Did you find yourself sputtering, as you read yesterday's post, "But -- but -- but what about Tertullian?" We certainly did ourselves, even as we were typing away. But perhaps we need not have.
Yesterday, we posted about the remark, attributed to Voltaire, that "the one who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." The remark, we observed, is a misquotation; Voltaire wrote something a bit subtler, about injustices. But the maxim is still worth remembering, particularly in a time when over-the-top heretical thinking has seized both political power and the the public name of Christianity.
Yet all the while, as we pontificated about those who make you believe absurdities, we were guiltily thinking of old Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus, the first great Latin theologian. Did he not say, as we distinctly remember being taught in an introductory church history course, "Credo quia absurdum est, I believe because it is absurd?" Is it not, therefore, practically incumbent upon us Christians to accept uncritically an entire body of historic doctrine not despite but because it gives offense to ordinary reason?
Well, no. The first thing is not what he said. Nor, even if Tertullian were an unimpeachable guide to Christian belief, would the second thing be quite what he had intended. Poor Quintus S.F.T. has, it seems, been more misquoted and misrepresented. And ironically enough, a chief part in the drama has been played by Voltaire himself.
In his treatise De carne Christi (5.4), Tertullian argues against Marcion and the Docetists generally that Christ did indeed possess a natural human body, one which therefore was both born and crucified. In the midst of this argument, he writes:
parce unicae spei totius orbis: quid destruis necessarium dedecus fidei? quodcunque deo indignum est mihi expedit: salvus sum si non confundar de domino meo: Qui me, inquit, confusus fuerit, confundar et ego eius. alias non invenio materias confusionis quae me per contemptum ruboris probent bene impudentem et feliciter stultum. crucifixus est dei filius: non pudet, quia pudendum est. et mortuus est dei filius: prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est. et sepultus resurrexit: certum est, quia impossibile. sed haec quomodo vera in illo erunt si ipse non fuit verus, si non vere habuit in se quod figeretur quod moreretur quod sepeliretur et resuscitaretur, carnem scilicet hanc sanguine suffusam ossibus substructam nervis intextam venis implexam, quae nasci et mori novit, humanam sine dubio ut natam deIn English:
homine? ideoque mortalis haec erit in Christo quia Christus homo et filius hominis. aut cur homo Christus et hominis filius si nihil hominis et nihil ex homine, nisi si aut aliud est homo quam caro, aut aliunde caro hominis quam ex homine, aut aliud est Maria quam homo, aut homo deus Marcionis?
Spare the one and only hope of the whole world: why tear down the indispensable dishonour of the faith? Whatever is beneath God's dignity is for my advantage. I am saved if I am not ashamed of my Lord. Whosoever is ashamed of me, he says, of him will I also be ashamed. (Mark 8:3) I find no other grounds for shame, such as may prove that in contempt of dishonour I am nobly shameless and advantageously a fool. The Son of God was crucified: I am not ashamed--because it is shameful. The Son of God died: it is immediately credible--because it is silly. He was buried, and rose again: it is certain--because it is impossible. But how can these acts be true in him, if he himself was not true, if he had not truly in himself that which could be crucified, which could die, which could be buried and raised up again--this flesh, in fact, suffused with blood, scaffolded of bones, threaded through with sinews, intertwined with veins, competent to be born and to die, human unquestionably, as born of a human mother? And in Christ this flesh will be mortal precisely because Christ is man, and Son of Man. Else why is Christ called Man, and Son of Man, if he has nothing that is man's, and nothing derived from man?--unless perchance either man is something other than flesh, or man's flesh is derived from somewhere else than from man, or Mary is something other than human, or Marcion's god is a man.
The whole thing is worth reading, if only to recall just what an entertaining stylist Tertullian was.
But let us note the key words, which are: The Son of God died: it is immediately credible, because it is silly. He was buried and rose again; it is certain, because it is impossible. This is not quite the maxim we were taught, and in context, its meaning seems quite different that we had been led to believe.
In a fine 2017 article in Church History, Peter Harrison sketches the ways that this remark has been changed over the years, and the rhetorical purposes behind those changes. To summarize, he detects two principal changes: Thomas Browne, in Religio Medici (1643), adds a personal note -- credibile becomes credo; and 124 years later Voltaire (in Le Diner du Comte de Boulanvilliers) makes the still more important change, by rendering ineptum into French as as absurde. Harrison argues that Browne, a convinced if eccentric Protestant, is using language, borrowed from the liturgical creeds, to emphasize the importance of one's personal appropriation of the common faith, and that Voltaire is trying to emphasize the irrationality of faith altogether. Harrison also shows that, throughout the modern period, this misquoted phrase has been held up frequently as an instance of faith as the willful abandonment of reason, variously contrasting Protestantism to Catholicism, Latin Christianity with Greek, or religion with unbelief.
A key problem is the translation of ineptum. Voltaire's absurde, like Ernest Evans' 1956 silly, quoted above, is lexically feasible. But neither quite hits the mark in context. Ineptus can be used a synonym for absurdus, meaning discordant, out-of-character, and carrying distinct tones of irrationality. But its primary senses according to Lewis & Short, are "unsuitable, impertinent, improper, tasteless," and another dictionary prefers "undignified."
When Tertullian uses the word, his argument centers not on whether Christ's incarnation, birth and death are reasonable, but whether they are dignified -- and his conclusion that they are not. The logic here is not easy for moderns to parse, but it helps to remember how many Patristic arguments are predicated on what is "fitting" for God to do. Tertullian seems argue that those "Christians" who deny the reality of the Lord's body (a form of materialism, and closer than he to what we would call "rationalism") call themselves Christians, but fail to embrace the paradoxical nature of the Gospel. In Christ, God over and over undertakes things which are not only uncharacteristic but undignified, even unworthy, of "God" as conceived by philosophy: to become human, to be born, to be killed -- and yet never ceases to be God.
To be sure, there is a bit of an anti-rational, or anti-rationalistic, argument here, but it falls well short of the common depiction of Tertullian as an advocate of uncritical acceptance of official doctrine. He is, at most, foreshadowing Luther's "theology of the Cross," with its emphasis upon the appearance of God in seemingly unlikely places.
On the contrary, as Harrison shows, Tertullian in this very work and elsewhere is eager to defend the human power of reason as well as to demand causes, reasons, for his own beliefs. His argument about indignity and impossibility may even proceed from Aristotle, who in the Rhetoric (2:23) suggests that reports of highly improbable events are more likely to be trustworthy than those of ordinary ones, because (quoting Harrison) "the only thing that would make a witness believe such a thing is that it had happened."
And in fact -- here we depart from Harrison, who must not be blamed -- Tertullian's claim, that the Incarnation and related events are credible because they do not seem like what one would expect from God, places him in line not with the irrationalist fanatics of the contemporary Christian world, but with their regular opponents, the hardheaded historical-critical Bible scholars. Is it not, after all, a maxim of textual and literary critics that lectio difficilior potior, meaning the more difficult reading of a text is the stronger one? By this they mean that, when an author writes something that seems odd or out of place, later scribes have a natural tendency to amend it to a more readily digestible form; and therefore the scholar, confronting two manuscript traditions, should take the one that seems "wrong" to be correct.
This, then, seems to be Tertullian's argument that Jesus possessed a true body against those who thought he merely gave that appearance: that they are trying to smooth over the difficulty of the authentic narrative, by retelling it in a way that seems more fitting for the "god" in whom they believe; but that in doing so, they lose the precise element which makes the original story convincing, which is that it presents a new and different vision of God.
When Tertullian uses the word, his argument centers not on whether Christ's incarnation, birth and death are reasonable, but whether they are dignified -- and his conclusion that they are not. The logic here is not easy for moderns to parse, but it helps to remember how many Patristic arguments are predicated on what is "fitting" for God to do. Tertullian seems argue that those "Christians" who deny the reality of the Lord's body (a form of materialism, and closer than he to what we would call "rationalism") call themselves Christians, but fail to embrace the paradoxical nature of the Gospel. In Christ, God over and over undertakes things which are not only uncharacteristic but undignified, even unworthy, of "God" as conceived by philosophy: to become human, to be born, to be killed -- and yet never ceases to be God.
To be sure, there is a bit of an anti-rational, or anti-rationalistic, argument here, but it falls well short of the common depiction of Tertullian as an advocate of uncritical acceptance of official doctrine. He is, at most, foreshadowing Luther's "theology of the Cross," with its emphasis upon the appearance of God in seemingly unlikely places.
On the contrary, as Harrison shows, Tertullian in this very work and elsewhere is eager to defend the human power of reason as well as to demand causes, reasons, for his own beliefs. His argument about indignity and impossibility may even proceed from Aristotle, who in the Rhetoric (2:23) suggests that reports of highly improbable events are more likely to be trustworthy than those of ordinary ones, because (quoting Harrison) "the only thing that would make a witness believe such a thing is that it had happened."
And in fact -- here we depart from Harrison, who must not be blamed -- Tertullian's claim, that the Incarnation and related events are credible because they do not seem like what one would expect from God, places him in line not with the irrationalist fanatics of the contemporary Christian world, but with their regular opponents, the hardheaded historical-critical Bible scholars. Is it not, after all, a maxim of textual and literary critics that lectio difficilior potior, meaning the more difficult reading of a text is the stronger one? By this they mean that, when an author writes something that seems odd or out of place, later scribes have a natural tendency to amend it to a more readily digestible form; and therefore the scholar, confronting two manuscript traditions, should take the one that seems "wrong" to be correct.
This, then, seems to be Tertullian's argument that Jesus possessed a true body against those who thought he merely gave that appearance: that they are trying to smooth over the difficulty of the authentic narrative, by retelling it in a way that seems more fitting for the "god" in whom they believe; but that in doing so, they lose the precise element which makes the original story convincing, which is that it presents a new and different vision of God.
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