Quo peruersius quid dici potest? Tertullian’s De anima and Its Reception in the Literature and Thought of the Early Church
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Petr Kitzler
Abstract
This paper examines in detail the reception history of Tertullian’s treatise De anima in the later literature and thought of the early church, the two key theological concepts, introduced in De anima and which subsequently found wider resonance, being the corporeality of the human soul and its transmission ex traduce. Since Augustine included Tertullian in De haeresibus, Tertullian was considered, strictly speaking, a heretic (the first signs of the reserve towards the Carthaginian being detectable since the mid-fourth century), and his name was only seldom mentioned by later authors. However, both of his aforementioned concepts, elaborated in De anima as adaptations of originally Stoic heritage, found a wider, albeit not very sympathetic response, especially in Jerome, one of the few known admirers of Tertullian in late antiquity, and in Augustine himself. Although Jerome’s predilection for Tertullian only seldom implied a deeper interest in the content of his writings in general, he must have been familiar with De anima: from it he borrowed some isolated, pointed statements, plus the notion of the traducianist transmission of the human soul, which he touches upon several times in his own writings. One cannot ignore their Tertullian heritage. Augustine, on the other hand, had studied Tertullian’s treatise thoroughly, and while he was critical towards Tertullian in general and especially towards his corporealism, De anima served not only as a catalyst for his own reflections on the origin of the soul (with his perpetual hesitation between creationism and traducianism) but probably also as a loose inspiration for his own explanations regarding the soul in De Genesi ad litteram.
Acknowledgements
This study is a result of research conducted at the Centre for Classical Studies, Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their helpful comments. All translations are my own, unless stated otherwise.
© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Titelseiten
- Artikel
- What Would an Ancient Person Think of a Talking Cross? Reading Gospel of Peter 10,38–42 as Ancient Mediterranean Religious Literature
- Martyrium Polycarpi 2,2–3,1 and the Question of an Earlier Archetype
- Justin the Seer: Viewing Christian Truth in the Second Century
- Quo peruersius quid dici potest? Tertullian’s De anima and Its Reception in the Literature and Thought of the Early Church
- Zeichen des Glaubens? Christliche Lesarten kaiserlicher Münzbilder in der Spätantike
- “Severe Initiation”, Monastic Personas, and Communal Membership in the Late-Antique Mediterranean
- Augustinian Theology in the Hispano-Mozarabic Eucharistic Prayers of the Holy Week
- Rezensionen
- Damien Labadie: Les Actes éthiopiens du diacre Étienne, Apocryphes, Collection de poche de l’AELAC 19, Turnhout (Brepols) 2024, 194 pp., ISBN 9782503612492, € 40.–.
- Hubertus R. Drobner: Die Chronologie der Predigten Augustins. Eine neue Methodologie, Paderborn (Brill Schöningh) 2024, LXVIII + 1491 S., 16 Abbildungen, ISBN 9783506793485 (Festeinband) oder 978-3-657-79348-8 (E-Book), € 349,–.
- Moritz Kuhn: Philologischer Kommentar zur ‚Vita Augustini‘ des Possidius von Calama, Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum. Ergänzungsbände. Kleine Reihe 17, Münster (Aschendorff) 2023, VI + 372 S., ISBN 9783402109298, € 62,–.
- Yuliya Minets: The Slow Fall of Babel. Languages and Identities in Late Antique Christianity, Cambridge (Cambridge University Press) 2022, XVI + 418 pp., ISBN 9781108833462 (hardback) / 9781108970495 (paperback), £ 90.00 (hardback) or £ 27.99 (paperback).
- Ildikó Csepregi: Incubation in Early Byzantium. The Formation of Early Christian Incubation Cults and Miracle Collections, Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 41, Turnhout (Brepols) 2024, 328 pp., ISBN 9782503606606, € 105,–.
- Lillian I. Larsen and Samuel Rubenson, eds.: Monastic Education in Late Antiquity. The Transformation of Classical ‘Paideia’, Cambridge/New York (Cambridge University Press) 2018, 399 pp., ISBN 9781108163842, £ 110,– (hardback), £ 29,99 (paperback) or $ 38,99.
