DOCETI. — The designation d. (from the Greek verb δοκεῖν = to seem) indicates a sect which goes back to apostolic times. According to this sect, Jesus Christ “seemed” to be a man, “appeared” to be born, to live, to suffer and to die. It was a genuine illusion: the Gospel narrative is a fanciful narrative, and consequently the Eucharist does not contain the body of Jesus. The principal exponents of Docetism were:
1) Simon Magus, who wanted people to believe that Jesus had suffered fictitiously and that he himself, on the other hand, had endured the sufferings attributed to the Master. This impostor gradually became so puffed up that he went so far as to pass himself off as the great Virtue of God (Act. 8, 10), and then as God himself. Toward the end of the 1st century, he simultaneously claimed for himself the role of each of the three Divine Persons. Simone is the true founder of Gnosticism, of which Docetism was merely one aspect. Only a few fragments of his work entitled Ἀπόρασις (“Revelation”) have come down to us.
2) The disciples of Simone: Cerinto, Menandro and Saturnilo. According to s. Ireneo, who draws these indications from s. Policarpo, Cerinto taught that the world had been created not by God, but by a force inferior to Him and without His knowledge. Jesus was not born of the Virgin through the work of the Holy Spirit, but of Maria and Giuseppe, neither more nor less than other men. At the hour of Baptism, a “Virtue” proceeding from God invested him. This Virtue, called Christ, gave him thaumaturgical power and accompanied him until the moment of the Passion. Then, however, it abandoned him, and he could thus suffer and die, while the aforementioned Virtue continued to be spiritual and impassible.
3) Basilide, born in Alexandria and living under Adriano and Antonino, a supporter of the doctrine of metempsychosis, reduced Redemption to a conjurer’s trick. The Son, incorporeal and protean, could not suffer: he had himself replaced by Simone di Cirene, who actually carried the Cross and was crucified, while Jesus, under the appearance of Simone, invisibly witnessed these sufferings, mocking them, and then returned to the Father.
4) The Gnostic Cerdone, from Syria, who came to Rome under Pope Igino (137), maintained that, since matter was the work of the demiurge and not of God, Christ could not have possessed it and consequently had no bodily birth.
5) Cerdone is regarded as the teacher of Marcione, born at Sinope on the Pontus in 85, who prospered in commerce and then moved to Rome during the pontificate of Igino (137). Marcione held the same principles as Cerdone and therefore did not admit that Jesus had descended into the womb of Maria. He was not born, but, descending from above, suddenly appeared, already an adult, at Cafarnao. Marcione passed himself off as a disciple of s. Paolo. Excommunicated in 144, he organized communities full of fanaticism in Europe, Asia and Africa.
6) Valentino, who likewise came to Rome during the pontificate of Pope Igino, spent 30 years there, from 136 to 165. His disciples were Tolomeo and Eraclione. He teaches that the First Being, like the seed of the fig tree, is very small, but endowed with inexhaustible power. From him
(photograph: Pont. comm. arch. sacra)
D.M.S. — Funerary inscription of Fl. Balbilla bearing the D.M.S. (363). Rome, Cemetery of SS. Marco and Marcellano.
DOCETI - DOCTRINA PATRUM DE INCARNATIONE VERBI
there proceed 3 Aeons: Tree, Leaf, Fruit, which, multiplied by 10, the perfect number, make 30. Each of these 30 Aeons, then, contributing the best part of itself, helped to form Christ, the image of God. He was not born of the Virgin Mary, even though he came forth from her, because his body, having descended from Heaven, merely passed through the Virgin’s body, taking nothing from II. Christ performed the events recounted in the Gospel, but at the moment of Baptism he assumed the appearance of another body. When the great archon, or chief of the evil angels, condemned him to the cross, he allowed his first, material body to be nailed to the gallows, but with his other, pneumatic body, received during Baptism, he defeated the great archon and sent his wicked designs to ruin.
7) The unknown author of the apocryphal Gospel of Peter, against which Serapion, bishop of Antioch (190–203), warned the faithful of Rossos (Cilicia).
8) The Bardesanians attributed an astral body and a fictitious birth to Christ. Their sect, which lasted until the fifth century, wrongly claimed the authority of Bardesanes, born in Edessa in 154 and dead in 222.
9) The Manichaeans, with their dualistic theory of Good, which is Spirit, and Evil, which is Matter, were compelled to deny Christ a body. In order, however, to preserve the reality of the Passion, they split Jesus in two, distinguishing between a suffering Jesus and an impassible Jesus.
10) The Paulicians of Armenia denied the reality of Christ’s birth. They imagined that the “other one,” whom John’s disciples asked Jesus whether they should await (Lc. 7, 20), was an angel who would actually come and undergo the Passion. For this reason they worshipped not the Cross, but the Gospel.
11) The Slavonic 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 really lived and died.
13) Since such an error lends itself to the oddities of the imagination and makes good use of the boundless credulity of simple people, Docetism has not exhausted the range of its fantasies and, in the theosophical or spiritualist circles of our own time, vies with the most tangled extravagances of ancient gnosis.