fl. c. 130–160 CE · Christian Gnostic teacher
Isidore, son of Basilides
Ἰσίδωρος
Basilides' son and pupil, who carried on his father's teaching in the second century. Clement of Alexandria quotes three of his books: On the Attached Soul, the Ethics and the Expositions of the Prophet Parchor. Hippolytus says that Basilides and Isidore claimed secret words handed down from the apostle Matthias. Nothing else is known of his life.
Their life and work
The fragments show a moralist as much as a mythmaker. On the Attached Soul held that the passions are appendages, spirits that cling to the rational soul, and Isidore insists that this is no excuse: a man must master them and may not say he was forced (Stromata 2.113–114). The Ethics, as Clement quotes it, counsels those who burn and cannot keep continence to marry rather than fall (3.1–3). The Expositions argue that the Greek philosophers took their wisdom from the prophets, Pherecydes his winged oak from the prophecy of Ham (6.53).
That he taught in Alexandria is a modern inference from his father's school there and from Clement, who read him in the city. No source says where he lived. Conjectured
Our device: Their emblem is a winged oak. No portrait of any of these people survives. The emblems are our devices.
On the shelves
- Isidore, son of Basilides, Ethics, On the Attached Soul, and Expositions of the Prophet Parchor · c. 130–160 CE · Survives in fragments
In the show
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Sources (5)
- Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 2.113.3–114.1; 3.1.1–3.3.2; 6.53.2–5
- Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies 7.20.1
- W. A. Löhr, Basilides und seine Schule (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1996)
- B. Layton, The Gnostic Scriptures (New York: Doubleday, 1987)
- Epiphanius, Panarion 32.4.1; 32.4.6–9 (quoting the Ethics after Clement)