2. MONARCHIANS -- SABELLIUS -- ST. HIPPOLYTUS
Of more serious intrinsic importance than this quarrel of liturgical observance was another controversy which began in the reign of this same pope, St. Victor I, and which raged around the divinity of the Second Person of the Divine Trinity, the Logos incarnate in Jesus Christ. The discussions which now began continued at intervals for the first half of the third century. Then, after a peace of fifty years, they revived, and for a good hundred and fifty years more they were the chief feature of the Church's history.
The traditional belief was simple. God is one and there is but one God. Jesus Christ is God, being the incarnate second term of the Divine Trinity, God the Son or Logos. The Logos is nevertheless not the Father. The intelligence of believers, and their piety, continued to meditate and probe these traditional data, always with a hope of better understanding, and with the practical aim of making the tradition seem reasonable to critics from outside. Two questions in the main divided the attention of these theorists, the relation between the human and the divine in Our Lord, and the way in which the divine in Our Lord was divine. This second question had been already discussed by St. Justin. Now it was the turn of the first, and when the theorists, in their efforts to conciliate seemingly contradictory beliefs, stumbled into a denial of the tradition, a school of thinkers arose to set them right who in turn stumbled into errors on the Trinitarian question.
There came to Rome towards the end of the pontificate of Eleutherius (175-189) a wealthy citizen of Byzantium, one Theodotus, by trade a dealer in leather. He had apostatised in a recent persecution, and now sought to hide his shame in the great city. He was less successful, however, than he had hoped; and taxed with his record he retorted that after all, in denying Jesus Christ he had not denied God, for Jesus was but a man, the holiest of men admittedly, upon whom the Christ had descended in the form of a dove when he was baptized in the Jordan by John but, for all that, no more than a man. To support the theory Theodotus produced a catena of texts from Holy Scripture. The pope, St. Victor I, in 190 excommunicated him, but Theodotus remained obdurate. He gathered round him a number of adherents, and soon was the leader of a sect taken from the most erudite circle of the Roman Church. Logicians, mathematicians, scientists, they used the comparative method and along with their Bibles studied Euclid and Galen and Aristotle: The Church tradition occupied a very small place in their critical labours, where indeed grammar and logic extracted from the Scriptures all they craved to know, How long the sect continued as a sect we do not know. But through one of its members of the second I generation, Artemus (fl. 235), its teaching passed to the notorious bishop of Antioch, Paul of Samosata, the friend of that Lucian who was the teacher of Arius and the real father of Arianism. The theories of Theodotus do not seem to have seriously troubled the peace of the Church, at any rate during his own lifetime. With the contemporary theory which bears the cumbrous name of Patripassian Monarchianism it was far otherwise. The thinkers responsible for this theory were moved by the desire to safeguard the two traditional truths of the unity of God and the real divinity of Jesus Christ, and to refute the suggested contradiction between the two. But their theory only achieved its end by identifying Father and Son, thus sacrificing a third truth of the tradition, namely that the Father and Son are really distinct. [1]
The first to bring this theory to Rome was, according to Tertullian, Praxeas in the closing years of the second century. Thence Praxeas had passed into Africa where Tertullian routed him, and, better still, converted him. Another account makes Smyrna the seat of the heresy's first beginnings and Noetus its founder. From Smyrna, after the excommunication there of Noetus, it came to Rome with one of his disciples, Epigonus, somewhere between 198 and 210. The Monarchists speedily became known, and the theory became the exclusive topic of discussion in the Roman Church. Nor was the cause of truth and peace at all assisted by the presence in Rome of a double opposition to Monarchianism. The Roman Church opposed it for the innovation it was; but, at the same time, it met with opposition of a very different character, the reasoned opposition of a philosopher, from the greatest scholar in the Roman Church, the priest Hippolytus. It was the misfortune of the Roman Church that between its officials and Hippolytus there was soon a war as bitter as that between either of them and the Monarchists. Nor did Hippolytus scruple to charge the official opposition with complicity with the heretics. On the other hand Hippolytus and his followers, in their ingenious defence of one truth, came very near to denying others. The task of the historian is not made easier by the fact that our knowledge of these transactions is due, in the very largest measure, to the writings of St. Hippolytus himself, -- written before the saint's reconciliation and martyrdom, when, the first of all the anti-popes, he was himself leading a schism against the lawful Bishop of Rome.
When Epigonus arrived in Rome to set up his school of Theology, mindful of the condemnation at Smyrna and perhaps knowing of the fate that had befallen Praxeas at the hands of Tertullian, he tempered his zeal with caution. It was his good fortune that the pope St. Zephyrinus (199-217) was an administrator rather than a scholar, and as Epigonus and his chief lieutenant, the more famous Sabellius, showed their belief in the reality of Our Lord's divinity in an instructed attack on the recently condemned Theodotus, they speedily gained a name for orthodoxy and the favour of the pope. But if Zephyrinus, lacking both taste for this theorising and skill in its practice, saw no more in the new party than welcome allies against the Adoptionists, this was by no means the case with Hippolytus. The writings of this great man have most of them perished, but enough remains to show that in him the Roman Church possessed a scholar of an erudition like to that of Origen. With the erudition, there went, alas, an uncomfortable impatience of ignorance in high places, and a genius for rough and bitter language that recall his other contemporary, Tertullian. In the events of the next few years both the learning and the caustic wit of St. Hippolytus were to have every opportunity. He now attacked Sabellius as he had attacked Theodotus; and when the pope refused to endorse the letter of his attacks, refused to make his own the learned theories by which Hippolytus was routing the new heresy, Hippolytus turned to attack the pope. Zephyrinus, however, stood firm. He refused to enter the dangerous ground of the rival philosophical explanations of the tradition, and contented himself with a steady re-affirmation of what had always been believed "I only know one God Who suffered and died, Jesus Christ and beyond Him no other. It is not the Father Who died but the Son."
In 217, while the three-cornered controversy was still raging, Zephyrinus died. He had ruled for nearly twenty years, but during all that time there had been a "power behind the throne", a greater man than himself, on whom, wisely enough, he relied. This was his deacon Calixtus. Calixtus had had an unusually exciting life. Years before, as a slave, he had managed his master's bank. He was unlucky enough to lose his master large sums of money, some of it in bad debts where the debtors were Jews. His efforts to recover from them led to a riot and, the Jews denouncing him as a Christian, he was sent to penal servitude in the mines of Sardinia. About the year 190 he was set free and returned to Italy. The accession of Zephyrinus found him at Antium, a pensioner of the Roman Church. The new pope brought him back to Rome and ordained him deacon, one of that council of seven who saw to the management of the Roman Church's temporal business. Calixtus was a man of affairs, a practical administrator, and in the influence of Calixtus over his master, Hippolytus saw the reason for the pope's reluctance to condemn Sabellius and the rest in terms of his theory. Hippolytus was, then, already personally hostile to Calixtus when Zephyrinus died. When Calixtus was elected to succeed him, the learned and choleric Hippolytus seceded, accusing Calixtus of Monarchianism, and of holding that the distinction of terms in the Trinity is incompatible with the divine unity.
Hippolytus had a numerous following. They gathered round him and he set up his sect as the true Church in opposition to the " Monarchist " Calixtus. Meanwhile Calixtus had acted. He condemned Sabellius and excommunicated him as an innovator in the traditional belief, but he did not, in so doing, make his own the subtle reasoning by which Hippolytus exposed the heresy and explained the compatibility of the related truths.
That reasoning is indeed subtle, and to distinguish it from the heresy which makes the Logos a second inferior God calls for a philosophical mind and much good will. Nevertheless, although he did not adopt the ideas of Hippolytus, neither did St. Calixtus condemn them.
The schism of Hippolytus -- he was never thrust out of the Church but left it himself -- continued long after the death of St. Calixtus (222) and of his successor Urban I. In the persecution of Maximin, which was directed mainly against the rulers of the Church, Hippolytus, a confessor now in the mines of Sardinia, found himself the fellow-sufferer of the lawful pope Pontianus (235). There, under what circumstances no record remains, he was reconciled to the power he had so long denied, and the Church honours him among her martyred saints.
1 Since they professed to uphold at all costs the oneness of the divinity, " the monarchy " as they never tire of calling it, and since they taught, in logical conclusion from their theory, that it was the Father whom Mary conceived and who died for us, the appropriateness of their many-sounding name is evident.
Of more serious intrinsic importance than this quarrel of liturgical observance was another controversy which began in the reign of this same pope, St. Victor I, and which raged around the divinity of the Second Person of the Divine Trinity, the Logos incarnate in Jesus Christ. The discussions which now began continued at intervals for the first half of the third century. Then, after a peace of fifty years, they revived, and for a good hundred and fifty years more they were the chief feature of the Church's history.
The traditional belief was simple. God is one and there is but one God. Jesus Christ is God, being the incarnate second term of the Divine Trinity, God the Son or Logos. The Logos is nevertheless not the Father. The intelligence of believers, and their piety, continued to meditate and probe these traditional data, always with a hope of better understanding, and with the practical aim of making the tradition seem reasonable to critics from outside. Two questions in the main divided the attention of these theorists, the relation between the human and the divine in Our Lord, and the way in which the divine in Our Lord was divine. This second question had been already discussed by St. Justin. Now it was the turn of the first, and when the theorists, in their efforts to conciliate seemingly contradictory beliefs, stumbled into a denial of the tradition, a school of thinkers arose to set them right who in turn stumbled into errors on the Trinitarian question.
There came to Rome towards the end of the pontificate of Eleutherius (175-189) a wealthy citizen of Byzantium, one Theodotus, by trade a dealer in leather. He had apostatised in a recent persecution, and now sought to hide his shame in the great city. He was less successful, however, than he had hoped; and taxed with his record he retorted that after all, in denying Jesus Christ he had not denied God, for Jesus was but a man, the holiest of men admittedly, upon whom the Christ had descended in the form of a dove when he was baptized in the Jordan by John but, for all that, no more than a man. To support the theory Theodotus produced a catena of texts from Holy Scripture. The pope, St. Victor I, in 190 excommunicated him, but Theodotus remained obdurate. He gathered round him a number of adherents, and soon was the leader of a sect taken from the most erudite circle of the Roman Church. Logicians, mathematicians, scientists, they used the comparative method and along with their Bibles studied Euclid and Galen and Aristotle: The Church tradition occupied a very small place in their critical labours, where indeed grammar and logic extracted from the Scriptures all they craved to know, How long the sect continued as a sect we do not know. But through one of its members of the second I generation, Artemus (fl. 235), its teaching passed to the notorious bishop of Antioch, Paul of Samosata, the friend of that Lucian who was the teacher of Arius and the real father of Arianism. The theories of Theodotus do not seem to have seriously troubled the peace of the Church, at any rate during his own lifetime. With the contemporary theory which bears the cumbrous name of Patripassian Monarchianism it was far otherwise. The thinkers responsible for this theory were moved by the desire to safeguard the two traditional truths of the unity of God and the real divinity of Jesus Christ, and to refute the suggested contradiction between the two. But their theory only achieved its end by identifying Father and Son, thus sacrificing a third truth of the tradition, namely that the Father and Son are really distinct. [1]
The first to bring this theory to Rome was, according to Tertullian, Praxeas in the closing years of the second century. Thence Praxeas had passed into Africa where Tertullian routed him, and, better still, converted him. Another account makes Smyrna the seat of the heresy's first beginnings and Noetus its founder. From Smyrna, after the excommunication there of Noetus, it came to Rome with one of his disciples, Epigonus, somewhere between 198 and 210. The Monarchists speedily became known, and the theory became the exclusive topic of discussion in the Roman Church. Nor was the cause of truth and peace at all assisted by the presence in Rome of a double opposition to Monarchianism. The Roman Church opposed it for the innovation it was; but, at the same time, it met with opposition of a very different character, the reasoned opposition of a philosopher, from the greatest scholar in the Roman Church, the priest Hippolytus. It was the misfortune of the Roman Church that between its officials and Hippolytus there was soon a war as bitter as that between either of them and the Monarchists. Nor did Hippolytus scruple to charge the official opposition with complicity with the heretics. On the other hand Hippolytus and his followers, in their ingenious defence of one truth, came very near to denying others. The task of the historian is not made easier by the fact that our knowledge of these transactions is due, in the very largest measure, to the writings of St. Hippolytus himself, -- written before the saint's reconciliation and martyrdom, when, the first of all the anti-popes, he was himself leading a schism against the lawful Bishop of Rome.
When Epigonus arrived in Rome to set up his school of Theology, mindful of the condemnation at Smyrna and perhaps knowing of the fate that had befallen Praxeas at the hands of Tertullian, he tempered his zeal with caution. It was his good fortune that the pope St. Zephyrinus (199-217) was an administrator rather than a scholar, and as Epigonus and his chief lieutenant, the more famous Sabellius, showed their belief in the reality of Our Lord's divinity in an instructed attack on the recently condemned Theodotus, they speedily gained a name for orthodoxy and the favour of the pope. But if Zephyrinus, lacking both taste for this theorising and skill in its practice, saw no more in the new party than welcome allies against the Adoptionists, this was by no means the case with Hippolytus. The writings of this great man have most of them perished, but enough remains to show that in him the Roman Church possessed a scholar of an erudition like to that of Origen. With the erudition, there went, alas, an uncomfortable impatience of ignorance in high places, and a genius for rough and bitter language that recall his other contemporary, Tertullian. In the events of the next few years both the learning and the caustic wit of St. Hippolytus were to have every opportunity. He now attacked Sabellius as he had attacked Theodotus; and when the pope refused to endorse the letter of his attacks, refused to make his own the learned theories by which Hippolytus was routing the new heresy, Hippolytus turned to attack the pope. Zephyrinus, however, stood firm. He refused to enter the dangerous ground of the rival philosophical explanations of the tradition, and contented himself with a steady re-affirmation of what had always been believed "I only know one God Who suffered and died, Jesus Christ and beyond Him no other. It is not the Father Who died but the Son."
In 217, while the three-cornered controversy was still raging, Zephyrinus died. He had ruled for nearly twenty years, but during all that time there had been a "power behind the throne", a greater man than himself, on whom, wisely enough, he relied. This was his deacon Calixtus. Calixtus had had an unusually exciting life. Years before, as a slave, he had managed his master's bank. He was unlucky enough to lose his master large sums of money, some of it in bad debts where the debtors were Jews. His efforts to recover from them led to a riot and, the Jews denouncing him as a Christian, he was sent to penal servitude in the mines of Sardinia. About the year 190 he was set free and returned to Italy. The accession of Zephyrinus found him at Antium, a pensioner of the Roman Church. The new pope brought him back to Rome and ordained him deacon, one of that council of seven who saw to the management of the Roman Church's temporal business. Calixtus was a man of affairs, a practical administrator, and in the influence of Calixtus over his master, Hippolytus saw the reason for the pope's reluctance to condemn Sabellius and the rest in terms of his theory. Hippolytus was, then, already personally hostile to Calixtus when Zephyrinus died. When Calixtus was elected to succeed him, the learned and choleric Hippolytus seceded, accusing Calixtus of Monarchianism, and of holding that the distinction of terms in the Trinity is incompatible with the divine unity.
Hippolytus had a numerous following. They gathered round him and he set up his sect as the true Church in opposition to the " Monarchist " Calixtus. Meanwhile Calixtus had acted. He condemned Sabellius and excommunicated him as an innovator in the traditional belief, but he did not, in so doing, make his own the subtle reasoning by which Hippolytus exposed the heresy and explained the compatibility of the related truths.
That reasoning is indeed subtle, and to distinguish it from the heresy which makes the Logos a second inferior God calls for a philosophical mind and much good will. Nevertheless, although he did not adopt the ideas of Hippolytus, neither did St. Calixtus condemn them.
The schism of Hippolytus -- he was never thrust out of the Church but left it himself -- continued long after the death of St. Calixtus (222) and of his successor Urban I. In the persecution of Maximin, which was directed mainly against the rulers of the Church, Hippolytus, a confessor now in the mines of Sardinia, found himself the fellow-sufferer of the lawful pope Pontianus (235). There, under what circumstances no record remains, he was reconciled to the power he had so long denied, and the Church honours him among her martyred saints.
1 Since they professed to uphold at all costs the oneness of the divinity, " the monarchy " as they never tire of calling it, and since they taught, in logical conclusion from their theory, that it was the Father whom Mary conceived and who died for us, the appropriateness of their many-sounding name is evident.
