Christian and Pagan in the Roman Empire

2. Testimony of the Soul

2 T E S T I M O N Y O F T H E S O U L Introduction This little treatise—one of Tertullian’s shortest1 —may in several respects be considered a companion piece to the Apology, which it appears to have followed within a year. In this treatise, as in the Apology, it is the image of the trial that provides the framework within which the argument proceeds. An ill-defined paganism that ridicules and hates Christian beliefs has put Christian faith on trial. In the course of the proceedings, Christian faith asks to cross-examine a witness from paganism itself— the soul not yet purified by the waters of baptism. During the procedure the unconverted soul confesses that it recognizes basic Christian beliefs as true; by implication it has acknowledged pagan religion as false. Plaintiff suddenly becomes defendant: because the unconverted soul acknowledges the truth of Christian faith, it stands guilty of living the lie of paganism, and at God’s Assize on the Judgment Day it will stand condemned.2 1. In the Latin text of Corpus Christianorum, the treatise has only 270 lines; To the Martyrs, Tertullian’s shortest treatise (included below), has, in the same text, 180 lines. 2. Tertullian shows little interest in clarifying the mise en scène implied in this treatise. The only explicit feature establishing the image of a case in court is the witness. It is not impossible, therefore, to imagine the personae in different roles: Christianity as the plaintiff, paganism as the defendant that condemns itself by its own witness. But the last sentence of chapter 1 and the first of chapter 2 sug71 While it appears that this treatise, like the Apology, is positioned as a defense of Christianity, it becomes in fact an exhortation to the pagans to adopt the faith of Christians, a faith that is shown to be at its source their own. Indeed, the brevity of the treatise, the limitation of its scope to a single issue—the validity of basic Christian doctrines—and especially the literary device of cross-examining a witness from the ranks of the opposing side, all help to foster a stronger sense of exhortation here than in the Apology. In effect, Tertullian has attempted to build a bridge between Christian belief and the pagan intellectual heritage as expressed in its assumptions, which in itself constitutes an invitation to pagans to believe. And yet, after the carrot , the stick: like the Apology the treatise concludes with the threat of punishment upon pagans who, still unconverted, will face the great Judge on the Last Day. Thus fear, too, has its role to play in Tertullian’s evangelical exhortation. As Tertullian himself acknowledges, he was not the first Christian to endeavor to speak to pagans on their own terms. Others, however, had sought to find in the literary tradition of paganism the kernels of truth pagans shared with Christians, in the hope that the recognition of a common truth articulated in the pagan tradition would facilitate pagan conversion. But Tertullian seeks to go beyond the literary tradition to find a source of truth on which indeed the tradition may draw, but which is more authoritative than the latter could ever be. This source is the “common ideas” shared instinctively by all human beings, even those left untouched by learning and so unacquainted with the literary tradition. The notion of communes sensus, “the common ideas,” was essentially Stoic in origin and assumed that all persons are born with a soul that derives ultimately from the divine. Because of its divine origin, the soul enters one’s life with an awareness of divine truth.3 This doctrine needed little adaptation for evan72 t e r t u l l i a n gest that it is the Christian faith that defends itself from the spiteful slanders of pagans, whom Christian doctrines offend, and it would be characteristic of Tertullian ’s irony to have the witness called from the plaintiff’s ranks only to find in the course of cross-examination that it has become a defendant. 3. For the Stoic origin of the doctrine of the “common ideas” and for the variety of expressions used by Tertullian to indicate this Stoic concept, see Quin- gelical purposes. The Christian could affirm that though sin has distorted the original integrity of the soul, and though a pagan education has obscured the...