Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/725

Rh GNOST Testament, and in the Apocryphal Book of Wisdom, denot- ' ing the knowledge of the true God, or knowledge communi- cated by Him. In the New Testament the word is fre- quently used by St Paul (1 Cor. i. 5, xii. 8; 2 Cor. iv. 6, x. 5), and in the second epistle of St Peter (i. 5, 6 ; iii. 18), to express the saving knowledge of God in Christ; and in the ﬁrst epistle to Tin1othy occurs the signiﬁcant phrase, “Oppositions of Science (~,rva’;o-ems) falsely so called.” It n1ay be inferred, therefore, that the use of the sin1ple term, in a bad as well as a good sense, was not unknown to the apostolic age, although the expression -yvwo--ru<6s (Gnostic) is said not to be found till the beginning of the 2d century, when it was ﬁrst employed by the sect of the Ophites, or, according to son1e, by Carpocrates. Both expressions were used by the early Christian fathers with the double meaning already indicated. Clement of Alexandria, in his Stro- matzc or Jlisccllcmics, entitles the enlightened or perfect Christian a Gnostic (Sh-om. i. 20, ii. 6). He points out at length the distinction between the true Gnostic and the disciples of false systems who laid claim to the name of Gnostics. It is only to systems of the latter kind that the name of Gnosticism is now applied. The sources of Gnosticism are to be found in diverse forms of religious and speculative culture antecedent to Christianity, especially in the theology of the Alexandrian Jews, as represented in the writings of Philo, and again in the inﬂuences ﬂowing from the old Persian or Zara- thustrian religion and the Buddhistic faiths of the East. To the theosophic system of Philo, with its mixture of Platonic and Old Testament ideas, some of the most characteristic conceptions of Gnosticism are certainly to be traced, such as the inﬁnite separation between God and the world, and the necessity of a mediating power or powers in the creation of the world. This class of ideas prevailed largely at the time of the introduction of Christianity, especially in Alexandria, which was the great meeting—point of Jewish and Hellenic culture. The more the state of the pre—Cl1ristian Jewish mind and Jewish literature is investigated, the n1ore do we recognize every where a strange commingli n g of old with new thoughts, of tradition with philosophy, of religion with speculation. The age was in all its aspects eclectic, and the Jewish no less than the Gentile schools of the time were centres for the fusion of old streams of culture from many quarters, and the rise of broader intellectual tendencies. Ever since the ciptivity, Judaism had borne more or less the impress of the old state religion which it encountered in its exile. How far post—Exilian Judaism was moulded by Zarathus- trian conceptions is a very diﬂicult question ; but no his- torical student can doubt that its cosmogony, its angelology, and even its anthropology, were largely modified by contact with Persia. But not only was Zarathustrianism active in and through Judaism. In itself, it spread westward, and became directly and indirectly both a precursor and a parent of Gnostic speculation. Certain forms of Gnos- ticism seem little else than adaptations of the Persian dualism to the solution of the great problem of good and evil. In other forms of it, again, the Pantheism of I11dia seems to have been a pervading inﬂuence. This, too, has its representative in the Jewish schools of the time, in the secret doctrines of the Kabbala, which many carry considerably beyond the time of Christ, although the two books through which we alone know these doctriues— the Book Qf C're.r(t1'o)z and the book called Z0/tar or Light —are plainly of much later production. These doctrines sprang up in Palestine, and not among the Hellenistic Jews. The philosophy on which they rest is plainly pan- theistic. Whereas the principle lying at the foundation of the theosophy of Philo makes almost an absolute distinction between the Supreme indeﬁnable Source of all things and ICISM 701 the world, the philosophic postulate of the Kabbala is the identity of God and the world——the one being the Eternal Substance of which the other is the manifestation a11d form. “In place of the personal God, distinct fron1 the world, acknowledged in the Old Testament, the Kabbala substi- tutes the idea of an universal and inﬁnite substance, always active, always thinking, and in the process of thought, developing the universe. In the place of a material world distinct from God and created from nothing, the Kabbalist substitutes the idea of two worlds——the one intel- ligible, the other sensible,——both being, not substances dis- tinct from God, but forms under which the Divine Sub- stance manifests itself ” Iansel’s Gnostic Ileresies, p. 35). Gnosticism is found reproducing one and all of these con- ceptions, with the additional idea of redemption directly borrowed from Christianity. In all its forms, it may be said to represent the efforts made by the speculative spirit of the time to appropriate Christianity, and to make use of some of its most fertile principles for the solution of the mysteries lying at the root of human speculation. The more advanced writers of the present day refuse to recog- nize Gnosticism as a Ieeres, or to speak of the Gnostics as deserters from the Christian Church. And they are right so far. The Gnostic schools were always so far outside the church. They were not heretical, therefore, in the ordinary sense. But it is no less true that Gnosticism, in all its developments, is only intelligible in connexion with Chris- tianity. It was the impulse of Christian ideas which alone originated it, which constituted the vital force of thought that made it one of the most signiﬁcant phenomena of early Christian history; and it is only its connexion with Chris- tianity which call be said to make it any longer interesting. The question as to the date of its origin has been 111uch investigated of late by such writers as the late Dean Hansel among ourselves, and Lipsius, Harnack, and Hilgenfeld i11 Germany. Do we ﬁnd traces of it in the New Testament writings? or are the supposed allusions to it there to be otherwise explained? It is well known that this question has an important bearing upon other questions as to the origin of some of the New Testament writings, and the special object for which these writings were composed. Wit-hout entering into details, or attem-pting to examine the several passages which may be supposed to contain allusions to Gnosticism in the New Testament, it may be said that such allusions, more or less deﬁnite, seem to occur in the later epistles of St Paul, especially the epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians, and in the Pastoral epistles. A supposed allusion has also been traced in the ﬁrst epistle to the Cori11— thians, where the word -yvibo-Ls, for the ﬁrst time in the New Testament writings, is found in a depreciatory sense, in the phrase 1'7 ‘yr/&3o'L9 qbvocof, 1'7 3% oi-yoi7n7 oiKo3o,u.ei.' (1 C01‘. viii. 1). In so very general a use of the expression, however, even in its connexion with the question of eating meats which had been offered to idols, it must be held very doubtful whether anything more than a general meaning is intended. And the same remark applies to many even of the more deﬁned modes of expression, such as Pleroma and Eon, which occur in the later epistles. The true explanation of all these phrases, as well as much else in St Paul's writings, is probably the fact that the spirit of Gnosticism, and the language which it afterwards developed and applied, were “in the air” of the apostolic age. Its modes of thought, as already seen, were prevalent in Philo and in other quarters, and the tendencies which were afterwards worked up into systems were no doubt in existence in the time of St Paul, and still more in the later apostolic time. It seems plainly against such tendencies, rather than against any special sects or schools, that the cautions of St Paul are directed. In the Apocalypse, and in the epistles and gospel attributed to St John, these tendencies are seen in a