The life and work of St. Paul

GNOSTICISM IN THE OERM. 611
the Colossians reflected in the positive theology which is here developed in
order to counteract thorn. In the moral and practical discussions of the
Epistle we see the true substitute for that extravagant and inflating asceticism
which had its origin partly in will-worship, ostentatious humility, and trust in
works, and partly in mistaken conceptions as to the inherency of evil in the
body of man. St. Paul points out to them that the deliverance from sin wag
to be found, not in dead rules and ascetic rigours, which have a fatal tendency
to weaken the will, while they fix the imagination so intently on the very sins
against which they are intended as a remedy, as too often to lend to those very
sins a more fatal fascination but in that death to sin which is necessarily in-
volved in the life hid with Christ in God. From that new life that resurrec-
tion from the death of sin obedience to the moral laws of God, and faithfulness
in common relations of life, result, not as difficult and meritorious acts, but as
the natural energies of a living impulse in the heart which beats no longer
with its own life but with the life of Christ.
Alike, then, from the distinct notices and the negative indications of the
Epistle we can reproduce with tolerable clearness the features of the Colossian
heresy, and we at once trace in it the influence of that Oriental theosophy,
those mystical speculations, those shadowy cosmogonies and moral aberrations
which marked the hydra-headed forms of the systems afterwards summed up
in the one word Gnosticism. This very circumstance has been the main ground
for impugning the genuineness of the Epistle. It is asserted that Gnosticism
belongs to a generation later, and that these warnings are aimed at the
followers of Cerinthus, who did not flourish until after Paul was dead, or
even at those of Yalentinus, the founder of a Gnostic system in the second
century. In support of this view it is asserted that the Epistle abounds in
un-Pauline phrases, in words which occur in no other Epistle, and in technical
Gnostic expressions, such as plenitude, mystery, wisdom, knowledge, powers,
light, darkness. Now, that Gnosticism as a well-developed system belongs to
a later period is admitted ; but the belief that the acceptance of the Epistle
as genuine involves an anachronism, depends solely on the assumption that
1
Gnostic expressions may not have been prevalent, and Gnostic tendencies
secretly at work, long before they were crystallised into formal heresies. As
far as these expressions are concerned, some of them are not technical at all
until a Gnostic meaning is read into them, and others, like " knowledge "
(gnosis), &c., "plenitude" (pleroma), though beginning to be technical, are
used in a sense materially different from that which was afterwards attached
to them. As for the asserted traces of doctrines distinctly and systematically
Gnostic, it is a matter of demonstration that they are found, both isolated and
combined, during the Apostolic age, and before it, as well as afterwards. The
esoteric exclusiveness which jealously guarded the arcana of its mysteries
1 The use of these expressions is admirably illustrated by some remarks of TertulHan,
Adv. Praxeam., 8. He nas used the word irpo/SaA.}), and anticipating the objection that
the word is tainted with Valentinianism, he replies that Herety baa taken that vcH
from Truth to mould it after its own likenesi,