CHAPTER VIII.

ORIENTAL SYNCRETISM—THE OPHITES—FUTURE APPARITION OF MANICHÆISM.

We should exceed our limits if we followed the history of those chimeras of the 3rd century. In the Greek and Latin world Gnosticism had been a fashion, it disappeared just as such with equal rapidity. Matters proceeded differently in the East. Gnosticism commenced a second life, much more brilliant and comprehensive than the first, through the eclecticism of Bardisanus, much more durable by Manichaeism. Already, since the 2nd century, the opponents of Alexandria were veritable dualists, attributing the origin of good and evil to two different gods. Manichæism shall go further; three hundred and fifty years before Mahommet, the genius of Persia realises already that which the genius of Arabia shall realise more powerfully, a religion which aspires to become universal, and to replace the work of Jesus, represented as imperfect or corrupted by his disciples.

The intense confusion of ideas which reigned in the East led to a general syncretism of the strangest of these. Some little mystical sects from Egypt, Syria, Phrygia, Babylonia, profiting by apparent resemblances, pretended to be joined to the body of the Church, and sometimes were received. All the religions of antiquity appeared to have revived again to anticipate Jesus and to adopt him as one of their pupils. The cosmogonies of Assyria, Phœnicia, and Egypt, the doctrines of the mysteries of Adonis, Osiris, and Isis, of the great goddess of Phrygia, made an invasion into the Church, and continued what might be called the Oriental branch—scarcely Christian—of Gnosticism, inasmuch as Jehovah, the God of the Jews, was identified with Assyro-Phœnician Ialdebaoth, “the Son of Chaos.” At other times the old Assyrian ΙΑΩ, which offers with Jehovah some strange traces of family connection, was brought into fashion, and approached with its quasi-homonymism in such a way that it was difficult to distinguish between the shadow and the reality.

The Ophialatros sects, so numerous in antiquity, lent themselves peculiarly to these senseless associations. Under the name of Nahassians, or Ophites, certain Pagan serpent-worshippers grouped themselves, whom it suited for a certain time to take the name of Christians. It is from Assyria that there comes the form of this bizarre Church; but Egypt, Phrygia, Phœnicia, and the Orphic mysteries have their share in it. Like Alexander of Abonoticos, preacher of his serpent-god Glycon, the Ophites had certain tamed serpents (agatho-demons) which they kept in cages. At the moment of celebrating the mysteries they opened the door to the little god and called upon him. The serpent came out, mounted on the table where the loaves were, and coiled himself round them. The Eucharist appeared then to the sectaries 75a perfect sacrifice. They broke the bread, distributed it, worshipped the agatho-demon, and offered through him, they said, a hymn of praise to the Heavenly Father. They sometimes identified their little animals with the Christ or with the serpent which taught men the knowledge of good and evil.

The theories of the Ophites upon the Adamas, considered as an Æon, and upon the cosmic egg, recall the cosmogonies of Philo of Byblos, and the symbols common to all the mysteries of the East. Their rites were more analogous to the mysteries of the Great Goddess of Phrygia than to the pure assemblies of the believers in Jesus. What was most singular about it was that they had their Christian literature, their gospels, and their apocryphal traditions, connecting them with James. They used principally the gospel of the Egyptians, and that of Thomas. Their Christology was that of all the Gnostics. Jesus Christ was according to their view composed of two persons, Jesus and Christ—Jesus the son of Mary, the most righteous, wisest, and purest of men, who was crucified; Christ, the heavenly Æon, who came to unite himself to Jesus, quitted him before the passion, sent from Heaven a virtue which made Jesus to rise, with a spiritual body, in which he lived eighteen months, giving to a small number of chosen disciples a higher instruction.

Upon these hidden borders of Christianity the most varied dogmas blended themselves together. The tolerance of the Gnostics and proselytism opened so wide the gates of the Church that everything passed through them. Some religions which had nothing in common with Christianity, and some Babylonian cults, perhaps some branches of Buddhism, were classed and numbered by the heresiologies among Christian sects. Such were the Baptists or Sabians, afterwards known under the name of Mendaîtes, the Perates, the adherents 76of a cosmogony half Phœnician, half Assyrian; a perfect balderdash, more worthy of Byblos, of Maboug, or Babylon, than the Church of Christ; and especially the Sethians, a sect in reality Assyrian, and which flourished also in Egypt. It was connected by some punsters with the patriarch Seth, the supposed father of a vast literature, and sometimes identified with Jesus Christ himself. The Sethians arbitrarily combined Orphism, Neo-Phœnicianism, and the ancient Semitic cosmogonies, and found the whole of this in the Bible. They said that the genealogies of Genesis included sublime views, which vulgar minds had looked upon as simple family records.

A certain Justin about this same time, in a work entitled Baruch, transformed Judaism into a mythology, and left scarcely any position to Jesus. Some exuberant imaginations, nourished by innumerable cosmogonies, and strangely placed in the severe régime of the Hebrew and gospel literature, could not accommodate themselves to so much simplicity. They inflated, if I may venture to say so, the historical records, legendary, or evhemeristic of the Bible in order to connect them with the genius of the Greek and Oriental fables to which they were accustomed.

It will thus be seen that the whole mythological world of Greece and the East was introduced surreptitiously into the religion of Jesus. Intelligent men of the Greco-Oriental world felt indeed that one and the same spirit animated all the religious creations of humanity. They commenced by comprehending Buddhism. Although it was then far from the time when the life of Buddha had become the life of a holy Christian, they spoke of him with nothing but respect.

The Babylonian Manichæism, which represented in the third century a continuation of Gnosticism, is 77strongly impregnated with Buddhism. But the attempt to introduce all this pantheistic mythology into the framework of a Semitic religion was condemned in advance. Philo, the Jew, the epistles to the Colossians and the Ephesians, the pseudo-Johannine writings, had been under this conviction as long as it was possible. The Gnostics marked the true sense of every word by pretending that they were Christians.

The essence of the work of Jesus was the improvement of the soul. Now these empty speculations embraced everything in the world except good sense and good morals. Even by holding as calumnies what has been said of their promiscuous intercourse and licentious habits, one cannot doubt that the sects of which we speak had had in common an evil tendency to moral indifference, and a dangerous quietism, a world of generosity, which led them to proclaim the uselessness of martyrdom. Their obstinate Docetism, their system of attributing the two Testaments to two different gods, their opposition to marriage, their denial of the resurrection and the final judgment, closed to them the gates of a church. There the rule of the leaders was always a kind of moderation and opposition to excess. Ecclesiastical discipline, represented by the episcopate, was the rock against which those disorderly attempts all came to be broken.

We should be afraid by speaking longer of such sects to have the appearance of taking too seriously what they did not take so themselves. What were they but Phibionites, Barbelonites, or Borborians, the stratiotics or soldiers, the Levitics or Codists? The fathers of the Church are unanimous in throwing upon all these heresies a ridicule which they doubtless deserved, and a hatred which perhaps they did not. There was in the whole of them more of charlatanism than wickedness.

With their Hebrew words often taken in an opposite sense, their magic formulas, and later on their amulets and their Abracadabras, the Gnostics of the lower type merited only to be despised.

But this contempt ought not to be poured out upon those great men who sought in that powerful narcotic the repose or the stupefication of their thoughts. Valentinus was in his own way a genius; Carpocrates and his son, Epiphanes, were brilliant writers, spoiled by utopia and paradox; but sometimes astonishingly profound. Gnosticism had a considerable part in the work of the Christian propaganda. Often it was the transition by which people passed from Paganism to Christianity. The proselytes thus gained became nearly always orthodox; they never returned to Paganism.

It is especially Egypt which preserves from these strange rites an ineffaceable impression. Egypt had not had any Judeo-Christianity. A remarkable fact is the difference between the Coptic literature and the other Christian literature of the East, while the greater number of Judeo-Christians are found in Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopic, Armenian; Coptic only shows a Gnostic background without anything further. Egypt also passes without the intermediary of the Pagan illumination to the Christian light. Alexandria was almost entirely converted by the Gnostics. Clement of Alexandria was what one would call a moderate Gnostic. He quotes with respect Heracleon as a doctor, claiming authority from many points of view. He uses in good sense the word Gnostic, and regards it as synonymous with Christian. He is far in any case from entertaining against the new ideas the hatred of Irenæus, of Tertullian, or the author of the Philosophumena. We may say that Clement of Alexandria and Origen introduced into Christian science that which the too 79bold attempt of Heracleon and Basilides had of acceptability.

Mixed intimately with all the intellectual movement, the gnosis had a decisive influence upon the turn which speculative philosophy took in the third century in that city, then become the centre of the human intellect. The consequence of these disputes without end was the constitution of a sort of Christian academy, a true school of sacred letters and exegesis, which Pantænus, Clement, and Origen soon made famous. Alexandria became every day more and more the capital of Christian theology.

The effect of the gnosis upon the Pagan school of Alexandria was not less. Ammonius Saccas, born of Christian parents, and Plotinus, his disciple, were both impregnated with it. The most open minds, such as Numenius of Apamea, entered by this path into the knowledge of Jewish and Christian doctrines, up till then so rare in the heart of the Pagan world. The Alexandrian philosophy of the third, fourth, and fifth centuries is full of what may be called the Gnostic spirit, and it linked to the Arabian philosophy a germ of mysticism which that should develop still more. Judaism on its side shall yield to similar influences. The Cabbala is nothing else than the Gnosticism of the Jews. The sephiroth are the perfections of Valentinus. Monotheism, to create itself a mythology, has only one process, and that is to give life to the attributes which it is accustomed to range around the throne of the Eternal.

The world, wearied of an effete polytheism, demanded in the East, and especially in Judæa, some divine names less used than those of the current mythology. These Oriental names had more weight than the Greek names, and a singular reason was given for their theurgic superiority; it is that the 80Divinity having been invoked by the Orientals at a more ancient period than by the Greeks, the names of the Oriental theology answered better than the Greek names to the nature of the gods, and pleased them more. The names of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Solomon passed in Egypt for talismans of the first potency. Amulets answering to this unruly syncretism covered the whole world. The words ΙΑω, ΑΔωΝΑΙ, CΛΒΑωΘ, εΛωΑΙ and the Hebraic formulas in Greek characters were mixed up with some Egyptian symbols and with the sacramental ΛΒΡΑCΑΞ, equivalent to the number 365. All this is much more Judeo-Pagan than Christian, and Gnosticism in Christianity representing the aversion to Jehovah pushed even to blasphemy; it is entirely inexact to connect with Gnosticism these monuments of absurdity. They were the effect of the general turn which the superstition of the time had taken, and we believe that at the period we have arrived at, Christians of all sects remained indifferent to these little talismans. It is from the conversion en masse of the Pagans, in the fourth and fifth centuries, that the amulets were introduced into the Church, and that some words and symbols decidedly Christian are begun to be met with there.

Orthodoxy was, therefore, ungrateful not to recognise the services which these undisciplined sects had rendered her. In dogma they provoked nothing but reaction, but their position was more considerable in Christian literature and liturgical institutions. They borrowed nearly always a good deal from those whom they anathematised. The first Christianity, quite Jewish still, was very simple, it was the Gnostics who made a religion of it. The sacraments were to a large extent their creation; their anointings, especially at the deathbeds of the sick, produced a deep impression. The holy chrism confirmation (at first an integral part 81of baptism), the attribution of a supernatural power to the sign of the Cross, and many other elements of Christian mysticism came from them. A young and active party, the Gnostics wrote much and launched boldly into apocrypha. Their books, assailed with discredit at first, finished by entering into the orthodox family. The Church soon accepted what it had at first inveighed against. A multitude of superstitions, festivals, and symbols of Gnostic origin thus became the superstitions, festivals, and symbols of Catholicism. Mary the mother of Jesus, in particular, with whom the Orthodox Church had little concerned itself, owed to these innovators the first development of her almost divine position. The apocryphal gospels are fully half at least the work of Gnostics. Now the apocryphal gospels have been the source of a great number of festivals, and have furnished the most cherished subjects for Christian art. The first Christian image, the first portraits of Christ, were Gnostic. The strictly orthodox Church would have remained iconoclastic if heresy had not penetrated it, or rather had not demanded from her, for the necessities of the times, more than one concession to Pagan weaknesses.

Moving from time to time from genius to folly, Gnosticism defies all absolute judgments on it. Hegel and Swedenborg, Schelling and Cagliostro, elbow each other there. The apparent frivolity of some of its theologians should not repel us. Every law which is not the pure expression of positive science must submit to the caprices of fashion. So Hegel’s formula, which in his time had been the most lofty view in the world, causes us to smile now. Such a phraseology in which to sum up the universe one day shall appear clumsy or weak. To all who make shipwreck in the sea of the infinite, indulgence must be given. Good 82sense, which appears at first sight irreconcilable with the chimeras of the Gnostics, was not so wanting in them as we might imagine. They did not fight against civil society; they did not seek for martyrdom; and they held excess of zeal in aversion. They had high wisdom, tolerance, and sometimes (can it be believed?) even discreet scepticism. Like all religious forms, Gnosticism softened, consoled, and excited the mind. Here are the terms in which a Valentinian epitaph, found on the Latin Way, tries to sound the abyss of death:—

“Desirous to see the light of the Father, companion of my blood, of my bed, O my wise one, perfumed in the sacred bath, with the incorruptible and pure myrrh of the Christ, thou hast hastened to go and contemplate the divine faces of the Æons, the great angel of the grand council, the true Son, hurried as thou wast from sleeping in the nuptial couch, into the bosom of the Æons.

“This death is not the lot of ordinary human beings. She is dead, and she sees and really may see the light incorruptible. To the eyes of the living she is living; those who believe her dead are really dead. Earth, what shall be said of thy wonders in presence of this new kind of manes! What shall be said of thy fear!”