HistoricalChristian.Faith

Was Tertullian right that flight in persecution is forbidden?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: contested — on the interpretation weighed here, Tertullian’s late On Flight in Persecution holds that a Christian may neither flee persecution nor buy immunity from it: persecution is God’s own instrument for sifting His people, so to escape it is to resist His will and, in effect, to deny Christ. Part of the position is strong. There really is a scriptural and traditional case for not shrinking from martyrdom (Matt. 10:28, 10:32–33, Rev. 21:8), and Tertullian’s harder claim — that to purchase exemption is a form of denial — was substantially vindicated a generation later, when the church in the Decian crisis reckoned the libellatici, who bought certificates of sacrifice they never performed, among the lapsed alongside those who actually sacrificed. But the absolute ban on flight overreaches that case. Christ’s own command, “when they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another” (Matt. 10:23), is directly against it, and Tertullian has to confine it to the apostles and their times against the plain reading of the church’s own commentators; the church’s settled mind and its greatest confessors went the other way — Polycarp withdrew to a farm and his Martyrdom censures the volunteer Quintus, Cyprian withdrew from Carthage in the Decian persecution and defended it from this very verse, Athanasius wrote a whole Defence of his Flight — and these are canonized saints, not cowards; and the decisive step in Tertullian’s own argument is done not by exegesis but by a fresh oracle of the Paraclete (“seek not to die… in soft fevers, but to die the martyr’s death”), so that here too the count turns, at root, into a question of authority. Tertullian himself, in his earlier catholic To His Wife, had granted flight as a lawful “permission”; the ban is a position he moved to. Strong as a refusal to buy immunity, overstated as a flat prohibition of flight against Christ’s own word and the practice of the saints, and disputed at its root.

Related arguments: the fairness of the verdict — see also Did Tertullian ever formally leave the catholic church? · Was the New Prophecy heretical in doctrine, or only in discipline and church order? · Was his denial of church forgiveness for adultery and apostasy a defensible reading of early discipline, or a Montanist novelty? · Was his ban on second marriage a severe reading of Paul, or a false doctrine?

This count does not appear among the three that Augustine names in the “Was Tertullian a Heretic?” timeline, but it belongs with them: it is one of the rigorist disciplines — no second marriage, stricter fasts, no flight in persecution — that Tertullian drove from the authority of the Paraclete once he had gone over to the New Prophecy. The companion arguments ask whether he ever separated from the church, what in general he was faulted for, and whether his bans on remarriage and on the reconciliation of grave sinners were novelties or severe readings of a real discipline. This one takes up the treatise On Flight in Persecution and asks whether its hard line — that a Christian may neither flee nor ransom himself — was a defensible reading of the church’s mind or a rigorist overreach.¹

The claim

Well, then, if it is evident from whom persecution proceeds, we are able at once to satisfy your doubts, and to decide from these introductory remarks alone, that men should not flee in it. For if persecution proceeds from God, in no way will it be our duty to flee from what has God as its author.

— Tertullian, On Flight in Persecution 4, ANF vol. 4. The treatise, written to a friend named Fabius about 208, answers the question “whether or not we ought to flee in persecution” with a flat no, and then presses further to a second no: since flight is forbidden, so too is ransoming oneself, for “as flight is a buying off without money, so buying off is money-flight.” The argument rests on a single premise about where persecution comes from: it is not the devil’s doing but God’s, “that fan which even now cleanses the Lord’s threshing-floor… separating the grain of the martyrs from the chaff of the deniers,” so that to evade it is at once to shun a good thing and to count oneself stronger than God. And it is clinched by an oracle of the New Prophecy, which Tertullian sets beside Scripture: “if you ask counsel of the Spirit… seek not to die on bridal beds, nor in miscarriages, nor in soft fevers, but to die the martyr’s death, that He may be glorified who has suffered for you.”²

Who advances it

The reading is advanced, first, by Tertullian himself, who casts the whole matter as one of discipline carried to its perfection by the Paraclete and of whether a man truly trusts the God in whose hand persecution lies. It is taken up, second, by those modern readers — in the revisionist line from Barnes onward — who set his rigorism within an authentic early-Christian valorization of martyrdom rather than treating it as sheer fanaticism, and by historians of persecution who trace a real North-African “theology of martyrdom,” inspired by the Spirit and suspicious of every evasion, that runs from the Passion of Perpetua through Tertullian to the Donatists. What the interpretation rests on, and what is not in dispute, is that a strong current in the ante-Nicene church did prize the confessor above the man who slipped away, and treated the purchase of immunity as a species of apostasy — so that Tertullian stands at the far end of a real spectrum, not off the map.³

The evidence for

Scripture sets confession over flight and threatens the fearful. Tertullian does not read his rigour off the Phrygian prophets alone. The Lord says, “Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father… but whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny”; he bids his own “fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul”; he blesses “they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake” and promises that “he that endureth to the end shall be saved”; and the Revelation ranks “the fearful” first among those whose part is “the lake which burneth with fire.” On these texts Tertullian builds a real dilemma: “How will he confess, fleeing? How flee, confessing?” A faith that runs from the trial, he argues, has already refused the confession the trial exists to draw out.⁴

Persecution is God’s instrument, not the devil’s — so to flee it is to resist God. The load-bearing move is the opening one. Nothing befalls the servant of God without God’s will; Satan could not touch Job, nor sift the apostles, nor enter the swine, but by leave from above; therefore persecution, which tries and proves faith, “is just the judgment of the Lord.” From this Tertullian draws that flight is doubly wrong: what proceeds from God “ought not on the one hand to be avoided, because it is good… and it cannot be evaded on the other,” so that those who flee “either reproach God with doing what is evil… or they count themselves stronger than God.” He drives it home with a cautionary tale — Rutilius, who fled from place to place and bought his safety with money, only to be seized, tortured, and burned all the same, “a punishment, I believe, for his fleeing.” The premise is arguable, but it is not nothing: if God governs the storm, running from it is a failure of trust.⁵

To buy immunity is a form of denial — the point the church would ratify against the libellatici. Tertullian’s second thesis is the sturdier one. He reasons that a man who pays an informer or a soldier to be let off “has denied that he is what he was unwilling to have it made public that he is,” and that “the refusal of martyrdom is denial”: to ransom with money a man “whom Christ has ransomed with His blood” slights the price of redemption. Within a generation the church made the same judgment in practice. In the Decian persecution of 250 the empire required a certificate (libellus) of sacrifice, and many Christians procured one by bribery without offering; Cyprian and the African church, settling the question of the lapsed, treated these libellatici not as innocents but as fallen, subject to penance for having “done that which was written,” even though they had not burned the incense with their own hands. The principle that purchasing exemption is itself a denial — the very heart of the second half of Tertullian’s treatise — became the church’s own.⁶

And the shepherd, at least, may not run. Even readers who allow the layman his flight have felt the force of Tertullian’s closing charge against the clergy. Building on the Lord’s word that “the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep” while “he that is an hireling… seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth,” he asks how a layman shall be persuaded to stand firm “when persons in authority themselves — I mean the very deacons, and presbyters, and bishops — take to flight,” for “this never happens more than when in persecution the Church is abandoned by the clergy.” Here the rigorist has hold of something the whole church would concede in some measure: the pastor’s desertion of his flock in the hour of danger is a scandal, and even Augustine, who defends flight in general, will insist that the clergy must not leave their people leaderless when the peril is common to all.⁷

Adversarial assessment

What holds. A real strand of the ante-Nicene church did exalt the martyr and distrust the man who slipped the trial; the scriptural summons to confess and not to fear is genuine; and the specific claim that to buy immunity is a species of denial was vindicated, not overturned, when the church counted the libellatici among the lapsed. On the purchase of exemption Tertullian was, in substance, right, and the church came round to his verdict. So the popular picture — that On Flight is simply the raving of a fanatic — is too quick: much of it lay well inside the tradition, and its pastoral warning against shepherds who abandon the flock retained its bite for centuries.

But Christ commanded the very thing Tertullian forbids. The flat ban on flight runs straight into a red-letter word of the Lord: “But when they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another” (Matt. 10:23). Tertullian feels the weight of it and answers by confining the command to the apostles alone, to Judea, and to their own generation — yoking it to the neighbouring “go not into the way of the Gentiles” (Matt. 10:5) and arguing that both lapsed together once the gospel passed to the nations. But the church’s own readers did not read it so. Jerome takes the verse to mean that the persecuted “should not fear, but may shun persecution,” and finds the primitive church already doing it when the Jerusalem believers “were scattered throughout all Judea”; Chrysostom stresses that Christ “did not at all command them, when persecuted, to close with the enemy, but to fly… ‘if ye fear,’ saith He, ‘flee’”; and Augustine makes the verse a standing permission — “let them fly from city to city, whenever any one of them is marked out for persecution.” To hold the ban, Tertullian must read out of the Gospel a command the church read as abiding.⁸

The church’s greatest confessors fled — and are saints for it. The practice went the way of the verse, not of Tertullian. Polycarp, at the urging of his people, “withdrew to a farm not far distant from the city” and was taken only later; and the same Martyrdom of Polycarp that honours him expressly refuses to praise the volunteer: of Quintus, who forced himself forward and then apostatized at the sight of the beasts, it draws the moral that “we do not commend those who give themselves up, seeing the Gospel does not so teach.” A hundred years on, Cyprian of Carthage withdrew from the Decian persecution and defended his retirement in exactly the terms Tertullian had denied: “the Lord commanded us in the persecution to depart and to flee, and both taught that this should be done, and Himself did it.” And when Athanasius was reproached as a coward for the same course, he wrote a whole Defence of his Flight, turning the charge back — “if it be a bad thing to flee, it is much worse to persecute” — and marshalling the very examples Tertullian had to explain away: Jacob fleeing Esau, Moses withdrawing to Midian, David hiding from Saul, the disciples in hiding, Paul let down from the Damascus wall in a basket, and Christ Himself withdrawing until His hour was come. On flight in persecution the mind of the church is not with the treatise but against it.⁹

Tertullian changed his own mind — and grounds the new rule on the oracle, not the text. The ban is not the rule Tertullian inherited but one he moved to. In his earlier, still-catholic To His Wife (c. 203) he had written that “even in persecutions it is better to take advantage of the permission granted, and ‘flee from town to town,’ than, when apprehended and racked, to deny the faith” — treating flight, in Christ’s own words, as a lawful permission, only a lesser good than a martyr’s death. By On Flight the permission has become a sin. And the hinge of the change is not a new reading of Scripture but a new authority: it is “the Spirit,” through the oracle bidding the faithful seek the martyr’s death and not the sickbed, that “incites all almost to go and offer themselves in martyrdom, not to flee from it.” The Paraclete is again made to abrogate what the Lord had allowed — which is why this count, like the ban on remarriage, does not finally stay within discipline but bleeds into the question of whether a later Spirit may bind the whole church beyond and against the apostolic word. A prohibition that has to override a command of Christ, and rests the override on a fresh revelation, is not a severe reading of the Gospel; it is a claim of authority over it.¹⁰

Assessment

contested. The interpretation is soundest where Tertullian’s treatise is narrowest and strains where it is most absolute. That the ante-Nicene church prized the confessor, that Scripture summons the disciple to confess and not to fear, and above all that the purchase of immunity is a form of denial — all this holds, and the last was ratified by the church itself when it reckoned the libellatici among the lapsed; his warning to shepherds who desert the flock keeps its force too. To that extent On Flight is not fanaticism but the hard pole of a genuine martyr-theology. But the outright ban on flight overreaches that case. Christ expressly commands the persecuted to “flee ye into another” city (Matt. 10:23), and Tertullian must confine the command to the apostles against the plain reading of Jerome, Chrysostom, and Augustine; the church’s own confessors — Polycarp, Cyprian, Athanasius — fled and were honoured, not condemned, for it, and the Martyrdom of Polycarp refuses even to commend the man who volunteers; and Tertullian, who had once granted flight as a lawful permission, grounds the reversal not on exegesis but on the Paraclete’s oracle, so that the count turns, at root, into a question of authority. Strong as a refusal to buy immunity, overstated as a flat prohibition of flight against Christ’s own word and the practice of the saints, and disputed precisely where discipline ends and the authority to bind begins. Contested.

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