Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [334]
So orthodox criticism of the Gnostics’ reluctance to martyrdom is but one side of thebattle. One can assume that the Gnostic and Docetic Christians underwent martyrdom and even sometimes sought it out, though the phenomenon was rare for both the Orthodox and Gnostics. It is rather the case that the orthodox were not willing to grant their opponents’ asceticism true virtue nor their martyrdom true steadfastness.31
For the Gnostics, physical seeing (the disciples physically saw Christ) counted little; only symbolic spiritual vision (through visions brought on by ascetic practice) revealed the truth of his message. We have seen this attitude before in the Gospel of Thomas. The Gnostics observed that many who witnessed Jesus in his life remained totally blind to the significance of Jesus’ mission, death, and resurrection. It was not those who literally carried on the written tradition that counted, but those who truly understood the meaning of the events, especially from visionary insight.
Ignatius of Antioch had already argued against his docetist opponents that one does not die for a ghost or phantom (Ign. Smyrn. 6) but rather for the right to be resurrected in the body and gain the full compensation for one’s sacrifice. This understands resurrection in exactly the way that the Jewish sectarians who promulgated it had originally wanted. But it begins the characterization of Gnostics as those who would refuse to be martyred at all. But most people, both Orthodox and Gnostic, do not evince Ignatius’ willingness to become a martyr, even ignoring chances to avoid martyrdom.
Basilides (fl. ca. 130-160 CE), a teacher, companion, and successor to Valentinus, illustrates the other side of the relationship between bodily resurrection and martyrdom. He explicitly used Platonism to interpret resurrection. For him salvation only belonged to the soul, not the body at all. As Frend says, “His is the earliest known attempt by a Christian to reconcile the Jewish requirement of righteous suffering as an atoning sacrifice with the Platonic view of providence.”32 The result is a major attack on the value of martyrdom. He believed that humanity was originally immortal, as did Valentinus. Death is the result of the demiurge who created the material world and imprisoned our immortal souls in matter.
The saving knowledge (gnōsis) of the redeemed is that humans are truly beyond the world, divorced from flesh, and free from its infection. Salvation was the abolition of death, not its acceptance through martyrdom. In his commentary on 1 Peter, Basilides states that all who suffer, suffer on account of sin, not merely those who committed grave offenses like adulterers and murderers. This did not mean that the sufferer led an evil life-that would be blaming the victim-rather that material life itself was an evil that needed atonement.
This is reminiscent of Plato’s Republic, Book 2: “If our commonwealth is to be well-ordered, we must fight to the last against any member of it being suffered to speak of the divine, which is good, being responsible for evil.” The true Gnostic then needs no martyrdom because the Gnostic has already triumphed over the devil in coming to the saving knowledge (the gnōsis).33 The “orthodox” therefore used their greater willingness to be martyred as a proof of the truth of their doctrine while the other side used their understanding of the primacy of the human soul to justify their greater reticence to do so. Some of the orthodox, including Ignatius himself, seemed to welcome martyrdom, even where prudence would have dictated an honorable way to avoid it.34 Some of the Gnostics were probably caught in unavoidable events and were martyred as well. But both sides adopted the characterization that they were defending or attacking the doctrine of bodily resurrection and lived by the consequences. The orthodox were training converts with high commitment and highly defined communal boundaries.