The Origin of Satan (32 page)

example, Irenaeus cites Marcus, a Valentinian teacher active “in

our own district in the Rhone Valley.” Irenaeus calls him a

seducer who concocts special aphrodisiacs to entice the many

women who “have been defiled by him, and were filled with

passion for him,” including “the wife of one of our deacons . . . a

woman of remarkable beauty,”74 who actually left home to travel

with Marcus's group.

But when Irenaeus gets down to describing Marcus’s actual

techniques of seduction, we can see that he is speaking

metaphorically. What concerns the bishop, among other things,

is the enormous appeal that Valentinian teaching had for women

believers, who were increasingly excluded during the second

century from active participation in Irenaeus’s church. Marcus,

Irenaeus says, “seduces women” by inviting them to participate

in celebrating the Eucharist, and by casting the eucharistic

prayers in such “seductive words” as prayers to Grace, the divine

Mother, along with the divine Father.75 Worse, Marcus “lays

hands” upon women to invoke the holy spirit to come down

upon them, and then encourages them to speak in prophecy.76

When Irenaeus accuses Marcus’s followers of adultery, he is

invoking a traditional biblical image for participating in “illicit”

religious practices. The prophets Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, for

example, often used the metaphors of adultery and prostitution

to indict those they accused of being “unfaithful” to God’s

covenant.77

Several Valentinian works discovered at Nag Hammadi,

including the
Gospel of Truth
and the
Gospel of Philip
, offer

correctives to charges that the Valentinians were immoral. In one

of the few remaining fragments of his teachings, Valentinus

himself, commenting on Jesus’ saying that “God alone is good,”

says that apart from God’s grace, the human heart is a “dwelling

place for many demons. But when the Father, who alone is good,

looks

THE ENEMY WITHIN / 171

upon it, he purifies and illuminates it with his light; thus the

one who has such a heart is blessed, because he sees God.”78 The

Gospel of Truth
, which may also have been written by

Valentinus, offers the following ethical instruction to gnostic

Christians:

Speak of the truth with those who seek for it, and of
gnosis
to

those who have committed sins in their error. Secure the feet of

those who have stumbled, and stretch out your hands to those

who are ill. Feed those who are hungry, and give rest to those

who are weary. . . . For you are the understanding which is

drawn forth. If strength acts thus, it becomes even stronger. . . .

Do not become a dwelling place for the devil, for you have

already destroyed him.79

The
Gospel of Philip
proposes an alternative to the common

Christian perception of good and evil as cosmic opposites.80 In

this gospel, unlike the New Testament gospels, Satan never

appears. Instead, the divine Father and the holy spirit, working

in harmony with each other, direct all that happens, even the

actions of the lower cosmic forces, so that ultimately, in Paul’s

words, “all things work together for good” (Rom. 8:28). The

Gospel of Philip
offers an original critique of the way all other

Christians, orthodox and radical alike, approach morality. Much

as they disagree on content, both orthodox and radical Christians

assume that morality requires
prescribing
one set of acts, and

proscribing
others. But the author of Philip wants to throw away

all the lists of good things and bad things—lists that constitute

the basis of traditional Christian morality. For, this author

suggests, what we identify as opposites—“light and dark, life

and death, good and evil”—are in reality pairs of interdependent

terms in which each implies the other.81

Intending to transpose Christian moral discipline into a new

key, the author of
Philip
takes the story of the tree of knowledge

of good and evil as a parable that shows the futility of the

traditional approach to morality. According to
Philip
“the law

was the tree”; the law, like the tree of knowledge, claims to give

“knowledge of good and evil,” but it cannot accomplish any

172 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

moral transformation. Instead, it “created death for those who ate

of it. For when it said, ‘Eat this, do not eat that,’ it became the

beginning of death.”82

To show that one cannot distinguish good from evil in such

simple and categorical ways,
Philip
tells another parable, of a

householder responsible for an estate that includes children,

slaves, dogs, pigs, and cattle. The householder, who feeds each

one the diet appropriate to its kind, is an image of the “disciple of

God,” who “perceives the conditions of [each person’s] soul, and

speaks to each one” accordingly, recognizing that each has

different needs and stands at a different level of spiritual

maturity.83 Thus
Philip
refuses to argue over sexual behavior—

whether, for example, Christians should marry or remain

celibate. Posed as opposites, these choices, too, present a false

dichotomy. This author admonishes, “Do not fear the flesh, nor

love it. If you fear it, it will gain mastery over you; if you love it,

it will devour and paralyze you.”84
Philip
intends to follow Paul’s

insight that for one person marriage may be the appropriate

“diet,” for another, celibacy.

While rejecting the ordinary dichotomy between good and

evil, this author does not neglect ethical questions, much less

imply that they are not important. For him the question is not

whether a certain act is “good” or “evil” but how to reconcile the

freedom
gnosis
conveys with the Christian’s responsibility to

love others. Here the author has in mind a saying from the gospel

of John (“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you

free”) and the apostle Paul’s discussion of love and
gnosis
in 1

Corinthians, chapters 8 and 9. There Paul says that he considers

himself, because of his own
gnosis
, free to eat and drink

whatever he likes, free to travel with a Christian sister as a wife,

and free to live as an evangelist at community expense. Yet, Paul

says, “since not everyone has this
gnosis
” (1 Cor. 8:7-13), he

willingly relinquishes his freedom for the sake of love, in order

not to offend potential converts or immature Christians. The

author of
Philip
follows Paul’s lead, then, when he takes up the

central question: How is the Christian to avoid sin? How can one

act in harmony with
gnosis
, on the one hand, and with
agape
, or

love, on the other?

THE ENEMY WITHIN / 173

The central theme of the
Gospel of Philip
is the transforming

power of love: that what one becomes depends upon what one

loves.85 Whoever matures in love takes care not to cause distress

to others: “Blessed is the one who has not caused grief to

anyone.”86 Jesus Christ is the paradigm of the one who does not

offend or grieve anyone, but refreshes and blesses everyone he

encounters, whether “great or small, believer or unbeliever.”87

The gnostic Christian, then, must always temper the freedom

gnosis
conveys with love for others. The author says, too, that he

looks forward to the time when freedom and love will harmonize

spontaneously, so that the spiritually mature person will be free

to follow his or her own true desires without grieving anyone

else. Instead of commanding one to “eat this, do not eat that,” as

did the former “tree” of the law, the true tree of
gnosis
will

convey perfect freedom:

In the place where I shall eat all things is the tree of

knowledge. . . . That garden is the place where they will say to

me, “Eat this, or do not eat that, just as you wish.”88

When
gnosis
harmonizes with love, the Christian will be free

to partake or to decline, according to his or her own heart's

desire. The majority of Christians, by contrast, characterized

spiritual formation as the Essenes had, as an internal contest

between the forces of good and evil. The great Christian ascetic

Anthony, who lived in Egypt c. 250-355 C.E. and became a

pioneer among the desert fathers, taught his spiritual heirs in

monastic tradition to picture Satan as the most intimate enemy of

all—the enemy we call our own
self.
The
Life of Anthony
, written

in the fourth century by Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria,

describes how Satan tempts Anthony by speaking through his

inner thoughts and impulses, through imagination and desire.

Philip
, on the other hand, interprets the human inclination to sin

without recourse to Satan. Rut this does not mean, as some

orthodox Christians suspected, that Valentinian Christians

naïvely believed that they had no need to engage in moral

struggle because they were “beyond good and evil,” essentially

incapable of sin. On the

174 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

contrary,
Philip
teaches that within each person lies hidden the

“root of evil.” This is
Philip’
s interpretation of the traditional

Jewish teaching of the
yetzer ‘hara
, which the rabbis called the

“evil impulse.” So long as we remain unaware of “the root of

evil” within us,
Philip
says, “it is powerful; but when it is

recognized, it is destroyed.” He continues,

As for us, let each of us dig down to the root of evil within us,

and pull out the root from the heart. It will be plucked out if

we recognize it. But if we do not recognize it, it takes root in

our hearts and produces its fruits in our hearts. It masters us,

and makes us its slaves. It takes us captive, so that “we do what

we do not want, and what we do not want to do, we do” [cf.

Rom. 7:14—15]. It grows powerful because we have not

recognized it.89

Essential to
gnosis
is to “know” one’s own potential for evil.

According to
Philip
, recognizing evil within oneself is

necessarily an individual process: no one can dictate to another

what is good or evil; instead, each one must strive to recognize

his or her own inner state, and so to identify acts that spring

from the “root of evil,” which consists in such impulses as anger,

lust, envy, pride, and greed. This teacher assumes that when one

recognizes that a certain act derives from such sources, one loses

the conviction needed to sustain the action. In order to do evil—

whether to indulge in an angry tirade, commit murder, or declare

aggressive war—one seems to require the illusion that one’s

action is justified, that one is acting for right reasons. This author

holds, then, the optimistic conviction that “truth ... is more

powerful than ignorance of error.”90 Knowing the truth in this

way involves more than an intellectual process; it involves

transformation of one’s being, transformation of one’s way of

living: “If we know the truth, we shall find its fruits within us;

if we join ourselves with it, we shall receive our fulfillment.”91

For the mature Christian,
Philip
suggests, the doctrine and

moral strictures of the institutional church have become

secondary, if not irrelevant. Yet unlike many later Protestant

Chris-

THE ENEMY WITHIN / 175

tians, Valentinian Christians did not simply reject the

ecclesiastical structures. Instead they claimed to build upon

them as upon a foundation, just as Christians as a whole claimed

to have built upon the foundations of Judaism. The author of

Philip
, in fact, like the author of the
Testimony
, at one point uses

the terms “Hebrew” and “Christian” to compare the relationship

between those who have received only the
preliminary

revelation, and those who have received the fuller

understanding of
gnosis.

Thus the author of
Philip
criticizes those he calls Hebrews and

defines as “apostles and apostolic people,” who fail to

understand, for example, the meaning of the virgin birth. Many

take it literally, as if Jesus’ “virgin birth” referred to an actual

conception and pregnancy.
Philip
ridicules such belief:

Some said, “Mary conceived by the holy spirit.” They are in

error. They do not know what they are saying; for when did a

female ever conceive through a female?92

As
Philip
sees it, Jesus, born of Mary and Joseph as his human

parents, was reborn of the holy spirit, the feminine element of

the divine being (since the Hebrew term for spirit,
Ruah
, is

feminine) and of the “Father in heaven,” whom Jesus urged his