BASILIDE. — A Gnostic heretic, active under Hadrian and Antoninus Pius (120–40) in Alexandria, where he had probably also been born. There he taught, and together with his son Isidore, who subsequently continued his work, gave rise to a new Gnostic heresy, still alive in the fourth century. The information in the Acta Archelai, 67, that he «also preached among the Persians» does not appear reliable.
He wrote a gospel secundum Basilidem, of which we do not know whether it was a personal work or an adaptation 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 served as instruments for propagating his doctrine.
According to the ancients, the doctrine of B. was a plagiarism of Hellenic religious conceptions; B. himself and Isidore appealed to the revelations of barbarian prophets such as Parchor, Barchof, Bar Kabba, and Cham, and of a supposed disciple of s. Peter, Glaucia. In fact, the Basilidian system, insofar as we know it, was strongly permeated by Eastern religious speculations.
His cosmology was emanationist. From a supreme entity without origin five other beings emanate; two of these, Wisdom and Power, create the first heaven and give rise to another 364 beings with an equal number of cycles. This divine system is called Abraxas (v.) or Abraxas, or also Mithra, words whose Greek letters, taken as numerical values, yield 365. Its soteriology is that common to the Gnostics. It is difficult to say what application it found in the sect’s official morality, since in this regard the details provided by anti-heretical writings are generally inconsistent and unreliable. In any event, magical practices and the grossest superstition seem to have held a prominent place among them.
The anthropology was distinctly dualistic. Isidore also wrote a book On the Congrown Soul, presenting man as a compound of two antagonistic beings, one the son of light and the other of matter. Redemption therefore consists in liberating the former from the latter. Jesus’ body was thus only apparently material, and on the cross, by a sleight of hand, the Cyrenean ascended in place of Jesus. Redemption is essentially intellectual.
The Basilidian doctrine appears to us, however, very different in the Philosophumena of Hippolytus. It is rather an evolutionist system, according to which from primitive non-being there first springs the «seed of everything», and then from this, through successive generations, an entire hierarchy of beings and cycles that constitute 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 Basilidians of his own time (which we know had changed considerably); perhaps he confused B. with the writings of another Gnostic of the same name.