Basilides

Basilides (early 2nd century) was an early Christian religious teacher in Alexandria, Egypt. He apparently wrote twenty-four books on the Gospel and promoted a dualism influenced by Zoroastrianism. His followers formed a Gnostic sect, the Basilideans. Historians know of Basilides and his teachings only through the writings of his detractors, Agrippa Castor, Irenæus, Clement of Alexandria, and Hippolytus. It is impossible to determine how reliable these hostile accounts are.

Basilides

Basilides was a pupil of an alleged interpreter of St. Peter, Glaucias by name, and taught at Alexandria during the reign of Hadrian (117–138). He may have been previously a disciple of Menander at Antioch, together with Saturnilus. The Acta Archelai state that for a time he taught among the Persians. He composed twenty-four books on the Gospel, which, according to Clement of Alexandria were entitled Exegetics. Some fragments, preserved by Clement and in the Acta Archelai, supplement the knowledge of Basilides furnished by his opponents.

The oldest refutation of the teachings of Basilides, by Agrippa Castor, is lost, and we are dependent upon the later accounts of Irenæus, Clement of Alexandria, and Hippolytus of Rome, who in his Philosophumena, gives a presentation entirely different from the other sources. It either rests on corrupt accounts, or, more probably, on those of a later, post-Basilidian phase of the system. Hippolytus describes a monistic system, in which Hellenic, or rather Stoic, conceptions stand in the foreground, whereas the genuine Basilides is an Oriental through and through, who stands in closer relationship to Zoroaster than to Aristotle.

Influence

Twentieth-century psychoanalyst Carl Jung wrote his Seven Sermons to the Dead and attributed them to Basilides. The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges was interested in Irenaeus' account of Basilides' Gnostic doctrine and wrote an essay on the subject: "A Vindication of the False Basilides" (1932). Basilides is also mentioned in Borges's short story "Three Versions of Judas" (1944), which opens with the striking passage "In Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith, when Basilides published that the Cosmos was a reckless or evil improvisation by deficient angels... "

See also

Basilides or, to be more precise, "the Gnostic Gospel of Basilides", is also mentioned in Borges' story "A Library of Babel".

• Christian mystics

External links

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

The Seven Sermons to the Dead

• "Basilides" by T. Apiryon
• Seven Sermons to the Dead
• Fragments of Basilides
• Fragments of his son Isidore
• Catholic Encyclopedia: a point-of-view from a conservative orthodox Catholic position

References

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• This article includes content derived from the Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, 1914, which is in the public domain.

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