Bardesan: Humanist Before Humanism

Before Renaissance philosophers proclaimed the ideal of man as free, rational, and divine— the Christian world had already known such a voice.

Not from Florence or Padua, but from the banks of the Euphrates. Not at the high noon of humanism, but in the first light of Christian civilization.

Before universities, before scholasticism, before creeds had hardened or canon closed— there, in the second century, lived a man named Bardaisan.

Philosopher, poet, astrologer, theologian. A polymath...

In another age, Bardaisan might have been remembered as a sage or a universal historian. It was only the narrowing margins of orthodoxy that cast him instead as a heretic...