Alexander Schmemann

1. The Beginning of the Church (28 pages)

Page 17

The danger increased when converted pagans began to outnumber Jews in the Church. Many were attracted to it by the same attitudes that explain the success of Gnosticism. By no means all of them could immediately appreciate the vital distinction between Christianity and the Eastern Hellenistic mystery religions; they saw in the Church what they wanted to see, the crowning of their own religious experience. “These pagans thought that they were under no obligation to abandon their former theories when they became Christian,” writes Professor Bolotov. “On the contrary they thought it correct to interpret and understand Christianity with their aid, in a high and perfect sense.” This Christian Gnosticism reached full bloom in the middle of the second century, in the teaching of Basilides, Valentinus, Saturninus, Marcion, and others. Their very number indicates the scale of the movement.

Attraction to Gnosticism cannot be ascribed only to corrupt imagination or interest in exotic mysteries. Its strength — as well as its falseness — was that, although Christ was acknowledged as the Logos, Savior, and Redeemer, the essence of Christianity as faith in the Incarnation of God and His coming into the world was corrupted. Christianity was transformed into a special mythological philosophy: instead of the drama of sin, forgiveness, and salvation, a personal encounter between God and man, Gnosticism offered a sort of cosmological scheme according to which the “spiritual elements” in the world were gradually freed from the captivity of matter and evil multiplicity gave way to abstract unity. It was a return in a new Eastern form to ancient Greek idealism.

Some historians have argued that out of the struggle with Gnosticism came a whole metamorphosis of the Church, transforming it into a structured, monolithic organization fortified by the authority of the hierarchy and official doctrine. Berdyaev even regards the condemnation of Gnosticism as a stifling of free thought. In the light of better knowledge of Gnostic documents, such conclusions are hardly still tenable. Nevertheless, the movement did oblige the Church to define more precisely the inner, organic laws of this life and to express in outward forms and formulas what had composed the essence of Christianity from the very beginning. In Gnosticism the Church saw the substitution of an alien and distorted image of Christ for the one by which it lived. The Gnostics referred to secret legends and created a whole apocryphal literature about Christ. Fragments of such Gnostic “gospels” have come down to us, written in the names of Peter, James, Paul, and John. “The image of Christ acquires . . . a character that is not only strange and superhuman but spectral as well. He is present invisibly, sometimes in the flesh, sometimes bodilessly, appearing variously as a child, an adult, or an old man . . . they responded to the curiosity which sought secret knowledge instead of the traditional teachings of the Church, theology and history.”6 The Church faced the necessity of defining on precisely what basis the Gnostic Christ was false and what would enable it to distinguish true tradition about Him from falsehood.

 

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