The North African Latin Christian apologist and theologian who created the Latin theological vocabulary — trinitas, persona, substantia — and whose Apologeticus, De Praescriptione Haereticorum, and other works defined the early Latin Christian intellectual tradition.
tertullian
Carthaginian Latin Christian writer (c. 155–220) who composed the first major body of Latin Christian literature, established the Latin theological vocabulary later adopted by Augustine and the Council of Nicaea, and whose later turn to the Montanist movement put him outside the catholic mainstream while his earlier work shaped it permanently.
c. 155 – c. 220 CE
Life
Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus was born around 155 CE in Carthage, then the second city of the Latin-speaking western Roman Empire, into a pagan family. His father, by Jerome's report in De Viris Illustribus, was a centurion in the proconsular army stationed in Carthage — a report modern scholars including Timothy Barnes (Tertullian: A Historical and Literary Study, Oxford University Press, 1971; rev. ed. 1985) have treated with skepticism, the centurion identification being possibly a misreading of Tertullian's own self-description as a soldier of Christ.
What is reasonably clear: Tertullian received an extensive Roman education in rhetoric and law; his prose suggests advanced training in both. Whether he practiced as a Roman jurist — as the Tertullian cited in the Digest might suggest, an identification rejected by most modern scholars — is uncertain. He converted to Christianity probably in the 190s, in his late thirties. By 197 CE, when his first major surviving work — the Apologeticus — was composed, he was an established Christian writer.
The last years brought a break with the catholic Christianity of Carthage. From around 207 he aligned himself with the Montanist movement, the Phrygian prophetic enthusiasm that had emerged in the 170s and that emphasized the continuing operation of the Holy Spirit, rigorous ascetic discipline, and the imminent end of the present age. Tertullian's late works increasingly criticized the catholic church's accommodations to ordinary life — second marriage after a spouse's death, flight in persecution, military service, attendance at public spectacles — against what he understood as the unmediated demands of the Spirit.
The date of his death is unknown; the conventional date of c. 220 CE rests on Jerome's report that he lived to a great age, which is itself an inference rather than a documented date. He left no successor at Carthage to continue his work directly; the African church's next major theologian, Cyprian, in the next generation, knew Tertullian's writings well — reportedly asking his secretary to give me the master when he wanted them — but treated him as a problematic figure whose work could not be cited without qualification because of the Montanist breach.
The Latin Theological Vocabulary
Tertullian's most enduring contribution may be linguistic. Writing Latin theology when there was as yet no Latin theological tradition — earlier Latin Christian writing was occasional, derivative, or addressed to internal communal needs — he was forced to invent or repurpose Latin vocabulary for theological purposes.
The terms that entered the permanent stock of Latin theology include: trinitas (Trinity, his coinage from the Greek trias), persona (Person, originally meaning theatrical mask, then legal person; Tertullian used it as the term for the distinct subsistences within the one divine substantia), substantia (substance), sacramentum (sacrament, from the military oath of allegiance), Vetus Testamentum and Novum Testamentum (Old and New Testament), resurrectio carnis (resurrection of the flesh), peccatum originale (original sin, in nascent form), and many more.
The Trinitarian formula "one substance in three persons" — una substantia, tres personae — is Tertullian's formulation in Adversus Praxean (c. 213), worked out over a century before the Council of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381) made it the binding language of orthodox Christianity. The Council of Chalcedon's (451) Christological formula of "one person in two natures" continues the same vocabulary in different application. Without Tertullian's linguistic invention, the Latin Trinitarian and Christological tradition would have had to find its language somewhere else.
The Apologetic Works
Apologeticus, composed in 197, is Tertullian's response to the persecution of Christians by Roman authorities. The work is addressed to Roman provincial governors rather than to a popular audience — a juridical defense arguing that the Roman legal procedures against Christians violate Roman law itself. Charges against Christians (atheism, incest, infanticide, magical practice, sedition) are individually refuted by demonstration that the charges are false and by demonstration that even if true the legal procedures — in which suspects were forbidden to be inquired about but were to be punished if denounced — are absurd.
The rhetorical mode is sharp, sometimes acid: "It is unjust to inquire whether a thing exists when one has assumed it does not" (Apol. II). "Plures efficimur, quotiens metimur a vobis; semen est sanguis Christianorum" — We grow more numerous every time we are mown down by you; the blood of Christians is seed (Apol. L) — is the most quoted line.
Related works include Ad Nationes (an earlier and rougher version of similar material), Ad Scapulam (a letter to the proconsul of Africa), and De Testimonio Animae (a brief argument that the human soul itself, in its instinctive language — good God, God help us, God knows — witnesses to the existence and nature of the one God independently of revelation).
The Anti-Heretical Works
De Praescriptione Haereticorum (composed c. 200) develops a legal-procedural argument against the heretics. The Roman legal concept of praescriptio allows a defendant to refuse to engage on the merits of a case on procedural grounds. Tertullian applies the concept: the heretics have no standing to interpret Scripture because Scripture belongs to the church that has descended in apostolic succession from the apostles; the heretics, lacking that succession, lack the right to use the Scripture they are interpreting. The argument is among the earliest sustained Christian formulations of the principle of apostolic succession and the role of the church as the authoritative interpreter of Scripture.
Adversus Marcionem (five books, composed in stages c. 207–12) is the longest of Tertullian's surviving works — a sustained refutation of the second-century Marcionite movement, which had distinguished sharply between the inferior creator God of the Old Testament and the supreme God of love revealed in Christ. Tertullian's argument defends the unity of the two Testaments, the goodness of the creator God, and the unity of the divine economy in salvation history. The work preserves substantial fragments of Marcion's lost Antitheses and Gospel and is therefore the principal source for what is known about Marcion's actual position.
Adversus Praxean (c. 213) defends the proper Trinitarian distinction against the modalist position of Praxeas, who had held that Father, Son, and Spirit were modes of one divine person rather than three distinct persons. The work is the principal text in which Tertullian develops the una substantia, tres personae formula.
The Disciplinary and Devotional Works
The shorter works that constitute much of Tertullian's surviving corpus address questions of Christian practice: De Baptismo, De Oratione, De Patientia, De Paenitentia, De Spectaculis (against attendance at the games and theater), De Idololatria, Ad Uxorem, De Cultu Feminarum (on the dress and adornment of Christian women), De Pallio (on Tertullian's own change of dress from Roman toga to the philosopher's pallium), De Carne Christi, De Resurrectione Carnis.
The later works, increasingly Montanist in coloration, include De Pudicitia (on penitential discipline, attacking the position later associated with the Roman bishop Callistus that murderers and adulterers could be readmitted to communion after penance), De Monogamia (against the permissibility of second marriage), De Ieiunio (defending Montanist fasting practices against catholic objection), and De Fuga in Persecutione (against flight from persecution).
It is in this last category that the famous Tertullianic positions appear. The line "Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis?" — What therefore has Athens to do with Jerusalem? — in De Praescriptione VII is often quoted as Tertullian's anti-philosophical manifesto, though the immediate context is more limited: Tertullian is attacking the use of philosophical schools as the source of heretical doctrine, not all philosophical reflection as such. The line Credo quia absurdum — I believe because it is absurd — is a misquotation; what Tertullian actually wrote in De Carne Christi 5 is certum est quia impossibile, it is certain because it is impossible — a tighter and more sophisticated argument about the kind of testimony that establishes the doctrine of the Incarnation.
Reception
Tertullian's African successor Cyprian (d. 258) inherited the basic theological vocabulary and the strong ecclesiology. Augustine, though knowing Tertullian's Montanist later writings well and citing him with reserve, absorbed the Latin theological vocabulary at depth; the entire Augustinian Trinitarian framework in De Trinitate operates on Tertullian's una substantia, tres personae. Jerome and Vincent of Lérins treated Tertullian as a learned but cautionary figure — a theologian whose later Montanism made his witness compromised but whose earlier work was indispensable.
The medieval Latin tradition continued to use Tertullian's vocabulary while sometimes forgetting its source. Modern editions — the Corpus Christianorum Series Latina volumes (Brepols), the Sources chrétiennes series — have made the complete corpus accessible. The standard biography is Barnes's Tertullian (1971; rev. ed. 1985); recent studies include Geoffrey Dunn's Tertullian (Routledge, 2004) and Eric Osborn's Tertullian, First Theologian of the West (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Significance
Tertullian's importance is twofold. He created the Latin theological vocabulary that fixed the terms of Western Christian doctrine for the next eighteen centuries, supplying the words and conceptual distinctions on which Latin Trinitarian theology, Christology, sacramental theology, and ecclesiology all rest. And he produced the first major body of Latin Christian apologetic and polemical literature, establishing the genres and rhetorical modes in which the Latin Christian intellectual tradition would express itself. The Montanist breach kept the church from formally canonizing him; the indebtedness was too great to allow him to be ignored.