Page:The Greek and Eastern churches.djvu/493

Rh 154 and died in 222. He was a man of scientific culture, but his mixture of astrological notions led to his expulsion from the Church, and he has come to be reckoned as one of the leaders of Syrian Gnosticism. Unlike Tatian, he was not ascetic. He did not join the Encratites; neither did he agree with Marcion in rejecting the Old Testament, or assigning the creation of the cosmos to a demiurge, a secondary god. According to the reports of his teaching, for which we are dependent on his opponents, his chief characteristic is the immense importance he attached to the power of evil, which he attributed in the first instance to Satan and then to the inherent malignity of matter, the origin of which he ascribed to Satan. Thus in the act of creation God formed the world out of pre-existent matter. It might be "the best of all possible worlds," but in a more limited sense than that in which Leibnitz used the phrase. The architect of the cosmos could only make the best of very objectionable material. In this way we are to account for the imperfections of nature and the evils of society. Here we have a combination of Persian and Greek conceptions. The important rôle assigned to a spiritual principle of evil is Zoroastrian; but the notion of a pre-existent matter out of which the Divine architect shapes the cosmos is Platonic. Now all this is more than doubtful. It has been gathered together from assertions and hints in Ephraim the Syrian and Western writers, some of which are but conjecturally connected with Bardaisan. So many of the Fathers accuse him of Gnosticism that it is probable there is some ground for their statements. Yet it seems as though his departures from conventional ideas have been greatly magnified. No trace of the Valentinian æons can be found even in his enemies' accounts of his tenets. We only possess one book which represents his views from his own side, and this contains nothing seriously unorthodox. It is the work commonly