(^786) EPILOGUE
HAD ALEXANDRIA TRIUMPHED
There followed centuries of silence. Gnostic texts were found beginning in
the Italian renaissance, but only in the twentieth century did we come upon
the equivalent of a Dead Sea Scrolls resurrection with the great find near the
town of Nag Hammadi in Egypt, which afforded us texts to comprehend, for
the first time, the literatures and thought of the gnostics. Jorge Luis Borges
points out that it might not have been this way had history been different, fa-
voring a gnostic majority. In an early essay, Borges spoke about the Alexan-
drian gnostic Basilides, whose work we still have only in fragmentary and
corrupt form as bequeathed to us by his condemners. In "A Defense of
Basilides the False" Borges writes, "Had Alexandria triumphed and not
Rome, the extravagant and muddled stories that I have summarized here
would be coherent, majestic, and perfectly ordinary." But Alexandria did not
triumph. A philosopher of the knowledge of nonbeing and the abyss,
Basilides was one of the most fascinating of the gnostic thinkers, but he is
preserved only in the writings of his opponents, and their summaries contra-
dict each other on significant points. That his works were not included in the
Nag Hammadi library or in other finds is lamentable. Were we to uncover a
major original text, on the basis of existing evidence, we would have the writ-
ings of an essential ancient philosopher. There is a strange fact of survival.
We have abundant texts by two neoplatonist philosophers from Alexan-
dria—Philo, a Jew, and Plotinos, a pagan—yet no original text of their fellow
Alexandrian philosopher Basilides. This strongly implies that to Christian
apologists, the gnostics were held to be more dangerous than the Jews or the
classical philosophers. So the gnostic writings of their greatest rival had to
be destroyed. It is some comfort that at least their refutations in the works of
Christians fathers, such as Irenaeus and Augustine, do exist and inform, if
not satisfy, us.
A RESURFACING OF GNOSTIC COMMUNITIES
With the iconoclastic rage unleashed by Christian orthodoxy in Alexandria,
Athens, Rome, and the Eastern Roman Empire against classical antiquity and
the gnostic heresy, by the middle of the fifth century even the widespread
gnostics began to fade. Western culture moved into its darkest centuries. Yet
much light still shone at the eastern and western edges of Europe, in Byzantium
elliott
(Elliott)
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