Tertullian and the Unborn Child

Christian and Pagan Attitudes in Historical Perspective

Julian Barr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317045878
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire antique

Tertullian of Carthage was the earliest Christian writer to argue against abortion at length, and the first surviving Latin author to consider the unborn child in detail. This book is the first comprehensive analysis of Tertullian's attitude towards the foetus and embryo. Examining Tertullian's works in light of Roman literary and social history, Julian Barr proposes that Tertullian's comments on the unborn should be read as rhetoric ancillary to his primary arguments. Tertullian's engagement in the art of rhetoric also explains his tendency towards self-contradiction. He argued that human existence began at conception in some treatises and not in others. Tertullian's references to the unborn hence should not be plucked out of context, lest they be misread. Tertullian borrowed, modified, and discarded theories of ensoulment according to their usefulness for individual treatises. So long as a single work was internally consistent, Tertullian was satisfied. He elaborated upon previous Christian traditions and selectively borrowed from ancient embryological theory to prove specific theological and moral points. Tertullian was more influenced by Roman custom than he would perhaps have admitted, since the contrast between pagan and Christian attitudes on abortion was more rhetorical than real.

1 Rhetoric and the unborn

Tertullian and the intellectual world of Roman Carthage

Before we delve into the intricacies of Tertullian’s arguments, I feel it is worthwhile establishing his place in the world of second-century rhetoric, his local surroundings, and the format in which he normally presented his ideas. Each had a direct impact upon his written work and shaped his arguments concerning the unborn. The influence of rhetoric must be fully acknowledged in order to understand how and why Tertullian chose to discuss the unborn child in his writings. Scholars focusing upon Tertullian have long recognised that he is best interpreted as an author of rhetoric. Before this consensus emerged, Tertullian’s works were commonly characterised as ‘random and haphazard’.¹ Tertullian’s corpus was described this way due to his loquacious syntax, his seemingly slapdash definition of topics, and also his frequent self-contradictions. Even in late antiquity, Tertullian attracted criticism for the difficulty of his prose.² To one unfamiliar with the cultural context and techniques of Latin oratory, Tertullian can indeed be hard to follow. He has been described as irrational or even ‘violent’ in his writing.³ However, from the 1970s onwards, it has been widely accepted that the precepts of Greco-Roman rhetoric played a vital role in shaping Tertullian’s literary output. Though Tertullian was certainly creative in his manipulation of its conventions, he carefully observed the structure of Latin oratory in most of his works.⁴ The key to approaching any aspect of Tertullian’s work, therefore, is to examine him in light of the manuals on rhetoric by Aristotle, Cicero, and especially Quintilian.

As Geoffrey Dunn suggests, increased awareness of the importance of rhetoric to Tertullian’s work should prove a fruitful avenue for future enquiries.⁵ Knowing that Tertullian wrote with a rhetorical purpose now discourages the tendency towards reductionist approaches to Tertullian’s corpus. The common practice of taking Tertullian’s passages out of context is now widely considered a methodological shortfall. Tertullian did not mention anything arbitrarily, but always to support the central thesis of his work. Moreover, he was perfectly willing to contradict himself between treatises, so long as each work held internal consistency. Attempts to simplify his views are therefore problematic. Studies continue to emerge on Tertullian’s approach to individual subjects, with an eye towards his agenda of persuading his reader to adopt an argument.

It is often said that by Tertullian’s period, Latin rhetoric had more or less given way to the Greek literary phenomenon known as the Second Sophistic movement.⁶ Only a handful of examples of second-century Latin literature survive. These include the works of the Younger Pliny, Tacitus, Fronto, Florus, Aulus Gellius, and Tertullian’s fellow North African, Apuleius. However, the low number of surviving Latin works from this period may not have been so much due to the diminishment of Latin rhetoric. Though little of their work has survived, it is clear that Latin oratory continued to thrive through the second century. After all, Latin rhetoric was one of the foundational disciplines of the Roman educational system; there is no indication that the state-sponsored schools of rhetoric founded under the emperor Vespasian ceased to function. Panegyrics continued to be performed in praise of emperors, such as those of Pliny and Fronto.

The low rate of survival for second-century Latin sources perhaps owes more to the selective interests of medieval copyists, rather than an actual decline in Latin letters. As Anthony Kaldellis points out, Byzantine producers of manuscripts had a stronger predilection for works written in Greek than Latin. It was thus not in their interest to preserve Latin works, since Latin was not their native language.⁷ In the Latin-speaking West, on the other hand, preservation and transmission of texts was even less methodical, in part due to unstable political and economic conditions in the centuries following the fall of the Western Roman Empire.⁸ Manuscript production of non-Christian Latin authors was particularly sporadic. This is unsurprising, given that the Church was responsible for the vast majority of book production, and was rather hostile to the literary output of pagan Rome. The Church did not discard second-century Latin works deliberately, since they were not destroyed in any systematic way. Medieval interest in pagan Latin texts was often primarily grammatical. Therefore, manuscripts of works from the so-called ‘golden age’ of Latin, the late Republican and early Augustan period, received much more intense interest from the copyists. Yet even their survival was often accidental. The preoccupation with Christian literature and Latin’s golden age came at the expense of second-century writers. The example of Fronto’s manuscript tradition demonstrates the limited medieval interest in second-century authors. The remains of Fronto’s correspondence with Marcus Aurelius survive only from meticulous reconstruction of fragments left on three palimpsests. His text was scraped off the page and overwritten.⁹

Tertullian’s home province of North Africa had an especially strong tradition of education in Latin rhetoric. Juvenal in the early second century complained in his Saturae that Africa had replaced Rome as the ‘nurturer of advocacy’.¹⁰ The emphasis upon Latin rhetoric among Africa’s provincial elites perhaps resulted from their anxiety to demonstrate that they held a Roman identity, rather than a Punic one.¹¹ There was therefore considerable opportunity in Carthage for a Latin rhetor. Apuleius, Tertullian’s closest predecessor in the North African canon, said in his Florida that he had been professionally declaiming at Carthage in Latin for six years.¹² Apuleius could never have achieved this unless he was working in an environment receptive to Latin declamation. By Tertullian’s lifetime, Latin rhetoric had long been formally taught in Carthaginian schools. Tertullian’s Adversus Valentinianos contained an accidental reference to a Latin rhetorician named Phosphorus, who ‘was in the schools of Carthage’.¹³

With the possible exception of Minucius Felix, Tertullian was the first to publish Christian rhetoric extensively in Latin. There had been a limited number of Christian rhetorical authors by Tertullian’s period. Arguably, the foundations for Christian rhetoric were laid in the New Testament. Paul and Luke’s arguments in favour of Christianity provided the model for subsequent Christian authors to follow. However, Christian rhetors prior to Tertullian had primarily consisted of apologists who wrote eloquent defences of Christianity in Greek, mostly intended for non-Christian readers.¹⁴ They sought to vindicate Christianity’s place in the Roman Empire upon a rational, rather than fideist basis. Notable examples included Justin Martyr and Athenagoras. Other writers, such as Irenaeus, wrote polemics dealing with controversies within Christianity. Though Christians were beginning to enter rhetorical discourse by the late second century, Christians had overall been somewhat sporadic in their output of rhetoric. Tertullian was the first prodigious Christian rhetor, with thirty-two treatises surviving and others lost.

There is an historical tradition, based on Eusebius and the Justinian Law Code, that Tertullian was a great legal expert. Eusebius’ Historia Ecclesiastica mentioned that Tertullian knew ‘the Roman laws extremely accurately’.¹⁵ Justinian’s Digesta and Codex also quoted legal works by a jurist named Tertullian.¹⁶ Quasten and Frend have suggested that the jurist Tertullian quoted in the Digesta and Tertullian of Carthage were one and the same.¹⁷ However, Barnes suggests that there is no concrete evidence of a connection between the jurist Tertullian and the Christian Tertullian.¹⁸ It is easy to see how Quasten and Frend came to this conclusion, though it is far from watertight. The cognomen Tertullianus was far from common among Latin authors, thus increasing the probability that Tertullian was the jurist of the Digesta. In Barnes’ view, this is an insubstantial argument. After all, though the cognomen was uncommon among published authors, it was not entirely unusual on inscriptions throughout the empire.¹⁹ Although the idea of two authors sharing this name might be strange to modern readers, it would not have been for Tertullian’s contemporaries.

We’ve already seen that Eusebius’ awareness of Tertullian was lacking, and his work is thus not the strongest evidence for Tertullian’s legal background. Indeed, among Tertullian’s treatises, Eusebius appeared aware only of the Apologeticum, and that in Greek translation.²⁰ Tertullian did indeed discuss the vicissitudes of Roman law in the Apologeticum, citing a precedent in which the emperor Tiberius supposedly threatened to punish anybody who accused Christians with death.²¹ This passage was perhaps the main reason Eusebius called Tertullian an expert in Roman law, and is in itself insufficient as a basis on which to identify him as a jurist.²²

The similarity of Tertullian’s rhetoric to courtroom speech has also led some to suggest that he was a practising lawyer. However, Barnes believes that this too is spurious since rhetorical training was hardly restricted to legal practitioners in the Roman world.²³ Tacitus and Quintilian tell us that training in law and oratory were the cornerstones of education for elite Roman males.²⁴ Thorough grounding in rhetoric was an essential...