But, besides this, the so-called Gnostic heresy introduced other elements into the legend. These Gnostics were a sect that arose in the early times of Christianity. They pretended to a special insight into the divine nature, and combined Platonic and oriental theories with Christian dogmas. They tried to convert the story of the Redemption into a cosmological myth, and regarded the human person of Christ as a kind of phantom--a magic apparition. Some of these Gnostics seem to have accepted Simon Magus as the 'Power of God'--as the Logos, or divine Reason, by which the world was created (or reduced from chaos to an ordered Cosmos). From this a curious myth arose. This Logos, or creative Power, was identified with the Sun-god, as the source of life, and as Sun-god was united to the Moon-goddess, Selene. Now the words Helen and Selene are connected in Greek, and Helen of Troy was accepted by these Gnostics as a mythical form of the goddess of the moon. Hence it came that in the Gnostic form of the Simon Magus legend he was married to Helen of Troy, and this notion found its way into the old Faust-legend, and is used by Goethe in that exceedingly wonderful and beautiful part of his great poem which is called the _Helena_.
After the suppression of Gnostic and other early heresies came the contest of the now united and politically powerful Church against the outer world of heathendom. While retaining for herself what we may call a monopoly in orthodox magic the Church condemned as in league with the devil _all_ speculation, whether theological or scientific--the one as leading to heresy, the other to sensual ends, such as riches, fame, and those lusts of the flesh and that pride of intellect which were fatal to the contemplative and ascetic ideals of medieval Christianity.
It was not among Teuton and Celtic savages but among the learned adherents of the old Greek philosophy that the Church in those earlier days found her most dangerous and obstinate adversaries. Plato and Aristotle (whose tenets the Christian Schoolmen afterwards endeavoured to harmonize with the teaching of the Gospel) were at first brought forward to oppose the new religion, these doctrines of Greek philosophy being largely supplemented by mystic ideas derived from oriental sources. It was however Pythagoras, the great Greek-Italian philosopher of the sixth century B.C., the predecessor and to some extent the inspirer of Socrates and Plato, who was most generally accepted as the rival of St. Paul. It was his mystical doctrines of Number and Harmony, of the Unit and the Triad, which were most often marshalled against the Christian doctrine of the Unity and Trinity of the Godhead. Indeed it even seems that Pythagoras was believed by some of these adversaries of Christianity to be the incarnation of Deity (as had been believed in his lifetime) and to be the friend and saviour of mankind, like Prometheus of old, who was said to have given his life for the human race devoted to destruction by the anger of an offended God.