Tertullian

• 1. Introduction

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  Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus, writing from Carthage around the turn of the third century, asked a question that still echoes through the history of Western thought: "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" That single line captures the man's entire combative genius. He was suspicious of Greek philosophy, deeply committed to scripture, and utterly unwilling to let Christianity drift into what he considered comfortable compromise. Yet the same man who distrusted reason left behind the very vocabulary that Christian theologians would use for centuries to reason about God. He coined the Latin term trinity. He gave Western theology its first systematic prose. He became, in the words of later historians, "the father of Latin Christianity" and "the founder of Western theology." How does a man so hostile to philosophy end up founding a philosophical tradition? That tension is the thread running through Tertullian's life and writings, and it begins in the city that shaped him: Carthage, in the Roman province of Africa.

• 2. The Man from Carthage

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  Roman Africa was celebrated throughout the empire as a nursery of orators, and that reputation left its mark on Tertullian's prose: archaic, provincial, vivid, and passionate in its temper. Jerome recorded that Tertullian's father served as a centurio proconsularis, an aide-de-camp, in the Roman army in Africa. Some sources describe Tertullian as Berber. The linguist Rene Braun suggested he was of Punic origin, though Braun also acknowledged the difficulty of deciding, since the heritage of Carthage had long since become common to the Berbers. Tertullian's own self-description in his book De Pallio was telling: he called himself "Poenicum inter Romanos" and claimed Africa as his patria. He was, in other words, a man of the Roman world who never entirely forgot that he came from somewhere older. He received an excellent scholarly education and wrote at least three books in Koine Greek, none of which survive. He is often assumed to have trained as a lawyer, given his habitual use of legal analogies, but his legal knowledge was not demonstrably greater than what a thorough Roman education would provide. The claim that he was an ordained priest is equally uncertain. In his own extant writings, Tertullian never describes himself as ordained and seems to place himself among the laity. His conversion to Christianity is believed by scholars including Adolf Harnack to have taken place around 197-198, a sudden and decisive break, in his own words a "radical act of conversion." He summarized it with a sentence that became one of early Christianity's most quoted lines: "Christians are made, not born."

• 3. The Writer's Arsenal

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  Thirty-one of Tertullian's works survive, along with fragments of others. At least fifteen more, in Latin or Greek, are now lost; three of them, De Paradiso, De superstitione saeculi, and De carne et anima, were still available in the Codex Agobardinus as recently as 814 AD, before that manuscript was damaged. Tertullian's writings ranged across virtually the entire theological field of his time: apologetics against paganism and Judaism, polemics against rival Christian sects, practical guidance on discipline and morality, and sweeping arguments about how human life should be reorganized on a Christian basis. His Apologeticus, addressed directly to Roman magistrates, stands as one of the most forceful defenses of Christianity from the ancient world. In it, he proclaimed freedom of religion as what he described as an inalienable human right and demanded that Christians receive a fair trial before condemnation to death. He was the first writer to systematically disprove charges that Christians sacrificed infants or committed incest at religious gatherings, and he pointed to the testimony of Pliny the Younger to show that Christians pledged themselves against murder and adultery. He introduced one of the most durable phrases in the early church's vocabulary: "the blood of the Christians is seed," drawn from the Apologeticum. His five books against Marcion, written in 207 or 208, are widely regarded as the most comprehensive and elaborate of his polemical works and remain invaluable for understanding early Christian views of Gnosticism. The earliest manuscript of any of his writings dates to the eighth century; most copies that survive date to the fifteenth.

• 4. Inventing the Trinity

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  In his treatise against the theologian Praxeas, who taught what was called patripassianism in Rome, Tertullian reached for terminology that no Christian Latin writer had used before. He deployed the words "trinity," "economy," "persons," and "substance" to describe the relationship among the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He maintained that the Son was distinct from the Father and the Spirit distinct from both. He was the first writer in Latin known to use the term trinitas. That contribution alone would have been enough to secure his place in history. His approach to God drew on the Logos doctrine and moved, according to B. B. Warfield, a considerable distance toward what would later become the doctrine of the immanent Trinity, though he did not fully arrive there. He also attributed corporeity to God in a Stoic sense, meaning actual material existence rather than flesh in the conventional understanding. At times, discussing the Father and the Son, he spoke of "two gods." He believed that all things belonging to the Father, including names like Almighty God, Most High, and King of Israel, also belonged to the Son. Later Catholic teaching would judge some of these positions as falling short; the New Catholic Encyclopedia observed that his teaching on the subordination of the Son to the Father anticipated, in its later and more extreme form, the very Arianism the church would declare heretical. He also invested a new theological identity in the consecrated virgin: scholar Jo Ann McNamara identified Tertullian as the person who originally gave the consecrated virgin the designation "bride of Christ."

• 5. Discipline, Morality, and the Flesh

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  Tertullian was among the most austere of the African church fathers, and the disciplinary writings make that austerity concrete. In De spectaculis he argued that a Christian should not attend the theatre or the amphitheatre, on the grounds that pagan religious rites were performed there, the names of pagan divinities invoked, and modesty and purity set aside. Women, he argued in De cultu feminarum, should put aside their gold and precious stones. Virgins should keep strictly veiled, in accordance with his reading of Paul. He labeled second marriage a species of adultery in his Exhortation to Chastity. He praised the unmarried state as the highest and challenged Christians not to let themselves be outpaced in celibacy by Vestal Virgins and Egyptian priests. He believed that marital desire and adulterous desire were essentially the same, and that even licit sexual relations would dull spiritual senses and avert the Holy Spirit. He was the first theologian to articulate a view of what he called sexual hierarchy in the church: those who abstain from sexual relations, he argued, should occupy a higher position than those who do not, because he saw sexual intimacy as a barrier to closeness with God. On baptism, he advised postponing the baptism of infants, noting that a child baptized early ran the risk of later falling into sin and losing salvation. He described baptism itself as a cleansing process that prepared one for the reception of the Holy Spirit in post-baptismal anointing, and De Baptismo contains the earliest known reference to a prayer for the consecration of baptismal waters. De cultu feminarum, section I.I, has drawn sustained criticism as misogynistic, though scholars such as Amy Place have argued that revisionist studies later offered more nuanced readings of those passages, without resolving the debate.

• 6. Montanism and Its Aftermath

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  Around 207, in what he called his middle life, Tertullian was drawn to the Montanist movement, a form of Christianity that emphasized prophetic gifts, strict asceticism, and the continuance of direct revelation. The Montanism that took root in North Africa appears to have differed meaningfully from that of Montanus himself; North African Montanists accepted Catholic bishops as successors of the apostles and treated the New Testament as the supreme authority. Most modern scholars now reject the long-held view that Tertullian left the mainstream church or was excommunicated. His standing remained high: he became the teacher of Cyprian and was regarded by Cyprian as a figure of authority. Augustine, writing much later, knew of a group called the Tertullianists, who still held a basilica in Carthage in his day; that basilica eventually passed to the orthodox church. Whether the Tertullianists were simply another name for North African Montanism, or whether Tertullian had eventually broken with the Montanists and founded a separate sect, remains debated. Tertullian's rigorist streak, his belief that those who committed grave sins such as sorcery, fornication, and murder should not be readmitted to the church, put him in direct conflict with church leadership. He mocked Pope Calixtus (or possibly Agrippinus, with scholars debating which) over the practice of forgiving capital sinners and welcoming them back. That friction prefigured a later schism: the Novatians, who refused forgiveness to those who had lapsed into idolatry, drew heavily on Tertullian's writings, and some Novatians even joined the Montanists. The views of Novatian on the Trinity and Christology bore the clear imprint of Tertullian's thought, carrying his arguments forward into later controversies.