Fundamental to Tertullian’s anthropology is the compositional assertion that the human person is a bi-partite reality of body and soul. Where it is more diffi cult to apply ‘bi-partite’ or ‘tri-partite’ terminology to the articulation of Irenaeus, with his alternating language of body/soul and body/soul/spirit, it is a direct matter to assign Tertullian the bi-partite label. From his earliest tracts this anthropological standpoint is clear. ‘Man himself, guilty as he is of every iniquity’, he writes in the
De spectaculis, ‘is not only a work of God – he is his image; yet both in soul and
body he has severed himself from his maker’.29 The basic biblical assertion, that
in humanity is found both the material and immaterial, is cast by Tertullian into language gleaned from scripture, though substantially expanded. The conjunction of body and soul comprises the ‘human’, realizes the ‘person’, and their disjunc- tion dissolves this human reality. This second point, central to Tertullian’s later discussions, is present already in his early tract On the testimony of the soul:
We maintain that after life has passed away you still remain in existence, and look forward to a day of judgement, and according to your desserts are assigned to misery or bliss, in either way of it forever. Moreover, that to be capable of this, your former substance must return to you, the matter and the memory of the same human being: for neither good nor evil could you feel if you were not again endowed with that sensitive bodily organisation; and there would be no grounds for judgement without the presentation of the very person to whom the sufferings of judgement were due.30
Tertullian defi nes ‘human being’ (eiusdemque hominis) as ‘matter and memory’, the latter term frequently a synonym in his corpus for the soul.31 With an eye
29 Spec. 2. 30 De Test. 4.
31 Technically, Tertullian sees memory as a faculty of the soul (cf. DA 12.1; Dunn, Tertullian 37); but to prevent misunderstanding this faculty as distinct from or higher than the soul, Tertullian regularly uses the terms synonymously. See Nasrallah, Ecstasy of Folly 117–22 .
towards the fi nal judgement, the just judgement of the person, the concrete indi- vidual under review at the fi nal tribunal, could not be authentically of that person, unless she or he were fully present. Such a full presence requires the restored inte- gration of body as well as soul.32
The full reality of the person is only encountered in the integration of humani- ty’s material and immaterial elements. ‘As death is defi ned as nothing else than the separation of body and soul’, he writes elsewhere, ‘life, which is the opposite of death, is susceptible of no other defi nition than the conjunction of body and soul’.33 Already in his earlier treatise, Tertullian began to expound on the distinc-
tion of natural properties between these elements. His assertion that ‘after life has passed away you still remain in existence’ gives indication of what will be devel- oped later as his conviction of the soul’s inherent immortality; whilst his articula- tion of the person as ‘matter and memory’ in some sense foretells his lengthier descriptions of the manner in which the soul and body interact in the human formation. Body and soul may equally be parts of the human composition, but they are not equal parts as respects their lot and function. So will he write in the
De anima:
For the fl esh is no doubt the house of the soul, and the soul is the temporary inhabitant of the fl esh. The desire, then, of the lodger will arise from the tem- porary cause and special necessity which his designation suggests – with a view to benefi t and improve the place of his temporary abode, while sojourn- ing in it; not with the view, certainly, of being himself the foundation of the house, or himself its walls, or himself its support and roof, but simply and solely with the view of being accommodated and housed, since he could not receive such accommodation except in a sound and well-built house.34
This is a later refl ection on body and soul than that we saw above – the De anima represents Tertullian’s fullest refl ection on the soul and, by consequence, the body in which its expresses its life – but the point of emphasis is unchanged. Just as the human being is persistently ‘matter and memory’, but not an amalgamation of these, so can the soul more specifi cally be described as ‘dwelling in’ the ‘house’ of the fl esh, the two retaining in this arrangement their distinct and abiding prop- erties. There is benefi cial modifi cation of the one (the fl esh) by the other (the soul) for the sake of its improvement; but never does the soul/body combination become ontologically singular in its union. The person is always soul and body – distinct realities brought together in creation to a single life. This is essentially the same point made by Irenaeus: that while both body and soul are ‘parts’ of a man, neither
32 So for Waszink, persona for Tertullian is ‘nec ita caro homo tanquam alia vis animae et alia’ (with
reference to DA 40.3 in particular); see his Index verborum et locutionem quae Tertulliani De Anima
libro continentur congessit (Petri Hanstein, 1935) 164.
33 DA 27. 34 DA 38.
is man in exclusion. The ‘man’, the person, is what these are together. Tertullian offers a more verbose explanation of the idea, precisely because, as shall be seen later, it is in this persistent distinction that the component ‘parts’ of the human person fi nd their iconic signifi cance in imaging the divine life.
For reasons of their being persistently distinct, the soul and body may also be rent apart, and it is possible to consider the one without the other, beyond the realm of their union. Two arenas of discussion therefore present themselves: the ‘before’ of somatic and pneumatic existence, and the ‘after’ of the soul and body following their dissolution. It is the latter that draws Tertullian’s attention fi rst, treated both in his On the testimony of the soul and Apologeticum, occasioned by discussions on metempsychosis or the transmigration of souls encountered in con- temporary philosophical discourse (he mentions the circulating views of Pythago- ras and Laberius by name35). It is in the longer Apologeticum that his view is
clearest:
If there is any ground for the moving to and fro of human souls into different bodies, why may they not return into the very substance they have left, seeing this is to be restored, to be that which had been? [. . .] But [. . .] a man will come back from a man – any given person from any given person, still retain- ing his humanity; so that the soul, with its qualities unchanged, may be restored to the same condition, though not to the same outward framework. Assuredly, as the reason why restoration takes place at all is the appointed judgement, every man must needs come forth the very same who had once existed, that he may receive at God’s hands a judgement, whether of good dessert or the opposite. And therefore the body too will appear; for the soul is not capable of suffering without the solid substance [the fl esh]; [and for this reason also,] that it is not right that souls should have all the wrath of God to bear: they did not sin without the body, within which all was done by them.36
The soul, after the dissolution from the body that Tertullian has described as death (cf. DA 27), retains its existence ‘with qualities unchanged’, awaiting restoration to its ‘solid substance’ in which the immaterial is made material and the human person complete, ready for judgement and reward.
The implications of what Tertullian says here are important. The soul persists after bodily death, and persists unchanged; yet this soul is itself not ‘a man’, not a person (persona). This we have seen before. The person is – and this is the brunt of Tertullian’s refutation of re-incarnation – only that soul in union with its body. Here the emphasis on its body is critical: the soul is not made human simply in conjunction with a vague or amorphous material element, or even with a generic
35 Pythagoras is mentioned in Apol. 11; and together with Laberius in Apol. 48. 36 Apol. 48.
human ‘house’ or frame. There is one body to which the soul belongs, which it perfects, in which it too grows. Once rent from this body at death, the soul only again comes to exist as fully human person when restored to union with this body, and no other. So while the soul may persist after death, and while the body may dissolve into the earth, the confession that human persons will be brought to judgement in the eschaton requires both that the soul again receive material embodiment (for it is ‘not capable of suffering without its bodily element’); and also that the restored body must be the same that had previously died and dis- solved – else the resulting formation would not be ‘a given man from a man; a human person from a human person’.37 In other words, belief in a fi nal judgement
requires not only a confession of the eternal reality of souls, but of particular, physical resurrection. When Tertullian comes to defend this claim – that specifi c bodies might be resurrected and restored to life, which his rhetorical opponents claim is less credible than a notion of re-incarnation that transmutes a soul into another bodily frame – he does so through a line of reasoning close to that of Irenaeus, in the latter’s refutation of Valentinian objections to bodily resurrection. Tertullian writes:
But how, you say, can a substance which has been dissolved be made to reappear again? Consider thyself, O man, and thou wilt believe in it! Refl ect on what you were before you came into existence: nothing. For if you had been anything, you would have remembered it. You, then, who were nothing before you existed, reduced to nothing also when you cease to be, why may you not come into being again out of nothing, at the will of the same creator whose will created you out of nothing at the fi rst? Will it be anything new in your case? You who were not, were made; when you cease to be again, you
shall be made. Explain, if you can, your original creation, and then demand to
know how you shall be re-created. Indeed, it will be still easier surely to make you what you were once, when the very same creative power made you without diffi culty what you never were before.38
The body and soul are, for Tertullian, always unique and personal realities. There is no generic soul just as there is no generic body. Tertullian is ready to admit that this predication demands a leap of faith: if both it and the fi nal judgement are true, there is mandated a belief that the bodies commonly seen to decompose in the earth will be resurrected and restored. Yet if God as creator could fashion them at the fi rst ‘from nothing’ (Tertullian’s employment of creation ex nihilo as evidence of God’s power in this regard is another trait he shares in common with Irenaeus), is it any more incredible to believe he could re-create them after their
37 Though the body is not exactly identical; cf. his comment on ‘not the same outer frameworks’. Perhaps Tertullian here alludes to the contents of 1 Corinthians 15.42–49, esp. v. 44.
dissolution?39 Such discussion creates for Tertullian a context in which both soul
and body have implicit value and, by extrapolation, the need for growth.