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 gods burlesqued in the arena. To Mithras perhaps he gave more attention. In discussing the soldier's crown he is able to quote an analogy from the rites of Mithras, in which a crown was rejected, and in which one grade of 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—"nobody," 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 passes on—"But this is esoteric—nor is it everybody's to know it."[[62]]
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 suffered under Saturninus, has enabled us to put a date to the event, for we read that it took place in the Consulship of Præsens (his second term) and of Claudianus—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 Cæsar of the passionless face[[67]] to impression, men of a more sensitive and imaginative make, quicker in penetrating the feeling of others.
Tertullian, in two short passages, written at different dates, shows how the martyrs—perhaps these very Scillitan 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 God, 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 animæ in deum[[71]]—that instinctive fear of God 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." "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? God 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]]
Idolatry
Tertullian's tract On Idolatry illustrates 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 God 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?