Tatian

TATIAN. - "Christian apologist" of the 2nd century. Very little is known of his life. He himself tells us that he was born "in the land of the Assyrians," that he had been a pagan and had been educated in Greek fashion (Or., ch. 42). He traveled a great deal, probably as a wandering philosopher, of the type of the rhetoricians and Cynics of the time; he sought in the mysteries a satisfaction for the spiritual needs that beset him (Or., ch. 49), and finally came to know the Scriptures which, as he asserts, convinced him fully by their humility, simplicity and purity, and made him a believer.

His growing disgust at the immorality of paganism, a stay in Rome where he met and was a disciple of St. Justin Martyr, the accusations and persecutions of a Cynic philosopher Crescens, whom Justin had victoriously refuted and shown to be ignorant (Justin, Apol., II, 3) and who repaid master and disciple with mortal hatred, drove him to hate violently the whole world and the ideas in which he had grown up. The term "barbarian," which had a whole history of its own not only in earlier apologetics but already in paganism and Judaism, was then taken up by him as a badge of revolt and violent opposition. The martyrdom of Justin must have confirmed him even more in this attitude. Of such a state of mind, as well as of the violent and aggressive personality of the author, his Discourse to the Greeks, the only writing of his preserved for us, is a testimony. It is a diatribe which in the violence of its language and the disconcerting radicalism of its denials has nothing to envy in the writings of certain Cynics. Undoubtedly the very literary genre chosen must also have influenced the tone of the polemic: nevertheless T. remains the first virulent and at times truculent apologist of Christianity. He is, however, a man who knows how to write: harsh, mocking, often vulgar, but always impassioned.

He has a style of his own, even if it is often, through an excess of subtleties, convoluted and obscure. Convinced that he had been a famous man when he was a pagan, he does not resign himself to not proving it now that he has become a Christian: this explains at once certain of his stylistic procedures and his tendency to make summary justice of what does not please him or what he does not understand: and of this he felt almost the need to exonerate himself in advance, foreseeing the hostile reaction (Or., ch. 35). Christian doctrine, anti-pagan polemic, and apology for Christianity are violently and tumultuously mixed in his Discourse, which is certainly not a model of order and clarity. T. begins by accusing the Greeks of having stolen everything from the barbarians: no art, no discipline would have been invented by them. Philosophy alone is their boast, but it is a very wretched thing, as the absurdities of the philosophers demonstrate (chs. 1-3). The practical and theoretical attitude of the Christians is quite different; they believe in one God and therefore do not admit idolatry (ch. 4). The unity and solitude of God do not conflict with the existence of another principle, the Logos, who was ab aeterno with the Father, inasmuch as God was alone in the beginning with respect to creation not yet accomplished, but since all things existed in him through rational power, God and the Logos existed in him. The Logos therefore proceeded from the Father and gave beginning to creation (ch. 5: one of the most difficult and controversial of the Discourse). There follows, according to a logical concatenation in part personal, the exposition of the other cornerstones of Christian doctrine. Resurrection of bodies (ch. 6), angelology and demonology (ch. 7), the fall of man and the action of demons (chs. 8-11), psychology and pneumatology (chs. 12-13), regeneration of man, not alluding concretely to the fact of the Incarnation, but following the speculative and moral lines of the problem and as a struggle against the action of demons, whose activity has a very wide range and extends even to the physical evils that afflict man (chs. 13-19). All this doctrinal part is, however, continually and extensively intermingled with a minute polemic against the at times contrasting aspects of paganism, especially against mythology, with digressions, developments, returns and repetitions. Then, after a mention (ch. 21) of the belief in "a God who appeared in the form of a man," in which Christians (whose name, moreover, is never pronounced) believe, the polemic begins against the moral and practical aspects of paganism: assemblies, festivals, spectacles (ch. 22); gladiatorial games (ch. 23), tragic performances (ch. 24), the life of the philosophers (ch. 25), the varieties of languages and the affectations of the grammarians (chs. 26-27), the different legislations (ch. 28). The complete lack of unity noted within paganism, personal experiences, its insufficiency against moral corruption—these are what at this point (ch. 29) T. recalls in explaining his conversion and advancing (ch. 30) the demonstration that he considers decisive for proving the validity of the doctrine he has now embraced. And it is the chronological argument that embraces the whole last part of the Discourse (chs. 31-41), the most cited and exploited by later writers (Clement of Alexandria, Eusebius, etc.). In it there is also inscribed, besides the usual personal and polemical digressions, the so-called "catalogue of statues" (chs. 33-34), a listing of more or less famous statuary works and of more or less well-known names of sculptors, which T. gives in order to demonstrate at once the immorality and vanity of pagan ideals and the personal knowledge he possesses of what he condemns. The basis of the chronological argument is the relationship between the two chronologies, Greek and "barbarian," the former starting from Homer, the latter from Moses. T., drawing on Chaldean, Phoenician, Egyptian and Greek testimonies, intends to demonstrate the priority of Moses and of his legislation with respect to Greek legislation, history, literature and wisdom. He concludes therefore (ch. 42) with an affirmation of certainty in the goodness of the cause he now upholds and declares himself ready, with God's help, to sustain the examination of his adversaries.

The date of composition of the Discourse is uncertain and disputed. It was certainly written outside Rome. According to Harnack, whose chronology is founded, to tell the truth, on very weak bases (a controversial passage in ch. 35), it would be shortly after the conversion, which would also partly explain its tone, and in any case prior to the death of Justin (163-67). For others (Kukula, Puech, Geffcken) it would already reflect the subsequent evolution of T. and is placed around 170 or after 172 (the date of T.'s return to the East). But even this chronology is far from being certain. From the point of view of doctrine it should be noted that often, because of the tendency to present Christian thought in a personal way, the relationship with the more current ideas of his contemporaries does not always clearly reveal itself in T. Even though he attacks Stoicism, the Stoic influences are undoubted, all the more accentuated inasmuch as the rational presentation of the datum of faith naturally leads him to express himself according to the current philosophical formulas. In a more accentuated way than the other apologetes he tends to present Christian beliefs according to their intimate rational and moral demands, which leads a character like his to assume positions sometimes different from those of his contemporaries and of the official Church itself. After the death of Justin, as Irenaeus testifies (Adv. haer., I, 28; Eusebius, Hist. eccl., IV, 29, 2), T. would have increasingly distanced himself from the current teaching. It is quite possible that he drew close to the Gnostics, in particular to the school of Valentinus (Clement of Alexandria, Strom., III, 13, 92, 1). In any case the heresy of which he was found guilty (172 A.D.) is above all a moral heresy, encratism, a rigorous moralism that condemned marriage, the eating of meat and, it is said, even of wine. The heresiologists make him the founder of a veritable sect of that name. It is probable in any case that the rigorous moralistic attitude, traces of which can be detected also in the Discourse to the Greeks (for example, in the tone of hostility he has toward matter), betrayed more particular and precise doctrinal reasons of a Gnostic coloring. A proof of this could be his own conception of the damnation of Adam, as the progenitor of the race, and, probably, also his belief—one not exclusive to Tatian, moreover—in the connection of his fall with the sin of sensuality. After the break with the Church, T. passed to the East, where he is found at the head of a Didaskaleion. It has even been supposed that the Discourse was an inaugural oration of one of the courses held there (Kukula). If one is to give credence to the rather late testimonies of Epiphanius (Panar., haer., 46), the Didaskaleion would have been located first in Mesopotamia, while T.'s further activity, by then totally heretical, would have taken place at Antioch in Syria, in Cilicia, Pisidia, etc. The date of his death is unknown.

Before the Discourse to the Greeks T. had already written a work on animals, to which he himself refers in the Discourse (ch. 15); he also alludes (ch. 16) to another work on demons. When he wrote the Discourse he had in mind another work against those who had written on the Divinity (ch. 40), of which it is not known whether he brought it to completion. He certainly wrote another work, this one heretical, on perfection according to the Savior, to which Clement of Alexandria, who combated it, refers and of which he has preserved a passage that represents a rigorist and encratite exegesis of 1 Cor. 7:5, from which to deduce the diabolical origin of marriage. It may be that the corrections to Pauline expressions which according to Eusebius (Hist. eccl., IV, 39, 6) were attributed to him concerned rather certain of his somewhat forced and arbitrary exegeses like the aforementioned one, or certain violences done to the text the better to support his theses. Eusebius (ibid., V, 13, 8) further recalls a work of Questions concerning the obscure and involved passages of the Old Testament, of which a disciple of T., Rhodon, had declared his intention to give the explanation.

More information is available, on the other hand, about another work of T., the Diatessaron. This is a fusion of the four Gospels into a single harmony, an attempt which, for practical reasons, met with great success. The original text has been lost, not only because the Church upheld and defended the four separate Gospels, but also because, having been composed when the author was already a heretic, it carried in its text elements that betrayed heterodoxy. It is known in fact that in it there were missing, for example, the genealogies of Jesus (Mt. 1:1-7; Lk. 3:23-38) and whatever could reveal a human origin of the Savior. And so much does Theodoret of Cyrrhus (v.) tell us, who in his diocese had more than two hundred copies destroyed that were in the hands of simple faithful, who used it as a useful Gospel compendium (Haer. fab. comp., I, 80). But despite this opposition the Diatessaron was extremely widespread: this too is a reason for the extreme complication that the problem of reconstructing the Diatessaron presents. At present the material available for a study of the question is represented by: a) a Persian Diatessaron translated from the Syriac which seems to date to be the text closest to the original; b) an Arabic translation also from the Syriac which is known in at least three related copies; c) a harmonized text of the Gospels, in Latin, in two recensions of which one, contained in the Codex Fuldensis, represents the harmonized text that in 546 Victor of Capua (v.) accepted in place of the four separate Gospels and which he no longer entitled Diatessaron but Diapente; d) a harmony in Old Dutch translated from a Latin original; e) a group of whole or fragmentary texts of Gospel harmonies in Old High and Low German; f) a harmonized text in Old English known as the Pepysian Harmony; g) a Diatessaron in Italian vernacular in two recensions, one Tuscan and one Venetian; h) a fragment of the Greek Diatessaron discovered in 1933 at Dura-Europos, therefore earlier than 256 (the existence of another Greek fragment is disputed). These texts are of very different value: all of them, however, in a more or less direct way seem to go back to a Syriac original, including the Greek fragment, which is no longer judged nowadays to be T.'s original, but itself a translation of a Syriac original. This series of Diatessarons presents quite complicated problems of mutual interference: sometimes, as is the case, for example, in the Arabic Diatessarons, the original text has been partly recast with the text of the Peshitta, not without certain peculiarities of the original reappearing. For the reconstruction of the original Diatessaron and for the history of the fortune of the Diatessaron, the commentaries made on it must also be kept in mind. The most important is the one in Syriac by St. Ephrem, of which only fragments of the original and an Armenian translation remain; another much later commentary (12th cent.) in Latin is owed to Zacharias Chrysopolitanus. As a complement to the above, one must further add the traces of lost Diatessarons and the direct and indirect influences exercised by one and the other.

Thus one posits an Armenian translation of the Diatessaron that would have influenced the subsequent Armenian and then Georgian translation of the Gospels. Influences are detected on the ancient Syriac versions of the Gospels, on readings in use in the Syriac Church, on Gospel citations in the Manichaean Kephalata, on various Eastern and Western liturgical and spiritual texts, ranging from Turkish texts to the Life of Christ by Ludolph of Saxony and, finally and above all, on the text of the ancient Latin translations of the Gospels and on the Greek text of the New Testament represented by the famous Codex Bezae (D). It has rightly been said that the problem of the Diatessaron represents one of the most difficult problems of ancient Christian literature. Two fundamental questions remain, among others, still unresolved. First of all, whether the Syriac original to which this whole complex of texts and testimonies seems to point must really authorize the conclusion that the original language of the Diatessaron was Syriac and not Greek, as Orientalists are inclined to conclude but as many still do not consider certain. Secondly, whether the presence of discordant readings or readings that seem to descend from extra-canonical or heretical texts in the Diatessaron can authorize the conclusion that T. did not use only the four Gospels, introducing into them on occasion certain heretical or extra-canonical readings that fitted well with his ideas, but deliberately placed as the basis of his harmony a fifth source that some identify outright with the Gospel according to the Hebrews, also on the basis of the vague testimony of Epiphanius (Pan., 46: but Epiphanius did not know the Diatessaron directly, and those who, according to Epiphanius's citation, identified the Diatessaron with the Gospel according to the Hebrews did so probably because they knew that this Gospel was considered Encratite, the heresy of which T. himself was held to be the founder). In his Diatessaron it is known that T. adapted the narrative of the Synoptics to the historical framework of the Fourth Gospel. The date and place of composition are not exactly known.

Franco Bolgiani