Marcionism as a Genealogical Category

This is the first in a series of articles on Christian Genealogical Thinking centered on the theme Deep in History.

The Apostle John and Marcion of Sinope from The Enigma of the Fourth Apostle at the J. Pierpoint Morgan Library

For better or worse, I am best known as someone who has argued that Gnosticism and/or Valentinianism have returned in the speculative discourses of modernity. These discourses suggest themselves to be precisely the refurbished forms of Christianity or post-Christianity that can exist in a modern world grown weary of confessional forms of Christianity and convinced of their obscurantism and general intolerance. For any number of reasons I don’t want to repeat what I have said elsewhere. It is not only that making the argument is complex, but also that one needs to have a larger array of genealogical categories in play, if one is to understand the various ways in which discourses in modernity do not so much reject the scriptural and creedal discourses of Christianity in toto, but present them in altered form to the secular world and even to Christians as what Christianity was always intended to be but, by historical accident and/or authoritarian machination, it was not. More specifically, in a highly abbreviated form, I want to present “Marcionism” as a genealogical category, that is, to present the way in which we can see ancient Marcionism returning in discourses that either redescribe and/or substitute for historical expressions of Christianity with the aim of having, in the modern world, something like the same authority, only this time having persuasive rather than coercive authority.

Genealogy in Catholicism

In these brief remarks, I will only provide a sketch of a sketch. Still, schematic as it is, I would like to speak (a) to the conditions of the return of Marcionism in modernity, and (b) to its two particular forms, that is, its Kantian or post-Kantian form, on the one hand, and its Romantic and post-Romantic form, on the other. As a term, Marcionism is derived from the historical figure Marcion, who in the second century produced an abridged New Testament that consisted of sections of the Gospel of Luke and select letters of Saint Paul. The ground for such contraction was that much of what was becoming canonic seemed to him to obscure the radicality of Christianity by bringing forward ideas and practices of biblical Judaism, and in particular by preserving the creator and legislator God of Hebrew scriptures, who, in his view, is nothing more than the “prince of this world.” Christianity is not about creation, but solely about the untoward and unforeseeable salvation in Christ. Before I get to my somewhat peremptory declaratives on these fronts, as a preliminary I should like to say something about genealogy and how Catholic thinkers engage in it.

If we identify genealogy with Nietzsche and latterly with Foucault, then we can say that Catholic thinkers do not engage in the enterprise, since generally—albeit to different extents—they are committed to tradition being a bearer of truth, even if more than occasionally mixed in with falsehood and distortion. In addition, Catholic thinkers—for example, John Henry Newman, Alasdair MacIntyre, Henri de Lubac, and Hans Urs von Balthasar—go to considerable lengths to present the development of the Catholic tradition and/or traditions even as they suggest that influential modern discourses find their antecedents in ancient skepticism and rationalism as inscribed in Arianism, medieval nominalism, apocalypticism, Gnosticism, and Marcionism. Genealogy then speaks of repetition—surprising repetitions—across historical periods and especially across the so-called hiatus between the modern and premodern world.

Importantly, however, the genealogical method is not only in principle secondary in Catholic thinkers—if not always in fact—to retrieval and development of the tradition, but it is usually reactive. In the main it is a discourse that responds to the provocation of aggressive anti-Catholic narratives, in which Catholicism is the contingent result of historical circumstances in which dogmatism, power politics, and an ethos of subservience fortuitously came into alignment and subsequently perpetuated. Catholic genealogy almost always involves a counter-narrative intended to undermine the hostile genealogical discourse that would frame Catholicism, whether one is talking about an Enlightenment progressive framing, a Nietzschean framing of decadence and its Foucauldian variant, a Marxian construction of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular as ideology, or Heidegger’s view of the violence of Catholic thought that betrays itself in the correspondence theory of truth and the illusory fruit of a system of thought in equal parts complacent and consistent.

With respect to Catholic thinkers, like me, who follow in the genealogical footsteps of Newman, de Lubac, and Balthasar by using as genealogical categories titles that were prominent in heresiological discourse, two basic points should be made: first, to speak of any modern discourse as being, for example, “Marcionite” or “Gnostic” does not mean that the discourses so framed repeat exactly what can be found in the phenomena of the early Church, from which we have acquired the names. The discourses so named will have bought into many—if not most—of the assumptions of modernity (e.g., the prerogatives of reason, autonomy etc). Equally important, the discourses so named are not necessarily discourses whose original home is theology. Often their native home is that of philosophy and/or literature, even if these discourses achieve such broad social and cultural appeal that they make their way into theological thinking in due course, although sometimes migrating from one confession to another.  

General Conditions for the Return of Marcionism and How You Might Recognize It

For a modern discourse to earn the label of “Marcionism,” there must be a sense not only that confessional forms of Christianity have failed much in the way that its Enlightenment critics suggest, but also that certain aspects of it can be saved. Secular culture seems to agree on the following: what has to be abandoned is any and all versions of Christianity based uncritically on the Bible or church authority, a creator God who is distant from the world and who deals with it in a capricious and oppressive way through commandments, and a view of the created order based on compliant acceptance of the social and political status quo rather than on the urge to transform the world in light of human ideals of freedom, equality, and human flourishing. Though the newly minted discourses of this type do not have to be theological in the strict sense, nonetheless, in all cases there has to be some connection to the Christian narrative, especially to the Christian narrative of redemption. More specifically, Marcionism thinks the Gospel of Christianity is entirely about redemption and that the creator and legislator God has tasked human beings with solving the problem of sin.

Two Forms of Modern Marcionism: The Kantian and the Romantic Form

There are essentially two forms of modern Marcionism (which, in general, suppose a Protestant backdrop), that is, the Kantian rationalist ethical form and the Romantic form. In both cases, it should be understood that we are dealing not only with Kant and the stars of German and English Romanticism, but also with their respective influence in general culture and the ways in which they have entered theological thought or at least come in for theological consideration. Of the two, the former is the better known and is the easier of the two to track, in terms of its theological influence. To the extent to which there is a pivotal text in Kant for the ascription of “Marcionism,” it is Religion within the Boundaries of Reason Alone (1793). There you find Kant interpreting the biblical narrative but considering creation and fall as the backdrop of a story of self-saving. Looking to Christ as a model, man forms an ideal kingdom  on earth, a community of moral and ethical selves. Kant may well be a Christian believer, but for the purposes of his watershed book, the Christian narrative is an allegory about human autonomy and both its individual and social complications. The Kant of this text sets the terms of a significant part of liberal Protestantism in the nineteenth century and beyond. Of course, few—if any—of these followers admitted that the profile of their Christianity was Marcionite, largely because they were reluctant to take into their more philosophically sanitized religious discourses theological categories, and even less heresiological categories. Though Schelling in his 1795 dissertation suggests that he is prepared to think of Marcionism as a cover term for a renovated religious philosophy that will go beyond, as well as save, Christianity, one has to wait until Harnack to see a historical theologian brave enough to admit that revisionist liberal theology goes hand in glove with an animated historical retrieval of Marcion.

The second and, from my point of view, far more interesting form of Marcionism is provided by some key figures of English and German Romanticism who, in turn, exert influence in philosophical and religious thought of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Speaking generally, both English and German Romantics, while largely accepting Enlightenment criticisms of confessional forms of Christianity as being moribund and oppressive, were reluctant to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Both forms exhibit a deep suspicion of the Enlightenment’s narrow view of reason and are skeptical regarding the definition and range of human knowledge and freedom. Perhaps even at a deeper level again is the shared anxiety as to whether the new dispensation of reason will actually provide an alternative to the community building and sustenance historically provided by the Christian Churches. Thus, these figures believe that while Christianity cannot survive whole cloth, perhaps fragments of it can.

In brief, we can see in Goethe, Schiller, Novalis and Hölderlin, Blake, the early Coleridge, and Shelley an attempt to disconnect Christ from the so-called God of Jesus Christ, the Jewish creator and legislator God. The true God Christ—or his substitute Prometheus, Los, or Dionysius—is involved in a mortal ideological struggle with regard to whether and how human beings individually and collectively can move forward toward the kingdom of knowledge, freedom, but above all, love. This view is taken up by Hegel in the Phenomenology, which is ground zero for a “Death of God” theologian such as Altizer who, even if his heyday has passed, once exercised extraordinary influence in American theology.

Of course, substitution of Christ by other divine figures with a more human profile is but one of the substitutions. Another, as M. H. Abrams and other scholars of Romanticism have pointed out, is that of a Nature which is regarded as irreducible to matter, and is thus sublime. Indeed, fast-forwarding, one can see how both of these views made their way into the American consciousness through Emerson and became background assumptions that find expression in Royce and the process thought of Whitehead, both of whom wanted a closer connection between matter and spirit than is typically avowed in the confessional traditions of Christianity. One can also see how Romantic modes of thought have had effect in various modes of ecological theology—in the absence of coherent confessional takes—and even in some forms of feminist theology. While literally dozens of theologians come to mind, perhaps Jürgen Moltmann represents a good example of the former and Catherine Keller a good example of the latter. And, of course, despite Heidegger’s swerve from confessional modes of Christianity and Catholicism in particular, his later work on the Fourfold is best thought of as a belated piece of Romanticism, a repackaging of Hölderlin, who wants the divine to be more immanent but who is not prepared like Heidegger to give up entirely on the name of Christ. This raises the question: is the thread that runs through them all a colorfully complex species of all-too-modern Marcionism?