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| Fenton John Anthony Hort |
In 1890, Fenton John Anthony Hort
(half of the Westcott-Hort duo) delivered a series of six lectures on
ante-Nicene fathers. They
were published in 1895, a few years after his death. What
follows here, with slight adjustments, is the fifth lecture in the series.
LECTURE V: TERTULLIAN AND CYPRIAN
The last
Father whose life and writings came before us was Clement of Alexandria. In him
ancient Christian theology in some important respects reaches its highest
point. There were after him greater as
well as more influential theologians, but with all his very manifest defects
there was no one whose vision of what the faith of Jesus Christ was intended to
do for mankind was so full or so true.
His great
pupil Origen, and one or two of Origen’s own pupils, who worthily carried on
the tradition of Alexandrian theology, will I hope come before us next time. Meanwhile we must turn aside today to a region
geographically not remote from Egypt, but in other respects curiously unlike
Egypt as regards the Christian theologians whom it bred in the earlier
centuries.
The Roman
proconsular province of Africa, approximately what we now in Church History for
clearness’ sake call “North Africa,” was, as
Mommsen has pointed out, a remarkably insulated region, being shut off from the
interior and from the coasts to the East by vast deserts. The most important
part of it answers roughly to the modern Tunis,
Carthage being
the capital. The Mediterranean divided it from Sicily
and Italy, but there was
close intercourse with Rome
by water. Unhappily we know nothing of
the foundation or earlier history of the North African Churches. But there is good reason to believe that they
first created a Latin Bible.
They also
probably contributed largely to the creation of the church organization which
became prevalent in the West. They
certainly created the distinctively Latin theology, which, developed especially
by Augustine, and again by great theologians of the Middle Ages, and again by
the leading Continental Reformers of the sixteenth century, has dominated men’s
thoughts in Western Europe respecting God and
man, both for good and for evil. We have
to consider today the first two great Fathers known to us from the North
African Churches, probably the first two great Fathers whom they produced: Tertullian and Cyprian.
Nearly all
that we know about
Tertullian is
gleaned from his own writings, and that is not much. He was probably born
somewhere about the middle of the second century, and himself a native of
North Africa. At
Carthage
he would have the fullest opportunity for acquiring the best culture of the
time.
Next to
Rome,
it was the second city of the
Western Empire
in size and importance; perhaps also, as Mommsen says, the most corrupt city of
the West as well as the chief centre of the Latin cultivation and
literature.
Tertullian’s writings show
what full use he made of these opportunities, as regards Greek and Roman
literature.
His occupation was that of
an advocate, and the usual course of a lawyer’s training in rhetoric would
naturally lead him to spend some time at
Athens
and at
Rome in
youth.
To an intelligent young lawyer
Rome would be a very attractive
place just then, on account of the distinguished Roman jurists of the
time.
All this time Tertullian was
assuredly a heathen, and apparently a man of vicious life, as he states
himself, and as the foulness which ever afterwards infested his mind too
painfully confirms.
How he became a
Christian he never tells us directly, but it is tolerably clear that he is
reciting his own experience when he more than once speaks of the moral
impression produced on beholders by Christian martyrs.
So in a famous passage of the
Apologeticum [Tert. Apol. 50]
addressed to the heathen:
“We
multiply every time that we are mown down by you:
the blood of Christians is seed . . . . That
very obstinacy which you reproach us with is a teacher.
For who when he beholds it is not impelled to
examine what are the inner contents of the matter?”
Again:
“Every one looking on such endurance, smitten as with a kind of scruple,
is both enkindled to examine whence it proceeds, and, when he has discovered, himself also at once
follows the truth.” Within the last few
years it has become possible to surmise with some probability what the
martyrdoms were which thus changed the course of Tertullian’s life. We now know that the year 180, the first year
of the
Emperor Commodus, was the
year when seven men and five women from the African town of
Scilla
were martyred at
Carthage.
The
Acts of their martyrdom are still extant.
[See
Lightfoot’s Apostolic Fathers (2nd
Edition), Ignatius, i. 524 foll.]
Seventeen
years later there was again persecution.
Apparently the Christians, or some Christians, refused to take part in the public festivities,
probably involving idolatrous usages, which greeted the final victory of the
Emperor Septimius Severus over other claimants of the imperial authority; and
accordingly the existing laws seem to have been put in force against Christians, though probably not by the Emperor himself. At least three of Tertullian’s writings are
memorials of this time; his great
Apologeticum,
a brilliant and elaborate defense of Christians from the charges of all kinds
brought against them, abounding in interesting matter of many kinds, and for
its own purpose effective; yet all written with an exuberant cleverness which
is too often merely painful. This book
was addressed to the governors of provinces, another the
Ad nationes
to the heathen peoples generally, a third
Ad martyres to
the Christian prisoners in
North Africa. To this crisis also belong the
Acts of Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, which, if not written by Tertullian
himself, as some think, at all events proceed from that set of North African
Christians of which he was the leader, and show clear signs of a Montanistic
feeling. Of all the genuine Acts of
Martyrdom that have been preserved to us these are the most interesting.
Taking a
second leap of fourteen or fifteen years more, we come to another apologetic
book of Tertullian’s,
addressed
to the Proconsul Scapula.
Severus
had died at
York
in February 211, and persecution broke out afresh quite early in his
successor Caracalla’s reign. Thus we
have Tertullian coming forward as an apologist at two distinct and distant
crises.
But, if he
was an energetic defender of the Church, he also became a hardly less energetic
assailant of the Church. Jerome writes
of him, “Till middle life he was a presbyter of the Church [this by the way is the only evidence we have, though
it is probably sufficient, that Tertullian was ever more than a layman], but, Jerome
proceeds, “having afterwards fallen away to the doctrine of Montanus through
the envy and contumelies of the clergy of the Roman Church, he refers to the
new prophecy in many books.” Jerome then enumerates certain books, now lost,
which he calls specially written against the Church. The statement is crude in
form, and evidently colored by reminiscences of Jerome’s own quarrels with the
Roman clergy of a century and a half later: but the substantial facts were
probably to be found in those books now lost. There are sufficient echoes of
them in the existing books. Every one
must be struck by the parallelism with the story of Hippolytus, all the more
when it is remembered that he and Tertullian were contemporaries. In more respects than one, they must have had
strong mutual sympathies, though Hippolytus, as far as we know, kept clear of
those special eccentricities which, as we shall shortly see, were the fundamental
cause of Tertullian’s eventual separation from the great body of the Church.
The story
which we have just been reading carries us to what was doubtless the governing
interest of Tertullian’s life, his relations to what is called Montanism. This, you will remember, was an enthusiastic
popular religious movement, originating in the uplands of Phrygia. It was the erratic form taken by a great
impulse towards reformation which went through various churches late in the
second century, partly due to a survival from an earlier stage of Christianity,
but still essentially a reaction and an innovation. Briefly, its characteristics were these;
first, a strong faith in the Holy Spirit as the promised Paraclete, present as
a heavenly power in the Church of the day; secondly, specially a belief that
the Holy Spirit was manifesting Himself supernaturally at that day through
entranced prophets and prophetesses; and thirdly, an inculcation of a specially
stern and exacting standard of Christian morality and discipline on the
strength of certain teachings of these prophets.
An increase
in the numbers and prosperity of the Church having brought an increase of
laxity, it was not unnatural that attempts should be made to stem it by a
rigorous system of prohibitions. To
these three characteristics of Montanism may be added two others, fourthly, a
tendency to set up prophets against bishops, the new episcopal organization
being probably favorable to that large inclusiveness of Christian communion in
which the Montanists saw only spiritual danger; and fifthly, an eager
anticipation of the Lord’s Second Coming as near at hand, and a consequent
indifference to ordinary human affairs.
Now it was
the rigorous moral legalism of Montanism that probably first attracted
Tertullian. With a man of vehement and
ill-disciplined character, as he was, and always remained, conversion from
heathenism might naturally be accompanied by a violent rebound: and traces of
this are seen in what are apparently his earliest writings; and then after a
time we find him drawn on from Montanist morality and discipline to belief in
the Montanist prophets, and to the ecstatic type of inspiration which they
represented, and to their peculiar form of devotion to the Paraclete. But all this time he is simply a partisan
within the Church, not in any way separated from it. But there is a third stage in which he writes
clearly as the member of a different body, claiming to be made up of ‘men of
the Spirit,’ while he sneers at the members of the great Church (the worldly
Church, he would say) as being only psychici,
‘men of the soul.’ In what manner he and
his ‘men of the Spirit’ became finally detached from the Church; whether e.g.
they seceded or (more probably) were expelled, we do not know.
Personal
squabbles, such as Jerome speaks of, may well have been mixed up with
intolerances on either side, or on both. The time when this took place was
probably some twenty years more or less from the beginning of the century. Jerome tells us that Tertullian is said to
have lived to an extreme old age. This
is all that we know.
Besides
Tertullian’s apologetic writings, nearly all of which have been already
noticed, he was the author of a number of tracts of greater or less length
addressed to Christians on various subjects belonging to morality or religion;
e.g.
theatrical
representations,
idolatry (i.e. as
mixed up with various trades and public occupations),
the soldier’s chaplet
(the laurel crown which he held to be implicated in idolatry),
flight in
persecution, ‘
Scorpiace’
(martyrdom),
prayer,
patience,
baptism,
repentance,
two books to his wife
(against second marriage of women),
adornment of
women,
exhortation
to chastity (against second marriage of men),
monogamy, modesty (
Pudicitia,
chiefly on the question of admitting penitents), fasting, against the
Psychici,
veiling of
virgins, and
the
cloak (i.e. the philosopher’s cloak, as now worn by Christians).
Besides these more or less practical
writings, there are eight or nine more of a strictly doctrinal character,
chiefly intended directly or indirectly for the confutation of Pseudo-Gnostics
or other supposed heretics; but including
a very important
treatise against Praxeas in which the doctrine of the Trinity is defended
against the Roman Sabellians against whom Hippolytus wrote.
Three of
the treatises bear the titles ‘
On the Flesh of
Christ,’ ‘
On the
Resurrection of the Flesh,’
‘
On the Soul.’ Much the longest is
the treatise
against Marcion in five books, probably founded on earlier Greek writings.
In spite of its reckless scurrility of tone, it contains many passages both
beautiful and true. The most popular
however of all these doctrinal works, and virtually a preface to them, is one
entitled ‘
On
the Prescription of Heretics.’ The
main drift of this most plausible and most mischievous book is this: you try to argue with heretics and to
convince them, and you do no good; you discuss Scripture with them and appeal
to its authority, and again you do no good; the only way to overcome them is to
shut them up sharply with what the Roman law calls Prescription, and tell them
our belief is the belief of the Churches
which trace back their origin to the Apostles, and therefore it must be the
true belief. It was pardonable enough that Tertullian should not have in mind
the living growth of belief which had been always going on in these very
churches. But it is another thing to
find him making war on all free action of the mind and conscience in the things
of faith, and assuming that there are no depths of Divine truth beyond the
doctrines which men have been able to formulate for public acceptance.
His
complaint is not only against ‘heretics’ but also against ‘nostri’; he names no
names, but what he says seems specially directed against Clement of Alexandria. It grieves him much that an appeal is made to our Lord’s words “Seek and ye
shall find, knock and it shall be opened to you,” which he explains away by a
series of ingenuities, beginning with the assertions that having been uttered
early in our Lord’s ministry, while He was as yet imperfectly known, they
ceased to be true afterwards, and that they were addressed to the Jews alone.
This is a
sufficient illustration of Tertullian’s characteristic defects. To understand
him rightly we must remember that under the Roman lawyer was probably hidden
the man of Carthaginian i.e. the Phoenician blood. As in the case of Tatian,
his utter want of sympathy with Greek and Roman greatness is probably due to
the inborn sense of alien race. To the
same source may perhaps be also traced his violence, his passion for bitter
antagonisms. But it is a relief to read the touching words in which, writing on
Patience, he bewails his own want of it.
“It will be
a kind of solace to dispute about that which it is not given me to enjoy, like
sick men, who, since they are removed from health, do not know how to cease
speaking about its advantages. So I, poor wretch (miserrimus ego), always sick with the heats of impatience, must
needs sigh after and call after and discourse about that health of patience
which I fail to possess. . . . .
Patience is so set at the head of the things of God, that no one can
observe any precept, or perform any work well pleasing to the Lord, if he be a
stranger to patience.”
Apart from
the infectiousness of his intolerance, Tertullian did serious injury to the
Church of his own age and of later ages by beginning the process of casting the
language of theology in the molds supplied by the law courts. In the Bible legal images take their place
among a variety of other images, but that is quite another thing from the
supremacy which legal conceptions of spiritual things acquired through the
reckless use of legal phraseology. But,
when the worst is said, Tertullian remains one of the greatest of the Fathers,
always needing to be read with the utmost caution, but almost always amply
worth reading; not the less perhaps because it needs some labor to extract the
meaning from his closely condensed and epigrammatic sentences. He is a man of true genius; and not that only
but also a man of warm and passionate Christian feeling; and moreover one who,
despite the obstacles created by his own theories, had a keen eye for many not
obvious aspects of truth, which presented themselves to him for the most part
in sudden flashes, and so by their frequent contradictions reflect the moods of
a fiery soul, itself always full of contradictions.
As a sample
of his more quiet controversial vein, in which he is something much better than
controversial, we may take a few words of his on the creation of man, in
refutation of Marcion’s theory that the God of creation and of the Law was only
a just God, not a good God. [See Tertullian adv. Marc. ii. 4.] The exaggerations here and there do
not spoil the general drift:
“Meanwhile the
world consisted of all good things, thereby sufficiently showing beforehand how
much good was in store for him for whom this whole [sum of things] was being
prepared. Lastly, who could be worthy to
inhabit the works of God but His own image and likeness? That also was wrought by Goodness. . . . Goodness spoke [the words]. Goodness fashioned man out of slime into such
a substance of flesh built up into so many qualities out of one matter,
Goodness breathed [into him] making him a soul that was living, not dead.
Goodness set him to enjoy and reign over all things, and moreover to give them
names. Goodness yet further bestowed fresh enjoyment on man, that, although a
possessor of the whole world, he should dwell in a specially pleasant region by
being shifted into Paradise, already out of a
world into a Church. The same goodness provided also a help for him, that
nothing good might be wanting; for it is not good, God said, that man be alone:
He knew that man would profit by the sex of Mary and thenceforward of the
Church. [In this curious limitation the Montanist speaks.] “But even the Law which thou blamest, which
thou twistest into themes of controversy, it was Goodness that enacted it for
the sake of man, that he might cleave to God, for fear he should seem not so
much free as abandoned, on a level with his minions the other living creatures
who had been cast loose by (from?) God and were free through His scorn of them;
but that man alone might have the boast of having been alone worthy to receive
a Law from God, and that, being a reasonable living creature with a capacity
for understanding and knowledge, he might be held in likewise by that very
liberty which belongs to reason, being subject to Him who had subjected to him
all things. And in like manner it was
Goodness that wrote on this law the counsel of observing it, ‘In the day that
ye eat thereof, ye shall surely die,’ for it graciously showed the issue of
transgression, for fear ignorance of the danger should help towards neglect of
obedience. . . . I call on thee
therefore to recognize thus far the goodness of our God as shown by works that were good, by blessings that were good, by acts of
indulgence, by acts of Providence,
by laws and forewarnings that were good and gracious.”
Jerome
tells us that once in North Italy he had met an old man who told him how when
he was quite young he had in like manner seen at Rome a man of great age, formerly a notary of Cyprian’s, and had heard from him how Cyprian was accustomed
to pass no day without reading something of Tertullian’s, and how he used often
to say to him, “Give me the Teacher,” meaning
Tertullian.
This
curious little reminiscence links together the two greatest men in the North
African Church before Augustine.
Strictly speaking
Cyprian
was not a theologian, while he was a great ecclesiastical ruler. His writings
show hardly any appropriation of the deeper elements in Tertullian’s thoughts,
those in which he claims affinity to Greek theology, perhaps partly due to
borrowing from it.
But the Roman
legalism, which was so potent an ingredient in Tertullian’s ways of thinking
and speaking, acquired still greater force in its guidance of a man of simpler
and more direct mind like Cyprian, accustomed through life to derive his
thoughts of social order from the provincial administration of the Roman
Empire, and when he had become a Christian bishop, writing almost always under
the impulse of grave practical responsibilities. The depth and purity of his
own religious feeling makes itself felt almost everywhere in his writings; yet
the conceptions of the Church and its institutions which he sets forth, and
which thenceforward dominated Latin Christianity, were indeed most natural
under their circumstances of time and place, but not less truly involved
injurious limitations and perversions of the full teaching of the Apostles.
We have the
great good fortune of possessing a large amount of Cyprian’s correspondence
during the last ten years or so of his life, and also
a memoir of him by his deacon Pontius.
We have also from his
pen about a dozen tracts on religious or disciplinary subjects. He bears well
the testing of his inner self which these materials render possible. There is
nothing petty and nothing ungoverned about him.
He is always pursuing high ends according to the best of his lights with
entire self devotion and seldom failing in patience and gentleness.
He lived habitually in accordance with what
he wrote in his early tract to his friend Donatus:
[See Cypr. ad Donat. 4. 5.]
“To God
belongs whatever power we have. From
that source we draw our life, from that source we draw our strength, from that
source is taken and embraced the energy by which, while still placed here, we
discern beforehand the signs of the things to come. Let only there be fear to guard innocence,
that the Lord, who by the visitation of the heavenly mercy has graciously shone
into our minds, may be held fast through righteous conduct as the guest of a
mind that delights Him, lest the security thus received breed heedlessness and
the old enemy steal in anew.” . . . “The Spirit,” he proceeds, “streams forth
incessantly, overflows abundantly: let only our breast be athirst and open, as
is [the measure] of faith to receive that we bring to it, such is [the measure]
of inflowing grace that we drink in.”
Cyprian was
apparently converted to the Gospel in middle life.
He was what we should call a country
gentleman, and at the same time a man of good Latin education.
Not long after he became a Christian he sold
his estates, wholly or in part, to give the proceeds to the poor; though
ultimately they were restored to him by the liberality of friends. Very early after
his baptism he was admitted to the presbyterate, and shortly afterwards, while
still accounted a neophyte, he was elected Bishop of
Carthage.
He was
evidently popular with the laity, with whom the election seems to have chiefly
rested.
His social position by itself
could hardly have won for him such a mark of confidence; doubtless he was
already before his conversion known as a man of virtuous life and high public
spirit.
It was no light task that was
laid on him by his election.
Persecution
had slumbered for about a generation, and as a consequence various abuses had
sprung up in the Church, the bishops and clergy not excepted.
But after a year and a half came the
persecution of
Decius, the same
persecution in which, as we saw last week, Alexander, Bishop of Jerusalem,
perished in prison.
Its fires were not
without a purifying effect on the Christian community, but it shortly gave rise
to a difficult question of discipline which much exercised Cyprian, the
treatment of those who had “lapsed” or fallen away under terror of death or
torments.
On the one hand there was a
strong party of mere laxity at
Carthage, on the
other a strong party of unswerving and indiscriminating severity at
Rome; and the controversy
was complicated by purely personal elements, Cyprian’s election not having been
by any means universally acceptable.
Of
course it would be impossible to give now a narrative of the complicated transactions
at
Carthage and at
Rome. It must suffice to say that Cyprian
took an intermediate and carefully discriminative course, and that his policy
was at last substantially adopted, though presently he was constrained by the
force of circumstances, and especially a lesser persecution under Gallus, to
accept a more indulgent set of rules than at first.
Presently North Africa was invaded by a terrible pestilence from
the East which lasted on for long years afterwards. Cyprian instantly stood forward to organize
his Christian flock for measures of help and relief, pecuniary and personal,
insisting strongly on the duty of helping heathens as well as Christians in the
spirit of true Sonship, following the example of Him who sends His rain and
sunshine on all alike.
Presently a
fresh controversy arose when Stephen became Bishop of Rome. The former
controversy had left behind it an unhappy schism, the followers of
Novatian having split
off from the Church at large in the name of stricter discipline.
The question now was whether persons having
received Novatianist baptism, and subsequently joining the Church, needed to be
baptized over again, or only to be received with laying on of hands. On this point
Cyprian threw all his strength into the stricter theory, which had been falling
into disuse in the West, and induced a large synod of North African Bishops to
support it unanimously; while Stephen upheld the view that ultimately became
fixed in the West, condemning such a repetition of baptism, only unfortunately
he upheld it with much violence and intolerance.
Stephen
died in August 257.
In the same month a
fresh persecution began under
Valerian,
and Cyprian was at once banished, though treated with remarkable respect and
forbearance by the heathen authorities; and in his banishment he devoted
himself to plans for help of other sufferers.
But in about a year the persecution assumed a more terrible form.
Xystus, Bishop of Rome, was beheaded as he
sat preaching in his episcopal chair in one of the Roman cemeteries, and
Cyprian returned to
Carthage
to await his now inevitable doom.
The
trial took place.
The sentence was
read: “It is decreed that Thascius Cyprianus be executed by the sword.”
The record then proceeds, “Cyprian the Bishop
said, ‘Thanks be to God.’”
