As regards their views concerning the person of Christ we may not now go into detail. We can simply state the views of the two chief Gnostics. Basilides identified Christ with the first-born of the Father, the emanation Mind (Νοῦς), who came to destroy the God of the Jews and all evil men, but to save those who believed on him.[353] Valentinus made Christ one of the Eons, forming a conjugal pair of Christ and the Holy Spirit; but Jesus who appeared on earth was another, the perfect product of the whole pleroma of Eons.[354] We may say that generally Christ was regarded by the Gnostics as one of the emanations of the supreme Being, by which the divine principle entered the visible world and made God known, whereas he had been hidden hitherto. Christ, therefore, was a power, a heavenly Eon, which was to be distinguished from his earthly appearance as the man Jesus. This view was in accord with other beliefs that Christ had not actually appeared and suffered in the flesh, to which is given the name docetism. The Gnostic ethics were based on the dual concept of man, with the natural result that in many groups a marked asceticism was practised. On the other hand the belief that the revelation brought by Christ had freed men from law—an exaggeration of Paul’s position, unchecked by Paul’s good-sense—led to the extremes of libertinism. The Gnostics laid much stress also on the magic value of the sacraments of baptism, the Lord’s supper, and anointing with oil. They treated them as the means of initiation into the holy mysteries of Christianity, whereby the initiate obtained, as in pagan mysteries, the higher knowledge (γνῶσις), which was salvation. Beyond this they resorted to the crassest magic, playing with names and numbers, employing images, incantations, invocations, and many kinds of curious arts.[355] But in this respect they were hardly in disaccord with their contemporaries. From the foregoing it will appear that the Gnostic movement represented in general exaggerations of the normal Christian tenets, produced by an attempt to combine Christianity with many Greek and oriental elements. The results varied from a doctrine which differed from that, for example, of the Johannine writings chiefly in denying the actual human existence of Christ, to the most extravagant perversions of Christian belief. Many Gnostics remained within the Church undisturbed, others were bitterly attacked.