Marcion's Love of Creation

Andrew McGowan
Journal of Early Christian Studies, Volume 9, Number 3, Fall 2001,
pp. 295-311 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/earl.2001.0045
For additional information about this article
Access Provided by University of Athens (or National and Kapodistrian Univ. of Athens) at 06/24/11 8:09PM GMT
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/earl/summary/v009/9.3mcgowan.html
MCGOWAN/MARCIONS LOVE OF CREATION 295
Journal of Early Christian Studies 9:3, 295311 2001 The Johns Hopkins University Press
Marcions Love of Creation
1
ANDREW MCGOWAN
Although Marcion is often said to have rejected matter as inherently evil,
Marcionite sacramental practice and asceticism suggest a more complex and
specic set of attitudes to material things and practices. Later heresiologists
analyzed Marcions rather negative cosmogony and saw inconsistency, but
Marcionite Christianity was less concerned with the origins of things than
with their signicance 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 Creators work and without afnity to that Stranger, then by
analogy the use of water in baptism or bread in the eucharist may be
understood as the ritual reconguration 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 1.17.1
2
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 Marcions 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. Sufcit unicum hoc opus deo nostro, quod hominem liberavit summa et
praecipua bonitate sua, et omnibus locustis anteponenda (CCL 1:458).
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 Marcions ancient opponents dwelt on this point at length, and
modern interpretations have continued to assert Marcions rejection of
matter, even developing boldly psychologizing reconstructions that sug-
gest a personal hatred or aversion to the material as such on his part.
6
Yet even the baldest assertions by ancient heresiologists have not pre-
vented 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 Marcions 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), 16677, 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 Inuence (London:
SPCK, 1948) 7778.
5. See F. C. Burkitt, The Gospel History and its Transmission (Edinburgh: T & T
Clark, 1906), 289323; E. U. Schle, Der Ursprung des Bsen bei Marcion,
Zeitschrift fr Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 16 (1964): 2342; 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), 5458. See also the
discussion of Marcions position relative to other gnostic exemplars in Michael A.
Williams, Rethinking Gnosticism: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious
Category (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 2326.
6. Burkitt speaks in terms of the deling contamination of matter (Gospel
History, 296), and Schle of eine Abkehr von allem Krperlich-Materiellen and
tiefste Verachtung alles Materiellen on Marcions part (Ursprung des Bsen, 26).
7. Harnack, Marcion 9799; Blackman, Marcion and His Inuence 1056; Schle,
Ursprung des Bsen, passim; R. Joseph Hoffmann, Marcion: On the Restitution of
Christianity, AAR Academy Series 46 (Chico: Scholars, 1984), 185208.
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, 9798. Markus Vinzent, in Christs
Resurrection: The Pauline Basis of Marcions Teaching, SP 31 (1997): 22533,
argues for the primacy of the resurrection, rather than cosmology or divine unity, in
Marcions scheme.
MCGOWAN/MARCIONS LOVE OF CREATION 297
Tertullian, Clement, and others who provide the evidence for Marcions
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 com-
pletely, many or most were employed normally, and still others were
embraced; most strikingly, Marcionite Christians had a sacramental prac-
tice. 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 Marcions theoretical cosmology and the place of evil in it,
recognizing the problems but nding little to illuminate them beyond re-
peating 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 rst on the relatively well explored area of
Marcions 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
Marcions 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 Marcions 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 (198788): 15758. Important reconsidera-
tions of the question of gnostic inuence are Barbara Aland, Marcion: Versuch einer
neuen Interpretation, ZTK 70 (1973): 42047, and Ugo Bianchi, Marcion:
Thologien biblique ou docteur gnostique? VC 21 (1967): 14149.
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
Tertullians 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 ight, Tertullian then adds evil itself to his
growing list of Marcions supposedly eternal, unbegotten gods, since,
he says, [Marcion] imputes evil to the materialone thing unbegotten
to another unbegotten, one uncreated to another uncreated, and one
eternal to another eternal (1.15.45).
12
The reference to preexistent matter as evil is clear enough, perhaps all
the more so for being incidental. Still, the focus of Tertullians discussion
is protological rather than more generally metaphysical, and if a genuine
report on Marcions 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 critics assumptions, but even brief
attention to Marcions apparent interests makes us wonder how impor-
tant 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 Clements discussion of
marriage, and the point contributes to his explanation of Marcionite
sexual asceticism; continence is a sort of nonreproductive passive resis-
tance 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 Creators 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. 3.3.1224), one minute Clement
casts Plato as having inuenced Marcion, and the next uses Plato as a stick
12. CCL 1:45657.
13. k te lhw kakw ka k dikaou . . . dhmiourgo (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 (198788): 14142.
MCGOWAN/MARCIONS LOVE OF CREATION 299
with which to beat the heretic. The sections Clement cites from the Politicus
(273 BC; the order of sentences is reversed) do serve to illustrate some
afnity, even if the intention was the opposite: The cause of these things
(sc. disorder, evil) was the material element (t svmatoeidw) in the worlds
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, Clements point need not be deemed worthless.
17
Even assuming that Clement justly represents Marcions 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 Creators
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 Clements 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 acknowl-
edge some principle of selectivity that involves more than the mere mate-
rial 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.
7.2921, where a forced effort to correlate Marcions teaching with Empedocles
renders the whole passage problematic as evidence. See also Hoffman, Marcion: On
the Restitution of Christianity, 18590. Some philosophical inuence 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): 5359.
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), 92102.
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), appar-
ently 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 identied with matter
(Hymni c. Haer. 48.16). Ephraem seems also to reect 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
Ephraems 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, 35; cf. 14.8) or even as
jaded sexual partners (Prose Refutations 1.6970).
23
Similar elements of
Marcionite teaching are known to Eznik of Kolb in the early fth century
(De Deo 358, 36672, etc.).
24
These distinctive elements in Ephraems
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 Marcions own position.
Given the oddities of this evidence as a whole, some have even ques-
20. See Edmund Beck, Die Hyle bei Markion nach Ephrm, OCP 44 (1978): 5
30; Drijvers, Marcionism in Syria, 15372.
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, 16270.
23. C. Mitchell, S. Ephraims Prose Refutations of Mani, Marcion, and Bardaisan,
2 vols. (London: Text and Translation Society, 1912).
24. PO 28:51417, 51921; sections 4.1 and 4.5 in the alternate numbering of
Ezniks work.
25. Beck, Hyle bei Markion nach Ephrm, 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 Marcions 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 Marcions 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/MARCIONS 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 Marcions own teaching, which seems un-
likely 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 reecting authentic tradi-
tions.
28
Taken together, these testimonies do suggest that Marcions teach-
ing assumed a negative judgment on the preexistent unformed stuff of the
created world. They also suggest, however, that evil hyle was not neces-
sarily 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 Marcions 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 signicance we give it in his thinking and in practice. This was one
isolated point at which Harnack suggested the inuence of gnosticism, via
Cerdo, but as an inessential or foreign element in Marcions 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:ixxii, xvxvi.
27. Thus Drijvers argument, that evil matter was a constituent part (Marcionism
in Syria, 168) of Marcions system because it has a place in the system of Ephraems
opponents, ought to be resisted. Drijvers may, however, be right to oppose Becks
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 Marcions thought and practice.
28. See Harnack, Marcion, 9798; Blackman, Marcion and His Inuence, 7679.
If what Tertullian and Clement do is to rebut what they regard as implicit in
Marcions 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 Mays 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 problem-
atic was far from unknown to contemporary thought.
30
The passage from
Platos Politicus already mentioned in connection with Clements critique
of Marcion gives some indication of starting points for Middle Platonist
speculations about matter. Among thinkers of Marcions 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 sufcient to say that bad things
(kak) come not from God but belong to matter (l) 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 Martyrs
identication 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, Justins 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 conict
between Marcion and such as Tertullian or Clement therefore embodies the
critical reection of early third-century theologians upon the vagaries more
typical of mid-second-century thought.
34
Any specic 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 Marcions world-denying system
also depends to some extent on the role of the Creator, the lesser god
30. May, Creatio Ex Nihilo, 5657, and especially 56 n. 71.
31. Chalcidius, Timaeus, ed. J. H. Waszink (London & Leiden: Warburg Institute
& E. J. Brill, 1975), 298.
32. SC 136:34446.
33. Creatio Ex Nihilo, 5657.
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 Inuence, 78 n. 1).
MCGOWAN/MARCIONS 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 worlds 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 Marcions Creator
the maker of evils (Adv. Haer. 1.27.2),
37
and Tertullian (Adv. Marc.
1.2.12) 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
Marcions Creator has a tendency to partiality, to disproportionate pun-
ishment and so forth, these are the characteristics not only (if at all) of
alttestamentlicher rulers,
39
but of the concrete and contemporary expe-
rience of Roman imperium. A political dimension, and not merely a
metaphysical one, is therefore at issue here.
Irenaeus has Marcions 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 nds the
35. Harnacks 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 Mhlenberg, Marcions Jealous God, in D. Winslow, ed.,
Disciplina Nostra: Essays in Memory of Robert F. Evans, PMS 6 (Cambridge, Mass.:
Philadelphia Patristic Foundation, 1979), 93113.
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 identied 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 inuence in Harnack,
as well as that of Marcions 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), 2:4558, and now Heikki Risnen, Marcion, Muhammad and the
Mahatma (London: SCM, 1997), 6480.
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. kosmokrtvr, 445.
304 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES
judicial character of the lesser god problematic need not arise merely
from difculties 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 gods
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
Marcions
world denial is not rst 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 Marcions rejection of meat as something more stark even than
Montanist dietary rigorism. Avoidance of wine is also implied in Tertullians
description of Marcionite liturgy (Adv. Marc. 1.14.3); that Tertullian
does not make anything of the absence of wine probably reects 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 assump-
tion 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 Mhlenberg, Marcions Jealous God,
1047.
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), 16467.
MCGOWAN/MARCIONS LOVE OF CREATION 305
antiquity, from Pythagoreans to Cynics to (some) Jews (Dan 1.816;
Josephus, Life 14), shared this common response to the civic and cosmic
order maintained through sacrice, of which these elementswine and
meatwere 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 14.2021). 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 specic
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 sacrice,
including Ebionites, Montanists, and some others harder to classify theo-
logically, it is difcult to nd 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, ight 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 thingsactions
46. See Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Cuisine of Sacrice among
the Greeks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), and Stanley Stowers,
Greeks Who Sacrice 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), 293333.
47. McGowan, Ascetic Eucharists, 6788.
48. On the diet of Ebionites and other Jewish-Christian groups, see McGowan,
Ascetic Eucharists, 14451; on Montanism and its rejection of meat and wine, pp.
16470.
306 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES
more obviously than objectsare those which seem especially to promote
or symbolize the Creators cause. Marriage has already been mentioned;
sacrice 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 Marcions
direct interest therein.
49
As sacricial foods, meat and wine are bound up
closely with kosmos, the world in the sense of the order of things, main-
tained by sacrice, 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 po-
litical dimension, in that it expressed rejection not merely (or not prima-
rily) 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 specic
evidence of Roman persecution in Pontus at the beginning of the second
century, and of the use of sacrice (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 specic set of issues underlying the atti-
tudes 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 com-
ing 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 be-
yond 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: Sacrice, 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, 129.
52. GCS 42:215.
MCGOWAN/MARCIONS 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
Marcions attitude to the present (Adv. Marc. 1.24.7).
Marcionites might well have shared the common demonological inter-
pretation of sacrice 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 sacrices poured with wine
upon altars . . . the multitude worships idols and does their will, sacricing
to them and offering wine and water libations as food and presenting
votives (7677).
54
These sources can only serve a comparative function. A similarity of
milieu, however, is clear enough, not least in terms of the common rejec-
tion of the cuisine of sacrice. 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 specic but
now largely unknowable qualities.
LEX ORANDI . . .
Just as remarkable as the specic nature of ascetic rejection of material
things, or even more so, is the positive use of objects in Marcionite liturgy.
According to Tertullian, Marcions god
certainly has not up until now rejected the Creators 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. Marcions 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: Wissen-
schaftliche 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 Mar-
cionite baptism the use of the Creators 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 eucha-
ristic elements, although we cannot be at all clear about Marcions theol-
ogy of them.
57
Whether or not they are understood to effect some transi-
tion, it seems likely that the objects involved are themselves brought out
from the Creators 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 judg-
ment does not obscure his conrming that the Stranger has in some sense
taken control of material things, which of course does not t 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 afnity 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 Strangers 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
Marcions god in book 4 of Adversus Marcionem, where his own theme is
the immorality of the theft by the Stranger of the Creators 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, 2225.
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/MARCIONS 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 Marcions understanding. Jesus miracles are not merely
spiritual events but physical ones, whose generosity and power contrasts
with those of the Creators 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 avoid-
ance of water, however, but is an instance of outdoing the Creators order.
As Ekkehard Mhlenberg puts it, One could . . . take the healings of
Jesus as a surpassing of the Creators 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 Marcions 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 Marcions 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 Marcions experience, and in his theology salvation was
achieved not by the modication of human existence, bodily or spiritual,
but by redemption from the reign of the Creator. Marcion does seem to
have had a specically negative attitude to the esh,
60
but human
embodiment must at least be acknowledged as something more specic
than material existence.
That Marcions eucharistic practice may have worked in terms of ap-
propriation of matter while his Christology did not, may also be under-
stood as an early example of the lex orandi, lex credendi principle, and/
or of Marcionite conservatism. Sometimes ritual precedes doctrine, and
since Christiansincluding Marcionitesate this ritual meal, Marcionite
theology needed to nd a way to allow and understand it, at least implic-
itly. Christology was still a sufciently open matter, as the varieties of
59. Marcions Jealous God, 109.
60. It was not only terrena but stercoribus infersafull of dung (Adv. Marc.
3.10.1 [CCL 1:521]).
310 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES
61. Hence there is some irony in Burkitts title for his Jowett Lecture on Marcion:
Marcion, or Christianity without History (Gospel History, 289323). Better
perhaps, given the contrast with the ahistorical tendency of gnosticism, to say
Christianity without a Past.
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 in-
cluded 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 evi-
dence 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 hu-
man beings within society, and meat and wine as the cuisine of sacrice,
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 Marcions theology came from its
claim that the alien god saves human beings without having any afnity
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.
MCGOWAN/MARCIONS LOVE OF CREATION 311
Marcion neither started nor nished 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 Chris-
tians, certain things in the old worldor rather from itcould be loved,
selectively, problematically, and passionately.
Andrew McGowan is Associate Professor of Early Christian History at
the Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts