Ticonius

Tyconius, the name is also spelled Ticonius, was a North African layman who wrote in the second half of the fourth century. He died about 390. He was a Donatist, and he was thrown out by the Donatists, and the Catholics never claimed him. He is one of the most influential biblical thinkers of the ancient West and he belonged to nobody.

The Donatist church was the majority church in much of North Africa, formed out of a fourth-century split over whether clergy who had handed over the Scriptures during the persecution could be received back. Its central conviction was that the true church is the pure church, and that the pure church was in Africa.

Tyconius accepted the Donatist position on the sacraments and never joined the Catholics. But he could not accept the ecclesiology. Reading the Bible, he concluded that the church is spread over the whole world by promise, that it is a mixed body of good and evil until the harvest, and that no communion has the right to identify itself as the pure remnant. He said so in writing. Parmenian, the Donatist primate, wrote against him and had him condemned at a Donatist council around 380.

He went on writing anyway, still a Donatist and still excommunicate.

His Book of Rules, written about 382, is the first handbook of biblical interpretation in Latin. It sets out seven rules for reading Scripture, on the Lord and his body, on the church's mixed nature, on promise and law, on species and genus, on the biblical use of times and numbers, on recapitulation, and on the devil and his body. Beneath the technical language the driving idea is that Scripture regularly says something about the head that is meant of the body, and something about the local that is meant of the whole, and that a reader who does not see the shift will misread the prophets and Revelation badly.

Augustine read it and was impressed enough to summarise the whole thing in the third book of On Christian Teaching, the standard textbook of biblical interpretation for the medieval West, while noting frankly that Tyconius was a Donatist and that the rules do not solve every difficulty. Through that summary Tyconius taught the Latin church to read.

His commentary on Revelation was lost, but its influence is everywhere. He read the thousand years not as a coming earthly reign but as the present age of the church, and the beast and the harlot as forces at work now. Augustine adopted that reading in The City of God, and it became the standard Western interpretation for over a thousand years. The commentary itself is being reconstructed by modern scholars out of quotations in Primasius, Bede, Beatus of Liébana, and others.

Sources: Tyconius, The Book of Rules (English translation by William S. Babcock, Society of Biblical Literature); Augustine, On Christian Teaching, book 3; Gennadius, De viris illustribus; Kenneth B. Steinhauser, The Apocalypse Commentary of Tyconius.