I TERTULLIAN AND THE BEGINNINGS OF THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY TERTULLI.AN AND THE BEGINNINGS OF THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY 1 FIRST ARTICLE IT is exceedingly impressive to see Christian Latin literature Athena-like spring at once into being, fully armed, in the person of an eminently representative man, in whom seem summed up the promise and potency of all that it was yet to be. This is what occured in Tertullian, whose advent and career provide a remarkable illustration of the providential provision of the right man for the right place. Seldom has one been called to a great work who was better fitted for it by disposition and talents as well as by long and strenuous preparation. Ardent in temperament, endowed with an intelligence as subtle and original as it was aggressive and audacious, he added to his natural gifts a profound erudition, which far from impeding only gave weight to the movements of his alert and robust mind. A jurist of note, he had joined to the study of law not only that of letters, but also that of medicine; born and brought up in the camp he had imbibed from infancy no little knowledge of the military art; and his insatiable curiosity had carried him into the depths of every form of learning accessible to his time and circumstances, not even excepting the occult literature of the day. When he gave himself in his mature manhood to the service of Christianity, he brought in his hands all the spoils of antique culture, smelted into a molten mass by an almost incredible passion.
The moment when he appeared on the scene was one well calculated to call out all his powers. It was shortly after the beginning of the last decade of the second century. Commodus had died and left a trail of civil war behind him, in the midst of which persecution had broken out afresh in Africa. Harassed from without, the African Church was also torn from within by an accumulation of evils; apostasies, heresies, and schisms abounded. Up through the confusion were thrust Tertullian’s mighty shoulders, casting off the enemies of the Gospel upon every side. He was not formed for defensive warfare. Even against the persecuting heathenism he took the offensive. Not content with repelling its calumnies and ridiculing the popular hatred of Christianity, he undertook to demonstrate, as a jurist, the illegality of the persecuting edicts, and, as a moralist, the absurdity of the heathen superstitions. He broke out a short and easy way for the refutation of heretics, by which he put them out of court at the start, and then followed them remorselessly into every corner of their reasoning. Within the Church itself he pursued with mordant irony the crowding abuses which had grown up in the Christian life. Of course he had the defects of his qualities. This terrible adversary of others was a terrible adversary also of his own peace. The extremity of his temper made him a prey to the fanatical claims of the Montanists and ultimately drove him beyond even them. He died the head of a new sect of his own.
Meanwhile he had rendered a service to the Church which it is no exaggeration to call inestimable. There is certainly discoverable in the writings of his immediate successors little open recognition of the immensity of the debt which Christianity owed to him. Throughout the whole of the remainder of the third century- a period of some eighty years - his name is not once mentioned. In the Greek Church, indeed, no one but the historian Eusebius seems ever to have heard of him. Even in his own West, Lactantius (305-306) is the first to allude to him, and he does so with obvious depreciation. Jerome, it is true, gives free vent to his admiration for the learning and acuteness, the vehemence and elegance of this ” torrent of eloquence,” and not only places him formally among the ” illustrious men” of the Church, but calls him fondly “our Tertullian.” With Hilary and Augustine, however, he has already taken hi~ place definitely in the catalogue of heretics, and thenceforward he found hardly any who were prepared to do him reverence.2 All this appearance of neglect passing into reprobation, however, is appearance only. Men might carefully avoid speaking of Tertullian; they could not escape his influence. Cyprian, for example, never breathes his name; yet the works of Cyprian are filled with the silent witnesses of the diligence with which he studied his brilliant predecessor; and his secretary told Jerome he never passed a day without reading him, and was accustomed to ask for him in the significant formula, “Hand me the Master.” This is not far from a typical instance. ” The man was too great a scholar, thinker, writer,” remarks Harnack,8 “and he had done the Western Church too distinguished service during a long series of years for his memory to become effaced.”
In modern times the vigor of Tertullian’s mind and the brilliancy of his literary gifts have perhaps generally been fully recognized. It is questionable, however, whether the greatness of his initiative in the development of Christian doctrine is even yet estimated at its true value. That many of the streams of doctrinal thought that have flowed down through the Western Church take their rise in him is indeed universally understood. But perhaps it comes to us with a little surprise when Harnack claims for him, for example, that it was he who broke out the road for the formulation of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. “When the Nicene formulary is praised,” says Harnack/ ” it is always of Athanasius that we think; when the Chalcedonian decree is cited, it is the name of Leo the Great that is magnified. But that Tertullian is in reality the father of the orthodox doctrines of the Trinity and of the Person of Christ, and that in the whole patristic literature the~e is no treatise that can be compared in importance and influence with his tract “Against Praxeas,” it has necessarily been left to the … investigation of our own day to exhibit.” If such a statement as this can be substantiated it is enough to mark Tertullian out not merely as a man of exceptional gifts and worthy performance, but as one of the greatest forces which have wrought in history.