The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire Part 42

{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]

To say, with Professor Hort, on the evidence of such pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sages 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 amus.e.m.e.nts, 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 G.o.d,--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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, who is the teacher of the teacher (_i.e._ Nature)";[41] and neither G.o.d 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 G.o.d,"[44] he says, and "our G.o.d is the G.o.d of Nature."[45] He identifies the natural and the rational--"all the properties of G.o.d 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} G.o.d'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 G.o.d 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 l.u.s.t.[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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sages 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sage how sensible he was. Marcion condemns the G.o.d 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 sh.e.l.l of any sea you like,--I do not say the Red Sea; one feather of a moor-fowl--to say nothing of a peac.o.c.k,--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 G.o.ds burlesqued in the arena. To Mithras perhaps he gave more attention. In discussing the soldier's crown he is able to quote an a.n.a.logy 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--"n.o.body," 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 pa.s.ses 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 Consuls.h.i.+p of Praesens (his second term) and of Claudia.n.u.s--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 pa.s.sionless face[67] to impression, men of a more sensitive and imaginative make, quicker in penetrating the feeling of others.

Tertullian, in two short pa.s.sages, 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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? G.o.d 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_ ill.u.s.trates 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 G.o.d 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?

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