The Latin Apologists

Carthage, 197 CE. A convert trained as a rhetorician sat down to answer the slanders against his new faith, and found that Latin had no words yet for most of what he needed to say - so he made them. Trinitas, persona, substantia, sacramentum: the technical vocabulary Western Christians still use for the Trinity and the sacraments came substantially off Tertullian's own pen, in the Apology and in the string of treatises that followed it - Against Praxeas arguing that Father and Son are genuinely distinct, the Prescription Against Heretics contending that Scripture belongs to the churches that received it, five long books Against Marcion answering the one rival he judged most dangerous. In his later years he grew steadily more rigorist and aligned himself with the New Prophecy out of Phrygia, which is one reason the Latin church quoted him endlessly and never made him a saint. Roughly a generation on and in a very different key, a Roman advocate named Minucius Felix wrote a dialogue set on the beach at Ostia, in which a pagan friend states the case against Christianity - it is a religion of the ignorant, its god was a criminal, Rome's greatness is proof enough that Rome's gods work - and is answered and convinced. What makes the Octavius unusual is that its author gives the other side the better speech: Caecilius' half is the fullest surviving statement of the educated pagan objection to Christianity. A century later and in a different register again, an African rhetorician at Sicca called Arnobius wrote seven furious books Against the Heathen - to persuade his own bishop that his conversion was genuine, if Jerome is to be believed - and produced along the way the most detailed account of Roman religious practice that any Christian left, because he had to describe what he was attacking. Between them, and impossible to date within three centuries, sits Commodian: eighty short poems in acrostic verse that does not scan by the old rules, aimed at ordinary people, half catechism and half warning. And at the end of the line stands Lactantius, whom Jerome makes Arnobius' pupil: a professor of Latin rhetoric summoned to Diocletian's new capital at Nicomedia, who lost the post when the persecution began and wrote the Divine Institutes in the middle of it, and who was old by the time it was over, when Constantine brought him to Trier to teach his son. What these five share is not a place or a generation. It is that each had to make the argument in Latin, in a vocabulary that had not been built to carry it - Tertullian first and most consequentially, the others after him.