dius, in his Life of Epiphanius, bp. of Pavia, mentions the emperor Glycerius as shewing so much veneration for that saint as to accept his intercession for some people in the diocese of Pavia, who had incurred the imperial displeasure (Ennod. Vit. Epiphan. in Patr. Lat. lxiii. 219 A). These are the sole grounds on which Gibbon hazards, doubtfully, the statement (Decl. and Fall, vol. iv. p. 295, ed. Smith) that Glycerius was promoted by Orestes from Salona to the archbishopric of Milan in reward for his assassination of Nepos.
[C.H.]
Gnosticism. The zeal with which a learner commences the study of ecclesiastical history is not unfrequently damped at an early stage, when he finds that, in order to know the history of religious thought in the 2nd cent., he must make himself acquainted with speculations so wild and so baseless that it is irksome to read them and difficult to believe that time was when acquaintance with them was counted as what alone deserved the name of "knowledge." But it would be a mistake to think too disdainfully of those early heretics who go by the common name of Gnostics. In the first place, it may be said in their excuse that the problems which they undertook to solve were among the most difficult with which the human intellect has ever grappled—namely, to explain the origin of evil, and to make it conceivable how the multiplicity of finite existence can all have been derived from a single absolute unconditioned principle. And besides, these speculators only did what learned theologians have constantly since endeavoured to do—namely, combine the doctrines which they learned from revelation with the results of what they regarded as the best philosophy of their own day, so as to obtain what seemed to them the most satisfactory account and explanation of the facts of the universe. Every union of philosophy and religion is the marriage of a mortal with an immortal: the religion lives; the philosophy grows old and dies. When the philosophic element of a theological system becomes antiquated, its explanations which contented one age become unsatisfactory to the next, and there ensues what is spoken of as a conflict between religion and science; whereas, in reality, it is a conflict between the science of one generation and that of a succeeding one. If the religious speculations of the 2nd cent. appear to us peculiarly unreasonable, it is because the philosophy incorporated with them is completely alien to modern thought. That philosophy gave unlimited licence to the framing of hypotheses, and provided that the results were in tolerable accordance with the facts, no other proof was required that the causes which these hypotheses assumed were really in operation. The Timaeus of Plato is a favourable specimen of the philosophic writings which moulded the Gnostic speculations; and the interval between that and a modern treatise on physics is fully as wide as between Gnosticism and modern scientific theology. So it has happened that modern thought has less sympathy with heretical theories deeply coloured by the philosophy of their own time than with the plain common sense of a church writer such as Irenaeus, which led him to proceed by the positive historical method, and reject what was merely fanciful and speculative. And it may be said that deeply important as were some of the particular questions discussed in the conflict between the church and Gnosticism, an even more important issue of that conflict was the decision of the method by which religious knowledge was to be arrived at. The Gnostics generally held that the Saviour effected redemption by making a revelation of knowledge, yet they but feebly attempted to connect historically their teaching with his; what was derived from Him was buried under elements taken freely from heathen mythologies and philosophies, or springing from the mere fancy of the speculator, so that, if Gnosticism had triumphed, all that is distinctively Christian would have disappeared. In opposition to them, church writers were led to emphasize the principle that that alone is to be accounted true knowledge of things divine which can be shewn by historical tradition, written or oral, to have been derived from the teaching of Christ and His apostles, a principle the philosophic justice of which must be admitted if Christ be owned as having filled the part in the enlightenment of the world which orthodox and Gnostics alike attributed to Him. Thus, by the conflict with Gnosticism reverence in the church was deepened for the authority of revelation as restraining the licence of human speculation, and so the channel was marked out within the bounds of which religious thought continued for centuries to flow.
We deal here with some general aspects of the subject, referring to the articles on the chief Gnostic teachers for details as to the special tenets of the different Gnostic sects.
Use of the Word Gnosticism.—In logical order we ought to begin by defining Gnosticism, and so fixing what extension is to be given to the application of the term, a point on which writers are not agreed. Baur, for instance, reckons among Gnostics the sectaries from whom the Clementine writings emanated, although on some of the most fundamental points their doctrines are diametrically opposed to those commonly reckoned as Gnostic. We conform to more ordinary usage in giving to the word a narrower sense, but this is a matter on which controversy would be only verbal, Gnosticism not being a word which has in its own nature a definite meaning. There is no difficulty in naming common characteristics of the sects commonly called Gnostic, though perhaps none of them is distinctive enough to be made the basis of a logical definition. They professed to be able to trace their doctrine to the apostles. Basilides was said to have learned from a companion of St. Peter; gospels were in circulation among them which purported to have been written by Philip, Thomas, and other apostles; and they professed to be able to find their doctrines in the canonical scriptures by methods of allegorical interpretation which, however forced, could easily be paralleled in the procedure of orthodox writers. If we made our definition turn on the claim to the possession of such a Gnosis and to the title of Gnostic, we should have to count Clement of Alexandria among Gnostics and I. Timothy among Gnostic writings; for the church writers refused to
