Tertullian

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

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F TERTULLIAN'S LIFE-STORY THERE IS NOT MUCH to be said. He was born in Carthage, according to Jerome, and was the son of a centurion. He was evidently given a good education in grammar and rhetoric, and he was a trained lawyer. In middle life he was converted to Christianity, lived and wrote in Carthage, presumably as a presbyter of the church there (though this cannot be proved beyond question), gradually moved towards Montanism, eventually broke with the catholics of Carthage to join that body, and died in old age, not before A.D. 220. His Christian writings cover the period from A.D. 197 to the papacy of Callistus,

218-222.

After a brief exhortation to Christians facing martyrdom, Tertullian launched out as an apologist with the Ad Nationes, followed by the magnificent Apology, in which he is principally anxious to remove the political and social charges commonly brought against Christianity. These three works date from 197. The apologetic interest continues in The Testimony of the Soul, the witness of natural instinct to the existence of the one God, and in the later Ad Scapulam (212). Another main group consists of the attacks on Gnostics: the De Praescriptionibus Haereticorum, an early work which disposes of all heresy in principle, removing the necessity of arguing against each in particular; the large work against Marcion; books against Hermogenes and the Valentinians; the treatises On the Flesh of Christ and On the Resurrection of the Flesh, the Scorpiace (Serpent's Bite) and the De Anima, though the last is also a positive presentation of Tertullian's doctrine of the soul. His most influential work of controversial theology was not directed against a

Gnostic; this is the book against the modalist Praxeas, a major source of western Trinitarian doctrine. Most of his other extant writings are moral and disciplinary. From his early period, that is, up to about 206 and before there are any traces of Montanism, come On the (Lord's) Prayer, On Baptism, On Patience, On Penance, On Women's Dress, To his Wife, On the Virgin's Veil. Of these the De Baptismo is important liturgically, as is the De Oratione to a less extent, while the De Paenitentia is of great, though occasionally baffling, significance for the history of the penitential discipline. Some years later came The Soldier's Crown (211), a repudiation of military service for Christians, and De Idololatria (“The Church and the World"). The Exhortation to Chastity also dates from this period. Fully Montanist are On Flight in Persecution (213), On Monogamy, On Fasting, On Chastity (De Pudicitia). Adversus Praxeam was also written in the Montanist phase, though it is not determined by Montanism. Tertullian wrote in Greek as well as Latin. De Spectaculis was certainly issued also in Greek, and he wrote in Greek on Baptism, not the extant work. Thirty-one works are extant, the two not mentioned above being De Pallio, a jeu d'esprit on the philosopher's cloak, and the unfinished Against the Jews. Tertullian was probably also the editor (some say the author) of the beautiful Passion of St. Perpetua. Not all his works have survived. Lost treatises include one against Hermogenes on the Origin of the Soul, one against the sect of Apelles, and books on Fate, Paradise, the Christian's Hope, and Ecstasy. The last might have told us much about Montanism.

II

Tertullian's style is the despair of the translator. He is passionate, vivacious, full of puns and plays on words, decorating his material with all manner of rhetorical devices. Again and again his ingenuity over-reaches itself, and he becomes tortuous and obscure, especially when he compresses the material of a sentence into two or three pregnant words. He must sometimes have had his tongue in his cheek, but there are other times when he cannot have known how wearisome his quibbling could become. At his best, however, he is forceful and brilliant. He used words as he thought he would, made them say what he wanted, and invented them if they did not already exist. If his substance is less original than his form (so far as that distinction is valid), the reader can never doubt that

he is in contact with a powerful and original mind. It is conventional to call him the "Father of Latin Theology." The title is deserved, but needs to be understood. Take, for example, the De Praescriptionibus. This undoubtedly exercised a great influence on the doctrine of the Church in the West-notably on and through Cyprian-but the fundamental notions came from Irenaeus, who, even if he wrote in the Greek tongue, was a western bishop and was presumably read in the West. Tertullian's debt to him for his material against the Gnostics is equally obvious, and he does not conceal it. He had read the Greek Apologists also, and was well acquainted with their Logos doctrine. Nevertheless Tertullian's own contribution to the doctrine of the Trinity in Adversus Praxeam is real and important. He certainly prepared the way for the serious, pessimistic, doctrine of the Fall which came to characterize the West; and in this respect he broke away from his Greek masters. If his rigorism in morals and discipline was not accepted, the books were there-and even the Montanist ones were copied and read-to be used by any who wanted support for a stern view of the Christian life. His legalistic concepts of sin as debt and of reward and punishment were unfortunate legacies, only too real.

When he is described as the father of Latin theology, attention is drawn also to his contribution to the making of a Latin theological terminology, and it is unquestionably true that much of the language of later days can be traced back to him. But even here a caveat must be entered. "To him we owe a great part of the Christian Latin vocabulary," said Souter. True, but just how much depends on the date of the earliest Latin versions of the Bible, and perhaps of a few other Latin translations of Greek works such as the Letter of Clement to Corinth and the Shepherd of Hermas. As long as it was believed that these were all later than Tertullian, or even that he himself made the first Latin translations of Scripture, it could be said that he created, in large part, Latin theological terminology. Today it is more commonly held that he had at least a LatinBible to help him.

Qualifications made, he stands out as one of the most influential men of the early Church. "Hand me the Master," Cyprian used to say to his secretary. Novatian's work on the Trinity rests on Tertullian's, the Commonitorium of Vincent of Lerins and its criterion of catholicity owe much to the De Praescriptionibus, Leo's Tome draws on Tertullian for its

Christological conceptions and terms. There will be many who prefer the subtler and, at the same time, more humane, more generous, more reasonable, Alexandrians. Tertullian did not like philosophy, though he could not quite get rid of his own Stoic notion of matter. Apart from that, he genuinely tried to understand Christianity as divinum negotium, as Revelation, as something that God has done. With all his exaggerations and perversions of detail, he was yet a major force in keeping the West steady and sensible, historical and biblical, against the much more fundamental perversions of theosophical and-shall we say, premature?-philosophical speculation.

The Prescriptions against the Heretics

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INTRODUCTION

I

HE TWENTIETH CENTURY HAS SEEN A PREDOMIN

ant concern with the problem of Revelation, and, in close connexion, with the nature and authority of the Church which is constituted by the Revelation in Christ. Something similar was taking place in the second century. The Gnostics, while claiming to be Christians, looked partly to reason and partly to mysticism and special revelations for their teachings. They used some of the books which now form the New Testament, but they treated them in a very highhanded fashion, as regards both text and interpretation; and they used other books which the Church has subsequently repudiated. Yet there were genuine Christian elements in or behind their teaching, and to many they must have seemed the most up-to-date religious teachers of the time, interpreting the Christian revelation in the light of the best contemporary thought. To the ordinary bishop or presbyter, responsible for the instruction of simple people, they would be at best a nuisance and at worst a serious danger-if they were not actually an attraction to him-unless he could find something firm and clear to hold on to and to teach.

The theologians of the second and early third century, Justin to some extent, Irenaeus in particular, Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian, were prepared to argue against Gnostic notions or teachers seriatim, and did so. But some of them recognized that the over-riding question raised by Gnosticism was, What is authentic Christianity? It was necessary to determine the authoritative sources of the faith (that is primarily, to delimit the sacred books, to form a Canon), and it was expedient, if it could be done, to show where authentic Christianity