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And in the whole history of human mind there is not a more instructive chapter at once stranger and sad, interesting to our curiosity and mortifying to our pride, than the history of Platonic philosophy sinking into gnosticism, or in other words, of Greek philosophy merging in Oriental Mysticism; showing, on the one hand the decline and fall of philosophy, and, on the other, the rise and progress of Syncretism.
Gnosticism was a serious and noteworthy attempt to bridge over the gap between a good supreme God and an evil world, and was in form a church, but its philosophical and mystical sides had so much that was fanciful and grotesque or ethically dangerous that it did not commend itself to the mass, and soon ceased to exist as a separate organization, though its echoes long continued to be heard in certain Christian groups.
As goddess, priestess and prophetess, woman continued to play her rôle in human affairs until the Christian period, when a remarkable transformation took place. The philosophy of dualism that emanated from Persia had affected all the religions of the Mediterranean Basin and had worked its way into Christian beliefs by way of Gnosticism, Manicheanism, and Neo-Platonism.
It was the latter that arranged and explained the Oriental traditions, loosed their tongues, and produced those religious doctrines and philosophical systems which culminated in Gnosticism, Neo-Platonism, the Judaism of Philo, and the Polytheism of Julian the Apostate.
So is Mrs. Eddy's theory. Gnosticism denied the "true humanity of the Redeemer, and made his person a mere phantom, and his work a mere illusion." So does Christian Science. Although Mrs.
Gnosticism has supervened upon the rudimental childhood of spiritual truth. He believed in progress.
And they astonished these beautiful but ignorant creatures by speaking to them of the stars with a knowledge acquired by seafaring. That's clear, I think, and I should like to know in what M. Mosaide could contradict me." Mosaide kept mute and M. d'Asterac, smiling again, said: "M. Coignard, you do not reason so badly, ignorant as you still are of gnosticism and the Cabala.
Arguing from such historical precedents as these one might easily assume a like fate for the Gnosticism of our own time, and yet a note of caution is needed here for there are divisive religious movements which have as yet neither failed nor been absorbed in that from which they took their departure.
The dualistic principle, one of the chief elements of Gnosticism, harmonized with the prevailing temper of that age, even as the pantheistic principle rules the schools of philosophy in our own. All Christians were alive to consciousness of the power of evil. Gnosticism recognized it. Christianity triumphs over it by the power of the Cross which procures redemption.
Philo's work was made to serve as the guide of that Christian Gnosticism which, within the next hundred years, proclaimed that Judaism was the work of an evil God, and that the essential mission of Jesus the good Logos was to dethrone Jehovah! But though the Logos conception was turned to non-Jewish and anti-Jewish purposes, it was in Philo the offspring of a pure and philosophical monotheism.
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