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4. Paul of Samosata, from 260 bishop of Antioch, and at the same time a civil officer (Ducenarius procurator), denied the personality of the Logos and of the Holy Ghost, and considered them merely powers of God, like reason and mind in man; but granted that the Logos dwelt in Christ in larger measure than in any former messenger of God, and taught, like the Socinians in later times, a gradual elevation of Christ, determined by his own moral development, to divine dignity (ý deoπoinois έk πрокожя). To introduce his Christology into the mind of the people, he undertook to alter the church hymns, but was wise enough to accommodate himself to the orthodox formulas, calling Christ, for example, Θεὸς ἐκ παρθένου, and ascribing to him even ὁμοουσία with the Father, but of course in his own sense. The bishops under him in Smyrna accused him not only of heresy, but also of extreme vanity, arrogance, pompousness, avarice, and undue concern with secular business; and, at a council in 269, they pronounced his deposition. But as he was favored by the queen, Zenobia of Palmyra, the deposition could not be executed till after her subjection by the emperor Aurelius, in 272, and after consultation with the Italian bishops. His overthrow decided the fall of the Monarchians, though they still appear at the end of the fourth century, as condemned heretics, under the name of Samosatenians, Paulianists, and Sabellians.

II. The second class of Monarchians, called by Tertullian Patripassians (as afterwards a branch of the Monophysites was called Theopaschites), together with their Unitarian zeal, felt the deeper Christian impulse to hold fast the divinity of Christ, but they sacrificed to it his independent personality, which they merged in the essence of the Father.

1. The first prominent advocate of the Patripassian heresy was Praxeas of Asia Minor. He came to Rome under Marcus Aurelius, with the renown of a confessor, procured there the condemnation of Montanism, and propounded his Patripassianism, to which he gained even the bishop Victor. But Tertullian met him, in vindication at once of Montanism and of Hypostasianism, with crushing logic, and

charged him with having executed, at Rome, two commissions of the devil: having driven away the Holy Ghost, and having crucified. the Father ("Paracletum fugavit et Patrem crucifixit "). According to Tertullian, Praxeas, constantly appealing to Is. 45: 5, John 10: 30 ("I and my Father are one"), and John 14: 9 seq. (“He that hath seen me hath seen the Father"), as if the whole Bible consisted of these three passages, taught that the Father himself became man, hungered, thirsted, suffered, and died, in Christ. True, he would not be understood as speaking directly of a suffering (pati) of the Father, but only of a sympathy (copati) of the Father with the Son; but, in any case, he lost the independent personality of the Son. He conceived the relation of the Father to the Son as like that of the spirit to the flesh. The same subject, as spirit, is the Father; as flesh, the Son. He thought the Catholic doctrine tri

theistic.

2. Noetus of Smyrna published the same view about A. D. 200, appealing also to Rom. 9: 5, where Christ is called the one God over all. When censured by a council, he argued, in vindication of himself, that his doctrine enhanced the glory of Christ. The author of the Philosophoumena places him in connection with the pantheistic philosophy of Heraclitus, who, as we here for the first time learn, viewed nature as the harmony of all antitheses, and called the universe at once dissoluble and indissoluble, originated and unoriginated, mortal and immortal; thus, Noetus supposed that the same divine subject must be able to combine opposite attributes in itself.

3. Callistus (pope Calixtus I.) adopted and advocated the doctrine of Noetus, which Epigonus and Cleomenes, disciples of Noetus, propagated in Rome under favor of pope Zephyrinus. He declared the Son merely the manifestation. of the Father in human form; the Father animating the Son, as the spirit animates the body,3 and suffering with

· Τί οὖν κακὸν ποιῶ, he asked, δοξάζων τὸν Χριστόν ;

2 Not his teachers, as was supposed by former historians, including Neander.

3 John 14: 11.

him on the Cross. "The Father," says he, "who was in the Son, took flesh, and made it God, uniting it with himself, and made it one. Father and Son were therefore the name of the God, and this one person (Tрóσwπov) cannot be two; thus, the Father suffered with the Son." He considered his opponents "ditheistic" (dideo), and they, in return, called his followers "Callistians."

These and other disclosures respecting the Church at Rome, during the first quarter of the third century, we owe to the ninth book of the "Philosophoumena" of Hippolitus, which were first published in 1851, and have created so much sensation in the theological world. Hippolytus was, however, it must be remembered, the leading opponent and rival of Callistus, and in his own doctrine of the Trinity inclined to the opposite subordinatian extreme. He calls Callistus, evidently with passion, an "unreasonable and treacherous man, who brought together blasphemies from above and below, only to speak against the truth, and was not ashamed to fall now into the error of Sabellius, now into that of Theodotus" (of which latter, however, he shows no trace). After the death of Callistus, who occu pied the papal chair between 219 and 221 or 224, Patripassianism disappeared from the Roman Church.

4. Beryllus of Bostra, in Arabia; from him we have only a somewhat obscure and very variously interpreted passage preserved in Eusebius (H. E., VI. 33). He denied the personal preëxistence,1 and in general the independent divinity (idia Deórns) of Christ, but at the same time asserted the indwelling of the divinity of the Father (ἡ πατρικὴ θεότης) in him during his earthly life. He forms, in some sense, the stepping stone from simple Patripassianism to Sabellian Modalism. At an Arabian Synod in 244, where the pres byter Origen, then himself accused of heresy, was called into consultation, Beryllus was convinced of his error by that great teacher, and was persuaded particularly of the existence of a human soul in Christ, in place of which he

1 'Idíafovolas Teрlypaph, i. e. a circumscribed, limited, separate existence. VOL. XV. No. 60.

63

had probably put his Taтρin Deóτns, as Apollinaris, in a later period, put the Xóyos. He is said to have thanked Origen afterwards for his instructions. Here we have one of the very few theological disputations which have resulted in unity, instead of greater division.

5. Sabellius, we learn from the "Philosophoumena," spent some time in Rome in the beginning of the third century, and was first gained by Callistus to Patripassianism, but when the latter became bishop, about 220, he was excommunicated.1 Afterwards we find him presbyter of Ptolemais, in Egypt. There his heresy, meantime modified, found so much favor, that Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, excommunicated him at a council in that city in 261, and, in vehement opposition to him, declared, in almost Arian terms, for the hypostatical independence and subordination of the Son in relation to the Father. This led the Sabellians to complain of that bishop to Dionysius of Rome, who held a council in 262, and in a special treatise controverted Sabellianism, as well as Subordinatianism and Tritheism, with nice orthodox tact. The bishop of Alexandria very cheerfully yielded, and retracted his assertion of the creaturely inferiority of the Son in favor of the orthodox óμoovσios. Thus the strife was for a while allayed, to be renewed with still greater violence, by Arius, half a century later.

Sabellius is by far the most original, ingenious, and profound of the Monarchians. His system is known to us only from a few fragments, and some of those not altogether consistent, in Athanasius and other Fathers. It was very fully developed, and has been revived in modern times, by Schleiermacher, in a peculiarly modified form.

While the other Monarchians confine their inquiry to the relation of Father and Son, Sabellius embraces the Holy Ghost in his speculation, and reaches a trinity; not a simultaneous trinity of essence, however, but only a successive trinity of revelation. He starts from a distinction of

1 Or was this possibly another Sabellius?

the monad and the triad in the divine nature.

His funda

mental thought is, that the unity of God, without distinction in itself, unfolds or extends itself,1 in the course of the world's development, in three different forms and periods of revelation, and, after the completion of redemption, returns into unity. The Father reveals himself in the giving of the law or the Old Testament economy (not in the creation also; this, in his view, precedes the Trinitarian revelation); the Son, in the incarnation; the Holy Ghost, in inspiration. He illustrates the Trinitarian relation by comparing the Father to the disc of the sun, the Son to its enlightening power, the Spirit to its warming influence. He is said also to have likened the Father to the body, the Son to the soul, the Holy Ghost to the spirit of man; but this is unworthy of his evident speculative discrimination. His view of the Logos, too, is peculiar. The Logos is not identical with the Son, but is the monad itself in its transition to triad; that is, God conceived as vital motion and creating principle, the speaking God (Oeòs λaλov), in distinction from the silent God (Θεὸς σιωπῶν). Each πρόσωπον is another διαλέγεσθαι, and the three πρόσωπα together are only the successive evolutions of the Logos, or the world-ward aspect of the divine nature. As the Logos proceeded from God, so he returns at last into him, and the process of Trinitarian development (diáλeğıç) closes.

Athanasius traced the doctrine of Sabellius to the Stoic philosophy. The common element is the pantheistic leading view of an expansion and contraction (exтaσis, or πλατυσμός, and συστολή), of the divine nature immanent in the world. In the Pythagorean system also, in the Gospel of the Egyptians, and in the pseudo-Clementine Homilies, there are kindred ideas. But the originality of Sabellius cannot be brought into question by these. His theory broke the way for the Nicene church doctrine, by its full

1 Η μονὰς πλατυνθεῖσα γέγονε τρίας.

2

* Ονόματα, πρόσωπα, - -not in the orthodox sense of the term, however, but in the primary sense of mask, or part (in a play).

3 Which has been for the first time duly brought out by Dr. Baur.

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