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4 Reevaluating Tertullian and the Virtue of Patience Dominique LaCapra approaches historiography as a conversation with the past.1 Through his dialogical approach historical texts “speak” to the contemporary reader who, through a process of critical analysis, speaks back to the text to see if he is understanding clearly. The reader is then transformed by history “through his or her own reading or rereading of the primary texts.”2 This process requires a reciprocity of interpretation and appropriation through “mutual” exchange enabled by the constant listening to and rereading of texts. As we read historical texts, the dialogue opens our eyes to new understandings and representations of the past. LaCapra relies upon Mikhail Bakhtin in order to substantiate this dynamic reading. More specifically, he draws upon Bakhtin’s notion of “carnivalesque” to help elucidate these new understandings and representations.3 In carnivalesque literature as in an actual carnival, the mask is an important object used to express or parody alternative identities. The mask signifies “the ability to change in ways that destabilize fixed identities and suspend ordinary rules and role differentiations,” and it indicates “the incongruity of man with himself.”4 The idea of a carnival mask 1. Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 21. 2. Ibid., 48. 3. See M. M. Bakhtin and Caryl Emerson, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, vol. 8 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); and Rabelais and His World (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968). The latter work was originally submitted as part of Bakhtin’s dissertation that was rejected after several years of debate. The idea of carnival stems from the medieval celebration of the Feast of Fools, which is roughly equivalent to today’s Mardi Gras with some important distinctions. The Feast of Fools was performed by the lower ecclesiastical orders just before the Lenten season and symbolized the suspension of everyday life. It was a time/ceremony in which opposites were intermingled such as fools becoming wise and the wise becoming fools. 4. LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History, 300. 107 appropriately describes the presence of masked, multiple and overlapping identities. Once again, these textual representations are revealed through a dialogical exchange between the present and its historical subjects. Often times, the masks LaCapra describes are not plainly evident, especially when one reads history through master narratives or what he refers to as the “documentary approach.”5 This is because these historical approaches flattenout historical particularities in an effort to find or provide larger trends and themes. Describing LaCapra’s ideas of dialogue and carnival masks in terms set by Jacques Derrida, the carnival mask represents the absence of a presence, or disappearance of the origin.6 He asserts that the boundaries we create around our identity are at once bounded and limitless. Knowledge of our past is at once inside and outside of us; it occurs within language and beyond all signs. Ultimately, history exists as a “trace” that is never present and yet exists in some shadowy relation to reality. The boundaries we construct around identity and historical representation are never static bulwarks, but infiltrate and are infiltrated by traces from outside their borders. Identity is never fixed but continually shifts as it engages other boundaries and representations. This chapter dialogues with Tertullian and his treatment of patience in an effort to identify the various faces behind the rhetorical masks evident in his writing. It does not proceed under the assumption that Tertullian’s true face will ever be exposed, nor will the identification of his masks bring us closer to the true, natural or original meanings intended in his texts. His true face, or whatever this statement means, is clouded by an inevitable interplay between contextuality and interpretation. As Elizabeth Clark states, “Although historians strive to uncover the views of the past authors they study, their own comprehension nonetheless affects the outcome of their investigations.”7 As a historical figure, Tertullian exists now in those texts attributed to his name and in the living interpretive traditions that revisit this pioneer of Latin Christianity.8 As a result, recovery of his sense of Christianity is always already 5. Ibid., 27 and note. Drawing from Hayden White, LaCapra highlights the inadequacy of this approach for intellectual history and uses it to signify historiographic methods of the nineteenth century. Hayden V. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); and Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press...

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