He literally didn't though. His metaphysics and ethics are thoroughly Stoic.
>"I call on the Stoics also to help me, who, while declaring almost in our very terms that the soul is a spiritual essence, will yet have no difficulty in persuading us that the soul is a corporeal substance."
>(De Anima, c. 5)

>>18469772
His work was actually pretty similar to how Christians would process things through the ages.
I don't think it was about anti-intellectualism as much as his being so anti-pagan and anti-heresy.
For him, Greek cultural thinking was always going to lead to wrong results in Christianity.

>>18469772
>Tertulian
>phoenician
>enemy of anything Greco-Roman
Just like Divus Scipio's times.

>>18469772
Unironically Tertullian was right. Christians, why do you try to appeal to Greek philosophy when Greco-Roman philosophers were pagans who believed in doctrines that Christians explicitly reject like reincarnation. Yes, many of them might have rejected the traditional anthropomorphic view of the gods and the myths surrounding them, but they still believed in the gods’ existence and that they were actual divine beings who ruled the universe and were owed worship, even if they viewed them in more complex terms. They still defended traditional religious practices, believing them to be valid ways for the masses to access the divine (otherwise Socrates’ last request wouldn’t have been to sacrifice a rooster to Asclepius). Also only early Greek philosophers fully rejected traditional myths as irrational, later philosophers recanted on this view and believed that myths were divinely-inspired allegories, not literal historical events nor mere fables.
>hurr durr they were actually proto-monotheist
They weren’t, what they actually believed in was that the gods were all aspects or emanations of a single divine source. This is not monotheism but monism which certainly isn’t incompatible with polytheism—monotheism explicitly rejects all gods but their own while monism allows the existence of multiple gods, viewing them all as aspects or faces of a single divine source, which to my knowledge is similar to the Hindu concept of Brahman and the Chinese concept of Dao. Also, this philosophical belief was literally inspired by the theology of pagan Egyptian priests who held similar views.

>>18469827
>I don't think it was about anti-intellectualism as much as his being so anti-pagan and anti-heresy.
>For him, Greek cultural thinking was always going to lead to wrong results in Christianity
So anti-intellectual then?

>>18469772
I feel like tertullian is playing a game with the tanakh and with hellenistic culture, tertullian accepts payment in gnostic currency for a new exegesis in koine which sets the orbits of obsolete philosophies and religions out of order by the warping and translating out order of the those ideas onto a procrustean bed that nobody understands including tertullian, later thinkers like hamann were important clues to this mode of composition, the only thing keeping that going is that the word is always hungry for fresh koine, this is also where appreciation of the text is also lost for a time in the ceaseless copying and warping of the pleroma, and part of the game that tertullian is playing is anti-gnosticism and part of that push pull relation of athens and jerusalem is part of what generates gnosticism or anti-gnosticism as a feeling of irreality and the anxiety and pleasure generated of that of what the words mean, in many ways this is literary culture and tertullian is fiercely defending the feudal seeming backward methods of tertullian that tertullian is setting up against the tanakh literary culture and also the alexandrian literary culture that tertullian plays a game with by innovating and allegorizing and although the compression of gnostic meaning might be to be much of the distance involved and the sort of thing that tertullian is claiming is this business about translation and that sort o thing, or something like that