Tatien the Syrian , Christian writer of the 2nd century, born in Syria (Mésopotamie) towards 110/120.
Heretic for the Greek and Latin churches, he is all the same the author of a Apologie which is worth to him to be regarded as a Père of the Church. Poor writer and obscure philosopher in all the directions of the term, he is also the author of the Diatessaron , the first agreement of the Gospels, which knew in Syria and well beyond an extraordinary fortune. Excessive in all, but of an obvious sincerity, awkward and enthusiastic fighter, this marginal in the Empire is perhaps représentif than one generally thinks it of the Christian intellectuals of his century.
Elements of biography
Tatien presents itself to the Greeks: “Me, Tatien, philosophizes Barbare, I was born with the country from the Assyrians, I was trained initially in your doctrines and then in those which I now undertake to proclaim”… Higher, he had already told his search of a religion which is appropriate to him: “… I was allowed with the mysteries; I examined all kinds of religious rites achieved by effeminatized and androgynes; I found among Romans Latin Jupiter making his delights of human blood… ; elsewhere of other demons fomenting of the eruptions of spite… ”. It is with the reading of the Old Testament - certain too old cruel writings to be compared with the writings of the Greeks and too divine to be compared with their errors - which it finally discovers in enthusiasm the truth so much required.
It is obviously a literary topos which is expressed here with a violence suitable for Tatien But it describes a route which is also that of Justin and undoubtedly of Athénagoras and which must comprise its share of truth. - to see Apologists of IIe century.
Its conversion probably occurred in Rome. It attends there the school of Justin which it considers “very admirable” a man and shares with him the animosity of the philosopher Crescens. It is of this time which its first writings must date (lost).
The real influence of Justin (or that of the small group which constitutes its “school”) on the thought of Tatien remains a discussed problem. A priori, the reading of the Discours appears to show a quite loose bond.
Justin, not without contradictions, endeavors to find elements of truth in the writings of pagan and to found them “rationally”; he in any case shows a large respect for the philosophy in which it was formed. Tatien, does not finish any to him shouting its horror of all that is Greek, philosophy, art, science, the laws and until the language. All is nonsense, illusion, immorality there. And so by chance, one finds there something which has price, it is a larceny which was made with the detriment of the Barbarians. With its opinion, the Christians do not reject with enough energy contemporary education and the culture where they do not have anything to gain and of which there is nothing to save.
One cannot prevent oneself from thinking that there is love disappointed in the aggressiveness of the Tatien barbarian towards these Greeks with whom it owes his formation all the same and undoubtedly much more than he does not want to recognize it.
To a date impossible to determine, Tatien turns over in its native East. Is party before or after the death of Justin whom one traditionally places into 165/166? It is difficult to judge some.
In chapter XVIII of the Speech , it evokes Justin with last and, in the following chapter, it insults Crescens which it takes for example of the immorality of the philosophers, by adding that Crescens threatened them of death, Justin and itself. Of Rome be would party because it had a presentiment of that the quarrels between schools were going to attract the intervention of the prefect Rusticus who did not joke with the law and order? Or then would its positions extremists, philosophical and morals, have more and more marginalized it in Roman Christendom? They was wholesale the opinion of Épiphane. In any case, it has escaped with the police haul which decimated the school of Justin.
According to Épiphane, good expert of the East, it settled with Séleucie-Ctésiphon. Many modern, frightened a little by this end of the world, would think readily of a less eccentric city like Antioche.
Had it opened a school in Rome before? It is probable. Rhodon was certainly its listener and it is possible that “old” the Apelle attended the group. In addition, Clément of Alexandria evokes a “Assyrian” among those who were its Masters and one often concluded from it that it was about Tatien, but that appears problematic all the same.
In any case, though it is said, it is in the East rather than in Rome, than Tatien had to publish its Discours with the Greeks and it is there especially that it had to work in its Diatessaron. It is in the East finally that he died, on a date which we are unaware of.
The Speech with the Greeks
This apology (Λογος προς Ἑλληννας) - because in spite of its tone for lampoon, it is an apology all the same - caused many interrogations of date and place, but also of intention. There rather than a treaty, one wanted to see a kind of “program of the course” intended to launch the school of Tatien, either in Rome, or in the East. In addition, the settlings of score of the Assyrian Christian with the Greek culture would hold to with it more place than defense of Christianity.
At all events, the work is difficult to read and include/understand. Tatien, bad rhetor who takes care to inform us that it learned rhetoric, seeks the assignment of the style, he likes the obscure turns and the unexpected metaphors. Its talks which feel the sophist, most of the time, turn short in digressions which want to tear off the conviction of the reader by putting in glance the nonsense of pagan on the same subject. This despiser of the Greeks puts moreover one obvious coquettery to pour in his writing all his mythological, philosophical and historical knowledge. Its kindness finally to be said “barbarian” on any occasion, to require, of these Greeks of which it mistakes all, attention and respect for “barbarian philosophy”, end up wearying. Tatien gives sometimes the impression to be really a “barbarian”, come from the third world of the hellenism, which regulates its accounts with a culture of which there remained marginal.
One can distinguish a first part which would be a talk of the Christian faith, constantly intersected of invectives against the philosophers. Tatien milked there successively of God, the relation between the Logos and the Father, of the Creation of the world, the creation of the man, resurrection and the last Judgment.
God being the base necessary of any thing, any thing, before even being created, is in power with God although God before creation is alone. Rather than an emanation, the Logos is a kind of car-realization of the Logos in power which is as a God and who becomes thus first-created at the beginning of all. In fact the Logos orders creation, but his report/ratio with God is of participation, not of separation, as a torch which does not separate from its light when one makes use of it to light other torches; or as while speaking, I do not separate from my word by transmitting it to you although this word acts on your spirit…
It is curious that this Logos is never identified with the Son, as it is of rule in the apologetic old one; moreover Jesus-Christ is large absent from all the Discours .
The creation of the man implies two spirits: an emanating spirit of the Father, present in each creature to which it gives form, and logos resulting from its Logos in power which makes angels and men of the images of God. The sin appears to produce a dissociation, not leaving more with the man but one heart become mortal (but promised with resurrection).
This first part ends in the free will |freedom of the will]], the sinned of Adam, the creation of the Angel and their fall, demons.
These demons introduce at the second part who is a Démonologie as much as doctrines of the hello. One can try to summarize it as follows: the man, while using badly of his freedom, submitted to the demons; but it with the possibility of freeing itself some by the radical renouncement of all the terrestrial things. It is necessary for him to manage to again link its heart with the pneuma, the divine spirit which in the beginning sat in him, but which was driven out by it by the sin, works of the demons. The demons which are only the reflections of the matter and spite cannot reach the repentance and penitence; but the man who is image of God can run away himself by mortification. If one includes/understands well, the Ascétisme is a kind of preparation of the sinner to death, the first separation (voluntary) of the heart with the material things, the total separation carried out in death being the condition so that it finds its immortality.
The last part is a dark table of the hellenism. All passes there once more: philosophy, the law, the theater, plays, dance, music, poetry… Compared with all that, the Christian religion shines about it only of one sharper glare. Tatien finally shows by a compared chronology of civilizations that Moïse is older than Homère and the Seven wise.
Tatien heretic?
The question is important, because behind it another is profiled some: that of a possible influence of the positions hétérodoxes of Tatien on the composition of the Diatessaron .
Our primary source is Irenee of Lyon. According to Irenee, as long as Justin lived, Tatien remained in orthodoxy, but after the death of its Master, it slipped quickly towards the heresy:
- swelling with the thought which he was a Master and believing themselves, in its pride, higher than everyone, he wanted to give a distinctive feature to its school: like the disciples of Valentine, he imagined éons invisible; like Marcion and Saturnin, he proclaimed that the marriage was a corruption and a vice; of itself finally, it was registered out of forgery against the safety of Adam.
All is known as: Tatien is a “encratite” - and better even, one of the founders of the sect.
What is called Encratisme in the first centuries, it is the ascetic tendency extremist of certain sects which prohibit with their members any sexual relationship like any drink enivrantes and meat consumption. But the concept is difficult to encircle: because encratites that one denounces are always introduced, moreover, like deviating dogmatic, generally “gnostic”, but not exclusively. Their asceticism is condemnable because it is the consequence of erroneous theories.
What is it of Tatien? Its evolution towards a moral rigorism is possible. He would have written a book “on the perfection according to the precepts of the Saver”, briefly refuted by Clément of Alexandria which objects only one banality to him on the holiness of the marriage in both Testaments.
Irenee, which introduces his matter by judging that those which reject the marriage are revolted and ungrateful towards God which created the man and the woman for procreation, is unaware of this work and does not seem more.
Gerald F. Hawthorne wondered whether, in fact of texts, Irenee knew another thing that the Discours . It of éons, but, specialist in the question, wouldn't Irenee is certainly not there question have smelled gnosticism behind the obscure cosmology of Tatien? As for the last objection, the same author thinks with reason that it is not the text of Tatien which makes problem, but well that of Irenee: how Irenee does it manage from there to treat “Blasphème” and to issue heretic the assertion according to which Adam was not saved, whereas this problem of the hello of Adam does not have any base scripturaire?
The posterior authors add little. Hippolyte, Eusèbe and Jerome depends on Irenee. For the remainder, we have really few things: traces of an obscure grammatical quarrel to know if the expression “That the light either” is that of an order or a prayer; a sentence which says that the same power which put its force in hair of Samson will punish the women who make use of their and of its ornaments to incite with the fornication (the power in question is apparently not God and Clement would have been shocked by it)… When Épiphane says to us that Tatien was driven out of Rome because it replaced the wine of the Eucharistie by water, it is obviously only by imprudent allusion to a practice spread at some encratites; that has nothing to do with Tatien who was surely not priest.
The testimony of Eusèbe
The testimony of Eusèbe is interesting: in a chapter on Justin, he notes only good of Tatien and rents even his science (IV, 16,7). In extracts of Rhodon, which one tells us continuation twice that it has was the pupil of Tatien, it appears not only that Rhodon, large destroyer of heresies, spoken forever about that of its Master (or then Eusèbe would certainly have brought it back), but it even seems to come out from it that, in the school of Tatien, one led the war to the Marcionites.Remain a chapter devoted specifically to “the heresy of Tatien”. Eusèbe is satisfied to place the quotation of Irenee there, still says to us that the Discours is most beautiful and most useful of its writings and holds for the Diatessaron a point which has nothing to do with the encratism. Allusions which one finds here and there with freedoms that Tatien would have taken with Paul saint concern the problems of the Diatessaron and does not relate to its possible encratite-gnostic heresy.
There finally does not remain large thing of the patriarch of the encratites , like known as Jerome saint. Its reputation of heretic very whole must in Irenee and one saw that the arguments of Irenee are quite weak…
A nonfounded charge
One can ultimately wonder whether the charge of encratism does not rest entirely on this second part of the Discours or Tatien establishes the need for mortification to arrive at the hello. One could with the rigor find gnosticism in certain ambiguous formulas there and insofar as the redemption plays there apparently no part. But it is necessary to also wonder if this theology which appears at the same time obscure to us and rudimentary does not reflect, its manner, which was discussed daily in these Christian “schools” of where one precisely tried to develop a “supposed Théologie of the Logos” to establish bridges between Christianity and pagan philosophy. Justin thought that the Platonisme was, of all of taking, the best (or the least bad) of philosophies. The average eclectic platonism provides without large difficulties the ingredients necessary to build a Cosmogonie like that of Tatien. From its time, there was nothing heretic to that. One would include/understand best the Christian discretion of the Discours as well as irritating intrication for us of the clean ideas of the author and his arrows against the pagan ones, if one could admit that Tatien as sought to show to the Greeks as him, the barbarian, could handle their philosophical tools as it made a point of showing them that it could handle their tools rhetoric.
Diatessaron
Returned in the East, old and perhaps assagi, Tatien undertakes to write an agreement of the Gospels, the first of the kind. Translated almost at once into Syriaque, this Diatessaron is a collection of very great importance for the Eastern churches and he knows, well beyond Syria, an extraordinary fortune until in the full Middle Ages. We reserve a special article to him.
Lost writings
Tatien itself says to us that it composed a treaty On the animals (perished zwwn) - which was to treat principles which them give life and form - and perhaps same kind on the nature of the demons. Rhodon gave a report on a collection of “problems” composed by Tatien, in which he proposed to discuss certain “obscure and hidden” items of the Writing; but as Rhodon promised itself to expose in a special book the solutions to the problems of Tatien, one can think that this work was not completed, or was not put in circulation. Perhaps it was about a collection of questions of school. We already quoted the book “on the perfection…” announced by Clément of Alexandria and from which we do not know anything, not even the title.
| Random links: | Curta | Berrieux | Championship of France of football D1 1983-84 | Pierre-Laurent Ellenberger | Pya |