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Updated: May 20, 2025
Reason attacks, and faith, which does not feel itself secure without reason, has to come to terms with it. And hence come those tragic contradictions and lacerations of consciousness. How far is this from that superb expression of Tertullian et sepultus resurrexit, certum est quia impossibile est!
Impossibile est igitur quod corpus humanum transeat in substantiam spiritualem.... Similiter etiam impossibile est quod corpus hominis resurgentis sit quasi aëreum et ventis simile. S. Thom., Cont. gent., lib. 4, c. 84. In the first place, rising a spiritual body implies that the glorified body will no longer need food, drink, and sleep, to sustain life and strength, as it now does.
'Tis my solitary recreation to pose my apprehension with those involved enigmas and riddles of the Trinity, with incarnation and resurrection. I can answer all the objections of Satan and my rebellious reason with that odd resolution I learned of Tertullian, Certum est quia impossibile est. I desire to exercise my faith in the difficultest point; for anything else is not faith but persuasion.
Of course he ought to take Kitty away. But short of resignation how was it to be done? And what, even, would resignation do supposing, per impossibile, it could be thought of but give to gnawing gossip a bigger bone, and probably irritate Kitty to the point of rebellion? Yet how induce her to go with any one else? Lady Tranmore was out of the question. Margaret French, perhaps?
That the universe was produced by the will of a personal Being, that its infinite forces are all the power of that one Being, its infinite relations the perceptions of one Mind would not this, if any truth could, demand the application of the maxim, Credo quia impossibile? Look at it only as a conception, and does the wildest fiction of the imagination equal it?
"Hominibus impossibile" replied the monk, as he filled his glass. Tabary was in ecstasies. Villon filliped his nose again. "Laugh at my jokes, if you like," he said. "It was very good," objected Tabary. Villon made a face at him. "Think of rhymes to 'fish," he said. "What have you to do with Latin?
It is all wildly fanciful; and yet, though knowing not Tertullian, a ``credo quia impossibile'' is on his tongue as he quickens his pace for what else can he do? A step, and the spell is shattered all is cruel and alien once more; while every copse and hedge-row seems a-tinkle with faint elfish laughter.
"But let us be cautious," continued the priest, "not to deceive ourselves as do some, who fancy themselves sound, and yet are diseased; who mix up the suggestions of the carnal understanding with heavenly promptings. Said not holy St. Augustine, credo quia impossibile et? There are minds too shallow to perceive the profound wisdom of the maxim, and scoff at it as an absurdity.
But, per impossibile, and for the sake of argument, suppose that the later interpolators and continuators of the Homeric lays were antiquarian precisians, or, on the other hand, "deliberately attempted to reproduce from their inner consciousness an archaic state of civilisation."
Sometimes a Tertullian voices this abdication of the reasoning faculty defiantly certum est quia impossibile est; but more often perhaps the same position is expressed in the spirit of Tennyson's well-known lines, which, indeed, bear directly upon our immediate theme:
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