Tertullian

Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus was born around the year 160, in Carthage, in the Roman province of Africa, in what is now Tunisia. His father was a centurion in the Roman army, and the family was pagan. Carthage was one of the great cities of the empire, second only to Rome in the West, a center of trade, law, rhetoric and the games. Tertullian received a first-rate education in Latin and Greek. He was trained in law and rhetoric, and he is thought to have practiced as a lawyer, perhaps in Rome. He wrote in a style that was marked by the lawyer's skill in argument, and a speaker's flair for the sharp phrase. He was a man of great intelligence and of fierce passions. In his pagan years, he enjoyed the pleasures of the city and the spectacles of the arena. He later confessed that he had gone to the games and had been moved by cruelty.

He was converted to the Christian faith around the year 197, when he was in his late thirties. The circumstances are not known in detail. He tells us that he was moved by the steadiness of the Christian martyrs, who met death in the arena with joy. He wrote that the more you mow us down, the more we grow, and that the blood of the Christians is seed. He became a member of the church in Carthage and may have become a presbyter, though he is not named as one. He was a married man. He wrote a book to his wife on the subject of remarriage after his death. His convictions were intense. He gave all of his literary skill to the service of the church.

He was the first great theologian to write in Latin. In the years from about 197 to 220, he wrote some thirty works that survive, and many others that are lost. They range from defenses of the faith to attacks on heresies and works on Christian conduct. His Apology, written in about 197, was a defense of the Christians against the charges made against them by the Roman authorities. In it, he argued that they were being condemned without a fair hearing, that they were loyal citizens who prayed for the emperor and that the charges of cannibalism and immorality were false. It is a brilliant piece of legal reasoning. He also wrote To the Nations, To Scapula and On the Testimony of the Soul. In On the Prescription of Heretics, he argued that the heretics have no right to use the Scriptures, since they belong to the church, and he asked what Athens has to do with Jerusalem, meaning what philosophy has to do with the faith.

His chief contribution was to the doctrine of God. In Against Praxeas, written in about 213, he took up the question of the Trinity. Praxeas held that the Father, Son and Spirit are only different modes of the one God. Tertullian replied that there are three persons in one substance. He was the first to use the Latin word Trinitas, and to speak of one substance and three persons, a formula that became the standard in the West. He also wrote on the person of Christ and on the two natures, divine and human, in one person. His language shaped the later councils of the church. He wrote on the soul, on the flesh, on the resurrection, on baptism, on prayer and on penance. His writings give a vivid picture of the life of the church in North Africa.

His later life took a turn that has puzzled readers ever since. Around 207, he was drawn to the Montanist movement, a prophetic movement that had arisen in Phrygia, in Asia Minor, around the year 170. The Montanists taught that the Holy Spirit was speaking in a new way through prophets, and they demanded a strict discipline. They urged fasting, they forbade second marriages and they refused to forgive grave sins after baptism. Tertullian came to feel that the church had grown lax. He broke with the main church, and in his later works, he wrote with great bitterness against the clergy, whom he called the psychics, the natural men. He wrote against the second marriage and against flight in persecution. He was, in the end, separated from the church that he had defended so well.

He had great faults. He was harsh, sarcastic and given to sweeping judgments. He was unforgiving. He was an enemy of philosophy and of the arts, though he used the tools of both. He held that women should veil themselves and that Christians should avoid the theater and military service. He had a hard view of the moral life. He was a man who loved argument, and who found it hard to make peace. Some have said that his later writings show a man consumed by the severity that he demanded of others.

The date of his death is not known. It is thought that he died around the year 225, in Carthage, at an age of about sixty-five. A later tradition says that he founded a group called the Tertullianists, which survived for some time. His life shows the effect of a brilliant lawyer who gave his gifts to Christ. His work gave the Western church its theological language, and his writings are still read.