Greek Education Against Gnosticism
GREEK EDUCATION AGAINST
GNOSTICISM
WHAT GREEK EDUCATION INVOLVES
When discussing Gnostic claims to "knowledge," Irenaeus treats of the arts and sciences to be found in the curriculum of a Graeco-Roman school that would be merely preparatory to rhetoric. Some fields involve theory, such as music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy,1 while others are practical: medicine, pharmacy; painting, portrait sculpture (working in bronze and marble); agriculture (horses, flocks); nautical, gymnastic, hunting; war, and kingship (2.32.2). Jerome provides a similar list: grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, geometry, dialectic, music, astronomy, astrology, medicine, all based on doctrine, method, and experience. Beyond these are manual skills: farming, stone-cutting, carpentry, metallurgy, forestry, woolworking and fulling, etc.2 Irenaeus does not mention Jerome's first three
(grammar, rhetoric, philosophy), but he obviously has them in mind. Indeed, his criticism of the Gnostics resembles the conventional Sceptical attack on grammarians in Sextus
Empiricus, who alleges that the art of grammar cannot deal with all the forms of speech in the poets. [To do so] is absolutely impossible, since on the poets there is discourse about the gods and about virtue and the soul, concerning which the grammarians have no expert knowledge.3
The grammarians of Sextus were implicitly making the same claim to expert knowledge as were the Gnostics of Irenaeus.
Origins of Valentinian theories in poetry A poet of the Old Comedy, Aristophanes,4 spoke with much more probability and elegance about the genesis of everything in a theogony. According to him, from Night and Silence was emitted Chaos, then from Chaos and Night,
Eros; from Eros came forth Light, then all the rest of the first generation of gods. After this the poet introduced the second generation of gods and the making of the world; then he tells of the shaping of mankind by the second gods.
From this, the Valentinians shaped their myth like a natural history, simply changing the names of the gods and showing the same beginning and emission of everything. For Night and Silence they name Abyss and Silence; for Chaos, Mind; for Eros, by which according to the comic poet all the rest
Greek education against gnosticism 31 were set in order, they have introduced the Logos. In place of the first and greatest of the gods they imagined the Aeons, in place of the second gods they tell of the activities of their
Mother outside the Pleroma, calling her "Second Ogdoad," to whom they ascribe the making of the world and the fashioning of mankind just as the poet did, and claiming that they alone know ineffable and unknown mysteries.
In reality they transfer to their own system what is said in theaters everywhere by actors with splendid voices, or rather they use the same plots and simply change the names
(Heresies 2.14.1).
Menander, favorite of the New Comedy, serves as another stick to beat Valentinians. "They seem to me to have applied to this Aeon the passion of the personage [Thrasonides] in the comic poet Menander who loves but is hated" (2.18.5). The reference is to the hero in the play Misumenos, of which extensive papyrus fragments have turned up.5 Stoics drew moral lessons from Menander's treatment of the conflict between love and hate. Zeno in his Republic and Chrysippus in his treatise On Love used the example of Thrasonides, who "had his mistress in his power but kept away from her because she hated him." This showed that "love is based on friendship and is not sent by the gods." Epictetus criticizes
Thrasonides for his emotions: he is the slave of desire, sends gifts to the woman he hates, and is elated when only moderately successful.6 Thus Irenaeus need not have seen the Misumenos when repeating what moralists said about it.
Irenaeus does not care for tragedy and finds "much tragedy and fantasy" in the Valentinian myths. Indeed, the Gnostic story is more extreme than the "Iou, iou" and "Pheu, pheu" and every other exclamation and expression of grief found in tragedy.7 The passion of Sophia apart from her consort is the basis of "the whole composition of their 'tragedy.'"
He compares the Gnostics to people who blind themselves, and later makes the allusion explicit by referring to "the Oedipus of tragedy."8 This does not show that he was close to the tragedies themselves.
…and Philosophy Not only do they put forward as their own what is found with the comic poets, but they collect what has been said by all the people who do not know God and are called philosophers; they have woven together a kind of cento out of many wretched pieces and prepared a false surface with subtle speech. The doctrine they present is new because it has been elaborated recently with a new art, but it is really old and worthless, since it was stitched together from old doctrines smelling of ignorance and lack of religion.
Irenaeus of Lyons To prove his point Irenaeus reinterprets a textbook on Presocratic philosophers' opinions about basic principles (2.14.2): Thales—water (the Valentinian Abyss), Homer—
Oceanus and Tethys (Abyss and Silence), Anaximander—the Infinite (Abyss and Aeons),
Anaxagoras—seeds fallen on the earth from the sky (seeds of the Mother). It was more difficult to show the influence of Democritus, Epicurus, Plato and the Stoics on the Gnostics, but Irenaeus tried hard (2.14.3–4).
But they do not know what they are talking about In regard to "nature," he read in the same textbook of philosophical opinions ("doxography") that the philosophers usually disagreed with one another; he could therefore conclude that they knew nothing about the subjects discussed. He criticized them for their physics and modestly claimed that "many things will escape our knowledge."9 While Job 38 had made the point much more vividly, Irenaeus used the school text to discuss four geographical topics: why the Nile rises, where migratory birds go in winter, why the tides rise and fall, and what lies beyond the ocean. Then he turned to weather phenomena: the causes of rain, lightning, thunder, the blowing of winds, the collections of clouds and fog and winds, snow and hail, etc., and the formations of clouds and fog. He ended with astronomy and metallurgy: causes of the phases of the moon and the differences in waters, metals, stones, etc. Only God knows the answers. From a different point of view Seneca lists phenomena with unknown causes and suggests that they be passed over as "neither possible nor useful to know."10 The argument is not philosophical, for Irenaeus also points out that his Gnostic opponents do not know how many hairs they have on their head or how many sparrows they will catch in a day.11
An anonymous philosopher knew the truth More positively, a text from the Presocratic philosopher Xenophanes provided a cornerstone of Irenaeus' anti-Gnostic theological system. He cites it five times, without naming Xenophanes. Sextus Empiricus quoted the original, also anonymously: "All of him
[God] sees, all thinks, and all hears."12 Diogenes Laertius explained that "the substance of God is spherical, in no way resembling man. He is all seeing and all hearing (though not breathing); he is all Mind and Thought and eternal."13 Even Pliny the Elder, relying on a philosophical mediator, cited the text (anonymously) as "all Mind, all Sight, all Hearing, all Soul, all Spirit, all himself."14 Irenaeus too uses nouns, and naturally leaves out the spherical. God "is all Mind, all Spirit, all Mentality, all Thought, all Word, all Hearing, all Eye, all Light, and entirely the source of every good thing—as religious and pious men rightly say of God."15 He thus appeals to a supposed consensus including Christians and devout pagans like Plato. After Irenaeus this theological opinion enjoyed considerable success. Within a few years Clement of Alexandria states that "the Son of God is all Mind, all Paternal Light, all Eye," and then adds "seeing all, hearing all, knowing all." Later he says that God is "all hearing, all eye."16 Other Greeks who cite the formula from Irenaeus include Cyril of Jerusalem and Theodoret. The Latin writer Novatian of Rome and three later authors from Gaul reflect continuing use of Irenaeus.17
Greek education against gnosticism 33 In Irenaeus' view the Creator predisposed us to be "religious." He regarded Plato as more religious than Marcion, for he held that God is both just and good.18 Though Gnostics call themselves religious, it is truly religious to study what can be known, and a simple presbyter is better than a blasphemous sophist or heretic. The Presocratic Anaxagoras, the "atheist," was irreligious, and so are Gnostic heretics.
Against Gnostic emanation doctrines, he repeats that "God is all Thought, all Will, all
Mind, all Light, all Eye, all Hearing, the source of all good things." He is contrasting the true doctrine of God with that of Ptolemaeus, who differentiates the aeonic "dispositions" of Thought and Will, which unite and produce other aeons. Such confusion also appears in the all too human Zeus of Homer, whose cares keep him from sleep as he wants to honor
Achilles and make a multitude of Greeks perish (Iliad 2.1–4, really Trojans). The true God is quite different from these.19
Again, Irenaeus claims that Gnostics create the emanations of Aeons "in accordance with human psychology" (ab hominum adfectione) as does anyone who compares the generation of the Logos with the human expression of a word. Presumably he has Theophilus, bishop of Antioch, in mind as well as the Gnostics. The comparison cannot be allowed, for God is all Mind, all Word, all Vision, all Hearing.20 Once more against the emanations but in more detail, he says that God is "all Mind, all Word, all operative Spirit, all Light, always identical with and like himself (as it is useful for us to think of God and as we learn from the scriptures)."21 What he earlier ascribed to "religious men" he now believes he finds in the Bible, presumably because God is Word, Spirit, and Light in the Johannine literature.22
Finally he uses the text to contrast the perfect Creator-god with imperfect created humanity and its progress and growth (Luke 2:40, 52) toward God. "God is perfect, equal to himself and uniform; he is all Light, all Mind, all substance (hypostasis), the source of all good things."23 It is significant, as J.H.Lesher notes after Werner Jaeger, that Xenophanes does not offer any argument to support this statement or his other theological comments.
After all, another fragment points out that "men cannot have knowledge of divine attributes and activities."24 Therefore when Irenaeus ascribes his doctrine both to religious men and to the scriptures he is appealing to "consensus," not logic.