Cassian appealed to this text also in proof that marriage [pg 228] was forbidden. But Clement of Alexandria refused to understand it in this sense. He is perhaps right when he argues that the first answer of our Lord means, that as long as there are men born, so long men will die. But the meaning of the next answer entirely escapes him. When our Lord says, “Eat of every herb save that in which is bitterness,” he means, says Clement, that marriage and continence are left to our choice, and that there is no command one way or the other; man may eat of every tree, the tree of celibacy, or the tree of marriage, only he must abstain from the tree of evil.
But this is not what was meant. Under a figurative expression, the writer of this passage conveyed a warning against marriage. Death is the fruit of birth, birth is the fruit of marriage. Abstain from eating of the tree of marriage, and death will be destroyed.
That this is the meaning of this remarkable saying is proved conclusively by another extract from the Gospel of the Egyptians, also made by Clement of Alexandria; it is put in the mouth of our Lord. “I am come to destroy the works of the woman; of the woman, that is, of concupiscence, whose works are generation and death.”[386] This quotation bears on the face of it marks of having been touched and explained by a later hand. “Of the woman,—that is, concupiscence, whose works are generation and death,” are a gloss added by an Encratite, which was adopted into the text received among the Egyptian Docetae. The words, “I am come to destroy the works of the woman,” i.e. Eve, may have been spoken by our Lord. By Eve came sin and death into the world, and these works Christ did indeed come to destroy.
But the gloss, as is obvious, alters the meaning of the saying. The woman is no longer Eve, but womankind [pg 229] in general; and by womankind, that is, by concupiscence, generation and death exist.
Clement of Alexandria was incapable of seizing the plain meaning of these words. He says, “The Lord has not deceived us, for he has indeed destroyed the works of concupiscence, viz. love of money, of strife, glory, of women ... now the birth of these vices is the death of the soul, for we die indeed by our sins.”
We must look to Philo for the key. The woman, Eve, means, as he says, the sense; Adam, the intellectual spirit. The union of soul and body is the degradation of the soul, the fertile parent of corruption and death.[387] Out of Philo's doctrine grew a Manichaeanism in the Christian community before Manes was born.
The work of Jesus was taught to be the emancipation of the soul, the rational spirit, Νοῦς, from the restraints of the body, its restoration to its primitive condition. Death would cease when the marriage was dissolved that held the spirit fettered in the prison-house of flesh.
Philonian philosophy remained vigorous at Alexandria in the circle of enlightened Jews. It struck deep root, and blossomed in the Christian Church.
A Gospel, which we do not know—it may have been that of Mark—was brought into Egypt. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, an Epistle clearly addressed to the Alexandrine Jews, prepared their minds to fuse Philonism with Christianity. We see its influence in the Gospel of St. John. That evangelist adopted Philo's doctrine of the Logos; the author of the Gospel of the Egyptians, that of the bondage of the spirit in matter.
The conceptions contained in the three passages which Clement of Alexandria has preserved are closely united. They all are referable to a certain theosophy, the exposition of which is to be found in the writings of Philo, and which may be in vain sought elsewhere at that period. Not only are there to be found here the theosophic system of the celebrated Alexandrine Jew, but also, what is a still clearer index of the source whence the Egyptian Gospel drew its mystic asceticism, we find the quaint expressions and forms of speech which belonged to Philo, and to none but him. No one but Philo had thought to find in the first chapters of Genesis the history of the fall of the soul into the world of sense, and to make of Eve, of the woman, the symbol of the human body, and starting from this to explain how the soul could return to its primitive condition, purely spiritual, by shaking off the sensible to which in its present state it is attached. When we shall have trampled under foot our tunics of skins wherewith we have been covered since the fall, this garment, given to us because we were ashamed of our nakedness,—when the body shall have become like the soul,—when the union of the soul with the body, i.e. of the male and the female, shall exist no more,—when the woman, that is the body, shall be no more productive, shall no more produce generation and death,—when its works are destroyed, then we shall not die any more; we shall be as we were before our fall, pure spirits; and this will be the kingdom of the Lord. And to prepare for this transformation, what is to be done? Eat of every herb, nourish ourselves on the fruit of every tree of paradise,—that is, cultivate the soul, and not occupy it with anything but that which will make it live; but abstain from the herb of bitterness,—the tree of the knowledge [pg 231] of good and evil, that is,—reject all that can weave closer the links binding the soul to the body, retain it in its prison, its grave.[388]