Quo peruersius quid dici potest? Tertullian’s De anima and Its Reception in the Literature and Thought of the Early Church

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F67985955%3A_____%2F25%3A00639501" target="_blank" >RIV/67985955:_____/25:00639501 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://doi.org/10.1515/zac-2025-0016" target="_blank" >https://doi.org/10.1515/zac-2025-0016</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/zac-2025-0016" target="_blank" >10.1515/zac-2025-0016</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Quo peruersius quid dici potest? Tertullian’s De anima and Its Reception in the Literature and Thought of the Early Church

Original language description

This paper examines in detail the reception history of Tertullian’s treatise De anima in the later literature and thought of the early church, the two key theological concepts, introduced in De anima and which subsequently found wider resonance, being the corporeality of the human soul and its transmission ex traduce. Since Augustine included Tertullian in De haeresibus, Tertullian was considered, strictly speaking, a heretic (the first signs of the reserve towards the Carthaginian being detectable since the mid-fourth century), and his name was only seldom mentioned by later authors. However, both of his aforementioned concepts, elaborated in De anima as adaptations of originally Stoic heritage, found a wider, albeit not very sympathetic response, especially in Jerome, one of the few known admirers of Tertullian in late antiquity, and in Augustine himself. Although Jerome’s predilection for Tertullian only seldom implied a deeper interest in the content of his writings in general, he must have been familiar with De anima: from it he borrowed some isolated, pointed statements, plus the notion of the traducianist transmission of the human soul, which he touches upon several times in his own writings. One cannot ignore their Tertullian heritage. Augustine, on the other hand, had studied Tertullian’s treatise thoroughly, and while he was critical towards Tertullian in general and especially towards his corporealism, De anima served not only as a catalyst for his own reflections on the origin of the soul (with his perpetual hesitation between creationism and traducianism) but probably also as a loose inspiration for his own explanations regarding the soul in De Genesi ad litteram.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

J_imp - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the Web of Science database

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

60304 - Religious studies

Project

—

Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2025

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

ZEITSCHRIFT FUR ANTIKES CHRISTENTUM-JOURNAL OF ANCIENT CHRISTIANITY

ISSN

0949-9571

e-ISSN

1612-961X

Volume of the periodical

29

Issue of the periodical within the volume

2

Country of publishing house

DE - GERMANY

Number of pages

24

Pages from-to

244-267

UT code for WoS article

001655056100002

EID of the result in the Scopus database

2-s2.0-105029031395