GNOSTIC, GNOSTICISM. The religion of Jesus Christ appearing as a Divine message, in which is announced God's plan of reconciling sin ners unto Himself, necessarily assumes a position of exclusiveness. It is not one religion among the many, the rdigion of a nation or a class • it is the only religion which God will acknowledge, or by which men can be benefited, and as such it claims the submission of all men alike. Such pretensions unavoidably brought it, when it first appeared, into direct antagonism with all existing religious systems—with Judaism as well as with the various forms of heathen belief and worship. Be tween it and them there could be no peace—no , riAteous or stable compromise.
As often happens, however, though the funda mental and formative principles of the opposing systems were utterly incapable of reconciliation, the boundary-line between them came ere long to be somewhat obscurely defined, and a considerable extent of border territory, so to speak, arose, on which it was attempted to effect the compromise which the inherent antagonism of the systems ren dered it hopeless to attempt in the interior. Thus, between Judaism and Christianity there lay a border land which was occupied by the Judaising teachers, against whom the Apostle Paul so frequently and energetically writes in his epistles, and at a later period by the Nazarenes and Ebionites. The bor der land between Christianity and Heathenism was chiefly occupied by the Gnostic sects, The aim of Gnosticism was to complete Chris tianity so as to render it a perfect solution of the great world-problem—the relation of the finite to the Infinite, of the relative and dependent to the absolute and self-existent. For this purpose its teachers, borrowed partly from the speculations of the Western schools of philosophy, especially that of the later Platonists, and partly from the reveries of the Eastern theosophists ; and these elements they sought to incorporate with Christianity, so as to work up a complete and congruous scheme of religio - philosophic speculation. The different sources from which these spcculatists drew their materials determined their division into two great classes,—the Alexandrian and the Syrian Gnostics; in the former of which thc doctrines of the Grecian philosophy predominated ; in the latter, those of the Parsee or Dualistic theosophy prevailed. Diffe rences of a less general kind divided them into many subordinate sects (Mosheim, De rebus Chris tianoruni ante Constantin. Mag. , p.333, ff.; Matter, Histoire du Gnosticisme ; Neander, Church HzIrt., 1 42, ff. ; Gieseler, Chun-h Hist. i. 134, ff. ; Hase, Hist. of the Church, sec. 76 ; Lewald, Comment. de Doctr. Gnostica, Heidelb. ISIS; Art. Gnosis by Jacobi in Herzog Encycl. v. 204; Dorner, De velopment of the Doctrine concerning the person of Christ,i. 184, ff.) It does not form any part of the design of this work to furnish detailed accounts of systems of speculative opinion ; and the Gnostics are noticed here simply because the question has been mooted whether, and to what extent, their doctrines are re ferred to in the N. T. As prepamtory to this in quiry, therefore, it may suffice to state briefly the fundamental principles common to all the Gnostic sccts, and by which they were distinguished from the Christians generally.
Gnosticism rested on three fundamental data :— 1. The existence of a Supreme Being entirely un connected with matter and incapable of being affected by it ; 2. The existence of a primal matter, an, entirely independent of God, and at the same time, as the principle of evil, antithetic to him ; 3. The existence of some being intermediate between these two. Girm these data the problem which it set itself to solve was to account for the phenoinena of the universe, and especially for the place which evil holds in it. This problem it solved after the following fashion :—The interme diate being reveals God, and so stands related to him ; he also has contact with matter, and so becomes the ani.ttoury6s, or world-creator. As the world thus created is the product of a good being, but is made out of the evil principle, Ool, it is necessarily a mixture of good with evil, and that under the eendition of the good being imprisoned, cribbed, confined, by the evil from which it strug gles to get free. This struggle suggests the idea of a deliverance by a higher power, and that of a redemption. Here, again, the agency of the inter mediate being comes into request ; but the diffi culty occurs, If the Demiurge could not at first snake a world free from evil, how can he extricate the good from the evil in the world which he has made ? To meet this difficulty the intermediate being, ceasing to be viewed as a monad, is con ceived as an aggregate of beings, of which the Demiurge is the lowest, the least perfect, the feeblest ; whilst a series of ascending beings, Suvd uecs or alaves, rise up to the X6-yos and the vas, in whom are found the revelation of God and the redemption of the good from the evil, and espe cially of human spirits from the tyranny of the an. These general conceptions pervade all the Gnostic system, though they are very differently construed and compounded by different sects, according as emanistic or dualistic notions pre dominated, according to the temperament and genius of the founder of them, and according as he stood nearer to the heathen, the Jewish, or the Christian point of view. With the Christian revelation this system of speculation connected itself thus :—It accepted the view given in the Bible of God as One, invisible, unsearchable, infinite, eternal ; it regarded Satan as the source of evil embodied in the Mtn ; it represented the God of Judaism as the Demiurge by whom the world ' had been created ; and it recognised in Jesus Christ the highest of the Aeons, by whom, along with another Aeon, the irveinha, the soul of man is redeetned and restored to unity with God, perfect light with perfect light. It is iu the school of Valentinus that we find the most complete develop ment of these notions. Those who accepted tbem boasted that they had found the true yvell'aLs which the Christ had left to his genuine followers, and by which they were enabled to penetrate into divine truth far beyond the reach of those who abode by the mere ricrres, or belief of the written word ; and hence the name they assumed, Gnostics.