The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire

by T. R. Glover

The incarnation of Christ

His best work in the controversial field is in his treatises, On the Flesh of Christ, On the Resurrection of the Flesh, and On the Soul. The first of these, above all, will appeal to any reader to whom the historic Jesus is significant. Much has changed in outlook and preconceptions since Tertullian wrote, but his language on the reality of Jesus, as an actual human being and no sidereal or celestial semblance of a man, on the incarnation, and the love of God, still glows and still finds a response. "Away," he pictures Marcion saying, "Away with those census-rolls of Cæsar, always tiresome, away with the cramped inns, the soiled rags, the hard stall. Let the angelic host look to it!"[[157]] And then he rejoins, Do you think nativity impossible—or unsuitable—for God? Declaim as you like on the ugliness of the circumstances; yet Christ did love men (born, if you like, just as you say); for man he descended, for man he preached, for man he lowered himself with every humiliation down to death, and the death of the cross. Yes, he loved him whom he redeemed at so high a price. And with man he loved man's nativity, even his flesh. The conversion of men to the worship of the true God, the rejection of error, the discipline of justice, of purity, of pity, of patience, of all innocence—these are not folly, and they are bound up with the truth of the Gospel. Is it unworthy of God? "Spare the one hope of all the world, thou, who wouldst do away with the disgrace of faith. Whatever is unworthy of God is all to my good."[[158]] The Son of God also died—"It is credible because it is foolish. He was buried and rose again; it is certain because it is impossible." And how could all this be, if his body were not true? "You bisect Christ with a lie. The whole of him was Truth."[[159]] The gospel narrative from beginning to end implies that Christ's body was like ours—"he hungered under the devil, thirsted under the Samaritan woman, shed tears over Lazarus, was troubled[[160]] at death (for, the flesh, he said, is weak), last of all he shed his blood." How could men have spat in a face radiant with "celestial grandeur"? Wait! Christ has not yet subdued his enemies that he may triumph with his friends.

Jesus is to come again, as he was, as he is, sitting at the Father's right hand, God and man, flesh and blood, the same in essence and form as when he ascended; so he shall come.[[161]] And men will be raised in the flesh to receive judgment. A storm overhangs the world.[[162]] What the treasure-house of eternal fire will be, may be guessed from the petty vents men see in Etna and elsewhere.[[163]] There will be white robes for martyrs; for the timid a little portion in the lake of fire and sulphur.[[164]] All that Gibbon thought would "offend the reason and humanity of the present age" in the last chapter of the de Spectacutis may recur to the reader. But, continues Tertullian in that passage, my gaze will be upon those who let loose their fury on the Lord himself—"'This,' I shall say, 'is he, the son of the carpenter or the harlot, Sabbath-breaker, Samaritan, demoniac. This is he whom you bought from Judas; this is he, whom you beat with the reed and the palms of your hands, whom you disfigured with your spittle, to whom you gave gall and vinegar. This is he whom his disciples stole away, that it might be said he had risen,—or the gardener took him away, that his lettuces might not be trodden by the crowds that came.'" "A long variety of affected and unfeeling witticisms," is Gibbon's judgment.

A mind less intent on polemic will judge otherwise of Tertullian and his controversies. There is, first of all, much more of the philosophic temper than is commonly supposed. He does not, like Clement and other Greeks, revel in cosmological speculations as to the Logos, nor does he loosely adopt the abstract methods of later Greek philosophy. But in his treatment of the Soul, of moral order and disorder, and of responsibility, he shows no mean powers of mind. He argues from experience, and from the two sources, from which he could best hope to learn most directly the mind of God, Nature and the Scriptures. The infallibility of the Scriptures is of course a limitation to freedom of speculation, but it was an axiom of the early church, and a man of experience might accept it, bound up as it was with sound results in the martyr-death and the changed life. Tertullian will get back to the facts, if he can; and if he judges too swiftly of Nature and too swiftly accepts the literal truth of Scripture,—while these are drawbacks to our acceptance of his conclusions, there is still to be seen in him more independence of mind than in those Greek Fathers for whom Greek philosophy had spoken the last word in metaphysics. It is psychology that interests Tertullian more, and moral questions, and these he handles more deeply than the Stoics. He stands in line with Augustine and Calvin, his spiritual descendants.

If he speaks more of hell than certain Greeks do, it is not unnatural. The man, who saw such deaths in the amphitheatre as he describes in the Passion of Perpetua, who remembered the expressions he had then seen on the faces of the spectators, who knew too well the cruelty that went with Roman lust, could hardly help believing in hell. What was the origin of evil? asked philosopher and heretic. What is its destiny? and what are you to do with it now? asked Tertullian; and, in all seriousness, the answer to the former question is more likely to be found when the answers of the latter are reached. At any rate the latter are more practical, and that adjective, with what it suggests of drawback and of gain, belongs to Tertullian.

On conduct

His application of the test of utility to belief is obviously open to criticism. "It is expedient," said Varro, "for men to be deceived in religion." No, Tertullian would have said, it is more expedient for them to know the truth; and he backed his conviction by his appeal to Nature, on the one hand, Nature, rational through and through, and ever loyal to law, to fixity of principle, and on the other hand by reference to the verification of his position yielded by experience—once more the martyr-death and the transformed character. These fundamental ideas he may have misused in particulars, if not in matters more essential; but, if he is wrong from the beginning in holding them, human knowledge, progress and conduct become fortuitous and desultory at once. Nature and verification from life are substantially all we have. To these of course Tertullian added revelation in a sense distinct.

From the question of conduct we pass naturally to the great cleavage of Tertullian with the church. A change had come in church practice and government since the days when the Teaching of the Apostles represented actual present fact,—perhaps even since the Apology of Aristides. The church had grown larger, it had developed its organization, and it was relying more on the practical men with a turn for administration, who always appear when a movement, begun by idealists, seems to show signs of success. The situation creates them, and they cannot be avoided. They have their place, but they do not care for ideas. Thus in the church the ministry of the Spirit, the ministry of gifts, was succeeded by the ministry of office, with its lower ideals of the practical and the expedient. The numbers of the church swelled, and a theory began to spread, which Cyprian took up later on, and which was almost inevitable on his principles, that the church was an ark, with beasts clean and beasts unclean within it. This theory answered to the actual facts, hardly to the ideal, and Tertullian rejected it.[[165]] Conduct at once suggested the theory, and responded to it. Christians fell into adultery and apostasy, and while at first this meant "delivery to Satan," restoration became progressively easy. The Shepherd of Hermas extended second chances, till Tertullian fiercely spoke of "that apocryphal shepherd of adulterers.[[166]]"

From Phrygia came the suggestion of reformation. Our evidence as to the history of Montanism in its native land is derived from hostile sources, and the value of it must partly depend on the truth of the witnesses and partly on their intelligence, and of neither have we any guarantee at all. That they are clearly hostile is plain from the fragments in Eusebius. That they understood the inner meaning of what they condemned, we have no indication. Montanus, however, asserted Christ's promise of the Paraclete—his enemies allege that he identified himself with the Paraclete, a statement which might be used to show how quotation may lead to suggestio falsi. But the coming of the Paraclete was not in fact a synonym for fanaticism and the collection of money, as the enemies of Montanus hinted. It meant the bracing of Christian life and character, and the restoration of prophecy, new revelation of truth, power and progress. It appealed to the Christian world, and the movement spread—probably with modifications as it spread. The oracles of Montanus and of two women, Prisca and Maximilla, became widely known, and they inculcated a stern insistence on conduct, which was really needed, while they showed how reformation was to be reached. To use language of more modern times, involves risk of misconception; but if it may be done with caution, we may roughly say that the Montanists stood for what the Friends call the Inner Light, and for progressive revelation—or, at any rate, for something in this direction. The indwelling of God was not consistent with low living; and earnest souls, all over the world, were invested with greater power and courage to battle with the growing lightness in the church and to meet the never-ceasing hostility of the world—the lion and the cruel faces of the amphitheatre.

Ecstacy