  The Pauline Protestantism of the first two centuries of the Church had not exhausted itself in Valentinianism. The fanatics who held free justification and emancipation from the Law were ready to run to greater lengths than Marcion, Valentine, or even Marcus, was prepared to go. Men of ability and enthusiasm rose and preached, and galvanized the latent Paulinian Gnosticism into temporary life and popularity, and then disappeared; the great wave of natural common-sense against which they battled returned and overwhelmed their disciples, till another heresiarch arose, made another effort to establish permanently a religion without morality, again to fail before the loudly-expressed disgust of mankind, and the stolid conviction inherent in human nature that pure morals and pure religion are and must be indissolubly united. Carpocrates was one of these revivalists. Everything except faith, all good works, all exterior observances, all respect for human laws, were indifferent, worse than indifferent, to the Christian: these exhibited, where found, an entanglement of the soul in the web woven for it by the God of this world, of the Jews, of the Law. The body was of the earth, the soul of heaven. Here, again, Carpocrates followed and distorted the teaching of St. Paul; the body was under the Law, the soul was free. Whatsoever was done in the body did [pg 300] “All depends upon faith and love,” said Carpocrates; “externals are altogether matters of indifference. He who ascribes moral worth to these makes himself their slave, subjects himself to those spirits of the world from whom all religious and political ordinances have proceeded; he cannot, after death, pass out of the sphere of the metempsychosis. But he who can abandon himself to every lust without being affected by any, who can thus bid defiance to the laws of those earthly spirits, will after death rise to the unity of that Original One, with whom he has, by uniting himself, freed himself, even in this present life, from all fetters.”503 Epiphanes, the son of Carpocrates, a youth of remarkable ability, who died young, exhausted by the excesses to which his solifidianism exposed him, wrote a work on Justification by Faith, in which he said: “All nature manifests a striving after unity and fellowship; the laws of man contradicting these laws of nature, and yet unable to subdue the appetites implanted in human nature by the Creator himself—these first introduced sin.”504 With Epiphanes, St. Epiphanius couples Isidore, and quotes from his writings directions how the Faithful are to obtain disengagement from passion, so as to attain union with God. Dean Milman, in his “History of Christianity,” charitably hopes that the licentiousness attributed to these sects was deduced by the Fathers from their writings, and was not actually practised by them. But the extracts from the books of Isidore, Epiphanes and Carpocrates, are sufficient to show that [pg 301] To the same licentious class of Antinomians belonged the sect of the Antitactes. They also held the distinction between the Supreme God and the Demiurge, the God of the Jews,506 of the Law, of the World. The body, the work of the God of creation, is evil; it “serves the law of sin;” nay, it is the very source of sin, and imprisons, degrades, the soul entangled in it. Thus the soul serves the law of God, the body the law of sin, i.e. of the Demiurge. But the Demiurge has imposed on men his law, the Ten Commandments. If the soul consents to that law, submits to be in bondage under it, the soul passes from the liberty of its ethereal sonship, under the dominion of a God at enmity with the Supreme Being. Therefore the true Christian must show his adherence to the Omnipotent by breaking the laws of the Decalogue,—the more the better.507 [pg 302]Was religious fanaticism capable of descending lower? Apparently it was so. The Cainites exhibit Pauline antinomianism in its last, most extravagant, most grotesque expression. Their doctrine was the extreme development of an idea in itself originally containing an element of truth. Paul had proclaimed the emancipation of the Christian from the Law. Perhaps he did not at first sufficiently distinguish between the moral and the ceremonial law; he did not, at all events, lay down a broad, luminous principle, by which his disciples might distinguish between moral obligation to the Decalogue and bondage to the ceremonial Law. If both laws were imposed by the same God, to upset one was to upset the other. And Paul himself broke a hole in the dyke when he opposed the observance of the Sabbath, and instituted instead the Lord's-day. Through that gap rushed the waves, and swept the whole Decalogue away. [pg 303]Some, to rescue jeoparded morality, maintained that the Law contained a mixture of things good and bad; that the ceremonial law was bad, the moral law was good. Some, more happily, asserted that the whole of the Law was good, but that part of it was temporary, provisional, intended only to be temporary and provisional, a figure of that which was to be; and the rest of the Law was permanent, of perpetual obligation. The ordinances of the Mosaic sanctuary were typical. When the fulfilment of the types came, the shadows were done away. This was the teaching of the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, called forth by the disorders which had followed indiscriminating denunciation of the Law by the Pauline party. But a large body of men could not, or would not, admit this distinction. St. Paul had proclaimed the emancipation of the Christian from the Law. They, having been Gentiles, had never been under the ceremonial Law of Moses. How then could they be set at liberty from it? The only freedom they could understand was freedom from the natural law written on the fleshy tables of their hearts by the same finger that had inscribed the Decalogue on the stones in Sinai. The God of the Jews was, indeed, the God of the world. The Old Testament was the revelation of his will. Christ had emancipated man from the Law. The Law was at enmity to Christ; therefore the Christian was at enmity to the Law. The Law was the voice of the God of the Jews; therefore the Christian was at enmity to the God of the Jews. Jesus was the revelation of the All-good God, the Old Testament the revelation of the evil God. Looking at the Old Testament from this point of view, the extreme wing of the Pauline host, the Cainites, naturally came to regard the Patriarchs as being under [pg 304] In this singular rehabilitation, Judas Iscariot was relieved from the anathema weighing upon him. This man, who had sold his Master, was no longer regarded as a traitor, but as one who, inspired by the Spirit of Wisdom, had been an instrument in the work of redemption. The other apostles, narrowed by their prejudices, had opposed the idea of the death of Christ, saying, “Be it far from thee, Lord; this shall not be unto thee.”508 But Judas, having a clearer vision of the truth, and the necessity for the redemption of the world by the death of Christ, took the heroic resolution to make that precious sacrifice inevitable. Rising above his duties as disciple, in his devotion to the cause of humanity, he judged it necessary to prevent the hesitations of Christ, who at the last moment seemed to waver; to render inevitable the prosecution of his great work. Judas therefore went to the chiefs of the synagogue, and covenanted with them to deliver up his Master to their will, knowing that by his death the salvation of the world could alone be accomplished.509 Judas therefore became the chief apostle to the Cainites. [pg 305] “It is certainly to be regretted,” says M. Nicolas, “that this monument of human folly has completely disappeared. It should have been carefully preserved as a monument, full of instruction, of the errors into which man is capable of falling, when he abandons himself blindly to theological dogmatism.”512 In addition to the Gospel of Judas, the Cainites possessed an apocryphal book relating to that apostle whom they venerated scarcely second to Judas, viz. St. Paul. It was entitled the “Ascension of Paul,” ??aat???? ?a????,513 and related to his translation into the third heaven, and the revelation of unutterable things he there received.514 An “Apocalypse of Paul” has been preserved, but it almost certainly is a different book from the Anabaticon. It contains nothing favouring the heretical views of the Cainites, and was read in some of the churches of Palestine. This Apocalypse in Greek has been published by Dr. Tischendorf in his Apocalypses Apocryphae (Lips. 1866), and the translation of a later Syriac version in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. VIII. 1864.515 |
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