The Joy of Heresy (Part 2)

{It has been suggested to me that very few people share my interest in early Christian heresies or in the ditheistic system of Marcion of Sinope. I find this difficult to believe. Is this not still a Christian nation? And ought Christians not to be on guard against the revival of ancient heresies such as Gnosticism, Pelagianism, and Marcionism? The roads to Hell are many and varied, filled with seductive roadside attractions and a plethora of unknown unknowns; the more we learn about the landscape of heresy, the better we can avoid it.} ¹

“In holding the idea that the revelation of God in Christ was transitory rather than intrinsic to the godhead itself, Marcion anticipated the modalist-Monarchians such as Praxeas and Sibellius. His Christology inevitably led him in the direction of patripassianism.” (R. Joseph Hoffmann, from Marcion: On the Restitution of Christianity)

Whatever happened to the Modalist Monarchians? They were one of the best of the New Wave/punk pseudo-apostolic bands; Praxeas and Sibellius were the Lennon and McCartney of their era. Perhaps they got lost on their way to Patripassianism; it is, I have heard, a long and winding road, and the signage, in koine Greek and Aramaic, is confusing.  

As we were saying, heresies—by which we mean, divergent views about Jesus and about the implications of his life, death, and resurrection—abounded in the early centuries of Christianity. It was only a matter of time before authorities stepped in to quell the riot of religious and metaphysical speculation. Unfortunately, by the time order was restored, an entire clowder of Gnostic cats had been let out of the bag. We turn again to Rufus Jones (The Church’s Debt to Heretics) for explanation:

It is no exaggeration to say that by the middle of the second century the Church found itself engaged in a life and death struggle with the multitudinous forms of Gnostic religion. With all their variations, they can quite well be grouped under the label, 'the Gnostic complex.'  ‘Complex’ seems a very appropriate word for these movements. The word properly means organized tendencies or sentiments which are in some degree confused, morbid and abnormal. They are usually found in individuals, but here in these movements we are confronted with social waves, or tides, or drifts, of morbid and unbalanced sentiments which were more or less 'contagious.' We have revealed to us in these movements a society which seems neurasthenic and psychopathic—suffering from nervous prostration— in which almost any ‘suggestion’ may powerfully operate and effectively work.

A great many of the Gnostic societies are, of course, not rightly called heretical. They were often wholly outside the sphere and area of the Church. Some of them plainly antedate the birth of the Church, but they tended all the time to influence and color its life and thought, and the movement was the fertile mother of heresies. Christianity has throughout all its history borne the marks of its conflict with this mélange of rival faiths, for while it was ostensibly victorious over them, it was at the same time in some degree 'led captive' by those whom it conquered.

Gnostic writings were given to speculation about the origin of the world and the source of evil, but they were much more akin to magic than to philosophy, and they drew upon mythology and imagination for their constructive material rather than upon rational and verifiable grounds of truth. They are decadent forms of religion, full of confusion, superstition, gullibility, credulity and wild imagination. ²

With all due respect to Rufus Jones: just hold your horses there a minute, buddy. “Mainstream” Christianity was chock-full of so-called "divine revelations," miraculous events, and what might plausibly be called wild imaginings. Paul deliberately eschewed and explicitly denigrated “rational and verifiable grounds of truth” in favor of mystical visions he modestly claimed to have been granted (“whether in the body or out of the body,” he did not know); those visions revealed to him, in his words, "things hidden since the foundation of the world."

As for Gnostics’ belief in magic: I am at a loss as to how anyone can view the transformative effects of pneuma, as described by Paul, as anything other than magic; pneuma was said eventually to transform believers into quasi-divine creatures with authority to judge angels. ³ The Church’s official doctrine of eucharistic “transubstantiation”—bread and wine transmuted into “the body and blood of Christ”—is as magical as the day is long, especially as it is facilitated, according to the Church, by formulaic words being spoken as part of a structured ritual by an authorized priest. You simply cannot get more magical than that.  

Continuing his polemic, Rufus Jones damned Gnostics with the faintest of praise, suggesting they were, at best, industrious scavengers:

Gnostics were very skillful in their use of “the debris of ancient faiths,” out of which they fashioned new and fantastic structures. They “plundered” the older faiths somewhat as the builders of new temples plundered the ancient shrines for their building material. The religions of Babylonia, Persia, Egypt, Asia Minor, the Old Testament and Greece, especially the imaginary world system set forth in Plato’s Timaeus, furnished suggestions, and sometimes even body and filling, for the weird Gnostic “gospel” during the prolific period of the first and second centuries.

Again, with respect: Gnostics were no more guilty of “plundering” than were orthodox Christians, who expropriated in toto the sacred scriptures of ancient Israel, reinterpreting them at will and using them as a cudgel with which to browbeat the Jewish people. Moreover, while the Gnostic gospels were undeniably “weird,” I would hesitate to make that point if I were, like Rufus Jones, an adherent of a religion which worships an incarnate God who was born of a miraculously impregnated virgin and who, after performing all sorts of miracles, allowed himself to be cruelly murdered before rising from the dead like a phoenix from the ashes and then disappearing from the planet for good.

In other words: let whoever is without weird religious ideas of their own cast the first stone at the glass houses of others.

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¹ See Fr. Tim McCauley’s prescient warning: Beware the Neo-Marcionites (crisismagazine.com)

² Pagans like Celsus and Porphyry described Christianity itself in almost identical terms.

³ Pneuma was also said to help build strong bodies 12 ways--I think. 

 

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