GNOSTICS, a religious philosophical sect, who boasted of a deeper insight into the origin of the world, and of the evil of the world, than the human understanding, so long as it remains in equilibrium, can deem admissible, or even possible. Simon the magician, of whom Luke speaks in the Acts of the Apostles, was the first among them. Even in his dogmas we discover the traces of ideas which were common to all the Gnostics. They may be reduced to the fol lowing principal heads: The world and the human race were created out of matter by one won, called the demiurge, or, according to the later systems of the Gnostics, by several aeons and angels. The eons made the bodies and the sensual soul of man (sensorium, psyche) of this matter ; hence the origin of evil in man. God gave man the rational soul; hence the constant struggle of reason with sense. What are called gods by men (for instance, Jehovah, the God of the Jews), they say, are merely such aeons or creators, under whose dominion man became more and more wicked and miserable. To de stroy the power of these creators, and to free man from the power of matter, God sent the most exalted of all aeons, to which character Simon first made pretension; he was followed in these pretensions by Menander, a Samaritan, the most celebrated of his scholars, who, toward the end of the 1st century, founded a sect at Antioch in Syria. Simon and Menander were enemies to Christianity. Cerinthus, a Jew, of whom John the Evangelist seems to have had some knowledge, combined these reveries with the doctrines of Christianity, and maintained that the most elevated mon, sent by God for the salvation of man, was Christ, who had descended upon Jesus, a Jew, in the form of a dove, and through him revealed the doctrines of Chris tianity. In the 2d century, during the reign of Hadrian and both the Antonines, these princi ples were adopted by certain Christian philos ophers, who are more particularly known under the name of Gnostics, and still further refined, extended and systematized. Saturninus, a Syrian, speaks of an unknown supreme God, who had generated many angels and powers; seven of these sons were, according to him, creators of the world, and soon fell from God; one of them, the God of the Jews, had seduced man to him, whence originated the difference between good and bad men. Saturninus also calls Christ the Saviour sent by God, and the Son of God; but the opinion that Christ was not actually born, and had not a real human body, but only an incorporeal image, is peculiar to him, on which account his followers and other later Gnostics who agreed with him in this respect were called (from Greek dokeiv, to seem) and Phantasiasts. The system of Carpocrates, an Alexandrian, who also ished during the reign of Hadrian, was distinguished from the one which we have just described in this respect only, that he sidered Christ as a mere man, whose purer and more powerful soul had more accurately bered what it had seen with God before its union with the body. The fathers of the
Church, Clement of Alexandria, Irenxus, bius and Epiphanius, from whom, in general, we derive all our information concerning the Gnostics, accuse the moral system of crates of destroying all distinctions between good and evil, and inculcating an unlimited dulgence of the sensual appetites. Certain it is that his followers practised the most detestable vices, and were the cause of many of the nies of the heathen writers concerning the tians of this century. The Valentinian party, which rose toward the middle of the 2d tury in Rome, and especially in Cyprus, and which was distinguished by its austere manners, was the most numerous of all the Gnostic sects, and continued until after the commencement of the 4th century. Marcion of Sinope, and Cerdo, a Syrian, renounced many of the absurdities of the earlier Gnostics, and formed a regular tem, the characteristic of which was the tion of the Old Testament. Bardesanes, a i Syrian, and Hermogenes, an African, who in the reign of the Emperor Commodus, aposta tized from Christianity and established sects, bordered, in their hypotheses concerning the origin of good and evil, upon Gnosticism. On the whole, when we take into consideration the philosophical tendency of that age, the passion for the marvelous that had taken possession of the effeminate nations of the Roman Empire, and the custom of pretending to a deeper in sight into the secrets of nature and the divinity, it is not to be wondered at that a religious phi losophy which adopted the most brilliant parts of Platonism, and which afforded nourishment alike to the imagination and to the vanity of secret wisdom, should have met with such uni versal success. By the austerity of its precepts, and its care for the well-being of the soul, it even prepossessed good men in its favor. The Gnostics were the Pietists of the 3d and 4th centuries. The Roman Catholic Church took occasion from their heresy to give greater pre cision to the articles of the orthodox faith. There have been no Gnostic sects since the 5th century; but many of the principles of their sys tem of emanations reappear in later philosoph ical systems, drawn from the same sources as theirs. Plato's lively representation had given to the idea of the Godhead something substan tial, which the Gnostics transferred to their eons; and Leibnitz's of God,' Ploucquet's (Real Presentations of God,' Saint Martin's and Mirrors,' and the like, as well as the Gnostic eons, are a proof that the essays of the human understanding to ex plain the creation and the origin of imperfect beings from the perfect always end in similar results. See Gnowricisss and works there referred to.