GNOS'TICS (from Gr. Gnosis, knowledge), the collective term for a number of early Christian sects which were known besides—with one insignificant exception—by special names derived from their respective founders. The word gnosis, when first applied to revealed religion, in many passages both of the Septuagint (for the Heir. Deah) and the New Testament, expressed a full and comprehensive acquaintance with, and insight into, the received laws and tenets, ritual and ethical, and was consequently praised as a desirable acquirement; by St. Paul even called a special gift (Charisma) (1 Cor. xii. 8, otc.). Gradually, however, there was—first by the Judmo-Alexandrine schools ingrafted upon it a meaning more akin to that in which it was occasionally used by Pythagoras and Plato; it designated a knowledge of certain mysteries, which lay hidden beneath the letter of the religious records, and could be received only by a few superior minds, while the multitude had to be satisfied with the outward apparent meaning. The remarkable form of Christianity to which the word in this sense was applied, is a religious phenomenon as extraordinary as were the times and causes that gave it birth. Rome had conquered well-nigh the whole of the then known civilized world, and within her vast dominions the barriers, which had hitherto separated the multifarious nations of east and west, were broken down. From the remotest corner of the empire philos ophers and priests, scholars and teachers, flocked to Rome, to Athens, to Alexandria, and communicated to each other, discussed, and frequently amalgamated their widely differing creeds and systems to such a degree that the lower national or personal individuality of opinion was almost effaced, snaking room either for a vacillating inde cision, or at the best a shadowy and passive eclecticism. And while, on the one hand, Greek philosophy, which formed a principal part of the education of the higher classes, had become almost exclusively a Platonism, sliding into overt skepticism; on the other hand, the naturalization in the Roman empire of a promiscuous Pantheon, whose gods were gathered from Egypt, Greece, Persia, India, and countries still more remote, had at Iength produced, out of an unparalleled mixture of religious ideas and fancies, a superstition so abject and unnatural, that it too, at last, was ready to give place to despairing unbelief. Judaism, again, had outlived its political existence, and began to assert itself as a faith, independent of any state-or dominion of its own, divided, how ever, into diffbrent schools, according to the more or less strict adherence to the letter of its written and oral laws. Nay, the influence of Hellenism had, among the Alexan
drines, produced such effect that, of the living body of Judaism, little remained but a skeleton framework, round which allegory and symbol had woven their fantastic fabric. Christianity, as yet not clearly defined, swept all the more irresistibly over the regions from the Euphrates to the Ganges, the Nile to the Tiber, as it offered a code of morals sublime and yet simple, a faith human and withal divine, superior to any of the abstruse and exploded Polytheisms, to a world agitated to its lowest depths, and yearning for some new and more satisfying doctrine; while, at the same time, it denounced the stringent and severe ritual tenets of its mother-religion, Judaism, as inconsistent with the freedom of the human mind. Yet it was not to be expected that the old pagan creeds and the old philosophies° would expire without a struggle. They made a last stand, and produced in their and the ancient world's dyint hour Gnosticism. It sprang suddenly out of a monstrous chaos, a consummate religious) ececticism, bold, consistent, to a certain degree even sublime. The wildly opposite ideas of Polytheism, Pantheism, Monotheism, the most recondite philosophical systems of Aristotle, Plato, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Empedoc]es, etc., together with the awe-striking Mysticism and Demonol ogy whin after the Babylonian captivity had created, in the very heart of Judaism, that stupendous and pre-eminently anti-Jewish science of Cabbala (q.v.)—all, it would appear, had waited to add something of their own to the new faith, which could not hold its own under all these strange influences. An open attack was no longer of any ,use; so, assuming the garb of the enemy, they sought to carry destruction into the center of the hostile camp. Moreover, an aristocracy of mind, powerful and numerous as none hind ever been before, could not but, even when it had outwardly assumed the new religion, loathe the thought of sharing it completely and .unreservedly with the herd of freed and unfreed slaves around them, with the low and the poor in spirit; and the exclusiveness of Gnosticism was undoubtedly, next to the fascination Of its dogmas, one of the chief reasons of its extraordinarily rapid propagation.