The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire Part 44

Again, Tertullian remarks frequently that heresy has the closest connexion with philosophy. Both handle the same questions: "Whence is evil, and why? and whence is man and how? and whence is G.o.d?"[147]

Marcion, for instance, is "sick (like so many nowadays and, most of all, the heretics) with the question of evil, whence is evil?"[148] and turns to dualism. Or else "the heretics begin with questions of the resurrection, for the resurrection of the flesh they find harder to believe than the unity of the G.o.dhead."[149] What Celsus, a typical product of {338} contemporary philosophy, thought of the resurrection of the flesh we have seen--a "hope of worms!" Lastly, there was a strong tendency in the church at large for re-statement of the gospel in the terms of philosophy; and in such endeavours, as we know, there is always the danger of supposing the terms and the philosophy of the day to be more permanent and more valid than the experience which they are supposed to express. In Tertullian's century there seemed some prospect that every characteristic feature of the gospel would be so "re-stated" as to leave the gospel entirely indistinguishable from any other eclectic system of the moment. Jesus became a phantom, or an aeon; his body, sidereal substance, which offered, Clement himself said, no material resistance to the touch of St John's hand. G.o.d divided, heaven gone, no hope or faith left possible in a non-real Christ even in this life--Christians would be indeed of all men most miserable, and morality would have no longer any basis nor any motive. What in all this could tempt a man to face the lions? It was not for this that Christians shed their blood--no, the Gnostics recommended flight in persecution. It is easy to understand the sweeping _Viderint_--Tertullian's usual phrase for dismissing people and ideas on whom no more is to be said--"Let them look to it who have produced a Stoic and Platonic and dialectic Christianity. We need no curiosity who have Jesus Christ, no inquiry who have the gospel."[150]

It was natural for Clement and his school to try to bring the gospel and philosophy to a common basis--a natural impulse, which all must share who speculate. The mistake has been that the church took their conclusions so readily and has continued to believe them. For Tertullian is, on his side, right, and we know in fact a great deal more about Jesus than we can know about the Logos.

[Sidenote: The _Praescription of heretics_]

Accordingly a large part of Tertullian's work, as a Christian, was the writing of treatises against heresy. He has in one book--_de Praescriptionibus Haereticorum_--dealt with all heretics together. The _Regula Fidei_, which is a short creed,[151] was inst.i.tuted, he says, by Christ, and is held among Christians without questions, "save those which heretics raise and which make heretics." On that _Regula_ rests the Christian faith. To know nothing against it, is to know everything. But appeal is {339} made to Scripture. We must then see who has the t.i.tle to Scripture (_possessio_),[152] and whence it comes.

Jesus Christ while on earth taught the twelve, and they went into the world and promulgated "the same doctrine of the same faith," founding churches in every city, from which other churches have taken faith and doctrine--he uses the metaphors of seed and of layers (_tradux_) from plants. Every day churches are so formed and duly counted Apostolic.

Thus the immense numbers of churches may be reckoned equivalent to the one first church. No other than the Apostles are to be received, as no others were taught by Christ. "Thus it is established that every doctrine which agrees with those Apostolic mother-churches, the originals of the faith, is to be set down to truth, as in accordance with what the churches have received from the apostles, the apostles from Christ, and Christ from G.o.d."[153] But have the churches been faithful in the transmission of this body of doctrine? Suppose them all to have gone wrong, suppose the Holy Spirit to have been so negligent--is it likely that so vast a number should have wandered away into _one_ faith? Again let Marcion and others show the history of their churches. Let their doctrines be compared with the Apostolic, and their varieties and contradictions will show they are not Apostolic. If then Truth be adjudged to those who walk by the _Regula_, duly transmitted through the church, the Apostles and Christ from G.o.d, then heretics have no right of appeal to the Scriptures which are not theirs. If they are heretics, they cannot be Christians; if they are not Christians, they have no right (_ius_) to Christian literature. "With what right (_iure_) Marcion, do you cut down my wood? By what licence, Valentinus, do you divert my springs? ... This is my estate; I have long held it; I am first in occupation; I trace my sure descent from the founders to whom the thing belonged. I am the heir of the Apostles."[154]

In this, as in most human arguments, there are strands of different value. The legal a.n.a.logy gave a name to the book--_praescriptio_ was the barring of a claim--but it is not {340} the strongest line. Law rarely is. But Tertullian was not content to rule his opponents out of court. He used legal methods and manners too freely, but he knew well enough that these settled nothing. As a rule he had much stronger grounds for his attack. He wrote five books against Marcion to maintain the unity of the G.o.dhead and the ident.i.ty of the Father of Jesus, the G.o.d of the Old Testament and the G.o.d of Nature. His book against the Valentinians has a large element of humour in it--perhaps the best rejoinder to the framers of a cosmogony of so many aeons, none demonstrable, all fanciful,--the thirty of them suggest to him the famous Latin sow of the _aeneid_.[155] Against Hermogenes he maintains the doctrine of the creation of the world from nothing. The hypothesis that G.o.d used pre-existing matter, makes matter antecedent and more or less equal to G.o.d. And then, in legal vein, he asks a question. How did G.o.d come to use matter? "These are the three ways in which another's property may be taken,--by right, by benefit, by a.s.sault, that is by t.i.tle, by request, by violence." Hermogenes denies G.o.d's t.i.tle in this case; which then of the other means does he prefer?[156]

[Sidenote: The incarnation of Christ]

His best work in the controversial field is in his treatises, _On the Flesh of Christ_, _On the Resurrection of the Flesh_, and _On the Soul_. The first of these, above all, will appeal to any reader to whom the historic Jesus is significant. Much has changed in outlook and preconceptions since Tertullian wrote, but his language on the reality of Jesus, as an actual human being and no sidereal or celestial semblance of a man, on the incarnation, and the love of G.o.d, still glows and still finds a response. "Away," he pictures Marcion saying, "Away with those census-rolls of Caesar, always tiresome, away with the cramped inns, the soiled rags, the hard stall. Let the angelic host look to it!"[157] And then he rejoins, Do you think nativity impossible--or unsuitable--for G.o.d? Declaim as you like on the ugliness of the circ.u.mstances; yet Christ _did_ love men (born, if you like, just as you say); for man he descended, for man he preached, for man he lowered himself with every humiliation down to death, and the death of the cross. Yes, {341} he loved him whom he redeemed at so high a price. And with man he loved man's nativity, even his flesh.

The conversion of men to the worship of the true G.o.d, the rejection of error, the discipline of justice, of purity, of pity, of patience, of all innocence--these are not folly, and they are bound up with the truth of the Gospel. Is it unworthy of G.o.d? "Spare the one hope of all the world, thou, who wouldst do away with the disgrace of faith.

Whatever is unworthy of G.o.d is all to my good."[158] The Son of G.o.d also died--"It is credible because it is foolish. He was buried and rose again; it is certain because it is impossible." And how could all this be, if his body were not true? "You bisect Christ with a lie.

The _whole_ of him was Truth."[159] The gospel narrative from beginning to end implies that Christ's body was like ours--"he hungered under the devil, thirsted under the Samaritan woman, shed tears over Lazarus, was troubled[160] at death (for, the flesh, he said, is weak), last of all he shed his blood." How could men have spat in a face radiant with "celestial grandeur"? Wait! Christ has not yet subdued his enemies that he may triumph with his friends.

Jesus is to come again, as he was, as he is, sitting at the Father's right hand, G.o.d and man, flesh and blood, the same in essence and form as when he ascended; so he shall come.[161] And men will be raised in the flesh to receive judgment. A storm overhangs the world.[162] What the treasure-house of eternal fire will be, may be guessed from the petty vents men see in Etna and elsewhere.[163] There will be white robes for martyrs; for the timid a little portion in the lake of fire and sulphur.[164] All that Gibbon thought would "offend the reason and humanity of the present age" in the last chapter of the _de Spectacutis_ may recur to the reader. But, continues Tertullian in that pa.s.sage, my gaze will be upon those who let loose their fury on the Lord himself--"'This,' I shall say, 'is he, the son of the carpenter or the harlot, Sabbath-breaker, Samaritan, demoniac. This is he whom you bought from {342} Judas; this is he, whom you beat with the reed and the palms of your hands, whom you disfigured with your spittle, to whom you gave gall and vinegar. This is he whom his disciples stole away, that it might be said he had risen,--or the gardener took him away, that his lettuces might not be trodden by the crowds that came.'" "A long variety of affected and unfeeling witticisms," is Gibbon's judgment.

A mind less intent on polemic will judge otherwise of Tertullian and his controversies. There is, first of all, much more of the philosophic temper than is commonly supposed. He does not, like Clement and other Greeks, revel in cosmological speculations as to the Logos, nor does he loosely adopt the abstract methods of later Greek philosophy. But in his treatment of the Soul, of moral order and disorder, and of responsibility, he shows no mean powers of mind. He argues from experience, and from the two sources, from which he could best hope to learn most directly the mind of G.o.d, Nature and the Scriptures. The infallibility of the Scriptures is of course a limitation to freedom of speculation, but it was an axiom of the early church, and a man of experience might accept it, bound up as it was with sound results in the martyr-death and the changed life.

Tertullian will get back to the facts, if he can; and if he judges too swiftly of Nature and too swiftly accepts the literal truth of Scripture,--while these are drawbacks to our acceptance of his conclusions, there is still to be seen in him more independence of mind than in those Greek Fathers for whom Greek philosophy had spoken the last word in metaphysics. It is psychology that interests Tertullian more, and moral questions, and these he handles more deeply than the Stoics. He stands in line with Augustine and Calvin, his spiritual descendants.

If he speaks more of h.e.l.l than certain Greeks do, it is not unnatural.

The man, who saw such deaths in the amphitheatre as he describes in the _Pa.s.sion of Perpetua_, who remembered the expressions he had then seen on the faces of the spectators, who knew too well the cruelty that went with Roman l.u.s.t, could hardly help believing in h.e.l.l. What was the origin of evil? asked philosopher and heretic. What is its destiny?

and what are you to do with it now? asked Tertullian; and, in all seriousness, the answer to the former {343} question is more likely to be found when the answers of the latter are reached. At any rate the latter are more practical, and that adjective, with what it suggests of drawback and of gain, belongs to Tertullian.

[Sidenote: On conduct]

His application of the test of utility to belief is obviously open to criticism. "It is expedient," said Varro, "for men to be deceived in religion." No, Tertullian would have said, it is more expedient for them to know the truth; and he backed his conviction by his appeal to Nature, on the one hand, Nature, rational through and through, and ever loyal to law, to fixity of principle, and on the other hand by reference to the verification of his position yielded by experience--once more the martyr-death and the transformed character.

These fundamental ideas he may have misused in particulars, if not in matters more essential; but, if he is wrong from the beginning in holding them, human knowledge, progress and conduct become fortuitous and desultory at once. Nature and verification from life are substantially all we have. To these of course Tertullian added revelation in a sense distinct.

From the question of conduct we pa.s.s naturally to the great cleavage of Tertullian with the church. A change had come in church practice and government since the days when the _Teaching of the Apostles_ represented actual present fact,--perhaps even since the _Apology of Aristides_. The church had grown larger, it had developed its organization, and it was relying more on the practical men with a turn for administration, who always appear when a movement, begun by idealists, seems to show signs of success. The situation creates them, and they cannot be avoided. They have their place, but they do not care for ideas. Thus in the church the ministry of the Spirit, the ministry of gifts, was succeeded by the ministry of office, with its lower ideals of the practical and the expedient. The numbers of the church swelled, and a theory began to spread, which Cyprian took up later on, and which was almost inevitable on his principles, that the church was an ark, with beasts clean and beasts unclean within it.

This theory answered to the actual facts, hardly to the ideal, and Tertullian rejected it.[165] Conduct at once suggested the theory, {344} and responded to it. Christians fell into adultery and apostasy, and while at first this meant "delivery to Satan," restoration became progressively easy. The _Shepherd_ of Hermas extended second chances, till Tertullian fiercely spoke of "that apocryphal shepherd of adulterers.[166]"

From Phrygia came the suggestion of reformation. Our evidence as to the history of Montanism in its native land is derived from hostile sources, and the value of it must partly depend on the truth of the witnesses and partly on their intelligence, and of neither have we any guarantee at all. That they are clearly hostile is plain from the fragments in Eusebius. That they understood the inner meaning of what they condemned, we have no indication. Monta.n.u.s, however, a.s.serted Christ's promise of the Paraclete--his enemies allege that he identified himself with the Paraclete, a statement which might be used to show how quotation may lead to _suggestio falsi_. But the coming of the Paraclete was not in fact a synonym for fanaticism and the collection of money, as the enemies of Monta.n.u.s hinted. It meant the bracing of Christian life and character, and the restoration of prophecy, new revelation of truth, power and progress. It appealed to the Christian world, and the movement spread--probably with modifications as it spread. The oracles of Monta.n.u.s and of two women, Prisca and Maximilla, became widely known, and they inculcated a stern insistence on conduct, which was really needed, while they showed how reformation was to be reached. To use language of more modern times, involves risk of misconception; but if it may be done with caution, we may roughly say that the Montanists stood for what the Friends call the Inner Light, and for progressive revelation--or, at any rate, for something in this direction. The indwelling of G.o.d was not consistent with low living; and earnest souls, all over the world, were invested with greater power and courage to battle with the growing lightness in the church and to meet the never-ceasing hostility of the world--the lion and the cruel faces of the amphitheatre.

[Sidenote: Ecstacy]

Yet Montanism failed for want of a clear conception of the real character of primitive Christianity. Aiming at morals, Montanists conceived of life and the human mind and G.o.d in a {345} way very far from that of Jesus. They laid a stress, which is not his, on asceticism and on penance, and they cultivated ecstasy--in both regions renouncing the essentially spiritual conception of religion, and turning to a non-Christian view of matter. They thus aimed at obtaining or keeping the indwelling spirit of Jesus, known so well in the early church, but by mechanical means; and this, though the later church in this particular followed them for generations, is not to be done. Still, whatever their methods and their expedients, they stood for righteousness, and here lay the fascination of Montanism for Tertullian.

Throughout his later life Tertullian, then, was a Montanist, though the change was not so great as might be expected. Some of his works, such as that _On Monogamy_, bear the stamp of Montanism, for re-marriage was condemned by the Montanists. Elsewhere his citation of the oracles of Prisca suggests that a book belongs to the Montanist period; or we deduce it from such a pa.s.sage as that in the work _On the Soul_ where he describes a vision. The pa.s.sage is short and it is suggestive.

"We have to-day among us a sister who has received gifts (_charismata_) of the nature of revelations, which she undergoes (_pat.i.tur_) in spirit in the church amid the rites of the Lord's day falling into ecstasy (_per ecstasin_). She converses with angels, sometimes even with the Lord, and sees and hears mysteries, and reads the hearts of certain persons, and brings healings to those who ask. According to what Scriptures are read, or psalms sung, or addresses made, or prayers offered up, the matter of her visions is supplied. It happened that we had spoken something of the soul, when this sister was in the spirit.

When all was over, and the people had gone, she--for it is her practice to report what she has seen, and it is most carefully examined that it may be proved--'amongst other things,' she said, 'a soul was shown to me in bodily form and it seemed to be a spirit, but not empty, nor a thing of vacuity; on the contrary, it seemed as if it might be touched, soft, lucid, of the colour of air, and of human form in every detail."[167]

Such a story explains itself. The corporeity of the soul {346} was a tenet of Stoicism, essential to Tertullian, for without it he could not conceive of what was to follow the resurrection. He spoke of it and we can imagine how. It would hardly take a vision to see anything of which he spoke. The sister however was, what in modern phrase is called, psychopathic, and the vision occurred, controlled by the suggestion that preceded it.

[Sidenote: Conclusion]

It must be admitted that there is in some of his Montanist treatises, particularly where he is handling matters of less importance, such as re-marriage, fasting, and the like, a bitterness of tone which is not pleasant. As long as his humour and his strong sense control his irony, it is no bad adjunct of his style, it is a great resource. But it declines into sarcasm, and "sarcasm," as Teufelsdrockh put it, "is the language of the devil"; and we find Tertullian, pleading for G.o.d and righteousness, in a tone and a temper little likely to win men.

But the main ideas that dominate him still prevail--conduct, obedience, G.o.d's law in Nature and in the book, the value of the martyr-death.

Little is to be got by dwelling on his outbursts of ill temper; they hardly do more than ill.u.s.trate what we knew already, his intensity, his sensibility, his pa.s.sion. They form the negative side of the great positive qualities. Let me gather up a few scattered thoughts which come from his heart and are better and truer ill.u.s.trations of the man, and with them let chapter and book have an end.

Conduct is the test of creed (_de Praescr. Haer._ 43). To lie about G.o.d is in a sense idolatry (_de Praescr._ 40). Security in sin means love of it (_de Pudic._ 9). Whatever darkness you pile above your deeds, G.o.d is light (_de Paenit._ 6). What we are forbidden to do, the soul pictures to itself at its peril (_de Paenit._ 3). Truth persuades by teaching, it does not teach by making things plausible (_adv. Valent._ 1). Faith is patience with its lamp lit--_illuminata_ (_de Pat._ 6).

Patience is the very nature of G.o.d. The recognition of G.o.d understands well enough the duty laid upon it. Let wrong-doing be wearied by your patience (_de Pat._ 3, 4, 8). There is no greater incitement to despise money than that the Lord himself had no wealth (_de Pat._ 7).

Love is 'the supreme mystery (_sacramentum_) of faith (_de Pat._ 12).

Faith fears no famine {347} (_de Idol._ 12). Prayer is the wall of faith (_de Or._ 29). Every day, every moment, prayer is necessary to men.... Prayer comes from conscience. If conscience blush, prayer blushes (_de exh. cast._ 10). Good things scandalize none but the bad mind (_de virg. vel._ 3). Give to Caesar what is Caesar's--his image on the coin; give to G.o.d what is G.o.d's--his image in man, yourself (_de Idol._ 15).

But to this there is no end, and an end there must be. By his expression of Christian ideas in the natural language of Roman thought, by his insistence on the reality of the historic Jesus and on the inevitable consequences of human conduct, by his reference of all matters of life and controversy to the will of G.o.d manifested in Nature, in inspiration and in experience, Tertullian laid Western Christendom under a great debt, never very generously acknowledged.

For us it may be as profitable to go behind the writings till we find the man, and to think of the manhood, with every power and every endowment, sensibility, imagination, energy, flung with pa.s.sionate enthusiasm on the side of purity and righteousness, of G.o.d and Truth; to think of the silent self-sacrifice freely and generously made for a despised cause, of a life-long readiness for martyrdom, of a spirit, unable to compromise, unable in its love of Christ to see His work undone by cowardice, indulgence and unfaith, and of a nature in all its fulness surrendered. That the Gospel could capture such a man as Tertullian, and, with all his faults of mind and temper, make of him what it did, was a measure of its power to transform the old world and a prophecy of its power to hold the modern world, too, and to make more of it as the ideas of Jesus find fuller realization and verification in every generation of Christian character and experience.

Chapter X Footnotes:

[1] Gibbon, _Decline and Fall_, c. 15 (vol. ii, p. 177, Milman-Smith); Tertullian, _de Spectaculis_, 30.

[2] Both of these in _de Pallio_, 1. It may be noted that in allusions to Dido's story he prefers the non-Virgilian version, more honourable to the Queen; _Apol._ 50; _ad martyras_, 4.

[3] _adv. Valentin._ 12.

[4] References to his Greek treatises (all lost) may be found in _de cor. mil._ 6; _de bapt._ 15; _de virg. vel._ 1.

[5] _De viris ill.u.s.tribus, sub nomine_.

[6] _de anima_ 39.

[7] _Ibid._ 41.

[8] _Ibid._ 39.

[9] _adv. Valent._ 3, _in infantia inter somni difficultates a nutricula audisse lamiae turres et pectines Solis; ibid._ 20, _puerilium dicibulorum in mari poma nasci et in arbore pisces_.

[10] e.g. he alludes to a manual on flowers and garlands by Claudius Saturninus, and another on a similar subject, perhaps, by Leo aegyptius; _de cor. mil._ 7, 12. Apart from the Christian controversy on the use of flowers, we shall find later on that he had a keener interest in them than some critics might suppose; _adv. Marc._ i, 13, 14.

[11] _de juga_, 10.

[12] _de anima_, 2; cf. _ibid._ 10, quotation of a great anatomist Herophilus who dissected "six hundred" subjects in order to find out Nature's secrets; also _ibid._ 25, a discussion of childbirth to show that the soul does not come into the child with its first breath; _ibid._ 43, a discussion of sleep. _Scorpiace_, 5, surgery.

[13] e.g. the end of _adv. Hermogenem_.

[14] Puns, e.g., on _areae, ad Scap._ 3; on _strophae, de Spect._ 29; on _pleroma, adv. Val._ 12. See his nonsense on the tears, salt, sweet, and bituminous, of Achamoth, a Valentinian figure, _adv. Val._ 15; on "the Milesian tales of his aeons," _de Anima._ 23.

[15] _adv. Valent._ 6.

[16] _adv. Valent._ 1.