the first ogdoad was complete. From the Word and Life proceeded ten more Æons; but these seem, from their names, rather qualities of the Supreme; at least the five masculine names, for the feminine appear to imply some departure from the pure elementary and unimpassioned nature of the primal Parent. The males are-Buthios, profound, with his consort Mixis, conjunction; Ageratos, that grows not old, with Henosis or union; Autophyes, self-subsistent, with Hedone, pleasure; Akinetos, motionless, with Syncrasis, commixture; the Only Begotten and the Blessed. The offspring of Man and the Church were twelve, and in the females we seem to trace the shadowy prototypes of the Christian graces : the Paraclete and Faith; the Paternal and Hope; the Maternal and Charity; the Ever-intelligent and Prudence; Ecclesiasticos (a term apparently expressive of church union) and Blessedness; Will and Wisdom (Theletos and Sophia). These thirty Æons dwelt alone within the sacred and inviolable circle of the Pleroma : they were all, in one sense, manifestations of the Deity, all purely intellectual, an universe apart. But the peace of this metaphysical hierarchy was disturbed, and here we are presented with a noble allegory, which, as it were, brings these abstract conceptions within the reach of human sympathy. The last of the dodecarchy which sprung from Man and the Church was Sophia or Wisdom. Without intercourse with her consort Will, Wisdom was seized with an irresistible passion for that knowledge and intimate union with the primal Father, the unfathomable, which was the sole privilege of the first-born, Mind. She would comprehend the incomprehensible: love was the pretext, but temerity the motive. Pressing onward under this strong impulse, she would have reached the remote sanctuary, and would finally have been absorbed into the primal Essence, had she not encountered Horus (the impersonated boundary between knowledge and the Deity). At the persuasion of this "limitary cherub" (to borrow Milton's words), she acknowledged the incomprehensibility of the Father, returned in humble acquiescence to her lowlier sphere, and allayed the passion begot of wonder. But the harmony of the intellectual world was destroyed; a redemption, a restoration, was necessary; and (for now Valentinus must incorporate the Christian system into his own) from the first Æon, the divine Mind, proceeded Christ and the Holy Ghost. Christ communicated to the listening Eons the mystery of the imperishable nature of the Father, and their own procession from him; the delighted Eons commemorated the restoration of the holy peace, by each contributing his most splendid gift to form Jesus, encircled with his choir of angels. Valentinus did not descend immediately from his domain of melaphysical abstraction; he interposed an intermediate sphere between that and the material world. The desire or passion of Sophia, im personated, became an inferior Wisdom; she was an outcast from the Pleroma, and lay floating in the dim and formless chaos without. The Christos in mercy gave her form and substance; she preserved, as it were, some fragrance of immortality. Her passion was still strong for higher things, for the light which she could not apprehend; and she incessantly attempted to enter the forbidden circle of the Pleroma, but was again arrested by Horus, who uttered the mystic name of Jao. Sadly she returned to the floating elements of inferior being; she was surrendered to Passion, and with his assistance produced the material world. The tears which she shed, at the thought of her outcast condition, formed the humid element; her smiles, when she thought of the region of glory, the light; her fears and her sorrows, the grosser elements. Christ descended no more to her assistance, but sent Jesus, the Paraclete, the Saviour, with his angels; and with his aid, all substance was divided into material, animal, and spiritual. The spiritual, however, altogether emanated from the light of her divine assistant; the first formation of the animal (the Psychic) was the Demiurge, the Creator, the Saviour, the Father, the king of all that was consubstantial with himself, and finally, the material, of which he was only the Demiurge or Creator. Thus were formed the seven intermediate spheres, of which the Demiurge and his assistant angels (the seven again of the Persian system), with herself, made up a second ogdoad,-the image and feeble reflection of the former; Wisdom representing the primal Parent; the Demiurge the divine Mind, though he was ignorant of his mother, more ignorant than Satan himself; the other sideral angels, the rest of the Eons. By the Demiurge the lower world was formed. Mankind consisted of three classes: the spiritual, who are enlightened with the divine ray from Jesus; the animal or psychic, the offspring and kindred of the Demiurge; the material, the slaves and associates of Satan, the prince of the malerial world. They were represented, as it were, by Seth, Abel, and Cain. This organisation or distribution of mankind harmonised with tolerable facility with the Christian scheme. But by multiplying his spiritual beings, Valentinus embarrassed himself in the work of redemption or restoration of this lower and still degenerating world. With him, it was the Christos, or rather a faint image and reflection (for each of his intelligences multiplied themselves by this reflection of their being), who passed through the material form of the Virgin, like water through a tube. It was Jesus who descended upon the Saviour at his baptism, in the shape of the dove; and Valentinus admitted the common fantastic theory, with regard to the death of Jesus. At the final consummation, the latent fire would burst out (here Valentinus admitted the common theory of Zoroastrianism and Christianity) and consume the very scoria of matter; the material men, with their prince, would utterly perish in the conflagra Barde sanes. tion. Those of the animal, the Psychic, purified by the divine ray imparted by the Redeemer, would, with their parent, the Demiurge, occupy the intermediate realm, there were the just men made perfect, while the great mother Sophia, would at length be admitted into the Pleroma or intellectual sphere. Gnosticism was pure poetry, and Bardesanes was the poet of Gnosticism (1). For above two centuries, the hymns of this remarkable man, and those of his son Harmonius, enchanted the ears of the Syrian Christians, till they were expelled by the more orthodox raptures of Ephraem, the Syrian. Among the most remarkable circumstances relating to Bardesanes, who lived at the court of Abgar, king of Edessa, was his inquiry into the doctrines of the ancient Gymnosophists of India, which thus connected, as it were, the remotest East with the great family of religious speculatists; yet the theory of Bardesanes was more nearly allied to the Persian or the Chaldean; and the language of his poetry was in that fervent and amatory strain which borrows the warmest metaphors of human passion, to kindle the soul to divine love (2). Bardesanes deserved the glory, though he did not suffer the pains, of martyrdom. Pressed by the philosopher Apollonius, in the name of his master, the Emperor Verus, to deny Christianity, he replied, "I fear not death, which I shall not escape by yielding to the wishes of the Emperor." Bardesanes had opposed with vigorous hostility the system of Marcion (3), he afterwards appears to have seceded or, outwardly conforming, to have aspired in private to become the head of another Gnostic sect, which, in contradistinction to those of Saturninus and Valentinus, may be called the Mesopotamian or Babylonian. With him, the primal Deity dwelt alone with his consort, his primary thought or conception. Their first offsprings, Eons, or emanations, were Christ and the Holy Ghost, who, in his system was feminine, and nearly allied to the Sophia, or Wisdom, of other theories; the four elements,-the dry earth, and the water, the fire, and the air,-who make up the celestial ogdoad. The Son and his partner, the Spirit or Wisdom, with the assistance of the elements, made the worlds, which they surrendered to the government of the seven planetary spirits and the sun and moon, the visible types of the primal union. Probably these, as in the other systems, made the second ogdoad; and these, with other astral influences, borrowed from the Tsabaism of the region, the twelve signs of the zodiac, and the thirty-six Decani, as he called the rulers of the 360 days, governed the world of man. And here Bardesanes became (1) Valentinus, according to Tertullian, wrote psalms (de Carne Christi, c. 20.); his disciple Marcus explained his system in verse, and introduced the Eons as speaking. Compare Hahn. p. 26. Bardesanes wrote 150 psalms, the number of those of David. (2) Theodoret, Hæret. Fab. 209. (3) According to Eusebius, E. H. v. 38., Bardesanes approached much nearer to orthodoxy, though he still "bore some tokens of the sable streams." implicated with the eternal dispute about destiny and freewill, on which he wrote a separate treatise, and which entered into and coloured all his speculations (1). But the Wisdom which was the consort of the Son was of an inferior nature to that which dwelt with the Father. She was the Sophia Achamoth, and, faithless to her spiritual partner, she had taken delight in assisting the Demiurge in the creation of the visible world; but in all her wanderings and estrangement, she felt a constant and empassioned desire for perfect reunion with her first consort. He assisted her in her course of purification; revealed to her his more perfect light, on which she gazed with reanimating love; and the second wedding of these long estranged powers, in the presence of the parent Deity, and all the Eons and angels, formed the subject of one of his most ardent and rapturous hymns. With her, arose into the Pleroma those souls which partook of her celestial nature, and are rescued, by the descent of the Christ, according to the usual Gnostic theory, from their imprisonment in the world of matter. Yet all these theorists preserved some decent show of respect for the Christian faith, and aimed at an amicable reconciliation between their own wild theories and the simpler Gospel. It is not improbable that most of their leaders were actuated by the ambition of uniting the higher and more intellectual votaries of the older Paganism with the Christian community; the one by an accommodation with the Egyptian, the others, with the Syrian or Chaldean; as, in later times, the Alexandrian school, with the Grecian or Platonic Paganism; and expected to conciliate all who would not scruple to engraft the few tenets of Christianity, which they reserved inviolate, upon their former belief. They aspired to retain all that was dazzling, vast, and imaginative in the cosmogonical systems of the East, and rejected all that was humiliating or offensive to the common sentiment in Christianity. The Jewish character of the Messiah gave way to a purely immaterial notion of a celestial Redeemer; the painful realities of his life and death were softened off into fantastic appearances; they yet adopted as much of the Christian language as they could mould to their views, and even disguised or mitigated their contempt or animosity to Judaism. But Marcion of Pontus (2) Marcion of disclaimed all these conciliatory and temporising measures, either Pontus. with Pagan, Jew, or evangelic Christian (3). With Marcion, all was hard, cold, implacable antagonism. At once a severe rationalist and a strong enthusiast, Marcion pressed the leading doctrine of the malignity of matter to its extreme speculative and practical consequences. His Creator, his providential Governor, the God of the (1) He seems to have had an esoteric and an exoteric doctrine. Hahn, p. 22., on the authority of St. Ephrem. Compare Hahn, Bardesanes Gnosticus Syrorum primus Hymnologus. (2) Marcion was son of the Bishop of Sinope. (3) On Marcion, see chiefly the five books of Tertullian adv. Marcenes; the Historian of Heresies, Irenæus, i. 27.; Epiphanius, 42.; Theodoret, i. 24.; Origen contra Cels.; Clem. Alex. iii. 425. St. Ephrem, Orat. 14. p. 468. Jews, weak, imperfect, enthralled in matter,-was the opposite to the true God: the only virtue of men was the most rigid and painful abstinence. His doctrine proscribed all animal food but fish: it surpassed the most austere of the other Christian communities in its proscription of the amusements and pleasures of life; it rejected marriage, from hostility to the Demiurge, whose kingdom it would not increase by peopling it with new beings enslaved to matter, to glut death with food (1). The fundamental principle of Marcion's doctrine was unfolded in his Antitheses, the Contrasts, in which he arrayed against each other the Supreme God and the Demiurge, the God of the Jews, the Old and New Testament, the Law and the Gospel (2). The one was perfect, pure, beneficent, passionless; the other, though not unjust by nature, infected by matter,—subject to all the passions of man,-cruel, changeable; the New Testament, especially, as remodelled by Marcion, was holy, wise, amiable; the Old Testament, the Law, barbarous, inhuman, contradictory, and detestable. On the plundering of the Egyptians, on the massacre of the Canaanites, on every metaphor which ascribed the actions and sentiments of men to the Deity, Marcion enlarged with contemptuous superiority, and contrasted it with the tone of the Gospel. It was to rescue mankind from the tyranny of this inferior and hostile deity, that the Supreme manifested himself in Jesus Christ. This manifestation took place by his sudden appearance in the synagogue in Capernaum; for Marcion swept away with remorseless hand all the earlier incidents in the Gospels. But the Messiah which was revealed in Christ was directly the opposite to that announced by the Prophets of the Jews, and of their God. He made no conquests; he was not the Immanuel; he was not the son of David; he came not to restore the temporal kingdom of Israel. His doctrines were equally opposed: he demanded not an eye for an eye, or a tooth for a tooth; but where one smote the right cheek, to turn the other. He demanded no sacrifices but that of the pure heart; he enjoined not the sensual and indecent practice of multiplying the species; he proscribed marriage. The God of the Jews, trembling for his authority, armed himself against the celestial invader of his territory; he succeeded, in the seeming execution of Christ upon the cross, by his death, rescued the souls of the true believers from the bondage of the law; descended to the lower regions, where he rescued, not the pious and holy patriarchs, Abel, Enoch, Noah, Jacob, Moses, David, or Solomon,-these were the adherents of the Demiurge or material creator,-but his implacable enemies, such as Cain and Esau. After the ascension of the Redeemer to heaven, the God of ρους, μηδὲ ἐπιχορηγεῖν τῷ θανάτῳ τρόφην. Ch. vi. (1) ᾧ δὴ λόγῳ μὴ βουλόμενοι τὸν κοσμὲν τὸν ὑπὸ τοῦ Δημιούργου γενομενον συμπληροῦν, ἀπέχεσθαι γάμου βούλονTai-Clem. Alex. Strom. iii. 3. unde av εισάγειν τῷ κόσμῳ δυστυχήσοντας ἐτές who, (2) Marcion is accused by Rhodon apud Euseb. H. E. v. 13., of introducing two principles,-the Zoroastrian theory. |