A Survey of Early Christian Heresies

 

I approach this topic neither as an ecclesiastical historian nor as a theologian, but as a literary critic.  Whether a given human belief is objectively “true,” it is always meaningful as an image, a symbol, a shadowing forth of character and desire.  In the ferment of the early centuries of Christianity, as the new belief supplanted ancient practices, a range of opinion blossomed, fascinating both as speculation and as spectacle.  In the mere listing of the names of heretical schools I find an incantatory power.  A romance, too, lingers about the ghosts of a thousand lost causes.  May this minimal survey summon a whiff of such old and wandering spirits momentarily reanimated, perhaps, by the reader’s sympathetic mind!

 

      Theological essays find few readers today even among believers.  The issues that once aroused fierce passions, energetic contentions, and, at times, persecution and war, seem to make little difference in the contemporary world.  As increasing numbers abandon organized religion altogether, the differences among sects or even belief systems seem less significant than what they share.  An expanded sense of “many mansions” informs the more liberal even among many whose creeds demand exclusivity.  The details of belief that once meant everything now seem all but inconsequential.

     In the Christian church’s early centuries, before the great councils that formed an orthodoxy of settled dogma, great ferment surrounded theological issues.  The word heresy is derived from αἵρεσις, meaning “choice” or “thing chosen,” originally with no anathema attached.  In the beginning before the enforcement of uniformity in the Christian community there was a broad spectrum of views from which to select that most fitting to the devotee’s spiritual needs,  Due to relentless persecution by those espousing majority views, most of the writing by these early heretics have vanished and their views can only be reconstructed with the aid of the hostile arguments of their opponents, most significantly Irenaeus in the second century and Epiphanius two hundred years later. 

     Amid the confusing proliferation of beliefs during this period, several common areas of controversy emerged.  Gnostics at first questioned the authority of the god of the Hebrew scriptures.  The everlasting punishments of hell remained a minority opinion for centuries.  For half a millennium and more clerics debated the enigmatic concept of the Trinity and, in particular, the exact nature of Christ.

    Most dramatically transgressing the orthodoxy that eventually coalesced were the sects labeled Gnostic.  Some were associated with Judaism, some with Christianity, and some with paganism, yet the common name may be justified by certain characteristics.  In the gnostic view, more dualistic than Christianity, the material world is inherently sinful, the creation not of the Supreme Being but of a demiurge.   The devotee’s goal is enlightenment and passions are considered obstacles to knowledge rather than sins.  Neoplatonism contributed substantially to gnostic cosmologies and the movement tended to veer (like Tibetan Buddhism) toward the esoteric and the mystical, including the construction of layers of mystical beings between humanity and the true god.

     Among the gnostic peculiarities was a particular interest in Seth, Adam and Eve’s third son, who was regarded as a forerunner of Christ and was made a model of wisdom and a culture hero, responsible, according to Josephus, for many inventions and discoveries.  The gnostics were prone to the elaboration of complex cosmological schemes unsupported by Hebrew scripture.  In the Apocryphon of John attributed to the apostle (2^nd c. C.E.) Ultimate Reality is the Monad, an utterly transcendent deity, who produces as a “first thought” an Aeon, or emanation of the divine, a female (or sometimes androgynous) entity called Barbelo.  A series of further Aeons are then created, one of whom, Sophia of Epinoia (“wisdom of thought or insight”) goes rogue, creating a demiurge called Yaltabaoth without the Monad’s oversight.  Sophia realizes the transgressive character of Yaltabaoth and conceals its existence, thus causing the created world to be ignorant of its source the Monad. 

     Related sects propounded a variety of such creative systems.  The Archontics and Borborites imagined eight archon-governed heavens; the seventh ruled by Sabaoth, the Hebrew god whom they depicted as an ass or a hog.  According to Epiphanius they used menstrual blood and semen in their eucharist. 

     The significance of similar trends in early Christian thought is apparent in the fact that the gnostic theologian Valentinus was, according to Tertullian, at one time considered for the position of bishop.   His numerous followers opposed the efforts of their opponents to expel them from Christian communities.  Valentinus claimed to be transmitting an esoteric doctrine that had passed from Paul the Apostle through Theudas to him.  Valentinus described the Aeons and emanations and the world’s fall through the action of Sophia, importing Platonic terms to distinguish spiritual and material worlds. 

     The Gospel of Truth is a Valentinian apocryphal text that attributes the creation to the Aeons and characterizes Christ’s crucifixion as Error’s attempt to maintain ignorance.  The book also contains an exposition of the esoteric name of Christ, an example of the numerology and esoteric analysis of letters that became common in later Gnosticism.  The Marcosians, for instance, built on earlier Hebrew and Pythagorean systems to investigate the mystic meaning of numbers, using, in particular, the method of isopsephy, adding the figures associated with the letters of a word to get a significant sum.  A student of Valentinus named Colarbasus maintained that study of the esoteric implications of the Greek alphabet could reveal all truth. 

     Basilides led another second century gnostic cult which is said to have followed the Pythagoreans (and more distant Hindus and Buddhists) in proposing metempsychosis.  Like other gnostics Basilides considered that salvation was a matter of knowledge rather than faith, and that souls advanced through a series of lives.  Thus his followers thought that Christian martyrs were simply working out the bad karma of an earlier life and were thus unworthy of praise.   

    Similar ideas were also circulating under the name of Marcion of Sinope, a second century evangelist who claimed to be the transmitter of the doctrines of St. Paul whom he considered the only true apostle.  Having been taught by a certain Cerdo, a follower of Simon Magus (who was himself said to fly).  Marcion, too, distinguished a supreme being associated with Christ’s unbounded love from a lesser creator called Yahweh by the Jews ruling the temporal world.  Marcion produced a book, the Antitheses, which sought to demonstrate the incompatibility of the two by contrasting parallel passages of Hebrew and Greek scriptures.  For him Christ was fully divine and his appearance before people was an illusion, a view called Docetism.  For a considerable time Marcionite congregations spread and flourished, for a time rivaling the orthodox.

     Jewish texts prior to a few hundred years B. C. E. promise no afterlife; the strongest hints of such a notion are in Daniel, a book atypical in language and content.  Many early Christians expected the Apocalypse to overtake the world at any moment, rendering any individual death incidental, but passages such as “And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal” (Matthew 25:46) clearly anticipate individual judgement resulting in rewards or retribution.   According to a recent study (Bart Ehrman’s Heaven And Hell: A History Of The Afterlife), the idea of heaven and hell, absent in mainstream Jewish thought in which body and soul were identified and the end of one implied the end of the other, actually derived from Greek influence.  

     The fact is that belief in eternal punishment after death was a minority opinion in early Christianity.  For influential theologians such as Origen, Clement of Alexandria, and Gregory of Nyssa hell was a temporary purgation which purified the soul prior to its entry into heaven.  Of the six major schools of thought in early Christianity, four (those centered in Alexandria, Antioch, Caesarea, and Edessa) were universalist, that is, they believed in the ultimate salvation of every soul.  This belief was founded on passages such as “For the Lord will not cast off for ever” (Lamentations 3:31) and “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” (1 Corinthians 15:22)  The dogma of a permanent hell did not appear until the pseudo-Athanasian Creed and universalism is not condemned until the Second Council of Constantinople in 533 C. E.   Belief in universal salvation (or apokatastasis) persisted, for instance in the work of St. Isaac the Syrian during the 7^th century and never really vanished in spite of the church’s opposition, resulting in the nineteenth century founding of the American Universalist Church. 

     The most tangled and perplexing disputes arose over the character of the Trinity and in particular the nature of Christ.  Those defending what came to be orthodox interpretations had to confront two paradoxes: first, the claim that Christianity is monotheistic while recognizing three divine persons, and, second, the claim that Christ is both god and human at the same time.  A great range of interpretations sought to make sense of this unique and ungainly concept.  A good many gods had been thought to appear in human form while remaining fully gods, a sort of disguise that in Christianity became the heresy of Docetism, the notion that Christ on earth was a sort of illusion, only appearing to be like other people while in fact omnipotent and unlimited.  On the other hand, the Audians thought that not Christ alone but god himself had a physical human form and thus were also called Anthropomorphites. 

     The problems of this complex of conundrums were evaded by those called Monarchianists who urged the sole power of God the Father.  Some asserted an Adoptionist view (also called psilanthropist), claiming that Christ was a virtuous mortal who had been selected by God as his agent.  Among these were the vegetarian Ebionites and the Valentinian gnostics who followed Theodotus’ teaching that, while Christ was born of a virgin, he had received the Holy Spirit only at the time of his baptism and had become wholly divine only upon his resurrection.    Other Monarchianists favored the Modalism of Sabellius who argued that God was a single person and that the three “persons” are in fact only three “modes,” aspects or roles of one agent.  As this view maintains Christ’s total divinity, he cannot have suffered or died as people do. 

     The most influential heretic who privileged God the Father over Christ was Arius, a writer from Cyrenaica (today Libya) who thought that Christ had not always existed and does not share the essence or nature of God the Father but is instead one of his works.  This group itself split into a more moderate faction, sometimes labeled semi-Arians, that described Christ’s nature as “similar” to God the Father or “homoiousian” and those who maintained that there was no likeness, the Anomoeans (also called Heterousians).  Varieties of Arianism were adopted by the Germanic tribes and persisted until the late seventh century. 

     In the fourth century Bishop Macedonius of Constantinople argued against the divinity of the Holy Spirit, saying that it had been created by the Son.  The supporters of this view were called Pneumatomachi, “those who battle the spirit” in the Hellespont area and Tropici in Egypt. 

     Monophysites for whom Christ had only a single divine nature lasted far longer, indeed into the present day (as the Miaphysites of the Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopian, and Syrian Orthodox churches).    So-called “real” Monophysites adhered to the teaching of Eutyches of Constantinople that Christ’s unitary nature combined human and divine, but the divine so dominated as to absorb or transmute the human element.  Some, favoring the view of Severus the Great that while Christ’s body was corruptible, he nonetheless had a single nature, were known as “verbal” Monophysites.  Endless regional political relationships as well as philosophical hair-splitting resulted in the Acephali, the Agnoetae, the Aphthartodocetae, the Apollinarians.  In the sixth century Monophysitism dominated the eastern empire under the patronage of Justinian’s wife Theodora though the emperor himself was a Chalcedonian. 

     Though the Sabellians, Monarchians and Pneumatomachoi considered the orthodox Trinitarians to be in fact “Tritheists,” believing in three gods (a view common among Muslims and Jews today), at the Council of Chalcedon the Homoousians, those for whom God and Christ had the same essence, won the day, defeating Monophysitism, Modalism, Arianism, and Homoiousianism, and defining acceptable belief on the issue until the Reformation.

     This unsystematic overview omits more than it contains.  There were those who welcomed new prophets, for instance, such as the followers of Montanus and his female sybils, called Cataphrygians, whose activities included ecstatic gatherings.  The Ascitae, for instance, danced around burst wine-skins, recalling practices of Pentecostals, Shakers, and Hasidim. 

     Outsiders of all sorts are often accused of antinomianism and especially with sexual transgressions, Such claims are often made with little or no evidence, yet unconventional sexual practices (sometimes exploitative) are common among cults.  Moderns will never know, for instance whether the Nicolaitians (who are actually mentioned in the Christian testament) indeed practiced promiscuity.  Epiphanius may have been maligning Deacon Nicolas when he quoted him as saying "Unless one copulates every day, he cannot have eternal life." Did the Carpocratians and the Phibionites also practice free love?  Today the  truth is obscure, impossibly jumbled with polemical propaganda. 

     The corpus of pseudepigrapha has increased significantly even in the last century.  The Gospel of Thomas, in which Christ dances with his followers like Krishna with the gopis, had long attracted attention.    The Gospel of Mary, a second century text, narrates the exchanges of a certain Mary, variously identified as the Mother of Christ, as Christ’s sister, and as Mary Magdelene, with skeptical disciples including Peter and Andrew.  In the Sethian gnostic Gospel of Judas it appears Judas is the sole confidant of Christ to whom he conveys an esoteric message: that liberation is not enabled by his death which, like animal sacrifice and the “cannibalistic” Eucharist, is abhorrent to a benevolent deity, but is rather available within each soul through contemplative practices.   

     Many have seen a kind of philosophia perennis underlying religious traditions in widely separated  parts of the world, particularly in the records of mystics.  Yet spiritual experience is not independent of individual sensibility and even taste.  Each heretical opinion reflects not so much a hermeneutic approach to scriptural authority as a style of approach to the holy.

     The gnostics begin with revulsion, conceiving of the creation as a thing of evil, gone wrong from the start, requiring the most rigorous efforts to overcome while promising a potential reward in the end of enlightenment.   The Aeons and the rest of the imagined cosmic machinery seem like baroque, over-elaborate decoration similar to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite dreaming up nine orders of angels or the fourteen  worlds of the Puranas and the Atharva Veda. 

     Clearly those who reject the notion that eternal punishment awaits the unrighteous after death are motivated by their loving kindness, which cannot conceive of an utterly punitive deity.

     The Christological disputes arise from subjective spiritual experience.  In Christianity the equivalent of enlightenment is to locate in oneself what George Fox called “that of God in every man.”  Some, such as Meister Eckhart, find at times what feels like a total identification.  For others the divine remains largely Other, to be propitiated with prescribed ceremony.  These opposed extremes allow as well countless intermediate positions. 

     Enforcement of orthodoxy has mercifully become far less common than it once was, yet the living ferment of religious experience within Christianity at any rate seems torpid today, focused mainly on political issues of ethics.  The breadth of spiritual choice, meanwhile, has enlarged with the popularity of New Age and exotic beliefs, and the earnest adoption of other people’s rituals.  Perhaps the most reasonable of arguments for the existence of god, the argument from desire, maintains that since all people everywhere seek god, it would be absurd if no such thing exists.  Yet the splitting of sects in every tradition indicates that a conviction of Ultimate Reality is only a beginning of a definition, not of the divine in itself, but of the individual’s spiritual desire.