DOCETI. - The appellation Docetae (from the Greek verb δοκεῖν = to seem) designates a sect that goes back to apostolic times. According to this sect, Jesus Christ "seemed" to be a man, "seemed" to be born, to live, to suffer and to die. It was a true illusion: the Gospel narrative is a fantastic narrative, and consequently the Eucharist does not contain the body of Jesus. The principal exponents of Docetism were:
1) Simon Magus, who wanted to make people believe that Jesus had suffered only in appearance and that he himself, instead, had endured the sufferings attributed to the Master. This impostor gradually became so puffed up with pride as to pass himself off as the great Power of God (Acts 8:10) and then as God himself. Toward the end of the 1st century, he simultaneously assumed for himself the role of each of the three Divine Persons. Simon is the true founder of Gnosticism, of which Docetism was but one aspect. Only a few fragments of his work entitled Ἀπόφασις ("Revelation") have come down to us.
2) The disciples of Simon: Cerinthus, Menander and Saturnilus. According to St. Irenaeus, who draws these indications from St. Polycarp, Cerinthus taught that the world was created not by God, but by a power inferior to Him and without His knowledge. Jesus was not born of the Virgin through the work of the Holy Spirit, but of Mary and Joseph, no differently from other men. At the hour of Baptism, a "Power" proceeding from God entered into him. This Power, called Christ, gave him the thaumaturgic power and accompanied him until the moment of the Passion. Then, however, it abandoned him, and he was thus able to suffer and die, while the aforementioned Power continued to be spiritual and impassible.
3) Basilides, born at Alexandria, who lived under Hadrian and Antoninus, a supporter of the doctrine of metempsychosis, reduced the Redemption to a sleight of hand. The Son, incorporeal and protean, could not suffer: he had himself replaced by Simon of Cyrene, who really carried the Cross and was crucified, while Jesus, under the appearance of Simon, watched these sufferings invisibly and mockingly, then ascended to the Father.
4) The Gnostic Cerdo, from Syria, who came to Rome under Pope Hyginus (137), maintained that, since matter is the work of the demiurge and not of God, Christ could not have had it, and therefore had no bodily birth.
5) Cerdo is regarded as the teacher of Marcion, born at Sinope on the Pontus in 85, who did good business in commerce and later moved to Rome during the pontificate of Hyginus (137). Marcion holds the same principles as Cerdo and therefore does not admit that Jesus descended into the womb of Mary. He was not born, but, lowered from on high, appeared suddenly, already an adult, at Capernaum. Marcion passed himself off as a disciple of St. Paul. Excommunicated in 144, he organized communities full of fanaticism in Europe, Asia and Africa.
6) Valentinus, who also came to Rome during the pontificate of Pope Hyginus, spent 30 years there, from 136 to 165. He had as disciples Ptolemy and Heracleon. He teaches that the first Being, like the seed of the fig, is very small, but of inexhaustible power. From him
(phot. Pont. comm. arch. sacra)
D.M.S. - Funerary inscription of Fl. Balbilla with the D.M.S. (363). Rome, Cemetery of the Sts. Mark and Marcellian.
there proceed 3 Aeons: Tree, Leaf, Fruit, which, multiplied by 10, which is the perfect number, form 30. Each of these 30 Aeons, moreover, by giving the best part of itself, contributed to forming the Christ, image of God. He was not born of Mary the Virgin, even though he came forth from her, because his body, rained down from Heaven, passed only through the body of the Virgin, without taking anything. The Christ accomplished the deeds set forth in the Gospel, but at the moment of the Baptism he took on the appearance of another body. When the great archon or chief of the evil angels condemned him to the cross, he allowed his first hylic body to be fastened to the gibbet, but with his other pneumatic body, received during the Baptism, he conquered the great archon and brought his wicked plans to nothing.
7) The unknown author of the Gospel of Peter, an apocryphal book, against which Serapion, bishop of Antioch (190-203), warns the faithful of Rhossus (Cilicia).
8) The Bardesanites attributed to Christ an astral body and a fictitious birth. Their sect, which lasted until the 5th century, wrongly appealed to the authority of Bardesanes, b. in Edessa in 154 and d. in 222.
9) The Manichaeans, with their dualistic theory of Good, which is Spirit, and Evil, which is Matter, were compelled to deny the body of Christ. To preserve, however, the reality of the Passion, they split Jesus in two, distinguishing a passible Jesus and an impassible Jesus.
10) The Paulicians of Armenia denied the reality of Christ's birth. They imagined that that "other" of whom John's disciples asked Jesus whether they were to await him (Lk. 7:20) was an angel who would come in reality and would suffer the passion. For this reason they adored not the Cross, but the Gospel.
11) The Slavic Bogomils believed that Jesus entered Mary through the ear and took in her a "likeness" of a body.
12) In the West the Council of Orléans in 1022 anathematized 13 Cathar heretics who denied that Christ had lived and died in reality.
13) Since such an error suits the whims of the imagination and takes good advantage of the unlimited credulity of simple people, Docetism has not exhausted the range of its fantasies and in the theosophical or spiritist circles of our time it vies with the most tangled oddities of ancient Gnosis.
Bibliography3 works
David Lathoud