CHAPTER X.

TATIAN HERETICAL—THE ENCRATITES.

What shows that the order of ideas which filled the minds of Marcion, Apelles, and Lucan came from the theological situation by a kind of necessity is that we see the faithful from all parts turning from the same side without their antecedents being possibly foreseen. Such was in special the fate which was reserved for the disciple of the tolerant Justin, for the apologist who had twenty times risked his life for his faith—Tatian. At a date which cannot be precisely fixed, Tatian, who at bottom was always an Assyrian at heart, and who much preferred the East to Rome, returned to Adiabene, where the number of Jews and Christians was considerable. There his doctrine altered more and more. Cut off from all the churches he remained in his own country what he was already in Italy—a sort of solitary Christian, not belonging to any one sect, although approaching the Montanists in asceticism, and some Marcionites by his doctrine and exegesis. His ardour for work was prodigious; his burning brain would not allow him to rest; the Bible, which he read without ceasing, inspired him with the most contradictory ideas; he wrote on this subject books without end.

After having been, in his apology, the fanatical admirer of the Hebrews against the Greeks, he fell into the opposite extreme. The exaggeration of the ideas of St. Paul, which had led Marcion to inveigh against the Jewish Bible, led Tatian to sacrifice entirely the Old Testament to the New. Like Apelles and the greatest number of the Gnostics, Tatian admitted a Creator God subordinate to the 91Supreme God. In the act of creation, by pronouncing the words “Let light be!” the Creator, according to him, proceeded, not by command, but by way of prayer. The Law was the work of the Creator God, only the Gospel was the work of the Supreme God. An exaggerated demand for moral perfection caused Tatian, after having repelled the Hellenic antiquity as impure, to repel likewise the Biblical antiquity. Hence an exegesis and a criticism little different from that of the Marcionites. His Problems, like the Antitheses of Marcion and the Syllogisms of Apelles, had doubtless for their object to prove the inconsequences of the ancient law and the superiority of the new. He presented there, with very lucid good sense, the objections which could be made against the Bible, by placing himself on the ground of reason. The rationalistic exegesis of modern times finds its ancestors in the school of Apelles and Tatian. Notwithstanding its injustice to the Law and the Prophets, this school was certainly, in exegesis, more sensible than the orthodox doctors with their entirely arbitrary allegorical and typical explanations.

The idea which governed Tatian’s mind in the composition of his celebrated Diatessaron could not be worthy in the opinion of the orthodox. The discordance of the gospels shocked him. Desirous above all to meet the objections of reason, he sought at the same time to do what would be most for edification. Everything in the life of Jesus which according to him brought the God too near the man was mercilessly sacrificed. However convenient was this attempt at the fusion of the gospels, it was denounced, and the copies of the Diatessaron were violently destroyed. The principal adversary of Tatian in this last period of his life was his old pupil Rhodon. Taking up one by one the Problems of Tatian, this presumptuous exegete set himself to 92reply to all the objections his master had raised. He also wrote a commentary on the work of six days. No doubt if we had the work which Rhodon composed upon so many delicate questions, we should see that it was less wise than that of Apelles or Tatian; those prudently confessed that they did not know how to solve them.

The faith of Tatian varied like his exegesis. Gnosticism, half conquered in the West, flourished in the East still. Combining together Valentinus, Saturninus, and Marcion (the disciple of St. Justin), forgetful of his master, fell into the dreams which he had probably refuted at Rome. He became a heresiarch. Full of horror on the matter, Tatian could not bear the idea that Christ should have had the least contact with it. The sexual relations of man and woman are sinful. In the Diatessaron, Jesus had no earthly genealogy. Like some apocryphal gospel, Tatian would have said: “In the reign of Tiberius, the Word of God was born at Nazareth.” He went so far logically as to maintain that the flesh of Christ was only an apparition. The use of flesh and wine classed a man in his eyes among the impure. In the celebration of the mysteries, he wished to be served with nothing but water. He passed thus as the head of those numerous sects of encratites or abstinents, forbidding marriage, wine and flesh, who arose in all places, and pretended to draw this from the rigorous sequence of Christian principles. From Mesopotamia these ideas spread to Antioch, Cilicia of Pisidia, through all Asia Minor, to Rome and all France. Asia Minor, especially Galatia, remained the centre. The same tendencies appeared in many places at the same time. Had not Paganism, on its side, the maceration of the cynics? A collection of false ideas, much spread, led men to believe that, evil arising from concupiscence, 93the return to virtue implied the renunciation of the most lawful desires.

The distinction between precepts and counsels remained still undecided. The Church was looked on as an assembly of saints waiting in prayer and in ecstasy the new heaven and new earth; nothing would be too perfect for it. The institutions of the religious life shall solve one day all these difficulties. The convent shall realise the perfect Christian life, a gift which the world has not to bestow. Tatian was not a heretic, except that he wished to put upon all as an obligation what St. Paul had presented as best.

Tatian presents, we may see, some likeness to Apelles. Like him, he changed much, and never ceased modifying his rule of faith; like him, he attacked the Jewish Bible resolutely and made himself the free exegete of it. He nearly approached some Protestants of the sixteenth century, particularly Calvin. He was in any case one of the most deeply Christian men of his century, and, if he fell, it was like Tertullian by excess of severity. We could rank among his disciples that Julius Cassian, who wrote many books of Exegetica, maintaining, by arguments analogous to those of the Discourse against the Greeks, that the philosophy of the Hebrews was much more ancient than that of the Greeks, pushed Docetism to such excess that he was looked on as the head of that heresy, and associated with it a horror of works of the flesh, which led him to a sort of nihilism destructive of humanity. This advent of the kingdom of God appeared to him like the suppression of the sexes and modesty. A certain Severus followed a still freer fancy, repelling the Acts of the Apostles, insulting Paul, and taking up the old myth of Gnosticism. From shipwreck to shipwreck, he went over nearly all the chimeras of the archonites, continuators 94of the follies of Markos. From his name the Encratites were called Severians.

All the aberrations of the mendicant orders of the middle ages existed at this time. There had been, from the first centuries, saccophores or sack-carrying brothers; apostles, pretending to reproduce the life of the Apostles; angelics, cathares or pure ones, apotactites or renouncers, who refused communion and salvation to all those who were married and possessed any property. Not being guarded by authority, these sects fell into the apocryphal literature. The Gospel of the Egyptians, the Acts of St. Andrew, of St. John, and St. Thomas were their favourite books. The orthodox pretended that their chastity was only apparent, since they drew women into their sect by every means, and were continually with them. They formed a sort of community in which the two sexes lived together, the women serving the men and following them in their travels by the title of companions. This kind of life was far from softening them, for they furnished in the struggles of martyrdom some athletes who put the executioners to shame.

The ardour for the faith was such that it was against the excess of sanctity that it was necessary to take measures; it was the abuse of zeal which needed to be guarded against. Some words which implied nothing but what was praiseworthy, such as “abstinent,” “apostolic,” became the marks of heresy. Christianity had created such an ideal of indifference that it recoiled before its own work, and said to the faithful: “Do not take me so very seriously, or you will destroy me!” They were afraid of the fire they had lit. The love of the two sexes had been so terribly abused by the most irreproachable teachers that the Christians, who wished to go to the end of their principles, came 95to hold it as sinful, and to banish it utterly. By force of frugality they blamed the creation of God, and left useless nearly all His gifts. Persecution produced, and up to a certain point excused, these unhealthy aspirations. Let us think of the hardness of the times, of that preparation for martyrdom which filled up the life of the Christian, and made out of it a kind of fascination analogous to that of gladiators. Boasting the efficacy of fasting and asceticism Tertullian says: “Behold how they endure prison, hunger, thirst, privations, and distresses; see how the martyr knows how to come forth from the concealment into which he has entered, not to meet there unknown pains; not finding there anything but the macerations of every day—certain of conquering in the fight, because he has killed the flesh, and because in him the torments have no point to seize. His dried epidermis will be like a cuirass to him, the iron nails will slip there as over a thick horn. Such shall be he who, by fasting, has often seen death near him, and has been emptied of his blood—a heavy and inconvenient burden from which the impatient soul longs to escape.”