The life and work of St. Paul

GNOSTICISM IN THE QERM. 609
of circumcision, if not upon its actual necessity. 1 Yet it did not, as a whole,
resemble the Galatian Judaism, nor did it emanate, like the opposition at
Antioch, from a party in Jerusalem, nor was it complicated, like the Corinthian
schisms, with personal hostility to the authority of St. Paid. Its character was
Judaic, not so much essentially as virtually ; not, that is, from any special
sympathy with national and Levitical Hebraism, but rather because there were
certain features of Judaism which were closely analogous to those of other
Oriental religions, and which commanded a wide sympathy in the Eastern
world.
We must judge of the distinctive colour of the dawning heresy quite as
much from the truths by which St. Paul strives to check its progress, as by
those of its tenets on which he directly touches. 2 In warning the Colossians
respecting it, he bids them be on their guard against allowing themselves to be
plundered by a particular teacher, whose so-called philosophy and empty deceit
were more in accordance with human traditions and secular rudiments than
with the truth of Christ. The hollow and misguiding system of this teacher,
besides the importance which it attached to a ceremonialism which at the best
was only valuable as a shadow of a symbol, tried further to rob its votaries of
the prize of their Christian race by representing God as a Being so far removed
from them that they could only approach Him through a series of angelic
intermediates. It thus ignored the precious truth of Christ's sole mediatorial
dignity, and turned humility itself into a vice by making it a cloak for inflated
and carnal intellectualism. In fact, it was nothing more nor less than pride
which was thus aping humility ; and, in endeavouring to enforce an ignoble
self -abrogation of that direct communion with God through Christ which is
the Christian's most imperial privilege, it not only thrust all kinds of inferior
agencies between the soul and Him, but also laid down a number of rules and
which were but a set of new Mosaisms without the true Mosaic sanc-
dogmas
tions. Those rules were, from their very nature, false, transient, and trivial.
They paraded a superfluous self-abasement, and insisted on a hard asceticism,
but at the same time they dangerously flattered the soul with a semblance of
complicated learning, while they were found to be in reality valueless as any
remedy against self-indulgence. That these ascetic practices and dreamy
imaginations were accompanied by a pride which arrogated to itself certain
mysteries as an exclusive possession from which the vulgar intellect must bo
kept aloof ; that, while professing belief in Christ, the Colossian mystic
represented Him as one among many beings interposed between God and man ;
that he regarded matter in general and the body in particular as something in
which evil was necessarily immanent, 3 seem to result from the Christology of
the Epistle, which is more especially developed in one particular direction than
i Col. ii. 11.
8 They were "Gnostic Ebionites," Baitr; "Corinthians," Mayerhoff; "Christian
Essenism in its progress to Gnosticism," Lipsius; "A connecting fink between Essence
and Cerinthians," Nitzsch ; "Ascetics and Theosophists of the Essene school," Holts
mann
"
; Precursors of the Christian Essenes," Ritschl. (Pfleiderer, ii. 98.)
*
So, too, Philo regarded the body M the Egypt of the sonL (Qua. rer. div. hoar. SIB.}