Note 202 — Chapter III

Footnote 202:

(return)

The precepts for a Christian life, if we may so speak, given by the new prophets, cannot be determined from the compromises on which the discipline of the later Montanist societies of the Empire were based. Here they sought for a narrow line between the Marcionite and Encratite mode of life and the common church practice, and had no longer the courage and the candour to proclaim the "e sæculo excedere." Sexual purity and the renunciation of the enjoyments of life were the demands of the new prophets. But it is hardly likely that they prescribed precise "laws," for the primary matter was not asceticism, but the realising of a promise. In later days it was therefore possible to conceive the most extreme demands as regulations referring to none but the prophets themselves, and to tone down the oracles in their application to believers. It is said of Montanus himself (Euseb., H. E. V. 18. 2): 'ο διδαξας λυσεις γαμων, 'ο νηστειας νομοθετησας; Prisca was a παρθενος (l.c. § 3); Proculus, the chief of the Roman Montanists, "virginis senectæ" (Tert., adv. Val. 5). The oracle of Prisca (No. 8) declares that sexual purity is the preliminary condition for the oracles and visions of God; it is presupposed in the case of every "sanctus minister." Finally, Origen tells us (in Titum, Opp. IV. 696) that the (older) Cataphrygians said: "ne accedas ad me, quoniam mundus sum; non enim accepi uxorem, nec est sepulcrum patens guttur menin, sed sum Nazarenus dei non bibens vinum sicut illi." But an express legal direction to abolish marriage cannot have existed in the collection of oracles possessed by Tertullian. But who can guarantee that they were not already corrected? Such an assumption, however, is not necessary.