od (at Cephallenia), as Epicurus was in
his school, and the image of Jesus crowned along with those of
Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle.[322] On this left flank are, further,
swindlers who take their own way, like Alexander of Abonoteichus,
magicians, soothsayers, sharpers and jugglers, under the sign-board of
Christianity, deceivers and hypocrites who appear using mighty words
with a host of unintelligible formulae, and take up with scandalous
ceremonies, in order to rob men of their money and women of their
honour.[323] All this was afterwards called "Heresy" and "Gnosticism,"
and is still so called.[324] And these names may be retained, if we will
understand by them nothing else than the world taken into Christianity,
all the manifold formations which resulted from the first contact of the
new religion with the society into which it entered. To prove the
existence of that left wing of Gnosticism is of the greatest interest
for the history of dogma, but the details are of no consequence. On the
other hand, in the aims and undertakings of the Gnostic right, it is
just the details that are of greatest significance, because they shew
that there was no fixed boundary between what one may call common
Christian and Gnostic Christian. But as Gnosticism, in its contents,
extended itself from the Encratites and the philosophic interpretation
of certain articles of the Christian proclamation, as brought forward
without offence by individual teachers in the communities, to the
complete dissolution of the Christian element by philosophy, or the
religious charlatanry of the age, so it exhibits itself formally also in
a long series of groups which comprised all imaginable forms of unions.
There were churches, ascetic associations, mystery cults, strictly
private philosophic schools,[325] free unions for edification,
entertainments by Christian charlatans and deceived deceivers, who
appeared as magicians and prophets, attempts at founding new religions
after the model and under the influence of the Christian, etc. But,
finally, the thesis that Gnosticism is identical with an acute
secularising of Christianity, in the widest sense of the word, is
confirmed by the study of its own literature. The early Christian
production of Gospel and Apocalypses was indeed continued in Gnosticism
yet so that the class of "Acts of the Apostles" was added to them, and
that didactic, biographic and "belles lettres," elements were received
into them, and