The Significance of Basilides in Ancient Christian ThoughtAuthor(s): Bentley LaytonReviewed work(s):Source: Representations, No. 28, Special Issue: Essays in Memory of Joel Fineman (Autumn,1989), pp. 135-151Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928589 .Accessed: 04/11/2011 00:39

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BENTLEY LAYTON

The Significance of Basilides in Ancient Christian Thought

Dis Manibus Joel Fineman

Like brilliant lamps the churches were now [about A.D. 135] shining throughout the world, and the faith in our Savior and LordJesus Christ was flourishing among all mankind, when the devil ... turned all his devices against the church. Formerly he had used persecutions . .. but now .. . he ... conducted his campaign by other measures, plotting by every means that sorcerers and deceivers might assume the same name as our religion and ... lead to the depth of destruction those of the faithful whom they caught.... Thus from Menander [an obscure religious teacher of the first century A.D.] ... there proceeded a certain snakelike power with two mouths and double head, and established the leaders of two heresies [Greek hairesis, "school of thought"], Saturninus, an Antiochian by race, and Basilides of Alexandria.... Irenaeus [A.D.

ca. 180] makes it plain that ... Basilides, under the pretext of secret doctrine, stretched fancy infinitely far, fabricating monstrous myths for his impious heresy.... A most powerful refutation of Basilides has reached us from Agrippa Castor, a most famous writer of that time [but now unknown except for the present passage], revealing the cleverness of the man's deceptions. .. . [Agrippa] says that [Basilides] compiled twenty-four books on the gospel, and that he named his own prophets Bar Cabbas and Bar Coph, and that he set up some others for himself who had never existed, but that he invented barbarous names for them to astonish those who were influenced by such things. He taught that there was no harm in eating things offered to idols, or in lightheartedly denying the faith in times of persecution. Like Pythagoras he enjoined those who came to him to keep silence forfive years. The same writer tells other similar things about Basilides.

-Eusebius of Caesaria Ecclesiastical History 4.7.1-81

THROUGH THE EFFORTS OF HISTORIANS like Eusebius of Cae- saria, Basilides the early Christian philosopher has fallen into disregard. Eusebius (ca. A.D. 260-339), a learned scholar who also became a propagandist for the Christian Emperor Constantine I, belonged to an established and theologically specific tradition of revisionist historiography, whose roots were very old. The deliberate rewriting of Christian intellectual history had begun almost as early as Christian philosophy itself. Adapting the genre of doxography already used in Hellenistic school polemics, a Christian Middle Platonist, Justin of Flavia Neapolis (St. Justin Martyr), had about A.D. 150 set out to trivialize all his rivals by arguing that their intellectual pedigrees went back to a mythic opponent of the apostles,

REPRESENTATIONS 28 * Fall 1989 ? THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 135

Simon Magus, and his own, back to divine reason or logos itself, which was once incarnate (Justin believed) in the man Jesus. Although Justin's influential work Against the Schools of Thought (Adversus haereses) does not survive, its contents can be surmised from Justin's successors, such as Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon (ca. A.D.

180),2 who built their own heresiologies upon it. While this Christianized version of the doxography genre (which has the

form of a stemmatic catalogue of erroneous opinions) purports to convey and record specific ideas from the past, its real effects are to replace the original exposition of these ideas with trivialized substitutes, to conceal any relevance or interest they might have actually had, and to cause them to be forgotten. The polemical features of this genre include: 1) sarcastic reduction of complex, nuanced bodies of teaching to a few pat sententiae-the dehumanization of alter- native points of view; 2) worry about the authority of teachers with an intellectual pedigree; 3) assumption that truth has only one right expression; 4) professed dislike of originality; 5) belief that false ideas and the guilt for false thinking are transmitted by epidemic contagion; 6) insistence that rival thinkers belong to par- ties or haereses, but that oneself does not; 7) simple logos Christology.

Many of these generic features are present in the opening citation from Eusebius of Caesaria. The historical sensibility of concealment effected by Chris- tian doxography was canonized, as it were, by Eusebius in his influential Ecclesi- astical History, which he published just before A.D. 300 (it is now one of our main sources for Christianity before the fourth century A.D.)3 and adopted as the historical shape of orthodoxy by subsequent mainline Christianity. Such is the pattern still underlying many modern Christian approaches to the history of dogma.

Basilides had been an older contemporary of Justin's; his own Christian phi- losophy was powerful but radically different from Justin's in many ways; and thus he had been among those targeted by Justin for trivialization and oblivion. After Constantine's military and political triumph some 150 years after Justin's death and Constantine's official efforts to establish only one single branch of Christian theology for survival, almost all detailed information about alternative philoso- phies such as that of Basilides perished for lack of official interest; nor has any of Basilides' written works been transmitted by the Byzantine scriptoria.

Faced with such an ancient tradition of "orthodox" concealment, the task of historians is now all but hopeless when they come to a figure such as Basilides. Nevertheless, close scrutiny of the surviving evidence in the context of second- century school philosophy will at least demonstrate-as I hope to show in this paper-what kind of philosopher Basilides must have been. It will also make it plain that Basilides must have set a stunning precedent in educated Christian circles as the first Christian philosopher and one of the earliest New Testament expositors: a predecessor figure whose significance was combatted and eventually repressed by orthodox memory.

136 REPRESENTATIONS

The Sources

Basilides flourished in Alexandria, Egypt, from the seventeenth year of the Emperor Hadrian down to the accession of Antoninus Pius, thus A.D. 132 to 135, and probably before and after those years as well. He had been the student of a certain Glaucias.4 These are the only reliable facts now known about his career.5 Eusebius' linkage of Basilides with Menander and Saturninus of Antioch ultimately derives from the framework of Irenaeus' polemical doxography and so must be viewed with suspicion. Otherwise, the surviving records say nothing about the social organization and ethos of Alexandrian Christianity, as such, in this very early period. So the historian can only focus on the principal actor, not the scenery or the supporting cast.

The remainder of the surviving evidence quotes and reports Basilides' philo- sophical positions and illustrates his biblical exegesis. The Basilides who survives is thus hardly more than an element of intellectual history. To avoid confusion, Basilides' own opinions must be strictly distinguished from the work and teaching of his son Isidore and from the later school called Basilideans, who are very dif- ferent in character.

Basilides writes in Greek, the principal language of Alexandria. Though not a single work by him survives, brief quotations, sententiae, and testimonia are found. At first glance, the primary evidence seems to be transmitted by Irenaeus of Lyon, Clement of Alexandria, Origen of Alexandria, Hippolytus of Rome, and Agrippa Castor (see table 1).

All else being equal, what type of primary source would most reliably transmit the kind of evidence we are looking for? Obviously one that is relatively close to Basilides in time, place, and sympathy.

Of our five candidates, Clement of Alexandria meets these criteria best. He belongs to the next generation or two after Basilides; he writes from Basilides' own city of Alexandria; he shares with him the profession of Christian philoso- pher of religion; and he is tolerant and interested in his rivals' opinions, as well as displaying a nice antiquarian bent.

In sorting out the evidence for Basilides' teaching, we should therefore take Clement's evidence as basic and use it as our standard for testing any other pos- sible source. Fortunately, the content of the Clementine evidence is both cosmo- logical and ethical, so Clement offers various points of contact for the evaluation of other proposed evidence.

Now, a special problem stands in the way of anyone who studies this cluster of primary sources. Irenaeus of Lyon and Hippolytus of Rome each purport to summarize Basilides' cosmology, but their two accounts are utterly different and mutually exclusive, as scholarship has long recognized. Shall we follow Irenaeus or Hippolytus? We have only to test these two possible sources against Clement of Alexandria.

The Significance of Basilides 137

TABLE 1

Chronology (dates a.d.)

Philo the Jew (Alexandria), On Creation ca. 30 Jewish uprising in Cyrene and Alexandria 115-16 Glaucias one generation before Basilides Basilides (Alexandria) fl. 132-35 Papias of Hierapolis fl. 135 Jewish uprising in Palestine 135-38 Justin Martyr (Rome), Adversus haereses ca. 150 Pantaenus (Alexandria) fl. 180 Irenaeus (Lyon), Adversus haereses ca. 180 Clement of Alexandria fl. 190 Origen of Alexandria, On Romans ca. 231 Hippolytus (Rome), Adversus haereses ca. 235 Agrippa Castor before 300 Eusebius of Caesaria, Ecclesiastical History just before 300 Reign of Constantine 1 306-37

In fact, one of the cosmological fragments preserved by Clement (Fragment A) provides sure evidence that Irenaeus gives the Alexandrian version of Basi- lides' cosmology. Clement tells us that Basilides' theology was not trinitarian but octonaritarian, an eightfold godhead (the doctrine of holy trinity was by no means universally accepted in Christianity at this time). Clement mentions two of these eight divine hypostases by name (they are what one might call divine attributes): justice and peace.

Then when we read Irenaeus' account of Basilides, six other divine hypos- tases are listed: unengendered parent, intellect, verbal expression (logos, word), prudence, wisdom, power. Taken together, these two lists add up to Clement's eight;6 Irenaeus (Adversus haereses 1.24.3) gives further information about their manner of progression and their relation to cosmogony. Irenaeus' testimonium therefore represents the very same cosmogony that was attributed to Basilides in Alexandrian teaching a few decades after Basilides' death; it can confidently be used to supplement Clement's report.

If however we turn to Hippolytus' alternative version of the Basilidean cos- mogony, we find an utterly different, and totally incomparable, account. So, against the general trend in twentieth-century scholarship on Basilides, I have no hesitation in using Irenaeus and discarding the testimony of Hippolytus, or rather, saving it for some other purpose.

138 REPRESENTATIONS

In the Alexandrian Catechetical School, Basilides' works were still being studied as late as a generation after Clement, for Clement's successor Origen quotes a passage from Basilides exegeting Paul's Epistle to the Romans, perhaps from Basilides' exegetical work called Commentaries.7

The genuine fragments of Basilides' philosophy are therefore nine in num- ber: seven in Clement of Alexandria;8 one of considerable length in Irenaeus, apparently based on the even earlier writer Justin Martyr;9 and one in Origen.'I The value of Agrippa Castor, cited at the head of this essay, is uncertain since his date and place are unknown (in addition, he is unsympathetic); for present pur- poses I shall leave him out of account.

Basilides' Philosophical Ethics

Much of the surviving evidence concerns the ethical division of Basi- lides' teaching. Basilides' ethics is a philosophical ethics and not a biblical one. It is marked by his firm commitment to Stoicism for certain important doctrines, which are used to interpret the meaning of biblical language. So far as I can see, this important Stoic element in Basilides' philosophy has never been recognized. In fact, it is relevant to the evaluation of Basilides' place in Alexandrian history.

Stoicism continued to flourish in Basilides' day, both as an independent school and as a component in the eclectic teaching of Middle Platonism. In its classical form, the Stoic system expounded a strongly deterministic view of fate and prov- idence, that is, the operation of divine reason minutely controlling all events in the universe. The providential operation of reason, the Stoics held, is what is meant by "the will of God." It is always good. As Basilides puts it (Fragment G), "I will say anything rather than call providence evil."

Two consequences follow from the Stoic acceptance of determinism: 1) First, things that in common parlance are called evil, such as human suf-

fering, must really have a rational purpose and so ultimately be good. Suffering, for example, may have educational value for the soul.

Here Basilides went beyond classical Stoicism, and in an eclectic move that was typically Alexandrian, had recourse to the "Pythagorean" or Platonic belief in the long-range education of each soul through a cycle of successive reincar- nations-something like a doctrine of karma: thus the soul of St. Paul must have been previously incarnate in a domestic animal or bird, since Paul tells us in Romans 7.9, "I was once alive apart from the Law.""

Origen too accepted a Platonic doctrine of reincarnation, and thus in a cen- tury of Alexandrian Christian teaching from Basilides to Origen, one finds a doc- trine of educational reincarnation at beginning and end.

In a remarkable fragment excerpted from Basilides' Commentaries by Clement

The Significance of Basilides 139

of Alexandria (Fragment G),12 Basilides defends the assumption that providence is both all-powerful and good. From this assumption he is led to conclude that all human suffering must be just (good) punishment for sinfulness; hence, suffering is not an evil but simply an aspect of God's justice and goodness, and in the long run can even have educational value.

As special limit cases Basilides considers: a) the suffering of the Christian martyrs; b) the suffering of a newborn baby; c) the suffering of the exceptional person who has never committed sinful acts; d) the suffering of Jesus.

For these special limit cases, Basilides proposes two explanations of suffering. First, someone who did not commit sin in the present life may nevertheless have sinned in a previous one; thus justice is exercised over the long range of history. Second, suffering may be requital for what Basilides vaguely terms "sinfulness" (Greek, to harmarttikon)-not sinful deeds, but merely sinful desires, sinful incli- nation, the capacity for sin, or just sheer humanness. The suffering of Jesus' soul,'3 which presumably became incarnate only once, must have been a requital for its "sinfulness"-in this case not sinful acts but simply Jesus' humanity (since Basilides assumes thatJesus was never substantially crucified, as Irenaeus tells us, the "suffering" in question must refer not to his crucifixion but to other kinds of suffering). 14

The souls that were recently incarnate as Christian martyrs, Basilides holds, had attained an especially excellent, though still imperfect, state in their last former life; and so by the kindness of providence in this present cycle of reincar- nation they were allowed to receive their suffering in an honorable way, a way that even appeared to them to be painless.

I should like to note in passing that while Basilides was sometimes criticized by later Christian writers for disparaging the martyrs or opposing martyrdom, nothing in this fragment supports such an interpretation, once we understand his philosophical assumptions.

Furthermore, in classical Stoic theory suffering may be seen as falling within a category of things that are ethically "indifferent" (ta adiaphora), that is, neither good nor bad in themselves but only good or bad in the way they are put to use (things such as life and death, pleasure and pain, beauty and ugliness, strength and weakness), and Irenaeus reports a sententia in which Basilides clearly assumes the Stoic doctrine of adiaphora. 5

2) A second ethical consequence of the Stoic doctrine of determinism or prov- idence is that the virtuous life is a life led in agreement with reason, that is, in agreement with "nature"-whether one's own rational nature or the rational nature of the whole universe as a system. A soul thus attuned will be "by nature" wholly virtuous.

Because of the strict control of determinism or providence, the individual soul does not generally possess free will. But it has the choice of either assenting

140 REPRESENTATIONS

to its fate, in which case it will be happy; or chafing at the bit, in which case it will be unhappy but still have exactly the same fate. The assent to all that is and comes to pass is the virtuous state that Basilides calls "to love the entirety" (Fragment D).

Virtue, in Stoic analysis, is not a kind of action but rather a state of the soul, in which it is in perfect rational agreement with nature and is unperturbed. Bas- ilides does not hesitate to apply traditional Christian language in describing this rational state: it can be called, in conventional terms, the state of "faith," of "elec- tion"; it is the presence of "the kingdom"; it is "worthy of riches, near to the creator." But in the final analysis, he says, one is "faithful and elect" only by "nature," and this nature of the soul comes from its "rational assent" to provi- dence. In other words, the meaning of Christian words such as faith, election, and kingdom of God are to be explained by Stoic concepts, and not the other way around.

The fragments of Basilides' ethical philosophy are meager indeed, and their interpretation can only be hypothetical at best. At its heart, his ethics seems to have been Stoic, though his psychology and specific doctrine of theodicy are Platonic (the combination of Platonism and Stoicism is typical in first- and second- century philosophy, for example in the "Stoics" Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius). In Basilides' view the "elect" Christian, equivalent in a way to the Stoic wise person, has no experience of desire or revulsion (Fragment D), and equally has no need of ethical injunctions, since virtuous deeds will follow from a virtuous state of the soul, and not vice versa. Thus Clement reports Basilides' view (Frag- ment C) that the commandments of both the old and the new covenants are superfluous if one is "by nature faithful and elect." To understand the rational nature of the soul, says Basilides, is to "understand God."

Basilides' Cosmology

It has reasonably been claimed that philosophy in the second century was dogmatic, conservative, and unoriginal. In some ways this may be true; but in at least one, it is false.

In certain schools of the second century, philosophers who took metaphysics seriously were expected to engage in research on the origins of the universe, just as many theoretical physicists deal with cosmology today. In the field of philo- sophical cosmology in the second century, there was no expectation of rigid tra- ditionalism, even though certain reference points (including the philosophical myth in Plato's Timaeus) were commonplace.

Basilides' cosmogonic research is known primarily from the summary pre- served by Irenaeus. From Irenaeus we learn that Basilides conceptualized God the parent of all being as a sourceless source ("unengendered parent"), whose

The Significance of Basilides 141

incipient activation produced a series of successive emanations. Clement and Ire- naeus, taken together, tell us that there were eight members in this series-the source plus seven hypostatic emanations:

unengendered parent= sourceless source intellect (nous) = first hypostasis

word (logos) prudence wisdom power justice peace

The source itself is called by the privative epithet unengendered in Irenaeus' terse account, and a bit further on, unnameable. Privative epithets find their nat- ural home in the apophatic theology (via negativa) of Middle Platonism; from this fact, we can extrapolate to the commonplace of God as being inherently unknow- able, unnameable, unqualifiable, ungraspable, and the like, except as manifested by God's intellection and logos. This extrapolation is circumstantially confirmed by the information that Basilides' first and second hypostases were called intellect (nous) and word (logos), which are classic components of a Middle Platonic logos theology-that is, a theology which distinguishes God as the ultimate and unknowable source from God's agents or agent in action and self-revelation (often including a figure called God's logos or word or wisdom).

The remaining hypostases were simply traditional Jewish and Christian aspects of God's goodness. Through the agency of one of the hypostases, wisdom, together with angels, God created the material universe: a similar wisdom cos- mogony is found in Proverbs, The Wisdom of Solomon, and Philo of Alexandria.

The universe, so created, is a complex of nested spheres, 365 in number, each with its motivating angel. At the center of this system is our earth and its sky; while at its outermost periphery are God and God's seven hypostases. Thus God-as in the Stoic commonplace-is that which contains all and is contained by nothing.

In a complex system such as this, God does not exert direct and personal providence over human affairs. But God is present in the cosmos by virtue of God's powers or "angels" and by the integral operation of a complex structure capable of transmitting and mediating the remote activation of divine reason or logos. In short, God is an absentee manager, reigning as did the Great King of Persia through the agency of his subordinate satraps.

This is a compromise between Platonism and Stoicism, such as one finds in the Pseudo-Aristotelian De mundo: not a Stoic pantheism of substance but rather a dynamic pantheism,'6 which has its earlier parallels in Philo and its later ones in Plotinus, and which is found in many Platonizing philosophers in between.

142 REPRESENTATIONS

Basilides' cosmology, then, fits coherently into the spectrum of cosmogonic speculation found in the professional philosophical schools of his day. In this sense, it is the work of a philosopher and not that of, say, a Gnostic mythogra- pher.'7 His logos theology is a complex hypostatic emanational structure. God is related to our world in a thoroughly organized, but highly mediated, monistic system, in which there is total exercise of divine rational providence. The system has loose parallels in both Philo and Plotinus, while being nevertheless more structured than Philo and more complex than Plotinus or Numenius. The system is eclectic and speculative-to a degree that was, I think, expected in second- century philosophy, but which was to become abnormal and unacceptable once a Christian orthodoxy had been firmly established.

Basilides' Biblical Criticism

Basilides set forth his biblical criticism in a work entitled Commentaries (Exigitika), which was at least twenty-three books in length. 18 He treated both the Septuagint (Old Testament in the standard Greek version) and Christian scrip- ture books that one would now call the New Testament. An idea of his point of view can be gleaned from testimonia in Irenaeus and Clement.

What little is known of Basilides' exposition of the Septuagint (Irenaeus Adversus haereses 1.24.3-4) shows no sign of deviating from the biblical narrative; in this he was much more conservative than the Gnostic Christian exegetes of the second century.'9 However, he sets Genesis 1.1 in the context of his own philo- sophical cosmogony, as described above. Heaven (that is, the three hundred and sixty-fifth, innermost heaven) and earth were created by a committee of angels, one of whom had superior status. This was no innovation, for already Alexan- drian philosophers like Philo the Jew had held that the true God was much too perfect to have had direct contact with our world, either in its creation or in the salvation of Israel. Consequently, God's mighty acts in human history had in fact (thought Philo) been performed by God's delegates, just as creation really must have been accomplished by a committee. In biblical discourse, according to Bas- ilides, this superior creator angel of the three hundred and sixty-fifth heaven was spoken of as the "God" of Israel. Each nation on earth also came to have its own national religion and national deity. These deities were not the vain imaginations of the peoples; rather, they were real, for they were in fact the angels or daimones that had helped "God" to create the world, though now they had come to be worshiped in specific national forms. Very many second-century Christian thinkers would have agreed on this qualified reality of the pagan pantheon, for example, Justin Martyr. The "God" of Israel led his people out of Egypt, gave them the Law, and then tried to subordinate all other nations to Israel. Yet this finally led to a disaster, which could be rectified only when the unengendered

The Significance of Basilides 143

parent sent the preexistent Christ (the first hypostasis) on a mission of salvation as Messiah Jesus.

An ambiguity in the text of Irenaeus, or in his source or his abridgement of that source, has obscured what the Messiah's exact purpose was supposed to be, in Basilides' opinion. Two understandings of the text seem possible in context:

1) The God and people of Israel were so aggressive that all other nations were ruined; in consequence, the Messiah was sent to save the gentiles from Jewish domination;

2) Alternatively, the God of Israel's attempt at supremacy led to religio- political strife among all nations, each one urged on by its own national god: in effect, traditional religion became the source of the world's misery; consequently the Messiah was sent to save all people,20 gentile and Jew alike, from human reli- gion as such and from serving the angels that made the world.

Now, these ideas about the world's religious history (whichever one is Basi- lides' own) may well strike us as anti-Semitic. But we must keep in mind the fact that if Basilides grew up in Alexandria, he or at least his parents would have lived through the Jewish uprising of A.D. 115-16, in which the long-standing hostility between Jew and gentile in Alexandria and Cyrenaica reached the flash point, and he or they would have witnessed its horrible aftermath for Alexandrian Jewry. So it is easy to imagine that Basilides conducted his professional career as Old Testament exegete with an Alexandrian gentile's innate prejudice against Jews.

Basilides' New Testament criticism is of considerable historical interest. He is the first expositor of New Testament books that one knows really anything about, and his evidence shows that in its origins academic New Testament exposition was deeply intertwined with philosophical speculation. Basilides' Romans exegesis is known from a tiny fragment that concerns reincarnation and soteriology.21 1 Peter he treats in a Stoic ethical perspective (Fragment G),22 which I have already described. But most striking of all is his treatment of Christology and the passion of Jesus (perhaps he had the Gospel According to Mark in mind), known to us from Irenaeus (Adversus haereses 1.24.4).

Basilides' Christology fits into his rather complex Middle Platonic logos theol- ogy. Within such a philosophical perspective the preexistent Christ (the first hypo- static emanation or savior) would be truly God and would have subsisted outside the realm of the cosmos, and accordingly his appearance on earth could not (on these Platonist assumptions) entail outright alteration into matter.23 Accordingly, Jesus Christ was an "incorporeal power" (uirtus incorporalis), and as such, the reader may assume, he was incapable of physical suffering (though he might nevertheless suffer in some nonphysical way as a result of stimuli from the phys- ical world).

Yet paradoxically, Jesus' crucifixion was truly a crucifixion of the flesh, with real suffering and real death, as narrated in the gospels of the New Testament.

144 REPRESENTATiONS

Basilides resolves this paradox in a way that keeps the literal narrative of the gospel text, fully conserves his Platonist metaphysics, and also accommodates an anti-Jewish point of view.

It was not, he says, the first hypostatic emanation who was crucified. Rather, it was a Jew named Simon from Cyrenaica24 who was executed on the Cross.25 The first hypostasis had transformed its manifestation into the form of Simon of Cyrene, and Simon into the form of Jesus.26 Thus, one might say, formally Jesus Christ was crucified, but substantially he was not.

There is room for theological reflection on the point that Basilides raised, and its relation to the meaning of Christian docetism. But as a historian, I want to note also that on this point, as in his treatment of the history of Israel, Basilides may have been speaking from an ingrained anti-Jewish sensibility. Cyrene, the capital of Cyrenaica in the Libyan coast, had been a major battle zone between Jews and gentiles in the Jewish uprising of 115-16. Here, reputedly, the Jews of Cyrene had brutally slaughtered hundreds of thousands of gentile residents; when some gentile survivors had fled from Cyrene to Alexandria a severe distur- bance had resulted, leading to a pogrom of the Alexandrian Jews.27 Thus in a political reading of Basilides' exegesis, Roman reprisal for the Jewish uprising is symbolized by the crucifixion of Simon of Cyrene.

Basilides' Place in Alexandrian Christianity

We have had a glimpse of Basilides the ethical philosopher, indebted to a Stoic understanding of the possibilities and responsibilities of being human and a Platonist view of the fate of the soul. We have also seen Basilides the profes- sional cosmologist, responding to something like the compromised Middle Pla- tonism found in the Pseudo-Aristotelian De mundo: he depicts a complex but integrated cosmos, surrounded at its periphery by an utterly transcendent deity whose providence dominates the world and human affairs. This is a thoroughly Alexandrian kind of world view, whose theology is not so very far from the ambig- uous complexity of Philo. Finally, we have viewed Basilides the biblical commen- tator: anti-Jewish and perhaps docetist in his reading of the biblical text, but not inclined to tamper extensively with the textual narrative.

What, then, was Basilides' place in the Christian school tradition of second- century Alexandria? Any response to this question will be necessarily speculative or hypothetical, but the outlines of an answer can be at least dimly perceived. Christian Alexandria is always associated, of course, with Christian Platonism. But also Stoicism was important in early Alexandrian Christianity, not only to Basilides but also to later and more famous Alexandrian Christians. Clement's teacher had been a Christian "Stoic philosopher," Pantaenus, and indeed, Clem-

The Significance of Basilides 145

ent's own writings show the obvious influence of Stoicism as well as "Pythago- reanizing" Middle Platonism. It is not possible to trace a continuous Christian philosophical school as a social institution in Alexandria before the time of Origen.28 But if one looks there for continuities of philosophical perspective among second-century Christian philosophers, the Stoic thread should not be underestimated.

Like his younger contemporary Valentinus, Basilides put forward his aca- demic pedigree, which one knows about from his later followers, cited by Clement. Basilides had been the disciple of a certain Glaucias, who was reputedly a "hermineus of Peter," an interpreter of Peter.29 The place of study may have been Alexandria, though such a supposition is not confirmed by any direct evidence. If Glaucias was an Alexandrian, then we could push back our knowledge of Alex- andrian Christianity by yet another generation to about A.D. 100.

But how should we understand the epithet of Glaucias, hermineus Petrou, "interpreter of Peter"? Not, I think, in the sense of a dragoman or linguistic inter- preter who would have accompanied St. Peter on his apostolic journeys. Rather, a clue in Basilides' Fragment G leads in a different direction. Fragment G, from book 23 of Basilides' Commentaries, is an exegesis of 1 Peter 4.12-19, as Otto Stahlin already noticed, in which Peter had raised the problem of Christian suf- fering and theodicy. Thus in Fragment G Basilides writes as a hermineus Petrou, an expositor of Peter. I see no reason to doubt that Glaucias had earned a repu- tation as a striking early commentator (hermineus) on a Petrine corpus; Basilides would then have carried on his master's work. Three generations later this enter- prise was still alive, for Clement of Alexandria, too, wrote comments on 1 Peter, of which extensive fragments survive. Thus obviously the exposition of Peter con- tinued to fascinate educated Alexandrian Christians in Clement's day.

It may be worth recalling a famous contemporary of Basilides', namely Papias of Hierapolis. Like Basilides, Papias wrote a large work called by the term exegesis or exegeseis, and actively used 1 Peter.30 Papias, too, referred to a hermineutis (sic) Petrou or "interpreter of Peter," but in this case it was not Glaucias but St. Mark. From his description of Mark's work, Papias seems to have understood that Mark composed his gospel by editing materials transmitted by Peter and that this job of transmitting and editingjustified the epithet hermineutis, interpreter. The Gospel According to Mark, or rather, several versions of this gospel (as Clement's Epistle to Theodore has revealed), were important in second-century Alexandria. This whole constellation of evidence seems to point to an ancient belief in a "Petrine" connection between Rome and Alexandria, variously understood in antiquity as having two possible manifestations: in one version, through Glaucias and Basi- lides; and in the other version, through Mark, allegedly the first bishop of Alex- andria. Of these two, the branch through Glaucias was the more real and continuous one, at least in second-century Alexandria. In fact only late writers can tell us the name of any successor to Mark in Alexandria, and if this testimony

146 REPRESENTATIONS

is not simply spurious, still it says nothing about a continuing Markan school tra- dition like the one through Glaucias.

The exegetical exposition of a scriptural book may be taken as a kind of evi- dence for its canonical status, and in this sense one can speak of the early canon- icity of 1 Peter in Alexandria. Furthermore, Basilides clearly knew a passion narrative of the Markan type in which Jesus' crucifixion was narrated. Although Basilides advanced a highly revisionist reading-an antireading-of the passion narrative, in so doing he presupposed the canonicity of this predecessor text- which might, of course, simply have been the Gospel According to Mark. Finally, in Fragment F he seems to treat Paul's Epistle to the Romans as authoritative. In its simplest interpretation, this three-part sample of authoritative Christian scrip- ture accepted in Alexandria about A.D. 135-a Markan-type gospel, an epistle by Peter, and an epistle to the Christians in Rome-points once again to a particular geographical axis: Rome and Alexandria, Peter and Mark, Peter and his Alex- andrian "interpreters."

Basilides' commenting on 1 Peter makes him one of the first New Testament expositors. Quite unlike the authors of classic Gnostic scripture, he was engaged in the typically Alexandrian literary occupation of expository exegesis. Not merely a theologian and philosopher, Basilides was also a literary critic, like Philo and perhaps Glaucias before him, and like Clement and Origen after him.

The first serious intersection of Christian thought and the technical matter of professional school philosophy is conventionally dated to A.D. 150 in the city of Rome and associated with the name of Justin Martyr.3' But this dating ignores the activity of Basilides of Alexandria some fifteen years before and the impor- tance of his precedent for the next generation of Christian teachers such as Justin and Valentinus. Unfortunately, the exact substance of Basilides' teaching remains unknown. But it seems quite clear that he was both a Christian and a serious, scientific, and original philosopher. In this sense, Basilides was the earliest Chris- tian philosopher, and for this he must occupy a unique place in any future history of ancient Christian thought.

Notes

The genuine fragments (Fragments A-H) of Basilides are designated here by the system that I established in The Gnostic Scriptures: A New Translation with Annotations and Introductions (Garden City, N.Y., 1987); see also notes 8-10 below. English translations of these and of the testimonium in Irenaeus are quoted from the same work, where further exegetical notes may be found. Earlier versions of this paper were read at Harvard University and at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. I am much indebted to Prof. David Dawson and Mr. Tom Jenkins for criticism and suggestions.

The Significance of Basilides 147

1. Eusebius Pamphili [bishop of Caesaria] The Ecclesiastical History, ed. and trans. Kirsopp Lake, vol. 1, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass., 1926), 313-17.

2. Irenaeus [bishop of Lugdunum] Adversus haereses; Contre les he're'sies, ed. and trans. A. Rousseau and L. Doutreleau, 5 vols., Sources chretiennes, nos. 100, parts 1 and 2; 152-53; 210-11; 263-64; 293-94 (Paris, 1965-82).

3. For Eusebius' exact strategy in his polemic against Basilides, see Robert M. Grant, "Place de Basilide dans la theologie chretienne ancienne," Revue des t'tudes augusti- niennes 25 (1979): 201-16; and for the Ecclesiastical History and Eusebius' career, Tim- othy D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), esp. 126-47. Eusebius issued a second and a third edition of the History, with revisions and expan- sions, after Constantine became emperor.

4. For Basilides' dates and his association with Glaucias, see Titus Flavius Clemens [Clement of Alexandria] Stromata 7.17.106.4.

5. There were, of course, a number of contemporaries also named Basilides, who must be kept apart. One such person has often been confused with Basilides of Alexandria. He is described in Hegemonius Acta Archaelai 67.4-12 (ed. Charles Henry Beeson): "There was an evangelist among the Persians, a certain Basilides, a rather ancient figure, who flourished soon after the era of our (Christian) apostles"; a summary of the Persian Basilides' teaching then follows. Since nothing in Hegemonius' account of Basilides the Persian's life or teaching agrees with known information about Basilides of Alexandria, I shall ignore this evidence. The Acta have been transmitted together with a brief Christian doxography of heresies (not by the author of the Acta), in the genre of Justin's lost work Adversus haereses, in which Basilides of Alexandria takes his accustomed place; but needless to say, the cotransmission of these two works is irrel- evant to the identity of Hegemonius' Basilides the Persian.

6. Adolph Hilgenfeld, Die Ketzergeschichte des Urchristentums urkundlich dargestellt (Leipzig, 1884), 219. Hilgenfeld's observation has been recently defended by Grant, "Place de Basilide."

7. After a productive career in Alexandria, Origen eventually moved to Caesaria Mari- tima; his Commentary on Romans may have been written there.

8. Clement of Alexandria Stromata 4:81.2-83.2 (Layton Fragment G; Volker frag. 2); 4.86.1 (Fragment D; Volker frag. 4); 4.153.3 (Fragment H); 4.162.1 (Fragment A); 4.165.3 (Fragment E); 5.3.2-3 (Fragment C); 5.74.3 (Fragment B).

9. Irenaeus Adversus haereses 1.24.3-5 (stopping at universae libidinis). 10. Origenes of Alexandria, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, ed. Ernst Lommatzsch,

in J. P. Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus: Patrologia Graeca, vol. 14, col. 1015 (Layton Fragment F; Volker frag. 3).

11. "Basilides ... has related the apostle [Paul]'s statement [in Romans 7.7b-10] to irrel- evant, blasphemous tales; on the basis of this saying of the apostle's, he tries to defend the doctrine of reincarnation, namely the idea that souls get transferred from one body to another. He says: 'Indeed, the apostle has said, "I was once alive apart from the law" [Romans 7.9], at some time or other. That is (Paul means), before I came into this body, I lived in the kind of body that is not subject to the law: the body of a domestic animal or a bird"'; Fragment F.

12. According to Clement of Alexandria:

Basilides, in book 23 of his Commentaries, speaks of those who suffer punish- ment as martyrs, with the following words: "I believe that all who experience the so-called 'tribulations' [i.e., martyrdom] must have committed sins [emending Otto Stahlin's etoi to houtoi] other than what they realize and so

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have been brought to this good end. Through the kindness of that which leads each one of them about [viz. Providence], they are actually accused of an extraneous set of charges so they might not have to suffer as confessed criminals convicted of crimes, nor be reviled as adulterers or murderers are, but rather might suffer because they are disposed by nature to be Christian. And this encourages them to think that they are not suffering.

"But even if a person should happen to suffer without having sinned at all-which is rare-still, that person's suffering is not caused by the plotting of some power. Rather, it is analogous to the suffering of a newborn baby, who seems not to have sinned....

"A newborn baby, then, has never sinned before; or more precisely, it has not actually committed any sins, but within itself it has the activity of sinning (to hamartisai). Whenever it experiences suffering, it receives benefit, profiting by niany unpleasant experiences. Just so, if by chance a grown man has not sinned by deed and yet suffers, he suffered the suffering for the same reason as the newborn baby: he has within himself the sinfulness (to harmar- tetikon), and the only reason he has not sinned (in deed) is because he has not had the occasion to do so. Thus not sinning cannot be imputed to him."

Clement then notes that "further along, [Basilides] speaks of the lord [i.e., Jesus] outright as of a human being," quoting the following words:

"Nevertheless, let us suppose that you leave aside all these matters and set out to embarrass me by referring to certain (famous) figures, saying perhaps, 'And consequently so-and-so must have sinned, since he suffered!' If you permit, I shall say that he did not sin, but was like the newborn baby that suffers. But if you press the argument, I shall say that any human being that you can name is human: God is righteous. For no one is 'pure of uncleanness,' as someone once said [Job 14.4]."

And finally Clement notes, "Basilides' presupposition is that the soul previously sinned in another life and undergoes its punishment in the present one. Excellent souls are punished honorably, by martyrdom; other kinds are purified by some other appropriate punishment."

13. In the text of Fragment G, Basilides refers only to prosopa tina, "certain (famous) fig- ures," but Clement (who probably knew the entire treatise from which this quotation comes) informs us that Basilides has in mind "the Lord" (ho kyrios), i.e., Jesus.

14. On the insubstantiality of Jesus' crucifixion, see above pp. 144-45. 15. Irenaeus Adversum haereses 1.24.5, obviously a fragment extracted out of context from

a longer passage in which Basilides listed examples of virtues and examples of vices, and then stated that "one should consider the remaining kinds of behavior and all kinds of pleasure as matters of indifference."

16. Philip Merlan, in The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, ed. A. H. Armstrong, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1970), 131.

17. Basilides is usually mislabeled a "Gnostic" (and so dismissed) by modern historians: this is merely a modern refinement of the ancient Christian sensibility of doxographic concealment, based, in this case, on a willful misreading of the ancient title of Irenaeus' Adversus haereses ("Detection and Overthrow of What Is Falsely Called Gnosis") so as to make all of its contents seem examples of "Gnosticism." In point of fact, although Irenaeus included Basilides in the "Detection and Overthrow," he carefully distin- guished Basilides' views (1.24.3-5a) from those of the Gnostics (1.29).

Ancient Gnostics, that is, members of the movement that called itself gndstikoi or offspring of Seth, characteristically wrote complex emanational cosmogonies in the

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form of philosophical myths somewhat reminiscent of Plato's Timaeus. However, Hans-Martin Schenke's work has made it possible to recognize the distinguishing characteristics of precisely the Gnostic type of myth-or as he calls it, Sethian myth- and his list of characteristic features seems to be wholly absent from Basilides; "Das sethianische System nach Nag-Hammadi-Handschriften," in Studia Coptica, ed. Peter Nagel, Berliner byzantinistische Arbeiten, no. 45 (Berlin, 1974), 165-73; also "The Phenomenon and Significance of Gnostic Sethianism," in The Rediscovery of Gnosticism, ed. Bentley Layton, vol. 2, Sethian Gnosticism, Studies in the History of Religions, no. 41 (Leiden, 1981), 588-616, 634-40, 683-85; and for the ancient historical meaning of the name Gnostic, Bentley Layton, "The History of the Gnostics,"Journal of Biblical Literature (in press).

Thus Basilides' cosmology is not at all Gnostic in the strict historical sense of the name. Instead, his ethics and in a way his cosmogony point toward an integral cosmic monism and a strong belief in universal providence-thus toward an ethos of world- affirming cosmic religiosity. No mythic tragedy occurs when wisdom creates the mate- rial world; there is no interruption halfway down the Great Chain of Being; the music of the spheres is played by angels, not by Satan or the diabolic creator of Gnostic myth.

It is true that Basilides' soteriology presupposes the superiority of the soul, the soul's need to get free from the body, and its essential alienation from matter. But this was a fundamental insight of Platonism, which was taken for granted by very many people in the second century A.D., as the phraseology of Greek and Latin funerary inscriptions demonstrates.

18. Or perhaps twenty-four, if Agrippa Castor had this work in mind: "[Agrippa] says that [Basilides] compiled twenty-four books on the gospel"; Eusebius Ecclesiastical His- tory 4.7.7. "The gospel" may here mean simply the Christian message, rather than a specific one of the works entitled gospel.

19. For their drastic rewriting of biblical mythos, see Layton, Gnostic Scriptures, 5-22, and selections translated there, 23-214.

20. "Innatum autem et innominatum Patrem, uidentem perditionem ipsorum, misisse Primogenitum" (Then the unengendered, unnameable parent saw their ruin, and sent its first-born). At stake is the referent of the pronoun ipsorum ("their" ruin): the gentile nations (first alternative)? the Jews? or both groups (second alternative)?

21. Grant, "Place de Basilide," 215-16, also connects Basilides' cosmological emana- tionism with the language of the Pauline epistles.

22. See text quoted above in note 12, and cf. 1 Peter 4.12-19. 23. According to Irenaeus Adversus haereses 1.24.4, Basilides said that Christ appeared on

earth as a man and performed deeds of power (aparuisse eum in terra hominem et uirtutes perfecisse). The brevity of this phrase leaves it an open question whether the hypostatic emanation called Christ became incarnate, thus making his earthly appearance in a physical human body, orjust "appeared" to have a human body but did not really have one.

24. His Jewishness is inferred from the name Simon. A large colony of Greek-speaking Jews had been settled in Cyrene by the Ptolemies.

25. Cf. the Gospel According to Mark 15.20-24 (Revised Standard Version), "And they led [ Jesus] out to crucify him. And they compelled a passerby, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in from the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to carry his cross. And they brought him [note the ambiguity of this pronoun] to the place called Gol- gotha.... And they crucified him."

26. "Hunc (Simonem) secundum ignorantium et errorem crucifixum, transfiguratum ab

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eo, ut putaretur ipse esse lesus, et ipsum autem lesum Simonis accepisse formam"; Irenaeus Adversus haereses 1.24.4.

27. Cassius Dio Roman History 68.32; Emil Schurer, A History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ, first division, vol. 2 (New York, 1891), 280-87. The Roman army was fighting against a second Jewish revolt, this time in Palestine, almost exactly at the height of Basilides' career (A.D. 132-35).

28. Gustave Bardy, "Aux origines de lFEcole d'Alexandrie," Recherches de science religieuse 27 (1937): 65-90, on the teaching careers of Pantaenus, Clement, and Origen and the nature of the Catechetical School of Alexandria.

29. Clement Stromata 7.17.106.4. 30. Eusebius Ecclesiastical History 3.39.17. 31. Henry Chadwick, in Cambridge History, 160.

The Significance of Basilides 151