BARDESANES, or Bar Deisan, a celebrated Gnostic, was a native of Edessa in Mesopotamia, and appears tc have flourished during the reign of Marcus Aurelius. Very little is known of his life. He is said to have held a disputation with Apollonius, a philosopher in the train of Lucius Verus, and he is known to have written against the Marcionite and other heresies. There is considerable doubt whether he was ever a disciple of Valentinus, but it is acknowledged that he never ceased to belong to the Christian church. However seriously his principles, if rigidly interpreted, might conflict with the doctrines of Christianity, he did not regard himself as opposed to that-faith, and he was generally considered one of its best defenders. He was especially famed for his hymns, fragments of which are still extant. Of his other works there seems to remain only a treatise On Fate, a portion of which was preserved by Eusebius {Prep. Evan., vi. 10), while the whole has been printed from a Syriac MS. with English translation by Cureton {Spicilegium, Syriacum, Lond. 1855). The system of Bardesanes, so far as it can be gathered from the scanty notices of other writers, had many points in common with that of Valentinus, but show’s to an almost greater extent the influence of Oriental mysticism and imagery. He begins, as do all the other Gnostics, with postulating the existence of the Unknown God or Father, the ground of all the forms of being. Alongside of God, and co-existing with Him,—in fact, His necessary shadow,—is vague, unformed, eternal, and uncreated Matter. From this dualism springs the possibility of evil in the universe. Evil is not, indeed, correlative and equally necessary with God, but arises from matter. The Eternal Father, through union with His everlastingly ...