_THE MORAL TEACHING OF THE GNOSTICS.--ITS MODERN COUNTERPART._
"But we know that the law is good if a man use it lawfully, as
knowing this, that law is not made for a righteous man, but for the
lawless and unruly, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and
profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for
man-slayers, for fornicators, for abusers of themselves with men,
for men-stealers, for liars, for false swearers, and if there be any
other thing contrary to the sound doctrine; according to the gospel
of the glory of the blessed God, which was committed to my trust"--1
Tim. i. 8-11.
The speculations of the Gnostics in their attempts to explain the origin
of the universe and the origin of evil, were wild and unprofitable
enough; and in some respects involved a fundamental contradiction of the
plain statements of Scripture. But it was not so much their metaphysical
as their moral teaching, which seemed so perilous to St. Paul. Their
"endless genealogies" might have been left to fall with their own dead
weight, so dull and uninteresting were they. Specimens of them still
survive, in what is known to us of the systems of Basilides and
Valentinus; and which of us, after having laboriously worked through
them, ever wished to read them a second time? But it is impossible to
keep one's philosophy in one compartment in one's mind, and one's
religion and morality quite separate from it in another. However
unpractical metaphysical speculations may appear, it is beyond question
that the views which we hold respecting such things may have momentous
influence upon our life. It was so with the early Gnostics, whom St.
Paul urges Timothy to keep in check. Their doctrine respecting the
nature of the material world and its relation to God, led to two
opposite forms of ethical teaching, each of them radically opposed to
Christianity.
This fact fits in very well with the character of the Pastoral Epistles,
all of which deal with this early form of error. They insist upon
discipline and morality, more than upon doctrine. These last solemn
charges of the great Apostle aim rather at making Christian ministers,
and their congregations, lead pure and holy lives, than at constructing
any system of theology. Erroneous teaching must be resisted; the plain
truths of the Gospel must be upheld; but the main thing is holiness of
life. By prayer and thanksgiving, by quiet and grave conduct, by modesty
and temperance, by self-denial and benevolence, by reverence for the
sanctity of home life, Christians will furnish the best antidote to the
intellectual and moral poison which the false teachers are propagating.
"The sound doctrine" has its fruit in a healthy, moral life, as surely
as the "different doctrine" leads to spiritual pride and lawless
sensuality.
The belief that Matter and everything material is inherently evil,
involved necessarily a contempt for the human body. This body was a vile
thing; and it was a dire calamity to the human mind to be joined to such
a mass of evil. From this premise various conclusions, some doctrinal
and some ethical, were drawn.
On the doctrinal side it was urged that the resurrection of the body was
incredible. It was disastrous enough to the soul that it should be
burdened with a body in this world. That this degrading alliance would
be continued in the world to come, was a monstrous belief. Equally
incredible was the doctrine of the Incarnation. How could the Divine
Word consent to be united with so evil a thing as a material frame?
Either the Son of Mary was a mere man, or the body which the Christ
assumed was not real. It is with these errors that St. John deals, some
twelve or fifteen years later, in his Gospel and Epistles.
On the ethical side the tenet that the human body is utterly evil
produced two opposite errors,--asceticism and antinomian sensuality. And
both of these are aimed at in these Epistles. If the enlightenment of
the soul is everything, and the body is utterly worthless, then this
vile clog to the movement of the soul must be beaten under and crushed,
in order that the higher nature may rise to higher things. The body must
be denied all indulgence, in order that it may be starved into
submission (iv. 3). On the other hand, if enlightenment is everything
and the body is worthless, then every kind of experience, no matter how
shameless, is of value, in order to enlarge knowledge. Nothing that a
man can do can make his body more vile than it is by nature, and the
soul of the enlightened is incapable of pollution. Gold still remains
gold, however often it is plunged in the mire.
The words of the three verses taken as a text, look as if St. Paul was
aiming at evil of this kind. These Judaizing Gnostics "desired to be
teachers of the Law." They wished to enforce the Mosaic Law, or rather
their fantastic interpretations of it, upon Christians. They insisted
upon its excellence, and would not allow that it has been in many
respects superseded. "We know quite well," says the Apostle, "and
readily admit, that the Mosaic Law is an excellent thing; provided that
those who undertake to expound it make a legitimate use of it. They must
remember that, just as law in general is not made for those whose own
good principles keep them in the right, so also the restrictions of the
Mosaic Law are not meant for Christians who obey the Divine will in the
free spirit of the Gospel." Legal restrictions are intended to control
those who will not control themselves; in short, for the very men who by
their strange doctrines are endeavouring to curtail the liberties of
others. What they preach as "the Law" is really a code of their own,
"commandments of men who turn away from the truth.... They profess that
they know God; but by their works they deny Him, being abominable, and
disobedient, and unto every good work reprobate" (Tit. i. 14, 16). In
rehearsing the various kinds of sinners for whom law exists, and who are
to be found (he hints) among these false teachers, he goes roughly
through the Decalogue. The four commandments of the First Table are
indicated in general and comprehensive terms; the first five
commandments of the Second Table are taken one by one, flagrant
violators being specified in each case. Thus the stealing of a human
being in order to make him a slave, is mentioned as the most outrageous
breach of the eighth commandment. The tenth commandment is not
distinctly indicated, possibly because the breaches of it are not so
easily detected. The overt acts of these men were quite sufficient to
convict them of gross immorality, without enquiring as to their secret
wishes and desires. In a word, the very persons who in their teaching
were endeavouring to burden men with the ceremonial ordinances, which
had been done away in Christ, were in their own lives violating the
moral laws, to which Christ had given a new sanction. They tried to keep
alive, in new and strange forms, what had been provisional and was now
obsolete, while they trampled under foot what was eternal and Divine.
"If there be any other thing contrary to the sound doctrine." In these
words St. Paul sums up all the forms of transgression not specified in
his catalogue. The sound, healthy teaching of the Gospel is opposed to
the morbid and corrupt teaching of the Gnostics, who are sickly in their
speculations (vi. 4), and whose word is like an eating sore (2 Tim. ii.
17). Of course healthy teaching is also _health-giving_, and corrupt
teaching is _corrupting_; but it is the primary and not the derived
quality that is stated here. It is the healthiness of the doctrine in
itself, and its freedom from what is diseased or distorted, that is
insisted upon. Its wholesome character is a consequence of this.
This word "sound" or "healthy" (=hygiainôn, hygiês=), as applied to
doctrine,[17] is one of a group of expressions which are peculiar to the
Pastoral Epistles, and which have been condemned as not belonging to St.
Paul's style of language. He never uses "healthy" in his other Epistles;
therefore these three Epistles, in which the phrase occurs eight or nine
times, are not by him.
This kind of argument has been discussed already, in the first of these
expositions. It assumes the manifest untruth, that as life goes on men
make little or no change in the stock of words and phrases which they
habitually use. With regard to this particular phrase, the source of it
has been conjectured with a fair amount of probability. It may have come
from "the beloved physician," who, at the time when St. Paul wrote the
Second Epistle to Timothy, was the Apostle's sole companion. It is worth
remarking that the word here used for "sound" (with the exception of one
passage in the Third Epistle of St. John) occurs nowhere in the New
Testament in the literal sense of being in sound bodily health, except
in the Gospel of St. Luke. And it occurs nowhere in a figurative sense,
except in the Pastoral Epistles. It is obviously a medical metaphor; a
metaphor which any one who had never had anything to do with medicine
might easily use, but which is specially likely to be used by a man who
had lived much in the society of a physician. Before we call such a
phrase un-Pauline we must ask: (1) Is there any passage in the earlier
Epistles of St. Paul where he would certainly have used this word
"sound," had he been familiar with it? (2) Is there any word in the
earlier Epistles which would have expressed his meaning here equally
well? If either of these questions is answered in the negative, then we
are going beyond our knowledge in pronouncing the phrase "sound
doctrine"[18] to be un-Pauline.
"Contrary to the sound doctrine." It sums up in a comprehensive phrase
the doctrinal and moral teaching of the Gnostics. What they taught was
unsound and morbid, and as a consequence poisonous and pestilential.
While professing to accept and expound the Gospel, they really
disintegrated it and explained it away. They destroyed the very basis
of the Gospel message; for they denied the reality of sin. And they
equally destroyed the contents of the message; for they denied the
reality of the Incarnation. Nor were they less revolutionary on the
moral side than on the doctrinal. The foundations of morality are sapped
when intellectual enlightenment is accounted as the one thing needful,
while conduct is treated as a thing of no value. Principles of morality
are turned upside down when it is maintained that any act which adds to
one's knowledge is not only allowable, but a duty. It is necessary to
remember these fatal characteristics of this early form of error, in
order to appreciate the stern language used by St. Paul and St. John
respecting it, as also by St. Jude and the author of the Second Epistle
of Peter.
St. John in his Epistles deals mainly with the doctrinal side of the
heresy,--the denial of the reality of sin and of the reality of the
Incarnation:[19] although the moral results of doctrinal error are also
indicated and condemned.[20] In the Apocalypse, as in St. Paul and in
the Catholic Epistles, it is mainly the moral side of the false teaching
that is denounced, and that in both its opposite phases. The Epistle to
the Colossians deals with the _ascetic_ tendencies of early
gnosticism.[21] The Apocalypse and the Catholic Epistles deal with its
_licentious_ tendencies.[22] The Pastoral Epistles treat of both
asceticism and licentiousness, but chiefly of the latter, as is seen
from the passage before us and from the first part of chapter iii. in
the Second Epistle. As we might expect, St. Paul uses stronger language
in the Pastoral Epistles than he does in writing to the Colossians; and
in St. John and the Catholic Epistles we find stronger language still.
Antinomian licentiousness is a far worse evil than misguided asceticism,
and in the interval between St. Paul and the other writers the
profligacy of the antinomian Gnostics had increased. St. Paul warns the
Colossians against delusive "persuasiveness of speech," against "vain
deceit," "the rudiments of the world," "the precepts and doctrines of
men." He cautions Timothy and Titus respecting "seducing spirits and
doctrines of devils," "profane and old wives' fables," "profane
babblings" and teachings that "will eat as doth a gangrene," "vain
talkers and deceivers" whose "mind and conscience is deceived," and the
like. St. John denounces these false teachers as "liars," "seducers,"
"false prophets," "deceivers," and "antichrists;" and in Jude and the
Second Epistle of Peter we have the profligate lives of these false
teachers condemned in equally severe terms.
It should be observed that here again everything falls into its proper
place if we assume that the Pastoral Epistles were written some years
later than the Epistle to the Colossians and some years earlier than
those of St. Jude and St. John. The ascetic tendencies of Gnosticism
developed first. And though they still continued in teachers like Tatian
and Marcion, yet from the close of the first century the licentious
conclusions drawn from the premises that the human body is worthless and
that all knowledge is divine, became more and more prevalent; as is seen
in the teaching of Carpocrates and Epiphanes, and in the monstrous sect
of the Cainites. It was quite natural, therefore, that St. Paul should
attack Gnostic asceticism first in writing to the Colossians, and
afterwards both it and Gnostic licentiousness in writing to Timothy and
Titus. It was equally natural that his language should grow stronger as
he saw the second evil developing, and that those who saw this second
evil at a more advanced stage should use sterner language still.
The extravagant theories of the Gnostics to account for the origin of
the universe and the origin of evil are gone and are past recall. It
would be impossible to induce people to believe them, and only a
comparatively small number of students ever even read them. But the
heresy that knowledge is more important than conduct, that brilliant
intellectual gifts render a man superior to the moral law, and that much
of the moral law itself is the tyrannical bondage of an obsolete
tradition, is as dangerous as ever it was. It is openly preached and
frequently acted upon. The great Florentine artist, Benvenuto Cellini,
tells us in his autobiography that when Pope Paul III. expressed his
willingness to forgive him an outrageous murder committed in the streets
of Rome, one of the gentlemen at the Papal Court ventured to remonstrate
with the Pope for condoning so heinous a crime. "You do not understand
the matter as well as I do," replied Paul III.: "I would have you to
know that men like Benvenuto, unique in their profession, _are not bound
by the laws_." Cellini is a braggart, and it is possible that in this
particular he is romancing. But, even if the story is his invention, he
merely attributes to the Pope the sentiments which he cherished himself,
and upon which (as experience taught him) other people acted. Over and
over again his murderous violence was overlooked by those in authority,
because they admired and wished to make use of his genius as an artist.
"Ability before honesty" was a common creed in the sixteenth century,
and it is abundantly prevalent in our own. The most notorious scandals
in a man's private life are condoned if only he is recognized as having
talent. It is the old Gnostic error in a modern and sometimes agnostic
form. It is becoming daily more clear that the one thing needful for the
regeneration of society, whether upper, middle, or lower, is the
creation of a "sound" public opinion. And so long as this is so, God's
ministers and all who have the duty of instructing others will need to
lay to heart the warnings which St. Paul gives to his followers Timothy
and Titus.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] 1 Tim. vi. 3; 2 Tim. i. 13, iv. 3; Tit. i. 9, 13, ii. 1, 2, 8.
[18] The Revisers as a rule render =didaskalia= by "doctrine," as here,
iv. 6, vi. 1, 3; 2 Tim. iv. 3; Tit. i. 9, ii. 1, 7, 10 (but not in iv.
13, 16, v. 17; 2 Tim. iii. 10, 16), while they render =didachê= by
"teaching," as 2 Tim. iv. 2; Tit. i. 9, and frequently in the Gospels.
But =didaskalia=, as being closer to =didaskalos= "a teacher," is
"teaching" rather than "doctrine," and =didachê= is "doctrine" rather
than "teaching." See p. 238.
[19] 1 John i. 8-10, ii. 22, 23, iii. 4, 8, iv. 2, 3, 15, v. 1, 5, 16,
17; 2 John 7.
[20] ii. 9, 11, iii. 15, 17.
[21] ii. 16, 21, 23.
[22] Rev. ii. 14, 20-22; 2 Peter ii. 10-22; Jude 8, 10, 13, 16, 18.