohs has been pointed out in detail by the veteran Egyptologist the late Prof. Lieblein and has been approved by M. Maspero[[603]]. It extends to particular details as well as to general ideas, as we see from the ritual inscribed on the tombs at Thebes, where each “circle” or division of the next world is said to have its own song and its own “mystery,” an idea often met with in the Pistis Sophia[[604]]. Even the doctrine in the Pistis Sophia that the dead had to exhibit a “seal” as well as a “defence” to the guardians of the heavenly places is explained by the Egyptian theory that no spell was effective without an amulet, which acted as a kind of material support to it[[605]]. The greater part of the allusions in the Pistis Sophia are in fact unintelligible, save to those with some acquaintance with the religious beliefs of the Pharaonic Egyptians.