Tyconius' Liber regularum as a Hermeneutical Treatise

A dissertation on Tyconius's Apocalypse Commentary

FUSCA SUM ET DECORA THE INFLUENCE OF TYCONIUS ON AUGUSTINE’S TEACHING OF THE ECCLESIA PERMIXTA, 2015

The verse from the Song of Songs, " I am black and beautiful " , quoted by Tyconius in the Rule II of his work Liber regularum, represents a famous passage considered a characteristic of his concept of the bipartite church. The African Donatist lay theologian became famous mostly for his seven rules of the interpretation of Scriptures as well as for his arduous critique of the Donatists who denied the universality of the church and limited her exclusively to the territory of North Africa. The aim of the present article is to analyse to which extent Augustine had got use of Tyconius's book in the period of his polemic with the Donatists, and whether its reading could, eventually, have stood at the origin of his choice of biblical texts, the ones he commented on as a preacher between the years 406–407. In the selected texts I have observed a certain predilection for a particular set of scriptural quotations used both as an argument and as an illustration to support Augustine's and Tyconius's thought concerning the universal-ity of the church. Despite the fact that we have no direct proofs about the inspiration sources of Augustine's anti-Donatist preaching between the years 406–407, the similarities in the use of scriptural citations used by both authors show that Tyconius's Book of Rules might have stood at the origin of Augustine's inspiration and argumentation. However, it does not prove a direct influence of Tyconius on Augustine's teaching on the ecclesia permixta and on the ecclesiastical tolerance since the bishop of Hippo, unlike Tyconius, does not see the church as a twofold body, rather he understands it as a mixture in which the good and the bad are in time mixed in together.

Augustiniana, 2023

AUGUSTINIANA 68 (2018) 125-140, 2018

Starting with an analysis of Gennadius of Marseille’s notice on Tyconius (fl. ca. 370-380), the present article first discusses the possible contents of the African Donatist’s lost work De bello intestino. The next focus is on the possible meaning of ‘bellum intestinum’. It is concluded that, in later tradition, there was an external and an internal meaning, the inward shift beginning with Augustine and his correspondent Paulinus of Nola and prevailing among the many disciples of Augustine. This internal meaning of ‘bellum intestinum’ as denoting the Christian’s inner and permanent struggle between flesh and spirit (cf. e.g. Rom. 7 and Gal. 5:17) is not attested in the works of Tyconius as far as we have them. From his recently reconstructed commentary on the Apocalypse of John, the most feasible solution seems to be that the title of Tyconius’ De bello intestino referred to the enduring war between good and bad Christians within the Church.

2018

The present article deals with Roger Gryson’s reconstruction of Tyconius’ lost Commentary on the Apocalypse (CCL 107A), his subsequent French translation of this reconstructed Commentary (CCT 10), and the English translation Tyconius, Exposition of the Apocalypse by Francis Gumerlock, with long introduction and ample notes by David Robinson (FoC 134). After having reviewed the strenghths and weaknesses of each of these publications, the article concludes with a discussion of the signifiance of Tyconius’ Commentary for the question of the origin of Augustine’s two civitates doctrine.

In the second decade of the 20 th century a small group of Jewish German intellectuals was considering resuscitating Schelling's late project of a philosophy of revelation. In his Star of Redemption, Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) reads the attempt of thinking revelation, which plunged idealism in an abyss of trans-speculative silence and in the depths of the via negativa, as the dawn of a different, thoroughly positive, line of approach not only to revelation itself but also to the thought that goes to revelation's encounter. Rosenzweig construes revelation as a complex speech-act that invites and enables a liturgical response. Instead of a semantics of revelation stretched beyond its speculative limits, Rosenzweig envisages a pragmatic of revelation and a performative-liturgical semiosis. Our group reunites three philosophers with a patristic background and an expertise in the modern and recent philosophies of language. We shall use the semantic-pragmatic tension at the heart of the Rosenzweig-Schelling debate to explore the possibility of a performative liturgical function of patristic literature as an alternative to the already well-studied semantic and speculative directions of this same literature. Our central concern will be taking seriously this literature's claims to being an extension of and a diligent response to scriptural revelation. To this end, we propose a set of analyses of Origen's exegesis of Proverbs 22:20-21, John 1:1-2, and Phillipians 2:6-11, as well as a few, more comprehensive, interpretations of Cappadocian homiletic literature, which we shall place in dialogue with Rosenzweig's Sprachdenken, Benveniste's theory of enunciation, and Austin's performative linguistics; with Lévinas' philosophy of language and its Lyotardian elaboration, as well as with Zizioulas personalist reformulation of patristic ontology.

In order to protect the church from the misuse of scripture promoted by heretical movements, early church fathers advanced hermeneutical mechanisms of control to guide biblical interpretation, which included forms of authoritative hermeneutics. The present investigation describes and briefly analyzes occurrences of these forms in Irenaeus and Tertullian, focusing on the concepts of the rule of truth/faith and church authority. The conclusion of the article highlights inadequacies of authoritative hermeneutics.