The first Christians to write in Latin, both in Rome and in Carthage, were Berbers.

TERTULLIAN’S TREATISE ON THE MANTLE.
In the works of Tertullian, there is a small treatise entitled De Pallio (Of the Coat), which owes its fame to the difficulty of understanding it. The commentators, who are attracted to obscurity as others are to light, have given it a great deal of attention; they have made great efforts to clarify it, but have only succeeded in part. One of these commentaries in particular, that of Saumaise, has remained in the memory of scholars: it is a remarkable work, and does great credit to French scholarship in the seventeenth century. However, Saumaise is far from having dispelled all the clouds; although he has better explained the details of words and phrases, the meaning of the entire work still remains rather uncertain. It is so difficult to grasp that Malebranche, in his Recherche de la vérité, sees it as nothing more than a mass of incoherent images, and that he regards Tertullian as the type of those brilliant and empty authors ‘who have the power to persuade without reasons, by dizzying and dazzling the mind, and solely by this deceptive power that the imaginations exert over each other’.
I would like to take up this little problem in my turn and try to find out whether it is possible to know what Tertullian wanted to do when he composed his treatise on the Cloak. It is a question which at first seems rather unimportant, and of a nature to please scholars rather than people of the world. I would have been very reluctant to tackle it before them, fearing to bore them, if it did not offer the opportunity to touch on a few interesting points in the history of early Christianity.
I.
To understand the work, we must first have an idea of the author. The man is, moreover, very curious to study, and fairly easy to get to know. He is such an original figure and of such powerful relief that it is easy to sketch his outlines.
We know little about his biography: he was from Carthage and lived at the time of Septimius Severus. His first works date from the end of the first century and it is assumed that he lived until the middle of the following century. He was not born a Christian, and more than once recalls the time when he attacked and mocked the new doctrine that he did not yet know. You can see from the way he talks about it that he must have been a fierce enemy at the time; but when he embraced it, he immediately became its most passionate defender.
He had a fiery nature in everything. Usually, the violence of his temperament is attributed to the country from which he originated, and the explanation seems plausible enough at first. However, it should not be forgotten that Africa has given the Church doctors who bear little resemblance to Tertullian. To name but one, the Bishop of Carthage, Saint Cyprian, was a skilful politician who knew how to get out of delicate situations skilfully and did not push things to extremes. In the first persecution, he did not hesitate to hide from the executioners because he thought it worthwhile to live, and in the second, he offered himself for death because he wanted to set a great example to the faithful. This wise man, who never acted except with reflection and moderation, was nevertheless an African like Tertullian, which shows that the influence of one’s environment is not as sovereign as it is said to be, and that the same country can produce opportunists and intransigents at the same time.
In fact, people of this temperament are not rare anywhere, even in the Church, and we have seen people today who, without having been born in Africa, brought terrible tempers to the defence of a religion of peace. The first trait of their character is that they are rigid, wholehearted and absolute, that they regard any concession as a weakness, that instead of avoiding difficulties they create them, that they demand blind acceptance of their opinions and that at the same time they work to make them less and less acceptable, They seem proud to offend public opinion; they like to pose like athletes and go to war at every opportunity; they have a talent for insulting others, preferably at the expense of their best friends.
These violins generally have great advantages over moderates. Not only do they appeal to violent people like themselves, because of the affinity of their characters; but they do not displease timid people either, over whom decisiveness and strength exert a great influence, and who are very ready to admire in others qualities of which they do not feel themselves capable. This man, moreover, had a very fine genius; he possessed great vigour of dialectic, vast knowledge, and a striking and personal way of expressing himself. The Church must have been very proud of him once he had conquered it; until then it had had very few men of letters, which seemed to vindicate its enemies when they mocked the ignorance of Christians and claimed that the most learned among them were only good for arguing with poor people or old women. The works of Tertullian refuted these taunts: at last the Church had a defender it could oppose to all the fine minds of the school. The apology he published on the Christian religion, which was one of his first books, was likely to cause great admiration in the community and some surprise outside it. No work of this kind and importance had yet appeared in Latin (1). And it wasn’t just the language that was new; the defence of Christianity was presented in a way that was original and entirely appropriate to the spirit of those for whom the book was written. The Greek apologists, if we are to judge by St Justin, usually used general and philosophical arguments; they invoked reason, common sense and humanity in favour of the Christians. They addressed themselves more to man than to the Roman. Tertullian wanted to convince the Romans in particular; he spoke to them as a jurist and politician. He tried to prove to them that everything about the procedures applied to Christians was unjust. He argued that torture, which had been devised to uncover the truth, should not be used to make them tell a lie. He shows that out-of-date laws are being sought in order to destroy them, and boldly demands that the axe be finally brought to bear in this forest of old plebiscites and outmoded senatus-consults, which, if they are not repealed once and for all, can provide weapons for all hatreds and authorise all iniquities. This way of reasoning is typical of a businessman, accustomed to legal discussions and who must have frequented the praetor’s court. This is what was new in Tertullian’s Apology. It was because of these qualities that it struck not only the Romans, for whom it was written, but also the Greeks, who usually admired only themselves and who nevertheless hastened to translate it into their own language. Thus the whole of Christendom adopted it, and it became the common defence of the whole Church under threat. It was a great service that Tertullian rendered to his brothers; but we shall see that by his exaggerations and his violence he compromised them even more than he had served them.
Christian society was going through a difficult crisis at the time. It was no longer the time when the small congregation, made up almost entirely of commoners or foreigners, could isolate itself from the rest of the world, when the faithful met peacefully on feast days in a few unknown oratories and, the rest of the time, went about their obscure occupations in their shops and workshops, without being noticed by anyone. Little by little, these little-known people, whose names were not known, were joined by people of some importance, bourgeois, rich freedmen, like ‘that Calixtus, a future pope, who had started out as a banker and even, it is said, by taking his shareholders’ money, professors, officers, magistrates and, under Marcus Aurelius, senators. This success greatly delighted Tertullian, who said to the pagans, with an air of triumph: ‘We have filled the cities, the castles, the islands, the municipalities, the towns, even the camps, the tribes, the decuries, the prince’s palace, the senate and the forum: all we have left you are your temples’. But this rapid spread, of which Christianity was so proud, was to cause it great embarrassment. The old religion, during so many centuries of domination, had found a way of interfering in everything. The family and the state depended on it. There was no act of public or domestic life that was not accompanied by prayers and sacrifices. The municipal magistrate, the official of the empire, the soldier and the officer could not under any pretext refrain from taking part in ceremonies celebrated for the state and the prince. In truth, these were usually pure formalities that did little to engage the conscience. Official religion consisted only of external practices to which most people attached so little significance that they did not understand why anyone should have any scruples about performing them. ‘If they refused to do so, the mildest and most insane of their enemies, like Pliny the Younger, lost patience and called them proud and stubborn, whose obstinacy deserved every punishment. So what was to be done? By becoming a Christian, were you to give up the position you held in the world, move away from the career you had hitherto followed, cease to be a decurion or duumvir in your home town, a tribune or centurion in the army, procurator to Caesar, administrator or civil servant? And even, if there was no other way of escaping the contagion of idolatry, was one forced to renounce all the habits of intimate life, family gatherings or friendship, and to condemn oneself to a kind of retreat or secession within the confines of the home? These questions were of great concern to Christian society, especially as they were not resolved in the same way by all the doctors. The gentler ones were keen to reassure troubled souls and readily lent themselves to accommodations which allowed the faithful to keep their faith without abandoning their position; but there were also rigorous ones, to whom the slightest compromise seemed like a crime.
I do not need to say which side Tertullian was on. No one will be surprised that, with the character we know about him, he was at the forefront of those who did not want to hear talk of concessions. We have a treatise of his against idolatry (De Idololatria), which is well known and has often been quoted and analysed, but to which we must always return if we want to have an idea of the situation of the Christians and the cruel embarrassments to which they were then subjected. He deals in his own way with some of the questions that the faithful anxiously asked the doctors of the church. He begins with those that seem easiest to resolve. First of all, he asks whether a Christian can make idols; of course not, since in so doing he is serving the cause of an enemy religion. It is all very well to say that he makes them, but that he does not adore them: ‘You adore them,’ replies Tertullian, ‘since it is thanks to you that they can be adored55 . You do not content yourself with offering them the blood of an animal, you sacrifice yourself in their honour; you immolate your genius to them; you pour out your sweat as a libation. Instead of incense, you pay them homage with your art. You are more than a priest to them, since it is through you that they have priests; it is your talent that makes them gods.’ At first, nothing seems more natural than this defence; but when we look closely, we see that it goes further than it seems, and that, if we push it to the extreme, it can have the most serious results. So long had idolatry reigned that Olympus seemed to have become the natural home of the imagination. Scenes from mythology fuelled painting as well as poetry; statues of gods and goddesses in marble, bronze and terracotta filled homes as well as temples. To forbid sculptors and painters to reproduce them was to dry up the source of their ordinary inspiration and outlaw the arts. The church seemed to have shrunk from this rigorous consequence. In decorative painting, where representations are less important, it allowed a few figures to slip in that were straight out of old mythology. On the very vaults of the catacombs, in the holiest places, we sometimes find winged genii, carrying torches and crowns, next to the serious Orantes or Jonah under his tree. We do not see that the artists who painted these profane images were rated any lower in the Christian community than the others, and Tertullian even tells us that there were idol-makers who were elevated to ecclesiastical honours. Such weakness outraged him; and, far from indulging in such indulgences, he took pleasure in throwing down a sort of challenge to this society where the taste for the arts had remained so lively. While it was trying to make its gods as beautiful as possible, he took insolent delight in maintaining that Jesus Christ was ugly. He was not far from wanting people to abide by the provisions of Deuteronomy, which absolutely forbids the reproduction of the figures of men and animals; if the artists demanded it, he mocked them and set out to prove to them that they were not so much to be pitied. Can’t they put their talent to other uses? Those who work with wood, ‘instead of getting the god Mars out of a lime tree,’ will make cupboards and chests; those who work with metal will make dishes and pots. At least they won’t run the risk of running out of work: the world needs pots more often than it needs gods. —- These jokes show us that the interests of the arts were the least of his concerns.
Having thus condemned the makers of idols, Tertullian goes on to discuss those who adorn and decorate them; then, all the trades that have something to do with idolatry, the architects who build or repair temples, and the merchants of incense, victims and flowers. While he is at it, he would like to extend his severity to the whole of commerce. How can commerce suit a servant of God, since it is based on greed and covetousness? Every trader desires to become rich; and the means he usually takes to get there sooner is to deceive and lie. There are at least certain professions from which a Christian must at all costs abstain; for example, he will not be a fortune teller, or an astrologer: anyone who tries to read the future in the stars treats the stars as gods, which is a crime. He will not be a lanista, or master of gladiators. The lanista teaches these wretches to kill themselves gracefully, and the Lord has said: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Nor will he be a schoolmaster or teacher of literature: he would be forced to make children explain books full of fables, to teach them the history, attributes and genealogies of the gods. From exclusion to exclusion, he came to wonder whether a Christian could be allowed to hold public office. This was a huge question, and we can see that it was much debated around Tertullian. For him, the answer is not in doubt: ‘If we admit,’ he says, ‘that one can be a magistrate without making sacrifices or ordering them, without offering victims, without looking after the temples or appointing people to look after them, without giving games and presiding over them, without judging the fortunes or lives of citizens, without condemning them to prison and torture, then we can decide that it is permissible for a Christian to be a magistrate’. He had a deep aversion to games in particular. They had become the greatest passion of the ancient world. The pleasure the Romans took in them was so great that without the theatre and the circus they no longer understood existence. It did not seem possible to them that a man could give them up of his own free will; so they were quite surprised to see that Christians usually refrained from appearing in them. They were not far from believing that this was a way of preparing for martyrdom, and supposed that they deprived themselves of the charms of life in order to have less difficulty in leaving it. Tertullian has no pity for all those who attend shows; he considers this crime to be the greatest of all and the most unworthy of forgiveness. The theatre seems to him to be the home of the devil, and he relates that an evil spirit once took possession of a Christian who happened to be at a public play, and when the exorcist asked the demon what right he had to enter the body of a servant of God, the other replied: ‘I met him in my own home’. We can therefore say that Tertullian’s conclusion is that we must keep away from pleasures, honours and business, in other words from everything that seemed to the Romans of that time to be worth living for.
II.
At first sight, this rigour hardly surprises us: there have always been two opposing currents in the Church; the severe Doctors, who want us to separate ourselves completely from the world, are opposed by the more indulgent moralists who are looking for an honest way of accommodating ourselves with it; the Jansenists and the Jesuits are of all times. In the middle of the second century, during the persecution of Decius, the poet Commodian, who belonged to the school of Tertullian, complained bitterly about those easy-going ecclesiastics who, out of kindness of spirit, interest or fear, concealed the truth from the faithful, tried to make everything easy and straightforward for them, and only ever told them what they would be pleased to hear; he even went so far as to accuse them twice of receiving small inducements to keep quiet. Not only must these indulgent casuists have been quite numerous, but it is probable that their influence outweighed that of their opponents, since in reality the Christians included merchants, bankers, artists, teachers and magistrates, which proves that Tertullian’s anathemas could not prevail against the necessities of life. Naturally, he was very irritated by this, and as the opposition only exasperated him, it is understandable that, in his anger, he often went too far. Besides, such exaggerations are natural to all those who undertake to reform public morals; they raise their voices to make themselves better heard and ask for a lot in order to obtain something. But it must be admitted that in this case severity pushed to its limits presented great dangers and that wise minds were not wrong to complain about it.
First of all, it had the disadvantage of disturbing Christian consciences. The sacrifices that Christianity demanded of those who embraced its doctrines were serious; it is clear that they could not resign themselves to them without pain. When they were asked to break with old habits and respectable family traditions, to give up occupations that were dear and profitable to them or dignities that they regarded as the honour of their house, it is understandable that their souls were torn with regret. This painful ordeal, from which not everyone emerged victorious, was made even more painful by Tertullian’s excessive demands and the harshness with which he treated those who hesitated. These unfortunate people searched the holy books to find some text that would favour their resistance. Necessity made them ingenious, subtle, adept at interpreting the words and phrases of Scripture in their own interests. But they had to deal with a master dialectician who was never at a loss, who opposed their texts with contrary texts and constantly thundered at them with new arguments. When, to excuse themselves for taking part in the pleasures of the crowd, they relied on the words of the apostle: ‘Rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep’, he reminded them that another apostle said: ‘The world will rejoice, but you will weep’. To the astrologers who defended themselves by the example of the Magi whose gifts Christ was willing to accept, which proves that he was not contrary to them, Tertullian is content to say that without doubt the Magi were well received at the cradle of Christ, but that by warning them to return by another route, God obviously wanted to order them to abandon their wicked trade. In order to be forgiven, public officials point out that Daniel and Joseph had been ministers to a king: ‘Daniel and Joseph,’ replies Tertullian, ‘were slaves, and therefore forced to accept the duties with which they were charged. You could refuse them, since you are free, and you ask for them! If by misfortune, in this struggle of quotations and subtleties, these poor people, harassed by their formidable adversary, allow themselves to say, which seems quite natural to us: ‘But how shall we live?’ he no longer restrains himself: ‘What do you say, “I shall be poor”?’ Did not the Lord say: ‘Blessed are the poor’? ‘I won’t have enough to eat. —- Isn’t it written that we mustn’t worry about living and clothing? —– ‘I did have some fortune, though.’ —- We must sell everything we have and give it to the poor. —- ‘But our sons and grandchildren, what will become of them?’ —- Anyone who puts his hand to the plough and looks back is a bad worker. —- ‘Yet I enjoyed a certain rank in the world.’ —- You cannot serve two masters. —- If you want to be the Lord’s disciple, take up your cross and follow the Lord. Parent, wife, children, he commands you to leave everything for him. When James and John were taken away by Jesus Christ and left their father and their boat behind, when Matthew got up from his post as tax collector and found that it took too long to take the time to bury his father, did any of them reply to Jesus who was calling them: ‘I won’t have anything to live on’? 59 It was in this tone that Matthew said: ‘I don’t have anything to live on’. It is in this tone that he refutes their arguments; he feels no pity for their worries and their turmoil, and even seems to triumph over the despair into which he throws them.
And it should be noted that this was not just a great battle, fought once in a lifetime, to decide whether or not to leave the profession you had practised up to that point; the battle was going on all the time. Every day new questions arose about minutiae, and Tertullian, as an intractable moralist, was no less demanding about the little things than he was about the big things. On all matters, he pushed scrupulosity to incredible refinements. A Christian may be invited by relatives, friends or neighbours to a betrothal, a wedding or a family celebration, when the son of the house, eight days after his birth, receives the name by which he is known or, at the age of eighteen, puts on his manly dress. When he meets a pagan along the way, he cannot refuse to talk to him. How carefully, if he talks to him, should he not watch his words! What refined scruples, not to say a word that could compromise his faith 1 For example, it is understood that a Christian must not pronounce the name of the gods: it is sacrilege. But what is to be done when this name designates a street or a public square? Will it be forbidden to say that such a person lives in the street of Isis or on the quay of Neptune? This time, Tertullian relented, as the most rigorous never go to the end of their intransigence. But he soon regained his severity. One day, when one of the faithful was arguing with a pagan, the other said to him: ‘May Jupiter take you away! —- ‘May he rather take you away yourself!’ replied the Christian, with no thought of harm. Tertullian immediately flew into a rage. Doesn’t speaking like that mean recognising the divinity of Jupiter and renouncing Christ? And this is how a word that slips out in the heat of a discussion can become a crime. With the need for constant self-monitoring and the perils to which faith is exposed at every moment, Tertullian was right to compare life to a sea voyage between rocky outcrops and shallows.
Another danger of this extravagant rigourism was that it risked completely alienating the Christian community from public authority, which was already ill-disposed towards it. Deep down, however, Tertullian was not an enemy of authority. Like all minds of his calibre, he had a taste for strong government. Philosophical and liberal opposition, which usually manifested itself only in good words, had the gift of irritating him, and he speaks lightly of this elegant and softened society which was rebellious only in words, sinon armis, saltem lingua semper rebelles estis. On the contrary, he preached everywhere obedience to the established powers and showed himself full of respect for the prince, who seemed to him a sort of lieutenant of God, a Deo secundus. But there was nothing servile about this respect. Although he honoured the emperor, he vigorously refused to worship him. He gives him his share, a very large share, in human things; but he does not intend to give him everything: ‘If everything is Caesar’s,’ he says, ‘what will be left for God? Now Caesar is accustomed to taking advantage, and it is probable that these reservations, however reasonable they may seem to us, will not be to his liking. Moreover, he will find other grounds for anger in the opinions held by Tertullian. We have seen what Tertullian thinks of public games and how rigorously he forbids Christians to attend them. These games were almost always given in honour of the prince; they recalled either the anniversary of his birth, or his accession to the throne, or some happy event that had happened to him; by refusing to take part in them, one was supposed to appear indifferent or contrary to his happiness and glory. When a letter crowned with laurels brought news of a victory to Rome, it was customary for good citizens to light up their door and surround it with a garland of flowers. At first sight, nothing could seem more innocent, and we know that Christians were very eager to pay the emperor a tribute that did not seem to them contrary to their religion. But Tertullian does not feel this way. He remembers that, in the ancient house, the door is a sacred place, and that Varro attributes three gods to it, who are specially charged with protecting it. Is it not to be feared that by placing flowers and lights there we might seem to be honouring idols? So in the midst of all the joy, the doors of the Christians alone must remain dark and bare. Here they are openly singled out for the emperor’s suspicion and the people’s anger. All the more reason why they should be forbidden to mingle, on feast days, with the explosions of popular joy. Tertullian, in order to discourage them, likes to paint unflattering pictures of them; he shows them how noisy, disorderly and rude they are: ‘It’s a fine thing to light fires in front of one’s door, to set up tables in the crossroads, to dine in the squares, to turn Rome into a cabaret, to pour wine along the roads, to run around in troupo to insult each other, to fight and to commit all sorts of disorders! Can public joy only be manifested by public dishonour? The Christians will therefore stay at home, when everyone is in the streets; they will be serious, grave, in the midst of the general jubilation, and it will not fail to be said that they are distressed by the common happiness, that they are discontented, factious, rebellious, and that they were right to be called ‘enemies of the human race! In this way, the slanderous accusations of which they had been the victims so many times would be spread among the crowd; but Tertullian was little affected by this danger. On the contrary, he does not mind being slandered; he rejoices in it, he triumphs in it, he adorns himself with these reproaches that are addressed to his doctrines as a tribute that one is forced to pay them: ‘O slanderer,’ he says, ‘sister of martyrdom, who proves and attests that I am a Christian, what you say against me is to my praise! It is in the nature of this fiery spirit to love to contradict and shock his adversaries. He worked with his hands to drive a deep wedge between the Church and the Empire; he showed them to be as irreconcilable and irreconcilable as he could. He prefers to attack the oldest opinions, the most respected maxims. In a society which honoured marriage above all else, which had long regarded the Julian laws and the rigorous punishments pronounced against bachelors as the safeguard of the state, he mercilessly condemned second marriages and allowed first marriages only with the greatest reluctance. If he finds it difficult to forgive those who have a wife, he openly congratulates those who have no children: ‘There are servants of God,’ he says, ‘to whom it seems that children are necessary, as if they did not have enough to do to look after their own salvation. Why did the Lord say: ‘Woe to the womb that conceived and to the breasts that nursed’? It is because on the day of judgment children will be a great embarrassment;’ and it seems to him that those who have none will be much sooner ready to respond to the angel’s trumpet. What must people have said when they heard these strange words, when they were accustomed to reproach bachelors, to consider it a misfortune and a disgrace not to leave an heir to their name and to die the last of their family? They were no less shocked by the way Tertullian expressed himself about public officials. A Roman considered it a sacred obligation to serve the state; he believed he owed it all his life and all his strength, and old Cato was greatly admired for having said ‘that the good citizen is accountable to the republic for his leisure time as well as his work’. Among a people who have always shown a superstitious respect for ancient maxims, even when they no longer practised them, what were we to think of a doctrine in which people were made to have scruples about being magistrates, civil servants and soldiers, and where one of the leaders of the sect |62 could write these words without hesitation: ‘There is nothing more alien to us than public affairs, nobis nulla res magis aliena quam publica.’ It must be admitted that such admissions, which a homain could not hear without anger, justify the hatred that the emperors had dedicated to Christianity, and that, to a certain extent, they explain the persecution.
It was not enough to provoke it with imprudent words; when it came, it seems that Tertullian took it upon himself to make it heavier and more general. Persecution was always a formidable test for Christian society. It meant risking one’s fortune, one’s freedom, one’s life, and these are sacrifices to which one does not readily resign oneself. The Church was well aware of this, so it did not demand the same heroism from everyone, as it knew that not everyone was capable of. First of all, it forbade, under the most severe penalties, running into danger and drawing it upon oneself by useless bravado. By exposing yourself, you were exposing others; and, besides, could you be sure of triumphing over the torments? Far from making it a duty to brave them, she advised evading them if you didn’t feel strong enough to overcome them. Many fled and hid, and among those who avoided death in this way were priests and bishops. Sometimes rich people used money to disarm the police: anyone who paid to escape prosecution was no hero; he did not give his life, but he sacrificed his fortune, which was something, and the church did not condemn him. Sometimes they even showered him with praise when he was able to give enough to save all his brothers, when his generosity ensured that the prince’s edict would be ignored and that the community would not be troubled. This is not the opinion of Tertullian: he regards all the precautions taken to escape danger as culpable weaknesses. For him, anyone who flees is a coward, anyone who hides is a renegade. It is shameful to owe one’s life to the indulgence of one’s enemies, and the money a man gives under the cloak (sub tunica et sinu) to save himself dishonours him. In short, persecutions seem to him to be more to be desired than to be avoided; they make the faithful better while they foresee them and prepare for them; they open heaven to them when they succumb to them. In all cases, they come from God, and it is a crime to oppose the decrees of Providence.
These are the principles of Tertullian; we can see how much he disliked leniency, and that on every occasion, in the most serious as well as the most trivial circumstances, he was always in favour of the most rigorous solutions. This violent temper inevitably led him to break with the society of his time; he repudiated its principles, tastes and habits; he made it the Christian’s duty to distance himself from it; he used all his dialectic to prove that it had no place for him and that he could not live in it without breaking his faith. This is the spirit which animates his most important works, for example his treatise on Idolatry and that on Spectacles. I thought it necessary to make this well known through analyses and quotations, so that it would be easier to grasp and appreciate the difference which separates these books from the one I have undertaken to examine in this study.
III.
Here is what gave him the opportunity to write the treatise on the Coat.
Tertullian, who enjoyed the right of Roman citizenship, like all the inhabitants of the colony of Carthage, and wore the toga, left it one fine day to put on the pallium, that is to say the Greek habit. In his work, he dwells at length on the differences between these two types of clothing, with minute details that are the delight and torment of antiquarians. The toga consisted of a large round piece of wool, with an opening in the middle for the head to pass through; it enclosed the entire body and hung evenly on all sides. The pallium, on the other hand, was a square piece of cloth that was placed on both shoulders, fastened around the neck with a clasp, and whose lower edges formed points of unequal length. It was a light cloak that could be draped in a variety of ways and was of great use to ancient sculpture (2). The toga was less elegant and, above all, less convenient; nevertheless, it was hardly renounced, despite its disadvantages: it was the insignia of the Roman citizen, and one resigned oneself to suffocating under this heavy cloak in order to convince those one met that one belonged to the gens togata and that one was entitled to the respect of all.
Why did Tertullian suddenly give up wearing it? What reason could he have for changing his old habits, for leaving behind a garment of which he was proud and which belonged to the masters of the world, to take on the garb of the vanquished? This is where the uncertainties begin. Various explanations have been given, and I find it difficult to be satisfied with them. The oldest opinion, and for a long time the most accepted, is that the pallium was the particular garment of Christians and that Tertullian adopted it when he converted. But Saumaise has shown that, when Terlullian wrote his treatise on the Coat, he had long ceased to be a pagan, and had already publicly professed Christianity and published works in its defence. Why, then, should he have taken so long to cover himself with the same garb as his brothers, or, if he had been wearing it since he became a Christian, why should no one have been surprised sooner? I would add that no ancient author tells us that Christians had a particular costume, and that it is hardly likely that a proscribed religion would have committed the imprudence of openly designating itself in this way to its enemies. By doing so, it would have made the work of the magistrates and the police much simpler. Spies and informers would no longer have been needed to uncover the Christians during the persecutions, since they would have been willing to give themselves up. In place of this hypothesis, which Saumaise fought victoriously, he substitutes another which seems to me to raise many objections. After showing that the pallium was not the costume of ordinary Christians, he assumes that it must have been that of priests. To demonstrate this, he relies on an expression in Tertullian’s treatise, which seems to him to say that the pallium is a priestly ornament, sacerdos suggestus. But, apart from the fact that the text is dubious and the meaning obscure, it may simply be seen as an allusion to the costume worn by the priests of Aesculapius. Among the Christians, the priests had no more reason than the ordinary faithful to make themselves known to the enemies of their faith; on the contrary, as they were held in greater contempt than others, and were the most threatened during the persecutions, they also had to hide themselves more carefully. I note, moreover, that Tertullian, who was indeed a priest, —- as we know from Saint Jerome, —- does not seem to attach much importance to this status. He usually speaks of them in a rather disrespectful way, and on one occasion he even likes to place himself among the laity in order to affirm that the laity, in their own way, are also priests: nonne et laici sacerdotes sumus? These are not the sentiments of a man prepared to adorn himself with the priesthood, to flaunt it complacently in the eyes of the indifferent and the unfaithful, even to the point of running the risk of exposing his liberty or his life in order to do himself credit. Finally, it may be said that, if the pallium were the ordinary garment of priests, the people of Carthage, where there were many Christians, would have been more accustomed to seeing it, and that Tertullian, when he put it on, would not have caused so much surprise. The astonishment they felt seems to show that they were in the presence of something new. It should be noted that he never defended anyone but himself, which could lead us to believe that he had no accomplices. It is therefore natural to think that in taking the pallium he was not following a custom, but that he was trying to set an example.
As nowhere did he formally state the reasons which led him to this innovation, we are reduced to conjecture. Of all the conjectures, here is the one that seems to me the most natural. I suppose that by distinguishing himself from others by his costume, he undertook to separate himself from them by his conduct. It was a sort of public profession that he intended to lead a more serious and less dissipated life. There were no monks yet, and they did not begin until much later; but the needs from which monastic life arose have always existed in the Church. From time immemorial, there have been Christians in the Church who have loved perfection, and who found that the demands of the world, the dissipation of business, the softening charm of the family, made it impossible to practise the precepts of Christ to the letter and in their rigour. When they reread the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles, and saw again the picture of those first blessed years ‘when all lived together, possessing nothing of their own and having but one heart and one soul,’ they could not help but be seized with great confusion, and sought to return in some way to that paradise to which all their dreams had brought them. The Greeks called them ascetics and the Westerners called them continens (3). Was it not something similar that Tertullian wanted to do when he donned the pallium? No doubt he did not foresee the great movement which, a century later, drove the faithful towards the solitudes of Egypt; it even seems that he wanted to condemn it in advance. In reply to those who accused the Christians of being useless people, he said to them in his Apology: ‘We are not, like the Brachmans and the ’gymnosophists, forest dwellers, exiles from life, neque enim brachmanae aut Indorum gymnosophistae sumus, silvicolae et exsules vitae. It was in another way, by remaining in the middle of the world and living differently from it, that he claimed to inaugurate his new existence. But while he criticised the gymnosophists for seeking perfection in the desert, he was not averse to imitating other philosophical sects. It was customary among the Greeks for those who professed to lead a more regular life, who were not content to study the precepts of philosophy and who wished to practise them, to take on a particular costume. It was said of them, as it was later said of monks: ‘He has taken the habit, vestem mutavit’. At the age of twelve, Marcus Aurelius took on the habit of a philosopher, which came as a great surprise to an heir to the empire; all the more so as, by covering himself with the pallium, he began to live more austerely and to sleep rough. In our time, the philosophical habit was not always well worn. There was no shortage of beggars and adventurers who went about the world wearing a worn-out pallium: it was a convenient way of gaining respect and sustenance at little cost. One of them once appeared before Herod Atticus, insolently begging for alms in the name of philosophy: ‘I can see a beard and a cloak,’ Herod replied; ‘I can’t see a philosopher. Tertullian was aware of the criticisms that could be made of the pallium; he knew that it had covered people who did not deserve to wear it, but he hoped to restore its dignity by making it Christian. This, then, is his plan: he adapts a pagan custom to Christianity, he takes the habit, like Marcus Aurelius; he wants to be, in the church, what a serious and practical philosopher is in secular society, an Epictetus, who, instead of Stoic virtues, follows the precepts of the Gospel; in a word, he is a kind of monk, helping monks (4).
In the heyday of the republic, it was considered a crime for a Roman to dress in foreign costume. Scipio had aroused public indignation for appearing in the streets of Syracuse wearing sandals and a Greek robe. Later, at a time when morals had changed greatly, Cicero was obliged to defend an unfortunate banker friend of his, Rabirius Postumus, who, having committed the imprudence of lending too much money to the king of Egypt in order to get back his funds and pay himself with his own hands, had allowed himself to be made his finance minister. It was necessary for him to take on the costume of the job, since he fulfilled its functions, and his enemies claimed that by dressing like a Greek, he had ceased to be Roman. But people had long since become less rigorous, and allowed themselves to make many infidelities to the toga. It was a majestic garment, but very inconvenient. There is none,’ says Tertullian, ’that we are happier to leave behind. It’s a good thing to say that you wear it: you’re not covered in it, but burdened by it’. So it was used as little as possible. Juvenal claims that there were municipalities in Italy where no one wore it except to be buried decently, nemo togam sumit nisi mortuus. In Rome, the unfortunate clients, obliged to put on the ceremonial habit to go in the morning to greet the patron and fetch the sportula, regarded this requirement as a torment (5). Even more so in hot countries such as Africa. It is therefore likely that in Carthage, people who wanted to be comfortable and did not want to suffocate, were usually content with the tunic, and only donned the official garb on special occasions. However, Tertullian tells us that when he dared to give up his official dress and put on the Greek cloak, people seemed indignant. This indignation must not have been very sincere, and although it was covered up by very honourable pretexts, deep down it can be explained by rather low motives. A man like Tertullian, so famous and so violent, must have had many jealousy and enemies. He was rude to those who did not share his opinions, so they eagerly seized the opportunity he offered them to take revenge. It was all the more favourable because, in attacking an adversary who had not spared them, they seemed to be defending ancient traditions and national honour. When they saw him proudly passing through the streets of Carthage in his new attire, they seemed carried away with anger, they raised their arms to heaven, saying: ‘He has left the toga for the pallium, a toga ad pallium! In a little work he wrote on patience, Tertullian begins by admitting that it is the least of his virtues. He was not in the mood to put up with insults and did not allow himself to be attacked without defending himself. To those people who, in order to harm him, pretended to be indignant patriots, to those supposed supporters of old customs and ancient costumes, he replied with his treatise on the Coat.
The analysis, if one had the leisure to do it, would be easy; Tertullian faithfully followed the method used in his time in the schools of rhetoric, where he had received his education: he develops his subject regularly by means of general ideas. It was Cicero who put this method into use among the Romans. He found it useful for giving his speeches the qualities that were most appreciated around him, and towards which his natural taste led him: breadth, elevation and majesty. From this came, in his works, that copia dicendi which, among his contemporaries, made him famous. After him, the rhetors inherited the process, which served them very well. They had got into the bad habit of making their pupils argue both sides of the argument; they liked to deal with the most extraordinary, the most unreasonable subjects before them, choosing these in preference because they were the most difficult and put their minds to the test; When panegyrics became a kind of state institution, and it became a duty for rhetors to deliver the eulogy of the prince or some great person every year, they had to be ready to celebrate people who hardly deserved it, to discover qualities in them at all costs, and to turn everything about them into praise. They therefore had to build up a stock of arguments of all kinds, enabling them to plead every cause, praise every prince with an appearance of sincerity, and never be caught unprepared. General ideas helped them out. As one always finds ideas that oppose each other without seeming to contradict, and which, in the most contrary senses, are equally right, they enabled them to support, with perfect conviction, the most opposing opinions. If they had to celebrate an upstart, they would declare that the greatest merit of a man consists in owing his fortune only to himself, which is strictly true. If their hero was from a great house, they maintained that there is nothing more glorious than a great name well worn, which is not false either. If he had wielded power with gentleness, it was an opportunity to assert that there is no greater virtue than clemency; if he had shown himself to be rigorous, it was doctrinally established that energy is the first quality of a head of state. So it is that general ideas have answers for everything, and that with them an orator is sure never to fall short.
They provided Tertullian with his main argument in the Treatise on the Cloak. Why,’ he said to his opponents, ’do you reproach me for having changed my clothes? Does not everything change in the world? Here is a fine subject for amplification; it is not entirely new, but it is rich, and if Tertullian had wanted to say everything, he could have given us a whole encyclopaedia. He confines himself to choosing, from the mass of facts provided by his immense reading, those which lend themselves best to being expressed in a piquant way. He shows that nature is constantly changing its appearance, that it is not the same day as night, summer as winter, storm or calm. The seas once covered the mountains, leaving behind shells that testify to their presence; volcanoes turn the land upside down, con-tinens become islands, and islands are lost at the bottom of the sea. Beasts, too, are subject to a thousand variations, and we see them take on different shapes and colours before our very eyes; on this subject, Tertullian speaks not only of the peacock and the chameleon, which give him the opportunity for brilliant descriptions, but also of the viper, which, as we used to think, changes sex, male for a season, female afterwards; of the snake ‘which, on entering its hole, emerges from its skin and leaves its years with its scales (6)’. And how often, since man began to cover himself with a garment of leaves, has he not changed the material or form of his clothing! As he has clothed himself in turn in linen, wool and silk, Tertullian’s erudition gives free rein to the subject of these various fabrics, their nature, their preparation and the way in which they were discovered and used. It is a tiresome luxury of memories, allusions and anecdotes drawn from mythology, history and natural science, by which I mean the science as it was understood at the time, that of Pliny the Elder, which our author reproduces with imperturbable confidence, and which he adorns with all the flowers of his rhetoric. He mixes in a host of moral reflections on men’s and women’s costume, not forgetting people like Achilles, who wore the clothes of both sexes, or like Omphale, who once had the fantasy of covering herself with the skin of the Nemean lion, which gives Tertullian a pretext to be indignant in the name of all the monsters that Hercules defeated and whose remains were desecrated by a courtesan’s whim.
IV.
It seems to me that this analysis of part of Tertullian’s work is sufficient to give an idea of the rest. It shows how he reasons. His arguments, it must be admitted, are not beyond reproach, and Malebranche, who prides himself on being a very sensible man, cannot help but feel violently angry. What!’ he says, ’Tertullian maintains that, because the Carthaginians once wore a cloak and left it for a robe, he has the right to leave the robe and return to the cloak! ‘But is it now allowed to wear a cap and burr because our fathers used them? And can women wear vertugadins and chaperons, except at Carnival, when they want to dress up in masks? He gives us pompous and magnificent descriptions of the changes taking place in the world, and claims to conclude that, since everything is renewed and nothing remains the same, he can well afford to change clothes. ‘Can one draw such conclusions with composure and stale common sense? And could one draw them without laughing, if this author did not stun and confuse the minds of those who read him. Malebranche is absolutely right. It is certain that Tertullian did not prove anything at all; but he achieved his goal nonetheless, because he did not want to prove anything. When he deals with a serious subject, when he has some error to refute, some truth to establish, he goes about it differently; need I remind you that the author of the Apology and the treatise on the Prescription knows how to be, when he wants to be, a powerful reasoner, a vigorous dialectician? If he has not been so here, it is because he did not want to be. He did not claim to be fighting a real battle, but a blunt fight, like those gladiators used to practice before the merciless battles. He was attacked without conviction; he defended himself without seriousness. The first opportunity was taken to tease him; he used the response as a pretext to amuse himself and show off his wit.
You will be convinced that he had no other intention if you look at the way the book is written. Tertullian is everywhere an obscure and precious writer, full of violent and singular expressions which are not always grasped at first sight; but here the research and the obscurity go beyond all limits. It is a series of enigmas that the author seems to be proposing to the public. When you start reading the Treatise on the Cloak, you seem to be embarking on a journey into darkness. It is true that after a while it happens to those who read it as it happens to people who get into the habit of guessing rebus: the eyes become accustomed to this darkness; you begin to recognise yourself in it; you become familiar with these stylistic devices which are almost everywhere similar; you are grateful for the difficulty overcome and you even end up taking some pleasure in it. It seems to me that from these characteristics it is easy to guess for whom Tertullian’s treatise was written. Although it contains popular words and turns of phrase, we can be sure that it was not written for the people. In general, Tertullian was not concerned with the crowd. A man like Tertullian, naturally inclined to subtleties and exaggerations, quick to stray from the great paths of moderation and common sense so readily followed by well-balanced geniuses such as Saint Augustine and Bossuet, must have enjoyed working in small committees and restricted circles; but never has he worked more obviously for a narrow and closed society. It was to please them that he used this difficult language, that he crammed in so many historical and mythological allusions, that he looked everywhere for new and unexpected ways of speaking, —- that, for example, he said : regarder avec les yeux d’Homère, homericis oculis spectare, for: to look without seeing,—- or that, in order to better depict the regularity of the folds formed by the quadrangular cloak, he calls it quadrata justicia,—- or that, alluding to the tree that bears wool and to certain crustaceans from which a material can be obtained that is used to make cloth, he claims ‘that we sow and sin our clothes. ’ Just about everything is written in this way. This style does not belong to him alone: it was the way people spoke around him in literate societies. Nor was he its creator, since we know its origins. They go back to that brilliant or brilliant school of Seneca, which wanted to put wit everywhere and speak only in figures. An African writer, Apuleius, found a way to add to these refinements. It is in his work that we find an abundance of these short, choppy phrases that respond to or oppose each other, two by two or three by three, with rhyme or assonance. Tertullian is their successor, their pupil, and he often surpasses his masters; but, in the Tract of the Coat, he surpasses himself. The manner, the research, the work, are pushed to the point where it is impossible to see it as anything other than a challenge and a game of wits.
And that is precisely what surprises us. Tertullian does not strike us as a man who is amused by such laborious childishness. As, from a distance, we are inclined to simplify characters, and to see in talented people only their main quality, we always imagine him to be serious, and solely concerned with the interests of his faith. The treatise on the Manteau is therefore a great surprise to us; and our surprise increases still further if we leave aside the way in which it is written in order to penetrate to the heart of the matter and examine the ideas. There are many that we are not used to seeing in him. I am not talking about the mythological allusions and all those memories of fable, which are recalled not only without anger, but with a certain complacency: this is a small thing when you think of the respect with which philosophy is surrounded there. Elsewhere he is not in the habit of being favourable to it; philosophers are for him ‘merchants of wisdom and eloquence, sapientiae et facundiae caupones’, he calls Athens for all praise ‘a talkative city’ and cruelly mocks ‘that wretched Aristotle’, the inventor of a marvellous science which gives credit to lies and ruins truth. Here he expresses himself in a different tone. It could be said that he has placed himself under the very protection of philosophy. If the pallium seems honourable to him to wear, it is because he has covered wise men, and that these wise men have rendered the greatest services to humanity. This is a far cry from the sapientiae et facundiae caupones that he mocked earlier! At the end of his book, he gives the pallium the floor, and, in an eloquent prosopopeia (there is no good school speech without prosopopeia), he lists the noble causes he has defended and the great culprits he has prosecuted. This was a good opportunity for one of those debauches of erudition in which Tertullian delighted. He does not fail to take advantage of it and gives us the names of the profligates and debauchees of ancient times, from the man who gave so much money from a table made of inlaid lemon wood, or another who paid six thousand sesterces for a fish, or the son of the actor Aesopus, who had pearls dissolved in the dishes served to him so that his meal would cost him more, to Vedius Pollio, a freedman of Augustus, who threw his old slaves into his fish tanks, thinking that the flesh of his moray eels would be more exquisite. It is the glory of the pallium that all these excesses were condemned by the voice of those who wore it. But its effect is even greater; it does not need to speak to instruct: ‘even when I am silent, held back by a kind of natural modesty (for the philosopher does not always want to speak well, it is enough for him to live well) (7), just by showing myself, I speak. The mere appearance of a wise man serves as a lesson. Bad morals cannot stand the sight of a pallium. Admittedly, it is difficult to go any further in this praise. In the end, however, Tertullian must pay tribute to his faith. The equivocation cannot continue to the end. He must make it clear to those he has been talking to about philosophy since the beginning of his work that he is not a philosopher, but a Christian. He does this as he bids farewell to his readers, and only in a few words. After congratulating himself on having associated the pallium with a school of divine wisdom, he adds: ‘Rejoice, Manteau, and triumph. You have risen to a better philosophy, since you are covering a Christian. Thus Christianity is ‘only a better philosophy,’ that is to say, a final advance in humanity, after many others, the conclusion and crowning of a long work that had begun long before it and from which it benefited. This is how many of today’s scholars speak when they look to ancient wisdom for the origins of Jesus’ doctrine. Tertullian tells us that this was already being done in his time. Christians and apologists for the new religion worked to bring it closer to the opinions of the ancient philosophers; they were happy to show what it had in common with them, and triumphed when they believed they had shown that it had said nothing very new and that it was unnatural enough to cause much surprise (nihil nos aut novum aut portentosum suscepisse). This method was suspect to Tertullian, who saw its dangers. In his treatise on the Prescription, he declares that he has no taste for this philosophical Christianity. Elsewhere he says even more clearly that there can be nothing in common between Athens and Jerusalem, between the academy and the church. This is his true thinking, and I imagine that he would not forgive someone who once took the liberty of writing that Christianity is only a better philosophy, if it were not for himself!
However great the contradiction, it would be easily explained if we could believe, as many have thought, that this tract is one of the first he wrote, and that it goes back to the time when he was still only half converted. Many saints passed through philosophy before coming to Christianity, and in the novelty of their faith they kept traces of their former opinions for some time. St Cyprian’s letter to Donatus sometimes resembles a treatise by Seneca more than a Christian work. The dialogues that St Augustine wrote in his retreat before receiving baptism are purely philosophical works in which the name of Christ is never mentioned. We know that Tertullian had gone through a similar crisis, and we have a work of his that he wrote at that time against the disadvantages of marriage. Saint Jerome, who found it very amusing, had it read to the young girls he encouraged to take up the monastic life. But the treatise on the Coat is much later. The historical events to which the author refers allow us to know its precise date; it is from the year 208 or 209, that is to say from the end of the reign of Septimius Severus. By then Tertullian had written his finest works, explained and defended his faith, and fought his most vigorous battles against the pagans and heretics. Not only had he been a Christian for a long time, but orthodox Christianity was no longer enough for this fiery spirit. He accused the Church of weakness, because it was wise and moderate; he reproached it for sparing society and power, because it refused to defy them madly and make irreconcilable enemies of them, and he had finally left it for a more rigid sect. And it was at this very moment, between two works inspired by the most severe Montanism, that we see him return to the world from which he had so dramatically separated himself. After having insulted it so many times, he made advances, he flattered its tastes, he imitated its ideas, he copied its way of writing, and from his retreat, where he was thought to be occupied with the most serious problems, he sent it a brilliant and futile book, a rhetorical work, in which he tortured his mind to deserve to please it.
What does this tell us? That deep down he was less detached from the world than he claims, and that between them there still remained a link, perhaps only one, that he had not been able to break. Somewhere he speaks rather lightly of people who, in these new times, persist in preserving the memory and curiosity of old literature. In his youth, he was under the spell of letters: it is an affliction from which he has never been able to recover. We like to joke about the old rhetoric, with its childish arguments, its faded flowers, its conventional pathos, its eternal amplifications. It must be said that rhetoric had qualities to which we are no longer susceptible, since no one escaped it in those days, and once it had bewitched youth, people belonged to it for the rest of their lives. Tertullian was one of these faithful disciples. There is not a single one of his works, by which I mean the most serious, the most profound, where rhetoric does not find a way to creep in, and it only needs a pretext for it to become completely dominant. If, for example, the subject leads him to talk about the world and especially about women, he immediately reverts to the pleasure of expressing himself well. He attacks their faults, the uncertainty of their moods, the futility of their tastes and above all their passion for finery. He describes the ornaments with which they like to cover themselves, ‘and those precious stones which are used to make necklaces, and those golden circles in which they enclose their arms, and those fiery red colours in which they dip their wool, and that black powder with which they colour around their eyes to give them a more provocative glow’. The saintly man has paid great attention to all these trinkets that he criticises, and in depicting them he deploys all the finesse of his wit, all the grace of his language. We must therefore take his side: this soul was not all of a piece, as it wanted to appear; it hid deep within itself a secret weakness that more than once overpowered it. In this bitter genius, in this vigorous thinker, who seemed completely detached from the things of the world and solely occupied with the interests of heaven, there was an incorrigible man of letters, who only asked for an opportunity to escape. This is the man of letters who wrote the treatise on the Coat.
As for the opportunity he had to write it, we do not know it; but it seems to me that it is not too rash to imagine it. Let us remember that Tertullian was then living in Carthage, and that there was no country where people were more interested in literature: ‘Here,’ said Apuleius, ‘everyone knows eloquence: children learn it, men practise it, old men teach it’; and he shows a whole crowd of lovers of beautiful language, in the theatre, crowding round his lectures, and busy examining every metaphor, weighing and measuring every word. In this literate city, Tertullian must have achieved oratorical success, and the memory remained dear to him, even though he tried hard to forget it. This book against marriage, which Saint Jerome tells us ‘was full of platitudes, in the style of a rhetorician’, had undoubtedly been very successful with those hungry for rhetoric. I imagine that they had enjoyed less the fine works that Tertullian wrote after his conversion, in which we find serious thoughts and profound speculations, but also less rhetoric and platitudes. It therefore seemed to them that Tertullian had weakened, and they blamed Christianity for this. It was generally thought to be a doctrine contrary to the mind, and Rutilius compared it to Circe, who turned men into beasts. It is therefore likely that they pitied poor Tertullian, who had been subjected to the common law, and insinuated that he would no longer be capable of writing the fine works of yesteryear. Under these reproaches, his vanity as a man of letters reared up and leapt. He willingly gave up everything: ‘I no longer care about the forum, the Champ de Mars or the curia; I am not attached to any public office. I am not seen climbing the tribune or besieging the praetor’s court. I no longer try to do violence to equity; I no longer howl for a dubious cause. I am not a judge, nor a soldier, nor a master of anything. I have retired far from the people, secessi de populo. But he still held on to his reputation as a fine wit and suffered to see it challenged. The scandal he caused by leaving the toga for the pallium having rekindled the slander, it was impossible for him to contain himself. By replying to his detractors, he wanted to prove that he had lost nothing, that he was perfectly alive and that his decline was being predicted too quickly. To combat them, he took up his old weapons and tried to show them that he still knew how to use them. For a time, he once again became the rhetorician and even the philosopher of old. He let go of the metaphors; he put all his erudition into motion; he became more mannered, more subtle, more refined than he had ever been: he insisted on surpassing himself. The result of this fine work was the treatise on the Manteau.
V.
This treatise is therefore in itself no more than a play on the mind, a literary curiosity, and would scarcely merit our stopping for a moment if we could not draw some general conclusions from it, which seem to me to be important. Tertullian is not the only Christian author to have made highly unusual concessions to rhetoric and wit. They are more noticeable in Tertullian, because it seems that with his temperament and opinions he was more likely to avoid them than the others; but the others are not exempt. Arnobius and Lactantius, to name but a few, were famous rhetors, and you can see this when you read them; Saint Ambrose, in his finest works, imitates Cicero and sometimes even copies him without feeling any qualms. Saint Jerome was more formal; he reproached himself, as if it were a crime, for the taste he felt for beautiful language, and was unable to correct it.
This taste, of which the writings of the fathers bear the mark at every moment, is easily explained: it came from the way in which they had all been brought up. It is a great surprise to us to see that Christianity, which aspired to change the world, which wanted to take on the whole man, to impose itself on his mind as well as on his heart, did not succeed in creating a new teaching for youth. In fact, he seems not to have bothered at all. Did he not see the interest for him in overhauling public education and putting into it a spirit that was in line with his doctrine, or did he think that he could not succeed? I don’t know; what is certain is that he didn’t try. When he made his first conquests among the people, and attacked the higher classes, he found among them a system of teaching which had been acclimatised there for centuries and enjoyed great favour among the learned. He seemed to accept it willingly. However, this system was contrary to him; the old religion had left its deep mark on it. Young people were nourished by the study and admiration of these beautiful poems, full of mythological fables, which had originally given them credit and which, through the charm of the narrative, still retained some authority. It is no exaggeration to say that teachers were even more than priests the defenders of the ancient cult. We have also seen that Tertullian did not want a Christian to ever be a teacher. It seems that, to remain true to himself, he should not have allowed him to be a pupil either. The teaching that a master cannot give without committing a crime, how could a pupil receive it without danger? If these names of gods and goddesses defile the mouth that utters them, is it possible that they do not offend the ear that hears them? But here, contrary to his custom, Tertullian does not dare to push his opinion all the way. He stops in midstream and does not hesitate to contradict himself. He does not think it possible that a young man should be prevented from going to school, and the reason he gives for this is worth mentioning: ‘How,’ he says, ‘would he learn human wisdom without it? How would he learn to direct his thoughts and actions, literature being an indispensable tool for man throughout his life? As we can see, Tertullian did not imagine that a young man could do without learning humanities, nor that they could be taught any differently from the way they were taught in his day; so he resigned himself to sending him to schools that he did not much like. The other Doctors of the Church, even when they protested against this necessity, like Saint Augustine, and pointed out its peril, did not dare to suggest evading it; and this is how it came about that the ancient education of youth, that of Cicero and Quintilian, lasted as long as the empire. A reading of Ennodius, a writer of the second century, gives us some very curious information on this subject. We see that at the time when the barbarians were masters of Italy, while Theodoric reigned in Ravenna, the schools were open as before; the grammarians and rhetors gave the same lessons, the pupils studied the same subjects, nothing had changed, and in the midst of a society that had become entirely Christian, teaching remained entirely pagan. Among the subjects for declamation that the master gave the pupils, I find this one, which no doubt dates back several centuries: ‘a man will be accused who has taken the liberty of carrying an image of Minerva in a bad place;’ and the good bishop of Pavia did not seem to realise that this subject was hardly suitable for schoolchildren and Christians.
I don’t need to say what the consequences of this education might have been, how deeply secular letters and sciences penetrated these young souls, and how difficult it was later to pull them out. The study we have just made is a living demonstration of this. When a man like Tertullian, so determined, so rigorous in his beliefs, so jealous of the purity of his faith, who made it a duty of the faithful to separate themselves completely from pagan society, allowed himself to be so dominated by the memories of the school and the preoccupation with old letters that he wrote the treatise on the Mantle, what were the others not to do! All of them brought to Christianity a soul full of the admiration of ancient writers, which had begun to live with them and had become imbued with their ideas. Not only did they set about writing to expound or defend their faith according to the methods they had learnt, unwittingly reproducing the models that had been set before their eyes, so that their literature was cast in the ancient mould, but they introduced into their new doctrine many ideas and opinions that had come to them from their acquaintance with the ancient authors. There are some, like Ausonius, who, although Christians in their private lives, believe they are entitled to be entirely pagan when they write verse, in order to be more like the great poets in whose footsteps they devoutly follow. The majority try to combine the two teachings they have received, that of the school and that of the church; they mix together as best they can Virgil and the Bible, Plato and Saint Paul. The mixture has taken place in different ways and in different proportions; but whichever element dominates, neither completely suppresses the other. Classical antiquity, even among severe pines, remains honoured and alive; it has its place alongside the holy books; with them and under their protection, it has survived the Middle Ages, and it is in this way that a religion which was supposed to destroy ancient literature actually saved it.
GASTON BOISSIER.
[Footnotes renumbered and placed at the end].
1 (1) Contrary to the opinion of Ebert and M. Renan, I believe Minucius Felix to be later than Tertullian. Recently, M. Massebieau, in a very interesting article in the Revue de l’histoire des religions (vol. xv, May 1887), seems to me to have put forward some excellent arguments against those of M. Ebert, which have hitherto seemed authoritative. The question seems to me to have been cleared up above all by the discovery made at Constantine, the ancient Cirtha, of inscriptions relating to Natalis, one of Octavius’ interlocutors, which post-date the reign of Septimius Severus. In this regard, I would point out that Minucius Felix, as well as Natalis, was born in Africa, and that inscriptions bearing this name have recently been found in Carthage and Tebessa. So the first Christians to write in Latin, both in Rome and in Carthage, were Africans by birth. Could it not be that in Rome, as in the great cities invaded by the Orientals, Christianity persisted for a long time in speaking Greek, whereas in Africa, from the very first day, it expressed itself in Latin?
2 (1) The Louvre Museum has a fine example of the use of the pallium in the statue known as the Pallas of Velletri.
3 (1) These conunens (qui se volunt continentium nomine nuncupari) are mentioned in a law of Valentinian I. (Theodosian Code, xvi, 20.) They were obviously the predecessors of monks in the West.
4 (1) The practice of taking the pallium when professing a more austere Christianity seems to have been common in the East. Saumaise has collected examples from Origen, Eusebius and Socrates, which prove this. Also the ascetic life was called among the Greeks φιλόσοφος βίος. It is, moreover, noteworthy that Saumaise, after maintaining that the pallium was the vestment of Christian priests, seems to incline, towards the end of his work, to the opinion that we believe to be the truest. Here is how he expresses himself: Nec enim omnes christiani, ut antea observavimus, pallium philosophicum sumebant, sed soli ascetae, et qui, inter christianos, exactions disciplinae et strictioris propositi rigore censeri volebant. This, I believe, is the truth. The pallium was indeed, as M. de Rossi says, a segno di cristiano ascetismo (Roma sott. crist., II, 319).
5 (1) Let us add that, when one took the toga, etiquette required that one leave the vandal, a shoe so convenient in hot countries, to enclose one’s feet in shoes, which seems to Tertullian to be the beginning of a prison.
6 (1) All this interminable amplification seems to be a commonplace of the school. It is developed in the same way in the speech Ovid gives to Pythagoras at the end of his Metamorphoses.
7 (1) It should be noted that Tertullian here removes with a stroke of the pen the reproach that Christians usually levelled at the ancient sages for not bringing their actions into line with their principles, and the easy antithesis they were sure to establish in this respect between Christianity and philosophy. Non eloquimur magna sed vivimus,’ said Minucius Felix. Tertullian seems to be saying the same thing here about pagan philosophy.