The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire

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!"[1020] 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."[1021]

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."[1022] 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."[1023] 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.[1024] He was far from studying the Scriptures – "nobody," he said later on, "comes to them unless he is already a Christian."[1025] 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[1026] 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."[1027]

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[1028] 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),[1029] 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.[1030] 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"[1031] – 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[1032] 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?"[1033] 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."[1034] 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.[1035] 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[1036] – 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."[1037] And again: "Why debate? God commands."[1038] 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."[1039]

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?[1040] Must you live? he asks. Elsewhere he says "there are no musts where faith is concerned."[1041] The man who claims to be condidonalis,[1042] to serve God on terms, Tertullian cannot tolerate. "Christ our Master called himself Truth – not Convention."[1043] 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.[1044] The dilemma of choosing between literature and Christ was a painful thing for men of letters for centuries after this.[1045] So Tertullian lays down the law for others; what for himself?

Under the Empire there were two ways to eminence, the bar and the camp, and Tertullian had chosen the former. His rhetoric, his wit, his force of mind, and his strong grasp of legal principles in general and the issue of the moment in particular, might have carried him far. He might have risen as high as a civilian could. It was a tempting prospect, – the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them – and he renounced it; and never once in all the books that have come down to us, does he give any hint of looking back, never so much as suggests that he had given up anything. Official life was full of religious usage, full too of minor duties of ritual which a Christian might not discharge. Tertullian was not the first to see this. A century earlier Flavius Clemens, the cousin of Domitian, seems to have been a Christian – Dio Cassius speaks of his atheism and Jewish practices, and Suetonius remarks upon his "contemptible inertia," though he was consul.[1046] In other words, the Emperor's cousin found that public life meant compromise at every step. This is Tertullian's decision of the case – it has the note of his profession about it. "Let us grant that it is possible for a man successfully to manage that, whatever office it be, he bears merely the title of that office; that he does not sacrifice, nor lend his authority to sacrifices, nor make contracts as to victims, nor delegate the charge of temples, nor look after their tributes; that he does not give shows (spectacula) at his own or the public cost, nor preside over them when being given; that he makes no proclamation or edict dealing with a festival; that he takes no oath; that – and these are the duties of a magistrate – he does not sit in judgment on any man's life or honour (for you might bear with his judging in matters of money); that he pronounces no sentence of condemnation nor any [as legislator] that should tend to condemnation; that he binds no man, imprisons no man, tortures[1047] no man" – if all this can be managed, a Christian may be a magistrate.[1048] Tertullian made his renunciation and held no magistracy. It may be said that, as he held none, it was easy to renounce it; but hopes are often harder to renounce than realities. So Tertullian left the law and the Stoics, to study the Scriptures, Justin and Irenæus[1049] – the Bible and the regula fidei his new code, and the others his commentators. The Christian is "a stranger in this world, a citizen of the city above, of Jerusalem"; his ranks, his magistracies, his senate are the Church of Christ; his purple the blood of his Lord, his laticlave in His cross.[1050]

But Tertullian could speak, on occasion, of what he had done. "We have no fear or terror of what we may suffer from those who do not know," he wrote to Scapula, "for we have joined this school (sectam) fully accepting the terms of our agreement; so that we come into these conflicts with no further right to our own souls."[1051] The contest was, as he says elsewhere, "against the institutions of our ancestors, the authority of usage, the laws of rulers, the arguments of the wise; against antiquity, custom, necessity; against precedents, prodigies and miracles,"[1052] and he did not need Celsus to remind him what form the resistance of the enemy might take. He knew, for he had seen, and that was why he stood where he did. But it is worth our while to understand how vividly he realized the possibilities before him.

There were the private risks of informers and blackmailers, Jews[1053] and soldiers, to which the Christians were exposed.[1054] They were always liable to be trapped in their meetings – "every day we are besieged; every day we are betrayed; most of all in our actual gatherings and congregations are we surprised."[1055] How are we to meet at all, asks the anxious Christian, unless we buy off the soldiers? By night, says Tertullian, "or let three be your church."[1056] Then came the appearance before the magistrate, where everything turned on the character or the mood of the official. Tertullian quotes to Scapula several instances of kindness on the bench, rough and ready, or high-principled.[1057] Anything might happen – "then," wrote Perpetua, "he had all our names recited together and condemned us to the beasts."[1058]

What followed in the arena may be read in various Acts of Martyrdom – in the story of Perpetua herself, as told in tense and quiet language by Tertullian. He, it is generally agreed, edited her visions, preserving what she wrote as she left it, and adding in a postscript what happened when she had laid down her pen for ever. The scene with the beasts is not easy to abridge, and though not long in itself it is too long to quote here; but no one who has read it will forget the episode of Saturus drenched in his own blood from the leopard's bite, amid the yells of the spectators, Salvum lotum! salvum lotum! nor that of Perpetua and Felicitas, mothers both, one a month or so, the other three days, stripped naked to be tossed by a wild cow. And here comes a curious touch; the mob, with a superficial delicacy, suggested clothing; rough cloths were put over the women, and the cow was let loose; they were tossed, and then all were put to the sword.

On martyrdom

"At this present moment," writes Tertullian, "it is the very middle of the heat, the very dog-days of persecution – as you would expect, from the dog-headed himself, of course. Some Christians have been tested by the fire, some by the sword, some by the beasts; some, lashed and torn with hooks, have just tasted martyrdom, and lie hungering for it in prison."[1059] Cross, hook, and beasts[1060] – the circus, the prison, the rack[1061] – the vivicomburium,[1062] burning alive – and meanwhile the renegade Jew is there with his placard of the "god of the Christians," an ugly caricature with the ears and one hoof of an ass, clad in a toga, book in hand[1063] – the Gnostic and the nervous Christian are asking whether the text "flee ye to the next" may not be God's present counsel – and meantime "faith glows and the church is burning like the bush."[1064] Yet, says Tertullian to the heathen, "we say, and we say it openly, – while you are torturing us, torn and bleeding, we cry aloud 'We worship God through Christ.'"[1065] To the Christian he says: "The command is given to me to name no other God, whether by act of hand, or word of tongue … save the One alone, whom I am bidden to fear, lest he forsake me; whom I am bidden to love with all my being, so as to die for him. I am his soldier, sworn to his service, and the enemy challenge me. I am as they are, if I surrender to them. In defence of my allegiance I fight it out to the end in the battle-line, I am wounded, I fall, I am killed. Who wished this end for his soldier – who but he who sealed him with such an oath of enlistment? There you have the will of my God."[1066] "And therefore the Paraclete is needed, to guide into all truth, to animate for all endurance. Those, who receive him, know not to flee persecution, nor to buy themselves off; they have him who will be with us, to speak for us when we are questioned, to help us when we suffer."[1067] "He who fears to suffer cannot be his who suffered."[1068] The tracts On Flight in Persecution and The Antidote for the Scorpion are among his most impressive pieces. They must have been read by his friends with a strange stirring of the blood. Even to-day they bring back the situation – living as only genius can make it live.

But what of the man of genius who wrote them? At what cost were they written? "Picture the martyr," he writes, "with his head under the sword already poised, picture him on the gibbet his body just outspread, picture him tied to the stake when the lion has just been granted, on the wheel with the faggots piled about him"[1069] – and no doubt Tertullian saw these things often enough, with that close realization of each detail of shame and pain which is only possible to so vivid and sensitive an imagination. He saw himself tied to the stake – heard the governor in response to the cry Christiana leonem[1070] concede the lion – and then had to wait, how long? How long would it take to bring and to let loose the lion? How long would it seem? Through all this he went, in his mind, not once, nor twice. And meanwhile, what was the audience doing, while he stood there tied, waiting interminably for the lion? He knew what they would be doing, for he had seen it, and in the passage at the end of de Spectaculis, which Gibbon quotes, every item of the description of the spectator is taken in irony from the actual circus. No man, trained, as the public speaker or pleader must be, to respond intimately and at once to the feelings and thoughts, expressed or unexpressed, of the audience, could escape realizing in heightened tension every possibility of anguish in such a crowd of hostile faces, full of frantic hatred,[1071] cruelty and noise. To this Tertullian looked forward, as we have seen, and went onward – as another did who "steadfastly set his face for Jerusalem." The test of emotion is what it has survived, and Tertullian's faith in Christ and his peace of mind survived this martyrdom through the imagination. Whatever criticism has to be passed upon his work and spirit, to some of his critics he might reply "Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin."

So much did martyrdom mean to the individual, yet it was not merely a personal affair. It was God's chosen way to propagate his church – so it had been foretold, and so it was fulfilled. "Nothing whatever is achieved," says Tertullian to the heathen, "by each more exquisite cruelty you invent;[1072] on the contrary, it wins men for our school. We are made more as often as you mow us down; the blood of Christians is seed."[1073]

Sixteen centuries or so later, Thoreau in his Plea for Captain John Brown, a work not unlike Tertullian's own in its force, its surprises, its desperate energy and high conviction, wrote similarly of the opponents of another great movement. "Such do not know that like the seed is the fruit, and that in the moral world, when good seed is planted, good fruit is inevitable, and does not depend on our watering and cultivating; that when you plant, or bury, a hero in his field, a crop of heroes is sure to spring up. This is a seed of such force and vitality, that it does not ask our leave to germinate."

On baptism

There were yet other possibilities in martyrdom. It was believed by Christians that in baptism the sins of the earlier life were washed away; but what of sins after baptism? They involved a terrible risk – "the world is destined to fire like the man who after baptism renews his sins"[1074] – and it was often felt safer to defer baptism to the last moment in consequence. Constantine was baptized on his death-bed. "The postponement of baptism is more serviceable especially in the case of children;" says Tertullian, "let them become Christians when they shall be able to know Christ. Why should the innocent age hasten to the remission of sins?"[1075] As to sins committed after baptism, different views were held. In general, as the church grew larger and more comprehensive, it took a lighter view of sin, but Tertullian and his Montanist friends did not, and for this they have been well abused, in their own day and since. They held that adultery and apostasy were not venial matters, to be forgiven by a bishop issuing an "edict," like a Pontifex Maximus, in the legal style, "I forgive the sins of adultery and fornication to such as have done penance, pænitentia functis."[1076] The Montanist alternative was not so easy; God, they held, permitted a second baptism, which should be final – a baptism of blood. "God had foreseen the weaknesses of humanity, the strategems of the enemy, the deceitfulness of affairs, the snares of the world – that faith even after baptism would be imperilled, that many would be lost again after being saved – who should soil the wedding dress, and provide no oil for their lamps, who should yet have to be sought over mountain and forest, and carried home on the shoulders. He therefore appointed a second consolation, a last resource, the fight of martyrdom and the baptism of blood, thereafter secure."[1077] This view may not appeal to us to-day; it did not appeal to Gnostic, time-server and coward. The philosophy of sin involved is hardly deep enough, but this doctrine of the second baptism cannot be said to lack virility.

But Tertullian himself did not receive the first baptism with any idea of looking for a second. Like men who are baptized of their own motion and understanding, he was greatly impressed by baptism. "There is nothing," he says, "which more hardens the minds of men than the simplicity of God's works, which appears in the doing, and the magnificence, which is promised in the effect. Here too, because, with such simplicity, without pomp, without any novel apparatus, and without cost, a man is sent down into the water and baptized, while but a few words are spoken, and rises again little or nothing cleaner, on that account his attainment of eternity is thought incredible."[1078] It must be felt that the illustration declines from the principle. It may also be remarked that this is a more magical view of baptism than would have appealed to Seneca or to his contemporaries in the Christian movement, and that, as it is developed, it becomes even stranger.

Tertullian's description of baptism is of interest in the history of the rite. The candidate prepares himself with prayer, watching and the confession of sin.[1079] "The waters receive the mystery (sacramentum) of sanctification, when God has been called upon. The Spirit comes at once from heaven and is upon the waters, sanctifying them from himself, and so sanctified they receive (combibunt) the power of sanctifying."[1080] This is due to what to-day we should call physical causes. The underlying matter, he says, must of necessity absorb the quality of the overlying, especially when the latter is spiritual, and therefore by the subtlety of its substance more penetrative.[1081] We may compare "the enthusiastic spirit," which, Plutarch tells us, came up as a gas from the chasm at Delphi,[1082] and further the general teaching of Tertullian (Stoic in origin) of the corporeity of the soul and of similar spiritual beings. He illustrates the influence of the Spirit in thus affecting the waters of baptism by the analogy of the unclean spirits that haunt streams and fountains, natural and artificial, and similarly affect men, though for evil – "lest any should think it a hard thing that God's holy angel should be present to temper waters for man's salvation."[1083] Thus when the candidate has solemnly "renounced the devil, his pomp and his angels,"[1084] he is thrice plunged,[1085] his spirit is washed corporeally by the waters "medicated" and his flesh spiritually is purified.[1086] "It is not that in the waters we receive the Holy Spirit, but purified in water under the angel, we are prepared for the Holy Spirit… The angel, that is arbiter of baptism, prepares the way for the Spirit that shall come."[1087] On leaving the water the Christian is anointed (signaculum). The hand of blessing is laid upon him, and in response to prayer the Holy Spirit descends with joy from the Father to rest upon the purified and blest.[1088]