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With his ardent faith he could have confuted the Gnostic or the Manichean heresies in colourful allegory, but instead he sang fervid hosannahs on his canvases to the greater glory of Christ and His saints. Perhaps if he had lived in our times he might have painted heads of fashionable courtesans or equivocal statesmen.
Soft, sad, and dreamy as they were, they had strength and beauty enough in them to supersede the Gnostic hymns of Bardesanes and his son Harmonius, which had been long popular among the Syrians; and for centuries afterwards, till Christianity was swept away by the followers of Mahomet, the Syrian husbandman beguiled his toil with the pious and plaintive melodies of St. Ephrem.
Persons were not lacking to perceive the contradiction inherent in such an eclecticism; and it was the Gnostic or neo-Platonic party, which denied creation and taught a pure asceticism, that had the best of the argument. The West, however, would not yield to their logic.
Perhaps the most significant difference between Jesus and Origen is that Origen was inclined to find the concrete expression of the Purpose of Life in self-realisation he was in the best sense a Gnostic while Jesus found it in the service of the weak, ignorant, and sinful, rather than merely in loyal obedience to the strong, wise, and righteous.
If, on the contrary, it is maintained that he used existing materials for his system, and explained away his improper connection with Helen by an adaptation of the Sophia-mythos, it is difficult to understand how such a palpable absurdity could have gained any credence among such cultured adherents as the Simonians evidently were. In either case the Gnostic tradition is shown to be pre-Christian.
Now we have reason to think that Gnostic sects of Jews, both in Alexandria and in Palestine, were at this time tending towards the division of the Godhead into separate powers.
It is the Demiurge, the highest magistrate in heaven, whom the gnostic Valentine calls a godlike angel, and of whom the rabbis said, "His name is like unto the name of his Master."
The shameful memory causes him to exclaim fervently: "May he who purged the lips of Isaiah with a burning coal deign to purify mine by the sacred kiss of penitence and pardon: in osculo sancto." There is a touch of sublimity in that, and the basia of Baal-Zeboub may well enough be more demoralising than those of Secundus. At the time, however, he founded the Gnostic Church.
It was partly also a religious ideal for some of the strange gnostic sects which flourished at that era. Moreover, it was an efficient weapon when used as an accusation, for Wycliff and the friars alike both dreaded its imputation. Perhaps of all that period, John Ball alone held it consistently and without shame.
The Gnostic sects, Ophites and Cainites, looked on the serpent and Cain as friends of the supreme Deity and of man; they were enemies only of the Demiourgos, the Jewish god Yahweh, who, they held, wished to keep man in ignorance. +694+. Thus, it cannot be said that a demon has ever developed into a god.
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