| #### 5. MARCION -- MONTANISM |

| #### #### The tableau of the life of the Church in this century of its first contacts with Pagan life and thought is not yet complete. Two more deviations from the Tradition call for record. They are the heresies called, after their founders, Marcionism and Montanism, heresies of quite another spirit than Gnosticism -- organised for specific purposes all their own. #### Gnosticism tended to make the traditional faith a mere introduction to the final truth of which the Gnostic alone held the key. Marcion was a revolutionary who proposed to reform the Church and to reconstitute it on entirely different foundations-an aim in which he is perhaps Luther's first precursor. That he made his own some of the ideas common to the Gnostic sects is not surprising -- they were the common coin of the day's religious life. But it is Marcion's aim which fixes his place in history, and his aim is not the Gnostic ambition to discover the hidden meaning of Christianity, but the practical business of bringing back the Church to its first mission, of restoring to men what alone could save them, the original uncorrupted gospel. This, and not any enthusiasm for a hidden and higher knowledge, motived his dissension. Marcion was born a Catholic, the son of the Bishop of Sinope. He came to Rome round about the year 135, and taught there for some twenty-five years. Valentine the Gnostic and Marcion were thus contemporary celebrities in the Roman Church. In 144 Marcion was excommunicated, but in what precise circumstances we do not know. At the basis of his system is a theory of the radical opposition between the Old and New Testaments, the Law and the Gospels. The Law, harsh and inflexible, was the work of the Creator, an imperfect God to be abandoned now for the Supreme God, God of Love and forgiveness, revealed in Jesus Christ. The Gospel, then, was meant to displace the Law; the New Testament to reverse the Old. Unfortunately the Apostles, through ignorance or prejudice or lack of courage, failed in their task of purging revealed religion from the Old Testament blemishes. Whence the Old Testament ideas which remain in the Church to harass the faithful. To this failure of the Apostles there is however one very notable exception-St. Paul. For St. Paul Marcion has the most extraordinary veneration; and Marcionism is little more, on its dogmatic side, than St. Paul’s doctrine of emancipation from the Law exaggerated to caricature. In the light of what he conceived St. Paul to have taught, Marcion revised the New Testament itself. From St. Paul he cast out the "interpolations" made by the Apostle's successful opponents which had masqueraded ever since as St. Paul’s own words. All the remaining books he rejected as worthless except his own, amended, version of St. Luke. A book of his own composition -- the Antitheses -- in which he set forth the opposition between the Law and the Gospel completed the Marcionite Bible. A new morality, in which the fashionable notions of the day appear, accompanied the new canon of Holy Scripture. For all believers the most rigorous asceticism was prescribed as of obligation. Fasts are multiplied, abstinence from meat is perpetual, and upon all there lies the obligation of perpetual celibacy. At the end of the world God will leave the wicked to the power of Demiurge the Creator who will, thereupon, devour them. #### Marcion showed himself a capable organiser, and, with the Church as his model, he set up a rival Church with a hierarchy and sacramental ritual. The movement met with success, and by the end of the century Marcionite churches were to be found in every province of the empire. Many of the Marcionites suffered death in the persecutions rather than sacrifice to the Pagan deities, and the sect continued to flourish for long after the Catholic Church had become the official religion of the Empire. In the middle of the fifth century the problem of whole villages of Marcionites in his diocese of Cyrrhus occupied the attention of the great Theodoret, and there is mention of them even so late as the tenth century. #### With Montanism we move yet further from the spirit which inspired the Gnostics. Here there is nothing of philosophising, nothing of the spirit of hellenic or oriental Paganism. It is a movement where the actors are Catholics, and the action is a revolt against one established institution bred of exaggerating the importance of another -- an effort to make private revelation supreme over the official teaching hierarchy. The movement first showed itself about the year 172, in the highlands of central Asia Minor, the neighbourhood of the modern Ancyra. Montanus, a recent convert, a one-time priest, self-mutilated, of the goddess Cybele began to experience "ecstasies", in the midst of which, to the accompaniment of bizarre gesticulations and long drawn out howlings, prophecy poured forth from him and new revelations. The Holy Ghost was speaking. The end of the world was at hand. The new Jerusalem was about to come down upon the earth, where Christ would reign with his elect for a thousand years. It was to come down at Pepusa, to be precise, some two hundred miles away to the east. So to Pepusa went the believers in their thousands; and in the plain soon to be favoured by the miracle a new city of the expectant sprang up. Montanus was there, and his assistants, the chief of whom, a notable novelty of the sect, were two women, Priscilla and Maximilla. Their pious exercises, the frequent ecstasies, with their accompaniment of "mystical" phenomena, served to console the faithful while in patience they waited. #### Except for their insistence that through them the Holy Ghost was speaking, the new prophets do not seem at first to have made any innovations in doctrine. In morality they followed the current of contemporary rigorism, with its food taboos and its suspicion of marriage. The main feature of the movement was its belief that the end of the world was at hand. The founders died; the end of the world delayed to come; but the sect still grew, and rapidly; while from all over the Church came protestations -- not against prophets as such, nor against the asceticism, but against the novelty that men should claim the authority of the Holy Ghost for things said in ecstasies whose extravagance suggested mania rather, or possession. The most important achievement of Montanism was that in the first years of the third century it made a convert of one of the very greatest of all Christian writers -- Tertullian. Finally, in different parts of the Church, bishop after bishop turned to expose and denounce the sect, which thereupon showed itself a sect -- for the Montanists preferred their prophets to the bishops. It was in this, precisely, that the novelty of Montanism lay -- "its desire to impose private revelations as a supplement to the deposit of faith, and to accredit them by ecstasies and convulsions that were suspect." The action of the bishops seems to have checked the movement's further progress, but in places where it was once established it lasted into the fourth century. Montanists suffered martyrdom with the Catholics, and they survived the attempts of the Catholic Emperors to suppress them. By the sixth century, however, all trace of them has vanished. #### The Montanist belief in the Millennium, in the theory that, as a first reward of their fidelity, the saints would reign with Christ for a thousand years upon this earth, was not, however, peculiar to the sect. Its affinity with some of the pre-Christian Jewish theories about the character of the triumph of Messias is evident. Not less evident is its connection with a literal interpretation of the Apocalypse. [ ] Within the Church it makes its first appearance in the first years of the second century, with the heretic Cerinthus and with Papias the -- orthodox -- disciple of St. John. For Cerinthus, and for the later heretical adherents to the belief, the coming reign would be a vie de Theleme, where previous asceticism would be rewarded by, amongst other things, a lively carnival of the flesh. The Christians who were Millenarists naturally steered clear of such horrors. What they anticipated was the triumph on earth, in an earthly life, of Christian holiness. Among those who held to this belief were such illustrious writers as St. Justin and St. Irenaeus, the latter developing it as an argument against the Gnostic denial of the resurrection of the body. These very writers, however, bear witness that Millenniarism was never the general belief of the Church in their time, and it met with vigorous opposition, at Rome from the priest Caius and in the East from Origen and, especially, from St. Denis of Alexandria. By the time of St. Augustine it had disappeared from the churches of the East, and the great authority of his exposition of the texts in the Apocalypse ended, for ever, whatever hold Millenniarism still possessed in the West. Henceforward, where it does survive it is no more than an eccentricity of heretical sects. [ ] |