the later Jewish history, it was merely to confirm their preconceived notions. The apparent investiture of the Jehovah with the state and attributes of a temporal sovereign, the imperfection of the law, the barbarity of the people, the bloody wars in which they were engaged,-in short, whatever in Judaism was irreconcilable with a purely intellectual and morally perfect system, argued its origin from an imperfect and secondary author. But some tenets of primitive Christianity came no less into direct collision with the leading principles of Orientalism. The human nature of Jesus was too deeply impressed upon all the Gospel history, and perplexed the whole school, as well the precursors of Gnosticism as the more perfect Gnostics. His birth and death bore equal evidence to the unspiritualised materialism of his mortal body. They seized with avidity the distinction between the divine and human nature; but the Christ, the Eon, which emanated from the pure and primal Deity, as yet unknown in the world of the inferior creator, must be relieved as far as possible from the degrading and contaminating association with the mortal Jesus. The simpler hypothesis of the union of the two natures, mingled up, too closely, according to their views, the ill-assorted companions. The human birth of Jesus, though guarded by the virginity of his mother, was still offensive to their subtler and more fastidious purity. The Christ, therefore, the Emanation from the Pleroma, descended upon the man Jesus at his baptism. The death of Jesus was a still more serious cause of embarrassment. They seem never to have entertained the notion of an expiatory sacrifice; and the connection of the ethereal mind with the pains and sufferings of a carnal body, was altogether repulsive to their strongest prejudices. Before the death, therefore, of Jesus, the Christ had broken off his temporary association with the perishable body of Jesus, and surrendered it to the impotent resentment of Pilate and of the Jews; or, according to the theory of the Docetæ, adopted by almost all the Gnostic sects, the whole union with the material human form was an illusion upon the senses of men; it was but an apparent human being, an impassive phantom, which seemed to undergo all the insults and the agony of the cross. Such were the general tenets of the Gnostic sects, emanating from one simple principle. But the details of their cosmogony, their philosophy, and their religion, were infinitely modified by local circumstances, by the more or less fanciful genius of their founders, and by the stronger infusion of the different elements of Platonism, Kabalism, or that which, in its stricter sense, may be called Orientalism. The number of circles, or emanations, or procreations, which intervened between the spiritual and the material world; the nature and the rank of the Creator of that material world; his more or less close identification with the Jehovah of Judaism ; of some parts of the New. Saturni nus. the degree of malignity which they attributed to the latter; the office and the nature of the Christos, these were open points, upon which they admitted or, at least, assumed, the utmost latitude. The earliest of the more distinguished Gnostics is Saturninus, who is represented as a pupil of Menander, the successor of Simon Magus (1). But this Samaritan sect was always in direct hostility with Christianity, while Saturninus departed less from the Christian system than most of the wilder and more imaginative teachers of Gnosticism. The strength of the Christian party in Antioch may in some degree have overawed and restrained the aberrations of his fancy. Saturninus did not altogether exclude the primal spiritual Being from all concern or interest in the material world. For the Creator of the visible universe, he assumed the seven great angels, which the later Jews had probably borrowed, though with different powers, from the seven Amschaspands of Zoroastrianism. Neither were these angels essentially evil, nor was the domain on which they exercised their creative power altogether surrendered to the malignity of matter; it was a kind of debateable ground between the powers of evil and of good. The historian of Gnosticism has remarked the singular beauty of the fiction regarding the creation of man." The angels tried their utmost efforts to form man; but there arose under their creative influence only a worm creeping upon the earth.' God, condescending to interpose, sent down his Spirit, which breathed into the reptile the living soul of man." It is not quite easy to connect with this view of the origin of man the tenets of Saturninus, that the human kind was divided into two distinct races, the good and the bad. Whether the latter became so from receiving a feebler and less influential portion of the divine Spirit, or whether they were a subsequent creation of Satan, who assumes the station of the Ahriman of the Persian system (2). But the descent of Christ was to separate finally these two conflicting races. He was to rescue the good from the predominant power of the wicked; to destroy the kingdom of the spirits of evil, who, emanating in countless numbers from Satan their chief, waged a fatal war against the good; and to elevate them far above the power of the chief of the angels, the God of the Jews, for whose imperfect laws were to be substituted the purifying principles of Asceticism, by which the children of light, were re-united to the source and origin of light. The Christ himself was the Supreme Power of God, immaterial, incorporeal, formless, but assuming the semblance of man; and his followers were, as far as possible, to detach them (1) On Saturninus, see Irenæus, i. 22.; Euseb. iv. 7.; Epiphan. Hær. 23.: Theodoret, Hær. Fab. lib. iii.; Tertullian de Animâ, 23.; de Præscrip. cont. Hær. c. 46. Of the moderns, Mosheim, p. 336.; Matter, i, 276. (2) The latter opinion is that of Mosheim. M. Matter, on the contrary, says,-" Satan n'a pourtant pas créé les hommes, et les a trouvés tout faits: il s'en est emparé; c'est là sa sphère d'activité et la limite de sa puissance. p. 285. selves from their corporeal bondage, and assimilate themselves to his spiritual being. Marriage was the invention of Satan and his evil spirits, or at best, of the great angel, the God of the Jews, in order to continue the impure generation. The elect were to abstain from propagating a race of darkness and imperfection. Whether Saturninus, with the Essenes, maintained this total abstinence as the especial privilege of the higher class of his followers, and permitted to the less perfect the continuation of their kind, or whether he abandoned altogether this perilous and degrading office to the wicked, his system appears incomplete, as it seems to yield up as desperate the greater part of the human race; to perpetuate the dominion of evil; and to want the general and final absorption of all existence into the purity and happiness of the primal Being. Alexandria, the centre, as it were, of the speculative and inte- Alexanlectual activity of the Roman world, to which ancient Egypt, Asia, Palestine, and Greece, furnished the mingled population of her streets, and the conflicting opinions of her schools, gave birth to the two succeeding, and most widely disseminated sects of Gnosticism, those of Basilides and Valentinus. dria. Basilides was a Syrian by birth, and by some is supposed to have Basilides. been a scholar of Menander, at the same time with Saturninus. He claimed, however, Glaucias, a disciple of St. Peter, as his original teacher; and his doctrines assumed the boastful title of the Secret Traditions of the great Apostle. He also had some ancient prophecies, those of Cham and Barkaph (1), peculiar to his sect. According to another authority, he was a Persian; but this may have originated from the Zoroastrian cast of his primary tenets (2). From the Zendavesta, Basilides drew the eternal hostility of mind and matter, of light and darkness; but the Zoroastrian doctrine seems to have accommodated itself to the kindred systems of Egypt. In fact, the Gnosticism of Basilides appears to have been a fusion of the ancient sacerdotal religion of Egypt with the angelic and dæmoniac theory of Zoroaster. Basilides did not, it seems, maintain his one abstract unapproachable Deity far above the rest of the universe, but connected him, by a long and insensible gradation of intellectual developments or manifestations, with the visible and material world. From the Father proceeded seven beings, who together with him made up an ogdoad; constituted the first scale of intellectual beings, and inhabited the highest heaven, the purest intellectual sphere. According to their names-Mind, Reason, Intelligence (póvnois), Wisdom, Power, Justice, and Peace, they are merely, in our language, the attributes of the Deity, impersonated in this system. (1) Irenæus differs in his view of the Basilidian theory, from the remains of the Basilidian books appealed to by Clement of Alexandria, Strom. vi. p. 375. 795.; Theodoret, Hæret. Fabul. 1, 2.; Euseb. E. H. iv. 7. Basilides publish ed twenty-four volumes of exegetica, or inter- (2) Clemens, Stromata, vi. 642. Euseb. H: E, The number of these primary ons is the same as the Persian system of the Deity and the seven Amschaspands, and the Sephiroth of the Kabbela, and, probably, as far as that abstruse subject is known, of the ancient Egyptian theology (1). The seven primary effluxes of the Deity went on producing and multiplying, each forming its own realm or sphere, till they reached the number of 365 (2). The total number formed the mystical Abraxas (3), the legend which is found on so many of the ancient gems, the greater part of which are of Gnostic origin; though as much of this theory was from the doctrines of ancient Egypt, not only the mode of expressing their tenets by symbolic inscriptions, but even the inscription itself, may be originally Egyptian (4). The lowest of these worlds bordered on the realm of matter. The first confusion and invasion of the hostile elements took place. At length the chief angel of this sphere, on the verge of intellectual being, was seized with a desire of reducing the confused mass to order. With his assistant angels, he became the Creator. Though the form was of a higher origin, it was according to the idea of Wisdom, who, with the Deity, formed part of the first and highest ogdoad. Basilides professed the most profound reverence for divine Providence; and in Alexandria, the God of the Jews, softened off, as it were, and harmonised to the philosophic sentiment by the school of Philo, was looked upon in a less hostile light than by the Syrian and Asiatic school. The East lent its system of guardian angels, and the assistant angels of the Demiurge were the spiritual rulers of the nations, while the Creator himself was that of the Jews. Man was formed of a triple nature. His corporeal form of brute and malignant matter; his animal soul, the Psychic principle, which he received from the Demiurge; the higher and purer spirit, with which he was endowed from a loftier region. This pure and etherial spirit was to be emancipated from its impure companionship : and Egypt, or rather, the whole East, lent the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, in order to carry this stranger upon earth through the gradations of successive purification, till it was readmitted to its parent heaven. Basilides, in the Christian doctrine which he interwove with this (1) See Matter, vol, ii. p.5-37. (2) It is difficult to suppose that this number, either as originally borrowed from the Egyptian theology, or as invented by Basilides, had not some astronomical reference. (3) Irenæus, i. 23. See in M. Matter, ii. 49.54, the countless interpretations of this mysterious word. We might add others to those collected by his industry. M. Matter adopts, though with some doubt, the opinion of M. Bellerman and M. Munter. Le premier de ces écrivains explique le mot "Abraxas" par le kopte, qui est incontestablement à l'ancienne langue d'Egypte ce que la grec moderne est au langage de l'ancienne Grèce. La syllabe "sadsch," que les Grecs ont dú convertir en σαξ, ου σας, ου σαζ, n'ayant pu exprimer la dernière lettre de cette syllabe, que par les lettres X, Z, ou Z, signifierait parole, et "abrak" beni, saint, adorable, en sorte que le mot "Abraxas" tout entier, offrirait le sens de parole sacrée, M. Munter ne s'éloigne de cette interpretation que pour les syllabes "abrak " qu'il prend pour le not kopte "berra" nouveau, ce qui donne à l'ensemble le sens de parole nouveau. Matter, ii. 40 (4) See, in the supplement to M. Matter's work, a very curious collection of these Egyptian and Egypto-Grecian medals; and a work of Dr. Walsh on these coins. Compare likewise, Reuven's Lettres à M. Letronne, particularly p. 23. imaginative theory, followed the usual Gnostic course (1). The Christ, the first Æon of the Deity, descended on the man Jesus at his baptism; but, by a peculiar tenet of their own, the Basilidians rescued even the man Jesus from the degrading sufferings of the cross. Simon the Cyrenian was changed into the form of Jesus; on him the enemies of the crucified wasted their wrath, while Jesus stood aloof in the form of Simon, and mocked their impotent malice. Their moral perceptions must have been singularly blinded by their passion for their favourite tenet, not to discern how much they lowered their Saviour by making him thus render up an innocent victim as his own substitute. Valentinus appears to have been considered the most formidable and dangerous of this school of Gnostics (2). He was twice excommunicated, and twice received again into the bosom of the church. He did not confine his dangerous opinions to the school of Alexandria; he introduced the wild Oriental speculations into the more peaceful West; taught at Rome; and a third time being expelled from the Christian society, retired to Cyprus, an island where the Jews were formerly numerous, till the fatal insurrection in the time of Hadrian; and where probably the Oriental philosophy might not find an unwelcome reception, on the border, as it were, of Europe and Asia (3). Valentinus annihilated the complexity of pre-existing heavens, which, perhaps, connected the system of Basilides with that of ancient Egypt, and did not interpose the same infinite number of gradations between the primal Deity and the material world. He descended much more rapidly into the sphere of Christian images and Christian language, or rather, he carried up many of the Christian notions and terms, and enshrined them in the Plerona, the region of spiritual and inaccessible light. The fundamental tenet of Orientalism, the incomprehensibility of the Great Supreme, was the essential principle of his system, and was represented in terms pregnant with mysterious sublimity. The first Father was called Bythos, the Abyss, the Depth, the Unfathomable, who dwelt alone in inscrutable and ineffable height, with his own first Conception, his Ennoia, who bore the emphatic and awful name of Silence. The first development or self-manifestation was Mind (Nous), whose appropriate consort was Aletheia or Truth. These formed the first great quaternion, the highest scale of being. From Mind and Truth proceeded the Word and Life (Logos and Zoe); their manifestations were Man and the Church, Anthropos and Ecclesia, and so (1) Irenæus, i. 29., compared with the other anthors cited above. (2) Irenæus, Hær. v. Clemens., Alex. Strom. Origen, de Princip. contra Celsum. The author of the Didascalia Orientalis, at the end of the works of Clement of Alexandria. Tertullian ad versus Valentin. Theodoret, Fab. Hær. i. 7. Epi- (3) Tertull. advers. Valentin., c. 4. Epiphan. Valenti nus. |