The explanation of this singular passage by Clement of Rome is, “Two shall be one when we are truthful with each other, and when in two bodies there will be but one soul, without dissimulation and without disguise. That which is without is the body; that which is within is the soul. Just as your body appears externally, so should your soul manifest itself by good works.” The explanation of the last member of the phrase is wanting, as the Epistle has not come down to us entire.

But this is certainly not the real meaning of the passage. Its true signification is to be found in the bloodless, passionless exaltation at which the ascetic aimed who held all matter to be evil, the body to be a clog to the soul, marriage to be abominable, meats to be abstained from. It points to that condition as one of perfection in which the soul shall forget her union with the body, and, sexless and ethereal, shall be supreme.

It was in this sense that the heretics took it. Julius Cassianus, “chief of the sect of the Docetae,”381 invoked this text against the union of the sexes. This interpretation manifestly embarrassed St. Clement of Alexandria, and he endeavours to escape from the difficulty by weakening the authority of the text.

He does this by pointing out that the saying of our Lord is found only in the Gospel of the Egyptians, and not in those four generally received. But as Julius Cassianus appealed at the same time to a saying of St. Paul, the authenticity of which was not to be contested, the Alexandrine doctor did not consider that he could avoid discussing the question; and he gives, on his side, an interpretation of the saying of Jesus in the Apocryphal Gospel, and of that of St. Paul, associated with it by Julius Cassianus. The words of St. Paul quoted by the [pg 226] heretic were those in Galatians (iii. 28): “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free, male or female.” Cassianus paid no regard to the general sense of the passage, which is, that the privileges of the gospel are common to all of every degree and nation and sex, but fastening on the words “neither male nor female,” contended that this was a prohibition of marriage. St. Clement pays every whit as little regard to the plain sense of the passage, and gives the whole an absurd mystic signification, as far removed from the thought of the apostle as the explanation of Julius Cassianus. “By male,” says he, “understand anger, folly. By female understand lust; and when these are carried out, the result is penitence and shame.”

It has been thought that the words “when two shall be one” recall the philosophic doctrine of the Pythagoreans on the subject of numbers and the dualism which was upheld by many of the Gnostics. St. Mark, according to Irenaeus, taught that everything had sprung out of the monad and dyad.382 But it is not so. The teaching was not philosophic, but practical. It may be thus paraphrased: “The kingdom of heaven shall have come when the soul shall have so broken with the passions and feelings of the body, that it will no longer be sensible of shame. The body will be lost in the soul, so that the two shall become one; the body which is without shall be like the soul within, and the male with the female shall be insensible to passion.”

It was a doctrine which infected whole bodies of men later: the independence of the soul from the body led to wild asceticism and frantic sensuality running hand in hand. Holding this doctrine, the Fraticelli in the thirteenth century flung themselves into the most fiery temptations, placed themselves in the most perilous [pg 227] positions; if they fell, it mattered not, the soul was not stained by the deeds of the body; if they remained unmoved, the body was indeed mastered, “the two had become one.”

The garment of shame is to be trampled under foot. Julius Cassianus explains this singular expression. It is the apron of skins wherewith our first parents were clothed, when they blushed at their nakedness. They blushed because they were in sin; when men and women shall cease to blush at their nudity, then they have attained to the spiritual condition of unfallen man.

We see in embryo the Adamites of the Middle Ages, the Anabaptists of the Reformation.

But the garment of skin has a deeper signification. Philo taught383 that it symbolized the human body that clothed the nakedness of the Spirit. Gnosticism caught at the idea. Unfallen man was pure spirit. Man had fallen, and his fall consisted in being clothed in flesh. This garment of skin must be trodden under foot, that the soul may arise above it, be emancipated from its bonds.

The second passage is quite in harmony with the first: “Salome having asked how long men should die, the Lord answered and said, As long as you women continue to bear children.384 Then she said, I have done well, I have never borne a child. The Lord answered, Eat of every herb, but not of that containing in itself bitterness.”385

Cassian appealed to this text also in proof that marriage [pg 228] was forbidden. But Clement of Alexandria refused to understand it in this sense. He is perhaps right when he argues that the first answer of our Lord means, that as long as there are men born, so long men will die. But the meaning of the next answer entirely escapes him. When our Lord says, “Eat of every herb save that in which is bitterness,” he means, says Clement, that marriage and continence are left to our choice, and that there is no command one way or the other; man may eat of every tree, the tree of celibacy, or the tree of marriage, only he must abstain from the tree of evil.

But this is not what was meant. Under a figurative expression, the writer of this passage conveyed a warning against marriage. Death is the fruit of birth, birth is the fruit of marriage. Abstain from eating of the tree of marriage, and death will be destroyed.

That this is the meaning of this remarkable saying is proved conclusively by another extract from the Gospel of the Egyptians, also made by Clement of Alexandria; it is put in the mouth of our Lord. “I am come to destroy the works of the woman; of the woman, that is, of concupiscence, whose works are generation and death.”386 This quotation bears on the face of it marks of having been touched and explained by a later hand. “Of the woman,—that is, concupiscence, whose works are generation and death,” are a gloss added by an Encratite, which was adopted into the text received among the Egyptian Docetae. The words, “I am come to destroy the works of the woman,” i.e. Eve, may have been spoken by our Lord. By Eve came sin and death into the world, and these works Christ did indeed come to destroy.

But the gloss, as is obvious, alters the meaning of the saying. The woman is no longer Eve, but womankind [pg 229] in general; and by womankind, that is, by concupiscence, generation and death exist.

Clement of Alexandria was incapable of seizing the plain meaning of these words. He says, “The Lord has not deceived us, for he has indeed destroyed the works of concupiscence, viz. love of money, of strife, glory, of women ... now the birth of these vices is the death of the soul, for we die indeed by our sins.”

We must look to Philo for the key. The woman, Eve, means, as he says, the sense; Adam, the intellectual spirit. The union of soul and body is the degradation of the soul, the fertile parent of corruption and death.387 Out of Philo's doctrine grew a Manichaeanism in the Christian community before Manes was born.

The work of Jesus was taught to be the emancipation of the soul, the rational spirit, ????, from the restraints of the body, its restoration to its primitive condition. Death would cease when the marriage was dissolved that held the spirit fettered in the prison-house of flesh.

Philonian philosophy remained vigorous at Alexandria in the circle of enlightened Jews. It struck deep root, and blossomed in the Christian Church.

A Gospel, which we do not know—it may have been that of Mark—was brought into Egypt. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, an Epistle clearly addressed to the Alexandrine Jews, prepared their minds to fuse Philonism with Christianity. We see its influence in the Gospel of St. John. That evangelist adopted Philo's doctrine of the Logos; the author of the Gospel of the Egyptians, that of the bondage of the spirit in matter.