The Romans knew well the dark art that we call “propaganda” today. As an example, this image, from the Trajan column in Rome, shows Dacian women torturing naked Roman prisoners; it was part of the demonization of the enemy during the Dacian campaign of the early 2nd century AD. However, with the gradual decline of the Empire, its propaganda was becoming more and more shrill and unrealistic. Christian thinkers such as Tertullian were reacting against the absurdity of the official propaganda by contrasting it with ideas that at the time were regarded as even more absurd.
Quintus Septimius Tertullianus (anglicized as “Tertullian”, ca. 150 – ca. 230) was one of the early fathers of Christianity. Of his numerous works, we often remember a sentence that reads “Credo quia absurdum.” (I believe it, because it is absurd). This exact phrase doesn’t exist in Tertullian’s works, but it describes well the essence of his way of thinking. He and the other Christians of that time were proposing something truly absurd: that a virgin had given birth to the son of God, that God was at the same time one and three, and that the son of a Jewish carpenter who had been executed as a common criminal was, actually, one of the three!
Almost two thousand years of diffusion of these concepts made them familiar to us and we don’t see them as absurd any more. But think of how they would be perceived in Roman times: they were the very essence of absurdity. Nevertheless, there is a logic even in absurdity and, in upholding these concepts, Tertullian was reacting to an even greater absurdity: the very existence of the Roman Empire.
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