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Updated: May 3, 2025
In the same manner the "Wisdom of God" and the "Word of God" became distinct personages. This was the germ of the process which has engendered the Sephiroth of the Cabbala, the Æons of Gnosticism, the hypostasis of Christianity, and all that dry mythology, consisting of personified abstractions, to which Monotheism is obliged to resort when it wishes to pluralize the Deity.
That the source of Gnosticism was to be sought in Mesopotamia was always recognized by scholars, but until the discovery of Babylonian literature, it was customary to seek for Jewish influences in the formation of the various Gnostic sects.
When it became the religion of the court and of the fashionable classes, it was used to support the very evils against which it originally protested, and which it was designed to remove. It first adopted many of the errors of the oriental philosophy. Gnosticism was embraced by many of the leading intellects of the church.
There was an organized fellowship among the members: bishops had become influential, not in society, but among the Christians; dioceses and parishes were established; there was a distinction between city and rural bishops; delegates of churches assembled to discuss points of faith, or suppress nascent heresies; the diocesan system was developed, and ecclesiastical centralization commenced; deacons began to be reckoned among the higher clergy; the weapons of excommunication were forged; missionary efforts were carried on; the festivals of the church were created; Gnosticism a kind of philosophical religion was embraced by many leading minds; catechetical schools taught the faith systematically; the formulas of baptism and the other sacraments became of great importance; marriage with unbelievers was discouraged; and monachism became popular.
If we had been Christians in those first centuries, when a powerful movement was under way called Gnosticism, which denied that God, the Father Almighty, had made both the heaven and the earth, which said that God had made heaven indeed but that a demigod had made the world, and which denied that Jesus had been born in the flesh and in the flesh had died, we would have done what the first Christians did: we would have defined in a creed what it was the Christians did believe as against that wild conglomeration of Oriental mythology that Gnosticism was, and we would have shouted the creed as a war cry against the Gnostics.
And it must have been more widely diffused in these times than many may be ready to believe, if it be true, as the Abbé Maret affirms, and as M. de Hammer offers to prove, that the Knights of the Order of the Temple were affiliated to secret societies in which the doctrines of Gnosticism and the spirit of Pantheism were maintained and cherished.
In the earliest times the mystic doctrine appears to have been a form of Jewish Gnosticism, speculation about the nature of God and His connection with the world. But it was not till the Middle Ages that Jewish mysticism received definite and separate literary expression, and by that time it was mixed up with a number of neo-Platonic and magical fancies and foreign theosophies.
Christianity had a hard battle with Gnosticism and Manichaeism, both of Persian origin, and did not come out unscathed. No Grecian system of philosophy, except Platonism, entered into the Christian system so influentially as the disastrous Manichaean heresy, which Augustine combated.
This is not the first time in the Western world that historic and authoritative Christianity has been challenged. We should have, perhaps, to go back to the fourth century to find an exact parallel and then we should find in the vast and confused movement of Gnosticism an unexpected parallel to a great deal of what is happening about us.
Augustine gave body and soul to two distinct worlds and finally identified woman with the body. But probably as a result of the teachings of Gnosticism with its Neo-Platonic philosophy which never entirely rejected feminine influence, some of this influence survived in the restatement of religion for the folk.
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