Justified True Belief

(●) The African who taught Western Christianity to think in Latin, and gave it the word Trinity. + Every time a Christian says that God is three persons in one substance, or calls baptism a sacrament, or speaks of the New Testament as a testament at all, the words being used were fixed in Christian Latin by a man from Carthage who has been dead for eighteen centuries. Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus is the earliest Christian writer in Latin whose work survives in any bulk, and he did not inherit a vocabulary. He built one. The reason he had to build one is worth pausing over. The first Christians thought and argued in Greek, and when the faith spread west into North Africa and Italy it needed Latin words for things Latin had never had to say. Tertullian supplied them, mostly by reaching into the courtroom and the account book: persona, the part a man plays and the standing he holds in law; substantia, the property that a thing actually consists of; satisfacere, to make good what you owe. A philologist is a scholar of words, of where they come from and when they first appear in a language. One of them, Heinrich Hoppe, went through the corpus in 1932, every page of Tertullian that has come down to us, and counted nine hundred and eighty-two words that turn up in Latin for the first time in his pages. A good many of them are still in the creeds. He is also hard company. He was funny, merciless, and thoroughly convinced he was right, and the same temper that made him unanswerable against Marcion, the teacher who wanted the Old Testament cut out of the Christian Bible, eventually turned on the bishops of his own church. The story has to be told in both directions, and the church that later called some of his opinions errors never stopped reading him: Cyprian of Carthage, the greatest African bishop of the next generation, is said to have read him every single day.

(●) c. 155 AD: He was born at Carthage, in a Roman province where being a Christian was still a capital charge. + Carthage in the middle of the second century was the second city of the Latin-speaking world: a rebuilt Roman colony on the coast of what is now Tunisia, rich on grain and olive oil, loud with lawyers, crowded with temples to gods both Roman and Punic. Tertullian was born there around 155 AD, though the year is a scholarly estimate rather than a record, worked backward from when his books appear. He was educated the way an ambitious provincial was educated, in literature and in rhetoric, the art of building a case and making an audience feel it, and the training shows on every page: he quotes Greek philosophers, Roman poets and Roman law with equal ease. Two familiar details about his family and career come from Jerome, writing nearly two centuries later, and both are now held loosely. Jerome calls him the son of a proconsul’s centurion, which would make his father a career officer on the staff of the senator Rome sent out to govern the province, and says he was a presbyter of the church, an elder, one of the ordained ministers of a congregation. Neither claim can be checked against anything Tertullian says about himself, and in one treatise he seems to count himself among the laity rather than the clergy, so careful historians treat both as later report. What is better attested is his legal turn of mind. Eusebius, the first church historian, describes him as "a man well versed in the laws of the Romans" (Ecclesiastical History 2.2.4), and whether or not he practiced in the courts, he argues like a man who has watched a great many of them. He was married, and that much we have from his own hand rather than from Jerome: one of his surviving books is a pair of letters addressed to his wife about what she should do if he died first.

(●) c. 195 AD: He became a Christian as a grown man, and afterward insisted that nobody is born one. + He never tells the story of his conversion, which is frustrating and very much in character; he was not a man who found himself interesting. What he does say, in the Apology, the public defence of the faith he published in 197 AD, is that he was once on the other side of it: "We are of your stock and nature: men are made, not born, Christians" (Apology 18). He had mocked the faith before he held it. Two things seem to have moved him, because he keeps returning to them. One is the martyrs. He writes about the executions at Carthage like a man who had stood in the crowd at one, and what he cannot get past is that the courage of the condemned fits no account of human nature he had been taught. The other is the church’s ordinary life. In the Apology he reports what the neighbours said when they watched a congregation at close range: "See, they say, how they love one another" (Apology 39). He puts the line in a pagan’s mouth on purpose, because a compliment is worth more from an enemy. He was baptized somewhere around the middle of the 190s, and within a few years he was the most formidable writer the Latin church had.

(●) 197 AD: In the Apology he told the governors of the empire that their own courts were breaking their own law. + An apology here means a defence speech, the word used in a courtroom, not an expression of regret. In 197 AD Tertullian wrote two of them, a rough draft called To the Nations and then the Apology itself, addressed to the magistrates of the Roman provinces, and the second is one of the great pieces of Latin prose from any century. His central move is legal, and it is worth seeing done. Roman trials worked by charge and evidence: you accused a man of a specific crime and you proved it. But Christians, Tertullian points out, were not tried for anything. They were asked whether they were Christians, and the confession of the name was itself the sentence. Worse, the standard procedure ran backwards: torture was normally used to make a suspect admit a crime, yet Christians were tortured to make them deny one. A judge who does that has stopped being a judge. He carries the point through to the last chapter of the book, where he dares the governors to go on with the killing: "your injustice is the proof that we are innocent" (Apology 50). Around the same years he was writing the shorter books that show the other half of him: To the Martyrs, a note of encouragement smuggled to Christians awaiting execution, and On Patience, which he opens by admitting he is the last man qualified to write it, being himself "ever sick with the heats of impatience."

(●) c. 200 to 213 AD: Book after book against the heretics, and Latin theology got its vocabulary. + The next dozen years or so are the most productive stretch any Latin Christian writer has ever had. He took on the whole field, one opponent at a time, and because Latin had almost no Christian vocabulary to draw on he had to invent the terms as he went. A word about the opponents first. A heretic, in his usage and his church’s, is not simply a Christian who has got something wrong. He is a teacher who has kept the Christian names and put a different religion behind them, and Tertullian thought that difference worth a decade of his life. Against Marcion, the shipowner from Sinope who taught that the God of the Old Testament was a lesser and crueller deity than the Father of Jesus, he wrote five long books, and he tells us himself that the version we have is the third edition. He dates it the way a Roman dated anything, by counting the years of the reigning emperor: no work of Marcion’s god had shown itself "up to the fifteenth of the Emperor Severus," which puts the first of the five books in 207 or 208 AD and the rest over the years that followed. The others came in turn. Against Hermogenes, a painter who taught that God shaped the world out of matter that had always been there, he argued that God made everything from nothing, which is the first sustained Latin defence of that doctrine. Against the Valentinians he used ridicule, which he considered a legitimate weapon against a system of thirty divine beings with names. And against Praxeas, who taught that the Father and the Son were one and the same person under two names, he wrote the treatise that gave the Latin church the words it has used for the Trinity ever since (T3). And against all of them at once he wrote the Prescription against Heretics, which does not argue about any particular text of Scripture at all. It argues about who is entitled to open the book (T1).

(●) c. 207 AD: He took up the New Prophecy, a movement that claimed the Spirit was still speaking, and his demands on ordinary Christians grew harder. + The New Prophecy was a renewal movement that began in Phrygia, in what is now central Turkey, around 165 AD. Its founder Montanus and two prophetesses, Priscilla and Maximilla, claimed that the Holy Spirit was speaking fresh words through them: not new doctrine, they insisted, but new discipline, calling the church to fasting, to plain living, to refusing flight in persecution, and to expecting the end soon. Opponents called the movement Montanism after the founder. Tertullian never used that name and wrote of the New Prophecy instead, and by about 207 he was writing as one of its supporters. It is easy to see the attraction. He had spent a decade watching Christians die well and other Christians make excuses, and here was a movement that told the comfortable to stop being comfortable. But the discipline hardened as he aged, and it hardened in the places where it costs a congregation something. Remarriage after a spouse’s death, which he had once merely discouraged in the letters to his wife, he came to call sin outright. Fleeing a persecution became forbidden, so that a Christian with a family and the means to leave town was expected to stay and be taken. And when a bishop announced that the church could forgive adultery and fornication after baptism, Tertullian wrote On Modesty to say the church had no such power: forgiveness of such sins belonged to "the Church of the Spirit, by means of a spiritual man; not the Church which consists of a number of bishops." Whether this ended in a formal break is genuinely unclear. Jerome says he lapsed to Montanus, driven off by the envy of the Roman clergy, and Augustine, two hundred years later, reports a small sect at Carthage still calling themselves Tertullianists, whose last few members crossed over to the catholic church while he was in the city and handed their basilica over to it (On Heresies 86). Catholic there is the old sense of the word, the whole body of the churches rather than any later denomination. Tertullian’s own books never describe an excommunication, and a good many modern historians think he lived and died inside the church, an increasingly bitter critic of its leadership rather than a man outside the door. The honest answer is that we do not know.

(●) c. 220 AD: He died old at Carthage, and the people he had quarrelled with kept reading him. + There is no account of his death. Jerome says only that he lived to a great age, which puts the end somewhere around 220 to 225 AD, and no grave and no martyrdom is recorded. For a man who wrote so much about dying well, he seems to have died in his bed. What happened next is the surprising part. A writer who ends his life at odds with the bishops might reasonably expect to be dropped. Instead thirty-one of his treatises came through the manuscript tradition intact, more Latin prose than survives from any Christian of the next hundred years, copied and recopied in monasteries by men who knew perfectly well that the church had ruled against some of what he said. They kept him because nobody could do without him. When the Latin West needed to say what it believed about God, about Christ, about the body, about the Scriptures, it reached for his sentences, and often it simply used his words.

What He Taught

(T1) The Scriptures belong to the church, and a heretic quoting them is trespassing. + Imagine a neighbour who has moved his fence twenty feet into your garden and now wants to argue with you, hedge by hedge, about where each shrub should go. You could spend a summer on it. Or you could go and get the deeds. That is exactly the move Tertullian makes in the Prescription against Heretics, written around 200 AD, and the title is a legal term. A praescriptio in Roman law was a preliminary plea: before the case is heard on its merits, the defendant objects that the other side has no standing to bring it at all. Tertullian applies it to the endless verse-by-verse fights with the Gnostic teachers, the men who offered a secret higher knowledge (gnosis is simply the Greek word for knowledge) that the ordinary churches were said never to have been given, and his complaint about those fights is practical. Marcion had produced his own shortened Bible; Valentinus kept the whole Bible and read it inside a system of his own invention. Argue text against text with either of them and you argue forever: a controversy over the Scriptures, he says, "can, clearly, produce no other effect than help to upset either the stomach or the brain," because each side simply hears the words differently. So he goes for the deeds instead. The apostles preached publicly and founded actual congregations in named cities, and what those congregations were taught from the beginning is the rule of faith: the short confession of one God the Creator, of his Son Jesus Christ born of the Virgin, crucified, raised and coming to judge, which Tertullian sets out in chapter 13 and which reads very like the creed a modern church still recites. That confession is the property of the churches the apostles actually planted, held from the first and handed on since. A teaching that turns up later, from a man with no such title, is by that fact an intruder. The argument has a limit worth naming, and it is the limit of every argument from possession: it works against a newcomer, and it does not settle a dispute between two ancient claimants. Tertullian’s own case shows the strain, since he would later stand outside the majority himself. But the instinct behind it is the one Jude presses when he tells Christians to "contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints" (Jude 1:3). Something was handed over. It is not up for reinvention.

(Q) "Who are you? When and whence did you come? As you are none of mine, what have you to do with that which is mine? Indeed, Marcion, by what right do you hew my wood? By whose permission, Valentinus, are you diverting the streams of my fountain? By what power, Apelles, are you removing my landmarks? This is my property." + Source: Tertullian, Prescription against Heretics 37 (Peter Holmes translation). He has put the church on its feet as the owner of an estate and is letting it question the trespassers by name: Marcion, Valentinus and Apelles were the three most successful heretical teachers of the century. The passage goes on, "I hold sure title-deeds from the original owners themselves, to whom the estate belonged. I am the heir of the apostles."

(T2) Philosophy is where the heresies come from. + This is his most quoted sentence and his most misread one, so it is worth slowing down over what he is actually complaining about. He is not saying that reasoning is bad. The man wrote a whole book of tight argument against Hermogenes about the nature of matter; he could not have meant it. His charge is about where the ideas came from, and he lays it out like a prosecutor tracing stolen goods back to the shop they were taken from. Every heresy he has to fight, he says, arrived carrying a philosopher’s luggage, and he opens the bags one at a time. Valentinus’ endless divine emanations, the long chain of lesser beings said to stream out of God the way light streams off a lamp, come out of Plato’s school. Marcion’s serene and untroubled higher god is the Stoics’ god with a new name on him. The teaching that the soul simply dies with the body is Epicurus. The claim that matter is as old as God is Zeno, the founder of the Stoics. What the heretics did, on his reading, was take the school opinions they already held and reshape the gospel until it fit them. Behind that stands Paul, whom he quotes directly: "See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ" (Colossians 2:8). And behind that stands a real fault line among the early Christian teachers. Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria treated Greek philosophy as a tutor sent to prepare the nations for Christ. Tertullian treated it as the place the infections come from. Both readings survive in the church, and most Christians since have wanted something of each: the confession that all truth is God’s truth, together with Tertullian’s warning that a borrowed system will quietly edit the gospel it was brought in to explain. It is only fair to add that his own thinking is soaked in the Stoicism he grew up with, most visibly in On the Soul, where he argues that the soul is a fine kind of body. He was not immune to the thing he diagnosed. Nobody is, which is rather his point.

(Q) "What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church? What between heretics and Christians?" + Source: Tertullian, Prescription against Heretics 7 (Peter Holmes translation). The Academy is Plato’s school at Athens; Jerusalem stands for the faith the apostles received. In the same chapter he calls for an end to any "mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic composition," a phrase aimed at teachers who were assembling the faith out of whatever materials came to hand (T2).

(T3) God is one substance in three persons, and that is not a contradiction. + A teacher named Praxeas had come from Asia to Rome with a tidy solution to a hard problem, and around 213 AD Tertullian sat down to take it apart. Christians confess one God, and they also pray to the Father, to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. Praxeas cut the knot: Father, Son and Spirit are one and the same person wearing three names, the way a single man is son, husband and father to different people. Later writers called the view modalism, from the idea of three modes of one actor. Its cost is brutal and Tertullian names it in his opening chapter, with a sneer he must have been pleased with: on this account it was the Father who was born, and the Father who hung on the cross. His answer was to write down a distinction that nobody had yet put into Latin. God is one substantia, one substance: the stuff, the reality, what a thing actually is, the word a Roman would use for the estate a man owns and holds. And God is three personae: not masks and not modes, but three who genuinely stand over against one another, the word for the standing a party holds in a lawsuit. The Father sends and the Son is sent; the Son prays and the Father hears; the Spirit is promised by one and given by the other. Take those exchanges as real, and you cannot collapse the three. Keep the one substance, and you have not made three Gods. He is the first surviving writer to use the Latin word trinitas, Trinity, of God, and the formula the Latin West settled into, one substance and three persons, is built out of his words. Two honest notes. Theophilus of Antioch had already used the Greek word trias for God, his Word and his Wisdom around 180 AD, so Tertullian coined the Latin, not the idea. And his own working out of it is not yet what the church confessed when its bishops gathered at Nicaea a century later; the way he ranked the Son under the Father would be ruled out there, and that belongs in his ledger rather than his credit column.

(Q) "Thus the connection of the Father in the Son, and of the Son in the Paraclete, produces three coherent Persons, who are yet distinct One from Another. These Three are one essence, not one Person." + Source: Tertullian, Against Praxeas 25 (Peter Holmes translation). Paraclete is the New Testament’s name for the Holy Spirit, the helper or advocate Jesus promises in John’s Gospel. Tertullian has just walked through the farewell discourses verse by verse, and he draws the conclusion from the way Father, Son and Spirit speak to and about each other. The next clause takes up the saying in John’s Gospel, "I and my Father are One," and adds that the oneness is "in respect of unity of substance not singularity of number."

(T4) The Son of God was really born in flesh, really died, and will really raise our bodies. + The most respectable heresy of the second century was not that Jesus was merely a man. It was the opposite. Educated people found it easy to believe he was divine and nearly impossible to believe he was born the way everyone is born, out of a womb, into blood and mess and a body that could sweat and be stabbed. The tidy solution was to say he only seemed to have flesh. Scholars call that docetism, from a Greek verb meaning to seem, and Tertullian went after it in On the Flesh of Christ and then, at length, in On the Resurrection of the Flesh. His method is to refuse the flinch. Marcion’s followers found the nativity disgusting, so Tertullian writes out what they are squeamish about in full: the womb, the birth, the nursing, the nappies. And then he asks what the disgust is really aimed at. God made that flesh. God is not embarrassed by his own workmanship, and a saviour who did not take it on has not saved it. The flesh he means is not a figure of speech: it is "this flesh suffused with blood, built up with bones, interwoven with nerves, entwined with veins," the flesh that knew how to be born and how to die. In On the Resurrection of the Flesh he puts the same claim into the future tense, and the promise is not that we shed the body at last but that this body is the one God intends to raise. That is the plain sense of the New Testament, and the apostle John had already made confessing it the test of a true spirit: "every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God" (1 John 4:2). Tertullian’s contribution was to see that the offence is the point. A religion invented to be attractive would not have included the manger or the tomb.

(Q) "The Son of God was crucified; I am not ashamed because men must needs be ashamed of it. And the Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd. And He was buried, and rose again; the fact is certain, because it is impossible." + Source: Tertullian, On the Flesh of Christ 5 (Peter Holmes translation). Later readers boiled this down to a slogan he never wrote, "I believe because it is absurd," and used it to make him the patron of thinking with your eyes shut. Read in place, it is doing the opposite. He is arguing against Marcion that nobody would invent a story so humiliating, so the very embarrassment of the claim is evidence that it was reported rather than composed. It is an argument about what fabrications look like, not a licence to believe anything.

(T5) The untrained soul, caught off its guard, testifies to a God nobody taught it. + Listen to how people talk when they are not thinking about it. A driver misses a lorry by inches and says "thank God," meaning nothing doctrinal by it. Someone cheated out of an inheritance says "God knows what he did." A man who would tell you flatly that he believes in nothing says "God help us" when the news is bad. Tertullian noticed this, and he built an argument out of it, first in the Apology and then in a short book of its own, On the Testimony of the Soul. His method is deliberately cheap: he refuses to quote Scripture, because his pagan readers do not accept it, and he refuses to quote philosophers, because his readers can hire other philosophers. He calls a witness they cannot object to, the ordinary soul, and he examines what it says by reflex. It says God, in the singular, when nobody has coached it. It says God sees, and God will repay. It speaks of the dead as though they still are somebody. None of that is Christian instruction. It is what falls out of a person before the instruction arrives. The technical name for what he is describing is general revelation, the knowledge of God that reaches every human being through the made world and the conscience, as distinct from the special revelation given in Scripture. Paul states it twice: God’s invisible attributes "have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made" (Romans 1:20), and Gentiles who never had the law "show that the work of the law is written on their hearts" (Romans 2:15). Tertullian draws a second conclusion from it, and this is where he is centuries ahead of his neighbours. If God has already planted the knowledge, then hammering it in by force is both pointless and wrong. Writing to the proconsul Scapula around 212 AD he states the principle flatly: "it is a fundamental human right, a privilege of nature, that every man should worship according to his own convictions." It is one of the earliest surviving statements of religious liberty as a right, made by a man from an illegal religion to the official who could have had him killed for it.

(Q) "It bears witness, too, that God is judge, exclaiming, God sees, and, I commend myself to God, and, God will repay me. O noble testimony of the soul by nature Christian!" + Source: Tertullian, Apology 17 (S. Thelwall translation). The "it" is the human soul, which he has just described coming to itself as out of a surfeit, a sleep or a sickness, and speaking of God without prompting. The Latin phrase, anima naturaliter Christiana, became one of the most quoted tags in Christian literature. He means the soul is made for the God it keeps naming, not that people are Christians without knowing it; the Apology spends the next chapter explaining why the written revelation is still needed (T5).

(Q) "The oftener we are mown down by you, the more in number we grow; the blood of Christians is seed." + Source: Tertullian, Apology 50 (S. Thelwall translation). Usually met in English as "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church," which is a later polishing of this sentence. He is closing the Apology by telling the governors that the executions are counterproductive: onlookers ask what could be worth dying like that, and some of them stay to find out. He knew that from the inside. Earlier in the same book he says that these things had once been the theme of his own ridicule (Apology 18).

What the Church Made of Him

(†) Cyprian read him every day, and through Cyprian the African church learned his habits of mind. + Jerome tells a story he had at Concordia in Italy from an old man named Paul, who as a young man had met the aged secretary of Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage martyred in 258 AD. Cyprian, the secretary told him, never let a day pass without reading Tertullian, and when he wanted the books he would say, "Give me the master" (Jerome, On Illustrious Men 53). It is a small domestic detail and it explains a great deal. Cyprian was the most influential bishop the Latin West had before Ambrose, and his prose, his instincts about the unity of the church, and his way of arguing from what the church has always held are Tertullian’s, cooled by about thirty degrees. The debt ran on from there. Novatian at Rome wrote the next Latin treatise on the Trinity and took his terms from Against Praxeas. Two centuries later Augustine, who could be sharp about Tertullian’s errors, quotes him with respect and inherits his vocabulary wholesale. Vincent of Lérins, writing in the 430s, set him beside Origen as the two greatest minds the church had produced in Latin and Greek, and paid him a compliment no one has improved on: "Every word almost was a sentence; every sentence a victory" (Commonitory 18). Vincent meant it as a warning as well as a tribute. His point was that even men of that calibre had gone wrong, so the church tests a teacher by what it has always held rather than by how well he writes.

(†) The words he made are still in use, and most Christians who use them have never heard his name. + A language does not automatically have room for a new religion. Greek already had centuries of philosophical and theological vocabulary; Latin, for these purposes, had almost none, and the Christians of North Africa and Italy were trying to confess in Latin what had been thought out in Greek. Tertullian took the words off the shelf nearest to hand, which was the law and the army and the counting house, and made them carry theology. - Trinity. Trinitas, threeness, used of God for the first time in surviving Latin. Every Western creed and catechism since runs on it (T3). - Person and substance. Persona and substantia in the sense the creeds use them: three who are genuinely distinct, one reality that they are. The Latin renderings of the Nicene confession say the Son is of one substantia with the Father, and the pair together became the settled Western way of stating the doctrine, from Novatian to Augustine. - Sacrament. Sacramentum was the oath a Roman recruit swore to his commander. He applied it to baptism, and the word has stayed on the font ever since. - Testament. He is a principal reason Latin Christians came to speak of the Old and New Testamentum, a will, rather than the covenant of the Greek. - Satisfaction. Satisfacere, to make good what is owed, a term he used of repentance. It later became load-bearing in the Western understanding of the atonement. Beyond the words there is the argument he handed on. Against Hermogenes he made the first sustained Latin case that God created out of nothing rather than shaping matter that was already there, which is how the church has read the opening of Genesis, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1), and what the letter to the Hebrews states outright, that "what is seen was not made out of things that are visible" (Hebrews 11:3). And the Apology founded a genre. Every later attempt to state the Christian case to a hostile public, from Augustine’s City of God to the paperback on the apologetics shelf, is doing what a Carthaginian lawyer did first in Latin, in 197 AD, to magistrates who could have had him killed for it.

(†) Where his own record fails him: a Son ranked below the Father, a mercy he would not extend, and a cruel streak. + The ledger has another column, and it is drawn from what he himself wrote rather than from what anyone later did with him. - He put the Son below the Father. Working before the language existed, he wrote that "the Father is the entire substance, but the Son is a derivation and portion of the whole" (Against Praxeas 9), and against Hermogenes he wrote plainly that "there was, however, a time when neither sin existed with Him, nor the Son" (Against Hermogenes 3). He was reaching for a way to say that the Son is truly God and truly distinct, and this was not it. The church at Nicaea in 325 AD ruled out exactly this way of speaking, and it was right to. Reading him fairly means noticing both that he supplied the words the settlement was written in and that his own use of them fell short of it. - He shut a door Scripture leaves open. In On Modesty he denied that the church could forgive adultery or fornication committed after baptism. Paul faced that question at Corinth about a man under discipline and gave the opposite answer: "you should rather turn to forgive and comfort him, or he may be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow" (2 Corinthians 2:7). The same hardening shows in On Flight in Persecution, which forbids running away, though Jesus told the twelve, "When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next" (Matthew 10:23), and in On Monogamy, which calls a widow’s remarriage sin, though Paul says she "is free to be married to whom she wishes, only in the Lord" (1 Corinthians 7:39). - He could be cruel in print. He ends On the Spectacles by inviting his readers to picture the last judgment as a better show than the amphitheatre, with the governors who persecuted Christians burning in fires fiercer than the ones they lit. And he opens On the Apparel of Women by telling every woman who reads it, "You are the devil’s gateway," and that on her account the Son of God had to die. Those are his sentences, not a hostile summary of them, and they are wrong about half the human race. None of this is a reason to put him down. It is a reason to read him the way he asked to be read, by the rule of faith and the Scriptures rather than by the force of his own prose, which is exactly the standard he applied to everyone else.