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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. [ ]
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