Carpo'crates

Carpo'crates OF ALEXANDRIA flourished in the first decades of the 2d century A.D., and founded the Gnostic sect of Carpocratians. According to him, the essence of true religion consisted in the union of the soul with the Monas or highest God, by means of contemplation, which elevated it above the superstitions of the popular faith, and liberated it from the necessity of submitting to the common laws of society. Among those who have attained to this are Jesus, Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle. Matter being regarded as the principle of evil, the soul had no obligations in regard to it, and the true rule of life was to cultivate an entire indifference to it, and simply follow one's own impulses. All life being an effluence from or a return to God, limitation or sin cleaves to all individual life as such. The soul's return to God is theoretically through the knowledge of the divine unity, and practically through a life that follows nature and overleaps all limits laid down for it by laws—e.g. the law of private property and the law of marriage, which were only instituted by the angels who made the worlds. The soul that attains to this freedom receives miraculous power; until it reaches it, it is held down by the world-makers in metempsychosis, remaining in the prison of bodily life until it has 'paid the uttermost farthing.' The Carpocratians existed down to the 6th century. See Gnostics.