Basilides

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Basilides was a Christian teacher active in Alexandria in the second century, under the emperors Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, and the founder of one of the earliest named systems later called Gnostic. None of his own writing survives intact. What is known of him comes from the church writers who set out to refute him — Irenaeus, Clement, Hippolytus — and from scattered fragments they quote in the course of disagreeing. He is among the first Christian thinkers whose name is attached to a developed cosmology, and almost everything about that cosmology is contested.

The difficulty is built into the sources. Irenaeus describes a Basilides of descending ranks: a supreme unbegotten Father, from whom emanate Mind, Word, Prudence, Wisdom, and Power, and below them a long succession of angelic orders governing a tiered cosmos — three hundred and sixty-five heavens in all, a number tied to the magical name Abrasax, whose Greek letters sum to exactly that. The lowest order made the material world; the God of the Jews was its chief. A century later Hippolytus reports something stranger and more philosophical: a “God who is not,” beyond being and beyond thought, from whom the whole of reality is not emanated but seeded, unfolding out of a primal nothing toward its own self-recognition. Scholarship has not settled which account, if either, preserves what Basilides actually taught; the two may reflect different stages of his school, different sources, or the differing aims of his opponents.

What can be stated more firmly is sparse. He worked in Alexandria, the city where Greek philosophy, Jewish scripture, and the new Christian movement pressed against one another most closely, and his thought bears the marks of all three. He is said to have written a gospel of his own and twenty-four books of commentary, the Exegetica, of which only fragments remain. His son Isidore continued the school, and the Basilidians persisted in Egypt into the fourth century. Clement, who knew their writings, preserves a few lines on suffering and providence — among them the unsettling claim that those who suffer must in some sense have merited it, a hard answer to the problem of innocent pain that his critics seized upon.

His followers held that salvation came through knowledge of this hidden order and of the soul’s place within it — the conviction, shared across the currents later grouped as Gnostic, that what redeems is recognition rather than obedience. Whether Basilides taught a strict dualism of two opposed principles or a single unfolding from the unnameable depends entirely on which witness one trusts, and the witnesses do not agree. He survives as a name around which a system was once built and is now reconstructed in outline only: a teacher remembered chiefly by the people who wanted him forgotten.

→ In the library: Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1906)

→ Related: Gnosis · Neoplatonism · Philo Of Alexandria · Justin Martyr