Tuesday, November 21, 2023

Gnosticism and Marcionism are Chaotically used terms

Marcion is one of many Christian Heretics who's name has become shorthand for just one particular idea he taught and thus Marcionism as a label will be applied to people or belief systems that are maybe even the opposite of Marcion on everything else.  In Marcion's case that is teaching that the God of the Hebrew Bible, YHWH, is not the same entity as The New Testament God who is The Father of Jesus.

I have recently learned that Marcion didn't even believe YHWH was Evil per se but more like Lawful Neutral to use some Gamer lingo. 

Others who separated the OT God from the NT God were even less hostile to the OT God.  Cerinthus separated them while still being a Legalist who said Christian should still keep The Torah.

Using Gnostic as a catch all term for everyone who believed anything even kind of like this or other related ideas was not being done at the time.  Irenaeus in Against Heresies used the word Gnostic only of the Valentinians and even that was not as a term to describe anything about their Theology or metaphysical world view but simply as his way of calling them pretentious.  Gnosis was a Greek word for knowledge, so you could translate calling someone a Gnostic as "know it all".

My past desire to define Gnosticism as simply the most extreme end result of 2nd Century Christians being too influenced by Middle Platonism and Neopythagoreanism is hindered by Wikipedia giving that label to Epiphanes who was clearly the opposite of that being more like a Zenonian Stoic.

The first theological system that tends to enter my mind when I think "Gnosticism" is primarily that of the Sethians.  So for example on my other blog in Gnosticism in Anime and Video Games the Sethian system is mainly what I had in mind when I suggested that SSSS.Gridman, Serial Experiment Lain and Revolutionary Girl Utena could perhaps be considered Reverse Gnosticism, using a Gnostic Mythological Framework but to actually convey the exact opposite attitude towards the material world.  

There are few topics where I am more susceptible to Godwin's Law then the subject of nominally Christian theologies that reject YHWH.  Thomas Carlyle had expressed a similar sentiment though he didn't go in-depth on it mostly not seeing himself as Christian at all anymore.  Volkish Antisemitism began doing this with Paul de Lagarde in the late 1870s.  Houston Stewart Chamberlain gave it a more refined expression in Foundations of the Nineteenth Century in 1899 and from there it was incorporated into the writings of NSDAP Propagandists like Alfred Rosenberg, Ludwig Muller and Ernst Bergman in forming their "Positive Christianity".  And in post-War Neonazism we see it even in how George Lincoln Rockwell describes the Old Testament in his Autobiography, but for him it lead to rejecting Christianity entirely.

However I have grown uncomfortable with calling this tendency "Nazi Marcionism" as I have in the past, partly because of the above but also because I know plenty of others do not connect their rejection of the Jewish God to any hostility to Jews themselves.  You could say there is a type of Antisemitism in viewing The Jews as the ultimate victims of a cruel evil god who Jesus came to save them from rather then for.  But that would be distinct from Nazi Antisemitism.

If I were to compare any ancient Anti-Yhwists to those Nazis it would be the Cainites.  They were the ones who were explicit that the followers of the Evil God were also Evil.  And they also loved identifying themselves with those YHWH was seemingly hostile to in The Hebrew Bible.  

Houston Stewart Chamberlain argued Jesus was an Aryan by arguing he was a Canaanite, this and a few other ideas of his imply he felt the Aryans were Biblically Hamites, an idea that wouldn't hold up to historical scrutiny but I know a few still try to argue it in the obscure corners the Internet to this day.

Meanwhile Cain and his descendants are presented as the first violent warmongers in my reading of Genesis 4 making them natural people for Fascists to identify with.  Cain is the perfect Biblical Symbol for the Nietzschean conception of Master Morality.

And then there is the bizarre Islamophilia of the Nazis which would lend itself to identifying with the Arabian antagonists of Israel, Ishmaelites, Midianites and Edomites/Amalekites.  Meanwhile the modern Palestinians falsely claim descent from the Philistines and Canaanites.

Now a lot of people online talking about the Nazis and Gnosticism tie into it some Conspiratorial belief in an unbroken continuity between Ancient Gnostics and groups active today.  That is obviously not the case, the Cainites died out during late Antiquity. The Manicheans survived into the "Middle Ages" in the East but even they eventually died out.  Only the Mandeans survived to today but as isolated communities in the middle east with no connection to any "Secret Societies" in The West.

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