Gnostics

(nos'tiks.) [FromGr. gnostikos, an adept in knowledge.] (Eccl. Hist.) A name significative of several bodies of theologians in the early Christian Church; although the term is more especially applied to a sect of philosophers that arose in the dawn of Christianity, and who pretended they alone had a true knowledge of the Christian religion. They formed for themselves a system of theology, in accordance with the philosophical doctrines of Plato and Pythagoras, and imagined they discovered deeper mysteries in the Scripture than were perceived by those whom they deemed as simple and ignorant. They held that all natures, intellectual and material, are derived by succe ive emanations from the Deity. As time rolled on, the name came to designate sectaries of several descriptions, but who all coincided in certain tenets and opinions; and the doctrine of belief which seemed most particularly to distinguish them was the existence of two first principles, or deities, the one the originator of good, and the other of evil. The religious system of the Gnostics became extinguished about the 5th cent. [s. 413]