Book of Rules of Tyconius, The: Its Purpose and Inner Logic

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION Just over a hundred years ago, the English scholar F.C. Burkitt was looking for a pre-Augustinian African writer whose citation from the Prophets might shed light on the Old Latin versions of the Bible. He found such a writer in the fourth century Donatist theologian and exegete, Tyconius. The Liber Regularum (LR)l of Tyconius, a treatise on the inter­ pretation of Scripture, provided Burkitt with a mine of prophetic material for the study of pre-Vulgate Latin Scriptures. Indeed Burkitt claimed that it was "the only considerable body of evidence for the Latin text of the Prophets current in Africa between the epochs of Cyprian and Augustine...2 Burkitt recognized that the immediate problem in the study of Tyconius' Book ofRules was the state of the printed text which had been first published in the sixteenth century by Grynaeus of Basle.3 It is I believe mainly this corrupt state of the text which has pre­ vented the recognition of the very important place which Tyconius holds in the history of Biblical Interpretation in Western Europe.4 lLiber Regularum (LR) F. C. Burkitt, The Book Of Rules of Tyconius (Cambridge: University Press, 1 894, reprint 1967). 2Burkitt, Book ofRules. Preface. 3 Burkitt, Book ofRules, xxviii. 4Burkitt, Book ofRules. Preface. 2 PAMELA BRIGHT Burkitt published his critical edition of the Book ofRules in 1894 but as his attention remained focused on textual criticism rather than upon biblical interpretation, a critical study of the Book ofRules as a work of ex­ egetical theory was left to later scholarship. A century after Burkitt's edition was published this intriguing work still awaits adequate research. The present study is indicative of the growing awareness of the place of this African the­ ologian in the history of Christian exegesis. The basic premise of the re­ search is that Tyconius must first be studied directly from his own works rather than indirectly through the many commentators of the ancient and me­ dieval Church who have been influenced by his ideas. Tyconius was one of the most incisive thinkers of the African Church in the seventies and eighties of the fourth century. From his pen came the commentary on the Apocalypse that influenced exegetes for the next millennium. A second work. the Book ofRules, was the first treatise on biblical hermeneutics in the Latin West. Both works have had a checkered history. The Apocalypse commentary has been lost, and its remains lie scat­ tered, either as source or as influence, in the works of medieval exegetes, thus providing a major task of literary reconstruction for the modem scholar.5 The Book ofRules has remained intact. It has suffered a different fate. Tyconius' fame as a thinker and writer extended beyond the Donatist community, but his star was eclipsed by that of Augustine, whose return to Africa in 388 renewed the fortunes of the Catholic party. Augustine was in­ trigued by the thought of the Donatist author, and summarized the seven rules of Tyconius in the De Doctrina Christiana .6 The prestige of Augustine's 5K. Steinhauser, The Apocalypse Commentary of Tyconius: A History ofIts Reception and Influence (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1987). 6Augustinc, De Doctrina Christiana III, 30-37, PL 34:16-121. THE BOOK OF RULES OF TYCONIUS 3 summary effectively deflected attention from Tyconius' text, a decisive factor in the history of the Book ofRules. The aim of the present work is to return to the text of the Book of Rules, and to provide an introduction to a book that needs to be read in its entirety for a just appreciation of a work so stamped with the mind of its au­ thor - at once original, creative and rigorously systematic. It is an introduc­ tion in the sense of a "re-introduction" to an acknowledged classic among the works of biblical interpretation of the past, but which has only recently been translated into a modern language. It is also a "re-introduction" to a work that has suffered serious distortion in the series of paraphrased or summarized versions through which it has been known even when the most influential of these comes from Augustine himself.7 In a more technical sense, the study is intended as an introduction to the purpose and inner logic of the Book of Rules. It examines the author's criteria for the selection of biblical texts. It seeks to understand both the "logic" of...