Pistis Sophia

The history of Gnosticism, which may be defined as the belief that man’s place in the next world is determined by the knowledge of it that he acquires in this, goes back probably to the very dawn of our civilisation; but its importance for most of us is mainly centred round the first three centuries of our Era. Not even Christianity, as Amélineau quotes from Pascal, was able at once to make an angel out of a beast; and no sooner did it emerge from its first home in Judæa into the broader light of the Roman Empire than there sprang up within it many more or less secret schools which sought to combine the truths of the new religion with some of the most pernicious superstitions of the old. Until lately, however, our knowledge of the teaching of these post-Christian Gnostics has been limited to the statements of their opponents. Before the close of the second century, Irenaeus and Tertullian had written against them; and, some two hundred years later, Epiphanius, then Bishop of Constantia in Cyprus, repeated their accusations in his huge Panarion, with some doubtful additions of his own in a form which at least has the merit of restoring for us a great part of the lost Greek text of Irenaeus. These writers were avowed heresy-hunters, keenly alive to the danger to Christianity in the doctrines which they exposed, and therefore necessarily inclined to believe the worst that could be said against them. But granting the Fathers’ entire good faith in the matter—and that of Irenaeus and Tertullian at least is undoubted—there was one cogent reason why their account of Gnostic teaching had to be received with suspicion. The leaders of the Gnostics did not teach openly but in secret and by a method of initiation and allegory which was directly copied from the Mysteries then current in the Pagan world; and such of their writings as fell into the hands of the Catholics were therefore not likely to give any clear view of their doctrine without prolonged study and comparison. Hence the heresiologists, while dwelling upon minor points which seemed strange and absurd to those who had not the key to their meaning, exaggerated the differences between the different teachers and ignored for the most part the many features of their teaching which they had in common. In the words of one who certainly had no leaning towards the error which the Fathers belabour: “... they took minor and unimportant details and magnified them, and treated them as the essentials of a system or systems.... The essential principles were largely the same throughout, the difference was chiefly in regard to details. It is this conduct on the part of the Fathers that gives us such a distorted and often ridiculous view of Gnosticism.”[1]

It is true that Clement of Alexandria and his friend Origen, writing in the birthplace of post-Christian Gnosticism, afford us a more tolerant and philosophical idea of Gnostical teaching, and have even preserved for us some precious extracts from the writings of the school of Valentinus, the great leader—who at one time nearly attained to the Primacy of the Catholic Church; but save for this, it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that we had any chance of studying Gnosticism from the works of its adherents. The discovery in 1840 of an almost complete copy of Hippolytus’ Philosophumena gave us for the first time sufficient excerpts from those writings to enable us to judge of their style and form; and the publication in 1851 of Schwartze’s text of the Pistis Sophia first made it known to the world of scholars that there were in the Museums of London and Oxford Coptic MSS. undoubtedly written by Gnostics for Gnostics. It is the longer and more important of these which forms the subject of the following pages.

The value of our text for the study of the early days of Christianity can hardly be overrated. If I am right in my conclusions, the main part of the documents which it contains are actually from the school of Valentinus, the heresiarch just mentioned who flourished in the reign of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, and one of them was certainly written before the Fourth Gospel was known to the Christian communities of the East. Hence it is to be placed among the earliest Christian writings, and follows immediately in point of date on the Synoptics and other writings of the Apostolic Age. Both this and the other documents in the MS. show also how these heretical schools used to wring and twist Scripture for their purpose, how closely their teaching was linked with the Egyptian and other religions of the pre-Christian world, and how surely, in spite of some good and even noble elements, it was bound to end as they did in what the late Professor Tylor styled with justice “one of the most pernicious delusions which ever vexed mankind, the belief in magic.” As I am dealing with this at more length in the Introduction, I will say nothing further about it here; but I may point out that the outlandish names and words in the later documents of our text have not yet been fully elucidated, and that it is probable that many of its episodes are intended to bear an allegorical interpretation. The use of words in a double sense is also one of the many means adopted by the writers in order to conceal their meaning from the profane, and this should be constantly borne in mind by the reader.