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Tatian
In his treatise, Concerning Perfection according to the Saviour, he writes, “Consent indeed fits for prayer, but fellowship in corruption weakens supplication. At any rate, by the permission he certainly, though delicately, forbids; for while he permits them to return to the same on account of Satan and incontinence, he exhibits a man who will attempt to serve two masters—God by the ‘consent’ (1 Cor. 7:5), but by want of consent, incontinence, fornication, and the devil.”—Clem. Alex.: Strom., iii. c. 12.
A certain person inveighs against generation, calling it corruptible and destructive; and some one does violence [to Scripture], applying to pro-creation the Saviour’s words, “Lay not up treasure on earth, where moth and rust corrupt;” and he is not ashamed to add to these the words of the prophet: “You all shall grow old as a garment, and the moth shall devour you.”
And, in like manner, they adduce the saying concerning the resurrection of the dead, “The sons of that world neither marry nor are given in marriage.”—Clem. Alex.: iii. c. 12, § 86.
Tatian, who maintaining the imaginary flesh of Christ, pronounces all sexual connection impure, who was also the very violent heresiarch of the Encratites, employs an argument of this sort: “If any one sows to the flesh, of the flesh he shall reap corruption;” but he sows to the flesh who is joined to a woman; therefore he who takes a wife and sows in the flesh, of the flesh he shall reap corruption.—Hieron.: Com. in Ep. ad Gal.
Seceding from the Church, and being elated and puffed up by a conceit of his teacher,[520] as if he were superior to the rest, he formed his own peculiar type of doctrine. Imagining certain invisible Æons like those of Valentinus, and denouncing marriage as defilement and fornication in the same way as Marcion and Saturninus, and denying the salvation of Adam as an opinion of his own.—Irenæus: Adv. Hœr., i. 28.
Tatian attempting from time to time to make use of Paul’s language, that in Adam all die, but ignoring that “where sin abounded, grace has much more abounded.”—Irenæus: Adv. Heres., iii. 37.
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