THE GNOSTICS AND THEIR REMAINS
GNOSTICISM AND ITS ORIGIN.
THE general name “Gnostics” is used to designate several widely differing sects, which sprang up in the Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire almost simultaneously with the first planting of Christianity.
That is to say, these sects then for the first time assumed a definite form, and arranged themselves under different teachers, by whose names they became known
to the world, although in all probability their main doctrines had made their appearance previously in many of the cities of Asia Minor.
There, it is probably, these sectaries first came into definite existence under the title of “Mystae,” upon the establishment of a direct intercourse with India and her Buddhist philosopher, under the Seleucidae and the Ptolmies.
The term “Gnosticism” is dervied from the Greek, Gnosis, knowledge—a word specially employed from the first dawn of religious inquiry to designate the science of things divine.
Thus Pythagoras, according to Diogenes Laertius, called the transcendental portion of his philosophy, Gnîsij tîn Ôntwn, “the knowledge of things that are.”
And in later times Gnosis was the name given to what Porphyry calls the Antique or Oriental philosophy, to distinguish it from the Grecian systems.
But the term was first used (as Matter on good grounds conjectures) in its ultimate sense of supernal and celestial knowledge, by the Jewish philosophers belonging to the celebrated school of that nation, flourishing at Alexandria.
These teachers, following the example of a noted Rabbi, Aristobulus, surnamed the
Peripatician, endeavoured to make out that all the wisdom of the Greeks was derived immediately from the Hebrew Scripture; and by means of their well-known mode of allegorical interpretation, which enabled them to elicit any sense
desired out of any given passage of the Old Testament, they sought, and often succeed, in establishing their theory.
In this way they showed that Plato, during his sojourn in Egypt, had been their own scholar; and still further to support these pretensions, the indefatigable Aristobulus produced a string of poems in the names of Linus, Orpheus, Homer and Hesiod—all strongly impregnated with the spirit of Judaism.
But his Judaism was a very different thing from the simplicity of the Pentateuch.
A single, but very characteristic, production of this Jewish Gnosis has come down to our times.
This is the “Book of Enoch” (v. p. 18), of which the main object is to make known
the description of the heavenly bodies and the true names of the same, as revealed to the Patriarch by the angel Uriel.
This profession betrays, of itself, the Magian source whence its inspiration was derived.
Many Jews, nevertheless, accepted it as a divine revelation; even the Apostle Jude scruples not to quote it as of genuine Scriptural authority.
The “Pistis-Sophia,” attributed to the Alexandrian heresiarch Valentinus (so importance a guide in the following inquiry), perpetually refers to it as:
The highest source of knowledge, as being dictated by Christ Himself, “speaking out of the Tree of Life unto ΙΕΟΥ, the Primal Man.”
Another Jewish-Gnostic Scripture of even greater interest, (inasmuch as it is the “Bible” of the only professed Gnostic sect that has maintained its existence to the present day, the Mandaites of Bassora,) is their textbook, the “Book of Adam.”
Its doctrines and singular application of Zoroastrism to Jewish tenets, present frequent analogies to those of the Pistis-Sophia, in its continual reference to the ideas of the “Religion of Light,” of which full particulars will be given when the latter remarkable work comes to be considered (see p. 14.)
“Gnosticism,” therefore, cannot receive a better definition than in that dictum of the sect first and specially calling itself “Gnostics,” the Naaseni (translated by the Greeks into “Ophites”), viz., “the beginning of perfection is the knowledge of man, but absolute perfection is the knowledge of God.””
And to give a general view of the nature of the entire system, nothing that I can do will serve so well as to transcribe the exact words of a learned and very acute writer
upon the subject of Gnosticism (“Christian Remembrancer,” for 1866).
“Starting, then, from this point we ask what Gnosticism is, and what it professes to teach. What is the peculiar Gnosis that it claims to itself?
The answer is, the knowledge of God and of Man, of the Being and Providence of the former, and of the creation and destiny of the latter.
While the ignorant and superstitious were degrading the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made with hands, and were chancing ‘the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creatre rather than the Creator,’ the ancient gnostics held purer and truer ideas.
And when these corrupted and idolatrous forms of religion and worship became established, and were popularly regarded as true and real in themselves, the “Gnostics” held and secretly taught an esoteric theology of which the popular creed
of multitudes of deities, with its whole ritual of sacrifice and worship, was but the exoteric form.
Hence all the mysteries which, almost if not all, the heathen religions possessed.
Those initiated into these mysteries, whilst they carefully maintained and encouraged the gorgeous worship, sacrifices and processions of the national religions, and even openly taught polytheism, and the efficacy of the public rites, yet secretly held something very different—at the first, probably, a purer creed, but in
course of time, like the exoteric form, degenerating.
The progress of declination differed according to race or habit of thought: in the East it tended to superstition, in the West (as we learn from the writings of Cicero) to pure atheism, a denial of Providence.
This system was adopted likewise by the Jews, but with this great difference, that it was superinduced upon and applied to a pre-existent religion; whereas in the other
Oriental religions, the external was added to the esoteric, and developed out of it.
In the Oriental systems the external was the sensuous expression of a hidden meaning; in the Jewish, the hidden meaning was drawn out of pre-existing external
laws and ritual; in the former the esoteric alone was claimed as divine, in the latter it was the exoteric which was a matter of revelation.
To repeat this seeming defect, the Kabbalists, or teachers of the ‘Hidden Doctrine,’ invented the existence of a secret tradition, orally handed down from the time of Moses.
We may, of course, reject this assertion, and affirm that the Jews learnt the idea of a Hidden Wisdom, underlying the Mosaic Law, from their intercourse with the Eastern nations during the Babylonian captivity; and we may further be assured that the origin of this Secret Wisdom is Indian.
Perhaps we shall be more exact if we say that the Jews learnt from their intercourse
with Eastern nations to investigate the external Divine Law, for the purpose of discovering its hidden meaning.
The heathen Gnostics, in fact, collected a Gnosis from every quarter, accepted all religious systems as partly true, and extracted from each what harmonized with their ideas.
The Gospel, widely preached, accompanied by miracles, having new doctrines and enunciating new truths, very naturally attracted their attention.
The Kabbalists, or Jewish Gnostics, like Simon Magus, found a large portion of apostolic teaching in accordance with their own, and easily grafted upon it so much
as they liked.
Again the Divine power of working miracles possessed by the Apostles and their successors naturally attracted the interest of those whose chief mystery was the
practice of magic.
Simon the Magician was considered by the Samaritans to be ‘the great Power of God;’ he was attracted by the miracles wrought by the Apostles; and no doubt he
sincerely ‘believed,’ that is, after his own fashion.
His notion of Holy Baptism was probably an initiation into a new mystery with a higher Gnosis than he possessed before, and by which he hoped to be endued with higher powers; and so likewise many of those who were called Gnostic Heretics by the Christian Fathers, were not Christians at all, only they adopted so much of the Christian doctrine as accorded with their system.”
The considerations of the local and political circumstances of the grand foci of Gnosticism will serve to explain much that is puzzling in the origin and nature of the system itself.
Ephesus was, after Alexandria, the most important meeting-point of Grecian culture and Oriental speculation.
In regard to commerce and riches, although she yielded to the Egyptian capital, yet she rivalled Corinth in both, which city in truth she far surpassed in her treasures of religion and science.
Her richness in theosophic ideas and rites had from time immemorial been manifested in her possession of Diana, “whom all Asia and the world,” worshipped—that pantheistic figure so conformable to the genius of the furthest East; her college of “Essenes” dedicated to the service of that goddess; and her “Megabyzae,” whose name sufficiently declares their Magian institution.
Hence, also, was supplied the talisman of highest repute in the antique world, the far-famed “Ephesian spell,” those mystic words graven upon the zone and feet of the “image that fell down from Jupiter;” and how zealously magic was cultivated by her citizens is apparent from St. Luke’s incidental notice of the cost of the books belonging to those that used “curious arts” (t¦ per…erga, the regular names for
sorcercy and divination) destroyed by their owners in the first transports of conversion to a new faith.
Such converts, indeed, after their early zeal had cooled down, were not likely to resist the allurements of the endeavour to reconcile their ancient, far-famed wisdom, with the new revelation; in short, to follow the plan invented not long before by the Alexandrian Jew, in his reconciliation of Plato with Moses and the Prophets.
“In Ephesus,” says Matter, “the speculations of the Jewish-Egyptian school, and the Semi-Persian speculations of the Kabbala, had then recently come to swell the vast conflux of Grecian and Asiastic doctrines; so there is no wonder that teachers should have sprung up there, who strove to combined the religion newly preached by the Apostle with the ideas so long established in the place.
As early as the year A.D. 58, St. Paul, in his First Epistle to Timothy, enjoins him to warn certain persons to abstain from teaching ‘strange doctrines,’ those myths and interminable genealogies that only breed division. these same ‘myths and genealogies’ apply, without any doubt, to the theory of the Emanation of the Æons-Sephiroth, and to all the relations between the Good and Bad Angels that the Kabbalists had borrowed from the religion of Zoroaster.” ~C.W. King, THE GNOSTICS ND THEIR REMAINS, Page 5-9
gnostic gnostic
#AnalyticalPsychology #DepthPsychology #CarlJung #TheUnconscious #JungianPsychology #Psyche #JungianConcepts #PsychologicalType #Archetypes #Individuation
