We began with Tertullian's twin claims for simplicity and perfection. Simplicity did not last long in the apologetic battle against diverse opponents. Athens turned out to have a lot to do with Jerusalem, and the Christian message of credible ineptitude made demands on understanding. Antitheses in God and a divine trinity left the ‘simplices ne dixerim imprudentes et idiotae’ well behind. Prayer took place in conflict and the demands of the bible could not be reduced to uniformity. The simplicity of baptism did not produce transformed lives. Not even sin was straightforward: Tertullian the sinner disagreed with bishops on the fate of exuberant sinners. Those who rose above this confused world, as Valentinians did, finished with greater confusion and muddled fantasies. Even death did not solve all puzzles, for the resurrection of the flesh was contradictory and essential.

Above all, Tertullian wanted to live and to help others to live a Christian life in a complex world. The excellence of Christian example first drew him to a church whose corporate mediocrity (mediocritas nostrd) repelled him. Besides this conflict, there was a deeper puzzle. The recapitulation of all things in Christ meant both correction and perfection. If someone struck you, retaliation was cleverly reconstructed. In giving a cheek for a cheek, you supplied the second cheek yourself and achieved correction and perfection. Ethics lay at the heart of the Christian mystery. The love command summed up the law.

Newness is more than a matter of timing. It is not enough, says Tertullian, to arrive early and stand at the head of a queue, as people did each day outside the baths in Carthage. An originator has to be original. The new miracles of Christ were followed by a long line of imitators; but the novelty of Christ was his uniqueness rather than his priority in time. In a humbler way, Tertullian himself is not merely first in an occidental queue. He is ‘astonishingly original and personal’ and is able to do theology, that laminated fusion of argument and scripture, in a way which breaks new ground. Strikingly, he wrote his own kind of Latin. He liberated Christian thought from its Greek beginnings by analysing and developing biblical concepts.

Thinkers are ‘divided according to traditions, each member of which partially adopts and partially modifies the vocabulary of the writers whom he has read’. Traditions begin from ‘the people with poetic gifts, all the original minds with a talent for redescription’. Tertullian was an innovator, and, in length of influence, he has outstripped the modern creators, like Darwin and Freud, by nearly two millennia. It is therefore useful to elucidate his final vocabulary, the words and meanings which continually recur in his arguments. Most of his words were not new, but the way he arranged them was. He purified a dialect, by framing a vocabulary which enabled him to challenge the opponents of his kind of Christianity.

‘We also are religious and our religion is simple’, objected the Roman proconsul to the martyr Speratus, at his trial near Carthage on 17 July 180. ‘If you will listen calmly’, replied Speratus, ‘I shall tell you the mystery of simplicity.’ Tertullian was not the only African who liked paradox. Speratus claims simplicity for Christians rather than pagans. He counters the accusation that Christians are secret and sinister, by asserting that their secret is simplicity. He draws on the New Testament account of the mystery of salvation. The writer to the Ephesians had been concerned to tell the nations of the unsearchable riches of Christ and to bring to light ‘the economy of the mystery which has been hidden from all ages in the God who created all things’ (Eph. 3.9). The church declares to heavenly powers the manifold (πολυποíκιλος) wisdom of God (Eph. 3.10), which is the divine mystery. The end of salvation, the vision of Christ and the church present a great mystery (Eph. 5.32).

Tertullian's lust for simplicity, supported by superlatives, persists throughout his work and is a good place to begin a study of his thought. A fine exposition, which begins ‘Tertullien déconcerte’, goes on to insist that Tertullian took a simple and total choice when he became a Christian and that his complexity comes from his earlier intellectual formation; whether a study of his thought begins from either simplicity or complexity, it will discover a profound unity.

Before a detailed study of Tertullian's arguments may proceed, it is wise to consider his reputation as the enemy of argument and the apostle of unreason. There are two famous passages where Tertullian seems to reject argument and reason: ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ (praescr. 7.9) and ‘it is credible because inept… certain because impossible’ (carn. 5.4). The first is a puzzle because in the Stoic Tertullian Athens has a lot to do with Jerusalem; the second is a paradox because credibility and ineptness, certainty and impossibility are opposites. These two claims have become slogans in fideist alternatives to the Enlightenment where they have each acquired a meaning which is foreign to Tertullian. Analysis of Tertullian's text will show that both puzzle and paradox make good sense, and that Tertullian's explict claim to follow the discipline of reason (disciplina rationis) and his demand ‘here again I must have reasons’ are amply justified. The first may be called ‘the puzzle’ and the second ‘the paradox’. Tertullian has countless paradoxes but this one is celebrated.

One by one the common opinions concerning Tertullian have fallen. Barnes has shown the improbability of his being the jurist Tertullian, the son of a centurion, or a priest. Hallonsten has shown that his accounts of satisfaction and merit do not anticipate later legalism. Rankin has challenged the view that he was a schismatic. It is equally necessary to show that Tertullian was not a fideist.

The apologeticum is a defence of Christians in face of persecution by Roman authorities. As elsewhere in early Christian literature, the virtues of Christians are set out, their blameless lives are extolled and the demonic origin of persecution exposed. However, as with Justin's Apology, there are general principles and themes which give coherence and intensity to the long list of details.

The first general principle is that the world is governed by the strife of opposites – of light with darkness, of good with evil. Following this axiom, three points are made. First, within universal conflict, justice or reason must balance all things, suppress evil and encourage good. Secondly, God is present from beginning to end, from first to last. His economy runs without faltering from creation through all his dealings with mankind, until the coming of the man Jesus in whom all is brought to perfection. Thereafter Jesus is present in the varied virtues of the church and in the seed of the martyrs, so that nothing lies outside his rule which is to be plainly declared in his final judgement. The third theme is the persistence of the cross. The worship of Christ as God comes from those who are tortured and afflicted. Out of the depth of their suffering, they proclaim salvation and out of their seed the gospel grows.

To these three themes (balance of justice, divine economy and seed of suffering), Tertullian adds a note of confidence.

There were several reasons for the length and care of Tertullian's reply to Marcion. Dualism was the foremost threat to emerging Christian theology. Marcion gave a negative answer to the first question of that theology: ‘Is there one God good and true who is creator of this world of evil and chaos?’ Since Marcion produced the strongest case against one God, and supported his argument from scripture, his work required careful discussion. Deeper still, Marcion's denial went to the central contention of the common response. He denied the economy of salvation, centred on Christ, which was the theme of the early Christian answer. For Marcion, God's total disgrace could not be the sacrament of man's salvation.

Paradox was unacceptable to Marcion because it contradicted the primary pledge to simplicity which Marcion and Tertullian shared. In God there could be no change nor shadow cast by turning. All that contradicted perfect love must be denied. In this Marcion followed a common view of God. For Plato, the form of the good was above all contradiction; dialectic was the way to reach the summit where all conflict ceases and there is an everlasting loveliness that neither flowers nor fades. For Aristotle, the first cause of all, like a magnet in an armchair, needed to do nothing. For the Epicureans, the chief attribute of gods was their remoteness and their lack of involvement in human affairs.

The influence of Tertullian's account of the trinity has been variously assessed. It has been claimed that through Novatian, whose work (according to Jerome) was an epitome of Tertullian, and through Hosius, Tertullian triumphed at Nicaea and the homoousion went on. Indeed, in Tertullian ‘we first find the accurate definition and technical terms that passed over into Catholic theology, winning prompt acceptance in the West and securing when the time came – the grudging but certain approval of the East’. This is an impressive claim; but ideas rarely enjoy such unambiguous triumph.

Tertullian's achievement may even be embarrassing in a climate of anti-trinitarian debate. Through him and other theologians, it is wrongly claimed that Christians lost their belief in God as ‘one without further qualification’, for the understanding of trinity requires such ‘well informed and highly sophisticated powers of thought’ that many Christians are effectively tritheist rather than monotheist. Today, ‘the contrast between the apparent simple clarity of Jewish and Muslim monotheism and the apparent complexity of Christian monotheism remains a stumbling-block to Christianity's detriment’. Tertullian was aware of the difficulty here raised (Prax. 3.1); but he insisted that trinity was the way to one God.

TRINITY A NEW FAITH IN ONE GOD

Trinity is never a mere multiplication of heavenly beings; there must be one God. Trinity is the faith of the gospel.

Most thinkers write under the stimulus of controversy, and Tertullian was fortunate to have many opponents to make him think. He denied the existence of eirenic theology. Confrontation was a fact of life and the only way to maturity (Marc. 2.29.4). Life and thought for a Heraclitean (PP 211,212) were adversarial (Marc. 1.25.6). Durability in disputation clarified his opinions, for propositions are understood from the proofs which support them. Like his contemporaries in philosophy, he chose a criterion or rule of truth and used ideas which were consistent with it.

We note first the limits of his achievement. Tertullian's loyalty to his rule and to scripture, together with his desire to destroy his opponents, brought mistakes. These came when he felt a need for answers which left no remainder, a need which derived from his logic of apologetic, and from the pressures of controversy and persecution. His answer to Marcion, that justice and goodness were united in one God, pointed back to the antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount and is confirmed in the universal Christian plea for divine mercy. However, in loyalty to this answer, he went further and felt obliged to argue that only a God who inspired fear could keep sinners from sinning; love could not conquer all. Even the notorious case of the bald Elisha and the brutal bears came down to this. For any advocate could prove a difference between the badness of boys and the innocence of infants; unlike Augustine, he does not condemn the latter for original sin.

PRAYER AS COMBAT

Trinity points to prayer, as the cross points to trinity. Jesus was the will and power of the father and yet, to demonstrate patience, he submitted to the father's will: ‘Not my will, but thine be done’ (or. 4.5). Conflict lies at the heart of prayer which is, for Tertullian, the Christian soldier's sword and shield. His short work on prayer concludes with the strife of opposites. Christian prayer is a defensive armour and an offensive weapon against the oppressive, encircling hostility of the devil. In prayer, Christians stand to arms under the standard of Christ, their General, waiting for the trumpet to sound for resurrection. Angels also pray, because they are caught up in the battle.

Prayer is natural. It belongs to this world, where nature adds her testimony to the truth and neither God nor nature lies. Cattle and wild animals bend their knees and, when they first rise from their rest, they look to heaven with a bellow or roar. Birds too, when they leave their nest, move towards heaven with wings in the form of a cross and make a sound that seems like prayer. Our lord, who is the peak of all creation, prayed (or. 29.4).

Yet prayer outstrips this world. The power of prayer is a spiritual power and a spiritual sacrifice. God rejected the multitude of sacrifices – the fat of rams and the blood of bulls and goats (Isa. 1.11; or. 28.1). The gospel teaches the true demands of a God who is spirit and must be worshipped in spirit and truth.

My books, at this epoch [wrote a modern novelist] if they did not actually serve to irritate the disorder, partook, it will be perceived, largely, in their imaginative and inconsequential nature, of the characteristic qualities of the disorder itself. I well remember, among others, … Tertullian's ‘DeCarne Christi’ … in which the unintelligible sentence, ‘Mortuus est Deifilius; credibile est quia ineptum est; et sepultus resurrexit; certum est quia impossible est [The son of God has died: this is believable because it is silly; buried he has risen again: this is certain because it is impossible] …’ occupied my undivided time, for many weeks of laborious and fruitless investigation.

Others have been less fortunate, because their fruitful investigations produced clear, but false, results which have encouraged irrational piety.

Tertullian is famous for his paradox (carn. 5.4), which is commonly misquoted and seen as the archetype of irrational faith. Yet his most assiduous modern editor and translator writes, ‘This is one of the most lucid sections of Tertullian's work, in which his Latin flows with unwonted ease and perspicuity.’ Is this claim, asks another, ‘unconscious humour’? Some writers take the passage by itself and find irrationalism, while others look at the context and find rational argument. A refrain of the treatise is ‘But here again I demand reasons’ (carn. 10.1).

Tertullian's paradox is a cruel test for sorting out those who analyse arguments from those who do not. Most error is caused by the attempt to use the paradox in settings where it does not belong.

MONTANISM

The New Prophecy emerged in Asia Minor in 157 or perhaps as late as 172. Our chief accounts of the movement derive from fourth-century sources (Eusebius and Epiphanius) which are marked by later orthodoxy. Earlier in the second century, Papias (130) preached a colourful chiliasm and Christian Asia Minor was strong in prophetic tradition and practice. According to Eusebius, Montanus was only a recent convert, when, in a village of Phrygian Mysia, he was seized with ecstasy and prophesied strange things which were not consistent with the tradition of the church. Some rejected him as a false prophet, but others were aroused and turned from the true faith. Two prophetesses joined him in enthusiastic frenzy and their influence spread, until, says Eusebius, their sayings were examined and they were expelled from the church.

According to a source in Epiphanius, the Montanists accepted what became the two testaments of the Christian bible, a trinitarian faith and the new prophecies of Montanus, Priscilla and Maximilla, with the requirement that others must exhibit the same spiritual gifts (Pan. 48.1.4). Yet Maximilla claimed inconsistently that after her there would be no more prophecy and that the end would come (Pan. 48.2.4). The oracles attributed to Montanus (Pan. 48.4, 10, 11) professed the passivity of a lyre under a divine plectrum, claimed to be God almighty in human form and pointed to new heights of spiritual excellence when even the little ones would shine brighter than the moon.

Recent moral philosophy has seen a revival of interest in virtue, and with it a striking, if often implicit, dialogue between Aristotle and Kant. To think of Kant as an exponent of virtue may seem to some readers itself novel and not easily associated with the Kant familiar to discussions of justice and rights. Certainly Kant's conception of virtue is in important ways distinct from Aristotle's, and Kantian texts are correctly thought of as a locus for modern discussions of autonomy and respect in a way that Aristotle's texts simply are not. But all the same, Kant, great admirer of the Stoics that he was, preserves the notion of virtue in his moral theory in a manner that bears recognizable traces to the Aristotelian tradition to which the Stoics themselves react. It is important to appreciate from the start, however, that Kant's reaction to the Stoics is complex and different in different periods of his writing. To cast Kant as the harsh “duty philosopher,” unsympathetic to human emotions, and to see this as a Stoic inheritance would be misguided. For it has not been adequately appreciated that Kant develops a complex anthropology of morals – a tailoring of morality to the contingent features of the human case – which at times brings him into surprising alliance with Aristotle and his project of limning an account of human excellence. Still, there remains the crucial distinction between Aristotle and Kant – that for Kant, moral anthropology rests always on a foundation of pure morality, on a conception of the autonomy of reason that can be stripped, for the most part, from the constraints of the human case.

Preceding chapters have discussed the role of emotions in Aristotelian and Kantian ethics, as well as the role of affiliation. In this chapter and the next, we turn to the notions of practical reason and moral perception. On the face of it and, indeed, on traditional tellings, our two accounts differ considerably on this subject. In Aristotelian ethics there is explicit emphasis on deliberating about the particulars of a case, with practical wisdom itself sometimes taking the form of perception. We are reminded regularly by Aristotle of the limitations of rules and procedures, and of the shortfalls of misplaced rigor. We must seek only so much precision as is appropriate for the subject matter. Practical wisdom is not scientific understanding (epistemē), Aristotle insists. Rather, it is a conjecturing and aiming (stochazomai) at the changing particulars. We work with summary rules, at best – rules of thumbs that hold only for the most part. Along with a focus on the particulars, there is also an emphasis on the actualized achievements of virtue – on moral choice as it is realized in actual action and an embodied standard of practical reason captured by the example of the practically wise person. On the Aristotelian view, to learn about virtue and moral reasoning we need to turn to a concrete paradigm. There is no algorithm we can appeal to for general guidance, no procedure that formalizes our practice.

We have now discussed the role of emotions in Aristotelian and Kantian theories of virtue. Early on in the discussion of Aristotle's views, I touched on the intuitive idea that emotions are a kind of social fiber. They connect us with others in a way that cold reason or affectless action cannot. Moreover, certain emotions, attachment or affiliative emotions, are directed specifically at the cultivation and maintenance of relationships. These relationships, or philiai, as Aristotle would call them, are grounded in shared activity and interest. In this chapter, I explore the role of friendship or affiliation in Aristotelian and Kantian accounts of morality. The general topic of friendship has come under considerable discussion in recent years. Within political philosophy, communitarians have charged that the issue of community is not adequately addressed by a political liberalism, such as Rawls's, based in Kantian notions of the person; within moral philosophy, feminists have argued that the moral importance of family and friendship has been obscured by an overemphasis on the moral perspective of impartiality. These contemporary debates are too extensive to review here, though I hope what I have to say might shed some light on them. For the purpose of this chapter, my aim is straightforward and limited. I want to explore what it is we value about doing things together, and how it is morally significant. I begin by examining these issues more or less independently of Aristotle and Kant's writings in order to fix our own intuitions about why we are interested in the topic in the first place.

HOW DEMANDING IS KANTIAN VIRTUE?

In the last chapter we saw that Kant's notion of imperfect duties brings to bear the important idea of discretionary latitude: We have play-room (Spielraum) in how we fulfill our ends. The introduction of this notion seemed a helpful way of relaxing what can be an overly rigoristic feature in Aristotle's account – perhaps best expressed by the thought that while there are many ways to go wrong in fulfilling virtue, there is only one way to get it right. Put this way, “hitting the mean” gives the sense that virtue has a determinate manifestation relative to each person – toward this object, at this time, in this manner. The discretionary element of good judgment becomes obscured. Still, Kant's notion of latitude may leave us wondering just how demanding his own conception of virtue is.

In this chapter I want to explore the kind of latitude imperfect duties permit. We can locate our discussion within the context of a pair of familiar, though conflicting, criticisms often leveled against Kant's theory of virtue. On the one side, it is argued that Kantian virtue theory is too latitudinarian, giving arbitrary discretion to whether we fulfill duties of virtue. This is sometimes couched within a more general view that Kantian ethics, as a duty-based theory, is minimalist insofar as doing one's duty is conceived of as doing some minimal amount and no more.