BASILIDES. — Gnostic heretic who flourished under Hadrian and Antoninus Pius (120–40) at Alexandria, where he was probably also born. There he held a school and, together with his son Isidore, who later continued his work, gave rise to a new Gnostic heresy that was still alive in the 4th century. The notice in the Acta Archelai, 67, that he “also preached among the Persians” does not seem reliable.
He wrote a Gospel according to Basilides, of which we do not know whether it was a personal work or a manipulation of one or more canonical Gospels; a commentary on it 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.
According to the ancients, Basilides’ doctrine was a plagiarism of Hellenic religious conceptions; Basilides himself and Isidore appealed to revelations of barbarian prophets such as Parchor, Barchof, Bar Kappa, Cham, and of a supposed disciple of St Peter, Glaucias. In fact, the Basilidean system, as far as we know it, was strongly permeated by Oriental religious speculations.
His cosmology was emanationist. From a supreme unoriginate being there emanate five other beings, two of which, Wisdom and Power, create the first heaven and give rise to another 364 beings with as many cycles. Abraxas (v.) or Abrasax or even Mithras, words whose Greek letters taken as numerals add up to 365. The soteriology is that common to Gnostics. It is difficult to say what application it found in the official morality of the sect, since in this point the details of anti-heretical writings are usually little concordant and reliable. In any case, magical practices and the lowest superstitions seem to have held an important place.
The anthropology was distinctly dualistic. Isidore also wrote a book On the Soul Grown Together, making man a compound of two antagonistic beings, one the son of light and the other of matter. Redemption therefore consists in freeing the former from the latter. Jesus’ body was therefore only apparently material, and on the cross, through a sleight of hand, it set the Cyrenean alight and not Jesus. Redemption is essentially intellectual.
The doctrine of Basilides, however, appears very different in the Philosophumena of Hippolytus. It is a rather evolutionary system, according to which from the primitive non-being there first springs the “seed of all,” and then from this, through successive generations, an entire scale of beings and cycles that form the Abraxas and the material world. It is difficult to resolve the enigma of this antithesis between the sources. Perhaps Hippolytus was referring to the beliefs of the Basilideans of his time (which we know to have changed considerably); perhaps he confused Basilides with the writings of another Gnostic of the same name.