Quo peruersius quid dici potest? Tertullian’s De anima and Its Reception in the Literature and Thought of the Early Church

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 .