BASILIDES. - Gnostic heretic, active under Hadrian and Antoninus Pius (120-40) in Alexandria, where he was probably also born. There he kept a school and, with his son Isidore, who later continued his work, gave rise to a new Gnostic heresy, still alive in the 4th century. The report of the Acta Archelai, 67, that he "also preached among the Persians" does not seem reliable.
He wrote a gospel secundum Basilidem, of which we do not know whether it was a personal work or a manipulation of one or more canonical gospels; a commentary on the same in 24 books; and religious hymns. Almost nothing of these works has survived; we know only that, together with those of his son, they were the instruments of propaganda for his doctrine.
The doctrine of B. according to the ancients was a plagiarism of Hellenic religious conceptions; B. himself and Isidore appealed to the revelations of barbarian prophets such as Parchor, Barchof, Bar Kabba, Cham, and of a supposed disciple of St. Peter, Glaucia. In fact the Basilidian system, as far as we know, was strongly permeated by Oriental religious speculations.
Its cosmology was emanatist. From a supreme being without origin five other beings are emanated, two of which, Wisdom and Power, create the first heaven and give origin to 365 other beings with as many cycles. This divine system is called Abraxas (v.) or Abraxas or also Mithras, words whose Greek letters taken as numerals give 365. The soteriology is that common to the Gnostics. It is difficult to say what application it found in the official morality of the sect, since on this point the details of the anti-heretical writings are usually little in agreement and unreliable. It appears in any case that magical practices and the basest superstition held a prominent place in it.
The anthropology was clearly dualistic. Isidore also wrote a book On the Co-grown Soul, making man a compound of two antagonistic beings, the one a son of light and the other of matter. Redemption therefore consists in liberating the former from the latter. The body of Jesus was therefore only apparently material, and on the cross, by a sleight of hand, it was the Cyrenian who ascended and not Jesus. Redemption is essentially intellectual.
The Basilidian doctrine, however, appears to us very different from the Philosophumena of Hippolytus. It is a rather evolutionistic system, whereby from the primitive non-being there first sprouts the "seed of all things" and then from this, through successive generations, a whole ladder of beings and cycles that form the Abraxas and the material world. It is difficult to solve the enigma of this antithesis between the sources. Perhaps Hippolytus was referring to the beliefs of the Basilidians of his time (which we know to have changed considerably); perhaps he confused with B. the writings of another Gnostic of the same name.