Against Hermogenes

Tertullian is a pre-Nicene writer, not a saint of the Orthodox Church; he is read here for his arguments, not cited as a Father.

Oversimplified

  • A treatise by Tertullian against Hermogenes, who taught that matter is eternal and that God merely arranged it rather than creating it.
  • The stake is huge: if matter is co-eternal with God, there are two uncreated first principles — which is really two gods. The Church confesses one God who creates out of nothing.

Summary

Hermogenes was a painter turned teacher who blended Christianity with Stoic-Platonic philosophy and denied creatio ex nihilo. Since (he reasoned) God could not create from Himself and could not create from what does not exist, He must have shaped pre-existing, eternal matter — the old pagan dualism dressed in Christian language. Tertullian's Against Hermogenes takes it apart from Scripture.[^1] The Orthodox tradition reaches the same verdict on deeper ground: creation from nothing is the shared confession of St. Basil the Great, St. John of Damascus, and the whole Greek patristic mind.

The objection Hermogenes pressed

"God had to make the world out of something." His dilemma: God creates either from Himself, from nothing, or from pre-existing matter; the first two are impossible; therefore matter is eternal.

The buried assumption is that "to make" always means "to shape existing material" — the instinct of a craftsman, who never makes clay but only pots from clay. Hermogenes imagined the Creator as a cosmic sculptor and then complained there was no marble. But that quietly smuggles the limits of a creature into our idea of God. A potter needs clay because a potter is not the source of being; God is the source of being, and so He needs nothing prior to Himself.

Tertullian's answer, from the text

  • The silence argument. Where Scripture shows a thing's origin it names the source; of heaven and earth it names none. That silence is evidence for creation from nothing, not against it.
  • The two-earths reading is incoherent. Hermogenes needs the "earth" of Genesis 1.2 to be a different, pre-existing chaos. But a thing that truly changes nature gets a new name — clay becomes a "pitcher." The shared name "earth" in verses 1 and 2 shows continuity, not two entities.
  • The moral argument. God calls the result "good," yet Hermogenes' eternal matter is supposed to be the source of all evil. The good creation and an evil primordial stuff cannot be the same thing.
  • The "Lord" argument — his most elegant move. In the creation narrative only the title "God" appears; "Lord" arrives only after man. Lordship is therefore relational, acquired when there was something to be Lord over — so there was no eternal matter for God to have been Lord over all along.

The Orthodox frame: creatio ex nihilo

The whole canon converges: Genesis 1; 2 Maccabees 7.28 ("God made them out of things that did not exist"); John 1.3; Romans 4.17; Hebrews 11.3. The Fathers read Genesis 1.2's formlessness not as pre-existing chaos but as the first, undifferentiated instant of created matter — matter newly made but not yet ordered. St. Basil's Hexaemeron is the patristic locus classicus here,[^2] and the Septuagint's aoratos kai akataskeuastos ("invisible and unformed") supports reading the verse as nascent creation rather than independent chaos (see Tohu Wabohu).

Why it matters: two uncreated realities would be two gods. Creation from nothing is precisely what secures God's freedom, transcendence, and simplicity — creation is a free act of His will and energies, not a negotiation with pre-existing stuff.

The same objection, revived today

Modern Old Testament scholarship that reads Genesis 1 as the ordering of pre-existing chaos — pointing to tehom (the deep), tohu wabohu, and darkness as an Ancient Near Eastern cosmogony — is Hermogenes in academic dress. The Orthodox answer is the same one Tertullian reached for, now backed by the patristic consensus: the canonical witness converges on ex nihilo, and the Fathers read 1:2 as the initial state of newly-created matter, not a chaos independent of God (see Tohu Wabohu, The Divine Council).

[^1]: Tertullian, Against Hermogenes (newadvent.org 0313; tertullian.org). [^2]: St. Basil the Great, Hexaemeron — the patristic locus classicus for creatio ex nihilo.