Bardaisan

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Bardaisan — Bardesanes in the Greek sources, Bar Dayṣān, “son of the Daiṣan,” after the river that runs through his city — was a Christian thinker, poet, and astrologer of Edessa, the Syriac-speaking city on the eastern edge of the Roman world, active from the late second century until his death in 222. He stands near the head of Syriac Christian literature, at the fountainhead of the written tradition that would later branch into Syriac Christian mysticism: among the first to write theology and philosophy in Syriac, and the first to set Christian teaching to music in that tongue. For centuries his name carried the charge of heresy. What he actually held is harder to recover than the charge.

The bare facts are reasonably firm. He was born in 154 to a family of standing, brought up alongside a prince of the house that ruled the small client-kingdom of Edessa, and grew into a courtier of the Edessene court under Abgar VIII — Abgar the Great, who reigned over a Syriac principality that kept its own dynasty while answering, more and more, to Rome. Bardaisan was learned in Greek philosophy and in the astral science of the older Mesopotamian world, the “Chaldean” art whose home lay just down the rivers from him; tradition also credits him with a study of Indian religion, quoted later by the Neoplatonist Porphyry, and with skill as an archer that suited a man raised at a martial court. When the Roman emperor Caracalla folded Edessa into the empire in 216, deposing its last king, Bardaisan held his ground: he made a public defense of the faith before the imperial representative, and even a hostile fourth-century witness conceded he had behaved almost as a confessor — one who suffers for the faith short of death. He was, in short, a Christian aristocrat of the frontier, moving between the throne-room, the philosophical school, and the church, and he brought to the new faith the conceptual machinery of the Greek schools — the ordered cosmos, the graded powers, the divine reason or Logos through which a single God governs the world.

The Book of the Laws of Countries

The one work that gives a direct view of his thought is the Book of the Laws of Countries, a dialogue preserved in Syriac and composed not by Bardaisan himself but by a pupil — named in the tradition as Philip — who set down his master’s teaching, with Bardaisan as the principal speaker and the students breaking in with questions. Even the clearest source, then, comes at one remove: the master heard through a disciple’s pen. Its other interlocutors are named — Awida, who puts the hardest objections, and Bar Yamma — and the conversation has the easy texture of a real schoolroom argument rather than a polished treatise. A Greek version of part of it, under the title Concerning Fate, was already circulating within a century of his death; Eusebius of Caesarea quoted a long stretch of it in his Preparation for the Gospel, which is how the dialogue survived into the wider Greek-reading world.

Its theme is the oldest problem the stars pose: if the heavens govern human life, what becomes of choice, and of right and wrong? Bardaisan refuses the two clean answers. He grants the planets — the Seven — real power: over the body, over the accidents of birth and fortune, over wealth and want and sickness and health. He had loved the Chaldean art himself, he says, and does not pretend it is empty. But against the astrologers who make the stars sovereign, and against those who would deny fate altogether and lodge everything in the human hand, he lays out a third way drawn from a single, devastating observation: the customs and laws of whole peoples do not move with the stars. Across every climate, men are born at every hour under every conceivable nativity, yet the law of their nation holds them all alike. The Seres of the far east do not murder; the Brahmins of India eat no flesh; the Persians wed their own daughters and sisters; the Britons share one wife among many men; the people of Edessa keep chastity; the Greeks train in the gymnasium; the Jews circumcise their sons and keep the sabbath wherever they live, under whatever sky. No horoscope can account for a whole nation behaving against what its scattered stars would dictate. The law of men, Bardaisan concludes, prevails over the decree of the stars.

From this he builds a careful tripartite settlement. Three powers order the world, and each rules its own province. Nature governs the body — that a man cannot father children before a certain age, cannot live without food, must grow old and die. Fate, which he calls Fortune, governs the soul’s circumstances — the accidents that fall on a life, the sickness and the windfall, the deformity and the early death. And free will, given by God, governs what the older tradition would call the spirit: the moral act, the choice for which a person is answerable. None of the three is absolute. Fate crushes nature at times, and at times the free will of a man repels and crushes fate. Over all three stands the one God, who alone is powerful in everything, and who apportioned to each power — to the angels, the elements, the governors of the spheres, and to men — its measure and no more. As the dialogue puts it, in the pupil’s record of the master’s words, “we men are found to be governed by Nature equally, and by Fortune differently, and by our Free-will each as he wishes.” It is a middle path cut with precision between surrender to astrology and its outright denial — and, within the terms of Hellenistic astrology and the wider art of divination, a remarkably exact piece of fencing: the stars are conceded their kingdom of body and fortune precisely so that the kingdom of the will can be walled off from them and kept for God.

The contested heresy

How far Bardaisan strayed from later orthodoxy is genuinely contested, and the contest is worth stating as such. The heresiologists who shaped his reputation accused him of a dualist cosmology, of teaching elements or “essences” existing alongside God before the world was made, of denying the resurrection of the body and treating the soul’s release from flesh as a deliverance, and of populating the heavens with subordinate divine beings — a Mother joined to a Father of Life, a Son of the Living. They filed him among the Valentinians and the wider gnostic currents of the age, and the fiercest of them, Ephrem the Syrian, writing in the same Edessa some six generations later, called him a garrulous sophist, orthodox in his mouth and a heretic in his heart, a man who died with the Lord on his lips and demons in his breast.

Modern scholarship reads the surviving evidence far more cautiously. The dialogue that survives is closer to a philosophical theism than to any developed gnostic myth: it has no fallen Sophia, no malign demiurge, no anti-cosmic despair, but a single good God who orders a graded cosmos and guarantees human freedom. The category of gnosis itself, and of Gnosticism as a single religion, has come under hard question — the figures it groups did not see themselves as one movement — and “Valentinian” had by the third century hardened into a convenient label to pin on any suspect teacher, much as “Manichaean” would later serve. A good deal of what was reported as Bardaisan’s own may belong to his followers, the Bardesanites, who carried his speculations about pre-existent elements and the structure of the heavens further than the cautious dialogue ever does, and whose later, more elaborate system is what Ephrem was often actually fighting. The hostile witnesses are also tangled witnesses: Ephrem confuses Bardesanites, Marcionites, and Manichaeans freely, lumping teachers who in fact opposed one another. The relation to Valentinus is real enough to explain the charge — Bardaisan worked in a world saturated with Valentinian vocabulary, and some of the hymn-fragments preserved in Ephrem’s attacks do sound the Mother-and-Father and the lower Wisdom of that school — but it falls well short of proving him a Valentinian. What the heresy charge fixes most reliably is not Bardaisan’s system but the boundary the later Syriac church was drawing, with him on the wrong side of a line he never knew was there.

The relation to the broader history of dualism is the sharpest test. If Bardaisan taught that matter, darkness, or the elements were eternal alongside God, he would stand at the head of a Mesopotamian line that runs forward into Mani and the religion of light. The link is not imagined by the heresiologists alone: Mani, born in Mesopotamia within a decade of Bardaisan’s death, wrote one of his seven canonical Syriac works, the Book of Mysteries, expressly against the Bardesanites — so the two systems were close enough to quarrel. Yet the quarrel cuts against the easy genealogy. Bardaisan’s dialogue insists on one omnipotent God and a freely willing creature, exactly the structure Manichaean dualism abandons; he is as plausibly read as an opponent of thoroughgoing dualism as its ancestor. Where he belongs on the map of late-antique Iranian and Mesopotamian gnosis is, in the honest state of the evidence, undecided — and the brief survives because the witnesses against him are louder than the one document that speaks in his own voice.

The hymns and the schools

Bardaisan was a poet before he was a heresiarch, and it was as a poet that he reached furthest. He and his son Harmonius are credited with a collection of psalms — by tradition a hundred and fifty, on the model of the biblical Psalter — composed in Syriac and set to music, the first to bend that language to meter and melody. They carried his teaching in a form that lodged in the memory and spread wherever Syriac was sung, through the kingdom of Edessa and beyond. Their very success made them dangerous to the later church: a century on, Ephrem the Syrian wrote his own orthodox hymns in the same meters, to the same tunes, to crowd the older songs out of the people’s mouths. The tactic worked. Almost none of Bardaisan’s own verse survives except as four fragments quoted inside the hymns written to refute it, and a single haunting phrase preserved by a later Syrian writer — that the Ancient of Eternity is a boy, forever young. The “Hymn of the Pearl,” the great initiation-poem embedded in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, has been attributed to him by a long line of scholars, though the attribution is not certain.

The texts and the modern reassessment

Bardaisan reaches the present almost entirely through two channels, and the gap between them is the whole problem. The Book of the Laws of Countries survives in a single Syriac manuscript, brought from the monasteries of the Nitrian desert to the British Museum in 1843 and edited with an English translation by William Cureton in his Spicilegium Syriacum of 1855 — the first time the West heard Bardaisan in something close to his own voice rather than in his prosecutors’. The standard modern critical edition and translation is H. J. W. Drijvers, The Book of the Laws of Countries: Dialogue on Fate of Bardaiṣan of Edessa (Assen, 1965; reprinted by Gorgias Press in 2007 with a new introduction), the work that did most to recast Bardaisan as a philosopher of fate and freedom rather than a gnostic mythographer; Drijvers’s earlier study, Bardaiṣan of Edessa (1966), remains the pivot of the reassessment. A concise scholarly overview, with the fragments and the secondary literature gathered, is the Encyclopaedia Iranica entry on Bardesanes, which sets him in the Iranian-Mesopotamian world that fed his astral science.

The hostile witnesses have their own critical apparatus, and it is older and fuller than the friendly one. Ephrem the Syrian’s prose attacks — the principal source for the more developed system of the Bardesanites — were edited with the Syriac text and an English translation by C. W. Mitchell, A. A. Bevan, and F. C. Burkitt as S. Ephraim’s Prose Refutations of Mani, Marcion and Bardaisan (two volumes, 1912 and 1921), still the standard edition of that material. The quarrel with the Manichaeans is documented from the other side as well: Mani’s Book of Mysteries, one of his seven canonical Syriac scriptures, was written expressly against the Bardesanites, and survives only in later report. The earliest accessible English account that already grasped the central point — that the recovery of the dialogue had overturned the inherited charge — is G. R. S. Mead’s chapter on Bardesanes in Fragments of a Faith Forgotten, which quotes Cureton’s translation at length and notes that F. J. A. Hort had already, by 1900, tried to reclaim Bardaisan from the gnostics for orthodoxy. The modern revaluation continues in the open-access Syriac scholarship gathered in the journal Hugoye, where studies such as Ute Possekel’s work on Bardaisan’s influence on late-antique Christianity trace how much of the heresiarch’s reputation was the achievement of his followers and his enemies rather than of the man who wrote, or rather spoke, the dialogue on fate.

What he never lost was the central wager of the Book of the Laws of Countries. The stars may rule the outer life — the body’s seasons, the turns of fortune, the climate of a man’s days. The customs of nations prove they do not rule the inner one. A people scattered across every horoscope keeps one law; a man under the most adverse heaven can still choose the good and answer for it; the will, walled off and given by God, is no planet’s to command. Bardaisan conceded the sky almost everything a frontier astrologer could ask, and kept back only the one thing that made a man more than a creature of the spheres — and on that single reservation he was willing to be counted a heretic.

→ In the library: Mead, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten — Bardesanes (1900)

→ Related: Gnosis · Logos · Divination · Neoplatonism · Free Will · Fate · Astrology · Hellenistic Astrology · Gnosticism · Valentinus · Dualism · Heresy · Syriac Christian Mysticism · Manichaeism Religion Of Light · Late Antique Iranian Mesopotamian Gnosis