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 Cæsar, 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 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 dæmon—"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.
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 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 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.
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 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 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]]
His early life