We have stated at the outset that Gnosticism was but a general name for a great number of diverging Christian schools. But all these had some fundamental points in common, which we will attempt to specify briefly, as far as the fragmentary and adul terated nature of the evidence will permit; for unluckily all we know of the Gnostics, we know from their Jewish and Christian adversaries, who confessedly tottk especial pride in representing them and their belief in their darkest hues: There is a Divine Being, whose essence is love, grace, and mercy. He is enthroned in the highest height, inclosed in an abyss (bathos), Ile is the sum of being, he is silence, abstraction, incomprehensible, for hunran minds almost non-existing (auk on). The Mosaic cosmogony has not seemingly, they said, brought us one step nearer to the solution of the problem of the creation. Out of nothing, nothing can come, not withstanding a divine fiat; for God can, through his spiritual nature, have no connection whatever with corporetil things, and lie could not, have originally made them. They, therefore, assumed a pre-existing matter (hyle), out of which the universe was merely formed. A corroboration for this opinion was found—according to the peculiar Gnostic mode of interpretation—in the two adjectives tohu vabohu (without form and void) (Gen. i. 2), applied to the earth, and which were by them interpreted as substantives Wilma kenon) intended to express the original substance the universe (Cf. Gen. Rab. i.). Between- this hyle, or visible world, however, which was either represented as the darkness or shadow alongside the divine _light, as sluggish, stagnant mass, or ab a turbulent, active;kingdomof evil; and that supreme niComprehensible Being, whose goodness could have nothing to do with the evils of the world, no more than nis per fection with its defects and misery, there existed a plertima, or fullness of light. In this fullness dwelt embodied attributes of divinity, the abstract ideas of wisdom, jus tice, right, power, truth, peace, and many more which had emanated or flowed out (in pairs, as some held, male and female) from the supreme central point, as rays innumer able flow out of the sun, as countless numbers from one unit, as echoes from a sound, or as, primarily, all The founts and rivers arise from the waters below. At the head of these emanations or ./Eons (Everlasting ones—like their source) which, descending lower and lower, form a link between heaven and earth, stands the Nous; and one.of the lowest .zEons is the Demiurgos. He is the real framer and master of the visible world, and partakes a certain degree of its nature. On the nature of this Demiurgos (Jahiabaoth, Archon), however, the two principal divisions of Gnosticism, which might be termed- Judmo-Alexan,drine and Syrian respectively, widely differed. The former took him as the representative and organ of the highest God. It was he who had been put by the divine will over Israel, especially, under the name of Jehovah. As other, though inferior, angels presided over the destinies of other nations, so this higher /Eon had to protect the peculiar people of God. It was he, therefore, who revealed himself —he who gave the laws—he who had sent the prophets. But in all this he acted rather as an unconscious medium; he was no more able to comprehend the full meaning of the ideas revealed through him in the Old Testament, than he understood the scope and significance•of the creation. His principal attributes are justice and severity, which, carried out with stern consistency, become cruelty. These Gnostics distinguished also among the Jews themselves, those "after the flesh" who, confounding the likeness with the original, the symbol with the idea, took the Demiurgos to be the supreme God, and those "after the Spirit," or Israelites indeed•—the privileged few who, divining at least the veiled ideas of the supreme God, needed no such education by fear or hoe, punish ment or reward, at the hands of the Demiurgog, but rose above him in understanding and conception of things human and divine. The other principal party of the Gnostics, however, the Syrian, under the influence of the Parsic (Zoroastrian) dualism, so far from considering the Demiurgos as an instrument of divinity, willing but poor in intel lect, looked upon him rather as a rival, and consequently conflicting power. He is the primary evil opposed to the primary good. The divine germs which, according to both parties, had been communicated through the lowest emanations in their downward course to matter and to mankind, the Demiurgos of the Alexandrians had not known how to develop in a proper manner, but had weaketted, sometimes neutralized them from want of knowledge, thus- engendering all earthly sin and misery against. his will, while the Syrian Demiurge spitefully and maliciously stifled these germs in order to wrest the power over the world from the Divine altogether. His base, revenge ful, and withal limited nature, they said, is fully and clearly stamped upon the Old Testament—exclusively his work.
Man—in this all the schools were agreed—was divided into three classes, correspond ing more or less to these predominant powers- of the world: Divinity, Matter, and Demiurgos. There were first the spiritual men or Pileurnatikoi, inspired by the highest God, striving towards him, with him; initiated into his counsels, understanding his essence. They were free from the yoke of law, for terrestrial nature had no power over them; they were the prophets, guiding, but not guided; the possessors of the true' Gnosis. Diametrically opposed to these, as was kyle to divinity, are.the terrestrial men, Sarkikoi or Choike—of the earth earthy—who are tied and bound by matter; they can neither aspire to the height of spiritual men, nor are they to be ruled by the pre cepts of law. Between these stand the Psychikoi, the blind servants of the lawgiving Demiurgos, who are, through the restraints put upon them by his either stupid or spiteful precepts, free to a certain degree from the terrestrial powers, but they can never reach the height in which the pneumatics habitually dwell. And again, corresponding to these three classes of men, there were three principal religions; Christianity aboT-e, heathenism below, Judaism in the intermediate space.
The two leading tendencies of Gnosticism, of which we have spoken, also manifested themselves, accordingly, in the view they each took of the person of Christ himself. According to both, he was the highest .won, suddenly sent down by the Supreme Being, to rescue and reclaim certain higher natures—for the lowest stratum of men, the carnal or terrestrial, was irredeemably lost—which had either been led astray by the Demiurgos, or had become entangled in the net of matter. At the same time the har monious combination of the human and divine in Christ, which the New Testament assumed, stood in direct opposition to the very basis of Gnosticism. The visible and the invisible, Elio finite and the infinite, God and man, cannot combine; in this they all agreed. But while Judaizing schools, divided Christ into two direct persons, one of heaven and one of earth, who had only become one at the baptism in the Jordan, and who had separated at the crucifixion; the other oriental section of Gnostics held that Christ's earthly manifestation in the flesh, that his whole humanity, was a mere shadow or delusion.
It might well be asked how, with this extraordinary conglomeration of monotheism, pantheism, spiritualism, and materialism, tte Gnostics could possibly take their stand on the Bible, which, from to last, it would seem, denounces, and in the strongest manner, doctrines such as fhe foregoing. The only answer to this is, that they, and they only, were the Pneumatikoi—the initiated. It was well for the other portions of mankind, the natural men, to take everything, including Scripture, and its historical as well as its dogmatical parts, literally. As in creation, so in the book; the Gnostics, guided by their inner lights, saw beneath the surface, and saw everywhere, the most complete affirmation of their peculiar ideas. If the Midrash (q.v.) gave the most fanciful and allegorical interpretations of the Old Testament, for the sake of inculcating moral principles, for edifying, elevating, comforting the congregation, but without the faintest pretense that any but the fixed traditional interpretation was binding and authoritative —Gnosticism, with a proud contempt of the laws of language and thought, did the same for its own purposes, but made its wildly symbolical and erratic interpretations of the religious records binding. We are fax from saying that they were in all cases guilty of intentional deception, in the ordinary sense of the word; although they must frequently have known the real meaning to be totally opposed to their explanations, as most of their teachers were learned Jews; but they, like other enthusiasts, gradually lost the power of discriminating between that which was, and that which might be. Some, however, more consistent, assumed that Christ and his apostles had still been partially under the influence of the Demiurgos, and also that what they had taught, they had expressed in accordance with the blindness of those whom they addressed. Proceeding consistently, they by degrees excluded from the code most of the books of the New Testament, especially those in which there were distinct attacks against them selves; and substituted a number of other epistles and religious documents of their own, in Greek and Syriac, such as the Prophecies of Cain, Writings of Pachur, Psalms by Valentinus and Bardesanes, Gnostic Hymns by Marcos, Books of Adam, Enoch, Mosek, Eliah, Isajah, etc., not to mention a host of writings by newly invented prophets of such peculiar -names as Pachor, Barkor, Armagil, Barbelon, Balsamum, Lensiboras, etc. (Hier. ad Theod. iii. 6, etc.).