I — Marcion and Gnosticism

My critics have all approved, so far as they have entered into the question, of my rejection of Bousset’s thesis that Marcionitism is a variety of Persian dualism; but von Soden and Walter Bauer enter strong reservations (indirectly Grejdanus as well), which in Bauer’s case in particular lead him to a conception of Marcion’s Christian teaching that rejects the one I have put forward and returns to the older view (Marcion a Gnostic).

Von Soden at first agrees to a wide extent with my conception of Marcion:¹

[Von Soden, quoted by Harnack:] “M. is in all essential points [p. 3] quite simply the polar opposite of Gnosticism. He is not an enthusiast but a biblicist, not a prophet but a reformer, determined not metaphysically but ethically, in character not systematic but dogmatic. That he has no aeon-speculation is indeed of decisive importance for judging his relation to Gnosticism. Above all, the Christology must be attended to here: if in Christology one distinguishes, as the one end of the series of types, the neutralizing of the historical person of the Redeemer by his dissection into aeons and his insertion into a system of such, and, as the other end, the modalistic absolutizing of that same person, then M. and the Gnostics represent here too the polar opposites, between which the moderated and restricted doctrine of aeons of the ecclesiastical hypostasis-Christology mediates. In my judgment M.’s doctrine of two Gods is nothing whatever but the raising to a higher power of his modalistic Christology, and with this he is, measured by the tendencies that determined the development, more reactionary than radical.”²

But then von Soden raises a series of mounting objections; I summarize them thus:

1. Harnack does indeed acknowledge the syncretistic and vulgar-dualistic strand in M., and with it certain points of contact with Gnosticism, but a kinship at the root must not be overlooked here.

2. That M.’s righteous God shades over again and again into the evil God, and readily turns into him — as is shown above all by the later development of the Marcionite church — has not been given its due weight.

[p. 4] 3. Harnack sometimes draws very subtle consequences with respect to M.’s teaching which cannot be demonstrated from the tradition. “He argues, for instance (in the doctrine of the twofold ‘goodness’, or in the reconstruction of M.’s eschatology), from Pauline passages which M. left standing, but of which we do not know how far he understood and valued them better than the Catholicism which also read them.”

4. Harnack “substitutes, where M. is concerned, the Pauline-Lutheran antithesis of law and grace, faith and works, and does not take into account that with him this antithesis is emptied out and de-spiritualized, in that it is hypostatized and mythologized by him into the antithesis of the two Gods, and that in asceticism a new law is set up … It amounts to an idealization when Harnack has Marcion hold that the departed righteous of the creator God cannot be redeemed because they do not recognize the deficiency of their righteousness, while the heathen and the sinners lay hold of redemption together with forgiving grace … When the account is drawn up, the fact acknowledged by Harnack, that M. thoroughly misunderstood Paul and did him unheard-of violence, is not brought fully to bear … M. is wholly closed to the thought of guilt (and thus to any proper consciousness of sin). At this point he is not more but less sensitive than many among the Gnostics … The exclusively soteriological orientation which Harnack praises in M. again and again is nevertheless in good part (by no means entirely) not the religious antithesis against a philosophy-of-religion cosmology, but the barbarous failure to appreciate the problems that had at that time been posed here, and the arbitrary disowning of consequences flowing from his own presuppositions — hence more theological dilettantism than religious depth.”

Grejdanus disputes that M. was a Paulinist in his doctrine of grace, in contrast to my presentation, in which he appears as a consistent Paulinist: in truth M. does not know grace at all; in Paul grace is something far deeper, namely love that forgives guilt; in M. man’s sin is not sin against God; therefore in M. too [p. 5] grace is not properly forgiveness; his conception rules out the possibility that man has ruined himself and brought himself into misery. That I have failed to see this difference between Paul and M. is said to be due to my defective Christian understanding, as I displayed it in Das Wesen des Christentums.

Bauer begins his critique by charging that I underestimate foreign influences in M. and overestimate the influence of Paul. An experience similar to Paul’s — that is, the recognition of the decisive antithesis of law and grace — is, he says, altogether inconceivable in the Gentile Christian M., and inconceivable as a point of departure; his protest is not directed at the law as such at all (so that the Mosaic law would be only one instance of it), but exclusively at the Old Testament law (the asceticism which demands a mortification of humanity shows that M. does after all stand under a demanding God); he also betrays nothing of a consciousness of sin and guilt awakened by the law after vain exertions, but knows only a redemption from misery, in which he fails to take the God of love in earnest, since he is content with the redemption of a smaller number of men. M. abhorred the Old Testament as a whole, and in and with it the law as well; conversely, he did not arrive out of an experience at faith in a God who is exclusively love and goodness, but this God arose for him merely as the antithesis to the Old Testament God. Since, furthermore, the docetic Christology, the hyper-ascetic tendencies and the rest cannot be derived from the moving antithesis of righteous and good, one must ask whether that antithesis really occupies the governing position in M., and whether he found his ideas — which are anything but Pauline — in the Pauline letters at all, and did not rather merely bring them to those letters. The true state of affairs, on this view, is that his aversion to Judaism and his loathing-become-disgust for the material, fleshly world flowed together in him into a violent hostility against the God of the Jews, who is at the same time the world-creator. Starting from this twofold presupposition [p. 6] of hatred, the Gospel and Paul were welcome to him and now enriched and determined his world of thought; from this starting point all the main features of his teaching are satisfactorily explained — with weighty stimuli from outside (see below).

The assumption that the experience of God as grace was M.’s point of departure is also, he says, ruled out by the observation that the positive commandment of love by no means forms the centre of M.’s piety, and further by the other observation that, although he praises with enthusiasm the absolute worth of the Gospel as compared with the Old Testament, and conversely expresses with equal emotion his abhorrence of the “flesh”, he has nevertheless never given expression to an experience of grace in holy exaltation. Finally, the two evangelical sayings which he preferred as mottoes (on the new wine and the old wineskins; on the bad tree and the good tree) exhibit not the gracious God who does away with the law, but the antithesis of the unconditionally perfect and the utterly corrupt God.

From this standpoint, Harnack’s view of the righteous God as M. conceived him requires thorough revision: he is bad in the same sense in which the Father of Jesus Christ is good, and his righteousness too is nothing but bad punitive justice. One may suppose that it gave “M. an inward satisfaction to make a word that otherwise denotes something good into a term of abuse for the Demiurge by enclosing it in quotation marks. I sense something like corrosive scorn in the ever-recurring talk of the ‘righteous’ God” … “Marcion speaks of the ‘righteous’ God as we speak of a ‘clean’ gentleman and a ‘nice’ fellow. It is true that M.’s venomous mockery was already no longer understood at an early date” … “Marcion’s ‘righteousness’ belongs in the register of the world-creator’s sins, and is meant to stamp him as bad just as much as the other predicates attributed to him do.” The Church Fathers, so it seems, felt rightly when they represent the Demiurge, in M.’s sense, as directly bad.

[p. 7] Bousset does indeed go too far with his identification of Marcionite and Persian dualism — Marcion has, alongside the world-creator, bad matter; he does not identify the world-creator with the devil, and knows nothing of the dualism of light and darkness —; but these concessions give the Old Testament God no lift that raises him above the level of the bad.* Matter does not relieve him, and neither does the devil, because the whole bad creation is in the end left sitting on his shoulders (matter is introduced in order not to ascribe to the world-creator the power of being able to create out of nothing, and the devil had to be taken over from the New Testament).

The view here set out is confirmed by the later development of Marcionitism; but it also compels us to place M. in a larger history-of-religions context, from which follows the most considerable restriction upon his originality. Despite undeniable differences, a strong dependence of M. upon Gnosticism emerges: the conception of the two Gods (the one as a subordinate Demiurge) is taken over; the “alien” God does after all belong with the “unknown” God and appears to be no wholly original creation (Reitzenstein); the anti-Jewish orientation had various representatives in that age, both in the Great Church and above all among the Gnostics (especially among the Mandaeans — Reitzenstein), and shows M. less under the spell of Paul than gripped by a current of the age, to which the dualistic strand in his piety (the hatred of the world, asceticism, and so forth), which explains a great part of his influence, is likewise to be traced back. Thus far Bauer.

If I wished to dispose of all these objections exhaustively, I should have to write a great part of my work over again — which would perhaps be the best thing, but is not possible. So I must content myself with setting principal observations over against my critics’ considerations, in the hope that they will suffice, since in the end the numerous doubts that have been raised can be settled by deciding the main points. In general I

* Translator’s note: the German (p. 7) reads “keinen Auftrieb, der ihn über das Niveau des Schlechten erheben”, with the verb left uninflected; the printed text is faulty. The sense is “no lift that would raise him above the level of the bad.” The whole clause is letter-spaced for emphasis in the original.

[p. 8] remark that in my judgment these doubts would not have been raised if the critics had kept constantly before them the whole content of the “Antitheses”, and in particular the profound Pauline ideas which M. preserved and expounded in his canon. In order not to make the work still more extensive, and to avoid repetitions, I had given only a few cross-references, in my presentation of M.’s teaching, to the individual “Antitheses”, which are set out in advance as a single connected whole.³ I now see that in doing so I asked too much of my readers and ought not to have shrunk from repetitions. As to the substance I remark — and my critics will certainly give me credit for it — that for decades I have myself weighed all the objections which they now put to me; for they positively force themselves upon one. But they are nevertheless incorrect, or correct only in a modest degree, and in that degree I do not reject them. The following main points are to be established:

1. In Marcion everything rests upon faith, namely upon faith in the redemptive deed of the God-Christ, who with his blood on the cross ransomed the sinners and transforms them by faith into “good” men. Adamant. II, 9: “The death of the Good One has become the salvation of men”; II, 1 f.: “The good (God) rescues those who believe in him”; II, 19 f.: “The good (God) is the father of believers”; I, 3: “The good (God) had pity on those who were foreign to him, as sinners; he desired them neither as good nor as bad, but had mercy on them out of heartfelt compassion”; II, 6: “The good (God) redeemed the men who were bad from the wicked (God) and transformed them by faith and made those who believe in him good” (Κακοὺς τοὺς ἀνθρώπους ὄντας ῥυσάμενος ἐκ τοῦ πονηροῦ ὁ ἀγαθὸς μετέβαλε διὰ τῆς πίστεως καὶ ἐποίησεν ἀγαθοὺς τοὺς πιστεύοντας αὐτῷ); Apelles: “Those are saved who set their hope on the Crucified, if they are found in good works”; in Tertull. IV, 18: “Out of [p. 9] faith there grew for the great sinful woman the goad that drives to repentance”, and so forth. I do not know how it could be brought out still more plainly that M. rests everything on faith, sees an inward transformation effected by faith (from sinners into good men), makes the death of Christ on the cross the content of this faith, and therefore in this decisive article of doctrine is a genuine disciple of Paul. That he lets the ransom be paid to the world-creator establishes no essential difference here in religious level, since he at the same time expresses in the plainest way that the matter in hand is the justificatio impii, and that for him the decisive thing is the transformation of the sinner effected by faith.⁴ Does this soteriological orientation really display “more theological dilettantism than religious depth”? Must one reproach M. with “a barbarous failure to appreciate the problems posed at that time” (so von Soden), or is the case not rather the reverse — that with this clear Pauline confession of faith M. towers high above the other Christian teachers of his age?

2. With this, the objection is also refuted that M. knows nothing of sin and the guilt of sin, but only of human misery, and is thereby distinguished toto coelo from Paul. Certainly the wretched misery of the botched creature, man, stands for him in the foreground; but did not Paul too sum up everything in the groan: “O wretched (ταλαίπωρος; M. addressed his own people as συνταλαίπωροι) man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death”? But if it be said that according to M. man is not responsible for his sin, because the creator

[p. 10] God made him as he is, then one overlooks the fact that according to M. too men are responsible, both to the creator God and to the good God, for the transgression of the ten commandments (M. did after all let the catechism-requirement stand as self-evident), and one overlooks further that M. holds men responsible for their unbelief now that Christ has appeared. In so far as difficulties and problems remain with regard to this twofold heavy responsibility, they are for M. no other and no greater than they are for every theory in this field. But apart from this, am I to begin enumerating the number of Church Fathers in whom the misery of sin likewise stands more in the foreground than the guilt of sin? How does the matter stand with Athanasius? Furthermore, the dialectic that before the Mosaic law there was no sin and yet there was sin does not depart too far from Paul; M. also said expressly (in Orig. on Rom. 5:20): “Haec fuit causa datae legis, ut peccatum, quod ante legem non fuerat, abundaret.” — When von Soden asserts that I sometimes draw very subtle consequences with respect to M.’s teaching which cannot be demonstrated from the tradition (“Harnack argues, in the doctrine of the twofold ‘goodness’ or in the reconstruction of M.’s eschatology, from Pauline passages which M. left standing, but of which we do not know how far he understood and valued them better than the Catholicism which also read them”), then I ask for evidence; for in bringing forward a great body of material (M.’s texts and M.’s exegeses) which has hitherto never been drawn upon for the determination of M.’s teaching, I have carefully guarded against asserting anything for M. that cannot be documented, and above all I have let the documents force me to the recognition that M. uses the concepts δίκαιος, νόμος, and even ἀγαθός, in a twofold sense, just as he also sharply distinguished between κακός and πονηρός. He is by no means “naive” here, but goes into the depths; and whoever will not allow this must show that it is only appearance or does not exist at all. Of course I may have gone wrong here or there; but von Soden has attempted no demonstration. Nor, [p. 11] further, may it be forgotten that the Church Fathers had an interest only in the coarse antitheses, not in the fine judgments of faith lying behind them; and yet, fortunately, such judgments have been preserved, so that one is still able to determine the level and the coherence of the ideas. This holds also of the eschatology, which clearly displays the threefoldness of M.’s ethical-theological ideas (evil, righteous, good) and the monarchy of the good God that results in the end, despite the dualistic formula.⁵ It holds also — and with this I return to the beginning of this section — of his consciousness of sin. He who answers the impudent question “Why do you not simply sin away, if your God does not judge?” simply with “God forbid, God forbid” (in Tert. I, 27) — he attests, by such an answer derived from Rom. 6:1 f., not frivolity or indifference toward sin, nor embarrassment, but the deepest earnestness and a sheltering experience of grace: “We who are dead to sin, how can we still live in it?” Only when that has been conceded is it to be established on the other side that M.’s description of the misery of sin rooted in the flesh, and his feeling of disgust at it, in so far as [p. 12] they do not rest upon wholly individual experiences, may derive from a way of looking at things originally foreign to Christianity, which had representatives outside Christianity in his age. From a later period, incidentally, one can find among Christian monks and Neoplatonists testimonies enough about the flesh and about procreation which yield nothing to the Marcionite ones in realism and in feeling of disgust.⁶

3. That the moving antithesis for Marcion is “good > righteous”* (compassionate love and punitive justice, lex and evangelium) is acknowledged by von Soden, because the sources force this fact upon us: how gladly would the Church Fathers, one and all — only a few of them actually did it — have converted this antithesis into “good and bad”, if they had been able to! A single unqualified testimony such as that of Origen (“… nam ut concedamus Marcioni … posse differentias deitatis inducere et aliam boni naturam, aliam vero iusti describere”) or that of Clement of Alexandria really suffices by itself (Οἱ ἀπὸ Μαρκίωνος τὸν νόμον κακὸν μὲν οὐ φήσουσι, δίκαιον δέ, διαστέλλοντες τὸ ἀγαθὸν τοῦ δικαίου) [“Those of Marcion’s following will not call the law bad, but righteous, distinguishing the good from the righteous”].⁷ But what holds of the law holds throughout of the lawgiver as well (lex = deus legis, Tert. V, 13). Nevertheless Bauer has repeated Bousset’s attempt to prove that, in M.’s sense, the world-creator is out and out bad —

* Translator’s note: the printed German has the mathematical sign, „Gut > Gerecht”, i.e. good ranked above righteous. The sign has been kept.

[p. 13] indeed he conjectures that the designation “righteous” is meant to be nothing but corrosive scorn and mockery. This hypothesis founders already on numerous passages of the Epistle to the Romans which M. left standing but would have had to alter if he had regarded the νόμος (θεὸς τοῦ νόμου) as bad at the root.⁸ Bauer’s hypothesis is all the more incomprehensible to me because he declares, with clear insight and with full right, that in M.’s sense M.’s second God coincides fully and without remainder with the God of the Old Testament, and is exhausted in him. Since M. did not allegorize and conjured nothing away, and since throughout he respected the letter of the Old Testament as reliable reality, but read this book the other way round from the Jews and the Church Fathers — that is, drew what was higher in the book down to the lower (not the reverse) — no other judgment whatever was possible for the strict biblicist than this: this God is δίκαιος, for in countless passages of the Old Testament he appears so, pursues the bad and sin with zeal, and is the source and the patron of moral holiness — and he is πονηρός:⁹ πονηρός in every gradation of what is burdensome to his own men, from oppressor to tormentor, from the wrathful to the annihilating despot, from the petty to the contemptible, from the limited to the ignorant, and from the creator of vermin to the creator of the worst evils.¹⁰ If it were otherwise, and he had judged πονηρία [p. 14] and δικαιοσύνη merely as manifestations of κακία, he would not have needed to write his “Antitheses” at all; for if a bad God simply stood over against the good God, all his outrages would have been self-explanatory. As it is, however, they appear piece by piece as disclosures of his righteous nature. But M. effected the reconciliation between δίκαιος and πονηρός in such a way that he let righteousness stand as the fundamental property, while making it, as ius talionis and pure punitive justice, and in its purely this-worldly determination, the source of everything bad. In this conception lies the decisive thing; it separates him from the churchmen as much as from the Gnostics and gives his religious-moral stance its originality. From this vantage point it is no subtle speculation but simply obligatory to recognize that M. knew a twofold antithesis to the good: the bad, and the “righteous” as it stamps itself out in the world-creator, in his world and in his law. The former is in itself morally worse than the righteous; but the latter is nevertheless the greater enemy, because it is aggressive and directly and decidedly keeps men from faith (“lex fidem impedit”, says M.). In this way of looking at things — however strongly M. may otherwise differ from the preaching of Jesus and of Paul — he continues Jesus’ struggle against Pharisaism and Paul’s struggle against Jewish-Christian self-righteousness.

But, Bauer objects, M.’s abhorrence of the law is nothing other than his abhorrence of the Old Testament in general, in which he does not stand alone, and therefore may not be singled out and made in isolation into the main thing, especially since it is only the Mosaic law, and not the legal as such, that rouses him to zeal; further, the words about the new wine and the old wineskins and about the two trees, which he set programmatically at the head, show that what is involved is merely the familiar Gnostic (cosmological) dualism; further, everything becomes much simpler, indeed quite clear, if one sees M.’s point of departure exclusively in the negative, in his twofold abhorrence of the Old Testament (Judaism) and of the hideous world — over [p. 15] against which the positive (the other God as the good one and as the redeemer) had to follow of itself; and finally, we possess no testimony at all that he experienced and felt anything analogous to Paul’s conversion in the sense of a release from the law.

As regards the first objection, this much is correct: M.’s abhorrence is directed at the Old Testament God and his book in their totality, and when he thinks of the law he thinks of the Mosaic law. But why then did other “false teachers” not likewise bring the object of this abhorrence under the common denominator “righteous”? That surely demands an explanation! The restriction to the Mosaic law, however — although he too read what stands in the Epistle to the Romans about the moral law of nature — is only a special instance within the remarkable observation that in his thinking he moves exclusively within the Old Testament and the Gospel. The whole of paganism, the whole of mythology, the whole of philosophy, mysticism and gnosis does not interest him, indeed does not exist for him. He is in every respect the least Hellenic, or least orientally-Hellenic, Christian we know. That is perhaps the most decisive difference between him and the Gnostics. If one wishes to explain it, an explanation offers itself which I have long cherished in silence but never uttered, because I cannot prove it: M., or his family, came from Judaism; Jewish proselytism preceded the conversion to Christianity — which is after all not surprising, but was the rule in the conversions of the earliest period. This is also supported by the fact that he explains the messianic prophecies just as the Jews do.¹¹ His Christianity is thus built upon a resentment with regard [p. 16] to Judaism and its religion; and precisely for that reason he was also able to have a religious experience similar to Paul’s, save that it reaches much further than the apostle’s — the apostle who breaks only with the law but otherwise possesses a warm heart for his people and their heritage, which a Greek by birth could not have. This explanation is, however, not necessary: heathen by birth have, as numerous examples down to Porphyry prove, expressed the same total rejection of the Old Testament and its God, but without summing it up in the formula “righteousness and law”. For M., however, the Mosaic law is the law as such, because the lawgiving God of the Old Testament is the world-creator, and because everything heathen was for him a quantité négligeable. “Separatio legis et evangelii proprium et principale opus est Marcionis” (Tert. I, 19).

Bauer’s second objection loses its force as soon as one recognizes that the programmatic words about the new wine and about the two trees are only introductory and formal points of departure, which say nothing whatever about the inner nature of the antithesis intended by M. They are meant merely to express that two opposed powers are involved which are incompatible and which follow their own nature. Incidentally, in Jesus’ parable the tree is not called the bad tree but the rotten tree. A kinship at the root with cosmologically interested Gnosticism cannot, therefore, be established from this quarter.

The third objection is in itself improbable: how should a religious personality — and Marcion was surely such — have derived its confession of the God of loving compassion merely from negations? How should the jubilation over the unspeakably glorious Gospel have burst forth merely out of a logical antithesis? In what way I am supposed to have made too far-reaching a use of this jubilant utterance is not clear to me; for surely one cannot rate this outburst of feeling too highly over against the meagre, partisan and obscuring reports of the Church Fathers! The situation here is the same as with Valentinus and the magnificent fragment Clem., Strom. IV, 13, 89 (Ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς ἀθάνατοι κτλ. [“Immortal from the beginning”, etc.]), or [p. 17] with Ptolemaeus and his letter to Flora; without these pieces we should easily misjudge these men! But now the God of goodness and love (“Ex dilectione dei consecuntur vitam aeternam Marcionitae”) is supposed to be a mere construction in M., because only a smaller part of mankind is saved, and because in the asceticism imposed the God of pure love nevertheless appears as a demanding God. But how often has the word of faith “God is love” remained wholly unshaken in convinced Christians in the face of that reflection; and, further, is the number small of ascetics of all ages who saw in asceticism absolutely no “demand”, but the angelic life, indeed the very foretaste of eternity? More plausible is the observation that M. speaks so little of love of neighbour, or of works of love; but did the Church Fathers have any reason to bring such passages forward? And did not M. write (Tert. IV, 16): “Creator quidem fratribus dari iussit, Christus vero omnibus petentibus; hoc est novum et diversum?” Did he not likewise emphasize love of enemies expressly in an antithesis (Dial. I, 12), and did not Apelles expressly designate ἔργα ἀγαθά as necessary for the justified? Why then should we believe that M. neglected the good works of love? But even if something was lacking here in his practice, it was a falling short of his own theory, which set everything good and everything eternal upon love.

By these considerations the fourth objection is also, in my judgment, disposed of. Bauer misses in M. an experience similar to Paul’s; but do the words which Bauer rejects in this connection not attest just such an experience: “O wonder beyond wonder, rapture, power and astonishment it is, that one can say nothing at all about the Gospel, nor think anything about it, nor compare it with anything”?¹² How then are these words to be understood, if they do not have the sense: “As a revelation of God the Gospel has dawned upon me, as the sole revelation of God, which stands over against everything that [p. 18] otherwise gives itself out as divine.” That need not have been a momentary experience like the day of Damascus; but only one man could write these words down: one who had experienced their content in himself as a breakthrough and as an overwhelming wonder, and who experienced it ever anew. To me, at least, no other psychological understanding is available here. And is the Gospel in M. anything other than precisely the God of love himself, or Christ — that Christ of whom M. testified: “in evangelio est dei regnum Christus ipse” (Tert. IV, 33)?

For my part I need not repeat that M. gravely misunderstood Paul and would have been rejected by him with the deepest indignation, for I have expressed that in the plainest way in my presentation; but that he gained his concept of faith, the separatio legis et evangelii, the fateful nature of the νόμος, the significance of the death on the cross and the nova creatura in Christ from the apostle’s letters¹³ seems to me incontestable. And precisely for this reason Bauer’s view cannot be maintained, that Paul became of significance for M. only secondarily — that Paul whose Gospel was for him the Gospel, and whom his adherents saw enthroned at Christ’s right hand!

From this vantage point the measure of M.’s dependence on extra-Christian, or Gnostic, ways of thinking must be determined, and not the reverse. In this determination it is first of all to be stressed that M. had no interest at all, or only a very slight one, in philosophy-of-religion theories (metaphysical, cosmological, rational-apologetic, and so forth). The decisive proofs of this, besides others, lie in the facts that (1) his church never had a common doctrine of first principles, but rather left room here for the most diverse doctrines and teachers, and (2) that M. himself evidently rested content with a serious lack of clarity in regard to matter. He introduced matter at the creation because, as I now believe, he wanted to relieve the righteous God of σάρξ [p. 19] and κακία;¹⁴ but then he let it drop and substituted for it the angel fallen away from the world-creator, the devil. Still, the fact that he was able to reach for matter at all as an effective ἀρχή shows extra-testamentary influence. One will have to assume such influence also in the docetism,¹⁵ in the estimate of matter (of the flesh), in the shaping of the asceticism, and above all in the transition to dualism itself; but that does not amount to much, and of a kinship at the root with Gnosticism one may hardly speak; for where the doctrine of the αἰῶνες and of divine προβολαί is lacking, there is no Gnosticism. Moreover, docetism at that time reached into the very heart of the Great Church, and matter (the flesh) counted in the widest circles as bad, and the strictest asceticism as the most pious. The strongest link of M. with Gnosticism lies in the doctrine of two gods — however close teachers of the Great Church came to the theoretical dualism between ὁ θεός and ὁ ἀρχὼν τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου, they always rejected it — and its abolition in the eschatology¹⁶ in Marcion comes too late.¹⁷ But does not [p. 20] a consideration come into play here too which distinguishes his dualism from the Gnostic? Does he not hold fast to it because otherwise he would have been compelled to develop an aeon-speculation, of which he wanted to know nothing? But however that may be, and whether one conceives the vulgar-Gnostic influence upon him as stronger or weaker — what theologian has ever remained free of the conceptions of his age that were in the air? And even if the Gnostic element belonged to M.’s origins (which I very much doubt) — must not a thinker be judged by the force with which he frees himself from his origins, and by the distinctive thing that he has brought to light? Let us surely not join company with those dreary historians who can endure no one who stands a head taller than themselves, and who do not rest until they have made the great small and the distinctive flat, and have removed or trivialized everything unusual by means of supposed analogies.¹⁸