EASTER QUINTET ON THE CHURCH’S DAWN// Part III// Cosmology and its discontents

The fate of parties engaged in the intersectarian fighting that marked much the late Second Temple period was often decided by levels of internal discipline, a phenomenon which dovetailed neatly with the emphasis placed on concord (homonoia) and unanimity (homodoxia) in the Second Sophistic (AD 60-230). Counterintuitively, considering the amount of ink spilt on plugging the greater rationality of non-Abrahamic western philosophical traditions, pagan philosophers were no less obsessed with policing the purity and transfer of their traditions than Muslims reciting hadith chains (isnad) today.

Both Christians and pagans liked to emphasise how the opposition was uniquely querulous and unreasonable with Celsus claiming that Christians ‘fail to make even the slightest concessions, and slander one another with abuse’ and Tatian asserting that pagans ‘contradict each other without end for they hate one another.’[1] To these groups diversity implied incoherence and error. By the second century at the latest, Christians were using hairesis––which had originally meant ‘school of thought’––to flag deviation from Christ’s principles, an outlook which by the fourth century had blossomed into a movement that placed emphasis on the correct thought (orthodoxia) that patterned their intellectual lineage. This is not to say early Christianity was not already moulded on such principles but they did not become explicit until c.300.

The earliest Christian thinkers could therefore find themselves placed in anachronistic intellectual genealogies. Origen, for example, famously failed to weather the changed historical context. Moreover, thinkers branded orthodox also held some left-field views. Justin for instance insisted that God ‘The Father of All… Had personal intercourse with nobody.’[2] However, orthodoxy’s main thrust, that certain churches––goaded by pride, too much philosophy, Jewish influence, or a general refusal to respect mystery––deviated from the correct path as defined by those who upheld apostolic succession, remains one of history’s most powerful ideas.

Despite the appeal of its narrative, the orthodox did not have a monopoly on the Church’s early direction. Different ways of philosophising about Christ produced various theologies. Perhaps the only thing different schools had in common were leaderships that underwent intense rhetorical education. And given rhetorical goals invariably involved distortions of the opposition’s views, the rise of schools resulted in a highly tendentious literature that offered caricatures, making meaningful dissection difficult. 

The first bone of contention was basic: the universe. During the early centuries of the faith it was commonly believed that the moon demarcated a cosmic zone between the confused and chaotic conditions on earth where the heaviest (and by indication, stupidest) matter had sunk, and the increasing perfections of the sun and five known planets, which possessed such divine forms of intelligence that labels like ‘gods’ were permitted.[3]

Manifest and visible, however, implied lower and lesser. For thinkers of a Platonic bent the visible had its foundation in powers that did not need to do or be anything. They lauded the solitary, transcendent, unique, immaterial, self-generated and changeless, properties which belonged to the ‘unborn,’ ‘highest god.’ Philo associated this deity with the God of Israel though others were not so sure. Either way, acquiring knowledge (gnosis) of a divinity whose properties essentially made him absent and unfathomable was theology’s unenviable task. But it generally started by calculating the divine’s relationship with the material universe, which was not easy as it was not obvious why a perfect divinity might want, need or suffer the existence of an imperfect material cosmos.

To get around this issue pagans had claimed that matter was less a manifestation of the divine god than an eternal mud known as hyle that had lurked around for time immemorial almost as a kind of dark matter mirror image to theos. Admitting its existence as a primordial flotsam and jetsam may have been awkward but it protected the divinity from dabbling in the superfluity of change and impurity, which was delegated to a lower deity, a demiurge or logos, as a contractor god and principle of divine, organising rationality. Yet this solution created its own questions to which various sets of Christians gave different answers.

Valentinus stretched out the cosmos by positing a whole new spiritual world above and preceding the material one. He called this upper the Pleroma, the “Fullness’ or the ‘All.’ At the apex of this universe was the Father. He was the ultimate source of all else. Out of him, in gendered pairs, spilled the personified aspects of his divinity: depth (masculine noun in Greek) and silence (a feminine noun), from which emanated mind (masculine) and truth (feminine), thence logos (masculine) and life (feminine), and so on. Such entities emanated effortlessly from the Divine One. In a daring revision of the Middle Platonic template, Valentinians asserted that matter was not coexistent with the Father but the result of a mistake, an error committed by one of the personified divine attributes, namely Wisdom who quit her place in the Pleroma in a desire to know the Father. The fog of error and anxiety, the ignorance of the Father, the passion that characterises longing for the knowledge of God, all these emotional states sit downstream of Wisdom's quest. 

Matter therefore had a beginning. It was a consequence of ignorance; it formed the Platonic cave, a poor shadow of the Pleroma, that could only be escaped by Christians in the postmortem state whose knowledge separated them from the doomed lower world. Such musings had the effect of twisting the meaning of the snake in Genesis––who becomes an avatar of Wisdom that manages to seduce Eve to produce Cain––casting God as a lower god whose pettiness was revealed in his desire to prevent knowledge of good and evil spreading via the fruit, and Christ as the ‘fruit of knowledge of the father.’[4] According to Hippolytus of Rome (d.236), in a lost work the Syntagma, Ophites pushed such beliefs to an extreme and understood the snake to be the Old Testament equivalent of Christ, liberating people from a world enslaved to the demiurge.

Meanwhile, Marcion––like Valentinian––distinguished God the Father from the God of Israel whom, like Valentinus, he identified with the world maker and ruler, a demiurge. Moreover, Marcion inserted a sharp distinction between the two and in his lost writing, Antitheses, contrasted Jewish scripture against Luke’s gospel, some letters by Paul, as well as a few ps.-Pauline letters that seemed to indicate a God of a very different nature. The juxtaposition was intended to set up a lower Jewish god invested in blood sacrifices and obsessed with sexual procreation against the benign divinity presented in New Testament texts. A large part of Christ’s mission, in Marcion’s view, had been to act as the true Lord’s messenger and get the world to glimpse past the veil and annul the laws of the demiurge.  It is easy to view the Qur’an’s claim (2:77-79) that its Abrahamic brothers had stripped texts of their signposts to Islam as a fairly transparent, low-effort maneuver. Yet such a strategy has its origins in the earliest Christian discourse. Tertullian for example accused Marcion of mutilating Christian texts by excising Jewish passages; Justin complained that the Jews had excised Christian passages from Jewish scriptures, and so on.[5] Irenaeus, for instance, claimed that ‘Marcion and his followers have mutilated the Scriptures… [and] curtailed the Gospel according to Luke and the Epistles of Paul, asserting that these are alone authentic, which they have themselves thus shortened.’[6] 

Despite Marcion’s overly enthusiastic abridgement (today’s NT contains 27 books), he can be credited with assembling the first Christian canon, a first ‘New Testament’ of sorts. Only once the idea of a ‘New Testament’ took hold could the Jewish scriptures (typically read in Greek) be arranged as an ‘Old Testament.’ Perhaps the greatest imprint left by Philo and the Gnostics on the early Church was forcing thinkers like Justin into agreeing that the divinity in Genesis was a derivative god of sorts. But monotheism was rescued by defining the divinity not only as God’s Logos, but a Logos who had been Christ before His incarnation: it was therefore Christ who had spoken with Moses, who had given the law, and so on.[7]

The incarnation had its own controversies. Valentinus taught that Christ had a special body that never defecated as food did not corrupt within him.[8] Similarly, Marcion’s version of Luke lacked a nativity and his vision of the resurrected body was spiritual not fleshly (in keeping with Paul’s statement in 1 Cor. 15:50 that ‘Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom’). Such views were often stretched, with varying levels of justice, to fit the heresy of docetism (dokeo is the Greek verb for ‘appear’) in contrast to orthodoxy’s emphasis on Christ’s physical return, giving Thomas the chance to touch his wounds (Jn. 20:27), wanting something to eat (Lk. 24:41), etc.

Sensing a need to cluster around the authority of a closed number of texts rather than a large number of apostolic memoires, Ireneaus (d.202) invoked the fourfold Gospel a generation after Tatian had asserted the authority of the same evangelists and blended their accounts in a continuous narrative, the Diatessaron (c.150). Against gnostics who claimed special knowledge, he insisted the true Church was obedient to the mystery upheld by those who practised apostolic succession. The basic teachings of which were belief in a Second Coming followed by the resurrection of the dead, redemption for some and eternal punishment for others. [Eternal punishment was bolstered by Isaiah talking of the ‘worm that shall not die and the fire that cannot be quenched,’ Daniel communicating God’s ‘everlasting contempt,’ Matthew’s repeated references to the ‘eternal fire,’ and Jude’s epistle alluding to the ‘gloom of total darkness.’ [9] More controversially, as the text was not universally recognized as orthodox until much later, Revelation added that God’s wrath ‘torments with fire… torments that do not cease.'[10] When Paul passed away c.65, pseudepigraphy was used to restrain extreme views and practices that discredited the Church. The second epistle of Peter, a late first-century Greek pseudograph, for example cautioned that Paul’s letters contained ‘things hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable people distort…’[11] Others also wrote in Paul’s name and, far from branding them frauds, orthodox authorities appear to have appreciated attempts to pilot the faithful given almost half the New Testament’s Pauline canon––2 Thessalonians, Ephesians and Colossians; 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, the pastoral Epistles–––preserves this type of text. These well-meaning steers, however, tended to introduce theories that were unsusceptible to speculation or conjecture. Second Thessalonians, for example, introduced a cycle of eschatological trouble centred around a dark figure, the ‘man of lawlessness,’ who will ‘proclaim himself god.’[12]

NOTES [1]  Origen, Against Celsus 5.63; Tatian, Oration to the Greeks 3 [2]  Justin, Trypho 56.1 [3]  Ancient ‘monotheism’ spoke to the hierarchical structure of heaven and not its absolute population. As long as a single highest god reigned, other subordinate forces could range beneath. [4] 'Gospel of Truth,' Nag Hammadi Library, trans. Robert M. Grant (1961). http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/got.html [5] Justin, Trypho 71.1;73.1-6 [6] Iren., Adv. Haer. 3.12.12. The latter points refer to Marcion’s collection of 10 Pauline letters, seven of which were genuine, and three (Colossians, “Laodiceans,” and 2 Thessalonians) of which were written by followers, forming the Apostolikon.  [7] Justin, 1 Apology 63.1 [8] Misc. 3.7. [9] Isa. 66:22-24; Dan. 12:1-2; Matt.18:6-9; Matt. 25:31-46; Jude 13. [10] Rev. 14:9-11. As late as the seventh century Maximos the Confessor rejected the book's canonical status. Much of the controversy surrounding it was the result of Origen’s pupil Dionysios, bishop of Alexandria who, in vying with literalists such as Nepos of Arsinoe, subjected Revelation to rigorous literary criticism and concluded that John its author could not be the same man as John the apostle, depriving the text of its main authority. See Eusebius, H.E., 7.24.1–2. [11] 2 Peter 3:16. [12] 2 Thessalonians 2.