Against Hermogenes

Tertullian wrote this treatise against Hermogenes, a painter and teacher active in Carthage who held that God made the world not from nothing but from eternal, uncreated matter. Hermogenes proposed this to solve the problem of evil: if matter alone is the source of disorder and imperfection in creation, God's goodness remains untouched. Tertullian, writing around 206, took this to be not a solution but a catastrophe for Christian doctrine, since it set up a second uncreated principle alongside God and so compromised the very uniqueness that made God God.

The treatise proceeds by relentless dialectic. Tertullian presses the logical consequences of positing eternal matter: if matter is uncreated, it must share God's attributes of eternity, and two eternal, unoriginated beings cannot coexist without one limiting or rivaling the other. He interrogates whether matter, on Hermogenes' own terms, can be called good, evil, or indifferent, and shows each option collapsing into contradiction. He turns to the opening words of Genesis, arguing that "in the beginning God made" excludes any co-eternal substance for God to work from. Throughout, he insists that evil enters the world through the misuse of will, not through the recalcitrance of pre-existent stuff, preserving both divine sovereignty and human responsibility without needing a metaphysical scapegoat. The argument is sharp, sometimes mocking, and thoroughly engaged with the Middle Platonist categories Hermogenes was drawing on.

The work stands among the earliest sustained defenses of creation from nothing, a doctrine that later became Christian orthodoxy but was still being fought for in Tertullian's day against philosophically respectable alternatives. It shows Tertullian's characteristic method: legal precision, sarcasm, and an insistence that theological error is traceable to identifiable logical failure rather than pious approximation. For the history of the doctrine of creation, and for seeing how early Christian writers absorbed and repurposed pagan philosophical categories while resisting their conclusions, it remains a primary text.

Who should read this: students of patristic theology and the history of the doctrine of creation, and readers interested in Tertullian's polemical method and his engagement with Middle Platonism. It is not devotional reading and offers little to those seeking spiritual formation in a direct sense; its interest is doctrinal and historical, aimed at readers willing to follow a technical argument about matter, evil, and divine uniqueness.