claimed a very important place. If this makes the Gnostic
literature approximate to the profane, that is much more the case with
the scientific theological literature which Gnosticism first produced.
Dogmatico-philosophic tracts, theologico-critical treatises, historical
investigations and scientific commentaries on the sacred books, were,
for the first time in Christendom, composed by the Gnostics, who in part
occupied the foremost place in the scientific knowledge, religious
earnestness and ardour of the age. They form, in every respect, the
counterpart to the scientific works which proceeded from the
contemporary philosophic schools. Moreover, we possess sufficient
knowledge of Gnostic hymns and odes, songs for public worship, didactic
poems, magic formulae, magic books, etc., to assure us that Christian
Gnosticism took possession of a whole region of the secular life in its
full breadth, and thereby often transformed the original forms of
Christian literature into secular.[326] If, however, we bear in mind how
all this at a later period was gradually legitimised in the Catholic
Church, philosophy, the science of the sacred books, criticism and
exegesis, the ascetic associations, the theological schools, the
mysteries, the sacred formulae, the superstition, the charlatanism, all
kinds of profane literature, etc., it seems to prove the thesis that the
victorious epoch of the gradual hellenising of Christianity followed the
abortive attempts at an acute hellenising.

The traditional question as to the origin and development of Gnosticism,
as well as that about the classification of the Gnostic systems, will
have to be modified in accordance with the foregoing discussion. As the
different Gnostic systems might be contemporary, and in part were
undoubtedly contemporary, and as a graduated relation holds good only
between some few groups, we must, in the classification, limit ourselves
essentially to the features which have been specified in the foregoing
paragraph, and which coincide with the position of the different groups
to the early Christian tradition in its connection with the Old
Testament religion, both as a rule of practical life, and of the common
cultus.[327]

As to the origin of Gnosticism, we see how, even in the earliest period,
all possible ideas and principles foreign to Christianity force their
way into it, that is, are brought in under Christian rules, and find
entrance, especially in the considerati