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Updated: May 3, 2025
In the second century, as the Christians become more visible, their dissensions are also more clearly marked; and it is important to observe that there is no period in the history of Christianity wherein those who laid claim to the name "Christian" were agreed amongst themselves as to what Christianity was. Gnosticism we see now divided into two main branches, Asiatic and Egyptian.
This is not, like the Pistis Sophia, the product of declining Gnôsticism, but dates from a period when Gnôstic genius, like a mighty eagle, left the world behind it and soared in wide and ever wider circles towards pure light, towards pure knowledge, in which it lost itself in ecstasy.
Gnosticism was viewed as a sort of Judaism, inasmuch as it did not rest its exclusiveness on the title of birth, but on especial knowledge communicated to the enlightened few. It was a philosophy whose esoteric doctrines soared above the comprehension of the vulgar; but it affected more than the surface of society; it poisoned the minds of those who aspired to lead the intelligence of the age.
With many, however, it assumed a form which at once engendered the worst errors of Gnosticism; and Gnosticism was, at first, considered a Christian heresy; so that a man might be a pantheist, of the worst kind, and still call himself Christian. St.
A new spirit has breathed; Gnosticism has already commenced; the Galilean era of the kingdom of God is finished; the hope of the near advent of Christ is more distant; we enter on the barrenness of metaphysics, into the darkness of abstract dogma.
One almost might consider that this setting forth of the primordial Buddha was real Monotheism; but on looking more carefully one sees that it is as little real Monotheism as was possible in the system of Gnosticism.
It is thus with 'Gnostic' and 'Gnosticism'; in the prominence given to gnosis or knowledge, as opposed to faith, lies the key to the whole system. The Greek Church has loved ever to style itself the Holy 'Orthodox' Church, the Latin, the Holy 'Catholic' Church. Follow up the thoughts which these words suggest.
Gnosticism would work out salvation by abstractions, by ascetic severities, by a renunciation of the pleasures of the world. Hence it is the real father of monasticism that spirit of seclusion and self-abnegation which became so prevalent in the third and fourth centuries, and which remained in the church through the mediaeval period.
At the very best her system is, as every historian knows, only a slight revision of the Oriental Philosophy; and notwithstanding its forged name Christian, it is truly subversive of the doctrine of Christ. Her grand central doctrine of the "allness" of mind and the unreality of matter is a true copy of the "fantastic idealism" of the Gnostics. Gnosticism was based on "speculative knowledge."
The Egyptian version of the Gospel story, being more appropriate to the Nile Valley than to the region from whence they came, the Greek colonists of Alexandria adopted it, but preferring to pay homage to Serapis, one of the ninth incarnations of God Sol, which they imported from Pontus, a Greek province of Asia Minor, they erected to his worship that celebrated temple known as the Grand Serapium; and, transferring the culture and refinement of Greece to the new city, it became, under the Ptolemian dynasty, a great seat of learning; the arts and sciences flourished, an immense library was collected, the various forms of Astral worship were represented and schools for the dissemination of the several phases of Grecian philosophy and Oriental Gnosticism were founded.
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