DOCETiE
cannot therefore have originated with Cassianus. As Clement distinguished the Docets from other Gnostic sects, he probablj' knew some sectaries the sum-total of whose errors consisted in this illusion theorj-; but Docetism, as far as at present known, was always an accompaniment of Gnosticism or later of Manichaism. The Docets described by Hippolj-tus (Philos., VIII, i-iv, X, xii) are likewise a Gnostic "sect ; these perhaps extended their Olusion theory to all material sub- stances.
Docetism is not properly a Christian heresy at all, as it did not arise in the t'hurch from the misunder- standing of a dogma by the faithful, but rather came from without. Gnostics starting from the prin- ciple of antagonism between matter and spirit, and making all salvation consist in becoming free from the bondage of matter and returning as pure spirit to the Supreme Spirit, could not possibly accept the sen- tence, "the Word was made Flesh", in a literal sense. In order to borrow from Christianity the doctrine of a Saviour who was Son of the Good God, they were forced to modify the doctrine of the Incarnation. Their embarrassment with this dogma caused many vacillations and inconsistencies ; some holding the in- dwelling of an .\eon in a body which was indeed real but was not his own; others denj'ing the actual objec- tive existence of any body or humanity at all; others allowing a "ps3'chic", but not a "hylic" or really ma- terial body; others believing in a real, yet not human but "sidereal" body; others again accepting the reality of the body but not the reality of the birth from a woman, or the reality of the passion and death on the cross. Christ only seemed to suffer, either be- cause He ingeniously and miraculously substituted some one else to bear the pain, or because the whole occurrence on Calvary was a visual deception. Simon Magus first spoke of a "putative" passion of Christ and blasphemously asserted that it was really he, Simon himself, who underwent these apparent suffer- ings. ".\s the angels governed this world badly be- cause each angel coveted the principalitj' for himself, he [Simon] came to improve matters, and was trans- figured and rendered like unto the ^'irtues and Powers and Angels, so that he appeared amongst men as man though he was no man and was believed to have suf- fered in Judaea though he had not suffered" (passum injudted putatum cum nonessel passus — Irenseus, Adv. Hser., I, xxiii sqq.). The mention of the demiurgic angels stamps this passage as a piece of Gnosticism. Soon after a Syrian Gnostic of Antioch, Satuminus or Satumilus (about 125) made Christ the chief of the Aeons, but tried to show that the Saviour was unborn (iyfvi'TITov) and without body (atriiimTon) and with- out form {avelSeov) and only apparently {(pavraalif) seen as man (Irenseus, Xdv. Haer., XXIV, ii).
Another Syrian Gnostic, Cerdo, who came to Rome under Pope Hyginus (137) and became the master of Marcion, taught that "Christ, the Son of the Highest God, appeared without birth from the Virgin, yea without any birth on earth as man". All this is nat- ural enough; for matter not being the creation of the Highest God but of the Demiurge, Christ could have none of it. This is clearly brought out by Tertullian in his polemic against Marcion. According to this heresiarch (140) Christ, without passing through the womb of Marj' and endowed with only a putative body, suddenly came from heaven to Caphamaum in the fifteenth year of Tiberius; and Tertullian remarks: "All these tricks about a putative corporeality Mar- cion has adopted lest the truth of Christ's birth should be argued from the reality of his human nature, and thus Christ should be vindicated as the work of the Creator [Demiurge] and be shown to have human flesh even as he had human birth" OVdv. Marc, III, xi). Tertullian further states that Marcion's chief disciple, .\pelles, slightly modified his master's sys- tem, accepting indeed the truth of Christ's flesh, but
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DOCET.S
strenuously denying the truth of His birth. He con-
tended that Christ had an astral body made of supe-
rior substance, and he compared the Incarnation to the
appearance of the angel to Abraham. This, Tertul-
lian sarcastically remarks, is getting from the frjHng-
pan into the fire, de calcaria in carbonariam. Val-
entinus the Egj-ptian attempted to accommodate his
system still more closely to Christian doctrine by ad-
mitting not merely the reality of the Saviour's body
but even a seeming birth, saying that the Saviour's
body passed through Mary as through a channel
(us Sii (TuX^i/os) though he took nothing from her, but
had a body from above. This approximation to or-
thodoxy, however, was only apparent, for Valentinus
distinguished between Christ and .lesus. Christ and
the Holy Ghost were emanations from the .\eon Nous;
and from all Aeons together proceeded Jesus the
Saviour, who became united with the Messias of the
Demiurge.
In the East, Marinus and the school of Bardesanes, though not Bardesanes himself, held similar views with regard to Christ's astral body and seeming birth. In the West, Ptolemy reduced Docetism to a minimum by sajing that Christ was indeed a real man, but His substance was a compound of the pneumatic and the psychic (spiritual and ethereal). The pneumatic He received from Achamoth or Wisdom, the psychic from the Demiurge; His psychic nature enabled him to suffer and feel pain, though He possessed nothing uXixif, i. e. nothing grossly material. (Irenaeus, Adv. Haer., I, xii, II, iv). As the Docetae ob- jected to the reality of the birth, so from the first they particularly objected to the reahty of the passion. Hence the clumsy attempts at substitution of another victim by Basilides and others. According to Basi- lides, Christ seemed to men to be a man and to have performed miracles. It was not, however, C'hrist who suffered but Simon of Cyrene, who was constrained to carrj' the cross and was mistakenly crucified in Christ's stead. Simon having received Jesus' form, Jesus as- sumed Simon's and thusstood by and laughed. Simon was crucified and Jesus retunieil to his father (Irenaeus, Adv. Ha>r., I, xxiv). According to some apocrypha it was Judas, not Simon the Cyrenean, who was "thus substituted. Hippolytus describes a Gnostic sect who took the name of Docetie, though for what reason is not apparent, especially as their semblance theorj' was the least pronounced feature in their system. Their views were in close affinity to those of the ^'alentinians. The primal Being is, so to speak, the seed of a fig-tree, small in size but infinite in power; from it proceed three Aeons, tree, leaves, fruit, which, multiplied with the perfect number ten, become thirty. These thirty Aeons together fructify one of themselves, from whom pro- ceeds the Virgin-Saviour, a perfect representation of the Highest God. The Saviour's task is to hinder fur- ther transference of souls from body to body, which is the work of the Great Archon, the Creator of the world. The Saviour enters the world unnoticed, un- known, obscure. An angel announced the glad tid- ings to Mary. He was bom and did all the things that are written of him in the Gospels. But in bap- tism he received the figure and seal of another body besides that bom of the Virgin. The object of this was that when the .\rchon condemned his own pecu- liar figment of fiesh to the death of the cress, the soul of Jesus — that soul which had been nourished in the body bom of the Virgin — might strip off that body and nail it to the accursed tree. In the pneumatic body re- ceived at baptism Jesus could triumph over the Archon, whose evil intent he had eluded.
This heresy, which destroyed the very meaning and purpose of the Incarnation, was combated even by the Apostles. Possibly St. Paul's statement that in Christ dwelt the fullness of the Godhead cnrporaliter (Col., i, 19, ii, 9) has some reference to Docetie errors. Beyond doubt St. John (I John, i, 1-3, iv, 1-3; II
