Tertullian goes over to the New Prophecy

schism · 207 · Carthage

The New Prophecy came out of Phrygia with an ecstatic discipline — fasts, a refusal of second marriage, no flight in persecution, no forgiveness for grave sin after baptism — and Tertullian, who had been arguing for rigour all along, found it congenial. From here he writes against the catholic party as the psychics, the merely soulish, and De pudicitia attacks a bishop for forgiving adultery. Jerome, writing a century and a half later, says he remained a presbyter until middle life and then, driven by the envy and abuse of the clergy of the Roman church, lapsed to the doctrine of Montanus. Whether that is what happened is disputed: he may never have been formally out of communion, and the Tertullianist sect Augustine reports at Carthage two centuries later may say more about Augustine's Carthage than about Tertullian. What is certain is the consequence for this dataset. He is the reason Latin has words for the Trinity, and he has no canonization, no feast, and no cult, and the page is right to show none.

Nothing he would have called a break — on his account the church had gone soft and he had not.

The strangest fact in Latin patristics: the man who supplied the vocabulary of orthodox Trinitarian theology is not a saint and has no feast anywhere.

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Jerome — On Illustrious Men 53