Part 42 (1/2)

{305}

CHAPTER X

TERTULLIAN

In his most famous chapter Gibbon speaks at one point of the affirmation of the early church that those who persisted in the wors.h.i.+p 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 G.o.ds, 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 blus.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sage 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 circ.u.mstances which gave rise to that mood. Yet on the evidence of this pa.s.sage and a sonnet of Matthew Arnold's, English readers pa.s.s 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 friends.h.i.+p 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, friends.h.i.+ps, 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 amus.e.m.e.nts 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sages 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 doc.u.ment to perfection, browbeat an opponent, argue _ad hominem_,[13] evade a clear issue, and antic.i.p.ate 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 pa.s.sion 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 G.o.d heard the three saints in the fiery furnace of the Babylonian king though they prayed _c.u.m 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 Herac.l.i.ti 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 pa.s.sion, 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 G.o.d,[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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d of the mythology, mutilated or burned alive, for the amus.e.m.e.nt 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 l.u.s.t, b.l.o.o.d.y and wanton; and the reader of the _Golden a.s.s_ 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]