The Pauline Protestantism of the first two centuries of the Church had not exhausted itself in Valentinianism. The fanatics who held free justification and emancipation from the Law were ready to run to greater lengths than Marcion, Valentine, or even Marcus, was prepared to go.
Men of ability and enthusiasm rose and preached, and galvanized the latent Paulinian Gnosticism into temporary life and popularity, and then disappeared; the great wave of natural common‐sense against which they battled returned and overwhelmed their disciples, till another heresiarch arose, made another effort to establish permanently a religion without morality, again to fail before the loudly‐expressed disgust of mankind, and the stolid conviction inherent in human nature that pure morals and pure religion are and must be indissolubly united.
Carpocrates was one of these revivalists. Everything except faith, all good works, all exterior observances, all respect for human laws, were indifferent, worse than indifferent, to the Christian: these exhibited, where found, an entanglement of the soul in the web woven for it by the God of this world, of the Jews, of the Law. The body was of the earth, the soul of heaven. Here, again, Carpocrates followed and distorted the teaching of St. Paul; the body was under the Law, the soul was free. Whatsoever was done in the body did not affect the soul. “It is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.”(502)
“All depends upon faith and love,” said Carpocrates; “externals are altogether matters of indifference. He who ascribes moral worth to these makes himself their slave, subjects himself to those spirits of the world from whom all religious and political ordinances have proceeded; he cannot, after death, pass out of the sphere of the metempsychosis. But he who can abandon himself to every lust without being affected by any, who can thus bid defiance to the laws of those earthly spirits, will after death rise to the unity of that Original One, with whom he has, by uniting himself, freed himself, even in this present life, from all fetters.”(503)
Epiphanes, the son of Carpocrates, a youth of remarkable ability, who died young, exhausted by the excesses to which his solifidianism exposed him, wrote a work on Justification by Faith, in which he said: