A. The History and Theology of Montanism
Most scholars agree that the Montanist movement[384] started around 156-7 when Montanus began to prophesy.[385] According to Eusebius, Montanus was a “recent convert.”[386] Jerome thought he was formerly a priest of Cybele who had emasculated himself.[387] According to Didymus of Alexandria, Montanus was the priest of an idol,[388] and yet another source makes him a priest of Apollo.[389] Clearly there is no reliable information about Montanus’ previous life, but we do know that at one time “he fell into frenzy and convulsions,” became ecstatic, spoke in a strange way, and uttered prophecies that were contrary to accepted traditions in the church.[390] Soon female associates appeared beside him; Priscilla and Maximilia claimed to have seen visions and also uttered prophecies.
As is customary with eschatological and charismatic movements, many people responded with faith in the “new prophecy,” which became the name of the movement. Individual Christians and eventually whole congregations followed Montanus. In time, however, the church turned against the “new prophecy” and the movement was branded a heresy. What happened to Montanus is uncertain because later references to him came from hostile sources, one of which asserted that he committed suicide.[391] After his death the prophetesses continued his work, but, as in most eschatological movements, when the prophecies failed to materialize, the movement settled down into a more or less routine church life. The best known convert to Montanism was the great Tertullian of Carthage, many of whose books reflect the theology and ethics of later Montanism.The “new prophecy” was a vigorous movement. Not only were Montanist preachers powerful speakers but they had fertile minds and produced many books.
According to Hippolytus they produced an “infinite number of books,”[392] none of which has survived, however; only a few sentences from them can be reconstructed.[393] A few of the original prophetic utterances of Montanus, Maximilia, and Priscilla are quoted by Eusebius and Epiphanius, but nothing in them shows any doctrinal deviation from the standards of the rest of the church; in matters concerning the rules of faith (regula fidei) the early Montanists were quite orthodox. They differed in practical matters and in their emphasis of certain ethical values, all of which would have been considered quite acceptable to every Christian a generation or two earlier. The Montanists believed in prophecy as a gift of the Holy Spirit; they accepted and practiced glossolalia and believed that a Christian must live up to the highest moral standards. These things were integral parts of early Christian life as it is reflected in the writings of the New Testament and earliest Christian literature. But the church of the middle of the second century was no longer the charismatic church of the apostles, and things that had been looked upon as signs of the activity of the Spirit a hundred years before had come to be viewed as strange and eccentric.An eschatological movement, the Montanists claimed that through a revelation they were warned that the new Jerusalem would soon descend from heaven.[394] Even the place where this was to happen was revealed to them: the village of Pepuza, and it was here that the faithful were to gather to await for the great event.[395] Montanus even called Pepuza ‘Jerusalem” and wanted to hold his church meetings there because it was the holy place. So strong was this faith in the immediate coming of God’s kingdom that even Tertullian (died c. 220), who was a second generation Montanist, believed in it, although without any reference to the village of Pepuza. It was Tertullian who preserved for us a story, perhaps stemming from the Parthian campaign (197-199) of Emperor Septimius Severus (193-211).
According to Tertullian’s account, a city was seen in the sky suspended from heaven. This sight could be viewed by everyone, even pagans confessed to having seen it, and it appeared every morning for forty days. For Tertullian this vision was the fulfillment of a Montanist prophecy “which is a part of our belief” that there will be a picture of the heavenly city as a manifestation of the truth of the prophecy.[396] The vision appeared in Judea, not in Pepuza, and Tertullian did not investigate whether it was a mirage, an optical illusion often experienced by visitors in hot sand deserts.In this respect, the Montanists returned to an early Christian concept of eschatology, i.e. a very realistic eschatology which found expression in statements such as Matthew 24.24, "... this generation will not pass away till all these things take place,” and the early letters of Paul, particularly 1. Thessalonians.[397] The very realistic view of the “heavenly Jerusalem” in Montanism also reminds us of a similar view held by Papias, a pupil of bishop Polycarp, who may have known the apostle John.[398] He believed that the kingdom of Christ “will be set up in material form on this earth/’[399] and that in those days each vine will have ten thousand branches, each branch ten thousand twigs, each twig ten thousand shoots, each shoot ten thousand clusters and each cluster ten thousand grapes and each grape will produce twenty five metretes of wine. It will be similar with grain production.[400] This vision of Papias brings to mind the experience of the worshippers of Dionysus, who, as we have seen above, thought of the world as flowing with milk, wine and nectar. Now Papias was also a Phrygian and it is difficult not to sense a certain spiritual affinity between his material vision of Paradise and the experience of the Bacchantes. But Eusebius says that Papias must have gotten these ideas from a “perverse reading” of the Bible, and besides, “he was a man of very little intelligence.”[401] Not so Eusebius, and generally the church after the post- apostolic period; they no longer nurtured such material visions of the new Jerusalem.
As a matter of fact, they kept delaying the time of Christ’s coming farther and farther into the future until they no longer had any vision of it at all; because it was now so far away from them, it did not cause any change in their everyday lives. For them it was no longer realistic to talk about the new Jerusalem except in homilies and in hypothetical terms, but for the Montanists eschatology was something immediate and the effect of this belief was a different ethic.Montanist prophecy was, consequently, directed toward everyday Christian behavior. No new “revelations” concerning the way of salvation were received, as in many Gnostic movements. That the utterances of the three original founders of the movement, Montanus, Priscilla, and Maximilia, were real prophecies, spoken under inspiration, not even the critics denied. What they questioned, however, was whether this inspiration was from the Holy Spirit of God. Their answer was that Montanist prophecies were uttered under the possession of demons; that demons existed, no one doubted. Montanus, we read in Eusebius “became obsessed, and suddenly fell into frenzy and convulsions/119 He was not the only one of his age subject to such phenomena. One of his contemporaries, who lived not very far from him, Alexander of Abonuteichus,[402] [403] behaved in a similar manner: in religious frenzy, he tossed his long locks and, foaming at the mouth (he produced foam by chewing soapwart plant, Lucian asserts), he screamed at the top of his lungs a volley of unintelligible words; he ran about chanting and praying so that eventually a great number of people believed that he was the chosen prophet of the healing god Asklepios. He then spoke a number of oracles which he developed into a prosperous business. As in the case of Montanus, Alexander’s oracles were mostly bits of pious advice on the everyday vicissitudes of life. Lucian indicated in one of his essays that several such people were healed by an exorcist in Palestine. The persons obsessed by the demon, he says, “fall down in the light of the moon and roll their eyes and fill their mouths with foam.” For a fee, they were restored to health by an exorcist. The exorcist could talk to the demons who answered him in the language of the country from which they came. At the command of the exorcist, they left the body of the one possessed. Lucian says that he himself saw one of these demons coming out “black and smokey in color.”[404] The eloquent and scholarly critic, Celsus, who wrote around 180 A.D. and thus was a contemporary of both Montanus and Alexander, confirmed that prophecy of this sort indeed was widely practiced. He wrote: “There are many, who, although of no name, with the greatest facility and on the slightest occasion, whether within or without temples, assume the motions and gestures of inspired persons; while others do it in cities or among armies, for the purpose of attracting attention and exciting surprise. These are accustomed to say, each for himself, ‘I am God; I am the Son of God; or, I am the Divine Spirit; I have come because the world is perishing... And those who know not the punishments which await them will repent and grieve in vain; while those who are faithful to me I will preserve eternally... ’ To these promises are added strange, fanatical, and quite unintelligible words, of which no rational person can find the meaning; they are so dark, as to have no meaning at all; but they give occasion to every fool or impostor to apply them to suit his own purposes.” Celsus also claimed to have interviewed such prophets who, when pressed by him, admitted that their incoherent words meant nothing.[405] The testimony of Lucian may be criticized as that of a satirist who emphasized things he disliked. But Celsus was a scholar and his statements must be taken with the same scholarly respect with which he wrote them. Montanus’ own prophecies seem to confirm that he considered himself the mouthpiece of the Paraclete,[406] although he did not necessarily identify himself with God or with Jesus Christ. Schepelern has convincingly argued that such use of the first person singular meant the god who spoke in the medium, not the medium himself.[407] This is the case with Apollo, who was originally a god of Asia Minor. His mouthpiece, the Pythia in Delphi, always spoke in the first person when she uttered her oracles and it was obvious to all that these were Apollo’s words and not those of the Pythia. The Pythia spoke when she was “entheos” “filled with God.” We have a vivid description of this condition by Virgil who tells us how Aeneas went to inquire of the Sybil at Cumae: when he arrived at the cave the prophetess was “raging fiercely,” trying to “shake the mighty goddess from her breast.”[408] Similarly, Ovid says that the Sibyl is inspired by “the presence of the god within her,” which means that she is “entheos,” “plena deo,” “filled with god.”[409] We also learn from Ovid that the Sybil was a virgin who resisted the advances of Phoebus (Apollo) when she was still an innocent young girl, which recalls the insistence of the Monta- nists that their prophetesses lived in a celibate state[410] and that Priscilla was a virgin. According to Epiphanius,[411] in Montanist services of worship virgins displayed a certain “enthusiasm,” that is, they showed signs of being entheos, “filled with God”, the condition of prophetic madness well known from ancient literature.[412] The Montanist prophets and other “ecstatics” mentioned by ancient authors seem to belong to the same group of people, those who spoke under the influence of a superior spiritual power whose voice their sayings were believed to be. This manner of speaking starts out as a coherent message, but as the frenzy grows it develops into an incoherent, ecstatic gibberish. By the second century this was a fairly common phenomenon. In the time of the New Testament it was called glossolalia, speaking in tongues, and may have originated with the pentecostal experience of the apostles, who under the influence of the Holy Spirit “spoke in other tongues’" and gave the impression to others that they were drunk.”[413] Paul is our witness that such glossolalia appeared to outsiders as madness[414] and indeed, if we draw upon some examples from gnostic practices we can understand why. Here are two sentences quoted by Irenaeus: “Basema Chamosse Baoenaora Mista- dia Ruada Kousta Babaphor Kalachthei. “Messia Uphareg Namenpsoe- mam Chaldoeaur Mosomedoea Acphranoe Psaua Jesus Nazaria.” [415] Another from a gnostic gospel: “Aeeou iao aoi oia psinother them&ps nopsiter zagoure pagowre netmomaoth nepsiomaolh marachachtha thobar- rabau tharnachachan zorokothora ieou sabaoth. ^[416] Lucian quotes similar gibberish concerning Alexander.[417] The frenzied speech of the Montanists must have been similar to that practiced by other emotionally supercharged people in Asia Minor and the surrounding areas, perhaps similar also to some Pentecostal charismatic speaking of modern times. The purpose of such behavior is to convey to the group messages from God. We have already seen that the Montanist prophecy consisted of counsels concerning practical, not theological, matters. Apart from the promise of the “new Jerusalem” and its speedy coming[418] the Montanist prophecies appear to have been didactic and homiletic. “Do not listen to me, but listen to Christ!” said Maximilia?6 Tertullian quoted a “counsel of the Spirit”: being defamed by the public is for the believer’s own good “for he who is not exposed to dishonor among men is sure to be so before the Lord... Seek not to die on bridal beds nor in miscarriages, nor in soft fevers, but to die in the martyr’s death, that he may be glorified who has suffered for you.”*7 In the Montanism represented by Tertullian such practical issues dominate, for, Tertullian said, “the Paraclete’s administrative office is the direction of discipline, the revelation of Scriptures, the reformation of the intellect and the advancement toward the better things.”[419] [420] [421] The rule of faith needs no improvement and no change, but righteousness develops in stages: first, a rudimentary stage, then, the Law, the prophets, and the gospel. And now finally “through the Paraclete it is settling into maturity. The Paraclete will be after Christ, the only one to be called and revered as Master; for He speaks not from Himself, but what is commanded by Christ.”[422] And what does the Paraclete command?-that virgins be veiled, that fasts be observed, that none should marry a second time, that martyrdom not be avoided, and similar matters that do not affect the rule of faith. [423] The morality of the Montanists was influenced by these “prophecies” and by their acute sense of the impending descent of the heavenly Jerusalem. So it was with Christians generally in apostolic times, but as their eschatological hopes faded so their moral outlook changed. Faith in the unique cleansing power of baptism which should have been effective until the second coming of Jesus was slowly abandoned, and the church developed a penitential system to accommodate repentant sinners. By the time of Tertullian even adultery and fornication were forgiven,[424] and it was against such “laxity” that the Montanists maintained high and rigorous standards for their daily lives. They were known for their strict fast which bordered on asceticism. Montanus himself had given laws concerning fasts[425] which Hippolytus called “novel and strange.”[426] They appear in the writings of Tertullian, who boasted of the strict practices of the Montanists and scolded the “Psychics” (the main church) whom he called “gluttons” because they “hated fasts.”[427] “It is these which raise controversy with the Paraclete; it is on this account that the New Prophecies are rejected; not that Montanus and Priscilla and Maximilia preach another God, nor that they disjoin Jesus Christ (from God), nor that they overturn any particular rule of faith or hope, but that they plainly teach more frequent fasting than marrying...” In addition to more fast days, Tertullian also mentions the Montanist practices of lengthening the fast periods which were observed by all Christians and xerophagies, i.e. dry fasts in which they abstained from water and even juicy fruits. The followers of Montanus are, therefore, constantly reproached with “novelty,” complains Tertullian, who then lashes into a vigorous defense of the Montanist standards accompanied by an equally vigorous denunciation of the “psychics’” laxity.[428] Abstinence from water included abstinence from bathing, boasted Tertullian, which conjures up images of certain ascetic monastics concerning whom Anatole France said that “the odor of their virtues rose up to heaven.”[429] Montanist morality was equally strict in sexual matters. So rigorous were they in this respect that Apollonius, a writer whose works Eusebius used, believed that Montanus “taught the annulment of marriage... ”[430] Later Apollonius and Eusebius stated that both Priscilla and Maximilia left their husbands as soon as “they were filled with the Spirit”; the Montanists, therefore, lie when they call Priscilla virgin.[431] Of course, marriage, divorce, and virginity should be mutually exclusive, except perhaps under some extremely unusual circumstances, but these references to early Montanism at least show that sex was viewed as a grave matter. These Montanists may have followed strictly Paul’s counsels in 1 Corinthians 7, where the apostle only grudgingly approves of marriage and sex because “the appointed time has grown very short,”[432] i.e. the end of the world was near. As an eschatological movement, the Montanists probably wanted to preserve themselves from the involvements of sex and marriage and to achieve perfection by the time the “heavenly Jerusalem” descended. In this matter, too, Tertullian formulated the Montanist views for his time, devoting an entire treatise to their discussion. He refers to their eschatological views in other writings, too. In his Exhortation to Chastity, Tertullian contrasts the desires of the flesh to our sanctification, God’s will that His image be restored in us so that we may become holy.[433] He distinguished three kinds of “sanctification”: the first is “virginity from one’s birth”; the second, “virginity from one’s second birth,” i.e. baptism. (If married, that means the renunciation of marital sex and for a widowed woman, perseverance in her widowhood.) The third grade of virginity is monogamy, that is, not marrying again after the first marriage is ended by the death of a partner. The first grade Tertullian calls “happiness, total ignorance of that from which you will afterwards wish to be freed”; the second is “virtue,” and the third, in addition to virtue, is also “moderation.”[434] In this treatise Tertullian quoted Priscilla, “the holy prophetess”: “The holy minister knows how to minister sanctity. For purity is harmonious, and they see visions; and turning their faces downward, they even hear manifest voices, as salutary as they are withal secret.”[435] Carnality, “the filthy concupiscences of the flesh,” averts the Holy Spirit, while “purity” is a precondition for an ecstatic experience. Tertullian wrote in a similar vein his treatise On Monogamy, which he begins with a tirade against heretics who do away with marriages and Psychics, who multiply them. “Among us, however, whom the recognition of spiritual gifts entitles to be deservedly called Spirituals,” there is only one marriage. The Psychics claim that this teaching of the Paraclete is a novelty, yet it is in harmony with apostolic teaching and tradition.[436] In a letter to his wife, Tertullian advised her not to marry after his death and assured her that in heaven the “voluptuous disgrace” which existed between them, “such frivolities, such impurities,” will not exist.[437] What she thought of such a valuation of their married life is not recorded, but fortunately for her, she preceded her husband in death. Tertullian was not the only one to hold such views of coitus and sex. With him we are already in that period of history when the church became preoccupied with the problem of sex in the way of salvation.[438] For the Montanists sexual continence was in the class of fasting, i.e., it was a means in the service of a higher, spiritual experience. The asexual view of heaven which Tertullian so greatly desired may have contributed to the position of women in Monta- nism. Since in Christ there is “no male and female”[439] and in the resurrection all will be “like angels in heaven,”[440] the Montanists disregarded sexual differences and, in a proleptic way, created in their church life the new Jerusalem in this respect. The two prophetesses were just as important as Montanus himself; indeed, they may have been regarded even more highly than Montanus himself if we are to accept at face value an account of Hippolytus.[441] Hippolytus says that the Montanists “magnify these wretched women above the Apostles and every gift of grace, so that some of them presume to assert that there is in them something superior to Christ.” Even the “novelties of fasts and feasts and meals of parched food” were introduced by them because “they have been instructed by women.”[442] Epiphanius wrote that the revelation concerning the holiness of Pepuza and the promise that Jerusalem would descend there was given to one of these women[443] and that in later Montanism the prophetic role of women in the church lived on. He writes: “Often seven white clad virgins come into their church. They carry torches and come before the congregation to prophesy, they demonstrate a certain enthusiasm (ενθουσιασμός), they deceive the people and make them all cry. They shed tears as if they would be in mourning of penitence and by their behavior they mourn the fate of men.”[444] Tertullian reports about a “sister” in his own congregation who had the spiritual gift of receiving revelation “which she experiences in the Spirit of ecstatic vision amidst the sacred rites of the Lord’s day in the church: she converses with angels, and sometimes even with the Lord; she both sees and hears mysterious communications... ”[445] It is well known that prophecy was one of those ministries that the early church accorded to women without hesitation,[446] but in the Montanist church women were also bishops and presbyters. This practice was justified on the basis of Galatians 3.28: “... there is no male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” In his pre-Montanist days, Tertullian criticized the “heretics’ who accorded women too many rights in the church: “The very women of these heretics, how wanton they are! For they are bold enough to teach, to dispute, to enact exorcisms, to undertake cures — it may be even to baptize,” i.e., administer the sacraments.[447] Yet this is what happened in Montanism. Firmilian, bishop of Cappadocia, wrote a letter to Cyprian, probably in 256 A.D., in which he related the story of a woman “who in a state of ecstasy announced herself as a prophetess, and acted as if filled with the Holy Ghost.” She deceived many with her marvels: she walked barefooted in the snow without being harmed, predicted earthquakes, and professed an ability to see the future. She also “sanctified bread and celebrated the Eucharist, and offered sacrifice to the Lord, not without the sacrament of the accustomed utterance; and also baptized many, making use of the usual and lawful words of interrogation, that nothing might seem to be different from the ecclesiastical rule.”[448] Firmilian’s problem was whether these baptisms were valid, seeing that a “most wicked demon baptized through means of a woman.”[449] We note that the woman administered the sacraments strictly according to ecclesiastical rules and regulations; the only problem was her sex. Augustine (died 430), who called the Montanists Pepuziani or Quinlilliani, similarly reported that they gave preferential status to women, including the priesthood.[450] Finally, a sixth-century letter from bishops of Gaul forbids the practice, followed in some congregations, of women assisting at the administration of the eucharist, just as in the “horrenda secta”—which is more than likely a reference to the Montanists.[451]