Tertullian, Perpetua, and Origen Explained (5 of 8)

Two cities, Carthage and Alexandria, and three people who are difficult to fit into a tidy account of orthodoxy.

One invented the vocabulary the church still uses and then left it. One was a young mother who wrote her own prison diary. One was the most learned Christian of the age and was condemned three centuries after he died.

Who Was Tertullian?

A North African with legal training who became the first major Christian writer in Latin.

That combination matters more than it sounds. He was not building on Greek philosophical categories the way Alexandria did. He reached for the vocabulary he knew, which was the vocabulary of Roman law, and the results shaped Western theology permanently.

Did Tertullian Invent the Word Trinity?

He is the first to use the Latin trinitas, and he coined it in an argument.

The opponent was Praxeas, who held that Father and Son were successive modes of one God rather than distinct. Tertullian’s line against him is famous and vicious: he drove away the Paraclete and crucified the Father.

The problem Tertullian was solving is the one every trinitarian formulation solves. If the Son and the Spirit are divine, how is this still monotheism. Trinitas was the framework he built to hold both.

What Did Tertullian Mean by Person and Substance?

Legal terms, used in a legal sense, and that origin explains a lot.

He distinguished one divine substantia from three personae. Substance in his usage most likely carries its legal sense of status or property held in common, the shared fundamental reality. Person is the legal term for a party in an action, each with a distinct role.

The word persona needs care, because in theatre it meant an actor’s mask, and that is exactly what a modalist would want it to mean. Tertullian is using it the other way. Not a phase of divine activity but an ongoing individuality, a standing relation rather than a role played in sequence.

Every later Western trinitarian statement runs on those two words, and they came out of a courtroom rather than a lecture hall.

Did Tertullian Leave the Church?

Yes, and the sources do not let us tidy it up.

Around 207 his strict moral views carried him into Montanism. The stated attraction was its commitment to lay discipleship, which he cared about as a layman himself, and his objection to the mainstream church was that it was centralising, growing lax, and drifting toward legalism.

After the move he accepted the Montanist expectation of an earthly millennium and wrote increasingly ascetic works, including an exhortation to chastity and a treatise on fasting. Sources put his separation as early as 202 and have him working with the Montanists until around 222. He died old, somewhere between 220 and 240.

The claim that he returned to the church before dying is sometimes made and cannot be substantiated, and the continued existence of a sect called the Tertullianists argues against it.

So the man who armed the West against Gnosticism and gave it the word Trinity died outside the communion he defended, and Rome has never numbered him among the saints. That is the honest ending and it should not be smoothed.

Who Was Perpetua?

A young noblewoman of Carthage, a nursing mother, executed in the arena, who left a diary.

The Passion of Perpetua contains material written by her own hand, along with a section by Saturus and an editor’s frame. It is one of the earliest surviving texts by a Christian woman and it reads like nothing else from the period, because it is interior. Her father pleading with her. Her anxiety about her infant. Her visions.

Two live disputes attach to it. The traditional date of 7 March 203, under Septimius Severus, has been challenged on the grounds that the games are connected to a birthday festival for Geta, which would push the execution to somewhere in 209 to 211. And the text has features that have led a number of scholars to suspect a Montanist connection, which would place the most beloved martyr account of the period on the wrong side of a line the church later drew.

Neither dispute is settled. Both are worth knowing before quoting her.

Who Was Origen and What Was the Hexapla?

The most learned Christian of the third century, and a work of textual scholarship nobody has matched for scale.

The Hexapla set the Hebrew Scriptures in six parallel columns: the Hebrew, the Hebrew transliterated into Greek characters, the Septuagint, and three further Greek translations. It ran to something like six and a half thousand pages and took thirty-one years.

It is lost. What survives is quotation and description.

The purpose was apologetic. Jewish and Gnostic critics were making arguments that turned on the text, and Origen wanted to know exactly what the text said in every version available. Whatever else he was, he was the first Christian to treat textual comparison as a discipline.

What Was Origen’s Method of Interpretation?

Three levels, ascending, with the literal at the bottom.

Literal, then moral, then spiritual, and he defended the hierarchy with a structural analogy: as a man consists of body, soul and spirit, so does Scripture.

He also defended allegory on practical grounds, by pointing at passages he thought could not be read literally. What man of intelligence, he asks, will believe that a first and second and third day existed without sun, moon and stars.

Underneath it sat a conviction that the whole universe is pervaded with symbols of the invisible, everything having a sensible aspect available to anyone and a mystical aspect available to the mature.

That method produced enormous riches and it also produced the standing problem of allegorical reading, which is that a sufficiently determined interpreter can find anything anywhere.

Did Origen Castrate Himself?

The story is old and it cannot be verified.

It appears in early church sources, attributed to a literal reading of Matt 19:12 about those who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom, and it was condemned at the time as a drastic misreading.

But it cannot be confirmed from Origen’s own writings or from his immediate contemporaries. It circulated in later tradition and that is the extent of its support.

Treat it as unverified. It is repeated constantly as a colourful fact about him and it is not one.

Why Was Origen Condemned?

Three centuries after his death, at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553.

The condemned positions were the pre-existence of souls, universal salvation, and a Christology that reads as subordinationist. He held that all spirits were created equal and existed before birth, and that all of them might eventually be saved, including Satan.

The timing is the thing to notice. He died around 254, in the aftermath of injuries from the Decian persecution, in good standing. The condemnation came in 553, judged against a doctrinal precision that did not exist while he was alive.

That is a recurring difficulty in reading this period. Men who were doing frontier work before the boundaries were drawn get assessed by boundaries drawn afterward, and some of them fail a test they were never sitting.

Part of a series on the Ante-Nicene age, following the Ante-Nicene timeline.

Footnotes2

1. That Tertullian's trinitarian vocabulary came out of Roman law rather than Greek philosophy is worth more attention than it usually gets. The West inherited a way of talking about God built from terms for shared property and parties to an action, and some of the later Latin and Greek disagreements trace back to the fact that the two halves of the church were using vocabulary from different disciplines.
2. Origen's condemnation in 553 raises a question the church has never fully answered about how to read pre-Nicene writers. Almost none of them would pass a fourth-century test, because the test did not exist and their work is part of what produced it.

Sources

Tertullian, Against Praxeas. The origin of trinitas and the argument against modalism. Free in full at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity. Contains Perpetua's own account. Widely available in translation.

Wendy Elgersma Helleman and Musa A. B. Gaiya, Early Christianity: A Textbook for African Students (Langham, 2019), 299. Supports the legal sense of substantia and persona in Tertullian.

John M'Clintock and James Strong, "Tertullian," in Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature (1881), 10:289. Supports the account of his final years and the Tertullianist sect.

F. L. Cross and Elizabeth A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford, 2005), 1201. Supports the description of Origen's symbolic reading of the universe.

E. Ferguson, "Origen," in New Dictionary of Theology: Historical and Systematic (IVP, 2016), 636. Supports the condemnation at Constantinople in 553.

Where the sourcing stops: the self-castration account is reported here as unverified because the sources that carry it are later than Origen and cannot be checked against him. The Perpetua dating dispute and the possible Montanist connection are both live and neither is resolved here.