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 god of the mythology, mutilated or burned alive, for the amusement of a shouting 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 lust, bloody and wanton; and the reader of the Golden Ass 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 passages 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 Cæsar 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 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 passages 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]]
The evidence of nature
Meanwhile, whatever his amusements, 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 sæpe 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 worship what he thinks right," he had sub-consciously gone back to the great Stoic Jus Naturæ.[[39]] Nature is the original authority—side by side, he would say in his later years, with the inspired word of God,—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 God of Moses none the less."[[40]] One of his favourite arguments rests on what he calls the testimonium animæ naturaliter Christianæ—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 God, who is the teacher of the teacher (i.e. Nature)";[[41]] and neither God 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 God,"[[44]] he says, and "our God is the God of Nature."[[45]] He identifies the natural and the rational—"all the properties of God 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 God'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 God 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 lust.[[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 God 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 God 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 passages 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. If he wrote as a pagan at all, what he wrote is lost; but it is not pushing 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.
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 passage how sensible he was. Marcion condemns the God 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 shell of any sea you like,—I do not say the Red Sea; one feather of a moor-fowl—to say nothing of a peacock,—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]]