Carpocratian Church & School | Gnostic Christianity and Spiritual Education

What if the Gnostics had won?

The Carpocratian Church

In the name of The Father, The Mother, and The Child, faith and love lead to salvation.

Based on Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies 1.25.5, c. 180 CE

The Carpocratian Church of Commonality and Equality is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit online church reconstructed and reimagined from sources before the third century CE. Drawing inspiration from Marcellina of Rome—the notorious disciple of Carpocrates of Alexandria and the only known woman to lead an autonomous Christian movement in second-century Rome—it approaches Gnostic Christianity as a living fellowship of equality, commonality, faith, love, and the liberation of every Soul.

Ancient opponents portrayed the Carpocratians as lawless, impious, and hostile to conventional morality. Yet the surviving evidence points to a more distinctive vision: salvation through faith and love, freedom from laws imposed by lesser powers, and a divine justice understood as fellowship grounded in equality.

What if the goal of faith-based education was Gnosis?

The Carpocratian School

Go to School

A unit is that through which each of the existing things is said to be one. A number, then, is a multitude composed of units.

Based on Euclid, Elements 7.def.1–2, c. 300 BCE

The Carpocratian School is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit online school reconstructing and reimagining the encyclical humanities and monadic gnosis that Carpocrates of Alexandria was said to have imparted to his son and only child, Epiphanes of Cephallenia. (Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 3.5.3.2, c. 198 CE)

The School approaches education as a path toward Gnosis: the cultivation of knowledge through the disciplined study of ourselves, the world, and the greater order of things. It offers a free course of self-education in the liberal arts and world sciences: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy—together with private research tools designed for independent inquiry.