Simon Magus

The first testimony of him is in the book of the Acts of the Apostles ( Acts 8: 9-24 ), which tells us that Deacon Philip , who successfully preached the Gospel in Samaria, baptized, by the way, one magician , Simon, who considered himself “something great ”, who performed all kinds of miracles and had many followers who saw in him the appearance of“ the great power of God. ” The apostles Peter and John arrived from Jerusalem to lay the hands of the Holy Spirit upon the baptized by laying on their hands. Simon Magus, seeing that the apostles have the gift of giving the Holy Spirit with the laying on of hands, decided to acquire the power that the apostles have. For this, he offered money to the apostles for giving him their gift and was severely convicted and rejected by the apostle Peter. Simon humbly accepted the reproof and asked the apostles to pray for him ( Acts 8:24 ).

In the future, the purchase and sale of the priesthood will be called Simonia - by the name of Simon Magus, who was the first to try to buy the grace of the priesthood from the apostles.

Simon Magus is one of the central figures of the apocryphal “ Acts of Peter ”, although not recognized as canonical, but influenced the Christian tradition of the suffering and death of Peter.

The further fate of Simon is known from other sources (mainly through Irenaeus and Hippolytus, who used the " Syntagma " of St. Justin , compatriot Simon, who did not reach us). From Samaria, Simon arrived in Tire , where, with money rejected by the apostles, he bought the woman Elena who had been there for 10 years from the fornication and declared her the creative thought ( Greek έπινοια ) of the supreme Deity, who gave birth through her to the archangels and angels who created our world. He impersonated himself as this supreme God as appearing in the past, present and future (ό εστώς, στάς, στησόμενος).

Applying Christian terms, Simon Magus announced that he is “ father ”, “ son ” and “ holy spirit ” - three manifestations of a single super-heavenly ( Greek ύπερουράνιος ) God: as a father he appeared in Samaria in the person of Simon; as a son , in Judea, in the person of Jesus, whom he left before the crucifixion; as a holy spirit he will enlighten the Gentiles in the whole universe. He told about God's inseparable thought that the cosmic spirits created by her, driven by love of power and ignorance, did not want to recognize her supremacy and, having imprisoned her in fetters of sensual-bodily existence, forced her to move from one female body to another.

She appeared as the Homeric Elena , the culprit of the Trojan War, and after 1000 years she found herself a prostitute in Tire, where Simon Magus, who followed all of her transformations, picked her up as a good shepherd to a lost sheep. The news of Simon’s journey to Rome and his successes there is completely believable, but these successes, of course, did not reach public honors on the part of the emperor and the senate, as church writers misled by reading the inscription on one statue dedicated to the Latinized Semitic deity Semo Sancus . The pseudo-clementines contain a lot of detailed, but false information about Simon: about his long confrontation with the apostle Peter in Caesarea and in Rome, about his unsuccessful attempt to ascend to heaven and even more unsuccessful - to rise from the tomb, where, at his request, the students put him alive, and three days later they found dead.

The main tendency in the fictional portrayal of Simon in Clementines is his identification with the Apostle Paul as "an enemy of the Mosaic Law and a crafty perverter of true Christianity." Historical Simon, as the founder of the Gnostics and the Apostle Paul, had only one thing in common: both of them, although in different directions, resolutely took the religious thought of Christians out of the bounds of contemporary Orthodox Judaism. Although Simon was undoubtedly involved in Hellenistic education, the direct affiliation to him of the Theosophical composition The Great Explanation ( Greek μεγάλη απόφασις ), from which significant passages are given from Hippolytus, is questioned; in any case, it is certain that this curious composition, with religious and mystical content, saturated with the philosophical concepts of Heraclitus , Empedocles , Aristotle and the Stoics , came out of the midst of the closest followers of Simon.

The author of The Great Explanation denotes the absolute beginning of everything possible and real as a double fire - hidden and explicit ( Greek: πϋρ διπλουν - το μέν τι κρυπτόν, το δέ τι φανερον ); the first is hidden in the second, the second arises from the first. In addition to the metaphorical name of the super-heavenly fire ( Greek: το πύρ ύπερουράνιον ), the absolute beginning of Simon is also indicated philosophically by means of the Aristotelian concepts δύναμις and ερέργεια (potency and act). The first act of the absolute beginning is a comprehensive thought ( Greek επινοια ), mentally giving birth to which the absolute is defined as the mind and father.

The first couple ( Greek συζυγία ) - mind and thought, turning inwardly on themselves, develop into two others: sound and name, reason and lust. The unified absolute principle hiding in these “six roots of being” itself is an invisible power, an incomprehensible silence ( Greek δύναμις σιγή αορατος, άκαταληπτος ); in its pure potentiality, as an undeveloped germ or a point of being, it is predominantly small ( Greek το μικρόν ); but, being such only for the sake of appearance, it becomes great, being defined in itself as mind and thought and eternally infuriating all further definitions of the intelligible world - and the mentally great ego becomes infinite in the phenomena of the real world, which develops according to the same pattern of active-passive , masculine-feminine combinations, as well as the intelligible world.

Here, the first syzygy (mind and thoughts) corresponds to heaven and earth, the second (to sound and name) - to the sun and moon, the third (to reason and lust) - air and water. The single true figure and engine of this logical and physical process is the same absolute beginning in his appearance, or “clear fire”, a great creative force, “portrayed” in all visible and invisible - that тотστώς οτάς, στησόμενος with which he identified himself Simon In the Great Explanation, this actual existing ( Greek ών ) god is represented by the speaker of the eternal or preexisting ( Greek προυπάρχουσα ) power of the deity (the absolute initial as such): “I and you are one, before me you are what is behind you , - I". This "second god" - or the whole reality of the absolute - is also called the seventh power, as the completion of all deeds emanating from the seven roots of being in the highland and sublime world. There is no direct connection between this speculation and the mystical romance of the mind and thought — Simon and Elena — probably because the Great Explanation has not reached us in its entirety. Of the followers of Simon and Elena, church historians do not name big names; directly behind Simon is Menander , a close but independent Gnostic.

• Simony
• Gnosticism

in Russian

• Hippolytus and Irenaeus (the latter is in the Russian translation of the Holy Preobrazhensky, M., ed. Ed. " Orthodox Review ").
• Simon Magus // Jonas G. Gnosticism (Gnostic religion) / Cover design A. Oleksenko, S. Shapiro. - St. Petersburg: Publishing House "Lan", 1998. - 384 p.
• Solovyov V.S. Simon the sorcerer // Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary : in 86 volumes (82 volumes and 4 additional). - SPb. , 1890-1907.

in other languages

• Hilgenfeld A. “Die Ketzer geschichte des Urchristenthums” (L., 1884).

• The overthrow of Simon the Magus by the Apostle Peter
• The famous panel on the Peter Gate of the Peter and Paul Fortress .