der all circumstances of life, it is essential not only to know what is good and necessary, but to know which, among these good and necessary things, is of the first or second importance. This, which is of supreme need in the affairs of life, is still more so in those of religion, for which faith fixes duties of such great import to humanity.
Tatian,[1] one of the Fathers of the early
- ↑ Tatian, an apologist of the second century, attracts the historian by the originality with which he assimilates revealed truths, and the somewhat rude eloquence with which he brands pagan corruption for its lapse from orthodoxy to the Gnostic heresy. He was born in Assyria, as he himself states in his Discourse to the Greeks.
Having vainly sought, as well in the popular faith, in the Oriental mysteries, and in the schools of philosophy, for a doctrine that would appease his intellectual doubts and satisfy the more elevated demands of his conscience, he found it ultimately in the Gospel, and described it in his first and most celebrated work, the Discourse to the Greeks, as the motive of his conversion. This apology, which would seem to have been written during a sojourn in Rome, is distinguished from all others that were written at that period by the irreconcilable antagonism it portrays between the pretended wisdom of the pagan and the Gospel. On one side all is light; on the other, utter darkness: here stand mythology with its absurd fables whose subtle allegories scarcely conceal their coarseness, art devoted entirely to sensual pleasures, and philosophy with its contradictions and its nothingness; there, Christianity with its simplicity and universality, its purity of life, and the courage in the presence of death with which its followers were inspired.
After the death of Justin Martyr, Tatian returned to Syria, and affiliated himself with one of the numerous sects to which Oriental fervor of imagination gave rise.
As far as can be ascertained where so much controversy existed, Tatian joined the sect of the Encratites, although he
