that is, real powers and heavenly persons in
whom is unfolded the absoluteness of the Godhead.[356]

(g) The assertion that Christ revealed a God hitherto unknown.

(h) The doctrine that in the person of Jesus Christ--the Gnostics saw in
it redemption, but they reduced the person to the physical nature--the
heavenly AEon, Christ, and the human appearance of that AEon must be
clearly distinguished, and a "distincte agere" ascribed to each.
Accordingly, there were some, such as Basilides, who acknowledged no
real union between Christ and the man Jesus, whom, besides, they
regarded as an earthly man. Others, e.g., part of the Valentinians,
among whom the greatest differences prevailed--see Tertull. adv. Valent.
39--taught that the body of Jesus was a heavenly psychical formation,
and sprang from the womb of Mary only in appearance. Finally, a third
party, such as Saturninus, declared that the whole visible appearance of
Christ was a phantom, and therefore denied the birth of Christ.[357]
Christ separates that which is unnaturally united, and thus leads
everything back again to himself; in this redemption consists (full
contrast to the notion of the [Greek: anakephalaiosis]).

(i) The conversion of the [Greek: ekklesia] (it was no innovation to
regard the heavenly Church as an AEon) into the college of the pneumatic,
who alone, in virtue of their psychological endowment, are capable of
Gnosis and the divine life, while the others, likewise in virtue of
their constitution, as hylic perish. The Valentinians, and probably many
other Gnostics also, distinguished between pneumatic, psychic and hylic.
They regarded the psychic as capable of a certain blessedness, and of a
corresponding certain knowledge of the supersensible, the latter being
obtained through Pistis, that is, through Christian faith.[358]

(k) The rejection of the entire early Christian eschatology, especially
the second coming of Christ, the resurrection of the body, and Christ's
Kingdom of glory on the earth, and, in connection with this, the
assertion that the deliverance of the spirit from the sensuous can be
expected only from the future, while the spirit enlightened about itself
already possesses immortality, and only awaits its introduction into the
pneumatic pleroma.[359]

In addition to what has been mentioned here, we must finally fix our
attention on the ethics of Gnosticism. Like the ethics of all systems
which are based on the contrast between th