II. The Gospel Of Truth.

[pg 278]II. The Gospel Of Truth.Valentine, by birth an Egyptian, probably of Jewish descent, it may be presumed received his education at Alexandria. From this city he travelled to Rome (circ. A.D. 140); in both places he preached the Catholic faith, and then retired to Cyprus.472A miserable bigotry which refused to see in a heretic any motives but those which are evil, declared that in disgust at not obtaining a bishopric which he coveted, and to which a confessor was preferred, Valentine lapsed into heresy. We need no such explanation of the cause of his secession from orthodoxy. He was a man of an active mind and ardent zeal. Christian doctrine was then a system of facts; theology was as yet unborn. What philosophic truths lay at the foundation of Christian belief was unsuspected. Valentine could not thus rest. He strove to break through the hard facts to the principles on which they reposed. He was a pioneer in Christian theology.And for his venturous essay he was well qualified. His studies at Alexandria had brought him in contact with Philonism and with Platonism. He obtained at Cyprus an acquaintance with the doctrines of Basilides. His mind caught fire, his ideas expanded. The Gnostic seemed to him to open gleams of light through the facts of the faith he had hitherto professed with dull, unintelligent submission; and he placed himself under the inspiration and instruction of Basilides.[pg 279]But he did not follow him blindly. The speculations of the Gnostic kindled a train of ideas which were peculiarly Valentine's own.The age was not one to listen patiently to his theorizing. Men were called on to bear testimony by their lives to facts. They could endure the rack, the scourge, the thumbscrew, the iron rake, for facts, not for ideas. That Jesus had lived and died and mounted to heaven, was enough for their simple minds. They cared nothing, they made no effort to understand, what were the causes of evil, what its relation to matter.Consequently Valentine met with cold indifference, then with hot abhorrence. He was excommunicated. Separation embittered him. His respect for orthodoxy was gone; its hold upon him was lost; and he allowed himself to drift in the wide sea of theosophic speculation wherever his ideas carried him.Valentine taught that in the Godhead, exerting creative power were manifest two motions—a positive, the evolving, creative, life-giving element; and the negative, which determined, shaped and localized the creative force. From the positive force came life, from the negative the direction life takes in its manifestation.The world is the revelation of the divine ideas, gradually unfolding themselves, and Christ and redemption are the perfection and end of creation. Through creation the idea goes forth from God; through Christ the idea perfected returns to the bosom of God. Redemption is the recoil wave of creation, the echo of the fiat returning to the Creator's ear.The manifestation of the ideas of God is in unity; but in opposition to unity exists anarchy; in antagonism with creation emerges the principle of destruction. The representative of destruction, disunion, chaos, is Satan. The work of creation is infinite differentiation in perfect[pg 280]harmony. But in the midst of this emerges discord, an element of opposition which seeks to ruin the concord in the manifestation of the divine ideas. Therefore redemption is necessary, and Christ is the medium of redemption, which consists in the restoration to harmony and unity of that which by the fraud of Satan is thrown into disorder and antagonism.But how comes it that in creation there should be a disturbing element? That element must issue in some manner from the Creator; it must arise from some defect in Him. Therefore, Valentinian concluded, the God who created the world and gave source to the being of Satan cannot have been the supreme, all-good, perfect God.But if redemption be the perfecting of man, it must be the work of the only perfect God, who thereby counteracts the evil that has sprung up through the imperfection of the Demiurge.Therefore Jesus Christ is an emanation from the Supreme God, destroying the ill effects produced in the world by the faulty nature of the Creator, undoing the discord and restoring all to harmony.Jesus was formed by the Demiurge of a wondrously constituted ethereal body, visible to the outward sense. This Jesus entered the world through man, as a sunbeam enters a chamber through the window. The Demiurge created Jesus to redeem the people from the disorganizing, destructive effects of Satan, to be their Messiah.But the Supreme God had alone power perfectly to accomplish this work; therefore at the baptism of Christ, the Saviour (Soter) descended on him, consecrating him to be the perfect Redeemer of mankind, conveying to him a mission and power which the Demiurge could not have given.[pg 281]In all this we see the influence of Marcion's ideas.We need not follow out this fundamental principle of his theosophy into all its fantastic formularies. If Valentine was the precursor of Hegel in the enunciation of the universal antinomy, he was like Hegel also in involving his system in a cloud of incomprehensible terminology, in producing bewilderment where he sought simplicity.Valentine accepted the Old Testament, but only in the same light as he regarded the great works of the heathen writers to be deserving of regard.473Both contained good, noble examples, pure teaching; but in both also was the element of discord, contradictory teaching, and bad example. Ptolemy, the Valentinian who least sacrificed the moral to the theosophic element, scarcely dealt with the Old Testament differently from St. Paul. He did not indeed regard the Old Testament as the work of the Supreme God; the Mosaic legislation seemed to him to be the work of an inferior being, because, as he said, it contained too many imperfections to be the revelation of the Highest God, and too many excellences to be attributed to an evil spirit. But, like the Apostle of the Gentiles, he saw in the Mosaic ceremonies only symbols of spiritual truth, and, like him, he thought that the symbol was no longer necessary when the idea it revealed was manifested in all its clearness. Therefore, when the ideas these symbols veiled had reached and illumined men's minds, the necessity for them—husks to the idea, letters giving meaning to the thought—was at an end.Like St. Paul, therefore, he treated the Old Testament as a preparation for the New one, but as nothing more. We ascertain Ptolemy's views from a letter of his to[pg 282]Flora, a Catholic lady whom he desired to convert to Valentinianism.474In this letter he laboured to show that the God of this world (the Demiurge) was not the Supreme God, and that the Old Testament Scriptures were the revelation of the Demiurge, and not of the highest God. To prove the first point, Ptolemy appealed to apostolic tradition—no doubt to Pauline teaching—which had come down to him, and to the words of the Saviour, by which, he admits, all doctrine must be settled. In this letter he quotes largely from St. Paul's Epistles, and from the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. John.Like Marcion, Ptolemy insisted that the Demiurge, the God of this world, was also the God who revealed himself in the Old Testament, and that to this God belonged justice, wrath and punishment; whereas to the Supreme Deity was attributed free forgiveness, absolute goodness. The Saviour abolished the Law, therefore he abolished all the system of punishment for sin, that the reign of free grace might prevail.According to Ptolemy, therefore, retributive justice exercised by the State was irreconcilable with the nature of the Supreme God, and the State, accordingly, was under the dominion of the Demiurge.To the revelation of the old Law belonged ordinances of ceremonial and of seasons. These also are done away by Christ, who leads from the bondage of ceremonial to spiritual religion.Another Valentinian of note was Heracleon, who wrote a Commentary on the Gospel of St. John, of which considerable fragments have been preserved by Origen; and perhaps, also, a Commentary on the Gospel of St. Luke. Of the latter, only a single fragment, the exposition[pg 283]of Luke xii. 8, has been preserved by Clement of Alexandria.475Heracleon was a man of deep spiritual piety, and with a clear understanding. He held Scripture in profound reverence, and derived his Valentinian doctrines from it. So true is the saying:“Hic liber est in quo quærit sua dogmata quisque,Invenit pariter dogmata quisque sua.”His interpretation of the narrative of the interview of the Saviour with the woman of Samaria will illustrate his method of dealing with the sacred text.Heracleon saw in the woman of Samaria a type of all spiritual natures attracted by that which is heavenly, godlike; and the history represents the dealings of the Supreme God through Christ with these spiritual natures (πνευματικοί).For him, therefore, the words of the woman have a double meaning: that which lies on the surface of the sacred record, with the intent and purpose which the woman herself gave to them; and that which lay beneath the letter, and which was mystically signified.“The water which our Saviour gives,”says he,“is his spirit and power. His gifts and grace are what can never be taken away, never exhausted, can never fail to those who have received them. They who have received what has been richly bestowed on them from above, communicate again of the overflowing fulness which they enjoy to the life of others.”But the woman asks,“Give me this water, that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw”—hither—that is, to Jacob's well, the Mosaic Law from which hitherto she had drunk, and which could not quench her thirst, satisfy her aspirations.“She left her water-pot behind[pg 284]her”when she went to announce to others that she had found the well of eternal life. That is, she left the vessel, the capacity for receiving the Law, for she had now a spiritual vessel which could hold the spiritual water the Saviour gave.It will be seen that Valentinianism, like Marcionism, was an exaggerated Paulinism, infected with Gnosticism, clearly antinomian. Though the Valentinians are not accused of licentiousness, their ethical system was plainly immoral, for it completely emancipated the Christian from every restraint, and the true Christian was he who lived by faith only. He had passed by union with Christ from the dominion of the God of this World, a dominion in which were punishments for wrong-doing, into the realm of Grace, of sublime indifference to right and wrong, to a region in which no acts were sinful, no punishments were dealt out.If Valentinianism did not degenerate into the frantic licentiousness of the earlier Pauline heretics, it was because the doctrine of Valentine was an intellectual, theosophical system, quite above the comprehension of vulgar minds, and therefore only embraced by exalted mystics and cold philosophers.The Valentinians were not accused of mutilating the Scriptures, but of evaporating their significance.“Marcion,”says Tertullian,“knife in hand, has cut the Scriptures to pieces, to give support to his system; Valentine has the appearance of sparing them, and of trying rather to accommodate his errors to them, than of accommodating them to his errors. Nevertheless, he has curtailed, interpolated more than did Marcion, by taking from the words their force and natural value, to give them forced significations.”476The Pauline filiation of the sect can hardly be mistaken.[pg 285]The relation of Valentine's ideas to those of Marcion, and those of Marcion to the doctrines of St. Paul, are fundamental. But, moreover, they claimed a filiation more obvious than that of ideas—they asserted that they derived their doctrines from Theodas, disciple of the Apostle of the Gentiles.477The great importance they attributed to the Epistles of St. Paul is another evidence of their belonging to the anti-judaizing family of heretics, if another proof be needed.The Valentinians possessed a number of apocryphal works.“Their number is infinite,”says Irenaeus.478But this probably applies not to the first Valentinians, but to the Valentinian sects, among whom apocryphal works did abound. Certain it is, that in all the extracts made from the writings of Valentine, Ptolemy and Heracleon, by Origen, Epiphanius, Tertullian, &c., though they abound in quotations from St. Paul's Epistles and from the Canonical Gospels, there are none from any other source.Nevertheless, Irenaeus attributes to them possession of a“Gospel of Truth”(Evangelium Veritatis).“This Scripture,”says he,“does not in any point agree with our four Canonical Gospels.”479To this also, perhaps, Tertullian refers, when he says that the Valentinians possessed“their own Gospel in addition to ours.”480Epiphanius, however, makes no mention of this Gospel; he knew the writings of the Valentinians well, and has inserted extracts in his work on heresies.[pg 286]III. The Gospel Of Eve.The immoral tendency of Valentinianism broke out in coarse, flagrant licentiousness as soon as the doctrines of the sect had soaked down out of the stratum of educated men to the ranks of the undisciplined and vulgar.Valentinianism assumed two forms, broke into two sects,—the Marcosians and the Ophites.Mark, who lived in the latter half of the second century, came probably from Palestine, as we may gather from his frequent use of forms from the Aramaean liturgy. But he did not bring with him any of the Judaizing spirit, none of the grave reverence for the moral law, and decency of the Nazarene, Ebionite and kindred sects sprung from the ruined Church of the Hebrews.He was followed by trains of women whom he corrupted, and converted into prophetesses. His custom was, in an assembly to extend a chalice to a woman saying to her,“The grace of God, which excels all, and which the mind cannot conceive or explain, fill all your inner man, and increase his knowledge in you, dropping the grain of mustard-seed into good ground.”481A scene like a Methodist revival followed. The woman was urged to speak in prophecy; she hesitated, declared her inability; warm, passionate appeals followed closely one on another, couched in equivocal language, exciting the[pg 287]religious and natural passions simultaneously. The end was a convulsive fit of incoherent utterings, and the curtain fell on the rapturous embraces of the prophet and his spiritual bride.Mark possessed a Gospel, and“an infinite number of apocryphal Scriptures,”says Irenaeus. The Gospel contained a falsified life of Christ. One of the stories from it he quotes. When Jesus was a boy, he was learning letters. The master said,“Say Alpha.”Jesus repeated after him,“Alpha.”Then the master said,“Say Beta.”But Jesus answered,“Nay, I will not say Beta till you have explained to me the meaning of Alpha.”482The Marcosians made much of the hidden mysteries of the letters of the alphabet, showing that Mark had brought with him from Palestine something akin to the Cabbalism of the Jewish rabbis.This story is found in the apocryphal Gospel of St. Thomas. It runs somewhat differently in the different versions of that Gospel, and is repeated twice in each with slight variations.In the Syriac:“Zacchaeus the teacher said to Joseph, I will teach the boy Jesus whatever is proper for him to learn. And he made him go to school. And he, going in, was silent. But Zacchaeus the scribe began to tell him (the letters) from Alaph, and was repeating to him many times the whole alphabet. And he says to him that he should answer and say after him; but he was silent. Then the scribe became angry, and struck him with his hand upon his head. And Jesus said, A smith's anvil, being beaten, can (not) learn, and it has no feeling; but I am able to say those things, recited by you, with knowledge and understanding (unbeaten).”483[pg 288]In the Greek:“Zacchaeus said to Joseph ... Give thy son to me, that he may learn letters, and with his letters I will teach him some knowledge, and chiefly this, to salute all the elders, and to venerate them as grandfathers and fathers, and to love those of his own age. And he told him all the letters from Alpha to Omega. Then, looking at the teacher Zacchaeus, he said to him, Thou that knowest not Alpha naturally, how canst thou teach Beta to others? Thou hypocrite! if thou knowest, teach Alpha first, and then we shall believe thee concerning Beta.”484Or, according to another Greek version, after Jesus has been delivered over by Joseph to Zacchaeus, the preceptor“—wrote the alphabet in Hebrew, and said to him, Alpha. And the child said, Alpha. And the teacher said again, Alpha. And the child said the same. Then again a third time the teacher said, Alpha. Then Jesus, looking at the instructor, said, Thou knowest not Alpha; how wilt thou teach another the letter Beta? And the child, beginning at Alpha, said of himself the twenty-two letters. Then he said again, Hearken, teacher, to the arrangement of the first letter, and know how many accessories and lines it hath, and marks which are common, transverse and connected. And when Zacchaeus heard such accounts of one letter, he was amazed, and could not answer him.”485Another version of the same story is found in the Gospel of the pseudo-Matthew:“Joseph and Mary coaxing Jesus, led him to the school, that he might be taught his letters by the old man, Levi. When he entered he was silent; and the master, Levi, told one letter to Jesus, and beginning at the first, Aleph, said to[pg 289]him, Answer. But Jesus was silent, and answered nothing. Wherefore, the preceptor Levi, being angry, took a rod of a storax-tree, and smote him on the head. And Jesus said to the teacher Levi, Why dost thou smite me? Know in truth that he who is smitten teacheth him that smiteth, rather than is taught by him.... And Jesus added, and said to Levi, Every letter from Aleph to Tau is known by its order; thou, therefore, say first what is Tau, and I will tell thee what Aleph is. And he added, They who know not Aleph, how can they say Tau, ye hypocrites? First say what Aleph is, and I shall then believe you when you say Beth. And Jesus began to ask the names of the separate letters, and said, Let the teacher of the Law say what the first letter is, or why it hath many triangles, scalene, acute-angled, equilinear, curvi-linear,”&c.486At the root of Mark's teaching there seems to have been a sort of Pantheism. He taught that all had sprung from a great World-mother, partook of her soul and nature; but over against this female principle stood the Deity, the male element.Man represents the Deity, woman the world element; and it is only through the union of the divine and the material that the material can be quickened into spiritual life. In accordance with this theory, they had a ceremonial of what he called spiritual, but was eminently carnal, marriage, which is best left undescribed.Not widely removed from the Marcosians was the Valentinian sect of the Ophites. Valentinianism mingled with the floating superstition, the fragments of the wreck of Sabianism, which was to be found among the lower classes.The Ophites represented the Demiurge in the same way as did the Valentinians. They called the God of this world and of the Jews by the name of Jaldaboth.[pg 290]He was a limited being, imposing restraint on all his creatures; he exercised his power by imposing law. As long as his creatures obeyed law, they were subject to his dominion. But above Jaldaboth in the sublime region without limit reigns the Supreme God. When Adam broke the Law of the World-God, he emancipated himself from his bondage, he passed out of his realm, he placed himself in relation to the Supreme God.The world is made by Jaldaboth, but in the world is infused a spark of soul, emanated from the highest God. This divine soul strives after emancipation from the bonds imposed by connection with matter, created by the God of this world. This world-soul under the form of a serpent urged Eve to emancipate herself from thraldom, and pass with Adam, by an act of transgression, into the glorious liberty of the sons of the Supreme God.The doctrine of the Ophites with respect to Christ was that of Valentine. Christ came to break the last chains of Law by which man was bound, and to translate him into the realm of grace where sin does not exist.The Ophites possessed a Gospel, called the“Gospel of Eve.”It contained, no doubt, an account of the Fall from their peculiar point of view. St. Epiphanius has preserved two passages from it. They are so extraordinary, and throw such a light on the doctrines of this Gospel, that I quote them. The first is:“I was planted on a lofty mountain, and lo! I beheld a man of great stature, and another who was mutilated. And then I heard a voice like unto thunder. And when I drew near, he spake with me after this wise: I am thou, and thou art I. And wheresoever thou art, there am I, and I am dispersed through all. And wheresoever thou willest, there[pg 291]canst thou gather me; but in gathering me, thou gatherest thyself.”487The meaning of this passage is not doubtful. It expresses the doctrine of absolute identity between Christ and the believer, the radiation of divine virtue through all souls, destroying their individuality, that all may be absorbed into Christ. Individualities emerge out of God, and through Christ are drawn back into God.The influence of St. Paul's ideas is again noticeable. We are not told that the perfect man who speaks with a voice of thunder, and who is placed in contrast with the mutilated man, is Christ, and that the latter is the Demiurge, but we can scarcely doubt it. It is greatly to be regretted that we have so little of this curious book preserved.488The second passage, with its signification, had better repose in a foot-note, and in Greek. It allows us to understand the expression of St. Ephraem,“They shamelessly boast of their Gospel of Eve.”489[pg 292]IV. The Gospel Of Perfection.The Gospel of Perfection was another work regarded as sacred by the Ophites. St. Epiphanius says:“Some of them (i.e.of the Gnostics) there are who vaunt the possession of a certain fictitious, far-fetched poem which they call the Gospel of Perfection, whereas it is not a Gospel, but the perfection of misery. For the bitterness of death is consummated in that production of the devil. Others without shame boast their Gospel of Eve.”St. Epiphanius calls this Gospel of Perfection a poem, ποιήμα. But M. Nicolas justly observes that the word ποιήμα is used here, not to describe the work as a poetical composition, but as a fiction. In a passage of Irenaeus,490of which only the Latin has been preserved, the Gospel of Judas is called“confictio,”and it is probable that the Greek word rendered by“confictio”was ποιήμα.491Baur thinks that the Gospel of Perfection was the same as the Gospel of Eve.492But this can hardly be. The words of St. Epiphanius plainly distinguish them:“Some vaunt the Gospel of Perfection ... others boast ... the Gospel of Eve;”and elsewhere he speaks of their books in the plural.493[pg 293]V. The Gospel Of St. Philip.This Gospel belonged to the same category as those of Perfection and of Eve, and belonged, if not to the Ophites, to an analogous sect, perhaps that of the Prodicians. St. Philip passed, in the early ages of Christianity, as having been, like St. Paul, an apostle of the Gentiles,494and perhaps as having agreed with his views on the Law and evangelical liberty. But tradition had confounded together Philip the apostle and Philip the deacon of Caesarea, who, after having been a member of the Hellenist Church at Jerusalem, and having been driven thence after the martyrdom of Stephen, was the first to carry the Gospel beyond the family of Israel, and to convert the heathen to Christ.495His zeal and success caused him to be called an Evangelist.496In the second century it was supposed that an Evangelist meant one who had written a Gospel. And as no Gospel bearing his name existed, one was composed for him and attributed to him or to the apostle—they were not distinguished.St. Epiphanius has preserved one passage from it:“The Lord has revealed to me the words to be spoken by the soul when it ascends into heaven, and how it has to answer each of the celestial powers. The soul must say, I have known myself, and I have gathered myself from all parts. I have not borne children to Archon (the prince of[pg 294]this world); but I have plucked up his roots, and I have gathered his dispersed members. I have learned who thou art; for I am, saith the soul, of the number of the celestial ones. But if it is proved that the soul has borne a son, she must return downwards, till she has recovered her children, and has absorbed them into herself.”497It is not altogether easy to catch the meaning of this singular passage, but it apparently has this signification. The soul trammelled with the chains of matter, created by the Archon, the Creator of the world, has to emancipate itself from all material concerns. Each thought, interest, passion, excited by anything in the world, is a child borne by the soul to Archon, to which the soul has contributed animation, the world, form. The great work of life is the disengagement of the soul from all concern in the affairs of the world, in the requirements of the body. When the soul has reached the most exalted perfection, it is cold, passionless, indifferent; then it comes before the Supreme God, passing through the spheres guarded by attendant aeons or angels, and to each it protests its disengagement. But should any thought or care for mundane matters be found lurking in the recesses of the soul, it has to descend again, and remain in exile till it has re-absorbed all the life it gave, the interest it felt, in such concerns, and then again make its essay to reach God.The conception of Virtues guarding the concentric spheres surrounding the Most High is found among the Jews. When Moses went into the presence of God to receive the tables of stone, he met first the angel Kemuel, chief of the angels of destruction, who would have slain him, but Moses pronounced the incommunicable Name, and passed through. Then he came to the sphere governed by the angel Hadarniel, and by virtue[pg 295]of the Name passed through. Next he came to the sphere over which presided the angel Sandalfon, and penetrated by means of the same Name. Next he traversed the river of flame, called Riggon, and stood before the throne.498St. Paul held the popular Rabbinic notion of the spheres surrounding the throne of God, for he speaks of having been caught up into the third heaven.499In the apocryphal Ascension of Isaiah there are seven heavens that the prophet traverses.The Rabbinic ideas on the spheres were taken probably from the Chaldees, and from the same source, perhaps, sprang the conception of the soul making her ascension through the angel-guarded spheres, which we find in the fragment of the Gospel of St. Philip.Unfortunately, we have not sufficient of the early literature of the Chaldees and Assyrians to be able to say for certain that it was so. But a very curious sacred poem has been preserved on the terra-cotta tablets of the library of Assurbani-Pal, which exhibits a similar belief as prevalent anciently in Assyria.This poem represents the descent of Istar into the Immutable Land, the nether world, divided into seven circles. The heavenly world of the Chaldees was also divided into seven circles, each ruled by a planet. The poem therefore exhibits a descent instead of an ascent. But there is little reason to doubt that the passage in each case would have been analogous. We have no ancient Assyrian account of an ascent; we must therefore content ourselves with what we have.Istar descends into the lower region, and as she traverses each circle is despoiled of one of her coverings[pg 296]worn in the region above, till she stands naked before Belith, the Queen of the Land of Death.i.“At the first gate, as I made her enter, I despoiled her; I took the crown from off her head.“‘Hold, gatekeeper! Thou hast taken the crown from off my head.’“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’ii.“At the second gate I made her enter; I despoiled her, and took from off her the earrings from her ears.“‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of the earrings from my ears.’“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’iii.“At the third gate I made her enter; I despoiled her of the precious jewels on her neck.“‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of the jewels of my neck.’“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’iv.“At the fourth gate I made her enter; I despoiled her of the brooch of jewels upon her breast.“‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of the brooch of jewels upon my breast.’“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’V.“At the fifth gate I made her enter; I despoiled her of the belt of jewels about her waist.“‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of the belt of jewels about my waist.’“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’vi.“At the sixth gate I made her enter; I despoiled her of her armlets and bracelets.“‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of my armlets and bracelets.’[pg 297]“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’vii.“At the seventh gate I made her enter; I despoiled her of her skirt.“‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of my skirt.’“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this degree of circles.’”500We have something very similar in the judgment of souls in the Egyptian Ritual of the Dead. From Chaldaea or from Egypt the Gnostics who used the Gospel of St. Philip drew their doctrine of the soul traversing several circles, and arrested by an angel at the gate of each.The soul, a divine element, is in the earth combined with the body, a work of the Archon. But her aspirations are for that which is above; she strives to“extirpate his roots.”All her“scattered members,”her thoughts, wishes, impulses, are gathered into one up-tapering flame. Then only does she“know (God) for what He is,”for she has learned the nature of God by introspection.Such, if I mistake not, is the meaning of the passage quoted by St. Epiphanius. The sect which used such a Gospel must have been mystical and ascetic, given to contemplation, and avoiding the indulgence of their animal appetites. It was that, probably, of Prodicus, strung on the same Pauline thread as the heresies of Marcion, Nicolas, Valentine, Marcus, the Ophites, Carpocratians and Cainites.Prodicus, on the strength of St. Paul's saying that all Christians are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, maintained the sovereignty of every man placed under[pg 298]the Gospel. But a king is above law, is not bound by law. Therefore the Christian is under no bondage of Law, moral or ceremonial. He is lord of the Sabbath, above all ordinances. Prodicus made the whole worship of God to consist in the inner contemplation of the essence of God.External worship was not required of the Christian; that had been imposed by the Demiurge on the Jews and all under his bondage, till the time of the fulness of the Gospel had come.501The Prodicians did not constitute an important, widely-extended sect, and were confounded by many of the early Fathers with other Pauline-Gnostic sects.[pg 299]

[pg 278]II. The Gospel Of Truth.Valentine, by birth an Egyptian, probably of Jewish descent, it may be presumed received his education at Alexandria. From this city he travelled to Rome (circ. A.D. 140); in both places he preached the Catholic faith, and then retired to Cyprus.472A miserable bigotry which refused to see in a heretic any motives but those which are evil, declared that in disgust at not obtaining a bishopric which he coveted, and to which a confessor was preferred, Valentine lapsed into heresy. We need no such explanation of the cause of his secession from orthodoxy. He was a man of an active mind and ardent zeal. Christian doctrine was then a system of facts; theology was as yet unborn. What philosophic truths lay at the foundation of Christian belief was unsuspected. Valentine could not thus rest. He strove to break through the hard facts to the principles on which they reposed. He was a pioneer in Christian theology.And for his venturous essay he was well qualified. His studies at Alexandria had brought him in contact with Philonism and with Platonism. He obtained at Cyprus an acquaintance with the doctrines of Basilides. His mind caught fire, his ideas expanded. The Gnostic seemed to him to open gleams of light through the facts of the faith he had hitherto professed with dull, unintelligent submission; and he placed himself under the inspiration and instruction of Basilides.[pg 279]But he did not follow him blindly. The speculations of the Gnostic kindled a train of ideas which were peculiarly Valentine's own.The age was not one to listen patiently to his theorizing. Men were called on to bear testimony by their lives to facts. They could endure the rack, the scourge, the thumbscrew, the iron rake, for facts, not for ideas. That Jesus had lived and died and mounted to heaven, was enough for their simple minds. They cared nothing, they made no effort to understand, what were the causes of evil, what its relation to matter.Consequently Valentine met with cold indifference, then with hot abhorrence. He was excommunicated. Separation embittered him. His respect for orthodoxy was gone; its hold upon him was lost; and he allowed himself to drift in the wide sea of theosophic speculation wherever his ideas carried him.Valentine taught that in the Godhead, exerting creative power were manifest two motions—a positive, the evolving, creative, life-giving element; and the negative, which determined, shaped and localized the creative force. From the positive force came life, from the negative the direction life takes in its manifestation.The world is the revelation of the divine ideas, gradually unfolding themselves, and Christ and redemption are the perfection and end of creation. Through creation the idea goes forth from God; through Christ the idea perfected returns to the bosom of God. Redemption is the recoil wave of creation, the echo of the fiat returning to the Creator's ear.The manifestation of the ideas of God is in unity; but in opposition to unity exists anarchy; in antagonism with creation emerges the principle of destruction. The representative of destruction, disunion, chaos, is Satan. The work of creation is infinite differentiation in perfect[pg 280]harmony. But in the midst of this emerges discord, an element of opposition which seeks to ruin the concord in the manifestation of the divine ideas. Therefore redemption is necessary, and Christ is the medium of redemption, which consists in the restoration to harmony and unity of that which by the fraud of Satan is thrown into disorder and antagonism.But how comes it that in creation there should be a disturbing element? That element must issue in some manner from the Creator; it must arise from some defect in Him. Therefore, Valentinian concluded, the God who created the world and gave source to the being of Satan cannot have been the supreme, all-good, perfect God.But if redemption be the perfecting of man, it must be the work of the only perfect God, who thereby counteracts the evil that has sprung up through the imperfection of the Demiurge.Therefore Jesus Christ is an emanation from the Supreme God, destroying the ill effects produced in the world by the faulty nature of the Creator, undoing the discord and restoring all to harmony.Jesus was formed by the Demiurge of a wondrously constituted ethereal body, visible to the outward sense. This Jesus entered the world through man, as a sunbeam enters a chamber through the window. The Demiurge created Jesus to redeem the people from the disorganizing, destructive effects of Satan, to be their Messiah.But the Supreme God had alone power perfectly to accomplish this work; therefore at the baptism of Christ, the Saviour (Soter) descended on him, consecrating him to be the perfect Redeemer of mankind, conveying to him a mission and power which the Demiurge could not have given.[pg 281]In all this we see the influence of Marcion's ideas.We need not follow out this fundamental principle of his theosophy into all its fantastic formularies. If Valentine was the precursor of Hegel in the enunciation of the universal antinomy, he was like Hegel also in involving his system in a cloud of incomprehensible terminology, in producing bewilderment where he sought simplicity.Valentine accepted the Old Testament, but only in the same light as he regarded the great works of the heathen writers to be deserving of regard.473Both contained good, noble examples, pure teaching; but in both also was the element of discord, contradictory teaching, and bad example. Ptolemy, the Valentinian who least sacrificed the moral to the theosophic element, scarcely dealt with the Old Testament differently from St. Paul. He did not indeed regard the Old Testament as the work of the Supreme God; the Mosaic legislation seemed to him to be the work of an inferior being, because, as he said, it contained too many imperfections to be the revelation of the Highest God, and too many excellences to be attributed to an evil spirit. But, like the Apostle of the Gentiles, he saw in the Mosaic ceremonies only symbols of spiritual truth, and, like him, he thought that the symbol was no longer necessary when the idea it revealed was manifested in all its clearness. Therefore, when the ideas these symbols veiled had reached and illumined men's minds, the necessity for them—husks to the idea, letters giving meaning to the thought—was at an end.Like St. Paul, therefore, he treated the Old Testament as a preparation for the New one, but as nothing more. We ascertain Ptolemy's views from a letter of his to[pg 282]Flora, a Catholic lady whom he desired to convert to Valentinianism.474In this letter he laboured to show that the God of this world (the Demiurge) was not the Supreme God, and that the Old Testament Scriptures were the revelation of the Demiurge, and not of the highest God. To prove the first point, Ptolemy appealed to apostolic tradition—no doubt to Pauline teaching—which had come down to him, and to the words of the Saviour, by which, he admits, all doctrine must be settled. In this letter he quotes largely from St. Paul's Epistles, and from the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. John.Like Marcion, Ptolemy insisted that the Demiurge, the God of this world, was also the God who revealed himself in the Old Testament, and that to this God belonged justice, wrath and punishment; whereas to the Supreme Deity was attributed free forgiveness, absolute goodness. The Saviour abolished the Law, therefore he abolished all the system of punishment for sin, that the reign of free grace might prevail.According to Ptolemy, therefore, retributive justice exercised by the State was irreconcilable with the nature of the Supreme God, and the State, accordingly, was under the dominion of the Demiurge.To the revelation of the old Law belonged ordinances of ceremonial and of seasons. These also are done away by Christ, who leads from the bondage of ceremonial to spiritual religion.Another Valentinian of note was Heracleon, who wrote a Commentary on the Gospel of St. John, of which considerable fragments have been preserved by Origen; and perhaps, also, a Commentary on the Gospel of St. Luke. Of the latter, only a single fragment, the exposition[pg 283]of Luke xii. 8, has been preserved by Clement of Alexandria.475Heracleon was a man of deep spiritual piety, and with a clear understanding. He held Scripture in profound reverence, and derived his Valentinian doctrines from it. So true is the saying:“Hic liber est in quo quærit sua dogmata quisque,Invenit pariter dogmata quisque sua.”His interpretation of the narrative of the interview of the Saviour with the woman of Samaria will illustrate his method of dealing with the sacred text.Heracleon saw in the woman of Samaria a type of all spiritual natures attracted by that which is heavenly, godlike; and the history represents the dealings of the Supreme God through Christ with these spiritual natures (πνευματικοί).For him, therefore, the words of the woman have a double meaning: that which lies on the surface of the sacred record, with the intent and purpose which the woman herself gave to them; and that which lay beneath the letter, and which was mystically signified.“The water which our Saviour gives,”says he,“is his spirit and power. His gifts and grace are what can never be taken away, never exhausted, can never fail to those who have received them. They who have received what has been richly bestowed on them from above, communicate again of the overflowing fulness which they enjoy to the life of others.”But the woman asks,“Give me this water, that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw”—hither—that is, to Jacob's well, the Mosaic Law from which hitherto she had drunk, and which could not quench her thirst, satisfy her aspirations.“She left her water-pot behind[pg 284]her”when she went to announce to others that she had found the well of eternal life. That is, she left the vessel, the capacity for receiving the Law, for she had now a spiritual vessel which could hold the spiritual water the Saviour gave.It will be seen that Valentinianism, like Marcionism, was an exaggerated Paulinism, infected with Gnosticism, clearly antinomian. Though the Valentinians are not accused of licentiousness, their ethical system was plainly immoral, for it completely emancipated the Christian from every restraint, and the true Christian was he who lived by faith only. He had passed by union with Christ from the dominion of the God of this World, a dominion in which were punishments for wrong-doing, into the realm of Grace, of sublime indifference to right and wrong, to a region in which no acts were sinful, no punishments were dealt out.If Valentinianism did not degenerate into the frantic licentiousness of the earlier Pauline heretics, it was because the doctrine of Valentine was an intellectual, theosophical system, quite above the comprehension of vulgar minds, and therefore only embraced by exalted mystics and cold philosophers.The Valentinians were not accused of mutilating the Scriptures, but of evaporating their significance.“Marcion,”says Tertullian,“knife in hand, has cut the Scriptures to pieces, to give support to his system; Valentine has the appearance of sparing them, and of trying rather to accommodate his errors to them, than of accommodating them to his errors. Nevertheless, he has curtailed, interpolated more than did Marcion, by taking from the words their force and natural value, to give them forced significations.”476The Pauline filiation of the sect can hardly be mistaken.[pg 285]The relation of Valentine's ideas to those of Marcion, and those of Marcion to the doctrines of St. Paul, are fundamental. But, moreover, they claimed a filiation more obvious than that of ideas—they asserted that they derived their doctrines from Theodas, disciple of the Apostle of the Gentiles.477The great importance they attributed to the Epistles of St. Paul is another evidence of their belonging to the anti-judaizing family of heretics, if another proof be needed.The Valentinians possessed a number of apocryphal works.“Their number is infinite,”says Irenaeus.478But this probably applies not to the first Valentinians, but to the Valentinian sects, among whom apocryphal works did abound. Certain it is, that in all the extracts made from the writings of Valentine, Ptolemy and Heracleon, by Origen, Epiphanius, Tertullian, &c., though they abound in quotations from St. Paul's Epistles and from the Canonical Gospels, there are none from any other source.Nevertheless, Irenaeus attributes to them possession of a“Gospel of Truth”(Evangelium Veritatis).“This Scripture,”says he,“does not in any point agree with our four Canonical Gospels.”479To this also, perhaps, Tertullian refers, when he says that the Valentinians possessed“their own Gospel in addition to ours.”480Epiphanius, however, makes no mention of this Gospel; he knew the writings of the Valentinians well, and has inserted extracts in his work on heresies.[pg 286]III. The Gospel Of Eve.The immoral tendency of Valentinianism broke out in coarse, flagrant licentiousness as soon as the doctrines of the sect had soaked down out of the stratum of educated men to the ranks of the undisciplined and vulgar.Valentinianism assumed two forms, broke into two sects,—the Marcosians and the Ophites.Mark, who lived in the latter half of the second century, came probably from Palestine, as we may gather from his frequent use of forms from the Aramaean liturgy. But he did not bring with him any of the Judaizing spirit, none of the grave reverence for the moral law, and decency of the Nazarene, Ebionite and kindred sects sprung from the ruined Church of the Hebrews.He was followed by trains of women whom he corrupted, and converted into prophetesses. His custom was, in an assembly to extend a chalice to a woman saying to her,“The grace of God, which excels all, and which the mind cannot conceive or explain, fill all your inner man, and increase his knowledge in you, dropping the grain of mustard-seed into good ground.”481A scene like a Methodist revival followed. The woman was urged to speak in prophecy; she hesitated, declared her inability; warm, passionate appeals followed closely one on another, couched in equivocal language, exciting the[pg 287]religious and natural passions simultaneously. The end was a convulsive fit of incoherent utterings, and the curtain fell on the rapturous embraces of the prophet and his spiritual bride.Mark possessed a Gospel, and“an infinite number of apocryphal Scriptures,”says Irenaeus. The Gospel contained a falsified life of Christ. One of the stories from it he quotes. When Jesus was a boy, he was learning letters. The master said,“Say Alpha.”Jesus repeated after him,“Alpha.”Then the master said,“Say Beta.”But Jesus answered,“Nay, I will not say Beta till you have explained to me the meaning of Alpha.”482The Marcosians made much of the hidden mysteries of the letters of the alphabet, showing that Mark had brought with him from Palestine something akin to the Cabbalism of the Jewish rabbis.This story is found in the apocryphal Gospel of St. Thomas. It runs somewhat differently in the different versions of that Gospel, and is repeated twice in each with slight variations.In the Syriac:“Zacchaeus the teacher said to Joseph, I will teach the boy Jesus whatever is proper for him to learn. And he made him go to school. And he, going in, was silent. But Zacchaeus the scribe began to tell him (the letters) from Alaph, and was repeating to him many times the whole alphabet. And he says to him that he should answer and say after him; but he was silent. Then the scribe became angry, and struck him with his hand upon his head. And Jesus said, A smith's anvil, being beaten, can (not) learn, and it has no feeling; but I am able to say those things, recited by you, with knowledge and understanding (unbeaten).”483[pg 288]In the Greek:“Zacchaeus said to Joseph ... Give thy son to me, that he may learn letters, and with his letters I will teach him some knowledge, and chiefly this, to salute all the elders, and to venerate them as grandfathers and fathers, and to love those of his own age. And he told him all the letters from Alpha to Omega. Then, looking at the teacher Zacchaeus, he said to him, Thou that knowest not Alpha naturally, how canst thou teach Beta to others? Thou hypocrite! if thou knowest, teach Alpha first, and then we shall believe thee concerning Beta.”484Or, according to another Greek version, after Jesus has been delivered over by Joseph to Zacchaeus, the preceptor“—wrote the alphabet in Hebrew, and said to him, Alpha. And the child said, Alpha. And the teacher said again, Alpha. And the child said the same. Then again a third time the teacher said, Alpha. Then Jesus, looking at the instructor, said, Thou knowest not Alpha; how wilt thou teach another the letter Beta? And the child, beginning at Alpha, said of himself the twenty-two letters. Then he said again, Hearken, teacher, to the arrangement of the first letter, and know how many accessories and lines it hath, and marks which are common, transverse and connected. And when Zacchaeus heard such accounts of one letter, he was amazed, and could not answer him.”485Another version of the same story is found in the Gospel of the pseudo-Matthew:“Joseph and Mary coaxing Jesus, led him to the school, that he might be taught his letters by the old man, Levi. When he entered he was silent; and the master, Levi, told one letter to Jesus, and beginning at the first, Aleph, said to[pg 289]him, Answer. But Jesus was silent, and answered nothing. Wherefore, the preceptor Levi, being angry, took a rod of a storax-tree, and smote him on the head. And Jesus said to the teacher Levi, Why dost thou smite me? Know in truth that he who is smitten teacheth him that smiteth, rather than is taught by him.... And Jesus added, and said to Levi, Every letter from Aleph to Tau is known by its order; thou, therefore, say first what is Tau, and I will tell thee what Aleph is. And he added, They who know not Aleph, how can they say Tau, ye hypocrites? First say what Aleph is, and I shall then believe you when you say Beth. And Jesus began to ask the names of the separate letters, and said, Let the teacher of the Law say what the first letter is, or why it hath many triangles, scalene, acute-angled, equilinear, curvi-linear,”&c.486At the root of Mark's teaching there seems to have been a sort of Pantheism. He taught that all had sprung from a great World-mother, partook of her soul and nature; but over against this female principle stood the Deity, the male element.Man represents the Deity, woman the world element; and it is only through the union of the divine and the material that the material can be quickened into spiritual life. In accordance with this theory, they had a ceremonial of what he called spiritual, but was eminently carnal, marriage, which is best left undescribed.Not widely removed from the Marcosians was the Valentinian sect of the Ophites. Valentinianism mingled with the floating superstition, the fragments of the wreck of Sabianism, which was to be found among the lower classes.The Ophites represented the Demiurge in the same way as did the Valentinians. They called the God of this world and of the Jews by the name of Jaldaboth.[pg 290]He was a limited being, imposing restraint on all his creatures; he exercised his power by imposing law. As long as his creatures obeyed law, they were subject to his dominion. But above Jaldaboth in the sublime region without limit reigns the Supreme God. When Adam broke the Law of the World-God, he emancipated himself from his bondage, he passed out of his realm, he placed himself in relation to the Supreme God.The world is made by Jaldaboth, but in the world is infused a spark of soul, emanated from the highest God. This divine soul strives after emancipation from the bonds imposed by connection with matter, created by the God of this world. This world-soul under the form of a serpent urged Eve to emancipate herself from thraldom, and pass with Adam, by an act of transgression, into the glorious liberty of the sons of the Supreme God.The doctrine of the Ophites with respect to Christ was that of Valentine. Christ came to break the last chains of Law by which man was bound, and to translate him into the realm of grace where sin does not exist.The Ophites possessed a Gospel, called the“Gospel of Eve.”It contained, no doubt, an account of the Fall from their peculiar point of view. St. Epiphanius has preserved two passages from it. They are so extraordinary, and throw such a light on the doctrines of this Gospel, that I quote them. The first is:“I was planted on a lofty mountain, and lo! I beheld a man of great stature, and another who was mutilated. And then I heard a voice like unto thunder. And when I drew near, he spake with me after this wise: I am thou, and thou art I. And wheresoever thou art, there am I, and I am dispersed through all. And wheresoever thou willest, there[pg 291]canst thou gather me; but in gathering me, thou gatherest thyself.”487The meaning of this passage is not doubtful. It expresses the doctrine of absolute identity between Christ and the believer, the radiation of divine virtue through all souls, destroying their individuality, that all may be absorbed into Christ. Individualities emerge out of God, and through Christ are drawn back into God.The influence of St. Paul's ideas is again noticeable. We are not told that the perfect man who speaks with a voice of thunder, and who is placed in contrast with the mutilated man, is Christ, and that the latter is the Demiurge, but we can scarcely doubt it. It is greatly to be regretted that we have so little of this curious book preserved.488The second passage, with its signification, had better repose in a foot-note, and in Greek. It allows us to understand the expression of St. Ephraem,“They shamelessly boast of their Gospel of Eve.”489[pg 292]IV. The Gospel Of Perfection.The Gospel of Perfection was another work regarded as sacred by the Ophites. St. Epiphanius says:“Some of them (i.e.of the Gnostics) there are who vaunt the possession of a certain fictitious, far-fetched poem which they call the Gospel of Perfection, whereas it is not a Gospel, but the perfection of misery. For the bitterness of death is consummated in that production of the devil. Others without shame boast their Gospel of Eve.”St. Epiphanius calls this Gospel of Perfection a poem, ποιήμα. But M. Nicolas justly observes that the word ποιήμα is used here, not to describe the work as a poetical composition, but as a fiction. In a passage of Irenaeus,490of which only the Latin has been preserved, the Gospel of Judas is called“confictio,”and it is probable that the Greek word rendered by“confictio”was ποιήμα.491Baur thinks that the Gospel of Perfection was the same as the Gospel of Eve.492But this can hardly be. The words of St. Epiphanius plainly distinguish them:“Some vaunt the Gospel of Perfection ... others boast ... the Gospel of Eve;”and elsewhere he speaks of their books in the plural.493[pg 293]V. The Gospel Of St. Philip.This Gospel belonged to the same category as those of Perfection and of Eve, and belonged, if not to the Ophites, to an analogous sect, perhaps that of the Prodicians. St. Philip passed, in the early ages of Christianity, as having been, like St. Paul, an apostle of the Gentiles,494and perhaps as having agreed with his views on the Law and evangelical liberty. But tradition had confounded together Philip the apostle and Philip the deacon of Caesarea, who, after having been a member of the Hellenist Church at Jerusalem, and having been driven thence after the martyrdom of Stephen, was the first to carry the Gospel beyond the family of Israel, and to convert the heathen to Christ.495His zeal and success caused him to be called an Evangelist.496In the second century it was supposed that an Evangelist meant one who had written a Gospel. And as no Gospel bearing his name existed, one was composed for him and attributed to him or to the apostle—they were not distinguished.St. Epiphanius has preserved one passage from it:“The Lord has revealed to me the words to be spoken by the soul when it ascends into heaven, and how it has to answer each of the celestial powers. The soul must say, I have known myself, and I have gathered myself from all parts. I have not borne children to Archon (the prince of[pg 294]this world); but I have plucked up his roots, and I have gathered his dispersed members. I have learned who thou art; for I am, saith the soul, of the number of the celestial ones. But if it is proved that the soul has borne a son, she must return downwards, till she has recovered her children, and has absorbed them into herself.”497It is not altogether easy to catch the meaning of this singular passage, but it apparently has this signification. The soul trammelled with the chains of matter, created by the Archon, the Creator of the world, has to emancipate itself from all material concerns. Each thought, interest, passion, excited by anything in the world, is a child borne by the soul to Archon, to which the soul has contributed animation, the world, form. The great work of life is the disengagement of the soul from all concern in the affairs of the world, in the requirements of the body. When the soul has reached the most exalted perfection, it is cold, passionless, indifferent; then it comes before the Supreme God, passing through the spheres guarded by attendant aeons or angels, and to each it protests its disengagement. But should any thought or care for mundane matters be found lurking in the recesses of the soul, it has to descend again, and remain in exile till it has re-absorbed all the life it gave, the interest it felt, in such concerns, and then again make its essay to reach God.The conception of Virtues guarding the concentric spheres surrounding the Most High is found among the Jews. When Moses went into the presence of God to receive the tables of stone, he met first the angel Kemuel, chief of the angels of destruction, who would have slain him, but Moses pronounced the incommunicable Name, and passed through. Then he came to the sphere governed by the angel Hadarniel, and by virtue[pg 295]of the Name passed through. Next he came to the sphere over which presided the angel Sandalfon, and penetrated by means of the same Name. Next he traversed the river of flame, called Riggon, and stood before the throne.498St. Paul held the popular Rabbinic notion of the spheres surrounding the throne of God, for he speaks of having been caught up into the third heaven.499In the apocryphal Ascension of Isaiah there are seven heavens that the prophet traverses.The Rabbinic ideas on the spheres were taken probably from the Chaldees, and from the same source, perhaps, sprang the conception of the soul making her ascension through the angel-guarded spheres, which we find in the fragment of the Gospel of St. Philip.Unfortunately, we have not sufficient of the early literature of the Chaldees and Assyrians to be able to say for certain that it was so. But a very curious sacred poem has been preserved on the terra-cotta tablets of the library of Assurbani-Pal, which exhibits a similar belief as prevalent anciently in Assyria.This poem represents the descent of Istar into the Immutable Land, the nether world, divided into seven circles. The heavenly world of the Chaldees was also divided into seven circles, each ruled by a planet. The poem therefore exhibits a descent instead of an ascent. But there is little reason to doubt that the passage in each case would have been analogous. We have no ancient Assyrian account of an ascent; we must therefore content ourselves with what we have.Istar descends into the lower region, and as she traverses each circle is despoiled of one of her coverings[pg 296]worn in the region above, till she stands naked before Belith, the Queen of the Land of Death.i.“At the first gate, as I made her enter, I despoiled her; I took the crown from off her head.“‘Hold, gatekeeper! Thou hast taken the crown from off my head.’“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’ii.“At the second gate I made her enter; I despoiled her, and took from off her the earrings from her ears.“‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of the earrings from my ears.’“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’iii.“At the third gate I made her enter; I despoiled her of the precious jewels on her neck.“‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of the jewels of my neck.’“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’iv.“At the fourth gate I made her enter; I despoiled her of the brooch of jewels upon her breast.“‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of the brooch of jewels upon my breast.’“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’V.“At the fifth gate I made her enter; I despoiled her of the belt of jewels about her waist.“‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of the belt of jewels about my waist.’“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’vi.“At the sixth gate I made her enter; I despoiled her of her armlets and bracelets.“‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of my armlets and bracelets.’[pg 297]“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’vii.“At the seventh gate I made her enter; I despoiled her of her skirt.“‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of my skirt.’“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this degree of circles.’”500We have something very similar in the judgment of souls in the Egyptian Ritual of the Dead. From Chaldaea or from Egypt the Gnostics who used the Gospel of St. Philip drew their doctrine of the soul traversing several circles, and arrested by an angel at the gate of each.The soul, a divine element, is in the earth combined with the body, a work of the Archon. But her aspirations are for that which is above; she strives to“extirpate his roots.”All her“scattered members,”her thoughts, wishes, impulses, are gathered into one up-tapering flame. Then only does she“know (God) for what He is,”for she has learned the nature of God by introspection.Such, if I mistake not, is the meaning of the passage quoted by St. Epiphanius. The sect which used such a Gospel must have been mystical and ascetic, given to contemplation, and avoiding the indulgence of their animal appetites. It was that, probably, of Prodicus, strung on the same Pauline thread as the heresies of Marcion, Nicolas, Valentine, Marcus, the Ophites, Carpocratians and Cainites.Prodicus, on the strength of St. Paul's saying that all Christians are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, maintained the sovereignty of every man placed under[pg 298]the Gospel. But a king is above law, is not bound by law. Therefore the Christian is under no bondage of Law, moral or ceremonial. He is lord of the Sabbath, above all ordinances. Prodicus made the whole worship of God to consist in the inner contemplation of the essence of God.External worship was not required of the Christian; that had been imposed by the Demiurge on the Jews and all under his bondage, till the time of the fulness of the Gospel had come.501The Prodicians did not constitute an important, widely-extended sect, and were confounded by many of the early Fathers with other Pauline-Gnostic sects.[pg 299]

[pg 278]II. The Gospel Of Truth.Valentine, by birth an Egyptian, probably of Jewish descent, it may be presumed received his education at Alexandria. From this city he travelled to Rome (circ. A.D. 140); in both places he preached the Catholic faith, and then retired to Cyprus.472A miserable bigotry which refused to see in a heretic any motives but those which are evil, declared that in disgust at not obtaining a bishopric which he coveted, and to which a confessor was preferred, Valentine lapsed into heresy. We need no such explanation of the cause of his secession from orthodoxy. He was a man of an active mind and ardent zeal. Christian doctrine was then a system of facts; theology was as yet unborn. What philosophic truths lay at the foundation of Christian belief was unsuspected. Valentine could not thus rest. He strove to break through the hard facts to the principles on which they reposed. He was a pioneer in Christian theology.And for his venturous essay he was well qualified. His studies at Alexandria had brought him in contact with Philonism and with Platonism. He obtained at Cyprus an acquaintance with the doctrines of Basilides. His mind caught fire, his ideas expanded. The Gnostic seemed to him to open gleams of light through the facts of the faith he had hitherto professed with dull, unintelligent submission; and he placed himself under the inspiration and instruction of Basilides.[pg 279]But he did not follow him blindly. The speculations of the Gnostic kindled a train of ideas which were peculiarly Valentine's own.The age was not one to listen patiently to his theorizing. Men were called on to bear testimony by their lives to facts. They could endure the rack, the scourge, the thumbscrew, the iron rake, for facts, not for ideas. That Jesus had lived and died and mounted to heaven, was enough for their simple minds. They cared nothing, they made no effort to understand, what were the causes of evil, what its relation to matter.Consequently Valentine met with cold indifference, then with hot abhorrence. He was excommunicated. Separation embittered him. His respect for orthodoxy was gone; its hold upon him was lost; and he allowed himself to drift in the wide sea of theosophic speculation wherever his ideas carried him.Valentine taught that in the Godhead, exerting creative power were manifest two motions—a positive, the evolving, creative, life-giving element; and the negative, which determined, shaped and localized the creative force. From the positive force came life, from the negative the direction life takes in its manifestation.The world is the revelation of the divine ideas, gradually unfolding themselves, and Christ and redemption are the perfection and end of creation. Through creation the idea goes forth from God; through Christ the idea perfected returns to the bosom of God. Redemption is the recoil wave of creation, the echo of the fiat returning to the Creator's ear.The manifestation of the ideas of God is in unity; but in opposition to unity exists anarchy; in antagonism with creation emerges the principle of destruction. The representative of destruction, disunion, chaos, is Satan. The work of creation is infinite differentiation in perfect[pg 280]harmony. But in the midst of this emerges discord, an element of opposition which seeks to ruin the concord in the manifestation of the divine ideas. Therefore redemption is necessary, and Christ is the medium of redemption, which consists in the restoration to harmony and unity of that which by the fraud of Satan is thrown into disorder and antagonism.But how comes it that in creation there should be a disturbing element? That element must issue in some manner from the Creator; it must arise from some defect in Him. Therefore, Valentinian concluded, the God who created the world and gave source to the being of Satan cannot have been the supreme, all-good, perfect God.But if redemption be the perfecting of man, it must be the work of the only perfect God, who thereby counteracts the evil that has sprung up through the imperfection of the Demiurge.Therefore Jesus Christ is an emanation from the Supreme God, destroying the ill effects produced in the world by the faulty nature of the Creator, undoing the discord and restoring all to harmony.Jesus was formed by the Demiurge of a wondrously constituted ethereal body, visible to the outward sense. This Jesus entered the world through man, as a sunbeam enters a chamber through the window. The Demiurge created Jesus to redeem the people from the disorganizing, destructive effects of Satan, to be their Messiah.But the Supreme God had alone power perfectly to accomplish this work; therefore at the baptism of Christ, the Saviour (Soter) descended on him, consecrating him to be the perfect Redeemer of mankind, conveying to him a mission and power which the Demiurge could not have given.[pg 281]In all this we see the influence of Marcion's ideas.We need not follow out this fundamental principle of his theosophy into all its fantastic formularies. If Valentine was the precursor of Hegel in the enunciation of the universal antinomy, he was like Hegel also in involving his system in a cloud of incomprehensible terminology, in producing bewilderment where he sought simplicity.Valentine accepted the Old Testament, but only in the same light as he regarded the great works of the heathen writers to be deserving of regard.473Both contained good, noble examples, pure teaching; but in both also was the element of discord, contradictory teaching, and bad example. Ptolemy, the Valentinian who least sacrificed the moral to the theosophic element, scarcely dealt with the Old Testament differently from St. Paul. He did not indeed regard the Old Testament as the work of the Supreme God; the Mosaic legislation seemed to him to be the work of an inferior being, because, as he said, it contained too many imperfections to be the revelation of the Highest God, and too many excellences to be attributed to an evil spirit. But, like the Apostle of the Gentiles, he saw in the Mosaic ceremonies only symbols of spiritual truth, and, like him, he thought that the symbol was no longer necessary when the idea it revealed was manifested in all its clearness. Therefore, when the ideas these symbols veiled had reached and illumined men's minds, the necessity for them—husks to the idea, letters giving meaning to the thought—was at an end.Like St. Paul, therefore, he treated the Old Testament as a preparation for the New one, but as nothing more. We ascertain Ptolemy's views from a letter of his to[pg 282]Flora, a Catholic lady whom he desired to convert to Valentinianism.474In this letter he laboured to show that the God of this world (the Demiurge) was not the Supreme God, and that the Old Testament Scriptures were the revelation of the Demiurge, and not of the highest God. To prove the first point, Ptolemy appealed to apostolic tradition—no doubt to Pauline teaching—which had come down to him, and to the words of the Saviour, by which, he admits, all doctrine must be settled. In this letter he quotes largely from St. Paul's Epistles, and from the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. John.Like Marcion, Ptolemy insisted that the Demiurge, the God of this world, was also the God who revealed himself in the Old Testament, and that to this God belonged justice, wrath and punishment; whereas to the Supreme Deity was attributed free forgiveness, absolute goodness. The Saviour abolished the Law, therefore he abolished all the system of punishment for sin, that the reign of free grace might prevail.According to Ptolemy, therefore, retributive justice exercised by the State was irreconcilable with the nature of the Supreme God, and the State, accordingly, was under the dominion of the Demiurge.To the revelation of the old Law belonged ordinances of ceremonial and of seasons. These also are done away by Christ, who leads from the bondage of ceremonial to spiritual religion.Another Valentinian of note was Heracleon, who wrote a Commentary on the Gospel of St. John, of which considerable fragments have been preserved by Origen; and perhaps, also, a Commentary on the Gospel of St. Luke. Of the latter, only a single fragment, the exposition[pg 283]of Luke xii. 8, has been preserved by Clement of Alexandria.475Heracleon was a man of deep spiritual piety, and with a clear understanding. He held Scripture in profound reverence, and derived his Valentinian doctrines from it. So true is the saying:“Hic liber est in quo quærit sua dogmata quisque,Invenit pariter dogmata quisque sua.”His interpretation of the narrative of the interview of the Saviour with the woman of Samaria will illustrate his method of dealing with the sacred text.Heracleon saw in the woman of Samaria a type of all spiritual natures attracted by that which is heavenly, godlike; and the history represents the dealings of the Supreme God through Christ with these spiritual natures (πνευματικοί).For him, therefore, the words of the woman have a double meaning: that which lies on the surface of the sacred record, with the intent and purpose which the woman herself gave to them; and that which lay beneath the letter, and which was mystically signified.“The water which our Saviour gives,”says he,“is his spirit and power. His gifts and grace are what can never be taken away, never exhausted, can never fail to those who have received them. They who have received what has been richly bestowed on them from above, communicate again of the overflowing fulness which they enjoy to the life of others.”But the woman asks,“Give me this water, that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw”—hither—that is, to Jacob's well, the Mosaic Law from which hitherto she had drunk, and which could not quench her thirst, satisfy her aspirations.“She left her water-pot behind[pg 284]her”when she went to announce to others that she had found the well of eternal life. That is, she left the vessel, the capacity for receiving the Law, for she had now a spiritual vessel which could hold the spiritual water the Saviour gave.It will be seen that Valentinianism, like Marcionism, was an exaggerated Paulinism, infected with Gnosticism, clearly antinomian. Though the Valentinians are not accused of licentiousness, their ethical system was plainly immoral, for it completely emancipated the Christian from every restraint, and the true Christian was he who lived by faith only. He had passed by union with Christ from the dominion of the God of this World, a dominion in which were punishments for wrong-doing, into the realm of Grace, of sublime indifference to right and wrong, to a region in which no acts were sinful, no punishments were dealt out.If Valentinianism did not degenerate into the frantic licentiousness of the earlier Pauline heretics, it was because the doctrine of Valentine was an intellectual, theosophical system, quite above the comprehension of vulgar minds, and therefore only embraced by exalted mystics and cold philosophers.The Valentinians were not accused of mutilating the Scriptures, but of evaporating their significance.“Marcion,”says Tertullian,“knife in hand, has cut the Scriptures to pieces, to give support to his system; Valentine has the appearance of sparing them, and of trying rather to accommodate his errors to them, than of accommodating them to his errors. Nevertheless, he has curtailed, interpolated more than did Marcion, by taking from the words their force and natural value, to give them forced significations.”476The Pauline filiation of the sect can hardly be mistaken.[pg 285]The relation of Valentine's ideas to those of Marcion, and those of Marcion to the doctrines of St. Paul, are fundamental. But, moreover, they claimed a filiation more obvious than that of ideas—they asserted that they derived their doctrines from Theodas, disciple of the Apostle of the Gentiles.477The great importance they attributed to the Epistles of St. Paul is another evidence of their belonging to the anti-judaizing family of heretics, if another proof be needed.The Valentinians possessed a number of apocryphal works.“Their number is infinite,”says Irenaeus.478But this probably applies not to the first Valentinians, but to the Valentinian sects, among whom apocryphal works did abound. Certain it is, that in all the extracts made from the writings of Valentine, Ptolemy and Heracleon, by Origen, Epiphanius, Tertullian, &c., though they abound in quotations from St. Paul's Epistles and from the Canonical Gospels, there are none from any other source.Nevertheless, Irenaeus attributes to them possession of a“Gospel of Truth”(Evangelium Veritatis).“This Scripture,”says he,“does not in any point agree with our four Canonical Gospels.”479To this also, perhaps, Tertullian refers, when he says that the Valentinians possessed“their own Gospel in addition to ours.”480Epiphanius, however, makes no mention of this Gospel; he knew the writings of the Valentinians well, and has inserted extracts in his work on heresies.[pg 286]III. The Gospel Of Eve.The immoral tendency of Valentinianism broke out in coarse, flagrant licentiousness as soon as the doctrines of the sect had soaked down out of the stratum of educated men to the ranks of the undisciplined and vulgar.Valentinianism assumed two forms, broke into two sects,—the Marcosians and the Ophites.Mark, who lived in the latter half of the second century, came probably from Palestine, as we may gather from his frequent use of forms from the Aramaean liturgy. But he did not bring with him any of the Judaizing spirit, none of the grave reverence for the moral law, and decency of the Nazarene, Ebionite and kindred sects sprung from the ruined Church of the Hebrews.He was followed by trains of women whom he corrupted, and converted into prophetesses. His custom was, in an assembly to extend a chalice to a woman saying to her,“The grace of God, which excels all, and which the mind cannot conceive or explain, fill all your inner man, and increase his knowledge in you, dropping the grain of mustard-seed into good ground.”481A scene like a Methodist revival followed. The woman was urged to speak in prophecy; she hesitated, declared her inability; warm, passionate appeals followed closely one on another, couched in equivocal language, exciting the[pg 287]religious and natural passions simultaneously. The end was a convulsive fit of incoherent utterings, and the curtain fell on the rapturous embraces of the prophet and his spiritual bride.Mark possessed a Gospel, and“an infinite number of apocryphal Scriptures,”says Irenaeus. The Gospel contained a falsified life of Christ. One of the stories from it he quotes. When Jesus was a boy, he was learning letters. The master said,“Say Alpha.”Jesus repeated after him,“Alpha.”Then the master said,“Say Beta.”But Jesus answered,“Nay, I will not say Beta till you have explained to me the meaning of Alpha.”482The Marcosians made much of the hidden mysteries of the letters of the alphabet, showing that Mark had brought with him from Palestine something akin to the Cabbalism of the Jewish rabbis.This story is found in the apocryphal Gospel of St. Thomas. It runs somewhat differently in the different versions of that Gospel, and is repeated twice in each with slight variations.In the Syriac:“Zacchaeus the teacher said to Joseph, I will teach the boy Jesus whatever is proper for him to learn. And he made him go to school. And he, going in, was silent. But Zacchaeus the scribe began to tell him (the letters) from Alaph, and was repeating to him many times the whole alphabet. And he says to him that he should answer and say after him; but he was silent. Then the scribe became angry, and struck him with his hand upon his head. And Jesus said, A smith's anvil, being beaten, can (not) learn, and it has no feeling; but I am able to say those things, recited by you, with knowledge and understanding (unbeaten).”483[pg 288]In the Greek:“Zacchaeus said to Joseph ... Give thy son to me, that he may learn letters, and with his letters I will teach him some knowledge, and chiefly this, to salute all the elders, and to venerate them as grandfathers and fathers, and to love those of his own age. And he told him all the letters from Alpha to Omega. Then, looking at the teacher Zacchaeus, he said to him, Thou that knowest not Alpha naturally, how canst thou teach Beta to others? Thou hypocrite! if thou knowest, teach Alpha first, and then we shall believe thee concerning Beta.”484Or, according to another Greek version, after Jesus has been delivered over by Joseph to Zacchaeus, the preceptor“—wrote the alphabet in Hebrew, and said to him, Alpha. And the child said, Alpha. And the teacher said again, Alpha. And the child said the same. Then again a third time the teacher said, Alpha. Then Jesus, looking at the instructor, said, Thou knowest not Alpha; how wilt thou teach another the letter Beta? And the child, beginning at Alpha, said of himself the twenty-two letters. Then he said again, Hearken, teacher, to the arrangement of the first letter, and know how many accessories and lines it hath, and marks which are common, transverse and connected. And when Zacchaeus heard such accounts of one letter, he was amazed, and could not answer him.”485Another version of the same story is found in the Gospel of the pseudo-Matthew:“Joseph and Mary coaxing Jesus, led him to the school, that he might be taught his letters by the old man, Levi. When he entered he was silent; and the master, Levi, told one letter to Jesus, and beginning at the first, Aleph, said to[pg 289]him, Answer. But Jesus was silent, and answered nothing. Wherefore, the preceptor Levi, being angry, took a rod of a storax-tree, and smote him on the head. And Jesus said to the teacher Levi, Why dost thou smite me? Know in truth that he who is smitten teacheth him that smiteth, rather than is taught by him.... And Jesus added, and said to Levi, Every letter from Aleph to Tau is known by its order; thou, therefore, say first what is Tau, and I will tell thee what Aleph is. And he added, They who know not Aleph, how can they say Tau, ye hypocrites? First say what Aleph is, and I shall then believe you when you say Beth. And Jesus began to ask the names of the separate letters, and said, Let the teacher of the Law say what the first letter is, or why it hath many triangles, scalene, acute-angled, equilinear, curvi-linear,”&c.486At the root of Mark's teaching there seems to have been a sort of Pantheism. He taught that all had sprung from a great World-mother, partook of her soul and nature; but over against this female principle stood the Deity, the male element.Man represents the Deity, woman the world element; and it is only through the union of the divine and the material that the material can be quickened into spiritual life. In accordance with this theory, they had a ceremonial of what he called spiritual, but was eminently carnal, marriage, which is best left undescribed.Not widely removed from the Marcosians was the Valentinian sect of the Ophites. Valentinianism mingled with the floating superstition, the fragments of the wreck of Sabianism, which was to be found among the lower classes.The Ophites represented the Demiurge in the same way as did the Valentinians. They called the God of this world and of the Jews by the name of Jaldaboth.[pg 290]He was a limited being, imposing restraint on all his creatures; he exercised his power by imposing law. As long as his creatures obeyed law, they were subject to his dominion. But above Jaldaboth in the sublime region without limit reigns the Supreme God. When Adam broke the Law of the World-God, he emancipated himself from his bondage, he passed out of his realm, he placed himself in relation to the Supreme God.The world is made by Jaldaboth, but in the world is infused a spark of soul, emanated from the highest God. This divine soul strives after emancipation from the bonds imposed by connection with matter, created by the God of this world. This world-soul under the form of a serpent urged Eve to emancipate herself from thraldom, and pass with Adam, by an act of transgression, into the glorious liberty of the sons of the Supreme God.The doctrine of the Ophites with respect to Christ was that of Valentine. Christ came to break the last chains of Law by which man was bound, and to translate him into the realm of grace where sin does not exist.The Ophites possessed a Gospel, called the“Gospel of Eve.”It contained, no doubt, an account of the Fall from their peculiar point of view. St. Epiphanius has preserved two passages from it. They are so extraordinary, and throw such a light on the doctrines of this Gospel, that I quote them. The first is:“I was planted on a lofty mountain, and lo! I beheld a man of great stature, and another who was mutilated. And then I heard a voice like unto thunder. And when I drew near, he spake with me after this wise: I am thou, and thou art I. And wheresoever thou art, there am I, and I am dispersed through all. And wheresoever thou willest, there[pg 291]canst thou gather me; but in gathering me, thou gatherest thyself.”487The meaning of this passage is not doubtful. It expresses the doctrine of absolute identity between Christ and the believer, the radiation of divine virtue through all souls, destroying their individuality, that all may be absorbed into Christ. Individualities emerge out of God, and through Christ are drawn back into God.The influence of St. Paul's ideas is again noticeable. We are not told that the perfect man who speaks with a voice of thunder, and who is placed in contrast with the mutilated man, is Christ, and that the latter is the Demiurge, but we can scarcely doubt it. It is greatly to be regretted that we have so little of this curious book preserved.488The second passage, with its signification, had better repose in a foot-note, and in Greek. It allows us to understand the expression of St. Ephraem,“They shamelessly boast of their Gospel of Eve.”489[pg 292]IV. The Gospel Of Perfection.The Gospel of Perfection was another work regarded as sacred by the Ophites. St. Epiphanius says:“Some of them (i.e.of the Gnostics) there are who vaunt the possession of a certain fictitious, far-fetched poem which they call the Gospel of Perfection, whereas it is not a Gospel, but the perfection of misery. For the bitterness of death is consummated in that production of the devil. Others without shame boast their Gospel of Eve.”St. Epiphanius calls this Gospel of Perfection a poem, ποιήμα. But M. Nicolas justly observes that the word ποιήμα is used here, not to describe the work as a poetical composition, but as a fiction. In a passage of Irenaeus,490of which only the Latin has been preserved, the Gospel of Judas is called“confictio,”and it is probable that the Greek word rendered by“confictio”was ποιήμα.491Baur thinks that the Gospel of Perfection was the same as the Gospel of Eve.492But this can hardly be. The words of St. Epiphanius plainly distinguish them:“Some vaunt the Gospel of Perfection ... others boast ... the Gospel of Eve;”and elsewhere he speaks of their books in the plural.493[pg 293]V. The Gospel Of St. Philip.This Gospel belonged to the same category as those of Perfection and of Eve, and belonged, if not to the Ophites, to an analogous sect, perhaps that of the Prodicians. St. Philip passed, in the early ages of Christianity, as having been, like St. Paul, an apostle of the Gentiles,494and perhaps as having agreed with his views on the Law and evangelical liberty. But tradition had confounded together Philip the apostle and Philip the deacon of Caesarea, who, after having been a member of the Hellenist Church at Jerusalem, and having been driven thence after the martyrdom of Stephen, was the first to carry the Gospel beyond the family of Israel, and to convert the heathen to Christ.495His zeal and success caused him to be called an Evangelist.496In the second century it was supposed that an Evangelist meant one who had written a Gospel. And as no Gospel bearing his name existed, one was composed for him and attributed to him or to the apostle—they were not distinguished.St. Epiphanius has preserved one passage from it:“The Lord has revealed to me the words to be spoken by the soul when it ascends into heaven, and how it has to answer each of the celestial powers. The soul must say, I have known myself, and I have gathered myself from all parts. I have not borne children to Archon (the prince of[pg 294]this world); but I have plucked up his roots, and I have gathered his dispersed members. I have learned who thou art; for I am, saith the soul, of the number of the celestial ones. But if it is proved that the soul has borne a son, she must return downwards, till she has recovered her children, and has absorbed them into herself.”497It is not altogether easy to catch the meaning of this singular passage, but it apparently has this signification. The soul trammelled with the chains of matter, created by the Archon, the Creator of the world, has to emancipate itself from all material concerns. Each thought, interest, passion, excited by anything in the world, is a child borne by the soul to Archon, to which the soul has contributed animation, the world, form. The great work of life is the disengagement of the soul from all concern in the affairs of the world, in the requirements of the body. When the soul has reached the most exalted perfection, it is cold, passionless, indifferent; then it comes before the Supreme God, passing through the spheres guarded by attendant aeons or angels, and to each it protests its disengagement. But should any thought or care for mundane matters be found lurking in the recesses of the soul, it has to descend again, and remain in exile till it has re-absorbed all the life it gave, the interest it felt, in such concerns, and then again make its essay to reach God.The conception of Virtues guarding the concentric spheres surrounding the Most High is found among the Jews. When Moses went into the presence of God to receive the tables of stone, he met first the angel Kemuel, chief of the angels of destruction, who would have slain him, but Moses pronounced the incommunicable Name, and passed through. Then he came to the sphere governed by the angel Hadarniel, and by virtue[pg 295]of the Name passed through. Next he came to the sphere over which presided the angel Sandalfon, and penetrated by means of the same Name. Next he traversed the river of flame, called Riggon, and stood before the throne.498St. Paul held the popular Rabbinic notion of the spheres surrounding the throne of God, for he speaks of having been caught up into the third heaven.499In the apocryphal Ascension of Isaiah there are seven heavens that the prophet traverses.The Rabbinic ideas on the spheres were taken probably from the Chaldees, and from the same source, perhaps, sprang the conception of the soul making her ascension through the angel-guarded spheres, which we find in the fragment of the Gospel of St. Philip.Unfortunately, we have not sufficient of the early literature of the Chaldees and Assyrians to be able to say for certain that it was so. But a very curious sacred poem has been preserved on the terra-cotta tablets of the library of Assurbani-Pal, which exhibits a similar belief as prevalent anciently in Assyria.This poem represents the descent of Istar into the Immutable Land, the nether world, divided into seven circles. The heavenly world of the Chaldees was also divided into seven circles, each ruled by a planet. The poem therefore exhibits a descent instead of an ascent. But there is little reason to doubt that the passage in each case would have been analogous. We have no ancient Assyrian account of an ascent; we must therefore content ourselves with what we have.Istar descends into the lower region, and as she traverses each circle is despoiled of one of her coverings[pg 296]worn in the region above, till she stands naked before Belith, the Queen of the Land of Death.i.“At the first gate, as I made her enter, I despoiled her; I took the crown from off her head.“‘Hold, gatekeeper! Thou hast taken the crown from off my head.’“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’ii.“At the second gate I made her enter; I despoiled her, and took from off her the earrings from her ears.“‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of the earrings from my ears.’“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’iii.“At the third gate I made her enter; I despoiled her of the precious jewels on her neck.“‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of the jewels of my neck.’“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’iv.“At the fourth gate I made her enter; I despoiled her of the brooch of jewels upon her breast.“‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of the brooch of jewels upon my breast.’“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’V.“At the fifth gate I made her enter; I despoiled her of the belt of jewels about her waist.“‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of the belt of jewels about my waist.’“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’vi.“At the sixth gate I made her enter; I despoiled her of her armlets and bracelets.“‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of my armlets and bracelets.’[pg 297]“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’vii.“At the seventh gate I made her enter; I despoiled her of her skirt.“‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of my skirt.’“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this degree of circles.’”500We have something very similar in the judgment of souls in the Egyptian Ritual of the Dead. From Chaldaea or from Egypt the Gnostics who used the Gospel of St. Philip drew their doctrine of the soul traversing several circles, and arrested by an angel at the gate of each.The soul, a divine element, is in the earth combined with the body, a work of the Archon. But her aspirations are for that which is above; she strives to“extirpate his roots.”All her“scattered members,”her thoughts, wishes, impulses, are gathered into one up-tapering flame. Then only does she“know (God) for what He is,”for she has learned the nature of God by introspection.Such, if I mistake not, is the meaning of the passage quoted by St. Epiphanius. The sect which used such a Gospel must have been mystical and ascetic, given to contemplation, and avoiding the indulgence of their animal appetites. It was that, probably, of Prodicus, strung on the same Pauline thread as the heresies of Marcion, Nicolas, Valentine, Marcus, the Ophites, Carpocratians and Cainites.Prodicus, on the strength of St. Paul's saying that all Christians are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, maintained the sovereignty of every man placed under[pg 298]the Gospel. But a king is above law, is not bound by law. Therefore the Christian is under no bondage of Law, moral or ceremonial. He is lord of the Sabbath, above all ordinances. Prodicus made the whole worship of God to consist in the inner contemplation of the essence of God.External worship was not required of the Christian; that had been imposed by the Demiurge on the Jews and all under his bondage, till the time of the fulness of the Gospel had come.501The Prodicians did not constitute an important, widely-extended sect, and were confounded by many of the early Fathers with other Pauline-Gnostic sects.[pg 299]

II. The Gospel Of Truth.Valentine, by birth an Egyptian, probably of Jewish descent, it may be presumed received his education at Alexandria. From this city he travelled to Rome (circ. A.D. 140); in both places he preached the Catholic faith, and then retired to Cyprus.472A miserable bigotry which refused to see in a heretic any motives but those which are evil, declared that in disgust at not obtaining a bishopric which he coveted, and to which a confessor was preferred, Valentine lapsed into heresy. We need no such explanation of the cause of his secession from orthodoxy. He was a man of an active mind and ardent zeal. Christian doctrine was then a system of facts; theology was as yet unborn. What philosophic truths lay at the foundation of Christian belief was unsuspected. Valentine could not thus rest. He strove to break through the hard facts to the principles on which they reposed. He was a pioneer in Christian theology.And for his venturous essay he was well qualified. His studies at Alexandria had brought him in contact with Philonism and with Platonism. He obtained at Cyprus an acquaintance with the doctrines of Basilides. His mind caught fire, his ideas expanded. The Gnostic seemed to him to open gleams of light through the facts of the faith he had hitherto professed with dull, unintelligent submission; and he placed himself under the inspiration and instruction of Basilides.[pg 279]But he did not follow him blindly. The speculations of the Gnostic kindled a train of ideas which were peculiarly Valentine's own.The age was not one to listen patiently to his theorizing. Men were called on to bear testimony by their lives to facts. They could endure the rack, the scourge, the thumbscrew, the iron rake, for facts, not for ideas. That Jesus had lived and died and mounted to heaven, was enough for their simple minds. They cared nothing, they made no effort to understand, what were the causes of evil, what its relation to matter.Consequently Valentine met with cold indifference, then with hot abhorrence. He was excommunicated. Separation embittered him. His respect for orthodoxy was gone; its hold upon him was lost; and he allowed himself to drift in the wide sea of theosophic speculation wherever his ideas carried him.Valentine taught that in the Godhead, exerting creative power were manifest two motions—a positive, the evolving, creative, life-giving element; and the negative, which determined, shaped and localized the creative force. From the positive force came life, from the negative the direction life takes in its manifestation.The world is the revelation of the divine ideas, gradually unfolding themselves, and Christ and redemption are the perfection and end of creation. Through creation the idea goes forth from God; through Christ the idea perfected returns to the bosom of God. Redemption is the recoil wave of creation, the echo of the fiat returning to the Creator's ear.The manifestation of the ideas of God is in unity; but in opposition to unity exists anarchy; in antagonism with creation emerges the principle of destruction. The representative of destruction, disunion, chaos, is Satan. The work of creation is infinite differentiation in perfect[pg 280]harmony. But in the midst of this emerges discord, an element of opposition which seeks to ruin the concord in the manifestation of the divine ideas. Therefore redemption is necessary, and Christ is the medium of redemption, which consists in the restoration to harmony and unity of that which by the fraud of Satan is thrown into disorder and antagonism.But how comes it that in creation there should be a disturbing element? That element must issue in some manner from the Creator; it must arise from some defect in Him. Therefore, Valentinian concluded, the God who created the world and gave source to the being of Satan cannot have been the supreme, all-good, perfect God.But if redemption be the perfecting of man, it must be the work of the only perfect God, who thereby counteracts the evil that has sprung up through the imperfection of the Demiurge.Therefore Jesus Christ is an emanation from the Supreme God, destroying the ill effects produced in the world by the faulty nature of the Creator, undoing the discord and restoring all to harmony.Jesus was formed by the Demiurge of a wondrously constituted ethereal body, visible to the outward sense. This Jesus entered the world through man, as a sunbeam enters a chamber through the window. The Demiurge created Jesus to redeem the people from the disorganizing, destructive effects of Satan, to be their Messiah.But the Supreme God had alone power perfectly to accomplish this work; therefore at the baptism of Christ, the Saviour (Soter) descended on him, consecrating him to be the perfect Redeemer of mankind, conveying to him a mission and power which the Demiurge could not have given.[pg 281]In all this we see the influence of Marcion's ideas.We need not follow out this fundamental principle of his theosophy into all its fantastic formularies. If Valentine was the precursor of Hegel in the enunciation of the universal antinomy, he was like Hegel also in involving his system in a cloud of incomprehensible terminology, in producing bewilderment where he sought simplicity.Valentine accepted the Old Testament, but only in the same light as he regarded the great works of the heathen writers to be deserving of regard.473Both contained good, noble examples, pure teaching; but in both also was the element of discord, contradictory teaching, and bad example. Ptolemy, the Valentinian who least sacrificed the moral to the theosophic element, scarcely dealt with the Old Testament differently from St. Paul. He did not indeed regard the Old Testament as the work of the Supreme God; the Mosaic legislation seemed to him to be the work of an inferior being, because, as he said, it contained too many imperfections to be the revelation of the Highest God, and too many excellences to be attributed to an evil spirit. But, like the Apostle of the Gentiles, he saw in the Mosaic ceremonies only symbols of spiritual truth, and, like him, he thought that the symbol was no longer necessary when the idea it revealed was manifested in all its clearness. Therefore, when the ideas these symbols veiled had reached and illumined men's minds, the necessity for them—husks to the idea, letters giving meaning to the thought—was at an end.Like St. Paul, therefore, he treated the Old Testament as a preparation for the New one, but as nothing more. We ascertain Ptolemy's views from a letter of his to[pg 282]Flora, a Catholic lady whom he desired to convert to Valentinianism.474In this letter he laboured to show that the God of this world (the Demiurge) was not the Supreme God, and that the Old Testament Scriptures were the revelation of the Demiurge, and not of the highest God. To prove the first point, Ptolemy appealed to apostolic tradition—no doubt to Pauline teaching—which had come down to him, and to the words of the Saviour, by which, he admits, all doctrine must be settled. In this letter he quotes largely from St. Paul's Epistles, and from the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. John.Like Marcion, Ptolemy insisted that the Demiurge, the God of this world, was also the God who revealed himself in the Old Testament, and that to this God belonged justice, wrath and punishment; whereas to the Supreme Deity was attributed free forgiveness, absolute goodness. The Saviour abolished the Law, therefore he abolished all the system of punishment for sin, that the reign of free grace might prevail.According to Ptolemy, therefore, retributive justice exercised by the State was irreconcilable with the nature of the Supreme God, and the State, accordingly, was under the dominion of the Demiurge.To the revelation of the old Law belonged ordinances of ceremonial and of seasons. These also are done away by Christ, who leads from the bondage of ceremonial to spiritual religion.Another Valentinian of note was Heracleon, who wrote a Commentary on the Gospel of St. John, of which considerable fragments have been preserved by Origen; and perhaps, also, a Commentary on the Gospel of St. Luke. Of the latter, only a single fragment, the exposition[pg 283]of Luke xii. 8, has been preserved by Clement of Alexandria.475Heracleon was a man of deep spiritual piety, and with a clear understanding. He held Scripture in profound reverence, and derived his Valentinian doctrines from it. So true is the saying:“Hic liber est in quo quærit sua dogmata quisque,Invenit pariter dogmata quisque sua.”His interpretation of the narrative of the interview of the Saviour with the woman of Samaria will illustrate his method of dealing with the sacred text.Heracleon saw in the woman of Samaria a type of all spiritual natures attracted by that which is heavenly, godlike; and the history represents the dealings of the Supreme God through Christ with these spiritual natures (πνευματικοί).For him, therefore, the words of the woman have a double meaning: that which lies on the surface of the sacred record, with the intent and purpose which the woman herself gave to them; and that which lay beneath the letter, and which was mystically signified.“The water which our Saviour gives,”says he,“is his spirit and power. His gifts and grace are what can never be taken away, never exhausted, can never fail to those who have received them. They who have received what has been richly bestowed on them from above, communicate again of the overflowing fulness which they enjoy to the life of others.”But the woman asks,“Give me this water, that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw”—hither—that is, to Jacob's well, the Mosaic Law from which hitherto she had drunk, and which could not quench her thirst, satisfy her aspirations.“She left her water-pot behind[pg 284]her”when she went to announce to others that she had found the well of eternal life. That is, she left the vessel, the capacity for receiving the Law, for she had now a spiritual vessel which could hold the spiritual water the Saviour gave.It will be seen that Valentinianism, like Marcionism, was an exaggerated Paulinism, infected with Gnosticism, clearly antinomian. Though the Valentinians are not accused of licentiousness, their ethical system was plainly immoral, for it completely emancipated the Christian from every restraint, and the true Christian was he who lived by faith only. He had passed by union with Christ from the dominion of the God of this World, a dominion in which were punishments for wrong-doing, into the realm of Grace, of sublime indifference to right and wrong, to a region in which no acts were sinful, no punishments were dealt out.If Valentinianism did not degenerate into the frantic licentiousness of the earlier Pauline heretics, it was because the doctrine of Valentine was an intellectual, theosophical system, quite above the comprehension of vulgar minds, and therefore only embraced by exalted mystics and cold philosophers.The Valentinians were not accused of mutilating the Scriptures, but of evaporating their significance.“Marcion,”says Tertullian,“knife in hand, has cut the Scriptures to pieces, to give support to his system; Valentine has the appearance of sparing them, and of trying rather to accommodate his errors to them, than of accommodating them to his errors. Nevertheless, he has curtailed, interpolated more than did Marcion, by taking from the words their force and natural value, to give them forced significations.”476The Pauline filiation of the sect can hardly be mistaken.[pg 285]The relation of Valentine's ideas to those of Marcion, and those of Marcion to the doctrines of St. Paul, are fundamental. But, moreover, they claimed a filiation more obvious than that of ideas—they asserted that they derived their doctrines from Theodas, disciple of the Apostle of the Gentiles.477The great importance they attributed to the Epistles of St. Paul is another evidence of their belonging to the anti-judaizing family of heretics, if another proof be needed.The Valentinians possessed a number of apocryphal works.“Their number is infinite,”says Irenaeus.478But this probably applies not to the first Valentinians, but to the Valentinian sects, among whom apocryphal works did abound. Certain it is, that in all the extracts made from the writings of Valentine, Ptolemy and Heracleon, by Origen, Epiphanius, Tertullian, &c., though they abound in quotations from St. Paul's Epistles and from the Canonical Gospels, there are none from any other source.Nevertheless, Irenaeus attributes to them possession of a“Gospel of Truth”(Evangelium Veritatis).“This Scripture,”says he,“does not in any point agree with our four Canonical Gospels.”479To this also, perhaps, Tertullian refers, when he says that the Valentinians possessed“their own Gospel in addition to ours.”480Epiphanius, however, makes no mention of this Gospel; he knew the writings of the Valentinians well, and has inserted extracts in his work on heresies.

Valentine, by birth an Egyptian, probably of Jewish descent, it may be presumed received his education at Alexandria. From this city he travelled to Rome (circ. A.D. 140); in both places he preached the Catholic faith, and then retired to Cyprus.472A miserable bigotry which refused to see in a heretic any motives but those which are evil, declared that in disgust at not obtaining a bishopric which he coveted, and to which a confessor was preferred, Valentine lapsed into heresy. We need no such explanation of the cause of his secession from orthodoxy. He was a man of an active mind and ardent zeal. Christian doctrine was then a system of facts; theology was as yet unborn. What philosophic truths lay at the foundation of Christian belief was unsuspected. Valentine could not thus rest. He strove to break through the hard facts to the principles on which they reposed. He was a pioneer in Christian theology.

And for his venturous essay he was well qualified. His studies at Alexandria had brought him in contact with Philonism and with Platonism. He obtained at Cyprus an acquaintance with the doctrines of Basilides. His mind caught fire, his ideas expanded. The Gnostic seemed to him to open gleams of light through the facts of the faith he had hitherto professed with dull, unintelligent submission; and he placed himself under the inspiration and instruction of Basilides.

But he did not follow him blindly. The speculations of the Gnostic kindled a train of ideas which were peculiarly Valentine's own.

The age was not one to listen patiently to his theorizing. Men were called on to bear testimony by their lives to facts. They could endure the rack, the scourge, the thumbscrew, the iron rake, for facts, not for ideas. That Jesus had lived and died and mounted to heaven, was enough for their simple minds. They cared nothing, they made no effort to understand, what were the causes of evil, what its relation to matter.

Consequently Valentine met with cold indifference, then with hot abhorrence. He was excommunicated. Separation embittered him. His respect for orthodoxy was gone; its hold upon him was lost; and he allowed himself to drift in the wide sea of theosophic speculation wherever his ideas carried him.

Valentine taught that in the Godhead, exerting creative power were manifest two motions—a positive, the evolving, creative, life-giving element; and the negative, which determined, shaped and localized the creative force. From the positive force came life, from the negative the direction life takes in its manifestation.

The world is the revelation of the divine ideas, gradually unfolding themselves, and Christ and redemption are the perfection and end of creation. Through creation the idea goes forth from God; through Christ the idea perfected returns to the bosom of God. Redemption is the recoil wave of creation, the echo of the fiat returning to the Creator's ear.

The manifestation of the ideas of God is in unity; but in opposition to unity exists anarchy; in antagonism with creation emerges the principle of destruction. The representative of destruction, disunion, chaos, is Satan. The work of creation is infinite differentiation in perfect[pg 280]harmony. But in the midst of this emerges discord, an element of opposition which seeks to ruin the concord in the manifestation of the divine ideas. Therefore redemption is necessary, and Christ is the medium of redemption, which consists in the restoration to harmony and unity of that which by the fraud of Satan is thrown into disorder and antagonism.

But how comes it that in creation there should be a disturbing element? That element must issue in some manner from the Creator; it must arise from some defect in Him. Therefore, Valentinian concluded, the God who created the world and gave source to the being of Satan cannot have been the supreme, all-good, perfect God.

But if redemption be the perfecting of man, it must be the work of the only perfect God, who thereby counteracts the evil that has sprung up through the imperfection of the Demiurge.

Therefore Jesus Christ is an emanation from the Supreme God, destroying the ill effects produced in the world by the faulty nature of the Creator, undoing the discord and restoring all to harmony.

Jesus was formed by the Demiurge of a wondrously constituted ethereal body, visible to the outward sense. This Jesus entered the world through man, as a sunbeam enters a chamber through the window. The Demiurge created Jesus to redeem the people from the disorganizing, destructive effects of Satan, to be their Messiah.

But the Supreme God had alone power perfectly to accomplish this work; therefore at the baptism of Christ, the Saviour (Soter) descended on him, consecrating him to be the perfect Redeemer of mankind, conveying to him a mission and power which the Demiurge could not have given.

In all this we see the influence of Marcion's ideas.

We need not follow out this fundamental principle of his theosophy into all its fantastic formularies. If Valentine was the precursor of Hegel in the enunciation of the universal antinomy, he was like Hegel also in involving his system in a cloud of incomprehensible terminology, in producing bewilderment where he sought simplicity.

Valentine accepted the Old Testament, but only in the same light as he regarded the great works of the heathen writers to be deserving of regard.473Both contained good, noble examples, pure teaching; but in both also was the element of discord, contradictory teaching, and bad example. Ptolemy, the Valentinian who least sacrificed the moral to the theosophic element, scarcely dealt with the Old Testament differently from St. Paul. He did not indeed regard the Old Testament as the work of the Supreme God; the Mosaic legislation seemed to him to be the work of an inferior being, because, as he said, it contained too many imperfections to be the revelation of the Highest God, and too many excellences to be attributed to an evil spirit. But, like the Apostle of the Gentiles, he saw in the Mosaic ceremonies only symbols of spiritual truth, and, like him, he thought that the symbol was no longer necessary when the idea it revealed was manifested in all its clearness. Therefore, when the ideas these symbols veiled had reached and illumined men's minds, the necessity for them—husks to the idea, letters giving meaning to the thought—was at an end.

Like St. Paul, therefore, he treated the Old Testament as a preparation for the New one, but as nothing more. We ascertain Ptolemy's views from a letter of his to[pg 282]Flora, a Catholic lady whom he desired to convert to Valentinianism.474

In this letter he laboured to show that the God of this world (the Demiurge) was not the Supreme God, and that the Old Testament Scriptures were the revelation of the Demiurge, and not of the highest God. To prove the first point, Ptolemy appealed to apostolic tradition—no doubt to Pauline teaching—which had come down to him, and to the words of the Saviour, by which, he admits, all doctrine must be settled. In this letter he quotes largely from St. Paul's Epistles, and from the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. John.

Like Marcion, Ptolemy insisted that the Demiurge, the God of this world, was also the God who revealed himself in the Old Testament, and that to this God belonged justice, wrath and punishment; whereas to the Supreme Deity was attributed free forgiveness, absolute goodness. The Saviour abolished the Law, therefore he abolished all the system of punishment for sin, that the reign of free grace might prevail.

According to Ptolemy, therefore, retributive justice exercised by the State was irreconcilable with the nature of the Supreme God, and the State, accordingly, was under the dominion of the Demiurge.

To the revelation of the old Law belonged ordinances of ceremonial and of seasons. These also are done away by Christ, who leads from the bondage of ceremonial to spiritual religion.

Another Valentinian of note was Heracleon, who wrote a Commentary on the Gospel of St. John, of which considerable fragments have been preserved by Origen; and perhaps, also, a Commentary on the Gospel of St. Luke. Of the latter, only a single fragment, the exposition[pg 283]of Luke xii. 8, has been preserved by Clement of Alexandria.475

Heracleon was a man of deep spiritual piety, and with a clear understanding. He held Scripture in profound reverence, and derived his Valentinian doctrines from it. So true is the saying:

“Hic liber est in quo quærit sua dogmata quisque,Invenit pariter dogmata quisque sua.”

“Hic liber est in quo quærit sua dogmata quisque,Invenit pariter dogmata quisque sua.”

“Hic liber est in quo quærit sua dogmata quisque,

Invenit pariter dogmata quisque sua.”

His interpretation of the narrative of the interview of the Saviour with the woman of Samaria will illustrate his method of dealing with the sacred text.

Heracleon saw in the woman of Samaria a type of all spiritual natures attracted by that which is heavenly, godlike; and the history represents the dealings of the Supreme God through Christ with these spiritual natures (πνευματικοί).

For him, therefore, the words of the woman have a double meaning: that which lies on the surface of the sacred record, with the intent and purpose which the woman herself gave to them; and that which lay beneath the letter, and which was mystically signified.“The water which our Saviour gives,”says he,“is his spirit and power. His gifts and grace are what can never be taken away, never exhausted, can never fail to those who have received them. They who have received what has been richly bestowed on them from above, communicate again of the overflowing fulness which they enjoy to the life of others.”

But the woman asks,“Give me this water, that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw”—hither—that is, to Jacob's well, the Mosaic Law from which hitherto she had drunk, and which could not quench her thirst, satisfy her aspirations.“She left her water-pot behind[pg 284]her”when she went to announce to others that she had found the well of eternal life. That is, she left the vessel, the capacity for receiving the Law, for she had now a spiritual vessel which could hold the spiritual water the Saviour gave.

It will be seen that Valentinianism, like Marcionism, was an exaggerated Paulinism, infected with Gnosticism, clearly antinomian. Though the Valentinians are not accused of licentiousness, their ethical system was plainly immoral, for it completely emancipated the Christian from every restraint, and the true Christian was he who lived by faith only. He had passed by union with Christ from the dominion of the God of this World, a dominion in which were punishments for wrong-doing, into the realm of Grace, of sublime indifference to right and wrong, to a region in which no acts were sinful, no punishments were dealt out.

If Valentinianism did not degenerate into the frantic licentiousness of the earlier Pauline heretics, it was because the doctrine of Valentine was an intellectual, theosophical system, quite above the comprehension of vulgar minds, and therefore only embraced by exalted mystics and cold philosophers.

The Valentinians were not accused of mutilating the Scriptures, but of evaporating their significance.“Marcion,”says Tertullian,“knife in hand, has cut the Scriptures to pieces, to give support to his system; Valentine has the appearance of sparing them, and of trying rather to accommodate his errors to them, than of accommodating them to his errors. Nevertheless, he has curtailed, interpolated more than did Marcion, by taking from the words their force and natural value, to give them forced significations.”476

The Pauline filiation of the sect can hardly be mistaken.[pg 285]The relation of Valentine's ideas to those of Marcion, and those of Marcion to the doctrines of St. Paul, are fundamental. But, moreover, they claimed a filiation more obvious than that of ideas—they asserted that they derived their doctrines from Theodas, disciple of the Apostle of the Gentiles.477The great importance they attributed to the Epistles of St. Paul is another evidence of their belonging to the anti-judaizing family of heretics, if another proof be needed.

The Valentinians possessed a number of apocryphal works.“Their number is infinite,”says Irenaeus.478But this probably applies not to the first Valentinians, but to the Valentinian sects, among whom apocryphal works did abound. Certain it is, that in all the extracts made from the writings of Valentine, Ptolemy and Heracleon, by Origen, Epiphanius, Tertullian, &c., though they abound in quotations from St. Paul's Epistles and from the Canonical Gospels, there are none from any other source.

Nevertheless, Irenaeus attributes to them possession of a“Gospel of Truth”(Evangelium Veritatis).“This Scripture,”says he,“does not in any point agree with our four Canonical Gospels.”479To this also, perhaps, Tertullian refers, when he says that the Valentinians possessed“their own Gospel in addition to ours.”480

Epiphanius, however, makes no mention of this Gospel; he knew the writings of the Valentinians well, and has inserted extracts in his work on heresies.

III. The Gospel Of Eve.The immoral tendency of Valentinianism broke out in coarse, flagrant licentiousness as soon as the doctrines of the sect had soaked down out of the stratum of educated men to the ranks of the undisciplined and vulgar.Valentinianism assumed two forms, broke into two sects,—the Marcosians and the Ophites.Mark, who lived in the latter half of the second century, came probably from Palestine, as we may gather from his frequent use of forms from the Aramaean liturgy. But he did not bring with him any of the Judaizing spirit, none of the grave reverence for the moral law, and decency of the Nazarene, Ebionite and kindred sects sprung from the ruined Church of the Hebrews.He was followed by trains of women whom he corrupted, and converted into prophetesses. His custom was, in an assembly to extend a chalice to a woman saying to her,“The grace of God, which excels all, and which the mind cannot conceive or explain, fill all your inner man, and increase his knowledge in you, dropping the grain of mustard-seed into good ground.”481A scene like a Methodist revival followed. The woman was urged to speak in prophecy; she hesitated, declared her inability; warm, passionate appeals followed closely one on another, couched in equivocal language, exciting the[pg 287]religious and natural passions simultaneously. The end was a convulsive fit of incoherent utterings, and the curtain fell on the rapturous embraces of the prophet and his spiritual bride.Mark possessed a Gospel, and“an infinite number of apocryphal Scriptures,”says Irenaeus. The Gospel contained a falsified life of Christ. One of the stories from it he quotes. When Jesus was a boy, he was learning letters. The master said,“Say Alpha.”Jesus repeated after him,“Alpha.”Then the master said,“Say Beta.”But Jesus answered,“Nay, I will not say Beta till you have explained to me the meaning of Alpha.”482The Marcosians made much of the hidden mysteries of the letters of the alphabet, showing that Mark had brought with him from Palestine something akin to the Cabbalism of the Jewish rabbis.This story is found in the apocryphal Gospel of St. Thomas. It runs somewhat differently in the different versions of that Gospel, and is repeated twice in each with slight variations.In the Syriac:“Zacchaeus the teacher said to Joseph, I will teach the boy Jesus whatever is proper for him to learn. And he made him go to school. And he, going in, was silent. But Zacchaeus the scribe began to tell him (the letters) from Alaph, and was repeating to him many times the whole alphabet. And he says to him that he should answer and say after him; but he was silent. Then the scribe became angry, and struck him with his hand upon his head. And Jesus said, A smith's anvil, being beaten, can (not) learn, and it has no feeling; but I am able to say those things, recited by you, with knowledge and understanding (unbeaten).”483[pg 288]In the Greek:“Zacchaeus said to Joseph ... Give thy son to me, that he may learn letters, and with his letters I will teach him some knowledge, and chiefly this, to salute all the elders, and to venerate them as grandfathers and fathers, and to love those of his own age. And he told him all the letters from Alpha to Omega. Then, looking at the teacher Zacchaeus, he said to him, Thou that knowest not Alpha naturally, how canst thou teach Beta to others? Thou hypocrite! if thou knowest, teach Alpha first, and then we shall believe thee concerning Beta.”484Or, according to another Greek version, after Jesus has been delivered over by Joseph to Zacchaeus, the preceptor“—wrote the alphabet in Hebrew, and said to him, Alpha. And the child said, Alpha. And the teacher said again, Alpha. And the child said the same. Then again a third time the teacher said, Alpha. Then Jesus, looking at the instructor, said, Thou knowest not Alpha; how wilt thou teach another the letter Beta? And the child, beginning at Alpha, said of himself the twenty-two letters. Then he said again, Hearken, teacher, to the arrangement of the first letter, and know how many accessories and lines it hath, and marks which are common, transverse and connected. And when Zacchaeus heard such accounts of one letter, he was amazed, and could not answer him.”485Another version of the same story is found in the Gospel of the pseudo-Matthew:“Joseph and Mary coaxing Jesus, led him to the school, that he might be taught his letters by the old man, Levi. When he entered he was silent; and the master, Levi, told one letter to Jesus, and beginning at the first, Aleph, said to[pg 289]him, Answer. But Jesus was silent, and answered nothing. Wherefore, the preceptor Levi, being angry, took a rod of a storax-tree, and smote him on the head. And Jesus said to the teacher Levi, Why dost thou smite me? Know in truth that he who is smitten teacheth him that smiteth, rather than is taught by him.... And Jesus added, and said to Levi, Every letter from Aleph to Tau is known by its order; thou, therefore, say first what is Tau, and I will tell thee what Aleph is. And he added, They who know not Aleph, how can they say Tau, ye hypocrites? First say what Aleph is, and I shall then believe you when you say Beth. And Jesus began to ask the names of the separate letters, and said, Let the teacher of the Law say what the first letter is, or why it hath many triangles, scalene, acute-angled, equilinear, curvi-linear,”&c.486At the root of Mark's teaching there seems to have been a sort of Pantheism. He taught that all had sprung from a great World-mother, partook of her soul and nature; but over against this female principle stood the Deity, the male element.Man represents the Deity, woman the world element; and it is only through the union of the divine and the material that the material can be quickened into spiritual life. In accordance with this theory, they had a ceremonial of what he called spiritual, but was eminently carnal, marriage, which is best left undescribed.Not widely removed from the Marcosians was the Valentinian sect of the Ophites. Valentinianism mingled with the floating superstition, the fragments of the wreck of Sabianism, which was to be found among the lower classes.The Ophites represented the Demiurge in the same way as did the Valentinians. They called the God of this world and of the Jews by the name of Jaldaboth.[pg 290]He was a limited being, imposing restraint on all his creatures; he exercised his power by imposing law. As long as his creatures obeyed law, they were subject to his dominion. But above Jaldaboth in the sublime region without limit reigns the Supreme God. When Adam broke the Law of the World-God, he emancipated himself from his bondage, he passed out of his realm, he placed himself in relation to the Supreme God.The world is made by Jaldaboth, but in the world is infused a spark of soul, emanated from the highest God. This divine soul strives after emancipation from the bonds imposed by connection with matter, created by the God of this world. This world-soul under the form of a serpent urged Eve to emancipate herself from thraldom, and pass with Adam, by an act of transgression, into the glorious liberty of the sons of the Supreme God.The doctrine of the Ophites with respect to Christ was that of Valentine. Christ came to break the last chains of Law by which man was bound, and to translate him into the realm of grace where sin does not exist.The Ophites possessed a Gospel, called the“Gospel of Eve.”It contained, no doubt, an account of the Fall from their peculiar point of view. St. Epiphanius has preserved two passages from it. They are so extraordinary, and throw such a light on the doctrines of this Gospel, that I quote them. The first is:“I was planted on a lofty mountain, and lo! I beheld a man of great stature, and another who was mutilated. And then I heard a voice like unto thunder. And when I drew near, he spake with me after this wise: I am thou, and thou art I. And wheresoever thou art, there am I, and I am dispersed through all. And wheresoever thou willest, there[pg 291]canst thou gather me; but in gathering me, thou gatherest thyself.”487The meaning of this passage is not doubtful. It expresses the doctrine of absolute identity between Christ and the believer, the radiation of divine virtue through all souls, destroying their individuality, that all may be absorbed into Christ. Individualities emerge out of God, and through Christ are drawn back into God.The influence of St. Paul's ideas is again noticeable. We are not told that the perfect man who speaks with a voice of thunder, and who is placed in contrast with the mutilated man, is Christ, and that the latter is the Demiurge, but we can scarcely doubt it. It is greatly to be regretted that we have so little of this curious book preserved.488The second passage, with its signification, had better repose in a foot-note, and in Greek. It allows us to understand the expression of St. Ephraem,“They shamelessly boast of their Gospel of Eve.”489

The immoral tendency of Valentinianism broke out in coarse, flagrant licentiousness as soon as the doctrines of the sect had soaked down out of the stratum of educated men to the ranks of the undisciplined and vulgar.

Valentinianism assumed two forms, broke into two sects,—the Marcosians and the Ophites.

Mark, who lived in the latter half of the second century, came probably from Palestine, as we may gather from his frequent use of forms from the Aramaean liturgy. But he did not bring with him any of the Judaizing spirit, none of the grave reverence for the moral law, and decency of the Nazarene, Ebionite and kindred sects sprung from the ruined Church of the Hebrews.

He was followed by trains of women whom he corrupted, and converted into prophetesses. His custom was, in an assembly to extend a chalice to a woman saying to her,“The grace of God, which excels all, and which the mind cannot conceive or explain, fill all your inner man, and increase his knowledge in you, dropping the grain of mustard-seed into good ground.”481A scene like a Methodist revival followed. The woman was urged to speak in prophecy; she hesitated, declared her inability; warm, passionate appeals followed closely one on another, couched in equivocal language, exciting the[pg 287]religious and natural passions simultaneously. The end was a convulsive fit of incoherent utterings, and the curtain fell on the rapturous embraces of the prophet and his spiritual bride.

Mark possessed a Gospel, and“an infinite number of apocryphal Scriptures,”says Irenaeus. The Gospel contained a falsified life of Christ. One of the stories from it he quotes. When Jesus was a boy, he was learning letters. The master said,“Say Alpha.”Jesus repeated after him,“Alpha.”Then the master said,“Say Beta.”But Jesus answered,“Nay, I will not say Beta till you have explained to me the meaning of Alpha.”482The Marcosians made much of the hidden mysteries of the letters of the alphabet, showing that Mark had brought with him from Palestine something akin to the Cabbalism of the Jewish rabbis.

This story is found in the apocryphal Gospel of St. Thomas. It runs somewhat differently in the different versions of that Gospel, and is repeated twice in each with slight variations.

In the Syriac:

“Zacchaeus the teacher said to Joseph, I will teach the boy Jesus whatever is proper for him to learn. And he made him go to school. And he, going in, was silent. But Zacchaeus the scribe began to tell him (the letters) from Alaph, and was repeating to him many times the whole alphabet. And he says to him that he should answer and say after him; but he was silent. Then the scribe became angry, and struck him with his hand upon his head. And Jesus said, A smith's anvil, being beaten, can (not) learn, and it has no feeling; but I am able to say those things, recited by you, with knowledge and understanding (unbeaten).”483

“Zacchaeus the teacher said to Joseph, I will teach the boy Jesus whatever is proper for him to learn. And he made him go to school. And he, going in, was silent. But Zacchaeus the scribe began to tell him (the letters) from Alaph, and was repeating to him many times the whole alphabet. And he says to him that he should answer and say after him; but he was silent. Then the scribe became angry, and struck him with his hand upon his head. And Jesus said, A smith's anvil, being beaten, can (not) learn, and it has no feeling; but I am able to say those things, recited by you, with knowledge and understanding (unbeaten).”483

In the Greek:

“Zacchaeus said to Joseph ... Give thy son to me, that he may learn letters, and with his letters I will teach him some knowledge, and chiefly this, to salute all the elders, and to venerate them as grandfathers and fathers, and to love those of his own age. And he told him all the letters from Alpha to Omega. Then, looking at the teacher Zacchaeus, he said to him, Thou that knowest not Alpha naturally, how canst thou teach Beta to others? Thou hypocrite! if thou knowest, teach Alpha first, and then we shall believe thee concerning Beta.”484

“Zacchaeus said to Joseph ... Give thy son to me, that he may learn letters, and with his letters I will teach him some knowledge, and chiefly this, to salute all the elders, and to venerate them as grandfathers and fathers, and to love those of his own age. And he told him all the letters from Alpha to Omega. Then, looking at the teacher Zacchaeus, he said to him, Thou that knowest not Alpha naturally, how canst thou teach Beta to others? Thou hypocrite! if thou knowest, teach Alpha first, and then we shall believe thee concerning Beta.”484

Or, according to another Greek version, after Jesus has been delivered over by Joseph to Zacchaeus, the preceptor

“—wrote the alphabet in Hebrew, and said to him, Alpha. And the child said, Alpha. And the teacher said again, Alpha. And the child said the same. Then again a third time the teacher said, Alpha. Then Jesus, looking at the instructor, said, Thou knowest not Alpha; how wilt thou teach another the letter Beta? And the child, beginning at Alpha, said of himself the twenty-two letters. Then he said again, Hearken, teacher, to the arrangement of the first letter, and know how many accessories and lines it hath, and marks which are common, transverse and connected. And when Zacchaeus heard such accounts of one letter, he was amazed, and could not answer him.”485

“—wrote the alphabet in Hebrew, and said to him, Alpha. And the child said, Alpha. And the teacher said again, Alpha. And the child said the same. Then again a third time the teacher said, Alpha. Then Jesus, looking at the instructor, said, Thou knowest not Alpha; how wilt thou teach another the letter Beta? And the child, beginning at Alpha, said of himself the twenty-two letters. Then he said again, Hearken, teacher, to the arrangement of the first letter, and know how many accessories and lines it hath, and marks which are common, transverse and connected. And when Zacchaeus heard such accounts of one letter, he was amazed, and could not answer him.”485

Another version of the same story is found in the Gospel of the pseudo-Matthew:

“Joseph and Mary coaxing Jesus, led him to the school, that he might be taught his letters by the old man, Levi. When he entered he was silent; and the master, Levi, told one letter to Jesus, and beginning at the first, Aleph, said to[pg 289]him, Answer. But Jesus was silent, and answered nothing. Wherefore, the preceptor Levi, being angry, took a rod of a storax-tree, and smote him on the head. And Jesus said to the teacher Levi, Why dost thou smite me? Know in truth that he who is smitten teacheth him that smiteth, rather than is taught by him.... And Jesus added, and said to Levi, Every letter from Aleph to Tau is known by its order; thou, therefore, say first what is Tau, and I will tell thee what Aleph is. And he added, They who know not Aleph, how can they say Tau, ye hypocrites? First say what Aleph is, and I shall then believe you when you say Beth. And Jesus began to ask the names of the separate letters, and said, Let the teacher of the Law say what the first letter is, or why it hath many triangles, scalene, acute-angled, equilinear, curvi-linear,”&c.486

“Joseph and Mary coaxing Jesus, led him to the school, that he might be taught his letters by the old man, Levi. When he entered he was silent; and the master, Levi, told one letter to Jesus, and beginning at the first, Aleph, said to[pg 289]him, Answer. But Jesus was silent, and answered nothing. Wherefore, the preceptor Levi, being angry, took a rod of a storax-tree, and smote him on the head. And Jesus said to the teacher Levi, Why dost thou smite me? Know in truth that he who is smitten teacheth him that smiteth, rather than is taught by him.... And Jesus added, and said to Levi, Every letter from Aleph to Tau is known by its order; thou, therefore, say first what is Tau, and I will tell thee what Aleph is. And he added, They who know not Aleph, how can they say Tau, ye hypocrites? First say what Aleph is, and I shall then believe you when you say Beth. And Jesus began to ask the names of the separate letters, and said, Let the teacher of the Law say what the first letter is, or why it hath many triangles, scalene, acute-angled, equilinear, curvi-linear,”&c.486

At the root of Mark's teaching there seems to have been a sort of Pantheism. He taught that all had sprung from a great World-mother, partook of her soul and nature; but over against this female principle stood the Deity, the male element.

Man represents the Deity, woman the world element; and it is only through the union of the divine and the material that the material can be quickened into spiritual life. In accordance with this theory, they had a ceremonial of what he called spiritual, but was eminently carnal, marriage, which is best left undescribed.

Not widely removed from the Marcosians was the Valentinian sect of the Ophites. Valentinianism mingled with the floating superstition, the fragments of the wreck of Sabianism, which was to be found among the lower classes.

The Ophites represented the Demiurge in the same way as did the Valentinians. They called the God of this world and of the Jews by the name of Jaldaboth.[pg 290]He was a limited being, imposing restraint on all his creatures; he exercised his power by imposing law. As long as his creatures obeyed law, they were subject to his dominion. But above Jaldaboth in the sublime region without limit reigns the Supreme God. When Adam broke the Law of the World-God, he emancipated himself from his bondage, he passed out of his realm, he placed himself in relation to the Supreme God.

The world is made by Jaldaboth, but in the world is infused a spark of soul, emanated from the highest God. This divine soul strives after emancipation from the bonds imposed by connection with matter, created by the God of this world. This world-soul under the form of a serpent urged Eve to emancipate herself from thraldom, and pass with Adam, by an act of transgression, into the glorious liberty of the sons of the Supreme God.

The doctrine of the Ophites with respect to Christ was that of Valentine. Christ came to break the last chains of Law by which man was bound, and to translate him into the realm of grace where sin does not exist.

The Ophites possessed a Gospel, called the“Gospel of Eve.”It contained, no doubt, an account of the Fall from their peculiar point of view. St. Epiphanius has preserved two passages from it. They are so extraordinary, and throw such a light on the doctrines of this Gospel, that I quote them. The first is:

“I was planted on a lofty mountain, and lo! I beheld a man of great stature, and another who was mutilated. And then I heard a voice like unto thunder. And when I drew near, he spake with me after this wise: I am thou, and thou art I. And wheresoever thou art, there am I, and I am dispersed through all. And wheresoever thou willest, there[pg 291]canst thou gather me; but in gathering me, thou gatherest thyself.”487

“I was planted on a lofty mountain, and lo! I beheld a man of great stature, and another who was mutilated. And then I heard a voice like unto thunder. And when I drew near, he spake with me after this wise: I am thou, and thou art I. And wheresoever thou art, there am I, and I am dispersed through all. And wheresoever thou willest, there[pg 291]canst thou gather me; but in gathering me, thou gatherest thyself.”487

The meaning of this passage is not doubtful. It expresses the doctrine of absolute identity between Christ and the believer, the radiation of divine virtue through all souls, destroying their individuality, that all may be absorbed into Christ. Individualities emerge out of God, and through Christ are drawn back into God.

The influence of St. Paul's ideas is again noticeable. We are not told that the perfect man who speaks with a voice of thunder, and who is placed in contrast with the mutilated man, is Christ, and that the latter is the Demiurge, but we can scarcely doubt it. It is greatly to be regretted that we have so little of this curious book preserved.488The second passage, with its signification, had better repose in a foot-note, and in Greek. It allows us to understand the expression of St. Ephraem,“They shamelessly boast of their Gospel of Eve.”489

IV. The Gospel Of Perfection.The Gospel of Perfection was another work regarded as sacred by the Ophites. St. Epiphanius says:“Some of them (i.e.of the Gnostics) there are who vaunt the possession of a certain fictitious, far-fetched poem which they call the Gospel of Perfection, whereas it is not a Gospel, but the perfection of misery. For the bitterness of death is consummated in that production of the devil. Others without shame boast their Gospel of Eve.”St. Epiphanius calls this Gospel of Perfection a poem, ποιήμα. But M. Nicolas justly observes that the word ποιήμα is used here, not to describe the work as a poetical composition, but as a fiction. In a passage of Irenaeus,490of which only the Latin has been preserved, the Gospel of Judas is called“confictio,”and it is probable that the Greek word rendered by“confictio”was ποιήμα.491Baur thinks that the Gospel of Perfection was the same as the Gospel of Eve.492But this can hardly be. The words of St. Epiphanius plainly distinguish them:“Some vaunt the Gospel of Perfection ... others boast ... the Gospel of Eve;”and elsewhere he speaks of their books in the plural.493

The Gospel of Perfection was another work regarded as sacred by the Ophites. St. Epiphanius says:“Some of them (i.e.of the Gnostics) there are who vaunt the possession of a certain fictitious, far-fetched poem which they call the Gospel of Perfection, whereas it is not a Gospel, but the perfection of misery. For the bitterness of death is consummated in that production of the devil. Others without shame boast their Gospel of Eve.”

St. Epiphanius calls this Gospel of Perfection a poem, ποιήμα. But M. Nicolas justly observes that the word ποιήμα is used here, not to describe the work as a poetical composition, but as a fiction. In a passage of Irenaeus,490of which only the Latin has been preserved, the Gospel of Judas is called“confictio,”and it is probable that the Greek word rendered by“confictio”was ποιήμα.491

Baur thinks that the Gospel of Perfection was the same as the Gospel of Eve.492But this can hardly be. The words of St. Epiphanius plainly distinguish them:“Some vaunt the Gospel of Perfection ... others boast ... the Gospel of Eve;”and elsewhere he speaks of their books in the plural.493

V. The Gospel Of St. Philip.This Gospel belonged to the same category as those of Perfection and of Eve, and belonged, if not to the Ophites, to an analogous sect, perhaps that of the Prodicians. St. Philip passed, in the early ages of Christianity, as having been, like St. Paul, an apostle of the Gentiles,494and perhaps as having agreed with his views on the Law and evangelical liberty. But tradition had confounded together Philip the apostle and Philip the deacon of Caesarea, who, after having been a member of the Hellenist Church at Jerusalem, and having been driven thence after the martyrdom of Stephen, was the first to carry the Gospel beyond the family of Israel, and to convert the heathen to Christ.495His zeal and success caused him to be called an Evangelist.496In the second century it was supposed that an Evangelist meant one who had written a Gospel. And as no Gospel bearing his name existed, one was composed for him and attributed to him or to the apostle—they were not distinguished.St. Epiphanius has preserved one passage from it:“The Lord has revealed to me the words to be spoken by the soul when it ascends into heaven, and how it has to answer each of the celestial powers. The soul must say, I have known myself, and I have gathered myself from all parts. I have not borne children to Archon (the prince of[pg 294]this world); but I have plucked up his roots, and I have gathered his dispersed members. I have learned who thou art; for I am, saith the soul, of the number of the celestial ones. But if it is proved that the soul has borne a son, she must return downwards, till she has recovered her children, and has absorbed them into herself.”497It is not altogether easy to catch the meaning of this singular passage, but it apparently has this signification. The soul trammelled with the chains of matter, created by the Archon, the Creator of the world, has to emancipate itself from all material concerns. Each thought, interest, passion, excited by anything in the world, is a child borne by the soul to Archon, to which the soul has contributed animation, the world, form. The great work of life is the disengagement of the soul from all concern in the affairs of the world, in the requirements of the body. When the soul has reached the most exalted perfection, it is cold, passionless, indifferent; then it comes before the Supreme God, passing through the spheres guarded by attendant aeons or angels, and to each it protests its disengagement. But should any thought or care for mundane matters be found lurking in the recesses of the soul, it has to descend again, and remain in exile till it has re-absorbed all the life it gave, the interest it felt, in such concerns, and then again make its essay to reach God.The conception of Virtues guarding the concentric spheres surrounding the Most High is found among the Jews. When Moses went into the presence of God to receive the tables of stone, he met first the angel Kemuel, chief of the angels of destruction, who would have slain him, but Moses pronounced the incommunicable Name, and passed through. Then he came to the sphere governed by the angel Hadarniel, and by virtue[pg 295]of the Name passed through. Next he came to the sphere over which presided the angel Sandalfon, and penetrated by means of the same Name. Next he traversed the river of flame, called Riggon, and stood before the throne.498St. Paul held the popular Rabbinic notion of the spheres surrounding the throne of God, for he speaks of having been caught up into the third heaven.499In the apocryphal Ascension of Isaiah there are seven heavens that the prophet traverses.The Rabbinic ideas on the spheres were taken probably from the Chaldees, and from the same source, perhaps, sprang the conception of the soul making her ascension through the angel-guarded spheres, which we find in the fragment of the Gospel of St. Philip.Unfortunately, we have not sufficient of the early literature of the Chaldees and Assyrians to be able to say for certain that it was so. But a very curious sacred poem has been preserved on the terra-cotta tablets of the library of Assurbani-Pal, which exhibits a similar belief as prevalent anciently in Assyria.This poem represents the descent of Istar into the Immutable Land, the nether world, divided into seven circles. The heavenly world of the Chaldees was also divided into seven circles, each ruled by a planet. The poem therefore exhibits a descent instead of an ascent. But there is little reason to doubt that the passage in each case would have been analogous. We have no ancient Assyrian account of an ascent; we must therefore content ourselves with what we have.Istar descends into the lower region, and as she traverses each circle is despoiled of one of her coverings[pg 296]worn in the region above, till she stands naked before Belith, the Queen of the Land of Death.i.“At the first gate, as I made her enter, I despoiled her; I took the crown from off her head.“‘Hold, gatekeeper! Thou hast taken the crown from off my head.’“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’ii.“At the second gate I made her enter; I despoiled her, and took from off her the earrings from her ears.“‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of the earrings from my ears.’“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’iii.“At the third gate I made her enter; I despoiled her of the precious jewels on her neck.“‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of the jewels of my neck.’“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’iv.“At the fourth gate I made her enter; I despoiled her of the brooch of jewels upon her breast.“‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of the brooch of jewels upon my breast.’“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’V.“At the fifth gate I made her enter; I despoiled her of the belt of jewels about her waist.“‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of the belt of jewels about my waist.’“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’vi.“At the sixth gate I made her enter; I despoiled her of her armlets and bracelets.“‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of my armlets and bracelets.’[pg 297]“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’vii.“At the seventh gate I made her enter; I despoiled her of her skirt.“‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of my skirt.’“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this degree of circles.’”500We have something very similar in the judgment of souls in the Egyptian Ritual of the Dead. From Chaldaea or from Egypt the Gnostics who used the Gospel of St. Philip drew their doctrine of the soul traversing several circles, and arrested by an angel at the gate of each.The soul, a divine element, is in the earth combined with the body, a work of the Archon. But her aspirations are for that which is above; she strives to“extirpate his roots.”All her“scattered members,”her thoughts, wishes, impulses, are gathered into one up-tapering flame. Then only does she“know (God) for what He is,”for she has learned the nature of God by introspection.Such, if I mistake not, is the meaning of the passage quoted by St. Epiphanius. The sect which used such a Gospel must have been mystical and ascetic, given to contemplation, and avoiding the indulgence of their animal appetites. It was that, probably, of Prodicus, strung on the same Pauline thread as the heresies of Marcion, Nicolas, Valentine, Marcus, the Ophites, Carpocratians and Cainites.Prodicus, on the strength of St. Paul's saying that all Christians are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, maintained the sovereignty of every man placed under[pg 298]the Gospel. But a king is above law, is not bound by law. Therefore the Christian is under no bondage of Law, moral or ceremonial. He is lord of the Sabbath, above all ordinances. Prodicus made the whole worship of God to consist in the inner contemplation of the essence of God.External worship was not required of the Christian; that had been imposed by the Demiurge on the Jews and all under his bondage, till the time of the fulness of the Gospel had come.501The Prodicians did not constitute an important, widely-extended sect, and were confounded by many of the early Fathers with other Pauline-Gnostic sects.

This Gospel belonged to the same category as those of Perfection and of Eve, and belonged, if not to the Ophites, to an analogous sect, perhaps that of the Prodicians. St. Philip passed, in the early ages of Christianity, as having been, like St. Paul, an apostle of the Gentiles,494and perhaps as having agreed with his views on the Law and evangelical liberty. But tradition had confounded together Philip the apostle and Philip the deacon of Caesarea, who, after having been a member of the Hellenist Church at Jerusalem, and having been driven thence after the martyrdom of Stephen, was the first to carry the Gospel beyond the family of Israel, and to convert the heathen to Christ.495His zeal and success caused him to be called an Evangelist.496In the second century it was supposed that an Evangelist meant one who had written a Gospel. And as no Gospel bearing his name existed, one was composed for him and attributed to him or to the apostle—they were not distinguished.

St. Epiphanius has preserved one passage from it:

“The Lord has revealed to me the words to be spoken by the soul when it ascends into heaven, and how it has to answer each of the celestial powers. The soul must say, I have known myself, and I have gathered myself from all parts. I have not borne children to Archon (the prince of[pg 294]this world); but I have plucked up his roots, and I have gathered his dispersed members. I have learned who thou art; for I am, saith the soul, of the number of the celestial ones. But if it is proved that the soul has borne a son, she must return downwards, till she has recovered her children, and has absorbed them into herself.”497

“The Lord has revealed to me the words to be spoken by the soul when it ascends into heaven, and how it has to answer each of the celestial powers. The soul must say, I have known myself, and I have gathered myself from all parts. I have not borne children to Archon (the prince of[pg 294]this world); but I have plucked up his roots, and I have gathered his dispersed members. I have learned who thou art; for I am, saith the soul, of the number of the celestial ones. But if it is proved that the soul has borne a son, she must return downwards, till she has recovered her children, and has absorbed them into herself.”497

It is not altogether easy to catch the meaning of this singular passage, but it apparently has this signification. The soul trammelled with the chains of matter, created by the Archon, the Creator of the world, has to emancipate itself from all material concerns. Each thought, interest, passion, excited by anything in the world, is a child borne by the soul to Archon, to which the soul has contributed animation, the world, form. The great work of life is the disengagement of the soul from all concern in the affairs of the world, in the requirements of the body. When the soul has reached the most exalted perfection, it is cold, passionless, indifferent; then it comes before the Supreme God, passing through the spheres guarded by attendant aeons or angels, and to each it protests its disengagement. But should any thought or care for mundane matters be found lurking in the recesses of the soul, it has to descend again, and remain in exile till it has re-absorbed all the life it gave, the interest it felt, in such concerns, and then again make its essay to reach God.

The conception of Virtues guarding the concentric spheres surrounding the Most High is found among the Jews. When Moses went into the presence of God to receive the tables of stone, he met first the angel Kemuel, chief of the angels of destruction, who would have slain him, but Moses pronounced the incommunicable Name, and passed through. Then he came to the sphere governed by the angel Hadarniel, and by virtue[pg 295]of the Name passed through. Next he came to the sphere over which presided the angel Sandalfon, and penetrated by means of the same Name. Next he traversed the river of flame, called Riggon, and stood before the throne.498

St. Paul held the popular Rabbinic notion of the spheres surrounding the throne of God, for he speaks of having been caught up into the third heaven.499In the apocryphal Ascension of Isaiah there are seven heavens that the prophet traverses.

The Rabbinic ideas on the spheres were taken probably from the Chaldees, and from the same source, perhaps, sprang the conception of the soul making her ascension through the angel-guarded spheres, which we find in the fragment of the Gospel of St. Philip.

Unfortunately, we have not sufficient of the early literature of the Chaldees and Assyrians to be able to say for certain that it was so. But a very curious sacred poem has been preserved on the terra-cotta tablets of the library of Assurbani-Pal, which exhibits a similar belief as prevalent anciently in Assyria.

This poem represents the descent of Istar into the Immutable Land, the nether world, divided into seven circles. The heavenly world of the Chaldees was also divided into seven circles, each ruled by a planet. The poem therefore exhibits a descent instead of an ascent. But there is little reason to doubt that the passage in each case would have been analogous. We have no ancient Assyrian account of an ascent; we must therefore content ourselves with what we have.

Istar descends into the lower region, and as she traverses each circle is despoiled of one of her coverings[pg 296]worn in the region above, till she stands naked before Belith, the Queen of the Land of Death.

i.“At the first gate, as I made her enter, I despoiled her; I took the crown from off her head.

“‘Hold, gatekeeper! Thou hast taken the crown from off my head.’

“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’

ii.“At the second gate I made her enter; I despoiled her, and took from off her the earrings from her ears.

“‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of the earrings from my ears.’

“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’

iii.“At the third gate I made her enter; I despoiled her of the precious jewels on her neck.

“‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of the jewels of my neck.’

“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’

iv.“At the fourth gate I made her enter; I despoiled her of the brooch of jewels upon her breast.

“‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of the brooch of jewels upon my breast.’

“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’

V.“At the fifth gate I made her enter; I despoiled her of the belt of jewels about her waist.

“‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of the belt of jewels about my waist.’

“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’

vi.“At the sixth gate I made her enter; I despoiled her of her armlets and bracelets.

“‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of my armlets and bracelets.’

“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this stage of the circles.’

vii.“At the seventh gate I made her enter; I despoiled her of her skirt.

“‘Hold, keeper of the gate! Thou hast despoiled me of my skirt.’

“‘Enter into the empire of the Lady of the Earth, to this degree of circles.’”500

We have something very similar in the judgment of souls in the Egyptian Ritual of the Dead. From Chaldaea or from Egypt the Gnostics who used the Gospel of St. Philip drew their doctrine of the soul traversing several circles, and arrested by an angel at the gate of each.

The soul, a divine element, is in the earth combined with the body, a work of the Archon. But her aspirations are for that which is above; she strives to“extirpate his roots.”All her“scattered members,”her thoughts, wishes, impulses, are gathered into one up-tapering flame. Then only does she“know (God) for what He is,”for she has learned the nature of God by introspection.

Such, if I mistake not, is the meaning of the passage quoted by St. Epiphanius. The sect which used such a Gospel must have been mystical and ascetic, given to contemplation, and avoiding the indulgence of their animal appetites. It was that, probably, of Prodicus, strung on the same Pauline thread as the heresies of Marcion, Nicolas, Valentine, Marcus, the Ophites, Carpocratians and Cainites.

Prodicus, on the strength of St. Paul's saying that all Christians are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, maintained the sovereignty of every man placed under[pg 298]the Gospel. But a king is above law, is not bound by law. Therefore the Christian is under no bondage of Law, moral or ceremonial. He is lord of the Sabbath, above all ordinances. Prodicus made the whole worship of God to consist in the inner contemplation of the essence of God.

External worship was not required of the Christian; that had been imposed by the Demiurge on the Jews and all under his bondage, till the time of the fulness of the Gospel had come.501The Prodicians did not constitute an important, widely-extended sect, and were confounded by many of the early Fathers with other Pauline-Gnostic sects.

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