5. Philosophy And Tertullian
5
PHILOSOPHY AND TERTULLIAN
Perhaps the two most oft-quoted lines from Tertullian are ‘Therefore what of Athens and Jerusalem? What of the academy and the church?’ (On the Prescriptions of Heretics 7.9) and ‘I believe it because it is absurd (credo quia absurdum est)’. From this, it is only natural that he has often been considered as a fideist and opponent of philosophy rather than as a rationalist. The fact that what Tertullian wrote in Latin is actually credibile est, quia ineptum est (On the Flesh of Christ 5.4) should be enough to make us want to look more carefully at Tertullian’s position with regard to the relationship between faith and reason and the broader issue of the relationship between Christianity and philosophy. As Osborn writes: ‘Some writers take the passage by itself and find irrationalism, while others look at the context and find rational argument.’ (Osborn 1997a:48–9).
There is indeed much criticism of philosophy in Tertullian’s writings. At the heart of the matter was his opinion that philosophy supported religious idolatry (To the Heathens 2.1.7). Philosophers are called ‘patriarchs of heresy’ (On the Soul 3.1). There was so much variation taught by philosophical schools, not all of which could be true, that it was simply an agent of spreading confusion and lies. On the other hand, what Christianity taught was the truth in all its simplicity (To the Heathens 2.1.12–14; Apology 47.4–10; On the Soul 2.6–7). Christian heretics distorted the truth because they depended upon the opinions of different philosophies (On the Soul 3.1; Against Hermogenes 8.3; On the Prescriptions of Heretics 7.3).
It was possible that the teaching of philosophy could coincide with Christian teaching, like a ship stumbling into a safe harbour during a storm (On the Soul 2.1; On the Testimony of the Soul 2.4), or could have borrowed from the Scriptures (To the Heathens 2.2.5–6). Yet, the method of philosophy was to distort the truth whenever it was grasped, so much so that Tertullian thought it better to ignore all philosophy, even though it might contain elements of the truth, because most people could not read it critically enough (On the Testimony of the Soul 1.4).
Tertullian also contrasted Christians and philosophers in terms of their practical morality. The philosophers based their ideas of goodness and virtue on mere human opinion. The obligation to live morally was based upon human authority for the philosopher. But just as human authority could be despised, so could human opinion be deceived (Apology 45.2). In contrast, Christian morality was based upon divine revelation and went much further in its demands (Apology 45.3). It also irked Tertullian that, while both Christians and pagan philosophers both were critical of the claims for the existence of the pantheon of gods, only the Christians were singled out for punishment for this view (Apology 46.4). Tertullian was not shy in naming philosophers and his points of disagreement with them. He devoted chapters two to six of the second book of To the Heathens to refuting the theories of what he described as ‘physical philosophy’. Democritus, Thales, Socrates, Plato, Zeno, Epicurus, the Stoics and Varro are all mentioned.
Yet that is not the end of the matter. Tertullian did have a large debt to classical culture; it influenced his thinking and writing, it provided him with a language and a methodology and it furnished him with the material against which he could react and develop his own position. Recent scholarship has been reappraising Tertullian’s use of philosophy without reaching a unanimous conclusion (Sider 1982:247–50). If one may be permitted to generalize, it seems that some modern commentators are taking the approach that Tertullian was not so much anti-philosophical or anti-rational, but rather that he developed a philosophy based on revelation; he did not separate faith and reason, but developed a reason based on faith. Osborn is at pains to mention Tertullian’s Stoicism throughout his 1997 monograph, particularly with regard to his concepts of the immanence of God, the balance between positive and negative theology, divine mutability, materiality, the two natures of Christ, rationality and ethics.
When we consider texts like On the Shows and On the Veiling of Virgins, in which we find Tertullian’s rhetorical threefold arrangement of arguments, not only is Scripture an authoritative source of evidence but also truth or intellect. What is particularly interesting is that these two works are not addressed to pagan readers but to Christians, when one might have thought that an appeal to ‘religiously neutral’ arguments based on reason would have been superfluous. Whole chapters of these and other treatises are devoted to rational argument not based upon anything overtly Christian. As Guerra points out, Tertullian constructed arguments from reason as one of the building blocks of treatise writing, but it is not just a question of a choice between reason and faith because Tertullian used about five such building blocks (moral behaviour, tradition and spiritual testimony being the other three) (Guerra 1991:109).
Tertullian opens On the Testimony of the Soul by acknowledging that non-Christians are more likely to be convinced by non-Christian evidence than by Christian evidence, no matter how overwhelmingly true the latter was. He pointed out that a number of Christian intellectuals had turned to philosophy and other pieces of non-Christian literature to demonstrate that there was nothing in Christianity that was contrary to philosophy at its best (On the Testimony of the Soul 1.1–2). Reason was a gift from God (On the Soul 16.2). Reason was to lead to what God has revealed in the Scriptures and reason could be judged by its conformity with the rule of faith (On the Prescriptions of Heretics 1–2). Osborn writes: The solution of the puzzle lies in the perfection of Christ; when the perfect is come, that which is in part, like philosophy, must be done away’ (Osborn 1997a:37).
We may witness this more positive mood in relation to classical culture in On the Pallium, a work of Tertullian’s maturity. On one level of reading, it is a work that advocates the abandonment of the Roman toga for the Greek/Punic pallium (On the Pallium 3–4).
So what does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? It all depends on how one interprets the two urban referents. González (1974:22) has argued that we cannot equate Athens simply with reason and Jerusalem simply with faith: ‘To him, then, the question is not one of reason versus faith as sources of authority but is rather a question of two different sorts of reason.’ The first argues about what is theoretically possible (when facts are made to conform with reason); the second argues about what has actually occurred (when reason is made to conform with facts).
The response to the paradox in On the Flesh of Christ is to understand that Tertullian was making use of a rhetorical topos, a little maxim whose very familiarity gave it a ring of truth. I take Tertullian’s comment about believing because something is improbable or impossible to be nothing much more than saying that the truth (in this case, about the resurrection of flesh) is often stranger than fiction (an argument that appears again in Against the Jews 9.7–8). González (1974:19–21) and Osborn (1997a:48–64) offer a more sustained investigation of this passage.