CARPOCRATES  , a Gnostic of the 2nd

century, about whose life and opinions comparatively little is known . He is said to have been a native of Alexandria and by birth a Jew . His family, however, seem to have been converted to Christianity . With Epiphanes, his son, he was the leader of a philosophic school basing its theories mainly upon Platonism, and striving to amalgamate Plato's Republic with the Christian ideal of human brotherhood . The image of Jesus was crowned along with those of Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle . Carpocrates made especial use of the doctrines of reminiscence and pre-existence of souls . He regarded the world as formed by inferior spirits who are out of harmony with the supreme unity, knowledge of which is the true Gnosis . The souls which remember their pre-existing state can attain to this contemplation of unity, and thereby rise superior to all the ordinary doctrines of religion or life . Jesus is but a man in whom this reminiscence is unusually strong, and who has consequently attained to unusual spiritual excellence and power . To the Gnostic the things of the world are worthless; they are to him matters of indifference . From this position it easily followed that actions, being merely external, were morally indifferent, and that the true Gnostic should abandon himself to every lust with perfect indifference . The express declaration of these antinomian principles is said to have been given by Epiphanes .

The notorious licentiousness of the

sect was the carrying out of their theory into practice .