The Origin of Satan (31 page)

“know nothing ... at variance with the truth of faith.” But when

people “insist on our asking about the issues that concern them,”

Tertullian says, “we have a moral obligation to refute them. . . .

They say that we must ask questions in order to discuss,”

Tertullian continues, “but what is there to discuss?” When the

“heretics” object that Christians must discuss what the

Scriptures really mean, Tertullian declares that believers must

dismiss all argument over scriptural interpretation; such

controversy only “has the effect of upsetting the stomach or the

brain.”55 Besides, Tertullian says, such debate makes the

orthodox position look weak:

THE ENEMY WITHIN / 165

If you do discuss with them, the effect on the spectators will

be to make them uncertain which side is right . . . the person in

doubt . . . will be confused by the fact that he sees you making

no progress, while the other side is on an equal basis with you

in discussion . . . and
he will go away even more uncertain about

which side to find heretical. . . . For, no doubt, they, too, have

things to say; they will accuse us of wrong interpretation, since

they, no less than we, claim that truth is on their side
(emphasis

added).36

Instead of admitting heretics into debates over the Scriptures,

Tertullian says, “straight thinking” (the literal translation of

“orthodox”) Christians must simply claim the Scriptures as their

own exclusive property:

Heretics ought not to be allowed to challenge an appeal to the

Scriptures, since we . . . prove that they have nothing to do

with the Scriptures. For since they are heretics, they cannot be

true Christians.57

But how do heretics come up with such ingenious and

persuasive arguments from Scripture? Their inspiration comes,

Tertullian says, from “the devil, of course, to whom belong the

wiles that distort the truth.”58 Satan, after all, invented all the

arts of spiritual warfare, including false exegesis. Paul’s warning

against “spiritual forces of evil in heavenly places,” which the

Reality of the Rulers
turns against the biblical God and his

angels, Tertullian takes in the opposite sense: Here, he says, Paul

warns against the devil, who contrives false readings of the

Scriptures to lead people into error.59 In place of choices,

questions, and discussions of scriptural interpretation, Tertullian

prescribes unanimous acceptance of the rule of faith and, to

ensure this, obedience to the proper ecclesiastical “discipline”—

that is, to the priests who stand in proper succession from the

apostles.60 Tertullian’s “prescriptions,” if they had been enforced,

might have proven effective against radical teachers like those

who wrote the
Testimony of Truth
, the
Reality of the Rulers
, and

the
Secret Book

166 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

of John
. In any case, the groups these texts represented remained

marginal among Christians; their appeal was limited to the few

who were willing to heed a gospel that required one to break not

only with the world but also with the Christian majority.

Others whom Tertullian and Irenaeus recognized as heretics

were, however, far less radical—and, precisely for that reason, far

more threatening to the emerging clerical authorities and their

advocates. Prominent among them were followers of Valentinus,

a Christian teacher from Egypt who had emigrated to Rome

around the time Justin did, c. 140 C.E. Valentinus had no quarrel

with clerical authority; in fact, if we can believe Tertullian on

this point, Valentinus “expected to become a bishop himself,

because he was an able man, both in genius and eloquence.”61 But

Valentinus “broke with the church of the true faith,”62 Tertullian

says, because another man was made bishop instead; Tertullian,

like Clement, attributes to those who challenge episcopal

authority the motives of envy and frustrated ambition.

Valentinus had been baptized and had accepted the creedal

statement of faith and participated in common Christian

worship. But after his baptism he received a revelatory dream in

which the Logos appeared to him in the form of a newborn

child;63 he took this vision as an impetus to begin his own

spiritual explorations. Having heard of a teacher named Theudas

who claimed to have received secret teaching from the apostle

Paul himself, Valentinus eagerly learned from him all he could.

Henceforth he became a teacher himself, amplifying what he had

learned from Theudas with his own spiritual explorations, and

encouraging his students to develop their inner capacity for

spiritual understanding.

Valentinus intended to steer a middle course between two

extremes—between those who claimed that the faith of the

majority was the only true faith, and those, like the authors of

parts of the
Testimony of Truth
and the
Reality of the Rulers
, who

rejected it as false and debased. While he took for granted that

accepting baptism and professing the common faith in God and

Christ were necessary for those making a beginning in the faith,

he urged his fellow believers to go beyond what Christian

THE ENEMY WITHIN / 167

preachers taught and beyond the literal interpretation of the

Scriptures to question the gospels’ deeper meaning. By so doing,

he believed, one could progress beyond faith to understanding,

that is,
to gnosis
. This word is often translated “knowledge,” but

the translation is somewhat misleading, since
gnosis
differs from

intellectual knowledge (as in phrases like “they
know

mathematics”), which is characterized in Greek by the word

eidein
(from which we derive the English word
idea
). English is

unusual within its language group in having only one verb (“to

know”) to express different kinds of knowing. Modern European

languages use one word to characterize intellectual knowledge

and another for the knowledge of personal relationships: French,

for example, distinguishes between
savoir
and
connaître
, Spanish

between
saber
and
conocer
, Italian between
sapere
and
conoscere,
German between
wissen
and
kennen.
The Greek word
gignosko
, from which
gnosis
derives, refers to the knowledge of personal

relationships (as in “We know Christ” or, in the words of the

Delphi oracle, “Know thyself”). The term might better be

translated “insight,” or “wisdom.” One gnostic teacher

encourages his students to seek
gnosis
within themselves:

Abandon the search for God, and creation, and similar things

of that kind. Instead, take yourself as the starting place. Ask

who it is within you who makes everything his own saying,

“my mind,” “my heart,” “my God.” Learn the sources of love,

joy, hate, and desire. . . . If you carefully examine all these

things, you will find [God] in yourself.64

Another teacher says that
gnosis
reveals “who we were, and

who we have become; where we are going; whence we have

come; what birth is, and what is rebirth.”65 What the gnostic

Christian finally comes to “know” is that the gospel of Christ

can be perceived on a level deeper than the one shared by all

Christians. One who takes the path of
gnosis
discovers that the

gospel is more than a message about repentance and forgiveness

of sins; it becomes a path of spiritual awakening, through which

one discovers the divine within. The secret of
gnosis
is that when

one

168 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

comes to know oneself at the deepest level, one comes to know

God as the source of one's being.

The author of the
Gospel of Philip
, a follower of Valentinus,

describes
gnosis
as a natural progression from faith. Just as a

harvest is gathered through the cooperative interaction of the

natural elements, water, earth, wind, and light, so,
Philip
says,

God’s farming has four elements—faith, hope, love, and
gnosis
.

Faith is our earth, in which we take root. And hope is the water

through which we are raised; love is the wind through which

we grow. Gnosis, then, is the light through which we ripen [or:

“become mature”].66

Unlike the radical Christians of the
Reality of the Rulers
or the

Secret Book of John
, Valentinus and his followers did not reject

the moral injunctions taught by priests and bishops; they did not

despise or invert the Hebrew Bible, nor did they openly deny the

authority of priests and bishops. Instead they accepted all these,

but with a crucial qualification: they accepted the moral,

ecclesiastical, and scriptural consensus as binding upon the

majority of Christians, but not upon those who had gone beyond

mere faith to
gnosis
—those who had become spiritually

“mature.”

Valentinus and his followers also accepted as necessary for

beginners the moral order that the bishops enjoined, prescribing

good works and proscribing bad ones. But Valentinus and his

followers saw in the churches two different types of Christian.67

Most Christians they call “ecclesiastic,” or “psychic,” Christians

(that is, those who function on the level of
psyche
, or soul); “and

they say,” Irenaeus protests indignandy, “that we of the church

are such persons.”68 But those who come to accept a second,

secret initiation called “redemption” henceforth regard

themselves as mature, “spiritual” Christians, who have advanced

from mere faith toward spiritual understanding, or
gnosis.

Because Valentinus and his followers publicly accepted

baptism, attended common worship, and pronounced the same

creed, most Christians considered them to be completely

innocuous fellow believers, and they themselves insisted that

this is what they

THE ENEMY WITHIN / 169

were. But within a generation of Valentinus’s teaching in Rome,

the movement had won a considerable following throughout the

Christian world, especially among the more educated members

of the church. Tertullian complains that often it is “the most

faithful, the most prudent, and the most experienced” church

members “who have gone over to the other side.”69 Irenaeus, to

his dismay, found Valentinian teachers active among members of

his own congregation in Lyons, inviting believers to attend secret

meetings, to raise questions about the faith and discuss its

“deeper meaning.”70 In such meetings, unauthorized by the

bishop, these Valentinians taught what Irenaeus regarded as

blasphemy. They taught, for example, that the creator God

described in Genesis is not the only God, as most Christians

believe—nor is he the malevolent, degraded chief of the fallen

angels, as the radicals imagine. According to Valentinus, he is an

anthropomorphic image of the true divine Source underlying all

being, the ineffable, indescribable source Valentinus calls “the

depth,” or “the abyss.” When Valentinus does invoke images for

that Source, he describes it as essentially dynamic and dyadic,

the divine “Father of all” and “Mother of all.”71 Those who

attended such meetings might also hear that the bishop—

Irenaeus himself—although a good man, was a person of limited

understanding who had not progressed beyond faith to gnosis.

Irenaeus acknowledges in
Against Heresies
that the followers

of Valentinus think of themselves as people who are reforming

the church and raising its level of spiritual understanding; but,

he says, nothing good they accomplish could possibly

compensate for the harm they inflict by “dividing in pieces the

great and glorious body of Christ,”72 the church. As bishop,

Irenaeus saw that the very act of committing themselves to

spiritual exploration set gnostic Christians apart from the rest,

and effectively divided the community. Their presence as an

insidious inner group threatened the fragile structures of

organizational and moral consensus through which leaders like

Irenaeus were attempting to unify Christian groups throughout

the world.

While Valentinian Christians agreed that the bishops’ moral

instruction was necessary for psychic Christians, they tended to

170 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

regard themselves as exempt, free to make their own decisions

about acts that the bishops prohibited. Some Valentinian

Christians, Irenaeus says, attend pagan festivals along with their

families and friends, convinced that doing so cannot pollute

them; others, he charges, go to gladiator shows, and are guilty of

what he describes as flagrant sexual transgressions.73 As an