Tertullian

Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus was born in Carthage around 150 CE, when the city ranked among the largest and wealthiest in the western Roman Empire ^[1]. Carthage in the second century was a hub of Latin learning, second only to Rome itself for schools of rhetoric and law, and its African church would soon produce a run of remarkable writers. Jerome, writing almost two centuries later, reported that Tertullian's father served as a centurion in the proconsular administration, though modern scholars treat that detail with caution since no earlier source confirms it ^[2].

Whatever his family's exact standing, the young Tertullian received an expensive education. His surviving works display command of Greek as well as Latin, deep reading in philosophy, medicine, and history, and a training in rhetoric that shows on nearly every page ^[1]. Some older scholarship identified him with a jurist named Tertullianus whose opinions appear in Roman legal compilations, but most specialists now doubt the identification, even while agreeing that his prose is saturated with the vocabulary and argumentative habits of the courtroom ^[3].

He grew up a pagan and said so plainly in his own writings, admitting that he had once mocked the beliefs he later defended ^[2]. The date and circumstances of his conversion are not recorded, but it appears to have happened in adulthood, probably in the 190s. Several historians suggest that the courage of Christian martyrs facing execution in the arena impressed him, since he later wrote that the blood of Christians is seed, meaning that persecution only multiplied believers ^[4].

Tertullian began publishing Christian works around 196 or 197 CE, and his output over the next two and a half decades was extraordinary. Thirty one of his treatises survive, more than from any earlier Christian author, and the titles of several lost works are known ^[1]. Anyone asking who was Tertullian in his own day would have heard of a fierce public advocate: his first major work, the Apologeticum of 197, addressed Roman provincial governors directly and argued that the persecution of Christians violated Rome's own legal standards ^[3].

The Apologeticum shows the method that made him famous. Rather than pleading for sympathy, he cross examined the prosecution. Romans condemned Christians for the name alone, he argued, without proving any crime, and they applied procedures to Christians that they used for no other defendants ^[3]. The treatise circulated widely and was translated into Greek within a generation, an unusual honor for a Latin Christian text at a time when Greek still dominated church literature ^[2].

His position within the Carthaginian church is debated. Jerome called him a priest, but Tertullian describes himself in one passage as a layman, and many modern scholars conclude that he never held clerical office ^[2]. Married to a Christian wife, to whom he addressed a two book treatise on marriage and widowhood, he worked as an independent teacher and writer rather than as an official spokesman ^[4].

Tertullian's achievements begin with language itself. He was the first Christian writer of consequence to compose in Latin, and in doing so he had to invent much of the vocabulary that Western theology still uses ^[1]. Scholars credit him with hundreds of new Latin words and senses. The most consequential was trinitas, the term Trinity, which he introduced in his treatise Against Praxeas along with the formula of three persons in one substance, tres personae, una substantia ^[5]. The Council of Nicaea in 325 and later councils worked out the doctrine in Greek, but the Latin West received its basic terminology from this Carthaginian layman a century earlier.

Against Praxeas, written around 213, defended the distinction of Father, Son, and Spirit against teachers who treated them as mere modes of a single divine person ^[5]. In other works he fought on different fronts. The five books Against Marcion, his longest surviving work, defended the unity of the creator God and the authority of the Hebrew scriptures against Marcion of Sinope, who wanted Christianity cut loose from its Jewish roots ^[1]. The Prescription of Heretics used a legal maneuver, arguing that heretics had no standing to argue from scripture at all because the scriptures belonged to the churches that had received them from the apostles ^[3].

He also wrote the earliest surviving Christian discussions of several practical subjects. On Baptism is the first extended treatment of that rite in any language. On the Soul engages Greek medical and philosophical writers at length, and On the Military Crown examines whether a Christian could serve in the Roman army ^[4]. Among notable Tertullian facts, his rhetorical question about the relationship between Athens and Jerusalem, that is, between pagan philosophy and Christian faith, remains one of the most quoted lines in early Christian literature, even though his own works engage philosophy constantly ^[1].

Details of Tertullian's private life come almost entirely from his own pen, and he was more forthcoming than most ancient authors. He was married, and his treatise To His Wife urged her not to remarry if he died first, or at least to marry only a fellow Christian ^[4]. A later work, On Monogamy, hardened that advice into a prohibition of all second marriages, one sign of the increasing rigor that marked his final decades.

His temperament comes through vividly. He was impatient with compromise, savage toward opponents, and honest about his own failings. In his work On Patience he confessed that he was writing about a virtue he conspicuously lacked, comparing himself to a sick man praising health ^[2]. That self awareness sits alongside real severity: he opposed flight during persecution, condemned attendance at games and theatrical shows, and argued in On the Apparel of Women for strict modesty in dress ^[4].

He never lost his intellectual range. Even his most combative treatises cite Plato, the Stoics, and the physician Soranus of Ephesus, and his Latin style, dense, punning, and abrupt, has fascinated and frustrated translators ever since ^[1]. Scholars of any Tertullian biography must reckon with a writer who could be brutally funny, as when he ridiculed pagan mythology, and startlingly tender, as in his descriptions of Christian charity and shared worship between husband and wife ^[3].

Sometime after 206, Tertullian aligned himself with the New Prophecy, a movement that had begun in Phrygia in Asia Minor under the prophet Montanus and the prophetesses Priscilla and Maximilla ^[2]. Its followers, later called Montanists, claimed continuing revelation from the Holy Spirit and demanded a stricter discipline than most bishops enforced: longer fasts, no remarriage, and no forgiveness for grave sins committed after baptism. To Tertullian, whose instincts had always run toward rigor, the movement looked like the church's conscience.

His writings from roughly 207 onward increasingly attack the mainstream clergy, whom he mocked as the party of the psychici, the merely natural or unspiritual people, in contrast to the spiritual followers of the Paraclete ^[4]. Whether he formally left the Carthaginian church or led a stricter faction within it is disputed. Augustine, writing in the fifth century, mentioned a sect of Tertullianists at Carthage that survived into his own lifetime before rejoining the main church, which suggests some kind of separate community had formed around his memory ^[6].

The end of his life is undocumented. Jerome wrote that he lived to a great age, and his last datable works belong to the years around 220, which is why historians place his death at about that time, presumably in Carthage ^[2]. No account of his death, no burial site, and no contemporary portrait survives. For a man who wrote so much about martyrdom, he seems, as far as anyone knows, to have died in his bed.

Tertullian's association with the New Prophecy cost him canonization, and later church authorities handled him warily. A sixth century document attributed to Pope Gelasius listed his works among writings to be treated with caution ^[6]. Yet the Latin church could not do without him. Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage martyred in 258, reportedly asked for the works of Tertullian daily with the words hand me the master, according to a story preserved by Jerome ^[2].

His theological fingerprints are everywhere in Western Christianity. The Trinitarian formula of one substance and three persons, the language of sacrament for Christian rites, and a legal framing of sin, merit, and satisfaction that would shape medieval theology all trace back to his vocabulary ^[5]. Historians rank the creation of Christian Latin itself among the foremost Tertullian achievements, since Augustine, Jerome, and the entire Western theological tradition wrote in an idiom he did much to create ^[1].

Modern scholarship has revised the older picture of Tertullian as a crude fideist who despised reason. Studies by Timothy Barnes, Eric Osborn, and others present him instead as a sophisticated thinker who used philosophy even while denouncing it, and whose apparent contradictions often turn out to be deliberate rhetorical strategy ^[7]. His complete works fill volumes of the standard collections of early Christian texts, and the Apologeticum still appears on university reading lists as a primary witness to how Christians and the Roman state regarded each other around the year 200 ^[3]. Few writers barred from sainthood have shaped a religion so thoroughly.