FOUR

AFTER SIMON, THE DELUGE

Of the Gnostics, so much has been cursorily, as it were, written. We proceed now to the sequel, and must again contemplate faith; for there are some who draw the distinction that faith has reference to the Son, and knowledge (gnosis) to the Spirit. But it has escaped their notice that, in order to believe truly in the Son, we must believe that he is the Son, and that he came, and how, and for what, and respecting his passion; and we must know who is the Son of God. Now neither is knowledge without faith, nor faith without knowledge. Nor is the Father without the Son; for the Son is with the Father. And the Son is the true teacher respecting the Father; and that we may believe in the Son, we must know the Father, with whom also is the Son. Again, in order that we may know the Father, we must believe in the Son, that it is the Son of God who teaches; for from faith to knowledge of the Son is the Father. And the knowledge of the Son and the Father, which is according to the Gnostic rule—that which in reality is Gnostic—is the attainment and comprehension of the truth by the truth.

Now the sacrifice which is acceptable to God is unswerving abstraction from the body and its passions. This is the really true piety. (Clement of Alexandria, Strōmateis, V, 1; 11, ca. 200 CE)

That Simon Magus may personally have set the radical Gnostic ball rolling with his self-made interpretations of Jewish scripture seems to be confirmed by the names and whereabouts of heresiarchs linked by opponents to Simon’s legacy. There is a time gap, however. Church tradition places Simon’s death in Rome during Nero’s reign of 54–68 CE, while his appearance in heresiological writings does not occur until the period 149–160 CE. Scholarship has also shown that numerous key twists of Christian practice later associated with Gnostics were present, at least in Pauline churches, from the 50s onward. Such twists, however, do not seem to have been worked into thoroughgoing all-in systems until the lifetime of Justin Martyr (ca. 100–165 CE), himself a native of Samaria with good knowledge of the region and its characters.

According to Justin’s Apology to Emperor Antoninus Pius, among the first heresiarchs to impact on his territory was Menander, a Samaritan, like Simon, and said to be his pupil.¹ Menander was successful in Antioch in the early second century persuading followers that they would not die. (See the opening lines of the Gospel of Thomas: “These are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke, and Didymus Judas Thomas wrote them down. And he said: ‘He who shall find the interpretation of the words shall not taste of death.’”) Menander’s promise does sound rather Simonian in its audacity. Hippolytus countered Menander’s “realized resurrection”—spiritual awakening to eternal life before death—with the remark that death was simply a “debt of nature.”

Irenaeus distinguished Menander from his predecessor Simon, in that Menander held the chief power to be unknown to all; the world was not made at Simon’s behest, but, as Simon himself taught, was fashioned by angels, themselves the work of the Ennoea of the supreme power: God’s First Thought, Wisdom.² We see at once in Menander the rift with nature also evident in the famous heresy of Menander’s contemporary, Marcion of Sinope (ca. 85–ca. 180), who according to Justin Martyr held that the Father of Jesus had no contact with the world, the world’s maker being a fairly savage deity responsible for the Old Testament’s violent threats and cursings.

It is this rift with nature that gives Gnostic-type groups two possible paths in assessing the lusts of the flesh, even though the two radically divergent paths are deduced from the same premises. First, flesh is part of the deficient creation, so involvement with it drags the spirit down to Earth, into the realm of death and spiritual sleep. Thus, the lusts of the flesh must be subdued: a conclusion shared by Palestinian and Syrian Encratites who went so far as to abjure marriage altogether, fearing (most un-Carpocratian!) contamination with impurities.

Second, the spiritual person or pneumatic is above nature, having escaped the tragic born-to-die cycle, and so long as he or she knows and maintains awareness of this superior state, the lusts and needs of the flesh cannot harm the essential being, for the flesh is weak and the spirit ever willing. The Gnostic is above them all. Thus marriage becomes incidental, a matter of spiritual indifference, or, to use Hippolytus’s phrase, “a debt of nature” for the provision of heirs or, note, the right kind of heirs: inheritors of spiritual seed. The Simonian tradition seems to have been: “make the most of it.” If sex exists, and we’re passing through, let’s use sex to its highest potential; that way we, forever contra mundum, can at least banjax the powers of the world!

Irenaeus expresses the indifferent attitude very well in chapter 6 of his Adversus Haereses, where, describing the followers of the Gnostic Ptolemy, he sums up a prevalent conceit of Gnostic groups in his period: “For even as gold, when submersed in filth, loses not on that account its beauty, but retains its own native qualities; the filth having no power to injure the gold, so they affirm that they cannot in any measure suffer hurt, or lose their spiritual substance, whatever the material actions in which they may be involved.” The idea seems to be: This Earth is the Demiurge’s inn—or brothel. We’re not here long; it behooves us to follow some of the rules, so long as we don’t forget that we know better and will be checking out soon enough with credit.

Again, I think we see the legacy of the Book of Enoch. It is a short, though highly significant, step to go from seeing the corruption of the world as the work of the fugitive Watchers under the leadership of Azazel, to attributing the nature and indeed origin of the present creation to those same agencies, having rebelled against their maker, or gone demented with jealousy over her: the feminine Wisdom who got beyond herself.

Menander advised his followers to get the better of the creative angels. According to Irenaeus, this they achieved by magic, taught them by the revealer, Menander himself, who passed on the gnosis as a magical attainment.³ Menander’s followers “obtain the resurrection by being baptized into him.” Might this have indicated some kind of homosexual, or indeed heterosexual, rite? We may presume that, if it did, Irenaeus would have been glad to pass on the news. However, doing so might have made ordinary Christians question what it was to be baptized into Jesus. The emphasis then is probably on Menander’s imposture in setting himself up in Jesus’s place. Anyhow, Irenaeus does not impute specific sexual activity to Menander, being content with repeating the charge against Simon that Menander was a perfect adept at magic and taught how one may overcome the angels that made the world. Since Irenaeus says he taught followers that through his resurrection they would attain eternal youthfulness, there may well have been a magical elixir produced, not only figuratively but actually, and we are free to speculate that such an elixir may well have been the product of sexual activity, diverting the will of the angels for human reproduction with alternative, transgressive uses for sexual fluids.

If, incidentally, you find this discourse about dark angels a trifle incredible, it might help to see them in more psychological terms as “chains of the mind,” subconscious powers that inhibit growth and awareness, though I dare say Professor Jonas would have regarded such a transposition as soft. These Gnostics believed firmly in the reality of these angels in the objective universe, which, anyhow, was their work.

Irenaeus asserts that it was at Antioch where Simon’s doctrinal virus was passed by Menander to Saturninus (or Satornilos) and to Basilides, whence it found itself replanted in Alexandria, there to be subjected to extensive philosophical exploitation and theological development. It also seems likely that the link with magic continued as well, for we read in Tertullian’s On the Prescription of Heretics:^*2

I shall not in this place omit to describe the conversation of heretics, how vain, and earthly, and frail it is, without weight, without authority, without discipline, though at the same time we shall readily allow it to be in every respect suitable to the faith they profess. The conversation of heretics is infamously notorious. They are almost continually with magicians, with jugglers, with astrologers, with philosophers. For the enchanting pleasure of curiosity must be gratified; “seek and ye shall find,” is with them a precept never to be forgotten, a precept eternally to be insisted upon.⁴

Such sarcasm is leveled by every heresiologist at every heresy, heresies whose chief proponents in this period (early to mid-second century) were Cerdo, Marcion, Cerinthus, Saturnilus, and Basilides: all come in for the sarcastic treatment.

CERDO

Apparently starting as a Simonian, Cerdo was active in Syria around 138, shortly after the Bar Kokhba rebellion provoked the traumatic Jewish expulsion from Jerusalem and the general diaspora, accompanied by eradication of Jewish and Samaritan political identity. Hippolytus credits Cerdo with having shared his two-gods theory with Marcion, but then Hippolytus also says Marcion got his two-gods idea from Empedocles. Tertullian’s take is that after Cerdo, “emerged a disciple of his, one Marcion by name, a native of Pontus, son of a bishop, excommunicated because of a rape committed on a certain virgin.” Starting from the fact that, it is said, “Every good tree beareth good fruit, but an evil [tree] evil,” he attempted to approve the heresy of Cerdo; so that his assertions are identical with those of the former heretic before him.”⁵ That is to say, the world contains evil so it must be the work of one disposed to evil. Since this idea, to the orthodox, was abominably blasphemous enough, that may account for why we hear nothing concerning sexual peculiarities related to either Cerdo or Marcion. However, it is likely that Tertullian couldn’t find anything more to pin on Marcion, other than his abominable ideas and that he had had an illicit affair, an accusation doubted by many scholars who think Tertullian misunderstood, or chose to misunderstand, an earlier accusation that Marcion had defiled the virgin church with his heresy.

Denial that the supreme God made the world was also attributed to Cerinthus, active around 100 CE. Hippolytus attributes Cerinthus’s teaching that the Old Testament God was just, but the Father of Jesus was good, to his “being disciplined in the teaching of the Egyptians.”⁶ This jibe may simply have meant Cerinthus had been influenced by paganism.

Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho⁷ (ca. 150–ca. 60 CE) associates Marcionites with the followers of Basilides and with Saturnilus (or Saturninus or Satornilus), whose teacher, allegedly, was Menander. Saturnilus, in his turn, allegedly taught Basilides, and Basilides would influence Valentinus, but the connections are vague and based on similarities of idea.

SATURNILUS

Saturnilus was apparently an Encratite—Irenaeus included Encratites in his list of heresies—on account of his being ascetic, eschewing marriage. Jesus was only the appearance of the divine savior who came to save the pneuma scattered among men. Man’s creation came about after the angels below caught a glimpse of a heavenly being, presumably the Logos or Gnostic anthrōpos (divine idea or ever-existing aeon of man), and tried to make one in the likeness of what they had glimpsed and in the image of themselves. Their creation was unable to stand (a Simonian echo), so the higher deity took pity and sent down pneuma to the creature, which, working as a spark and dynamic breath within man, over time, evolved within him to create the upright figure able to stand the doctrine of pneuma-salvation. Clearly, the theory of human evolution from a crawling thing to erect posture is not new (“creationists” and anti-creationists should both note!), but the spiritual motivator or spark of Logos-within might alert evolutionists to a variant interpretation of the usual materialism. Even after all this innovative pneumatic evolution, however, the heresiologists believed that, for Saturnilus, the body did not count, since the spark flees heavenward when the corpse is discarded. The highest God might just as well have kept the pneuma to himself in the first place, rather than subject it to ignominious incarnation!

Now it may be that, contrary to the last chapter’s suggestion, a fully Encratite type of Gnostic was indeed active in the early to mid-second century, of a Syrian-Palestinian /northwest Mesopotamian provenance. However, it is just as possible that these ideas were backdated from the late second and early third century, when Encratism was considered a priority problem for orthodox authorities, a problem sufficiently painful to inspire the anti-Encratite chapter 26 of book 4 of Clement of Alexandria’s Strōmateis, titled “How the Perfect Man Treats the Body and the Things of the World.” On the other hand, the libertine Simonian strain might have been the exception, but this is unlikely. Irenaeus, for example, mentions a sect of Nicolaitanes, followers, he says of Nicholas, one of the seven apostle-appointed deacons referred to in the Acts of the Apostles. “They lead,” Irenaeus says, “lives of unrestrained indulgence,” deeming adultery a thing indifferent.⁸

In book 1, chapter 28, Irenaeus refers to the Encratites directly, saying they are “springing from Saturninus and Marcion,” suggesting perhaps that followers of the latter have “moved on” from older heresies with new, stricter ideas about denying marriage, insisting on vegetarianism, lest they take in “created” flesh and corrupt themselves. Encratites, Irenaeus insists, set aside “the original creation of God” (male and female) and gainsay the divine wisdom of procreation. They “indirectly” blame God for having made men and women. This suggests another take on the androgynous, or more likely, sexless, spirit. Encratites also deny that Adam (the first created) will be saved. This, however, says Irenaeus, is only the latest notion (ca. 180 CE), and he attributes it to one Tatian, originally a “hearer” (or uncommitted acolyte) of Justin, and who, after Justin’s martyrdom, allegedly separated himself from the church to assume big ideas about being a teacher, inventing his own system of invisible aeons, “while like Marcion and Saturninus, he declared that marriage was nothing else than corruption and fornication.”⁹ Irenaeus concedes laconically that denying Adam’s salvation really was original to Tatian!—its very originality rendering it ridiculous.

Immediately after implying that Gnostics might be “going Encratite,” Irenaeus presents us with fresh fever:

Others, again, following upon Basilides and Carpocrates, have introduced promiscuous intercourse and a plurality of wives and are indifferent about eating meats sacrificed to idols, maintaining that God does not greatly regard such matters. But why continue? For it is an impracticable attempt to mention all those who, in one way or another, have fallen away from the truth.

If the picture appeared confusing to Irenaeus, a man on the ground so to speak, we must be permitted some margin for error in assessing the facts of the situation over eighteen hundred years later.

Again, we cannot be sure if all the views attributed to Saturnilus by Hippolytus¹⁰ are not those of later followers, but it is most interesting to see how, in Hippolytus’s account of Saturnilus, beliefs about marriage are tied in with what is clearly a development of the ideas of the earlier and post-Jesus portions of the Book of Enoch. That is to say that in the earliest part of the Book of Enoch, written between the first century BCE and the lifetime of Jesus, God (the Father of Lights) determines to quash the earthly power of the evil angels (Watchers), led by Azazel, who have sinned and fornicated with the daughters of men, while in the later sections, the agent of the angels’ apocalyptic downfall is named as the “Son of Man” (considered by scholars as a Jewish-Christian interpolation). The Enochian picture appears directly in Hippolytus’s account of Saturnilus where the wicked “Watchers” have probably been translated into the Greek “Archons” or “Rulers” of zodiacal fate:

And he says that the God of the Jews is one of the angels, and, on account of the Father’s wishing to deprive of sovereignty all the Archons [my italics], that Christ came for the overthrow of the God of the Jews, and for the salvation of those that believe upon Him; and that these have in them the scintillation of life. For he asserted that two kinds of men had been formed by the angels—one wicked, but the other good. And, since demons from time to time assisted wicked [men, Saturnilus affirms] that the Savior came for the overthrow of worthless men and demons, but for the salvation of good men. And he affirms that marriage and procreation are from Satan [my italics]. The majority, however, of those who belong to this [heretic’s school] abstain from animal food likewise, [and] by this affectation of asceticism [make many their dupes]. And [they maintain] that the prophecies have been uttered, partly by the world-making angels, and partly by Satan, who is also the very angel whom they suppose to act in antagonism to the cosmic [angels] and especially to the God of the Jews. These, then, are in truth the tenets of Saturnilus.

I suspect here that we have perhaps one of the best sources to account for negative views on marriage advocated by some of those promoting a redemptive gnosis from the grip of the archons. The wicked angels have defiled the relations that should pertain to spiritual beings by means of their evil seed, passed on from generation to generation. Such believers would find nothing to admire in the sex-charged Simonians, unless, of course, they accepted an interpretation of Simonian sex magic as the sacramental means for redeeming the vulnerable logos spermatikos, but it is impossible to believe the Encratite type could ever tolerate the thought of spermatophagous rites.

Such qualms would not have bothered some of the other Gnostic groups that had emerged by, at least, the 170s.