Tertullian, Quintus Septimius Florens

Tertullian, Quintus Septimius Florens (c.160–c.225), African Church Father. Brought up in Carthage as a pagan, he may have practised as a lawyer. He was converted to Christianity before 197. The chronology of his life and works is disputed.

Tertullian wrote a large number of apologetic, theological, and ascetic works. In his Apologeticum (c.197) he appeals for toleration of Christianity, attacking pagan superstition, rebutting charges against Christian morality, and claiming that Christians are no danger to the State but useful citizens. In moral and disciplinary works addressed to Christians he emphasizes the separation from pagan society which is needed to escape contamination from its immorality and idolatry. Many occupations and social institutions are barred, and in the last resort martyrdom must be accepted. He may be the editor of the Passion of St Perpetua and St Felicity. His theological works are mainly polemical in origin and form. In the early De Praescriptione Haereticorum he disposes of all heresy in principle: the one true Church alone possesses the authentic tradition and has the authority to interpret Scripture; it has no need to argue. Against Marcion he defended the identity of the God of the Old and New Testaments and that of Jesus Christ with the Messiah of prophecy. Against ‘Praxeas’ he tried to expose the unscriptural and unhistorical implications of Modalism and to formulate a positive doctrine of the Trinity. In De Anima, which advocated Traducianism, he prepared the way for the pessimistic doctrine of the Fall and Original Sin which came, through St Augustine, to dominate Latin theology. The rigorist strain in Tertullian, and the opposition which it evoked, took him into Montanism, and his rigorism is evident in his extant Montanist works.