Marriage, Food, and Light

In his book On Perfection according to the Savior he writes: “Agreement does suit prayer, but sharing in corruption weakens a man’s petitions. At any rate, by granting the permission he is certainly forbidding — only delicately. For while he allows them to come back together on account of Satan and their lack of self-control, he holds up a man who will try to serve two masters: God, by the ‘agreement,’ but by the failure to agree — by lack of self-control, by sexual immorality, and by the devil.”

Someone attacks birth itself, calling it corruptible and destructive. Someone else does violence to the text, applying the Savior’s words to the getting of children: “Do not store up treasure on earth, where moth and rust destroy.” And he is not ashamed to add the prophet’s words to these: “You will all wear out like a garment, and the moth will eat you.” In the same way they bring forward the saying about the resurrection of the dead: “The sons of that age neither marry nor are given in marriage.”

Tatian held that Christ’s flesh was only an appearance, and he declared all sexual union impure. He was also the most violent leader of the Encratites, and he argued along these lines. “Whoever sows to the flesh will reap corruption from the flesh.” But the man who is joined to a woman sows to the flesh. Therefore the man who takes a wife and sows in the flesh will reap corruption from the flesh. [d]

He broke away from the church, and, swollen and puffed up with pride in his teacher, as though he were better than everyone else, he formed a type of teaching all his own. He imagined certain invisible Aeons, as Valentinus did; he denounced marriage as defilement and sexual immorality, in the same way Marcion and Saturninus did; and he denied that Adam was saved, which was an opinion of his own.

Tatian tries from time to time to use Paul’s language, that in Adam all die, while ignoring that “where sin increased, grace overflowed all the more.”

Against Tatian, who says that the words “Let there be light” are to be taken as a prayer. If the one who spoke them knew a higher God, how is it that he says, “I am God, and there is no other besides me”?

He said that there are punishments for blasphemy, for foolish talk, and for obscene words, and that these are punished and corrected by the Word. And he said that women are punished on account of their hair and their ornaments by a power set over such things — the same power that gave Samson his strength through his hair, and that punishes those whom the ornament of their hair drives to sexual immorality.

But Tatian did not understand that “Let there be” is not always a request; sometimes it is a command. So he imagined something deeply impious about God, who said “Let there be light” — that God prayed for light rather than ordered it into being, as though, on his impious view, God were in darkness. [h]

Tatian separates the old man from the new — but not the way we do, taking the old man to be the law and the new man to be the good news. We agree with him in saying the same thing, though not in the sense he wants, since he throws out the law as if it belonged to another God. Tatian condemns and rejects not only marriage but also foods that God created to be used. [i]

“But you gave the Nazirites wine to drink, and you gave orders to the prophets, saying, Do not prophesy.” On this, perhaps, Tatian the head of the Encratites tries to build his teaching, claiming that wine is not to be drunk at all, since the law commanded that Nazirites were not to drink wine, and here the prophet accuses the people who give the Nazirites wine.

Tatian, the patriarch of the Encratites, rejected some of Paul’s letters himself, and yet he held that this one above all — the letter to Titus — ought to be declared the apostle’s, thinking little of the claim of Marcion and others, who agree with him on this point.

Archelaus, overseer of Carrhae in Mesopotamia about AD 280, puts his fellow countryman Tatian in with “Marcion, Sabellius, and others who have worked up a special knowledge of their own” — that is, a teaching of their own making. [m]