[Review:] The Gnostics and Their Remains

THE GNOSTICS AND THEIR REMAINS, ANCIENT AND MEDIÆVAL. By C. W. King, M.A. Second Edition. David Nutt, 270 Strand, London, 1887. pp. 466, 8vo.

It would be unfair to the erudite and painstaking author of “The Gnostics and Their Remains” for a reviewer to take the title of his book as altogether appropriate, for it suggests too high a standard of criticism. Mr. King says in the introduction that his book is intended to be subsidiary to the valuable treatise of M. Matter, adding: “I refer the reader to him for the more complete elucidation of the philosophy of Gnosticism, and give my full attention to its Archæological side.” The italics are the author’s, and they disarm criticism as far as the philosophical side of Gnosticism is concerned; for thus italicised, this passage is, at the outset, as plain a confession as could, in conscience, be expected of an author of a fact which the reader would probably have found out for himself, before he closed the volume: namely, that the work is chiefly valuable as an Archæological compendium of “Gnostic Remains.” Unfortunately, the most interesting point about the Gnostics is their philosophy, of which their Archæological remains are, properly speaking, little more than illustrations. But the fact is, that the hard-shelled Archæologist is the last man in the world to appreciate the real esoteric signification of symbolism. All true symbols have many meanings, and for the purposes of descriptive Archæology the more superficial of these meanings are sufficient. Ignorance of the deeper meaning may indeed be bliss for the Archæologist, for it necessitates an amount of ingenuity in the fitting together of “remains,” that commands the admiration of the public, and is productive in the Archæological bosom of that agreeable sensation known as “fancying oneself.” As a laborious collector and compiler, and an ingenious worker-up of materials into interesting reading, too much can hardly be said in Mr. King’s praise, and had he a greater intuitional power, and a knowledge of esoteric religion, his great industry and erudition would make his writings valuable even to students of Occultism.

Since the publication of the former edition of his work, twenty-three years ago, Mr. King has come across and read the Pistis Sophia. The discovery of this, the only remaining Gnostic Gospel, or rather, Gospel fragment, is attributed to Schwartze, and the Latin translation to Petermann (in 1853). But Mr. King does not seem to be aware that as far back as 1843, another and ampler copy than that in the British Museum was in the hands of a Russian Raskolnik (dissident), a Cossack, who lived and married in Abyssinia; and another is in the possession of an Englishman, an Occultist, now in the United States, who brought it from Syria. It seems a pity that in the interim Mr. King did not also read Isis Unveiled, by H. P. Blavatsky, published by Bouton in New York in 1876, as its perusal would have saved him a somewhat absurd and ludicrous blunder. In his Preface, Mr. King says:—“There seems to be reason for suspecting that the Sibyl of Esoteric Buddhism drew the first notions of her new religion from the analysis of the inner man, as set forth in my first edition.”¹ The only person to whom this passage could apply is one of the Editors, the author of Isis Unveiled. And this, her first publication, contains the same and only doctrine she has always, or ever, promulgated. Isis Unveiled has passed through eight editions, and has been read by many thousands of persons; and not only they, but everyone who is not strangely ignorant of the very literature with which it was Mr. King’s business to make himself conversant, are perfectly aware that the two large volumes which compose that work are entirely devoted to a defence of the philosophy, science, and religion of the ancients, especially of the old Aryans, whose religion can hardly be called a “new” one, still less—“Esoteric Buddhism.” If properly spelt, however, the latter word, or Buddhism, ought to be written with one “d,” as in this case it means Wisdom. But “Budhism,” or the wisdom-religion of the Aryans, was still less a religion, in the exoteric sense, than is Buddhism, but rather a philosophy. In that part of Isis Unveiled which treats of the Gnostics, Mr. King will find a few quotations from his writings side by side with quotations from other writers on the same subject; but he will find no “new religion” there, or anywhere else, in the works of H. P. Blavatsky. And, if anyone drew the “first notions” of their religion from his “analysis of the inner man,” it must have been the early Aryans, who, unfortunately, have neglected to acknowledge the obligation. What makes Mr. King’s self-complacency the more ridiculous, is that in his preface he himself accuses someone else of “the grave error of representing their (the Gnostics’) doctrines as novel, and the pure inventions of the persons who preached them.” And in another place he confesses that he owes to Matter the first idea which has now become a settled conviction with him, that “the seeds of the gnosis were originally of Indian growth.” If Matter “faintly discerned” this truth, on the other hand Bailly, Dupuis, and others had seen it quite clearly, and had declared it most emphatically. So that Mr. King’s “discovery” is neither very new nor very original.

Mr. King must be aware that of late years immense additions have been made to western knowledge of eastern philosophies and religions—a new region in ancient literature having, in fact, been opened up by the labours of Orientalists, both European and Eastern. A study of these Oriental systems throws a strong though often a false light upon the inner meaning of Gnostic symbolism and ideas generally, which Mr. King acknowledges to have come from Indian sources; and certainly the reader has a right to expect a little more knowledge in that direction from a writer of Mr. King’s pretensions, than is displayed. For example, in the section about Buddhism in the work before us: one is tempted sometimes to ask whether it is flippancy or superficiality that is the matter with the author—when he calls the ancient Indian gymnosophists “fakirs,” and confounds them with Buddhists. Surely he need hardly be told that fakirs are Mahomedans, and that the Gymnosophists he mentions were Brahmin Yogis.

The work, however, is a valuable one in its way; but the reader should not forget that “there seems reason for suspecting” that the author does not always know exactly what he is talking about, whenever he strays too far from Archæology, on which he is no doubt an authority.