APOLLONIUS OF TYANA. - What relates to this figure is the product of the reaction that Eastern-Hellenistic religious syncretism opposed to the advent and spread of Christianity. This opposition took concrete form in the strange figure of A., in the sense that through it — a fantastic transformation of a historical A. — an attempt was made to create a character who could contend either for equality or, worse still, for superiority with the historical figure of Christ.
What we know about A. comes from a purported biography that Philostratus wrote of him at the invitation of Julia Domna, the second wife of Septimius Severus: in this biography Philostratus refers especially to the testimony of one Damis, an alleged follower of A., as well as to no less alleged letters of his. From Philostratus's writing the purpose of that opposition to Christ of which we have spoken stands out clearly, especially because there recur in it, as works of A., certain miracles that the Gospel affirms of Christ, such as the healing of a blind man, of a paralytic, the resurrection of a dead man and the like.
According to Philostratus, A. would have been born a few years before the Christian era at Tyana, a city of Cappadocia, situated at the foot of the Taurus; he would have suffered persecutions under Nero and later under Domitian, whose death he would have foretold. He would have traveled very extensively from East to West, in Greece and in Italy; he would have been in contact with Vespasian and Titus; and he would have appeared to Aurelian, as one reads in the life of this emperor, written by Vopiscus in an openly anti-Christian spirit. A. had a cult, altars and temples through the agency of Caracalla and Aurelian; Alexander Severus in his Lararium, a place reserved for domestic worship, placed A. alongside Abraham, Orpheus, Alexander the Great and Christ.
The legend of A. of Tyana, fashioned from disparate elements but with precise intentions, thus became fixed in time, especially because of its anti-Christian significance, although some favorable interpretation was not lacking among Christian writers. We know, for example, that Philostratus's writing was brought into the field by Hierocles, proconsul of Bithynia in the time of Diocletian, that is, in the last decades of the 3rd century, to demonstrate that miracles are by no means an exclusive element of Christianity.
It may be that the romance woven around A. was not exclusively an invention of Philostratus. Of an A. who lived historically as the author of philosophical-religious works, the lexicon "Suda," written around the year 1000, speaks to us. From Porphyry and Iamblichus, Neoplatonists, we have reports of a life of Pythagoras written by an A.; it may therefore be that this author was the historical personality around whom the biography of Philostratus was later woven. In the latter, in fact, Pythagorean elements can be traced among so many fantastic elements, as can also be gathered from the fact that in the biography it is expressly stated that A., only after embracing Pythagoreanism, devoted himself to silence and meditation in order to purify himself.
Paolo Rotta
His semi-legendary figure, which fundamentally belongs more to the romantic literature of the time and is intended above all as an exaltation of Neopythagoreanism, was willingly set in opposition to that of Christ by the pagan reaction of the 3rd and 4th centuries; but so inferior was it and so overloaded with magical and paganizing elements that after the victory of Christianity its "Life" fell completely into the oblivion from which the Renaissance rescued it together with so many other works of antiquity. Moreover, even in antiquity the fame of A. derived especially from Eusebius's polemic against Hierocles, who is reproached for having set A. against Christ: a polemic that drew upon him the attention of Christian writers such as Lactantius, Jerome, Augustine, Cyril, while he receives no particular notice from the Neoplatonists of his time.
Today the name of A. has returned to a certain honor among theosophists and students of the occult sciences, always in an anti-Christian spirit, as can be seen in the work of Mead.
Bibliography3 works
Nicola Turchi