Tertullian’s comments on the divine creation of the soul (it is God who creates it, as much as it is God who creates all43) set the groundwork for exploring what
the soul is understood to be. First, since the soul as part of the human person was created ex nihilo, not formed by an arrangement of substance, ‘it may be seen that the soul is rather the offspring of God than of matter’.44 There is a divine origin to
42 For speculation on the character and content of the De censu animae, see Waszink, De Anima 7*–14*. Whatever the specifi c contents of that tract may have been, it is clear from the references in the De anima explored by Waszink, as well as from the character of that tract proper, that Tertullian’s address of the soul represents a continuation of his discourse on the creation of the world. See J. Daniélou, The Origins of Latin Christianity, tr. J. A. Baker and D. Smith (The Development of Christian Doctrine Before the Council of Nicaea, 3; London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1977) 371. 43 See De Test. 2; cf. DA 3.4 – presumably the internal reference is to the De Cens. (so Waszink, De Anima 5*; Nasrallah, Ecstasy of Folly 115).
the soul, and this stands behind much of what Tertullian wishes to say; but one must not read this statement too dramatically. By the logic that asserts it, the body is also of divine origin, since it is equally created by God. Nonetheless, as the soul is the immaterial ‘breath’ of human life, whereas the body is of a material essence common with the cosmos, the soul bears a more direct connection to its maker. Daniélou’s claim, that Tertullian is concerned above all to show that the soul has a different origin and census from the body, is borne out here.45 It is even to be
called ‘divine’, for reason of its sharing in the immaterial and eternal attributes of God’s nature. So can Tertullian suggest:
We, however [against Tertullian’s reading of Plato], who allow no appendage to God (in the sense of equality), by this fact reckon the soul as very far below God: for we suppose it to be born, and thereby to possess something of a diluted divinity and an attenuated felicity, as the breath [of God], though not his Spirit; and although immortal – as this is an attribute of divinity – yet for all that passible, since this is an incident of a born condition, and consequently from the fi rst capable of deviation from perfection and the right, and by consequence susceptible of a failure in memory.46
This dense text condenses Tertullian’s view of the soul as connecting the theologi- cal and anthropological realms. The soul is not to be equated with God qua God; it is not an ‘appendage’ or emanation of the divine nature. An emerging Platonic anthropology in the early third century, as in some sense a reformation in the popular mind of a loose Stoic model popular in the second, is a phenomenon Tertullian rejects with vigour.47 As regards God’s nature as divine being, the soul
is not only slightly ‘diluted’ in its divinity, but ‘very far below God’. It is, after all, a thing created – in human procreative terms generated, born – and ‘that which has received its constitution by being made or by being born is by nature capable of being changed’.48 But, second, the thing born is so of God’s breath, thus
possessing attributes of the divine, just as human breath possesses characteristics gleaned from its source (warmth from the lungs, moisture from the mouth, etc.). Still, while this breath comes directly from God, the breath and God’s Spirit (the Holy Spirit) are not one and the same. Tertullian, like Irenaeus, sees the divine breath of Genesis 2.7 as spiritual but not the Spirit proper – though as coming from God the Father, Father of the Spirit, it is not disconnected from him. Third, and signifi cantly, the soul, which is thus a created and generated reality born of the Father’s breath, is by virtue of that birth passible, even as it is eternal. It shares in the divine attribute of immortality, yet creation nonetheless implies transforma-
45 See Daniélou, Origins of Latin Christianity 375.
46 DA 24.
47 On this cultural shift, see Munier, Petite vie 53–55. 48 DA 21.
tion. A thing made is a thing capable of change, a change that may be to the better or the worse. This is a note of interpretation we have already seen in Irenaeus, where it was key in understanding his articulation of human reality as necessarily
in history. It is here reiterated in Tertullian, and it will similarly reappear in every
author we examine. The fi nitude and mutability of the created, held alongside confession of the eternity and immutability of the creator, is a basic building block of Christian anthropological discussion.
These various assertions combine to form a picture of the human soul that is itself profoundly dynamic, even before it is examined in light of its necessary union with the body – a fact that causes Tertullian to see the soul as primary means of understanding how the trinitarian life of Father, Son and Spirit is imaged in the human person. The soul is a thing divine, receptive of God’s divinity, through which divine attributes are made the proper characteristics of the human. A reveal- ing passage in the Testimony of the Soul has Tertullian query the reality of divine prophecy and revelation, ultimately to exclaim that such prophetic insights come as ‘outbursts of the soul’, as teachings ‘of a nature congenital [to it] and the secret deposit of inborn knowledge’.49 The divine property of God’s foreknowledge
becomes a human property, because the soul is the partaker of divine attributes. Nonetheless, it partakes always as created, generated entity. While the body may be more impatient than the soul (cf. On patience 13), still both are fi nite realities. With this background in mind, Tertullian can make his bold claim that the soul in fact grows and develops, just as the body grows and develops. It is not a generic ‘divine principle’ any more than the body is a generic material element. Rather, just as the body remains ever body, yet grows over time and through the phases of life, so the soul possesses always its same created nature, yet develops in its existence over time and through the same phases of life as does the body. The two are precisely co-ordinated. An important passage from the De anima refi nes this discussion:
Here, therefore, we draw our conclusion, that all the natural properties of the soul are inherent in it as parts of its substance, and that they grow and develop along with it, from the very moment of its own origin at birth. Just as Seneca says, whom we so often fi nd on our side: ‘There are implanted within us the seeds of all the arts and periods of life; and God, our Master, secretly produces our mental dispositions’50 – that is, from the germs that are implanted and
hidden in us by means of infancy, and these are the intellect: for from these our natural dispositions are evolved. Now, even the seeds of plants have one form in each kind, but their development varies: some open and expand in a healthy and perfect state, while others either improve or degenerate, owing to the conditions of weather and soil, and from the appliance of labour and care
49 De Test. 5.
[. . .], in like manner, the soul may well be uniform in its seminal origin, although multiform by the process of nativity.51
Tertullian is the fi rst Christian author to assert in so direct a manner this develop- mental characteristic of the soul. It is nowhere as clear in Irenaeus, though one might argue it is implied in his developmental discussion overall. For its unique- ness, Daniélou characterized it as part of Tertullian’s ‘profoundly original’ expan- sion on earlier thought, specifi cally that of Irenaeus; namely, that for Tertullian there is a process by which not only the body, but the soul itself, advances and becomes spiritual.52 The soul changes and grows over time, and while all souls
should be considered uniform in nature in that they are created equally as souls by God, the necessarily individual course of development of each (begun in ‘the process of nativity’) means that souls as found in realized, individual human per- sons will express infi nite variation. Tertullian draws the parallel of fl owers from seeds: every poppy is born of a poppy-seed, each of which is equally ‘poppy’ in nature and each of which will produce the same species of fl ower. Yet each poppy is unique, for each encounters different accidents of development – soil quality, water, sunlight, etc. This can be exactly co-ordinated to the developmental prog- ress of the soul:
How much more, in fact, will those accidental circumstances have to be noticed, which, in addition to the state of one’s body or one’s health, tend to sharpen or to dull the intellect! It is sharpened by learned pursuits, by the sciences, the arts, by experimental knowledge, business habits and studies; it is blunted by ignorance, idle habits, inactivity, lust, inexperience, listlessness and vicious pursuits. [. . .] It is evident how great must be the infl uences which so variously affect the one nature of the soul, since they are commonly regarded as separate ‘natures’. Still, they are not different species, but casual incidents of one nature and substance – even of that which God conferred on Adam, and made the mould of all. Casual incidents they will always remain, but never will they become specifi c [i.e. natural] differences.53
The developmental maturation of the physical body is read by Tertullian – given his insistence on the unifi ed character of soul and body as ‘person’ – as exactly paralleled in this developmental quality of the soul. Nowhere is this clearer than at De anima 37:
We have already demonstrated the conjunction of the body and the soul, from the concretion of their very seminations to the complete formation of the foetus. We now maintain their conjunction likewise from the birth onwards;
51 DA 20.
52 So Daniélou, Origins of Latin Christianity 377–82.
in the fi rst place, because they both grow together, only each in a different manner suited to the diversity of their nature – the fl esh in magnitude, the soul in intelligence; the fl esh in material condition, the soul in sensibility.
Carefully qualifi ed later in the passage to make clear that the soul never increases ‘in substance’ – that is, it never becomes ‘larger’ or more substantively soul than it is at its creation54 – Tertullian here spells out a distinctly developmental
conception of economic personhood. It is not merely the bodily substance of the person that grows and develops in the progression of history, but the immaterial soul as well. Tertullian has articulated in more detail than Irenaeus the manner in which humanity’s development relates to its participation in God’s glory. Irenaeus had argued that humanity ‘could not have received’ God’s full glory at its initial creation, nor, if such glory had been received, could humanity have retained it (cf. Refutation 4.38, 39); but the defence he gives for this statement is entirely physical in orientation. Just as a human child cannot eat solid foods in infancy, and so a mother gives instead milk, so God revealed his glory to primal man in a lesser degree than he might otherwise have done. What remains unanswered, at least in a technical sense in the writings of Irenaeus, is precisely how the physical analogy of infantile bodies and solid food relates to the transcendent reality of God’s glory revealed in the immaterial soul, which Irenaeus sees as its means of communication to the body. With Tertullian this is explained precisely through his articulation of the soul’s development, too, from nativity to its adulthood. This development is primarily moral and intellectual, but also a development of function, of receptive capability. Its capacities increase as its natural properties are ‘drawn forth’ in the process of development, a process that is intimately con- nected to the developmental maturation of the body – so much so that Tertullian can speak of the ‘puberty of the soul, which coincides with that of the body, that they attain both together to this full growth at about the fourteenth year’. More generally, the stages of development of the soul ‘advance by a gradual growth through the stages of life and develop themselves in different ways’.55