Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

454
Jonathan Barnes
He was neither the first nor the last philosopher so to proceed; nor is
the double appeal peculiarly Christian. Still, you might wonder why
Tertullian adopted it; and one passage in On the Soul has been thought
to hint at an explanation. After Chapter 25 has recorded various – conflicting
– pagan views on the first association between soul and body,
Chapter 26 begins like this:
All this incongruity of human opinion extends as far as the boundaries of
God: I shall now take up position in our own lines and prove to Christians
the answer which I have given to the philosophers and doctors. (26.1)
The argument which follows appeals to various Biblical texts: Tertullian
appears to mean that he offers the Scriptures to Christian readers and
reasonings to the pagans. So, quite generally, the double appeal to argument
and authority answers to the needs of a double readership: argument
for the pagans, authority for the Christians. 13
That is a pretty idea; but it can hardly be right – for whatever may
have been in his mind at 26.1, Tertullian can scarcely have expected or
hoped that his essay would circulate among the pagans. It is, of course,
easy to invent explanations, some bad and some good, for the double
appeal; and in any event, one thing is plain: although the Scriptures
may be sufficient proof both of the errors of pagans and heretics and
of the truths of the Christian faith, Scriptural citation is not the only
weapon which Tertullian uses in his skirmishings.
To be sure, the fact that Tertullian deploys abstract reasoning as well
as biblical quotation does not, in itself, imply that he will sometimes
adopt the ideas and the arguments of the pagan philosophers – after
all, the reasoning with which Scriptural authority is conjoined might,
in principle, be reasoning of a specially Christian stamp. Nonetheless,
as a matter of fact Tertullian did summon the pagans to his aid, and
some of his reasonings are taken – directly and openly – from pagan
sources: pagan thinkers make a positive contribution to Christian psychology.
Tertullian’s first task in On the Soul is to determine what souls are made
of, to fix their stuff. The Scriptures will, of course, provide the right answers
to his questions; but Tertullian does not invoke the authority of
13 Waszink paraphrases thus: “After giving an advice to philosophers and physicians,
I now proceed to the furnishing of convincing proofs from the Scriptures
to my Christian readers” (1947, 335).