FREEDOM THAT IS THE LAW OF GOD 397
Jungle, iTorvia, dr)p£>v, then the ailing Universe must have been created
by another god who is not the God of Love. In the second century of
the Christian Era the Catholic Christian Church impaled itself on the
first of the two horns of this dilemma, while a Marcionite Christian
Church impaled itself on the second.
Marcion was a posthumous disciple of the Apostle Paul who drew,
with an un-Pauline rigour, the logical consequences of a Pauline distinc-
tion between opposing realms of Mosaic Law and of Christian Grace.
Marcion's uncompromising jealousy for the immaculateness of the God
who is Love made it impossible for him to remain in communion1 with
any fellow Christian
Who trusted God was Love indeed,
And Love Creation's final law,
Tho* Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravin, shriek'd against his creed.2
Marcion broke with a Catholic Christianity because he had wrestled
with the question
Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such_evil_dreams ?3
and had given, for his part, the affirmative answer that William Blake's
anima naturaliter Marcionita was to give to the same question some
seventeen hundred years later.
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered Heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He that made the Lamb make thee?
Blake's and Marcion's solution for this moral enigma is to attribute
the creation of an ailing Universe to a god who, so far from being
identical with God the fount of Love and Father of the Saviour, is His
antithesis inasmuch as the creator god's distinctive characteristic is the
forbidding negative quality of being both unloving and unlovable. In
Blake's, as in Marcion's, theology, God the Creator's role is to play the
Erinyes to God the Redeemer's Orpheus.4 While the Saviour God wins
souls by love, without ever terrorizing them by threats of constraining
them by force, the highest moral level to which a creator god depicted
as a Prussian drill-sergeant in excehis is deemed capable of rising is to
exact outward conformity with the prescriptions of a cut-and-dried
moral law by imposing savage penalties for formal breaches of it. He is
spiritually impotent to move his human creatures by touching their
heart-strings.
This melancholy taskmaster god whom Marcion identifies with a
Mosaic Jehovah and whom Blake names 'Urizen' and nicknames *Nobo-
daddy* would be bad enough if he performed Ms self-imposed duties
1 Marcion founded a church of his own hi A.D. 144, after his doctrine had been rejected
by the Catholic Christian community at Rome. For the date, see Harnack, A. von:
Marcion, Das Evangelium vom Fremden Gott (Leipzig 1921, Hinrichs), pp. 24 and 18*.
* Tennyson: In Memoriam, Section LVI, Stanza 4.
3 Ibid., Section LV, Stanza 2.	4 See IV. iv. 123-5.