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Оглавление§ 26. Gnosticism in General.38
The Judaism and paganism imported into the church proved more dangerous to it than the storm of persecution raging against it from without. Ebionism (§ 28) was the result of the attempt to incorporate into Christianity the narrow particularism of Judaism; Heretical Gnosis or Gnosticism was the result of the attempt to blend with Christianity the religious notions of pagan mythology, mysteriology, theosophy and philosophy. These two tendencies, moreover, were combined in a Gnostic Ebionism, in the direction of which Essenism may be regarded as a transitional stage (§ 8, 4). In many respects Manichæism (§ 29), which sprang up at a later period, is related to the Gnosticism of Gentile Christianity, but also in character and tendency widely different from it. The church had to employ all her powers to preserve herself from this medley of religious fancies and to purify her fields from the weeds that were being sown on every side. In regard to Ebionism and its gnosticizing developments this was a comparatively easy task. The Gnosticism of Gentile Christianity was much more difficult to deal with, and although the church succeeded in overcoming the weed in her fields, yet many of its seeds continued hidden for centuries, from which sprouts grew up now and again quite unexpectedly (§§ 54, 71, 108). This struggle has nevertheless led to the furtherance of the church in many ways, awakening in it a sense of scientific requirements, stirring it up to more vigorous battling for the truth, and endowing it with a more generous and liberal spirit. It had learnt to put a Christian gnosis in the place of the heretical, a right and wholesome use of speculation and philosophy, of poetry and art, in place of their misuse, and thus enabled Christianity to realise its universal destination.
§ 26.1. Gnosticism was deeply rooted in a powerful and characteristic intellectual tendency of the first century. A persistent conviction that the ancient world had exhausted itself and was no longer able to resist its threatened overthrow, now prevailed and drove the deepest thinkers to adopt the boldest and grandest Syncretism the world has ever beheld, in the blending of all the previously isolated and heterogeneous elements of culture as a final attempt at the rejuvenating of that which had become old (§ 25). Even within the borders of the church this Syncretism favoured by the prevailing spirit of the age influenced those of superior culture, to whom the church doctrine of that age did not seem to make enough of theosophical principles and speculative thought, while the worship of the church seemed dry and barren. Out of the fusing of cosmological myths and philosophemes of oriental and Greek paganism with Christian historical elements in the crucible of its own speculation, there arose numerous systems of a higher fantastic sort of religious philosophy, which were included under the common name of Gnosticism. The pagan element is upon the whole the prevailing one, inasmuch as in most Gnostic systems Christianity is not represented as the conclusion and completion of the development of salvation given in the Old Testament, but often merely as the continuation and climax of the pagan religion of nature and the pagan mystery worship. The attitude of this heretical gnosis toward holy scripture was various. By means of allegorical interpretation some endeavoured to prove their system from it; others preferred to depreciate the Apostles as falsifiers of the original purely gnostic doctrine of Christ, or to remodel the apostolic writings in accordance with their own views, or even to produce a bible of their own after the principles of their own schools in the form of gnostic pseudepigraphs. With them, however, for the most part the tradition of ancient wisdom as the communicated secret doctrine stood higher than holy scripture. Over against the heretical gnosis, an ecclesiastical gnosis was developed, especially in the Alexandrian school of theology (Clement and Origen, § 31, 4, 5), which, according to 1 Cor. xii. 8, 9; xiii. 2, was esteemed and striven after as, in contradistinction to faith, a higher stage in the development of the religious consciousness. The essential distinction between the two consisted in this, that the latter was determined, inspired and governed by the believing consciousness of the universal church, as gradually formulated in the church confession, whereas the former, completely emancipated therefrom, disported itself in the unrestricted arbitrariness of fantastic speculation.
§ 26.2. The Problems of Gnostic Speculation are: the origin of the world and of evil, as well as the task, means and end of the world’s development. In solving these problems the Gnostics borrowed mostly from paganism the theory of the world’s origin, and from Christianity the idea of redemption. At the basis of almost all Gnostic systems there lies the dualism of God and matter (ὕλη); only that matter is regarded sometimes in a Platonic sense as non-essential and non-substantial (=μὴ ὄν) and hence without hostile opposition to the godhead, sometimes more in the Parsee sense as inspired and dominated by an evil principle, and hence in violent opposition to the good God. In working out the theosophical and cosmological process it is mainly the idea of emanation (προβολή) that is called into play, whereby from the hidden God is derived a long series of divine essences (αἰῶνες), whose inherent divine power diminishes in proportion as they are removed to a distance from the original source of being. These æons then make their appearance as intermediaries in the creation, development and redemption of the world. The substratum out of which the world is created consists in a mixture of the elements of the world of light (πλήρωμα) with the elements of matter (κένωμα) by means of nature, chance or conflict. One of the least and weakest of the æons, who is usually designated Δημιουργός, after the example of Plato in the Timæus, is brought forward as the creator of the world. Creation is the first step toward redemption. But the Demiurge cannot or will not carry it out, and so finally there appears in the fulness of the times one of the highest æons as redeemer, in order to secure perfect emancipation to the imprisoned elements of light by the communication of the γνῶσις. Seeing that matter is derived from the evil, he appears in a seeming body or at baptism identifies himself with the psychical Messiah sent by the Demiurge. The death on the cross is either only an optical illusion, or the heavenly Christ, returning to the pleroma, quits the man Jesus, or gives His form to some other man (Simon of Cyrene, Matt. xxvii. 32) so that he is crucified instead of Him (Docetism). The souls of men, according as the pleromatic or hylic predominates in them, are in their nature, either Pneumatic, which alone are capable of the γνῶσις, or Psychical, which can only aspire to πίστις, or finally, Hylic (χοϊκοί, σαρκικοί), to which class the great majority belongs, which, subject to Satanic influences, serve only their lower desires. Redemption consists in the conquest and exclusion of matter, and is accomplished through knowledge (γνῶσις) and asceticism. It is therefore a chemical, rather than an ethical process. Seeing that the original seat of evil is in matter, sanctification is driven from the ethical domain into the physical, and consists in battling with matter and withholding from material enjoyments. The Gnostics were thus originally very strict in their moral discipline, but often they rushed to the other extreme, to libertinism and antinomianism, in consequence partly of the depreciation of the law of the Demiurge, partly of the tendency to rebound from one extreme to the other, and justified their conduct on the ground of παραχρῆσθαι τῇ σαρκί.
§ 26.3. Distribution.—Gieseler groups the Gentile Christian Gnostics according to their native countries into Egyptian or Alexandrian, whose emanationist and dualistic theories were coloured by Platonism, and the Syrian, whose views were affected by Parseeism.—Neander divides Gnostic systems into Judaistic and Anti-Jewish, subdividing the latter into such as incline to Paganism, and such as strive to apprehend Christianity in its purity and simplicity.—Hase arranges them as Oriental, Greek and Christian.—Baur classifies the Gnostic systems as those which endeavour to combine Judaism and paganism with Christianity, and those which oppose Christianity to these.—Lipsius marks three stages in the development of Gnosticism: the blending of Asiatic myths with a Jewish and Christian basis which took place in Syria; the further addition to this of Greek philosophy either Stoicism or Platonism which was carried out in Egypt; and recurrence to the ethical principles of Christianity, the elevation of πίστις above γνῶσις.—Hilgenfeld arranges his discussion of these systems in accordance with their place in the early heresiologies.—But none of these arrangements can be regarded as in every respect satisfactory, and indeed it may be impossible to lay down any principle of distribution of such a kind. There are so many fundamental elements and these of so diverse a character, that no one scheme of division may suffice for an adequate classification of all Gnostic systems. The difficulty was further enhanced by the contradiction, approximation, and confusion of systems, and by their construction and reconstruction, of which Rome as the capital of the world was the great centre.
§ 26.4. Sources of Information.—Abundant as the literary productions were which assumed the name or else without the name developed the principles of Gnosticism, comparatively little of this literature has been preserved. We are thus mainly dependent upon the representations of its catholic opponents, and to them also we owe the preservation of many authentic fragments. The first church teacher who ex professo deals with Gnosticism is Justin Martyr (§ 30, 9), whose controversial treatise, however, as well as that of Hegesippus (§ 31, 7), has been lost. The most important of extant treatises of this kind are those of Irenæus in five books Adv. hæreses, and of Hippolytus Ἔλεγχος κατὰ πασῶν αἱρέσεων, the so-called Philosophoumena (§ 31, 3). The Σύνταγμα κ. π. αἱρ. of Hippolytus is no longer extant in the original; a Latin translation of it apparently exists in the Libellus adv. omnes hæreses, which has been attributed to Tertullian. Together with the work of Irenæus, it formed a query for the later heresiologists, Epiphanius and Philaster (§ 47, 10, 14), who were apparently unacquainted with the later written but more important and complete Elenchus. Besides these should be mentioned the writings of Tertullian (§ 31, 10) and Theodoret (§ 47, 9) referring to this controversy, the Stromata of Clement of Alexandria, and the published discussions of Origen (§ 31, 4, 5), especially in his Commentary on John, also the five Dialogues of the Pseudo-Origen (Adamantius) against the Gnostics from the beginning of the fourth century;39 and finally many notices in the Church History of Eusebius. The still extant fragments of the Gnostic Apocryphal historian of the Apostles afford information about the teaching and forms of worship of the later syncretic vulgar Gnosticism, and also from the very defective representations of them in the works of their Catholic opponents.
