Gnosticism is now well-nigh forgotten, or noticed only by those who are led to an acquaintance with it either by its connexion with certain passages in the New Testament, or by a systematic study of the early Fathers of the Church. And yet it existed in the world, and spread over the civilized portions of it as a system of philosophy at a time when heathen speculation had attained its highest refinement, and Christianity had introduced certainty to take the [pg 318] place of speculation. But that it should have taken hold on the minds of men to such an extent and at such a time, is surely one of the most unaccountable facts in the history of the human mind. To us, even the Platonic system would appear so much more rational and intelligible, and the Christian doctrine so much more simple and natural, and, if I may so say, manly, that in their presence one wonders what there could have been to recommend Gnosticism. The Grecian schemes were so many efforts of unassisted reason to find out truth by simple speculation. They could therefore never be propounded as certainties, but only as probabilities. They accordingly rested on their probability, and struck out many truths. They bear about them the air of the conclusions of men searching after truth, and having in some degree attained it. Christianity, on the other hand, professed to be a revelation from above. It did not pretend to speculate or to reason; it taught its doctrines as infallible truths, and supported its teaching by miracles, and an appeal to fulfilled prophecy. Gnosticism was like neither. It was in fact gratuitous speculation, founded upon nothing but the fact of a great difficulty, which human reason had never yet solved, the causation of evil; but it claimed no support from reason; it propounded no proofs; but put itself forward as the revealed solution of this difficulty. It wrought miracles, indeed, which might have served where the [pg 319] Christian miracles were unknown, but poor and weak indeed to put in competition with them, for they were mere juggles. They answered no beneficial end; they were over in a few minutes; they submitted themselves to no daily and hourly proof; and although professing to support a higher and purer God than was ever before thought of, they were of the same nature as those practised by heathen sorcerers. But to have solved this great difficulty, the system ought at least to have been uniform, or at most progressive. No teacher should have contradicted another, however much he might improve upon him. And yet this was far from being the case. The various successive teachers not only pulled down what their predecessors had set up, but even contemporary leaders contradicted each other. This would have been perfectly consistent if they had set up as mere speculators; but they claimed a sort of inspiration; nay, whilst setting aside the Gospel, they claimed support from the Gospel; whilst making higher pretensions than they allowed the Apostles, they professed to have a tradition received from the Apostles; whilst utterly overthrowing the religion of Christ, they appealed to his words and teaching as supporting them.
But although borrowing support from Christianity, it was not itself in any sense a religion. It taught no present devotion towards any superior being. It [pg 320] had no offerings, no prayers, still less any expiations. Although some of its teachers practised rites borrowed from the eucharist, they had no religious object. They were mere juggles. Although the idea of glorifying the beings above entered into the system, yet it affected only the beings above man, or man after he quitted this state. It had no place on earth. This was a place of discipline, or training, for a state in which he was to glorify the great First Cause; but he had nothing to do with glorifying him here. The great object of man here was knowledge. In this respect it was analogous to the Grecian philosophies; for they had no connection with religion, but were rather antagonists to it. They tended to overthrow the heathen superstitions, but they furnished nothing to replace them. They taught, it may be, moral duties; but it was not upon any principles of religion, but rather of social benefit. They attained to better notions on the unity and nature of God than were entertained by their compatriots, but they led not to a purer worship of him. At best they refined and mysticized the mythology and religious observances of the old religions. In this respect, then, of being unconnected with religion, it was like the philosophical systems of its own and former times; but it went further than they in being essentially irreligious, by placing the perfection of man in knowledge, and that only. By this means the necessity of religion of any kind was totally done [pg 321] away. Curiosity was substituted for devotion, and unbounded liberty for duty, whether to God or to man.
Curiosity being thus canonized, it is remarkable that the Gnostic system had baits for almost every description of it. It is curiosity, the desire of knowing what others know, fully as much as passion and appetite, which leads men into the various descriptions of vice; and this species of curiosity was not only allowed, but even sanctioned and stimulated. Men were told that it was the express destiny of every one who was to be perfect, to know everything that could be known in this world; and not only that, but that if a person failed of acquiring the requisite knowledge in one lifetime, his soul must pass into another and another body, until it had arrived at the necessary degree of information. It is true that this implied, in its literal meaning, the knowledge of good as well as of evil. But it requires little acquaintance with human nature to tell us in what sense it would be most commonly taken. And if any scruples still remained, they were removed by the doctrine that all actions were naturally indifferent, and that nothing but human opinion, or the arbitrary will of a tyrannical being, the Jewish God, had ever made any such thing as moral distinctions. Thus a vicious curiosity became a duty, if such a term had been allowable in Gnosticism; or, at all [pg 322] events, that man who did not foster and indulge it to the utmost, was fighting against his own interest.
There is another kind of curiosity, which has governed many in all ages, and which is not even yet extinct, and that is, a desire to be acquainted with future or unknown circumstances, or to possess a power beyond the reach of ordinary men. There have been always those who have professed themselves possessors of this supernatural knowledge, and of course others who have desired either to possess it or to witness and profit by its exercise. From this desire has arisen the whole of magic from the beginning, and the science of astrology in particular. Accordingly, this was a marked feature in many of the Gnostic teachers, that they laid claim to magical powers; and herein they differed from the heathen philosophers, and became the antagonists of the Christian apostles. Simon Magus, for instance, who is generally reckoned the first Gnostic leader, was a magician, and there is great reason to suspect that his faith was more a reliance on the Apostles, on the supposition of their having some deeper art than his own, than the faith of the heart in the principles of the Gospel.
But there is another class of persons who could neither be imposed on by the pretensions to supernatural power, nor the seductions of evil appetites, [pg 323] whose cast of character is altogether intellectual, and whose temptations must therefore be intellectual. The attention of such persons had in all ages been directed to the unseen things of creation, the invisible springs of all earthly motions and actions, the secret agencies of nature, the nature of the Great Original of all things, the methods of his providential government, the time and manner of the creation, the origin of evil, the future state of mankind after their departure from this earthly scene. Questions of this kind had engaged the curiosity of minds of the higher order ever since civilization began, and no system could find acceptance with them which offered no solution of such questions. Gnosticism accordingly furnished food for the curiosity of these, and that in greater abundance than any other system yet invented.
Besides the Gentile speculatists, there was also the philosophical Jew, who had become acquainted with the Grecian learning, and had thus come to endeavour to account, upon new principles, for the economy of the divine government under the law; partly for his own satisfaction, partly to render it palatable to his heathen friends. Two points in his law would present difficulty: first, the endless forms and ceremonies considered with reference to God, who, being a spirit, would require a spiritual worship, [pg 324] (for this is a truth which this class of Jews were fully sensible of,) together with the prohibitions of various animals; and secondly, the severities which God himself exercised and taught their forefathers to exercise against idolaters. And no doubt many Jews of this class were become practically unbelievers by speculating upon points which their forefathers implicitly received and devoutly practised.
There was again another class; viz. Christians by birth and education, brought up in leisure, and given to study, who, never having received the Gospel humbly and practically, became infected with the unsettled spirit of speculative inquiry. These would see the apparent incongruities between the law and the Gospel, especially in the spirit in which each was administered; and instead of being contented to be ignorant of that which had not been revealed, would endeavour to form some system independent of revelation, by which to account for these incongruities. To these two classes we shall see that Gnosticism also adapted itself; and indeed to the latter it would be specially adapted in the licentiousness of its morals. For being brought up without their own choice in a system of great strictness, at which their nature perhaps rebelled, and which they had themselves never heartily embraced; and yet not liking to renounce it on the distinct avowal [pg 325] of a love of vice, they would gladly close with a scheme which gave unbounded license the character of superior wisdom, and even of duty itself.
We see then what there was in the character of the times to prepare men for such a system as Gnosticism. But it did not grow up at once into all its completeness. It developed itself by degrees, as men were prepared for it; and when we have considered it in its leading features, we can scarcely fail to acquiesce in the view of it taken by the Christian writers contemporary with it; viz. that it was a scheme specially concocted by the author of evil, as antagonist to Christianity.
Simon Magus, as all agree, was the first teacher of Gnosticism; and when he first appeared in that character in Samaria, it is obvious that he could have known but little of the Gospel, and this may account for the little notice taken of it in his system. He came as the great power of God, that is, as God manifested on earth; and he wrought pretended miracles in confirmation of his pretensions. It is remarkable that none of his successors made any such pretension as this, although they too, at least some of them, professed miraculous power. He was therefore the antagonist of Christ; strictly Antichrist, in a higher sense than any other. He taught that the God of the Jews was not truly God, but only, [pg 326] like the Jupiter of heathenism, one of a set of angelic powers; that the Supreme God had nothing to do with the origination of evil further than that he had created those angelic powers from whom it had sprung; nay, that he had not created them directly, but by his thought, which, taking a personal character, was the actual Creator of these; that therefore the Supreme Being had nothing to do with anything in this world, excepting in so far as he had interfered to remedy the mischief occasioned by the angels. It was in this way that he endeavoured to reconcile the imperfections of this world with the perfection of God. But he went further than this; for by making the Creator of this world and the God of the Old Testament an imperfect being, he in reality denied God, whilst professing to know more of him than other men.
This part of the system only accounted for physical evil, and such moral evils as oppression and violence: but moral evil, as we commonly understand it, he treated in quite a different way; i. e. by denying that it was evil at all; for he asserted that it was so only through the tyrannical imposition of the angels. Nay, he even went so far as to assert that he himself was God, come down from above to rescue men from their thraldom by teaching them the truth of things; and thus to restore them to their rightful liberty, by showing them that they might [pg 327] do whatever they listed, and indeed ought to do so to vindicate his authority, which had been usurped by the angels. A more plausible scheme of blasphemy and licentiousness could scarcely have been concocted for the philosophizing Jew, or the heathen who had looked into Judaism merely as a rival system of barbarian philosophy. It recognised all the facts of the Old Testament; but it totally neutralized them, and destroyed altogether the religion with which they would have appeared to be inseparably blended.