Marcion Borrows from Empedocles

But Marcion, a native of Pontus, is far more out of his mind than these men. He drops most of what the majority hold and pushes on to a still more shameless teaching: he supposed that the universe has two originating causes, one of them a good one and the other an evil one. And imagining that he was introducing something new, he founded a school full of folly and of the Cynics’ dog-like life — he himself being a quarrelsome man. He thought the crowd would forget that he was no disciple of Christ but of Empedocles, who lived long before him, and he framed and shaped the very same opinions: that there are two causes of the universe, Discord and Friendship. For what does Empedocles say about the plan of the world? Even though we have spoken about this before, we will not keep silent now either — if only so that this plagiarist’s heresy can be set beside its source. [a]

This philosopher says that the elements out of which the world consists and gets its being are six. Two of them are material: earth and water. Two are instruments by which material things are arranged and altered: fire and air. And two work on matter by means of the instruments and shape it: Discord and Friendship. Empedocles puts it something like this:

Zeus is fire; life-bringing Hera is earth, which produces the fruits that keep us alive; and Aidoneus is air, because although we see everything through him, he is the one thing we do not see. Nestis is water, since water is the one carrier of food and so becomes a cause of nourishment for everything that is fed — though water by itself cannot feed anything. If it could feed, he says, animal life could never be destroyed by famine, since there is always more than enough water in the world. That is why he calls water Nestis: because although it is a cause of nourishment, it is not by itself able to nourish the things that are fed.

So these, sketched in outline, are the principles that make up Empedocles’ whole theory of the world: water and earth, out of which generated things come; fire and spirit, which are the instruments and the working causes; and Discord and Friendship, which are the principles that do the craftsmanship. Friendship is a kind of peace and harmony and love, and its whole effort is that there should be one finished and complete world. Discord, however, always separates that one world and divides it up, or makes many things out of one. So Discord is the cause of the whole creation, and he calls it oulomenon, that is, destructive; for it is Discord’s business that through every age the creation should go on keeping the condition it is in. Ruinous Discord has thus been the fabricator and the working cause of everything that is produced, while Friendship is the cause of drawing existing things out, altering them, and restoring them into one system. About these two Empedocles says that they are immortal and unbegotten principles, and that they have never yet received any originating cause of their own existence. Somewhere he puts it like this:

And what are these two? Discord and Friendship. They did not begin to come into being; they existed before and always will, because, being unbegotten, they cannot undergo decay. Fire and water and earth and air, on the other hand, are things that perish and revive. For when these generated bodies cease to exist because of Discord, Friendship takes hold of them, brings them forward, and attaches and associates them with herself in the universe. This happens so that the universe may go on being one, always ordered by Friendship in one and the same way, without a break.

But when Friendship makes unity out of plurality and joins separated things into unity, Discord in turn forcibly tears them away from unity and makes them many: fire, water, earth, air, and the animals and plants produced from these, and whatever parts of the world we can see. And as for the form of the world, what sort of thing it is when Friendship has arranged it, Empedocles puts it this way:

This is the work Friendship keeps up, making one most beautiful form of the world out of plurality. Discord, however, being the cause of the way each of the parts is arranged, forcibly tears that one form apart and makes many things out of it. And this is what Empedocles says about his own birth:

That is, by “God” he means the unity and unification of that one form in which the world existed before the separation and production that Discord introduced among the many things that came about by Discord’s arrangement. For Empedocles says that Discord is a furious, disturbed, unstable craftsman — calling Discord the maker of the world. This is the condemnation and the necessity laid on souls, which Discord forcibly tears away from unity and then shapes and works on. He puts it in some such way as this:

— meaning by spirits long-lived souls, because they are immortal and live for long ages:

— calling blessed those who have been gathered by Friendship out of the many existing things into the unification that belongs to the world grasped by the mind. He says that these are exiles, and that

He says that the hard roads are the alterations and transformations of souls into one body after another. This is what he says: “exchanging one hard road of life for another.” For souls change, one body after another being altered and punished by Discord and not allowed to stay in a single frame; instead the souls are caught up in every kind of punishment as Discord changes them from body to body. He says:

This is the punishment the craftsman inflicts, like a smith shaping a piece of iron and dipping it in turn out of fire into water. For fire is the upper air, out of which the craftsman transfers the souls into the sea; and the land is the earth. That is why he uses the words “out of water into earth, and out of earth into air.” This is what Empedocles says:

So the souls, hated and tormented and punished in this world in this way, are, according to Empedocles, gathered up by Friendship, which is a good power and pities their groaning and the disorderly, wicked contrivance of furious Discord. Friendship is eager, and works hard, to lead the souls out of the world little by little and to settle them at home with unity, so that everything, brought along by her, may arrive at unification. And so, because destructive Discord has arranged this divided world in such a way, Empedocles urges his disciples to keep away from every kind of animal food. For he says that the bodies of animals are the dwellings of punished souls. He also teaches those who listen to teaching like his to refrain from intercourse with women. He gives that instruction so that his disciples will not cooperate with and assist the works that Discord fabricates — Discord being always at work dissolving and forcibly tearing apart the work of Friendship. Empedocles says this is the greatest law governing the universe, putting it something like this:

By Fate he means the change from unity into plurality, according to Discord, and from plurality into unity, according to Friendship. And, as I said, Empedocles holds that there are four perishable gods — fire, water, earth, and air — but two that are immortal, unbegotten, and endlessly hostile to each other: Discord and Friendship. Discord, he says, is always guilty of injustice and greed, seizing by force what belongs to Friendship and taking it for itself. Friendship, on the other hand, being always and unchangeably a good power, set on union, calls back and draws toward itself and reduces to unity those parts of the universe that have been forcibly torn apart, tormented, and punished in the creation by the craftsman. Some such system of philosophy as this is what Empedocles offers us concerning the world’s beginning, its destruction, and its make-up as a thing consisting of what is good and what is bad. And he says that there is also a certain third power, one that is grasped by the mind, and that it can be understood from these two. He puts it something like this:

So when Marcion, or one of his hounds, barks against the craftsman and brings out arguments drawn from a comparison of good and bad, we ought to tell them that neither Paul the apostle nor Mark the stump-fingered announced anything of the sort. None of these doctrines has been written in the Gospel according to Mark. The real author of the system is Empedocles, son of Meton, a native of Acragas. Marcion robbed him, and imagined that to this day nobody would catch him carrying the whole arrangement of his heresy — in the very same words — over from Sicily into the story of the Gospels. [p]

Bear with me, Marcion. Since you have set up a comparison of good and evil, I too will set up a comparison today, following your own doctrines as you take them to be. You say the world’s craftsman is evil — why do you not hide your face in shame at teaching the church the doctrines of Empedocles? You say there is a good God who destroys the works of the craftsman — then are you not plainly preaching to your pupils, as the good God, the Friendship of Empedocles? You forbid marriage and the having of children, and you forbid the foods God created to be received by those who have faith and know the truth. Do you think, then, that you can escape being found out while you impose the purification rules of Empedocles? For in fact you follow this pagan philosopher at every point, since you instruct your own disciples to refuse meat so as not to eat any body that might be what is left of a soul the craftsman has punished. You break up marriages that God has joined. And here again you are conforming to the doctrines of Empedocles, so that for you the work of Friendship may go on as one and undivided; for according to Empedocles, as we have proved, marriage separates unity and makes plurality out of it.

Marcion’s chief heresy, and the one of his that is least mixed with other people’s, is the one whose system is built out of the theory about a good God and a bad one. We have made it plain that this belongs to Empedocles. But since in our own day a certain follower of Marcion, Prepon the Assyrian, has tried to bring in something newer still, and has given an account of his heresy in a work addressed to Bardesanes the Armenian, I will not keep silent about this either. [s]

By claiming that what is just makes a third principle, set between what is good and what is bad, Prepon cannot possibly avoid teaching the opinion of Empedocles. For Empedocles says that this world is managed by wicked Discord, and that the other world, the one managed by Friendship, is grasped by the mind. These, he says, are the two different principles, of good and of evil, and that between these opposite principles stands just reason, according to which the things Discord has separated are united and, under the influence of Friendship, are fitted together into unity. This just reason itself, the helper of Friendship, Empedocles calls the Muse. And he asks her himself to help him, putting it something like this:

Marcion took these ideas over and rejected the birth of our Savior altogether. He thought it absurd that the Word, who was the helper of Friendship — that is, of the good God — should have come under the heading of a creature fashioned by destructive Discord. His teaching was rather that the Word himself came down from above without being born, in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, and that, standing midway between the good God and the bad one, he went and taught in the synagogues. For if he is a mediator, Marcion says, then he has been set free from the whole nature of the evil God. The craftsman is evil, he claims, and so are his works. That is why, he says, Jesus came down unbegotten: so that he might be free of every admixture of evil. And he has been set free from the nature of the good One as well, so that he may be a mediator — as Paul states, and as he himself acknowledges: “Why do you call me good? There is one who is good.”

These, then, are Marcion’s opinions, and by them he made dupes of many, using the conclusions of Empedocles. He transferred the philosophy that ancient thinker invented into his own system of thought, and out of Empedocles he constructed his own godless heresy. But I consider that we have refuted this sufficiently, and that I have left out no opinion of those who steal their opinions from the Greeks and treat the disciples of Christ spitefully, as though the disciples had been the ones who taught them these doctrines. And since it seems that we have explained this man’s teachings well enough, let us see what Carpocrates says.