A Short History of Christianity / Second Edition, Revised, With Additions

by J. M. Robertson

Systems such as the bulk of those above described, drawing as they did on any documents rather than the Old and New Testaments, are obviously not so much Christian schisms as differentiations from historic Christianity—developments, in most cases, of an abstract Christism on lines not merely Gentile but based on Gentile religions, as against the Jewish. Broadly speaking, therefore, they tended to disappear from the Christist field, inasmuch as paganism had other deities better suited to the part of the Gnostic Logos. The intermediate type, bodiless at best, must die out. Gnosticism had not only no canon of its own, but no thought of one: while the fashion lasted every decade saw a new system, refining on the last and multiplying its abstractions, till the very term gnosis must have become a byword. Success, as has been said above, must remain with the simple and concrete system, especially if that were organized; and the Gnostics of the second century attempted no general organization. Yet Gnosticism left a lasting impress on Christianity. In its earlier stages, as we have seen, it modified the gospels; and after it had evolved away from the gospel basis it left an influence on the more philosophically-minded writers of the Church, notably Clement of Alexandria, who is as openly anxious to approve himself a “good Gnostic” as to found on the accepted sacred books of the Church. Deriving as it partly did from the Jewish Platonist Philo, it brought into the Church his fashion of reducing Biblical narratives to allegories—a course much resorted to not only by Origen but by Augustine, and very necessary for the defence of Hebrew tales against pagan criticism. Further, the regular practice of the Church in the matter of separating catechumens from initiates was an adoption of the Gnostic principle of esoteric knowledge.

In yet other ways, however, Gnosticism influenced early Christianity. It was the Gnostics who first set up in it literary habits: they were the first to multiply documents of all kinds; and it is not unlikely that their early additions to the gospels gave a stimulus to its expansion on other lines. They were, in short, the first to introduce a tincture of letters and art into the cult; and it was their spirit that shaped the fourth gospel, which gave to Christism the only philosophical elements it ever possessed. They are not indeed to be regarded as having cultivated philosophy to any good purpose, though they passed on some of the philosophic impulse to the later Platonists. Rather the average Gnostic is to be conceived as a leisured dilettante in an age of learned ignorance and foiled intelligence, lending an eager ear to new mysticisms, as so many half-cultured idlers are seen still doing in our own day. They cared as much for abracadabral amulets, apparently, as for theories; and their zeal for secret knowledge had in it something of the spirit of class exclusiveness, and even of personal arrogance. It would seem as if, when tyrannies in the ancient world made an end of the old moral distinctions of classes, men instinctively caught at new ways of being superior to their fellows—for the spirit of Gnosticism arose among the later Greek pagans, who here followed the lead of Egyptian priests, as well as among Samaritans and Grecized Jews. At most we may say of the Gnostics that they were much more concerned than the orthodox to frame a complete and consistent theistic theory of things, and that in their learned-ignorant way they sought to walk by reason as well as by faith. Necessarily they were in a minority. It was, however, their theoretic bent, surviving in the gospel-reading Church, that determined the dogmatic development of the Christist creed. Their recoil from the conception of a Saviour-God in a human body comes out in the later debates and creeds as in the fourth gospel; and if the final doctrine of the Trinity be not truly Gnostic, it is because the Gnostics showed more concern for plausibility, and never aimed at tying thought down forever to a plainly self-contradictory formula. Much of their movement probably survived in Manichæism, which, though sufficiently dogmatic, never flaunted such propositions as those of the Nicene creed, and was a critical thorn in the flesh of the Church. Even their amulets seem to have had a Christian vogue; and the worship of angels, which began to flourish among Catholics in the fourth century, seems to have been a reflex of their teaching.

In some respects, finally, the modern Church has confusedly reverted to their view of a future state. While the “orthodox” Christians of the second century believed that souls at death went to the under-world, to be raised with the body for the approaching millennium, or thousand-years reign of Christ, the Gnostics, scouting the millennium as a grossly materialistic conception, held that at death the soul ascended to heaven. That appears to be the prevailing fancy among Protestants at the present day, though men have grown cautious of formal dicta on the subject.

§ 4. Marcionism and Montanism

Apart from Gnosticism, the Church of the second century was affected by certain heretical or sectarian movements which centred round single teachers of an influential sort, in particular Marcion of Sinope and Montanus, who became the founders of something like separate churches. Montanus, like Manichæus, has mythical aspects; and it is impossible to be sure of the historicity of either;[2] but Marcionism sets up no such difficulty. Marcion, who was a disciple of the Gnostic Cerdo, and like him flourished in the reign of Antoninus Pius, held by some of the main Gnostic theories, but differed from the Gnostics in general in that he founded solely on New Testament writings and did not absolutely oppose Judaism. In his system the Supreme God, who is Good, creates a Demiurge or world-maker, who is merely Just or legalist, the God of the Jews; while Satan, the offspring of Matter, governs the heathens. Only the Christians are ruled by the Good God, who is first revealed to men solely by the Christ. It was in this way that he applied the Gnostic principle of “oppositions” or “antitheses,” in a work bearing that title. His ethic appears to have been a sectarian version of that of Bardesanes, who had defined the good as those who did good even to the wicked; the just as those who did good only to the good; and the wicked as those who did evil even to the good. It does not seem to have occurred to Marcion that in classing all pagans as outside of the pale of goodness he was stultifying his own avowed principle of divine love and mercy; but in this respect at least he was not heretical, for all who bore the Christian name agreed in limiting salvation to Christists, and dooming all other men to hell-fire.

That he was a fanatic of exceptional force of character is proved by the facts that (1) it was he who forced on the Church the problem of a canon, he being the first to form one, by way, as he explained, of excluding Jewish documents and Jewish interpolations in the gospel and the Pauline epistles; and that (2) he was able to form a separate organization, which subsisted for centuries, with some variations in doctrine, alongside of the “catholic” Church, being heard of as late as the eighth century. The controversies he set up affected the whole literature of the Church for generations; and though it was a point of honour with the orthodox to accuse him of corrupting the texts as well as the faith, it is finally held that some of his readings of the third gospel, which he specially favoured, are really the original ones. Inasmuch, however, as he laid stress on asceticism, to the extent of prohibiting marriage, he necessarily failed to attract the multitude, though his was one of the influences which fostered ascetic ideas within the Church from his time onwards.

The movement of Montanus, known also as the Cataphrygian heresy, has two aspects—that of a sect apparently founded by a zealot of strong personality, who felt that he had special inner light and claimed (or was claimed) to be inspired by the Paraclete promised in the gospel, and that of a general reaction against officialism in the Church, somewhat in the spirit of the Quakers of the Reformation period. It stressed all the extremer social tendencies of the early Church, the prediction of the end of the world, the impropriety of marriage and child-bearing in prospect of the catastrophe, the multiplication of fasts, the absolute condemnation of second marriages, the renunciation of earthly joys in general. Christ, said Montanus, had withdrawn the indulgences granted by Moses; and through himself, the Paraclete, cancelled those given by Paul. Thus true religion, having had its infancy under Judaism, and its youth under the gospel, had reached maturity under the Holy Spirit (an idea revived a thousand years later in Catholic Europe). Hardness of heart had reigned till Christ; weakness of flesh till the Paraclete. A special feature of the Montanist schism—which spread far, and ultimately absorbed Tertullian, who for a time had opposed it—was the association of the founder with two wealthy women of rank, Maximilla and Priscilla, who endowed the movement. It is noteworthy that this special growth of asceticism took its rise in Phrygia, one of the regions specially associated in pagan antiquity with sensuous and orgiastic worship. It would seem as if an age of indulgence led in natural course to a neurotic recoil. In any case it is neurosis that speaks in the ascetic polemic of Tertullian, who became a typical Montanist.

Montanism, it has been said, was “all but victorious”; but its victory was really impossible in the circumstances. It would have meant arresting the growth of Christism to the form of a moribund State Church by depriving it of all popular attraction; and the vested interests were too great to permit of such a renunciation. The movement may be loosely compared to the secession of more rigid bodies from the relaxing sects of Methodism and Calvinism in our own time: voluntary austerity must always be in a minority. A Church which absolutely refused to retain or readmit any who committed a cardinal sin or lapsed during persecution—saying they might be saved by God’s grace, but must not be allowed human forgiveness—was doomed to the background. But Montanism, appealing as it did to an ideal of holiness which the average Christian dared not repudiate, influenced the main body, especially through the writings of such a valued polemist as Tertullian, who taunted them with being inferior even to many pagans in the matter of chastity and monogamy. The main body was not to be metamorphosed; but it read the lesson as inculcating the need for at least nominal priestly celibacy. Every notable “heresy” so-called seems thus to have left its mark on the Church.

What above all is proved by the movements of Marcion and Montanus is the power of organization in that period to maintain a sect with sacred books of any kind. They had learned the lesson taken from Judaism by the first Christists, and proceeded to show that just as organized Jesuism could live apart from Judaism in the Gentile field, so new Christist sects could live apart from the orthodox Church when once separation was forced on them. Montanism, like Marcionism, survived for centuries, and seems to have been at length suppressed only by sheer violence on the part of the Christian emperors, who could persecute far more effectually than pagans ever did, having the Church as an instrument. In the face of such developments, and still more in view of the later success of Manichæism, which, as we shall see, applied still better the principle of organization, there can be no longer any difficulty in accounting for the rise of Christism on purely natural grounds. Given the recognition of a few essential conditions, the creation of a sect was a very simple and facile matter. Montanism and Manichæism successively endured more persecution, pagan and Christian, than the Christian Church ever did; and it was only the essential unpopularity of the ideals of Montanism that permitted of its suppression as a sect even by the persecuting established Church. Manichæism, as we shall see, was almost insuppressible, even when political changes had given the Church a power of centralization and coercion which otherwise could never have been developed. At the end of the third century, in short, the Church of its own nature was rapidly approaching disruption into new and irreconcilable organizations.