"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him: and without him was made nothing that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it....And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we saw his glory, the glory as it were of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth" (John 1:1-5, 14).

If Pride is the first sin, then Gnosticism was the first rebellion. We have little record of that fateful spiritual battle waged in the heavens in the dawn before time; we know nothing more than what has been revealed, and that is itself scarce. We know that one of the greatest amongst the angels--Lucifer, the bearer of light--was a proud creature who rebelled against his Creator. We know that the immediate result of this rebellion is that he and the other traitorous angels were cast out of heaven, out of the presence of God. Lucifer could not rule heaven, but would be made instead to govern hell.

What is the nature of this rebellion, we can only speculate. What we do know is that Lucifer was, as per his name, the "light bearer" of God. Yet, light is a physical reality, and can not exist as such before the universe's creation. What nature could this light have, but a spiritual one? Though physical reality often reflects spiritual reality, and thus our physical object, light, is but the mirror of a spiritual object: knowledge and understanding. Thus does "enlighten" mean to give knowledge to, but also and perhaps especially to give spiritual insight to. So many of our metaphors for acquiring knowledge, wisdom, and understanding are based on light or sight.

Possessing a vast intellect, complete with an abundance of knowledge and understanding, Lucifer still lacked a critical virtue: wisdom. Because he was given knowledge superior to any other created being, he thought himself at least equal to God--the sin of Pride swelled to its fullest--and thus believed that he could rule as God could. Having been given possession of knowledge, he perhaps took it upon himself to becomes God's adviser--rather than His steward--and thus could not bear to see God reject his advice, for God has not only infinite knowledge but also infinite understanding and wisdom.

It is thus fitting that the first sin to which the devil tempted man was one of pride pertaining to knowledge--though a literal reading of Genesis would give this as the only possible sin for man to commit. In both cases--the First Rebellion and the Fall--is found not only a desire to be like God, but also a lack of trust in God. It is perhaps for this reason that faith is so crucial to man's salvation, because faith involves a good deal of trust in God. Man's first failing was that he trusted the devil rather than God; the devil's failing was that he trusted himself and not God. Man's salvation thus must come about in part by reversing this lack of trust, this lack of faith.

Gnosticism as a heresy places itself as a barrier to faith. Since a form of gnosticism--pride of knowledge and trust in one's own knowledge--underlies both the first Rebellion and the first sin, it is quite fitting that gnosticism was amongst the first heresies faced by the Church after Christ's Resurrection and Ascension. The earliest Christians based their faith not on the Bible--for it was not yet completed--but on a single historical event, namely the Resurrection. They were Christians before the term had come into widespread use; they instead referred to themselves as "followers of the Way" (see John 14:6). Salvation comes through Christ, though cooperating with grace in an active faith.

The newly founded Church made no secret of her beliefs--many members were killed for their witness--or of the LORD's teachings. The road to salvation was open to all, since all would otherwise be on the road to damnation. Yet the Gnostic heresy would seek to change the basis of salvation and thus to limit it to the select few who possessed the intellect and cunning to gain knowledge, for their heresy was founded upon hidden knowledge and not upon faith.

The Gnostics had embraced a dualism of body and spirit which opposed the two. Their belief held that the body was at best unimportant and at worst evil, and that the spirit alone was good and relevant. Saint John therefore wrote his Gospel account to show that the two, rather than being opposed, were in fact joined in partnership in the human person. The whole person--not just the soul--would be redeemed, and the body would be resurrected and rejoined to the soul in the afterlife.

Thus, what man did to and with his body mattered. Sins committed "in the flesh" were every bit as real as those committed "in the heart" (soul), for the body is every bit as much a part of man as is his soul. The body is the physical manifestation of the person, but this does not make it any less a part of him. Thus are there sins committed against both the body and the soul; most physical sins--fornication, masturbation, adultery, over-consumption, mutilation, murder, and so on--are committed against the body more so than the soul. Yet these things leave every bit as much a mark on the soul--sometimes a greater mark--than many of the "spiritual" sins. (The danger of the more spiritual sins is that they are often much harder to diagnose).

The gnostics would reject the "physical" sins out of hand--since they were sins "of the flesh" and not "of the spirit", they were unimportant. But in rejecting all things physical, they also rejected the very basis of salvation, the physical event of the Resurrection. If the physical did not matter, neither then could Christ's Resurrection matter, and thus an alternate mode of salvation became necessary. For the Gnostics, this mode was to be found in knowledge; yet the Church had already established that salvation was boguht by Christ's Death and Resurrection, two physical events. Knowledge had a place within Christian thought--as evidenced by the countless philosophers (and scientists, historians, etcetera) found in Christendom.

But the place of knowledge was not as a mode of Salvation. Thus did the Gnostics need to give primacy to secret rites and hidden knowledge--knowledge unknown to the early Church. The Church had been given many rite of her own, not least of which are the Sacraments--those bestowers of special graces for mankind. Yet the Sacraments required specific physical actions or media: consumption of Christ's Body Soul and Divinity in the accidents of bread; baptism in the medium of water; confirmation and annointing using the medium of oil; ordination with the laying of hands. Physical actions once again have spiritual consequences.

The Gnostics could not tolerate this. Though they often had rites of their own, those rites often involved punishing the body or "depriving" it. In various incranations, the same dualism which underlies Gnosticism demanded abstention from marriage and especially the marital embrace; from food, even to the point of death; from sleep, to the point of exhaustion or dementia. Such rites were not aimed at the healing of the body and soul from sin or the strenghtening of both to do God's will and to live in faith; rather, they aimed at the liberation of the spirit at the expense of the body, the subjugation or even destruction of the body.

Even in our own day, we see a form of this dualism at work. If the body doesn't matter, then homosexuality cannot be sinful, since the body doesn't matter then two men or two women are just as good as one of each; for that matter, women ought to be ordained every bit as much as men, since the only real difference is in the body; nor is there anything wrong with sex-changes or even self-mutilation so long as it harms only the body and not the soul. Abortion can't really be murder, because that clump of cells isn't really another human being yet--regardless of DNA--there is no soul so it's just a body; there is nothing wrong with pornography; euthanasia and suicide are both perfectly acceptable ways of ending one's life; violence and abuse are only wrong so far as they cause mental or spiritual injury; torture is justifiable, since it only injures the body, not the spirit.

The answer to Gnosticism was to be found in the person of Christ--True God and True Man--God made incarnate in a human body. Saint John rejects the Gnostic charge that Jesus was really a pure spirit Who only appeared to have a body. His is the Gospel which records the incident with "doubting" St Thomas:
"But [Thomas] said to [the other disciples who had seen the Risen LORD]: Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the place of the nails, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe. And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them. Jesus cometh, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said: Peace be to you. Then he saith to Thomas: Put in thy finger hither, and see my hands; and bring hither thy hand, and put it into my side; and be not faithless, but believing" (John 20:25-27).
Thomas was invited to put his finger into the Risen LORD's side and in His hand's: in other words, to touch Christ's body. These events were reported by St John, who at the time would have been one of the only living eyewitnesses to them.

The body and the soul are both, therefore, important elements of man, and of his salvation. Spiritual pride, shame at the crudeness of physical nature, has often led man to reject his own body. The vast and formidable powers of the human intellect only strengthen this dualistic dichotomy, for man sees that he has grown much in knowledge, but not in strength of body. As intellect is the thing which the devil knows best--his being one of the greatest in all Creation--it is through intellect that he most successfully tempts man to pride. And as the devil is spirit but not body, it is in pride of spirit and the rejection of the body where he most successfully tempts man, both in the beginning and today.