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By the later Roman Church Fathers of the Catholic Church Gnosticism will be regarded as the most serious of all the threats to the existence of a unified and Catholic Church. It had to be eradicated in the eyes of Rome. That means not only the extermination of those holding these religious tenants through crusades and murder but their religious writings had to be destroyed as well. If these writings could not be destroyed and earased from the memory of the masses then they had to be altered, added to, and deleted in order to confuse if not purge them of their Gnostic religiious thought. The purge of existing Ancient turth begins! Had it not been for the discovery in 1945-1946 of the Nag Hammadi Library of Coptic Gnostic texts that revolutionized our traditional understanding of Gnosticism and the true origins of earliest Christianity then we would not know what we do today about the diverence of Christianity from its earliest religious tenants. But Gnosticism also contains within it ideas important for later times. Gnostic tendencies reappear in later heresies, especially in those of the late Middle Ages. They appear in some religious groups today - for example, in certain groups formed for meditation, or for the achievement of greater spiritual consciousness, both within and without the mainstream churches.
The central aim of the second-century teachers of Gnosticism was to establish an understandable Christian philosophy and a system to live by. The fourth-century Roman controversialists, on the other hand, were concerned with refutation of error in points of doctrine, and the fourth and fifth-century heresies arose out of the exploration or defence of such points. These controversies were of more fundamental importance than sometimes might appear, but, nevertheless, their argument was basically an intellectual one of definition. Those who belonged to and those who attacked the Gnostic schools were concerned to discover what Christianity was; for above all, the Gnostic teachings regarding God and man's role in God's creation, considered heresies by later Rome, were spreading at a time when Christian doctrines and modes of worship were still in a state of formation in Roman Catholicism.
These early heresies, from what we can find out about them, would seem to exemplify the most interesting elements in all "great heresies" - that is to say, the teaching may have contained an idea of great value, but the teacher may have expounded it before he had attained sufficient stature himself fully to comprehend it; or the teaching may have fallen into the wrong hands and so become distorted or trivialized; or it may have lost its balance through over-emphasis. Hints of all these things can be found in the discovered records of the Gnostic sects.
But there is more to it than this. The question has already arisen - how much has been lost in condemning the Gnostic schools and in turning away from them? It is here that the study of Gnosticism is important, because this is a question that cannot be ignored and must be constantly returned to.
Clement of Alexandria and Origen - Christian theologians of the second and the beginning of the third centuries - did not reject all Gnostic ideas. Clement of Alexandria (150 To 215 AD), Presbyter and head of the Christian catechetical school in that city, often quoted from the Gnostics. This is startling in light of later Roman Catholic teaching that Gnosticism has to be eradicated from the face of the earth and did its best to accomplish the task. Clement of Alexandria considered Valentinus and his school to be Christians bent on finding the truth, though led into error by misunderstanding Greek and pagan philosophies.
Origen, (185 to 254 C.E.) was Clement's successor as Presbyter of the school. Both he and Clement had much in common and much sympathy with the Gnostics, especially with the Valentinians; but the Alexandrians' views, though influential, were not incorporated into "orthodoxy", and several of Origen's ideas were actually condemned as heretical in Councils of the fifth and sixth centuries.
Clement, the "blessed presbyter", as he was called, was revered by all early Christian writers as a truly saintly man. He was acknowledged as a Saint of the Church until the eighteenth-century Pope, Benedict XIV, having read and believed a hostile account of Clement's work by Photius, a ninth-century ecclesiastical writer, excluded Clement's name from the catalogue of Saints. This was, and is, regretted by many.
Clement's ideal was the Christian Gnostic. "The true gnostic is the Lord's brother and friend and son," he wrote in his Stromateis (meaning "miscellaneous collection" - literally, "bag of oddments"). And he even went so far as to say, "The gnostic practises being God, and has already become God". (Strom iv 23). Like the Valentinians, he did not equate the saving knowledge, necessary for perfection, with intellectual enquiry, though he felt strongly that reason had an important part to play.
In Clement's teaching, true experiential knowledge comes through the continued practice of faith and love. He disagreed with the Gnostic conception of the world as evil. But anything which he thought to be of value in the Gnostic systems Clement accepted and made use of, just as he made use of Greek philosophy, which he held to be the forerunner of Christianity, for him the highest exposition of truth. In fact, for Clement, Christianity was essentially a philosophy in its original sense of "love of wisdom" - a search for wisdom and the true way to gain holiness (wholeness).
Clement wrote that Truth is Truth wherever it is found, and it is everywhere the word of God. "It is the unique Word, which has given out to each nation, through the angel set over it, the form of wisdom proper to it. Wisdom is one in principle but multi-form in presentation. This same Word manifests itself anew in Christ, but the same pattern remains," (as quoted in Daniélou and Marrou, The Christian Centuries - The First Six Hundred Years). Clement was never formally attacked for his ideas, but they seem to have been forgotten and set aside.
Christ, as Clement taught, was essentially a teacher and a revealer, who came to lead men, through wisdom, to become Sons of God. Like the Gnostics, he thought that there were grades of Christians. There were the "pistes", who accepted Christ without knowing why and who worked only in obedience and for a hoped-for reward. These formed the great body of the baptized. There were also the "pneumatics", who had some knowledge in addition to this and knew what they were doing. But, unlike the Gnostics, in Clement's doctrines, there was a possibility for everyone who worked towards the true practice of contemplation and right living to progress and so to become a true gnostic and attain fulfillment.
One can find in Clement's writings the assumption of a secret Apostolic tradition - an allegorical teaching, handed down, not through a succession of bishops but of teachers. This again is exactly what Gnosticism teaches! Clement wrote that "after the resurrection, the Lord delivered the Gnosis to James the Just and to John and Peter; they delivered it to the other apostles", (from Eusebius" Church History 2, i.4). There must exist, if this be so, an esoteric as well as an exoteric Christianity.
This idea was more clearly expressed by Ongen, who had listened as a boy to Clement's lectures. Origen, as well as being a committed and devout Christian and Christian traditionalist, was a philosopher who had studied the Gnostic systems and who clearly knew a great deal about the Gnostic schools that existed in his time. He held that man was striving towards a sorrowless condition - a state of order and of rest. According to Origen this condition of rest and completeness could be reached by intense practice of contemplation and by self-knowledge, which, for him, meant Divine Wisdom. "The soul is trained, as it were, to behold itself in a mirror. It shows the divine spirit, if it should be found worthy of such fellowship, as in a mirror, and this discovers traces of a secret path to participation in the divine nature."
But Origen accepted that complete and certain knowledge rests wholly on Divine Revelation. This means that he desired his cosmological speculations to be based on the sacred Scriptures, whose understanding had a special significance for him. In his teaching the facts recorded in the Old and New Testaments appear as vehicles of ideas, and their importance lies in this aspect. Unlike the Gnostics, Origen emphasized the empirical and historical in Scripture, as concrete facts. But for him their actuality did not give them their value; historical Christianity was the husk which enclosed the true kernel.
What was fundamental in Origen's exposition of Christianity was his insistence that scriptural ideas existed on three different levels - the "Flesh of Scripture" was the body of happenings in time and space, which was to edify the masses; the more advanced, the "pneumatics", could study the mysteries, the "Soul of Scripture"; only the "perfect" could understand the "Spirit of Scripture" - the level above mere history. Certain Christian teachings, he said, should not lightly be committed to writing; without the "key to knowledge" there would always be mistakes in the teaching of Scripture and Christian Tradition. Again we find these three designations applied to mankind and their understanding of things pertaining to the Spiritual dimension. Origen's view that the recorded facts of Christianity were of small value beside their secret inner meaning was difficult to reconcile with the rules of faith given to the congregations in the Roman churches. And it was on this point that Origen made clear his belief that there was both an esoteric and an exoteric Christianity as had his mentor Clement of Alexandria.
Although the Christian masses could not grasp the deeper meanings expounded in the Scriptures, the "flesh" of Scripture was necessary for their life and growth. Simple faith was enough for Salvation, and the Church had embodied the substance of Christian belief in its exoteric rules of faith. Anthropomorphic language was what could be generally understood, but Christ would have different meanings according to the believer's spiritual progress.
Now take a deep breath and ponder what is said next. The centre of Christianity for Origen was Christ; not as Man, but as Logos - the Logos who was with the Father from all eternity. Those who had striven to draw near to the Logos -men such as Socrates and Heracitus - were Christians before the coming of Christ.
Some Gnostics had incorporated Jesus into their cosmological scheme - Jesus for many Gnostics was the mythical Revealer, who came from above. His descent from Heaven, and his ascent back to Heaven were only to be understood allegorically and metaphors or symbols of the soul's destiny. Christ was the Archetypal Man. Origen had sympathy with the Gnostics' views, but he did not agree with them that all the facts stated in the Christian Revelation were purely symbols of the inner life. Christianity, he said, was a practical principle, unfolded in historically revealed facts. Nevertheless, he taught a cosmological and theological system that incorporated many ideas not found in the traditional Christian teaching of the time.
In Origen's system the first act by the Father of All Being was to create the realm of intelligences. Some of these spirits cooled in their love for their Creator and fell away. God made the material world as a means of recovering these spiritual beings who, through their own fault, were now imprisoned in human bodies.
Origen believed in a pre-mundane fall, as did the Gnostics, but, unlike the Gnostics, he believed that the Creator God was good and all-merciful, creating the world as a training-ground for human souls, which the fallen spirits had now become, so that they might return to the Fount of their Being. The "world", unlike the Gnostics" "world", was not evil - the suffering in it being necessary for the training and purification of the fallen souls. For him, evil's root was purposelessness - absence of good - and God did not punish. The punishment of human kind consisted in their turning away from where alone true happiness could be found. Their redemption consisted in being shown the way to find it again.
Depending on the quality of their life on earth, souls might evolve or degenerate. After further lives of striving, finally, all would eventually be saved. This last belief was contrary to that of the Gnostics, who assumed a pre-destined elect. Origen believed that every man has within him the image of the Divine Word. Unless he destroys this entirely, there is always hope for him. He believed in the possibility of attaining perfection after death. The soul's growth in comprehension would continue through a slow and painful ascent of many lives. As no one on this earth is sinless, there will be purging "fire" at death. This belief in the restitution of all souls back to purity and blessedness, through the means of suffering, contained within it the germ of the doctrine of Purgatory. And the idea of Purgatory became a general assumption in Church teaching from then on, though it was not formulated till Gregory the Great did so in the sixth century, and it was not included in official doctrine until the thirteenth. Yet the final restitution of all things was, in Origen's teaching, relative, since all spirits inherently possess free will and so could fall again. God remains eternally immutable, but the falling and the rising may continue. Origen did not conceive the End as an apocalyptic transfiguration of the world, but, as in Gnostic doctrine, a liberation of the spirit from its union with the sensual. His was a spiritual, not a physical resurrection.
Origen taught that the idea of three persons within the Godhead was fundamental to Christian understanding:
The Logos is the wisdom and power of God, directing the Universe. So the Word is midway between the Uncreated God and created things. It is this Logos or Word which is a spiritual intermediary between Pure Spirit (God) and Matter (mankind). This is pure Gnosticism. But, though in the way in which he wrote the Son appeared subordinate to the Father, Origen held that the immutability, the pure knowledge and the blessedness of the Father were communicable attributes, and so the Son possessed complete Divinity.
Ongen's teaching influenced many Christian thinkers, but some of his ideas were held to be heretical, and the Council of Alexandria in 400 and that of Constantinople in 543 condemned them. Strangely enough, Origen was not attacked for the general scheme of ideas that formed his system, though they might have been thought to be close to Gnosticism and to be a departure from mainstream Christianity; for example, what would appear contrary to the teaching of the Great Church was the distinction which he made between:
In reality Origin taught the existence of "two Christianities"; and indeed his whole conception of man's redemption - the fallen spirits returning through many lives to the source of their pure being - might have been expected to be equally unacceptable. Instead, he was attacked on isolated propositions, such as his conception of a spiritual as against a physical resurrection. His belief in the pre-existence of souls was said to be heretical, and his teaching on the restoration of all things back to God was attacked on the grounds that this must include even the devils. Above all, he was accused of heresy on account of his exposition of the Logos and of the explanation which he gave of the Son's relationship to the Father. He was accused of making the Son subordinate and so detracting from His Divinity. And yet, in the religious controversies concerning this relationship, both sides drew most of their ideas from him.
In the same way as Clement, Origen recognized what was of value in Gnostic teaching and developed it, though, strangely enough, much of what can now be learned of his ideas comes from his writings against what he held to be Gnostic errors. For both Clement and Origen, there existed a question that has never been answered - was there an authentic tradition, unknown to the ordinary Christian, on which the Gnostic writers relied"?
It is ironic that a great part of Origen's teaching should have been obscured by theological argument and controversy, because, for Origen, Christianity was essentially not a doctrine, but a life; not a Law, but a Spirit. He laid special emphasis on the importance of the Spirit as against the Letter in all Christian teaching. And yet the creation of a permanent, institutional Church demanded the "Letter". Already, Irenaeus, the great second-century apologist, had begun to propound what the "Letter" entailed.
We will find that it will Irenaeus who will counter the Gnostic's allegorical First New Testament with a "literal" [of the letter] anti-Gnostic Catholic one in and around 180 C.E. Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, lived between c. 130 and 202 AD. Up till that time the word "catholic" meant simply "worldwide". By the end of the second. century, it meant holding to doctrines of Apostolic Tradition as accepted by a universal federation of churches which recognized one another.
Irenaeus' main concerns were to preserve what he held to be the Apostolic Tradition, and to ensure that every church agreed with the Roman Church as a matter of necessity; for, he said, this Church represented the leadership of faith. "And to this Church, on account of its more powerful leadership, it is necessary for every church to gather; that is to say, the faithful from all quarters, because the tradition from the Apostles is preserved there by those who come from all quarters." (Adversus Heresies III 3 i).
Irenaeus' great work in five books was entitled Against Heresies. The use of the word "heresy" in a work which received general acclaim shows that, already by the second century, there was a collection of belief that was considered to be "orthodox".
The main object of Irenaeus' attack was Gnosticism. He considered, as did Hippolytus and Justin Martyr-also writing in the second century - that Simon Magus was the founder of Gnosticism; and they equated a Simon, (possibly a leader of a Samaritan sect that had spread to Syria, Phrygia and even to Rome) with the Simon of the Acts of the Apostles chapter 8. "But there was a certain man, called Simon, which before time, in the same city, used sorcery and bewitched the people of Samaria, giving out that himself was some great one; to whom they gave heed from the least to the greatest, saying 'this man is the great power of God'." Hippolytus attributed a "gnostic" book called The Great Revelation to this Simon.
As in all Gnostic sects, the "Simonians" held, as one of their central beliefs, that within humanity, or within some portion of humanity, a Divine Spark was imprisoned and this had to be redeemed. Irenaeus maintained that Simon, the leader, announced himself as this Redeemer - the Supreme God, who had descended through the worlds to appear as man (though not a man) in order to set right that which had gone astray on earth. In this form the belief naturally appeared blasphemous to Irenaeus, but he was also attacking the general Gnostic idea of a mythical Saviour (using "myth" in its sense of a philosophic abstraction or cosmic explanation); and he opposed this Docetic interpretation of Christ - that is Christ as purely a spirit-being. An essential element in Irenaeus' teaching and in what became "mainstream" or "orthodox" Christianity was the belief that Jesus Christ lived on earth as a human being in historical time. Irenaeus held that only in this way could Christ recapitulate perfection step by step, thereby showing that mankind had the possibility of a return to the immortality lost by Adam's fall. God created man in His image to live in a world created for his use and for his training.
It was the speculative, subjective and unhistorical approach of the Gnostics that Irenaeus found dangerous - especially because it could lead, and in fact did lead, to a proliferation of schools and of "gospels". It was a single teaching, handed down from the Apostles and their successors which Irenaeus was concerned to establish and preserve. As a boy he had listened to St Polycarp; and St Polycarp had been a disciple of St John. He felt, therefore, that he could personally witness to a continuity of teaching.
Irenaeus maintained that there was an oral tradition given by the Apostles to the Elders and, from them, to the bishops whom they appointed, and so on to their successors. The four Gospels were the written records of this teaching in four forms. Matthew, he thought, was the first to write. But it was not the Gospels that Irenaeus held to be the primary authority, but the voice of the succession of Elders; and the original kerygma, or oral teaching, which was later written down in the Gospels, had been possessed by the Apostles in its entirety. Irenaeus insisted that if they had known of hidden mysteries, they would have told their successors.
Questions had arisen and different interpretations had been given from the very beginning of the new religion. Irenaeus does not enter into this, but writes in order to show that a teaching had continued without a break, and that its reliability was guaranteed by an unbroken succession of authority. To prove this, he traced a continuous line of Bishops of Rome back to St Peter, himself the first Bishop of Rome. Irenaeus gave the Bishops of Rome as the example of a continuous succession of authority, because he held Rome to be the preeminent and leading church. He believed this to be so because tradition held that the Roman church was founded by St Peter and St Paul, both martyred in Rome. And because, as he said, "all roads lead to Rome", it was possible for interpretations of Christian teachings to be checked there in the one centre, and the true character of the universal faith could thus be clarified.
The Gnostics, too, put their faith in an oral tradition, but they maintained that it was a secret one, given only to those who could understand; and they suggested that the apostles themselves often did not understand it. Even in the next generation, they said, the purity of the teaching was no longer perfect. Hints of a "secret teaching" often appeared in their allegorization of the Gospels - their mystical interpretation of the events recorded there. And it was against such allegorization that Irenaeus wrote most strongly. His main method was to hold fast to the "canon of truth received at baptism". This was the "baptismal creed" - at first, not so much a creed as a series of answers given by the Christian believer, on entering into his new life. What came to be called "The Apostles' Creed" - the oldest confession of faith - appears to have been formulated around the year 150 AD, and probably originated in Rome. The beliefs stated in the "Apostle's Creed" it seem to have been carefully defined in order to counteract Gnosticism.
It is possible that, had the "orthodox" Church not felt the need to defend Christian teaching from Gnosticism, the Creed would not have been formulated in that particular way.
Irenaeus summed up his attack on the Gnostics by his affirmation that Scripture - the Scripture then accepted by the Great Church and soon to be almost identical with the present New Testament - together with Apostolic Tradition, constituted the faith by which Christians live.
As can be seen from contemporary and later history, Irenaeus' proofs of a single, guaranteed, unbroken tradition were not irrefutable. But for many they seemed so, and they gave yet greater strength to the ever increasing importance of the central teaching-authority at Rome.
This central authority was forming its Canon of Scripture and beginning to formulate its Creed. Whether these could be understood and acted upon by every type of believer did not present itself as a problem to the first leaders of the Great Church. But it was a problem in the view of some thinkers, and was to appear as a problem running through most of the Christian heresies of the first three centuries.
I hope you noticed that as late as 250 C.E. that Gnostic understanding of Christianity and "the Christ" yet lived and was prospering as seen in these early and very prominent Christian teaches. They understood what we don't; namely, that there are levels of understanding of God, the soul, and His "Christ." Some of the greatest minds ever given to mankind adopted and supported many Gnostic religious beliefs and many of these were respected early Church leaders like Clement of Alexandria and Origen. Rome will pronounce such ones later as "heretics." Others and their writings and importance will be brushed under the rug. Literalistic Rome will not accept this deeper understanding of God and His "Christ" as taught by the earliest Christians; both Jewish and non-Jewish. Gnosticism will become the great enemy of the Roman Church and it had to be eradicated.
Already at work since 180 C.E. is the Roman printing press which, in accordance with its own Church Councils, was active in suppressing Gnosticism and Gnostic concepts through not only the production of new "Apostolic Revelation" in the names of Apostles and Paul but the destruction and censoring of those who advocated them as well as their Gnostic writings. The light of this ancient truth is beginning to be extinguished by the diligent efforts of Rome. The anti-Gnostic Second New Testament will be Rome's answer to the Gnostic problem as well as their Gnostic apologists such a Justin Martyr and Irenaeus as well as a host of others which Rome will send.