Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/562

Rh 534 M A R C I O N fixed constitutions and creeds, schools with distinctive esoteric doctrines, associations for worship with peculiar mysteries, and ascetic sects with special rules of conduct. Of churchly organizations the most important, next to Catholicism, was the Marcionite community. Like the catholic church, this body professed to comprehend every thing belonging to Christianity. It admitted all believers without distinction of age, sex, rank, or culture. It was no mere school for the learned, disclosed no mysteries for the privileged, but sought to lay the foundation of the Christian community on the pure gospel, the authentic institutes of Christ. The pure gospel, however, Marcion found to be everywhere more or less corrupted and mutilated in the Christian circles of his time. His undertaking thus resolved itself into a reformation of Christendom. This reformation was to deliver Christendom from false Jewish doctriuesby restoring the Pauline conception of the gospel, Paul being, according to Marcion, the only apostle who had rightly understood the new message of salvation as delivered by Christ. In Marcion s own view, therefore, the founding of his church to which he was first driven by opposition amounts to a reformation of Christendom through a return to the gospel of Christ and to Paul ; nothing was to be accepted beyond that. This of itself shows that it is a mistake to reckon Marcion among the Gnostics. A dualist, we shall see, he certainly was, but he was not a Gnostic. For he ascribed salvation, not to &quot;knowledge&quot; but to &quot;faith&quot;; he appealed openly to the whole Christian world ; and he nowhere consciously added foreign elements to the revelation given through Christ. It is true that -in many features his Christian system if we may use the expression resembles the so-called Gnostic systems ; but the first duty of the historian is to point out what Marcion plainly aimed at ; only in the second place have we to inquire how far the result corresponded with those purposes. The doctrines of Marcion and the history of his churches from the 2d to the 7th century are known to us from the controversial works of the catholic fathers. From Justin downwards, almost every eminent church teacher takes some notice of Marcion, while very many write extensive treatises against him. The most important of those which have come down to us are the controversial pieces of Ireuaeus (in his great work against heretics), Tertullian (Adv. Marc., i.-v.), Hippolytus, Pseudo-Origen Adamantius, Epiphanius, and the Armenian Esnik. From these works the contents of the Marcionite Gospel, and also the text of Paul s epistles in Marcion s recension, can be settled with tolerable accuracy. His opponents, more over, have preserved some expressions of his, with ex tracts from his principal work ; so that our knowledge of Marcion s views is in part derived from the best sources. Marcion was a wealthy shipowner, belonging to Sinope in Pontus. He appears to have been a convert from paganism to Christianity, although it was asserted in later times that his father had been a bishop. That report is probably as untrustworthy as another, that he was excommunicated from the church for seducing a virgin. What we know for certain is that after the death of Hyginus (or c. 139 A.D.) he arrived, in the course of his travels, at Rome, and made a handsome donation of money to the local church. Even then, however, the leading features of his peculiar system must have been already thought out. At Rome he tried to gain acceptance for them in the college of presbyters and in the church ; indeed he had previously made similar attempts in Asia Minor. But he now encountered such determined opposition from the majority of the congregation that he found it necessary to withdraw from the great church and establish in Rome a community of his own. This was about the year 144. The new society increased in the two following decades ; and very soon numerous sister- churches were flourishing in the east and west of the empire. Marcion took up his residence permanently in Rome, but still undertook journeys for the propagation of his opinions. In Rome he became acquainted with the Syrian Gnostic Cerdo, whose specu lations influenced the development of the Marcionite theology. Still Marcion seems never to have abandoned his design of gaining over the whole church to his gospel. The proof of this is found, partly in the fact that he tried to establish relations with Polycarp of Smyrna, from whom, to be sure, he got a sharp rebuff, partly in a legend to the effect that towards the end of his life he sought re- admission to the church. Such, presumably, was the construction put in after times on his earnest endeavour to unite Christians on the footing of the &quot; pure gospel.&quot; When he died is not known ; but his death can scarcely have been much later than the year 165. The distinctive teaching of Marcion originated in a com parison of the Old Testament with the gospel of Christ and the theology of the apostle Paul. Its motive was not cosmological or metaphysical, but religious and historical. In the gospel he found a God revealed who is goodness and love, and who desires faith and love from men. This God he could not discover in the Old Testament ; on the contrary, he saw there the revelations of a just, stern, jealous, wrathful, and variable god, who requires from his servants blind obedience, fear and outward righteousness. Overpowered by the majesty and novelty of the Christian message of salvation, too conscientious to rest satisfied with the ordinary attempts at the solution of difficulties, while yet he was in no position to reach an historical insight into the relation of Christianity to the Old Testament and to Judaismwho indeed was so in those days ? he believed that he expressed Paul s view by the hypothesis of two Gods : the just God of the law (the God of the Jews, who is also the Creator of the world), and the good God, the Father of Jesus Christ. Paradoxes in the history of religion and revelation which Paul draws out, and which Marcion s contemporaries passed by as utterly incomprehen sible, are here made the foundation of an ethico-dualistic conception of history and of religion. It may be said that in the 2d century only one Christian Marcion took the trouble to understand Paul ; but it must be added that he misunderstood him. The profound reflexions of the apostle on the radical antithesis of law and gospel, works and faith, were not appreciated in the 2d century. Marcion alone perceived their decisive religious importance, and with them confronted the legalizing, and in this sense Judaizing, tendencies of his Christian contemporaries. But the Pauline ideas lost their truth under his treatment ; for, when it is denied that the God of redemption is at the same time the almighty Lord of heaven and earth, tlie gospel is turned upside down. The assumption of two gods necessarily led to cosmo logical speculations. Under the influence of Cerdo, Marcion carried out his ethical dualism in the sphere of cosmology ; but the fact that his system is not free from contradictions is the best proof that all along religious knowledge, and not philosophical, had the chief value in his eyes. The main outlines of his teaching are as follows. Man is, in spirit, soul, and body, a creature of the just and wrathful god. This god created man from Hyle (matter), 1 and imposed on him a strict law. Since no one could keep this law, the whole human race fell under the curse, temporal and eternal, of the Demiurge. Then a higher Go r l, hitherto unknown, and concealed even from the 1 On the relation of matter to the Creator Marcion himself seems not to have speculated, though his followers may have done so.