nos'tiks, a general name applied to early schools of speculators, which combined the fantastic notions of the Oriental systems of religion with the ideas of the Greek philosophers and the doctrines of Christianity. They nearly all agreed on the points that God is incomprehensible; that matter is eternal and antagonistic to God; that creation is the work of the Demiurge, an emanation from the Supreme Deity, subordinate or opposed to God, and that the human nature of Christ was a mere deceptive appearance. The doctrines of the earliest Gnostics may be reduced to the following heads: God, the highest intelligence, dwells at an infinite distance from this world, in the Abyss, removed from all connection with every work of temporal creation. He is the source of all good. Matter, the crude, chaotic mass of which all things were made, is, like God, eternal, and it is the source of all evil. From these two principles, before time commenced, emanated beings, called aeons, which are described as divine spirits, inhabiting the Pleroma, or plenitude of light, which surrounds the Abyss. The world and the human race were created out of matter by one aeon, the Demiurge, or, according to the later systems of the Gnostics, by several aeons and angels. The aeons made the bodies of man of matter; hence the origin of evil in man. God gave man the soul. What are called gods by men are merely such aeons or creators, under whose dominions man became more and more wicked and miserable. To destroy the power of the creators and to free man from the power of matter, God sent the most exalted of all aeons, Christ. All the Gnostic systems admit a good and an evil principle and are usually classified into three schools, that of Basilides and Valentinus; that of the Clemtines; that of the Ophites, the last finding the perfect expression of truth in Jesus Christ. There have been no Gnostic sects since the fifth century.