Credible because it is silly

Abstract

Tertullian’s paradoxical statement that Christ’s death is credible because it is silly has been understood as a rejection of human rationality. However, there is scholarly consensus that this interpretation cannot be sustained. This raises the question of how Tertullian’s paradox should then be interpreted, which, surprisingly, has received very little attention in research. This article proposes a new interpretation of the famous text: While, according to Tertullian, the incarnation follows directly and necessarily from God being Creator, the crucifixion and death of the Son constitute a genuine paradox. It should not have been possible, given who God is. Nevertheless, this impossible event happened, and did so with the same necessity as did the incarnation, as a consequence of God entering sinful humanity. This, in turn, raises the question of what place this paradox – and paradoxicality as such – should have in Christian thought.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 De Anima 3,1.

2 De Praescriptione Haereticorum 7,9.

3 De Carne Christi 5,4.

4 Osborn, Tertullian: First Theologian, 48–53.

5 Labhardt, “Tertullien”; Sider, “Credo Quia Absurdum?,” 417.

6 Osborn, Tertullian: First Theologian, 50.

7 Harrison, “Believe Because It is Absurd”.

8 Kierkegaard, Philisophiske Smuler, 256–7. Climacus’ project, for which Tertullian is invoked in support, is that Christian faith is possible only as the personal passion God calls forth in the believer at the downfall of human reason, a downfall that happens as reason is confronted with the absolute paradox of the incarnation.

9 Harrison, “Believe Because it is Absurd,” 339–40; Sider, “Approaches to Tertullian,” 247–50.

10 causas requiro, as he puts in in De Carne Christi 10,1.

11 Moreschini, “Tertullian”.

12 De Anima 20,1.

13 Eric Osborn is eager to point to Tertullian’s use of Stoic concepts (Osborn, “Was Tertullian a Philosopher?,” 328–31), picturing his entire theology as shaped by these. Osborn even characterises Tertullian as “a Heraclitean Stoic” (Osborn, Tertullian: First Theologian, 163), and states that “the Heraclitean strain of Stoicism … was his dominant drive,” (Osborn, “Conflict of Opposition,” 623). A more nuanced evaluation of Tertullian’s Stoicism can be found in the balanced study of Marcia Colish, concluding that it is “impossible to sustain the view that he [Tertullian] is primarily or exclusively a supporter, an enemy, or a transformer of Stoicism. He does all of these things simultaneously and to approximately the same degree … In all three cases he draws heavily on the thought of his Greek apologetic predecessors,” (Colish, Stoic Tradition, 13).

14 When Tertullian, in De Praescriptione Hereticorum 7,12 (and De Anima 58,9), rejects speculative inquiry or pursuit (curiositas), he is not rejecting any rational analysis of Christian faith. Rather, he opposes specific forms of philosophical speculation that, in his view, are contrary to belief in Christ and the gospel. This is evident from the mentioned texts and further supported by Tertullian’s positive use of the term curiositas, referring to rational justification of Christian faith (e.g., De Testimonio Animae 2,4).

15 Osborn, “Was Tertullian a Philosopher?,” 323. In the context, Osborn summarises the rejection of the psychological interpretation of Tertullian’s alleged irrationalism in terms of a sacrificium intellectus as described by C.G. Jung. This rejection was formulated in the mid-twentieth century and has since then become dominant in Tertullian research throughout the last two generations of scholars.

16 According to Heinrich Steiner, it is the entire ancient paideia (Steiner, Das Verhältnis). He presents Tertullian as a defender of Christianity in terms of a better philosophy that outperforms this paideia. I myself have argued that Tertullian’s quarrel is primarily with Plato and with the Platonist’s of his days (Søes, Image of God, 60–62.80). I have suggested that what Tertullian rejects in the Platonic philosophers is not only the theoretical content of Platonic (or Middle Platonic) metaphysics but, to an even greater extent, their lifestyle and ethics. For Tertullian, true philosophy is fundamentally a way of life (Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, 172–175.229–231), and he criticises the Platonic philosophers for teaching a wisdom they themselves do not follow.

It is important to underscore that Tertullian’s quarrel with Middle Platonism revolves around this, and around specific doctrinal points. In my opinion, this does not preclude the possibility that Tertullian made positive apologetic use of Middle Platonic philosophy in the form he knew it from his education, imbued with the Second Sophistic, as argued particularly by Claudio Morischini (Moreschini, “Adversus Marcionem and Middleplatonism”). However, I have some reservations regarding his argumentation concerning the extent of Tertullian’s Middle Platonism. But since I do not believe Middle Platonism to play any crucial role in the argumentation in De Carne Christi 5, I do not address it in this article.

17 Sider, Ancient Rhetoric, 58.

18 Neither does James Moffat’s much older proposal to interpret Tertullian’s statement in light of Aristotle’s rhetoric provide any answer to what Tertullian intends to convey with it. According to Moffat, Aristotle argues that a claim about something extremely improbable is credible precisely because of its improbability, which makes it very unlikely to be asserted or believed unless it is actually true (Moffatt, “Aristotle and Tertullian”). Moffat, however, acknowledges that this cannot be Tertullian’s point in the context of De carne Christi. Therefore, the potential formal similarity to Aristotle’s statement, in my view, becomes less interesting.

19 Kraft, “Die Paradoxie,”, widely cited, including in Wuchterl and Schröer, “Paradox (Paradoxon, Paradoxie)”; Schütt and Mühling-Schlapkohl, “Paradox”.

20 Décarie, “Le paradoxe,” 30.

21 Adversus Marcionem IV,21,12.

22 Adversus Marcionem II,2,4-6.

23 Fredouille, Tertullien et la conversion, 334.

24 Otten rightly emphasises that Tertullian’s concern in De Carne Christi is to defend that the Son of God assumed real human flesh because he holds it to be a prerequisite for the hope of a future physical resurrection. To do so, Tertullian draws on 1 Cor 1:27, which speaks of God choosing what is considered foolish in the world to shame the wise. This apparent foolishness is the incarnation, including Christ’s birth and full humanity, as clearly evident in De Carne Christi 4. However, according to Otten, the reference to the crucifixion, death, and resurrection in chap. 5 is nothing more than an elaboration of what is already inherent in the incarnation (Otten, “Christ’s Birth,” 253.)

This means that the foolishness of the incarnation (chap. 4) and the foolishness of Christ’s passion (chap. 5) are identical, so Otten. In both cases, it is no more than an apparent foolishness or paradoxicality arising from Marcion’s and his followers' attempt to judge God with their own understanding.

However, Tertullian’s “constructive intention” is to overlay this Marcionite (worldly) rhetoric with the eschatological reality of redemption (Otten, “Rhetoric of Redemption,” 338–9). Consequently, Otten appears to imply that Tertullian maintained the conviction that because the incarnation and the cross do not inherently manifest themselves as unmistakable divine acts of salvation, it leaves room, so to speak, for the Holy Spirit to triumph over human wisdom.

Otten does not comment on Tertullian’s explicit differentiation between the folly of the incarnation and the folly the cross by referring to the latter as “other foolish things” (alia stulta, De Carne Christi 5,1).

25 Lukas explicitly includes both the incarnation and the death on the cross in the follies (Törichten, Lukas, De Carne Christi, 149), which both gentiles and Jews take offense at. He also refers, like Fredouille, to Adversus Marcionem V,5. The point here, once again, is that the scandal over Christ’s birth and the scandal over his crucifixion are one and the same thing, fundamentally concerning his flesh.

26 Formally, De Carne Christi 1,4-5,10 appears to engage directly with Marcion. This rhetorical construction is, of course, fictitious, as Marcion had been dead for nearly half a century at the time of writing. The fictional Marcion of the text serves the same rhetorical purpose as in the five books of Adversus Marcionem (Søes, Image of God, 35–6), where Tertullian addresses both Marcion and an imagined Marcionite reader. This serves as a means of communicating with the text’s intended readers, probably fellow church members in Carthage/Roman Africa, whom Tertullian sought to caution against the influence of Marcionism.

27 deo nihil impossibile, De Carne Christi 3,1.

28 De carne Christi 4,1, transl. E. Evans (Evans, De Carne Christi Liber, 13).

29 Christus creatoris est, suum … amavit, 4,3).

30 stultus, 4,5-6, quoting 1 Cor 1:27: Stulta mundi elegit deus.

31 Adversus Marcionem II,6,2.

32 Adversus Marcionem I,17,4.

33 Søes, Image of God, 54. Andrew McGowan has put it a bit less sharply (McGowan, “God in Christ,” 9, cf. Osborn, Tertullian: First Theologian, 121).

34 De carne Christi 5,4, transl. E. Evans (Evans, De Carne Christi Liber, 19).

35 contumelias et passiones dei, De Carne Christi 5,1.

36 phantasma, De Carne Christi 5,2.

37 “Wir stellen zunächst fest, daß Tertullian seine Aussagen nicht von Gott, sondem vom Sohne Gottes macht. Vergleichen wir mit seiner Christologie, dann zeigt sich, daß es sich um Aussagen über die menschliche Natur Christi handelt.” (Kraft, “Die Paradoxie,” 271). As noted, I find Kraft’s interpretation implausible because it is impossible to justify how Tertullian can claim that the death of the Son is credible because it is silly, if the point was that there was nothing foolish or paradoxical about it. Moreover, I find it unreasonable that Kraft can simply “assert” that Tertullian’s statement is not about God when Tertullian uses the expression “God was crucified” twice in the context.

38 Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, 129.

39 Grillmeier builds in particular on Adversus Praxean 27,15, where Tertullian indeed presents it in such a way that the divine Logos-nature (sermo or spiritus) is the sole subject of “its own deeds,” namely signs and wonders, while the human nature (carnis) alone suffers hunger, thirst, sorrow, temptation and death.

40 Dunn, “Jesus in Tertullian,” 82.

41 “Tertullian had not yet considered what unity of the person of Christ means, whether the ‘man’ in Christ has his own prosopon.” (Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, 129). According to Grillmeier, Tertullian understands the divine and human natures almost as two independent subjects whose unity depend on “the early Christian practice of communicatio idiomatum” (ibid. 122, 131).

42 in una persona deum et hominem Iesum, Adversus Praxean 27,11.

43 Tertullian asserts that the Father, due to “the fullness of his majesty” (pro plenitudine maiestatis, Adversus Praxean 14,3) could not become visible, that is, incarnate. However, the Son could do what the Father could not, because of his “derived mode of being” (pro modulo derivationis, ibid.). Hence, the term person does not refer to the unity of divine and human substance, which was established at Christ’s conception and birth. On the contrary, the character of his person is the reason for the Son’s ability to perform visible and “fleshly” actions. Thus, according to Tertullian, it is the Son, not the Father, who is the subject of all the Old Testament theophanies (ibid. 14,1-10, McGowan, “God in Early Latin Theology,” 67–8) and of all the instances in Scripture – prior to the incarnation – where God displays human affections such as repentance etc. The Son’s ability to do this is not due to human nature (carnis), but to the character of his person within the Trinity, and precisely this character enabled him, and not the Father, to assume human flesh.

44 necessarium dedecus fidei, De Carne Christi 5,3, cf. 6,6.

45 salvus sum, ibid.

46 Søes, Image of God, 136.

47 For Tertullian summarised in the Rule of Faith, eg. De Praescriptione Haereticorum 13,2-5. Adversus Praxean 2,1-2. Cf. Sandnes, “Rule of Faith”.

48 See the fascinating argumentation in De Anima 16, where Tertullian departs from both the Platonic and Stoic dichotomy between reason and passion by incorporating passio into the divine ratio. Cf. Søes, Image of God, 71–2; and Gavrilyuk, Suffering of the Impassible, 58–9., for more examples.

49 Søes, Image of God, 44–6.