Tertullian catholic writings: forms and norms

Abstract

The end of the second century saw the birth and the development of a fairly important Christian community in Roman Africa, noticeably living in Carthago. In the meantime, a new intellectual and literary movement started and grew around numerous writers among whom Tertullian (155-225?) is considered to be the forerunner. Indeed, this African born author is regarded as the first Christian Latin author, and he is part of a vast movement for the defence of Christian faith called apologetics. Until that day, Christianism, as a new religious trend, had been written and thought in Greek. With Tertullian, who was a convert, the Christian faith was, from then on, expressed in Latin; and gradu¬ally, around writers such as Lactance, Cyprian and Augustine, there settled a sort of patristic literature as it was called. The life and the chronology of Tertullian's works is not something we know very well, and it is difficult to draw a portrait of the man and his writings. However, since the XIXth century, experts have classified his thirty-one treaties into two great periods. On the one hand, there is a set of « catholic » treaties (197-208); then, there are writings which were more or less influenced by the Montanist heresy (until approximately 220). The « catholic » period, as it is called determines the scope of this research work which aims at analysing the logics of a polemical Christian speech. Owing to his studies, (he was a lawyer, a jurisconsult), this Father of Church resorted to Roman law to enounce the Christian faith and its rules. He is in the centre of a normalization process of the Christian speech, with a transposition of some of its concepts stemming from Roman law, in the field of Christianism. The first part consists in studying, thanks to data-processing, quantitative and serial studies, the global logics of Tertullian's polemic. Resorting to the method of the thematic index, we have focused on the various denominations of the Christian as a