SIN AS CONTRADICTION

If Tertullian finds antithesis in the world and God, he will have no trouble finding it in human beings. Everyone had found contradictions in the human person, which was racked by every kind of tension – soul/body, reason/passion, saint/sinner and free/enslaved. A part of European culture, east and west, is the history of Paul's struggle (‘the good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do’), narrowly anticipated in Ovid (‘I see and approve better things, but follow worse’) and repeated in Augustine (‘What shall wretched man do?).

Always Tertullian's antitheses come, not from perversity, but from a sense of reality. His own reality was dominated by his consciousness of slavery to sin and the deliverance of baptism. At the last judgement, he would remember the adulteries with which he had once stained his flesh, and be confident that God would raise that flesh which Christ had long since cleansed in baptism (res. 59.3). Sin was the supreme contradiction, for it denied God and destroyed humanity. Platonists like Clement could doubt the ultimate reality of evil. Heraclitean Stoics like Tertullian could only face reality when evil and sin were taken seriously. Tertullian, like Paul, thought and wrote a lot about sin. He made the first moves toward a doctrine of original sin and his views on the forgiveness of sins caused conflict with the hierarchy of the church.