RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Monarchianism
ignored entirely by Hippolytus, Praxeas. He probably came to Rome during the pontificate of Victor, but remained there only a short time. Fifteen years later, when the controversy was in full course at Rome and Carthage, his name was forgotten. Notwithstanding this, Tertullian polemized against him as the first to arouse controversy in Carthage, although in his attacks he regarded the conditions of about 210, with reference, apparently, to the Roman Monarchians. Praxeas was a confessor of Asia Minor, the first to bring the Christological controversy to Rome, and a man filled with zeal against the rising prophetic school. Not only did he find no opposition at Rome, but he even induced the pontiff (either Eleutherus or Victor) to retract the " letters of peace " which he had bestowed on the new prophets and their communities in Asia. But the presence of Praxeas in Rome caused no lasting strife. From Rome he went to Carthage, where he opposed the hypostatic Christology, only to be silenced and forced to a written retraction by Tertullian. Thus ended the first phase of the controversy, and the name of Praxeas vanished; nor is anything certainly known of the downfall of Monarchianism in Carthage.
The sources are too scanty for a complete presentment of the tenets of the earlier modalistic Monarchianism. Yet the sources are not alone to blame; for the theory that in Christ 3. Doc- God himself had become incarnate trines of might lead to wild hypotheses of transthe Early formation or approximate dynamistic Modalists. Monarchianism. Again, so soon as the indwelling of the " divinity of the Father " in Jesus was not regarded strictly as an incarnation, the way was open for the Artemonite heresy (see Artemon). In the writings of Origen are many passages which may refer to either modalists or Artemonites, especially as the two were united by their opposition to the Logos-Christology. The best account of the older modalists is contained in the polemic of Hippolytus against Noetus. His followers held that Christ was the Father, and that the Father himself had been born, had suffered, and died. If Christ is God, he is surely the Father, or else not God; and therefore, if Christ suffered, then God suffered. Yet it was not only their decided monotheism, which made them term their opponents ditheists, that led them on; they were impelled, besides this, by their interest in the divinity of Jesus, which, in their opinion, could be maintained solely by their teachings, in support of which they appealed to such passages as Ex. iii. 6, xx. 2-3; Isa. xliv. 6, xlv. 5, 14-15; Bar. iii. 36; John x. 30, xiv. 8-9; Rom. ix. 5. While they thus recognized the Gospel of John, they explained away its allusions to the Logos allegorically. In his Philosophumena Hippolytus asserts that the Noetians maintained that the distinction between the Father and the Son was merely nominal (except in so far as it was redemptorial), since the one God, when born as man, appeared as the Son. God is invisible when he will, and visible when he will (this being based on an appeal to the Old-Testament theophanies); and in like manner he is both incomprehensible and comprehensible, unconquerable and
conquerable, unbegotten and begotten, immortal and mortal. In so far as the Father suffered himself to be born of the virgin, he is the son of himself, and not of another, and he who suffered the passion and rose on the third day was the God and Father of all. While Stoic influence can not be denied in the Noetian system, the basis is certain ancient quasiliturgical formulas as used by Ignatius, the author of II Clement, and Melito, and of similar purport with the views just cited.
The concept and importance of the human " flesh " of Jesus, according to these Monarchians, is uncertain (see Flesh). More complicated are the Monarchianistic formulas attacked by Tertullian in the Adversus Praxeam and as-
4. Later cribed by Hippolytus to Calixtus.
Modalism Tertullian's Monarchians maintain the and Catho- complete identity of the Father and
lie Com- the Son, and had no place for the Logos
promise, in their Christology, regarding the word as empty sound. Like the Noetians, they were intensely monotheistic and feared the recrudescence of Gnosticism in hypostatic Christology. Obliged to explain the Biblical passages in which the Son appears as distinct from the Father, they asserted that the flesh made the Father the Son, or that in the person of the Redeemer the flesh (the man, Jesus) was the Son, and the spirit (God, Christ) was the Father, appealing, in support of their view, to Luke i. 35. Since God is spirit only, he could not suffer; but by assuming human flesh, he could be a fellow sufferer. It is at once evident that as soon as the distinction between flesh (the Son) and spirit (the Father) was taken seriously, the doctrine approached the Artemonite teaching. Yet such a distinction could not satisfy the advocates of the Logos Christology, since it maintained the identity of the Father with the spirit in Christ. Any attempt to recognize the Logos Christology on the basis of modalism necessarily led to dynamistic Monarchianism; yet the formulas of both Zephyrinus and Calixtus had arisen from efforts at compromise. In the formula of the latter — that God (the Logos, both Father and Son) was an indivisible spirit filling all things, the incarnate spirit being identical with the Father, so that the human manifestation was the Son and the indwelling spirit the Father, the Father suffering with the Son — Origen rightly recognized a mixture of Sabellian and Theodotian views. The adoption of this formula in Rome, except by a few extremists of either party, was due not only to its admission of the Logos-concept, but to its declaration that, at the incarnation, God had deified the flesh; and that the Son, as representing the essentially deified flesh, should be regarded as a second person, though truly one with God. The formula was, moreover, admirably adapted, by its ambiguity, to establish among the faithful the mystery under whose protection hypostatic Christology gradually gained entrance.
Hypostatic Christology, as opposed to modalism, was evolved between 200 and 250 on the basis of the theology of the apologists. It easily refuted, by arguments from the Bible, the Monarchian identification of the Father with the Son, and rejected
Monarchianism Monasticism