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Updated: May 22, 2025
The community at Alexandria was a very heterogeneous body; not only were the sects which had appeared in Palestine, the Sadducees, Samaritans, Pharisees, and Essenes, represented there too, but in addition there were parties who attached themselves to one or other of the Greek schools, the Pythagoreans, Skeptics, and the like, and lastly Gnostic groups, who cultivated an esoteric doctrine of the Godhead, and were lax in their observance of the law, which they held to be purely symbolical and of no account in its literal meaning.
I have seen somewhere a Gnostic or early Christian emblem which indicates this doctrine. Some Shepherd or Saviour stands, his feet on the earth, his head towering above the planets, lifting his follower in his outstretched arms. The Gnostics are still commonly thought of as a body of Christian heretics.
In modern days, and among scientific people, the affirmation which is the reverse of this became at one time popular, widely accepted not Gnostic but "Agnostic," "without the Gnosis"; that was the position taken up by Huxley and by many men of his own time of the same school of thought.
How much of real vision there may have been in Gnosticism; how much of mere speculation, which is but a step towards vision, I am not prepared to guess; but have little doubt that Gnostic activities made ready the ground for Neo-Platonism; so that when the latter's Manasaputric light incarnated, it found fit rupas to inhabit.
This teaching is not lost; the church cast it out when she expelled the great Gnostic Doctors, but it has nevertheless been preserved, and it is precisely that Wisdom which we are studying precisely that which we find to answer all the problems of life, to give us a rational rule by which to live, to be to us a veritable gospel of good news from on high." St.
Among the ecclesiastics there had always been many, occasionally some of eminence, who set their faces against the connexion of worship with art; thus Tertullian of old had manifested his displeasure against Hermogenes, on account of the two deadly sins into which he had fallen, painting and marriage; but Gnostic Christianity had approved, as Roman Christianity was now to approve, of their union.
Thus the Adamites, a rather obscure gnostic sect of the second century, attempted to imitate the Edenic state by condemning marriage and abandoning clothing. Their assemblies were held underground, and on entering the place of worship both sexes stripped themselves naked, and in that state performed their ceremonies.
Unable any longer to soar to Heaven, it sullied the majesty of the Deity, and divided the Godhead in order to bridge the gap. Numenius represents in philosophy the Gnostic ideas about God which were widely held by the heretics, Jewish and Christian, of the second century.
"I guess that either our young friend here has got the vision, or that he will make a first-class novelist," said Colonel Josiah Smith. "Any way, if you care to part with that talisman, Miss Ogilvy, I will be glad to give you five hundred dollars for it on the chance of his integrity." She smiled and shook her head, stretching out her hand to recover the Gnostic charm.
So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of "Agnostic." It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the "Gnostic" of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant; and I took the earliest opportunity of parading it at our Society to show that I, too, had a tail like the other foxes.
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