Polemic Writings.

        Closely related to these were his polemic writings, attacking the positions of heretics and schismatics. In his book On Prescription of Heretics, which Hort called a most plausible and most mischievous book,[90] he argues that, after reasoning is exhausted with such people, one must simply say, “What we hold is the belief of the church, handed down from the apostles, from bishop to bishop, in all the historic centers of Christianity, so it must betrue, and there is no more to be said.” This shows that when he wrote this book, at least, Tertullian was a strong adherent of the,, Catholic movement, which Irenaeus reflected. He was, in fact, much influenced in his polemic writings by Irenaeus, and Tertullian and Irenaeus are the first Catholic Fathers.

        This appeal to the great apostolic churches, as faithful depositories of Christian tradition, naturally directed North African Christians to Rome, the only church in the West of apostolic. foundation:

Since you are close upon Italy, you have Rome, from which there comes even into your hands the very authority [of the apostles].. How happy is its church, upon which apostles poured forth all' their doctrine, along with their blood! Where Peter endures a passion like his Lord's! Where Paul wins his crown in a death like John's! Where the apostle John was first plunged unhurt into boiling oil, and then returned to his island exile!... The Law and the prophets she unites with the writings of evangelists and apostles, from which she drinks in her faith [chap. 36].

This is very much what Irenaeus says in his work Against Heresies (iii. 3. 2, 3) about the position of the Roman church, which he in Lyons looked up to from Gaul, just as Tertullian looked up 1 to it from Africa.

        But Tertullian's greatest polemic work was that Against Mar cion, in five books, written over and over again, until his work on it spread over ten or twelve years of his life, from about zoo to 212. This elaborate work gives us our principal information about Marcion, and especially about his effort to put a Christian scripture consisting of the Gospel of Luke and ten letters of Paul in place of the Jewish scriptures which then made up most of the Bible of Christian churches. Other polemic writings were Against the Jews, Against Hermogenes, and Against the Valentinians.

        We have grouped Tertullian's writings as apologetic, practical, doctrinal, and polemic. But there is also a value in surveying them in the order m which they were written, for they reveal the gradual shift in his religious views, which carried him in the course of ten years from the bosom of the Catholic church into that of the Montanist sect. He was a strong Puritan in feeling and, what ever direction he took, was fairly certain to go to extremes. His devotion to the Catholic movement and his aversion to heretics are very marked in the Prescription of Heretics, which he wrote in his first period when he was a thoroughgoing Catholic. It covers the years 197 to 202. He had become a Christian probably by A.D. 195, perhaps a little earlier. In 197, as we have seen, he wrote his principal apologetic books, To the Martyrs, To the Heathen, the Apologeticus, and also the Testimony of the Soul, which he thought essentially Christian by nature and itself a witness to Christianity. In the course of the next five years, 198-202, he wrote twelve other books and treatises: On Shows (two editions), On the Dress of Women, On Baptism, On Repentance, On Patience, On Prayer, To His Wife (against remarriage of women), On Idolatry, On prescription of Heretics, Against Marcion (two editions), Against Hermogenes, and Against the Jews.

        The edict of Severus in 202, forbidding anyone to become a Christian, marks a shift in Tertullian's attitude. He now begins to see truth and value in the Montanist's positions — their Puritan morality in contrast with the growing laxity of the Roman church; their spiritual emphasis, in contrast with the political cast that was coming over Roman Christianity. For five years Tertullian works to build these Montanist values into his Catholic Christianity. He is still a Catholic, but he sees the worth of Montanism, too, and strives to realize them both and to unite them.

        In this period of tension he probably wrote three works now lost: On Ecstasy, in seven books, dealing with Montanism; On the Hope of the Faithful including the millennial expectations, which he shared; and On Paradise-these probably in 202-3 to 204-5. The Exhortation to Chastity and the book On Veiling Virgins also belong to this time, 204-5 to 206-7.

        But by 207-8 the tension had become unbearable, and Tertullian with other Montanists left the church. He now produced a third edition of the first four books Against Marcion, his longest work, zoo-8. He also wrote now Against the Valentinians and Against the Followers of Apelles, the Marcionite leader, a work now lost. These belong to 207-8. In 210 he wrote On the Cloak (which he wore instead of the toga), in 211 On the Chaplet, and in 211-12, On Flight in Persecution, holding it inadmissible.

        In the following five years, 208-13, he wrote also the books On the Flesh of Christ, On the Testimony of the Soul, On the Soul, On the Resurrection, and the fifth and final book Against Marcion, completing his discussion of Marcion's proposed scripture, Luke and Paul. In Books i and ii, Tertullian had dealt with Marcion's doctrine that the Creator and the Father of Jesus were different beings; in Book iii he argued that the Christian movement does not contradict the prophets but fulfills them; in Books iv and v he uses Marcion's own scripture, Luke and Paul, to establish this.

        About 212 he wrote his short apology to the proconsul, To Scapula, and in 212 or 213 his Scorpaace, warning against the scorpion sting of heresy and encouraging martyrdom, which some Gnostics taught was unnecessary. In the course of the next five years he wrote Against Praxeas his defense of the Trinity, and soon after 217-18 his book On Monogamy, protesting against second marriages, and his work On Fasting. And finally, not long before 222-23, he wrote the work On Modesty, bitterly assailing the action of Calixtus, bishop of Rome, in declaring that the sins of adultery and fornication, although committed after baptism, could be forgiven by the church; it had previously been held that whereas God could forgive them, along with murder and idolatry, the church could not. Tertullian's invective against this action stands in sharp contrast to his rhapsody upon the Roman church, in his Prescription of Heretics, chapter 36, written twenty years before, in 198-202:

The Pontifex Maximus, that is the bishop of bishops, issues an edict: I remit, to such as have discharged the requirements of repentance (or penitence), the sins both of adultery and of fornication. O edict which cannot be inscribed “Good deed!” [chap. 1].

All three of these last works of Tertullian, in fact (Monogamy, Fasting, and Modesty), are bitter in their denunciation of the laxity that was pervading the Roman church under Zephyrinus and Calixtus. He felt strongly that it had forfeited the spiritual heritage of Christianity. “You have quenched the spirit,” he cried, “You have driven away the Comforter (Paraclete).”

        Augustine, almost two hundred years later, found a group of Tertullianists still meeting independently in Carthage and brought them back into the church. For it may be that by the time of Tertullian's death, soon after A.D. 222-23, he had left the Montanists and organized a little sect of his own.

        Some of Tertullian's writings, like the one On Veiling Virgins, he wrote first in Greek. Whether he was the author of the Martyrdoyyi of Perpetua and Felicitas, women of Carthage who suffered in the persecution of A.D. 202-3, is not certain; it is extant in both Greek and Latin and is a work of moving simplicity. Perpetua was a woman of position, while Felicitas was a slave. The account is written from a Montanist point of view. Jerome also mentions a book On the Difficulties ofMarriage addressed “to a philosophic friend,” which may have been written early in life and possibly even in a lighter vein, for Jerome speaks of him as “playing” (lusit) with the subject.

        Of the works of Tertullian, thirty-one have been preserved, and the names of more than a dozen others can be gathered from references to them in Tertullian himself, in Jerome, or in the table of contents of the Codex Agobardinus. The Greek form of the book On Baptism dealt also with the question of heretical baptism and was evidently a different book from the Latin work of that name. Other lost writings are the Hope ofthe Faithful, Paradise, Against the Followers of Apelles, the Origin ofthe Soul, Fate, Ecstasy, the Garments of Aaron, To a Philosophic Friend, Flesh and Soul, Submission of Soul, and the Superstition ofthe World. The Greek forms of the works On Shows and On the Veiling of Virgins have also been lost. He may also have written On Clean and Unclean Animals and On Circumcision, as Jerome intimates (Epist. 36:1).

        Tertullian is always the advocate; there is nothing judicial about his attitude; he sees only one side. His style is impetuous, dramatic, direct, varied, often richly illustrated, sometimes full of apostrophe and exclamation, gifted, but uncontrolled, except by overwhelming conviction. It reveals unmistakably one of the most powerful personalities of the early church, whose works have for the most part survived even though he had withdrawn from the Catholic church years before his death.