“All depends upon faith and love,” said Carpocrates; “externals are altogether matters of indifference. He who ascribes moral worth to these makes himself their slave, subjects himself to those spirits of the world from whom all religious and political ordinances have proceeded; he cannot, after death, pass out of the sphere of the metempsychosis. But he who can abandon himself to every lust without being affected by any, who can thus bid defiance to the laws of those earthly spirits, will after death rise to the unity of that Original One, with whom he has, by uniting himself, freed himself, even in this present life, from all fetters.”[503]
Epiphanes, the son of Carpocrates, a youth of remarkable ability, who died young, exhausted by the excesses to which his solifidianism exposed him, wrote a work on Justification by Faith, in which he said:
“All nature manifests a striving after unity and fellowship; the laws of man contradicting these laws of nature, and yet unable to subdue the appetites implanted in human nature by the Creator himself—these first introduced sin.”[504]
With Epiphanes, St. Epiphanius couples Isidore, and quotes from his writings directions how the Faithful are to obtain disengagement from passion, so as to attain union with God. Dean Milman, in his “History of Christianity,” charitably hopes that the licentiousness attributed to these sects was deduced by the Fathers from their writings, and was not actually practised by them. But the extracts from the books of Isidore, Epiphanes and Carpocrates, are sufficient to show that [pg 301] their doctrines were subversive of morality, and that, when taught as religious truths to men with human passions, they could not fail to produce immoral results. An extract from Isidore, preserved by Epiphanius, giving instructions to his followers how to conduct themselves, was designed to be put in practice. It is impossible even to quote it, so revolting is its indecency. In substance it is this: No man can approach the Supreme God except when perfectly disengaged from earthly passion. This disengagement cannot be attained without first satisfying passion; therefore the exhaustion of desire consequent on the gratification of passion is the proper preparation for prayer.[505]
To the same licentious class of Antinomians belonged the sect of the Antitactes. They also held the distinction between the Supreme God and the Demiurge, the God of the Jews,[506] of the Law, of the World. The body, the work of the God of creation, is evil; it “serves the law of sin;” nay, it is the very source of sin, and imprisons, degrades, the soul entangled in it. Thus the soul serves the law of God, the body the law of sin, i.e. of the Demiurge. But the Demiurge has imposed on men his law, the Ten Commandments. If the soul consents to that law, submits to be in bondage under it, the soul passes from the liberty of its ethereal sonship, under the dominion of a God at enmity with the Supreme Being. Therefore the true Christian must show his adherence to the Omnipotent by breaking the laws of the Decalogue,—the more the better.[507]
Was religious fanaticism capable of descending lower? Apparently it was so. The Cainites exhibit Pauline antinomianism in its last, most extravagant, most grotesque expression. Their doctrine was the extreme development of an idea in itself originally containing an element of truth.
Paul had proclaimed the emancipation of the Christian from the Law. Perhaps he did not at first sufficiently distinguish between the moral and the ceremonial law; he did not, at all events, lay down a broad, luminous principle, by which his disciples might distinguish between moral obligation to the Decalogue and bondage to the ceremonial Law. If both laws were imposed by the same God, to upset one was to upset the other. And Paul himself broke a hole in the dyke when he opposed the observance of the Sabbath, and instituted instead the Lord's-day.
Through that gap rushed the waves, and swept the whole Decalogue away.
Some, to rescue jeoparded morality, maintained that the Law contained a mixture of things good and bad; that the ceremonial law was bad, the moral law was good. Some, more happily, asserted that the whole of the Law was good, but that part of it was temporary, provisional, intended only to be temporary and provisional, a figure of that which was to be; and the rest of the Law was permanent, of perpetual obligation.
The ordinances of the Mosaic sanctuary were typical. When the fulfilment of the types came, the shadows were done away. This was the teaching of the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, called forth by the disorders which had followed indiscriminating denunciation of the Law by the Pauline party.