Marcion's Love of Creation


Although Marcion is often said to have rejected matter as inherently evil, Marcionite sacramental practice and asceticism suggest a more complex and specific set of attitudes to material things and practices. Later heresiologists analyzed Marcion's rather negative cosmogony and saw inconsistency, but Marcionite Christianity was less concerned with the origins of things than with their significance in light of the new creative work of the loving Stranger god. What Marcion despised was arguably the order (kosmos) of creation, rather than the mere fact of it. If the higher god saves human beings, who are part of the Creator's work and without affinity to that "Stranger," then by analogy the use of water in baptism or bread in the eucharist may be understood as the ritual reconfiguration of matter into the new order willed by its "new master and proprietor."