Simon Magus (
Greek
Σίμων ὁ μάγος), also known as
Simon the Sorcerer
and
Simon of Gitta, was a
Samaritan proto-Gnostic
and traditional founder of the
Simonians in the
first century A.D. His only
Biblical reference is in and prominently in several
apocryphal and heresiological
accounts of
early Christian
writers, some of whom regarded him as the source of all
heresies, particularly
St. Justin who wrote about Simon about one
hundred years after his life.
Simon Magus has been portrayed as both student and teacher of
Dositheus, with followers who
revered him as the
Great Power of God. There were later
accusations by Christians that he was a
demon
in human form, and he was specifically said to possess the ability
to
levitate and fly at will.
The fantastic stories of Simon the Sorcerer persisted into the
Middle Ages, becoming a possible
inspiration for the
Faustbuch, and
Goethe's Faust.
Sources
Almost all of the surviving sources for the life and thought of
Simon Magus are contained in works from ancient
Christian writers: in the
Acts of the Apostles, in
patristic works (
Irenaeus,
Justin Martyr,
Hippolytus of Rome,
Epiphanius of Salamis), and in the
apocryphal Acts of Peter, early
Clementine literature, and the
Epistle of the
Apostles.
There are small fragments of a work written by him (or by one of
his later followers), the
Apophasis Megale, or
Great Declaration. He is also supposed to have written
several treatises, two of which bear the titles
The Four
Quarters of the World and
The Sermons of the Refuter,
but these are lost to us.
Josephus mentions a magician named Simon in
his writings as being involved with the procurator Felix, King
Agrippa II and his sister Drusilla, where
Felix has Simon convince Drusilla to marry him instead of the man
she was engaged to. Some scholars have considered the two to be
identical, although this is not generally accepted, as the Simon of
Josephus is a Jew rather than a Samaritan. Note, however, that
Samaritans considered themselves Jewish, as well as did much of the
ancient world. According to most sources, secular leaders of Judea
at this time included descendants of those proselytized by the
forced conversions during the reign of the
Maccabees, and would not have been as likely to
consider Samaritans non-Jewish, as the
Idumean conversions took place at the same time that
the Maccabees conquered Samaria. This would likely have affected
Josephus' opinion that a Samaritan was properly referred to as a
Jew.
Life
Acts of the Apostles
The different sources for information on Simon contain quite
different pictures of him, so much so that it has been questioned
whether they all refer to the same person. Assuming all references
are to the same person, as some (but by no means all) of the
Church fathers did, the earliest
reference to him is the
canonical
Acts of the Apostles, verses .
But there was a certain man, called Simon, which
beforetime in the same city used sorcery, and bewitched the people
of Samaria, giving out that himself was some great one: To whom
they all gave heed, from the least to the greatest, saying, This
man is the Great Power of God.
And to him they had regard, because that of long time
he had bewitched them with sorceries.
Acts tells of a person named
Simon Magus practicing magic in the city of Sebaste in Samaria
, being
(supposedly) converted to Christianity by Philip the Evangelist, but then trying
to offer money to the Apostles in
exchange for miraculous abilities, specifically the power of
laying on of hands. The
sin of
simony, or paying for position and
influence in the church, is named for Simon. Verse 6.19 of the
Apostolic Constitutions also
accuses him of
antinomianism.
Clementine Literature
The
Clementine
Recognitions and Homilies give an account of
Simon Magus and some of his teachings in regards to the Simonians.
They are of uncertain date and authorship, and seem to have been
worked over by several hands in the interest of diverse forms of
belief.
Simon was a Samaritan, and a native of Gitta. The name of his
father was Antonius, that of his mother Rachel.
He studied Greek literature in Alexandria
, and, having in addition to this great power in
magic, became so ambitious that he wished to be considered a
highest power, higher even than the God who created the
world. And sometimes he "darkly hinted" that he himself was
Christ, calling himself the Standing One.
Which name he used to indicate that he would stand for ever, and
had no cause in him for bodily decay. He did not believe that the
God who created the world was the highest, nor that the dead would
rise.
He
denied Jerusalem
, and introduced Mount Gerizim
in its stead. In place of the Christ of the
Christians he proclaimed himself; and the Law he allegorized in
accordance with his own preconceptions. He did indeed preach
righteousness and judgment to come: but this was merely a bait for
the unwary.
There was one
John the Baptist, who
was the forerunner of
Jesus in accordance with
the law of parity; and as Jesus had twelve Apostles, bearing the
number of the twelve solar months, so had he thirty leading men,
making up the monthly tale of the moon. One of these thirty leading
men was a woman called Helen, and the first and most esteemed by
John was Simon.
But on the death of John he was away
in Egypt
for the
practice of magic, and one Dositheus, by spreading a false report
of Simon's death, succeeded in installing himself as head of the
sect. Simon on coming back thought it better to dissemble,
and, pretending friendship for Dositheus, accepted the second
place. Soon, however, he began to hint to the thirty that Dositheus
was not as well acquainted as he might be with the doctrines of the
school.
Dositheus, when he perceived that Simon was
depreciating him, fearing lest his reputation among men might be
obscured (for he himself was supposed to be the Standing One),
moved with rage, when they met as usual at the school, seized a
rod, and began to beat Simon; but suddenly the rod seemed to pass
through his body, as if it had been smoke.
On which Dositheus, being astonished, says to him,
‘Tell me if thou art the Standing One, that I may adore thee.’ And
when Simon answered that he was, then Dositheus, perceiving that he
himself was not the Standing One, fell down and worshipped him, and
gave up his own place as chief to Simon, ordering all the rank of
thirty men to obey him; himself taking the inferior place which
Simon formerly occupied.
Not long after this he died.
The encounter between both Dositheus and Simon Magus was the
beginnings of the sect of Simonians. The narrative goes on to say
that Simon, having fallen in love with Helen, took her about with
him, saying that she had come down into the world from the highest
heavens, and was his mistress, inasmuch as she was
Sophia, the Mother of All. It was for her
sake, he said, that the Greeks and Barbarians fought the
Trojan War, deluding themselves with an image of
truth, for the real being was then present with the First God. By
such specious allegories and
Greek myths
Simon deceived many, while at the same time he astounded them by
his magic. A description is given of how he made a
familiar spirit for himself by conjuring the
soul out of a boy and keeping his image in his bedroom, and many
instances of his feats of magic are given.
Myth of Simon and Helen
Justin Martyr (in his
Apologies, and in a lost work
against heresies, which Irenaeus used as his main source) and
Irenaeus (
Adversus
Haereses) are the first to recount the myth of Simon and
Helen, which became the center of Simonian doctrine. Epiphanius
also makes Simon speak in the first person in several places in his
Panarion, and the inference is
that he is quoting from a version of it, though perhaps not
verbatim. Here, Helen is given different origins:
In the beginning God had his first thought, his
Ennoia,
which was female, and that thought was to create the angels. The
First Thought then descended into the lower regions and created the
angels. But the angels rebelled against her out of jealousy and
created the world as her prison, imprisoning her in a female body.
Thereafter, she was reincarnated many times, each time being
shamed.
Her many reincarnations included Helen of Troy; among others, and she finally was
reincarnated as Helen, a slave and prostitute in the Phoenician
city of Tyre
. God
then descended in the form of Simon Magus, to rescue his
Ennoia, and to confer salvation upon men through knowledge
of himself.
"And on her account," he says, "did I come down; for
this is that which is written in the Gospel 'the lost sheep'."
For as the angels were mismanaging the world, owing to their
individual lust for rule, he had come to set things straight, and
had descended under a changed form, likening himself to the
Principalities and Powers through whom he passed, so that among men
he appeared as a man, though he was not a man, and was thought to
have suffered in Judaea, though he had not suffered.
"But in each heaven I changed my form," says he, "in
accordance with the form of those who were in each heaven, that I
might escape the notice of my angelic powers and come down to the
Thought, who is none other than her who is also called Prunikos and
Holy Ghost, through whom I created the angels, while the angels
created the world and men."
But the prophets had delivered their prophecies under the
inspiration of the world-creating angels: wherefore those who had
their hope in him and in Helen minded them no more, and, as being
free, did what they pleased; for men were saved according to his
grace, but not according to just works. For works were not just by
nature, but only by convention, in accordance with the enactments
of the world-creating angels, who by precepts of this kind sought
to bring men into slavery. Wherefore he promised that the world
should be dissolved, and that those who were his should be freed
from the dominion of the world-creators.
Upon the story of "the lost sheep," Hippolytus (in his
Philosophumena) comments as follows.
But the liar was enamoured of this wench, whose name
was Helen, and had bought her and had her to wife, and it was out
of respect for his disciples that he invented this
fairy-tale.
Simoni Deo Sancto
Justin and
Irenaeus also record several other pieces of information: After
being cast out by the Apostles he came to Rome
where,
having joined to himself a profligate woman of the name of Helen,
he gave out that it was he who appeared among the Jews as the Son,
in Samaria as the Father and among other nations as the Holy
Spirit. He performed such miracles by magic acts during the
reign of
Claudius that he was regarded as a
god and honored with a statue on the island in the Tiber which the
two bridges cross, with the inscription
Simoni Deo Sancto,
"To Simon the Holy God". However, in the 1500s, a statue was
unearthed on the island in question, inscribed to
Semo Sancus, a
Sabine
deity, leading most scholars to believe that Justin Martyr confused
Semoni Sancus with Simon.
Simonians
Hippolytus gives a much more doctrinally detailed account of
Simonianism, including a system of
divine emanations and interpretations of
the Old Testament, with extensive quotations
from the
Apophasis
Megale. Some believe that Hippolytus' account is of a
later, more developed form of Simonianism, and that the original
doctrines of the group were simpler, close to the account given by
Justin Martyr and Irenaeus (this account however is also included
in Hippolytus' work).
Hippolytus says the
free love doctrine was
held by them in its purest form, and speaks in language similar to
that of Irenaeus about the variety of magic arts practiced by the
Simonians, and also of their having images of Simon and Helen under
the forms of
Zeus and
Athena. But he also adds, "if any one, on seeing the
images either of Simon or Helen, shall call them by those names, he
is cast out, as showing ignorance of the mysteries."
Epiphanius writes that there were some Simonians still in existence
in his day (c. A.D. 367), but he speaks of them as almost extinct.
Gitta, he says, had sunk from a town phanius into a village.
Epiphanius further charges Simon with having tried to wrest the
words of
St. Paul about the armour of God
(Ephesians 6:14-16) into agreement with his own identification of
the
Ennoia with Athena. He tells us also that he gave
barbaric names to the "principalities and powers," and that he was
the beginning of the Gnostics. The Law, according to him, was not
of God, but of "the sinister power." The same was the case with the
prophets, and it was death to believe in the
Old Testament.
Death
The
apocryphal Acts of Peter gives a legendary tale of
Simon Magus' death.
Simon is performing magic in the Forum
, and in
order to prove himself to be a god, he levitates up into the air
above the Forum. The apostle
Peter prays to God to stop his flying, and he
stops mid-air and falls into a place called the
Sacra Via
(meaning, Holy Way), breaking his legs "in three parts". The
previously non-hostile crowd then stones him.
Now gravely injured,
he had some people carry him on a bed at night from Rome to
Ariccia
, and was
brought from there to Terracina
to a person named Castor, who on accusations of
sorcery was banished from Rome. The Acts then continue that
he died "while being sorely cut by two physicians".
Another apocryphal document, the
Acts of Peter and Paul gives a
slightly different version of the above incident, which was shown
in the context of a debate in front of the Emperor
Nero. In this version,
Paul
the Apostle is present along with Peter, Simon levitates from a
high wooden tower made upon his request, and dies "divided into
four parts" due to the fall. Peter and Paul were then put in prison
by Nero while ordering Simon's body be kept carefully for three
days (thinking he would
rise
again).
Cyril of Jerusalem (346 CE) in
the sixth of his Catechetical Lectures prefaces his history of the
Manichaeans by a brief account of
earlier heresies: Simon Magus, he says, had given out that he was
going to be translated to heaven, and was actually careening
through the air in a chariot drawn by demons when Peter and Paul
knelt down and prayed, and their prayers brought him to earth a
mangled corpse.
The church
of Santa
Francesca Romana
claims to have been built on the spot in question
(thus claiming that Simon Magus could indeed fly). Within
the Church is a dented slab of marble that purports to bear the
imprints of the knees of Peter and Paul during their prayer.
Hippolytus gives a very different version of Simon's death. Reduced
to despair, he says, by the curse laid upon him by Peter, he
embarked on the career that has been described:
Until he came to Rome also and fell foul of the
Apostles.
Peter withstood him on many occasions.
At last he came [...] and began to teach sitting under
a plane tree.
When he was on the point of being shown up, he said, in
order to gain time, that if he were buried alive he would rise
again on the third day.
So he bade that a tomb should be dug by his disciples
and that he should be buried in it.
Now they did what they were ordered, but he remained
there until now: for he was not the Christ.
Radical criticism
According to
radical critic Hermann
Detering, Simon Magus may be a
proxy for
Paul of
Tarsus, with Paul originally been detested by the church, and
the name changed when Paul was rehabilitated by virtue of
forged Epistles
correcting the genuine ones.
Notably, Simon Magus is sometimes described in apocryphal legends
in terms that would fit Paul, most significantly in the previously
mentioned
Clementine
Recognitions and Homilies. It is contended
that the common source of these documents may be as early as the
1st century, and must have consisted in a polemic against Paul,
emanating from the Jewish side of Christianity. Paul being thus
identified with Simon, it was argued that Simon's visit to Rome had
no other basis than Paul's presence there, and, further, that the
tradition of Peter's residence in Rome rests on the assumed
necessity of his resisting the arch-enemy of Judaism there as
elsewhere. Thus the idea of Peter at Rome really originated with
the
Ebionites, but it was afterwards taken
up by the Catholic Church, and then Paul was associated with Peter
in opposition to Simon, who had originally been himself.
The enmity between Peter and Simon is clearly shown. Simon’s
magical powers are juxtaposed with Peter’s powers in order to
express Peter’s authority over Simon through the power of prayer;
and in the 17th
Homily, the identification of Paul with
Simon Magus is effected. Simon is there made to maintain that he
has a better knowledge of the mind of Jesus than the disciples, who
had seen and conversed with Him in person. His reason for this
strange assertion is that visions are superior to waking reality,
as divine is superior to human. Peter has much to say in reply to
this, but the passage which mainly concerns us is as follows:
But can any one be educated for teaching by
vision?
And if you shall say, "It is possible," why did the
Teacher remain and converse with waking men for a whole
year?
And how can we believe you even as to the fact that he
appeared to you?
And how can he have appeared to you seeing that your
sentiments are opposed to his teaching?
But if you were seen and taught by him for a single
hour, and so became an apostle, then preach his words, expound his
meaning, love his apostles, fight not with me who had converse with
him.
For it is against a solid rock, the foundation-stone of
the Church, that you have opposed yourself in opposing
me.
If you were not an adversary, you would not be
slandering me and reviling the preaching that is given through me,
in order that, as I heard myself in person from the Lord, when I
speak I may not be believed, as though forsooth it were I who was
condemned and I who was reprobate.
Or, if you call me condemned, you are accusing God who
revealed the Christ to me, and are inveighing against Him who
called me blessed on the ground of the revelation.
But if indeed you truly wish to work along with the
truth, learn first from us what we learnt from Him, and when you
have become a disciple of truth, become our
fellow-workman.
Here we have the advantage, rare in ecclesiastical history, of
hearing the other side. The above is unmistakably the voice of
those early Christians who hated Paul, or at all events an echo of
that voice. But how late an echo it would be hazardous to
decide.
There are other features in the portrait which remind us strongly
of
Marcion. For the first thing which we
learn from the
Homilies about Simon's opinions is that he
denied that God was just. By "God" he meant the Creator. But he
undertakes to prove from Scripture that there is a higher God, who
really possesses the perfections which are falsely ascribed to the
lower. On these grounds Peter complains that, when he was setting
out for the Gentiles to convert them from their worship of
many
gods upon earth, the Evil Power had sent Simon before him to
make them believe that there were
many gods in
heaven.
The
Catholic Encyclopedia, on the other hand, argues for a
very late date to be assigned to the Clementines. The great pagan
antagonist of the 3rd century was the
Neo-Platonic philosopher,
Porphyry, and his disciple
Iamblichus was the chief restorer and defender of
the old gods. The doctrines and practices repelled are the
theurgy and magic,
astrology and mantic, miracles and claims to union
with the Divinity, which characterized the Neo-Platonism of 320-30.
Consequently, Simon and his disciples may represent not Paul or
Marcion, but Iamblichus.
See also
References
- http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13797b.htm Catholic
Encyclopedia article on Simon Magus
- http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08580c.htm Catholic
Encyclopedia article on St. Justin Martyr
- Sometimes with Mug
Ruith.
- "Surely few admirers of Marlowe's and Goethe's plays have an
inkling that their hero is the descendant of a gnostic sectary, and
that the beautiful Helen called up by his art was once the fallen
Thought of God through whose raising mankind was to be saved." See
also:
- Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews xx. 7,
§ 2
- Hilgenfeld, Ketzergeschichte, p. 170; Albert, Die
Ersten Fünfzehn Jahre der Christlichen Kirche, p. 114,
Münster, 1900; Waitz, in Zeitschrift für Neutestamentliche
Wissenschaft, v. 128
- ANF07. Fathers of the Third and Fourth Centuries:
Lactantius, Venantius, Asterius, Victorinus, Dionysius, Apostolic
Teaching and Constitutions, Homily | Christian Classics Ethereal
Library
- Clementine Homilies, ii. 23
- Clementine Recognitions, ii. 11
- Epiphanius, Panarion, 58 A
- Epiphanius, Panarion, 56 C, D
- Hippolytus, Refutation of all Heresies,
6, 19
- The Acts of Peter
- CHURCH FATHERS: The Acts of Peter and Paul
- Hippolytus, Refutation of all Heresies,
6, 15
- Hermann Detering, The Dutch Radical Approach to the
Pauline Epistles
- See also: F C Baur, A. Hilgenfeld, Hermann
Detering ("The Falsified Paul: Early Christianity in the Twilight"
- 1995 (translated into English in 2003), and J.R.Porter, The Lost
Bible, pg 230.
- http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf08.vi.iii.v.xl.html
- xvii. 5, 14
- ii. 14
- iii. so, 38
- e.g. iii. 3, 9, 59
- Chapman, John. "Clementines." The Catholic
Encyclopedia. Vol. 4. New York: Robert Appleton Company,
1908.
Sources
- Jewish Encyclopedia: Simon Magus
- Catholic Encyclopedia: Simon Magus
- Simon Magus in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
- David R. Cartlidge, The Fall and Rise of Simon Magus,
Bible Review, Vol 21, No. 4, Fall 2005, Pages 24-36.
- Francis Legge, Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity, From
330 B.C. to 330 A.D. (1914), reprinted in two volumes bound as
one, University Books New York, 1964. LC Catalog 64-24125.
- G. R.
S. Mead,
Simon Magus
- Ported, J.R., The Lost Bible
- Detering, H., The Falsified Paul (1995/2003)
Wikis
Quiz
Map
Search