THE "LERNAEAN HYDRA" AND THE PROBLEM OF THE ORIGIN OF GNOSTICISM

In the second century A.D. the Mediterranean world underwent a profound change in ethical attitude towards the cosmos and human society, and the change is especially well reflected in one of the most controversial intellectual movement of the Late Antiquity, the so-called Gnostic tradition. Although attempts to draw a coherent picture of Gnosis which have been undertaken so far have yielded no satisfactory result, the basic patterns of thought, commonly labeled as 'Gnostic', are reasonably well known. Taken in the broadest sense of the word, Gnosticism is a specific world attitude. In the framework of Judeo-Christian world-view the Gnostics contemplated the world affairs from a global prospective, put them in the context of world history and developed a specific form of eschatology. In this paper (which is a revised Russian translation of the English original, published in Sigma XO Lambda H 2.1 (2008) 125-132) the author undertakes to interpret select historical evidence, which can throw the light upon the development of this quite diverse and controversial tradition, including a passage from the Stromateis of Clement of Alexandria (Strom. III 29, 1-2 St), which, surprisingly enough, was not previously treated in this context.