I picked up Bentley Layton’s chapter on Basilides expecting to find the God who is not. That phrase is the reason most people have heard of him, if they’ve heard of him at all. It turns out to sit in a footnote, attached to a source Layton thinks probably wasn’t written by Basilides.
That’s a strange discovery to make about a man whose name Carl Jung borrowed for the Seven Sermons to the Dead. It’s also a pretty good summary of what studying him is like. Almost everything we know comes secondhand, from people who were arguing with him, and the reports don’t agree with each other.
So this is two stories. One is the Basilides we can actually piece together from his fragments. The other is the idea that got attached to his name, which is wilder and maybe more important.
A Teacher in Alexandria
Layton dates Basilides’ teaching career to Alexandria around 132 to 135 AD, and earlier. That makes him one of the oldest Christian thinkers we know by name outside the New Testament. He wrote a commentary on Christian scripture that ran to at least 23 books, which puts him among the first two people known to have written one at all.
He wrote songs. He put out his own edition of a gospel. All of it is lost.
His followers later claimed he’d been taught by a man named Glaucias, supposedly an interpreter for the apostle Peter. Nobody can check that.
What we can check is that he was good at building something that lasted. Layton notes that the Basilidean movement was still active in Egypt in the fourth century, two hundred years after him. His son Isidore was one of its early leaders.
He was also in the right city at the right time. Valentinus began teaching in Alexandria in the same decades, and Layton thinks he almost surely knew Basilides’ ideas. If you’ve read my post on Valentinus, some of what follows will sound familiar.
Three Reports That Don’t Match
Here’s the problem with Basilides. Three different ancient writers describe him, and they might as well be describing three different people.
The most trustworthy, according to Layton, is Clement of Alexandria, who lived in Basilides’ own city around 200 AD. Clement disagreed with him but wasn’t out to destroy him, and he quoted actual sentences. Those quotations are the closest we’ll get to Basilides’ own voice.
Irenaeus of Lyon gives the second, a summary probably adapted from a lost work by Justin Martyr. It credits Basilides with a full myth. An unengendered parent produces Mind, Word, Prudence, Wisdom and Power. From those come rulers and angels, who build a heaven, whose angels build another, and so on down through 365 heavens.
The angels of the lowest one made our world, and their chief is the god of Israel. That last move shows up across the Gnostic sources, and the tradition’s treatment of the Hebrew God is a real problem I want to take up properly in another post.
Report number three comes from a book called the Refutation of All Heresies, written in Rome a little after 222 AD and often credited to Hippolytus. It’s the one with the God who is not.
Layton calls it “utterly different” from the others, says it fits poorly with what Clement quotes, and suggests it may have been written by a later follower. If you accept it as genuine, he adds, you have to throw out the Irenaeus summary. You can’t keep both.
The Myth, Briefly
One scene in the Irenaeus version sticks. When the Father sends Mind, called Christ, into the world, the rulers try to crucify him. According to this account, Simon of Cyrene, the man in the gospels who was forced to carry the cross, got crucified in his place, mistaken for Jesus. Meanwhile Jesus took Simon’s form and “stood by, laughing at them.”
It’s a disturbing image, and plenty of readers have found it cruel. Layton points out what it tells us historically. Basilides was arguing against passion stories that people in Alexandria already knew, which means gospels like Mark were circulating there by his time. His own gospel must have left the crucifixion out.
Irenaeus says the moral Basilides drew was that people who know these things are set free from the rulers who made the world. The rest of the summary drifts into what Basilides’ successors did, with their angel names, spells and passwords. Layton warns that this second half shouldn’t be used to reconstruct what the founder himself believed.
What He Actually Wrote
The fragments Clement preserved show a very different mind from the myth-teller in Irenaeus. They’re dense, philosophical, and full of Stoic vocabulary. The Stoics believed that providence, the rational order of the universe, controls everything that happens and is always good.
Basilides took that idea and ran it straight into the hardest question Christians were facing. Why do good people get dragged before magistrates and killed?
His answer, in a commentary passage Layton translates, is uncomfortable. He says that anyone who suffers must carry some capacity for sin, even a newborn who has done nothing. A soul might be paying for a previous life, since he believed in reincarnation.
Then he gives the reason he’s willing to say all this:
For I will say anything rather than call providence evil.
I don’t agree with where he lands. Calling a suffering baby sinful to protect the goodness of the universe is a high price, and I’ve written about a very different Gnostic answer to suffering. But I respect the honesty of the sentence.
He knows he’s paying that price. He tells you exactly which belief he refuses to give up and what it costs him to keep it.
Another fragment is gentler. Clement quotes Basilides on what God actually wants from a person:
We assume that one part of the so-called “will” of god is to love all… a second, is to desire nothing… and a third, is to hate nothing.
Layton reads “love all” in the Stoic sense of accepting the whole order of things without protest. That’s a demanding instruction, and also a usable one. You could try it for an afternoon.
Where the God Who Is Not Comes From
So what about the famous idea? In the Refutation’s account, before anything existed there was nothing at all, and the God at the top of that system is so far beyond being that even “exists” is too much to say about him. This nonexistent God wills a world into being out of nothing, without intention and without any change in himself. Every word you might use for him has to be taken back.
Hans Jonas, in The Gnostic Religion, treats this as one of the boldest moves in the whole tradition. He lists the Valentinian name for God, the Abyss, alongside “the non-being God” of the Basilides report. Then he draws the conclusion. “The knowledge of him itself is the knowledge of his unknowability,” Jonas writes, and he says this is where negative theology, the way of describing God only by what God is not, gets its first clear voice before it grows into “a mighty chorus in Western piety.”
Later Christian mystics like Pseudo-Dionysius and Meister Eckhart sing in that chorus, and so does the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing. None of them would have wanted to be traced back to a heretic, but the move is the same. Whatever you can picture, God is not that.
Whether Basilides himself said it, I honestly don’t know, and neither does anyone else. Maybe a student took his teacher’s hints about an unnamable Father and pushed them to the limit. Students do that. The idea ended up under his name either way, and that’s the version Jung inherited.
Trying It Out
I’ve found two of these ideas worth taking off the page.
The first is the negative way. Pick a word you use for God, or for whatever you’d call the ground of things, like love, Father, light or mind. Sit with it and ask where it falls short. Then let it go and try the next word.
You aren’t trying to end up with nothing to believe. It’s to notice how much of your picture of God is really a picture, and to leave room for whatever the picture leaves out.
Then there’s the fragment about God’s will. Love all, desire nothing, hate nothing. Try it on a bad commute. You probably won’t manage the first one, but you can get further than you’d expect with the third.
Hating nothing mostly means not rehearsing the argument with the driver who cut you off, which is most of what hating that driver consists of anyway.
Basilides left one more line worth carrying around, quoted by Clement in a different context and reported by Jonas. He called the human being “an encampment of many different spirits.” Sit in traffic long enough and you can hear several of them.
The Basilides of the fragments would say they’re all part of the order of things. The Basilides of the Refutation would say the God behind that order isn’t any of them, and isn’t even a he.
Basilides’ fragments (Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 4.81-83 and 4.86) and the summary of his myth (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.24.3-7) are quoted from Bentley Layton’s translations and introductions in The Gnostic Scriptures (Yale, 2nd ed.). The “non-being God,” the line on unknowability, and the “encampment of many different spirits” (Clement, Stromata 2.20) are quoted from Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Beacon, 3rd ed., 2001). The account in the Refutation of All Heresies, Book 7, is paraphrased.
