TERTULLIAN

TERTULLIAN (ca. 155-ca. 225). Tertullian was the most important pre-Nicene Christian writer in Latin. Trained in law, versed in Greek, both the language itself and its philosophical tradition, he was a writer of fiercely polemical character. All his works are characterized by a burning zeal that verges on, and in later life tumbles over, the edge of fanaticism. At first a catholic Christian, he became ca. 210 a devotee of the Montanist movement, an action that led him to emphasize truth, veritas, and absolute standards of moral conduct. His contributions to Latin-speaking Christianity were immense, including the invention (or at least first witness to) much of its theological vocabulary, e.g., substantia and persona for the essence and persons of the Trinity (q.v.), the word trinitas itself, and naturae for the humanity and divinity in Christ. His works in translation fill two volumes of the Ante Nicene Fathers series. They include apologetics (q.v.), polemics, and treatises on moral and ecclesiological issues. His polemical works include the brief but famous Prescription against the Heretics, an antignostic work, Against Marcion, which opposes the latter’s dualism and argues in defense of both the Old and New Testaments, and Against Praxeas in defense of the persons of the Trinity and against the modalism popular in Rome at the turn of the 3rd c.