Wednesday, February 23, 2022

Dragoş Andrei Giulea on Tertullian's Belief in "Heavenly Corporeality"

  

TERTULLIAN ON CHRIST’S INVISIBLE FORM AND HEAVENLY CORPOREALITY

 

It was in the context of his debates against the Docetic and Gnostic positions concerning a purely spiritual Jesus that Tertullian developed a doctrine of the Form of God (e.g., Carn. Chr.) In order to defend the corporeal condition of the incarnate Christ, Tertullian assumed that even Christ’s pre-incarnate status involves body and form. Adversus Praxean 7, a passage elaborating on the generation of the Son from the Father, is one of the most evident witnesses. We are informed that the Word takes a glorious form (specia) while being divinely (and most likely from eternity) generated by God the Father:

 

Then, therefore does the Word (sermo) also Himself assume His own form and glorious garb (speciem et ornatum). How own sound and vocal utterance, when God says, “Let there be light” (Gen 1:3). This is the perfect nativity of the Word, when He proceeds forth from God—formed (conditus) by Him first to devise and think out of al thinks under the name of Wisdom)—“The Lord created or formed me as the beginning of His ways (condidit me initium uiarum)” (Prov 8:22) (Tertullian, Prax. 7)

 

Tertullian defends the idea of Divine Form by means of an argument for God’s substance. Assuming the metaphysical principle that nothing can come from nothing, the author maintains that the Son possesses a substance because he comes from the Father who is a substance, and also because he produces all things of the world not from void but from his own substance (Prax. 7). In the next step of his argument Tertullian adopts another metaphysical principle, namely, that a body always needs a form. Since God is Spirit and the Spirit presumes a body, a bodily substance, God necessarily possesses a body and, therefore, a form (effigia). Tertullian expressly quotes here Phil 2:6, εν μορφη θεου

 

In that Word of God, then, a void and empty thing, which is called the Son, who Himself is designated God? “The Word was with God, and the Word was God.” It is written, “Thou shalt not take God’s name in vain.” This for certain is He “who being in the form of God (in effigie Dei constitutes), thought it not robbery to be equal with God” (Phil 2:6). In what form (effigie) of God? Of course he means in some form, not in none (utique in aliqua, non tamen in nulla). For who will deny that God is a body (quis enim negabit Deum corpus esse), although “God is a Spirit (etsi Deus spiritus est)?” (John 4:24). For Spirit has a bodily substance of its own kind, in its own form (spiritus enim corpus sui generis in sua effigie). (Prax. 7)

 

In the last passage of the chapter, Tertullian tackles the epistemological facet of the topic by affirming that invisible things—which are invisible only from the limited perspective of the human sight—are actually visible and possess body and form from God’s perspective:

 

Now, even if invisible things (invisibilia illa), whatsoever they be, have both their substance and their form in God (habent apud Deum et suum corpus et suam formam), whereby they are visible to God alone (soli Deo uisibilia sunt), how much more shall that which has been sent forth from His substance not be without substance (quod ex ipsius substantia emissum est sine substantia non erit)! Whatever, therefore, was the substance of the Word that I designate a Person, I claim for it the name of the Son; and while I recognize the Son, I assert His distinction as second to the Father. (Prax. 7)

 

Proclaiming straightforwardly the corporeal nature of Christ endowed with spiritual body and form, Tertullian shares the same understanding of the concept of relative “invisibility” with Irenaeus, Clement, and Hippolytus, namely that Christ’s spiritual form is invisible, only for the ordinary eye but visible for the Father, prophets, and apostles. The apostles, for instance, were able to see the wonderful glory of the Son on the Mount of Transfiguration. What they saw was the glory “of the visible Son, glorified by the invisible Father (gloriam . . . Filii, scilicet uisibilis, glorificati a Patre inuisibili)” (Prax. 15. The Son’s visibility does not have to be understood in an absolute way but from the Father’s perspective. As seen above in Prax. 7, there are even other objects which are invisible. The distinction invisible Father-visible Son [cf. Novatian, On the Faith 18.1 and 31] is one from human perspective: while the Son manifests himself in theophanies, the Father remains unmanifested).

 

His doctrine on spiritual bodies, as exposed for instance in Adversus Marcionem 5.10, is also Pauline theology quoted directly; namely, 1 Cor 15:40 (corpora caelestia) and 1 Cor 15:44 (corpus spiritale). The spiritual corporeality is one of an extraordinary essence, since it is not perceptible through the earthly and sensible power of seeing. To the contrary, it pertains to the noetic and spiritual realm, and it is visible from the Father’s perspective, as Adversus Praxean 7 clearly implies. Using Tertullian’s terminology, it is of a different quality (qualitas), as he states in an analysis regarding the corporeal natures of the soul and resurrected body (Marc. 5.10.3; 5.15.7) Thus, Tertullian acknowledges the reality of the invisible bodies and describes the soul as such a substance. According to him, corporeality—whether visible or invisible—is a sine qua non condition of existence. Not having a body simply implies non-existence:

 

If it has this something, it must be its body (Si habet aliquid per quod est, hoc eric corpus eius). Everything which exists is a bodily existence sui generis (Omne quod est, corpus est suit generis). Nothing lacks bodily existence but that which is non-existent (nihil est incorporale, nisi quod non est). If, then, the soul has an invisible body (inuisibile corpus) . . . (Carn. Chr. 11.3-4)

 

In the process of the incarnation which should be described, according to Tertullian, as clothing with flesh rather than transfiguration into flesh, the Logos remains unchanged in his Divine Substance and form:

 

And the Word of God abideth for ever, evidently by continuing in his own form (perseuerando scilicet in sua forma). And if it is not feasible for him to be conformed (to something else) (non capit transfigurari), it follows he must be understood to have been made flehs in the sense that he comes to be in flesh (fit in carne), and is manifested (manifestatur) and seen (uidetur) and is handled by means of the flesh: because the other considerations also demand this acceptation. (Prax. 27. Evan’s translation is preferable to the ANF in this case, since ANF 3:623 enders informabilem through “incapable of form,” a solution coming in complete contradiction with the next lines which affirm that, in his incarnation, the Logos does not loose his form, and more generally with Tertullian’s doctrine according to which God has a form. Evans’s solution “untransformable” makes much more sense, because the idea is that the Divine Form of the Word is not changed through incarnation)

 

Tertullian inserts the concept of form even within the Trinitarian doctrine. According to him, the Trinity possesses a unity of substance and subsists in three different forms:

 

[W]hile none the less is guarded the mystery of that economy (oikonomiae sacramentum) which disposes the unity into trinity, setting forth Father and Son and Spirit as three, three however not in quality but in sequence (non statu sed gradu), not in substance but in aspect (nec substantia sed forma), not in power but in (its) manifestation (nec potestate sed specie), yet of one substance and one quality and one power, seeing it is one God from whom those sequences and aspects (formae) and manifestations are reckoned out in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. (Tertullian, Prax. 2. Cf. Prax. 8 and 11-13 for his further discussions on the unity and distinction in the Trinity. It is worth mentioning that Tertullian affirms in Carn. Chr. 3.8 that that the Spirit did not put an end to his substance [substantia] when he descended at the Baptism and took a different substance [SC 216:220]) (Dragoş Andrei Giulea, Pre-Nicene Christology in Paschal Contexts: The Case of the Divine Noetic Anthropos [Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae Texts and Studies of Early Christian Life and Language 123; Leiden: Brill, 2014], 323-26)