A revised version of a doctoral thesis presented to the University of St Andrews, this study seeks to assess Tertullian within the specific context of Roman North Africa in the later second and third centuries. Drawing upon the tools of postcolonial criticism and social anthropology, Wilhite develops a different account of his subject from those typically projected by Western, ‘Eurocentric’ patristic scholarship: Tertullian is not merely ‘the Father of Latin Theology’, intellectual conduit for various Western doctrinal inheritances, brilliant if cantankerous defender of Christian convictions, moralist of uncompromising enthusiasm, but a distinctively African believer, whose self-identity as a follower of Christ is profoundly shaped by the realities of his social, ethnic and cultural worlds.
The first chapter sets out the author's conceptual frameworks, arguing for the importance of postcolonial and social-scientific reading practices in the reinterpretation of patristic texts. When such methods are applied to Tertullian's writings, his ‘non-Romanness’ is brought into strong relief. Heir though he is to the privileges of a classical education, rhetorician and thinker – on the face of it one of the new elite of his political territory whose cultural connections are at least as strong with Rome as they are with North Africa – Tertullian is also a fierce critic of Rome and its systems. His hostility cannot be neatly reduced to a general condemnation of imperial religion or to some supposedly decisive break with the Roman church. Tertullian is an African who lives under Rome's yoke, for whom potential threats to existence come not just from practitioners of indigenous religions but from Roman colonisers and those who further their ends. The vital disjunction is not Christian versus non-Christian, but Christian African versus non-Christian Roman; Christian and non-Christian African may sometimes have shared sensibilities.
In the chapters which follow, Wilhite explores Tertullian's social identity with reference to Ad nationes and Apologeticum; kinship identity in Ad uxorem; class identity as evinced in De virginibus velandis and De cultu feminarum; ethnic identity in De pallio; and religious identity in Ad martyras. The readings are generally very perceptive, albeit anthropological theory yields somewhat less striking heuristic results for Africanity in the cases of kinship and class than it does on ethnicity and religion. Tertullian's identities emerge as ‘fluid, discursive and manifold’ (p. 74), but through it all his ethos as African is fundamental to his Christian faith.
There is an evident danger in constructing firm socio-cultural categories, often from fairly limited historical evidence, then reading these back into texts. I am not sure that the attempt to classify the social constituencies of North Africa and to pinpoint Tertullian's allusions to boundary-markers is always as straightforward as may here be suggested. There is a certain risk that Africanness rather than African Christianity comes across as the primordial category. More might be said about possible constraints upon theological contextualisation, as well as its undoubted importance. On the whole, however, Wilhite is careful to avoid genetic reductionism, or the simplistic explanations of religious conviction which too often emerge from attempts to revisit ancient social settings. His closing chapter on what it might mean to label Tertullian a practitioner of ‘African theology’ is justly attentive to the delimitations which must follow such a description in contemporary parlance. Alert to the challenges as well as the potential of viewing Tertullian that way, this scholarly book presents a refreshing rereading of an enduringly intriguing figure. There are a few typos and minor errors.
