All surviving Christian literature after the apostolic period was produced by gentiles. Their first task, then, was not to refute or assimilate Judaism but to define the belief and practice of the church itself; their second was to prove that a gentile convert had good reason to abandon the religion of his childhood. Modern talk of identity, selfdefinition, apologetic, and polemic often threatens to obscure the fact that when a person adopts a new philosophy, he will feel, before he starts to vindicate it to outsiders, that he needs to justify it to himself and to harmonize it with those elements of his previous education that he wishes to retain. Second-century churchmen made pronouncements that can now be cited in histories of dogma; their aim, however, was not to resolve intestine controversies, but to strengthen perseverance and to demonstrate to pagans that the God of Jesus Christ, having made the world and thus the empire, would infallibly be its judge.
Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, was perhaps the earliest writer to say explicitly that Christ was God and man, and to make obedience to the clergy a condition of salvation. Those who belittled Christ were the docetics who maintained that he was man in appearance only and had therefore never suffered; the factions of the church included celebrants of a private Eucharist and Judaizers who displayed the outward works without circumcision (Ign., Phld. 6). It is possible that all the schismatics formed a single party; certainly it was equally convenient in a season of tribulation to deny that Christ had suffered, to secede from the visible church and to conform to the practice of the synagogue. To all three errors Ignatius gave the same answer as he passed through Asia to martyrdom in Rome. If Christ had been a phantom or an angel, why should his human followers submit to pains that he had only pretended to undergo? How can a congregation be divided in its worship if the Eucharist is the flesh and blood of the undivided Savior? How can we let a Judaizer challenge us for a proof from the so-called archives when our archive is the one Lord Jesus Christ (Ign., Phld. 8)? Should it be said that Christ is now invisible, and the episcopate is our guarantee of unity; by presiding at the Eucharist, the bishop reminds the people that they are all one body in the Christ who died for them, sustaining them with a medicine of immortality, in contrast to the medicine of death that is purveyed by those who stand outside the altar (Ign., Eph. 20; Tr. 6). The bishop is the apex of a threefold order of ministry: after him come the presbyters or elders and then the deacons, who, as servitors to the clergy and the laity, are an earthly type of Christ (Ign., Tr. 3).
Ignatius was the first spokesman of a ‘‘catholic’’ church (Sm. 8.3), and the only one of the Apostolic Fathers who came close to the formulation of a creed. For a comparable fusion of Christology with the doctrines of salvation and the church we must look, not to these contemporaries, but to a generation of innovators, then decried as heretics and now conventionally labeled Gnostics. As the Fathers insisted, however, Gnosticism was no more a single heresy than its putative helpmeet Middle Platonism was a school. Most scholars now know better than to caricature every Gnostic as an arch-dualist, who equated matter with evil, regarded incarnation and resurrection as degrading to the spirit, and substituted nebulous myths for the plain sense of the scriptures. Even before the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Codices in 1945, it was all too clear that these simple notions were incompatible with the ancient charges that Apelles attributed eternal flesh to Christ, that Valentinus foisted the properties of matter on the Godhead, and that Marcion put too literal a construction on the prophets and the Law. If we believe Hippolytus, the first men to describe themselves as Gnostics (he prefers to call them serpent-folk, or Naas-senes) professed a gnosis or knowledge not primarily of God or of the soul, but of the truths concealed in the mysteries, mythologies, and scriptures of the nations (Hipp., Ref. 5.6-11). The theme of the Naassene Sermon - a catena of testimonies from all religions, not excluding Christianity - is that matter and spirit were at first a ‘‘single blessed substance,’’ an undifferentiated sea of being. Now that the waters have parted, a benevolent Creator sits above, a fiery Demiurge below, and seeds of spirit are in constant pilgrimage from one side of the firmament to the other. The initiate in the lower realm will yearn to ascend, but rather by the sublation than the rejection of the body, as the Naassenes taught by adopting the symbolism of alchemy.
It has been maintained that Gnosticism was not so much a heresy as a Hellenization of Christian thought, or else a distinct, more primitive religion of the Mediterranean world. Such theories may commend themselves to those who think it possible to distinguish between the Palestinian yolk of Christianity and the Hellenistic albumen which nourished it; but since most scholars now acknowledge almost as many varieties of Judaism as of Hellenism, it seems wiser to assume that Christianity was complex even in embryo, and kept pace as it matured with the development of the womb that gave it birth. If there was ever an independent Gnosticism, it left no trace of itself in archaeology or in the works of any heresiarch who did not purport to be a
Christian. If their doctrines had been too exotic to be reconciled with the apostolic literature, such teachers could not have hoped to gain a following, and they would not have been the ones to set a precedent for treating the works of Paul and the evangelists as scripture. Basilides of Egypt, for example, was a pioneer in the fertile vein of negative or apophatic theology, which denies that even the most exalted predicates can be applied to God (Hipp., Ref. 7.2-27). Nevertheless, he says, the ineffable Father has revealed himself through three descending Sonships, each of which brings order to the ferment of creation, then assumes its destined place, with its proper retinue, on one side or another of the heavens. Much remains obscure, but as Basilides is alleged to have composed the earliest commentary on John’s Gospel, we may plausibly surmise that his three Sons are also those of the Evangelist: the Son of God in the bosom of the Father, the Son of Man ascending where he was before, and the Son of Man as he toils with the elect.
Salvation is thus prefigured in cosmogony - a trope which may reveal that Basilides understood both the pagan mysteries and the Book of Genesis better than his orthodox co-religionists. A similar reading seems to be demanded by the tragedy of Sophia, which was always associated in antiquity with another Egyptian Christian, Valentinus. It probably originates, however, in Ignatius’ bold description of the incarnate Christ as the ‘‘word who proceeds from silence’’ (Mg. 8.2) - that is to say, from the virgin womb and the secret counsel of God. In the Valentinian myth this silence is personified as the consort of the Father, now conceived as an unfathomable abyss (Iren., AH 1.1-5). The aeons or ages springing from their union make up the pleroma, or fullness, of the Godhead. The last of these, Sophia or ‘‘wisdom,’’ falls from the pleroma when she endeavors to create without a consort or to plumb the ineffable being of the Father. She spawns a son, the Demiurge, who proclaims himself the only God and fashions the material world as a feeble copy of the divine original. This pretender is evidently the Yahweh of the Old Testament, the totem of the Jews and of ‘‘psychic’’ Christians who possess soul but not spirit and remain in willing bondage to the Law. Meanwhile the entire pleroma brings forth Christ and the Holy Spirit for the redemption of Sophia, but it is her task to emancipate her spiritual children, the Valentinian elect. The story of the fall of Eve is thus turned into an allegory of our common human tendency to fall into idolatry by overreaching the limits of our wisdom; as in Paul the fullness of the Godhead dwells in Christ, but only the spiritual perceive this, while the psychics put their faith in Moses or some other creature. Whereas Paul declared that the crucifixion was a stumbling block to the wisdom of Jews and gentiles, Valentinus postulates two crosses - first a heavenly one, dividing the other aeons from Sophia, then an earthly one on which the embodied Christ (in the Gospel of Truth) became the first fruits of the pleroma. Purified flesh is promised in the Letter to Rheginus to those who enter into the aeon; a purified understanding of the Old Testament reveals that it is partly inspired and partly consummated in the New.
Less mythical in form, and thus more obviously at odds with the mind of the primitive church, is Marcion’s dichotomy between the God of Moses and the father of Jesus Christ. The first is just, the second good; the second redeems the spirit from the world that the first created for the flesh. Marcion’s canon allegedly consisted of a few truncated letters of Paul and the tatters of Luke’s Gospel; his strictures on the Old Testament, which he rejected in its entirety, were fully, though obliquely answered in Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho. This work was designed ostensibly to convince a Jew that Christ was the Messiah, and his church therefore the Israel, of the prophets. The tone, like that of an earlier text ascribed to Paul’s friend Barnabas, is hostile to Judaism: where Barnabas maintains that the outward rite was a misconstruction of a precept addressed to the inner man, Justin argues that it foretold the severance of the Jews from God (Barn. 9.4; Justin, Trypho 16). He further enhanced the authority of the Old Testament - or at least the Greek version of it - in his Apologies, where he urged that the loftiest thoughts of the philosophers had been stolen from the prophets. Justin’s ‘‘spermatic logos’’ works primarily through this licensed plagiarism, not by direct inspiration (1 Apol. 44). Despite his Platonic schooling, he is therefore not the humanist that he is often supposed to be; when he uses Logos as a title of Christ it means to him what it means in the Gospel of John - the word of God in creation and in prophecy - rather than what the Platonists meant by this term or by nous. Still less is the Christian Logos derived from that of the Stoics, which is not a subaltern deity but Zeus himself, though at the same time (as Justin protested at 2 Apol. 7) immanent in and coeval with the world.
Martyred around the year 165, Justin was a touchstone of orthodoxy in the eyes of Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, two decades later. In his skilful ‘‘Refutation of GnlJsis falsely so-called,’’ Irenaeus accuses the Valentinians of slighting the incarnation, the resurrection, and the unity of God. Rejecting the possibility of change or emanation in the Godhead, he foreshadows the later doctrine that the three hypostases (Father, Son, and Spirit) are coeternal (Iren., AH 2.12-13); he also threatens to turn a commonplace into a heresy, for most of the second-century apologists had preserved their monotheism by maintaining that the Logos was initially no more than the immanent thought of God the Father, and had become distinct from him only when the thought was enunciated as the edict of creation. Irenaeus is equally innovative in anthropology, for he urges (against the Gnostics, and indeed most future Christians) that the whole of the human frame, including the body, has been fashioned in the image of its Creator (Iren., AH 5.6.1). He must therefore suppose that the Logos was eternally resolved to become incarnate - his argument implies, indeed, that without this manifestation of divinity, the human race could not achieve its end. Adam and Eve in Eden, he contends, were only capable of perfection, not yet perfect, and, as he believes perfection to consist in virtue freely chosen, he grants to the Valentinians that God would be unjust if he deprived us permanently of the knowledge of good and evil. To eat the fruit of knowledge was therefore not an act of wickedness but, like the sin of Sophia, a premature striving for the good (Iren., AH 4.38-9). Now that Adam’s offense has made us mortal, the way to immortality is to exercise our freedom in obedience to God, and thus to mature into the likeness which was not initially given with the image. In our present condition this would be impossible, had not Christ by his free obedience reversed the disobedience of Adam, conquered Satan, and released us - by persuasion, not by force - from the toils of hell (Iren., AH 5.1; 5.20). The fall is not so catastrophic, the cross not so divisive, the world not quite so demon-ridden in the sober exposition of Irenaeus as in the myths of his adversaries; it was thanks to him, however, and therefore thanks to them, that these themes were restored to the central place in Christian thought that they had occupied in Paul.
World History
