Quotes:Menander

Zirkoff, Boris

Menander. Early Gnostic teacher, regarding whom very little is known. G. R. S. Mead, an authority on the subject of Gnosticism, writes as follows:

“Of the line of descent of the Simonian school we have but the scantiest information; the history of the earliest Gnostics is plunged in as great obscurity as the rest of the origins. One of the followers of Simon, however, is singled out by Justin for especial mention 582 because of his having led ‘many’ away, even as Marcion was gaining an enormous following in his own time. This teacher was Menander, a native of the Samaritan town Capparatea. The notice in Justin shows us that Menander was a man of a past generation, and that he was especially famous because of his numerous following. We know that the dates of this period are exceedingly obscure even for Justin, our earliest authority. For instance, writing about 141 a.d., he says that Jesus lived 150 years before his time; that is to say that even in Samaria the epoch was quite legendary. Hence his Simon and Menander dates are equally vague; Menander may have lived a generation or four generations before Justin’s time.

“The centre of activity of Menander was at Antioch, one of the most important commercial and literary cities of the Graeco-Roman world, on the highway of communication between East and West. He seems to have handed on the general outlines of the Simonian Gnosis, especially insisting on the distinction between the God over all and the creation power or powers, the forces of nature. Wisdom, he taught, was to be attained by the practical discipline of transcendental magic; that is to say, the Gnosis was not to be attained by mere faith, but by definite endeavour and conscious striving along the path of cosmological and psychological science. Menander professed to teach a knowledge of the powers of nature, and the way whereby they could be subjected to the purified human will; he is also said to have claimed to be the Saviour sent down by the higher powers of the spiritual world to teach men the sacred knowledge whereby they could free themselves from the dominion of the lower ‘angels.’ The neophyte on receiving ‘baptism,’ that is to say, on reaching a certain state of interior purification or enlightenment, was said to ‘rise from the dead’; thereafter, he ‘never grew old and became immortal,’ that is to say, he obtained possession of the unbroken consciousness of his spiritual ego. Menander was especially opposed to the materialistic doctrine of the resurrection of the body, and this was made a special ground of complaint against him by the Patristic writers of the subsequent centuries.

“The followers of Menander were called Menandrists, and we can only regret that no record has been left of them and their writings. As they seem to have been centralized at Antioch, seeing that tradition assigns the founding of the Church of Antioch to Paul, and assigns to it Peter as its first bishop, seeing again that the ‘withstanding to the face’ incident is placed by the Acts’ tradition in the same city, it cannot but be that their writings would have thrown some light on the obscure origins of dogmatic Christianity.” (Lucijer, London, Vol. XIX, February, 1897, pp. 483-85.)

Source: Boris de Zirkoff, «H. P. Blavatsky Collected Writings», vol. 11, pp. 581-582