apostolicfathers0201clem - Carmel Apologetics

384 EPISTLES OF S. IGNATIUS.
Basilides flourished during the reign of Hadrian (a.d. 117— 138),
but his sect maintained a somewhat vigorous life for some generations
after. He taught indeed in Alexandria, but he seems to have been
educated in Syria
and the East. How is it that there is no allusion in
these letters to the Non-existent Being, to the World-seed,
Great Archon, to the Ogdoad and the Hebdomad,
to the
to the Threefold
Sonship, to the Abrasax, to the three hundred and sixty-five heavens,
to the prophets Barcabbas and Barcoph, to the ' Expositions ',
to the
depreciation of martyrdom, to the compromise with idolatrous sacrifices,
to any book or any tenet of Basilides and the Basilideans
Again; some years before the middle of the century Marcion
appears on the scene. Marcion was a native of Asia Minor, and he
taught in Rome. At Rome he came in contact with Ignatius' friend
and correspondent Polycarp, who then and there denounced him as
'the first-born of Satan' (Iren.
iii.
3. 4). Thus he trod the very same
ground, as it were, with the author of these epistles. His reputation
was world-wdde for good or for evil. His adherents were found in
most parts where Christianity had spread. For some generations later
the Marcionites were sufficiently powerful to call forth elaborate
polemical treatises from champions of orthodox Christianity. It must
therefore be regarded as a significant fact, that here too our author
betrays not the famtest sign of any knowledge
of his doctrine or his
existence. There is no allusion whatever to his trenchant dualism,
to his ' antitheses,' to his views of the conflict between the work of the
Creator and the work of Christ, between the Just God and the Good
God, between the Old Testament and the New, between the Apostles
of the Circumcision and the Apostle of the Gentiles; none to his
mutilated Gospel, to his tortuous exegesis, to his rigid asceticism. Yet
this silence is not explicable on the ground that our author's polemics
are concentrated on subjects alien to Marcion's theology. More than
once he discusses the relations of the Old Testament to the New, of
the prophets and patriarchs to the Gospel {Magn. 8, 9, Phi/ad. 5, 9,
Smyrn. 5, 7).
More than once he aims his blows at a Docetism
identical in its main lines with the Docetism of Marcion (see above,
p. 380 sq). But in both cases the only antagonists whom he sees
before him are Judaizers, whereas Marcion was markedly Anti-judaic.
Yet his theological position leaves no doubt that on such questions
Marcion's views would have been even more intolerable to him than
those of his Judaic antagonists. How then is this silence to be explained,
except on the ground
that Marcion was excluded from his
range of vision by the impervious barrier of chronology