ovah of the Old Testament gave rise to the
class of opinions described as Gnosis, or Gnosticism. The signification
of Gnosis is simply "rationalism,"--the endeavour to harmonize the
materialistic statements of an old mythology with the more advanced
spiritualistic philosophy of the time. The Gnostics rejected the
conception of an anthropomorphic deity who had appeared visibly and
audibly to the patriarchs; and they were the authors of the doctrine,
very widely spread during the second and third centuries, that God could
not in person have been the creator of the world. According to them,
God, as pure spirit, could not act directly upon vile and gross matter.
The difficulty which troubled them was curiously analogous to that
which disturbed the Cartesians and the followers of Leibnitz in the
seventeenth century; how was spirit to act upon matter, without
ceasing, pro tanto, to be spirit? To evade this difficulty, the Gnostics
postulated a series of emanations from God, becoming successively less
and less spiritual and more and more material, until at the lowest end
of the scale was reached the Demiurgus or Jehovah of the Old Testament,
who created the world and appeared, clothed in material form, to the
patriarchs. According to some of the Gnostics this lowest aeon or
emanation was identical with the Jewish Satan, or the Ahriman of the
Persians, who is called "the prince of this world," and the creation of
the world was an essentially evil act. But all did not share in these
extreme opinions. In the prevailing, theory, this last of the divine
emanations was identified with the "Sophia," or personified "Wisdom," of
the Book of Proverbs (viii. 22-30), who is described as present with
God before the foundation of the world. The totality of these aeons
constituted the pleroma, or "fulness of God" (Coloss. i. 20; Eph. i.
23), and in a corollary which bears unmistakable marks of Buddhist
influence, it was argued that, in the final consummation of things,
matter should be eliminated and all spirit reunited with God, from whom
it had primarily flowed.

It was impossible that such views as these should not soon be taken up
and applied to the fluctuating Christology of the time. According to the
"Shepherd of Hermas," an apocalyptic writing nearly contemporary with
the gospel of "Mark," the aeon or son of God who existed previous to
the creation was not the Christ, or the Sophia, but the Pneuma or Holy
Spirit, represented in the Ol