Simon Magus
Some notes on my readings about Simon the Magician, early heretic:
According to Alfred Firmin Loisy, Simon Magus was a 'contemporary of Jesus and the first missionaries' whose 'messianic pretentions' qualified him, 'from the Christian point of view', as an Antichrist. Strictly speaking Simon 'never was a heretic in regard to Christianity, for he never professed it'. Rather, Simonianism was a rival cult arising out of the same millieu that gave rise to Christianity. 'Both in reality and legend the case of Simon and Dositheus [another would-be Messiah] is not without analogy to the case of Jesus, their relative insuccess, compared with the fortune awaiting him, being due to the limits which their origin and circumstances imposed on their propaganda'. Simon 'is presented in Christian tradition as the father of heretical gnosis'. However, from a less partisian point of view the distinction is less critical; Loisy contends that the orthodox Christianity that emerged from this period was in a sense 'a disciplined gnosis born of the same movement which produced the gnosis called heretical'.
On the doctrine of Simon:
'Among the Simonians the incarnation of Wisdom [a figure central to the cosmological narratives of classical Gnosticism] was alloted to Helena, Simon's female companion: she was the Supreme Thought, mother of all things; after issuing from the abode of divinity she brought forth the angels and the angels made the visible world, but they kept their mother a prisoner in order to conceal their origin and otherwise ignored God. After various metempsychoses - the most remarkable being that in which this feminine Logos became Helen of the siege of Troy - the Great Thought turns into a prostitute in a house of resort at Tyre; there the Great Power, incarnate in Simon, finds her, buys her freedom and attaches her to himself. In this gnostic poem (which the writers on heresy, to whom we owe the account of it, did not invent, though they may have put undue emphasis on some of its features) the Great Power is said to have been manifested in three forms; to the Jews, as Son, in Jesus who suffered death in appearance but not in reality; to the Samaritans, as Father, in Simon himself; to other people as the Holy Spirit. Salvation among the Simonians consists in the knowledge of this mystery; the knowledge carried with it freedom from the Law, which was a work of the creator-angels, and from laws of every kind, the distinction between good and evil being a human convention. - In this outline we are following Irenaeus {Heresies, i, 28) and Hippolytus {Philosophoumena, vi, 19, 20).'
According to Alfred Firmin Loisy, Simon Magus was a 'contemporary of Jesus and the first missionaries' whose 'messianic pretentions' qualified him, 'from the Christian point of view', as an Antichrist. Strictly speaking Simon 'never was a heretic in regard to Christianity, for he never professed it'. Rather, Simonianism was a rival cult arising out of the same millieu that gave rise to Christianity. 'Both in reality and legend the case of Simon and Dositheus [another would-be Messiah] is not without analogy to the case of Jesus, their relative insuccess, compared with the fortune awaiting him, being due to the limits which their origin and circumstances imposed on their propaganda'. Simon 'is presented in Christian tradition as the father of heretical gnosis'. However, from a less partisian point of view the distinction is less critical; Loisy contends that the orthodox Christianity that emerged from this period was in a sense 'a disciplined gnosis born of the same movement which produced the gnosis called heretical'.
On the doctrine of Simon:
'Among the Simonians the incarnation of Wisdom [a figure central to the cosmological narratives of classical Gnosticism] was alloted to Helena, Simon's female companion: she was the Supreme Thought, mother of all things; after issuing from the abode of divinity she brought forth the angels and the angels made the visible world, but they kept their mother a prisoner in order to conceal their origin and otherwise ignored God. After various metempsychoses - the most remarkable being that in which this feminine Logos became Helen of the siege of Troy - the Great Thought turns into a prostitute in a house of resort at Tyre; there the Great Power, incarnate in Simon, finds her, buys her freedom and attaches her to himself. In this gnostic poem (which the writers on heresy, to whom we owe the account of it, did not invent, though they may have put undue emphasis on some of its features) the Great Power is said to have been manifested in three forms; to the Jews, as Son, in Jesus who suffered death in appearance but not in reality; to the Samaritans, as Father, in Simon himself; to other people as the Holy Spirit. Salvation among the Simonians consists in the knowledge of this mystery; the knowledge carried with it freedom from the Law, which was a work of the creator-angels, and from laws of every kind, the distinction between good and evil being a human convention. - In this outline we are following Irenaeus {Heresies, i, 28) and Hippolytus {Philosophoumena, vi, 19, 20).'