When Christianity began to spread, and Jesus was believed on by multitudes, and reverenced by many who did not receive him, it became politic to recognise the Gospel in the same manner in which the Law had been recognised. Accordingly, the external facts of the life of Jesus were not disputed, but a new spirit was given to them. Jesus was a manifestation of the Supreme God, as Simon was; come upon the same errand, to destroy the Jewish law; and thence an object of hatred to the Jews, who triumphed so far as to crucify the external body in which he appeared, but had no power over him who had inhabited it. Here there was just enough of truth to impose upon a person brought up to believe the Gospel without really loving it, and falsehood enough altogether to prevent its reception.
The sketch which I have now traced is the nucleus [pg 328] of Gnosticism. Simon's dignifying his paramour with the title of the Thought of the First Cause, and his figment of her having been in a perpetual state of transmigration, was no doubt an after thought to cover the grossness which prying minds might fancy in the great empiric; an end which might not be sufficiently accomplished by his doctrine that all actions were indifferent.
Whether Simon really invented the first ogdoad of pure emanations from the Great Father may be doubted; for the testimony to that fact does not appear sufficiently early, and those who assert it contradict each other in the names of them. But that he taught that there were Excellences and Powers, as well as angels, appears from Irenæus. Yet as that author undertakes to tell the share which Simon had in forming the system, and certainly attributes the regularity of it to his successors, it appears most probable that he defined nothing as to the number or functions of those celestial beings.
The sketch, however, of Simon, to whatever extent he went, was sufficiently filled up by his successors. In his system of angelic beings they defined their number, and to a certain extent fixed their functions. There was at last a body of these formed between the Supreme Being and the authors of this world, perfect in holiness and obedience. [pg 329] The defection of one of these was made as much as possible the work of accident. She was made, according to various schemes, sometimes to be totally excluded from this perfect society, sometimes to be restored to it again, leaving an imperfect offspring behind her. From her or her offspring, sprang the Creator, who is sometimes represented as the chief of seven angels, sometimes as a peculiar being having the angels under him. The creation of man is represented as the work of this imperfect being, but the spark of heavenly life in him as an emanation, more or less direct, from the First Cause. In this way the scheme became more definite; but from the same cause it became a set of schemes more or less inconsistent with each other, but all aiming at having a succession of mysteries to be communicated by degrees. In this way the minds of men were amused and tantalized, and prevented from a serious search after truth; whilst if one scheme was searched to the bottom, and its stock of mysteries exhausted, there was still another and another refinement to lure him away from the real truth. There was, however, the uniform tendency to remove the government of this world from the cognizance of the Supreme Being, and to represent the author of the law and the prophets as an imperfect, self-contradictory, cruel being. There was the same mode of rendering null the distinction between moral good and evil, by attributing it to opinion, or [pg 330] custom, or the ordinance of the God of this world. There was the same attempt to nullify the Gospel, by doing away with the Christian idea of the incarnate Son of God, and representing the advent of Jesus as a portion of the Gnostic scheme. For whether Jesus was considered as only apparently a man, or as merely a man; whether the Saviour dwelt in him or made use of him; whether it were the Saviour, or the Christ, or the Only-begotten, or the Jesus above, who interested himself for the redemption of the spiritual seed, it all amounted to the same thing in the end. It abolished the real salvation of the soul; it took away the incarnation and atonement; it made the Gospel of no effect.
The nature of the redemption it preached was likewise everywhere the same. It was not a redemption from the dominion of sin, but by denying that there was any such thing as sin. Whether it taught that the simple practical knowledge of this fact was all the redemption necessary, or that some initiatory rite was requisite to give that knowledge, or that a full knowledge of the Gnostic theory was to be superadded to qualify for eternal redemption,—whether it led its votaries to defy the God of the Old Testament, or taught them mystic forms by which to elude him when sitting in judgment, it all amounted to the same thing. Lewdness of the grossest kind was denied to be any sin. There were, [pg 331] indeed, some who embraced the general theory, and with it believed that the flesh, as being the work of the Creator, was to be denied and mortified in every way, and who therefore decried marriage[730] itself, and forbad to eat flesh; but they were the few. The opposite use of the undervaluing of the flesh was the more popular and the more prevalent.
Hitherto, perhaps, there has appeared but little in common with our own times; but there were other features of Gnosticism, in which it will appear to have been the parent of Antinomianism, even that of the most recent days. If any one is at all familiar with the high Calvinism of Toplady and his school, he will have found that it strongly resembled the Gnosticism of the age of Irenæus. It is of the essence of strict Calvinism to teach that individuals are inevitably destined to salvation; and so it was in Gnosticism. The spiritual seed must all be brought back again from earthly degradation; none can fail of being so, first or last. It may be destined to numerous transmigrations; but the spirit must finally be wafted upward to the eternal Fulness[731]. Again, the spiritual pride and presumption of the genuine Antinomian is a very observable trait: his speaking [pg 332] of all as carnal who do not adopt his scheme; his placing religion not in holiness, but in knowing the truth; his assumption of superior illumination; his declarations that none but those specially favoured are capable of knowing the truth; all this is merely a repetition of Gnosticism. The Gnostic called himself spiritual, and the Churchman carnal[732]; he was the elect and perfect, and the orthodox the ignorant and simple[733]; he derived his very name from his making knowledge paramount to all other things[734]; he declared that none were capable of receiving his scheme but the spiritual seed[735]; that to others good works were necessary and useful[736], but that their lot, however praiseworthy, could never be the same as that of the elect[737]. So, again, the abuse of the doctrine of justification by faith is as early as those times. They declared that faith and love was the sum of their religion[738]; that the law might be a restraint suited to inferior natures, but that to them it would be a degradation to submit their minds to its yoke; and that, in fact, whatever acts they might commit, it was impossible for them either to be polluted by those acts or to fail of salvation[739]. Who would not suppose that the modern ultra-Calvinist was the speaker? So again, at that time, as in these days [pg 333] these tenets were not always taken up as a cloak for licentiousness. Saturninus and Tatian were extremely correct in their lives; and Valentinus was not accused of any peculiar immorality: indeed, he long continued nominally a member of the Church, which, if his conduct had been flagitious, he could not have done. If they despised the restraints of the moral law, they probably supposed, like Toplady and others, that they had higher principles, which would lead them to greater heights of purity: or they were men of a speculative turn, who took up Gnosticism as a theory, without any disposition to make that practical use of it which others did, merely because they were not persons of warm passions. Indeed, if we may judge from a fragment preserved by Clement of Alexandria, Valentinus was rather a mystic in his religion[740].
There are two or three features in which the Gnostics were the forerunners of a very different class of errors. Transubstantiation no doubt arose in time by a natural depravation of the true doctrine of the Eucharist, through the desire of defining that which Scripture and primitive tradition had left undefined. But it is curious that a hint of it should have been struck out by Marcus, one of the magical Gnostics, who, amongst other arts of legerdemain, [pg 334] hit upon the idea of bringing down into the wine and water the blood of the supernal grace, by means of an invocation[741]. It is equally curious to read in the account of Carpocrates and his disciples, that they asserted that Pilate had procured a likeness of Jesus Christ to be taken, and that they set his image amongst those of Pythagoras, and Plato, and Aristotle and the rest, and decked it with chaplets, and paid to it the selfsame honours which the heathen paid to their idols[742]. Nor is it less remarkable that the Gnostics in general, when refuted by the Scriptures, should have spoken in disparagement of them (as I have already pointed out) in terms singularly corresponding with those sometimes made use of by Roman controversialists: “They turn to accuse the Scriptures, as though they were not correct, nor of authority; and say that they are at variance with themselves, neither can the truth be discovered from them by those who are ignorant of their tradition[743].” Coincidences of this kind are at least curious; and the further we search the more clearly will it appear that the germs of all subsequent errors appeared in very early times.
[Transcriber's Note: Obvious printer's errors have been corrected.]