Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

452
Jonathan Barnes
philosophers” (1.1) – that is to say, with the pagan philosophers. 10 And
as a matter of fact they are present on every other page. They are introduced
as adversaries; and it seems at first that they are essentially ignorant
adversaries – “for who has discovered truth without God? and to
whom is God known without Christ? and who has found Christ without
the Holy Spirit? and to whom has the Holy Spirit been given without
the sacrament of faith?” (1.4). (That, be it noticed in passing, is typical
of Tertullian: he offers a sequence of rhetorical questions which expect
one answer and which ought in truth to receive another. But no
matter.)
But if, strictly speaking, the pagans can know nothing about the
soul, perhaps they may have a few true opinions about it? Well, Tertullian
allows that the pagans have sometimes hit upon a truth or two, and
that they have sometimes produced valid arguments; after all, like any
other men, they possess “the common sense with which God has condescended
to endow the soul” (2.1). 11 But even in the realm of opinion,
their success is, at best, partial; for they mix the bad and the good:
What sets us and the philosophers at odds, in the present matter especially,
is this: sometimes they clothe opinions which we share in arguments of
their own which are contrary to our rule; and sometimes they fortify opinions
of their own with arguments which we share. (2.5).
Sometimes the pagan philosophers support true doctrines by false arguments,
and sometimes they use true arguments to support false doctrines
– they get things half right, and therefore half wrong.
If the pagan philosophers are so hopelessly muddled, then why
bother with their opinions at all? Well, St. Paul had explained that
“there must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved
may be made manifest among you” (1 Cor 11.19). Tertullian acknowledges
the truth of Paul’s remarks; but he wishes that Paul had been
wrong and that there had been no need for heresies – “for then we
should have no need at all, in the matter of the soul, to have business
with the philosophers, who are – if I may so put it – the patriarchs of
the heretics” (3.1). Most of the Fathers allege that the pagan philosophers
were at the origin of Christian heresies; and here Tertullian adduces
that common charge as a reason – indeed, as the sole reason – for his
10 A little later, at 2.6, he mentions the pagan doctors; cf. 26.1.
11 Tertullian alludes lightly to, but neither endorses nor rejects, the suggestion –
common in early Christian writers – that when the pagan philosophers hit
upon a truth it was because they had stolen it from the Old Testament (see 2.4).