The case was different with Apelles, who was certainly later in date than Marcion and perhaps succeeded him in the headship of the sect, either immediately or at one remove[[753]]. According to Tertullian, Apelles left Rome for Alexandria where he no doubt came in contact with the Gnostic opinions there rife[[754]]. The slander that Tertullian sets on foot about him to the effect that he forsook his master’s continence and was addicted to the company of women is unexpectedly refuted by Tertullian’s contemporary, Rhodo[[755]]. But Apelles must have come in contact in Alexandria with the followers of Valentinus and other Gnostic teachers, and their arguments no doubt compelled him to modify the strict dualism of his master. According to Rhodo, Apelles asserted that there was only one principle of all things, which would imply that the Demiurge was the creature of the Supreme God, and that Matter, instead of being essentially evil and independent, must have been also created by Him. Hippolytus, who was possibly a little later than Rhodo, amplifies this by the statement that Apelles held the Demiurge to be the fashioner of things coming into being (subsequent to him)[[756]], and that there was a third god or angel of a fiery nature who inspired Moses, and even a fourth who was the cause of evil. In this the Gnostic idea of correspondence or reflection of one world in another is manifest; but it is evident that it also approaches more nearly than does the uncompromising dualism of Marcion himself to the teaching of the Catholic Church. The same tendency to compromise is evident in Apelles’ willingness to use the books of both the Old and the New Testament, quoting with regard to them, if Epiphanius is to be believed, the apocryphal saying of Jesus “Be ye wise money-changers!” to be found in, among other works, the Pistis Sophia[[757]]. Apelles seems also to have modified his master’s teaching with regard to the body of Jesus, which was, he said, no phantasm, but a real body of flesh and blood assumed by Him on His descent to the earth, and returned by Him piece by piece on His Ascension to the different elements whence it was drawn. His indebtedness in this to the sources from which the author of the Pistis Sophia drew the same doctrine needs no demonstration. Yet there is no reason to assert that Apelles considered these “corrections” of Marcion’s teaching in any way essential or binding on his followers. He seems, too, to have adopted one of the practices of the primitive Church in paying attention to the ecstatical visions of “prophets” of both sexes, his faith in the prophecies of a virgin named Philumene being the foundation of Tertullian’s slander on his morals. There can be no doubt, however, that in spite of these tendencies, he remained in essentials a true follower of Marcion, and that like his master, he deprecated enquiry into insoluble problems. “One ought not,” he said, as Rhodo reports, “to examine doctrine, but everyone should be steadfast in the faith. Those who trust in Him that was crucified will be saved, if only they do good works[[758]].” Herein he also, like Marcion himself, seems to have anticipated by many centuries the teaching of the German Reformers.

Other followers of Marcion there were who, thanks to our lack of information concerning them, are to us merely names. Thus Tatian, who was according to tradition a disciple of Justin Martyr but fell away from orthodoxy after his teacher’s death, seems to have held a kind of intermediate position between the two great schools of heresy. While teaching, according to Irenaeus, a system of aeons not unlike that of Valentinus, he adopted in full the notions of Marcion as to abstinence from marriage, from the eating of flesh, and from the use of wine, and may have been the founder of a separate sect called Encratites[[759]]. We hear, too, of one Prepon, “an Assyrian” or native of Syria, a follower of Marcion, whom Hippolytus represents as teaching that Jesus Himself was intermediate between the good and evil deities and came down to earth to be freed from all evil[[760]]. Rhodo also speaks[[761]] of Potitus and Basilicus, followers of Marcion, who held fast to his doctrine of two principles, while Syneros, as he affirms, led a school which asserted that there were three “natures.” Lucian also, who, according to Hippolytus and Epiphanius, came in point of time between Marcion and Apelles[[762]], may have inclined to the same doctrine, and taught, unlike Marcion, that there would be a resurrection, not of the body nor of the soul, but of some part of man which he also defined as being of a “third nature[[763]].”

The conversion of Constantine put a violent end to any open propagation of the doctrines of Marcion or his successors. In the picturesque words of Eusebius “the lurking-places of the heretics were broken up by the Emperor’s commands, and the savage beasts which they harboured were put to flight.” Hence, he goes on to tell us, many of those who had been “deceived” crept secretly into the Church, and were ready to secure their own safety by every sort of dissimulation[[764]]. This practice, as we have seen, had always been popular among the Gnostics properly so called, whose religion consisted in part in the knowledge of the formulas secretly imparted and preserved with jealous care from all but the initiated. Although there is no distinct proof that the same course was now adopted by the Marcionites, there is some reason for thinking that this was the case. The postponement of baptism noticed above must have early divided the members of the Marcionite churches into grades of which the largest was in an inferior position to the others. It is unlikely that these catechumens, who might witness but not share in the sacraments celebrated for their higher-placed brethren, should have courted persecution on behalf of a faith with which they were not fully entrusted. The outbreak of the Arian controversy, which followed so closely on the conversion of Constantine, also carried within the Catholic Church those speculations about the Divine nature which had hitherto formed a fruitful source of dissension among the Marcionites themselves. With their synagogues and meeting-places taken away from them and handed over to the Catholics, many of them must have looked about for some tolerated community which they could join, and of all that thus offered themselves, the Catholic Church offered the greatest inducements to them.

Yet another way was open to the convinced Marcionite who could not bring himself to reject Marcion’s view that the true purport of Jesus’ teaching had been obscured by the additions of Judaizing apostles. The sect of the followers of Manes, who began to show themselves in the Western part of the Roman Empire shortly before Constantine’s conversion, professed a dualism more uncompromising than any that Marcion had taught, and coupled with it an organization so skilful and effective that it was able for some ten centuries longer to defy the efforts of the rest of Christendom for its suppression. In its division of all Manichaeans into the two great classes of Perfect and Hearers it drew very close to Marcionite practice; and the liberty which it allowed the Hearers of outwardly professing any faith they pleased must have enabled the Marcionite who joined it to keep those articles of his former creed most dear to him without coming into violent collision with either Church or State. Hence the tradition seems well founded which asserts that the majority of those Marcionites, who did not become reconciled with the Catholic Church after Constantine’s alliance with it, joined the ranks of the Manichaeans, and so ceased to exist as a separate community[[765]].

The direct influence of Marcion’s teaching upon that of the Catholic Church was probably very small. In spite of the efforts of recent writers to maintain the contrary[[766]], it is difficult to see that this first attempt, honest and sincere as it undoubtedly was, at the reformation of Christianity ever bore fruit of lasting value. Its main principle which, as we have seen, was the rejection of the Jewish scriptures and their bearing upon the Mission of Jesus, has been ignored, since Marcion’s death as in his lifetime, by every other Church and sect professing Christian doctrines. His common-sense view, that the words of the Christian Bible must mean what their authors and their contemporaries would have naturally taken them to mean, and do not for the most part contain any deeply hidden or allegorical significance, was in like manner repudiated by the whole of Christendom, which, up to the latter part of the XIXth century, continued to construe the greater part of its sacred books by trope and figure[[767]]. There remains then only the asceticism and austerity that Marcion practised which the orthodox could have borrowed from him. But, we have seen that the religious abstinence from procreation, and from the use of meat and wine, can be traced back to the appearance of Orphism in Greece some five hundred years before the Birth of Christ; and if the Christian Church adopted, as it partly did, these practices in a modified form, it was by way of inheritance from a source which was much nearer to it than Marcion’s heresy. That many of Marcion’s ideas have been revived in our own day is likely enough, and this opinion has been put forward with much skill and point by Dr Foakes-Jackson in his Hulsean Lectures. But this is a case of revival rather than of descent, and a reformer who has to wait some eighteen centuries before his ideas meet with acceptance, may well be held to have failed to influence after ages.

Notwithstanding this, the heresy of Marcion will always have great interest for the student of the History of Religions. The success—fugitive as such things go, but real enough for a time—with which Marcion set up a Church over against that tremendous polity which has been called without much exaggeration “the very master-piece of human wisdom,” would be alone sufficient to make it precious in the eyes of those who are not blind to the romance of history. To archaeologists it is the more interesting that it is only in its direction that we are likely to receive in future much additional light upon the struggles of nascent Christianity with one category of its competitors. The very voluminous writings of the other Gnostics were destroyed by the triumphant Church with such minute care that the Coptic texts described in the last chapter form the only relics of this once enormous literature that have survived to us. The heathen religions which for some time disputed the ground with the Church have also left few traces partly for the same reason, and partly because the secrecy to which they pledged their votaries made it unlikely that many written documents of these faiths would survive. But the Antitheses of Marcion were in the hands of Photius in the Xth century; and, although it is dangerous to prophesy in such matters, it is by no means impossible that some lucky discovery within the borders of the Turkish Empire may yet give us a MS. that will enable us to reconstruct them. If that should ever be the case, we shall be in a far better position than we are now to decide whether the analogies between Marcionism and Protestantism that have been detected of late years are essential or superficial.

CHAPTER XII
THE WORSHIP OF MITHRAS

Few of us, perhaps, are inclined to recognize that, from its first establishment down to the Mahommedan Invasion of the VIIth century, the Roman Empire found itself constantly in the presence of a bitter, determined, and often victorious enemy. Alexander had conquered but had not destroyed the Persians; and, although the magic of the hero’s personality held them faithful to him during his too brief life, he was no sooner dead than they hastened to prove that they had no intention of tamely giving up their nationality. Peucestas, the Royal bodyguard who received the satrapy of Persia itself on his master’s death, and was confirmed in it at the first shuffling of the cards at Triparadisus, found it expedient to adopt the Persian language and dress, with the result that his subjects conceived for him an affection only equal to that which they afterwards showed for Seleucus[[768]]. Later, when the rise of the Parthian power under Arsaces brought about the defeat of Seleucus II Callinicus, the opposition to European forms of government found a centre further north[[769]], whence armies of lightly-equipped horsemen were able to raid up to the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean[[770]]. Thanks probably to the knowledge of this support in reserve, when Western Asia found the military power of the Greek kings becoming exhausted by internecine wars, she began to throw off the alien civilization that she had in part acquired, and to return more and more to Persian ways[[771]]. When the Romans in their turn set to work to eat up the enfeebled Greek kingdoms, they quickly found themselves in presence of a revived nationality as firmly held and nearly as aggressive as their own, and henceforth Roman and Parthian were seldom at peace. The long struggle with Mithridates, who gave himself out as a descendant of Darius[[772]], taught the Romans how strong was the reaction towards Persian nationality even in Asia Minor, and the overthrow of Crassus by the Parthians convinced his countrymen for a time of the folly of pushing their arms too far eastwards.

With the establishment of the Empire, the antagonism between Rome and Persia became still more strongly marked, and a struggle commenced which lasted with little intermission until the foundation of the Mahommedan Caliphate. In this struggle the advantage was not always, as we should like to think, on the side of the Europeans. While Augustus reigns, Horace boasts, there is no occasion to dread the “dreadful Parthians[[773]]”; but Corbulo is perpetually fighting them, and when Nero commits suicide, the legend immediately springs up that the tyrant is not dead, but has only betaken himself beyond the Euphrates to return with an army of Rome’s most dreaded enemies to lay waste his rebellious country[[774]]. Towards the close of the first Christian century, Trajan, fired, according to Gibbon, by the example of Alexander, led an army into the East and achieved successes which enabled him to add to his titles that of Parthicus[[775]]; but the whole of his Oriental conquests were given back by the prudent Hadrian on his succession to the throne. During the reign of Marcus Aurelius, Avidius Cassius obtained some solid victories on the frontier; but Macrinus is said to have bought off the Parthians with a bribe of nearly two millions of money. The rise of the Sassanian house and the retransfer of the leadership from the Parthians to their kinsmen in Persia proper brought about the reform of the Persian religion, and added another impulse to the increasing strength of Persian national feeling. Alexander Severus may have gained some successes in the field over Ardeshîr or Artaxerxes, the restorer of the Persian monarchy[[776]]; but in the reign of the last named king’s son and successor Sapor, the capture of the Emperor Valerian with his whole army, and the subsequent ravaging of the Roman provinces in Asia by the victors, showed the Republic how terrible was the might of the restored kingdom[[777]]. Aurelian, the conqueror of Palmyra, did much to restore the prestige of Roman arms in the East; and although he was assassinated when on the march against Persia, the Emperor Carus shortly after led a successful expedition into the heart of the Persian kingdom[[778]]. In the reign of Diocletian, indeed, the Persians lost five provinces to the Romans[[779]]; but under Constantine the Great the Romans were again vanquished in the field, and the Persians were only prevented by the heroic resistance of the fortified town of Nisibis and an incursion into their Eastern provinces of tribes from Central Asia from again overrunning the Asiatic possessions of Rome[[780]].

Henceforward, the history of the long contest between the two great empires—“the eyes,” as the Persian ambassador told Galerius, “of the civilized world[[781]],” is the record of almost uninterrupted advance on the part of Persia and of continual retreat on the side of Rome. The patriotic enthusiasm of a Julian, and the military genius of a Belisarius, aided by the dynastic revolutions common among Oriental nations, might for a time arrest the progress of the conquering Persians; but, bit by bit, the Asiatic provinces slipped out of the grasp of the European masters of Constantinople. In 603 A.D., it looked as if Persia were at length in the position to deliver the final blow in a war which had lasted for more than five centuries. By the invasion of Chosroes and his successive captures of Antioch, Jerusalem, and Egypt, it seemed as if the Persians had restored the world-empire of Cambyses and Darius; but the Persians then discovered, as Xerxes had done a millennium earlier, how dangerous it is for Orientals, even when flushed by conquest, to press Europeans too far. The Roman Emperor Heraclius, who never before or afterwards gave much proof of military or political capacity, from his besieged capital of Constantinople collected an army with which he dashed into Persia in a manner worthy of Alexander himself. After six brilliant campaigns he dictated to the Persians a triumphant peace in the very heart of their empire[[782]]. A few years later, and its shattered and disorganized remains fell an easy prey to the Mahommedan invaders.