Chapter X: Tertullian (1)

In his most famous chapter Gibbon speaks at one point of the affirmation of the early church that those who persisted in the worship of the daemons "neither deserved nor could expect a pardon from the irritated justice of the Deity." Oppressed in this world by the power of the Pagans, Christians "were sometimes seduced by resentment and spiritual pride to delight in the prospect of their future triumph. 'You are fond of spectacles,' exclaims the stern Tertullian, 'expect the greatest of all spectacles, the last and eternal judgment of the universe. How shall I admire, how laugh, how rejoice, how exult, when I behold so many proud monarchs, and fancied gods, groaning in the lowest abyss of darkness; so many magistrates, who persecuted the name of the Lord, liquefying in fiercer fires than they ever kindled against the Christians; so many sage philosophers blushing in red-hot flames with their deluded scholars; so many celebrated poets trembling before the tribunal, not of Minos, but of Christ; so many tragedians more tuneful in the expression of their own sufferings; so many dancers----' But the humanity of the reader will permit me to draw a veil over the rest of this infernal description, which the zealous African pursues in a long variety of affected and unfeeling witticisms."[1]

The passage is a magnificent example of Gibbon's style and method,--more useful, however, as an index to the mind of Gibbon than to that of Tertullian. He has abridged his translation, and in one or two clauses he has missed Tertullian's points; finally he has drawn his veil over the rest of the infernal description exactly when he knew there was little or nothing more to be quoted that would serve his purpose. He has made no attempt to understand the man he quotes, nor the {306} mood in which he spoke, nor the circumstances which gave rise to that mood. Yet on the evidence of this passage and a sonnet of Matthew Arnold's, English readers pass a swift judgment on "the stern Tertullian" and his "unpitying Phrygian sect." But to the historian of human thought, and to the student of human character, there are few figures of more significance in Latin literature. Of the men who moulded Western Christendom few have stamped themselves and their ideas upon it with anything approaching the clearness and the effect of Tertullian. He first turned the currents of Christian thought in the West into channels in which they have never yet ceased to flow and will probably long continue to flow. He was the first Latin churchman, and his genius helped to shape Latin Christianity. He, too, was the first great Puritan of the West, precursor alike of Augustine and of the Reformation. The Catholic Church left him unread throughout the Middle Ages, but at the Renaissance he began once more to be studied, and simultaneously there also began the great movement for the purification of the church and the deepening of Christian life, which were the causes to which he had given himself and his genius.

Such a man may be open to criticism on many sides. He may be permanently or fitfully wrong in thought or speech or conduct; but it is clear that an influence so great rests upon something more profound than irritability however brilliant in expression. There must be somewhere in the man something that corresponds with the enduring thoughts of mankind--something that engages the mind or that wins the friendship of men--something that is true and valid. And this, whatever it is, is the outcome of many confluent elements--of temperament, environment and experience, perhaps, in chief. The man must be seen as his personal friends saw him and as his enemies saw him; what is more, they--both sets of them--must be seen as he saw them. The critic must himself, by dint of study and imagination, be played upon by as many of the factors of the man's experience as he can re-capture. Impressions, pleasures, doubts, hopes, convictions, friendships, inspirations--everything that goes to shape a man is relevant to that study of character without which, in the case of {307} formative men, history itself becomes pedantry and illusion. Particularly in the case of such a man as Tertullian is it needful to repeat this caution. The impetuous dogmatism in which his mind and, quite as often, his mood express themselves, and his hard words, harder a great deal than his heart, no less than his impulsive convictions, "seem," as Gibbon put it, "to offend the reason and the humanity of the present age." On the other side, the church, which the historian in a footnote saddles with the responsibility of sharing Tertullian's most harsh beliefs, is at one with "the present age" in repudiating him on grounds of her own. Yet, questioned or condemned, Tertullian played his part, and that no little one, in the conflict of religions; he stood for truth as he saw it, and wrote and spoke with little thought of the praise or blame of his contemporaries or of posterity--all _that_ he had abandoned once for all, when he made the great choice of his life. Questioned or condemned, he is representative, and he is individual, the first man of genius of the Latin race to follow Jesus Christ, and to re-set his ideas in the language native to that race.

[Sidenote: Carthage]

Tertullian was born about the middle of the second century A.D. at Carthage, or in its neighbourhood. The city at all events is the scene of his life--a great city with a great history. "Tyre in Africa" is one of his phrases for Carthage and her "sister-cities," and he quotes Virgil's description of Dido's town _studiis asperrima belli_.[2] But his Carthage was not that of Dido and Hannibal. It was the re-founded city of Julius Caesar, now itself two hundred years old--a place with a character of its own familiar to the reader of Apuleius and of Augustine's _Confessions_,--a character confirmed by the references of Tertullian to its amusements and its daily sights. "What sea-captain is there that does not carry his mirth even to the point of shame? Every day we see the frolics in which sailors take their pleasure."[3] Scholars have played with the fancy that they could trace in Tertullian's work the influence of some Semitic strain, as others with equal reason have found {308} traces of the Celt in Virgil and Livy. Tertullian himself has perhaps even fewer references to Punic speech and people than Apuleius, while, like Apuleius, he wrote in both Greek and Latin,[4] and it is possible that, like Apuleius, and Perpetua the martyr, he spoke both.

Jerome tells us that Tertullian was the son of a centurion.[5] He tells us himself, incidentally and by implication, that he was the child of heathen parents. "Idolatry," he says, "is the midwife that brings all men into the world;" and he gives a very curious picture of the pagan ceremonies that went with child-birth, the fillet on the mother's womb, the cries to Lucina, the table spread for Juno, the horoscope, and finally the dedication of a hair of the child, or of all his hair together, as the rites of clan or family may require.[6] Thus from the very first the boy is dedicated to a genius, and to the evil he inherits through the transmission of his bodily nature is added the influence of a false daemon--"though there still is good innate in the soul, the archetypal good, divine and germane, essentially natural; for what comes from God is not so much extinguished as overshadowed."[7] The children of Christian parents have so far, he indicates, a better beginning; they are holy in virtue of their stock and of their upbringing.[8] With himself it had not been so. It is curious to find the great controversialist of later days recalling nursery tales, how "amid the difficulties of sleep one heard from one's nurse about the witch's towers and the combs of the sun"--recalling too the children's witticisms about the apples that grow in the sea and the fishes that grow on the tree.[9] They come back into his mind as he thinks of the speculations of Valentinus and his followers.

[Sidenote: His training]

His education was that of his day,--lavish rhetoric, and knowledge of that very wide character which in all his contemporaries is perhaps too suggestive of manual and {309} cyclopaedia[10]--works never so abundant in antiquity as then. But he was well taught, as a brilliant boy deserved, and his range of interests is remarkable. Nor is he overwhelmed by miscellaneous erudition, like Aulus Gellius for instance, or like Clement of Alexandria, to come to a man more on his own level. He is master of the great literature of Rome; he has read the historians and Cicero; he can quote Virgil with telling effect. _Usque adeone mori miserum est?_ he asks of the Christian who hesitates to be martyred;[11] "a hint from the world" he says. Sooner or later, he read Varro's books, the armoury of every Latin Christian against polytheism.

He "looked into medicine," he tells us, and a good many passages in his treatises remind us of the fact.[12] It may help to explain an explicitness in the use of terms more usual in the physician perhaps than in the layman.

But his career lay not in medicine but in law, and he caught the spirit of his profession. It has been debated whether the Tertullian, whose treatise _de castrensi peculio_ is quoted in the Digest, is the apologist or another, but no legal treatises are needed to convince the reader how thoroughly a lawyer was the author of the theological works. He has every art and every artifice of his trade. He can reason quietly and soundly, he can declaim, he can do both together. He is a master of logic, delighting in huge chains of alternatives. He can quibble and wrest the obvious meaning of a document to perfection, browbeat an opponent, argue _ad hominem_,[13] evade a clear issue, and anticipate and escape an obvious objection, as well as any lawyer that ever practised. Again and again he impresses us as a special pleader, and we feel that he is forcing us away from the evidence of our own sense and intelligence to a conclusion which he prefers on other grounds. His {310} epigrams rival Tacitus, and there is even in his rhetoric a conviction and a passion which Cicero never reaches. The suddenness of his questions, and the amazing readiness of his jests, savage, subtle, ironic, good-natured, brilliant or commonplace,[14] impress the reader again and again, however well he knows him. Yet Tertullian never loses sight of his object, whatever the flights of rhetoric or humour on which he ventures. In one case, he plainly says that his end will best be achieved by ridicule. "Put it down, reader, as a sham fight before the battle. I will show how to deal wounds, but I will not deal them. If there shall be laughter, the matter itself shall be the apology. There are many things that deserve so to be refuted; gravity would be too high a compliment. Vanity and mirth may go together. Yes, and it becomes Truth to laugh, because she is glad, to play with her rivals, because she is free from fear."[15] Then, with a caution as to becoming laughter, he launches into his most amusing book--that against the Valentinians.

[Sidenote: His style]

Tertullian rivals Apuleius in brilliant mastery of the elaborate and artificial rhetoric of the day. He has the same tricks of rhyming clauses and balancing phrases. Thus: _attente custoditur quod tarde invenitur_;[16] or more fully: _spiritus enim dominatur, caro famulatur; tamen utrumque inter se communicant reatum, spiritus ob imperium, caro ob ministerium_.[17] Here the vanities of his pagan training subserve true thought. Elsewhere they are more playful, as when he suggests to those, who like the pagans took off their cloaks to pray, that God heard the three saints in the fiery furnace of the Babylonian king though they prayed _cum sarabaris et tiaris suis_--in turbans and trousers.[18] But when he gives us such a string of phrases as _aut Platonis honor, aut Zenonis vigor, aut Aristotelis tenor, aut Epicuri stupor, aut Heracliti moeror, aut Empedoclis furor,_[19] one feels that he is for the moment little better than one of the wicked. At the beginning of his tract on Baptism, after speaking {311} of water he pulls himself up abruptly--he is afraid, he says, that the reader may fancy he is composing _laudes aquae_ (in the manner of rhetorical adoxography) rather than discussing the principles of baptism.[20] His tract _de Pallio_ is frankly a humorous excursion into old methods, in which the elderly Montanist, who has left off wearing the _toga_, justifies himself for his highly conservative and entirely suitable conduct in adopting the _pallium_. The "stern" Tertullian appears here in the character that his pagan friends had long ago known, and that his Christian readers might feel somewhere or other in everything that he writes. There is a good-tempered playfulness about the piece, a fund of splendid nonsense, which suggest the fellow-citizen of Apuleius rather than the presbyter.[21] But earnestness, which is not incompatible with humour, is his strong characteristic, and when it arms itself with an irony so powerful as that of Tertullian, the result is amazing. Sometimes he exceeds all bounds, as when in his _Ad Nationes_ he turns that irony upon the horrible charges, which the pagans, knowing them to be false, bring against the Christians, while he, pretending for the moment that they are true, invites his antagonists to think them out to their consequences and to act upon them.[22] Or again take the speech of Christ on the judgment day, in which the Lord is pictured as saying that he had indeed entrusted the Gospel once for all to the Apostles, but had thought better of it and made some changes--as of course, Tertullian suggests, he really would have to say, if it could be supposed that the latest heretics were right after all.[23]

But, whatever be said or thought of the rhetoric, playful or earnest, it has another character than it wears in his contemporaries. For here was a far more powerful brain, strong, clear and well-trained, and a heart whose tenderness and sensibility have never had justice. In some ways he very much suggests Thomas Carlyle--he has the same passion, the same vivid imagination and keen sensibility, the same earnestness and the same loyalty to truth as he sees it regardless of {312} consequence and compromise,--and alas! the same "natural faculty for being in a hurry," which Carlyle deplored, and Tertullian before him--"I, poor wretch, always sick with the fever of impatience"[24]--the same fatal gift for pungent phrase, and the same burning and indignant sympathy for the victim of wrong and cruelty.[25] The beautiful feeling, which he shows in handling the parables of the lost sheep and the prodigal son, in setting forth from them the loving fatherhood of God,[26] might surprise some of his critics. Nor has every great Christian of later and more humane days been capable of writing as he wrote of victory in battle against foreigners--"Is the laurel of triumph made of leaves--or the dead bodies of men? With ribbons is it adorned--or with graves? Is it bedewed with unguents, or the tears of wives and mothers?--perhaps too of some who are Christians, for even among the barbarians is Christ."[27] There are again among his books some which have an appeal and a tender charm throughout that haunt the reader--that is, if he has himself passed through any such experience as will enable him to enter into what was in Tertullian's mind and heart as he wrote. So truly and intimately does he know and with such sympathy does he express some of the deepest religious emotions.[28]

[Sidenote: His early life]

From time to time Tertullian drops a stray allusion to his earlier years. He was a pagan--_de vestris sumus_--"one of yourselves" (_Apol._ 18); "the kind of man I was myself once, blind and without the light of the Lord."[29] A Roman city, and Carthage perhaps in particular, offered to a gifted youth of Roman ways of thinking endless opportunities of self-indulgence. Tertullian speaks of what he had seen in the arena--the condemned criminal, dressed as some hero or god of the mythology, mutilated or burned alive, for the amusement of a shouting {313} audience,[30] "exulting in human blood."[31] "We have laughed, amid the mocking cruelties of noonday, at Mercury as he examined the bodies of the dead with his burning iron; we have seen Jove's brother too, with his mallet, hauling out the corpses of gladiators."[32] In later days when he speaks of such things, he shudders and leaves the subject rather than remember what he has seen--_malo non implere quam meminisse_.[33] He knew the theatre of the Roman city--"the consistory of all uncleanness" he calls it. "Why should it be lawful (for a Christian)," he asked, "to see what it is sin to do? Why should the things, which 'coming out of the mouth defile a man,' seem not to defile a man when he takes them in through eyes and ears?"[34] He speaks of Tragedies and Comedies, teaching guilt and lust, bloody and wanton; and the reader of the _Golden Ass_ can recall from fiction cases wonderfully illuminative of what could have been seen in fact. When he apostrophizes the sinner, he speaks of himself. "You," he cries, "you, the sinner, like me--no! less sinner than I, for I recognize my own pre-eminence in guilt."[35] He is, he says, "a sinner of every brand, born for nothing but repentance."[36] To say, with Professor Hort, on the evidence of such passages that Tertullian was "apparently a man of vicious life" might involve a similar condemnation of Bunyan and St Paul; while to find the charge "painfully" confirmed by "the foulness which ever afterwards infested his mind" is to exaggerate absurdly in the first place, and in the second to forget such parallels as Swift and Carlyle, who both carried explicit speech to a point beyond ordinary men, while neither is open to such a suggestion as that brought against Tertullian. With such cases as Apuleius, Hadrian or even Julius Caesar before us, it is impossible to maintain that Tertullian's early life must have been spotless, but it is possible to fancy more wrong than there was. The excesses of a man of genius are generally touched by the {314} imagination, and therein lies at once their peculiar danger, and also something redemptive that promises another future.

Tertullian at any rate married--when, we cannot say; but, as a Christian and a Montanist, he addressed a book to his wife, and in his _De Anima_ he twice alludes to the ways of small infants in a manner which suggests personal knowledge. In the one he speaks with curious observation of the sense-perception of very young babies; in the other he appeals to their movements in sleep, their tremors and smiles, as evidence that they also have dreams. Such passages if met in Augustine's pages would not so much surprise us. They suggest that the depth and tenderness of Tertullian's nature have not been fully understood.[37]

[Sidenote: The evidence of nature]

Meanwhile, whatever his amusements, the young lawyer had his serious interests. If he was already acquiring the arts of a successful pleader, the more real aspects of Law were making their impression upon him. The great and ordered conceptions of principle and harmony, which fill the minds of reflective students of law in all ages, were then reinforced by the Stoic teaching of the unity of Nature in the indwelling of the Spermaticos Logos with its universal scope and power. Law and Stoicism, in this union, formed the mind and character of Tertullian. In later days, under the stress of controversy (which he always enjoyed) he could find points in which to criticize his Stoic teachers; but the contrast between the language he uses of Plato and his friendliness (for instance) for _Seneca saepe noster_[38] is suggestive. But that is not all. A Roman lawyer could hardly speculate except in the terms of Stoicism--it was his natural and predestined language. Above all, the constant citation of Nature by Tertullian shows who had taught him in the first instance to think.

When, years after, in 212 A.D., he told Scapula that "it is a fundamental human right, a privilege of Nature, that any and every man should worship what he thinks right," he had sub-consciously gone back to the great Stoic _Jus Naturae_.[39] {315} Nature is the original authority--side by side, he would say in his later years, with the inspired word of God,--yet even so "it was not the pen of Moses that initiated the knowledge of the Creator.... The vast majority of mankind, though they have never heard the name of Moses--to say nothing of his book--know the God of Moses none the less."[40] One of his favourite arguments rests on what he calls the _testimonium animae naturaliter Christianae_--the testimony of the soul which in its ultimate and true nature is essentially Christian; and this argument rests on his general conception of Nature. Let a man "reflect on the majesty of Nature, for it is from Nature that the authority of the soul comes. What you give to the teacher, you must allow to the pupil. Nature is the teacher, the soul the pupil. And whatever the one has taught or the other learnt, comes from God, who is the teacher of the teacher (_i.e._ Nature)";[41] and neither God nor Nature can lie.[42] An extension of this is to be found in his remark, in a much more homely connexion, that if the "common consciousness" (_conscientia communis_) be consulted, we shall find "Nature itself" teaching us that mind and soul are livelier and more intelligent when the stomach is not heavily loaded.[43] The appeal to the _consensus_ of men, as the expression of the universal and the natural, and therefore as evidence to truth, is essentially Stoic.

Over and over he lays stress upon natural law. "All things are fixed in the truth of God,"[44] he says, and "our God is the God of Nature."[45] He identifies the natural and the rational--"all the properties of God must be rational just as they are natural," that is a clear principle (_regula_);[46] "the rational element must be counted natural because it is native to the soul from the beginning--coming as it does from a rational author (_auctore_)."[47] He objects to Marcion that everything is so "sudden"--so spasmodic--in his scheme of things.[48] For himself, he holds with Paul ("doth not Nature teach you?") that "law is natural and Nature legal," that {316} God's law is published in the universe, and written on the natural tables of the heart.[49]

This clear and strong conception of Nature gives him a sure ground for dealing with antagonists. There were those who denied the reality of Christ's body, and declaimed upon the ugly and polluting features in child-birth--could the incarnation of God have been subjected to this?[50] But Nature needs no blush--_Natura veneranda est non erubescenda_; there is nothing shameful in birth or procreation, unless there is lust.[51] On the contrary, the travailing woman should be honoured for her peril, and counted holy as Nature suggests.[52] Here once more we have an instance of Tertullian's sympathy and tenderness for woman, whom he perhaps never includes in his most sweeping attacks and condemnations. Similarly, he is not carried away by the extreme asceticism of the religions of his day into contempt for the flesh. It is the setting in which God has placed "the shadow of his own soul, the breath of his own spirit"--can it really be so vile? Yet is the soul _set_, or not rather blended and mingled with the flesh, "so that it may be questioned whether the flesh carries the soul or the soul the flesh, whether the flesh serves the soul, or the soul serves the flesh.... What use of Nature, what enjoyment of the universe, what savour of the elements, does the soul not enjoy by the agency of the flesh?" Think, he says, of the services rendered to the soul by the senses, by speech, by all the arts, interests and ingenuities dependent on the flesh; think of what the flesh does by living and dying.[53] The Jove of Phidias is not the world's great deity, because the ivory is so much, but because Phidias is so great; and did God give less of hand and thought, of providence and love, to the matter of which he made man? Whatever shape the clay took, Christ was in his mind as the future man.[54]

Some of these passages come from works of Tertullian's later years, when he was evidently leaning more than of old to ascetic theory. They are therefore the more significant. {317} If he wrote as a pagan at all, what he wrote is lost; but it is not pushing conjecture too far to suggest that his interest in Stoicism precedes his Christian period, when such an interest is so clearly more akin to the bent of the Roman lawyer than the Christian of the second century.

[Sidenote: The goodness of the Creator]

The rationality and the order of the Universe are commonplaces of Stoic teachers, and, in measure, its beauty. Of this last Tertullian shows in a remarkable passage how sensible he was. Marcion condemns the God who created this world. But, says Tertullian, "one flower of the hedge-row by itself, I think--I do not say a flower of the meadows; one shell of any sea you like,--I do not say the Red Sea; one feather of a moor-fowl--to say nothing of a peacock,--will they speak to you of a mean Creator?" "Copy if you can the buildings of the bee, the barns of the ant, the webs of the spider." What of sky, earth and sea? "If I offer you a rose, you will not scorn its Creator!"[55] It is surely possible to feel more than the controversialist here. "It was Goodness that spoke the word; Goodness that formed man from the clay into this consistency of flesh, furnished out of one material with so many qualities; Goodness that breathed into him a soul, not dead, but alive; Goodness that set him over all things, to enjoy them, to rule them, even to give them their names; Goodness, too, that went further and added delight to man ... and provided a helpmeet for him."[56]

Of his conceptions of law something will be said at a later point. It should be clear however that a man with such interests in a profession, in speculation, in the beauty and the law of Nature, could hardly at any time be a careless hedonist, even if, like most men converted in mid-life, he knows regret and repentance.

On the side of religion, little perhaps can be said. He had laughed at the gods burlesqued in the arena. To Mithras perhaps he gave more attention. In discussing the soldier's crown he is able to quote an analogy from the rites of Mithras, in which a crown was rejected, and in which one grade of {318} initiates were known as "soldiers."[57] Elsewhere he speaks of the oblation of bread and the symbol of resurrection in those rites, "and, if I still remember, Mithras there seals his soldiers on the brow."[58] _Si memini_ is a colloquialism, which should not be pressed, but the _adhuc_ inserted may make it a more real and personal record.

To Christian ideas he gave little attention. There were Christians round about him, no doubt in numbers, but they did not greatly interest him. He seems, however, to have looked somewhat carelessly into their teaching, but he laughed at resurrection, at judgment and retribution in an eternal life.[59] He was far from studying the Scriptures--"nobody," he said later on, "comes to them unless he is already a Christian."[60] Justin devoted about a half of his _Apology_ to prove the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy in the life of Jesus--an _Apology_ addressed to a pagan Emperor. Tertullian, in his _Apology_, gives four chapters to the subject, and one of these seems to be an alternative draft. The difference is explained by Justin's narrative of his conversion, in which he tells us how it was by the path of the Scriptures and Judaism that he, like Tatian and Theophilus, came to the church. Tertullian's story is different, and, not expecting pagans to pay attention to a work in such deplorable style[61] as the Latin Bible, which he had himself ignored, he used other arguments, the weight of which he knew from experience. In his _de Pallio_, addressed to a pagan audience, as we have seen, he alludes to Adam and the fig-leaves, but he does not mention Adam's name and rapidly passes on--"But this is esoteric--nor is it everybody's to know it."[62]

[Sidenote: The martyrs]

Tertullian is never autobiographical except by accident, yet it is possible to gather from his allusions how he became a Christian. In his address to Scapula[63] he says that the first governor to draw the sword on the Christians of Africa was Vigellius Saturninus. Dr Armitage Robinson's discovery of the original Latin text of the _Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs_, who {319} suffered under Saturninus, has enabled us to put a date to the event, for we read that it took place in the Consulship of Praesens (his second term) and of Claudianus--that is in 180 A.D., the year of the death of Marcus Aurelius. These _Acts_ are of the briefest and most perfunctory character. One after another, a batch of quite obscure Christians in the fewest possible words confess their faith, are condemned, say _Deo Gratias_, and then--"so all of them were crowned together in martyrdom and reign with the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit for ever and ever. Amen." That is all. They were men and women, some of them perhaps of Punic extraction--Nartzalus and Cittinus have not a Roman sound. After this, it would seem that in Africa, as elsewhere, persecution recurred intermittently; it might be the governor who began it, or the chance cry of an unknown person in a mob, and then the people, wild and sudden as the Gadarene swine and for the same reason (Christians said),[64] would fling themselves into unspeakable orgies of bloodshed and destruction. What was more, no one could foretell the hour--it might be years before it happened again; it might be now. And the Christians were surprisingly ready, whenever it came.

Sometimes they argued a little, sometimes they said hardly anything. _Christiana sum_, was all that one of the Scillitan women said. But one thing struck everybody--their firmness, _obstinatio_.[65] Some, like the philosophic Emperor, might call it perversity; he, as we have seen, found it thin and theatrical, and contrasted it with "the readiness" that "proceeded from inward conviction, of a temper rational and grave"[66]--an interesting judgment from the most self-conscious and virtuous of men. On other men it made a very different impression--on men, that is, more open than the Caesar of the passionless face[67] to impression, men of a more sensitive and imaginative make, quicker in penetrating the feeling of others.

Tertullian, in two short passages, written at different dates, shows how the martyrs--perhaps these very Scillitan {320} martyrs--moved him. "That very obstinacy with which you taunt us, is your teacher. For who is not stirred up by the contemplation of it to find out what there is in the thing within? who, when he has found out, does not draw near? and then, when he has drawn near, desire to suffer, that he may gain the whole grace of God, that he may receive all forgiveness from him in exchange for his blood?"[68] So he wrote in 197-8 A.D., and fourteen years later his last words to Scapula were in the same tenor--"None the less this school (_secta_) will never fail--no! you must learn that then it is built up the more, when it seems to be cut down. Every man, who witnesses this great endurance, is struck with some misgiving and is set on fire to look into it, to find what is its cause; and when he has learnt the truth, he instantly follows it himself as well."[69] It would be hard to put into a sentence so much history and so much character. _Et ipse statim sequitur_.

The martyrs made him uneasy (_scrupulo_). There must be more behind than he had fancied from the little he had seen and heard of their teaching. "No one would have wished to be killed unless in possession of the truth," he says.[70] In spite of his laughter at resurrection and judgment, he was not sure about them. When he speaks in later life of the _naturalis timor animae in deum_[71]--that instinctive fear of God which Nature has set in the soul--he is probably not himself without consciousness of sharing here too the common experience of men; and this is amply confirmed by the frequency and earnestness with which he speaks of things to come after death. Here however were men who had not this fear. Their obstinacy was his teacher. He looked for the reason, he learned the truth and he followed it at once. That energy is his character--to be read in all he does. Like Carlyle's his writings have "the signature of the writer in every word." {321} "It is the idlest thing in the world," he says, "for a man to say, 'I wished it and yet I did not do it.' You ought to carry it through (_perficere_) because you wish it, or else not to wish it at all because you do not carry it through."[72] And again: "Why debate? God commands."[73] Tertullian obeyed, and ever after he felt that men had only to look into the matter, to learn and to obey. "All who like you were ignorant in time past, and like you hated,--as soon as it falls to their lot to know, they cease to hate who cease to be ignorant."[74]

[Sidenote: Idolatry]

Tertullian's tract _On Idolatry_ illustrates his mind upon this decisive change. There he deals with Christians who earn their living by making idols--statuaries, painters, gilders, and the like; and when the plea is suggested that they _must_ live and have no other way of living, he indignantly retorts that they should have thought this out before. _Vivere ergo habes?_[75] _Must_ you live? he asks. Elsewhere he says "there are no musts where faith is concerned."[76] The man who claims to be _condidonalis_,[77] to serve God on terms, Tertullian cannot tolerate. "Christ our Master called himself Truth--not Convention."[78] Every form of idolatry must be renounced, and idolatry took many forms. The schoolmaster and the _professor litterarum_ were almost bound to be disloyal to Christ; all their holidays were heathen festivals, and their very fees in part due to Minerva; while their business was to instruct the youth in the literature and the scandals of Olympus. But might not one study pagan literature? and, if so, why not teach it? Because, in teaching it, a man is bound, by his position, to drive heathenism deep into the minds of the young; in personal study he deals with no one but himself, and can judge and omit as he sees fit.[79] The dilemma of choosing between literature and Christ was a painful thing for men of letters for centuries after this.[80] So Tertullian lays down the law for others; what for himself?

{322}

Under the Empire there were two ways to eminence, the bar and the camp, and Tertullian had chosen the former. His rhetoric, his wit, his force of mind, and his strong grasp of legal principles in general and the issue of the moment in particular, might have carried him far. He might have risen as high as a civilian could. It was a tempting prospect,--the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them--and he renounced it; and never once in all the books that have come down to us, does he give any hint of looking back, never so much as suggests that he had given up anything. Official life was full of religious usage, full too of minor duties of ritual which a Christian might not discharge. Tertullian was not the first to see this. A century earlier Flavius Clemens, the cousin of Domitian, seems to have been a Christian--Dio Cassius speaks of his atheism and Jewish practices, and Suetonius remarks upon his "contemptible inertia," though he was consul.[81] In other words, the Emperor's cousin found that public life meant compromise at every step. This is Tertullian's decision of the case--it has the note of his profession about it. "Let us grant that it is possible for a man successfully to manage that, whatever office it be, he bears merely the title of that office; that he does not sacrifice, nor lend his authority to sacrifices, nor make contracts as to victims, nor delegate the charge of temples, nor look after their tributes; that he does not give shows (_spectacula_) at his own or the public cost, nor preside over them when being given; that he makes no proclamation or edict dealing with a festival; that he takes no oath; that--and these are the duties of a magistrate--he does not sit in judgment on any man's life or honour (for you might bear with his judging in matters of money); that he pronounces no sentence of condemnation nor any [as legislator] that should tend to condemnation; that he binds no man, imprisons no man, tortures[82] no man"--if all this can be managed, a Christian may be a magistrate.[83] Tertullian made his renunciation and held no magistracy. It may be said that, as he held none, it was easy to renounce it; but hopes are often harder to renounce than realities. So Tertullian left the law and the Stoics, to study {323} the Scriptures, Justin and Irenaeus[84]--the Bible and the _regula fidei_ his new code, and the others his commentators. The Christian is "a stranger in this world, a citizen of the city above, of Jerusalem"; his ranks, his magistracies, his senate are the Church of Christ; his purple the blood of his Lord, his _laticlave_ in His cross.[85]

But Tertullian could speak, on occasion, of what he had done. "We have no fear or terror of what we may suffer from those who do not know," he wrote to Scapula, "for we have joined this school (_sectam_) fully accepting the terms of our agreement; so that we come into these conflicts with no further right to our own souls."[86] The contest was, as he says elsewhere, "against the institutions of our ancestors, the authority of usage, the laws of rulers, the arguments of the wise; against antiquity, custom, necessity; against precedents, prodigies and miracles,"[87] and he did not need Celsus to remind him what form the resistance of the enemy might take. He knew, for he had seen, and that was why he stood where he did. But it is worth our while to understand how vividly he realized the possibilities before him.

There were the private risks of informers and blackmailers, Jews[88] and soldiers, to which the Christians were exposed.[89] They were always liable to be trapped in their meetings--"every day we are besieged; every day we are betrayed; most of all in our actual gatherings and congregations are we surprised."[90] How are we to meet at all, asks the anxious Christian, unless we buy off the soldiers? By night, says Tertullian, "or let three be your church."[91] Then came the appearance before the magistrate, where everything turned on the character or the mood of the official. Tertullian quotes to Scapula several instances of kindness on the bench, rough and ready, or high-principled.[92] Anything might {324} happen--"then," wrote Perpetua, "he had all our names recited together and condemned us to the beasts."[93]

What followed in the arena may be read in various Acts of Martyrdom--in the story of Perpetua herself, as told in tense and quiet language by Tertullian. He, it is generally agreed, edited her visions, preserving what she wrote as she left it, and adding in a postscript what happened when she had laid down her pen for ever. The scene with the beasts is not easy to abridge, and though not long in itself it is too long to quote here; but no one who has read it will forget the episode of Saturus drenched in his own blood from the leopard's bite, amid the yells of the spectators, _Salvum lotum! salvum lotum!_ nor that of Perpetua and Felicitas, mothers both, one a month or so, the other three days, stripped naked to be tossed by a wild cow. And here comes a curious touch; the mob, with a superficial delicacy, suggested clothing; rough cloths were put over the women, and the cow was let loose; they were tossed, and then all were put to the sword.

[Sidenote: On martyrdom]

"At this present moment," writes Tertullian, "it is the very middle of the heat, the very dog-days of persecution--as you would expect, from the dog-headed himself, of course. Some Christians have been tested by the fire, some by the sword, some by the beasts; some, lashed and torn with hooks, have just tasted martyrdom, and lie hungering for it in prison."[94] Cross, hook, and beasts[95]--the circus, the prison, the rack[96]--the _vivicomburium_,[97] burning alive--and meanwhile the renegade Jew is there with his placard of the "god of the Christians," an ugly caricature with the ears and one hoof of an ass, clad in a toga, book in hand[98]--the Gnostic and the nervous Christian are asking whether the text "flee ye to the next" may not be God's present counsel--and meantime "faith glows and the church is burning like the bush."[99] Yet, says Tertullian to the heathen, "we say, and we say it openly,--while you are torturing us, torn and bleeding, we cry aloud 'We worship God through Christ.'"[100] To {325} the Christian he says: "The command is given to me to name no other God, whether by act of hand, or word of tongue ... save the One alone, whom I am bidden to fear, lest he forsake me; whom I am bidden to love with all my being, so as to die for him. I am his soldier, sworn to his service, and the enemy challenge me. I am as they are, if I surrender to them. In defence of my allegiance I fight it out to the end in the battle-line, I am wounded, I fall, I am killed. Who wished this end for his soldier--who but he who sealed him with such an oath of enlistment? There you have the will of my God."[101] "And therefore the Paraclete is needed, to guide into all truth, to animate for all endurance. Those, who receive him, know not to flee persecution, nor to buy themselves off; they have him who will be with us, to speak for us when we are questioned, to help us when we suffer."[102a] "He who fears to suffer cannot be his who suffered."[102b] The tracts _On Flight in Persecution_ and _The Antidote for the Scorpion_ are among his most impressive pieces. They must have been read by his friends with a strange stirring of the blood. Even to-day they bring back the situation--living as only genius can make it live.

But what of the man of genius who wrote them? At what cost were they written? "Picture the martyr," he writes, "with his head under the sword already poised, picture him on the gibbet his body just outspread, picture him tied to the stake when the lion has just been granted, on the wheel with the faggots piled about him"[103]--and no doubt Tertullian saw these things often enough, with that close realization of each detail of shame and pain which is only possible to so vivid and sensitive an imagination. He saw _himself_ tied to the stake--heard the governor in response to the cry _Christiana leonem_[104] concede the lion--and then had to wait, how long? How long would it take to bring and to let loose the lion? How long would it seem? Through all this he went, in his mind, not once, nor twice. And meanwhile, what was the audience doing, while he stood there tied, {326} waiting interminably for the lion? He knew what they would be doing, for he had seen it, and in the passage at the end of _de Spectaculis_, which Gibbon quotes, every item of the description of the spectator is taken in irony from the actual circus. No man, trained, as the public speaker or pleader must be, to respond intimately and at once to the feelings and thoughts, expressed or unexpressed, of the audience, could escape realizing in heightened tension every possibility of anguish in such a crowd of hostile faces, full of frantic hatred,[105] cruelty and noise. To this Tertullian looked forward, as we have seen, and went onward--as another did who "steadfastly set his face for Jerusalem." The test of emotion is what it has survived, and Tertullian's faith in Christ and his peace of mind survived this martyrdom through the imagination. Whatever criticism has to be passed upon his work and spirit, to some of his critics he might reply "_Ye_ have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin."

So much did martyrdom mean to the individual, yet it was not merely a personal affair. It was God's chosen way to propagate his church--so it had been foretold, and so it was fulfilled. "Nothing whatever is achieved," says Tertullian to the heathen, "by each more exquisite cruelty you invent;[106] on the contrary, it wins men for our school. We are made more as often as you mow us down; the blood of Christians is seed."[107]

Sixteen centuries or so later, Thoreau in his _Plea for Captain John Brown_, a work not unlike Tertullian's own in its force, its surprises, its desperate energy and high conviction, wrote similarly of the opponents of another great movement. "Such do not know that like the seed is the fruit, and that in the moral world, when good seed is planted, good fruit is inevitable, and does not depend on our watering and cultivating; that when you plant, or bury, a hero in his field, a crop of heroes is sure to spring up. This is a seed of such {327} force and vitality, that it does not ask our leave to germinate."

[Sidenote: On baptism]

There were yet other possibilities in martyrdom. It was believed by Christians that in baptism the sins of the earlier life were washed away; but what of sins after baptism? They involved a terrible risk--"the world is destined to fire like the man who after baptism renews his sins"[108]--and it was often felt safer to defer baptism to the last moment in consequence. Constantine was baptized on his death-bed. "The postponement of baptism is more serviceable especially in the case of children;" says Tertullian, "let them become Christians when they shall be able to know Christ. Why should the innocent age hasten to the remission of sins?"[109] As to sins committed after baptism, different views were held. In general, as the church grew larger and more comprehensive, it took a lighter view of sin, but Tertullian and his Montanist friends did not, and for this they have been well abused, in their own day and since. They held that adultery and apostasy were not venial matters, to be forgiven by a bishop issuing an "edict," like a _Pontifex Maximus_, in the legal style, "I forgive the sins of adultery and fornication to such as have done penance, _paenitentia functis_."[110] The Montanist alternative was not so easy; God, they held, permitted a second baptism, which should be final--a baptism of blood. "God had foreseen the weaknesses of humanity, the strategems of the enemy, the deceitfulness of affairs, the snares of the world--that faith even after baptism would be imperilled, that many would be lost again after being saved--who should soil the wedding dress, and provide no oil for their lamps, who should yet have to be sought over mountain and forest, and carried home on the shoulders. He therefore appointed a second consolation, a last resource, the fight of martyrdom and the baptism of blood, thereafter secure."[111] This view may not appeal to us to-day; it did not appeal to Gnostic, time-server and coward. The philosophy of sin involved is hardly deep enough, but {328} this doctrine of the second baptism cannot be said to lack virility.

But Tertullian himself did not receive the first baptism with any idea of looking for a second. Like men who are baptized of their own motion and understanding, he was greatly impressed by baptism. "There is nothing," he says, "which more hardens the minds of men than the simplicity of God's works, which appears in the doing, and the magnificence, which is promised in the effect. Here too, because, with such simplicity, without pomp, without any novel apparatus, and without cost, a man is sent down into the water and baptized, while but a few words are spoken, and rises again little or nothing cleaner, on that account his attainment of eternity is thought incredible."[112] It must be felt that the illustration declines from the principle. It may also be remarked that this is a more magical view of baptism than would have appealed to Seneca or to his contemporaries in the Christian movement, and that, as it is developed, it becomes even stranger.

Tertullian's description of baptism is of interest in the history of the rite. The candidate prepares himself with prayer, watching and the confession of sin.[113] "The waters receive the mystery (_sacramentum_) of sanctification, when God has been called upon. The Spirit comes at once from heaven and is upon the waters, sanctifying them from himself, and so sanctified they receive (_combibunt_) the power of sanctifying."[114] This is due to what to-day we should call physical causes. The underlying matter, he says, must of necessity absorb the quality of the overlying, especially when the latter is spiritual, and therefore by the subtlety of its substance more penetrative.[115] We may compare "the enthusiastic spirit," which, Plutarch tells us, came up as a gas from the chasm at Delphi,[116] and further the general teaching of Tertullian (Stoic in origin) of the corporeity of the soul and of similar spiritual beings. He illustrates the influence of the Spirit in thus affecting the waters of baptism by the analogy of the unclean spirits that haunt streams and fountains, natural and artificial, and similarly affect men, though for evil--"lest any should think it a hard thing that God's holy angel should be present to temper {329} waters for man's salvation."[117] Thus when the candidate has solemnly "renounced the devil, his pomp and his angels,"[118] he is thrice plunged,[119] his spirit is washed corporeally by the waters "medicated" and his flesh spiritually is purified.[120] "It is not that in the waters we receive the Holy Spirit, but purified in water under the angel, we are prepared for the Holy Spirit.... The angel, that is arbiter of baptism, prepares the way for the Spirit that shall come."[121] On leaving the water the Christian is anointed (_signaculum_). The hand of blessing is laid upon him, and in response to prayer the Holy Spirit descends with joy from the Father to rest upon the purified and blest.[122]

[Sidenote: Renouncing the world]

Tertullian never forgot the baptismal pledge in which he renounced the devil, his pomp and his angels; and, for his part, he never showed any tendency to make compromise with them--when he recognized them, for sometimes he seems not to have penetrated their disguises. Again and again his pledge comes back to him. What has the Christian to do with circus or theatre, who has renounced the devil, his pomp and his angels, when both places are specially consecrated to these, when there, above all, wickedness, lust and cruelty reign without reserve?[123] How can the maker of idols, the temple-painter, etc., be said to have renounced the devil and his angels, if they make their living by them?[124] We have seen the difficulty of the schoolmaster here. The general question of trade troubles Tertullian--its cupidity, the lie that ministers to cupidity, to say nothing of perjury.[125] Of astrologers, he would have thought, nothing needed to be said--but that he had "within these few days" heard some one claim the right to continue in the profession. He reminds him of the source of his magical information--the fallen angels.[126] One must not even name them--to say _Meditis fidius_ is idolatry, for it is a prayer; but to say "I live in the street of Isis" is not sin--it is sense.[127] Many inventions were attributed by pagans to their gods. If every implement of life is set down to some god, "yet I still must recognize Christ lying on a couch--or when he brings a basin {330} to his disciples' feet, or pours water from the jug, and is girded with linen--Osiris' own peculiar garb."[128] In fact, common utility, and the service of ordinary needs and comforts, may lead us to look upon things (to whomsoever attributed) as really due to the inspiration of God himself "who foresees, instructs and gives pleasure to man, who is after all His own."[129] Thus common sense and his doctrine of Nature come to his aid. "So amid rocks and bays, amid the shoals and breakers of idolatry, faith steers her course, her sails filled by the Spirit of God."[130]

[Sidenote: The _Apology_]