Life & Wisdom Quote by Tertullian

Tertullian is not pleading for peace; he is diagnosing a kind of spiritual indigestion. In a culture where public argument was both entertainment and status sport, “stomachache and a headache” lands as a deliberately bodily rebuke: theology that stays in the mouth and never reaches the gut of conduct will make you sick. The line treats Scripture not as raw material for cleverness, but as a volatile substance; mishandled, it irritates, inflames, and leaves the debater worse off than before.

The intent is polemical in a sly way. By calling scriptural arguments “nothing,” Tertullian delegitimizes a rival Christian posture: the idea that truth emerges from endless parsing, disputation, and rhetorical one-upmanship. He’s also taking a shot at the intellectual marketplace around him - Greco-Roman schools of philosophy, and intra-Christian battles with “heretics” - where citation wars could replace moral seriousness. The subtext is that argument is often a mask: for vanity, for control, for belonging to the “right” camp. When Scripture becomes ammunition, the debater may feel righteous while actually growing less humane.

Context matters: Tertullian writes as an early Christian apologist, fiercely protective of a young movement trying to define itself under pressure from pagan critics and internal fragmentation. His own work is famously combative, which makes the line doubly sharp: he knows the seduction of the fight. The quip functions as an acid test of religious talk - if it produces only pain and no transformation, it wasn’t piety, it was performance.