CARPOCRATIANS

Heretics who sprang up in the second century; followers of Carpocrates, of the island of Cephalenia, according to Epiphanius, or, according to Theodoret and Clemens Alex and rin us, of the city of Alexandria. This Carpocrates was a man of the worst morals, and addicted to magic. Eusebius says expre ly, he was the father of the heresy of the Gnostics; and it is true that all the infamous things imputed to the Gnostics are ascribed likewise to the Carpocratians. It is sufficient to mention two of their principles: the one is, a community of wives; the other, that a man cannot arrive at perfection, nor deliver himself from the power of the princes of this world, as they expre ed it, without having pa ed through all sorts of criminal actions; laying it down for a maxim, that there is no action bad in itself, but only from the opinion of men. This induced them to establish a new kind of metempsychosis, that those who have not pa ed through all sorts of actions in the first life, may do it in a second, and, if that be not sufficient, in a third, and so on, till they have discharged this strange obligation. Accordingly, they are charged with committing the most infamous things in their Agapæ, or love-feasts. As to their theology, they attributed the creation of the world to angels; they said that Jesus Christ was born of Joseph and Mary in a manner like other men; that his soul alone was received into heaven, his body remaining on the earth; and, accordingly, they rejected the resurrection of the body. They marked their disciples at the bottom of the right ear with a hot iron, or with a razor. They had images of Jesus Christ as well in painting as in sculpture, which they said were made by Pilate; they kept them in a little box or chest. They had likewise the images of Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and other philosophers. They put crowns on all these images, and paid them the same superstitious honours which the Pagans did to their idols, adoring them, and offering sacrifice to them. A woman of this sect, named Mar cell in a, came to Rome, in the pontificate of Anicetus, where she made a great many proselytes. She worshipped the images of Jesus Christ, Paul, Homer, and Pythagoras, and offered incense to them. Carpocrates had a son, named Epiphanes, who, by means of the Platonic philosophy, gave a greater extent to the fabulous opinions of the Carpocratians. He died at seventeen years of age, but in that short time had acquired so great a reputation among the disciples of his father, that, after his death, he was revered by them as a god, insomuch that they built a temple to him in the island of Cephalenia, and the Cephalenians, every first day of the month, solemnized the feast of his apotheosis, offering sacrifices to him, and singing hymns to his honour. Epiphanius relates of himself, that in his youth he accidentally fell into company with some women of this sect, who revealed to him the most horrible secrets of the Carpocratians. They were armed with beauty sufficient to make an impre ion on a person of his age; but, by the grace of God, he says, he escaped the snare which the devil had laid for him. (See Gnostics .)— Brouqhton.