Fathers, Ante-Nicene
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THE AGES DIGITAL LIBRARY COLLECTIONS THE ANTE-NICENE FATHERS VOL. 3 Edited by A. Roberts and J. Donaldson B o o k s F o r Th e A g e s AGES Software • Albany, OR USA Version 2.0 © 1997 2 THE ANTE-NICENE FATHERS The Writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325 THE REV. ALEXANDER ROBERTS, D.D., AND JAMES DONALDSON, LL.D., EDITORS AMERICAN REPRINT OF THE EDINBURGH EDITION printed July, 1975 VOLUME 2 LATIN CHRISTIANITY: ITS FOUNDER, TERTULLIAN 1. APOLOGETIC; 2. ANTI-MARCION; 3. ETHICAL. 3 LATIN CHRISTIANITY ITS FOUNDER, TERTULLIAN THREE PARTS: 1. APOLOGETIC 2. ANTI-MARCION 3. ETHICAL AMERICAN EDITION CHRONOLOGICALLY ARRANGED, WITH NOTES, PREFACES, AND ELUCIDATIONS, BY A. CLEVELAND COXE, D.D. Ta< ajrcai~a e]qh kratei>tw. The Nicene Council 4 PREFACE We present a volume wildly differing, in its contents, from those which have gone before; it contains the works of the great founder of Latin Christianity, the versatile and brilliant Tertullian. Not all his works, indeed, for they could not be contained in one of our books. This book, however, considerably overruns the promised number of pages; and gives three complete parts of Tertullian’s writings, according to the classification of our Editor-in-chief. The Fourth volume will begin with the fourth class of his works, those which exhibit our author’s ascetic ideas and the minor morals of the Primitive Christians, that collection being closed by the four treatises which were written in support of a defined and schismatical Montanism. The Editor-in-chief has been in active correspondence with representative men of divers theological schools, hoping to secure their cooperation in editorial work. As yet, however, the result has not enabled us to announce more than one additional collaborator: the rapidity with which the successive volumes must be furnished proving an almost insurmountable obstacle in the way of securing as co-workers, divines actively engaged in professional duties and literary tasks. The sympathy and encouragement which have been expressed by all with whom a correspondence has been opened, have been most cheering. To the Rev. Dr. Riddle, of Hartford, well known as one of the most learned of the American Revisers of the New Testament, we are indebted for his consent to edit one of the concluding volumes of the Series, accompanying it with a Bibliographical Review of the entire Literature of the Patrologia of the Ante-Nicene period: supplying therein a compendious view of all the writers upon this period and of the latest critical editions of the Ante-Nicene authors themselves. The editor-in-chief will continue his annotations and the usual prefaces, in Professor Riddle’s volume, but will be relieved, in some degree, of the laborious and minute attention to details which earlier volumes have necessarily exacted. 5 It is needful to remind the reader that he possesses in this volume what has long been a desideratum among divines. The crabbed Latin of the great Tertullian has been thought to defy translation: and the variety and uncertain dates of his works have rendered classification and arrangement almost an equal difficulty. But here is the work achieved by competent hands, and now, for the first time, reduced to orderly and methodical plan. We have little doubt that the student on comparing our edition with that of the Edinburgh Series, will congratulate himself on the great gain of the arrangement; and we trust the original matter with which it is illustrated may be found not less acceptable. 6 CONTENTS OF VOLUME 3 THE WRITINGS OF TERTULLIAN. INTRODUCTORY NOTE PART FIRST. 1. THE APOLOGY 2. ON IDOLATRY 3. THE SHOWS, OR DE SPECTACULIS 4. THE CHAPLET, OR DE CORONA 5. TO SCAPULA 6. AD NATIONES APPENDIX, FRAGMEN 7. AN ANSWER TO THE JEWS 8. THE SOUL’S TESTIMONY 9. A TREATISE ON THE SOUL PART S ECOND. 1. THE PRESCRIPTION AGAINST HERETICS 2. THE FIVE BOOKS AGAINST MARCION BOOK 1. BOOK 2. BOOK 3. BOOK 4. BOOK 5. 3. AGAINST HERMOGENES 4. AGAINST THE VALENTINIANS 5. ON THE FLESH OF CHRIST 6. ON THE RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH 7. AGAINST PRAXEAS 8. SCORPIACE 9. APPENDIX. AGAINST ALL HERESIES PART THIRD. 1. ON REPENTANCE 2. ON BAPTISM 3. ON PRAYER 4. AD MARTYRAS 5. APPENDIX. THE M ARTYRDOM OF PERPETUA AND FELICTAS 6. OF PATIENCE 7 TERTULLIAN PART FIRST INTRODUCTORY NOTE. [A.D. 145-220.] When our Lord repulsed the woman of Canaan (<401522>Matthew 15:22) with apparent harshness, he applied to her people the epithet dogs, with which the children of Israel had thought it piety to reproach them. When He accepted her faith and caused it to be recorded for our learning, He did something more: He reversed the curse of the Canaanite and showed that the Church was designed “for all people;” Catholic alike for all time and for all sorts and conditions of men. Thus the North-African Church was loved before it was born: the Good Shepherd was gently leading those “that were with young.” Here was the charter of those Christians to be a Church, who then were Canaanites in the land of their father Ham. It is remarkable indeed that among these pilgrims and strangers to the West the first elements of Latin Christianity come into view. Even at the close of the Second Century the Church in Rome is an inconsiderable, though prominent, member of the great confederation of Christian Churches which has its chief seats in Alexandria and Antioch, and of which the entire Literature is Greek. It is an African presbyter who takes from Latin Christendom the reproach of theological and literary barrenness and begins the great work in which, upon his foundations, Cyprian and Augustine built up, with incomparable genius, that Carthaginian School of Christian thought by which Latin Theology was dominated for centuries. It is important to note (1.) that providentially not one of these illustrious doctors died in Communion with the Roman See, pure though it was and venerable at that time; and 8 (2.) that to the works of Augustine the Reformation in Germany and Continental Europe was largely due; while (3.) the specialties of the Anglican Reformation were, in like proportion, due to the writings of Tertullian and Cyprian. The hinges of great and controlling destinies for Western Europe and our own America are to be found in the period we are now approaching. The merest school-boy knows much of the history of Carthage, and how the North Africans became Roman citizens. How they became Christians is not so clear. A melancholy destiny has enveloped Carthage from the outset, and its glory and greatness as a Christian See were transient indeed. It blazed out all at once in Tertullian, after about a century of missionary labors had been exerted upon its creation: and having given a Minucius Felix, and Arnobius and a Lactantius to adorn the earliest period of Western Ecclesiastical learning, in addition to its nobler luminaries, it rapidly declined. At the beginning of the Third Century, at a council presided over by Agrippinus, Bishop of Carthage, there were present not less than seventy bishops of the Province. A period of cruel persecutions followed, and the African Church received a baptism of blood. Tertullian was born a heathen, and seems to have been educated at Rome, where he probably practiced as a jurisconsult. We may, perhaps, adopt most of the ideas of Allix, as conjecturally probable, and assign his birth to A.D. 145. He became a Christian about 185, and presbyter about 190. The period of his strict orthodoxy nearly expires with the century. He lived to an extreme old age, and some suppose even till A.D. 240. More probably we must adopt the date preferred by recent writers, A.D. 220. It seems to be the fashion to treat of Tertullian as a Montanist, and only incidentally to celebrate his services to the Catholic Orthodoxy of Western Christendom. Were I his biographer I should reverse this course, as a mere act of justice, to say nothing of gratitude to a man of splendid intellect, to whom the filial spirit of Cyprian accorded the loving tribute of a disciple, and whose genius stamped itself upon the very words of Latin theology, and prepared the language for the labors of a Jerome. In creating the Vulgate, and so lifting the Western Churches into a position of intellectual equality with the East, the latter as the well as St. Augustine himself were 9 debtors to Tertullian in a degree not to be estimated by any other than the Providential Mind that inspired his brilliant career as a Christian. In speaking of Tatian I laid the base for what I wished to say of Tertullian. Let God only be their judge; let us gratefully recognize the debt we owe to them. Let us read them, as we read the works of King Solomon. We must, indeed, approve of the discipline of the Primitive Age, which allowed of no compromises. The Church was struggling for existence, and could not permit any man to become her master. The more brilliant the intellect, the more dangerous to the poor Church were its perversions of her Testimony. Before the heathen tribunals, and in the market-places, it would not answer to let Christianity appear double-tongued. The orthodoxy of the Church, not less than her children, was undergoing an ordeal of fire. It seems a miracle that her Testimony preserved its unity, and that heresy was branded as such by the instinct of the Faithful. Poor Tertullian was cut off by his own act.