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Updated: May 22, 2025
He then descants at great length on Symbols, expounding Pythagorean, Hebrew, Egyptian, and then remarks that the ignorant and unlearned man fails in understanding them. "But the Gnostic apprehends. The Pythagoreans and Plato, Zeno, and Aristotle had exoteric and esoteric teachings.
Jean Kostka, as already indicated, is a spiritual sentimentalist; he has passed by a rapid transition common to such natures from the Gnostic transcendental initiate to the pious Catholic devotee, and he will make an excellent Lourdes pilgrim. As there will be no need to recur to him again, it will be permissible to justify my criticism by some account of his personal experiences.
Both again preface their own views of the question of Providence by a preliminary statement of the various opinions held by other sects. Here too the two accounts are in the main similar, except that Aaron ben Elijah is somewhat more detailed and names a few sects not mentioned by Maimonides, among them being the Manicheans and the followers of the Syrian Gnostic Bardesanes.
We are horrified at the morals and tenets of the Gnostic sects, the Manicheans, the Albigenses, and other defunct heresies of old; but we doubt if any thing more impious, immoral, or absurd happened under the auspices of these by-gone sects than the blasphemies, delusions, and corruptions carried on under the cloak of your "camp meetings," "revivals," "mediums," "spiritual wife system," and other modern reproductions of the Protestant Christian churches, falsely so called.
Not only does the author allow no time at all for Irenaeus to compose his own work, not only does he allow none for him to become acquainted with the Gnostic doctrines, and for those doctrines themselves to become consolidated and expressed in writing, but he goes so far as to make Irenaeus testify to a state of things five years at least, and very probably ten, in advance of the time at which he was himself writing!
But when Gnostic principles were embraced by good men, those which, for instance, entered into monastic or ascetic life, it was necessary that some great genius should arise and expose their oriental origin, and lay down the Christian law definitely on that point.
The speculative tenets of the sect, concerning the person of Christ, and the nature of the human soul, were derived from the Gnostic and Manichæan system; and this vain philosophy, which had been transported from Egypt to Spain, was ill adapted to the grosser spirits of the West.
This extract from Hippolytus occurs in the long discourse in which he 'exposes' the heresy of the so-called Naassene doctrines and mysteries. But the whole discourse should be read by those who wish to understand the Gnostic philosophy of the period contemporary with and anterior to the birth of Christianity. Reitzenstein, op. cit., quotes the discourse largely.
In the middle of the second century, this Philonian theory was the one thing needful to add metaphysical precision to the Gnostic and Pauline speculations concerning the nature of Jesus. According to Justin, an impassable abyss exists between the Infinite Deity and the Finite World; the one cannot act upon the other; pure spirit cannot contaminate itself by contact with impure matter.
The theatrical exhibitions at Alexandria in mockery of the question were calculated to confirm him in his opinion: his judgment was lost in the theories that were springing up as to the nature of Christ; for on the Ebionitish, Gnostic, and Platonic doctrines, as well as on the new one that "the logos" was made out of nothing, it equally followed that the current opinion must be erroneous, and that there was a time before which the Son did not exist.
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