Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

Anima Christiana 453
taking pagan philosophy into consideration in his work On the Soul. The
heretics must be addressed; the heretics depend on the pagan philosophers:
therefore – and for no other reason – the pagan philosophers
must be addressed.
The pagans are there to be confuted; and the task of confutation is
not at all difficult:
Wherever in this way they have darkened the clear bright air of truth with
the fumes of philosophy, the Christians will be obliged to dissipate the
clouds, smashing their antiquated (I mean, their philosophical) reasonings
and setting against them the arguments of heaven (I mean, of the Lord),
so that we may destroy the items with which philosophy captures the gentiles
and blunt the items with which heresy shakes the faithful. (3.3)
The “arguments of heaven” are set out in the Scriptures: to refute the
errors of the heretics and their pagan patrons it is enough to invoke
Holy Writ. For the Scriptures are always right, and any thesis with
which they conflict is therefore false. Plato, for example, argued that
souls are unborn and unmade, and that each soul has existed for ever.
According to Moses, “the Lord God formed man of the dust of the
ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became
a living soul” (Gn 2.7). That text proves that souls are created
by God, and hence that Plato is wrong. (See 4.1 – Tertullian’s interpretations
of his proof texts are often imaginative.)
The pagan philosophers are cited only because they have encouraged
heresy, and their mistakes are quickly exposed. That, at least, is the impression
which the opening pages of Tertullian’s essay is likely to give.
And yet things are not quite so simple. After he has cited Moses against
Plato, Tertullian concludes his argument thus: “So the opinion of the
philosopher is refuted by the authority of prophecy as well” (4.1).
“As well”: Tertullian must mean to say that Plato is refuted by the authority
of Scripture as well as by abstract reason. True, it is hard to find
any pertinent abstract reasoning in Tertullian’s text (and at least one editor
has supposed that there is a lacuna in the Latin) 12 ; but whatever may
be the case at 4.1, Tertullian frequently does make a double appeal –
both to argument and to Scripture, both to ratio and to auctoritas, both
to revelatio and to aestimatio (9.3).
12 Waszink 1947, 125, defends the received text: he finds a decent parallel for the
odd position of the word “quoque”; but his identification of the pertinent reasoning
is strained.