Page 9, 3rd June 2011

3rd June 2011

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Page 9, 3rd June 2011 — The rebirth of a heresy
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Locations: St Epiphanius, Rome

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The rebirth of a heresy

arcion ’s damaging ideas are back, says Jerome di Costanzo Why do we need to remember the second-century heretic Marcion of Sinope? He started 300 years of debate, led by the Church apologists and scholars such as Tertullian, Rhodon, St Justin the Martyr, Adamantius, St Hyppolytus of Rome and St Epiphanius of Salamis. Their critical treatises, in answer to Marcion’s heresy, moulded the foundation of the Christian Church and defined our faith. And yet, according to some of our leading philosophers, the essence of Marcion’s heresy has returned.
His heresy, initiated in Rome around 144, was a complete and radical rejection of the Old Testament. Marcion saw two distinct gods: the creator, or demiurge, of the Old Covenant and the good god manifested by Jesus. Christ in Marcionism isn’t God made man, but the appearance, without flesh, of God Himself. Marcion’s Deus ex machina was not foretold by the Old Testament, a stance which Tertullian answered with an ironic “Suddenly a Son, suddenly sent, suddenly Christ”. For Marcion there was no resurrection of the body: Christ’s Passion was the work of the demiurge and just an appearance. Jesus could not have been incarnate because all that was created was bad. Only Jesus, the manifested God, was good and superior.
Marcion wasn’t a Gnostic or an early Manichean but a radical disciple of St Paul, seeing him on Christ’s right hand, his true Apostle. Marcion was the first “Christian” theologian to propose a canon of the Bible, but with deliberate omissions and manipulation. He edited the Evangelists to justify his rejection of the Jewish tradition. His à la carte canon included a version of Luke’s Gospel with two chapters omitted – the other Apostles were considered “false” – and 10 Epistles from St Paul. He makes the canon fit his own vision or doctrine, and frankly just for this he could be considered a heretic or at the very least a savage theological thug. Marcion thought that one Book, being the only source of truth, was enough. But what would Christianity be without its libraries? Like Thomas Aquinas, “I fear the man of a single book”. Marcionism had completely disappeared around the fifth century. It was also perhaps the victim of its own contradiction highlighted by the Christian scholars. Some historians in the Middle Ages saw Catharism as a form of Marcionite revival, but there was no direct link for this. Some modern religious historians, such as Adolf von Harnack, affirmed that the Church accepted a Marcionite preface to St Paul’s Epistles. This does not, however, demonstrate the Church’s acceptance of Marcion doctrine, but just that his translation, with its corrections and annotations, was the basis of an early translation of St Paul.
So what is Marcion’s legacy? What do our philosophers say? In the late 1970s the French historian Alain Besançon wrote in his book Les Origines intellectuelles du Léninisme that it is in a pseudo-Christian background, a Marcionism, that we may explain the great totalitarian regimes such as Leninism and Nazism. Were these revolutions daughters of Marcion in their wish to clear the table of the past to build a better world? One could compare Edmund Burke to Tertullian in their respective positions against Revolution and Marcion.
Rémi Brague, in a reflection on Marcionism and the modern age in his Eccentric Culture, asks: “Is the modern age a break away from a ‘bad’ Middle Ages or is the modern age a continuation of the Middle Ages? For Marcion the Christian revelation was a reaction against Judaism and yet for the Church scholars it was a continuation. And so Marcion’s heresy becomes a pertinent subject of debate and reflection today. Is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a symbol of the Modern Age a break away from Christian Middle Age philosophy or is it a continuation?” In many ways we’re living in a Marcionite culture, in that all that has gone before is considered bad. The content of our new heresy has changed – it’s no longer a question of the Old Testament and the nature of Christ – but the essence of Marcionism has reappeared.
Our history programmes change, cut or re-write the past, as Marcion did with his scripture, just to affirm the truth of the new dogma of the politically correct, so that Richard the Lion heart was a homosexual mass murderer of Muslims. Historical Marcionism is at work again when the EU refused to refer to any Christian roots in its constitution.
From a Chestertonian point of view yesterday’s heretics have became today’s orthodox. The pseudo-secularist or Neohumanist obsessive criticism of Catholicism as being wrong is another form of Marcionism. The Church takes the place of the Hebrew because of the rigorous condemnation: the Middle Age faith of Catholicism is all bad.
Marcion said that the body is bad and the spirit is good, making him perhaps an early preacher of the gender equality, because men and women are similar in God. Today we are encouraged by our law not to think of gender. Our tax declarations no longer specify a wife or a husband, but a partner. We now have civil partnerships of non-specific gender. Nature is no longer recognised by law, just as Marcion’s Nature belonged to the “bad”!
The modern cult of aesthetic surgery, which gives you the appearance of being years younger, is a manifestation of youth, but not its reality, like Marcion’s Christ. Modern eugenics, with its pretension to correct human nature, bases its ethic on the evilness of the body.
And then there are online community networks with their virtual worlds. The people are not flesh and blood, but manifestations of themselves. Users can edit themselves – their pictures, their thoughts and background – showing only what they feel might be “right”.
Why did the Marcionism of the past fail? Maybe, and this is just a supposition, it died because of its own egotistic tendencies and its desire to be selfreliant. Marcion’s propensity to reject reality and Nature is his principle mistake and I think the modern Marcionite shares this desire. Our society seems more and more like one of the Marcionite communities lost in the desert, grabbing at its own unshareable truth.
Jerome di Costanzo is a French analyst and journalist now living in Yorkshire. He specialises in politics, religion and philosophy




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