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Updated: May 3, 2025
The apocalyptic enthusiasm changed little by little into neo-platonic mysticism, which theology thrust further into the background. It feared the excesses of the imagination which was supplanting faith and creating gnostic extravagances. But it had to sign a kind of pact with gnosticism and another with rationalism; neither imagination nor reason allowed itself to be completely vanquished.
The training which the great leaders had received in philosophy and rhetoric had made them keen dialectics. They had something of Paul's abhorrence of heathen abominations, for they saw them on every hand. They saw also the specious admixtures of Gnosticism, and they met them squarely.
Tatian was a teacher of rhetoric, an Assyrian by birth, who was converted to Christianity by Justin Martyr, but after his death fell into heresy, leaning towards the Valentinian Gnosticism, and combining with this an extreme asceticism. The death of Justin is clearly the pivot on which his date will hinge. If we are to accept the conclusions of Mr.
"How nearly I come back at times to the Christian theology!... And then, Redemption by the shedding of blood." "Life, like a rebellious child, struggling out of the control of the hate which made it what it is." But that was Mr. Britling's idea of Gnosticism, not of orthodox Christianity. He went off for a time into faded reminiscences of theological reading. What had been the Gnostic idea?
Harnack also regards Gnosticism as an embodiment of the genuinely Greek view of revelation, forgetting that orthodox Platonism was as hostile to Gnosticism as the Church itself. In rejecting Gnosticism, the Church in fact decided for genuine Hellenism against a corrupted and barbarized development of it.
The Alexandrian Gnosticism failed to excite in the minds of the holy monks of the East that aversion which we now feel for its tenets, inasmuch as it did not openly anathematize the Scriptures of the Old Law, nay, even preserved a certain outward respect for them, on account of the multitude of Jews living in Alexandria, and particularly because the open system of Dualism, which afterward came from Syria and in the hands of Manes established the existence of two equal and eternal principles of good and evil, found no place in the teachings of Valentinus and his school.
Self-sufficing Pelagianisn and Arianism, here; self-confounding Gnosticism and Manichaeism there.
Here appear the allegorical beings mentioned above, half concept, half symbol; the ten Sephiros of the Cabala, immutable forms of being; the syzygies or couples of Gnosticism soul and reflection, depth and silence, reason and life, inspiration and truth, etc.; the absolute manifesting itself by the unfolding of fifty-two attributes, each unfolding comprising seven eons, corresponding to the 364 days of the year, etc.
The Talmud has frequent reference to Alexandrian Jews, and that it makes little direct mention of the Alexandrian exegesis is explained by the distrust of the whole Hellenistic movement, which the rise of Christianity and the growth of Gnosticism induced in the rabbis of the second and third centuries.
If we knew more of the realities about Simon Magus on the one hand, and Paul of Tarsus on the other, we might have clearer light on the whole problem; at present must be content with saying this much: that Gnosticism, with its deep mystical truths, emerges into the light of well-founded history about neck and neck with orthodox Christianity; was considered a branch of the same movement, equally Christian; but was at least tinged with esoteric truth, and deeply Hellenized, and perhaps Persianized; whereas the orthodox branch was the legitimate heir of exoteric Judaism.
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