23. Augustine

The first writer to testify to the first purely Christian mysticism was St. Augustine, who concerns us today. In him we have the first Christian mysticism before us. Thus the riddle that the mysteries of the ancients underlie primitive Christianity will appear most clearly to us. The Gnostics were Christian mystics of the first century. I said that these Gnostics taught the ancient theosophical teachings of the Logos, of the Logos embodied in matter, and that they spread what they had gained from the ancient Mysteries. I said that they assumed that man can only ascend to a real vision through the various degrees of knowledge - they recognized a spiritualized Christ as their own - that they made use of all the means of the Christian mind in order to carry over as many teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as possible into those teachings which you can still guess from the Gospels today. There were also various sects among the Gnostics. Those teachings are essentially nothing more than ancient mysticism translated into popular form. If we think of this spirit [of the old teaching poured into new forms], then we have what the Gnostics represented. They were also the ones who said that the best cannot be entrusted to Scripture, but that the highest levels can only be transmitted from personality to personality.