Marcion's Love of Creation

MCGOWAN/MARCION’S LOVE OF CREATION 295 Marcion’s Love of Creation1 ANDREW MCGOWAN Although Marcion is often said to have rejected matter as inherently evil, Marcionite sacramental practice and asceticism suggest a more complex and specific set of attitudes to material things and practices. Later heresiologists analyzed Marcion’s rather negative cosmogony and saw inconsistency, but Marcionite Christianity was less concerned with the origins of things than with their significance in light of the new creative work of the loving Stranger god. What Marcion despised was arguably the order (kosmos) of creation, rather than the mere fact of it. If the higher god saves human beings, who are part of the Creator’s work and without affinity to that “Stranger,” then by analogy the use of water in baptism or bread in the eucharist may be understood as the ritual reconfiguration of matter into the new order willed by its “new master and proprietor.” “Just this one work is enough for our God: that by his surpassing and unique kindness, which is worth more than any number of locusts, he freed humanity” Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem 1.17.12 MARCION AND CREATION More even than for most other losers in the history of Christianity, the words of the second-century heresiarch Marcion survive only between the lines of his opponents’ rhetoric, and in incidental references which are at best fragmentary, at worst opaque. Among the few things most people are agreed upon about Marcion’s doctrine, apart from his two gods and 1. Earlier versions of this paper were presented to Patristica Bostoniensia in March 1999, and at the NAPS Annual Meeting in May 2000. My thanks to those who responded on those occasions, and to two anonymous JECS readers for insightful suggestions. 2. “Sufficit unicum hoc opus deo nostro, quod hominem liberavit summa et praecipua bonitate sua, et omnibus locustis anteponenda” (CCL 1:458). Journal of Early Christian Studies 9:3, 295–311 © 2001 The Johns Hopkins University Press 296 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES rejection of the Hebrew Bible, is an “anticosmic dualism.”3 Marcion is said to have thought that matter itself was evil;4 many have held this to be the key to his theodicy, and to a world-denying asceticism among the Marcionites. Comparisons with other ancient systems that rejected or stigmatized the world and matter suggest to many that his rejection of material things was radical even in comparison to gnosticism.5 At least some of Marcion’s ancient opponents dwelt on this point at length, and modern interpretations have continued to assert Marcion’s rejection of matter, even developing boldly psychologizing reconstructions that suggest a personal hatred or aversion to the material as such on his part.6 Yet even the baldest assertions by ancient heresiologists have not prevented doubts and problems about these conclusions from being raised.7 Why do Justin and Irenaeus, near-contemporary opponents of Marcion, make no mention of evil matter,8 while Tertullian and Clement do? Why do those slightly later critics address Marcion’s cosmology with far greater interest than Marcion himself seems to have evinced, if this is really the key to the question of evil, “unde malum” (Adv. Marc. 1.2.2)? 9 3. Nils Arne Pedersen, “Some Comments on the Relationship between Marcionism and Manichaeism,” Apocryphon Severini, ed. P. Bilde et al. (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1993), 166–77, drawing on the work of Ugo Bianchi. 4. Adolf von Harnack, Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott, 2d ed. (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1924), 97; E. C. Blackman, Marcion and His Influence (London: SPCK, 1948) 77–78. 5. See F. C. Burkitt, The Gospel History and its Transmission (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1906), 289–323; E. U. Schüle, “Der Ursprung des Bösen bei Marcion,” Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 16 (1964): 23–42; Gerhard May, Creatio Ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of “Creation out of Nothing” in Early Christian Thought, tr. A. S. Worrall (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1994), 54–58. See also the discussion of Marcion’s position relative to other “gnostic” exemplars in Michael A. Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 23–26. 6. Burkitt speaks in terms of “the defiling contamination of matter” (Gospel History, 296), and Schüle of “eine Abkehr von allem Körperlich-Materiellen” and “tiefste Verachtung alles Materiellen” on Marcion’s part (“Ursprung des Bösen,” 26). 7. Harnack, Marcion 97–99; Blackman, Marcion and His Influence 105–6; Schüle, “Ursprung des Bösen,” passim; R. Joseph Hoffmann, Marcion: On the Restitution of Christianity, AAR Academy Series 46 (Chico: Scholars, 1984), 185–208. 8. Irenaeus, it is true, indicates that for Marcion the body cannot be saved because it comes from the earth (“corpus . . . a terra sit sumptum . . . .” Adv. Haer. 1.27.3 [SC 264:350]). This seems to be because it comes from the realm of the Creator, rather than because matter is evil; but of course the soul is also from the Creator. 9. CCL 1:443. See Harnack, Marcion, 97–98. Markus Vinzent, in “Christ’s Resurrection: The Pauline Basis of Marcion’s Teaching,” SP 31 (1997): 225–33, argues for the primacy of the resurrection, rather than cosmology or divine unity, in Marcion’s scheme. MCGOWAN/MARCION’S LOVE OF CREATION 297 Tertullian, Clement, and others who provide the evidence for Marcion’s view of evil inherent in material things also point out that Marcionite practice did not really match the theoretical rejection of matter in any consistent way. While certain objects and practices were avoided completely, many or most were employed normally, and still others were embraced; most strikingly, Marcionite Christians had a sacramental practice. What allowed or directed such selective treatment of matter, along a continuum from complete rejection to celebration? Most scholarly discussions have focused merely on the heresiologists’ evidence for Marcion’s theoretical cosmology and the place of evil in it, recognizing the problems but finding little to illuminate them beyond repeating the accusation of inconsistency.10 A second and more practical set of issues concerning matter, those of liturgy and asceticism, has mostly been dealt with cursorily, although these are presumably basic to the Marcionite worldview. Examination of early Marcionite theory and practice together, of theology and asceticism, may perhaps be more revealing.11 In what follows I will concentrate first on the relatively well explored area of Marcion’s views on the nature and origin of matter, including the questions of the source of the notion of evil unformed matter and of the importance of the Creator and his character. From there I will turn to the relatively neglected issue of the actual uses (and avoidances) of real material things. EVIL MATTER Marcion’s belief that this world was the work of a lesser god suggests that neither the artist nor the material was greatly to be loved. The higher god, the loving Stranger, was the creator of another invisible and spiritual realm, and was by nature unconnected with either the present order or its underlying substance (Tertullian, Adv. Marc. 1.16.1). 10. Past debates over Marcion’s worldview as either “Paulinist” or “gnostic” are properly labeled simplistic, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they continue to hang over present discussions, as Han Drijvers notes; see “Marcionism in Syria: Principles, Problems, Polemics,” SCe 6 (1987–88): 157–58. Important reconsiderations of the question of gnostic influence are Barbara Aland, “Marcion: Versuch einer neuen Interpretation,” ZTK 70 (1973): 420–47, and Ugo Bianchi, “Marcion: Théologien biblique ou docteur gnostique?” VC 21 (1967): 141–49. 11. Some imprecision about what is attributable to Marcion personally and what comes from his followers is unavoidable here, especially when community practice is at issue. I have attempted at certain points below to note later developments, yet have at times used “Marcion” referring to something more than the (inaccessible) personal subject, but to a somewhat hypothetical set of practices and beliefs to which the early heresiologists responded. 298 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES More starkly, there are explicit claims that Marcion regarded hyle, the preexistent stuff used by the lesser demiurgic Creator god, as evil. Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria are the most important witnesses. Early in Tertullian’s work Adversus Marcionem, Marcion is claimed to teach that the just god made the world from preexistent matter. Tertullian suggests that Marcion has not merely two gods, “for the material too is a god, being unbegotten, uncreated, and eternal, in accordance with the nature of divinity.” In full satirical flight, Tertullian then adds evil itself to his growing list of Marcion’s supposedly eternal, unbegotten “gods,” “since,” he says, “[Marcion] imputes evil to the material—one thing unbegotten to another unbegotten, one uncreated to another uncreated, and one eternal to another eternal” (1.15.4–5).12 The reference to preexistent matter as evil is clear enough, perhaps all the more so for being incidental. Still, the focus of Tertullian’s discussion is protological rather than more generally metaphysical, and if a genuine report on Marcion’s doctrine is present, it has more to do with how things came to be than how things are in the present. As often, the issues are presented in line with the ancient critic’s assumptions, but even brief attention to Marcion’s apparent interests makes us wonder how important this really was. Clement of Alexandria gives the blunt report that, for Marcionites, “nature is regarded as evil because it was created out of evil matter and by a just creator” (Strom. 3.3.12).13 This is part of Clement’s discussion of marriage, and the point contributes to his explanation of Marcionite sexual asceticism; continence is a sort of nonreproductive passive resistance to the Creator. Clement claims that the Marcionites are altogether unwilling “to use what [the Creator] has made,” but goes on, using a stock argument also leveled against Christians in general by pagans (cf. Origen, Contra Celsum 8.28),14 to claim the futility or hypocrisy of such partial rejection of the Creator’s works. Clement offers more information on the supposed source of these views, presenting a rather Platonist sketch of Marcion.15 In the course of his somewhat confused discussion (Strom. 3.3.12–24), one minute Clement casts Plato as having influenced Marcion, and the next uses Plato as a stick 12. CCL 1:456–57. 13. “¶k te Ïlhw kak∞w ka‹ §k dika¤ou . . . dhmiourgoË” (GCS 52 [15]:200). 14. See J. E. L. Oulton and H. Chadwick, Alexandrian Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1964), 46 n. 28. 15. See Gerhard May, “Marcion in Contemporary Views: Results and Open Questions,” SCe 6 (1987–88): 141–42. MCGOWAN/MARCION’S LOVE OF CREATION 299 with which to beat the heretic. The sections Clement cites from the Politicus (273 B–C; the order of sentences is reversed) do serve to illustrate some affinity, even if the intention was the opposite: “The cause of these things (sc. disorder, evil) was the material element (tÚ svmatoeid¢w) in the world’s constitution . . . before it came into its present ordered state it was in a condition of great chaos” (Strom. 3.3.20).16 If the usual heresiological tendency to draw polemical connections with pagan philosophy must be acknowledged, Clement’s point need not be deemed worthless.17 Even assuming that Clement justly represents Marcion’s own judgment on primordial matter, there must be some question as to how well this accounts for Marcionite attitudes to material practice, or in particular the sexual asceticism with which Clement is concerned. As Clement realizes, rejection of marriage does not really constitute a clean break from the material world, however much it might symbolize rejection of the Creator’s will. Where he sees only contradiction however, there may be room to consider other motivations or lines of reasoning. Similar stances can also be found in other ascetic Christian circles with quite different cosmologies.18 Even in Clement’s own presentation, there is no direct statement that the body, much less the body of the Christian, is itself evil for Marcionites.19 Here it is the opposition toward the Creator and the refusal to populate his realm that is central; the issue is not so much the negative character of matter or the body, but the positive demands of serving the higher god. Where Clement allows only inconsistency, we ought rather to acknowledge some principle of selectivity that involves more than the mere material substance of things. The lateness and peculiar features of Ephraem Syrus’ polemic have led to ongoing discussion of its usefulness in regard to Marcion or early 16. GCS 52 (15):204; Oulton and Chadwick, Alexandrian Christianity, 49. 17. Compare, however, the unhelpful discussion of Marcion in Hippolytus, Ref. 7.29–21, where a forced effort to correlate Marcion’s teaching with Empedocles renders the whole passage problematic as evidence. See also Hoffman, Marcion: On the Restitution of Christianity, 185–90. Some philosophical influence on Marcion must almost certainly be credited, although this does not mean reducing his position to that of a particular school, or of “philosophy” as such. See John Gager, “Marcion and Philosophy,” VC 26 (1972): 53–59. 18. Notably the more or less “orthodox” Tatian and the “Encratites” associated with him: see Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia, 1988), 92–102. 19. Which is not to say that Marcion had no issue with embodiment (cf. Tertullian, Adv. Marc. 3.10.1), merely that rejection of marriage and sexuality was not necessarily a direct answer to that particular problem. 300 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES Marcionitism.20 His most basic point is already familiar from Tertullian; Ephraem argues that Marcion (along with Bardaisan and Mani) sets matter “over against the Creator” (Hymni contra Haereses 14.8), apparently meaning that the fact of its independent existence lessens the status of that god.21 Attacking the independent existence of matter, Ephraem makes much of the distinction between the Creator and the stuff he made use of, and the resulting multiplicity of eternal principles. Ephraem also refers to the belief that matter is evil (see especially Hymni c. Haer. 48), but takes this further on a “demonizing” trajectory: according to those whom he attacks, Satan is to be identified with matter (Hymni c. Haer. 48.16). Ephraem seems also to reflect a more systematic position on the part of his opponents, addressing their belief in three eternal principles (Hymni c. Haer. 3.7), which was the position of some later Marcionites.22 Ephraem’s polemic also refers to mythological views of the relationship between Creator and matter, depicting the two as parties to a failed contract (Hymni c. Haer. 48.1, 3–5; cf. 14.8) or even as jaded sexual partners (Prose Refutations 1.69–70).23 Similar elements of Marcionite teaching are known to Eznik of Kolb in the early fifth century (De Deo 358, 366–72, etc.).24 These distinctive elements in Ephraem’s critique are best explained as responses to later sources.25 While he and his opponents may all be dealing with issues set in motion by the tensions or contradictions in the original teaching of Marcion, this does not make them direct evidence for Marcion’s own position. Given the oddities of this evidence as a whole, some have even ques20. See Edmund Beck, “Die Hyle bei Markion nach Ephräm,” OCP 44 (1978): 5– 30; Drijvers, “Marcionism in Syria,” 153–72. 21. CSCO 169:52; see Edmund Beck, in Ephraem, Hymnen contra Haereses, CSCO 170 (Louvain: L. Durbecq, 1957), 51 n. 4. 22. See Harnack, Marcion, 162–70. 23. C. Mitchell, S. Ephraim’s Prose Refutations of Mani, Marcion, and Bardaisan, 2 vols. (London: Text and Translation Society, 1912). 24. PO 28:514–17, 519–21; sections 4.1 and 4.5 in the alternate numbering of Eznik’s work. 25. Beck, “Hyle bei Markion nach Ephräm,” and Pedersen, “Some Comments on the Relationship between Marcionism and Manichaeism,” 171 n. 28. Even if Ephraem knew the Antitheses (Harnack, Marcion, 356*) this does not mean that his mythical and other material can be attributed to them (despite Han J. W. Drijvers, “Christ as Warrior and Merchant: Aspects of Marcion’s Christology,” SP 21 [1989]: 75, 81). Some of that content would certainly have been commented on by Tertullian and others much earlier, had it been in Marcion’s work. Ephraem is also able to quote verbatim from Marcionite sources not represented in Tertullian or other earlier refutations (e.g., Pr. Ref. 1.47; see Drijvers, “Marcionism in Syria,” 159). MCGOWAN/MARCION’S LOVE OF CREATION 301 tioned whether Marcion really thought matter was preexistent, let alone evil.26 After all, neither Justin nor Irenaeus, both of whom wrote before Tertullian and Clement, make this point in their attacks. Even the other heresiologists’ shared tendency to polemicize against the independent and eternal existence of matter (on the basis that this accords it “divinity”) may not help reveal much of Marcion’s own teaching, which seems unlikely to have posited, let alone enumerated, various eternal principles, but to have produced them incidentally or implicitly in its polemical progress.27 It seems best nonetheless to take Tertullian and Clement as witnesses to early Marcionite theology, at least indirectly reflecting authentic traditions.28 Taken together, these testimonies do suggest that Marcion’s teaching assumed a negative judgment on the preexistent unformed stuff of the created world. They also suggest, however, that evil hyle was not necessarily a central idea, nor one whose consequences were uniformly applied in practice; it was not the basis of Marcionite attitudes to material things. THE PREEXISTENT IDEA One interesting and potentially illuminating aspect of Marcion’s notion of hyle is the origin of the idea itself. How and from where Marcion obtained the notion of preexistent evil matter makes some difference to the significance we give it in his thinking and in practice. This was one isolated point at which Harnack suggested the influence of gnosticism, via Cerdo, but as an inessential or foreign element in Marcion’s teaching; evil matter was thus itself an alien (gnostic) idea in the Pauline gospel of the alien god.29 26. E. Evans, Tertullian: Adversus Marcionem, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 1:ix–xii, xv–xvi. 27. Thus Drijvers’ argument, that evil matter was a “constituent part” (“Marcionism in Syria,” 168) of Marcion’s system because it has a place in the system of Ephraem’s opponents, ought to be resisted. Drijvers may, however, be right to oppose Beck’s suggestion that evil matter in later Marcionite theology is a Manichean element. The link seems more likely to be the systematization, by the likes of Apelles and Megethius, of the anticosmic element implicit in Marcion’s thought and practice. 28. See Harnack, Marcion, 97–98; Blackman, Marcion and His Influence, 76–79. If what Tertullian and Clement do is to rebut what they regard as implicit in Marcion’s view of the world, rather than engage directly with him on his own terms, we have no particular reason to see them attributing to him material from other sources. Justin and Irenaeus were less likely to have seen this issue as noteworthy; see further below on the development of the idea of creatio ex nihilo. 29. Marcion, 97. Gerhard May’s analysis, largely followed here, makes more sense of the irrelevance Harnack himself noted for the doctrine of evil uncreated matter. 302 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES In fact, the idea of eternal matter as inherently and essentially problematic was far from unknown to contemporary thought.30 The passage from Plato’s Politicus already mentioned in connection with Clement’s critique of Marcion gives some indication of starting points for Middle Platonist speculations about matter. Among thinkers of Marcion’s time, hyle seems to have been regarded as anything from dull or intransigent to actively bad. Numenius of Apamea held that, while for the Stoics matter was neutral in nature, in (his own “Pythagorean”) truth it was plane noxia.31 Origen cites Celsus in slightly more restrained (and perhaps more typical) mode, saying: “. . . for most people it is sufficient to say that bad things (kakã) come not from God but belong to matter (Ïl˙) and inhabit mortal things” (Contra Celsum 4.65).32 Nor was Marcion the only Christian writer of this time to assume some correlation between biblical creation and Platonist demiurgy. Justin Martyr’s identification of the primordial chaos of Genesis 1 with the rather negative notion of erebus (1 Apol. 59) is an awkward but important example. As Gerhard May has pointed out, Justin’s and Irenaeus’ silence on the question of preexistent matter in Marcion may even mean that earlier critics did not instantly recognize this aspect of his teaching as problematic.33 The conflict between Marcion and such as Tertullian or Clement therefore embodies the critical reflection of early third-century theologians upon the vagaries more typical of mid-second-century thought.34 Any specific connection between the inherent quality of matter in the beginning and the character of Marcionite ascetic practice in the present seems weaker in this light. It is not plausible to argue that such a widely shared attitude to the origin of material things would necessarily give rise to the stark and distinctive dietary and sexual commitments of the Marcionite Christians. AUTHOR OF EVIL The relative importance of matter in Marcion’s world-denying system also depends to some extent on the role of the Creator, the lesser god 30. May, Creatio Ex Nihilo, 56–57, and especially 56 n. 71. 31. Chalcidius, Timaeus, ed. J. H. Waszink (London & Leiden: Warburg Institute & E. J. Brill, 1975), 298. 32. SC 136:344–46. 33. Creatio Ex Nihilo, 56–57. 34. Note also that Tertullian does not mention Marcion in the treatise Against Hermogenes. Hermogenes was more distinguished by insistence on the eternity of matter (Blackman, Marcion and his Influence, 78 n. 1). MCGOWAN/MARCION’S LOVE OF CREATION 303 whose demiurgy combined with matter to constitute the world as it is. In some modern accounts of Marcion, matter seems to be the basic problem in the world’s makeup, and the Creator merely a mediocrity, victim of the lousy material he had to work with.35 In fact, it seems perfectly possible that for Marcion the Creator is both just and the author of evil, in the sense that he is responsible for the way of the world and the structure of things, the concrete ways in which people experience evil and suffering.36 Irenaeus calls Marcion’s Creator the “maker of evils” (Adv. Haer. 1.27.2),37 and Tertullian (Adv. Marc. 1.2.1–2) has Marcion reveling in Isaiah 45.7, where God says, “It is I who create evils (ego sum, qui condo mala).”38 Harnack drew an insightful comparison between the just Creator god and an ancient despot; yet if Marcion’s Creator has a tendency to partiality, to disproportionate punishment and so forth, these are the characteristics not only (if at all) of “alttestamentlicher” rulers,39 but of the concrete and contemporary experience of Roman imperium. A political dimension, and not merely a metaphysical one, is therefore at issue here. Irenaeus has Marcion’s Christ destroy “all the works of that god who made the world, whom he calls Cosmocrator” (Adv. Haer. 1.27.2;40 cf. Eph 6.12). That title, which Marcion found applied to spiritual powers in his “Laodiceans” (i.e., Ephesians), was also generally used for the pagan gods and the Roman emperors.41 Thus the fact that Marcion finds the 35. Harnack’s treatment downplays, in the end, the role and responsibility of the Creator in the origin of evil. See the discussion of Pedersen, “Some Comments,” and that of Ekkehard Mühlenberg, “Marcion’s Jealous God,” in D. Winslow, ed., Disciplina Nostra: Essays in Memory of Robert F. Evans, PMS 6 (Cambridge, Mass.: Philadelphia Patristic Foundation, 1979), 93–113. 36. Early Marcionite exegesis of negative Pauline references to the “world” (1 Cor 1.20, 4.9, 2 Cor 3.14) seems readily to have identified that world not with matter, but with the god of the world, the Creator (Adv. Marc. 5.5.7, 7.1, 11.5); Pedersen, “Some Comments,” 171. 37. SC 264:350. 38. CCL 1:443. 39. This of course raises the question of antisemitism and its influence in Harnack, as well as that of Marcion’s antijudaism. Two recent discussions of interest are Stephen Wilson, “Marcion and the Jews,” Anti-Judaism in Early Christianity, 2 vols., Studies in Christianity and Judaism 2 (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1986), 2:45–58, and now Heikki Räisänen, Marcion, Muhammad and the Mahatma (London: SCM, 1997), 64–80. 40. SC 264:350. 41. Walter Bauer, William F. Arndt, and F. Wilbur Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), s.v. “kosmokrãtvr,” 445. 304 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES judicial character of the lesser god problematic need not arise merely from difficulties in accepting the god of the Hebrew scriptures.42 The real experiences by Christians of trials before real judices are as (or more) likely to have provided at least the symbolic or experiential basis for describing and criticizing the lesser god in these terms; but more than that, local magistrates were arguably the actual practitioners of the lesser god’s rule. Thus it seems to be kosmos, the order or array of things social as well as natural, that is the problem from which Marcion began, as much or more than any assumption about the nature of matter, hyle.43 Marcion’s world denial is not first and foremost utter rejection and condemnation of the material, but refusal to acknowledge the dominion expressed in the ethos of the world.44 THE CUISINE OF SACRIFICE It is already apparent that a negative judgment on primordial matter does not entirely account for Marcionite sexual asceticism. The same seems to be true for the ascetic patterns determining use of material objects in Marcionite Christianity. Despite the alleged revulsion towards matter, Marcion rejected only two things, meal elements: meat and wine. Tertullian is explicit about the former (De ieiunio 15.1), and is apparently happy to present Marcion’s rejection of meat as something more stark even than Montanist dietary rigorism. Avoidance of wine is also implied in Tertullian’s description of Marcionite liturgy (Adv. Marc. 1.14.3); that Tertullian does not make anything of the absence of wine probably reflects his own Montanizing attitudes.45 The Marcionite exclusion of wine seems very likely, even though it is not stated explicitly until Epiphanius (Panarion 42.3.3). The selective nature of these prohibitions is not well accounted for by the old accusation of inconsistency, which in turn depends on the assumption that primordial cosmology is the guiding principle. There are in this instance numerous analogues that suggest a different set of concerns. Dissident groups of various religious and philosophical traditions in 42. On the aemulatio of the lesser god, see Mühlenberg, “Marcion’s Jealous God,” 104–7. 43. Harnack, Marcion, 33. 44. May, Creatio Ex Nihilo, 55. 45. Andrew McGowan, Ascetic Eucharists: Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), 164–67. MCGOWAN/MARCION’S LOVE OF CREATION 305 antiquity, from Pythagoreans to Cynics to (some) Jews (Dan 1.8–16; Josephus, Life 14), shared this common response to the civic and cosmic order maintained through sacrifice, of which these elements—wine and meat—were the characteristic “cuisine.”46 Although other foods were used in Greek and Roman temples as in the Jerusalem temple, meat and wine had a distinctive association with pagan cultus that made them problematic for many (cf. 1 Cor 8, 10; Rom 14.20–21). According to a story repeated in various Rabbinic sources, some Jews vowed to abstain from these, but not the elements of the oil or grain offerings, etc., after the Temple was destroyed (see b. B. Bat. 60b). Thus a variety of specific theological reasons were attached to such ascetic practice; dualism or attitudes to matter are not, however, a common feature.47 Even among the Christian groups who rejected the cuisine of sacrifice, including Ebionites, Montanists, and some others harder to classify theologically, it is difficult to find much common ground beyond the rejection itself.48 Theologically they were quite varied, and the ascetic pattern does not in all cases include rejection of marriage. To begin with, this may simply have been the maintenance of received tradition among certain Christians from places like Pontus, rather than a deliberate deviation from the orthodox norm. What is arguably common to these groups is a critique of or disengagement from the “world,” but not necessarily from matter itself. That rejection of the “world” also applies in the case of Marcion and his followers hardly needs to be restated, but its meaning may seem more than, or other than, flight from the material when viewed through the lens of this dietary and ritual practice. Did Marcion and his disciples believe that in rejecting meat and wine they were spurning the Creator and his works? Almost certainly. Yet their concern about these works was arguably focused not on matter, which was not itself attributable to the Creator in any case, but on particular qualities and processes associated with some material things far more than others. These things—actions 46. See Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), and Stanley Stowers, “Greeks Who Sacrifice and Those Who Do Not: Toward an Anthropology of Greek Religion,” The Social World of the First Christians: Essays in Honor of Wayne A. Meeks, ed. L. Michael White and O. Larry Yarborough (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1995), 293–333. 47. McGowan, Ascetic Eucharists, 67–88. 48. On the diet of Ebionites and other Jewish-Christian groups, see McGowan, Ascetic Eucharists, 144–51; on Montanism and its rejection of meat and wine, pp. 164–70. 306 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES more obviously than objects—are those which seem especially to promote or symbolize the Creator’s cause. Marriage has already been mentioned; sacrifice may be added, not only because of its association with Judaism and the Temple cult, which Marcion is known to have rejected, but also because of paganism, even though we have little indication of Marcion’s direct interest therein.49 As sacrificial foods, meat and wine are bound up closely with kosmos, the world in the sense of the order of things, maintained by sacrifice, as indeed by marriage.50 To refuse to eat meat or drink wine does not remove one from the world any more than does sexual abstinence, but these all express and enact a rejection thereof that allows the Christian to create a new order in the body and in the community. Marcionite asceticism may therefore have had at least an implicit political dimension, in that it expressed rejection not merely (or not primarily) of the god of the Hebrew Bible but of the god or gods of civic order. This was not only a matter of abstract worldview; we do have specific evidence of Roman persecution in Pontus at the beginning of the second century, and of the use of sacrifice (including wine) as the test of loyalty to the imperium (Pliny, ep. 10.96).51 Clearly the refusal or removal of wine and meat from diet indicates a specific set of issues underlying the attitudes towards them. If we lack an explicit Marcionite articulation of this, there are parallels from similarly ascetic Christian sources, close in space and time, which can responsibly be used to help us imagine it. Most strikingly apt for Marcion is perhaps the statement by Peter in the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies, that “those who have decided to accept the things of the coming reign may not claim for themselves things that are here, since they are the property of a foreign king, except only water and bread, and those things procured with sweat to stay alive. . . .” (Hom. 15.7.6).52 Granted the anti-Marcionite elements in the Pseudo-Clementines, this passage represents a theology of “things” hardly less radical than that often attributed to Marcion; material wealth, including food and clothing beyond a bare minimum (as well as meat and wine), are the property of the ruler of this world. Exceptions can be made, not because of any inherent 49. Harnack, Marcion, 166. 50. See Nancy Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion and Paternity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 51. Meat is not a direct issue in these cases, but we should not expect the expensive and awkward practice of ritual slaughter to be used often as a practical test. On Christianity in Pontus see Hoffman, Marcion: On the Restitution of Christianity, 1–29. 52. GCS 42:215. MCGOWAN/MARCION’S LOVE OF CREATION 307 difference between one thing and another that could be established ontologically, but for pragmatic reasons. Notable also in this case is the distinction drawn between the two kingdoms in essentially historical terms; it is the future kingdom to which the ascetic Christians belong, and its rule determines their conduct even now. Tertullian speaks similarly of Marcion’s attitude to the present (Adv. Marc. 1.24.7). Marcionites might well have shared the common demonological interpretation of sacrifice found in pagan and Christian sources alike, and thus have thought of meat-eating as empowering the Creator, or even Satan.53 In another work associated with communities rejecting wine and meat, the Acts of Thomas, this is presented (by a demon) in a way linked to meat, wine, and possibly even more accommodating forms of eucharistic practice: “And as you enjoy your prayer and good works and spiritual hymns, so I enjoy murders and adulteries and sacrifices poured with wine upon altars . . . the multitude worships idols and does their will, sacrificing to them and offering wine and water libations as food and presenting votives” (76–77).54 These sources can only serve a comparative function. A similarity of milieu, however, is clear enough, not least in terms of the common rejection of the cuisine of sacrifice. Just as Marcionite asceticism was not practically far removed from the “Jewish-Christian” and “Encratite” forms presented in these two works, its rationale need not have been vastly different, granted the probability that it had its own specific but now largely unknowable qualities. LEX ORANDI . . . Just as remarkable as the specific nature of ascetic rejection of material things, or even more so, is the positive use of objects in Marcionite liturgy. According to Tertullian, Marcion’s god certainly has not up until now rejected the Creator’s water in which he washes his own, nor the oil with which he anoints them, nor the mixture of honey and milk by which he nourishes them, nor the bread by which he represents his own body, even now needing for his own rites the beggaries of the Creator (Adv. Marc. 1.14.3).55 53. Marcion’s view of the devil seems to have been close to the orthodox one; see Adv. Marc. 2.10. 54. R. Lipsius and M. Bonnet, Acta apostolorum apocrypha (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1959), 2.2:191. 55. CCL 1:445. 308 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES What may we imagine was understood to allow the use of bread, water, milk and honey in Marcionite ritual? The answer ought not to be entirely unconnected to how human embodiment was itself at least tolerable, or simply how humans could be saved. We might therefore better approach the question through soteriology rather than cosmogony; what water does in baptism matters more than where it came from, and what bread (and water?) represent in the eucharist transcends or effaces what they were previously in themselves. R. Joseph Hoffmann speculates, not entirely implausibly, that in Marcionite baptism the use of the Creator’s water subverts the role of the elements in his scheme of things, making it the means of transition from his power to that of another.56 Something similar may apply to the eucharistic elements, although we cannot be at all clear about Marcion’s theology of them.57 Whether or not they are understood to effect some transition, it seems likely that the objects involved are themselves brought out from the Creator’s dominion. Tertullian is aware of such a notion of appropriation or liberation of persons and material things, but prefers to call it theft. This moral judgment does not obscure his confirming that the Stranger has in some sense taken control of material things, which of course does not fit with the usual picture of “dualism.” In existing scholarship, this dynamic is better recognized as it applies to human beings, i.e., soteriologically, but there is no reason to exclude the possibility that it was extended to some (other) material things. Since human beings are themselves genuinely the work of the Creator (Clement, Strom. 3.3.12) and are saved despite that, so too the material things used in liturgy could transcend their origins, caught up out of their residual affinity with the lesser god through the grace of the higher. That is to say, in the eucharist bread and perhaps other elements are taken (stolen, for Tertullian) and made part of the Stranger’s realm, becoming spiritual food which belongs to him and is eaten as such by people who belong to him. Tertullian seems to hint at such an appropriation of the elements by Marcion’s god in book 4 of Adversus Marcionem, where his own theme is the immorality of the theft by the Stranger of the Creator’s work. This higher god is a “new master and proprietor of the elements” (4.20.1);58 56. Hoffmann, Marcion: On the Restitution of Christianity, 22–25. 57. If a hyper-Pauline eucharistic theology is imagined, it might well have memorialized the last supper and death of Jesus as the central redemptive acts of the higher god. 58. CCL 1:594. MCGOWAN/MARCION’S LOVE OF CREATION 309 his saving work is said to have brought into effect a new kingdom (3.24; 4.24). Just as those who would be saved were apparently regarded as few (1.24), the elements which can be used appropriately also seem relatively few; but this would present no greater problem than the parsimony of the soteriology itself. This also invites comparison with the way material things are used in miracle stories in Marcion’s understanding. Jesus’ miracles are not merely spiritual events but physical ones, whose generosity and power contrasts with those of the Creator’s dispensation: Jesus touches a leper to show hostility to the law (Adv. Marc. 4.9.5; cf. 4.35.4), and cleansed more lepers than Elisha had (4.9.6; see 2 Kgs 5). In this case, Marcion also seems to have taken Jesus’ healing by word, rather than by the material use of water, as a sign of his superiority. This does not amount to avoidance of water, however, but is an instance of outdoing the Creator’s order. As Ekkehard Mühlenberg puts it, “One could . . . take the healings of Jesus as a surpassing of the Creator’s sphere, rather than an elimination of it.”59 The fact that the healings take place at all precludes a completely antimaterial position. The docetic character of Marcion’s Christology is of course a further reminder of the limited scope of this logic. It was more important that the Savior belong totally to the other, invisible realm than that he embody the gracious appropriation of matter. Still, one must resist the temptation to see in Marcion’s position on the body of Jesus a deliberate rejection of incarnational theology. The ideas of an Irenaeus, let alone an Athanasius, did not exist in Marcion’s experience, and in his theology salvation was achieved not by the modification of human existence, bodily or spiritual, but by redemption from the reign of the Creator. Marcion does seem to have had a specifically negative attitude to “the flesh,”60 but human embodiment must at least be acknowledged as something more specific than material existence. That Marcion’s eucharistic practice may have worked in terms of appropriation of matter while his Christology did not, may also be understood as an early example of the lex orandi, lex credendi principle, and/ or of Marcionite conservatism. Sometimes ritual precedes doctrine, and since Christians—including Marcionites—ate this ritual meal, Marcionite theology needed to find a way to allow and understand it, at least implicitly. Christology was still a sufficiently open matter, as the varieties of 59. “Marcion’s Jealous God,” 109. 60. It was not only terrena but stercoribus infersa—“full of dung” (Adv. Marc. 3.10.1 [CCL 1:521]). 310 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES early docetic theology attest, for Marcion to believe he was maintaining his position rather than inventing it. CONCLUSION It seems therefore that early Marcionite Christians understood material things in no fewer than three different ways. First and most prominently for the heresiologists at least, some things and practices were to be avoided altogether, namely, meat and wine, and sexual intercourse. Second, Marcionites made relatively normal or unremarkable use of most objects, foodstuffs and other substances. Third, Marcionite Christians certainly made ritual use of certain objects or substances that imply some form of positive transvaluation, comparable in form and content to the practice of other Christian communities and traditions. These seem to have included bread, water (for baptism and perhaps also for drinking), oil, milk and honey. As in other forms of Christianity, there seems no special inherent value in these substances as such, but in particular settings they could be sacralized for baptismal and eucharistic use. There is little evidence of Marcionites agonizing about the immediate and unavoidable fact of embodiment as such. Was this inconsistent? All these things were material, but only some were instruments of kosmos, being the fundamental means of forming and reforming the social structure. Marriage, in the arrangement of human beings within society, and meat and wine as the cuisine of sacrifice, the ritual construction of the rejected order, were arguably tainted more by association and function than by their original “stuff.” Other material things and hyle as such were arguably more or less indifferent, rather than impure or corrupt. World-denial may be a presupposition for Marcion, but it is not the last word. The strangeness and power of Marcion’s theology came from its claim that the alien god saves human beings without having any affinity with them whatsoever. Salvation was not the restoration of a relationship with the Creator, but the creation of one with the Stranger. Marcion thus emphasizes not origins but destinies.61 “Just this one work,” Marcion said, “is enough for our God: that by his surpassing and unique kindness, which is worth more than any number of locusts, he freed humanity.” 61. Hence there is some irony in Burkitt’s title for his Jowett Lecture on Marcion: “Marcion, or Christianity without History” (Gospel History, 289–323). Better perhaps, given the contrast with the ahistorical tendency of gnosticism, to say “Christianity without a Past.” MCGOWAN/MARCION’S LOVE OF CREATION 311 Marcion neither started nor finished with cosmology, but rather with soteriology, the one great and simple creative work that superseded, and sometimes transformed, the complex and banal reality of material things as they stood. Of course Marcion did not love the old creation as such, but heralded the new; but just as his higher god had acted to save Christians, certain things in the old world—or rather from it—could be loved, selectively, problematically, and passionately. Andrew McGowan is Associate Professor of Early Christian History at the Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts