Gnostic Scriptures and Fragments: Epiphanes - On Righteousness
Clement of Alexandria: Stromata, Book 3
"The righteousness of God is a kind of sharing along with equality...All beings beget and give birth alike, having received by justice an innate equality. Common justice is given to all equally...Customs geared toward private ownership have cut apart and eaten away at the the universal equality of the divine law...
The ideas of 'Mine' and 'Thine' crept in through the laws which cause the earth, money, and even marriage no longer to bring forth fruit of common use.
The Creator and father of all...did not make a distinction between female and male, rational and irrational, nor between anything else at all; rather he shared out sight equally and universially...
With a view to the permanence of the race, God has implanted in men a strong and ardent [sexual] desire which neither law nor custom nor any other restraint is able to destroy. For it is God's decree."
Epiphanes (gnostic) - Wikipedia
A ridiculously strange and paradoxical title for a thread, I know, but there really is no other way to describe the group I'm about to discuss here - as you will soon learn. I welcome your thoughts on this early form of heretical Christianity The quotation above is from the son of Carpocrates, the early second century founder of this Christian sect.
I'm talking about the so-called Libertine Christians of the first century church in Corinth, later castigated by their enemies as antinomians (from the Greek: ἀντί, "against" + νόμος, [moral] "law") and who evolved into the Carpocratians of the second century CE, only for their ideas to resurface in the medieval 'Brethren of the Free Spirit' and then in the Ranters of 17th century England, and whose modern heirs in spirit were surely the Free Love Hippies of the 1960s.
This controversial heresy had uniquely Gentile Christian roots and developed very early in some of the churches founded by the Apostle Paul, so its a remarkably primitive perspective in the Christian tradition. His First Letter to the Corinthians was, in part, a dialogue with the views of this sectarian faction: conceding certain of their understandings of doctrine while strongly criticising other ones.
But first, some context.
There are many fascinating early Christian heresies that ultimately failed to convince the developing proto-orthodox church-majority of their views but which, nonetheless, provide us - whether through their extant writings or references to them in the literature of their patristic opponents - with invaluable insight into a rich ferment of ideas from a time when, as Kathy L. Gaca notes in her book The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity: "Christianity was still a countercultural movement partly shaped by communal social ideals" (p.274).
Some of these sects, like the Valentinian Gnostics, were brain-numbingly metaphysical and arcane; others were radically egalitarian, including the holy-spirit guided Montanist church which recognised women as bishops and priests but also encouraged ethical rigorism and strict fasts; another variety were fanatically ascetic, such as the Encratite Christians who forbade marriage and practised vegetarianism; while others again were devoutly Jewish and Torah-observant but also socially radical, like the Ebionite Christians who adhered to voluntary poverty and rejected the Apostle Paul as an apostate from the law of Moses. And then you had the good old Carpocratian Christians, who - according to the partisan wording of the church father st. Irenaeus - taught their "followers to perform every obscenity and every sinful act" as a means of salvation, meaning absolutely free sexual licence and hedonism.
(continued....)
Clement of Alexandria: Stromata, Book 3
"The righteousness of God is a kind of sharing along with equality...All beings beget and give birth alike, having received by justice an innate equality. Common justice is given to all equally...Customs geared toward private ownership have cut apart and eaten away at the the universal equality of the divine law...
The ideas of 'Mine' and 'Thine' crept in through the laws which cause the earth, money, and even marriage no longer to bring forth fruit of common use.
The Creator and father of all...did not make a distinction between female and male, rational and irrational, nor between anything else at all; rather he shared out sight equally and universially...
With a view to the permanence of the race, God has implanted in men a strong and ardent [sexual] desire which neither law nor custom nor any other restraint is able to destroy. For it is God's decree."
(Epiphanes (late 1st Century or early 2nd Century), Carpocratian Christian (On Righteousness, Strom 3.7.2–3))
Epiphanes (gnostic) - Wikipedia
Epiphanes is the author of On Righteousness,[1] a notable early Gnostic Christian literary work that promotes communist principles, that was published and discussed by Clement of Alexandria, in Stromaties, III...
According to Clement, Epiphanes was born on Cephalonia in the late 1st Century or early 2nd Century to Carpocrates (his father), and Alexandria of Cephalonia (his mother). Epiphanes died at the age of 17...
Vanderbilt Professor Kathy L. Gaca promotes a view of Epiphanes as one of the voices in early Christianity who held a positive and liberationist view of sexual pleasure, and who was among those like him who were ultimately silenced by the victorious leadership represented by Clement of Alexandria, Tatian, Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine
According to Clement, Epiphanes was born on Cephalonia in the late 1st Century or early 2nd Century to Carpocrates (his father), and Alexandria of Cephalonia (his mother). Epiphanes died at the age of 17...
Vanderbilt Professor Kathy L. Gaca promotes a view of Epiphanes as one of the voices in early Christianity who held a positive and liberationist view of sexual pleasure, and who was among those like him who were ultimately silenced by the victorious leadership represented by Clement of Alexandria, Tatian, Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine
A ridiculously strange and paradoxical title for a thread, I know, but there really is no other way to describe the group I'm about to discuss here - as you will soon learn. I welcome your thoughts on this early form of heretical Christianity The quotation above is from the son of Carpocrates, the early second century founder of this Christian sect.
I'm talking about the so-called Libertine Christians of the first century church in Corinth, later castigated by their enemies as antinomians (from the Greek: ἀντί, "against" + νόμος, [moral] "law") and who evolved into the Carpocratians of the second century CE, only for their ideas to resurface in the medieval 'Brethren of the Free Spirit' and then in the Ranters of 17th century England, and whose modern heirs in spirit were surely the Free Love Hippies of the 1960s.
This controversial heresy had uniquely Gentile Christian roots and developed very early in some of the churches founded by the Apostle Paul, so its a remarkably primitive perspective in the Christian tradition. His First Letter to the Corinthians was, in part, a dialogue with the views of this sectarian faction: conceding certain of their understandings of doctrine while strongly criticising other ones.
But first, some context.
There are many fascinating early Christian heresies that ultimately failed to convince the developing proto-orthodox church-majority of their views but which, nonetheless, provide us - whether through their extant writings or references to them in the literature of their patristic opponents - with invaluable insight into a rich ferment of ideas from a time when, as Kathy L. Gaca notes in her book The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity: "Christianity was still a countercultural movement partly shaped by communal social ideals" (p.274).
Some of these sects, like the Valentinian Gnostics, were brain-numbingly metaphysical and arcane; others were radically egalitarian, including the holy-spirit guided Montanist church which recognised women as bishops and priests but also encouraged ethical rigorism and strict fasts; another variety were fanatically ascetic, such as the Encratite Christians who forbade marriage and practised vegetarianism; while others again were devoutly Jewish and Torah-observant but also socially radical, like the Ebionite Christians who adhered to voluntary poverty and rejected the Apostle Paul as an apostate from the law of Moses. And then you had the good old Carpocratian Christians, who - according to the partisan wording of the church father st. Irenaeus - taught their "followers to perform every obscenity and every sinful act" as a means of salvation, meaning absolutely free sexual licence and hedonism.
(continued....)