This part of the system only accounted for physical evil, and such moral evils as oppression and violence: but moral evil, as we commonly understand it, he treated in quite a different way; i. e. by denying that it was evil at all; for he asserted that it was so only through the tyrannical imposition of the angels. Nay, he even went so far as to assert that he himself was God, come down from above to rescue men from their thraldom by teaching them the truth of things; and thus to restore them to their rightful liberty, by showing them that they might do whatever they listed, and indeed ought to do so to vindicate his authority, which had been usurped by the angels. A more plausible scheme of blasphemy and licentiousness could scarcely have been concocted for the philosophizing Jew, or the heathen who had looked into Judaism merely as a rival system of barbarian philosophy. It recognised all the facts of the Old Testament; but it totally neutralized them, and destroyed altogether the religion with which they would have appeared to be inseparably blended.
When Christianity began to spread, and Jesus was believed on by multitudes, and reverenced by many who did not receive him, it became politic to recognise the Gospel in the same manner in which the Law had been recognised. Accordingly, the external facts of the life of Jesus were not disputed, but a new spirit was given to them. Jesus was a manifestation of the Supreme God, as Simon was; come upon the same errand, to destroy the Jewish law; and thence an object of hatred to the Jews, who triumphed so far as to crucify the external body in which he appeared, but had no power over him who had inhabited it. Here there was just enough of truth to impose upon a person brought up to believe the Gospel without really loving it, and falsehood enough altogether to prevent its reception.
The sketch which I have now traced is the nucleus of Gnosticism. Simon's dignifying his paramour with the title of the Thought of the First Cause, and his figment of her having been in a perpetual state of transmigration, was no doubt an after thought to cover the grossness which prying minds might fancy in the great empiric; an end which might not be sufficiently accomplished by his doctrine that all actions were indifferent.