HistoricalChristian.Faith

Did the envy of the Roman clergy drive Tertullian to Montanism?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: sound — the interpretation weighed here is that Jerome’s famous explanation of Tertullian’s turn to the New Prophecy — that he was “driven by the envy and abuse of the clergy of the Roman church” (invidia… et contumeliis clericorum Romanae ecclesiae) — is unsupported. It is a claim about an interior motive that rests on a single witness writing about 172 years after the fact, who had a discernible use for the story; Tertullian’s own works give theological and disciplinary reasons for the turn throughout, and never once name a personal grievance against Rome as its cause; and the one documented Rome-and-the-Paraclete episode in his writings — a Roman bishop’s recognition and then withdrawal of the Phrygian prophecies (Against Praxeas 1) — is about doctrine and church policy, not about how Tertullian himself was treated. Two counterweights are folded in and do not overturn the finding. Tertullian’s late works do show real animus toward Roman claims — the sarcasm against the “bishop of bishops” in On Modesty 1, the bitterness of Against Praxeas 1 — and the sheer heat of the polemic is a fact that wants some explaining; so “no evidence of the motive” is not the same as “he felt no resentment.” But that friction is doctrinal and disciplinary in kind, not the private wounded pride Jerome alleges, and it cannot supply the corroboration the motive lacks. What can be shown is that the motive is undocumented; what cannot be shown is that it is true. Sound — that the resentment-motive is unsupported.

Related arguments: the biography from Jerome — see also Was Tertullian a presbyter, a lawyer, and a convert in middle life?

This is the most repeated single sentence about why Tertullian left the great church, and it functions as the standard psychological reduction of the whole affair: not conviction, but wounded pride — a talented man snubbed by Rome who took his revenge by going over to its enemies. The question weighed here is not whether Tertullian was right to embrace the New Prophecy (other pages take up the counts he was faulted for) but the narrower, prior one: does the motive Jerome supplies have any support? Its nearest neighbour is the parallel dispute over whether Tertullian was really a presbyter, a lawyer, and a convert in middle life: both the presbyterate and this motive descend from the same paragraph of Jerome, and both are weighed against the same silence in Tertullian’s own words. The two together are the received Life as Jerome composed it — and of its several elements, the motive is the one on the thinnest ground of all.

The claim

He was presbyter of the church until middle life, afterwards driven by the envy and abuse of the clergy of the Roman church, he lapsed to the doctrine of Montanus.

— Jerome, On Illustrious Men 53 (c. 392), NPNF2 vol. 3. In the Latin: “Hic cum usque ad mediam aetatem presbyter ecclesiae permansisset, invidia postea et contumeliis clericorum Romanae ecclesiae, ad Montani dogma delapsus…”¹ Two words carry the whole reduction: invidia, envy or jealousy, and contumeliis, insults or abuse. The sentence tells not only that Tertullian went over to the New Prophecy but why — he had been slighted by the Roman clergy, and reacted — and it is this “why”, repeated in account after account since, that is weighed here. (Its neighbour, the presbyterate, is weighed on the companion page.)

Who advances it

The motive is Jerome’s, and after him the whole tradition’s: because his chapter became the frame in which the Latin West read Tertullian, the “envy and insults of the Roman clergy” passed into the standard biography and are still repeated, often as bare fact, in popular and reference accounts of why Tertullian turned Montanist. Against taking it as fact stands the modern critical line. T. D. Barnes, whose 1971 study reopened the whole received Life, reads the presbyterate and this motive alike as inferences or embellishments that Jerome supplied without independent support. And Christine Mohrmann had already put the sharpest form of the objection: the notice “is not confirmed by any other data,” and what one sees reflected in it is not Tertullian’s grievance but “the resentment of saint Jerome himself with regard to the clergy of Rome” — Jerome, who had his own bruising quarrel with the Roman clergy after the death of Pope Damasus and left the city under a cloud, reading his own wound back into his subject.

The evidence for

One late, interested witness. The motive appears nowhere before Jerome, who wrote it at Bethlehem about 392 — roughly 172 years after Tertullian’s death, with no continuous Carthaginian tradition behind him. Eusebius, who knew Tertullian a century earlier as a man “well versed in the laws of the Romans,” reports no such quarrel; no African source does. It is a single-strand claim about an interior state of mind, offered by a writer who was himself, at the very time he wrote, nursing a real and recent grievance against the Roman clergy — which is exactly the condition under which an unsupported motive is most to be suspected of projection.²

Tertullian’s own works give a different reason, and never this one. Where Tertullian explains his adherence to the New Prophecy, he grounds it not in any slight but in the authority of the Paraclete to carry Christian discipline to perfection. In On the Veiling of Virgins the rule of faith “is altogether one, alone immoveable and irreformable,” while discipline is “directed, and ordained, and carried on to perfection, by that Vicar of the Lord, the Holy Spirit”; in On Fasting he insists the Prophecy is rejected “not that Montanus and Priscilla and Maximilla preach another God… but that they plainly teach more frequent fasting than marrying”; in On Monogamy he divides the church by its reception of the Spirit, not by any personal history. Across the openly New-Prophecy treatises the reason offered is always the same — the Comforter perfecting a discipline the “soulish” will not accept — and a resentment of the Roman clergy is never among them.³

The one Rome episode he does record is about doctrine, not his own treatment. Tertullian’s writings do contain a Roman grievance touching the New Prophecy — but it is the movement’s, not his own. Opening Against Praxeas, he reports that “after the Bishop of Rome had acknowledged the prophetic gifts of Montanus, Prisca, and Maximilla, and, in consequence of the acknowledgment, had bestowed his peace on the churches of Asia and Phrygia,” Praxeas “compelled him to recall the pacific letter which he had issued, as well as to desist from his purpose of acknowledging the said gifts” — so that Praxeas “did a twofold service for the devil at Rome: he drove away prophecy, and he brought in heresy; he put to flight the Paraclete, and he crucified the Father.” This is genuinely a bitter complaint about Rome, and it names the reversal that stung the Montanists most; but it is a complaint about a bishop’s doctrinal and policy decision on the prophecies, not about the clergy’s envy of Tertullian or their insults to him. The nearest thing in his corpus to Jerome’s motive turns out, on inspection, to be a different kind of grievance altogether.⁴

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The core of the case is simply that the motive has no support and some counter-evidence. It is attested by one witness, late and interested; the subject’s own writings supply a different and consistent reason for the very act being explained, and nowhere mention the alleged one; and the only documented Rome-quarrel in those writings is of the wrong kind to corroborate it. A claim about an interior motive is fragile even when well-attested; this one is attested once, at a distance of nearly two centuries, by a man reading his own recent injury into the record. Mohrmann’s verdict — not confirmed by any other data, and telling us more about Jerome than about Tertullian — is the natural one, and Barnes’s placing of the motive among Jerome’s embellishments has become the mainstream. On the evidence, the resentment-motive cannot be sustained.⁵

What must be granted on the other side. Two things keep this from tipping into a hagiographic “Tertullian bore Rome no ill will.” First, his late works do carry real animus toward Roman claims. The opening of On Modesty mocks a bishop’s edict of pardon — “The Pontifex Maximus — that is, the bishop of bishops — issues an edict” — and denies that the power of the keys belongs to “the Church which consists of a number of bishops” at all; Against Praxeas 1 seethes at what was done “at Rome.” There plainly was friction between Tertullian and the Roman hierarchy, and the polemical heat of the rigorist treatises is a fact that any account has to reckon with. Second, and following from this, “unsupported” is a verdict about the evidence for the motive, not a proof that no such resentment existed: the argument establishes that Jerome’s specific claim is undocumented and probably a projection, not that Tertullian felt nothing toward Rome. What it does show is that the friction we can actually document is doctrinal and disciplinary — a fight over the prophecies, the penitential edict, and the reach of the keys — not the personal envy-and-insult story Jerome tells, so that even the real animus does not vindicate his motive; it explains the polemic on grounds Tertullian himself gives, and leaves the psychological reduction exactly where it was, unsupported.⁶

Assessment

Sound — that the resentment-motive is unsupported. Jerome’s “envy and abuse of the clergy of the Roman church” is a single-witness claim about an interior motive, written 172 years late by a man with his own quarrel with the Roman clergy, confirmed by no other source and contradicted by the reasons Tertullian himself gives for the turn, which are theological and disciplinary throughout. The only Rome-grievance his own works record is doctrinal — a bishop’s reversal on the Phrygian prophecies — not the personal slight the motive alleges. Read the sentence, then, as Jerome’s construction rather than reported fact. Two honest limits keep the finding exact and un-hagiographic: Tertullian’s late works do show real hostility to Roman claims, and “no evidence of the motive” is not “he harboured no resentment” — the point is only that the motive Jerome names cannot be shown, and that the friction that can be shown is of a different kind. What the evidence bears is a doctrinal and disciplinary quarrel; what it will not bear is the psychological reduction that has stood in for an explanation ever since.

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