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The identification of this incarnate Logos with Jesus of Nazareth was part of Clement's inheritance, and as usual he accepted the form which the tradition of the Church had assumed. But Clement's theology altered the significance of Jesus. For the Abba Father whom Jesus loved, he substituted the great Unknowable, and then he had to bring in a figure unfamiliar to the thought of Jesus – the Logos, whom he clothed with many of the attributes of the Father of Jesus, and then identified with Jesus himself. Not unnaturally in this combination the historic is outweighed by the theoretic element, and indeed receives very little attention. The thought of Incarnation is to Clement much more important than the Personality.
The virgin-birth
Jesus is "God and pedagogue," "good shepherd," and "mystic Angel (or messenger)," "the pearl," "the great High Priest," and so forth.[926] In a few passages (some of them already quoted) Clement speaks of the earthly life of Jesus – of the crown of thorns, the common ware, and the absence of a silver foot-bath. But he takes care to make it clear that Jesus was "not an ordinary man," and that was why he did not marry and have children – this in opposition to certain vain persons who held up the Lord's example as a reason for rejecting marriage, which "they call simple prostitution and a practice introduced by the devil."[927] So far was Jesus from being "an ordinary man" that Clement takes pains to dissociate him from ordinary human experience. To the miraculous birth he refers incidentally but in a way that leaves no mistake possible. "Most people even now believe, as it seems, that Mary ceased to be a virgin through the birth of her child, though this was not really the case – for some say she was found by the midwife to be a virgin after her delivery."[928] This expansion of the traditional story is to be noted as an early illustration of the influence of dogma. The episode appears in an elaborate form in the apocryphal Gospels.[929] But Clement goes further. "In the case of the Saviour, to suppose that his body required, quâ body, the necessary attentions for its continuance, would be laughable (gélos). For he ate – not on account of his body, which was held together by holy power, but that it might not occur to those who consorted with him to think otherwise of him – as indeed later on some really supposed him to have been manifested merely in appearance [i. e. the Docetists who counted his body a phantom]. He himself was entirely without passion (apathés) and into him entered no emotional movement (kínema pathetikón), neither pleasure nor pain."[930] A fragment (in a Latin translation) of a commentary of Clement's upon the first Epistle of John, contains a curious statement: "It is said in the traditions that John touched the surface of the body of Jesus, and drove his hand deep into it, and the firmness of the flesh was no obstacle but gave way to the hand of the disciple."[931] At the same time we read: "It was not idly that the Lord chose to employ a body of mean form, in order that no one, while praising his comeliness and beauty, should depart from what he said, and in cleaving to what is left behind should be severed from the higher things of thought (tôn noetôn)."[932]
It is consistent with the general scheme of Clement's thought that the cross has but a small part in his theology. "It was not by the will of his Father that the Lord suffered, nor are the persecuted so treated in accordance with his choice" – it is rather in both cases that "such things occur, God not preventing them; this alone saves at once the providence and goodness of God."[933] Yet "the blood of the Lord is twofold; there is the fleshly, whereby we have been redeemed from corruption, and the spiritual, by which we have been anointed."[934] The cross is the landmark between us and our past.[935] On the whole Clement has not much to say about sin, though of course he does not ignore it. It is "eternal death";[936] it is "irrational";[937] it is not to be attributed "to the operation (energy) of dæmons," as that would be to acquit the sinner, still it makes a man "like the dæmons" (daimonikós).[938] God's punishments he holds to be curative in purpose.[939] He says nothing to imply the eternity of punishment,[940] and as we have seen he speaks definitely of the Gospel being preached to the dead.
The vision of the true gnostic
The Christian religion, according to Clement, begins in faith and goes on to knowledge. The heavier emphasis with him always falls on knowledge, though he maintains in a fine chapter that faith is its foundation.[941] "The Greeks," he says, "consider faith an empty and barbarous thing,"[942] but he is far from such a view. Faith must be well-founded – "if faith is such as to be destroyed by plausible talk, let it be destroyed."[943] But the word left upon the reader's mind is knowledge. A passage like the following is unmistakable. "Supposing one were to offer the Gnostic his choice, whether he would prefer the knowledge of God or eternal salvation, one or the other (though of course they are above all things an identity); without the slightest hesitation he would choose the knowledge of God for its own sake."[944] The ideal Christian is habitually spoken of in this way, as the "man of knowledge" – the true "Gnostic," as opposed to the heretics who illegitimately claim the title. A very great deal of Clement's writing is devoted to building up this Gnostic, to outlining his ideal character. He is essentially man as God conceived him, entering into the divine life, and, by the grace of the Logos, even becoming God.
This thought of man becoming God Clement repeats very often, and it is a mark of how far Christianity has travelled from Palestine. It begins with the Platonic ideal of being made like to God, and the means is the knowledge of God or the sight of God given by the Logos. "'Nought say I of the rest,'[945] glorifying God. Only I say that those Gnostic souls are so carried away by the magnificence of the vision (theopía) that they cannot confine themselves within the lines of the constitution by which each holy degree is assigned and in accordance with which the blessed abodes of the gods have been marked out and allotted; but being counted as 'holy among the holy,' and translated absolutely and entirely to another sphere, they keep on always moving to better and yet better regions, until they no longer greet the divine vision in mirrors or by means of mirrors, but with loving souls feast for ever on the uncloying never-ending sight, radiant in its transparent clearness, while throughout the endless ages they taste a never-wearying delight, and thus continue, all alike honoured with an identity of pre-eminence. This is the apprehensive vision of the pure in heart. This, then, is the work (enérgeia) of the perfected Gnostic – to hold communion with God through the Great High Christ being made like the Lord as far as may be. Yes, and in this process of becoming like God the Gnostic creates and fashions himself anew, and adorns those that hear him."[946] In an interesting chapter Clement discusses abstraction from material things as a necessary condition for attaining the knowledge of God; we must "cast ourselves into the greatness of Christ and thence go forward."[947] "If a man know himself, he shall know God, and knowing God shall be made like to him… The man with whom the Logos dwells … is made like to God … and that man becomes God, for God wishes it."[948] "By being deified into Apathy (apatheian) a man becomes Monadic without stain."[949] As Homer makes men poets, Crobylus cooks, and Plato philosophers; "so he who obeys the Lord and follows the prophecy given through him, is fully perfected after the likeness of his Teacher, and thus becomes a god while still moving about in the flesh."[950] "Dwelling with the Lord, talking with him and sharing his hearth, he will abide according to the spirit, pure in flesh, pure in heart, sanctified in word. 'The world to him,' it says, 'is crucified and he to the world.' He carries the cross of the Saviour and follows the Lord 'in his footsteps as of a god,' and is become holy of the holy."[951]
We seem to touch the world of daily life, when after all the beatific visions we see the cross again. Clement has abundance of suggestion for Christian society in Alexandria, and it is surprising how simple, natural and wise is his attitude to the daily round and common task. Men and women alike may "philosophize," for their "virtue" (in Aristotle's phrase) is the same – so may the slave, the ignorant and the child.[952] The Christian life is not to eradicate the natural but to control it.[953] Marriage is a state of God's appointing – Clement is no Jerome. Nature made us to marry and "the childless man falls short of the perfection of Nature."[954] Men must marry for their country's sake and for the completeness of the universe.[955] True manhood is not proved by celibacy – the married man may "fall short of the other as regards his personal salvation, but he has the advantage in the conduct of life inasmuch as he really preserves a faint (olígen) image of the true Providence."[956] The heathen, it is true, may expose their own children and keep parrots, but the begetting and upbringing of children is a part of the married Christian life.[957] "Who are the two or three gathering in the name of Christ, among whom the Lord is in the midst? Does he not mean man, wife and child by the three, seeing woman is made to match man by God."[958]
The real fact about the Christian life is simply this, that the New Song turns wild beasts into men of God.[959] "Sail past the siren's song, it works death," says Clement, "if only thou wilt, thou hast overcome destruction; lashed to the wood thou shalt be loosed from ruin; the Word of God will steer thee and the holy spirit will moor thee to the havens of heaven."[960] To the early Christian "the wood" always meant the cross of Jesus. The new life is "doing good for love's sake,"[961] and "he who shows pity ought not to know that he is doing it… When he does good by instinctive habit (en héxei) then he will be imitating the nature of good."[962] God breathed into man and there has always been something charming in a man since then (philtron).[963] So "the new people" are always happy, always in the full bloom of thought, always at spring-time.[964] The Church is the one thing in the world that always rejoices.[965]
Clement's theology is composite rather than organic – a structure of materials old and new, hardly fit for the open air, the wind and the rain. But his faith is another thing – it rests upon the living personality of the Saviour, the love of God and the significance of the individual soul, and it has the stamp of such faith in all the ages – joy and peace in believing. It has lasted because it lived. If Christianity had depended on the Logos, it would have followed the Logos to the limbo whither went Æon and Aporrhoia and Spermaticos Logos. But that the Logos has not perished is due to the one fact that with the Cross it has been borne through the ages on the shoulders of Jesus.
CHAPTER X
TERTULLIAN
In his most famous chapter Gibbon speaks at one point of the affirmation of the early church that those who persisted in the worship of the dæmons "neither deserved nor could expect a pardon from the irritated justice of the Deity." Oppressed in this world by the power of the Pagans, Christians "were sometimes seduced by resentment and spiritual pride to delight in the prospect of their future triumph. 'You are fond of spectacles,' exclaims the stern Tertullian, 'expect the greatest of all spectacles, the last and eternal judgment of the universe. How shall I admire, how laugh, how rejoice, how exult, when I behold so many proud monarchs, and fancied gods, groaning in the lowest abyss of darkness; so many magistrates, who persecuted the name of the Lord, liquefying in fiercer fires than they ever kindled against the Christians; so many sage philosophers blushing in red-hot flames with their deluded scholars; so many celebrated poets trembling before the tribunal, not of Minos, but of Christ; so many tragedians more tuneful in the expression of their own sufferings; so many dancers – ' But the humanity of the reader will permit me to draw a veil over the rest of this infernal description, which the zealous African pursues in a long variety of affected and unfeeling witticisms."[966]
The passage is a magnificent example of Gibbon's style and method, – more useful, however, as an index to the mind of Gibbon than to that of Tertullian. He has abridged his translation, and in one or two clauses he has missed Tertullian's points; finally he has drawn his veil over the rest of the infernal description exactly when he knew there was little or nothing more to be quoted that would serve his purpose. He has made no attempt to understand the man he quotes, nor the mood in which he spoke, nor the circumstances which gave rise to that mood. Yet on the evidence of this passage and a sonnet of Matthew Arnold's, English readers pass a swift judgment on "the stern Tertullian" and his "unpitying Phrygian sect." But to the historian of human thought, and to the student of human character, there are few figures of more significance in Latin literature. Of the men who moulded Western Christendom few have stamped themselves and their ideas upon it with anything approaching the clearness and the effect of Tertullian. He first turned the currents of Christian thought in the West into channels in which they have never yet ceased to flow and will probably long continue to flow. He was the first Latin churchman, and his genius helped to shape Latin Christianity. He, too, was the first great Puritan of the West, precursor alike of Augustine and of the Reformation. The Catholic Church left him unread throughout the Middle Ages, but at the Renaissance he began once more to be studied, and simultaneously there also began the great movement for the purification of the church and the deepening of Christian life, which were the causes to which he had given himself and his genius.
Such a man may be open to criticism on many sides. He may be permanently or fitfully wrong in thought or speech or conduct; but it is clear that an influence so great rests upon something more profound than irritability however brilliant in expression. There must be somewhere in the man something that corresponds with the enduring thoughts of mankind – something that engages the mind or that wins the friendship of men – something that is true and valid. And this, whatever it is, is the outcome of many confluent elements – of temperament, environment and experience, perhaps, in chief. The man must be seen as his personal friends saw him and as his enemies saw him; what is more, they – both sets of them – must be seen as he saw them. The critic must himself, by dint of study and imagination, be played upon by as many of the factors of the man's experience as he can re-capture. Impressions, pleasures, doubts, hopes, convictions, friendships, inspirations – everything that goes to shape a man is relevant to that study of character without which, in the case of formative men, history itself becomes pedantry and illusion. Particularly in the case of such a man as Tertullian is it needful to repeat this caution. The impetuous dogmatism in which his mind and, quite as often, his mood express themselves, and his hard words, harder a great deal than his heart, no less than his impulsive convictions, "seem," as Gibbon put it, "to offend the reason and the humanity of the present age." On the other side, the church, which the historian in a footnote saddles with the responsibility of sharing Tertullian's most harsh beliefs, is at one with "the present age" in repudiating him on grounds of her own. Yet, questioned or condemned, Tertullian played his part, and that no little one, in the conflict of religions; he stood for truth as he saw it, and wrote and spoke with little thought of the praise or blame of his contemporaries or of posterity – all that he had abandoned once for all, when he made the great choice of his life. Questioned or condemned, he is representative, and he is individual, the first man of genius of the Latin race to follow Jesus Christ, and to re-set his ideas in the language native to that race.
Carthage
Tertullian was born about the middle of the second century A.D. at Carthage, or in its neighbourhood. The city at all events is the scene of his life – a great city with a great history. "Tyre in Africa" is one of his phrases for Carthage and her "sister-cities," and he quotes Virgil's description of Dido's town studiis asperrima belli.[967] But his Carthage was not that of Dido and Hannibal. It was the re-founded city of Julius Cæsar, now itself two hundred years old – a place with a character of its own familiar to the reader of Apuleius and of Augustine's Confessions, – a character confirmed by the references of Tertullian to its amusements and its daily sights. "What sea-captain is there that does not carry his mirth even to the point of shame? Every day we see the frolics in which sailors take their pleasure."[968] Scholars have played with the fancy that they could trace in Tertullian's work the influence of some Semitic strain, as others with equal reason have found traces of the Celt in Virgil and Livy. Tertullian himself has perhaps even fewer references to Punic speech and people than Apuleius, while, like Apuleius, he wrote in both Greek and Latin,[969] and it is possible that, like Apuleius, and Perpetua the martyr, he spoke both.
Jerome tells us that Tertullian was the son of a centurion.[970] He tells us himself, incidentally and by implication, that he was the child of heathen parents. "Idolatry," he says, "is the midwife that brings all men into the world;" and he gives a very curious picture of the pagan ceremonies that went with child-birth, the fillet on the mother's womb, the cries to Lucina, the table spread for Juno, the horoscope, and finally the dedication of a hair of the child, or of all his hair together, as the rites of clan or family may require.[971] Thus from the very first the boy is dedicated to a genius, and to the evil he inherits through the transmission of his bodily nature is added the influence of a false dæmon – "though there still is good innate in the soul, the archetypal good, divine and germane, essentially natural; for what comes from God is not so much extinguished as overshadowed."[972] The children of Christian parents have so far, he indicates, a better beginning; they are holy in virtue of their stock and of their upbringing.[973] With himself it had not been so. It is curious to find the great controversialist of later days recalling nursery tales, how "amid the difficulties of sleep one heard from one's nurse about the witch's towers and the combs of the sun" – recalling too the children's witticisms about the apples that grow in the sea and the fishes that grow on the tree.[974] They come back into his mind as he thinks of the speculations of Valentinus and his followers.
His training
His education was that of his day, – lavish rhetoric, and knowledge of that very wide character which in all his contemporaries is perhaps too suggestive of manual and cyclopaedia[975] – works never so abundant in antiquity as then. But he was well taught, as a brilliant boy deserved, and his range of interests is remarkable. Nor is he overwhelmed by miscellaneous erudition, like Aulus Gellius for instance, or like Clement of Alexandria, to come to a man more on his own level. He is master of the great literature of Rome; he has read the historians and Cicero; he can quote Virgil with telling effect. Usque adeone mori miserum est? he asks of the Christian who hesitates to be martyred;[976] "a hint from the world" he says. Sooner or later, he read Varro's books, the armoury of every Latin Christian against polytheism.
He "looked into medicine," he tells us, and a good many passages in his treatises remind us of the fact.[977] It may help to explain an explicitness in the use of terms more usual in the physician perhaps than in the layman.
But his career lay not in medicine but in law, and he caught the spirit of his profession. It has been debated whether the Tertullian, whose treatise de castrensi peculio is quoted in the Digest, is the apologist or another, but no legal treatises are needed to convince the reader how thoroughly a lawyer was the author of the theological works. He has every art and every artifice of his trade. He can reason quietly and soundly, he can declaim, he can do both together. He is a master of logic, delighting in huge chains of alternatives. He can quibble and wrest the obvious meaning of a document to perfection, browbeat an opponent, argue ad hominem,[978] evade a clear issue, and anticipate and escape an obvious objection, as well as any lawyer that ever practised. Again and again he impresses us as a special pleader, and we feel that he is forcing us away from the evidence of our own sense and intelligence to a conclusion which he prefers on other grounds. His epigrams rival Tacitus, and there is even in his rhetoric a conviction and a passion which Cicero never reaches. The suddenness of his questions, and the amazing readiness of his jests, savage, subtle, ironic, good-natured, brilliant or commonplace,[979] impress the reader again and again, however well he knows him. Yet Tertullian never loses sight of his object, whatever the flights of rhetoric or humour on which he ventures. In one case, he plainly says that his end will best be achieved by ridicule. "Put it down, reader, as a sham fight before the battle. I will show how to deal wounds, but I will not deal them. If there shall be laughter, the matter itself shall be the apology. There are many things that deserve so to be refuted; gravity would be too high a compliment. Vanity and mirth may go together. Yes, and it becomes Truth to laugh, because she is glad, to play with her rivals, because she is free from fear."[980] Then, with a caution as to becoming laughter, he launches into his most amusing book – that against the Valentinians.
His style
Tertullian rivals Apuleius in brilliant mastery of the elaborate and artificial rhetoric of the day. He has the same tricks of rhyming clauses and balancing phrases. Thus: attente custoditur quod tarde invenitur;[981] or more fully: spiritus enim dominatur, caro famulatur; tamen utrumque inter se communicant reatum, spiritus ob imperium, caro ob ministerium.[982] Here the vanities of his pagan training subserve true thought. Elsewhere they are more playful, as when he suggests to those, who like the pagans took off their cloaks to pray, that God heard the three saints in the fiery furnace of the Babylonian king though they prayed cum sarabaris et tiaris suis– in turbans and trousers.[983] But when he gives us such a string of phrases as aut Platonis honor, aut Zenonis vigor, aut Aristotelis tenor, aut Epicuri stupor, aut Heracliti moeror, aut Empedoclis furor,[984] one feels that he is for the moment little better than one of the wicked. At the beginning of his tract on Baptism, after speaking of water he pulls himself up abruptly – he is afraid, he says, that the reader may fancy he is composing laudes aquae (in the manner of rhetorical adoxography) rather than discussing the principles of baptism.[985] His tract de Pallio is frankly a humorous excursion into old methods, in which the elderly Montanist, who has left off wearing the toga, justifies himself for his highly conservative and entirely suitable conduct in adopting the pallium. The "stern" Tertullian appears here in the character that his pagan friends had long ago known, and that his Christian readers might feel somewhere or other in everything that he writes. There is a good-tempered playfulness about the piece, a fund of splendid nonsense, which suggest the fellow-citizen of Apuleius rather than the presbyter.[986] But earnestness, which is not incompatible with humour, is his strong characteristic, and when it arms itself with an irony so powerful as that of Tertullian, the result is amazing. Sometimes he exceeds all bounds, as when in his Ad Nationes he turns that irony upon the horrible charges, which the pagans, knowing them to be false, bring against the Christians, while he, pretending for the moment that they are true, invites his antagonists to think them out to their consequences and to act upon them.[987] Or again take the speech of Christ on the judgment day, in which the Lord is pictured as saying that he had indeed entrusted the Gospel once for all to the Apostles, but had thought better of it and made some changes – as of course, Tertullian suggests, he really would have to say, if it could be supposed that the latest heretics were right after all.[988]
But, whatever be said or thought of the rhetoric, playful or earnest, it has another character than it wears in his contemporaries. For here was a far more powerful brain, strong, clear and well-trained, and a heart whose tenderness and sensibility have never had justice. In some ways he very much suggests Thomas Carlyle – he has the same passion, the same vivid imagination and keen sensibility, the same earnestness and the same loyalty to truth as he sees it regardless of consequence and compromise, – and alas! the same "natural faculty for being in a hurry," which Carlyle deplored, and Tertullian before him – "I, poor wretch, always sick with the fever of impatience"[989] – the same fatal gift for pungent phrase, and the same burning and indignant sympathy for the victim of wrong and cruelty.[990] The beautiful feeling, which he shows in handling the parables of the lost sheep and the prodigal son, in setting forth from them the loving fatherhood of God,[991] might surprise some of his critics. Nor has every great Christian of later and more humane days been capable of writing as he wrote of victory in battle against foreigners – "Is the laurel of triumph made of leaves – or the dead bodies of men? With ribbons is it adorned – or with graves? Is it bedewed with unguents, or the tears of wives and mothers? – perhaps too of some who are Christians, for even among the barbarians is Christ."[992] There are again among his books some which have an appeal and a tender charm throughout that haunt the reader – that is, if he has himself passed through any such experience as will enable him to enter into what was in Tertullian's mind and heart as he wrote. So truly and intimately does he know and with such sympathy does he express some of the deepest religious emotions.[993]
His early life
From time to time Tertullian drops a stray allusion to his earlier years. He was a pagan —de vestris sumus– "one of yourselves" (Apol. 18); "the kind of man I was myself once, blind and without the light of the Lord."[994] A Roman city, and Carthage perhaps in particular, offered to a gifted youth of Roman ways of thinking endless opportunities of self-indulgence. Tertullian speaks of what he had seen in the arena – the condemned criminal, dressed as some hero or god of the mythology, mutilated or burned alive, for the amusement of a shouting audience,[995] "exulting in human blood."[996] "We have laughed, amid the mocking cruelties of noonday, at Mercury as he examined the bodies of the dead with his burning iron; we have seen Jove's brother too, with his mallet, hauling out the corpses of gladiators."[997] In later days when he speaks of such things, he shudders and leaves the subject rather than remember what he has seen —malo non implere quam meminisse.[998] He knew the theatre of the Roman city – "the consistory of all uncleanness" he calls it. "Why should it be lawful (for a Christian)," he asked, "to see what it is sin to do? Why should the things, which 'coming out of the mouth defile a man,' seem not to defile a man when he takes them in through eyes and ears?"[999] He speaks of Tragedies and Comedies, teaching guilt and lust, bloody and wanton; and the reader of the Golden Ass can recall from fiction cases wonderfully illuminative of what could have been seen in fact. When he apostrophizes the sinner, he speaks of himself. "You," he cries, "you, the sinner, like me – no! less sinner than I, for I recognize my own pre-eminence in guilt."[1000] He is, he says, "a sinner of every brand, born for nothing but repentance."[1001] To say, with Professor Hort, on the evidence of such passages that Tertullian was "apparently a man of vicious life" might involve a similar condemnation of Bunyan and St Paul; while to find the charge "painfully" confirmed by "the foulness which ever afterwards infested his mind" is to exaggerate absurdly in the first place, and in the second to forget such parallels as Swift and Carlyle, who both carried explicit speech to a point beyond ordinary men, while neither is open to such a suggestion as that brought against Tertullian. With such cases as Apuleius, Hadrian or even Julius Cæsar before us, it is impossible to maintain that Tertullian's early life must have been spotless, but it is possible to fancy more wrong than there was. The excesses of a man of genius are generally touched by the imagination, and therein lies at once their peculiar danger, and also something redemptive that promises another future.
Tertullian at any rate married – when, we cannot say; but, as a Christian and a Montanist, he addressed a book to his wife, and in his De Anima he twice alludes to the ways of small infants in a manner which suggests personal knowledge. In the one he speaks with curious observation of the sense-perception of very young babies; in the other he appeals to their movements in sleep, their tremors and smiles, as evidence that they also have dreams. Such passages if met in Augustine's pages would not so much surprise us. They suggest that the depth and tenderness of Tertullian's nature have not been fully understood.[1002]
toîs dè bebamekósi skópos he paidopoiîa, telos dè he euteknía. Cf. Tertullian, adv. Marc. iv, 17, on the impropriety of God calling us children if we suppose that he nobis filios facere non permisit auferendo connubium. The opposite view, for purposes of argument perhaps, in de exh. castitatis, 12, where he ridicules the idea of producing children for the sake of the state.
