Tertullian uses the image of the church as mother to designate a person‘s relationship to the true church. It is therefore no surprise that he associates the ritual of baptism, which he understands to signify the rebirth of an individual into an eternal life, with the motherhood of the Church. In On Baptism, Tertullian states,
121 Dunn, Tertullian, 10.
122 Praescr. Haer. 3.6.
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Therefore, blessed ones, whom the grace of God awaits, when you rise from that most holy bath of your new birth and for the first time spread your hands before your mother with your brothers, petition from the Father, petition from the Lord to be supplied with the inheritance of grace and the distribution of charismas.123
While some scholars argue that Tertullian understood the church‘s motherhood in a locative sense (apud matrem = in domo matris), indicating the catechumen‘s physical movement from the baptistery to the main building of the church,124 I am less inclined to read the above passage this way for three reasons. First, there is no literary or
architectural evidence outside of this passage to suggest the use of baptisteries.125 Second, Tertullian allows any kind of body of water to be used for baptism, which suggests a lack of normative practice contraindicative of having a baptistery.126 Third, he never links the parturient qualities of the baptismal font to the motherhood of the church. Given the frequent and direct association made between womb/font and mother/church in later North African architecture and writing, it seems odd that Tertullian did not make the obvious metaphorical connection if he had a locative understanding of the church‘s motherhood. He more likely understood the catechumens‘ relationship to the mother in an associative sense with the mother conceived of as the totality of the community. Apud should not be taken as in domo matris but rather interpreted relationally as a nearness in respect of persons.
123 Bapt. 20.5 (CCSL 1:295.28-32): ―Igitur benedicti quos gratia dei expectat, cum de illo sanctissimo lauacro noui natalis ascenditis et primas manus apud matrem cum fratribus aperitis, petite de patre, petite de domino peculia gratiae distributiones charismatum subiacere‖ (Trans. author).
124 Plumpe, Mater Ecclesia, 51-4.
125 See J. G. Davies, The Architectural Setting of Baptism (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1962), 1-2.
126 Bapt. 4.
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For Tertullian, once a person is baptized into the church, his or her relationship changed. A person now can claim God as a father by being children of mater ecclesia. As David Rankin comments, ―We are moving closer to a point when the acknowledgement of the church as ‗mother‘ becomes a prerequisite for that of God as ‗father,‘ and
acceptance by the latter becomes somewhat dependent on that by the former.‖127 Not only does Tertullian make this link in On Baptism, but he also clearly does so in On Prayer:
―Not even our mother, the church, is passed by because the mother, from whom the name of Father and Son corresponds to, is recognized in the Son and Father.‖128 This pairing of God the Father and the church the mother is again repeated in On Monogamy.129
Tertullian was the first patristic writer to make such a link between the fatherhood of God and motherhood of the church. This is a significant development in the maternal
metaphor and will form the basis for Cyprian‘s later understanding of the church and its maternal function.
True motherhood, according to Tertullian, is exclusive to the church alone, and a person can only claim to be a child of God if they were in proper relationship with the mother. Heretics cannot claim to have a mother because they were outside the unity of the church. For Tertullian, heretics are inherently parasitic since they are formed out of something else and work to destroy that very thing from which they came. In
Prescription against Heretics, he states,
Again, all heresies that have been thoroughly investigated are discovered to be of differing opinions in many things even among their own leaders.
127 Rankin, Tertullian and the Church, 81.
128 Orat. 2.6 (CCSL 1:258.14-16): ―Ne mater quidem ecclesia praeteritur, siquidem in filio et patre mater recognoscitur, de qua constat et patris et filii nomen‖ (Trans. author).
129 De Monog. 7.9 (CCSL 2:1239.64): ―Viuit enim unicus pater noster deus et mater ecclesia.‖
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For the most part, they do not have churches – outcasts without a mother, home, or faith – exiles roving like hissing serpents.130
For Tertullian, the motherhood of the church is exclusionary and demarcates those who are in association with it from those who are not.
Not only does Tertullian apply the exclusivity of mater ecclesia against heretics but also against those who fail to uphold the standards of the community. In On Idolatry, he states that the faith of the church will be directed to ―bewailing that a Christian might come from idols into the church, come from the workshop of the enemy into the house of God, raise their hands, the mothers of idols, to God the Father.‖131 As with his
understanding of heresy, Tertullian locates the creation of idolatry outside of the church in a different workshop, where the hands of an individual become the mother or artificer of idols. Unless individuals are in full communion with the true church and free from the contamination of idolatry, they cannot properly claim to be a child of the true mother. He again invokes this imagery in On Modesty when he argues that all those who sin against God, even adulterers, must remain repentant outside of the church: ―Together they remain fixed according to the duty of penance; they bristle in sackcloth and ash; they groan with the same tears; they go around with the same prayers; they entreat on the same knees;
they evoke the same mother.‖132
130 Praescr. Haer. 42.9-10 (CCSL 1:222.19-23): ―Denique penitus inspectae haereses omnes in multis cum auctoribus suis dissentientes deprehendunter. Plerique nec ecclesias habent, sine matre, sine sede, orbi fide, extorres quasi sibilati uagantur‖ (Trans. author).
131 Idol. 7.1 (CCSL 2:1106.12-15): ―perorabit ingemens: christianum ab idolis in ecclesiam uenire, de aduersaria officina in domum dei uenire, attollere ad deum patrem manus matres idolorum‖ (Trans. author).
132 Pud. 5.14 (CCSL 2:1289.53-56): ―Pariter de paenitentiae officio sedent, in sacco et cinere inhorrrescunt, eodem fletu ingemiscunt, eisdem precibus ambiunt, eisdem genibus exorant, eandem inuocant matrem‖
(Trans. author).
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Tertullian utilizes maternal imagery in another disciplinary work, On Monogamy.
He argues what he perceives to be a median position between the overly ascetic attitude of the Gnostics, who repudiate marriage, and the overly licentious individuals in the church, who allow remarriage. Against those who argue for remarriage on the basis of creating heirs, he rages,
No doubt a Christian, being disinherited from the whole world, will seek heirs! He has brothers; he has the church as his mother. It is different if they believe action before Christ is taken according to the Julian laws and judge that the unmarried and childless are not able to receive the full inheritance of God.133
Tertullian‘s opponents were concerned that because of the lex Iulia de maritandis
ordinibus and lex Papia Poppaea, which were a set of laws emperor Augustus enacted in 18 BCE and 9 CE to promote the child-bearing among the Roman elite through an complex set of civil benefits and sanctions, marriage and the propagation of offspring were necessary in order to avoid its testamentary penalties, which could be quite restrictive. Typically, the unmarried could not inherit, and childless couples could only inherit half of the benefits.134 Thus, Christian celibates and young widows who did not remarry could expect such testamentary penalties.
Tertullian, who understood Christianity to be fundamentally opposed to the world, argues that in the church a person has a mother and brethren, and Christ (unlike the government) does not penalize the childless. He goes so far as to link those not ascribing to this intensified discipline with the apocalypse. In On Monogamy, he states,
133 De Monog. 16.4 (CCSL 2:1251.21-24): ―Haeredes scilicet christianus quaeret saeculi totius exhaeres.
Habet fratres, habet ecclesiam matrem. Aliud est, si et apud christum legibus iuliis agi credunt, et existimant caelibes et orbos ex testamento dei solidum non posse capere‖ (Trans. author).
134 Tit. Ulp. 13-16.
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Let them collect enough seasonable fruits from their repeated marriages for the last time – breasts heaving, wombs afflicted, infants crying. Let them prepare [children] for the Antichrist on whom he may more
passionately rage against. He will lead them to murderous midwives.135
Because those who do not follow the law of the Paraclete are outside of the true church in Tertullian‘s mind, the children do not belong to the life-giving mother but a midwife who will murder them.136
Like Irenaeus, Tertullian understands that the church‘s maternity is prefigured in the Old Testament. Tertullian, however, sees the church as prefigured in Eve rather than in Paradise. In On the Soul, he links the two figures: ―For if Adam was given as a figure for Christ, then Adam‘s sleep was [the shadow] of Christ‘s death, who was to sleep in death, so that in like manner from the wound in his side, the church, the true mother of the living, was figured.‖137 Just as Eve was the one mother of all humans and the spouse of Adam, the church likewise functions in the salvific recapitulation of the original failing as the mother of eternal life and the spouse of the new Adam; and just as Eve had come from the wound of Adam, so too did the church originate from the wound of Christ.138 Tertullian understands the mother, as the new Eve, to be holy and linked to the heavenly
135 De Monog. 16.5 (CCSL 2:1252.32-35): ―Satis opportunos nouissimis temporibus fructus iteratis matrimoniis colligant, ubera fluitantia et uteros nauseantes et infantes pipiantes. Parent antichristo, in quae libidinosius saeuiat. Adducet illis carnifices obstetrices‖ (Trans. author).
136 There is an interesting passage in Against the Valentinians (3.3) where Tertullian likens Gnosticism to the far-fetched lullabies that nurses (nutricula) recited to children. Tertullian always ascribes a negative quality to anyone who is not a true mother or part of the nuclear triad; such an ideal may come from his own indebtedness to stoicism. While some philosophers, such as the sophist Favorinus (Aul. Gell. NA 12.1.17), viewed nutrices in a negative light, they were not understood as mother substitutes in practice;
see, Suzanne Dixon‘s, The Roman Mother (London: Routledge, 1990), 141-61. For a good analysis of the role and prevalence of wet nurses in Roman society, see Keith R. Bradley‘s Discovering the Roman Family: Studies in Roman Social History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 13-29.
137 De anim. 43.10 (CCSL 2:847.62-65): ―Si enim adam de christo figuram dabat, somnus adae mors erat christi dormituri in mortem, ut iniuria perinde lateris eius uera mater uiuentium figuraretur ecclesia‖ (Trans.
author).
138 cf. De Monog. 5.7.
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Jerusalem.139 There is no suggestion in his extant works that Tertullian believed there to be a link between Mary-Eve-church. The closest association he makes is in Against Marcion: ―For it is not good, He said, that the man is alone. He knew what a benefit the sex of Mary and then of the Church would be to him.‖ 140 However, Tertullian here is only speaking of the gendered pre-figurement that both Mary and the church share.
The oddest maternal reference in Tertullian‘s works is in On the Antidote to the ‟ , where he states, ―Wisdom, he said, has slain her own children. Sophia is wisdom. Certainly she has slain them wisely so long as in life, reasonably so long as in glory.‖141 Although some scholars have conjectured that Tertullian is identifying Sophia with the pre-existent church, akin to that in 2 John 1, this is a faulty reading of the text.142 He is not referring here to the church but using Proverbs 9:2 (―She has killed her beasts‖) against the argument made by some Gnostics that God is needlessly murdering his own children (i.e., the martyrs). Tertullian, while calling Sophia mother, clearly equates her with God when he says that she killed her only Son.143 There is no notion in Tertullian,
139 Marc. 5.4.8 and De carn. 7.2. Rankin argues that except for the passage in Against Marcion, Tertullian never directly links holiness to the motherhood of the Church (Tertullian and the Church, 82). Given Tertullian‘s overall ecclesiology coupled with his emphasis of the church‘s maternity as demarcating ecclesial membership, I argue that her holiness is implied in all of those instances and is confirmed by the passage in Against Marcion.
140 Marc. 2.4.5 (CCSL 1:479.18-20): ―Non est enim, inquit, bonum solum esse hominem. Sciebat illi sexum mariae et deinceps ecclesiae profuturum‖ (Trans. author).
141 Scorp. 7.1 (CCSL 2:1081.1-2): ―Sophia, inquit, iugulauit filios suos. Sophia sapientia est. Sapienter utique iugulauit, dum in uitam, et rationaliter, dum in gloriam‖ (Trans. author).
142 Rankin, Tertullian and the Church, 78-9.
143 Scorp. 7.3.
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or any early church father, for a pre-existent church existing separately from its members.144