* * *

Prophetism, which was little valued by the clergymen who aspired to exercise their priesthood with the benediction of the State, risked lending itself to unfortunate abuse. The prophet arrogated to himself the right to change the Law and the laws, since God had spoken through his mouth.

If one can believe Epiphanius of Salamis’s Panarion (II, 1, 18), Montan[’s Jesus] proclaimed: “I am neither an angel nor a messenger, I am the Lord, the all-powerful God, present before you in the form of a man.” Montan clealy marked the rupture with the conception of a Messiah who had been, until then, anticipated as the angelos-christos, the messenger-angel of God. (Between his two “Marys,” Montan concretized in human form the personage of Jesus, who had until then been abstract, a secret and sacred name, an angel descended from the heavens and resuscitating, in the beyond, the time that assures the salvation of all through his sacrifice.)

The remark [attributed to Montan], which disavows Judeo-Christianity and Marcionism, implies the human character of Jesus and his nature as a divine being, a spirit capable of reincarnating himself in other prophets.

Tertullian was not deceived: it is man, possessed by the spirit, who can pardon, not the Church: “The Church will no doubt accord pardons for sins, but the Church as the Spirit, through a spiritual man, not the Church as the ensemble of bishops” (De pudicitia, 21, 17). This was competition that the Church could not tolerate. The Church would endeavor to unite in itself the [scattered] temporality of the Son and the incarnation of the spirit that spoke through the Church’s voice, proferring truths — orthodoxies — and condemning prophets to death from the Ninth to the Seventeenth Centuries.

Nevertheless, the New Prophecy contented itself with following, to the letter, the Apostle, the only apostle from the Second Century (in 220, Tertullian still did not know an authority other than Paul). And the first Epistle to the Corinthians prescribes prophecy without any circumlocations: “He who prophesizes edifies the assembly [...] I prefer that you prophesize. He who prophesizes is superior to he who speaks in tongues.”

The New Prophecy would accord to whomever speaks by the Spirit “full power to renew traditional eschatological conceptions from top to bottom.”[244]

Prophecy entered into the practices of the majority of Christian communities. It was prescribed by the Didache. It would reappear in the Seventeeth Century in Pietist sects, which willingly identified themselves with primitive Christianity. Priscilla, practicing esctasy, did not fail to foreshadow Machtilde of Magdebourg, Beatrice of Nazareth, Hadewijch of Antwerp and Theresa of Avila, when she affirmed that the Christ had visited her and slept near her, at Pepuza, taking the form of fire and penetrating her with his wisdom.

Millenarianism, the imminence of the end of time, and the instauration of the kingdom of God on earth were also attached to the New Prophecy. Tertullian of Carthage and Irenaeus of Lyon showed themselves to be its ardent defenders. Montan was the Holy Spirit descended to the earth. “Maxilmilia was the last prophetess, after whom one must only wait for the end of the world.”[245]

In each millenarianism, the same scenario was reproduced: “The New Jerusalem will descend from the heavens to Pepuza. The Montanists received exceptional promises that would be realized at the End of Days. Due to the impending end, ethical demands provided an exceptionally acute relief.”[246]

For Tertullian, avoiding martyrdom was clinging to a world condemned to impending destruction. “Do not desire to die in your bed or in the langors of fever,” he wrote in De fuga, “but rather in martyrdom, so as to glorify he who suffered for you.”

In sum, do not the punishments inflicted by the mob or by justice fence in with good logic an existence of which asceticism prescribed the removal of all the pleasantness?

Tertullian, an adept and philosopher of the new current, laid the foundations of a new Christian morality, with which Catholicism compromised; Calvinism and Protestantism in general would be bent on promoting it. Respectful of the orders of abstinence extolled by its adversary, Marcion, the New Prophecy nevertheless gave a completely different meaning to its asceticism. The Marcionites and the supporters of [the idea of] a bad world created by the crazy God refused pleasure, procreation, and food that wasn’t frugal, so as to not ratify a work that they denigrated. The Christians of the New Prophecy rejected neither the world nor the flesh, they only wanted to purify them and purify themselves, with the result that the Spirit would descend to and reside upon the earth without the hindrances of materiality.

Long fasts recused the faithful from the pleasures of terrestrial nourishment and exalted spiritual communion. The refusal of amorous relations did not pursue a will to extinguish the race of men, as did the Gnostics who were “beyond the world,” but proscribed pleasure by husbanding the coitus of procreation in the manner of the Essenes. “It is no longer permitted, once a Christian, to contract a second marriage; only the contract and the dowry are able to differentiate adultery from fornication” (Tertullian, De pudicitia). The hatred of women (*) shared by Tertullian, Epiphanius, Augustin and the master thinkers of the Church was accompanied by the cult of virginity. The idea of Mary, virgin and mother of the Christ, certainly drew from the legends of Montanist propaganda.

(*) “The relations of man and woman are the works of pigs and dogs” (Elenchos). Tertullian: “Woman, you are the door of the Devil. It was you who persuaded he whom the Devil did not dare to attack directly. It was because of you that the Son of God had to die: you must always go about dressed in mourning and in rags and tatters.”

Montanism also preached (for the first time in the history of the Christianity) the resurrection of the body, which Saul/Paul had so curiously borrowed from the Pharisians. In his De resurrectio carnis, Tertullian says “Of those who deny the resurrection of the flesh, the prophetess Prisca said: they are flesh and they hate the flesh.” By dying, the martrys exchanged their torn bodies for bodies of glory that would enter into the divine cohort of saints, a veritable celestial Church.

Although virginal and penetrated by the Spirit, the prophetesses of Montan aroused the reprobation of many community leaders. Tertullian was happy to celebrate their chastity in De exhortatione castitatis; the author of the Elenchos (around 230) reproached the new Christians for “letting themselves be guided by little girls [femmelettes]”; and Origen, who would nevertheless push abnegation to [the point of] self-castration, referred them back to the Apostle Paul (*) who constituted their supreme authority this polymorphous Paul, directed against Marcion, his inventor, and now against the anti-Marcionites: “Women, the Apostle said, must keep quiet in the ecclesiastical communities. Here is a prescription that the disciples of the women, those who let themselves be instructed by Priscilla and Maximilia, have not obeyed.”

(*) Priscilla held the Epistle to the Laodiceans, a text from 160 or 170 that was originally Marcionite and placed under the name of Paul, to be authentic.

The New Prophecy And The Christian Philosophers Of The Second Century

The New Prophecy threw into the pond of the many Christian Gnosticisms the paving stone of faith. Pistis, which excited the exalted crowds to punishment and a fervent conviction that polytheism knew nothing about, exercised on Greco-Roman mindsets a kind of fascination that Judaism previously exercised and that xenophobia forbade since the last war of the Jews.

A “true” Christianity swept the theological arguments from the Gnostic systems. The fabrication of texts redesigned the personage of the Christ Jesus with the realism of everyday existence. This creation drove speculations about the angelos-christos to a secondary plane and mocked the intellectual Christians who had been diverted from the Jews and their Scriptures so as to participate in Greek mythology and Platonic scholasticism.

Justin the Apologist, Irenaeus of Lyon, the authors of the Pastor, and Tertullian launched a philosophical offensive — which was implicitly supported by the army of the Christ, which scorned death in the name of the Living Spirit — against “so-called gnosis” (the phrase is from Irenaeus).

Justin The Apologist

Although his death [roughly] coincided with the birth of the New Prochecy, Justin belonged to Hellenized and anti-Marcionite Christianity: the search for martyrs; the recuperation of the Jewish Scriptures; the care taken to invite the State to recognize this religion, purged of its Semitism, which was odious to the Greeks and Romans; and a Church of which the pacifist and nonviolent ideal did not contravene public order.

Born around 100 in Flavia Neapolis, in Samaria, Justin was initiated into philosphy and, in particular, Plato and Stoicism. He founded a school at which he taught a Christianity that had broken with Essene Judaism without rejecting the texts of the Scriptures.

Drafted around 135, after the defeat of Bar Kochba and in the wave of anti-Semitic hysteria that followed it, Justin’s Dialogue with the Jew Tryphon affirmed that — the Christians having freed a truth from the Scriptures that the Jews no longer understood — the Bible by all rights belonged to the Churches of the Christ. (At the same time, a Diatribe against the Jews by Apollonios Molon and On the Jews by Philo of Byblos were circulating.)

If this Messiah was still related to the angelos-christos of Judeo-Christianity and Marcionism, Justin revoked Marcion’s aggressive dualism. Justin’s Good God confronted, not the Demiurge who had created the world, but the Adversary, the fallen angel, the bloody rebel raised against the Divine Order: Satan the temptor.

Justin’s schools were celebrated in Asia Minor and Rome. He wrote a lampoon of Marcion that has been lost. Tatian, his disciple, would discover in the New Prophecy the application of Justin’s lessons: follow the example of the Christ through purity of habit and self-sacrifice to the point of martyrdom.

Among the first [followers] of the new religion, Justin lay the bases for a politics of recognition by the central State (it is possible, in this sense, that the morbid extremism of the Montanists displeased him, as it was repugnant to Meliton of Sardinia, but it is also true that Tertullian, another apologist, found nothing embarrassing in it). Justin published an Apology to the Roman Senate in Favor of the Christians. Several years later, around 154, he reiterated [his points] in Second Apology to Antonin the Pious in Favor of the Christians. (These Apologies reflected the new political line of the Churches. A federation, with Rome at the head, could assure the State of a religion of change, a solution in which the New Prophecy was substituted for weakening polytheism and the solar cult of the Emperors. And so Quadratus of Athens wrote to Hadrian and Aristide, Justin wrote to Antonin [138–166], and Meliton of Sardinia and and Apollonaire of Hierapolis wrote to Marcus Aurelius [169–177]. Did not Athenagore of Athens [177–178] declare, in his Petition in Favor of the Christians, that “the Empire and Christianity have grown side by side. The prince has nothing to fear, but everything to gain with the conversion of the Empire”?)

In vain. The Greeks and Romans did not care to distinguish Christians from Jews, and Justin’s friends from the rigmarole [kyrielle] of sects — Sethians, Cainites, Nazarenes, Elchasaites, Marcionites, Judeo-Christians, Valentinians and anti-Marcionites — all of whom justified a Messiah who had been crucified and resuscitated, and in whose name they had excluded as idolatries the other cults, which Rome, as a good State merchant, had freely tolerated.

Religious fanaticism appeared particularly odious to the Greeks and Romans. Their interests prescribed searching for it in Palestine. Did not Deuteronomy (17, 12) enjoin “he who gives in to pride and does not want to obey the authority of the priest who serves YHWH your God, nor the sentence of the judge, will die and thus you will extirpate the evil from Israel”?

Therefore, what did Justin ask of the Emperor? The help of the State against those who scoffed at the Holy Spirit — by which one can understand the partisans of Simon of Samaria and all those who allowed his partisans to assimilate. Ammien Marcellin wrote about the Second Century what he had established in the Fourth: “The wildest animals are to be feared less than the Christians.”[247]

Intolerance: such was still the reproach that Celse in his True Discourse (178–180) addressed to the Jews and Christians (indifferent to him), the sectarians of the crucified Serpent, the God with the head of a donkey (Seth) and a magician named Jesus.

The palms of the martyr, by which Justin found himself encumbered, were necessary to his fanaticism and the taste for death celebrated by Tertullian and the Christians of the New Prophecy. At the time, there was a bad quarrel between Justin and the cynical philosopher Crescentius, who challenged him to take the scorn for existence to its logical end. The conflict became inflamed, a trial ensued. Crescentius found an ally in the prefect Junnius Rusticus, a Stoic philosopher who had initiated Marcus Aurelius into the doctrine of Epictete. The polemic ended dramatically with the decapitation of Justin in 165.

A dialogue, which has been preserved, plays on the meanings of “gnosis” — science, learning, knowledge.

Rusticus: “You who know (who have knowledge, learning), how can you imagine that if I decapitate you, you will resuscitate and rise to the heavens?”

Justin: “I do not imagine it, but I know it from a definite science.”

In his pamphlet Sects on Auction, Lucien of Samosate, a contemporary of Justin, disdained to cite the Christians. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that, in an extract from The Death of Peregrinus, quoted by Rougier in his Celse against the Christians, the author had the Christians of the New Prophecy in mind when he pointed out, ironically: “The unfortunate imagine that they are immortal and that they will live eternally. Consequently, they scorn the punishments and voluntarily surrender to death.”[248]

Shunted by the solicitations of collective masochism, the crowds only devoted themselves more easily to the bloody excesses by which they exonerated themselves from repressions and set-backs. In these first instances, the victims did not succumb to the legal persecutions begun by Antonin the Pious or Marcus Aurelius. The former’s twenty-three years’ of rule count among the least bloody in Roman history and are preserved in memory by the suavitas morum, the gentleness of the morals of the emperor. Despite an excusable repugnance for sanctified morbidity, Marcus Aurelius did not depart from the principle instituted by Trajan: not to seek out disciples of the Christ, but punish them uniquely if, denounced, they refuse obedience to the Emperor and the offerings of the traditional cults.

Hermas and The Pastor

In Rome, around the middle of the Second Century, under the name of The Pastor, there circulated a collection of texts collated in the manner of a novel, the author of which called himself Hermas. Held in great esteem by the Christians for three centuries, it would be excluded from the canon by Gelase’s decree at the end of the Fifth Century.

A didactic work of Judeo-Christian inspiration, The Pastor presented itself as a revelation. (Its author referred to the apocalypse of Eldat and Modat, now lost). It contained five visions, the last of which was actually an apocalypse, twelve precepts and ten parables. The spirit, still close to the Essene Manual of Discipline and the Writing from Damascus, brought together Nazarenism and the New Prophecy-in-gestation, without succumbing to Marcionite influence. Dualism had nothing in common with the “two Gods.” It referred to the two spirits of The Rule of the Community: “God, who created man, placed before him [man] two spirits so that (he would be) guided by them until the moment of the visit: these were the spirits of truth and iniquity.”

An embarrassment to the Catholic Church, The Pastor presented a Christian panorama that was completely different from the fantastic survey of the official history.

Hermas not only knew nothing of a historical Jesus, but didn’t even know the name. He knew nothing of Mary, Joseph, Pilate and their associates.

“The visions name the Son of God once, in a formula: ‘The Lord has sworn it by his Son,’ which doubles another one: ‘The Master has sworn it by his glory’ (6, 8, 4), which is suspect as a result.”[249]

The Son of God is the Spirit, the Great Archangel, sometimes named Michael.

Though Hermas and his nobodies resided in Rome, they had never heard of (and for good reason) the canonical gospels, nor of Matthew, Luke, Mark nor John. Hermas’ only references are to the Bible, the one Marcion called the Old Testament. If The Pastor speaks of apostles, it refers to itinerant missionaries who propagated the Christian doctrine: the book distinguishes them from the didaskaloi, those who taught (this was the era of the Didache, which was inspired by the Epistle attributed to Barnabas).

In 150, Hermas had no knowledge of a monarchal episcopacy, a fortiori an “Ancient Pope,” who according to the historians reigned over the Church’s destiny. “Presbyterians and Episcopalians are synomynous for him.”[250] Indeed, he denounced the ambitious caste of the priests, to whom he compared apocathary poisoners in a Vision and venomous reptiles in The Ninth Similitude.

As in Essenism and Pharisian practice, the Church identified itself with a community charged with protecting widows, orphans, and the poor. It appeared to itself as an old woman, and it appealed to the purification of the faithful for their rejuvenation.

Purity of habit and the necessity of penitence, which washed the soul of its sin, constituted the central articulation of Hermas’ Christian doctrine. The old Essene tradition married the movement of the New Prophecy at the moment of its birth.

Chastity was exalted in a scene that prefigured the adventures of Parsifal: Hermas resists the temptation of women, who cajole and solicit his love. Good for him, because — having triumphed over the test — it was revealed to him that, under the appearance of seductresses, were hiding “virginal natures.” And “these virgins, who were they? They were holy spirits.” Thus the martyred virgins of the New Prophecy acceded to their reality as saints, clothed, beyond the pangs of death, in resplendent bodies, haloed by virtue, which — through a pleasing return — the Italian painters, combing the hair of their mistresses in ecstasy, would render with their native sensuality. (The Madonnas of Filippo Lippi, one knows, represent the pretty nun whom he seduced and who abandoned the God of her convent to be with him, the revelation of which haloed her.)

In accord with the future rigor of Tertullian and the new Christianity, Hermas rebelled against those who judged the sins of the flesh to be of little importance. Nevertheless, his asceticism was opposed to the spirit of Marcion and his doctrine of the two Gods: “Believe that there is only one God [...] Thus believe in him and fear him, and through this fear be continent.” Faith (pistis) had the upper hand over gnosis, knowledge. On the other hand, if there existed a possibility of salvation through [good] works, through good acts, in no case did Hermas refer to redemption accomplished through Jesus. In addition, the questions of penitence and redemption were settled by the sinner and God, without the intervention of the priest. The faithful is he who, living in fear of displeasing the God of Goodness, bans terrestrial pleasures and nourishments from his existence: “He also commits adultery who lives like the nonbelievers (tois ethnesin).” Calvin would not speak in any other fashion.

Irenaeus Of Lyon

Around 180, Irenaeus, the bishop of a Christian community in Lyon, wrote a work against other Christians — principally the Marcionites and Valentinians — in which he attacked gnosis and salvation through knowledge. He related the entirety of these doctrines back to a unique source: the radicality of Simon of Samaria.

His essay corresponded to the rejection by Christians of the New Prophecy of philosophical elitism, esotericism, nay, magical practices that were communicated in the name of the Messiah by a cultural class that was opposed to the faith of the simple believers, who in their turn were little interested in speculative quibbles and obeyed an austere existence and a constant aspiration for martyrdom as to to assure their posthumous felicity.

Three years later in Lyon and Vienna, a pogrom put to death the new Christians during a massacre of the Jews; the Marcionite, Valentinian and Marcosian Gnostics escaped, in all probability due to their dealings with the well-to-do classes (the “dames of the purple-bordered robes,” disciples of Marcos).

In Irenaeus’ care to purge the churches of the extreme influence that anti-Semitism accorded to Greek philosophy, he wrote — not Against the Heresies, which was originally a Latin and later work, which suggests that the author spoke in the name of a Catholic Church and a well-established orthodoxy — but Light Upon and Refutation of So-Called Gnosis.

To the abstract developments of the Gnostics, the polemical conventions of which he often reported in the form of a tissue of absurdities, Irenaeus opposed blind faith, the pistis of the simple people who followed the law of the Christ without asking any questions. He had this (already Pascalian) profession of faith, which would inspire the “Happy are the poor of spirit” that the authors of the Gospels loaned to Jesus: “It is better, it is more useful, to be ignorant and know little, and to resemble God through charity, than it is to appear learned and know much by committing blasphemy against he who they call Demiurge.”[251]

Irenaeus had two good reasons to attack Marcion and Gnosticism. The partisan of a politics of Church unification, resolved to confer the supreme authority to a Roman bishop, he perceived the antithetical character of ecclesiastical monarchism and the belief in two Gods, one ungraspable, the other despicable.

In the second place, Irenaeus was the author of an Epideixis, in which the Christian doctrine was explicated by the prophetic texts of the Bible, the same one that Marcion took exception to for its immorality and incoherence.

Irenaeus’ love for the prophetic tradition reconciled him with the Christianity of the New Prophecy and the Christ who was [re]incarnated in Phrygia, and thus aroused a wave of conversions everywhere in the Empire. For the endorsement of such a hypothesis, it is fitting to recall that Tertullian mentioned a bishop of Rome who was a partisan of the Montanist current and one knows that Irenaeus intervened in favor of the new faith at the side of Eleuthere, a bishop of one of the churches of Rome between 170 and 190.

Annexed by Catholicism due to his hostility to gnosis and his defense of the monarchal principle in the Church, Irenaeus suffered the fate of Origen, who was revised and corrected by Rufin[us]. The Epideixis disappeared. Irenaeus’ millenarianism, which was shared by Hermas and the New Prophecy, was eradicated from his work. The discovery of a manuscript in the Nineteenth Century was necessary to rehabilitate this bishop, who was sanctified by the Church at the cost of several censures due to his millenarianist “heresy.”

The work of Irenaeus was recopied, revised, stuffed full of interpolations and citations of canonical gospels (while Tertullian, who was particularly erudite, knew no other gospel than the “Good Word” of Paul). Of the original text of the Refutation, there only remains Greek fragments of citations taken from the author of the Elenchos and from notorious forgers: Eusebius of Cesarea, Epiphanius of Salamis and Theodoret of Cyrus.

Tertullian, Philosopher Of The New Prophecy

Born around 160 in Carthage and issued from the aristocracy, Tertullian had a classical education. Breaking with rhetoric and philosophy, he devoted himself to dissipation in his youth, only to suddenly renounce it, perhaps around 190, and converted to Christianity, which for the first time was massively propagating itself.

“We only got here yesterday,” Tertullian wrote in 197, “and already we have filled the earth and everything that is in it thanks to you: the towns, the islands, the fortified posts, the municipalities, the villages, the camps themselves, the tribes, the ten families, the palace, the senate, the forum; we have only left your temples.”[252]

While persecutions most often took the form of pogroms — although Tertullian took care to separate the wheat from the chaff in his Adversus Judeos — the pro-consul Vigellius Saturninus decapitated 18 Romanized Africans and Christians in the small town of Scili in 180.

Tertullian was inflamed by the New Prophecy. “I was blind, deprived of the light of the Lord,” he moaned, “only having nature for a guide.”[253] This was why he was in the world: “to weep (his) faults in the austerity of penitence.”[254]

Tertullian’s militant asceticism rejected the “visionary poets who ascribe to the gods the vises and passions of men,” the philosophers who become “patriarchs of heresies.”[255] He admired Justin, Tatian, Theophile of Antioch and Irenaeus, whom he imitated in a series of polemics against Marcion and the Valentinians.

The New Prophecy professed a frenzied asceticism, though different from that of Marcion, for whom sought-after pleasure was a concession to the bad work of the Demiurge. “The God of Marcion,” Tertullian would write in his Adversus Marcionem, “by reproving marriage as bad and blemished by indecency, acted to the detriment of chastity, the interests of which he had the appearance of defending.” If women had some importance in Montanist revelation — to the point that the author of the Elenchos would mock “their respect for the ramblings [devagations] of the little women who endoctrinate them” — , this was at the cost of a loudly claimed chastity, the status of inviolable virginity (the martyrs preferred death to defloration). A spiritual movement par excellence, founded on the repression of desire, it responded to the objurgations of Tertullian: “By economizing on flesh, you will acquire the Spirit” (De exhortatione castitatis).

Tertullian extolled martyrdom (*) (“Blood is the seed of the Christians”), condemned second marriages (in a polemic against the Carthaginian painter Hermogene, who defended the eternity of matter, Tertullian reproached him for being married several times), appealed to continence, and scorned women and the pleasures of love.

(*) The doctrine that provoked hysterical adhesion to Montanism, and provoked its reflux and its growing discredit, was the taste for martyrdom. Did not Tertullian proclaim, in his De fuga, “do not desire to die in your bed, in the langors of a fever, but as a martyr, so that he who suffered for you is glorified”?

Associating richness with lust and debauchery, the New Prophecy directly attacked a part of the clergy, which subsisted on tithes from the faithful and painlessly acclimated themselves to the duties of faith and the compromises of wordly representation. This is why Tertullian and the author of the Elenchos blamed Callixte, one of the principal bishops of Rome (whose name would be given to the catacombs as a whole), whom they reproached for his laxity.

The Church would not lack arguments for condemning Tertullian. But the importance of his apologetic works would incite Catholicism to set him aside using other methods. His biographers insinuated that he only adopted Montanist views rather late, that he was under the hold of Gatism, which unfortunately the vigor of his thought and style did not accredit. A lampoon of the heresies would even be attributed to him: one in which anti-Gnosticism was placed next to critiques of Montanism!