SOURCE: "Tertullian of Carthage," in The Early Christian Apologists and Greek Philosophy, Van Gorcum & Comp. B. V., 1973, pp. 40-58.

[In the following essay, Timothy explores the sustained antipathy toward Greek philosophy in the writings and thought of Tertullian.]

Tertullian is a man clearly with a quarrel on his hands. Dispensing with preliminaries he throws down the challenge to his opponents with these words:

"Our contest lies against these things, the institutions of our ancestors, the authority of tradition"—by which he means, as the context shows, the tradition of paganism—"the laws of our governors and the reasonings of the wise."

The last-named come in particularly for the full brunt of his attack, for out of their own conjectures they have ingeniously composed their physical philosophy. Their systems which existed in a crude form in the apostolic times, though found of late in a somewhat polished form, are still essentially the same. If there is any basis for comparison between them and the Christians, it consists in what they have borrowed from Christianity and not Christianity from them, for "which of the poets or the sophists", asks Tertullian, "has not drunk at the fountain of the prophets?"

They have perverted what they found in scripture by altering what pleased them to suit their own designs, because being still in obscurity they lacked the means required for proper understanding of the scriptures. Some of them likewise have altered and corrupted the "newly given revelation" into a philosophic system, striking off from the one way many inexplicable ways. They have transformed the simplicity of the truth which they were too proud to believe and what was certain they, with their fastidious admixtures, have infected with uncertainty. Whatever in their own systems corresponds with prophetic wisdom they either ascribe to some other source or apply in some other sense. Thus truth is jeopardized, for they pretend either that truth is aided by falsehood or that falsehood derives support from truth which has wellnigh been excluded by the poisons with which they have contaminated it.

Having in some detail explained the techniques employed by the philosophers to this end Tertullian proceeds to lay down what he considers to be the effective remedy.

There must be a separation of the sentiments entertained by Christians in common with philosophy from the arguments the philosophers employ by recalling all questions to the inspired standard of God. Whatever noxious vapours exhaled by philosophy obscure the clear and wholesome atmosphere of truth require to be cleared away by shattering the arguments drawn from the principles of things and by setting over against them the maxims of heavenly wisdom, that the pitfalls whereby philosophy ensnares the heathen may be removed and the methods repressed that heresy makes use of to shake the faith of Christians.

The philosophers in general are comparable to Thales of Miletus who, while star-gazing, fell into a well. They are stupidly curious about natural phenomena while ever oblivious of the creator and ruler of all; they cannot be counted really wise since, where their discovery began, they wandered away from the beginning of wisdom which is the fear of God. What passes with them for investigation of the scriptures ends up as the metamorphosis of the latter into what their own minds have produced.

The very variety of the philosophic schools is further evidence of their service to untruth, more diversity than unanimity being discoverable among them: even in their agreement can be discovered diversity. Where, then, does truth come in when by the variety of its mutually antagonistic sects philosophy is itself divided into manifold heresies? These mockers and corrupters of the truth which they merely affect to hold care for nothing but vainglory: they philosophize in purple and, while holding to the name and honour that go with wisdom, forsake their principles. Their curious researches may have unearthed some elements of truth but these they changed into the products of their own minds as their vain desires increased, so that the truth they found has degenerated, and from one or two drops of the same they produce a perfect flood of argument. Speaking of his experience of the loquacious city of Athens, of the straining of philosophy after that facility of language which, rather than teaching, is mere talk, the apostle Paul sounded a warning against "subtle words and philosophy" signifying worldly learning which, he saw, would prove injurious to the truth.

By this same token, Tertullian continues, all heresies stand condemned because they consist of the resources of subtle speech and the rules of philosophy which is the material of this world's wisdom, the rash interpreter of the nature and dispensation of God, the origin of the aeons and who can tell what infinite forms, and the trinity of man in the system of Basilides, and Marcion's better god with all his tranquillity. Down with the teaching of Zeno which has contributed to equating matter with God and that of Heraclitus with his doctrine involving a god of fire. The unpardonable offence of the philosophers is the part that they have played in aiding and abetting the heretics who associate with them as well as with magicians, mountebanks and astrologers: they are the patriarchs of heresy and along with other representatives of cultured paganism transmitters of heathen superstition. The same subject-matter is discussed repeatedly by heretics and philosophers alike, the same arguments are involved: "What is the source of evil? Why is it allowed? What is the origin of man: how does he come into existence?—and the question raised recently by Valentinus, "How did God originate?" and the answer that he gives, "From invention and abortion." "O unhappy Aristotle", cries Tertullian, "who invented for these men the dialectic art of building up and pulling down … embarrassing even to itself, detracting everything and treating actually of nothing, whence are derived those "fables and endless genealogies", those "unprofitable questions", and "words that spread like a cancer." The apostle Paul, placing a restriction on all such things, expressly names philosophy.

Because of their desire for knowledge the heretics misinterpret Pauls' advice to "prove all things", and the dominical text likewise, "Seek and ye shall find." The advice to seek, says Tertullian, was needless enough for the apostles who had the Holy Spirit to instruct them, but even less so for us who have received the testimony of both the apostles and the Spirit and who, therefore have no need of additional research. One must seek doubtless till he find and believe when he has found. All that remains thereafter is to hold fast what one has believed, provided one also believes this, that there is no more to be believed, so nothing further to be sought after having found and believed what was taught by Christ who commands us to seek no further. Once one has believed his seeking is at an end for he has through believing found what he was looking for. If one must go on seeking so long as the possibility exists of finding anything, either he does not yet believe, because so far he has not found what he seeks, or having found it he has lost it or ceased to believe in it. Such seeking indicates the absence of fixed tenets, therefore, the absence of belief. Once anyone has laid hold of Jesus Christ, in short, and entered into enjoyment of the Gospel, he has no use for curious investigation or disputation: faith in Christ is all that he requires.

The answer to the question whether God required any material for the creation of the world is forthcoming not from the philosophers but from the prophets, from Wisdom itself, God's counsellor. The school of heaven is the school for Christians. Let the latter restrict themselves to what lies in their own field: let their seeking be confined to what can be investigated without impairing the rule of faith, to know nothing opposed to which is to know everything and with regard to which the rule of reason is applicable, under the three heads: Matter, Time, and Limit, with the questions, What?, When? and How long? related thereto respectively. There must be no interpretation which ignores this principle. Where after all is the need for such intellectual curiosity when the most ordinary person has direct access to the essential knowledge of God? "There is not a Christian workman", Tertullian confidently asserts, "but discovers God and manifests him and hence assigns to him all those attributes which go to make up a divine being, though as Plato affirms it is far from easy to find out the maker of the universe and hard, when he is found, to make him known to all. It is better to remain in ignorance lest one should arrive at knowledge of what one ought not to know. As to what Christians ought to know, that has been provided for. Whoever has the fear of God, provided he has attained to the knowledge and truth of God will, even though ignorant of all else, possess complete and perfect wisdom. If it is a question of revelation, it is better to be in ignorance of something because God has not revealed it than to know it according to human wisdom because man has been so bold as to assume it. "I praise the faith that has believed", Tertullian confesses, "in the duty of complying with the rule before learning the reason for it" and with one of his not infrequent rhetorical flourishes, he says, apostrophizing the soul, "I summon thee not as when, formed in schools, trained up in libraries, nurtured in the academies and porticos of Attica, thou pourest forth thy wisdom. I address thee, simple and unpolished, and uncultured and untaught, such as they have who have thee only, that very thing of the road, the street and the workshop, unsullied and entire. I want thine inexperience since in thy meagre experience no one feels any confidence. I ask of thee what thou bringest into man, which thou knowest from thyself or from thine author, whoever he may be."

Next to be dealt with are the crimes laid by Tertullian at the door of the philosophers with reference to God, creation, and the destiny of the soul, in connection with which we learn that the authority of the physical philosophers is alleged as the mancipium or special property of wisdom, in particular where the mystery of matter is concerned, though "the renowned Mercurius Trismegistus", we are told, who was master of all physical philosophy was unable to arrive at a solution, but then, neither the prophets nor the apostles nor even Christ had any knowledge concerning it.

The aim of the Stoics is to demonstrate, points out Tertullian, that matter, the material from which everything was created by the Lord, was unborn and unmade, having neither beginning nor end, and to establish the divine nature of the material elements. In this, of course, they are not alone, for the professors of wisdom in general from whose genius the spirit of every heresy derives have called the world's unworthy elements divine, according to their various schools of thought. Thales assumed the basic world-stuff to be water: Heraclitus, fire: Anaximenes, air: Anaximander, all the heavenly bodies: Plato, the stars and Zeno, air and ether. This is the error censured by Paul in his letter to the Galatians where he speaks of that "physical and natural speculation which holds the elements to be God." The fault, I suppose, of the divine doctrine, Tertullian says ironically, lies in its springing from Judaea rather than from Greece: it is evident that Christ erred in that, instead of sophists he sent out fishermen to preach. The ordinary man may be in error but is better off for erring simply than the physical philosophers who err speculatively. God had offenders in the wise and prudent who would not seek after him, though he was discoverable in his many mighty works, or who philosophized about him rashly and thereby furnished the heretics with their arts, not expounding God as they found him, but preferring to dispute about his quality, his nature, and even his abode. The worst of their aberrations is the trouble to which they go to prove the divine indifference or impassibility. It was from Epicurus that Marcion derived the foremost term of his philosophy, and the Gnostics would have men contemplate the "lonely goodness" of God. How, Tertullian demands, could a previously uncommunicative deity begin suddenly to communicate himself? How is salvation, an activity of goodness, to be reconciled with celestial neutrality? Nothing is so suited as salvation to the character of God whose nature would negate itself, if he should cease to act, as we are taught by God, not by the philosophers.

In addition, through assailing the veracity of the senses which are the stamp of man's rationality, God's dispensation has been impeached by the heretics. Valentinus draws a distinction between the bodily senseorgans and the intellectual faculties, a dualism responsible for the Gnostic aeons and genealogies. If, counters Tertullian, a dualism is involved, it has to do solely with the objects of sense-perception, not with the locus of soul and mind or sense and intellect. But why, he expostulates, adopt such methods in any case for torturing simple knowledge and for crucifying truth. You overthrow the whole condition of human life, he protests, railing at the Academy: you turn the order of nature in its entirety upside down: you veil the good providence of God himself by calling in question the trustworthiness of human sense-perception.

The philosophers have sought also to repudiate the resurrection of the body and for this the Stoics and the Epicureans are to be held responsible, though their teaching on the subject is not subscribed to by all the philosophic schools, since Pythagoras, Empedocles and Plato uphold the opposite point of view. That the latter, though not entering, at least knocked at the door of truth, Tertullian is willing to allow, but that is as far by way of compromise or conciliation as he is prepared to go.

His mantle, he tells us, has been adopted into a new and nobler philosophy, yet its original material has a tendency in many places to shine through. He sings avowedly a new song but the strains of the old song he was trained to can not infrequently be heard. "I must needs use a name", he says, "to express the essence of which that being consists who is called God and who is accounted the Great Supreme, not from his name but owing to his essence." God is one, he reasons, otherwise he does not exist, "because we more properly believe that what is not as it ought to be has no existence." He acknowledges that Christianity has unambiguously declared the principle of the uniqueness and the unity of God, but he bases the principle on a philosophical assumption and it is by logical deduction that he arrives at the proof of it. Reason forbids, he argues, belief in more gods than one, for God must by definition be a being to whom there is no equal, since he is the Great-Supreme. That being to whom nothing is equal must moreover be unique. It therefore follows that God is one. He debates the relationship of substance to attribute and speaks of reasoning from species to genus and vice versa.

It is, however, with regard to certain tenets of the Stoic philosophy, in which as a Roman lawyer he was trained, that the persisting influence of his intellectual heritage, the forces that had stamped themselves, in a sense, ineradicably on his mind and outlook, may be most clearly seen.

He considers sin in every form irrational and the world a prison house, a thought with which he would console the imprisoned martyrs and reconcile them to their fate. He says, with a touch of Stoic self-sufficiency, "My only business is with myself and adds with something of the Stoic's proud indifference, "I have, apart from that, no other care save not to care." With reference to Peter's experience recorded in Acts X,9f., he sees in the "vessel coming down, like a huge sheet lowered by the four corners to the earth" and containing "all quadrupeds and creeping things of the earth and wild birds", a vision of universal community. He has also reminiscences of Stoic fatalism. It was, in Tertullian's opinion, necessary that there should have been heresies. The scriptures themselves were fashioned by the will of God to furnish material for heretics. It was no less necessary that evil should exist and that the Lord should be betrayed.

Recurrence for Tertullian, as for the Stoics, lies at the heart of all creation. "Whatever", he writes, "you chance on has been already in existence and whatever you have lost returns unfailingly … All things after passing out of sight revert to their former state … they come to an end for the very purpose of coming into existence once again."

On the subject of man's mortality he echoes the familiar Stoic attitude. "There is one thing only that much concerns us in this life and that is getting quickly out of it: there is nothing to be feared after death, if there is nothing to be felt."

In several respects he is not far removed from Stoic pantheism. He gives expression to the sentiment in several places throughout his works that all things are full of their maker and occupied by him. Rather than think of the natural elements as not worthy of God, he prefers to regard them as divine, in spite of his having on this very point severely criticised the pagan philosophers, and likens the Son, the Logos, to a ray emitted by the Creator by whose active agency all things, he says, consist, though here the aim may be to safeguard the idea of God's transcendence and unity.

His anthropology has also an unmistakably Stoic ring. There are, quite literally, an outer and inner man. The latter is the soul which is born of the divine afflatus, but, as regards its form is an exact replica of the body: both are in fact bodies, for example, the soul has eyes and ears wherewith to see God and hear His voice.

Calling in question the distinction drawn by the dialecticians between the natural and the supernatural, he insists that everything without exception falls into the former category, for nature, he argues, if it is anything, is a reasonable work of God. "We are worshippers", he declares, "of one God of whose existence and character nature teaches all mankind, who will never be concealed, will never be absent, will always be known and heard …, who has for his witness all this that we are and wherein we exist, whereby proof is afforded of his being and unity". Even in matters of faith it is pointless to expect men to arrive at knowledge of the deity by the unaided light of reason, because those even who believe depend on some token of the latter in works worthy of God. There is, accordingly, for faith a basic unity of reason and of natural revelation. God must first be known from nature and thereafter authenticated by instruction, from nature through His works and by instruction through the revelation he has given in the scriptures, with the aid of discipline. Scripture, nature and discipline combine to reinforce awareness of God, each in its own way ministering to His purpose. Scripture establishes God's law, nature attests it, while discipline exacts it, and whatever is out of harmony with these three can have no claim to be of God. If scripture is uncertain, nature is manifest, and with regard to nature's witness scripture can be in no uncertainty. If as regards the latter there is any dubiety, discipline indicates what has been ratified by God.

The resurrection of the dead is testified to by "the whole revolving order of things", and affords an illustration of the divine energies displayed as much in nature as in God's spoken word. God wrote it in His mighty works before He wrote it in the scriptures, with the intention of sending prophecy (or scripture) as a supplementary instructor.

The Greeks used the term, … [logos] which is correctly understood as signifying "word", but the older meaning, "reason" signifies the thought or consciousness of God. A statement already made is recalled to the effect that God made the cosmos and everything it contains by his Word and Reason and Power. The wise men of the Greeks agree that the Logos or Word and Reason are responsible for the creation of the world.

Zeno lays it down that he who fashioned all things should be called creator, though he also designates him Fate, God, the soul of Jupiter and the necessity of things. Cleanthes gathers up all these various designations under the name of spirit. To the Word and Reason and Power by means of which, as we proclaim, says Tertullian, God created everything, we also ascribe spirit, as their appropriate substance, the Word dwelling in the latter when it speaks forth, Reason being present when it commands and Power presiding when it carries things into effect. By his exorcising, healing and life-restoring miracles, by his stilling of the storm and his walking on the sea, Christ is proved to be God's Logos, the same who was doing and who had done all things, the primal, first-begotten Word.

The Son's authority was not restricted to things that pertained to the world's creation, for at all times he held converse with men, from Adam to the patriarchs and the prophets, in visions, dreams, dark sayings and the like, laying from the beginning the foundation of what he intended to follow out to the end. For the sake of those who later in history were to witness the Incarnation he rehearsed his destined role so as to smooth the path of faith, or to make belief in the Incarnation easier for them when it eventually took place.

God's overall perfection springs from his eternity and his rationality. Everything in him is bound to be rational as it is natural, and since nothing can be accounted good but what is rationally good, reason will be a necessary attribute of his goodness. He has provided, disposed and arranged everything by reason, and according to reason everything he has willed should be handled and understood. Reason will thus be found to lend support to tradition, custom and faith. It is the rudder without which those who are ignorant of God steer their whole course through life, knowing not how to avoid the tempest which is threatening the world.

Before the world was made, and prior to the generation of the Son, God existed … in and for himself, since nothing else extrinsic to himself was in existence. Even then, however, God was not alone, for he had his Reason with him … Reason was first in him.

God is the source also of the generalized primordial law that rules the universe and from which all other manifestations of the law of God derive. Within the latter like the leaves and branches present (potentially) at the embryonic stage of a tree's development, were comprised all the precepts of the posterior law which in due time germinated when disclosed. There existed before Moses an unwritten law which in a natural way was understood habitually and habitually observed and was not given primarily at Horeb or at Sinai in the desert but first existed in Paradise and at given periods passed through successive stages of reformation or improvement (for the patriarchs, for the Jews, and later for the Gentiles), in keeping with the circumstances of the times, with a view to man's salvation.

The role delegated to the Paraclete in the Christian economy is the direction of discipline, the unfolding of the scriptures, the reformation of intellect and making progress toward better things; for nothing is without its progressive stages of development. The creation, little by little, advances to fruition. First, there is the grain; then, from the grain, the shoot; and, from the shoot, the shrub. Branches and leaves follow. Presently the full-grown tree expands to view and finally emerge the flourish and the mellow fruit from it. So it is with goodness, for the God of creation and the God of goodness are the same. The latter was to begin with in an elementary state, motivated by the natural fear of God. From there, through the Law and the prophets, it advanced to infancy; thence, through the Gospel, to the fervour of its youth; and now, through the Paraclete, it is coming to a settled state of maturity.

The argument for Christian practices is strengthened when they are upheld by nature, "the first ruler of all", the authority of which, on the ground of the consensus gentium is one of the chief factors setting the standard for Christians. Any practice, per contra, that is opposed to nature sets those indulging in it at variance with the rest of their fellow-men, or with humanity at large.

As for the soul, rationality impressed on it from the first moment of its creation by its author who is himself essentially rational is its natural condition. The soul has knowledge of itself without which it would have been incapable of fulfilling its true function. It is in keeping with the fitness of things in a special way that man should have been equipped with such a soul as to be in a unique sense the rational animal. "O testimony of the soul by nature Christian", exclaims Tertullian. Though in bondage to the body, led astray by depravities, weakened by lusts and by passions, and in slavery to false gods, the soul, notwithstanding, whenever it comes to itself, as when roused from sleep or illness or the like, and whenever it acquires something of its natural soundness, speaks of God. Every soul by its own right proclaims what Christians may not utter above their breath.

The testimonies of the soul are one with those of nature and of reason; they are simple as they are true, and commonplace as they are simple; universal as they are commonplace, natural as they are universal, and divine as they are natural. One has only to reflect upon the majesty of nature from which the soul derives its authority. Nature is the mistress, her disciple is the soul, but all that is taught and all that is learned comes from Him who teaches the mistress, that is to say, from God.

The soul was before prophecy and its endowment from the beginning was the inborn knowledge of God which amongst the Egyptians, the Assyrians, and the inhabitants of Pontus, is the same, seeing that their souls call the God of the Jews their God. Goodness, originally divine, inborn and natural resides in the soul of man and makes the soul akin to God whose image or form in man, received originally from the divine afflatus has been lost as a result of human sin. The likeness of God in man persists, however, as the earnest of his eternal destiny, for what comes from God cannot be so much extinguished as obscured. Obscured it can be, because it is not God; extinguished it cannot be, because its being derives from Him. It continues to manifest itself, being indestructible, in that native attribute of goodness, man's freedom and power of will.

At Christ's coming the Creator who is law, reason and world-soul initiated a process of recapitulation whereby the human race is renewed and illuminated and in which Jesus figures as the enlightener and trainer of mankind, the master teaching them how to escape to safety, and preparing by degrees the means of healing for the inflamed condition induced by Adam's sin.

Men cannot plead ignorance of God or Providence, for the world is itself inscribed with the signature of its maker and in each man's conscience the inscription may be read.

Because it is good originally and remembers its origin, God is assented to from within the soul of man, by such expressions as "Good God", "God knows" etc. It is thus that in prophetic forecasts the soul's divinity bursts forth. Every land has its own language but the subjects that speech deals with are common to them all, and man is the one name belonging to every nation upon earth. God is everywhere, goodness is everywhere, the soul's witness is world-wide.

Nature is a source in many of the knowledge of the immortality of the soul, and of the knowledge of God in all, as is the conscience of a nation when it attests the one, supreme divinity, and other intelligent or rational beings like ourselves when they acknowledge God as judge. What commends common-sense is its simplicity, its sharing the same sentiments and opinions and the fact that its pronouncements are open and accessible to each and everyone. It may not like the divine reason which can often be at variance with superficial appearances lie at the very heart of things, but, for all that, it is divine.

Some of Tertullian's statements quoted at the beginning of this chapter have already afforded some indication as to how he felt about Greek culture in general. His reaction is on the whole denunciatory and at times abusive in the extreme. He seems to take special pleasure in the prospect of deified emperors and governors of provinces who persecuted the Christians, philosophers who scouted the idea of a hereafter, not to mention other, more colourful representatives of the pagan way of life, enveloped in fires more fierce than those wherewith, in the days of their power and pride of life, their wrath waxed hot against the followers of Christ, or tossing in the fiery billows of the judgment after death; yet even in his castigation of institutions embodying that pagan way of life he cannot refrain here and there from being philosophical.

Believe your books, if you must, he counsels his pagan audience, but so much more believe those that are divine and which agree with the light of nature in the witness of the soul. Choose which you find to be, he tells them, the more faithful friend of truth. Your books may be distrusted but neither God nor nature lie; or consider the result, he says of what goes on at the racecourse—disfiguration, among other things, of the human countenance which is no different from the disfiguration of the image of God himself. Such excesses accompanying participation in the public sports, games, shows, etc. are totally opposed to nature, to reason and to God, and all that is so opposed deserves to be branded as monstrous among men.

With the object of upholding the integrity of human sense-experience, and in proof of its wholesome influence he points with approbation to the cultural and civilizing accomplishments of which the sense-impressions are the source—"tot artes, tot ingenia, tot studia, negotia, officia, commercia, remedia, consilia, solatia, victus, cultus ornatusque omnia". The body or man's physical constitution is the medium, he contends, for the procreation of the arts, the mind's pursuits and powers, and the soul's activities. There is thus no reason to exclude the physical from the eternal life of heaven. It therefore follows that the doctrine of the resurrection of the body is acceptable as a reasonable belief.

This conclusion is reinforced by a brief excursus into physiological psychology. Thinking is physically conditioned. The faculty, which rules in the sensory perceptual field of human experience is situated in the brain or in the space between the eyebrows or wherever else the philosophers see fit to locate it. The physical is, therefore, the locus in which the thought processes occur. The soul, so long as it is embodied, is never separate from the flesh, while the flesh does nothing without the soul.

Even the virtues which the Christian extols are not produced on soil foreign to the cultivated life. Modesty, the pre-condition of all good dispositions, is, like every worthy human quality, the outcome of breeding and educational influences. The flower of manners, it is a rare thing, not perfected easily, yet tenuous if life, if nature, training, and self-discipline play their part. Neglect of study on the other hand leads to lapse in discipline, which is regrettable. The soul's substance is not benefitted by education but its conduct and discipline are; such nurture does nothing to increase the soul, but adds to its grace and embellishment.

Tertullian deplores the fact that many Christians are uneducated, that still more falter in their faith, that some again are lacking in intellectual stability and in need of instruction, direction and strengthening. There are those also of a somewhat perverse inclination—the uneducated mostly—who take wrong meanings out of words, while the majority are startled at the slightest mention of the Trinitarian formula or any allusion to common-sense. Certain people are well satisfied with simply having believed carrying in their minds through ignorance a faith which they have never put to the test and the foundation of which is mere probability, so unlike those "who have agonized into the same light of truth from the same womb of a common ignorance". Yet we see something of the other side of Tertullian, when, in a self-revealing moment, he confesses openly that, new disciple that he is, and a follower of the apostle Paul, he believes nothing in the meantime but that nothing should rashly be believed and that whatever is believed without enquiry into its source is believed rashly; but to continue the former strain, the heretics, he says, with the philosophers and others laugh and jeer at the things Christians believe and this should be enough to challenge the latter to avail themselves of their rhetoric as well as their philosophy.

It is not that the adjuncts to civilized existence are unconditionally bad, for nature teaches, as is known universally, that God is the creator of the universe, that the universe is good, and that it belongs to man by the free gift of his maker who has blessed the whole of his creation for wholesome and good uses. Not cultured living in itself but the excesses attending it, is what is being condemned. Christ came in the flesh not to enlighten feardriven boors and savages … but men already civilized, yet under illusions from their culture, so that they might arrive through him at the knowledge of the truth.

The whole creation fashioned with a rivalry among its several parts demonstrates the regulation of the universe by an over-ruling reason. "Will a single floweret from the hedgerow", asks Tertullian, ".… a single little shellfish from any sea, … a single stray feather of a moorfowl, to say nothing of a peacock, inform you that the creator was a poor craftsman?" "Imitate, if you can", he says elsewhere, "the bee's cells, the ant's hills, the spider's webs, the silkworm's threads. Endure, if you know how, the creatures that take possession of your bed and house, the blister beetle's poisonous injections, the fly's spikes, the gnat's sheath and sting. Take a turn finally round yourself; survey man inside out. Even this handiwork of our God will please you, inasmuch as your own Lord, that better God, loved it so well." Nothing in fact occurs without the will of God, whether it be for the shielding or for the shaking of faith.

This somewhat rhapsodic train of thought is apparently no answer to the question which breaks in upon it at this point: "What of evil things?" God made these things, but not of his own will and pleasure, is Tertullian's reply; that would have been unworthy and unseemly of him as well as being at variance with the universal fitness of things. The fault really lies in matter which, admittedly, may be evil and yet good things are created out of it.

But the questioner is not satisfied insisting, "What about the text: 'It is I who create evil.'?" and Tertullian replies by explaining that two kinds of evil are involved—mala culpae, evils of sin of which the devil is the cause; and mala poenae, penal evils the author of which is God. The former are morally bad, whereas the latter resulting from the operation of divine justice on human sin which is the consequence of the schism that arose initially from the first anti-rational action on man's part in an otherwise good world, may seem to be evil in the eyes of those who suffer them, but are not actually so, since they are providentially and remedially arranged.

"Then, what of evil in the larger, cosmic sense?", reiterates the questioner. The two kinds of evil, answers Tertullian, come into it again. There is that which, owing to the evil spirit's intervention, supervenes upon the soul, and a natural, antecedent evil which arises of itself—we might prefer to say "primordially" or "nonderivatively"—our nature being corrupted by another nature owning a god and father of its own.

Tertullian thus asserts the basic unity of all being and in support of his assertion invokes the sacramental principle.

What, in your estimate, he says, addressing the heretics, is the utter disgrace of my God, in fact is the sacrament of man's salvation. The Son has been seen and heard and met in the Incarnation … uniting God and man in himself, God in mighty deeds, in weak ones man, so that he might give to man as much as he takes from God.

God held converse with man that man might learn to act like God; God dealt on equal terms with man that man might learn to deal on equal terms with him; God was made little that man might be made great.

Take it all in all, whatever happens happens for Tertullian in the best of all possible worlds—except for the philosophers for some of whom he shows a degree of preference by the labels he attaches to each of them—"… the nobility of Plato, the force of Zeno, the level-headedness of Aristotle, the stupidity of Epicurus, the sadness of Heraclitus, and the madness of Empedocles", but for all of them, apparently, without exception he has this final parting shot:

What has Athens to do with Jerusalem; what concord is there between the Academy and the Church? The Christian's instruction comes from the porch of Solomon who taught that the Lord should be sought in simplicity of heart. Away with all efforts to produce a mottled Stoic-Platonic-dialectic Christianity! Where is there any likeness between the Christian and the philosopher; between the disciple of Greece and the disciple of heaven; between the man whose object is fame and the man whose object is life; between the talker and the doer; between him who builds up and him who pulls down; between the friend and the foe of error; between one who corrupts the truth and one who restores and teaches it?