ON THE NON-ETERNITY OF THE VISIBLE WORLD

Tertullian on doctrinal issues

30.  On the non-eternity of the visible world.

31.  On the nature of the soul.

32.  On the resurrection of the flesh.

33.  On the relationship between the Divine Persons.

34.  On the importance of Baptism.

30. ON THE NON-ETERNITY OF THE VISIBLE WORLD

It is a comparatively small thing, that certain men, like Phygellus, and Hermogenes, and Philetus, and Hymenaeus, deserted His apostle: the betrayer of Christ was himself one of the apostles. We are surprised at seeing His churches forsaken by some men, although the things which we suffer after the example of Christ Himself, show us to be Christians. "They went out from us," says (the apostle John) "but they were not of us. If they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us." (De praescriptione haereticorum, 3).

These corrupters of the truth we mention as being more notorious and more public than others. There is, however, a certain man named Nigidius, and Hermogenes, and several others, who still pursue the course of perverting the ways of the Lord (De praescriptione haereticorum, 30).

The same apostle (Paul), when disapproving of those who are "in bondage to elements," points us to some dogma of Hermogenes, who introduces matter as having no beginning, and then compares it with God, who has no beginning. By thus making the mother of the elements a goddess, he has it in his power "to be in bondage" to a being which he puts on a par with God (De praescriptione haereticorum, 33).

Now, the doctrine of Hermogenes has this taint of novelty. He is, in short, a man living in the world at the present time; by his very nature a heretic, and turbulent withal, who mistakes loquacity for eloquence, and supposes impudence to be firmness, and judges it to be the duty of a good conscience to speak ill of individuals. Moreover, he despises God's law in his painting, maintaining repeated marriages, alleges the law of God in defence of lust, and yet despises it in respect of his art. He falsifies by a twofold process-with his cautery and his pen (Adversus Hermogenem, 1).

For, turning away from Christians to the philosophers, from the Church to the Academy and the Porch, he (Hermogenes) learned there from the Stoics how to place Matter (on the same level) with the Lord, just as if it too had existed ever both unborn and unmade, having no beginning at all nor end, out of which, according to him, the Lord afterwards created all things (Adversus Hermogenem, 1).

He (God) could not have made all things, he (Hermogenes) says, of Himself; because whatever things the Lord made of Himself would have been parts of Himself; but He is not dissoluble into parts, because, being the Lord, He is indivisible, and unchangeable, and always the same. Besides, if He had made anything out of Himself, it would have been something of Himself (Adversus Hermogenem, 2).

He (Hermogenes) adds also another point: that as God was always God, there was never a time when God was not also Lord. But it was in no way possible for Him to be regarded as always Lord, in the same manner as He had been always God, if there had not been always, in the previous eternity, a something of which He could be regarded as evermore the Lord. So he concludes that God always had Matter co-existent with Himself as the Lord thereof (Adversus Hermogenem, 3).

At this point, then, I shall begin to treat of Matter, how that, (according to Hermogenes, ) God compares it with Himself as equally unborn, equally unmade, equally eternal, set forth as being without a beginning, without an end. For what other estimate of God is there than eternity? ... Hermogenes, therefore, introduces two gods: he introduces Matter as God's equal. God, however, must be One, because that is God which is supreme; but nothing else can be supreme than that which is unique; and that cannot possibly be unique which has anything equal to it; and Matter will be equal with God when it is held to be eternal (Adversus Hermogenem, 4).

He (Hermogenes) says in reply, that even though this is the prerogative of Matter, both the authority and the substance of God must remain intact, by virtue of which He is regarded as the sole and prime Author, as well as the Lord of all things. Truth, however, maintains the unity of God in such a way as to insist that whatever belongs to God Himself belongs to Him alone (Adversus Hermogenem, 5).

When he contends that matter is less than God, and inferior to Him, and therefore diverse from Him, and for the same reason not a fit subject of comparison with Him, who is a greater and superior Being, I meet him with this prescription, that what is eternal and unborn is incapable of any diminution and inferiority, because it is simply this which makes even God to be as great as He is, inferior and subject to none-nay, greater and higher than all (Adversus Hermogenem, 7).

Nay more, he even prefers Matter to God, and rather subjects God to it, when he will have it that God made all things out of Matter. For if He drew His resources from it for the creation of the world, Matter is already found to be the superior, inasmuch as it furnished Him with the means of effecting His works; and God is thereby clearly subjected to Matter, of which the substance was indispensable to Him (Adversus Hermogenem, 8).

He cannot say that it was as its Lord that God employed Matter for His creative works, for He could not have been the Lord of a substance which was co-equal with Himself. Well, but perhaps it was a title derived from the will of another, which he enjoyed -a precarious holding, and not a lordship, and that to such a degree, that although Matter was evil, He yet endured to make use of an evil substance, owing, of course, to the restraint of His own limited power, which made Him impotent to create out of nothing, not in consequence of His power; for if, as God, He had at all possessed power over Matter which He knew to be evil, He would first have converted it into good-as its Lord and the good God-that so He might have a good thing to make use of, instead of a bad one (Adversus Hermogenem, 9).

Great, in all conscience, must be the blindness of our heretics which leaves them to argue in such a way that they either insist on the belief of another God supremely good, on the ground of their thinking the Creator to be the author of evil, or else they set up Matter with the Creator, in order that they may derive evil from Matter, not from the Creator ... he has effected no result by this device of his. For observe how God is found to be, if not the Author of, yet at any rate the conniver at, evil, inasmuch as He, with all His extreme goodness, endured evil in Matter before He created the world, although, as being good, and the enemy of evil, He ought to have corrected it. For He either was able to correct it, but was unwilling; or else was willing, but being a weak God, was not able (Adversus Hermogenem, 10).

Now, more glory accrued to Him from a creation of His own will than from one of necessity; in other words, from a creation out of nothing, than from one out of Matter. It is more worthy to believe that God is free, even as the Author of evil, than that He is a slave. Power, whatever it be, is more suited to Him than infirmity (Adversus Hermogenem, 14).

If any material was necessary to God in the creation of the world, as Hermogenes supposed, God had a far nobler and more suitable one in His own wisdom -one which was not to be gauged by the writings of philosophers, but to be learnt from the words or prophets. This alone, indeed, knew the mind of the Lord. For "who knoweth the things of God, and the things in God, but the Spirit, which is in Him? " Now His wisdom is that Spirit ... Therefore on this ground Hermogenes puts Matter even before God, by putting it before the Son (Adversus Hermogenem, 18).

For I maintain that, even if the Scripture has not expressly declared that all things were made out of nothing -just as it abstains (from saying that they were formed)out of Matter- there was no such pressing need for expressly indicating the creation of all things out of nothing, as there was of their creation out of Matter, if that had been their origin (Adversus Hermogenem, 21).

But he draws an argument from the following words, where it is written: "And the earth was without form, and void." For he resolves the word earth into Matter, because that which is made out of it is the earth. And to the word was he gives the same direction, as if it pointed to what had always existed unbegotten and unmade. It was without form, moreover, and void, because he will have Matter to have existed shapeless and confused, and without the finish of a maker's hand (Adversus Hermogenem, 23).

Besides, the belief that everything was made from nothing will be impressed upon us by that ultimate dispensation of God which will bring back all things to nothing. For "the very heaven shall be rolled together as a scroll;" nay, it shall come to nothing along with the earth itself, with which it was made in the beginning. "Heaven and earth shall pass away," says He (Adversus Hermogenem, 34).

Matter, says he, at first sight seems to us to be incorporeal; but when examined by the light of right reason, it is found to be neither corporeal nor incorporeal. What is this right reason of yours, which declares nothing right, that is, nothing certain? (Adversus Hermogenem, 35).

When anything moves even of itself, its motion is the result of impulse; but certainly it is no part of its substance in your sense, when you make motion the incorporeal part of matter. All things, indeed, have motion-either of themselves as animals, or of others as inanimate things; but yet we should not say that either a man or a stone was both corporeal and incorporeal because they had both a body and motion: we should say rather that all things have one form of simple corporeality, which is the essential quality of substance. If any incorporeal incidents accrue to them, as actions, or passions, or functions, or desires, we do not reckon these parts as of the things (Adversus Hermogenem, 36).

I come back to the point of motion, that I may show how slippery you are at every step. Motion in Matter was disordered, and confused, and turbulent. This is why you apply to it the comparison of a boiler of hot water surging over. Now how is it, that in another passage another sort of motion is affirmed by you? For when you want to represent Matter as neither good nor evil, you say: "Matter, which is the substratum (of creation) possessing as it does motion in an equable impulse, tends in no very great degree either to good or to evil." Now if it had this equable impulse, it could not be turbulent, nor be like the boiling water of the caldron; it would rather be even and regular, oscillating indeed of its own accord between good and evil, but yet not prone or tending to either side (Adversus Hermogenem, 41).

You are unwilling that God should seem to be equal to Matter; and then again you say that it has a common condition with God. "For it is impossible," you say, "if it has nothing in common with God, that it can be set in order by Him." But if it had anything in common with God, it did not want to be set in order, being, forsooth, a part of the Deity through a community of condition (Adversus Hermogenem, 42).

You are plainly enough at variance with the philosophers; but neither are you in accord with the prophets. The Stoics maintain that God pervaded Matter, just as honey the honeycomb. You, however, affirm that it is not by pervading Matter that God makes the world, but simply by appearing, and approaching it, just as beauty affects a thing by simply appearing, and a loadstone by approaching it. Now what similarity is there in God forming the world, and beauty wounding a soul, or a magnet attracting iron? (Adversus Hermogenem, 44).

If, on the contrary, He made this world simply by appearing and approaching it, did He, on the completion of His work, cease to appear and approach it any more? Nay rather, God began to appear more conspicuously and to be everywhere accessible from the time when the world was made ... Therefore, in as far as it has become evident that Matter had no prior existence (even from this circumstance, that it is impossible for it to have had such an existence as is assigned to it), in so far is it proved that all things were made by God out of nothing. It must be admitted, however, that Hermogenes, by describing for Matter a condition like his own -irregular, confused, turbulent, of a ddoubtful and precipate and fervid impulse- has displayed a specimen of his own art, and painted his own portrait (Adversus Hermogenem, 45).

Tertullian is traditionally regarded as a fiery apologist of unknown biography who burst into Latin Christianity, in the reign of Septimius Severus, with a number of remarkable treatises that he composed over a relatively short period of time, after which he fizzled out for the rest of his long-lasting life. Surprisingly, he focused his attacks on a Greek painter, and also fought some other unfamiliar character that could not share his admiration for a strange group of visionaries who lived in Phrygia long time since. Some less demanding section of the clergy unleashed his fury no less than an otherwise unrecorded persecution of Christians. Not only himself but also his epoch is elusive. Ruthless opponents of the bishop Cyprian, who fled Carthage when Decius launched his anti-Christian campaign, followed his guidelines in a religious confrontation closely mirroring the subsequent Donatist controversy that flared up in Africa after Diocletian’s resignation. Following his unrelenting defence of the orthodox stance and his proscription of all heretics, at some point in time he supposedly forsook the Church Catholic to follow the ridiculous directions and put up with the frivolities of a gang of false prophets. Such two hardly compatible stages in his career were not successive but widely overlapping.

A quite different approach is presented in Did Tertullian really exist? Did Cyprian? Did Hippolytus? according to which the efforts of early 4^th-century African and Roman rigorists, forcefully denouncing an entrenched ecclesiastical body intent on preserving its former privileged position in the Church in spite of the disappointing behaviour of many of its members in times of harassment, along with the reaction of the hierarchical organization under attack, gave rise to the purported works of their respective literary champions, which conveniently came down from the preceding century to the assistance of Donatists and Caecilianists.

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