Page:EB1911 - Volume 27.djvu/882

Rh The chief sacrament of the Valentinians seems to have been that of the bridal chamber.

We have stated above the relation of this sacrament with the Valentinian speculations. Just as the apostle Paul represented his Christianity as a living, dying and rising again with Christ, so the first concern of the pious Valentinian was the experience of the divine marriage feast of Sophia. As Sophia was united with the Soter, her bridegroom, so the faithful would experience a union with their angel in heaven (i.e. their " double," Doppelgänger). The ritual of this sacrament is briefly indicated by Irenaeus i. 21, 3: "A few of them prepare a bridal chamber and in it go through a form of consecration, employing certain fixed formulae, which are repeated over the person to be initiated, and stating that a spiritual marriage is to be performed after the pattern of the higher Syzygia." Through a fortunate chance, a liturgical formula which was used at this sacrament appears to be preserved, though in a garbled form and in an entirely different connexion, the author seeming to have been uncertain as to its original meaning. It runs: "I will confer my favour upon thee, for the father of all sees thine angel ever before his face . . we must now become as one; receive now this grace from me and through me; deck thyself as a bride who awaits her bridegroom, that thou mayest become as I am, and I as thou art. Let the seed of light descend into thy bridal chamber; receive the bridegroom and give place to him, and open thine arms to embrace him. Behold, grace has descended upon thee."

Besides this the Gnostics already practised baptism, using the same form in all essentials as that of the Christian Church. The name given to baptism, at least among certain bodies, was apolytrosis (liberation) ; the baptismal formulae have been mentioned above. Great importance attaches in the Gnostic sacramental speculations to invocation (of the name). The Gnostics are baptized in the mysterious name which also descended upon Jesus at his baptism. The angels of the Gnostics have also had to be baptized in this name, in order to bring about redemption for themselves and the souls belonging to them (excerpla ex Theodoto, 22). In this connexion we also find the formula λύτρωσιν ἀγγελικἠν (for the angelic redemption, Irenaeus i. 21, 3). In the baptismal formulae the sacred name of the Redeemer is mentioned over and over again. In one of the formulae occur the words: "I would enjoy thy name, Saviour of Truth." The concluding formula of the baptismal ceremony is: " Peace over all upon whom the Name rests " (Irenaeus i. 21, 3) This name pronounced at baptism over the faithful has above all the significance that the name will protect the soul in its ascent through the heavens, conduct it safely through all hostile powers to the lower heavens, and procure it access to Horos, who frightens back the lower souls by his magic word (exc. ex Theodoto, 22). And for this life also baptism, in consequence of the pronouncing of the protecting name over the baptized person, accomplishes his liberation from the lower daemonic powers. Before baptism the Heirmarmene is supreme, but after baptism the soul is free from her (exc. ex Theod. 77).

With baptism was also connected the anointing with oil, and hence we can also understand the death sacrament occurring among the Valentinians consisting in an anointing with a mixture of oil and water (Irenaeus i. 21, 4). This death sacrament has naturally the express object of assuring the soul the way to the highest heaven " so that the soul may be intangible and invisible to the higher mights and powers " (Irenaeus, loc. cit.). In this connexion we also find a few formulae which are entrusted to the faithful, so that their souls may pronounce them on their journey upwards. One of these formulae runs: " I am a son of the Father, the Father who was before the whole world—I came to see everything, that which is strange and that which is my own; and deep down there is nothing strange, but only that which belongs to Achamoth. For she is the feminine aeon, and she has made all things. I draw my sex from that which was before the world, and take back to it the property from which I came" (Irenaeus i. 21, 5). Another formula is appended, in which there is a distinction in the invocation between the higher and lower Sophia. Another prayer of the same style is to be found in Irenaeus i. 13, and it is expressly stated that after prayer is pronounced the Mother throws the Homeric helm:t (cf. the Tarnkappe) over the faithful soul, and so makes him invisible to the mights and powers which surround and attack him.

On the other hand, we see how here and there a reaction took place against the absurdity of this sacramental superstition. Thus Irenaeus (i. 2I, 4) tells us of certain Gnostics who would admit no external holy practices as efficacious: "The completed apolytrosis is the actual knowledge of the inexpressible majesty (of God), for through ignorance arose all faultiness and suffering, and through knowledge will be removed all the conditions which arose from ignorance; and therefore knowledge (gnosis) is the perfecting of the inner man." A pure piety, rising above mere sacramentalism, breathes in the words of the Gnostics preserved in excerpta ex Theodoto, 78, 2: "But not baptism alone sets us free, but knowledge (gnosis) : who we were, what we have become, where we were, whither we have sunk, whither we hasten, whence we are redeemed, what is birth and what rebirth."

VIII. It has already been seen clearly that Valentinian Gnosticism affected the nearest approach of all the Gnostic sects of the Catholic Church. Valentinus's own life indicates that he for a long time sought to remain within the official Church, and had at first no idea of founding a community of his own. Many compromises in his theories point the same way. The Johannine tendencies of his doctrine of the aeons (Logos, Zoë, Aletheia, Parakletos) ; the attempt to modify the sharp dualism of Gnosticism in a monistic direction; the derivation of the world from the fallen Sophia; the favourable judgment of the Demiourgos, and his origin in the repentance and conversion of Sophia, which are peculiar to the Valentinian system; the triple division of mankind into pneunzatici, psychici and hylici, which is obviously contrived for the benefit of the psychici; the inclusion of an element of the psychici in the composition of the Redeemer; the theory that Jesus possessed a miraculous body formed in the upper world; the emphasis on the fact that the redemption of Jesus was primarily for the psychici; the doctrine that by the final redemption the Demiourgos and the psychici find a place in the Ogdoas; the adoption of Christian baptism—all this, and perhaps more, indicates a definite and deliberate approach towards the doctrine of the Church.

These Gnostics, as in the case of most of the other Gnostic sects, possessed their own peculiar holy writings and books, but they also made a great use in their own circle of the canon of the Christian Church, especially the canon of the New Testament and—though with a few reservations—of the Old Testament. Irenaeus in his account of the Ptolemaean sects has used a source which contained a detailed scriptural ex-position of the Valentinian doctrines based on the New Testament. We can even—and this is of great interest and significance for the history of the canon—establish the contents of the Gnostic canon. It included the three first gospels and the apostle Paul. The proofs are constantly drawn firstly from the utterances of the Saviour, and then from the Epistles of Paul. The Gospel of John does not seem to have yet found a place in this canon, for the very good reason that it was not yet widely known and circulated. Later Valentinian Gnosticism delighted in making use of the Johannine Gospel as a crowning testimony. Thus to the older and ancient scriptural evidences which we mentioned above, Irenaeus (i. 8, 5) directly appends a commentary on the Gospel of John, which is ascribed to Ptolemaeus himself., And in the excerpla ex Theodoto, 6 seq., we also find a commentary on the prologue to this Gospel. And we know that the later Valentinian Herakleon wrote a detailed exposition of the whole Gospel. But the Old Testament too was a sacred book of these Gnostics, and its statements were used as evidence and proofs. This was done with some diffidence and caution. The attitude, at least of the later Valentinians, is best indicated by the letter of Ptolemaeus to Flora, which is preserved in Epiphanius 33, 3-7. Ptolemaeus here openly attacks the doctrine that the Old Testament is the work of the devil, or that it cannot at least be ascribed unconditionally, to the Supreme God. The Old Testament he considers to contain a system of laws given by God himself, a system of laws given by Moses according to his own ideas, and precepts interpolated by the elders of the people. The laws of God himself fall then into three classes: the true law, which is not interwoven with evil; the law permeated with unrighteousness, which the Redeemer has dissolved; and the typical and symbolical law, which the Redeemer has translated from the material into the spiritual. Thus there is a gradual approach to the Christian Church's conception of the Old Testament. (It should indeed be remarked that Ptolemaeus in the above-mentioned letter has purposely expounded the exoteric doctrine in special approximation with the Catholic Church, while for the actual difficult questions as to the nature of the Demiourgos and his relation with the unity of the Divine nature he consoles Flora with a further and more intimate instruction.)

And yet this reconciliation of Gnosticism was a fruitless and henceforward a purposeless undertaking. Oriental dualism and wildly intemperate Oriental mythology had grown into so radical and essential a part of Gnosticism that they could not be separated from it to make way for a purer and more spiritual view